Racism

[version]

I read something interesting earlier about a trip to China in the early 70s and the reaction of the visitors re: individualism vs. collectivism,

 

[you]

One symptom of this is found in consent. That to record a yes at one point means someone is consenting for the entirety, or sort of horribly machinic-bro view contra affirmative or enthusiastic consent.

 

[version]

On the point about language and terms like "BAME", it feels as though this stuff just comes down the pipeline from marketing and consultant types and gets forced on whichever groups it's deemed applicable to until a new term comes down the pipeline and they're told that now this is who they are.

 

[version]

The main thing about this stuff for me is that it feels very superficial. There's a lot of money and terminology being thrown around, but is it actually doing any good? Are ordinary people's lives being improved? It often feels to me like the Tories redefining poverty in order to avoid being seen to have missed their own targets. A great deal of effort going into the appearance of progress.

 

[catalog]

I was surprised the first time I heard it but I now understand, to an extent, how, in India, they have "veg" and "non-veg".

So they don't bother with "meat" cos that throws up a lot of issues.

So I just think "white" and "non-White" would be more clear.

BUT I do understand that there is something very unpalatable about that. Just seems wrong. So I do have a degree of sympathy for the people who have to come up with these things, they're never gonna get it right. What I find really annoying is the people who go along with it without questioning it or explaining how it's tricky.

 

[version]

The main thing about this stuff for me is that it feels very superficial. There's a lot of money and terminology being thrown around, but is it actually doing any good? Are ordinary people's lives being improved? It often feels to me like the Tories redefining poverty in order to avoid being seen to have missed their own targets. A great deal of effort going into the appearance of progress.

Chris Smalls, the guy who led the successful Amazon unionisation campaign, being criticised for going on Fox News to discuss it felt like a pretty striking example of what I'm talking about re: the appearance of progress vs. actual progress.

That guy (along with a bunch of other people) beat Amazon and all some people could talk about was how it was a bad look to go on Fox. The game of appearances seemed to matter more to them than workers managing to stand up to one of the biggest companies on the planet.

Obviously Fox is a shitshow, but you want as many people realising it's possible to stand up to these companies as possible and if even a few Fox viewers gain a more favourable view of unions then that's a positive.

 

[IdleRich]

I'm wary of that sort of, I don't really know how to describe it, professional language? Technical language? There's someone currently getting piled on on Twitter for making a thread about their kids with that sort of phrasing, like they're talking about clients or customers. They described washing their daughter's hair as "emotional labour" and complained that the teenager they'd fostered coming to them for support was unhealthy and treating them - the parent - like a therapist...

This person sounds pretty fucked up in any language. I think you are right to draw attention to the jargon though cos my feeling is that they are using it as a kind of smokescreen to express their unpleasant sentiments. Even this person would probably baulk at openly saying what they mean, which is something akin to "I just can't be arsed to wash the little bitch's hair for her" but I reckon that they have written it like this in an attempt to convince themselves that they are not being selfish or uncaring in any way... with some success I'd guess, given that it was probably this emboldened state which meant that they felt fine to say it online somewhere (twitter reading back - the worst place!), thinking that this horrible burden of emotional labour they described would win over everyone who read it in the same fashion.

 

[version]

I was surprised the first time I heard it but I now understand, to an extent, how, in India, they have "veg" and "non-veg".

So they don't bother with "meat" cos that throws up a lot of issues.

So I just think "white" and "non-White" would be more clear.

BUT I do understand that there is something very unpalatable about that. Just seems wrong. So I do have a degree of sympathy for the people who have to come up with these things, they're never gonna get it right. What I find really annoying is the people who go along with it without questioning it or explaining how it's tricky.

I think defining people as a negative would be incredibly unpleasant. I doubt anyone wants to be defined in terms of what they're not.

 

[IdleRich]

there was definitely a point at which these kinds of slightly conceptual terms that broadly come from 'left discourse' went from being something that i knew about, had read about in one or two places, would never have mentioned in real life because no-one would know what i was on about......became fairly commonly understood.

Or misunderstood. And used all the same.

 

[IdleRich]

In light of stuff like this, I think right-wing claims that the (academic) "far left" is corrupting our country are somewhat understandable. My main counterargument, having embodied this kind of woke academia before, is that much of it is done in good faith, but is just out of touch with how academic and nitpicky it seems to people who don't purely live in their heads.

I've been very struck over the last few years by the right co-opting this kind of thing. Once it was left-wing academics talking about how there were no absolute facts and that narratives and perspectives were all important. And for a long time the right (and not just the right in fact, people from all over the political spectrum grew hugely frustrated with this kind of thing. Hence the Sokal Hoax etc) fought tooth and nail against it... until, it feels, someone suddenly said "Hang on a minute, no facts you say? Hmmm" and then - I'm not sure of the mechanism by which it fed through - shortly after that you get Trump completely abandoning facts as we previously understood them, except of course, he's not talking about the previously unexpressed narratives of the downtrodden, he's moved to a position where truth is whatever the loudest shouter says it is, confident in the fact that he has a very loud voice.

Remember Trump's spokesman actually saying "We are going to give you some alternative facts" after his poorly attended inauguration? Language that used to belong in the academy moved to the centre of debate for Fox News style talking heads.

 

[version]

You had the (allegedly) Karl Rove thing prior to Trump too, mind you.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

 

[IdleRich]

Tea, just spent last Wednesday to today in the worst pain I’ve ever been in. If you have fentanyl administered in a British hospital, something is drastically wrong

Oh shit, sorry to hear about that. How you doing now? Through the worst I'm hoping if you can get on here and moan about it.

 

[IdleRich]

The main thing about this stuff for me is that it feels very superficial. There's a lot of money and terminology being thrown around, but is it actually doing any good? Are ordinary people's lives being improved? It often feels to me like the Tories redefining poverty in order to avoid being seen to have missed their own targets. A great deal of effort going into the appearance of progress.

Trivial equivalence but reminds me of what I said about CSI NY two days ago - as the actual quality of police officers and the work they do decreases to laughable levels (this was in the context of the cock-ups relating to the recent subway shooting), tv programmes tell us more and more powerfully how great they are. Now I don't think that Fox Crime is in league with the police or anything but I guess I have the idea that reflexively they are on the same side - that of the status quo - and it does somehow feel that as the elements of the establishment get worse instead of striving to improve that, it just spends money on telling us that actually things are getting better.

 

[IdleRich]

You had the (allegedly) Karl Rove thing prior to Trump too, mind you.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

I don't think Trump was the first to do this on the right, and I certainly don't think he came up with the idea of it. I'm just saying that at some point the majority of the right seemed to abandon their position of "Some things are clear and absolute and this is one of them and we're correct" in favour of a new style of argument in which, as long as they said it loudly and confidently enough, they could just say whatever they wanted regardless of whether it was true or had any supporting evidence. And needless to say this meant that they could make much stronger and more harmful claims than was previously possible. And Trump is perhaps the greatest and most visible exponent of this even though I'm sure he has no idea where the origins of that type of rhetoric lie (no pun intended) and is probably not even aware that he's doing it.

 

[version]

Trivial equivalence but reminds me of what I said about CSI NY two days ago - as the actual quality of police officers and the work they do decreases to laughable levels (this was in the context of the cock-ups relating to the recent subway shooting), tv programmes tell us more and more powerfully how great they are. Now I don't think that Fox Crime is in league with the police or anything but I guess I have the idea that reflexively they are on the same side - that of the status quo - and it does somehow feel that as the elements of the establishment get worse instead of striving to improve that, it just spends money on telling us that actually things are getting better.

Mark citing Marshall Berman on Stalin in Capitalist Realism comes to mind too,

"Stalin seems to have been so intent on creating a highly
visible symbol of development that he pushed and squeezed
the project in ways that only retarded the development of the
project. Thus the workers and the engineers were never
allowed the time, money or equipment necessary to build a
canal that would be deep enough and safe enough to carry
twentieth-century cargoes; consequently, the canal has never
played any significant role in Soviet commerce or industry.
All the canal could support, apparently, were tourist
steamers, which in the 1930s were abundantly stocked with
Soviet and foreign writers who obligingly proclaimed the
glories of the work. The canal was a triumph of publicity; but
if half the care that went into the public relations campaign
had been devoted to the work itself, there would have been
far fewer victims and far more real developments - and the
project would have been a genuine tragedy, rather than a
brutal farce in which real people were killed by pseudo-
events."

 

[IdleRich]

In Portugal we still have good old-fashioned overt acism which always catches me by surprise. I saw my friend Renato on Saturday and he told me that he had gone to this club called Incognito and someone came up to him and said "Oh, I see they're letting black people in here now".
Since I have been living here there I have witnessed the following directly or been told of by friends - all things that really kinda surprised me in their blatancy apart from everything else.

- people looking for flats being told by the estate agent "You won't want to live here, there are too many blacks in this area"
- taxi driver saying to us "Don't go to that beach, it's near to a train station and so loads of blacks go there. You want to go to a beach far from a station cos they can't afford cars"
- walking with a friend who wore a headscarf and someone (a black person) made a comment about her. Later a member of our group expressed outrage that "an n-word" could insult a muslim like that.
- numerous incidents that Renato has told me about including the above
- an Asian guy that we know constantly being turned away from Lux without explanation, including the other day when he was on the guest-list

 

[IdleRich]

You had the (allegedly) Karl Rove thing prior to Trump too, mind you.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

 

[Clinamenic]

In Portugal we still have good old-fashioned overt acism which always catches me by surprise. I saw my friend Renato on Saturday and he told me that he had gone to this club called Incognito and someone came up to him and said "Oh, I see they're letting black people in here now".
Since I have been living here there I have witnessed the following directly or been told of by friends - all things that really kinda surprised me in their blatancy apart from everything else.

- people looking for flats being told by the estate agent "You won't want to live here, there are too many blacks in this area"
- taxi driver saying to us "Don't go to that beach, it's near to a train station and so loads of blacks go there. You want to go to a beach far from a station cos they can't afford cars"
- walking with a friend who wore a headscarf and someone (a black person) made a comment about her. Later a member of our group expressed outrage that "an n-word" could insult a muslim like that.
- numerous incidents that Renato has told me about including the above
- an Asian guy that we know constantly being turned away from Lux without explanation, including the other day when he was on the guest-list

Yeah as many criticisms as I voice about liberal culture, which I tend to take for granted, it's really nothing compared to stuff like this - IE the criticisms I'd voice about conservative culture, which is ultimately why I'm a liberal. Just feels obvious to me.

 

[IdleRich]

Sometimes I'm really not sure what I think, in that the polite "politically correct" or woke or whatever you wanna call it society that most of us live in most of the time tend to mask some feelings. I'm not sure that I'm saying this very articulately but what I'm trying to get at is that nagging feeling that I think a lot of us have a lot of time, the one that tells us that although on the surface a lot of lip-service is being paid to anti-racism awareness and Kick It Out and all sorts of other things, it is just that, just on the surface. I think a lot of the comments above in this thread were at least related to that, maybe even taking it for granted, we all know that just cos there is an anti-racism charity in football it doesn't mean that football has dealt with racism, we know that just cos we see some guy deploring racism after the match, it's no guarantee of his real feelings or how he acts when he's drunk with his mates.

That's obvious, so obvious people didn't really even bother to mention it explicitly. So I suppose what I'm trying to say is that societies that have made it socially unacceptable to be openly racist do clearly have their own problems - but one that they don't tend to have is this kind of thing when someone comes out with these horrible and ignorant comments. A taxi driver doesn't tend to say "don't go to the beach with the black people" cos he knows that if he does there is a reasonable chance that someone will report him and he will get in trouble. He may well be thinking that to himself but he won't dare to say it.

I do think there is probably some truth about how if you change language it does tend to change thought. That if people realise that their openly racist comments keep getting them in trouble then they stop saying them and start biting their tongue instead. And then maybe after a while they stop thinking it so much too. Though of course that raises more questions about whether it's ok to bully people into being better like with Alex in Clockwork Orange - in this instance people haven't learned or got nicer or whatever, they have just mended their ways to stay out of a trouble, like a kind of pavlovian reaction... giving someone an electric shock every time they swear will probably stop them swearing....

 

[IdleRich]

I'd be interested to know how people would react to some of the above. The one that sticks out to me was the one about the beach. We were in a cab on our way one at the time. It was me and Liza and a friend of mine from school, not actually an especially close one but we are in touch and he was gonna come through Lisbon so we met up - that sort of feels relevant as it may have affected the amount to which we felt we could rely on each other for a united front, I dunno. Anyway it's a bit of a drive, we were kinda half way there, on the motorway and the guy comes out with that.... what would you do?

Predictably enough we basically did nothing. We were in the back and we all sort of looked at each other and there was big awkward silence. I guess we didn't want an argument, we didn't want to get dumped in the middle of nowhere. We didn't know what to do... ultimately, there's not really much more that I can say except admit that we were just pussies. We pretended not to hear and changed the subject. He clearly knew that he had pissed us off cos at the end as he dropped us off he said it again or some variant on it. Which is probably a perfect example of how our weakness and the way we just did nothing even though we all clearly thought it was wrong emboldened him. Thinking back I feel a bit ashamed, I wish that I could tell you that I righteously brow-beat him into an apology but that would be far from the truth. Sorry. I would like to hear what people think that they would have done, honest assessments of course.

The other thing. Kinda from the other side. Renato telling me about that guy deliberately making a racist comment to him and in a way the challenge for him was to not rise to it. In the previous example it was incumbent on us to do something, to make the effort to do the right thing. Here it was the other way round in that it would have been very easy for him to snap but in fact (he told me) that he almost got really annoyed but actually controlled himself and he said that he grabbed the guy's arm and just said to him very clearly and in a manner that was serious and heartfelt "That's not a nice thing to say". I think that was quite well done in the circumstances, he made a real attempt to force the guy to actually think about what he was saying and understand that it was being directed not at some abstract group but at a particular individual and that it was hurtful and cruel etc etc

As it happens, those guys have been going to that club for years, they know the owner and the staff and so on and another member of the group pointed the bloke out and he was thrown straight out. That wasn't down to Renato but I think he would have been well within his rights to do that as well - what I mean is, yeah, he rose above violence or even anger and that's great but there is no reason for him to rise above having that guy booted out. If it had been him who had made that happen I don't think that that would have in any way detracted from his having managed to not get annoyed if you see what I mean.