hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

learning about racism in 1995

2014-01-25T07:40:34Z

For some reason I've been thinking a lot lately about the first time I realized racism was alive and well. Obviously, as a white person in the USA, I've been benefiting from racism since t=0: as carefully as I was trained to telegraph that we were not poor white trash despite our class background making us vulnerable to such accusations, that "white" part was still pretty important. But the first time I really got it was pretty late.

I was in undergrad the first time, at a small women's college (I got sexism okay!), and I met someone I knew from online gaming when they happened to be traveling through my town. We hung out a little awkwardly and ate pizza and talked about our schools and the people we knew online. Then, as they were leaving, they asked me humbly, "Please don't tell anyone I'm Asian."

Now, I have always been bad with shocking social situations, and I just kind of did shock/buffer-overflow for a minute. And they said, people treat me differently when they know, I don't like it. I said okay.

Then... I treated them differently. And I would say it wasn't because of their race, but it was. It wasn't because I judged them for being Asian or thought that was bad or we didn't have things in common or anything like that. It was because they'd given me that experience of learning that something was really wrong, and I couldn't get my head around being able to talk normally with someone when I had not known that. White guilt crashed in on me for the first time, though it was mainly white confusion for kind of a long time after that.

So S, if you're out there somewhere: I'm sorry. I'm still working on it, and always will be.

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rhymes in Angela Brazil

2012-11-25T00:45:17Z

Angela Brazil's books are fun except where they are racist as fuck. For instance, in A Terrible Tomboy, we are introduced to a young English girl who loves music and composes pretty little songs, how nice. In the next chapter, we find out that what she composes are songs about enslaved people in the American South, complete with romanticized situations and dialect. No other kind of songs, but three or four of these. Why would you specialize in that? Why would people think it was cute? The whole thing is almost too weird to be offensive, but only almost. (There are plenty of racist moments that are just straight-up offensive as well; usually one per book, but don't let your guard down.)

Apart from that they are stories about girls, usually in schools, using all those school-story tropes that everyone else has subsequently appropriated, and highly enjoyable.

What I wanted to mention, though, was the new perspective that they're giving me on folk rhymes. Because of some combination of author choice and focus on children of a certain period, there are a fair number of jumprope chants and little songs and things appearing, so you can see a snapshot and infer the folk process. For instance, I did not know that Simon and Garfunkel's "April Come She Will" was a riff on a rhyme about a cuckoo -- you know, the nest parasite? Possibly I should have noticed this when they sang it in Moonrise Kingdom, but seeing it in text was necessary. I don't think S&G meant to be especially misogynist, but I have a sneaking doubt now. (Note that Brazil includes a final couplet I haven't seen on the web: 'And if the cuckoo stays till September, It's as much as the oldest man can remember.' So it wasn't necessarily S&G who extended it.)

[ETA: And now I have edited Wikipedia in a thoughtful and structured fashion to include this information, which probably no one but me actually cares about, because --> Actual Geek Girl.]

I was also disturbed by "No more Latin, no more Greek, no more cane to make me squeak" as a clear antecedent to "No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks." I guess a decline in corporal punishment is something I approve of! (Also on this topic: Ana Mardoll points out physical abuse in Farmer Boy.)

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and I thought I was racially marked before

2012-11-07T02:52:32Z

It is definitely really weird to have people feel up your hair. Awkward, laughing, freaking out -- it could easily have shaded into bullying. Even if it's one person* whom you like, and even if you're weirdly positioned in the conversation as having the socially-better hair texture. (Is it actually true that some people's hair is so strong it can poke into their skin, or were they messing with me? I kept the terminology at "strong" rather than anything less positive, because wow was that fraught.) She says she wants her hair to be so soft, too. I pointed out that it mostly correlates with color and that stronger hair doesn't break all the time, but she was not dissuaded. I settled on, "I'm sorry, I can't help you," which at least made everyone laugh.

(It was also very strange to be touched at all; I want that a lot right now, actually, but perhaps not in a disturbing, charged context, okay?)

I keep thinking that more white Americans should experience this racial-minority thing, but I'm still creepily advantaged, there's no escaping it. Besides, I don't think the jingoists I grew up around would react to it by understanding the overall dynamic, interpreting it for their situation, or gaining that much empathy.

* Only one woman in the room at the time; the men had more sense or reserve for whatever reason than to try it. I am not ruling out the possibility that I may be mobbed by female labmates at some future time.

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