Oceans Yet to Burn

the-grey-tribe

Anyway, before I miss out on the other discourse going on: Piper Harron has basically said that universities need to fire white mathematicians, because WOC have no chance to be hired to do math otherwise.

Problematic?

Or super problematic?

mitigatedchaos

No. Woke.

the-grey-tribe

Dammit! Are you sure?

mitigatedchaos

Does she look white to you? Woke.

Granted, I was just shitposting and hadn’t checked first, but this whole edge case wokeness thing has been more stupid than politics in general so it seemed like a good guess. Of course if a white man said the same thing it would be a sign of his racism, but SJ informally asserts that truth value is based on race, sex, and orientation of the speaker, so…

identity politics race politics

the-grey-tribe

Where are you from

the-grey-tribe

I guess one of the symptoms of this “identity confusion“ is that asking “Where are you from - originally? What are you?“ is sometimes considered a micro-aggression, and sometimes people identify strongly with that place, and sometimes people from the Old Country ask you “Where are you from?“ in exactly the same way, but it can’t be a micro-aggression in that case.

Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when it turns out the waiter is Greek? Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when *you* are Italian? Is it an insult to ask somebody for directions in Mandarin because that person *looks* Chinese? Does it matter if you are a Mandarin native speaker? Does it matter if you’re a Cantonese native speaker? Does it matter if this happens in the US, or in France, and you don’t speak French?

Does it matter if your family was forced to renounce their heritage in one of the World Wars or by Stalinist resettlement?

If you try hard to keep your identity and culture alive, you will have an answer ready to “Where are you from?“.

Treating “Where are you from, originally?“ as a kind of slight enforces the mainstream US categorisation into back, white, brown, Asian, Latin American, native American.

Sometimes, the question is where *in China* are you from? What place exactly? Are you from the same place *I* am from?

argumate

what is your ethnoracial heritage? wait, just spit into this test tube and I’ll send it to 23andme myself.

the-grey-tribe

For what it’s worth, Americans always want me to really specifically say where I’m from, even if they have never heard of the place, and are most satisfied with my answer if I also give the distance to the next NATO base that has marines on it.

Americans also really specifically tell me what state they are from, what the chief export of that state is, and the distance from their home town to the state capital.

My point was that these “microagressions“ are only microagressions if you ask them as a member of the wrong ethnic group. There is something there that gibes me pause. But if you assume we are all members of one nationality, without any subcultural divisions, that is a microagression as well.

Identity politics claims that ethno-cultural divisions are fundamental to our identities, at least until a white person asks about them to understand a person’s identity better, at which point the ethno-cultural divisions become a socially constructed tool of oppression and marginalisation.

argumate

I can answer this: it’s polite to ask an African person where they are from, it’s a microaggression to ask an African American person where they are from.

It’s polite to ask where in China a Chinese person is from, it’s a microaggression to ask a Chinese American person where in China they are from, or (worse) where in Asia they are from, or (even worse) where in the world they are from.

What, you can’t tell if someone is Chinese or Chinese American just by looking?

ms-demeanor

“Where are you from?”
California.
“No, I mean where are you from?”
Pasadena.
“No, what are you?”

see also:
“What are you mixed with?”

When it goes away from “hey, what’s up, are you traveling, fellow human” to “how can I categorize you” is where people start to see a clear problem.

Like, look there are tons of blonde-haired, blue-eyed 8th generation American people who are happy to natter on about the small Dutch village and French provincial town where Gran-gran-gran-mere and UberGrosOpa lived until the war brought them together, but asking someone to bring out that story upon first introduction is a bit rude, especially when the answer is “well my family has been here for four hundred years but we lose the thread somewhere in the middle passage” or “we’ve only been here two generations and fled from an oppressive regime” or “I’m not telling you because I’m not actually from here and I don’t know if you’re an ICE agent who’s going to follow me home and deport my parents.”

Seems like the kindest question is “so do you live/work/go to school around here?” for light chatter, but you’ve gotta be a level four friend to unlock someone’s backstory whether it’s tragic or mundane.

Also this sort of thing comes up a lot after people hear an “exotic” name or if someone isn’t easily slotted into a stereotypical category, which intensifies its interpretation as a microaggression - Janey from Omaha likely doesn’t get asked where she’s from as much as Zuelma from East LA does. The vast majority of people I know who interpret “where are you from” as a microaggression only do so after experiencing another microaggression (a long assessing stare or a comment on the strangeness of their clothes, hair, or *loudly* commenting on an accent).

Most people I know don’t see “where are you from” as an irritation, it’s the “where are you *really* from” that’s read as hostile.

[I work with a man who has a really hard-to-pronounce-for-the-unpracticed name, even though he’s the owner of the company and I’m fielding calls from cold-call vendors I hear “wow, I’m not even going to try to say that right - where is Boss from?” about 2-3 times a week. Montrose. He’s from Montrose.]

Aaaaaaalso the question of when it’s appropriate to use Spanish [or insert applicable language] is somewhat fraught. Another man I work with is the son of immigrants, has dark skin, and has a name that reads as Mexican, but his parents never allowed him to learn Spanish or speak Spanish with them because they though it would make it hard for him to get a job or would get him in trouble at school. As an adult he speaks only rudimentary Spanish and each time it comes up he insists that he doesn’t speak Spanish and is embarrassed by his poor command of the language. It’s difficult for him to talk to his parents because their command of English isn’t very strong. So when someone speaks Spanish to him he A) gets reminded of all that history and B) has to explain to the Spanish speaker that he doesn’t speak the language, and I’ve seen people call him a liar or stuck up for not speaking Spanish. No one speaking Spanish to him knows all that history and is bringing up that strain for the sake of being mean, but fuck I can’t blame him for getting worn out by it coming up on a regular basis. If I, a white woman, speak Spanish to a Latinx person am I making the assumption that they can’t speak English or am I trying to be accommodating and accept the fact that I live in an area with a dozen languages in use and a wide array of cultures sharing space? Am I being rude by asking them to tolerate my poor Spanish or polite by making the attempt? Both. Neither. It’s complicated.

Different people have different ideas about what’s rude, and I think that may be a better context to set that in. Is is rude to ask someone where they’re from? Probably not the first time, but it is rude to stare at someone then ask where they’re from.

the-grey-tribe

The post was motivated partly by South Asian exchange students in $REDACTED ordering curry in Hindi and asking where the waiter is from when he does not understand.

Everybody immediately assumes the asker is white. Kind of my point here.

My dad has a co-worker who married a son of an Italian immigrant. The other day he (the father-in-law born in Italy) came to the shop and my dad used it as an opportunity to practise his Italian.

Turns out the co-worker took it as a slight. She had never learned to speak Italian.

mitigatedchaos

This is also part of the more indirect costs of multiculturalism. A dozen different cultures, cultures mixing and flowing but simultaneously being prohibited from mixing and flowing because it’s “appropriative”…

You don’t just get 12 scales of what’s polite and impolite behavior. You get somewhere between 12 scales and one scale for every person in the area.

It was said some study found that above a certain level, diversity imposed a higher cost due to all the needs to overcome communication and negotiation barriers, effectively wasting what could have been productive time for insufficient gains. I wish I cold find it.

identity politics

argumate

for a post-racial society Tumblr sure does get heated about whether Armenians count as white or not.

it’s mercifully one of the few debates that feature the Kardashians and genocide as legitimate talking points.

mitigatedchaos

I thought Tumblr was all about racial awareness, not being post-racial?

I thought that was the new SJ Left thing - racial awareness, racial consciousness, ethnic experiences - just only for those with enough overlapping categories in the Venn Diagram of Oppression.

identity politics race politics

sighinastorm

All white people owe poc reparations

ratherbeinspacewithotherstars

This isn’t a debate.
Your guys’ ancestors enslaved us and treated us like property that could be disposed of easily.
Now you continue to mistreat us.
Pay up
You reparations show you are sorry for your ancestors racism and the current racism.
So pay up

anti-sjw-movement

My ancestors didn’t though, in fact most people ancestors didn’t. A tiny percentage of the global populace owned slaves and the majority of that was in Africa where it’s still happening today… do they pay reparations too? By your logic. Yes they do.

sighinastorm

I do think reparations were owed, but the only sound way to do it, that I can
think of, would be for reparations to have taken the form of (at least partially) education and higher vocational training, beginning immediately during Reconstruction. Even today, I think a program like that could do a lot of good, but with what we’re doing along those lines now, we begin too late. College is too late. We need to be assigning scholarships to preschools and grade schools.

“Your guys’ ancestors“, though? Please.

anti-sjw-movement

I don’t think reparations is owed at all, for a start the white people today who’s families did indeed own slaves at one point are not at fault for that, they didn’t personally own slaves and they could very well be upstanding members of society who would never do wrong, why should they suffer whether financially or made to sit in a classroom to be told how they’re bad.

Secondly whilst slavery was a disgusting part of human history, it was the social norm and people then were accustom to it, those who weren’t stood against slavery firmly.

Thirdly, many many many white people gave their lives in war to free slaves, no one ever mentions this, acknowledges that these people died to change the world.

All of this and more reasons are why reparations are unjust and unneeded.

sighinastorm

When the slaves were freed and then basically just left to figure out
what to do for themselves, a self-perpetuating underclass was
created. This has left a black mark (no pun intended) on our social
history, and a brake on our nation’s progress in countless fields.

For the ever-present “race issue“ to not be a thing that exists America, what would that be worth? For racial division to have never have been such an issue
in justice, imprisonment, crime, poverty, sciences, arts,business, ownership, housing, city settling, finance, what would that be worth to a country?

Reparations isn’t just some moral absolution for a sin (yours, mine,
or somebody else unrelated’s). The goal was integration, which,
foolishly, was thought to be obtainable for 40 acres and a mule.

>> why should they suffer whether financially?

A cohesive society benefits all therewithin.

mitigatedchaos

That isn’t what the reparations people actually want, though, and the reparations people will never agree that any sum of money is enough, so the right move for the national government is to never pay any reparations on this matter.

The reintegration of blacks into the broader American culture is Nationalist, would require rejecting Multicultural Diversity as a terminal value, and would mean in some ways result in the dissolution of what has effectively become an ethnic group within the nation.

Can you imagine the enormous left-wing freak-out if they caught on that that was what were doing? Re-activating the melting pot within the nation on its own groups? Further transforming “American” into an outright ethnicity?

It would be worth an utterly enormous amount of money, more than it would actually cost, but no one in this country is capable of actually executing it. The ones that want to do it won’t do it correctly, and the ones that don’t want to do it don’t want to pay for it.

identity politics the iron hand fish breathe water

mitoticcephalopod

medium.com

I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out. — Medium

thegestianpoet

“Because for some transwomen, femininity can feel asymptotic — the closer you get, the more you feel you can never make it.”

This is a…hard, uncomfortable read if you’re a cis woman, but it’s a good read.

suffire

a lot to think about.

pussy-strut

as someone who has engaged in a lot of shitty misguided misandry in the past, this was a crucial read. who is invested in the stability of men as a category n why? how can one speak to one’s experiences with weaponized masculinity without reinforcing other kinds of structural violence, like cissexism and white supremacy?

collaterlysisters

This is a bullshit article. It reflects tremendous self-loathing, and it was irresponsible for Medium to publish it. “It’s so hard the other girls don’t know my tragic trans narrative, because I have made a conscious decision to live it only in dreams and online anonymous op-eds and will never ever tell them.”

This is another case of cis people exploiting the pain and suffering of trans people who aren’t in a position to know better.

I originally discussed this article in some depth on facebook so please read on for a (slightly choppy) elaboration of my reaction:

Keep reading

antriebsloosigkeit

I just read the text. I don’t know what I think about it yet, but I know one thing for sure : wow, fuck you :) @collaterlysisters

mitoticcephalopod

let me add on to this, fuck you @collaterlysisters

mitigatedchaos

Ah, yes, I read this some time ago.

I can never be a true traditionalist, because I want to build the switch and obliterate dozens of category distinctions in doing so. It’s the only way to end many of the existing tensions within so many systems. Eventually, you have to go beyond triaging with limited resources and build such an overwhelmingly powerful economy that you can choose all the options you wanted before simultaneously.

Source: thegestianpoet gender politics identity politics

silver-and-ivory

are you a “makes fun of otherkin” anti-sj or are you a “writes thousand word posts about intersectionality and the evils of normativity” anti-sj

mitigatedchaos

I’m “thinks otherkin are ridiculous since that’s not a realistic variation on human brain designs, but supports their right to morphological freedom in the transhuman future”.

identity politics gender politics

bambamramfan

congruentepitheton

I’m not exactly sure what causes people to flip when they see the word privilege, though.

Some time ago [Popular Blog] was asked whether they considered themselves privileged. It was a perfectly polite ask that was quite clearly not meant to ignite animosity or taunt or shame or make [Popular Blog] lose authority and status in front of its followers. It was quite clearly simply prompted by the fact that [Popular Blog] does not seem to fall under any of the major axes of oppression discussed around here, and seems to live a perfectly cosy life. [Popular Blog] flipped anyway and termed the word privilege inherently offensive.

That was an extremely bizarre moment of internet wtfery to me.

I cannot shake off the idea that if the question had instead been, “would you say that life has treated you kindly so far?” the answer would have been completely different, even though the question is, at heart, the same minus the word privilege.

If that anecdote is an accurate model of the instinctive reaction people have to that word, it seems to me that the word itself (though not necessarily the concept) has at this point outlived its usefulness. If your gut reaction is to flinch away from it, you cannot think about it critically. You cannot imagine ever thinking even of yourself in those terms, which I thought was supposed to be the whole aim of Tumblr discourse.

(And if the aim isn’t encouraging people to think, “wait, does this apply to me? Do I in fact wield some power over the people around me and what can I do with it to make life easier for those who find themselves in a worse position than mine?” then, in fact, what even is it?)

Because if the idea of someone being in a worse position than you makes you instinctively defensive — either because you’re losing oppression points or because you feel that the amount of hard work you’ve put into achieving your current position in society is being dismissed, mocked or invalidated — then the whole terminology used to describe privilege cannot possibly be helpful or useful any longer in any practical sense. It means we’ve reached the point where we’re unconsciously equating “privileged” with “inherently evil.” And that is not the best strategy to encourage either self-analysis or understanding (let alone decency) towards other people.

discoursedrome

I think there are two separate problems with “privilege”. The first, which is the bigger of the two, is that it’s a shibboleth. It identifies the user as belonging to a particular social tribe and something like 75% of peoples’ reaction to it, positive and negative, can be explained by how they feel about members of that tribe. That’s a hard problem to overcome if you want to talk about the specific concept. Any word used predominantly by one group will undergo this process naturally, so you’re caught between a euphemism treadmill and trying to alter the meaning of a shared word to capture the specific nuances you’re interested in (as has been done with “racism”).

The other problem, which is subtler, is that “being privileged” is a shared concept and it has quite a different meaning from “privilege” in the social justice sense. “Being privileged” doesn’t just mean that you have privileges, it means you’re upper-crust, some kind of sweater-wearing trust-fund type. Outside the circles where “privilege” is widely discussed this meaning tends to shade into discussions of privilege generally, and it’s particularly bad if people say “privileged” rather than “having privilege”, which isn’t a distinction that people are trained to avoid in the context of social justice privilege. This does suggest that another word, carefully chosen, might be an improvement, but in the case you mention it sounds like it’s the former problem predominates.

arjan-de-lumens

As it looks to me, a *major* problem with the social justice version of the “privilege” concept is that it has picked up a strong use/connotation of being a dismissal device rather than just a pure analytical device - where people’s lived experiences get dismissed out of hand because they are deemed to belong to some “privileged” group. There is a certain kind of conversation I’ve seen a few times that goes roughly as follows:

College-educated rich white person A: “You possess white privilege!”

Poor white person B: “Huh? What does that even mean? My life has generally been shit …?”

A: “It means that you’re less likely than people of color to have experienced ___” [long list of bad things that A has never experienced but that A is sort-of-aware happens to people of color quite a bit]

B: “but .. I *have* experienced most of those things. [long essay about major hardships that B has experienced in their life]”

A: “you still have it better than PoC that experience those things, and you need to acknowledge your white privilege” (with a tone indicating that this point is more important than the experiences that B just listed.)

B: “… this is bullshit. go fuck yourself”

where it doesn’t even occur to A that the experiences of B indicate that A obviously possesses some form of unrecognized privilege that B very much doesn’t possess, and where B recognizes the discussion as basically A using the “privilege” concept as a justification/excuse to dismiss B’s concerns and experiences out of hand.

A related phenomenon sometimes arises when people pose questions like “do trans men possess privilege?” which has sometimes resulted in debates/flamewars where people have treated it as basically a life-or-death issue. Which is absurd when considering “privilege” as an analytical device, but makes sense when treating privilege as a dismissal device; declaring the trans men as possessing privilege comes very close to saying that they don’t deserve help and support with any social issues that arise from their situation, which can be quite threatening indeed.

As such, with a really strong “privileged”=“can be dismissed” connotation in place, a question like “do you consider yourself privileged?” is likely to be interpreted -

- not as a benign “do you consider yourself lucky with your life situation?” kind of thing that one would expect from viewing privilege as an analytical concept -

- but more like a double-bind type rhetorical trap, kind of similar to the so-called “Kafkatrap”, where you can either - admit to being privileged and thereby imply that your life experiences shouldn’t matter and can and should be dismissed - or reject the notion that you’re privileged, which makes you look like you’re being aggressively unaware of people whose life situation is legitimately worse than your own - or you can try the kind of unpacking that I’m trying to do here, which is likely to come across as “trying to dodge the question” or something like that if you try it as a direct response to the question as posed. Either way, you lose. Which I think is why people interpret this kind of question as an attack rather than as just a benign query.

“Flipping out” in various forms seems to be a somewhat common response to this kind of rhetorical trap - seemingly-unreasonable responses to things that look innocuous is an indication that there might be a trap like this present, that people are reacting to.

Source: congruentepitheton identity politics

silver-and-ivory

Every time that I’ve talked about feeling white guilt and in general being seen as a white person, people have said things like, “But… aren’t you Asian?”

And they’re right to say that, to be clear! It’s really shitty to reduce Asians to Basically-White if they disagree with you, and I appreciate everyone who pointed the gross unfairness of this action out.

But at the same time I feel like they’re missing the point. For all intents and purposes, as someone who’s been adopted across racial lines, I am white. I am white-cultured. I am Western-cultured. I’m American in my individualism and my perspectives.

And that feels wrong to ignore as well.

When kyriarchy tries to cleave reality at inexact and ill-defined fault lines, people rightly object. Categories don’t cut neatly; there are always people who queer binaries by their very existence. Forcing them to Choose a Side rarely works out well.

The same applies to sj. I’m racially Chinese and ethnically white-American; you can’t discredit the white part of me without also ignoring and erasing the Chinese part, and you can’t pedestalize the Chinese part without ignoring and erasing the white part.

Under white supremacy, either my white-American ethnicity is celebrated and my Chinese race is “excused” (and erased), or my white-American ethnicity is erased and my Chinese race is denounced. Under the reverse discourse, either my Chinese race is celebrated while my white-American ethnicity is “excused” (and erased), or my Chinese race is erased and my white-American ethnicity is denounced.

Sj must not forget intersectionality. It must not forget that identities lead to complicated intersections that are inseparable from each other. It must deconstruct and replace kyriarchal categories rather than enforcing them.

I’m not American+Chinese. I’m Chinese American.

mitigatedchaos

I propose a model in which power is represented and analyzed as a graph of relationships between individuals, where nodes represent individuals and weighted directed edges represent power relationships.

Relationships that effect groups can then be observed and measured without reducing all members of those groups into indistinct blobs where all members are considered interchangeable, or venn diagram intersections.

Edit: May also be of interest to @theunitofcaring.

identity politics gender politics race politics

quixylvre

Source: alexxdz identity politics

the-grey-tribe

raggedjackscarlet

So I’ve been seeing this post go around our little sphere here, and….

look, everything in that post is correct, but the change is never going to happen.

the “Dork = Reactionary” narrative is a superweapon that SJ is never going to willingly surrender. it’s too goddamn useful.

not only does it allow them to righteously bash a helpless target (“THESE BARELY-FUNCTIONAL ASPIES ARE ALL SECRETLY NAZIS!!!”), but also allows them to use the threat of being tarred as a NEET to keep each other toeing the line.

It’s never going away.

Source: raggedjackscarlet identity politics

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Where are you from

All white people owe poc reparations

I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out. — Medium