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Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Retrospective — On Race in Liberal Blogland

For the clarity and convenience of the record, I'm assembling my series on racism in the liberal blogosphere into a single post. There are admittedly a few tangential strands in there, but I think the overall narrative thread is easy enough to discern, beginning with the infamous blackface incident (when I first began to notice the rift in the leftish blogosphere) and culminating with my polemical tirade on "The Greatest Cliché" (if you only have time to read one post, that's the one). Enjoy.

2006.08.20 — Blackface Joe: Five Grievances

2006.09.17 — The Color Line and the Perceptual Gulf

2006.09.20 — A Chasm Illuminated

2006.10.04 — Battleground America

2006.10.27 — The White Liberal Race Card

2006.10.30 — White Liberal Blackface

2006.11.04 — The Greatest Cliché: The Unexamined Propaganda of "Political Correctness"

2006.12.12 — Constructive Chatter

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Speaking of liberal racism (and misogyny, and rape culture) here's this bit of fucked up $hit that aired on Saturday Night Live this weekend. I'm just hearing about this now. I ain't seen it at all in the media.

I'll tell y'all more when I've calmed down.

The whole blackface joe thing went right over my head while it was happening--I think I must have been at the north pole that week or something. But reading back over the whole thing at FDL I was struck by people insisting over and over that it couldn't be considered racist until a black person proclaimed it racist; of course, once many, many people of color decried the racism of the image then the same people who wanted validation of its racism claimed people of color were too sensitive. Jeez. And if that sentence was twisted, it's nothing compared to the logic of white liberals who expect to be forgiven just cuz their intentions were good.

kactus:

The problem with so many of those old FDL threads is they were deleting comments with opposing views very quickly as they appeared, so if you weren't there in real time you didn't get the sense of protest. They're not archival at all.

So it's funny reading people lately (not you) who continually say that FDL is not so bad, etc. You kinda had to be there. I was, for a lot of it, and the deletions were so swift it was appalling.

Jenny, I've found a lot of people who were just really, really hurt when a blog community they thought was safe turned on them. FDL, for example. The first exposure I had was meeting women from DKos who were still reeling from the infamous pie fight--another thing that went bam, over my head.

Not ever having been involved with any of the big blogs, I've escaped that; but I know that the smaller-scale, but no less intense fights that have erupted in the feminist and POC blogosphere have been really painful. Lots of anger flung about, much justified, but also huge learning possibilities for people who kept their minds open. Sadly, though, those who are willing to listen and learn seem to be in the minority.

I've heard about the comment deletions at FDL and don't doubt it for a second.

kactus, I missed the pie fight, mercifully, but it must've been quite the tsunami because it's always referred to almost apocalyptically! I can imagine the reverberation, as the Kos site is so huge.

Yeswell, like you said, all of these quakes open up huge possibilities (the waters of chaos!) and I have been personally impacted because the latest FDL mess really helped me to realize how much quality is out in the larger blog world (kai and Donna, for instance) and so it has been a real fine set of circumstances all in all!

Take care,

Y. Carrington, I'm really tempted to do a round-up of all the media coverage that's pretty much acquitted the lacrosse players that's accumulated over the past couple of months. The fallout's pretty disgusting, and to say this case has been handled improperly grossly understates the whole media crap-in.

Kai, thanks for compiling all these posts. I've explicitly told people reading my blog to disobey your request to read the bolded one if they don't have time and to read them all anyway. I didn't realize the yellowface/Bush and the blackface/Blitzer incident took place, either. Good Lord.

Hi folks!

Just wanted to drop a note saying I've been traveling and so haven't been around. I'm currently visiting my sister in Ohio for the holidays. I haven't yet had a chance to check out the SNL clip (thanks, Yolanda) but will do so shortly, though from what I'm hearing I should probably drink a bottle of something strong before subjecting myself to it...

Happy Solstice!

Kai, I'm sending you a virtual bottle of Tawny Port. Enjoy!

Kai, Happy Holidays!

Enjoy the holiday, Kai!

Good posts, as in, very good posts, and worth assembling for a Very Visible Long Article to be published in paper somewhere, I'd say.

All of these white people keep saying that because they do not have overt racist feelings, they do not participate in racism, or there is no racism, or something like this: it is amazing that they say this, but they do keep saying it.

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  • Through holding together, restraint is certain to come about. The yielding obtains the decisive place, and those above and those below correspond with it. Strong and gentle; the strong is central and its will is done. This is called the Taming Power of the Small.
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Highlights

  • Brokedown Dreamhouses of a New York Suburb (Sept-2007)
    Rene Javier Perez took leave of his wife Miliana Morales and their 2-month-old daughter Gladys in the Guatemalan town of Chiquimula. Unfortunately, the years did not unfold as planned. Sometimes you just can't summon the strength to fight for yourself anymore; sometimes you stop believing that things will get any better; worst of all, sometimes it's true.
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    The tired, the poor, the huddled masses of dream-hungry immigrants coming across the Pacific — like those coming across the deserts and rivers along the Southern US border — have never been greeted by a Mother of Exiles.
  • President McKinney (Oct-2007)
    The whole notion of "electability" is a profoundly misguided and anti-democratic concept. There's a reason elementary schoolteachers ask children to put their heads down on their desks before voting by show of hands: they're learning to make independent decisions. Asking which candidate is more "electable" pre-emptively marginalizes one's own value as a unique perceiver and one's agency as a democratic participant.
  • Protesting a War of Cowards and Madmen (Oct-2002)
    As much as the invasion of Iraq is a coward's war, it's also a madman's war, and there's a dangerous intersection between cowardice and madness where many acts of horror originate.
  • The Greatest Cliché: The Unexamined Propaganda of "Political Correctness" (Nov-2006)
    It's axiomatic that good writing tends to avoid clichés, because clear thinking is a fresh response to living reality, not a tired repurposing of brittle brain-crust. A logical inverse to this axiom is that political commentary tends to brim with toxic portions of vapid clichés, because good writing is about as widespread in today's political discourse as it is in corporate accounting memos.
  • The White Liberal Conundrum (Oct-2007)
    Many of my POC friends would actually prefer to hang out with an Archie Bunker-type who spits flagrantly offensive opinions, rather than a colorblind liberal whose insidious paternalism, dehumanizing tokenism, and cognitive indoctrination ooze out between superficially progressive words.

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