or: why my classmates think blackface is funny
this post is true. every fucking word of it. and if it doesn't depress the hell out of you, it should. and if you understand why it's true, you should be proud of yourself, because our media and our culture has done its damnednest to keep you from doing so.
h/t pandagon
posted by anne @ 12:26 PM
15 Comments:
So true - have you read Backlash by Faludi? Deals with this issue re. feminism. It seems like Americans have no cultural memory - we don't learn about, or from, the past.
-tanya
Yeah. Yeah.
The Fairness Doctrine was one of those things that held the world up. It got misused and abused. Hell, Network was made while it was in force. I imagine it looked dumb to some people, like a mess of duct tape holding a ventilation tube together. But, damn.
Crossfire got canceled. And I don't know of too many real, non-pundit people who were really upset, even if they thought Jon Stewart was a left-wingnut jerk. But Crossfire's spawn did not. And we've got whole networks modeled after it, except they're playing squash instead of tennis, on every conceivable level.
I don't know where to bang on it, but I think we're closer to the octopus's head here than we are while in the vicinity of Ann Coulter.
the weird thing is that 1988 really does seem to be the cutoff. it's amazing. when i speak to people born before 1988, the majority of them seem to be open to exploring this sort of thing. those born after 1988 don't. at all. they're all South Park Libertarians.
god, i miss the fairness doctrine. it's hard to believe such an inconsequential thing would have such an effect on discourse, but i really do believe it did, and i blame its absence for the problems we have now.
So, to summarize: the solution to our problems is more outrage!
It seems to me that the author you link to ignores the significant possibility that language is being given greater freedom because the horrible actions connected with racist speech are diminishing.
Also, her argument about the advance of previously unacceptable -isms and -ias in the media may be an argument for the inefficacy of the '70s- and '80s-era beliefs about how to stop these phenomena; in other words, "stop people from talking these ways and the causes will disappear" may be a flawed notion. Isn't it possible that younger generations have grown up with the same maelstrom of identity and cultural conflicts and malignancies and rebelled against a public discourse that prevents self-expression?
The MSM may not be the problem so much as it has failed to be the solution, a role to which it may have been poorly suited in the first place.
Anyway, it's interesting to read about the Fairness Doctrine... first time I've ever heard of it.
nate, read the comments after her post. the questions you ask are answered there, by the post's author and by others. a few kids came into the thread all indignant, insisting that they were post-racist (whatever that means) and, with some discussion, realised they had some seriously unconsidered assumptions about themselves and others.
part of that might be the legacy of "70s- and '80s-era beliefs about how to stop these phenomena", but i think that's a misunderstanding of those beliefs. the PC Brigade is always depicted as some fun-hating mob out to keep people from using mean words, and that isn't the point at all. just telling someone not to use a certain word is pointless. more discussion is needed, not less; the idea is to explain the history behind the word, what it really means. if someone doesn't intend to say something completely hateful, they won't use that word in that context anymore. but radio shock-jocks have ridiculed that kind of discussion into non-existence. it's boring to have a conversation, and realising you might have unexamined prejudices is unpleasant, and so people just tune it out.
Isn't it possible that younger generations have grown up with the same maelstrom of identity and cultural conflicts and malignancies and rebelled against a public discourse that prevents self-expression?
the OP's point was that public discourse no longer does prevent that sort of "self-expression" (but, damn, what kind of self do you have if it needs that sort of "expression"?) public discourse encourages it. if something is said which is too obviously hate speech, the first defense is always 'jeez, can't you take a joke?', and anyone complaining gets labeled a humourless, hypersensitive killjoy.
and so, threats against supreme court justices? just a joke. nooses hung on college and high-school campuses? jokes. calling things you don't like "gay" or "faggy"? just a figure of speech. that time my
co-workers were hitting on 13-year-old girls on the street, in my presence, talking about which they'd like to rape the most? they were just joking -- and i was some bitchy lesbo with no sense of humour.
do you really think that death at the hands of a mob is a joke, nate? that's what it means when you use the word 'lynch'. you know that. i know that. the sportscaster knew that too. but our culture makes us pretend we don't know that. calling for someone else to die or be humiliated or hurt because of who they are should never be a joke. it's not "self-expression", either, unless you really do believe, somewhere, that black people should get lynched just for being black.
I found your response more interesting than the prospect of reading the comment thread over at Shakesville, so I hope you'll forgive me for replying to you before reading it.
I don't disagree with everything you say here, Anne; words do have histories and real ephemera that can't be casually discharged. I don't intend to argue with the malignancy of using racist language.
However, racism is self-expression. Racist language is self-expression, just as racist acts are. I meant to propose the possibility that much of the backlash against stringent, universally applied standards of verbal civility (PCness) is because language was curtailed in a way that attitudes could not be. I really worry about telling people who believe bad things that they should just shut up about it.
It seems to me that PC theory implies that if such poison can't be publicly expressed, it can neither be spread and will die out in a generation or two. But if it creeps back into public forums, it'll start catching. I'm not sure this isn't the case, but I think it's just possible that it's not only not true, but actively foments some of the things it tries to repress.
Your example of your co-workers is a useful one for me: it's clearly a terribly upsetting thing to have happen to you. (That is: to have your coworkers express such sentiments.) But the expression is mostly the revelation of something that is already terrible, i.e. their beliefs and attitudes toward women. I'd rather have language give me the chance to be publicly horrified and berate them for it than to never know, really. (I am, of course, as another male far more able to actually do something like that and be useful about it).
I was a little bit hurt that you brought up the example of the joke defense for hate speech and then immediately attributed belief in that defense to me. ("Do you really think that death at the hands of a mob is a joke, Nate?") Need we be so rhetorically aggressive? Each of us knows that if we disagree about the seriousness of hate speech, it's not because we disagree about the horror of the crime to which thing like the word "lynch" point.
It's hard for me to imagine a truth seeker who does not readily grant that at least some of such speech is actively and terribly dangerous, and that some of it really does consist of people stumbling upon histories and meanings of which they were ignorant. If you want to convince the ignorant that use of the term is too dangerous to be brooked, the first thing you ought to do is to show your trustworthy by being able to tell the difference.
That last should read "your trustworthiness".
Nate, this really doesn't seem too complicated to me. If we tell people it's okay to use phrases calculated to hurt large groups of people indiscriminately, people will get hurt. Personally, I'm against people getting hurt as a rule.
More importantly, what kind of mixed message does that send? "It's okay to hate people for no reason, it's okay to say horrible and hateful things, but if you actually act on what you say, we as a society will act shocked and appalled and wring our hands most fervently!"
It seems to me that PC theory implies that if such poison can't be publicly expressed, it can neither be spread and will die out in a generation or two.
this is the representation of PC theory which we've all come to believe thanks to the frame-job of the shock-jocks and those who label themselves proudly non-PC, though. it's a gross distortion of the idea behind the theory. through the 70s and 80s, the intent was never to hide racism, or to make it go away by restricting speech -- quite the opposite. the idea was never to shut down discussion, but to encourage it, thus all that talk of "consciousness-raising".
the idea is to make people more mindful of the attitudes they express in the words they use, not by just labeling certain words as Bad, but by talking about what those words mean, and where they came from, and what they mean now.
the backlash against political correctness was inspired by a misunderstanding -- i would say an intentional misunderstanding -- of the theory behind it. that backlash has, i think, caused the phenomenon you attribute to "PCness". those who identify as "politically incorrect" tend to be the ones who shut down discussion of race and gender, and they managed to do it while blaming that shutting-down of discussion on those who were trying to start a discussion in the first place.
and this is where the fairness doctrine comes in. it died just around the time "political incorrectness" came into vogue. completely inaccurate claims were made about politically correct speech and what it meant, and they went uncountered and unchallenged, and even now they're generally accepted as true. before it's even possible to have a conversation about the words in question, this false idea of "political correctness" has to be broken down.
and because that definition of political correctness is so ingrained in all of us, now, the conversation is very hard to have. the reflexive response is always an appeal to humour, to rule-breaking, to something dangerous and fun and liberating.
(splitting this into two comments, as this has gotten long)
"Nate, this really doesn't seem too complicated to me. If we tell people it's okay to use phrases calculated to hurt large groups of people indiscriminately, people will get hurt. Personally, I'm against people getting hurt as a rule.
More importantly, what kind of mixed message does that send? "It's okay to hate people for no reason, it's okay to say horrible and hateful things, but if you actually act on what you say, we as a society will act shocked and appalled and wring our hands most fervently!"
I don't think your condescension helps your argument at all, Martin. It is more complicated than you claim, and Anne's attempts to address that in full are far more helpful to me the alternative you present. No one is proposing that it is "okay" to say hateful things, but as you, pro-choice advocate despite abortion being bad, should well understand, there are many bad things that it might be important to allow, or even not get outraged about.
Anyway, Anne, it looks like I won't get the rest of your comment 'til much later this evening (I'm off to do things), but I look forward to it.
If you want to convince the ignorant that use of the term is too dangerous to be brooked, the first thing you ought to do is to show your trustworthy by being able to tell the difference.
the difference between ignorance and malice, you mean, when such terms are used? i just want to be clear.
if i was overly-strident in my comment, i apologise. i didn't understand your use of "self-expression" there, and that, coupled with the little jab at the top of your comment, led me to believe you weren't particularly open to discussion.
when i read "self-expression", i thought immediately that you were defending racist jokes, made by those who then claim not to be racists, as "self-expression". after your clarification in the second comment, though, i'm not quite sure what you mean by self-expression. this post hasn't been about those who openly engage in racist speech with knowledge of the implications, whether or not the speakers care about those implications, but those who indulge in racist speech and then stridently claim not to be racists. few people openly -- or even consciously, i'd argue -- identify as racists or sexists, and so using "self-expression" in the way i'm reading it seems problematic. could you say more?
to return to the example i gave, with my co-workers: when pressed, all of them strenuously denied being sexists, even as they continued making sexist jokes and remarks and judgments. the culture which allowed them to make those jokes openly didn't give me the platform to talk with them at all; if anything, it just made those unconsidered attitudes of theirs more deeply entrenched.
we all want to believe that our society has gotten beyond race and gender, and we're all conditioned to believe that truly racist and sexist things aren't condoned in our society. when comedians and personalities in the media come out with these hateful statements, then, it only serves to reassure people that they can't really be racists or sexists if they say the same things themselves. the conversation becomes harder and harder to have. the abandon with which we can make these 'jokes' is itself poisonous, i think. you can berate people, but as long as the joke defense is considered acceptable, it does no good.
(i'd argue, also, that your gender wouldn't put you at much of an advantage when dealing with those attitudes. a male acquaintance of mine called the guys on their behaviour, and was even more roundly rebuffed than i was. i was just a pushy dyke who didn't know anything anyway and secretly liked being hit on and wouldn't admit it and was probably on the rag, but this was a fellow Dude, violating the Dude Code. the only headway we ever made came after i heard them mocking him, and pointed out that, of all of the men present, only this guy they were calling emasculated actually had a girlfriend. that actually shut them up, as they re-considered the claims they were making that women really did like that sort of thing.)
anyway, short version: the argument that political correctness is an attempt to change society for the better by shaming people out of words is a distortion, and, as a result of that distortion, a lot of people today seem to believe that making racist or sexist jokes, or otherwise engaging in hate-speech, is actually a proof of being past those racist or sexist or hateful attitudes. that belief is the truly poisonous one, i think; people believe they're somehow innoculated against being racists and so refuse to take others seriously when called on the things they say. the collapse of the fairness doctrine has in part pushed the media into encouraging these attitudes, and as a result, ignorance about hate speech is everywhere. because people are ignorant, hate speech becomes normalised, and it becomes okay to say more and more hateful things. we don't notice the gradual change, and soon there's an entire generation which doesn't believe hate speech exists anymore.
Boy, it's late. Three episodes of the Wire goes past without you noticing it, you know?
By "self-expression" I mean that people who are still really racist or sexist or homophobic are whatever are going to rebel against an attempt to make all language that expresses these beliefs off-limits. To tilt it further toward the direction they see it, all these people who aren't convinced that X belief really is racist are going to chafe all the more. I was arguing that I wasn't sure how useful it was to cut off self-expression of evil things (they really believe them, even if they'll use jokes or denial or whatever to avoid that conclusion).
I'm just not sure that cultural tyranny is the right way to end evil beliefs... I don't like it in the religious right, I don't like it in the progressive left. People have to be convinced... shown that what they think is okay is really wrong. It seems like racist speech is getting stoppered up in a bottle and is proving, unsurprisingly, not to have really gone away. People learned it was unacceptable to talk about black people as being bred for athletics, but they didn't learn the fundamental errors and continuation of evils involved in that thought.
Anyway, your version of political correctness that involves more dialog rather than less sounds great: sign me up. And I also agree that the idea that jokes are proof of being post-racist is a dangerous one. I've certainly encountered examples like the one you describe, and it sucks. Do you think all South Park / Spike Lee-esque "libertarianism", as you describe it, is bunk, though? Where every poison possible is spit out and forced to actually see the light of day? It's always struck me that South Park doesn't ultimately think any of the stuff it shows is "okay", which seems to me to make it very different.
Your earlier reference to SP made me curious.
I'm just not sure that cultural tyranny is the right way to end evil beliefs... I don't like it in the religious right, I don't like it in the progressive left.
it's just that "cultural tyranny" hasn't been practiced by the progressive left in this way. for those who cling to their racist beliefs, the goal of equality could certainly be seen as "tyranny", and that, i think, is where the modern idea of Political Correctness came from. the progressive left of the US overwhelmingly considered "political correctness" as something of a joke term. where it was used seriously, it was never applied to a particular lexicon which progressives wanted to impose on society, but rather a way of thinking -- the mindfulness i described in an earlier post. that mindfulness involves not just thinking out the possibly racist or sexist implications of words or deeds, but also considering the possible intent of the person who might be using them, and applying that scrutiny to oneself and to others.
but to those who don't want to be challenged on their racist beliefs, that mindfulness is something of a threat. US conservatives of the late 80s and early 90s diffused that threat by re-defining the term "political correctness", and frankly by outright lying (or at least being disingenuous) about what it meant and what its goals were.
regenry press (home of ann coulter and dinesh d'souza) and its stable of professional conservative jerks did a lot of damage to the term. they did this, essentially, by outright disinformation.
People have to be convinced... shown that what they think is okay is really wrong.
by defining any attempts to examine ourselves and our culture as "political correctness", and by tying simultaneously this idea of "cultural tyranny" -- which was never part of the idea -- to that same term, "political correctness", the cultural conservatives of the early 90s are still keeping us from having that conversation today. which was, i think, the intent of those who did that framing.
Anyway, your version of political correctness that involves more dialog rather than less sounds great: sign me up.
gladly -- but it's not my version, and it's not political correctness.
(splitting comments again -- south park gets its own comment, and that might take me a bit, as i've got work today. should have something by tonight.)
anne: you might find this discussion of "rape jokes" interesting
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