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.

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From:

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Actually anybody can walk away from a conversation with which they do not want to deal.

True, but there's the whole "out of the frying pan, into the fire" thing -- I can walk away from any given person who's saying any given thing, but it doesn't do me a lot of good if I'm not going to get more than a few steps without having to hear someone else say it. That's where I understood

firecat to be coming from -- it's easy for most white people (me included) to spend a lot of our time not having to deal with race, and not as easy for most people who aren't white to get away from the topic as often.

I don't know exactly what 'informs their whole lives' means, but if you think white people aren't affected negatively by race relation failures but people of other colors are, that is by definition prejudice on your behalf.

When, in your view, do statistical generalizations become "prejudice" in a negative sense, and when are they valid heuristics for interacting with the world?

I don't have a great answer to that question myself, but I think there *has* to be an answer, because at some level, most of our interactions with the world rely on generalizing from experience. So I know that one way to answer it is just to say that some categories are valid bases for generalization, but that race is so historically problematic that we can't risk anything short of ignoring it entirely. On the other hand, a major problem with that is that many people aren't *capable* of ignoring it, at least at a subconscious level, and some other people aren't willing to. So if we reject any kind of aggregate consideration of how race affects people's lives, discrimination continues subtly and often unintentionally, and we don't have any way to point it out or try to respond to it. And meanwhile, as racial disparities continue, they keep being the basis for more prejudices. It's a situation that could perpetuate itself forever, and I see no reason to believe that well-intentioned people can stop it simply by refusing to overtly acknowledge race.

So another approach that I see is to go ahead and explicitly acknowledge where race seems to affect many people's experience -- recognizing that none of what you're describing is universal, and none of it is unalterable, but that on a large scale, this is what's happening. That has the danger that it too can be made an excuse for perpetuating racialized harms -- this comes up a lot around issues like statistical racial profiling in law enforcement -- but I think the best answer to that is to look at any given way of discussing and using the knowledge we've got, and say "Is this going to cause more harm than it remedies?"

And I personally think that it is not especially harmful to draw the statistical conclusions that most people who aren't white have been negatively affected by race more often than they've been positively affected by race, and that most people who are white have been positively affected by race more often than they've been negatively affected by race. I think it becomes harmful prejudice if I don't allow room for people to refute its applicability to them personally, or if I treat it as something that can't be changed. But I also think that taking it into account carefully and thoughtfully, and anticipating the ways in which it might affect conversational dynamics, gets me closer to treating people fairly than if I instead assume racial disparities don't exist. And I don't think it promotes racial hatred, which I agree is a bad thing -- I don't think it involves my hating anybody, or encouraging anyone else to hate anybody, and in fact, I think that by helping to counter the racial disparities that do promote racial hatred in this society, it helps to counter racial hatred.

How do you think race relations in this country can be healed?