wise men want fame, fools want gold
Oct. 29th, 2012 06:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseA thing I do not get about my fellow white people: why is pain so worthless to us as a form of evidence? I bit the bullet today and used the last five minutes of my comp courses to throw up the we're a culture, not a costume posters, and address the total lack of necessity for we white kids to keep dressing up as POC when POC keep saying it hurts them.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I have been guilty of this sin. I think my mama and my daddy thought that dressing up as POC was good for our awareness of diversity, and they totally encouraged the geisha girl/indian princess thing. In high school, when I was heavy into yoga, I habitually wore bindis, which I still think are incredibly pretty. But then I got me an education - and more importantly started actually meeting/listening to POC, both in person and online. And they've kept saying, yeah no please don't do that, we don't care that you're only doing it because you think our culture is cool/pretty/more authentic than yours. This hurts us, please don't. So, you know, I stopped. Because why the fuck wouldn't I? My ability to play Tiger Lily < POC pain.
I downplayed it in the classroom, kept it light, admitted my own complicity, made jokes. Only talked about it for four minutes. I debated back and forth whether I should do it at all, and then five minutes before class s. e. smith posted there's still time to not be racist for halloween, and then I had to. But they still tried to get into it with me, and I just don't get it. Because what they kept saying, implicitly, was that POC pain wasn't a good enough reason for them to do anything. They don't accept POC pain as a valid form of evidence. I don't know what they would accept - like, what, you want studies? Those have been done. You want white men to tell you this? That's happened. And the word of POC still doesn't seem to mean jack to them.
It reminds me of the white person habit of "trying on" different ethnicities/races in order to "prove" that oppression is real. White girl pins on her mama's scarf for an afternoon at the mall and then she can tell you all about how it sucks to be a hijabi. Hell, wasn't there an old Lois Lane comic where she was "magically" turned Black for an issue, and she suffered from racism and reverse racism at the same time, boo fucking hoo cue the learning moment? And I don't get why the testimony of actual Muslim women, actual Black people, isn't enough to establish the reality of their oppression. We'll believe that white girl when she affirms the existence of religious and cultural intolerance, but - she must have been told by a Muslim woman once, either in person or in print or through some other medium, and for some reason that woman's testimony based on lived experience wasn't enough. It's amazing how much more weight we give to experiential learning when it happens to pasty people.
Off to reread Patricia Hill Collins nao. Because, as usual, she's got all the answers.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I have been guilty of this sin. I think my mama and my daddy thought that dressing up as POC was good for our awareness of diversity, and they totally encouraged the geisha girl/indian princess thing. In high school, when I was heavy into yoga, I habitually wore bindis, which I still think are incredibly pretty. But then I got me an education - and more importantly started actually meeting/listening to POC, both in person and online. And they've kept saying, yeah no please don't do that, we don't care that you're only doing it because you think our culture is cool/pretty/more authentic than yours. This hurts us, please don't. So, you know, I stopped. Because why the fuck wouldn't I? My ability to play Tiger Lily < POC pain.
I downplayed it in the classroom, kept it light, admitted my own complicity, made jokes. Only talked about it for four minutes. I debated back and forth whether I should do it at all, and then five minutes before class s. e. smith posted there's still time to not be racist for halloween, and then I had to. But they still tried to get into it with me, and I just don't get it. Because what they kept saying, implicitly, was that POC pain wasn't a good enough reason for them to do anything. They don't accept POC pain as a valid form of evidence. I don't know what they would accept - like, what, you want studies? Those have been done. You want white men to tell you this? That's happened. And the word of POC still doesn't seem to mean jack to them.
It reminds me of the white person habit of "trying on" different ethnicities/races in order to "prove" that oppression is real. White girl pins on her mama's scarf for an afternoon at the mall and then she can tell you all about how it sucks to be a hijabi. Hell, wasn't there an old Lois Lane comic where she was "magically" turned Black for an issue, and she suffered from racism and reverse racism at the same time, boo fucking hoo cue the learning moment? And I don't get why the testimony of actual Muslim women, actual Black people, isn't enough to establish the reality of their oppression. We'll believe that white girl when she affirms the existence of religious and cultural intolerance, but - she must have been told by a Muslim woman once, either in person or in print or through some other medium, and for some reason that woman's testimony based on lived experience wasn't enough. It's amazing how much more weight we give to experiential learning when it happens to pasty people.
Off to reread Patricia Hill Collins nao. Because, as usual, she's got all the answers.