Our friend, the throat-punching machine.
Mar. 1st, 2010 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinThis post is the sequel to my previous post about the notion of a "throat-punching machine". It has been sitting in an open Notepad window on my netbook for a couple of weeks now. A post on a friend's Livejournal made me realize I never actually put it up.
Note: There will almost certainly be people reading this who think that parts of it were written to address things they said in particular, either as comments on the referenced previous post or elsewhere, but everything between the two horizontal bars was written before that post went up.
I think that most people would agree in the abstract that a system that punches some people in the throat isn't good and it isn't fair, but of course not everyone is going to agree that we have a system like that, or that it's widespread.
So now, I'm going to talk about one particular "throat-punching mechanism" that is present in our society. The purpose of this post is to show how the attitudes that we share does disadvantage persons of color and therefore does privilege white folks.
I mean, if somebody else is getting held back, you have an advantage, right?
And here's where we come to one of the reasons why I've made a series of posts revolving around the proposition of racism arising without racist intentions. On its own, this might actually look like kind of a wishy-washy way of confronting racism.
And it is.
Seriously, it is.
But there is a point here. There is a method to my blandness!
See, so long as we think of racism that can only happen when somebody is acting on a racist intent then the answer, the rebuttal, to any talk of widespread racism is to say "But I don't even think about race.", to insist that we could solve any lingering problems of racism by refusing to think about race, by being "colorblind".
But a lot of the mechanisms by which our society punches people in the throat is at work no matter what a given individual thinks of race or even if a given individual thinks of race.
Does that sound impossible? HP managed to put a web cam that functioned better for white people without thinking about race. Whether or not you want to call that "racism", the fact is still there that if they had thought about race they might have tested the camera more extensively and caught the problem before it went out.
So, anyway, let's imagine for the sake of argument a crazy hypothetical situation, something that's just slightly less ludicrous and far-fetched than the literal throat-punching device and something that has just slightly more real-world impact on people than a webcam function that works better for people who happen to look like the folks who designed and tested it.
The remainder of this post is addressed as if the reader is a white American, or something near to that. That's who the message behind it is more or less aimed at, though there may be a lesson in it for others. You can consider the racial and cultural identity of the referenced "you" as part of the hypothetical, if it doesn't otherwise apply to you.
Now, you aren't racist, right? You don't have a racist thought in your head. You have friends of many races... not that you notice their races, because you don't. People are all just people to you. The place you live in is a place of shocking diversity, where nobody seems to even notice race all that much. Certainly you never hear anybody talking about it.
So that's you.
You sound pretty swell, actually.
Hypothetically speaking.
In our hypothetical situation, we'll imagine that your ideal for what hair looks like when it's clean, well cared-for, normal... professional... is what hair with the texture and follicle structure most commonly associated with white people is when it's been treated with the typical regimen that white Americans tend to follow with regards to hair care.
Of course it would be ridiculous to imagine you came to this idea all on your own, so we have to imagine that you're part of a society in which this idea is widespread, so that it could have been propagated through you in the first place.
You don't think of it as "white hair", of course.
You don't think about race that much at all... you prefer to judge people by the content of their character, right? Because you're not racist. Where you come from, it seems like no one talks about race... certainly no one thinks about it, much less acts on it.
So when you're rubbing elbows with someone on public transportation, when you interact with a person doing their job... from food service to health care, from manual labor to white collar professions... or when you're considering hiring somebody for a position, you're not thinking about what race they are, you're judging them on things that might indicate whether or not they seem like a pleasant person, whether they're someone you'd care to do business with, someone you'd trust to take care of your interests.
You don't even think about race.
You only assess people based on things that matter.
Things like... hygiene.
Things like whether they take pride in their personal appearance or they just don't seem to care.
Whether they look professional enough to be acceptable, or slovenly.
Of course, in our crazy hypothetical world one of your benchmarks for how you judge these things--how they keep their hair--just happens to be tied up in race.
Yes, there will be people of color who manage to fit themselves into your box for "acceptable standards of hair care". Some of them might not even to try that hard... after all, the physical things that underly our sociological concept of "race" are not binaries.
But more European-descended people will fit your standard more easily than people of African extraction.
And so it's not hard for you to end up making racially biased judgments about people without harboring the slightest intent to do so. You can do it while thinking to yourself how bad racism is and how much it sucks to judge other people for the color of their skin. And because it's not just your own random personal preference, a larger hypothetical society is also doing this, the results of this "unintended racism" are felt by large numbers of real people.
Your individual impact might be minimal... in fact, depending on where you live it may be possible for you to personally harbor this bit of programming in a way that never actually affects anyone.
And maybe you personally don't care how people wear their hair. Maybe you're not in an industry where it matters. Maybe you're kind of a grungey slacker type yourself so even if certain hairstyles code to you as kind of grungey you don't care.
Or maybe you're a human resources agent, and maybe you mentally sort job applicants into an A and B pile based on how "professional" they look, how well you think they'll fit in with the "corporate culture", and maybe hair that looks "dirty" or "unprofessional" to you nudges people towards the B pile.
Either way, tthe mechanism is still there, and it's only one of many. If you're not a cog in this particular throat-punching machine, you'll still be a cog in several others.
Now, of course, I'm being more than a little facetious when I call this a "crazy hypothetical" situation... I'm talking about the world we live in, where the default for what is nice, what is normal, what is presentable, what is professional, what is hygienic in how we wear and treat our hair is strongly rooted in how white people from Europe tend to wear the sort of hair we tend to have.
And of course, hair is hardly an aberration. It is... like the HP camera... merely one example in a sea of examples.
The voices that most stand out to us (and thus register as "loud") in a crowd of people all having conversations in big echo-y public spaces are the voices that sound the least like our own and like the voices we grew up surrounded by. The voices like ours, being "normal", get swallowed up in the crowd.
See also: names.
See also: any criteria we might use to judge what constitutes somebody who is "just hanging out"/"just passing through" vs. someone who is "up to something".
And even if we are aware of these things and do our very best not to be influenced by them personally, we white folks are still privileged by the existence of these standards.
I've had to cut or re-color my hair for job interviews before, but I can walk into any building where they might be hiring wearing a hair style that naturally "works" with my hair and not worry about whether it will be accepted as professional. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to choose to spend a lot of time and money and anguish altering my hair or dealing with the consequences that come with treating it more naturally.
That? That's privilege. Even if I never have another job interview, even if I never take advantage of that fact, it's an opportunity I have.
It's a thing about which I do not need to worry, ever.
I'm not the first person to observe this, but the thing about the status quo is we don't have to try very hard to reinforce it. It wouldn't have become the status quo if there weren't forces at work preserving it. No matter how unbiased we try to be (and chances are we aren't as unbiased as we think we are) these forces are still going to affect us and even work through us.
Notice I'm using "we", the first person plural, here... I am not exempt, I am not above it, I am not some post-racial paragon. I do see race, I do think about race, I fail about race... often hardest when I'm not thinking about. I hope nobody (least of all the people whose kneejerk response to people talking about race is to worry that they're going to get "blamed" for something) thinks I'm standing up high somewhere looking down at people and lecturing.
I'll straight-up say it: J'accuse moi!
I am part of the problem I am describing!
For each time I make a post on the internet about race (which is pretty much the extent of what I'm doing to dismantle racism, honestly), there are dozens of times that I walk right past the throat-punching machine that isn't programmed to hit me and I don't say a word about it. Sometimes I honestly don't notice that it's there... is that better or worse than the times I see it's there but don't say anything because I can't be bothered at the moment or because I'm afraid or because I don't want to deal with the people who are going to lash out at me for pointing out its presence?
So the point of all this isn't to say that we white people are all horrible, horrible people who are condemned to a life of being condemned for privilege no matter what our intentions are.
But at the same time... can we really excuse ourselves for not being willing to talk about this stuff? To think about it? To examine society around us... to examine ourselves? People are being punched in the throat. Other people are being held down in ways we aren't, and we're being helped up in ways that other people aren't.
And no, privilege does not just come from racism. There is classism. There is ableism. There is sexism. There is privilege rooted in sexual orientation and identity. There are a lot of different ways that these things intersect. I've been emphasizing racism over any of the others because it's one of the major areas where I'm unequivocably privileged. I'm not arguably white or a little bit white. I didn't experience white privilege for just part of my life.
I could have picked an area in which I am less privileged, in which I experience genuine oppression, but how much good would that do when my point is that we shouldn't fear talking about our own privilege? We shouldn't be afraid to own our issues, be they with race or class or anything else.
I said "I accuse myself" above, but privilege isn't a crime. We all have our privilege. We all have our racial and class-related and other issues. Feeling guilty about them isn't a solution and it's not even necessarily a step in the right direction... too often, the guilt ends up being treated as if it were the problem and then the solution becomes seeking absolution, rather than addressing the actual situation.
Conversations We Won't Be Having: Why you would care more about the oppression of some people if it weren't phrased in terms of privilege other people have, how "some hair" actually does look cleaner/more professional, how treating the majority as the default is just a fact of life and statistics and not racist at all... and above all else, how racism can only exist when a human being articulates an explicitly racist intention.
Note: There will almost certainly be people reading this who think that parts of it were written to address things they said in particular, either as comments on the referenced previous post or elsewhere, but everything between the two horizontal bars was written before that post went up.
I think that most people would agree in the abstract that a system that punches some people in the throat isn't good and it isn't fair, but of course not everyone is going to agree that we have a system like that, or that it's widespread.
So now, I'm going to talk about one particular "throat-punching mechanism" that is present in our society. The purpose of this post is to show how the attitudes that we share does disadvantage persons of color and therefore does privilege white folks.
I mean, if somebody else is getting held back, you have an advantage, right?
And here's where we come to one of the reasons why I've made a series of posts revolving around the proposition of racism arising without racist intentions. On its own, this might actually look like kind of a wishy-washy way of confronting racism.
And it is.
Seriously, it is.
But there is a point here. There is a method to my blandness!
See, so long as we think of racism that can only happen when somebody is acting on a racist intent then the answer, the rebuttal, to any talk of widespread racism is to say "But I don't even think about race.", to insist that we could solve any lingering problems of racism by refusing to think about race, by being "colorblind".
But a lot of the mechanisms by which our society punches people in the throat is at work no matter what a given individual thinks of race or even if a given individual thinks of race.
Does that sound impossible? HP managed to put a web cam that functioned better for white people without thinking about race. Whether or not you want to call that "racism", the fact is still there that if they had thought about race they might have tested the camera more extensively and caught the problem before it went out.
So, anyway, let's imagine for the sake of argument a crazy hypothetical situation, something that's just slightly less ludicrous and far-fetched than the literal throat-punching device and something that has just slightly more real-world impact on people than a webcam function that works better for people who happen to look like the folks who designed and tested it.
The remainder of this post is addressed as if the reader is a white American, or something near to that. That's who the message behind it is more or less aimed at, though there may be a lesson in it for others. You can consider the racial and cultural identity of the referenced "you" as part of the hypothetical, if it doesn't otherwise apply to you.
Now, you aren't racist, right? You don't have a racist thought in your head. You have friends of many races... not that you notice their races, because you don't. People are all just people to you. The place you live in is a place of shocking diversity, where nobody seems to even notice race all that much. Certainly you never hear anybody talking about it.
So that's you.
You sound pretty swell, actually.
Hypothetically speaking.
In our hypothetical situation, we'll imagine that your ideal for what hair looks like when it's clean, well cared-for, normal... professional... is what hair with the texture and follicle structure most commonly associated with white people is when it's been treated with the typical regimen that white Americans tend to follow with regards to hair care.
Of course it would be ridiculous to imagine you came to this idea all on your own, so we have to imagine that you're part of a society in which this idea is widespread, so that it could have been propagated through you in the first place.
You don't think of it as "white hair", of course.
You don't think about race that much at all... you prefer to judge people by the content of their character, right? Because you're not racist. Where you come from, it seems like no one talks about race... certainly no one thinks about it, much less acts on it.
So when you're rubbing elbows with someone on public transportation, when you interact with a person doing their job... from food service to health care, from manual labor to white collar professions... or when you're considering hiring somebody for a position, you're not thinking about what race they are, you're judging them on things that might indicate whether or not they seem like a pleasant person, whether they're someone you'd care to do business with, someone you'd trust to take care of your interests.
You don't even think about race.
You only assess people based on things that matter.
Things like... hygiene.
Things like whether they take pride in their personal appearance or they just don't seem to care.
Whether they look professional enough to be acceptable, or slovenly.
Of course, in our crazy hypothetical world one of your benchmarks for how you judge these things--how they keep their hair--just happens to be tied up in race.
Yes, there will be people of color who manage to fit themselves into your box for "acceptable standards of hair care". Some of them might not even to try that hard... after all, the physical things that underly our sociological concept of "race" are not binaries.
But more European-descended people will fit your standard more easily than people of African extraction.
And so it's not hard for you to end up making racially biased judgments about people without harboring the slightest intent to do so. You can do it while thinking to yourself how bad racism is and how much it sucks to judge other people for the color of their skin. And because it's not just your own random personal preference, a larger hypothetical society is also doing this, the results of this "unintended racism" are felt by large numbers of real people.
Your individual impact might be minimal... in fact, depending on where you live it may be possible for you to personally harbor this bit of programming in a way that never actually affects anyone.
And maybe you personally don't care how people wear their hair. Maybe you're not in an industry where it matters. Maybe you're kind of a grungey slacker type yourself so even if certain hairstyles code to you as kind of grungey you don't care.
Or maybe you're a human resources agent, and maybe you mentally sort job applicants into an A and B pile based on how "professional" they look, how well you think they'll fit in with the "corporate culture", and maybe hair that looks "dirty" or "unprofessional" to you nudges people towards the B pile.
Either way, tthe mechanism is still there, and it's only one of many. If you're not a cog in this particular throat-punching machine, you'll still be a cog in several others.
Now, of course, I'm being more than a little facetious when I call this a "crazy hypothetical" situation... I'm talking about the world we live in, where the default for what is nice, what is normal, what is presentable, what is professional, what is hygienic in how we wear and treat our hair is strongly rooted in how white people from Europe tend to wear the sort of hair we tend to have.
And of course, hair is hardly an aberration. It is... like the HP camera... merely one example in a sea of examples.
The voices that most stand out to us (and thus register as "loud") in a crowd of people all having conversations in big echo-y public spaces are the voices that sound the least like our own and like the voices we grew up surrounded by. The voices like ours, being "normal", get swallowed up in the crowd.
See also: names.
See also: any criteria we might use to judge what constitutes somebody who is "just hanging out"/"just passing through" vs. someone who is "up to something".
And even if we are aware of these things and do our very best not to be influenced by them personally, we white folks are still privileged by the existence of these standards.
I've had to cut or re-color my hair for job interviews before, but I can walk into any building where they might be hiring wearing a hair style that naturally "works" with my hair and not worry about whether it will be accepted as professional. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to choose to spend a lot of time and money and anguish altering my hair or dealing with the consequences that come with treating it more naturally.
That? That's privilege. Even if I never have another job interview, even if I never take advantage of that fact, it's an opportunity I have.
It's a thing about which I do not need to worry, ever.
I'm not the first person to observe this, but the thing about the status quo is we don't have to try very hard to reinforce it. It wouldn't have become the status quo if there weren't forces at work preserving it. No matter how unbiased we try to be (and chances are we aren't as unbiased as we think we are) these forces are still going to affect us and even work through us.
Notice I'm using "we", the first person plural, here... I am not exempt, I am not above it, I am not some post-racial paragon. I do see race, I do think about race, I fail about race... often hardest when I'm not thinking about. I hope nobody (least of all the people whose kneejerk response to people talking about race is to worry that they're going to get "blamed" for something) thinks I'm standing up high somewhere looking down at people and lecturing.
I'll straight-up say it: J'accuse moi!
I am part of the problem I am describing!
For each time I make a post on the internet about race (which is pretty much the extent of what I'm doing to dismantle racism, honestly), there are dozens of times that I walk right past the throat-punching machine that isn't programmed to hit me and I don't say a word about it. Sometimes I honestly don't notice that it's there... is that better or worse than the times I see it's there but don't say anything because I can't be bothered at the moment or because I'm afraid or because I don't want to deal with the people who are going to lash out at me for pointing out its presence?
So the point of all this isn't to say that we white people are all horrible, horrible people who are condemned to a life of being condemned for privilege no matter what our intentions are.
But at the same time... can we really excuse ourselves for not being willing to talk about this stuff? To think about it? To examine society around us... to examine ourselves? People are being punched in the throat. Other people are being held down in ways we aren't, and we're being helped up in ways that other people aren't.
And no, privilege does not just come from racism. There is classism. There is ableism. There is sexism. There is privilege rooted in sexual orientation and identity. There are a lot of different ways that these things intersect. I've been emphasizing racism over any of the others because it's one of the major areas where I'm unequivocably privileged. I'm not arguably white or a little bit white. I didn't experience white privilege for just part of my life.
I could have picked an area in which I am less privileged, in which I experience genuine oppression, but how much good would that do when my point is that we shouldn't fear talking about our own privilege? We shouldn't be afraid to own our issues, be they with race or class or anything else.
I said "I accuse myself" above, but privilege isn't a crime. We all have our privilege. We all have our racial and class-related and other issues. Feeling guilty about them isn't a solution and it's not even necessarily a step in the right direction... too often, the guilt ends up being treated as if it were the problem and then the solution becomes seeking absolution, rather than addressing the actual situation.
Conversations We Won't Be Having: Why you would care more about the oppression of some people if it weren't phrased in terms of privilege other people have, how "some hair" actually does look cleaner/more professional, how treating the majority as the default is just a fact of life and statistics and not racist at all... and above all else, how racism can only exist when a human being articulates an explicitly racist intention.
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no subject
on 2010-03-01 08:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Posted byno subject
on 2010-03-01 09:23 pm (UTC)I am personally an all-American Mutt. (Spanish & Indian on Mom's side, pure WASP on the other.) The irony is this:
I'm just a bit on the dark side of "average". (And why is Italian considered White, but Spanish considered "nonWhite"? I digress....)
To the average White person, I'm "Mexican".
To the average minority person, I'm "White".
Some of us don't even get the benefit of being any racial background. The only (somewhat amusing) benefit of having 12% Kickapoo blood was telling a bunch of WHITE people that if they didn't like it here, they could get off my land and go back where they came from.
(no subject)
Posted byOther calibrations
on 2010-03-01 09:27 pm (UTC)Re: Other calibrations
Posted byno subject
on 2010-03-01 09:37 pm (UTC)I remember the first time I learned that some people don't have hair exactly like mine, and was utterly shocked -- the concept had never occurred to me, and I wonder even now how many people are unaware of it, and think of some of the 'black hairstyles' as being merely ethnic rather than also functional. It also makes me feel terribly ignorant -- how many more such things are there, differences between people, that I simply do not know about?
(no subject)
Posted by(no subject)
Posted by(no subject)
Posted byno subject
on 2010-03-01 10:00 pm (UTC)On the one hand, I get to feel better about myself because I know that it's not skin color (not only skin color, at least); when people come in from, say, the braiding place next door, I don't do it- even though they're just as black. So I can at least take comfort in that I don't automatically assume every black person's a potential robber.
On the other hand, I think about the repercussions of my reaction. I'm sure there's physical components to it- I watch these people walk in, I pause in what I'm doing, and there's likely some visible tension as I consider what could happen. And I think how that must make them feel, that someone immediately reacts that way.
And beyond that, there's the whole aspect of assuming that someone who fits the niche of being that poor is also someone who could do those things. Is that fair? Or am I being overly judgmental? At what point does it go from being reasonably cautious to being biased? When am I just looking at potential consequences, the same as I do with the rest of my life, and when am I taking it all too far?
I haven't figured any of that out yet.
no subject
on 2010-03-02 12:48 am (UTC)1. the show Better of Ted did an interesting a quite good episode that to me got this point across. On the episode the main show company had in an effort to decrease cost set up motion sensor lighting that did not recognize darker skinned employees. Or as one article put it, "the episode’s underlying premise is that the company has added light sensors to everything to save money, only it turns out the sensors can’t see black people. This isn’t racist, mind you, because “the company’s position is that it’s actually the opposite of racist because it’s not targeting black people, it’s just ignoring them. They insist the worst people can call it is indifferent.” These indifferent sensors lead the company to try several failed solutions which are ostensibly cheaper than just removing the sensors, like giving the blacks their own drinking fountains or having them each get their own “white shadow” to trigger the sensors for them"
2. I did a really interesting research paper once on how Colonizing countries used Hamatic beauty standards to "conquer and divide" native cultures and how that let to concepts of high yellow which are still seen prevalently today in the type of ethic actors and models used in media. (ie how becomes famous and not)
3. I like to use my husband of an example of how arbitrary the concept of race is. He will tell you he is white, I agree, and most anyone who has ever known him agrees. If his mother had stayed with his father he would be deemed by society as Hispanic. His mother is white Texan(she would be mad if I didn't include that); his father was a Mexican.
no subject
on 2010-03-02 03:59 am (UTC)*Note the difference between dialect and language is political not linguistic. It has been said a language is a dialect with an army of navy.
(no subject)
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