And in other news...

[cyrano]

So the Don Imus thing has once again brought people out of the woodwork saying stupid things. From my position of white privelege, there are two things that bug me that don't seem to be covered by other, smarter people.

First, Snoop Doggy Dogg's comment about why he can call women hos and bitches and be an artistic force because of it while Don Imus is just ignorant and misogynistic. "First of all, we ain't no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel." So the idea is that since Snoop's commentary on 'hos in the hood' is coming from his mind *and* his soul, and it's relevant to how he feels, then it's cool. Which would mean that if some crusty old white supremacist complains about those selfsame hos, it would be okay so long as it came from his mind and his soul and was relevant to how he felt.
Mister Dogg, I respectfully disagree here. A male employee in my work environment feels pretty comfortable tossing around the words 'slut' and 'whore' when talking about women. I am so torn between punching him in the mouth and going to my manager and complaining about a hostile work environment that the indecision essentially means that I keep doing nothing. I'm fairly certain that this is coming straight out of his soul, and it's relevant to how he feels about women. I'm also fairly certain that this is no excuse for being a hateful ignorant thoughtless turd.

The second aspect--the discussion about racism and the idea that 'racism == prejudice + power' and thus only white people can be racist. I must again disagree here, as I don't know why racism gets a different benchmark than any other -ism. I have friends who are communists. They are not members of a communist government, nor high ranking party members with power. They're still communists. I have friends who are feminists. They are not members of a ruling female class, they do not live in a society that systemically and categorically degrades and devalues men because of their Y chromosome. They're still feminists. Ice Cube, Korea still thinks you're a racist. I think the formula would be best represented as 'racism == prejudice with a racial bent'.

There. Now I've said *my* stupid things. I only have one last thing to say. Curses. Foiled again.

Comments

[jholloway.livejournal.com]

Are you seriously claiming that "honky" or "ofay" are as offensive as "nigger?" Because I can see how you might claim that they ought to be as offensive, but in fact they're not. And it's worth you considering why they're not.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Quite seriously. It's true that there are far fewer black people than white here and therefore one doesn't hear it often. It's also true that many white people have other consolations. But that's only a matter of palliating it afterwards, not of how offensive it is in the first place. "Acting white" is, yes, a phrase as offensive as "nigger."

It's a matter of a person facing a person, and on an individual level like that the relative numbers of white and black people in America don't matter.