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.

Read the rest of this entry »