100 Ways White People Can Make Life Less Frustrating For People of Color
Just a few suggestions to start with.
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17772988
A helpful guide on how to be less frustrating towards people of color.
Is this us-defaultism?
This is focused at Americans. Don't assume readers on the internet are from your country.
It's an American magazine, written in American English for an American audience about American racism. You're the one assuming that every article needs to be written for a globalized audience. How would that even be possible for a complicated, nuanced, and hyper-localizef social disorder like racism?
Are you assuming where we live?
The article has several points that are American specific.
There is actually only one way. Don't treat people differently because of their skin colour.
This sounds an awful lot like "I don't see color" and is a pretty ignorant take. How do you prevent treating people differently while there is systemic discrimination giving people power over others and leading to a complicated web of privileges? Saying "don't treat people differently" is ignoring the systemic level of racism (and other forms of discrimination). You don't get absolved about confronting yourself with your own privileges and position of power over others just because you pretend to treat everyone equally. And I'm fact I don't think you can treat all people equally. Think of people you have a relationship with vs strangers for example.
This is some white saviour bullshit right here and I say that as a brown south Asian born in Britian. Most people want to be treated like equal humans, not charity cases, not terrorists. A human being capable of human achievement and human malice. If someone treats me "ah too sweetly and gently" because I'm brown like my best friends Oxford mother does at time, I see it as extremely condescending and arrogant. But I was also very fortunate to grow up in a safe enough environment to grow and learn about these things that many of my ethnic background never get to.
I didn't say treat all people equally. What I say is don't treat people differently just because of the colour of their skin.
There are nice people and there are arsehole people, that applies to every skin colour. But you must not make a pre-selection based on skin colour.
Just treat people with respect, regardless of their skin colour, and don't put up with arseholes.
- Do not compare the exploitation of animals to racism. Ever. I’m deadly serious.
Why not? Intersectionality has taught us how interconnected various forms of systemic oppression are. So why not compare (cis-)sexism, racism, antisemitism, ableism and speciesism? I get that racial slurs often work by comparing people to animals and/or by dehumanizing them for example. But isn't this the point of it? That this only works because we have these interlocking systems of oppression in place?
I had a really good dialogue about this a while ago. Here's a transcription, if you're interested in a detailed answer to this:
Factory farming is terrible. I completely respect anyone who is vegan because they oppose the abuse or exploitation of animals.
The issue with stuff like this is that it indicates some equivalency of human women and animals. I remember when PETA did a "holocaust on your plate" campaign which was fairly critisized for indicating that the murder of millions of men, women, and children was the same as eating meat.
I don't think the meat industry is ok and I agree that what it now considered normal in that industry is morally wrong. I also think it's a separate issue from human social trends. Minorities being compared to animals is never a good thing.
Two points on that.
- There were multiple holocaust survivors that went vegan, citing the similarities between the their experiences and that of animal agriculture;
- This is because what the holocaust was, in essence, was treating people like animals. Jewish people were loaded onto cattle cars on trains, sent to what were effectively slaughterhouses, and gassed in chambers - where I live (UK) almost all pigs are killed in gas chambers.
You can make the argument that animals deserve no moral consideration if you want, but a lot of the worst things that humans have ever done to other humans is what humans do to animals all the time.
It isn't the act of eating meat that is compared by animals rights groups to the holocaust, its all the stuff that came before it. Because it was essentially the same process.
I actually stated multiple times that I do believe animals deserve moral consideration. Once again, I think the norms of the meat industry are clearly immoral. Where we disagree I think is that I believe human considerations are fundamentally different from considerations of other animals, and putting people on the same level as animals in argumentation is more harmful than productive for a variety of factors.
I'm not saying that humans should have the same considerations as non-human animals, I'm saying that the holocaus analogy isn't innacurate, as the same acts were/are committed. Do you disagree?
As far as the animals are concerned, what they go through is the holocaust (obviously they aren't sapient, but you get my point).
Before saying anything else, I want to be clear that I would like to see a future free of animal meat from the practice of slaughter. I strongly disagree that these two things are comparable in any way other than they both involve the act of killing at high rates.
I’m not going to argue that our ancestral nature is morally correct, because in many ways we understand that many our instinctive impulses and wants are morally wrong. This being the case, the most available source of sufficient protein necessary to power our brains and bodies has come from meat, and this has been the case until very recently with advancement in our understanding of nutrition. Humans and our ancestors have killed other animals to eat them since before we even assumed our present taxonomy. There is an almost universal instinctual and cultural reason that people kill animals to eat them. I think we agree that it would be best to progress past this draconian practice, but there is no malice or de-humanizing campaign of extermination here whatsoever.
Compare this to the Holocaust. There is no way whatsoever that it could ever possibly be justified in any way. It was the result of reactionary politics coming into power and leading an entire society through the use of propaganda and terror to despise a group of sapient people for reasons that were entirely and demonstrably untrue. Sapience is a major factor. Although livestock can definitely understand when they’re being abused, they can’t comprehend the scope of what is happening beyond their immediate experience. The people in the camps lived every day with a full understanding that they were being tortured and murdered en masse as a political scapegoat at best and pure sadism at worst. They suffered their abuse and suffered the understanding of why it was happening and how little they could do about it. They weren’t being harvested, they were being murdered in a premeditated fashion in massive numbers exclusively for reasons of prejudice and intentional malice. The motives and suffering caused from this evil I think are significantly greater.
Complicating it further, there is a social imperative to de-humanize a person before they can be abused, exploited, or murdered. There is a common understanding that some creatures exist to be beasts of burden, some are dangerous predators to repelled, and some are invasive pests to be exterminated. There are life-forms such as actual cockroaches in which this understanding is completely justified. De-humanizing is taking a person who has agency and cognition and framing them as if they are an unthinking creature to be managed in some way for the “good” of the perpetrator.
Like I said above, the only similarity between these two evils is superficial. I believe they are fundamentally different.
This seems like a pretty reasonable dialogue that covers a number of salient points. That said, it's not at all obvious to me that other animals aren't sapient. That seems, to me, to be something we tell ourselves to justify cruelty toward them and to reduce the significance of their suffering. I don't see anything particularly special about human beings that indicates to me that we have a monopoly on the sort of self-awareness that we possess.
Thanks for the input. I've actually had debates like this before, too.
But fundamentally I still disagree with you and I don't see the similarities as superficial. People have been treated by the Nazis like animals in this industrial killing process. And they've actually been "harvested". Not sure in how much detail I should go, but at least in some extermination camps the Nazis collected various human Organs, like their hair, their skin, their nails and also all the possessions they've had.
Regarding your argument of animals as protein and generally placing them as an inferior other that has been historically treated as such, you seem to tap into some fallacies. It is never good to base an argument solely on traditional practices. Because then what else has been practiced for thousands of years? Abuse, wars, enslavement and a lot of other very horrendous stuff. Also, isn't this the whole point of discussing how animals should be treated in the first place? That it is ethically wrong. And you seemingly draw a mental line that you don't want to cross, so you refer to traditional practices. But this is exactly how many people justify sexism, racism to themselves. Women shouldn't vote because they're brain isn't capable of it, or biological races exist and thus some people are inferior are similar to animals can't comprehend what's going on and it is therefore ethically acceptable to treat them badly.
I was confused at first, why you kept referring to how bad you think of killing animals. But apparently that's were you've decided to draw the line for yourself. That what we do to animals is killing them and nothing else. I would argue, that the killing is actually a result of structural devaluation of animals that encompasses so much more than just the killing part. And now I could go into critique of capitalism and intersectionality. How people that are made to be powerless cogs in this system seek to have at least some power over others. And how this then breeds all kinds of discriminations, abuse, etc. Also against animals. Or how our understanding of the world is very much informed by false dualities that place woman against man, savage people against the civilized white man, inferior animal against superior human, nature vs culture. (Or have a look at Edward Said's Orientalism, making a similar analysis for oriental against civilized west.) In short, all of this is about power. I would argue that exploitation of animals surely stems from a need for resources but that in our current world it is very much about power as well.
I also disagree that animals aren't sapient. Like, how would you define sapience in the first place? Continued studies over the last decades have shown that animals are pretty much capable of everything we thought would be limited to humans. And we constantly keep searching for the next distinction how animals are fundamentally different from humans, and we keep failing! So no, I don't see a fundamental difference in animals vs humans. Again, this is a false duality. We are animals!
I don't have a lot on the content other than I read the article and while I don't think I learned anything new I think it's probably good to have reminders. This article is pretty clearly intended to be read by people who are already receptive to anti-racism and intersectionality, and this seems like a good spot to post it.
I think people get defensive when they read that headline (and don't read any further), if they haven't grappled with the fact the responsibility is on all of us to actively make the world less racist. Just being there isn't enough when the system is built wrong to begin with.
I also wonder if the time for these kinds of articles has passed. Back in 2018 it was, I think, far more common to find people on the left who hadn't grappled with race before, content to say they were color blind but open to changing their view. Today I imagine that group is much smaller, and those remaining are doing so out of ignorance, defensiveness, or explicit racism.
Thank you for your well thought out response.
Sadly there are still many many people who are overtly individually racist, even on the 'left'. I have seen and met many who still are and it is deeply upsetting and sadenning to have to meet such people but also aggrivating.
Just the other day I had someone tell me that "I don't see color" so sadly, it is still the time for such articles.
Until the systems of opression stop existing and we all fully grapple with how it makes us racist then people are going to keep on being racist.
"Don't be a dick"
- Don’t have dreadlocks if you’re not Black, just don’t.
Sadhus and sadhvis: "Am I a joke to you?"
i think contextually this article would make the point that it's directed at white people considering wearing dreads and not other non-white groups, but yes it is pretty corny to effectively frame black people as the only group that has a cultural tradition of locked hair
Aside from point 84, which I have some disagreements with as an antispecist, it's the only point I have a problem with. Everything else is sound and should be basic knowledge ; I lament how it's still relevant to point these out even today...
It would have been better to phrase it as something like "don't have dreadlocks if it's not culturally or religiously appropriate, just don't".
Religiously because I believe a serious rastafari (and not just someone who listens to Marley and smokes weed), whatever their ethnicity, also deserves to wear their locks proudly.
This is always ridiculous to me, it's a hair style. Not even a black thing.
Literally used by many backgrounds to make hair manageable while outdoors. Like how a bandana isn't a gangster thing when it's just good for sweat on your brow and keeping your hair back while you work.
It frustrates me to see it as a staple of butch fashion when it's not even utilized, but hey whatcha gonna do.
Then again, lots of things have been co-opted. Like how no one talks about cowboy culture being a predominantly Mexican thing. Vaquero the Spanish word that literally translates to cow-er, like bean-er. Roughly meaning he who works with cows or he who works with beans.
Vaquero eventually became buckaroo, and America kept the cosplay for their manifesting.
It's life, you live and you learn. And you'd be an idiot not to learn from those around you. Just seems a weird hill to die on
This article very clearly about white people. Why bring up sadhus and sadhvis?
Please be(e) nice on our instance
Apologies article just felt mad goofy
