It's Time to Boycott Arizona

[Kobi]

dread,

We were having a discussion about the development of ethics and of philosophy. You used race as an example. I kept the discussion to a level of the development of ethics and philosophy using the example you set forth. I did not offer any judgements, nor will I. It is not for me to judge what was appropriate or not appropriate in a different era with different prevailing truths when discussing the development of ethics and philosophy. It was not a discussion about race. Forgive me if sticking to the topic was offensive. It was perhaps, your interpretation of why I didnt say something as opposed to why I didnt.

You dont know me dread or my life or who my friends and lovers have been. I can tell you I am and have been involved with people of color and no one has ever spoken to me the way people here feel they can. Never. Ever.

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Very true, but not in the direction you necessarily think.



Welcome to my world, Kobi. I have to be careful what I say and how I say it everywhere I go, every day of my life.

I have had to sit there and TAKE IT when a colleague at work asked me "were you raised by a white family". Why would they ask me that? Because of the way I speak. I sound educated and therefore I must have been raised by a white family. Now, of course, you're going to ask "why didn't I report that person to HR". I'll tell you why. Because the minute I do that, I'm a troublemaker, I'm whining, I'm trying to blame white people, I'm doing everything BUT making a report of a racist statement.

During hurricane Katrina I had to endure my co-workers making some of the most racist statements about "those people" who were "living like animals". I can't get angry, Kobi. I simply do not get to do that. Oh, at home I can but, just for instance, I have a buddy at work we call Ogre who will get frustrated and pound his fist on his desk. If I did that I would be an 'angry black woman' he does it and he's this big, overgrown frat boy with a heart of gold.
So, again, Kobi welcome to my world--except that here, if you say something impolitic nothing happens to your paycheque. If I say something impolitic I can forget the concept of raises or promotions because once 'angry black woman' is established, there's no getting out from under that label.



I'm curious, Kobi, have you read any Malcolm X OTHER than what you quoted here? Have you ever read DuBois in depth? The problem isn't you quoting a person of color, Kobi, the problem is you quoting a person of color in an attempt to try to tell other people of color how we should live in America. I said it before and I'll repeat it now--every single person of color participating in this discussion has forgotten more about what it is like to be a person of color in America then you will ever realize there is to know.



Don't you see that your inability to condemn something that was so manifestly wrong that the US Government (not known for being the first in line to say mea culpa) apologized is deeply problematic? It makes me--and perhaps others--wonder what you WOULD condemn. You have said, on a number of occasions, that it would be wrong to judge the prevailing ideas of, say, early 20th century America by early 21st century standards. You have said, in making this argument, that it is impossible to say if the pervasive racism that early 20th century blacks had to endure was wrong, or unjust or evil. You have even said that we cannot even say that the idea that blacks were inherently inferior was wrong because we don't know by whose standard to judge. I'm sorry Kobi, but I find that absolutely shocking. I have had a lot of conversations about race and I have to say that this is the only time I have had a conversation with someone who claims to not be a racist, who was not willing and able to say that the lynchings, the beatings, the daily humiliations, the fear, the terrorizing, the unequal treatment, the segregation, the exclusion were wrong, unjustified and a moral blemish on this nation. The only one. In, perhaps, three *decades* of talking to white people about race. Every other person who was unwilling to say so was a racist and wasn't going to condemn it. The truly astonishing thing to me is that you don't see that as at all problematic. You see this refusal to take a stand as somehow admirable or noble. I don't know what metric you are using but it is not one I would want to use.



No, Kobi, no one is saying a white person can't quote a person of color. You are, of course, free to interpret it that way but that's not what people are saying. It's not that you quoted a black man, it's that you deployed that quotation as some means of lecturing people of color about what it is like to be people of color as if you knew something about the subject we don't.
You invoked Malcolm X in a ham-handed fashion and you got called out on it.
You were trying to put me 'in my place' and tell me how I should think about being black in America. You did so by invoking black men because they are, as you put it, 'my leaders'. It is not quoting black men it is the way you went about deploying this as a means of putting a black woman in her place.

It backfired, of course, because this image that people have about black women is not even remotely related to my life. You've learned that now.

Aj

[Corkey]

And there it is, the privilege yet again, and you don't even know you are doing it. Saying you have lovers, friends, who are POC to try to deflect. Kobi, open your eyes, Please. I have a daughter who is black, and Puerto Rican, does that mean I know her struggles, NO.

[Dylan]

Kobi,

Really

You really should just step back

Each post is more offensive than the last

You've finally landed on the, "I have POC friends/partners" trope


Dylan...selectively on ignore

[The_Lady_Snow]

Originally Posted by Kobi

dread,

We were having a discussion about the development of ethics and of philosophy. You used race as an example. I kept the discussion to a level of the development of ethics and philosophy using the example you set forth. I did not offer any judgements, nor will I. It is not for me to judge what was appropriate or not appropriate in a different era with different prevailing truths when discussing the development of ethics and philosophy. It was not a discussion about race. Forgive me if sticking to the topic was offensive. It was perhaps, your interpretation of why I didnt say something as opposed to why I didnt.

You dont know me dread or my life or who my friends and lovers have been. I can tell you I am and have been involved with people of color and no one has ever spoken to me the way people here feel they can. Never. Ever.

I think if any of my lovers spoke of me this way... I would have to punch them in the throat....

How belittling is this.....

"I am and have been involved with people of color"

Goody goody gum drops for you to speak of our experience because of who you fuck and share coffee with!!

Yipeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

Damn, you just don't know when to stop do ya?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Kobi

dread,

We were having a discussion about the development of ethics and of philosophy. You used race as an example. I kept the discussion to a level of the development of ethics and philosophy using the example you set forth. I did not offer any judgements, nor will I. It is not for me to judge what was appropriate or not appropriate in a different era with different prevailing truths when discussing the development of ethics and philosophy. It was not a discussion about race. Forgive me if sticking to the topic was offensive. It was perhaps, your interpretation of why I didnt say something as opposed to why I didnt.

You dont know me dread or my life or who my friends and lovers have been. I can tell you I am and have been involved with people of color and no one has ever spoken to me the way people here feel they can. Never. Ever.

No, Kobi, I don't know you. You don't know me. Well, it may not be for you to judge, Kobi, but *I* will judge what happened in a different era. My grandparents were born, lived and died as human beings--while the prevailing ethics of the era was that they weren't really human beings or if they were they were inferior sorts of same, I say that was wrong. I understand, to you maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. But to me--my grandparents, my parents, my sibling, myself, my son and my granddaughter were all born human beings in every sense of that word. That is not negotiable, Kobi--not now. Not 100 years ago and not 100 years hence.

I'm glad, Kobi, that you have never had anyone speak to you the way you have been spoken to here. I would love to say the same but I can't. I have had white people tell me what I needed to do in order to deal with racism--and their sentences sounded very much like yours. I have had white people insist that 'you're really smart for a black girl' isn't a racist statement. The one thing you have done that has surprised me is your inability to condemn racism because you are unclear about whether or not the people who were harmed by racism were--I don't know what--human enough by the standards of the day to BE harmed by it. I have to say I've never had anyone take that stance. Other than that, nothing in this dialog has really been surprising or shocking to me. You see people do feel that they can speak to me the way you did earlier, Kobi. People do feel that they can dismiss racism--past and present--and that blacks just need to 'get over it' and 'stop blaming white people'. Now, I understand that you cannot and will not condemn even that because who is to say that 'you're really smart for a black girl' is wrong or insulting? Perhaps I'm just being sensitive. Perhaps the question "you speak so well, was one of your parents white" is also not a racist statement. Who is to say? I understand that you can't condemn that either.

I don't care who you have dated, Kobi. If I said that I am married to a white woman now, would that mean you would take me seriously then? Would it change a damn thing to know that? What you think telling me that you have deigned to associate with non-whites does to bolster your credibility in this discussion is beyond my comprehension. I didn't say you wouldn't date a (nominally human, at least in the present but not in the past) woman of color. It makes absolutely no difference in this discussion. I'm curious how negotiable the people of color in your life feel their humanity is.

I do want to thank you, though, for one thing you have done today. You have illustrated, *precisely* why I am passionate about freeing liberalism from this meme that has possessed it most of my adult life. I understand that to you, not condemning slavery, Jim Crow, segregation or even lynching is noble and admirable because you will not judge people of the past by the standards of today. The problem is, of course, that means that these things are up for grabs and not settled issues. All it would take is for the prevailing winds to change and there is no reason, at least none you have articulated, to believe that you would consider a return to segregation unjust. If, however, there is a bedrock ethic--that certain things should not be done to human beings and whenever they have happened an injustice has been done--then it does not matter what the prevailing winds do.

I believe that the ideas you express, while well intentioned, harm the cause of equality because it allows too much hedging. I believe that as a queer rights movement we have been fighting a battle with one-hand tied behind our backs precisely because this unwillingness, on our part, to truly condemn the prejudice and bigotry thrown our direction as moral and social evils which must stop. We have avoided doing so because not only did we not want to condemn bigotry in the past, we didn't want to condemn bigotry in the present! So this has given me an opportunity to see how this philosophy plays out in real-time. Largely, the conclusions I had reached about the ideas you have expressed about non-judgement, were hypothetical. I saw glimmers of it from time to time but this is the first time I have ever seen it play out so clearly and in unadulterated form. So I thank you for that. I wish that my hypothesis--that this inability to make reasoned judgements from first principals ineluctably would lead to an inability to condemn or even fight effectively against bigotry and injustice--had been proven incorrect. Unfortunately, you have proven it beyond what I would have thought possible a year ago.

Aj