Here’s my attempt at starting the conversation.

Let’s posit that [...]]]> hlwiley asked me in a recent comment whether I thought were any useful analogies to be made in the -isms spaces. I responded that while I thought in general, analogies are really sticky and tricky and dangerous things, I would think about it and get back to it.

Here’s my attempt at starting the conversation.

Let’s posit that it’s very tricky to do a comparison/analogy from one group’s experience of social/economic/political inequality to another’s, just as it’s really tricky to do a comparison/analogy from one civil rights fight to another. The field is fraught with turf wars started by someone making what they thought was a good argument that devolved into a flamefest not about the original point but about the rhetoric that person chose to use.

Start there, and also start with my preceding comments about the privilege and entitlement to safety.

Given that I think the field of rhetoric/expression is terribly fraught and you’re likely to take some hard lumps even thinking about trying it, here’s what I think might work, and what it’s worth to consider when designing this sort of argument. When, indeed, if ever, is it useful to make any analogy at all between one group and another or one fight or another? How do you go about doing it in order to have the discussion go positively? What should you consider?

Again, this represents my best attempt at starting the conversation and trying to give helpful guidelines. Like my overall remarks about safety, I cannot guarantee that any of these will work or give you a safe haven should you try it.

Immense props also go to H, who talked very sanely with me this evening as with all other times I’ve spoken with her about this sort of thing.

• Overarching guideline: Exercise careful respect
  Flippancy is right out, but also be sure that you examine your rhetorical gambit from as many angles as you have available. Do your homework, pay your respects, be sure you lay the groundwork for your argument. Be as serious and respectful as you can be. Assume that your publishing audience/venue is the scariest and most powerful witch you have ever had the honor of addressing. Be sure you know and display that you know your place in the dialogue.
• Preparation: Define your context carefully
  As part of avoiding flippancy, it’s important that you lay the groundwork to minimize misinterpretation not only of your overall rhetorical goal but also of your motivations and of your phrasing. I won’t say that this will guarantee you absolute safety, but it is part of your duty to the topic and to the risks associated with your rhetorical gambit.
• Preparation: Display humility
  Another part of exercising respect is displaying humility. You are not, in this space, any kind of authority. In fact, it could be argued that in taking the risk of using this rhetorical gambit, you are utilizing a very unsafe method to get your way and you should pay for it up front by displaying appropriate humility.
• Preparation: Do your homework
  Do as much homework as you can to not only be able to prepare your context and to rightly display humility, but also because it’s your duty to be as careful and comprehensive about this subject as possible, for both groups/movements you are comparing or analogizing. Doing proper homework will help you forestall your own social gaffes. It may also help you facilitate any kind of interaction between your two groups that your gambit initiates. It is part of your duty in assuming the responsibility of using the gambit to make as sure as you can be to minimize drama and have the analogy be useful to all the consumers of your prose.
• Guideline: Do your level best to avoid rudeness or tactlessness
  Again, homework will help you here, so will common sense, a solid ability to be self-critical, and a good sense for trouble and avoiding it. Given that you are already here in the risky land of the troublesome rhetorical gambit, you have already thrown some caution to the winds, but I am forced to assume you have a good head on your shoulders and that you can be sensible.
  If/when a person represented by one of the groups you have used as a rhetorical tool calls you out, your best hope to salvaging your pride may be humility. I recommend lots of humility, some apology, and a refusal to trade flamebait or barbs.
• Guideline: Do not steal thunder or dilute power
  In my example below about the person who compared carrying concealed firearms in airports to being black in airports, one of the many essential problems with this analogy is that taking the relatively trivial and relatively personal topic of carrying concealed firearms in airports (narrow in both situational scope and in overall usefulness except in the unlikely event of a violent revolution carried out by  airport furniture) and comparing it to the relatively large-scale and long-fought civil rights issue of trying to avoid being hassled and oppressed for your skin color and cultural expression in any number of ways is, honestly, a dilution and dismissal of the sheer gulf of experience.
  This kind of very problematic comparison is at best a disrespectful and flippant dilution of power for the black civil rights movement and is NOT OKAY.
  Do what you can to avoid this sort of comparison when you craft yours.
• Guideline: Be responsible for/to different interpretations of your argument
  Regardless of how much time, energy and thought you put into your analogy, there will always be someone who doesn’t like it. That person may tell you they don’t like it, and their narration may reveal what seems to you to be a fundamental misunderstanding of your argument. If it evolves that you cannot politely disabuse your reader of that notion, too bad. You started the conversation, and you are responsible for its readings, even by folks who cannot be reasoned with.
  Do what you can to ethically disengage if you think folks are being unreasonable, but do not shout this person down, and do not be unduly upset that you were misunderstood. It happens. Deal.
• Guideline: Compare like kinds of disadvantage/exploitation
  It may be okay to talk about different groups experiencing similar kinds of exploitation or disadvantage. There may be profit in comparing and contrasting exploitation of Black and Asian and other workers on the Transcontinental Railroad, and then again there may be parts that are tactless to compare or contrast.
  For another example, there might be usefulness in comparing similar experiences of sexually exploited women and children. And again, there may be subjects there that are rude or tactless to bring up.
  To take an example from today’s dialogues, it is not appropriate to frame a conversation about carrying concealed firearms in airports to being black black in airports. These are two so very different issues that it is not useful to go there – the amount of flak you generate will far outweigh any useful discussion about your point.
• Warning: Be prepared for people to misread and/or misunderstand you
  Like the guideline above where I say you are responsible for misreadings and misunderstandings, this will very likely happen. Be prepared to deal with these responses ethically and fairly. Do not make these interactions all about you or about justice or injustice. They just are. As you go on in life you may be able to use these kinds of feedback as useful indicators of whether you’ve made a useful point with your rhetoric, but you will very likely never be rid of them.
• Warning: Be prepared to take your lumps
  I talked about safety in a prior blog entry. This is a risky business. I’ve warned you multiple times. Going on with it means you assume the risk. Take it like a responsible adult.

Updated: To try to clarify a bit.

In review, for the purposes of my discussion about privilege and entitlement, social position is your place in society’s hierarchies based on your [...]]]> In which I shall attempt to explain how I think entitlement/privilege is related to docentry/tokenism, reverse racism and how I think you can use your entitlement/privilege for good.

Updated: To try to clarify a bit.

In review, for the purposes of my discussion about privilege and entitlement, social position is your place in society’s hierarchies based on your appearance (looks, dress, fashion, behavior, etc.). Privilege is what you have, what is afforded you, unasked, by society at large and by individuals in society, based on your social position. Entitlement is what grows in you in response to that privilege, based on the frequency of the privilege being made available to you over the years.

The idea is that while in general except with individuals you see frequently, you probably can’t do much about the privilege you get, you can do something about your entitlement. You can nip that entitlement right in the bud, and instead of being an entitled asshole about your privilege (for instance, demanding that privilege even when it’s not volunteered for you), you have the power to overcome that entitlement and instead use your position of privilege to do good for society. From my perspective as an anti-racist, this is where the rubber meets the road. I know I have a duty to overcome my entitlement and use my position of privilege to improve upon the social inequalities between races. I think everyone who claims to be anti-racist should be doing this work too.

To review basic assumptions in the anti-racist community, there is a tried and true maxim that white people shall not engage or encourage people of color (POCs) to explain oppression or to be the museum docent to the POC’s life, lifestyle or living conditions. Why is this maxim so supported among POCs? I think I have part of the answer.

I know, from my Honorary Whiteness, from my privileged upbringing as a highly assimilated half-Asian, half-white guy, that among the many possible unexamined privileges and entitlements of being white is an entitlement to (social) safety. There is an expectation I know from my own upbringing as an Honorary White Guy that there will always be a safe path through any social interaction, one where I will not be taken to task for having made any sort of mistake. This entitlement exists even though that path to safety is often a myth and any safety you are afforded is derived directly from social expressions of your privilege.

In contrast, unless POCs want to and do assimilate and are extra careful and extra good, unthreatening and unopinionated, we rarely get to be socially safe. At any moment in the mixed social sphere, POCs are at the disadvantage of being called out simply for being different. Many times this hinges on aspects of appearance that cannot be effectively managed by anyone who is not unimaginably rich (and who can to some extent shape their own appearance, their own social circles, and engineer a situation where difference will either be ignored or celebrated).

To try to make this idea more clear, consider one social dynamic: In the greater social contexts (i.e. the public sphere) there’s generally a lot more social effort involved in calling out a white guy, or for that matter, a white woman, when sie is being an asshat and racist than there is in calling out a POC for violating the same sorts of rules. I think that this dynamic is a direct expression of this privilege of social safety.

I believe that socially liberal/progressive white folks feel instinctively guilty and desperate (with respect to wanting, having or finding a safe path through it where guilt is minimized) about social and economic inequality as exhibited by troublesome POCs who refuse to seek/attain equality. In this kind of environment, the urge to find a native guide must be overwhelming. This is how I think the urge to nominate a token and demand docentry is probably nearly impossible to manage or overcome.

As H said to me this evening, it’s also important to consider that the systems that create the -isms, the social inequalities in our society are so vast that there is really no one who has all of the pieces in control or understood, and it’s something we activists hardly ever talk about. Simply put, we know there’s a problem, but we don’t have a clear idea of how to fix it.

We have developed a lot of mitigation strategies and identified a lot of problem behaviors that contribute to making the problems we see and experience about social inequalities worse, but we, as far as I know, simply do not know how to fix the total underlying problems. At best we tend to hope that if the folks who are being *-ist would fucking stop, maybe we’d know where to go from there.

It should then be obvious that even a POC docent won’t help you find that safety you’re looking for. In some cases a willing POC docent might hinder you by providing you only a partial solution to a social problem or providing you one that only works with a very small, very specific population.

I come around again to something I’ve written about before. In a situation of lack of safety, your best strategy is to try your best and be prepared to take your lumps when you fuck it up. And you will fuck it up. Without a lot of experience under your belt, you will not be able to think of every aspect of what you write or say, and you may learn a lot by the school of hard knocks. Learning not to fuck it up is a little like being a child and learning how to be polite – you just cannot hope to properly navigate it all the time until you get a lot of experience under your belt.

As a thought leader in my corporate setting has said many times in the past to me, when you are stuck and see no clear way out, sometimes the best action is just to take action, get moving, and do the steering out later. Like ships with no momentum we are stuck. The rudder only works when there is motion as well. Over analyzing the situation to find another position of safety may only leave you stuck in the dock, not having gained a thing.

Like I have said before, this mythological safety is not afforded those of us who are not white. When we fuck up, we know it immediately. The social inequalities are built that way – immediate feedback for those on the short end of the stick who fuck it up. The fact that white people can even start in a position of safety or relative safety already exposes your privilege in that space. How you choose to use that position is up to you, and I think it will say a lot about your character.

I think this expectation of safety also an entitlement/privilege that makes complaints about “reverse racism” pretty toothless. If you happen to intersect, as a white person, with a strong community of POCs, and someone is biased against your white ass, too fucking bad. This entitlement to safety that makes you think there is a universal polite and PC path through any social situation also makes you a whiner, because you assume that everyone is safe all the time.

This assumption is essentially bullshit and it probably makes you feel justified in complaining about “reverse racism”. No one except you is safe. If you only realize the lack of safety when someone in a strong POC community is biased toward you and refuses to provide you your accustomed privilege, then suck it up. No POC wants to hear your whining about how unsafe you feel. It is a problem that happens to a POC every day (and to some particularly abhorrent [to some white people] POCs much more frequently than that).

I think this privilege of safety also touches on something I’ve looked for a long time for within folks who are white and whom I’m still proud to call my staunch anti-racist allies. To me, one of the defining characteristics I look for in any skilled and ethical anti-racist activist (there are of course exceptions, but not with many close friends and strong allies nor with myself) is that almost we have accepted the idea that we are racist. The idea is that we acknowledge that we have enculturated (that we grew up with, that influences our decision-making every day) baggage that makes us have racist attitudes that must be intentionally overcome while we work to do good in society.

There are a lot of folks I’ve encountered in the wider world who consider themselves anti-racist activists who also consider themselves not racist. I don’t know how that works, because when I interact with them, they are often very invested in demonstrating that they are not racist, and not so invested in the doing good portion of anti-racist activism.

To me, when an anti-racist activist accepts that their upbringing in this society is/was racist, not only have they intentionally surrendered that entitlement to safety (which is a good faith gesture that I appreciate), but they have also intentionally done away with having to justify and defend their mythical non-racist selves from charges of racism. The assumption is now that they’re racist and that they should do good anyhow, if possible.

If you are my friend and you are white, I personally will try to give you a lot of useful feedback and a minimum of ass-kickings as you learn how to manage all of this. The harder you try to do good with your privilege the easier on you I will try to be. I cannot promise you any other safety than that, as I can’t compel anyone else to be easy on you.

Updated: Both trying to provide more concrete examples of privilege as well as some notes at the end about how this entitlement makes me personally feel that charges of “Reverse Racism” are essentially bullshit whining, as well as how this ties back to good faith efforts I see in my strongest white allies.