Monday, June 20, 2005
After reading Reappropriate.com this past weekend, I have to applaud Angel. A snazzy new redesign aside, her blog is the most popular and most thought-provoking site of all those I know personally. It's really an amazing blog; check it out if you haven't already.
Still, with more comments comes more commentary. A recent post by Angel defending herself from a baseless charge of classism prompted today's discussion here. Long story short, one of Angel's commenters accused her of 'obvious class bias' or something after a throwaway line on the use of Pampers' Pull-Ups by busy working parents to potty-train young children, and Reappropriate has been abuzz with comments on the subject of class bias and parental critique. Check it out here.
After reading this stuff, I was irked. More than anything, I feel it's counterproductive to accuse minority leftists of class bias, as if classism and racism and sexism and homophobia and religious oppression are all different faces of the same American Oppression Rubik's Cube, as if one can negate a person's commentary on race or sex or whatever through flippant remarks upon their middle class or upper-middle class backgrounds. Look, I'm from Black suburbia; anyone who wishes to pretend that my comments on race or sex are thereby invalid won't last long in a civilized discussion with me. Incidentally, I had to prove this last Saturday as I was getting my haircut at Ithaca's finest barbershop, J.C. Knight's. Don't be surprised if this writer has no idyllic Menace II Society admiration for the always imitated, never duplicated 'hood; criminals of every hue and description deserve prosecution to the fullest extent of the law, no matter their broken single-parent homes or drug-infested streets or AIDS-ridden ex-con crackhead sisters, aunts, and mothers. I could care less. Nothing justifies the personal choice of crime. Deal.
What also bothers me are those literate, intellectual leftists who are so afraid of association with class bias that they seek and destroy with rhetorical scorched-earth policies any and all allusions from others associating their positions with class bias. Angel falls into this at times in my opinion, and I feel that it hurts her overall perspective. Frankly, a child of hardworking immigrant parents who scratched, toiled, and fought for every scrap of financial security and educational improvement they've ever enjoyed need not apologize for the affluence grew up with. True, it may not make her the world's foremost authority on all things poor and criminal, but that in no way dictates forced silence on the problems of economic and racial underclasses in Western society. In the end, you speak with your own voice; don't waste time apologizing for how you sound.
Given that perspective, White liberals need to stop trying to one-up their racial minority counterparts through the prism of class in America. We live roughly sixty years past Roosevelt's New Deal and roughly forty past LBJ's Great Society. Every affirmative action program ever designed has assisted poor White people and White women in greater proportion than various racial minorities. Frankly, my eagerness to assist the poor struggling White man has reached a general peak. Class matters. Race matters. Still, White liberals (in their continued post-Civil Rights desire to achieve radical leftist supremacy over Black leftists without the intellectual and real-life background of oppressive American grievance needed for such a reverse Cornell '69 coup) must remember that they can not pretend to assert that poverty is more damning and more damaging than race in American society without an expressed acknowledgment of their own White privilege. No, it's not the easiest tack to recognize own's own societal benefits, but since we all have them, and poor White liberals wish to point out the classism of moderately affluent minority leftists, they present a great opportunity for everyone to try and recognize where America actually works for them. Otherwise, the balkanized Left is forever doomed to the type of group-narrative identity-politics that makes everyone sound like whiny crybabies, and the White evangelical Protestant Christianity of Jerry Falwell and George W. Bush, repressive, murderous, corporate, continues it's hegemony over American politics, eliminating pluralism from our national institutions as surely as they wipe free speech and personal privacy from our civic order.
It's all rather childish, really. People pissed off with a second-generation Chinese-Canadian woman who speaks heavily on issues of racism and sexism, who denigrate her perspectives by calling her a classist. Over potty-training. Over pull-ups. Please. To add some perspective, after a long dialogue on attacking pull-ups and charges of class bias, Angel wrote:
"Attacking pull-ups is not an attack on working parents -- they are an attack on pull-ups and what I perceive as the mindset behind many parents who use pull-ups: that you are removing the impetus for a child to potty train so that potty training can be on the parents' schedule."
This prompted a commenter, Different Anonymous, to write:
"Where does this belief in the "pull-up" mindset come from? (Maybe I'm missing something here, but I have never heard of parents foregoing potty-training and letting kids "figure it out" on their own with pull-ups...)
Condemning pull-ups because some people *might* use them that way (or attacking pull-ups to express your point of view on lazy parents who might use them as a parenting substitute) seems very much like condemning computers entirely because some people interact exclusively through them, instead of being active members of society. A tool should not be condemned simply because it *can* be used half-assedly."
Ok, Different Anonymous, since when are pull-ups a necessary 'tool' never to be attacked for fear that children will grow up never having learning to urinate in toilets instead of on themselves? I mean, I can see computers as a 'tool' to be defended for their public and private virtue. But pull-ups?
And why is it impossible to disagree with new trends in shoddy on-the-go parenting without engendering the wrath of parental apologists who feel that no one can possibly publicly condemn parental choices? You can't go to a mall or movie theater in modern America without running into young children misbehaving in public, yet having a negative response to these loud obnoxious children opens one up to character attacks. What gives?
The simple truth is that no one emerges from the closet of classists by noticing that the mindset of some working parents on child-rearing is more controlled by the parent's convenice than by what's best for the child. The advent of the Parent's Television Council and the V-Chip display not a concern for children's well-being but rather a drive for absentee parenting from those with the money and leisure time to lobby the rest of us to change our tastes and habits in public entertainment to more banal, childlike, immature propaganda, without nuance or nudity, so that the parents won't have to waste time from their busy schedule watching and discussing television and movie programming with impressionable children.
Corporate reports are due, important meetings must be attended, and dinner parties must have appearances, so if modern yuppie parents would rather have the security that little Bobby won't be exposed to pimps and prostitutes while they are wining and dining with the bosses at the Waldorf-Astoria, the V-chip makes sense. Anything is better than wasting the time talking to little Bobby about the pros and cons of pimping and prostitution.
Now, as a result of this, America ends up not only with Columbine, but more importantly, Woodstock. In 1999, the disaffected angry White male with too much money, privilege and post teenage angst, hopped up on recreational alcohol and Limp Bizkit recordings, shocked and awed the country with a violent dismemberment of the anniversary concert that encapsulated their parent's 1960's flirtation with free love and youthful innocence. In 1999, their sons rampaged and raped, overturning structures and burning what they could not smash. Perhaps the link between pull-ups and this post-Beowulf mead hall behavior is not readily apparent, but the sad irony of the pull-up and the V-chip is that the parent (rich enough to afford and defend both) takes his and her input and guidance away from the child, leaving self-constructed chance and neutralized, antiseptic, artificial fate to do the needed work of child-rearing. Here's the useful class dynamic: White parents with money spend more time spending than parenting, and the entire society suffers as a result. Those children of a silicon god grow to maturity without a strong belief that their actions, no matter how heinous or negative or illegal, really have meaningful consequences. Those who don't believe their actions affect society have no reason to abide by society's regulations. Like Chris Rock, I too have measured fear for young suburban White boys aged 18-25. They are big kids now. Just like their parents.
Still, with more comments comes more commentary. A recent post by Angel defending herself from a baseless charge of classism prompted today's discussion here. Long story short, one of Angel's commenters accused her of 'obvious class bias' or something after a throwaway line on the use of Pampers' Pull-Ups by busy working parents to potty-train young children, and Reappropriate has been abuzz with comments on the subject of class bias and parental critique. Check it out here.
After reading this stuff, I was irked. More than anything, I feel it's counterproductive to accuse minority leftists of class bias, as if classism and racism and sexism and homophobia and religious oppression are all different faces of the same American Oppression Rubik's Cube, as if one can negate a person's commentary on race or sex or whatever through flippant remarks upon their middle class or upper-middle class backgrounds. Look, I'm from Black suburbia; anyone who wishes to pretend that my comments on race or sex are thereby invalid won't last long in a civilized discussion with me. Incidentally, I had to prove this last Saturday as I was getting my haircut at Ithaca's finest barbershop, J.C. Knight's. Don't be surprised if this writer has no idyllic Menace II Society admiration for the always imitated, never duplicated 'hood; criminals of every hue and description deserve prosecution to the fullest extent of the law, no matter their broken single-parent homes or drug-infested streets or AIDS-ridden ex-con crackhead sisters, aunts, and mothers. I could care less. Nothing justifies the personal choice of crime. Deal.
What also bothers me are those literate, intellectual leftists who are so afraid of association with class bias that they seek and destroy with rhetorical scorched-earth policies any and all allusions from others associating their positions with class bias. Angel falls into this at times in my opinion, and I feel that it hurts her overall perspective. Frankly, a child of hardworking immigrant parents who scratched, toiled, and fought for every scrap of financial security and educational improvement they've ever enjoyed need not apologize for the affluence grew up with. True, it may not make her the world's foremost authority on all things poor and criminal, but that in no way dictates forced silence on the problems of economic and racial underclasses in Western society. In the end, you speak with your own voice; don't waste time apologizing for how you sound.
Given that perspective, White liberals need to stop trying to one-up their racial minority counterparts through the prism of class in America. We live roughly sixty years past Roosevelt's New Deal and roughly forty past LBJ's Great Society. Every affirmative action program ever designed has assisted poor White people and White women in greater proportion than various racial minorities. Frankly, my eagerness to assist the poor struggling White man has reached a general peak. Class matters. Race matters. Still, White liberals (in their continued post-Civil Rights desire to achieve radical leftist supremacy over Black leftists without the intellectual and real-life background of oppressive American grievance needed for such a reverse Cornell '69 coup) must remember that they can not pretend to assert that poverty is more damning and more damaging than race in American society without an expressed acknowledgment of their own White privilege. No, it's not the easiest tack to recognize own's own societal benefits, but since we all have them, and poor White liberals wish to point out the classism of moderately affluent minority leftists, they present a great opportunity for everyone to try and recognize where America actually works for them. Otherwise, the balkanized Left is forever doomed to the type of group-narrative identity-politics that makes everyone sound like whiny crybabies, and the White evangelical Protestant Christianity of Jerry Falwell and George W. Bush, repressive, murderous, corporate, continues it's hegemony over American politics, eliminating pluralism from our national institutions as surely as they wipe free speech and personal privacy from our civic order.
It's all rather childish, really. People pissed off with a second-generation Chinese-Canadian woman who speaks heavily on issues of racism and sexism, who denigrate her perspectives by calling her a classist. Over potty-training. Over pull-ups. Please. To add some perspective, after a long dialogue on attacking pull-ups and charges of class bias, Angel wrote:
"Attacking pull-ups is not an attack on working parents -- they are an attack on pull-ups and what I perceive as the mindset behind many parents who use pull-ups: that you are removing the impetus for a child to potty train so that potty training can be on the parents' schedule."
This prompted a commenter, Different Anonymous, to write:
"Where does this belief in the "pull-up" mindset come from? (Maybe I'm missing something here, but I have never heard of parents foregoing potty-training and letting kids "figure it out" on their own with pull-ups...)
Condemning pull-ups because some people *might* use them that way (or attacking pull-ups to express your point of view on lazy parents who might use them as a parenting substitute) seems very much like condemning computers entirely because some people interact exclusively through them, instead of being active members of society. A tool should not be condemned simply because it *can* be used half-assedly."
Ok, Different Anonymous, since when are pull-ups a necessary 'tool' never to be attacked for fear that children will grow up never having learning to urinate in toilets instead of on themselves? I mean, I can see computers as a 'tool' to be defended for their public and private virtue. But pull-ups?
And why is it impossible to disagree with new trends in shoddy on-the-go parenting without engendering the wrath of parental apologists who feel that no one can possibly publicly condemn parental choices? You can't go to a mall or movie theater in modern America without running into young children misbehaving in public, yet having a negative response to these loud obnoxious children opens one up to character attacks. What gives?
The simple truth is that no one emerges from the closet of classists by noticing that the mindset of some working parents on child-rearing is more controlled by the parent's convenice than by what's best for the child. The advent of the Parent's Television Council and the V-Chip display not a concern for children's well-being but rather a drive for absentee parenting from those with the money and leisure time to lobby the rest of us to change our tastes and habits in public entertainment to more banal, childlike, immature propaganda, without nuance or nudity, so that the parents won't have to waste time from their busy schedule watching and discussing television and movie programming with impressionable children.
Corporate reports are due, important meetings must be attended, and dinner parties must have appearances, so if modern yuppie parents would rather have the security that little Bobby won't be exposed to pimps and prostitutes while they are wining and dining with the bosses at the Waldorf-Astoria, the V-chip makes sense. Anything is better than wasting the time talking to little Bobby about the pros and cons of pimping and prostitution.
Now, as a result of this, America ends up not only with Columbine, but more importantly, Woodstock. In 1999, the disaffected angry White male with too much money, privilege and post teenage angst, hopped up on recreational alcohol and Limp Bizkit recordings, shocked and awed the country with a violent dismemberment of the anniversary concert that encapsulated their parent's 1960's flirtation with free love and youthful innocence. In 1999, their sons rampaged and raped, overturning structures and burning what they could not smash. Perhaps the link between pull-ups and this post-Beowulf mead hall behavior is not readily apparent, but the sad irony of the pull-up and the V-chip is that the parent (rich enough to afford and defend both) takes his and her input and guidance away from the child, leaving self-constructed chance and neutralized, antiseptic, artificial fate to do the needed work of child-rearing. Here's the useful class dynamic: White parents with money spend more time spending than parenting, and the entire society suffers as a result. Those children of a silicon god grow to maturity without a strong belief that their actions, no matter how heinous or negative or illegal, really have meaningful consequences. Those who don't believe their actions affect society have no reason to abide by society's regulations. Like Chris Rock, I too have measured fear for young suburban White boys aged 18-25. They are big kids now. Just like their parents.
27 Comments:
At 6/20/2005 08:36:00 AM, Karlos said:;
My friend, Mark, told me a story from his childhood yesterday:
Little Mark came home from school one day with a big smile on his face and said, "Mom, you can't hit me anymore." "Why's that?" she replied calmly. "Because they told me that if you do, I can call the police." Mom grabbed a switch out of the tree and proceeded to beat little Mark senseless. Then she tossed the phone to him. "Go ahead; call the police. I've got yo ass for 10 more minutes before they get here."
Just thought you'd like that one, J. Good to read you again; it's been too long since I've heard anyone use the word "hegemony" or mention the "pros" of pimping and prostitution! By the way, do you have a measured fear of me, or do I need to listen to some more Limp Bizkit?
I couldn't agree more about the lack of parenting ability in this country. Not saying we need to be like Mark's Mom, but kids need to know there'll be swift and unpleasant consequences if they throw a tantrum in the mall. And yeah, a parent who shows their kid a movie about pimps and talks to the kid about it is a better parent than the one that lets the kid watch a movie with the same game playing out in an office building or a church and figures no discussion's necessary since a "Janet Jackson special" never graced the screen.
Maybe if those kids had learned how a pimp hand is kept strong, they could've avoided landing in the "Priests Up, Altar Boys Down" reality show.
-Karlos
At 6/20/2005 12:06:00 PM, shelly said:;
hey james -- always enjoy reading your posts, they're just so few and far between!! :) Anyway, very interesting post and i agree that Angel's words were twisted around so a few posters could steer the arguement towards something that they were more comfortable with. I just have a question about your reference to woodstock. And this is seriously a question, although it could be taken as an attack out of context -- i just really want to know where you come down on this: Do you feel that if there was a festival of similar size, funding, and attendance of Woodstock II but it had been a predominantly black audience, would the outcome have been different? Would there have been the same destruction and violence?
At 6/20/2005 05:50:00 PM, James said:;
Karlos, Shelly, thanks for commenting! I thought folk had already moved on from this corner of the 'sphere. Thanks for coming by guys.
K, I love that story. You always make a brother laugh. "Priests Up, Altar Boys Down" is some scandalous shit, for real. I laughed out loud on that one.
Seriously, children need disipline tempered with reason. You have to explain stuff to children until they get it - otherwise, they don't learn, and are denied their own ability to self-reflect, dangerous for anyone. Parents who don't parent hurt everyone, especially their own children.
At 6/20/2005 05:51:00 PM, James said:;
Shelly, to answer your question, if Woodstock II had been a predominantly African American audience, I do not believe the levels of violence shown then would have occured. Black people at modern hip-hop concerts don't randomly burn cars and overturn stands because of water shortages and aggressive music. Plus, the high amounts of security present at a hip hop concert of that magnitude (because of racist perceptions of the supposed dangers of large groups of young Black people) would have prevented the rioting seen by the youthful charges of the wealthy American Establishment that populated Woodstock II.
Mostly, Black people are too afraid of police sanctions to engage in widespread looting and violence without larger political connotations, in my opinion. Racial animosity simmered in Los Angeles because of demographic shifts and police brutality for years before the Rodney King verdict incited the L.A. Riots. The Watts riots emerged following similar poitical unrest. The alcohol-drenched angry White men of our generation seem more likely in my opinion to engage in violence for violence's sake then any G-Unit compatriot.
At 6/20/2005 05:59:00 PM, William said:;
Objection!
Dude, we can't even have The Source Awards without some shit happening!
And it's contained in a colloseum. Imagine what brothas would do in the out of doors!
Then again, it might just turn into one giant cookout. I'll bring the ribs (Just don't tell Farrakhan)!
At 6/21/2005 06:27:00 AM, shelly said:;
ooookay... james, maybe you've got a point with the increased security argument. but you're stoned if you think black men and women of the same age won't get drunk and start shit, too. you said, "Black people at modern hip-hop concerts don't randomly burn cars and overturn stands because of water shortages and aggressive music." yeah, um, neither do white people. does the pit get a little agressive?? sure. do people get drunk and do stupid things? of course. but making the incident that happened at woodstock a generalization for typical white rock audiences is ridiculous. i know you're all about deliniating (spelling?) the differences between black and white. which is fine, do you what you gotta do. But some issues aren't black vs. white all the time. The crowd at woodstock was predominately white, yes. But i don't feel that has anything to do with the violence and destruction that happened. It just happened that the bands and promotors drew in a whiter audience. So there were more white people there. BFD. Shit happens, and sometimes its just shit happening. regardless of what color person the shit comes out of.
At 6/21/2005 10:22:00 AM, Jenn said:;
i have no idea whether or not a predominantly black woodstock would result in drunken debauchery, rape and rioting. It seems far too hypothetical for me to postulate on.
i do think it's interesting that in this discussion, there seems to be a general consensus that behaviour at a "Black Woodstock" would be a direct result of and subsequent symptom of Black America, i.e., how a "Black Woodstock" would turn out would be and should be linked to American perceptions of Black America, overall. (e.g., Will's point about the Source awards)
And yet, for whites, that link apparently does not, can not, and should not exist.
At 6/21/2005 10:55:00 AM, Shelly said:;
jenn -- you hit on what i was trying to say, that it doesn't matter what the racial majority of attendants at a concert is, there's the same chance for violence, or peace, or bad music as anywhere else. I was offended by the suggestion that it was the concertgoers' race at woodstock II that fueled the violence. I'm pretty sure it was just drunken stupidity. Something people of ANY race can relate to.
At 6/22/2005 10:52:00 AM, James said:;
Will, there's a difference between African American rappers who engage in riotous and criminal publically televised violence to increase album sales among young White suburban listeners (like the Source Awards) and random young Black urban and suburban rap fans at modern big-budget rap concerts, like the Hard Knock Life or Anger Management tours of today.
For most of the '90's, hip hop acts made most of their money through album sales and corporate advertising contracts, because concert promoter fears of venue violence annhilated all hopes for hip hop concert tours. Those fears emerged not from empirical evidence, but rather from political pressure over the subversive and ofttimes street criminal themes of rap music.
Today, rap tours are among the most lucrative in the entire music industry, without widespread violence at every show. The insinuation that any large collection of African Americans is a recipe for violence is one unsupported by fact, not to mention a stereotype I refuse to believe in.
At 6/22/2005 01:08:00 PM, Anonymous said:;
Yet, every White gathering is a Klan rally to you. Way to rock that double-standard!
At 6/22/2005 01:14:00 PM, James said:;
Shelly, while I would never say that White people have a intrinsic or genetic predisposition for mob violence, I do believe that the spoiled, self-centered, middle to upper middle class to upper class, athletic, college educated, angry, mildly disaffected, moneyed, misogynistic, arrogant, privileged White male progeny of our generation, products of laissez-faire neo-conservative capitalist broken homes where divorced parents influenced by both Dr. Benjamin Spock and Gordon Gekko purchase their children's love and affection as easily as they purchase Microsoft stock, display in distinct new-age fashion a cultural commitment to aimless, alcohol-fueled group violence as ancient in the Anglo-Saxon tradition as Beowulf or Macbeth. The fraternity mead-halls of our generation spawn remorseless violence without individual consequence as a method of acceptable socialization and useful male behavior, and this very subculture was responsible for the tragedy of Woodstock II. Yes, those violent criminal concertgoers were individuals with free will and free choice, but they provide an interesting recent flashpoint of violence emergent in a wealthy White demographic.
That type of violence did not stop concert promoters from producing concert tours from angry, post-pubescent rock bands. My cynicism does not allow me to believe that a violent rap concert populated by a mostly African American crowd would engender the same national nonchalance.
Frankly, I disagree with the idea that the larger White crowd had no bearing on the violence involved at Woodstock II. No matter how 'crunk' Lil' Jon makes a crowd of Black rap fans, rap music (even given its origins in rock riffs and violent cadences) is in my opinion too far removed from White male angst to promote the spastic 'hurt everybody' violence shown during Woodstock II. People are created equal, but cultural differences are palpable and influential. My post discusses my belief that the social indifference and extreme individualism fostered in financially stable White households (as evidenced by V-chips as parenting tools) creates utterly nihilistic White males whose aggression exists without inhibition because of the White males' socialized belief that social legal sanctions do not apply to their group.
In this respect, it makes sense to understand the behavioral origins of the perpetrators of the Woodstock II tragedy, to prevent its recurrence. After decades of academic interrogation of African American criminal pathology, I feel no ill will is intended or expressed by a quick questioning of rich White Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultural violent crime. White folk can handle it. If not, they'll Fred Hampton me anyway, so why not?
At 6/22/2005 01:24:00 PM, James said:;
Anonymous, thanks for posting. I don't feel that all gatherings of White people are Klan rallies.
Thanks for reading my blog.
At 6/23/2005 06:34:00 AM, Shelly said:;
you know what i find funny... if i had made the offensive racial generalizations you just made, only i did it about black men instead of white men... i'd be accused of racism. so you know what, that response to MY response was racist. you can't use big words and 18 commas per sentance and just hope the underlying BS gets lost... i was offended by that post and while, i'm all about a good social discussion, this topic is no longer worth my time or energy. sorry we disagree, i'm a middle-class white kid, so obviously we'll never get along. i'll try to keep my kids away from your kids so their violent behavior doesn't rub off.
At 6/23/2005 06:42:00 AM, Anonymous said:;
I agree with Shelly. You use a bunch of $12 words just to say, "No, I only hate RICH White people." Well, your whole response to her was turgid. See, I can boil my thoughts down to ONE $12 word. Work on that.
At 6/23/2005 07:55:00 AM, James said:;
Shelly and Anonymous, if you guys don't understand what I'm saying, that's fine.
If you find my commentary racist, that's fine.
At the end of the day, the simple truth is that Woodstock II never characterized all White men as violent. It probably shouldn't have, but examples of Black violence always serve to demonize all Black men. Always.
Shelly, you know what I find funny? The insinuation that I'm somehow racist when I inquire about cultural reasons for White violence, when you raised the counterpoint hypothetical of a 'Black Woodstock'. You wanted to have the conversation, and now you can't handle it.
How 'Runaway Bride' of you.
At 6/23/2005 09:12:00 AM, Shelly said:;
yeah, i'm running away. i posed the question to see if your response would be a new perspective on something i didn't quite understand, or if it would be more white-bashing... clearly it was the latter. what i don't quite understand is how you can be so against racial stereotyping, but use it in your own argumetns all the time. I will concede that I am often too naive, and I often want everything to be pretty and equal and fair and sunny... but I refuse to let go of that. I respect your opinions and (even though today it may not seem like it today) enjoy your blog a lot. If you were just a random blog site that i had no personal attachments to, I would rip into you and not think anything further about it. But you're a friend of Will's and I don't want any hard feelings. You may say this makes me weak and I shouldn't back down from my opinions just b/c of this. But some things are more important to me than being right. So, yep, i'm running away. peace, literally.
ps: 'you wanted to have the conversation and now you can't handle it.' once you get to know me, you'll understand how wrong you are in making this statement.
At 6/23/2005 11:08:00 AM, Jenn said:;
wow... this got pretty cutthroat pretty quickly. shel, i didn't actually raise that point to agree or disagree. i'm merely pointing out that if will's argument that the result of the source awards would indicate that a black gathering coming together would inevitably become riotous, then james' argument that woodstock II showed white people coming together would be riotous would hold equal water. either james and will are wrong, and violence in a gathering of the masses has nothing to do with race, or they are both right and race IS a factor.
what I was trying to say was that it was interesting that most mainstream commentators are so quick to characterize an entire minority community for actions of some of its members but are just as quick to deny any correlation between the action of members of the majority and the majority community. it seemed possible that this was happening here, given will's comments about the source awards.
personally, i'm loathe to say anything about a group of white people vs. a group of black people coming together and making trouble, but I do wonder if perhaps james was trying to make the point that white American culture is more centered around drunken debauchery for the sake of drunken debauchery than black culture.
After all, while it may not seem obviously race-related, it is suspicious to me that most drunken frat parties are white and that white youth culture is centered around bars and pubs while black youth culture is centered more around dancing and music. obviously alcohol flows freely in both events, but is it hard to imagine that an outsider looking into white youth culture might conclude that white youths have a higher preference for idle drinking as a form of entertainment?
At 6/23/2005 01:25:00 PM, phillyjay said:;
I get what Shelly is saying.Race
issues no matter how small can often get very heated.
Hey Anonymous, care to stop being anonymous? :)
At 6/24/2005 06:40:00 AM, James said:;
Jenn and PhillyJay, thanks for commenting.
Jenn, the reason I think race was a different factor in the Source Awards than in Woodstock II is because the obvious use of race in the former example was to add images of gully street credibility to rappers who wish to sell Black stereotypes directly to mainly White suburban audiences. With Woodstock II, a small but distinct set of White males engaged in violent behavior without any cross-cultural captialist impetus or gain whatsoever. In essence, these particular White boys were left to their own devices and ran amuck, totally on their own free will.
To me, that's an important difference, but not one that negates your point about the similarities of Will's and my arguments.
Philly, while I too understand where Shelly and Anonymous are coming from, what bothers me is the unspoken assupmtion speaking about White cultural violence is inherently racist, simply because some White people are discussed in a negative light. I have to endure open discussions of widespread Black criminality all the time; if some White people can't handle the same treatment, perhaps their skins are a little too thick to handle reasonable discourse.
At 6/29/2005 08:09:00 AM, Jenn said:;
Anonymous. You're an ass. A cowardly ass at that, for not being willing to divulge a name -- it's the ultimate balls-big-as-nickels act to hide behind anonymity and take potshots in the dark. If you want anyone to take your flaming seriously, get a brain and a name. It's easy to sound big when you don't think anyone can come after you.
I just re-read this post and then considered the comments and the question that bothers me is when you make relevant commentary about race-associated culture, why that becomes "racism"? That's bullshit. I am Asian. That isn't just my beautiful mocha skin colour, but also an associated colour. You'll never hear me say that most Asian parents, for example, don't raise their kids differently than white parents do. It's fact.
Similarly, like it or not, being white and privileged does lead to some real cultural differences in child-rearing... for example, raising white children to think the world owes them something or revolves around them. And, yes, there IS a white, mead-hall culture.
To point out cultural differences in child-rearing is not racism, and to call it so (and take random, unnecessary offense) is immature and a cop-out. If you can't back that claim up, then it's hollow, meaningless and just plain sad. And just because you see race doesn't make you racist -- James' analysis pointing out problems with whiteness doesn't make him a racist, it makes him able to see past the foolish personalizations that make it so difficult for people of colour to have a dialogue in this country.
At 6/29/2005 09:03:00 AM, James said:;
Jenn, calm down. It's all good.
People have been calling me a racist my entire life for speaking what I believe. I invite anyone who reads my stuff to disagree openly with me, to have a discussion on my points.
Sometimes, my detractors are ill-eqipped to have those discussions. At the end of the day though (even though it did bother me a little to deal with this flaming), no one proved my points incorrect.
So James Lamb will be James Lamb tomorrow. Life goes on.
At 6/30/2005 06:19:00 PM, William said:;
Fine, Jenn. I'm an ass. But I did NOT omit a name due to cowardice. I don't sign when I'm at work 'cause I'm not gonna risk being fired over this dreck. I'm sorry, but this ain't worth it to me.
So, recently, I've been criticized for not using my powers good, on top of the fact that I post a question and you see it as an attack, I've gotta say that I'm done with this. I said what i felt. I've spoken with James, and he knows I was SOME of the Anonymous posts, but not all. Anyway, he knows where I was coming from, and that's really all that matters to me. But I don't owe an explanation to anyone here. I said what I meant, and I stand by it. So, don't worry, 'cause I won't darken y'all's blog doors again. How Runaway Bride of me...
At 7/01/2005 12:43:00 PM, Jenn said:;
Gee Will, I didn't know you were anonymous. what makes you think I woulda known something like that?
At 7/17/2005 05:44:00 PM, if my name was gustav, would it matter? said:;
Jenn, why does a person's name change the validity of their arguments?
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