Rhi. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rhivolution) wrote2010-06-17 11:07 pm
rhivolution) wrote2010-06-17 11:07 pm
class, part 2.
Right, now that I've broken away from the Story of Rhi's People...I am here to tell you that my story is ONE story of the multitude of narratives of class in the US and the world.
Because class is an inextricable factor. It may be fluid, but whomever you are, wherever you go, you are put into a social class. And being disenfranchised in some way can affect that social class. Race...well, if any US American tries to tell me that there aren't fiscal and class implications surrounding race in the US, I will tell you that you didn't pay the fuck attention in US history lectures.
Again, a disclaimer: I am trying not to fuck this up, but if I do, please let me know. Also, this is highly influenced by the Class 202 panel at WisCon.
And now we get into the 'institutionalized racism' bit. I will confess that I am not very much of an academic, and so if I'm fucking up by my understanding this argument is coming from, please forgive and correct.
I personally feel it's impossible to take a look at the history of any major societal organization and say that issues of racism never played a part in their policies at any point in the past. It all builds up upon itself. And then it is very hard to eradicate the residual effects of a previous government-endorsed disenfranchisement of either an explicit or implicit sense. This has been shown worldwide, very explicitly in race, but also in gender and sexuality and disability. In the US, the legacy of policy is pretty damn explicit: we're still fighting like cats and dogs over gay marriage and abortion because some dudes two centuries ago thought it best to decentralize powers. And a lot of people feel that states' rights are paramount only because it's always been this way, they don't care about any legal precedent passed afterwards, or even really about the Constitution. Things are how they are, and people are scared of change.
So yeah, one can say that racism is one person acting to one person, and on one level, that is true. But at the same time, as a cultural studies geek, I have a very hard time believing that there is not a greater cultural mindset, an impression of things, that affects people in every possible way, including race relations.
Even without that: when the government and any other people at the top of a society are invested in maintaining a socioeconomic system that has old problematic legacies, and the privileged people in that society are invested in maintaining the status quo or trying to get ahead, how are the disenfranchised people supposed to do fuck all? The US is particularly culpable here, though it sure as hell is not alone. (Britain, I'm looking at you.)
Bear with me, I know this sounds basic, but I think sometimes we need the basics, stated over. and. over. again.
------
So when Assholes insist that it's all about class, that hurts me. It hurts me not only because it hurts people I care about, not only because I know in my gut and in my logical mind that that race (and other areas of disenfranchisement) plays into class on a very obvious level.
It also hurts me because it harms my ability to discuss the class narrative overall, which is what I thinkwrdnrd was saying. It hurts me because I see classism from an entirely different place, and painful stuff happening in regards to my experience, and a discussion of that being derailed by asswipes who insist that class is the overarching everything of disenfranchisement.
It's not, because for a start, that means that money is the only way of looking at worth. Secondly, it's just your pet subject. And you are doing it wrong.
And the truth is, the discussion of class fucking sucks, in any political arena. The trailer trash jokes and the redneck jokes. Amazed staring at people of any race who live in the alleged middle of nowhere or flyover state, either with pity or 'why don't they leave'. Comments like 'It's stupid how X always votes for Y when Y doesn't do any good for them fiscally, is it just because Y is [identity]?' The bullshit 'welfare queen' narrative. The fucking repulsive bootstraps bullshit, implying that just because class is a malleable identity, everyone has the same ability to get ahead.*
Those are a few tropes I can think of on the US American front alone. And we are all stuck in these or similar mindsets, privileging those with more money (preferably if they've 'earned it themselves' [which is BS too] or got it handed down), because money is the power in a capitalist environment.
Now, lest you think that this is solely devoted to criticisms of the right and libertarian, I point you to the Wonkette article on the Prescott, Arizona mural fail. I must have seen that linked on Twitter twenty times.
The core story? Wicked important. Please don't think I'm denying that.
But fucking hell, once the description of the story was done, the author(s) sat there and lumped every unemployed and working-class white person in that town into one big group, painted them with a big brush of Irrevocably Racist and called them 'trash', direct quote.
That's the sort of thing that's going on when we're all irrevocably entrenched in highly capitalist societies; there's this inherent belief that people without money must be slackers who are inherently bad people because they don't have the power. Or, alternately, that their lives must be tragic and romantic and beautiful.
It's happening on the left and on the right. And I expect better from everyone, myself included.
I don't have any suggestions, at the moment, just that we all think about it for a while.
* If it weren't midnight and I weren't running the hell out of spoons, I'd be getting intofuturansky's thought on how treating people of all classes equally doesn't help either, but if you're creative, you can see how that concept played into this post. Imagination!
------
As an aside, because I said I was going to talk about the recent fail, I will. If you haven't figured out how class plays into that after reading this post, then carry on.
Haiti: High levels of poverty, population almost exclusively people of color. We now have Two White American Guys bounding in to save the day, Angels Of Mercy To The Suffering Black People. That much is obvious and that much is honestly fucked up. But what are we subconsciously reading under that and not questioning?
Consider this: not only do we have these two white American dudes, they are privileged in yet another way. A doctor and a photojournalist, two upper-middle-class jobs, where you have the means to just bound off to Haiti without particular cares, the means to not worry too much about being queer, the means to keep yourself 'safe' while trying to do your work.
And they've come in, with all that baggage, to help the poor people of color. They CAN do that. And no one thinks about this in the context of the fic, this is just how it is for the narrative, waving the magic wand.
Then consider the glut of TV programs right now, worldwide, about rich people. Both the decadent and the ones who give away their money to 'the deserving'. Think about RTD writing Cassandra calling Rose Tyler a chav. Think about how The Wire stunned everybody because it showed a spectrum of ethics, both within a housing project of poor black people and working-class cops.
We need to talk about this. I just don't know how.
------
And there is so much more to say about disability and class, about gender and sexuality and class, about the current economic crisis, and how the center cannot hold when it comes to the current state of socioeconomic affairs, in every economy in the world, but I just don't have the spoons. It's nearly 1 am as I finish editing this, sorry.
If you're interested, though, here are some resources on classism compiled bywrdnrd.
Because class is an inextricable factor. It may be fluid, but whomever you are, wherever you go, you are put into a social class. And being disenfranchised in some way can affect that social class. Race...well, if any US American tries to tell me that there aren't fiscal and class implications surrounding race in the US, I will tell you that you didn't pay the fuck attention in US history lectures.
Again, a disclaimer: I am trying not to fuck this up, but if I do, please let me know. Also, this is highly influenced by the Class 202 panel at WisCon.
And now we get into the 'institutionalized racism' bit. I will confess that I am not very much of an academic, and so if I'm fucking up by my understanding this argument is coming from, please forgive and correct.
I personally feel it's impossible to take a look at the history of any major societal organization and say that issues of racism never played a part in their policies at any point in the past. It all builds up upon itself. And then it is very hard to eradicate the residual effects of a previous government-endorsed disenfranchisement of either an explicit or implicit sense. This has been shown worldwide, very explicitly in race, but also in gender and sexuality and disability. In the US, the legacy of policy is pretty damn explicit: we're still fighting like cats and dogs over gay marriage and abortion because some dudes two centuries ago thought it best to decentralize powers. And a lot of people feel that states' rights are paramount only because it's always been this way, they don't care about any legal precedent passed afterwards, or even really about the Constitution. Things are how they are, and people are scared of change.
So yeah, one can say that racism is one person acting to one person, and on one level, that is true. But at the same time, as a cultural studies geek, I have a very hard time believing that there is not a greater cultural mindset, an impression of things, that affects people in every possible way, including race relations.
Even without that: when the government and any other people at the top of a society are invested in maintaining a socioeconomic system that has old problematic legacies, and the privileged people in that society are invested in maintaining the status quo or trying to get ahead, how are the disenfranchised people supposed to do fuck all? The US is particularly culpable here, though it sure as hell is not alone. (Britain, I'm looking at you.)
Bear with me, I know this sounds basic, but I think sometimes we need the basics, stated over. and. over. again.
------
So when Assholes insist that it's all about class, that hurts me. It hurts me not only because it hurts people I care about, not only because I know in my gut and in my logical mind that that race (and other areas of disenfranchisement) plays into class on a very obvious level.
It also hurts me because it harms my ability to discuss the class narrative overall, which is what I think
wrdnrd was saying. It hurts me because I see classism from an entirely different place, and painful stuff happening in regards to my experience, and a discussion of that being derailed by asswipes who insist that class is the overarching everything of disenfranchisement.It's not, because for a start, that means that money is the only way of looking at worth. Secondly, it's just your pet subject. And you are doing it wrong.
And the truth is, the discussion of class fucking sucks, in any political arena. The trailer trash jokes and the redneck jokes. Amazed staring at people of any race who live in the alleged middle of nowhere or flyover state, either with pity or 'why don't they leave'. Comments like 'It's stupid how X always votes for Y when Y doesn't do any good for them fiscally, is it just because Y is [identity]?' The bullshit 'welfare queen' narrative. The fucking repulsive bootstraps bullshit, implying that just because class is a malleable identity, everyone has the same ability to get ahead.*
Those are a few tropes I can think of on the US American front alone. And we are all stuck in these or similar mindsets, privileging those with more money (preferably if they've 'earned it themselves' [which is BS too] or got it handed down), because money is the power in a capitalist environment.
Now, lest you think that this is solely devoted to criticisms of the right and libertarian, I point you to the Wonkette article on the Prescott, Arizona mural fail. I must have seen that linked on Twitter twenty times.
The core story? Wicked important. Please don't think I'm denying that.
But fucking hell, once the description of the story was done, the author(s) sat there and lumped every unemployed and working-class white person in that town into one big group, painted them with a big brush of Irrevocably Racist and called them 'trash', direct quote.
That's the sort of thing that's going on when we're all irrevocably entrenched in highly capitalist societies; there's this inherent belief that people without money must be slackers who are inherently bad people because they don't have the power. Or, alternately, that their lives must be tragic and romantic and beautiful.
It's happening on the left and on the right. And I expect better from everyone, myself included.
I don't have any suggestions, at the moment, just that we all think about it for a while.
* If it weren't midnight and I weren't running the hell out of spoons, I'd be getting into
futuransky's thought on how treating people of all classes equally doesn't help either, but if you're creative, you can see how that concept played into this post. Imagination!------
As an aside, because I said I was going to talk about the recent fail, I will. If you haven't figured out how class plays into that after reading this post, then carry on.
Haiti: High levels of poverty, population almost exclusively people of color. We now have Two White American Guys bounding in to save the day, Angels Of Mercy To The Suffering Black People. That much is obvious and that much is honestly fucked up. But what are we subconsciously reading under that and not questioning?
Consider this: not only do we have these two white American dudes, they are privileged in yet another way. A doctor and a photojournalist, two upper-middle-class jobs, where you have the means to just bound off to Haiti without particular cares, the means to not worry too much about being queer, the means to keep yourself 'safe' while trying to do your work.
And they've come in, with all that baggage, to help the poor people of color. They CAN do that. And no one thinks about this in the context of the fic, this is just how it is for the narrative, waving the magic wand.
Then consider the glut of TV programs right now, worldwide, about rich people. Both the decadent and the ones who give away their money to 'the deserving'. Think about RTD writing Cassandra calling Rose Tyler a chav. Think about how The Wire stunned everybody because it showed a spectrum of ethics, both within a housing project of poor black people and working-class cops.
We need to talk about this. I just don't know how.
------
And there is so much more to say about disability and class, about gender and sexuality and class, about the current economic crisis, and how the center cannot hold when it comes to the current state of socioeconomic affairs, in every economy in the world, but I just don't have the spoons. It's nearly 1 am as I finish editing this, sorry.
If you're interested, though, here are some resources on classism compiled by
wrdnrd.
no subject
Think about RTD writing Martha Jones calling Rose Tyler a chav.
- did you mean Cassandra, or am I being very dense and missing that this is a hypothetical situation rather than something that actually happened?
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
I mean, The Beverly Hillbillies, which is emblematic in US pop culture, takes that very issue as its major plot point. More recently, I think it's been touched on in Gossip Girl, The OC and the whole Real Housewives of [Place] phenomenon...
But it's not really explicitly delineated, really all implied, which could be part of the issue.
no subject
That fanworks might include these tropes and stereotypes is upsetting and distasteful but not particularly surprising, given that they're informed by the media, and the entertainment industry even now clings doggedly to its white superiority complex. Most people in the US, I think, go to films or watch television shows wherein the white savior swoops in and saves the day for the noble but childlike natives, and it never occurs to them that there is any problem with it because our entertainment is so incredibly rife with these same tropes; because all we see is white, all the time; because the people in Hollywood want to seem progressive, but Hollywood itself is little different now than it was fifty years ago.
Ultimately, I don't know what to do about it, either, aside from conscientiously and carefully educating the people around me as best I can from my inherently privileged position. Just in the past five years or so I've learned a tremendous amount about that privilege and how it affects myself and others, and most of that is owing to other people talking about it. So yeah, I also definitely agree that continuing a dialog is important.
no subject
I think you're doing the right thing, that education is ideal. And I think dialoguing is really, really important too, thus all the massive piles of meta that I've been writing of late. (I could probably do a whole post on where concept-known-as-institutionalized-racism plays into the media industry and thus how everything's a little bit wrong.) Which probably bugs the shit out of some people reading my LJ, but I cannot be bothered, yo.
Because the truth is that awareness is key. It's okay to enjoy things that are problematic, in certain ways. But ignoring it just makes it fester.