(no subject)

[labellementeuse]

Someone just brought up tone in an (off-LJ) discussion about race. (It is, in fact, on a feminist knitters forum on Rav, and it's a Seal Press redux.) Can anyone link me to any of the excellent discussions of why bringing up tone in a discussion about race can range from revealing of your own shortcomings through hypocritical to downright racist, but is usually not a good idea, that have been posted this year? Ta.

Comments

[reticent-lass.livejournal.com]

Wait, what do you mean by 'tone'? Like skin tone or speaking tone?

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Like speaking tone.

What you see repeatedly in fandom is a woman of colour identifying something that is problematic - about the source text, about something else, whatever - and possibly being a little bit upset about it. [Note that the last is not necessarily true; I have seen completely calm, well-spoken posts be treated the same way.] White people respond by attacking the tone of the post as destructive/not conducive to dialogue. This plays into two things: 1. the dismissal of people of colour as "angry" (i.e. dismissable; in other words, the fact that people of colour are angry at the way they have been and are being treated means that their grievances should be ignored); what they're saying is meaningless not because of what they're actually saying, but because of the way they're saying it. and 2. the idea that people of colour should vet every post they write in case it might offend a white person; that it is people of colour's obligation to educate white people about racism, and to do it politely and nicely.

There's also the very icky 3., which is: there is a stereotype in white culture that black people are more aggressive, angry, physically dangerous, loud, etc, than white people. Bringing up tone can be akin to reminding people of this.

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

It goes beyond discussions of racism.

Complaining about the process is almost always a way to obscure talking about the issues. Regardless of what's being discussed.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Yup, I agree.

[reticent-lass.livejournal.com]

Oh, I hate that. Here's what I have dug up:

-Discussion tactics people use to sound less racist. (http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2006/07/27/colorblind-and-laissez-racism/) Be sure to check out the comments, they're interesting.

-An article about how thoughtless diction can make a huge impact. (http://www.allaboutrace.com/2008/08/05/arrogant-uppity-and-entitled-obama/) I find this especially interesting because I am a freak about semantics and what unconscious word choice reveals about what a person's really saying. Good for when someone's trying to play the 'well I didn't mean it like that' card.

-A pair of articles about what happens when a woman challenges the traditional kindergarten 'Pilgrims & Indians Thanksgiving feast' play. This one (http://www.jbs.org/index.php/education-blog/4205) belittles her argument and talks about PC-ness run amok. This one (http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/category/race-racism-and-related-issues/) gives a little more background on just how offensive the defenders of tradition got without considering themselves racist. Me, I think it'd be a little better if they actually told the kids that the colonists could be kind of mean and snobby towards the Indians and then did a little research on How Tribes Are Different. Come on, how often did you hear that the Pilgrims were anything less than honest, brave, hardworking people fighting who headed for America in search of equality and freedom of religion--as long as it was theirs? Not to mention that I was probably in fourth grade before I had a teacher mention that Native Americans had many, many different cultures and languages and weren't some single mass of people in leather skirts and feathered headbands.

-Calling out (http://restructure.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/white-people-think-that-people-of-colour-have-more-culture/) the old 'white people have no cultural identity' idea--watch people squirm when they realize that what they call standard-issue is actually culture-based.

Forgive me if these are stupid, inappropriate, or just plain off-base. It's rapidly approaching midnight and I'm rapidly approaching that phase of sleep deprivation where you start hallucinating spools of color.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Those are super useful and really really edifying. (And, hey, one of them has a Rachel Maddow clip. ♥ I love her.)

Come on, how often did you hear that the Pilgrims were anything less than honest, brave, hardworking people fighting who headed for America in search of equality and freedom of religion--as long as it was theirs?

Truthfully, I hardly ever hear anything about the Pilgrims. It's not really a part of our education in NZ. :P But what I do hear is not terribly favourable - in terms of racism we tend to rest on our laurels a little bit, but one of the ways we do this is by pointing out how crappy the USA's history has been. Plus, I read a lot of Barbara Kingsolver as a teenager, which will really make you worry about the plight of the first peoples, yanno?

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

I've always found it interesting that the Boston Pilgrims are such a crucial part of America's historical narrative, and the Jamestown settlers so small a part. Although I would argue that the pilgrims motive was mostly economic, the fact that they're superficially percieved as moral idealists tells us a lot about how white America wants to be regarded.

[reticent-lass.livejournal.com]

Crap, I forgot you were a Kiwi. I am so sorry! Because I find the find the stance of the American public on teaching what whites did to natives ridiculous, I am compelled to present a major bad case of TL; DR ahead. Be warned. Long comment is loooooong. Usually the Lovey-Dovey Thanksgiving indoctrination goes like this:

Kindergarten-second grade: The Pilgrims were a bunch of really cool but super oppressed English people who wore funny clothes. They bravely crossed a whole ocean and built an adorable log-cabin village, which was the first American settlement, in order to set a model for freedom and equality all over the world. But they weren't very good farmers, so the Indians showed them how to plant corn. (Indians are nice people who wear buckskin skirts with fringe and headbands with feathers in them.) After a bad winter, they all sat down together and had a delicious dinner of cornbread, mashed potatoes, biscuits, and turkey. We know this because we have the same thing for snacktime at the end of the play. (If there are any tanned Asians or dark-skinned kids of Mexican descent, they will mostly wind up on the Indians' side of the table. White girls like me get jealous because though the Indians have fewer lines, they get cooler costumes.)

-Third grade-sixth grade: Pilgrims were religious people of an unspecified brand of Christianity and they were not the first European settlers in America. Indians come in lots of different tribes, but essentially are still nice people in buckskin skirts with feathered headbands. Also, they are totally awesome with horses. There used to be more of them, but the Europeans accidentally gave them bad diseases so a bunch of them died. The Spaniards set up twenty-one missions a day's travel apart on the west coast that educated Indians in exchange for letting them learn about Jesus and farm with them.

-Junior high-high school: Pilgrims and other Europeans tended to be strict, close-minded jerks who belittled, abused, robbed, raped, lied to, and outright enslaved Native Americans. There were a bunch of very different tribes, some of them friendlier than others, but Europeans tended not to distinguish between them and kill whichever ones happened to be handy in times of unrest. The missions on the west coast basically enslaved any Indians in the area and forced them to convert and work for them or suffer the consequences. All traces of Native American culture were to be erased, even to the point of stealing children and placing them in schools that taught them to forget their native language and be as white as they could.

The last one's degree of thoroughness varies a lot, especially the part about the missions. Few of my classmates even know about the institutionalized whitewashing of Indian children. There are many who like to pretend that the Europeans (especially the Spanish, oddly enough--I think it's because religious centers promoting literacy get better press) did them nothing but favors. The weird thing is that we hate teaching the real deal from kindergarten up, so every few grade levels we have to stop and say 'Remember last time you learned about the Native Americans? That wasn't entirely true.'

[chattycheese.livejournal.com]

You must be from the west coast- back East we never hear about the Spanish missions. We hear about the West in small bits which are defined by MAJOR happenings. Otherwise, all American history pretty much happened along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

[chattycheese.livejournal.com]

Haha if you want to learn about them at home, take Vic's first year Empires paper. Somehow it's not about Empires, it's about American History (which, I guess, makes sense in a very small way-when we started you had six or seven Empires interacting with each other, and then we were the first cultural empire). Seems half my hostel took that paper last trimester, they all came to me for help. Aye.

On a somewhat unrelated note, it's interesting to me that this (and, really, most) discussions about race, especially when participated in by Yanks, seem to stick to the Natives, they never mention the giant stinking dead elephants, slavery and segregation. Those two are still very touchy issues these days. That's why we don't like to mention Jamestown as much- while they weren't insane zealots, they did have slaves (and a lot of yellow fever). The Pilgrims give us an example which, while they were just as cruel, didn't have slaves.