If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know that a) I recently wrote a response to the backlash against the popular video “Shit White Gilrs Say to Black Girls,” and b) I often get trolls who leave inflammatory and/or stupid comments in response to something I’ve written.
Fewer than forty-eight hours after I published that post, I received a troll dropping about my unfair standards for white people.
I am so surprised that it took fewer than two days for a white person to get outraged by what HA I ALMOST FINISHED THAT SENTENCE WITH A STRAIGHT FACE LOL. Just kidding. I’m not surprised at all.
As is my wont when I get a troll dropping, I take my readers through the trolling comment so we can all have a good laugh.
This dropping is courtesy of a person named “Shocked&Appalled” and has a UK email address, so I’m assuming he’s the rich guy from The Simpsons who says, “That was my third monocle this week. I simply must stop being so horrified.”
“i.) So, prejudice exhibited by minorities is permissible on the grounds of ‘the sins of the father’? Hardly seems ‘fair’. It sounds like you’re (albeit no doubt unintentionally) advocating ‘one rule for ‘them’, another for ‘us’.’ The onus is not on white people to change their culture to accommodate minority sentiment: the suggestion otherwise is anti-democratic. “
Aww, it’s so cute when they misuse quotation marks! The quotations around “fair” are completely unnecessary, see, as they imply the opposite of what he meant. (Then again, I’m an American – what do I know about English when I have someone from the father country to school me?)
Anyway, could someone please point to the part in my post where I said that “prejudice exhibited by minorities is permissible,” because I can’t find it. I believe the point of my post was to show where different forms of prejudice come from, and to explain how this form of “reverse racism” white people whine about is, in fact, a sense of justifiable mistrust based on experience, combined with a defense mechanism.
Now, if this video had been of Franchesca Ramsey calling white people “honkies” and “crackers” for two minutes, my response to the video would undoubtedly be different (though I probably still would not have been offended – just bored). But no, sorry, I don’t find it racist to point out the racist things white people say to black people. And sorry, I don’t think “White people always follow me around when I go into their stores” is on the same level as a white girl once asking me why I had a black American Girl doll because “those people smell bad.”
I also love the whining about “rules,” like I’m proposing a Constitutional Amendment or law against saying racist comments and suggesting we throw people who say the “n-word” in jail, or something. Please. There’s no reason to be so put-upon. The original post is, at most, a suggestion about how we conduct ourselves. People can take it or leave it. I’m not violating anyone’s First Amendment rights by saying, “This is why many of my students didn’t trust white people.”
Anyway, there’s more. Shall we see what else “Shocked&Appalled” has to offer?
“ii.) Despite your qualifications, your characterizations of the prejudice exhibited by the respective ‘groups’ is grossly naive.”
Oh, I see what he’s doing here. “Naive” is his word for “largely based on the author’s personal experiences and observations in four years of hearing black students make comments about racism.” I’m believing this stuff because it’s a fairy story told to me by Mommy and Daddy at bedtime, not because I actually heard them with my own ears or anything. Okay, player.
” I concede that the nature of each group’s prejudices is informed by the asymmetrical distribution of power (which is a product of history)…”
He concedes? Oh, thank GOD. I was worried there for a minute.
Actually, he really should have stopped with that.
“…but Black prejudice is, like all prejudice, informed primarily by Man’s intuitive ethnocentrism (about which there is nothing inherently malicious, that is until it is converted by exigency into xenophobia, which then becomes potentially susceptible to hysteria and irrationality), that is to say, people mistrust each other for the simple reason that they’re different: solidarity stems largely from propinquity.”
Translation: “I use a lot of big words and that makes me smart! BOW BEFORE ME, YANKEE!”
Or, another translation: “People can’t help if they’re drawn to other people who look like them, and repelled by people who don’t look like them!”
Sigh.
Look, I get that there are extremely white areas of the United States, and extremely black (and Latino and Asian and Jewish, etc., etc.) areas of the United States, and sometimes people simply don’t run into other people of different ethnicities on a regular basis. But that argument really has no place in a discussion where I’m talking about my students and their particular experiences dealing with racism. They didn’t “assume” white people were racist because white people look different from they do. Their mistrust is based on experience, for Christ’s sake.
“Again, you’re asking people to change their culture to suit others: the placing of the boot on the other foot.”
*spit take*
I’m sorry. I’m asking people to change their culture because, at the end of the original post, I suggested that white people should become vocally anti-racist?
Being racist is such an inherently important part of white culture that it’s a huge imposition to ask people to change it? Really?
Yeesh. If being racist and saying racist shit to black people is all white people have to offer as part of our culture, then we really do suck. Fortunately, I think we’re better than that.
It also occurs to me that the idea that all people are just inherently racist or mistrustful of people of different ethnicities, and therefore completely unaccountable for the assumptions they make about others, sounds awfully familiar…claiming that a certain type of urge is “natural” and cannot be helped, and therefore an excuse for hurting other people…where have I heard that before?
“iii.) Please explain this remark:
‘Except for that one incident, I can’t say that I was offended at all by any comments that my students made about “white people,” but if a white student had made a comment about black people, he would’ve had to haul ass to the assistant principal.’”
Sure, I’ll explain. “Haul ass” is a slang term we Yanks use to mean “move extremely quickly.”
“- I sincerely hope that this is not a serious proposal, or an example of something you yourself would have practised. If either, i’m glad you’re no longer a teacher.”
Well, I’m glad I’m no longer a teacher, too, because I signed up to teach kids literature, not test prep, and did a lot more of the latter than of the former.
In “Shocked&Appalled’s” defense, though, I admit that I was unclear when I wrote that part of my post. The “white student” I used as an example is purely hypothetical, as I didn’t have any white students in all four of my years of teaching. The only non-black students I had were Latino/a or Arab. When my students made comments about “white people,” I was the only white person in the room. I didn’t allow them to go on rants about white people while white students sat uncomfortably.
I do love the outrage at the suggestion that I would send a student to the AP’s office, as though a single visit to an AP’s office for inflammatory language is the equivalent of sending a kid to prison. It’s a trip to the AP for a conversation about his words, dude. Calm down.
“On an unrelated note, good work on the ‘Lyanna Stark’ article. Pity about this one.
Yours,
An Unimpressed Brit (you know, of ‘Colonial Oppressors’ fame).”
That signature, folks, is the reason for my sarcastic references to the poster’s English-ness throughout this post. He’s making it fair game.
It just occurred to me that I have been subconsciously referring to this poster as “he” and “him” when I have no evidence that the troll is, in fact, male. Is this sexist of me?
Perhaps. It’s not fair of me to assume that a condescending doucheturd is necessarily a man. However, throughout my life, I have had many people condescend to me, and most of the time, the condescending doucheturd was a man.
It’s not that I don’t like men. It’s that so many men have condescended to me throughout my life that I have a built-in defense mechanism combined with a fair amount of mistrust.
Sound familiar?
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BTW- have you seen Shit White Girls Say to Jewish Girls?
Another note, really on your previous post: Throughout the last decade, I’ve been shocked at how much the black community has been taught that they’re at some sort of war against the Jewish community. I wasn’t informed. In fact, my grandfather always took enormous pride in his civil rights activism, and in sharing civil rights era history with me on this particular subject.
Jews were treated nearly as poorly as African Americans in much of the country. Redlined out of neighborhoods, beaten on the streets, banned from public establishments… Never as institutionalized, of course. Never with the weight of a history of slavery. But instead, with a religious zeal that it was right to oppress or attack Jews- not because they looked different (and most people would say they still do), but because they had earned it by killing Jesus.
Jews stood side by side African Americans across the country to fight for equality and civil rights. It’s just that when things got really bad in the slums (think 1980’s Brooklyn) that different gangs were pitted against each other. And Jews are much better at “passing” than most African Americans. Which meant that by the 90’s, the majority of Jews looked pretty much “just like everyone else,” which is to say, white. And many Jews have embraced that. But the rest of us, the ones who stay away from things like “Hannukah Bushes” and naming their kids Chris or changing their last name from “Borenstein” to “Burns,” never had any intention of “passing.” And still get treated like outsiders, others, and inferiors for the crime of not being “American” enough. Which is to say, Christian.
I’ve always felt allied to the black community in my other-ness. But during this last decade, working with black urban youth, I keep finding myself disheartened and shocked that the history has been so thoroughly thrown on its head.
Just wanted to put that out there, as irrelevant as it is.
I did watch it on your suggestion, and oops, I realized that I use “that’s so not kosher” all the time. And, in a typical reaction of the privileged class, I want to whine and pout that I like saying that phrase and I don’t want to give it up…but I think I’ll use “that’s so not raven” instead. I think it’s funnier, anyway.
I’ve been shocked at how much the black community has been taught that they’re at some sort of war against the Jewish community.
Yeah, the comment that I mentioned in the earlier post was, unfortunately, not the only anti-Semitic comment I’ve ever heard from them. A lot of them toned it down a notch after learning about the Holocaust in social studies, but they still have a ways to go.
It’s unfortunate. Even Malcolm X believed that the two groups were at “war” with each other in a sense. In his autobiography, he wrote about how the Jewish community benefited from racism against black people. Then again, that was before his pilgrimage and I believe he changed his mind about that later in life.
The sad fact is, privileged groups benefit from underprivileged groups hating each other.
As always, the troll droppings (and your polemic with the troll) didn’t fail to excessively divert me.
(BTW, Lea –> thank’s for pointing out the sketch!)
I guess every minority in every community could form a similar youtube series, not only in the US. But it is true that after the few years I lived in Texas as a kid (and from my many later travels) I could write a long series of “Shit People of All Races, Religions and Backgrounds Say To Polish Girls”. Most times they are just ridiculously funny and are a source of many anecdotes, but still.
Some examples:
“Do you guys have TV/computers/electricity?”
“So, you’re from Portland?”
“Do you guys, like, have snow all the time and use sledges and dogs all the time?” (I kid you not)
“Do you want to buy a lot of sugar for your family back home?” (Geez, it was 2002, not 1982)
“So, is your mommy a nanny?/ For who do your parents work?” (umm… ma dad had a scholarship at Rice Uni, my mom at the Medical Center…)
“So, you speak Russian in Poland?” (NEVER EVER ask a Slav or any ex-member of the Soviet Block if they speak another Slavonic Language , ESPECIALLY Russian. Still sensitive topic.)
And my personal favorite: [in class, when learning about Copernicus]:
“He was Polish? I didn’t know you had any famous people!” (That was from a 12 year old, but believe me, I’ve heard it from older people)
I did have a more “possitive” one: [I was showing my classmates my Polish schoolbooks; In the history book there were a lot of photos of castles in my region]:
“So you all live in castles in Poland?”
And many, many more.
But, I guess, what do we live for if not to make sport of our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?
You have a good point that subgroups of white people and certain nationalities face their own unique prejudices and stereotypes. I’ve definitely heard many a Polish joke in my life.
Polish jokes are fine. I love Polish jokes.
In fact, many jokes told in Poland are Polish jokes, like the one when An Italian, an American, a Frenchman and a Pole are locked up in seperate cells for two years, each given two marbles and they are to make something with them. I don’t remember exactly what the Frenchman and the Italian did, I think one did something useless but beautiful, the American did something that sold very well, and the Polish guy lost one and broke the other. I love this joke.
The only jokes of this kind told in Poland in which the Pole is the good smart guy are those where there’s also a Russian and a German (sorry…).
Yeah, I’m not saying “OMG, we must not ever tell Polish jokes again!” I think this is a conversation worth having – is it possible to rib each other about our cultural differences without reinforcing stereotypes, and if so, how do we do it?