Some Racefail thoughts

[firecat]

If a person has multiple identities and names, and if they state that they do not want other people to publicly associate their different identities and names, it is wrong to publicly associate their different identities and names. (There might be exceptions to this if a person has committed criminal activities. But writing things that piss you off does not count as an exception.)

It is wrong to try to shut people up by threatening legal action against their blogs. If someone has done this to you, there are resources to help you.

When talking about systemic oppression of certain groups of people, the word "privilege" is used to describe the advantages a person gets if they happen to belong to a group that is "approved" by the system. The word applies to the behavior of the system as a whole. In this context, it is not synonymous with "advantage" or "influence." Therefore, in this context, there is no such thing as oppressed groups of people having "privilege...in internet debates."

50books_poc is a really cool community.

http://asim.livejournal.com/388028.html is an awesome post.

I am interested in the possibilities of the new LJ community fight_derailing.

I agree with what papersky said about trying to blend families, and I posted this comment:

Also, sometimes this happens: A person gets away from their family of origin for a while and gets a different perspective and decides that some of the things they "made allowances" for were not just rude/crude but toxic/damaging/abusive. And sometimes this person goes back and tries to talk about this to the family. And the family isn't able to entertain the different perspective, for whatever reason, and there's a great deal of hurt on both sides.

I think this is part of what's happening too. Not only in this Racefail thing, but in discussions of racism in general, and other isms.

Edited to add: jordan179 has taken strong exception to my viewpoint about the term "privilege" and my statement in the comments that privileged people have a moral obligation to non-privileged people. He has made a post in his journal inviting people to come over here and disagree with me.

I'm not interested in repeating the whole RaceFail'09 argument in my journal. I have my journal set to screen comments from people who are not on my friends list, and I will be screening comments that I don't want to deal with. If this isn't enough to prevent my becoming seriously upset, I will freeze comments on the whole entry.

This is an excellent example of how white privilege gives me advantages. I can walk away from a conversation about race that I don't want to deal with. People of color can't, because it informs their whole lives.

Comments

[leback.livejournal.com]

If I interact with Barack Obama, am I morally obligated to treat him politely because of the greater privilege I possess, or is he so obligated to me because of the greater privilege he possesses?

For me, in situations like this, it tends to come down to the specifics of the conversation we're having -- how each of our experiences (or what I think might be true about those experiences from the cues available to me) relate to the particular topic under discussion, and how the particular conversational setting might be giving one person an unjustified edge over the other.

Which really means -- as I think you're pointing out -- that I think each person should treat the other politely, insofar as politeness involves trying to make sure everybody gets a fair chance to express themselves. It's just that what I see as fair depends a lot on the people and the situation, and so instead of dictating some fixed set of behaviors, politeness for me dictates paying attention to context and behaving in a way that suits the situation at hand.

So in some conversations, that means I (as a white person) am going to try to defer to people from minority racial backgrounds, both because they're the ones whose experience (in my observation) often isn't represented as well in our society's common understandings -- and thus more of what they have to say will be new to me or others, while I can probably make myself understood relatively easily. Meanwhile, in other conversations, some other difference between us might be more relevant to determining which of us is at an advantage, and I might expect politeness to demand more deference from them, instead.