alexandraerin

This 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.

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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.

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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.

karnythia recently linked to a news article about people studying the effects of television on racial biases. There was an old bit on SNL's Weekend Update when I was growing up, where Norm Macdonald would read a headline about a recent medical study and then announce that it and other news could be read in the pages of the medical journal "DUH!".

As others observed on her post, there have been studies about this sort of thing for as long as there has been television... while more attention given to it is not a bad thing, the thought behind this research (as presented in the article, anyway) seems somewhat naive.

To quote:

The psychologists wondered how such biases could persist in a society in which racism is socially unacceptable and indeed publicly denounced.

I would submit that there is and always has been a difference between "this thing is not done in our society" and "this thing is not admitted to in our society". What is socially unacceptable is to be openly and overtly racist, to admit to racism... this is what makes talking about racism so difficult. If a person or group is doing something in a way that seriously disadvantages or negatively impacts minorities, attempts to discuss the very real problem they present frequently break down into protracted discussions of their motivations and their feelings.

Of course, people who shout "I HATE [epithet]S!" from the rooftops seriously suck. Seriously. But their ability to affect people on a day to day basis is severely limited because they are denounced so quickly and people are so quick to distance themselves from such overt racism. Such overt bigots can assault people, can injure and hurt them, but do not usually have the power to oppress all by their lonesome.

(This isn't to say we shouldn't denounce them. If we don't make it clear that such things are intolerable, then they won't stay lonesome and they will get power. "Society" is a shoutocracy: loudest voice frequently wins.)

Oppression is a systemic problem. It comes from institutional racism.

Example: when a company sells only products that are primarily useful for or attractive to white folks or markets them in a way that makes it seem like they're only meant for white folks, it might be described as a pure number-crunching exercise. They might describe their target audience not as white (or hetero, or able-bodied, or cis, or English speaking) but as "mainstream". And many people wouldn't argue with that.

But doing this is not only a response to our society where certain people and their perceived tastes are "mainstream" and thus more worth catering to, it perpetuates that perception, rebuilds it and makes it stronger all the time.

Take a look at this video:



Now, because some things are going to be raised as objections any time something like this is posted in an open forum:

1. Yes, the lighting conditions are not optimal and probably not in line with the manufacturer's recommendations or set-up instructions. It's certainly possible that with enough jiggering and a bit of poking, the man in the video could get the camera to recognize and track his face.

2. No, the HP engineers did not invent the laws of physics as they apply to optics.

3. No, no one is saying that Hugh L. Packard, president of HP, said "FUCK THE BLACKS. MAKE IT ONLY WORK ON WHITE PEOPLE."

The fact is that a major consumer electronics manufacturer released, shipped, and sold a device that at the very least works best for white people, works under a wider range of conditions for white people, and requires less fiddling around with your room's set-up out of the box for white people. That's charitably assuming it would work in a reasonable fashion for the gentleman doing the demonstration, if he dimmed the backlighting and put a light source in front, as some commenters on the video suggested.

"That's not racist, that's just how lighting and cameras work."... except... can anybody imagine this being considered a viable commercial technology if it worked the other way around? If the technology for using facial tracking on white folk was such that it would require a level of finicky fiddling about with ambient lighting that the old ROB robot that was bundled with the NES in the 1980s did, would a computer manufacturer actually bundle it with a computer webcam package on the cusp of 2010? Or would they be going "It's an interesting concept, but the technology is not really 'there' yet. Let's keep trying to improve it."

Some people will probably look at that and wonder if I'm suggesting that nobody should be able to buy this webcam product unless it works perfectly for everyone. I'm not. I'm suggesting we wouldn't be able to buy it... at least not as a feature with an HP media center computer rather than a quirky toy for techno-hobbyists who don't mind the fiddling around... if it didn't work well for white people. Because it does, it has "mainstream commercial appeal".

This is systemic racism, institutional racism in action. I'm sure some people are going to roll their eyes and say things like "Oh, life is so hard for people who can't get a webcam to follow their movements. It must be nice if that's the only problem they have to complain about." To which I say: yes, I'm sure it would be nice if that were the only thing that someone had to complain about. But this is not some weird random example of something that goes against the common trend. The "mainstreaming" of whiteness is pervasive and so are its effects.

Shows and movies (and books and magazines) centered around white actors/characters are marketed as the default. If a character with a different skin tone is cast white in an adaptation to broaden the appeal, it's a main character... characters who become minority in translation ostensibly for the same reason are almost always background characters or sidekicks (There are exceptions. They are played by Will Smith and Morgan Freeman. And Obama is president. And Sammy Davis, Jr. played at the Copacabana Club. The existence of minority superstars are one of the best examples of the hoary old chestnut about "the exception that proves the rule".) We judge the cleanliness and "professionalism" of people's hair based on the way white folks' hair looks when it's well-cared for. We have a similar rubric for judging the professionalism of people's names.

The number of people who can complain with a straight face on the "racism" of a channel called "Black Entertainment Television" when we spend our lives so immersed in things targeted directly at white folks "mainstream people" demonstrates how pervasive the problem is: it's so deeply rooted in our culture that we don't even see it.