i wrote a post that ticked people off at another list. someone posted about a student who was upset she couldn't find any research on blacks' racism against whites. she had been raped by a group of young black men once because she was white and had other experiences of being called names, etc. i wrote something hoping to explain why that wasn't oppression. anyway, i got this as a reply. is this true? i've never heard of such a thing...
kelley
Greetings,
I am catching up on old messages, so I'm behind a few weeks maybe, but I have a question about the racism thing as it's been approached here. I appreciate your concern for finding the appropriate theoretical framework for this student to analyze her experience, but I'm also struggling with similar issues and I have as yet had difficulty with it vis-a-vis current frameworks.
I am curious about how you would theorize the situation of white students in the 1960s who went to integrated schools and were regularly beaten up by enraged African American kids in the middle of the Black Pride movement? There are plenty of folks who lived through such a situation. It was locally constituted, it was historically the result of white racism that was no longer containable or bearable by the Black Americans who suffered under the weight of it, but it sure as hell was oppressive for the white kids who endured it, and had lasting psychological effects that weren't just resentment about affirmative action programs.
Talking about it plays into white racism, but not talking about it sure as hell doesn't shed any light on theory, in my opinion. So what can you suggest in this case?
Jan Bramlett
Date sent: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 02:59:55 -0500 From: kcwalker at syr.edu Subject: Re: Hate to ask........ To: wcs-l at tc.umn.edu, working-class- list at list.acs.uwosh.edu
i think that, if your student would deal with the issue of race as a fundamentally structural *process* that results from systemic oppression, rather than as an identity, she might start to see how it just won't work. i would suggest a read of marilyn frye's chapter on oppression. it's about women's oppression, but in this case it will work. oppression is like a bird cage, frye argues. when we look microscopically and see individual bars or just a few of them crisscrossing, we imagine that the bird can easily escape. and yet, when we step back and look macroscopically, we see a pattern, a systematic crisscrossing of the bars. so, while those individual bars may seem at times trivial [as some feel that language practices are not especially important to oppression] and, at other times, they might seem utterly abhorrent, but inexplicable aberrations, they gain their strength from the way inwhich they are welded together with all the other bars--those seemingly unrelated instances of bigotry, stereotyping, etc.
now, if your student can see "racism" against whites on the part of blacks as akin to the bird cage analogy then she might be on to something. but, i think what she will find is that this isn't the case. she will not find that hate induced violence against whites in her neighborhood and bigoted remarks and ignorant stereotypes and so forth are to be found all over the place, but she won't find that they intersect with other societal processes that limit her and other poor/working class white people on the basis of their white skin alone.
i'm asking here for some analytical and theoretical precision. i realize that that's difficult. but i don't think it's impossible. if she's doing a research pro- ject, clarifying her terms and a lit review is part of the process, right?
back in dec. there's was a long thread about what working class really is. i didn't have time to jump in but it seemed to lack just this theoretical precision [not that this is ever altogether that precise]. what i mean is that the language typically used didn't allow people to think through or articulate their experiences. at any rate, we have been basically skirting around the difference between structural-level and individual-level racism. they work in conjunction, but we can theoretically disentangle them for the purpose of analysis in order to look at precisely this situation.
i don't think race or gender is being erased when we point to class. to say that is to presume precisely what the rcg discourse hoped to undermine:
the snap-together toy beads metaphor for identity that spellman and lugones argued against in, "Have We got a Theory for You". we don't mix and stir our race, class, gender, sexuality. we don't experience our womaness here and our upper middle classness there. your student probably wouldn't have been the target of violence had she lived in greenwich connecticut in an uppermiddle class subdivision.
another good essay i'd suggest is one in Collins and Andersen's _Race, Class, Gender_ Anthology. the author and title escapes me and i can't seem to find it on my bookshelves.
the term racialization was used by your student and i'm wondering where she encountered it and what she means. i think it's imperative to look at the history of racialization because that seems the best way to stop analyzing race--and any identity category--by focusing on "the group" that is the object of systemic oppression. that is, we too often direct our attention to the 'raced' in analyses that look at individual level racism alone. racialization seems to me to be a category that insists, absolutely, that we look at those doing the racializing.
finally, you might have her sit down and tell you what she thinks are the various stereotypes she has of white upper middle class people. then ask if she would find it accurate to say that she's oppressing them or engaging in practices and process of systemic oppression by thinking those things.
were she to deface their she she condos in the gentrified neighborhoods filled with white upper middle class folks by spraying painting them with "die bourgeois yuppie scum" would that be an act of oppression? would they experience that act in the context of countless other acts, incidences, messages, images and so forth that would all collude in a myriad of complex ways?
what your student has experienced, as have i and most white working class people on this list, is that she participates in the white privilege diiferently than do people who are middle adn upper middle class
kelley