Sauce for the goose

[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.)

Comments

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.