Racism and patriarchy, cont.
Apr. 3rd, 2007 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwOk, I am *still* reading the bell hooks book.
I would like to note that no non-fiction book this short, without footnotes, has ever taken me so long to read. I think it's because the writing is very dense, and the arguments are made in a nice, classical essay way. The sort of essay I got used to reading in my 1800s lit. books as a kid, and missed in the scholarly/academic world.
Namely, the point of an essay is to convince the reader of something or to convey an experience. Or both. Ideas are introduced and elaborated on as they support this goal, in a manner that is artistic and rhetorical as well as logical. And then, once the message has been conveyed, the essay is done. It's very much the oppposite of the 5-paragraph "I'm about to tell you X, I'm telling you X, I just told you X" model.
So, today's major mind nuggets:
1) Ms. hooks explained the whole "how do white people question their racism if non-white people refuse to dialogue with them" thing that's been driving me nuts for ten years now. Ever since my freshman year of college, when I was so irked by the people chosen to read our school's mandatory diversity lectures for freshman, I've been struggling with this, and she put it in a way that both relieved me and helped me to see the other side of the argument more clearly. Yay!
My argument had been: while I get that non-white people are tired of explaining themselves and being viewed as some kind of "other" to be explored, it's not actually possible for a white person to learn about non-white cultures and experiences without, y'know, some two way interaction. And we're told constantly that mass media are not a valid way of learning about other cultures, because of the way those media are influenced and/or controlled by white cultural priorities, so it has to be a direct contact. But there are a lot of activists who I've read who are basically saying "it's racist to ask black people questions about black experience, because this makes them into token or representative black people, as opposed to individuals."
Well, fair enough, I think if someone came up to me and said "hey, tell me what it's like to be a woman" I'd be a bit irked too! But there's a lot of difference between "tell me what it's like to be a woman" and "tell me about your experiences and feelings about being a woman".
Ms. hooks talks about how there's a racism inherent in a white person wanting a black person to do the work for them - to fix their racist "problem". And I finally got the context (a bit) from the other side: it must feel like how I feel when I'm tutoring and a kid wants me to do their homework for them. Here I've gone to all the effort to show up to help them do something for themselves, and instead they want me to do it for them. So yeah, clearly that would be wrong. And I bet that there are people who just experience this user dynamic again and again, and that's where the statements that have irked me come from.
2) I just like all the comments about patriarchy. I've always felt that real democratic life needs to be built on the formative experiences of a more democratic family unit. Otherwise we're perpetuating this creepy Locke-ian model of "the country is like the family and the king is like the father" thing that I never approved of in Locke (well, I don't like Locke much, actually. think he's icky). Ms. hooks is the first author I've read who connects the structure of the family to the structure of the government in a critical way. Yay!
Namely, the point of an essay is to convince the reader of something or to convey an experience. Or both. Ideas are introduced and elaborated on as they support this goal, in a manner that is artistic and rhetorical as well as logical. And then, once the message has been conveyed, the essay is done. It's very much the oppposite of the 5-paragraph "I'm about to tell you X, I'm telling you X, I just told you X" model.
So, today's major mind nuggets:
1) Ms. hooks explained the whole "how do white people question their racism if non-white people refuse to dialogue with them" thing that's been driving me nuts for ten years now. Ever since my freshman year of college, when I was so irked by the people chosen to read our school's mandatory diversity lectures for freshman, I've been struggling with this, and she put it in a way that both relieved me and helped me to see the other side of the argument more clearly. Yay!
My argument had been: while I get that non-white people are tired of explaining themselves and being viewed as some kind of "other" to be explored, it's not actually possible for a white person to learn about non-white cultures and experiences without, y'know, some two way interaction. And we're told constantly that mass media are not a valid way of learning about other cultures, because of the way those media are influenced and/or controlled by white cultural priorities, so it has to be a direct contact. But there are a lot of activists who I've read who are basically saying "it's racist to ask black people questions about black experience, because this makes them into token or representative black people, as opposed to individuals."
Well, fair enough, I think if someone came up to me and said "hey, tell me what it's like to be a woman" I'd be a bit irked too! But there's a lot of difference between "tell me what it's like to be a woman" and "tell me about your experiences and feelings about being a woman".
Ms. hooks talks about how there's a racism inherent in a white person wanting a black person to do the work for them - to fix their racist "problem". And I finally got the context (a bit) from the other side: it must feel like how I feel when I'm tutoring and a kid wants me to do their homework for them. Here I've gone to all the effort to show up to help them do something for themselves, and instead they want me to do it for them. So yeah, clearly that would be wrong. And I bet that there are people who just experience this user dynamic again and again, and that's where the statements that have irked me come from.
2) I just like all the comments about patriarchy. I've always felt that real democratic life needs to be built on the formative experiences of a more democratic family unit. Otherwise we're perpetuating this creepy Locke-ian model of "the country is like the family and the king is like the father" thing that I never approved of in Locke (well, I don't like Locke much, actually. think he's icky). Ms. hooks is the first author I've read who connects the structure of the family to the structure of the government in a critical way. Yay!
