Sunday, October 19, 2008

The Ingredients of Silence

This is not how I intended to come back to a prior post about the power of naming. I wonder if this means there's a third post in this somewhere? But tonight I had the experience of calling out someone who used a term that's usually a racist slur. In the course of conversation I got told that:

a) The person using the slur was biracial

b) Her feelings were more important than my defending a fictional character from a possible slur

c) Her white friend uses that term to describe herself all the time. So the only racist is me, who sees the term and thinks woman of colour.

These things have all led me to think about the power of naming. Did the individual interacting with me know that I too am a woman of colour? It's possible. But somehow I doubt it. The way the card was played, and yes, I'm calling it a card quite on purpose, I could tell this was meant to silence me. She's a woman of colour therefore she has more right than I to decide what is racist and what isn't. And usually that card's only trumped on the assumption that the other person is a 'well meaning white person making things uncomfortable'.

And right then it occured to me that race is a name of power. Not calling someone by their name, is name power. Not calling them by the right name, is name power. Mocking their name, is name power (which is the third essay that'll come about at some point in time). But self labeling is also name power.

Perhaps it's my fanciful mind. But I could so clearly see her drawing a circle about herself, sticking in some zodiac signs, lighting a few candles, exhaling and then going, all Pokemon style. "I choose you! My non-White side! Go forth and battle this bitch who's getting on my last nerve with her insistence that feelings have been hurt by a mere word! SILENCE HER!"

And even as I describe that, I can so easily see another circle, with another individual drawing up power from somewhere, symbols glowing in yellow candle flame. "I choose you! My 1/16th Cherokee/Souix/Cree/Apache/Insert First Nations Tribe Here - Heritage. Go forth and SILENCE my accusers. Manifest as a Princess, oh great, great, great, great, great, great, great grand-mother and repulse those that would label me insensitive, racist, or ignorant!"

I haven't gotten any further in my thoughts that that, however. Because obviously the self-naming/self-labeling spell gets bounced off someone who also is a minority, or who perhaps is listed on their Tribe's rolls, or their parents are. Or better yet, the spell bounces off knowledge, rightenousness and history. But all too often, I'm sure, someone is silenced. Someone does get confused because they were certain they saw what they saw, but now...

And I haven't thought of a spell that'll counteract that. How do you tell the budding anti-racists they need yet more knowledge? Doesn't it seem daunting to them that they need it, not in a general way to understand more or learn more but as a shield against this kind of crap?

Is there a way to stop people pulling out their bag of tricks and glitter? Is that a better use of time and energy? And what about people who have dual or more heritages? What about people with colonial history in their past where various tribes of the oppressed intermingled? I've seen quite a few heads come near to exploding when they realized the person they were trying to silence was South Asian, Black and Chinese.

Any thoughts?

7 comments:

  1. "And even as I describe that, I can so easily see another circle, with another individual drawing up power from somewhere, symbols glowing in yellow candle flame. "I choose you! My 1/16th Cherokee/Souix/Cree/Apache/Insert First Nations Tribe Here - Go forth and SILENCE my accusers. Manifest as a Princess, oh great, great, great, great, great, great, great grand-mother..."

    I've got one of those. Can I use her to battle those of others? Will there be badges?

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  2. What I see is this:

    "Racial slur. Tool of genocide and oppression. I choose you!"

    There is no divorcing the tool from it's history. Whether you use the rationale that you're white and the other person is lesser, or that, you're not white and therefore "do not benefit" from it's use, in the end, it still supports white supremacy.

    I really don't know what to say. So many are trained to participate in The Oppression, they act as if they get a free pass.

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  3. Bankeui:

    "There is no divorcing the tool from it's history"

    My last (ending) statement to her was that she kept saying she'd never brought up race, but where did she think that term came from.

    I wasn't trying to do Race 101, or even Race 204. So I surprised myself by being relatively civil. I was definitely angry.

    Still I'm disappointed in the fact that upon hearing her excuse my first thought was "You might be biracial but you sure as hell are showing which side of your heritage you claim as every day and matter of fact."

    Because that plus "My white friend uses the term." Just seemed to blink (neon letters) of 'I am clueless and shall remain so ?'. And it hurt to realize I was judging someone (a possible WoC) so harshly. Not because I was judging them, but because I had to judge them; if that makes any sense.

    I've surrounded myself with strong women of colour, online and IRL. It was a harsh reminder of -- hmm, the reality of the unaware, uninformed, willfully blind? I'm not sure what to call it.

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  4. The hurt of it all is having to basically consider this person from potential ally to someone giving active harm- someone who has chosen to ally with the oppression, even as someone who suffers from it. It's the fact that we hold both compassion for people under this system of mind colonization even as we hold anger for their perpetuation of it.

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  5. Well, that seems to be the entire purpose of Michelle Malkin's existence - to extend the force-shield to the entire Right Wing punditosphere. (Plus of course other Pundits of Color like Star Parker and Alan Keyes, but Malkin has managed to become First Among Wingnuts due to her vehemence and being not-as-obviously-barking-mad as say, Keys.) It's like some sort of diseased symbiosis - mutual parasitism I guess - where they can say "Look it's not racist to say we should put brown people in camps cause we've got a brown person saying so!!1!" and she gets a bigger cheering section and blog fanclub than anybody else egging her on.

    Or - egads - Adam Yoshida, who seems to think that if he just finds the right star to wish upon, he will magically transform into an Anglo-American gentleman of 1898...

    It's odd, because I've encountered (just one or two) Indian-American blog commenters who were all "Rah Rah Raj!" basically b/c their families did very well under it and so what Amritsar? echoing the kind of stuff that Pat Buchanan says about slavery & gratitude (blech) but I have yet to find a single Irish-American uttering platitudes of gratitude for the Famine and the exile that led the Irish diaspora to become so powerful and prosperous (eventually) in the US...for some strange reason they're all very bitter about it, even the ones who talk like Pat about colonial Uplift for other races... [/snark]

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  6. PS - this also seems connected to the Quest For Cultural Authenticity that I sometimes mutter about, usually it's all about who's more Holy Roman than thou, but there's that long odd trend of WASPY white-supremacy types nevertheless wanting to be able to claim that Cherokee Princess in their background, too. It's all so tangled and mucky with Noble Savage romanticism and Ties To The Land legitimizing, as well as all kinds of macho warrior-heritage sentimentality that I doubt there's a simple explanation, but definitely a "psychic shield" of sorts too.

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  7. The hurt of it all is having to basically consider this person from potential ally to someone giving active harm- someone who has chosen to ally with the oppression, even as someone who suffers from it.

    bankuei, you just described my mother, who spent her life simultaneously attacking women's rights (she was a big Phyllis Schlafly fan!) telling herself and everyone that she was being the big rebel against the Tyrannical Forces Of Liberalism & Modernism, *and* demanding to be treated as an equal/superior leader-type by the men in our rightwing Catholic social circle - and being furious that they never did let her into the boys' club all the way.

    And "colonized" is exactly the word for it - I well remember how angry I got when I first encountered the concept in college, how fiercely I denied that such a thing was even possible...because I knew deep down that I was an example of it. But saying out loud "No, I WANT to be treated like a doormat, I LIKE being servile and disrespected because it makes God love me more!" - well, if you say it out loud it breaks the spell...

    It took reading black (& mostly women) film critics' media reviews to open my eyes to a large degree - first about why race representations in pop culture were giving me bad vibes, even the "benign" ones, and then by extension to be able to look at gender without reflexively defending "The Man" as default.

    I hate (1000 suns &c) the phrase "false consciousness" b/c I think it is insanely confusing which is the opposite of what a term should be, but I think that the concept of mental colonialism is exactly accurate, in part because it so well reflects the fact that even under colonialism, there were always some among the colonized who were able to do very well for themselves by working against their fellows, and who thus came to self-identify with their masters, even to defend being kicked by them, because it profited them. (Follow the money is always true - even if it isn't literal $$$.)

    My mother had to build a huge web of lies - and tangle us all up in it - to avoid facing up to the fact that she had not been able to deal with being a working single mom living in her parents house and using her folks as free day care, and had jumped at the first man who came along and asked her to marry him, claiming it was a Sign From God and was all for the sake of her daughter. It was a bad bargain, of course, for both of them - but since she couldn't ever admit she was wrong about ANYTHING (just a sinner!) and also couldn't take responsibility for any choice of hers, she had to find a social circle that would continuously validate this decision and allow her to claim that it was the ONLY moral one for any woman, anywhere, ever.

    But she hated being subjugated, really, no matter how much she talked about the Glories Of Voluntary Servitude, so it pretty much sucked as a situation for the whole family.

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