At Alas!, Amp posts this (rather on-point) cartoon basically pointing out that it isn’t black people’s job to reassure white people that the white people are on the side of the angels. A fair point, and it’s a pretty funny cartoon too, esp. the last inset panel, where the black lady asks “do you even hear the words I say?” and the white lady responds “the ones I like”.

A few days later, Amp’s coblogger Mandolin makes a post discussing white views of racism, and making the interesting historical point that white opinions about racism and race relations haven’t changed very much in the last 40-50 years, and that arguably this demonstrates a large degree of disconnect between white people’s experiences and black people’s experiences on race in the US. (Short version, in the 1960s white people thought racism wasn’t a problem even though nowadays we pretty much all recognize that it was; today white people still think racism isn’t a problem, and Mandolin’s argument is that this indicates that we should be cautious about validating that perception.)

In the discussion following the post, yet-another-coblogger Myca writes in response to a white commenter’s dismissive opinion of Mandolin’s point:

Well, and this is why I think it’s so important to privilege the words and experiences of PoCs in conversations about racism…When you have zero skin in the game, it’s easy to be cavalier. Maybe we should listen to the folks whose skin is the game.

Also a fair point. So a couple of comments later, an African-American commenter named BluntHammer comes in and posts a long comment, not so much disagreeing with Mandolin’s argument as saying that the black community has made its own contribution to white perceptions.

And, well, wow. Mandolin’s response is basically an unbelievably snotty, educated white liberal’s dismissal of a black person’s contribution to the conversation. She starts off by mocking his (completely innocuous) handle. She then goes on to explain why this man’s life experience is irrelevant to the discussion, because it disagrees with “the sociology”, and says that he is “gloating” about his success in escaping the ghetto. She tells him that his opinion is at variance from what the majority of black people think, and that therefore she doesn’t have to take it seriously. She expresses doubt that he is actually black. She…oh, go read it for yourself, it’s quite a remarkable text. (I’m going to go ahead and reproduce it below in full, just to have an archival record, because I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up editing.)

So I guess that privileging the words and experiences of people of color in discussions of racism…kind of depends on the content of those words and experiences. Black people who don’t buy into the progressive worldview of racism? Deluded tools, explicitly compared to UFO abductees.

Progressives love to listen to black people. At least, the black people who say the things that progressives want to hear.

Cut and paste of original comment, retrieved 6/6/2010, 10:43 AM MST.

Mandolin Writes:
June 6th, 2010 at 9:09 am

Well, I’m glad your hammer isn’t *sharp* because then it wouldn’t be much use as a hammer. So, congratulations on your superfluous adjective.

Your claim to authority, however? Not very interesting.

1) My husband is “living proof” that people can be born poor and “get out” and then make stupidly ridiculous amounts of money helping multinational corporations fuck up the environment. His existence–even his testimonials!–in no way negates the sociology indicating that class boundaries are mostly impermeable in the United States. Exception != rule. You’ve heard that anecdote doesn’t equal data? Well, congratulations. It doesn’t.

Your gloating over your own superior ability to rise in the world does nothing to disprove the studies indicating that black men are less likely to be interviewed for jobs, that black-sounding names are a deterrent–that black people face discrimination in every part of the hiring process. This happens whether or not they support “that lifestyle.”

2) Assuming for the moment that you are actually a black person, does your skin color make you in general more informed about racism than white people in general? Yeah, playing the probabilities, I’ll go there. But the claim that black people as a group are more informed than white people as a group does not prevent individual examples from being scattered any-the-fuck-where on the continuum. In this case, you’re scattered far away from both the heart of the sociology, and the heart of what the majority of black people think. Am I going to listen to the science-denying fringe just because their skin is brown? No. Nor do I listen to physicists with alien abduction stories–at least not unless they can martial more than the power of anecdote and actually slip some science behind their doe-eyed assertions.

3) You’re aware that the description of the problem with drugs/legal system/black people is the disparity in sentencing, right? So your admonition to others to recriminate about what would have happened “if I hadn’t smoked pot” does… what to deal with that? If your skin is black, and you smoke that pot, then you are much more likely to be arrested and imprisoned. If you’re white, then can you spell the word s-k-a-t-e? We can argue all day about whether it’s stupid to make smoking pot a jail-serving offence (though it clearly is), and whether or not it’s stupid to smoke pot given that it is a jail-serving offense (arguable)–but unless you’ve got some actual science lingering up in where you pulled your arguments from, then you can’t argue that the consequences for smoking pot are different depending on your skin color, and way more dire for those who are brown. There’s a word for how outcomes mysteriously end up skewed worse for the brown folk, but darn–it slips my mind.

4) America once had slaves! Let us get over this! After all, no one now is currently enslaved! And we know–wealth does not build up over generations! The systematic stripping of wealth from one generation of black people has nothing to do with the wealth possessed by their descendants! Also, attitudes do not linger! The shape of slavery in the American south never influenced a single goddamn modern racist attitude! For instance! The 3/5 compromise that valued black lives and labor at less than white has nothing at all in common with Pat Buchanan’s blithe assertion on Maddow’s program that America was built with the labor of white people, which is why our government does not need to include black people in it, while he sat in a city whose infrastructure was laid down with the labor of enslaved Africans! These devaluings are totally unrelated! And if they are related, we should ignore them anyway, because the important lesson of all history is that we should “get over it!” Mistakes from the past are unimportant because we should all just “get over them” like small children with scraped knees! Moving on is always an admirable goal, no matter what it is that we are moving on from!

In conclusion, Sir Hammer, your argument is weak, and you should return to the tool bench to see if you can muster some better construction.