Thinking out a personal experience

On Friday I was walking through the metro station with my sister, and my parents were a little further behind us. We walked through a crowded area and a guy leaned in towards me and my sister, I think more her but I was right there too, and said “Beautiful baby”. It sounds awkward because it was; he was clearly not a native speaker of English. I’m assuming French because it would upset me more if a guy felt like he owned the world enough to do that in a country he didn’t even live in. Anyway. White guy, in case you get any ideas.

I know it doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world to say to someone. But it came off kind of taunting, and the way he leaned in at us…I don’t know what it was, actually, I can’t tell you for the life of me what was going through my head, all I know is that I looked him in the eye and said “Fuck you.”

Then I kept walking and he started to yell something at me that was still like, in line with what he had said before, and then changed his mind and said “Fuck you” and kept yelling but I haven’t the faintest idea what he said. It was just starting to dawn on me that I had said the F word in front of my family and they were going to be terrified of me using the metro now…

My mom caught up to me and started lecturing me on how you never say anything back, and he’s still behind us, he’s getting on this train, quick get in, and when we got off, look, he’s back there, quick let’s leave. Ok, so maybe I didn’t think that through. Chances of getting hurt in the middle of a crowd in the hall of the metro station are slim; chances of getting followed by a pissed off misogynist and raped in an alley, perhaps not so slim. Fortunately there were no more run-ins.

But I started thinking. First, about why I reacted that way to such a seemingly harmless thing. I didn’t have the impression he was going to do anything else. I had been on the receiving end of this sort of thing twice earlier that day and not been overly offended. I didn’t like it, but those two times, it was from two members of a capoeira group, and I was smiling at them to say “good job”, not knowing how to say that in Portuguese, or really in French, for that matter. One of them did a kiss thing at me. Another one said “beautiful” when he walked by me. Maybe this is unfeminist, but I forgave them for it on the grounds that they probably thought my smile invited it. I found them…entitled, let’s say. Like they assumed I would take their approval as a welcome compliment; like they thought it was totally fair for them to try to trap women into being sexual in some way with them (this I gathered from watching them grab a couple of female spectators and dance with them during a routine a little later; the girls were very reluctant, but they were smiling, it gave you the impression they were just embarrassed. I don’t know).

But then the guy in the metro…maybe three’s my limit for one day? Maybe I was subconsciously worried for my sister more than myself? Maybe he just came off more harass-y about it than the guys before did. I think that last one is true, but the others are still possibilities.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is whether my reaction was so wrong. And what it means if it is. My boyfriend said it’s normal, welcome to the life of European women. (He was kind of relieved since he thinks I’m generally way too nice to guys who hit on me.) My parents think it was absolutely horrible, because it puts me in danger. I personally think “fuck you” was not the best choice. But I’m kinda glad I said something. One thing I was thinking about afterwards was about an idea I had, an unresearched one, while thinking about street harassment. The idea is that a lot of guys seem to think 1) these are welcome compliments, we’re just dying for male approval of our appearance at all times, and 2) you can pick up women this way. I don’t think that’s the whole story of street harassment, I think a lot of it is about exerting power through sexuality, not unlike rape, but still…I thought maybe some of it, anyway, was based on the myth that we like it. So maybe that was subconsciously going on in my head and I decided to show this guy that actually, we don’t. (I read an article about bottom-smacking in Italy, which can now get you sent to jail [hooray], and most of the guys interviewed said it wasn’t a big deal, socially acceptable, while all of the women interviewed said it was a bad thing. Not at all a representative sample, but it made me think, anyway.)

What concerned me the most was what my mom said. Basically the idea is to be silent and never stand up for yourself - to accept verbal harassment - because the threat of physical harassment is behind it. This may well be the smartest thing to do, and I certainly would not fault anyone for doing so. But it’s pretty telling, isn’t it? This is about the threat of rape being hung over women’s heads to keep them in their place, to keep them silent and submissive, to remind them that they are there to be seen and judged by men rather than to act. I’m not trying to make a big deal out of this one incident, I’m saying if this is the rule for how to handle all incidents of street harassment - and it gets way worse than this in some places - that’s the kind of society it makes. Which is something I already knew, but I guess it didn’t really make sense to me until Friday. And I can feel that it won’t make sense to a lot of other people, if people who don’t already get it happen to read this.

Then again, you could look at it the way she did, which was that you don’t respond to bullies because that’s just what they want.  There’s something to that…but I don’t think that’s enough.  Because nobody is telling these guys they’re not supposed to act this way.  And there are always kids who get beaten up even without talking back to the bully.  Not that I think every woman needs to decide to talk back, I just think society needs to start saying street harassment is not ok.

I’m gonna give one more stab at an explanation of what’s wrong with street harassment. Because I know if anyone who doesn’t already get it reads this they’ll think I’m against all flirtation and feminists hate sex blah blah blah never mind the fact that I blog a fair amount about how consensual sex of all types should be more accepted than it is.

I am not walking down this street or this hall in the metro station to display my body for you. I happen not to dress very “provocatively” - which is a shitty victim-blaming term anyway - but even if I did, it wouldn’t be for the sake of some guy who crossed my path for a second on my way somewhere more important. Get over yourself.

I am not here, on the earth, for you to judge me. I’m not waiting to see what number you hold up. If you think you get to judge me, my appearance or anything else about me, and you don’t even know me, and I haven’t entered any competitions, you are a self-centered entitled asshole. If you think I will appreciate your display of assholery just because this time it confirms that I win in the context of patriarchy, which still means losing because patriarchy treats me as less than human, you’re steeped in male privilege and clearly think too little of me to be mistaken for someone who would give me a worthwhile compliment.

You are welcome to approach me if you would like to offer me the opportunity to engage with you. But it needs to be an offer, not something you yell and back up with threats so that I have no choice in the matter, so that you can show me how you have power over me, so you can intimidate me, so you can force your desires or your judgment on me. You need to not corner me, you need to not follow me when I walk away from you. You need to not tell me I’m mean when I say no, because you are not so universally desirable that the only reason a person would want to leave you would be for the sake of being mean, and because you know perfectly well that when you say that you’re trying to manipulate me into staying, and my opinion matters, it shouldn’t be about trapping me into doing what you want.

And it needs to be about a dialogue, meaning two-way, meaning you treat me as a human being with thoughts and feelings and agency. You don’t have to go Oprah on me, you just have to talk me like a person you’d like to get to know (or even if you just want sex - which you’re not going to get, but you can’t know that ahead of time - you still have to treat me like a person that gets ASKED for consent, that has an opinion that is valid, a whole person who is about more than sex even if that is the only part of me you’re personally interested in), a person who you want to hear something back from after you’re done expressing interest.

The “male gaze” is one of the things I’ve learned about sexism that bothers me the most, at least from among the things that affects me personally. To those guys, a woman is an object, not only in the sense of objectification-women-are-pieces-of-meat, but in the sense of the object of the verb. Not the subject. The gaze only goes one way. The judgment, the desire, the decision, are only relevant in the male. I know it’s real and not just an academic feminist concept because it explains why I see myself from the point of view of men so much, instead of from the point of view of myself. That’s a pretty shitty feeling, when you can’t even get away from the sexism in your own head. I’m working on it though.

I hope that makes things a little more clear.

Also: check out Female and Breathing on my blogroll, and she has links to Holla Back NYC and other sites that deal with this issue.

hooray

So last semester I was in this discussion group at school where we talked about race.  We watched I think two parts of an apparently three part series from PBS on how race doesn’t have any biological basis.  I was going to try to recreate what I learned from it by retelling some stories and trying to find similar studies online, but fortunately, ABW linked to Karnythia and one of her commenters knows the website for the series.  I’m going to read their background reading and try to synthesize some ideas and make a post out of it, but in the meantime, this is really cool.

Privilege

I’m thinking of submitting this to The Angry Black Woman’s Carnival of Allies, you may want to write your own submission.

Privilege is going to be an important concept to grasp for anyone who’s going to read my blog, and it’s something I’d like to flesh out a definition for, so here we go. I’m going to talk mostly about white privilege with respect to racism against black people, although there are many other types of racism and many other types of privilege. I’m going to ask you to first read this through and just think about it in relation to me and/or in the abstract. Think about whether you think this response is appropriate coming from someone in the group oppressing you, if you feel yourself to be in an oppressed group. Then, unless you’re a completely unprivileged queer atheist disabled fat mentally ill poor undocumented transwoman of color, read it again and apply it to yourself and your type(s) of privilege.

Clearly I think certain groups are oppressed. But the corollary of that claim is that other groups are privileged. For example, if people of color are oppressed, white people are privileged (via ABW). (Let’s be clear that racism didn’t end with slavery and people who have long been dead; this is about us, now.) It’s a lot easier to swallow the first part than the second part if you belong to the privileged group. Pity isn’t too hard of an emotion to work up, but guilt sucks. Not as much as being oppressed sucks, though.

My story

I’m white and I grew up soaked in white privilege. That’s different from growing up soaked in explicit racism. I heard some racism, but it was whispered and usually looked down upon. But I did grow up in a white neighborhood, and I belonged to a white country club, and I went to schools that had some black kids, but not a whole lot, and we tended to stay fairly separate. There was only one black person in the gifted program in my elementary school. At my high school graduation, I saw a lot of black people who I didn’t even recognize. And of course, the mainstream media wasn’t about to fill in the blanks for me on the lives of people of color, except for the cribs of a few rappers.

I believed in equality. But I didn’t really know black people, so I didn’t identify with them. That meant I didn’t need to examine whether or not I really felt that they were just as normal and just as human as me. Racism and other types of oppression can affect you without you even noticing it - for instance, I’m not only racist, I’m also prejudiced against women, despite being pretty much obsessed with feminism. I can’t get some of that subconscious “Men=Normative” to go away. So I’m suspicious of anyone who says they’re totally not racist (or whatever-ist) at all. It’s much more helpful to admit that we are and go from there.

Another result of not really knowing black people and not really living in their world was that I didn’t hear about how racism affected their lives, so I was able to think racism was over just because I didn’t see it. When I did think about people of color, I would more or less extrapolate my experiences to imagine what theirs were like. Since my life was free of the effects of racism and seemed to fit the idea of meritocracy pretty well, I figured theirs was similar.

I didn’t know that even in black families with the same income as my family (which were probably rare because they probably had less chance of getting the education my dad got), black people had less wealth than my family had, and that the difference in wealth was due to the accumulation of racist government policies and white privileges.  I didn’t know that the kind of cocaine more commonly used by black people was punished 100 times more harshly than the kind more commonly used by white people. I didn’t know that black women try to change their appearance to look more like white women because they’ve gotten the message that black is ugly. I didn’t know that the reason other races have their own special clubs and magazines and TV shows and so on was because they didn’t feel welcome in ours, and I was completely unaware that my clubs and magazines and TV shows and so on weren’t just general, they were white. I didn’t realize that if I was able to see white as general it was because of racism - because I saw white as the Norm, because I had no trouble momentarily forgetting about the existence of people of color, because I saw people of color as the Special Case, the people that would only be on a TV show if it was expressly trying to prove it wasn’t racist, and that PC stuff is so annoying, isn’t it? (Let it be known that calling something PC does not count as a real argument on this blog. You can say it, but get ready to be criticized.)

Privilege of Better Treatment

Privilege includes a lot of things - it includes how I get messages that my skin color is prettier than others, it includes how people assume I’m well-behaved, it includes how I can call the police and expect them to actually help me (potentially not in the case of rape and DV, but if I’m robbed, you betcha, and even in the cases where they often assume women are lying, they’re a lot less likely to assume I’m lying than to assume that of a woman of color).  It includes how I have connections with rich people that can help me get good jobs, it includes how my parents and grandparents have home equity that can give me a head start financially, that black people were systematically excluded from getting.

Privilege to Ignore

But what makes privilege so dangerous is that it includes the luxury to ignore. As Kate Harding said: That’s what privilege is. It’s the option to ignore nasty shit that doesn’t directly affect my own life, my career, my relationships, my bank account, my social standing, my housing situation, etc. I can ignore people of color; they can’t ignore white people. I can ignore racism; they can’t. And when I ignore them and I ignore racism, I make the institution of racism stronger, because I cover for it. I can swear up and down that it’s not there because I don’t see it, then sit on the pile of advantage I have and yell down at black people that they must not be working hard enough.  There aren’t a whole lot of people in the US anymore who are willing to openly say they hate people with a certain color of skin, but there are plenty of people who are willing to ignore what happens to people with a certain color of skin, and if there’s no listening to what people of color are saying, no awareness of the long history of institutionalized racism, no acknowledgment that it was more than “hard work” that got white people where they are today, and not even much concern for what it’s like to be a person of color because they’re not your friends or really on your radar, can you really be so surprised that racism is still around?

This is important. It means that although I can ignore racism, I cannot opt out of it altogether. I can feel like it doesn’t have anything to do with me, but I am already part of it. It doesn’t matter if I haven’t burnt any crosses on people’s lawns, I’m still part of it.

Privilege to Ignore + Privilege of Better Treatment = Entitlement.

When I don’t know that the privileges I get, the way people think better of me and treat me better, are in fact based on my skin, I assume that I earned them and that I am entitled to them. Then if someone tries to take them away, I get mad. I think I’m being robbed of rights, being penalized for something I didn’t do, but that’s just because I don’t see that I am doing something - perpetuating racism - and that I’m losing privileges, not rights, and that I have to give up those privileges in order for other people to have their rights.

Guilt

Now let’s walk through the analysis of guilt together, because this is where people get all freaked out.

There are two kinds of being guilty. There’s being guilty in a court of law, where ignorance of the law is not a defense against being found guilty, where guilty means you committed the crime. That’s guilty, the state. Then there’s guilty in terms of morality, where ignorance is a defense because you’re judged not on what you did but on what you intended, and where things that are out of your control are not held against you. That’s guilty, the emotion.

I only need to feel guilty, the emotion for things I had control over, times when I knew better. In those cases, guilt is a healthy sign that I’m not a psychopath (meant literally) or a hypocrite (believing in human rights only for my group). It should lead me to think and to try to do better. But that’s really my deal. Speaking as a feminist on male privilege for a sec, I frankly do not care how you feel. I care how you act. I don’t want revenge (see my posts on prison), I want results.

So whether or not I’m guilty, the state (actually did something to help racism) matters more. But there’s no need to get all freaked out about how I couldn’t help it and that’s not fair, because it’s not about revenge, it’s not about the kind of guilt that makes you sulk and hate yourself. It’s about taking upon myself the responsibility to improve. It’s an asymptotic kind of motion, I can’t just snap my fingers and be perfect, but I have to keep in mind that it affects other people’s lives whether I get it right or not (whereas my good intentions don’t really help them much). So I have to work on it.

From Negative Motivation (avoiding guilt) to Positive Motivation (creating change)

If I can see past guilt, the emotion and care about guilt, the state, I’m shifting the issue from being my personal problem about clearing my conscience and reputation (because let’s be honest, sometimes it’s less about how I feel so bad and more about how I look bad) to a problem about how other people are suffering. My conscience will always be involved in my personal thoughts about it, but in order to actually be helpful, I need to be motivated by the fact that people are oppressed and that is unacceptable, not by the fact that I don’t want to be criticized or to have to feel uncomfortable. I have to be motivated to move towards change rather than just trying to flee guilt.

Now what I have to do is stay in that I’m-not-the-center-of-the-universe mindset when I mess up and get called out on it, as is inevitable if I’m really trying in the first place (which I haven’t been doing enough, in case you were wondering). When that happens, if I get defensive and forget all about how my privilege means my racism detector is defective and thus I’m not the best judge of this, I’m going back to caring more about my comfort than about justice. Remember: being oppressed hurts more than feeling guilty or being wrong. It may be hard to believe in the moment, but it’s true. So what I have to do in those times is shut up and listen to the people who know racism from the other side. Be warned: just because someone belongs to the group in question doesn’t mean they’re right (see: female anti-feminists). But since I know my racism detector is defective – and only in one way, it only underestimates racism – I know that I should give extra credence to whatever a person of color says about racism being present somewhere that I didn’t see it. It may be wise to just think about it for a while and not say anything at first. Then I’ll probably have questions. Finally, in the vast majority of cases where I will be the one who was mistaken, I should apologize, fix my mistake as well as I can, and move on (via ABW again).

Ok, your turn.

PS: I hope to write a post about anger soon, which is another controversial emotion, like guilt, but on the other side of the oppression. I also have a draft going on how race is fake but racism is real; I know that sounds obvious, but people continue to argue as if it’s not.

PPS: Link to your favorite blogs by women of color in the comments. Clearly I find The Angry Black Woman’s blog pretty useful (and I swear I’m not sucking up by linking to it all the time, it just had related stuff).