Social Justice

[Badfinger]

wow that was easy wish someone had thought of that before

 

I know it's flippant, but it's frustrating to see people fret over the consequences faced by assholes when the system that finally catches up to them, when they're too public with their shit, leaves the people they trod over on the outside looking in in the first place.

[Merus]

The system also catches up to people who are not assholes. The system does not always understand what it is trying to achieve.

 

And the fretting over the fate of racist people who are rightly being challenged is part of the system that has allowed racism to grow, so it might be frustrating, but racism isn't caused by the racists. It is everywhere. The world you live in has been shaped by racism, and it is the work of generations to root it all out, especially in America, which has racism baked into the constitution and its most fundamental systems. (Take the electoral college: imagine what kind of states benefited most from a system where the population of a state was more influential than the amount of people voting in that state.)

 

(It was slave states.)

[Badfinger]

The system also catches up to people who are not assholes. The system does not always understand what it is trying to achieve.

 

I'm aware. The system is not good. I want to put my energy towards them. I'm not concerned about saving my tears for the people who forced the system to act on them by being shits.

[Jov]

Black or African American?

[Jutranjo]

Black or African American?

 

I don't think you can get away with calling people in Europe african americans.

[jennegatron]

Is this a question as to what vocabulary we should use? I think it depends, both are useful in certain contexts, and I think "African American" is overused in the hopes of being welcoming to the point that it becomes an inaccurate modifier.  Because Idris Elba, for example, is not African American, but he is a Black man.

 

I think you're pretty safe as long as you use "black" as an adjective to describe a person or people rather than a noun. Avoid calling a group of humans "blacks" and instead refer to them as "Black People"

[Gormongous]

Is this a question as to what vocabulary we should use? I think it depends, both are useful in certain contexts, and I think "African American" is overused in the hopes of being welcoming to the point that it becomes an inaccurate modifier.  Because Idris Elba, for example, is not African American, but he is a Black man.

 

Yeah, I think "black" has generally come back into favor because it is descriptive, succinct, and has emotional weight, in a way that "African-American" doesn't really approach. "Hispanic" and "Latino/Latina" are parallel developments — more so the latter. Also, very few other ethnic and cultural identities go the hyphen route, making "African-American" sound like a sterile euphemism or even something of a solecism. You'd never call someone "Anglo-African" or "Euro-American," but there you go.

[Jov]

I don't think you can get away with calling people in Europe african americans.

Well, yeah... Sorry, I should have given more context. I was hoping to get a feel for you guys.

 

Personally I say Black and I say White, but mostly I try to just say "Man" or "Woman" because I don't think race is (or at least should be) a necessary qualifier.

 

But I really try not to say African American anymore these days because it GENERALLY just feels like a cringeworthy level of faux political-correctness and like a misplaced and undesired attempt at sensitivity. Maybe it's just me but I think we're in the 'people is people' time, and if I gotta say white/black or Asian or whatever it just needs to be said and African American is just too much of a mouthful and furthermore inaccurate - as Jentron or whoever said - I mean I'm not European American and goddamnit it's been long enough that black people are not African Americans. We're all American Americans. Amirite? Have I offended anyone?

 

But yeah, mostly I was just dropping the question as a conversation-starter and to get a general flavor of the Readers. 

 

Edit: wat

 it GENERALLY just feels like a cringeworthy level of faux having an opinion and like a misplaced and undesired sensitivity.

[Twig]

I know it's flippant, but it's frustrating to see people fret over the consequences faced by assholes when the system that finally catches up to them, when they're too public with their shit, leaves the people they trod over on the outside looking in in the first place.

Yeah I mean I completely get where you're coming from.

 

But in a lot of cases people just literally don't know better, and treating them like the human garbage they appear to be can actually turn them into human garbage.

 

EDIT:

 

Edit: wat

Hahahaha well you ran into one of the awkward auto-replacements this forum has accumulated over the years (most from before I even joined, I think?!). This is one of the more annoying ones. The rest are mostly for fun.

[Bjorn]

But yeah, mostly I was just dropping the question as a conversation-starter and to get a general flavor of the Readers.

 

We skew very progressive/social justicy (which not everyone can get on board with) and often try to drill down into the nuance of why various subjects/ideas/issues matter. 

 

I still find the occasional time when African-American feels like the better option to use, but generally I agree with you that it (and all the other hyphenate Americans) can make it sound like those groups are second class or somehow not fully American.  It's also an interesting contrast with other historic nationality/ethnic identifiers, like people self identifying as Irish or Scottish, where no American is tacked on. 

[Badfinger]

Yeah I mean I completely get where you're coming from.

 

But in a lot of cases people just literally don't know better, and treating them like the human garbage they appear to be can actually turn them into human garbage.

 

You're right. I was tired and frustrated and am being a jerk about it.

 

I would rather be in a place societally where all people were equally supported than all people were equally dicked over.

[Jutranjo]

Sorry, I typed that more of as a joke, not seriously.

 

There's not many black people in my country, I've seen less than ten in five years of living in the capital. People on the street usually stare so I try not to do that but I just end up desperately looking away. I'm probably the least opinionated in a way that is different from me/well behaved person in this thread of americans.

[Merus]

Hahahaha well you ran into one of the awkward auto-replacements this forum has accumulated over the years (most from before I even joined, I think?!). This is one of the more annoying ones. The rest are mostly for fun.

 

You would not believe how often pineapples come up on a video gaming forum.

[James]

Isn't another facet to cultural appropriation that it's quite patronising? It's something that's harder to pin down than more concrete forms of harm, but it can be emblematic of a lack of respect for the richness of another culture.

[jennegatron]

https://www.brennancenter.org/press-release/kentucky-governor-creates-new-process-help-restore-voting-rights-170000-citizens this is fantastic, and in a country whose states are doing everything they can to strip away voting rights for people, this makes me feel a little better.

[clyde]

I don't deny that cultural appropriation is happening, I also think it's a perspective worth being aware of, but I don't think that identifying that cultural appropriation is happening is necessarily a good reason to shut something down or label something as harmful. Calling out cultural appropriation in a damning tone seems like it will lead more and more toward efforts to certify authenticity and I find that dehumanizing to the individual and disrespectful to their particular spectrum of culture and mixtures of culture.

[Gormongous]

I don't deny that cultural appropriation is happening, I also think it's a perspective worth being aware of, but I don't think that identifying that cultural appropriation is happening is necessarily a good reason to shut something down or label something as harmful. Calling out cultural appropriation in a damning tone seems like it will lead more and more toward efforts to certify authenticity and I find that dehumanizing to the individual and disrespectful to their particular spectrum of culture and mixtures of culture.

 

Yeah, but cultural appropriation itself is disrespectful. Disrespecting the disrespectful is somewhat lower on my list of things to avoid.

 

I like Bjorn's example of a woman with no ties to any communities of First Peoples selling Navajo- or Hopi-inspired items that she has made, because it shows how many ways that cultural appropriation is harmful: it replaces (or at least competes with) minorities in public spaces and mindshare; it profits from a minority's culture without giving anything back (besides a vaguely defined "credit" that is mostly a marketing point); and it erodes minority identity from cultural objects and practices. When mainstream culture decides that it wants something, it assimilates it, Borg-like, and you can technically argue that nothing was lost, but especially in the case of salable products and ideas, it's definitely deleterious to minority communities.

[clyde]

Yeah, but cultural appropriation itself is disrespectful. Disrespecting the disrespectful is somewhat lower on my list of things to avoid.

 

I like Bjorn's example of a woman with no ties to any communities of First Peoples selling Navajo- or Hopi-inspired items that she has made, because it shows how many ways that cultural appropriation is harmful: it replaces (or at least competes with) minorities in public spaces and mindshare; it profits from a minority's culture without giving anything back (besides a vaguely defined "credit" that is mostly a marketing point); and it erodes minority identity from cultural objects and practices. When mainstream culture decides that it wants something, it assimilates it, Borg-like, and you can technically argue that nothing was lost, but especially in the case of salable products and ideas, it's definitely deleterious to minority communities.

 

How is the bold part determined?

[Gormongous]

How is the bold part determined?

 

I'm not sure. It'd have to pass a smell test, but it'd probably be the same way that status as "ally" is determined in feminist and LGBTQ circles. You can't just have a black friend or be one-sixteenth Cherokee, of course. That's tokenism. 

 

 

On a different note, Amazon decided to advertise for its series The Man in the High Castle by covering every surface of New York subways with imagery inspired by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. No swastikas, thankfully, but plenty of rising suns, Reich eagles, and iron crosses. I am not really sure how this campaign was rolled out without anyone at Amazon stopping to think about whether it'd be a good idea to invoke these warmongering and genocidal regimes publicly, especially since the two most emphasized parts of the TV show (and, regrettably, the two least interesting parts that could be taken from the book by Philip K. Dick) are "Man, wouldn't America be a fucked-up place if it were ruled by totalitarian fascists and imperialists" and "Man, aren't these ideologies perniciously toxic even on their most superficial level."

[tberton]

Yeah, I think "black" has generally come back into favor because it is descriptive, succinct, and has emotional weight, in a way that "African-American" doesn't really approach. "Hispanic" and "Latino/Latina" are parallel developments — more so the latter. Also, very few other ethnic and cultural identities go the hyphen route, making "African-American" sound like a sterile euphemism or even something of a solecism. You'd never call someone "Anglo-African" or "Euro-American," but there you go.

 

Euro-American, Euro-Canadian and Anglo-Canadian are actually all terms used pretty commonly in colonial histories of North America, at least in my experiences. English (or Anglo) Canadian is still a commonly used term, differentiated from French Canadian.

 

How is the bold part determined?

 

Not an expert, but I imagine the same way that belonging to many other communities works: recognition by the community, either informally through personal ties or formally through legal ones. Obviously, those formal ties are pretty fraught when they are determined by colonial states and not First Nations themselves. But yeah, in the limited reading I've done on the topic, belonging and citizenship are hugely complicated and important issues within First Nations, especially when many of the methods for determining them (blood quantum, marital status and voting, notably) have been imposed from the outside.

[Gormongous]

Euro-American, Euro-Canadian and Anglo-Canadian are actually all terms used pretty commonly in colonial histories of North America, at least in my experiences. English (or Anglo) Canadian is still a commonly used term, differentiated from French Canadian.

 

Oh, I agree, but scholarly usages for historical peoples are different from casual and daily practice. In the United States, at least, only people of color get a hyphenated "American" name, like Jov and Bjorn pointed out, so I'm comfortable with it falling out of favor in non-technical contexts.

[clyde]

Not an expert, but I imagine the same way that belonging to many other communities works: recognition by the community, either informally through personal ties or formally through legal ones. Obviously, those formal ties are pretty fraught when they are determined by colonial states and not First Nations themselves. But yeah, in the limited reading I've done on the topic, belonging and citizenship are hugely complicated and important issues within First Nations, especially when many of the methods for determining them (blood quantum, marital status and voting, notably) have been imposed from the outside.

 

What I should have said is that whatever the process of certifying authenticity of an individual's ties to a culture is, I suspect that it is dehumanizing and disrespectful to personal experience.

 

-edited to take out inflammatory language.

[Badfinger]

You can just delete the stuff you want to not be in there, rather than doubling down on calling attention to it with a strikethrough and an edit.

[Gormongous]

What I should have said is that whatever the process of certifying authenticity of an individual's ties to a culture is, I suspect that it is dehumanizing and disrespectful to personal experience.

 

Possibly, but again, when other feminists inform a male ally that he doesn't speak for them, because of inflammatory, misogynistic, or simply inaccurate opinions that he's expressed, we accept their statement, however disrespectful it is to his self-proclaimed status and experience as an ally. The same with other avenues of social justice, I think. The dignity and wellbeing of oppressed peoples requires understanding, respecting, and safeguarding in ways that white, straight, and/or male members of the dominant culture will never need. Respecting someone's choice to disrespect an entire people (by selling their culture as a commodity or reducing it to a fashion) is an odd application of Popper's paradox of tolerance.

[clyde]

You can just delete the stuff you want to not be in there, rather than doubling down on calling attention to it with a strikethrough and an edit.

 

I saw that others were in the thread and I didn't want to look like I was changing what they were responding to. I'm comfortable with calling attention to it, though my intentions were the opposite of doubling down on the use of "dehumanizing".