Here’s a nice example of what this site’s about. Angry Black Woman was asked by a man – presumably white, since he didn’t say, and we all know what that means – why she feels the need to identify herself with race, in addition to “angry” and “woman”? He says,
I mean, I myself am an “angry guy”, but I don’t really feel the need to add race into it. So my question is, why is there a need to put race into the picture?
Wow, dude, the privilege is like right there and you don’t see it. ABW nails the problem: her race is making Angry White Guy uncomfortable. He wants her not to mention it for all the reasons she says.
“White” is not a race. It is a cultural (delusional) default. It’s everyone who’s something other than white who belongs to a race. White people have the privilege of being race-less. Angry White Guy feels no need to bring race into it because he doesn’t belong to a race. He simply belongs.
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I don’t agree that is it delusional to consider white the cultural default. White is simply the majority in this country. If you know absolutely nothing about a person, it is perfectly natural to assume that person is white; therefore they need not mention it.
As for the angry black woman, the reason she mentions race is obvious to me, but it is context based. If her race has been a contributing factor to the experiences that have angered her, it deserves mention. The same applies to her gender.
For example, if she were complaining only about park visitors failing to pick up after their dogs, she should only say she is angry, since her race and gender have nothing to do with it. But if she is venting about a lifetime spent on the receiving end of both racism and sexism, it is perfectly appropriate for her to call herself an ABW; it sums up her story in three words.
Richie P(Quote) (Reply)
Uh-huh. Just like, when you don’t know someone’s gender, you assume she’s a woman rather than a man, because there are more women than men.
This is the saddest argument I’ve heard in months. If it was about majorities, women would be the default gender. But it’s not. It’s about who societies deem important.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer, you rock.
Richie, it would only be natural to assume everyone were white if everyone were white. Luckily, many many people are not.
Anne(Quote) (Reply)
There are times that yes, I wonder why race was brought into the picture. The other day someone was talking about an irritating customer. This person has talked about irritating customers before, and this time around, instead of being ‘that idiot’, it was ‘that black guy’. And I wondered, why bring up what ethnicity the person was? It wasn’t like it was germane to the story, the race of the customer didn’t come into play. The customer was your average garden variety moron who thinks the expiration date on a coupon doesn’t apply to them because they are special snowflakes. So…why was race an issue? Assholes come in all shapes and colors.
It does go the other way too, and I’ve dealt with that was well. I sell eggs, and you get a discount if you decline a carton. The other day a customer told me, ‘I bet if I wasn’t ______, you’d throw in the carton for free’ and it just floored me. I spent an hour afterward analyzing my behavior to determine what gave the person that impression. It’s not the first time something like that has happened. On occasion, I can see how someone who has suffered a lifetime of racism can come to that conclusion, such as the time I was able to provide a carton to a white man and not to the black woman who pulled in as he was leaving, but the truth of the matter was he had simply taken the last carton I happened to have on hand that day. I do hate the assumption that because I am one color, I automatically have a problem with other colors just as much as I hate the assumption that because I am one color I am not as intelligent/competent/educated/worthy. Some folks have a chip on their shoulder, and racism takes many forms. I don’t like having to be on guard against accidental offense even as I acknowledge it is necessary.
Unless someone indicates otherwise, I just assume they are the same gender/race/creed that I am if I think on it at all. Safer that way, as it does wonders for preventing me from having a bias based on interactions of the day.
GardenGoblin(Quote) (Reply)
At a job I had for a year or so, I actually called someone on this kind of storytelling. He was talking about a rude guy in the supermarket and kept referring to him as a Turkish man. I asked him why it was important that the man was Turkish, and he nearly flipped out. All the listeners thought it was innocuous, but I still said that if it had been a German-looking (!) person, he wouldn’t have mentioned it.
We recently had a case where a man was kicked to death when he tried to help some other person being attacked, and the police initially described the suspects as having a mediterranean look. So the largest yellow paper called them Nasir and Murat, and there was a lot of talk by the right-wing parties and some blogs why the police wouldn’t reveal these people’s names and ethnicities after they caught them – was it to pretend that immigrants weren’t responsible?
Thing is, these guys weren’t immigrants by a long stretch, and they had perfectly normal “German” names, they just had had a sun tan. But did you see anybody wise up or be ashamed? No.
It’s like if a German guy goes out drunk and kills his wife for leaving him, that’s a tragic crime, and if an immigrant kills his daughter, it’s an honor killing and a sign how muslims don’t fit into our society.
To me, that’s the only reason race in such cases is important: because it draws a line between the crime and the ethnicity, and the perpetrator becomes a representative of his group, not an individual.
T. O. Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
It does seem to go to strange extremes at times though. At a renfaire, I was describing someone who knew a lot about beer making so an interested party could find him and ask him some questions. I described the beer maker as ‘the tall black guy in the blue tabard and black leather boots’. An eavesdropper (white, for the record) took offense to that description because I shouldn’t have brought race into the picture. Then she backed off because ‘well, you are a minority to, so I guess it’s okay if you do it.’ WTF? Double standard much?
Racial profiling sucks, but should skin color not be mentioned at all in a description of someone? If the guy who assaulted me was a tall with a tattoo on his neck and happened to be white, should I leave the white part out of the description and have them stop every tall man with a tattoo on his neck regardless of skin color? Wouldn’t we be better off just treating skin color as though it had no negative connotations rather than as dirty words? I’d love to see a time when describing someone as ‘brown skinned’ was no different than describing them as ‘brown haired’ or ‘brown eyed’. My best friend is a wonderful shade of milk-chocolate brown and I’d love to drag her to the paint store with me and say ‘this, this right here, this is the color I want for the window trim’. But as amusing as she’d find that, somebody would get offended.
Your other story does remind me of an incident that occurred at college. I was sitting with a group of friends, and it happened that day that there was only one white person in the group. A nasty passerby made a remark about ‘fucking immigrants taking up space’. The white guy in the group looked at the multi-colored faces of the entirely born in the US group around him and responded in his thick Russian accent, ‘And to what tribe do you belong?’ The look on the bigot’s face was priceless.
GardenGoblin(Quote) (Reply)
I wish I had read this two weeks ago, when I just couldn’t find the right words to explain to a bunch of (white) people on some forum why I felt the need to mention my race when they didn’t perceive it as relevant to the topic.
Most of them are women, though, and it’s always odd when the people you think would know where you’re coming from (at least better than the multiple-privileged white man) systematically dismiss your concerns and make you feel ridiculous in the process.
Lisa(Quote) (Reply)
Sadly, feminism has a history of white middle class hetero women forgetting, you know, every other type of woman out there. People typically have trouble seeing their own privilege – even if they themselves are un-privileged in some way (for lack of a better term). And unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of voices out there reminding people: “Maybe if you’ve never been X, then you should listen to someone who is X instead of assuming you know how the world works/looks from their perspective.”
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
This is a late response, but anyway, in reading this entry, and the comments, I was reminded of a time on another forum when a poster talked about how he was being bullied at school by another student. He described the behavior of the student, which was obviously relevant to the topic, since he was seeking advice about what to do about the situation. However my problem was when he brought up the bully’s race. Instead of just talking about the bullying behaviors, he also mentioned that the student was black and some other, what I felt were unnecessary descriptors. Myself and a few other posters commented that it was kind of unnecessary to bring the person’s race into the discussion, especially since the bullying wasn’t due to race or motivated by race. The initial poster responded with an apology for including the racial descriptor. I wasn’t expecting an apology from the poster or anything like that, I just felt like I needed to point it out that race was not important to the discussion. Once the person apologized though, other people started telling him that he had nothing to apologize for and that people shouldn’t be so sensitive. I felt like it had nothing to do with sensitivity on my part, but I do know how people react and the assumptions that are made, whenever someone who is not white participates in negative behavior. I’ve read many comments that followed news articles, and if a story involves a non-white person, negative racial comments are always made because people assume that violent/bad/uncouth behaviors are inherent to anyone who isn’t white, so they take that opportunity to rant about how the really feel.
introvertedwanderer(Quote) (Reply)
Having said what I did in the above, I do think that it is necessary to mention race or to include it as a descriptor, sometimes. For example, on YouTube, there is a series that comes on once a month called Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, which is a series that centers around a character who is all three of the descriptors in the title. I feel like it is a great title and that it is important that the title includes the race of the central character because not only is the title catchy but it also highlights a specific personality characteristic that some black people, and in this case, some black women deal with, which is social awkwardness, and personality quirks that are only usually displayed in white characters. Usually, when people think about and talk about black women, they are under the impression that all black women are strong, confident, outspoken, and basically able to handle themselves in all situations, and that they don’t have individual personalities, quirks, weaknesses, and strengths, like others do. The creator of the show, Issa Rae, who also plays the central character, got tired of seeing black characters on television that did not represent her, so she decided to create the Misadventures series to show that not every black person acts the same way or has the same experiences, and that yes, there are black people who are socially awkward and who don’t come from the mold of strong, assertive, and outspoken.
introvertedwanderer(Quote) (Reply)
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