As a free-wheeling bisexual trans woman of the creative sort, I know what you're talking about. Really, it comes down to homogeneity and heteronormativity, full stop.
But three things that have to be kept in mind:
One is that even as a right-brained artsy type, I'm advantaged by my whiteness. If I wanted to get published, I'd have a leg up. This isn't to say that white authors just have to give the secret handshake and we're in. It's to say that authors who aren't white are at a disadvantage, or at multiple disadvantages. I'd link to some serious discussions of that, but I don't really want to look at them right now, so maybe that will be a separate post later on.
I suspect that musicians and performance artists who busk professionally have very different experiences based on their races.
Two is that it's easier for more white folks to mold themselves into the "default white collar career" type, for reasons having to do with names and hair and other people's perceptions of us that we can't control.
And three is that even at the height of something like the backlash against "beatniks", the crap we get for being dreamers and artists isn't anywhere near the consequences of being the "wrong" race. It might seem to be conceptually in the same neighborhood, but really... no. Having to put up with eyerolling and being told to get a real job? It's a difference of orders of magnitude from institutional racism.
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ninetydegrees
Re: Other calibrations
on 2010-03-01 10:16 pm (UTC)But three things that have to be kept in mind:
One is that even as a right-brained artsy type, I'm advantaged by my whiteness. If I wanted to get published, I'd have a leg up. This isn't to say that white authors just have to give the secret handshake and we're in. It's to say that authors who aren't white are at a disadvantage, or at multiple disadvantages. I'd link to some serious discussions of that, but I don't really want to look at them right now, so maybe that will be a separate post later on.
I suspect that musicians and performance artists who busk professionally have very different experiences based on their races.
Two is that it's easier for more white folks to mold themselves into the "default white collar career" type, for reasons having to do with names and hair and other people's perceptions of us that we can't control.
And three is that even at the height of something like the backlash against "beatniks", the crap we get for being dreamers and artists isn't anywhere near the consequences of being the "wrong" race. It might seem to be conceptually in the same neighborhood, but really... no. Having to put up with eyerolling and being told to get a real job? It's a difference of orders of magnitude from institutional racism.