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morgan_dhuI’ve been thinking a lot about what would be appropriate for me to write about for International Blog Against Racism Week.
I thought about collecting links about Canadian racism – because there’s this comforting little bullshit mantra we white Canadians keep repeating to ourselves, that Canada isn’t nearly so much of a racist country as, say, the U.S. is, which is false, because it’s not better here, it’s just different – but due to some health issues, I haven’t had the time to search for all the links I’d want to include. So I’ve decided to save that for next year, and prepare it in advance, because it needs to be said.
Then I thought about doing some sort of autobiographical piece, on how I noticed that there were people of colour in my world and when I started figuring out that there were differences in treatment, and how being raised by a well-intentioned liberal mother to believe that all people are the same, no matter what their race, religion or ethnicity (the good old colourblind approach to racism) might have made my behaviour different from that of some other people (because, when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, there wasn’t a lot of colourblindness going around, and I think, it may have been an essential step in the evolution of white recognition of racism and white privilege) but at the same time blinded me to the realisation of how important it is to recognise and respect difference, and to realise that saying “la-la-la, this is how I think it should be in a perfect world” does jackshit about how it is right now. But then I realised that this was that kind of shifting the focus of the issue away from racism and onto me, me, me, the well-meaning white person, that so many well-meaning white persons do so very well. So I’ll do that some other time in some other post when focusing on me is more appropriate.
Instead, I’m going to post an expanded version of some comments I made in response to an IBARW post about anger on
oyceter’s journal.On the Uses of Anger and the Resistance of the Privileged
I’ve been running into a lot of discussions of anger and how it is received when it is part of a protest against social injustice (such as acts or speech grounded in sexism, racism, ablism, heterosexism, transphobia, and other institutionalised systems of Othering, oppression, repression, prejudice, and privilege), especially when it is shown by someone who is a member of the Othered group.
It seems that it’s not nice for women to get angry about sexism, or for people of colour to get angry about racism, or people with disabilities to get angry about ablism, and so on. And when your inferiors aren’t nice to you, what do you do? Well, at first you ignore them, because as a superior person, you’re too nice to pay attention to their loss of proper subservience. Then you try to get rid of them – sometimes you even have to call in the servants to toss them out. You disparage them, talk to all your equally nice and superior friends about how horrible it is that all these inferior people are going around shouting and screaming and using foul language and sometimes even getting physical. You pass laws to keep them from acting up. You refuse to have them anywhere in your nice house, neighbourhood, workplace, playground, school, gentleman’s club, and so on.
It has been argued that this is why oppressed peoples should not allow themselves to be seen as angry, because then no one will listen to them, and nothing will change.
But then, one must ask, just how far does an oppressed group get by being quiet and polite and reasonable, and never, never angry?
bellatrys has, I believe, covered this scenario very well. You don’t get far. And yes, it’s very true that, if you then show your anger, you will encounter a great deal of resistance. But resistance is part of a process. If they are resisting, that means they have been engaged. They are no longer able to ignore, to pretend there is nothing happening. And that, I believe, is vitally important for change.
It is my belief that anger is important, that anger should not be set aside in the struggle for justice and for change. It is my belief that it should be harnessed, used to fire the spirit and support the body while you fight, even while it is controlled and channelled so that it feeds the message rather than rendering it incoherent. It seems to me that anger is how people respond when they are hurt, injured, mistreated, betrayed, belittled, excluded, done an injustice. It’s a healthy response. It means that you know something is wrong, and it has to be fixed. It gives you the energy to resist, to fight, to save yourself. Anger is not something to be denied. And using it effectively does not necessarily mean using it with violence, which is something that many people seem to think is true. Anger is energy – how it is externalised is up to you.
And yes, people who think of themselves as good people may – and probably will – get upset if you tell them by your righteous anger that they have at the very least benefited and been complicit in such injustices. In fact, they will probably go a lot farther than that. They’re going to resist. They’re going to call names, to excuse themselves, to say it happened a long time ago and it wasn’t their fault. They will argue that whatever is hurting you is hurting them too, to point out places and times where you, or your ancestors, or people like you, might have done something bad, or times when bad things happened to them, or their ancestors, or people like them (and all that might well be true, but some truths are not always relevant). And they’re going to be very, very hurt and dismayed at how angry you are, and how that’s just not like you, and they’ll try to persuade you that anger is not a valid approach, that you should be nice and calm and sensible and rational, just like them. They may even talk about how your anger is a sign that you’re not ready for, or perhaps not even capable of, being treated as equals.
But they can’t ignore the anger of the oppressed any longer. They have responded, and that is the beginning of dialogue.
(Time for a shift in POV and a narrowing of focus.)
Speaking as a white person in the face of anger expressed by people of colour, our reactions to anger are our problem. Not the problem of the people who are oppressed by the society we live in and benefit from, the people whom we indirectly and often directly oppress. We’re the ones who have to work though all the bullshit our privilege allows us to think and say and do. The anger of people of colour is what it is – the only honest response to what white colonialism, racism and imperialism has done to them. The fact that it is also a gift to us, if we chose to see it, is for us to understand and use.
Because people in power, people with white privilege - are, for the most part, not going to give up, or share, power and access, or let go of all the apparatus of lies and mystifications and covertly racist policies and all that shit that keeps us comfortable and unaware just because someone makes quiet, calm, logical, rational, nice arguments and appeals to reason. Because we can come up with just as many calm and logical arguments why it shouldn’t be done, why it doesn’t need to be done because the laws of god or history or the free market will do it in the right time and you’ll just have to wait for it, why it can't be done, at least right now, or why it wouldn't be right or fair or proper, or it would harm something important like the economy or national security or making whites feel good about ourselves, and all the other bullshit arguments. We have a million of them.
Most of us will not really be moved until we see and feel the anger of those we have oppressed, and understand it, and its consequences, in our gut. We are not going to change if we are asked nicely. Why should we? We have power, and privilege. It’s comfortable for us to stay that way. We might be poor, or women, or disabled, or queer, but at least we’re not people of colour – no matter how bad it gets for a white person, there’s always that little bit of privilege we can hold onto. (Of course, the intersectionality of oppressions means that many of you out there, regardless of your chromatic status, can say “at least I’m not a woman/disabled/queer/poor” – but this post is about racism, and we don’t need to fight about a hierarchy of oppressions, because there isn’t one.)
We’re not going to give this up without a struggle. We’re not even going to think about trying to give it up until we are forced to feel it. And we can’t feel a rational argument, or a polite observation. But we can feel your anger. And realise that this much anger has to come from something that hurts. That really, really hurts. And if we have any empathy left at all – and many of us do, it just that we don’t often engage it for people who we think aren’t like us – that’s going to eat inside of us, because we get angry when we’ve been hurt, and it will make us realise that you are like us, because you get angry when you’ve been hurt too. And then we, at least some of us, will start thinking about trying to give it up (in fact, some of us already have, and its because injustice makes us angry, pain makes us angry, and your anger made us understand that you are experiencing injustice and feeling pain).
Because it is about pain and empathy. This is why we make up myths about how certain kinds of people “don’t feel pain that way we do” or “don’t care about human life the way we do” or "hate our freedoms.” Because if we let ourselves realise that we're not the only ones who love life and freedom, and feel pain, that we're not special and refined and more evolved than all those other people we think are inferior, then we couldn’t sustain the illusion for ourselves any longer.
And that’s why anger will work, does work, has always worked. Constructive anger, anger that focuses the fire of justice on the pain that the unjust are trying to conceal, until even we can see how much pain you feel and how unjust we are.
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 08:58 pm (UTC)I think the problem with anger is one of definition: the word means different things to different people. I think that the implacable assertion of the demand for justice is hugely important, and many people see that as anger. I am not clear that expressing personal pain as anger always works that well, because there are a lot of people who either have very limited capacity for empathy, or - I hate to say this, but I think it is true - are capable of feeling other people's pain and enjoying it. Then there is the fact that anger calls forth anger, more or less automatically - that simply isn't very helpful.
I actually believe in appealing directly to people's sense of justice. I think humans in general are more decent and fair-minded than it is fashionable, nowadays, to believe. Also, that if you tell people that you know they are decent people AND that decent people are not racists - or anti-gay, whatever - a lot of them will try to live up to this.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-14 12:14 am (UTC)Anger can certainly call forth anger - viz one of the other commenters below - but part of the unpleasant fact of resisting oppression is that any resistance will evoke attempts to maintain the status quo or even make things worse. There is no path to justice on this scale, when the privileged have convinced themselves that they have too much to lose, that doesn't involve the privileged fighting back, and that will hurt. Even in non-violent protest, people die - and often it isn't until there has been enough death among those who resist oppression that the oppressors figure out that the struggle isn't going away, and that what they are doing doesn't work.
Certainly, some people do respond to an appeal to their sense of justice - but the thing is, those people are already allies by now. My thoughts are more focused on dealing with those who don't respond to that sort of appeal, and yet stop short of being, as you point out, someone who knows there is injustice, and not only doen't care, but actually enjoys it.
Perhaps I've been jaundiced by my own experiences, but I do think that repressing or denying just anger (and I do think this is a particular category of anger) injures the person who feels it, and makes it easier for the one who does not feel it to just walk away, and keep walking away.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-14 12:49 am (UTC)Oh, absolutely. I think we are totally in agreement over that. And I do agree that denying just anger is a very very bad idea.
I guess what worries me is partly the anger that goes round looking for a grievance, rather than being an emphatic way of proposing effective action, and partly the deliberate guilt-tripping approach, which may work with some of the people some of the time, but is usually counter-productive with the rest. Back in my gay rights campaigning days, one of the ways in which I used to work out effective rhetorical strategies was by considering the various approaches taken by anti-racism campaigners and working out what had had a real impact on the way I acted, and what had made me feel angry and resistant - even when I thought they had a fair point.
People really don't like to think of themselves as racists - their very anger when challenged reveals this - and it's possible to work with that - by offering them different ways to act, different possibilities in their behaviour.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-13 05:53 pm (UTC)If someone's mad at me for that, he has a problem. If he attempts to express this anger against me through words, I will use words back. If he attempts to express it through force, I will use force back. And I will be acting purely in self-defense, and I don't give jack s**t what happened to his ancestors, save as a point of history.
And if more whites refused to feel guilty for things they did not personally do, then the tactic of appealing to white guilt would be dropped as useless, and we could all have a much saner world.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-13 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-13 09:44 pm (UTC)Why is refusing to accept unearned guilt "sociopathic?" What is wrong with feeling guilty for the things that you do, and treating blame for things you didn't do as irrational?
no subject
Date: 2007-08-13 09:47 pm (UTC)It would be a more comfortable world for all people, if we stopped feeling anger toward those who simply look like those who wronged us, or our ancestors, and if we stopped feeling guilt for things that we did not do.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-13 11:55 pm (UTC)And that you think you share in none of the responsibility for having received the benefits of being white in a racist society.
And that you think that the desired response to anger from people of colour is guilt. I suspect that people of colour don't give a damn if we feel guilty or not, as long as the racism ends.
You, I must assume, have never felt righteous anger over some act of injustice, to yourself or to someone you know, that has fired you to act to oppose that injustice - in, as I suggested, a controlled and focused way that supports the message rather than subverting it. Either you live in a very wonderful world where no one is the victim of injustice - and if so, please tell me where you found it and how you got there - or you are missing the injustice around you, or you see it and don't give a damn.
I can only suggest that you get over yourself, because guilt is irrelevant. Injustice in your immediate environment is one of those circumstance where, if you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem. And that does make it your personal responsibility.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-14 03:24 pm (UTC)And that you think you share in none of the responsibility for having received the benefits of being white in a racist society.
I don't believe that there is a "system of institutionalized racism" in modern America. I believe that there was such a system, which today survives merely as remnants, gradually being eaten away by the overall climate of racial egalitarianism. And I do not hold myself responsible for any benefits which may have been afforded me at anyone else's expense without my consent or knowledge, since one is responsible only for what one consents to be done to oneself, whether good or ill.
And that you think that the desired response to anger from people of colour is guilt.
I am not a racist: I judge people by the same standards regardless of what their race happens to be.
I suspect that people of colour don't give a damn if we feel guilty or not, as long as the racism ends.
I don't give a damn whether they're angry or not, as long as this anger does not express itself in actions or words against myself or my innocent friends. At the point which it does, I judge that this person has named himself "enemy," and I do not accept the persecution of his ancestors by people who looked vaguely like me as a valid excuse for such rude behavior.
You, I must assume, have never felt righteous anger over some act of injustice, to yourself or to someone you know, that has fired you to act to oppose that injustice -
Of course I have.
But these were individuals who harmed me, or those who directly supported them, not those who merely happened to look like them. Still less were they those who happened to look like those who harmed those who happened to look like me.
If I did, I might bear the Germans some ill-will. There were once many Bassiors in Poland: you will now find none. Do you know why?
Would being angry at the present-day Germans, who are merely the descendants of those who murdered those who were merely my kin, help?
Injustice in your immediate environment is one of those circumstance where, if you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem.
I am "part of the solution" -- I treat those who I meet based upon their own merits, rather than the colors of their skins. I do not despise people because they are nonwhite -- nor do I favor them for that reason.
Answer Part One
Date: 2007-08-14 11:35 pm (UTC)To start at the very beginning, what then would be your explanation for the fact that infant mortality rates among black and Aboriginal populations in both Canada and the US, are so much higher than rates among the white population? We could then go on to look at comparative rates for poverty, life expectancy, education, employment, income, and all sorts of other things.
Or perhaps you would rather tell me why, when my college-educated, professional, mixed-race American ex-brother-in-law drives around his own upper-middle class neighbourhood in his expensive car, he is stopped by the police and his ownership of the car is checked every couple of months?
And I do not hold myself responsible for any benefits which may have been afforded me at anyone else's expense without my consent or knowledge, since one is responsible only for what one consents to be done to oneself, whether good or ill.
So you have always refused everything that you might have been offered on a preferential basis because of your race or any other privileged status you might hold? I'm impressed. Most people don't live lives in which it's possible to separate those things that we know we're getting an head start on because of our race, and those that we know have absolutely no racial preferences built into them, and refuse to accept those that do. I know I haven't been able to do that, and I've tried.
I am not a racist: I judge people by the same standards regardless of what their race happens to be.
No. If true, that means you personally are not prejudiced. I can and do believe that some white people have worked through the prejudicial images and beliefs about people of colour. I could also believe that, if you are indeed not prejudiced and if you had figured out how the power of the privileged functions in your society and made a decision to try to actively oppose the power and privilege systems that advantage you and disadvantage people of colour, that you may not be actively racist - but you clearly do not realise how power and privilege function in your behalf and against the interests of people of colour.
To be continued...
Answer Part Two
Date: 2007-08-14 11:36 pm (UTC)There were once many Bassiors in Poland: you will now find none. Do you know why?
Not specifically, no. I am unfamiliar with the name, but I do know something about the German occupation of Poland, as well as its occupation of Latvia and Estonia. I imagine the reasons could be similar to the reasons that there are only a handful of members of my ex-husband's family anywhere in the world, and no male members of that family at all remaining in Latvia, where it originated. My ex-husband's father survived because as a 15-year-old boy, he was conscripted by the German army. Following two unsuccessful escape attempts, he finally made his way through Finland to become a DP in Britain. Or to the reasons that another former partner of mine has no living relatives in Europe at all, though his family had been settled in Poland for generations; his father escaped to Ireland; everyone else died in the ghettos and camps.
But here we're talking about past injustices, which we both agree were committed. Our essential argument, I beleive, is over the question of whether institutionalised racism is active in the present, and whether white people are responsible for benefits we receive from currently existing racist structures, policies, social attitudes, etc, that are still being perpetuated today. I'm advocating anger over injustices that really are going on right now. You appear to believe such injustices do not exist.
I treat those who I meet based upon their own merits, rather than the colors of their skins. I do not despise people because they are nonwhite -- nor do I favor them for that reason.
Yes, the colourblind position. I understand that, and I know that it feels like it's the answer, because I was raised to believe that being colourblind was the right thing. And you know, someday, when the playing field really is levelled all over the world between peoples of different races, religions and ethnicities, it might be. But because we're not there yet, being colourblind actually makes one blind to the fact that you have to work to get the world to that place before being colourblind is also being fair.
I'm not comparing the situations directly, but I'll talk about a brand of privilege and power that is a personal matter to me. I'm queer. Bisexual, actually, which means that I can pass for straight if I have a partner of the soi-disant opposite sex (which I do), if I want to and if I keep my mouth shut about a significant part of my life, my history, my interests, my sexuality.
In the perfect world where there is no difference between the way that queer people and straight people are treated, legally, socially, etc, and no prejudice against people who are not straight, then it won't matter to anyone but me and my sex partners what I am. But until then, while any queer person is denied human rights, is treated differently under the law, is at risk of losing a job, or housing, or hir children, or hir life, because of being queer, then there is a difference, and it is happening now, and if I'm angry, it's not because queers were sent to the concentration camps along with all the other undesirables, it's because I and many of my friends are at risk right now for reasons that a straight person does not have to consider. It's because friends of mine have been killed by gay-bashers during my own recent personal history. It's becasue friends of mine who have lived together for more than 15 years and are raising a child cannot marry in their own country, but anyone who is straight can get married one day and divorced the next, if that's what they want to do.
All of this has roots in the past, but it is still happening now. and I am angry now, because of what is happening now.