IBARW day 2

[chickenfeet]

I guess I should have expected it. IBARW is generating far more heat than light. The only good news is that I haven't yet read a post or comment mentioning Nazis.

I should have listened more carefully to the wise words of misia

I am fundamentally leery of "Verb against Noun $thingy" sorts of schemes. All too often an excuse to give lip service to Noun for a little while so that when one feels guilty later one can assuage said guilt by pointing to it and say "Oh, but you see, I participated in Verb Aginst Noun $Thingy, so I'm one of the Good Guys," as well as an object illustration of preaching to the choir.

To which I might add that nothing is more likely to provoke really acrimonious disagreement than minor divergences of opinion among people who fundamentally agree with each other. In the immortal words of Cleese. Palin et al

BRIAN:
Brothers! Brothers! We should be struggling together!
FRANCIS:
We are! Ohh.
BRIAN:
We mustn't fight each other! Surely we should be united against the common enemy!
EVERYONE:
The Judean People's Front?!

Comments

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think there was a fair level of light in there - the key to doing this sort of thing is that the verb in question probably has more to do with thinking, or at least writing, than flagwaving - I'm not against anyone blogging "Racism is wrong, m'kay?" but can't imagine it would generate light or heat. The majority of responses I've seen here are individual's take on the topic, and mostly individuals who have had no direct experience of racism addressed at them (except for our English correspondents, of course).

As Brian went on to say:

You've all got to think for yourself!
(Crowd) Yes, we've all got to think for ourself.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I guess I've seen two takes on the theme. One is the "well this is what it was/is like where I grew up/am" which I can take albeit it's a bit anodyne. The second, which grates for me, is the "Oh noes, so much historical injustice, we (for some value of we) are all (for some value of all) guilty!".

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Ah, well, luckily enough, I haven't come across the later - if I had I think I'd have had a strong reaction. And then, once I'd cleaned it up, I would have sent a strong reply. People apologising for the sins of history always get on my goat.

And as for the first, I think there's a provision in Sturgeon's Law that "Ninety percent of the internet is anodyne."

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

People apologising for the sins of history always get on my goat.

N
It's the dominant trope among liberal north Americans. Racism is something that people of European extraction do to people of African or native American extraction. It's convenient because it's time bounded. All injustices before the arrival of Europeans in North America are, by definition, out of scope and by implication patterns of land ownership/occupation as they existed at first European contact are just. Similarly, any objective analysis of who did what in the slave trade is irrelevant. By definition, it was a white on black thing.

I'm fairly firmly of the opinion that what $groupx did to $groupy hundreds of years ago is a pretty poor basis for making policy even if we could unravel it. To then make facile assumptions of a one-to-one map and some kind of inherited guilt between $groupx', the purported descendants of $groupx, the usually ill defined perpetrators of whatever is just nuts.

[dyddgu.livejournal.com]

The Pythons got a lot of things Right...

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

There's also the "But I'm not a racist" and "But racism is over" type. It's a tough call. I've seen at least one very strident post that rails against the hatred of one group while using the hatred of another to bolster the argument. Me? I think race is something we all deal with on a daily basis, but it can be no more than how we deal with any other cultural dividing lines, or it can be something harmful.