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Girakittie, I think that this thread, and your contribution to it, would be more interesting if you dropped your desire to be right, and started looking at the issues. I realise that you are about to tell me that you are in fact doing precisely that, so let's save time and skip that part.
That said, there was an interesting statement at the beginning of this thread:
I think that by not acknowledging race, when we notice it, or by not commenting on it because we are "not going to discuss race", after all, we are not being inclusive of diversity and we are actually trying to impose a cultural hegemony on others that may or may not preexist.
Okey. First up, I'm not sure how one can impose a cultural hegemony that does not pre-exist. So, my understanding of that is more like "we are actually trying to impose a cultural hegemony on others that we have the option of applying or not" - that is, a hegemony against which resistance is possible. That's reasonable - hegemony can be opposed.
Now, let's bring in the modifier "cultural". Cultural hegemony is a concept with its roots in Gramsci (again). Very broadly sketched, it means that groups whose interests are not served by the cultural systems of the hegemon (in our and his case, capitalism) are induced to believe that pursuing the interests of the hegemon rather than their own is desirable - so, for example, seeking to become middle-class rather than overthrow the capitalist system which divides people along class lines. This is done throught mechanisms controlled by the hegemon - most obvously, the media.
Now, there are a number of issues with this simplified model of cultural hegemony, at least from my point of view. It's monolithic, with the hegemon and its institutions at one end and everyone else at the other. It also relies heavily on the idea of "false consciousness" - that is, that the masses have been brainwashed into seeking the advantage of the hegemonic structure at their own expense, by believing themselves to be best served by existing within a system the parameters of which have been set by the hegemon, much to the frustration of left-wing intellectuals. On the other hand, if you're a member of the masses the hope of future global emancipation and the current ownership of a dishwasher might actually be a much harder call.
So, hegemony. Is cultural hegemony served by not mentioning race? I'd say, if you accept that model of hegemony, then in some cases yes. For example, if one did not mention that a disproportionate amount of poverty in the US is suffered by non-white people, one might be consciously ignoring the interrelationship of race and class. Likewise if one did not discuss the proportion of white and non-white Americans currently suffering as a result of Hurricane Katrina. However, another might accuse me of using race as a PC smokescreen to avoid confronting the real issue of inequality of wealth in the city.
Now, how about the Rodney King case? Was it significant that Rodney King was black and the arresting officers white? How about the disproportionate number of black men dying in police custody in the UK? Is the "point" there that they are black, or that they are men, or that the Police do not know how to treat sufferers of schizophrenia in custody? Where is the description oof the victims as black making a point, and where is it "straightforward reporting of the facts"?
At the time of writing, girakittie's most recent contribution to the thread, talking about the distinction of gender as a parallel, said:
Yet the one thing I have learned living in the San Francisco Bay Area and after being involved on several levels with a couple of different trans people is that you are generally safest in ascribing to someone the pronoun with which they "present". If you are unsure, ask.
I think that we have become so oversensitized to the use of descriptive words that there can be a definite tendency to ascribe a motive or hidden meaning to the words when often, as in the case of my vignette, there was none intended other than a straightforward reporting of the facts.
Now, there's always a danger in "isn't x just like y?" questions, which is that the answer is very often "no". In this case, we are given the example of ascribing (gender-descriptive) terminologies to transpeople, and have that compared to applying (race-descriptive) terminologies to people in general. However, the difference is arguably in the question - girakittie describes gender presentation as an active process:
You are generally safest in ascribing to someone the pronoun with which they "present"
Conversely, racial identification is a process undertaken - girakittie was passing, did not have time to earwig, did not have time to inquire as to the particulars of the situation, but did have the opportunity to identify the race of the speakers - this was not a consultative process. In most cases, of course, neither is gender identification - it's possible that the girl was a boy and the man was a woman, and that the identification by girakittie was mistaken. It's possible, by the same token, that the bottle of Orangina was not Orangina, and so on. Which is another dimension of this particular situation - the competing claims of politics, reportage and narrative. It probably doesn't matter enormously in narrative terms whether the bottle was an Orangina bottle or a Sprite bottle, but it may matter whether it was an Orangina bottle or a bottle of sherry in a brown bag, or a bottle of Chateau Lafitte '71, and so on. Likewise, the race of the participants, and the way it is described, may have political implications, or implications for the accuracy of the narrative, or implications for the effect of the narrative. So, "simple reporting of the facts" is a more complex (and, I'd say, larger) claim than one might otherwise think. id entity touches on that in the Conversation thread with:
I usually can't tell at a glance if someone is African American, Afro-Cuban, or Black Bahamanian (as I was recently reminded, to my embarassment).
That is, terminology like "African-American", although often used interchangeably with a description of the colour of somebody's skin, is not actually a description of somebody's skin colour. People who appear to be white might be "African-American", in the sense of being Americans of African origin (qv Nella Larsen, for starters), and people who are dark-skinned may be not of African origin or may not be of American nationality, and so on. One can make further and better assumptions - based, for example, on accents or fashions - but these are precisely that. So, I'd question whether "reporting of the facts" is ever in this instance entirely simple, and certainly question whether it was simple here. Deva, later in the Conversation, provides a sense in which it was not simple for her - that is, a way in which the information provided in the anecdote complicated what would have been her instinctive reading of the narrative (that the man and girl were father and daughter).
This is getting a bit long, so question to wrap up - is "simple" a useful term here? That is, can one usefully apply it to explain why a particular statement is not open to examniation, and why to attempt examination is a sign of having become "oversensitised". One might cross-refer "oversensitive" and its brother "overanalytical" and the term "politically correct" in terms of usage, also. |
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