- When a person of color says that they hate white people, they hate white people as an institution (aka white supremacy/hegemony)
- When a woman says that they hate men, they hate men as an institution (aka male dominance/patriarchy)
- When a queer person says that they hate straight people, they hate straight people as an institution (aka heteronormativity)
- When a trans* person says that they hate cisgender people, they hate cisgender people as an institution (aka gender essentialism/rigid gender roles)
SO WHEN ANY OF THESE PEOPLE SAY THAT THEY HATE ANY OF THESE GROUPS, DON’T RESPOND WITH “NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE/MEN/STRAIGHT/CIS PEOPLE ARE LIKE THAT”. WE KNOW THAT. IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU PERSONALLY. IT’S ABOUT INSTITUTIONS AND THE WAYS IN WHICH THEY, AS INSTITUTIONS, OPPRESS US. SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Not only did a Latino actor not play Tony, who clearly in real life looks like a Chicano, but his ethnicity is stolen from the Latino community at a time when Latinos have been demonized. Our real Latino national heroes if acknowledged would dramatize our patriotism and contribution to the United States…
In “Argo” we have yet another instance where the public has been denied of an opportunity for all Americans to learn of an American Latino’s valor, talent and patriotism. This occurs because there has been no consequence to this behavior. It is time for a change.
—
Moctesuma Esparza on Ben Affleck’s Argo and the White-Washing of the Mexican-American. Esparza says:
The film actually goes out of its way to obscure Tony Mendez’ ethnicity. His name (Mendez) is mentioned only once and the character says he is from New York (Tony was born in Nevada from a mining family with six generations in Nevada and raised in Colorado). Nowhere in the movie does the viewer get that the hero is Mexican American.
Ben Affleck’s portrayal of Antonio “Tony” Mendez was very contained and had very little range, I don’t know what Tony personality is like to judge the portrayal but this did not impact the movie’s success or failure. It was an excellent role that would have elevated a Latino actor like Benjamin Bratt or Michael Peña.
Instead, like with the story of Guy Gabaldon, whose extraordinary achievements in the WWII Battle of Saipan, capturing, by himself, 1800 enemy soldiers, more than any other American soldier in the history of our country, was similarly white-washed as Jeffrey Hunter played him in the 1960 film, “Hell to Eternity.” But that was more than half a century ago, Argo is now.
In the closing credits, the photos of the real people portrayed are presented side-b- side with the actors’ photos showing the very close resemblance and care that was taken in the casting process to cast actors who looked like the real people. Yet, for the key role of Tony Mendez, the director/producer Ben Affleck chose a single long shot of Tony with President Carter where his image was not distinct or recognizable, breaking the pattern he had chosen for all the other real people depicted.
(via racebending)
White privilege is being able to star in a person of color’s life story. See also: Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart and almost everyone in 21. Nevemind. I should have made a separate post. Sorry, folks.
I don’t need a ‘What If’ movie scenario for black heroes because history shows they actually existed. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, MLK—Where the frack are their movies? Do you know Danny Glover has been trying for almost two decades to get a Touissant L’Oeuverture movie made? And every major studio has shut the door in his face. And let’s not talk about how a Nat Turner movie has been unanimously blackballed in Hollyweird. So a studio will give money to a fictionalized spaghetti western, revenge slavery movie but not support our real heroes. Think on that. Then go get your life!
—
ReBecca Theodore-Vachon, Thinking Critically Because You Refuse To (via sonofbaldwin)
nat turner, for folks who dont understand why his story is so scary.
(via deluxvivens)
This is how this shit works:
One of the ancient ploys of the film industry is to make a film about non-white people and find a way, however convoluted, to tell it from the point of view of a white character.
—
Film critic Roger Ebert on Hollywood in his review of “Flowers of War”
(via racebending)“Can you think of any reason the character John Miller is needed to tell his story? Was any consideration given to the possibility of a Chinese priest? Would that be asking for too much?”
Terms such as “culturally deprived,” “economically disadvantaged” and “underdeveloped” place the responsibility for their own conditions on those being so described. This is known as “blaming the victim.” It places responsibility for poverty on the victims of poverty. It removes the blame from those in power who benefit from, and continue to permit, poverty.
Still another example involves the use of “non-white,” “minority” or “third world.” While people of color are a minority in the U.S., they are part of the vast majority of the world’s population, in which white people are a distinct minority. Thus, by utilizing the term “minority” to describe people of color in the U.S., we can lose sight of the global majority/minority reality - a fact of some importance in the increasing and interconnected struggles of people of color inside and outside the U.S.
To describe people of color as “non-white” is to use whiteness as the standard and norm against which to measure all others.
—
Robert B. Moore, “Racism in the English Language”
Why people of color > “minorities” or “non-white”
(via wretchedoftheearth)
to a white person diversity basically means ‘i have the option of interacting with Black/Brown folks at the time and place of my choosing.’
like they are a resource to be called upon when they want ‘soul food’ or someone to practice their spanish on. but if the Black/Brown presence is readily visible/audible outside of the gentrifiers choosing, then they are an invasive nuisance.
because this is ‘diversity’ not ‘i want to live in an all Black/Brown community’.
They basically want to be cultural tourists, to visit POCLand, not live there.
(Source: grapeson)
In this country, ‘American’ means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
— Toni Morrison (via mindovermatterzine)
(Source: blackgirlsbirthedtheearth)
lucy liu actually is two years older but martin freeman looks about twenty years her senior
interesting
Asians don’t raisin?
Yep. Everyone in my family looks at least a decade younger than they are. When white people are being racist, I at least have the comfort of knowing they’ll look like hell much sooner than I will.
Martin Freeman is 41. Lucy Liu is 44.
Melanin: the true fountain of youth.
When you are the only Indian-American female lead in a television show, you seem to be making sweeping statements about that person simply because you are that person and the only one, whereas, for instance, Steve Carell — he’s not making sweeping generalizations about white American men on his show because there’s so many different white American men on different shows. So I get worried by doing this character that people think that I’m saying that about all those people. And I just have the weight of that on my shoulders, which is something that I do envy other performers for not having.
— Mindy Kaling (x)
(Source: oodlyenough)
(via The shocking - and forgotten - toll of missing black women across the U.S. | Mail Online)
This pie chart from the article, holy shit:
Asian Americans Respond to Pew: We’re Not Your Model Minority
Note: I am not getting involved into Tumblr clusterfucks about ‘Asian privilege’ but this is worth reading for Asians and non-Asians alike who doubt that the model minority MYTH is proof that Asians are Most Favored
It’s not every day that deep and rigorous research about Asian Americans is released to the public. So when the well-respected Pew Research Center released “The Rise of Asian Americans,” a comprehensive report on the community on Tuesday, it should have been reason enough to celebrate. Instead, the report, which hailed Asians as the fastest-growing and highest-achieving racial group in the country, drew widespread criticism from Asian American scholars, advocates and lawmakers who raised alarm about the report, and warned against taking it seriously at all. Poor research of an oft-overlooked community, it turns out, might do more damage than no research at all.
We are “deeply concerned about how findings from a recent study by the Pew Research Center have been used to portray Asian Americans,” the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice, a network of civil rights advocacy groups said on Wednesday. The report’s authors, the AACAJ said, “paint a picture of Asian Americans as a model minority, having the highest income and educational attainment among racial groups. These portrayals are overly simplistic.”
The Pew report included both census data and social trend polling of the six largest Asian-American ethnicities—Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese. These communities make up 85 percent of the roughly 17 million Asian Americans. According to Pew, half of Asians in the U.S. graduated from college, compared with just 30 percent for the general population, and report a median annual household income of $66,000* when Americans as a whole make $49,000…
Critics say the Pew report mixes some fact with too much mythology about what people imagine Asians to be. While a portrayal of Asian Americans as high-achieving, and adept at overcoming humble beginnings to reach great financial and educational success seems flattering, many Asian Americans say this frame is not only factually inaccurate, it’s damaging to the community.
*One of the reasons the median ‘Asian’ income is higher than most racial groups is because there are very few Asian Americans compared to most other groups (they make up less than 3% of the population) and the vast majority live in extremely expensive cities. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are richer, it means that the cost of living in these cities is higher but for specific reasons, Asians have patterns of settling there (think LA, Cali, Texas is cheap but living in Houston is not always cheap, etc). Again this is a statistical slight that doesn’t show you the whole picture.
Glossing over the class and educational disparities (among other things) among Asian Americans not only reinforces racist perceptions of Asians as interchangeable (“all the same”), but serves to reinforce the white supremacist race hierarchy:
The narrative fits in neatly with a very American “bootstraps” ethos, where people rise and fall on their own skills and merits. It’s a convenient narrative for silencing other groups who try to make claims of institutional racism and racial discrimination. “There’s this aspect of the media coverage where races are being played against each other,” said Yeung. “The not so implicit message is Asians are the better people of color whereas blacks and Latinos are seen as having all these kinds of problems, so why can’t all people of color be like us.”
I love historical films and I’m so sick of all these kinds of Jane Austen movies where they have these fucking period movies. How many times do we have to remake fucking Pride and Prejudice? How many times do white people need their history told to them over and over and over again? It’s so fucking boring. It’s always the same. There are enough movies like that. There are enough examinations of white people history. There’s enough of all these novels, all the Bronte sisters, all the fucking Jane Austen bullshit — I don’t care anymore. I’m sick of it. Why can’t we go into other people’s history? Why can’t we go into more Asian history? Why can’t we go into more Asian-American history? Why can’t we go into more Latin-American history? Why can’t we do any of these things? But they don’t. We have to keep regurgitating Old England. It’s so racist, and nobody actually comes out and says this is fucking stupid.
Who’s white?
For whatever reason, many white Americans seem to think that ‘white’ = WASP (white Anglo Saxon Protestant) and that folks whose forebears came over on the Mayflower are the actual whites, not the Italians, Russian Jews, Irish Catholics, etc. It’s certainly true that non-Anglo European ethnic groups were once considered nonwhite. But the definition of whiteness changed generations ago to encompass pretty much any European ethnicity that embraced white supremacy. So nonwhites from Europe got to become white ethnic Americans and enjoy white privilege. And nonwhites from every other continent remained nonwhite…because what’s the point of being white if there are no nonwhite people around to oppress?
Yet I’ve had many conversations with white Americans who’ve tried to employ that throwback definition of whiteness, to treat ‘white’ as though it only means ‘WASP’. Conveniently, this distancing from whiteness tends to only occur during conversations about racism. I don’t think they realize that whiteness is achieved, but that non-whiteness is thrust upon you. Their European ancestors gladly handed in their nonwhite badges as soon as they were able to do so. This was an opportunity that many others at the time did not have (though some tried) because their ethnicity was visible in their skin color, hair texture, eye shape, etc.
What’s particularly annoying is when white Americans not only deny their whiteness, but attempt to use their immigrant ancestry to appropriate ‘person of color’ as an identity. ‘People of color’ was devised as a positive, empowering alternative to terms like ‘minorities’ and ‘nonwhites’, which can be inaccurate or suggest otherness and inferiority. The term subverts the usual racial dynamic by suggesting that white people lack color instead of us lacking whiteness. ‘People of color’ is a specifically racial term. It does not mean ‘ethnic people’ or ‘non-WASPs’.
It is also a modern term that began gaining prominence by being employed by racial justice advocates in the 1960s and ’70s. It is nonsensical and self-serving to use an archaic definition of non-whiteness in order to claim a label that modern nonwhites popularized.
So the fact that your ethnicity wasn’t considered white generations ago doesn’t mean you can get away with claiming to be nonwhite or a person of color today. You still benefit from white privilege. And claiming POC status so on the basis of your Euro ethnic identity is particularly offensive since your ancestors chose to leave non-whiteness behind by stepping on black people, Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, and other nonwhites on their way up the racial hierarchy.
Some further reading:
- Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America, Mary C. Waters
- How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev
- Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Frye Jacobson (pdf with excerpts)
Downlo: desmadres replied to your post: desmadres replied to your link: Oh…
desmadres replied to your post: desmadres replied to your link: Oh God, Please…
I feel like it’s a really small fraction of working class males who fall under this white male victimhood thing.Dude, I just don’t care. I don’t care about white working class males. They have been…
I’m actually a woman of color, so not sure if “do your own homework” was directed to me, or just in general, to white working class men.
I suppose we fundamentally disagree because I do care about white working class men. Some parts of our identities privilege others, and I acknowledge that one aspect about my identity privileges all white working class men even if I am a woman of color from a working class family, that, on top of that, does not identify as straight. By your own standards, I should be all of the way at the bottom of those privileged, except, I am getting an education from an elite institution, which gives me a privilege that they don’t have.
And, we also disagree because I don’t believe in a patriarchy (in the sense that it’s men oppressing women) in the U.S. And this is why:
“Men do behave badly, do act in sexist ways, do beat and rape women in the home. Feminists interpret this as the enactment of male power. The Marxist reply is not to simply say these are the actions of men shaped by the society they grow up in. That is only one side to the argument. The other is to point out, as Marx did, that “men make their own history”. While humans are the products of society they are also conscious, thinking beings. […] Ideas (such as racism and sexism) propagated by the ruling class are not simply taken up by workers in a straightforward way. They are refracted through working class experience (such as differences in wages, domestic violence, etc) and interpreted in various ways. […]
The idea that men have power over women can do nothing but get in the way. It reinforces the division of sexism. Men are sexist today. But women’s oppression does not equal male power. If we see the fight against sexism as separate from the class struggle, we can easily fall into seeing working class men as an enemy. In reality, they are potential allies. In the seventies when building workers were confident of their union strength the Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (BLF) supported women’s right to work on building sites. Every defence of abortion rights against the Right to Life has received support from large numbers of men. In the mass abortion campaign against Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen government in 1979-80, men were able to be won to support the struggle, including transport workers at Email, who stopped work to join a picket. In 1986, BLF support for the nurses’ strike in Victoria challenged their sexist ideas about the role of women.
Once we understand that working class men have nothing to gain from women’s oppression, we can see the possibility of breaking them from sexist ideas. Then we can be confident that workers, women and men fighting side by side in solidarity, can begin to change the “existing categories”. There is nothing automatic about changes in consciousness in struggle. But with an understanding of the roots of women’s oppression, socialists can intervene around these issues and relate them to the experience of workers’ struggles.
Women are better placed today to fight for liberation than in any time in history. They are no longer simply housewives. They are half the working class and able to exercise the power of that class alongside male workers. Ultimately, it is the struggle of the working class which can destroy the very social structures which gave rise to women’s oppression in the first place.”
So. I think misandry is bullshit and unproductive for the liberation of both women and men, whether they’re a person of color or white. Upper class women contribute to the oppression of working class women more than white working class men.
Because historically it has been white, affluent men in positions of power, that is still the case (that is, mostly rich white men run many if not most institutions in the U.S.), but even under capitalism, as more people of color get those positions of power, the same oppression will continue.
Racism and sexism exist because capitalism allows them to exist. The ruling class thrives on racism and sexism by dividing and conquering males, females, people of color, people with different abilities, people with different beliefs, the LGBTQ community, etc. And you, by insisting that “white male victimhood” is misplaced, are perpetuating this division among people. You are doing a favor to the ruling class. I would prefer to take these white males as allies to liberate us all from all of our oppressions that manifest themselves in different ways—whether it’s male disposability (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp8tToFv-bA), attacks on the undocumented, women of color’s lower wages, etc.
It’s not just “their” homework. It’s all of our homework, just like the liberation of women is their homework, too.
A good article on the origins of family as we know it and the start of women’s oppression: http://www.isreview.org/issues/02/engles_family.shtml
I get you, downlo. I get frustrated, too, by people who forget intersectionality, but intersectionality includes class. I am aware that you know of classism, but let’s not discriminate against our white counter parts because they were born into a capitalist society that gives them certain privileges. Men are starting to be vocal about their own oppression because before (and even now), men showing and talking about their weaknesses was looked down upon. I am THRILLED that men are now talking about their own oppression. Yes, people have to continue checking their privileges (including white males), but let’s check our own, too, and let’s not make ourselves the only ‘victims’ because we aren’t. If you want to be truly intersectional, then address ALL forms of oppression, even if means of your own oppressor at times, because yes, they too, can still be oppressed.
Xxoxo,
Xicana BisExual MArxista
LMBO. I’m not even going to respond because so much of this is just obvious nonsense. But it was too cute not to share. I bolded the parts that I thought were the funniest.
