Sauce for the goose
Apr. 29th, 2009 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.)
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.)
no subject
Date: 2009-04-29 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-29 03:48 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-29 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-29 03:53 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-29 04:07 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2009-04-29 04:33 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2009-04-29 05:41 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-29 10:14 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-29 10:52 pm (UTC)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?
no subject
Date: 2009-04-30 12:38 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2009-04-29 08:57 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2009-04-29 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-29 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-29 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-29 05:49 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-29 06:06 pm (UTC)