Mad Dogs and Englishmen

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So I kind of feel like I’m being asked to give permission for something here, which makes me feel sort of weird? Apologies if that’s not what you intended, anon, but I’m not sure why anyone needs to steer into these sorts of tropes, whether or not they’re still recognizable.

But here’s a personal anecdote: in high school, my friends and I thought the song “What Makes the Red Man Red” from Disney’s Peter Pan was really funny, because HOO BOY is it racist, but like, all of those stereotypes are really old and dated and surely no one thinks that way anymore, right?

A few years later, in college, I met my now-best friend, and at some point that song came up, and I said I thought it was funny, and she actually got really, rightfully pissed at me. Because as a teenager who didn’t actually know any indigenous people, I thought that sort of racism was a thing of the past, but she was better informed, and knew that it still existed and was still actively harming people (and yet more years later, still is).

I don’t think that song’s funny anymore.

See, the way a lot of stereotypes work - a way that they survive - is by seeming ridiculous to people who don’t have any skin in the game. If someone starts talking about the secret conspiracy of lizard people who control the banks, you might have a good laugh because it’s so ridiculous…but it’s a coded antisemitic dog whistle. It doesn’t matter if you know what it means. It’s what the bigots use to talk to each other, and to hurt the people it refers to.

Blood libel, for example - the belief that Jews drink the blood of Christian babies and/or use it to flavor matzoh (ridiculous, matzoh is not “flavored” in any possible sense of the word, it is sad cardboard) - is a very, very old stereotype and most people know that it’s complete hateful nonsense…but it has also morphed into a QAnon theory that is topping Amazon bestseller lists. That book isn’t targeting a Jewish person, but it’s referencing blood libel to stir up paranoia and hatred. Because even after the non-bigoted goyim forget the stereotype, even after the Jews forget the stereotype, the bigots remember. And it’s how they say “Hey, wink wink nudge nudge, I’m one of you, they’re out to get us, let’s go shoot up a synagogue/school/pizza parlor.”

And they morph into less extreme versions, too. You (the general You, not you specifically, anon) may not believe that Jews are lizard people who control the banks, but do you, deep down, think of them as greedy, or universally rich? Do you just kind of feel like black people are more dangerous or Asian people are more submissive or Muslim people aren’t really American/British/whatever? Because these stereotypes manifest in extreme versions but also really hard to perceive subtextual ways, embedded throughout our culture, and the only way to combat their effect is to see them for what they are. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really permit allowing them to lapse. (See also: Tr*mp’s referring to Chuck Schumer as “sleepy-eyed,” a very dated antisemitic stereotype that was very very clear to his base.)

So yeah, to your specific example, I don’t think the “Jews are redheads” thing has much traction anymore…but I don’t hang out in neo-Nazi circles. What I know from what I’ve seen, and the mistakes I’ve made, is that just because you think a stereotype is so ridiculous it couldn’t possibly be true, doesn’t mean that there isn’t someone out there still wielding it as a weapon. Personally, I’d rather not take the risk.

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buildarocketboys:

miseriathome:

There’s this notion that I keep seeing that privileged people benefit from oppression of another class, and it’s an idea I never saw when I first started learning sociological theory.

Back in like 2012, tumblr was all about including men in feminism and talking about how feminism would benefit everybody because it would do away with homophobia/homoantagonism and toxic masculinity, etc.

Like… to say that privileged groups (if not individuals) actively benefit from oppression is to erase the performative aspect of privilege; entry to privilege is determined by the privileged (see: Straight determines Straight) and if you deviate Too Much from their expectations, they revoke your right to reap the benefits of membership.

For example, despite all the campaigns about how Real Men Cry or whatever, the prevailing cognitive understanding that society holds is that crying is not masculine, and men who cry are shameful. This is sets a very hard limit on the emotions that a man is capable of showing, which is absolutely a kind of marginalization (but not inherently oppression).

To put it another way, if a cis man wears a dress, would he not face tangible violence from society at large regardless of what he claims his gender is? Is it the same as systemic legal disenfranchisement? Of course not. But a cis man in a dress has less social power than a cis man following social norms. And that power difference is rooted in transphobia/transantagonism. Whether or not it necessarily is the same experience is debatable, but transphobia/transantagonism is inexorably linked to rigid gender roles and toxic masculinity and homophobia/misogyny and other systems that actively hurt both oppressed and privileged classes.

Orientation-wise, people have discussed how coercive heterocentricism can negatively impact people who have never thought about their own orientations before, regardless of if they would turn out straight in the end anyway.

Even aside from gender and orientation, does anyone really benefit from ableism? A student experiencing one-off anxiety will likely not receive any more accommodation than somebody with an anxiety disorder with no legal documentation of it. How often do able-bodied people feel awkward about using the elevator? And how many often do disabled folks feel similarly awkward about how soon it’ll be before somebody makes them justify their right to use accessibility features? Again, abled people are not systemically disenfranchised and stigmatized, but both classes would benefit from a world where nobody gatekeeps disability or bats an eye at accommodations.

The problem with the Us vs Them model of privilege and oppression is that it seeks to create new power structures alongside the existing ones, instead of dismantling the entire notion of power itself. If you let people do what they need to do (whether it’s using the elevator or wearing a dress) without trying to retroactively judge the validity of their experiences, then everybody gets an equal playing field to be themselves freely and openly. After all, the number of elevators (ie resources) that exist in a space should be determined by usage statistics, and not by some statistic of how many disabled people there are present.

Exclusive labels will always leave out a grey population or fringe groups of marginalization.  Everybody oppresses each other and that’s a fact of life and intersectionality. What needs to happen is an abolishment of the systems that keep everyone down; true revolution means aligning not through labels but through ideologies. Even Marx said that when the time comes to overthrow capitalism, some bourgeoisie will align themselves with the revolution. Disability and gender are social constructs that exist because people in power say they do, but those people in power would benefit more in the end from saying they don’t.

@birobotic I know you were talking about this wrt men a little while ago

Something that always comes to mind when I read this is what happened to my stepfather. He is white, and grew up in South Africa during Apartheid. He told me stories about this and it is, as far as I can make out, a story about coercive whiteness. 

See, in SA at the time it wasn’t enough to be white. You had to be a particular kind of white. You had to hang around with the right people, have the right interests, even down to the right haircuts. 

And this to my terminally hippie, long haired, pot smoking stepdad who spent most of his time in black neighbourhoods.

He got the crap beat out of him by the police.

Repeatedly.

This was nothing new, of course, to what his black friends faced and they got beat up right along with him, but it highlights privilege in a very stark way. My stepdad had the privilege of not having to be beat up. he could have cut off his black friends, stayed in the white neighbourhoods, given up art and cut his hair. He could have done these things a hell of a lot easier than his friends could have changed their skin colour.

It doesn’t change the fact that this still sucked massive amounts of anus and I’m not surprised my stepdad got the hell out of there the moment he was 18.

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It was one of the first Vietnam war movies I saw. It was hilariously funny, and I always enjoyed watching the wonderful Robin Williams (sniff) doing his awesome stand up comedy routines about the Cold War.

That being said, even I had to admit that the framing narrative around the comedy routines was a bit… lacking. Oh, it was clearly well intentioned, determined to show the consequences of the war on the Vietnamese population and refusing to make this a stand up war movie. Which was great, except it tackled these concepts with all the subtlety of a rampaging bull with an anvil strapped to its tail. Watching the movie was an interesting exercise in vacillating between laughing your head off and wincing in embarrassment.

So husband and I decided that, since we were going to Vietnam (I am writing this in Hue right now) we would remedy my sad deficit of good Vietnam War movies (the only other I’d seen was Apocalypse Now) and I looked forward to seeing a more nuanced and interesting picture of the war from a Vietnamese perspective.

Well. If you’ve seen any Vietnam War movies, you can guess how well that turned out.

It was about at that point in Platoon where random white POV character says “We did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves” that I started feeling really fucking insulted on the behalf of the people of Vietnam because what the fuck was the Viet Cong and ANV then? Chopped fucking liver?

Turns out, Good Morning Vietnam was the only Vietnam War movie that even recognised there were people in Vietnam other than Americans, and these people didn’t have names like ‘one legged man’ or ‘woman in village.’

And this pissed me the fuck off because besides being racist as all fuck, telling the Vietnam war from a Vietnamese perspective would make a really really fucking good movie.

I mean, I went on a tour today around the DMZ, with a guide who had been around at the time and could remember the war and what came to me again and again was-

These were people fighting a massively technologically advanced enemy, who was waging war not only against their people but against the whole world around them- poisoning the ground, burning down forests, using immense amounts of hardware they couldn’t dream to match in a direct fight and which could just annihilate everything in their path.

Where have I heard this story before?

I’ve just described the plot to HG Well’s War of the Worlds.

So yeah, fuck Joseph Conrad’s raving racism, the real turn of the century novel-to-Vietnamese war movie is War of the Worlds written from the POV of someone in Da Nang or something when the Americans more in. 

It works on just every level. No one knows if the invaders are going to be good or bad, check. Massive destruction on an unimaginable scale, check. People living underground to escape the machines of death, check. Envrionmental annihilation, check.

And the ending of the novel - slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth - doesn’t refer to bacteria, but rather the sheer arrogance of the American military in thinking the Vietnamese were weak and pathetic and easily conquered. Check mothafucking check.

So fuck Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket, and Apocalypse Now, and even Good Morning Vietnam. 

What we need is a War of the Worlds Vietnam movie.