feminists of color have often pointed out that white people should move over and quit telling people of color how their struggles ought to be fought. they've said, "look, if you want to be helpful, YOU figure out how whiteness works, YOU educate one another, etc"
the whole discussion has reinforced why i think it's imperative that men read materialist feminists. i think these writers have a better handle on it than most dippy white male theorists, that's for sure.
"The forms of racism that I pick up on these days are 1]. aware/blatant racism, 2] aware/covert racism, 3] unware/unintentional racism and 4]. aware/self-righteous racism. I can't say that I prefer any one form of racism over the others, because they all look like an itch needing a scratch. I've heard it said that the aware/blatant form is preferable if one must suffer it. Outright racists will, without apology or confusion, tell us that b/c of our color we don't appeal to them. i f we so choose, we can attempt to get the hell out of their way before we get the sweat knocked out of us. growing up, aware/covert racism is what I heard many of my elders bemoaning 'up north," after having escaped the aware/blatant racism "down south". <...>
Unaware/unintentional racism drives usually tranquil white liberal wild when they get called on it, and confirms the suspicions of many people of color who feel that white folks are just plain crazy. it has led white people to assume that bending over backwards and speaking to me in high-pitched condescending tones would make up for all the racist wrongs that distort our lives. This type of racism has led whites right to my doorstep, talk 'bout, "we're sorry/we love you and want to make things right," which is fine, and further, "We're gonna give you the opportunity to fix it while we sleep. Just tell us what you need. Bye." -- which *ain't* fine. With the best of intentions, the best of educations, and the greatest generosity of hear, whites operating on the misinformation fed to them from day one, will behave in ways that are racist, will perpetuate racism by being 'nice' the way we're taught to be nice. You can just 'nice' somebody to death with naivete and lack of awareness of privilege. Then there's guilt and the desire to end racism and how the two get all tangled up to the point that people, morbidly fascinated with their guilt, are immobilized. Rather than deal with ending racism, they sit and ponder their guilt and hope nobody notices how awful they are. meanwhile, racism picks up momentum and keeps on keepin' on.
Now, the newest form of racism that I'm hip to is unaware/self-righteous racism. The 'good white' racist attempts to shame Blacks into being blacker, scorns Japanese-Americans who don't speak Japanese, and knows more about the Chicano/a community that the folks who make up the community. They assign themselves as "good whites," as opposed to "bad whites," and are often so busy telling people of color what the issues in the Black, Asian, Indian, Latino/a communit9ies should be that they don't have time to deal with their errant sisters and brothers in the white community. which means that people of color are still left to deal with what the 'good whites' don't want...racism.
<...> Gloria Yamato, Something about the subject makes it hard to name. in Changing Our Power: An introduction to Women's Studies, by Jo Whitehorse Cochran, Donna Langston, and Carolyn Woodward, eds.
[1] although it appears that i've agreed with yoshie, i haven't really. i find her and carrol's structuralist marxism extraordinarily odd, particularly for yoshie, since she's supposedly a fan of bhaskar -- who'd quickly point out to here that carrol and yoshie have advocated a reifying approach to social theory. furthermore, she way more than anyone else, has been indulging in methodological individualism because she presumes that the only way to understand the individual or subjective is to do so in the absence of an examination of meso and macro social structure. but this is simply not so. but more on this later. for now, let me just point out that the whole conversation is absurd. yoshie has not advocated that we not say terrible things about the white working class. she's rejecting--as i did--the imputation of purposively rational desires to be racist to whites. my argument has been: but most people don't think they are racist. sure, there are racist examples of white workers upholding racism because it benefits them, but they don't see it as necessarily benefiting them *materially* or in many of the ways folks think. as best i can tell, yoshie's argument has been: it's "not marxist" to speak of the psychological, the subjective, etc. andit's not marxist to speak of groups of people -- strata or sectors within the working class.