nancylebov: blue moon (Default)
[personal profile] nancylebov
It occurs to me that if it's reasonable to talk about the legacy of slavery (218,000 google hits) in some black communities (if you think there's "the black community" you aren't paying attention to plausibility), it's equally reasonable to talk about the legacy of slave-holding (6 google hits) in some white communities.

Addendum: Slavery by Another Name is a book about the continuation of slavery through the legal system until the beginning of WWII-- black men (few black women and very few white men) were convicted under trumped up laws (frex, leaving an employer without permission) or just arrested without charge and handed over to deadly industrial slavery. This happened to some tens of thousands, and had a chilling effect on those who weren't taken.

(I've heard interviews with the author, but haven't read the book.)

Date: 2009-04-29 03:39 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] onceupon.livejournal.com
I think the disparity in google results does not reflect so much on the validity of the discussion (because it WOULD be valuable to discuss what it means to come from a slave-owning group that has traditionally held the power) but more on the way race is not generally a topic that white people discuss among themselves unless it is to talk about how racist black people are (which is usually followed by a lot of reassuring each other that, no, of course, they would never act in a racist fashion).

Date: 2009-04-29 03:48 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nancylebov.livejournal.com
My point in citing the google stats wasn't to imply that "the legacy of slave-holding" isn't a valid angle. It was to suggest that the legacy of slave-holding is a very plausible angle which has been neglected.

I've been in a number of discussions of race with white people which don't match your model. At all. I don't think I'm that much of an outlier.

Date: 2009-04-29 03:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] osewalrus.livejournal.com
Now that I've seen this comment, I think I get where you are coming from. It would indeed be an interesting and challenging topic -- particularly top do it in a way that recognizes that "yes, being a slave holding society did influence slave holders (and non-slave holders but non-slaves) in complex ways" but does not come off like a corruption of blood ("your great-grandparents had slaves and so you are tainted forever").

Date: 2009-04-29 03:53 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] onceupon.livejournal.com
I agree with you that it has been neglected. I think we were both saying the same thing there. I definitely wasn't trying to imply that you personally were questioning the validity of the discussion.

But I disagree that you are not that uncommon.

The vast majority of discussion that I have on race issues involve people of color. There are white people involved as well, but the group of white people I know who would voluntarily and actively pursue such a discussion amongst themselves is incredibly small. And when I read comments to blogs or talk to people I don't already know or otherwise interact with regular people who do not actively work toward social justice, the discussion is very much not welcome.

That's one of the frustrating things about the whole "we live in a post-racist society" spin that gets put on Obama's election. Having a black president doesn't make that so but there are a lot of white people who are ready to sweep racism and the legacy of things like slave-ownership as under ther ug as possible.

ETA: There's an interesting survey floating around that I have to see if I can find again, about the ways in which people self-identify. The results were that people of color almost always self-identify according to race and that white people almost never do when asked to describe their identity. I think that goes along with this.
Edited Date: 2009-04-29 03:55 pm (UTC)

Date: 2009-04-29 04:07 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nancylebov.livejournal.com
I ran into the stuff about self-identification here. It was an exercise for a class where education students talked (yelled) about race.

The specifics about race are important, but so is the idea that people are more likely to have self-identifications in areas where they've been hurt.

This both personally interesting (it's not a coincidence that short characters are important to me) and might have some implications for Buddhism.

Date: 2009-04-29 04:33 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] whswhs.livejournal.com
I would note that in the educational culture of the past few decades, a black person who proudly labels himself as "black" and a white person who proudly labels himself as "white" are not going to get equivalent treatment. So white people not talking about being white may not be all that much a matter of internal motivation; it may be partly recognition of external penalties, ranging from being thought rude to being administratively disciplined to being sued. Even some white people who honestly feel that they are being abused for the benefit of black people (and that includes a fair number of white people who are getting the short end of the stick) may know that they can't avow their whiteness, or that they must do so very carefully. "Say it now and say it loud,/I'm white and I'm proud" would not be a very popular chant.

In other words, I think it's fallacious to infer internal sense of identity directly from overt behavior in a non-neutral social context—and the United States is definitely a non-neutral social context, not in a uniform way but in a complex and often contradictory one.

Date: 2009-04-29 05:41 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nancylebov.livejournal.com
Fair enough, though note that the original case was about asking people what their self-identifications were, not what they were proud of.

I can't think of any reliable way to tell whether someone who'd generally be considered white isn't calling themselves white because they think of their race as default human or because they're afraid of being considered racist.

Or they might be Hispanic, someone from a black family who looks white, or a non-Spanish European-ancestry American who just didn't get the usual imprinting.

Race is blurrier around the edges than science fiction.

Edited Date: 2009-04-29 06:07 pm (UTC)

Date: 2009-04-29 10:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] whswhs.livejournal.com
Your link doesn't go anywhere, so I don't know what the original article said. But if I felt anger toward black people, or some other nonwhite group, and I were a student placed in a multiracial group and encouraged to talk about my feelings about being white, I think if I were smart I would not say that my white identity was important to me, or that I felt black people were better treated than I was, or that I resented nonwhite groups . . . because I would anticipate negative consequences from doing so, ranging from hostility and possible retaliation from nonwhites to official condemnation by the people running the school for "racism." In fact, I would be prepared to speculate that white people who do feel such anger overestimate the danger of such harmful consequences. But there could be real consequences even for, say, a white student who innocently did as they were asked.

In prison environments, prisoners learn to tell The Man what he wants to hear, to keep him happy and not get in trouble. And school is a prison environment: you are there under compulsion, under arbitrary authority that can do bad things to you and not be held to account for it, and confined with other people who may hate and abuse you, and from whom the authorities have no obligation to protect you. Expecting accurate and honest self-revelation under such conditions is unrealistic.

Date: 2009-04-29 10:52 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nancylebov.livejournal.com
http://dolphin--girl.livejournal.com/153506.html

This link should work-- sorry about the botched html.

How much are you talking about your own experience, and how much are you talking about your best guesses?
Edited Date: 2009-04-29 10:55 pm (UTC)

Date: 2009-04-30 12:38 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] whswhs.livejournal.com
I have only the most tangential experience with that sort of educational environment; I was in college when the very first black studies and "Chicano studies" (that's what it was called at UCSD in 1970) courses were coming into the curriculum. Elementary and secondary schools might have been starting in the same direction; I wasn't in contact with them, so I don't know.

In my last few years at a corporate job, we were all sent to "diversity training," and it was basically harmless tedium, nothing like the "yelling class" your link describes. My most vivid memory of it was of one of the instructors putting up a chart of our "diversities," where we could write into a circle words for things that made us distinctive, and filling it in—and her "diversities" were things like "woman" and "mother" and "professional" and "consultant." So I raised my hand, and commented that the things she had put down were not particularly unusual traits, but were presumably traits that were personally important to her, and asked if she wanted us to define ourselves in terms of what we thought was important about us, or of what we thought was unusual about us, and she said, "fill it out according to what you think the instructions mean." So I left it blank, and when she came to me, I said, "I have an unusually strong need for explicit definitions" and stopped.

It sounds as if this course was taught in a college, and to students who chose to be there, though they may not have known what they were getting into. That changes the dynamics from the "mandatory high school program" that I assumed.

Date: 2009-04-29 08:57 pm (UTC)
avram: (Default)
From: [personal profile] avram
A valid or plausible angle on what?

This post, and the entire comment thread, leaves me feeling like I've read a long sentence where the author neglected to include the verb.

Date: 2009-04-29 03:48 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] osewalrus.livejournal.com
True, but I don't think there is the same level of interest in the discussion. Is there someone who wants to talk about the legacy of slave holding who feels repressed?

Date: 2009-04-29 04:15 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nancylebov.livejournal.com
There might be-- it could imply a theory of why they're being repressed.

Date: 2009-04-29 05:41 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dcseain.livejournal.com
A friend of a friend's family kept slaves at least into the 1930s.

Date: 2009-04-29 05:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nancylebov.livejournal.com
Where? And how?

Slavery by Another Name is on my to-read list. Part of what was going on is that there was an amendment abolishing slavery, but there were no laws against slavery.
Edited Date: 2009-04-29 05:55 pm (UTC)

Date: 2009-04-29 06:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dcseain.livejournal.com
Somewhere in Goochland County, Virgnia. That is all i know. At least as late as 1938, i i recall correctly.

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