jesse_the_k | Entries tagged with white privilege

Per an email from OTW a couple weeks back, I learned that they’re updating the Terms of Service (TOS) for Archive of our Own (AO3).

They finally address requests for including warnings for Hate Speech, Racism, Slavery at some length, but they’ve hidden the discussion deep in a draft.

tl;dr — No new warnings. Only a handful of people have commented. They’re soliciting comments until 17 November 2024. The rest of this post is linked excerpts from OTW’s reasoning against warnings, and from folks who've commented.

( 900 words )

If you're white, please go read gaudior's post about "White Anger" https://gaudior.dreamwidth.org/505889.html

It reframes my feelings about white supremacy from the useless emotion of shame to the productive emotion of anger.

White supremacy does harm in my name, and I don't like it!

If you happened to watch the Hamilton movie recently, you can share your enthusiasm at hamiltunes where we've been squeeing for five years.

runpunkrun summarizes why it’s time to talk reparations for slavery, provides some good background reading, and a sample letter for your Congressional representatives.

sonia rounded up five particularly good links for white people engaged in anti-racist reflection

jedusor has created a comm that’s right up my alley: therooftops is the place to alert the world to great short fiction

under 25,000 words that has a strong speculative component. Speculative means the story explores a reality different from our own in some crucial way; this includes science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, alternate history, slipstream

Full how-to

Even when I'm offline, it seems, I'm opening tabs!

Prof Deb Reese accomplishes two useful things here at her American Indians in Childrens Literature blog: a. Speaking up on why the phrase "a few dead Indians" is problematic and b. Documenting info and rumor flow via Twitter, blogs, email, &c.

( Web-related book rave )

( Jesse Goes to the Ball Park )

Ooops! Time's up! Back at you in a couple days.

Current Mood: awake

Poll #330 Fundamental WisCon Question

This poll is closed.
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 6

I need to know if you're ...

Super Dark >70%
5 (83.3%)

Sorta Dark >50% <70%
0 (0.0%)

Milk
0 (0.0%)

White
0 (0.0%)

Mango Sorbet instead
1 (16.7%)

Feh, enough about the con already
0 (0.0%)

What do pugilists do in the pedicular circus?

Ticky box
4 (100.0%)

Current Mood: curious

In this week's Science Times, Dr. Pauline Chen meditates on her own reluctance to use interpreters, as well as a recent study in the Journal of Internal Medicine.

“[...] physician-patient communication is driven by the physician’s need for patient input rather than by the patient’s need to communicate. Communication is viewed as something that is supposed to change decisions that the doctor can foresee. So the use of interpreters may have more to do with how we think about communication with our patients and less to do with our views on interpreters, limited English proficiency patients or even time pressures.”

Chen provides a vivid example of the unquestioned medical assumption that what the doctor has to say is more important than the patient's needs. She decides her ability to ask Dolor? and that patient's response of thumbs'-up or thumbs'-down is adequate for "routine rounding" (i.e., post surgical check-ins).

Chen is a transplant surgeon; the patient she's routinely rounded has just had a liver transplant. As anyone who's been hospitalized for illness or injury will readily understand, there's nothing quite so intimidating, so important as those 5 minutes a day when you actually get to communicate with the doctor. This is thoughtless privilege at its most frightening. The JIM study concludes:

Although previous research has identified time constraints and lack of availability of interpreters as reasons for their underuse, our data suggest that the reasons are far more complex. Residents at the study institutions with interpreters readily available found it easier to “get by” without an interpreter, despite misgivings about negative implications for quality of care. Findings suggest that increasing interpreter use will require interventions targeted at both individual physicians and the practice environment.

The comments are interesting, if ill-informed. There's the predictable "don't get sick in a language you don't know," but most get stuck in two issues—cost and availability—for which the study controlled.

Do readers not really read? The willingness people have to defend the indefensible fascinates and repels me. Dr Chen has made a habit of bravely admitting hard realities in a national newspaper; the commenters largely want to give her a pass.

Current Mood: frustrated

...apparently a lot. (Tell me you're surprised. Go ahead, just tell me.)

As the Brits put in their captions:

(!)

NPR's useful series The York Project: Race & The '08 Vote follows a roundtable of 13 diverse voters from Pennsylvania. They talk about race—principally, their fears on the topic.

The reporters set up a long-term relationship, in hopes of moving beyond the animosity, silence & nonsense that is certain to accompany initial conversations about race. They're on the right path. The honesty on display in the series is stunning.

From their introduction

And since we wanted to make sure our voters got comfortable, we began our discussion with comfort food. Thirteen voters from York and the surrounding suburbs joined us for dinner. Our producers had carefully selected a group that loosely represented York's demographics: young and old; Democrats, Republicans and independents. We thought it was a fairly random group, but once we got into the room, it turned out there were all kinds of connections.
The real estate agent and the high school drama teacher had a school connection. The lawyer remembered the law enforcement officer who used to visit his high school for anti-drug presentations. The former factory worker and the seamstress had a common acquaintance. Such is life in a fairly small city.

It's the "all kinds of connections" that make the conversation so important: we may not often be neighbors (given persistent redlining) but we do live in webs of community.

Particularly useful are the reporters' meditations on the meaning of their own race. Here's Steve Inskeep, who's White:

When race does come up among white people, in my experience, it's easy for people to say a handful of safe things and then stop talking about this dangerous subject. If you're white, there is a formula for you to follow. First, you reflect on your youth. You note that, for whatever reason, you were brought up in a home without prejudice. You may offer an anecdote about how your mother believed in civil rights or how you, yourself, stood up for a black kid in school. Finally, you report that you try to see people according to what's inside them, just as your family taught you.

Michelle Norris, who's Black, recounts her personal experiences with hard-core, totally unsubtle racism, then reflects:

Our conversations in York have me wondering about those men on the sidewalk. I wonder what they would say about this election year if they were included in our conversations. So often, discussions about race are driven by people who chaffed under restrictive laws or customs. The "success despite oppression" narrative is quite common in politics and film and business. Less common — or perhaps more muted — are the contemporary viewpoints of people who enforced, enjoyed or evolved past the point of assumed white privilege.

I've sometimes discounted the thoughtless privilege brandished in online discussions, assuming that those who post them are the exceptional case. This radio series brought me up short, because it ain't just the net, folks.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Thanks to

haddayr's posts, I was aware of—and thunderstruck by—the police arrest of press during the Republican National Convention. I was horrified because it was wrong, but I couldn't articulate exactly why.

Last week, WNYC's On the Media featured an excellent interview with Amy Goodman which provides that crucial context:

Let's say your editor wants you to cover what’s going on in the convention, and you want to go outside ‘cause you see there are thousands of people that are out there, and maybe you could do that and then run in and do the job that they asked you to do, and maybe you could even get some of that into your story.

You’re not going to risk it if you could be arrested [LAUGHS] if you go outside and then you’re not there to do what your editor wanted you to do. It has a chilling effect. It prevents journalists from doing their job but it also really hurts the public. Reporters have to be able to put things on the record without getting a record.

Complete audio and transcripts here.

I love Dmae Roberts's radio pieces. She explores vital, difficult issues and they're full of laughter. Listening to her voice helps me experience her insights more directly.

What are we but a collection of secrets? as we move through our lives, as we choose to reveal our lives, our stories, our very being to strangers—or not. 'How did your parents meet?'

Being visibly different in our racist society, she daily experiences rude questions from strangers. (Some of those same folks likewise see my power wheelchair as permission to say remarkably intrusive & thoughtless things.)

Her "Secret Asian Woman" explores the costs of passing. Her parents are White and Chinese, and she looks "White enough" to witness countless racist comments. She browses labels—"White," "half-Oriental," "Eurasian," "half-breed," "multiracial," "HAPA," "mixed,"—comparing their histories and fit. I laughed at her fellow-feeling with "Secret Agent Man," the 60s TV show: by being able to pass she inhabited the mysterious-infiltrator role into which many Asian women are cast.

( more good stuff from Dmae Roberts )

The current economic mess is comprehensible, as long as the folks explaining are clever enough.

The 60-minute radio show "The Big Pool of Money" explains why subprime mortgages got popular with bankers and borrowers, with the amusing style This American Life is famous for. Many factors are involved, but the biggest was "the triumph of data over common sense" and peer pressure: 1000s of bankers knowing they were doing the wrong thing, but they couldn't resist the profit. It also explains how investment banks are different than "real" banks, and why they're probably going to disappear R.S.N.

For ongoing coverage, I've been following National Public Radio's Planet Money blog. It's updated many times a day by NPR's economic correspondents. You can listen to all the reports that have aired on NPR's programs; they also have an audio Q&A section where they field listeners' questions.

Of course, NPR is not a neutral source of information, but their coverage has, so far, assumes the audience are not earning more than US$150,000 annually. Tell me about other helpful info sources!

...was a beautiful movie. Not perfect: the overwhelming whiteness of life-on-the-hive-ship was jarring, and the conflation of disability, power mobility, obesity, and moral laxness was infuriating. But the good bits were gorgeous, elegant, dreamy, awe-inspiring.

The Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac news is veryconfusing. I'm a total illiterate when it comes to economics. I'm trying to decode this NPR primer on the next big crash.

Current Mood: anxious

Excellent drawings, challenging text:
Incognegro by Mat Johnson & Warren Pleece, Vertigo/DC Comics 2008.

A fictional tale of two African-American men who can pass as white. They travel from Harlem to Mississippi to rescue a relative from lynching, with mixed success. Powerfully evokes the "family carnival" atmosphere attendant on lynching, while also exploring women who pass as men.

The ethics of those who can or do pass can divide identity communities, and seems to be a universal issue, even as it's highly particular in each of those cultures.

Bold move from the director of a North Carolina lab: he was willing to be fired rather than fly the NC flag to honor Jesse Helms.

All Things Considered, July 10, 2008: North Carolina lowered flags this week to honor the late Sen. Jesse Helms. But L.F. Eason -- director of the state Standards Laboratory -- chose to retire rather than comply with the directive. Eason explains his objections.

BTW, web sites tend to hide their low-bandwidth versions (probably because they serve fewer ads). With no graphics and no javascripts, they load really quickly. All the content is there, just way faster:
http://thin.npr.org

Current Mood: respectful

Just finished Timothy Tyson's memoir of rural North Carolina in the late 60s and early 70s.

Blood Done Sign My Name
0609610589
(I read the unabridged CD edition, skillfully narrated by Robertson Dean. )

A child of a liberal white Methodist preacher, Tyson skillfully blends homiletic and storytelling traditions to examine the personal and societal impacts of white privilege and racism. The cold-blooded daylight murder of a young African-American, and the wildly various reactions to this crime, provide a lens on a particular time and place as well as an opportunity to meditate on what's lost when people don't know their own histories.

I laughed, I cried, and I learned a lot. In particular, he does an excellent job challenging the whitewash of the civil rights movement -- I found it a particularly bracing antidote to the recent nonsense of how LBJ ensured black people's voting rights. He firmly demonstrates both the contributions and shortcomings of white liberals. Tyson counters the marketing of Martin Luther King, Jr into a "kind of Black Santa Claus," providing many examples of the long-standing, grass-roots, widespread, and sometimes violent foundations of African Americans' campaign for true citizenship.

Current Mood: enthralled

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Inside the Little Plastic Castle

adventures with Jesse the K

Entries tagged with white privilege

No Racism/Slavery Warnings in AO3's TOS update #endOTWracism

Boost: @gaudior on productive anger about white supremacy

Four Local Boosts: Hamilton, Anti-racism * 2, short story recs

Brain Tabs: Native Americans; Books; Baseball

WisCon Members Please Weigh In

Medical Privilege, Let Me Show You It

Does Race Matter on a Sub Conscious Level?

Reporters have to be able to put things on the record without getting a record.

Anti-Racism 102

Fiscal Whazzat?

WALL-E

Incognegro

Taking A Stand Against Racism

Blood Done Sign My Name

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