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syncope at 10:42am on 12/11/2008
syncope at 10:42am on 12/11/2008I've been pretty mum on the racial commentary on the passage of Prop 8. Mostly because I think a lot of the rhetoric on the "the blacks passed Prop 8!!!" speaks for itself. What's really shocked me is how flagrantly stupid a lot of the NPR coverage of this has been. I was appalled the other day to hear a "insightful" report by an obviously liberal leaning reporter lamenting how the get out the vote campaign backfired. Yeah, no.
I think a lot of what's happening with this shitstorm is a reliance on conventional wisdom. Most people LOVE conventional wisdom. You know, the stuff They say, that everybody knows. Everybody knows, you don't have to explain! One of the things they say that everybody knows is that churchy types hate the gays and that black people are churchy types.
When people react emotionally they tend to leap to conclusions based on conventional wisdom. As often as not, conventional wisdom is racist, sexist, and rooted in old fashioned thinking that is pretty lowest common denominator and absolutely reductionist. Churchy types had a LOT to do w/ the passage of Prop 8, and there are a lot of black people who go to church, but these things aren't connected. I know people don't take logic any more, but it would be helpful to me if they did (so I could just bust out that most of the rhetoric around Prop 8 stems from false syllogisms and be done, but instead I will linkify my post with truthiness).
Everyone's favorite statistician weighs in on this matter.
Talk of the Nation podcast with a black community organizer in LA.
Sometimes you have to step back and realize that there's no simple answer to most big issues in life. Mama isn't going to explain things to you in a simple subject-verb-prepositional phrase sentence so that it's easy to digest the weight of history.
I've been thinking a lot about how what seems like huge failures of social understanding are often doorways for many people to leap out of their old ways of perceiving the world. The Prop 8 disaster is an example in wider society--at first gay rights advocates FAILED EPICALLY and exposed their complete lack of a grasp of civil rights realities for people who aren't white gay dudes. Now that that's blown up in their faces, there can a new understanding of unity and a need for dialogue among different oppressed groups. (This is what I'm hoping, and I think in situations like this one must be hopeful rather than cynical because our goal is to make the world better, right? So hope is always preferable to despair.) In a more immediate way for most people reading this journal, I've seen this play out time and again in fandom. I know that many PoC and other minorities get fed up with having to explain white privilege and latent racism to fools on the internet, but think of this way: how many people have been enlightened through this medium and have then gone out into the wider world to spread that message? Each person who makes a concerted effort to work harder to be a better person seeds five? ten? a hundred? other people to do likewise. It's called a fight for a reason; you might get bruised and you might get exhausted, but you can take a smoke break if you need to and ask someone else to hold the line for a while.
Often people's own disenfranchisement blinds them to the struggles of others, but when this is exposed it's like your parents letting you make your own mistakes, it's a way to grow. We have to pick ourselves up, try to see life from someone's else's perspective, and riot. Oops, that last part just slipped out! Just because solidarity was a forgotten concept for a long time doesn't mean it always has to be.
There needs to be some serious discussion of how one kind of disenfranchisement doesn't give you immediate access to every sort. There are points of interconnective of experience, of course, but that is tangential to the whole of lived experience. Each life is unique and typical in different measures and likewise the experience of oppression/marginalization/disenfranchisement differs and is similar at the same time. For me personally, I struggle to not troll people who roll up in racism debates and prelude their comments with "as a woman..." or "as a queer person..." or "as a muslim/jew/parsi/cheetah worshipper..." because I think that IMMEDIATELY presents the commenter as someone who wants access to a special status in racism conversations as someone who has valuable knowledge of their own oppression. Please stop. We can have conversations about intersectionality, but not ALL conversations need to be about intersectionality.
Prop 8 itself should have been a conversation about intersectionality and human rights. The time was ripe for that and we let it blow by (I say WE because I am individually responsible in my own way). If we first debate the difference of our experiences we can come to a firmer understanding of our commonalities. Personally, I've never been trailed in a store as a shoplifting suspect because I'm queer or Jewish.
I think a lot of what's happening with this shitstorm is a reliance on conventional wisdom. Most people LOVE conventional wisdom. You know, the stuff They say, that everybody knows. Everybody knows, you don't have to explain! One of the things they say that everybody knows is that churchy types hate the gays and that black people are churchy types.
When people react emotionally they tend to leap to conclusions based on conventional wisdom. As often as not, conventional wisdom is racist, sexist, and rooted in old fashioned thinking that is pretty lowest common denominator and absolutely reductionist. Churchy types had a LOT to do w/ the passage of Prop 8, and there are a lot of black people who go to church, but these things aren't connected. I know people don't take logic any more, but it would be helpful to me if they did (so I could just bust out that most of the rhetoric around Prop 8 stems from false syllogisms and be done, but instead I will linkify my post with truthiness).
Everyone's favorite statistician weighs in on this matter.
Talk of the Nation podcast with a black community organizer in LA.
Sometimes you have to step back and realize that there's no simple answer to most big issues in life. Mama isn't going to explain things to you in a simple subject-verb-prepositional phrase sentence so that it's easy to digest the weight of history.
I've been thinking a lot about how what seems like huge failures of social understanding are often doorways for many people to leap out of their old ways of perceiving the world. The Prop 8 disaster is an example in wider society--at first gay rights advocates FAILED EPICALLY and exposed their complete lack of a grasp of civil rights realities for people who aren't white gay dudes. Now that that's blown up in their faces, there can a new understanding of unity and a need for dialogue among different oppressed groups. (This is what I'm hoping, and I think in situations like this one must be hopeful rather than cynical because our goal is to make the world better, right? So hope is always preferable to despair.) In a more immediate way for most people reading this journal, I've seen this play out time and again in fandom. I know that many PoC and other minorities get fed up with having to explain white privilege and latent racism to fools on the internet, but think of this way: how many people have been enlightened through this medium and have then gone out into the wider world to spread that message? Each person who makes a concerted effort to work harder to be a better person seeds five? ten? a hundred? other people to do likewise. It's called a fight for a reason; you might get bruised and you might get exhausted, but you can take a smoke break if you need to and ask someone else to hold the line for a while.
Often people's own disenfranchisement blinds them to the struggles of others, but when this is exposed it's like your parents letting you make your own mistakes, it's a way to grow. We have to pick ourselves up, try to see life from someone's else's perspective, and riot. Oops, that last part just slipped out! Just because solidarity was a forgotten concept for a long time doesn't mean it always has to be.
There needs to be some serious discussion of how one kind of disenfranchisement doesn't give you immediate access to every sort. There are points of interconnective of experience, of course, but that is tangential to the whole of lived experience. Each life is unique and typical in different measures and likewise the experience of oppression/marginalization/disenfranchisement differs and is similar at the same time. For me personally, I struggle to not troll people who roll up in racism debates and prelude their comments with "as a woman..." or "as a queer person..." or "as a muslim/jew/parsi/cheetah worshipper..." because I think that IMMEDIATELY presents the commenter as someone who wants access to a special status in racism conversations as someone who has valuable knowledge of their own oppression. Please stop. We can have conversations about intersectionality, but not ALL conversations need to be about intersectionality.
Prop 8 itself should have been a conversation about intersectionality and human rights. The time was ripe for that and we let it blow by (I say WE because I am individually responsible in my own way). If we first debate the difference of our experiences we can come to a firmer understanding of our commonalities. Personally, I've never been trailed in a store as a shoplifting suspect because I'm queer or Jewish.
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