[Bill Dyes]

Martin:

Your “Can we not learn to get along” and all your references to the “emphasis” on skin pigmentation sound simplistic, shallow and rather insincere.

“Race is a purely social construct”.
It has also been a political construct and a scientific eugenic construct.
Whatever construct it takes has meant bad news for some group of people.

To be honest, I really have only a passing interest in Coleman Hughes and Kahlil Gibran Mohammed or even who’s President of this country.
Some are a lot more dangerous than others.

I didn’t need the death of George Floyd to tell me that in every since of the word "matter",
a black life in America has never held the same value as a white life.
A reparation check would have the same significance to me as a stimulus check. I’d spend it and forget about it.
Unless I'm asked for my vote, I have no say in what this country thinks it owes me.

I spend part of every day with my own racist thoughts and am only serious about reforming some of them.
My main interest is trying to get what’s in my head down into a poem.
It doesn’t feel remotely like a social contract and I am absolutely selfish about it.
Currently, the only helpful images I have to get there are Emily Dickenson alone in her room and Sonny Rollins alone atop the Brooklyn Bridge.

Bill

[Julie Steiner]

[Cross-posted with Andrew M. and Bill]

Martin, I'm far more interested in "what is" than "what if." Talking about hypothetical situations is not as enlightening as listening to actual lived experience.

I am white. My husband is American-born Chinese. One of our daughters is very dark-skinned, and she jokes that her features look as if I made no genetic contribution to her whatsoever, except that her hair is dark brown instead of black. Our other daughter has skin even paler than mine, but her eyes look East Asian enough that she can't pass for white.

I look very different from my daughters, and when they were young, other white moms we encountered in suburban parks often asked me one of these three questions, before introducing themselves:

1. "Are you the nanny?"
2. "Are you their REAL mom, or are they adopted?"
3. "They're beautiful! Where did you get them/From what country did you adopt them?"

The fact that so many felt they needed to know these things, before proceeding to any other sort of social niceties, suggests that since they couldn't size up our family's social status at a glance, their number one priority was to gather more information before deciding how friendly they wanted to be with me.

This wasn't racism. It was classism. Many college-educated moms are insecure about the social status they lose when society sees them only as someone's mom, rather than as someone in a prestigious, high-paying career. I experienced this myself, and it was a real identity crisis for me, but some other women took it to the point of a horror of mistakenly treating someone else's hired help as their own peer.

Classism also recognizes that there is social capital for white families to gain when they engage with non-whites, because it might later be trotted out as useful proof that they are not racist. I often suspected that these moms were pumping me for details to include in a subsequent report to their real friends, about how nicely their children had made friends with children who were not 100% white, and what that implied about the niceness of these white moms themselves.

In the vast majority of our interactions in parks, nobody cared about race enough to mention it, and the kids and moms and nannies just enjoyed each other's company. But if things had started with one of those three questions, things were going to remain little awkwardly self-conscious and how-do-I-look between the adults for the whole time.

Changing topic a bit:

When out in public, our light-skinned daughter is frequently approached by East Asian women and asked what product she is using to lighten her skin. Light skin, especially in women, has long been associated with high social class in many Asian and European cultures. Think of the hats and gloves and long sleeves that fashionable European and American men and women used to wear, either to avoid tanning or to avoid showing it. Also think of the more recent pejorative terms "redneck" and "farmer tan," which connote a man of low social class. Only in the 20th century did a suntan become associated with the financial means to indulge in outdoor leisure activities; before that, tanned or sunburned skin tended to be associated with not having the financial means to escape menial labor in the fields.

Again, a lot of society's racial attitudes are actually class attitudes. We are social animals, and we rely on stereotypes to assess our relative positions in the pecking order as quickly as possible. Since accusations of racism (or even just implicit bias) can cause white people to lose social status quickly, it is understandable that many, many white people are anxious to avoid all suspicion of that. But some go so far to proclaim themselves racism-free that they actually say that if Black and brown people would just stop bringing up race and accusing the nice white majority of bias, we would all live in peace and harmony and mutual goodwill. Sam Harris said something along those lines in the video you pointed to recently, and it struck me as a particularly naïve, head-in-the-sand, self-exonerating attitude. It is a flat denial both that significant injustice exists, and that white people have any obligation to surrender the advantages that they may have unknowingly been enjoying at others' expense. Harris made a point of saying that more white people than Black people are victims of police brutality, but he neglected any mention the fact that most people of any race who become victims of police brutality (outside of protests) have tended to come from social classes with few resources, whom the police feel they can push around with impunity. It seems hugely relevant that a higher percentage of Black people than white people are trapped in similarly vulnerable social classes. Harris ignored this completely. He instead asked why the Black Lives Matter activists weren't advocating for those white victims, or making songs to remember their names, and he implied that this was very, very unfair of them--as if the BLM activists are the ones guilty of racism, not the white majority. This is ridiculous. One could as well ask why Sam Harris wasn't advocating for those white victims, and couldn't be bothered to use his platform to publicize their names. And I think the answer is that the social class gulf between him and those white victims keeps him from empathizing with them, or worrying that what happens to a poor white drunk of below-average intelligence might happen to him.

White communities have long enjoyed the social, political, and economic benefits of excluding non-whites from opportunities to compete in business and to acquire the kind of property that builds intergenerational wealth. Those disparities will not miraculously vanish if Black and brown people just stop talking about them. Or if the white majority stays focused on hypothetical intellectual exercises, rather than listening to firsthand testimony about lived reality.

[John Riley]

I learned through reading labor history that the term “redneck” originated during coal miner strikes in W. Virginia. The striking miners would wear red bandanas around their necks to show solidarity.

You mentioned earlier Julie that it is a white European male thing to like women based on hair color. Hair color does vary more among people from more northern regions. Makes sense. Does that mean men from areas where hair colors vary less don’t have other things they find more alluring than others? Isn’t it true that women have traits they find more alluring than others?

I’ve been aware I live in a place where white supremacy is the dominant evil since I was a small child. I was dirt poor from a totally screwed family and am still, at sixty-five, always aware how I don’t fit here, especially here, and other places because of the not having the opportunities so many take for granted. I am also aware, and have been my entire life, that being African American or Native American would have made my situation immeasurably worse. I know about classicism and if I didn’t I’d learn it at the Sphere. I also think some of the sample slicing going on these days is getting mighty thin. There are major brutish, cruel forces in America and elsewhere today and maybe slamming men because they like a certain hair color is not the best place to focus outrage? Here in my city poor, predominantly African American, families are facing evictions and the same old racists are spewing the same shit about self-sufficiency, although the minimum wage jobs these families depend on have gone away. It isn’t a problem that needs a poet’s subtlety.

Best

[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by John Riley

I learned through reading labor history that the term “redneck” originated during coal miner strikes in W. Virginia. The striking miners would wear red bandanas around their necks to show solidarity.

Here's what one dictionary says, which supports an association with skin color, even if (as you contend, and which I see no reason to reject) it might not have started with one:

red·neck
/ˈredˌnek/
INFORMAL•DEROGATORY
noun: redneck; plural noun: rednecks
a working-class white person, especially a politically reactionary one from a rural area.
"rednecks in the high, cheap seats stomped their feet and hooted"
Similar:
provincial, bumpkin, country bumpkin, yokel, rustic, country dweller, peasant, country cousin, reactionary, conservative, hayseed, hick, hillbilly, rube, apple-knocker
Origin
mid 19th century: from the idea of the back of the neck being sunburned from outdoor work.

You mentioned earlier Julie that it is a white European male thing to like women based on hair color. Hair color does vary more among people from more northern regions. Makes sense. Does that mean men from areas where hair colors vary less don’t have other things they find more alluring than others? Isn’t it true that women have traits they find more alluring than others?
[...]
There are major brutish, cruel forces in America and elsewhere today and maybe slamming men because they like a certain hair color is not the best place to focus outrage?

I didn't intend to slam men, or to imply that women don't have similarly arbitrary preferences about what they find attractive. I just meant to question the accuracy of Martin's assumption that hair color is a complete non-factor in humans' decisions about how to treat each other.

For the record, my husband says he initially was only interested in my legs and tits. How enlightened of him.

[Martin Elster]

If some of my statements seem naive, that’s likely due to the fact that I have never been very interested in politics. It’s actually General Talk here at Eratosphere that got me a bit more interested. So then I started listening to random videos and podcasts about the things going on these days, and I especially learned things from people like Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury (having also heard John and Glenn together in discussions), Sam Harris, and others.

I find these topics interesting, but I still would rather just write poems. I rarely listen to the news. I enjoy hearing and reading ideas from more knowledgeable folks than me and getting a balanced view of things rather than getting emotional about sensational and often one-sided news items. For many years I composed lots of music and performed music, but lately, it’s mostly poetry. I also like science, so tend to view worldly issues in a scientific way.

By the way, I have lived in many kinds of neighborhoods. For the last few years, I’ve been living in a very mixed neighborhood, predominantly African American. So I don’t think I’m totally isolated from the world, except for now during this pandemic!

Bill, Julie, Andrew, and John - thanks for your thoughts and comments, which I am reading through and enjoying the discussion. I haven’t finished reading your Post #12, Julie, but I’ll get to it. All of your thoughts are thought-provoking and broadening my views.

Around a half year ago I acquired an old, used book entitled Evolving Life Styles: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology by Elbert W. Stewart. I found it quite fascinating.

[John Riley]

Yes skin pigmentation is a result of proximity to the equator and race is a social construct. There are also strong theories about why societies world-wide probably developed east-west/west-east than south-north, having to do with constancy of climate and many other environmental realities. Race is stupid, surely not the human race at its best. But right now, in the Western World, race matters immensely. No matter how far we may feel progressed from race personally, we still live in a world where black kids are serving four times the amount of prison time for the same amount of drugs. We live in a society in which people go to prison at all for drugs because of racist drug laws. We live in a society in which having a “black-sounding name” on your resume lessens one’s chance of getting a job. Trump right now is trying to roll back rules put in place to end red-lining and other discrimination in housing to appeal to white people. We live in a society where a white congressman feels free to accost a woman of PR descent, who is also dutifully elected, and call her a “fucking bitch.” Do you think he would have done that to a white woman?

The list goes on and on. So, bottom line, our ideas or awareness of the racism of race, don’t matter a whole lot. And yes, skin color makes a bigger difference than hair color. Sheesh.

[Martin Elster]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

I didn't intend to slam men, or to imply that women don't have similarly arbitrary preferences about what they find attractive. I just meant to question the accuracy of Martin's assumption that hair color is a complete non-factor in humans' decisions about how to treat each other.

I didn't intend to slam men, or to imply that women don't have similarly arbitrary preferences about what they find attractive. I just meant to question the accuracy of Martin's assumption that hair color is a complete non-factor in humans' decisions about how to treat each other.

Julie - I didn’t quite mean to suggest that hair color isn’t a factor in people’s behavior toward each other. Just that it’s not a factor in who is admitted into Harvard. Does anyone care how many blonds went to Harvard or Yale last year? But, as female birds find the coloring of male birds attractive or unattractive, so people may do the same with each others’ hair color or style and other physical attributes, like height or shape or age — or the brands and colors of clothing they happen to wear.

[Martin Elster]

Originally Posted by Bill Dyes

On the other hand, read Mr. Muhammed's book "The Condemnation of Blackness" it is the most extended & enlightening account of the accusation of racism directed against the criminal justice system.

Originally Posted by John Riley

No matter how far we may feel progressed from race personally, we still live in a world where black kids are serving four times the amount of prison time for the same amount of drugs. We live in a society in which people go to prison at all for drugs because of racist drug laws.

The "war on drugs" is stupid and has never been proven to work.

Yesterday I was listening to this talk between Coleman Hughes and John Pfaff about that very topic (the criminal justice system). I haven't listened yet to the whole video, but plan to do so later today.

Deadly And Dangerous Prison Conditions | John Pfaff (Ep.6)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuHq_Y_xlt4

[W T Clark]

Martin
To be at a tangent from the conversation, regarding your point that you have started reading and watching more black thinkers.
Being mixed race I make sure to read a wide variety of poets, though someone's race should never be a reason for their reading habits. Here are a few suggestions, if you're interested, these are less political than poetic, but they still might be fun to read, no matter how unrelated to the present point.

Jay Wright
Vahni Capildeo
Derek Walcott
Edward Kamau Brathwaite
"Scavella" (pffa)
Robert Hayden
Lucille Clifton
Jay Bernard

I'm sure you have heard of a few, so sorry if this seems patronising. I've tried to avoid obvious mentions like Nikki Giovani, and Maya Angelou, both of whose poetry I do not care for.

Hope this helps.

[Bill Dyes]

One of the things I consciously thought about when I had my daughter was that as much as possible I was going to let her and her generation decide for themselves how they came to grips with race. I did not want to bombard her constantly like my parents did with us about stories of Jim Crow America.

It was not until my daugher's generation that you could safely refer to yourself as 'mixed'. In my generation calling yourself 'mixed' was evidence that you were ashamed to be black or were tryng to pass. I spent a year at an all black Universtiy in Prarie View, Texas in the early 70's. Knowing better I embarked on an explanation of my heritage to a brother and he said, 'Cut it, man...you black". America was under the same domination of the 'one drop rule' as apartheid South Africa.

My daughter in junior high once asked me what box she should check on a form when it came to enquire about race and I said "Oh Hell, check them all.

Bill


Bill