Why there is no such thing as reverse racism

I came across a good article explaining the difference between discrimination and racism and wanted to share. The entire article can be found here and I encourage you to read the entire article, but I would like to highlight the following definitions:

Prejudice is an irrational feeling of dislike for a person or group of persons, usually based on stereotype. Virtually everyone feels some sort of prejudice, whether it's for an ethnic group, or for a religious group, or for a type of person like blondes or fat people or tall people. The important thing is they just don't like them -- in short, prejudice is a feeling, a belief. You can be prejudiced, but still be a fair person if you're careful not to act on your irrational dislike.

Discrimination takes place the moment a person acts on prejudice. This describes those moments when one individual decides not to give another individual a job because of, say, their race or their religious orientation. Or even because of their looks (there's a lot of hiring discrimination against "unattractive" women, for example). You can discriminate, individually, against any person or group, if you're in a position of power over the person you want to discriminate against. White people can discriminate against black people, and black people can discriminate against white people if, for example, one is the interviewer and the other is the person being interviewed.

Racism, however, describes patterns of discrimination that are institutionalized as "normal" throughout an entire culture. It's based on an ideological belief that one "race" is somehow better than another "race". It's not one person discriminating at this point, but a whole population operating in a social structure that actually makes it difficult for a person not to discriminate.

Too often, I hear of people in positions of privilege claim reverse racism when they get discriminated against. But what is an isolated act of discrimination by individuals does NOT amount to an entire institutionalization of that discrimination, which is what racism is. In the US and Australia, it is still far to easy to name all the ways racism is built into the system (voting rights, policing of ethnic minorities, job interviews, etc). Reverse racism is not real - white people still have as much privilege as ever (just look at how many cases against affirmative action there have been in the US) and if anyone tries to use it as an excuse for anything, it needs to get called out.

In Response to The Gravity of the Uninitiated

In response to Bubbler's post "The Gravity of the Uninitiated"




You've written:
"The root of the problem here (and source of the symptom) is that a label [such as the words 'gay' or 'queer'] that is watered down becomes a becalmed idea."
I actually see a different root of the problem: In that some people experience the inclusion of multivariant definitions to a word or an identity-label as a 'watering down,' and others experience this inclusion as coalitionary, empowering, and nourishing.

And once again, we don't have to 'pick one'. Inclusion can be both a 'watering down' AND a 'liberation', depending on a whole host of factors, such as context, and even how we simply happen to be feeling that day (and indeed, perhaps any pre-existing relationships we may have with anyone in the room).

You've also written:"I fully acknowledge and revel in the incredible passion and warmth of a discussion like this - there's this hope to be inclusive, to move as one, which I find attractive."

And I would also like to acknowledge that we share in this attraction to a politics of inclusion (of diverse manifestations of 'queerness'), one which can and did involve incredible passion and warmth.




and you continue with:
"But there's also this sense of breathlessness - something encountered in art galleries where the blurb on the side of an art piece acquires this almost hysterical academic voice to validate itself and its own interpretation."




Well:
At the risk of re-inscribing any degree of condescension: This stuff is hard.

Like you, I was pretty uncomfortable with some of how the evening went. More accurately, I felt annoyed and upset. I was rather confronted by some of the roles that I saw us all falling into: Exasperated "Educators", the defensive "Uninitiated", some desperate "Pastoral" attempts at integration, bringing it back, centering, humble reminders of our common humanity...




More personally:
One of the ways that I have come into my own political consciousness (rightly or wrongly) is through an "academic voice", which I think you correctly point out can and does sometimes lead to a vanguardism which, in its own way, becomes a hindrance to the inclusion and emancipation that we are all (at least in theory) committed to.

You make an important, emotive point here about the importance of keeping knowledge accessible, rather than available only to the ranks of the initiated.

That said: Language is always simultaneously, and paradoxically, inclusive and exclusive: It includes those who speak it, who learn it, who feel liberated by what its parameters paradoxically enable, and excludes those who do not speak it, cannot speak it, do not want to or cannot learn it (either from lack of access or from righteous indignation), and who thus may experience neither its full limitations nor its transformative liberations.

On one level:
Part of what's involved in doing this anti-oppression work is precisely that our preconceived ways of knowing or understanding the world along the lines of race, nationality, ethnicity, spirituality, gender, sex and sexuality (and so on) are completely and utterly broken open.

Also, a la Alika's poem in "Pariah" -->
"Heartbreak opens onto the sunrise 

for even breaking is opening 

and I am broken, 

I am open. 

Broken into the new life without pushing in, 

open to the possibilities within, 

pushing out. 

See the love shine in through my cracks? 

See the light shine out through me? 

I am broken, 

I am open, 

I am broken open. 

See the love light shining through me, 

shining through my cracks, 

through the gaps. 

My spirit takes journey, 

my spirit takes flight, 

could not have risen otherwise and 

I am not running, 

I am choosing. 

Running is not a choice from the breaking. 

Breaking is freeing, 

broken is freedom. 

I am not broken, 

I am free. "

Brokenness is Freedom. And in this, we are Free...
And, as I tried to express during film night, this freedom is not always pleasant...

What are the alternatives?
All of us have been so broken, at various points in our lives, around any number of diverse, sometimes all-consuming issues.
And all of us have yet to be broken, still, further.
And in this brokenness, we may derive new languages, new ways of being with one another.

All of us, in a sense, have to be fully 'Uninitiated', from all that we have known, and indeed even all we have yet to know, before we can see that wellspring of true liberation, beyond all language: That shines through the cracks. Deconstruction does not only end in rubble...

May we all be Beginners with one another.

Pariah Postcard

The exercise was to pick a post card / something graphic to represent what the trailer of Pariah had impressed on you before heading to the screening of 'Pariah'.

I chose this card because it reminded me of something my lesbian neighbour from the apartment down the corridor once said. The Melbourne Queer Film Festival was coming up at that point and I suggested that we head to see some shows together. And she was like, 'Nooo, aboslutely not. Purely Lesbian shows are spaces that should be kept for lesbians and women they want to sleep with. It gives us a space to project ourselves and what we want to be, how we want to be seen on ourselves and our community - or at least one person's perspective'. And I thought that was rather fair. I've actually only seen (by my count) 3 lesbian shows: Boys Don't Cry and The Colour Purple.

However, at the end of the show, during the discussion, I was told that The Colour Purple had homoerotic tones but was not really a lesbian show. Oh. Okay, that was a pity. Because I thought it was so empowering in my mind. But I could see how I had been misguided, and in truth, I like seeing it more broadly because it ended up being an incredible story about Black Women.

The second observation was lost on me. Someone mentioned that Boys Don't Cry was not really a lesbian show because the main character identified as male. It was more about transexuals. I was like... erm. I don't really agree (well, I didn't say it out loud because after the previous post, I thought this would open up another hideous can of worms on defining terms). The main character in Pariah undergoes this transformation in her school toilets, in buses - changing the way she looks to please her mother even though she doesn't want to wear the earrings, prefers a look that is more androgynous. She wears a strap on dildo to the club and the show was, in my interpretation, one of boi-culture. So that distinction made between Boys Don't Cry and this was lost on me. Is it because in Boys Don't Cry, Hilary Swank 'passed' for a male and was only discovered to be a girl later on? I dunno. Probably.Or maybe it's a reverse projection that we do on the movie.

What I've always struggled with was the violence in the 3 shows I've now watched. I thought Boys Don't Cry was incredibly violent. And so was the Colour Purple. And the violence in Pariah was very painful to watch.

The Gravity of the Uninitiated

Gravity - Sara Bareilles


-- -- -- --
We watched 'Pariah' as a group last night and I found the conversation that followed rather instructive and I wish to record here or to chart this initial resistance I'm having to engagement on this very theoretical level with my one sexuality and thoughts of my community. I'm not sure how I'll evolve from here, but I think this is a great place to start.

The scenario:

At one point in the discussion, it was raised that the director was deft in presenting a film about African- American Lesbians (and the 'Boi' culture), and that it was robust and complete without having to reference any non-Black characters or to fall into the many of the stereotypes. My previous post about me finding the label 'People of Colour' very referential and reactive to a Non-coloured state was brought into the discussion and it was mentioned that I struggled to identify with that label.

And so I mentioned that for me, labels needed to mean something on its own, to define and to create a connection between those identified. And for me, a label loses its usefulness in dialogue if it is diluted or its meaning was not shared (the connectivity bit). I raised the example of being 'Queer'. My understanding of the label 'Queer' is that it is a gender-neutral term that defined primarily gays and lesbians, which could be inclusive of transgendered people who may have heterosexual orientations (should they choose) because of its gender-neutral quality. I think it would be hard to be gay or lesbian without being Queer... or at least, if one can be a gay or lesbian without being queer, it escapes my current level of comprehension. 

To be honest, I didn't think that non-transgendered people who were in heterosexual relationships would fall under the term 'Queer'. And if you shared my thinking, you would have found yourself in very much the same position I was in. I was corrected last night: you can be queer and in a heterosexual relationship and non-transgendered. But that for me did not capture what I perceived as my community and who I wanted to connect with when I used the word 'Queer'.

The Uninitiated?

I was certainly confused. So I expressed that I was uncomfortable with how broadly Queerness was being defined: to me, such an act would dilute meaning or to bring about a level of confusion wherein meaning would be suspect. And if the terms of reference aren't certain, dialogue becomes exponentially difficult. That's not to say that people don't have the right to label themselves or to have their own identities defined / created they want it to be created, but if uncertain, the construction of umbrella identities and the call to connect (for that really is the point of a label) becomes... problematic.

The conversation shifted and I was surprised that what was picked up on was not so much the idea of identity needing sufficient certainty to anchor it, whether it is in a label that exists in the mind or in transit/communication. The leap was to my discomfort and how being uncomfortable with an uncomfortable thought was something to be embraced. This progressed to a sharing about discovering attraction with someone who didn't fit within the scope / focus of one's sexuality - which I found in its proximity to issue I was raising to be a bit condescending. I understand that people who are highly skilled and educated in talking about queerness would also, at times, be uncomfortable and embrace discomfort when talking about queerness, or examining their own theory / self-imposed labels. But to me, that's just picking up the symptom of the problem and trying to resolve it with a salve. Yes, I do understand the need to stretch one's understanding of what labels one puts on oneself... that being gay might not prevent you from falling in love with a trans-man. But that's not my point. The root of the problem here (and source of the symptom) is that a label that is watered down becomes a becalmed idea.

On one level, I fully acknowledge and revel in the incredible passion and warmth of a discussion like this - there's this hope to be inclusive, to move as one, which I find attractive. But there's also this sense of breathlessness - something encountered in art galleries where the blurb on the side of an art piece acquires this almost hysterical academic voice to validate itself and its own interpretation. And I don't think that's very helpful in the situation. 

One thing that struck me was a comment made earlier in the night: a member of the group shared about joining a 'Queer Space' / discussion group for the first time, and their initial feeling was one of intimidation - that one was ignorant and didn't know enough about the vocabulary of queerness to participate. And that for me is scary, because then we as community lose accessibility, and everything is an interrogation. And while there is room for it, ultimately, if someone who doesn't share your vocabulary is forced to only talk to you on your own terms, or is made to play this defensive role in an interrogation... how will this be fertile ground for understanding? I'm gay and I feel this way - how will a straight person navigate this minefield of charged 'words'.

The conversation reached a point of clarity for me when the term 'common humanity' was finally used (about connecting with people at our level of 'common humanity' and moving to a place where you could engage meaningfully with someone).... which for me sounded a lot like: let's let go of the labels and the theory because it's becoming a barrier to our conversation. And I heartily agreed.

Where I'm at: 

I dunno. It surprised me about how easy it was to go awry - given this was the second meeting. Perhaps there is a gravity to being uninitiated that keeps me rooted to my own frame of reference. Or that the discussion is far too grave for one without training to engage lightly in. I wonder if this sensitivity (or, I would suggest, oversensitivity), or penchant for interrogation, has been rewarded by a plethora of gay-interest sites (I'm talking solely as a gay man here) that focus on the very 'common humanity' level of flashing up sexy male pictures in the mould of Eating Out no. 24,780. It's a lot easier to roll around at that particular level where you're not under a microscope for all your opinions because who is going to really analyse your opinion of 'He's hot!' or 'He's not!'. oh wait. no. you might still be expressing some form of internalised racism.

Foiled again.

What's clear, even though I've engaged with my community in various capacities for over a decade and a half without great calamity: within this group, a lack of education in this field (whether willed or by default) requires me to walk around with a sign 'Warning: Unitiated'.

Pigment

Image source: here.

I found it fascinating that I had such a huge reaction to the acronym 'QPOC'. It stands for 'Queer People of Colour', and it's roughly pronounced 'Kew Pok'. I spoke to one of my classmates from Connecticut yesterday about how I find the term incredibly stilted, and he mentioned how he struggled with it as well (he's white). Apparently in the U.S., the term 'Coloured People' was considered racist, and so they changed it to 'People of Colour'. I'm not sure how accurate that statement is, but for a person what wasn't grafted into the American way of life, or was born there, 'POC' doesn't bring with it the spirit of empowerment that it probably delivers to some others. And that's even with my solid dose of American tv growing up.

I think the clearest time I saw myself as 'yellow' was when I was 19, in the unisex bathroom of University College, brushing my teeth in the morning next to Ian. We were both topless and there was a distinctly yellow tone to my skin. And I remember thinking... wow. I *AM* yellow. And then my next thought was: waitaminute, when I was young, my sister was born with neonatal jaundice, and my dad told me she was so yellow because she had urine circulating through her body (I think he meant 'bilirubin' but that was probably too difficult a concept to explain to a child). So for a brief moment, the thought did cross my mind as I was brushing my teeth: do Asians carry a higher content of pee than our caucasian counterparts, and does it circulate around our system... can we pee longer, and pee further? It was a tragic train of thought (in hindsight), but eventually, I figured I really needed to know: Why does our skin carry golden tones? (see what I just did) I'm still not sure, but apparently, it's either the amount / percentage of fat we carry (fat, I'm told, is yellow) - we keep more around our eyes and body because we evolved to live survive in the cold; or we have more ceratone in our skin (the same thing that makes eggs yellow and carrots orange), and that higher ceratone content sits in our fat layer under our skin. I'm sure somewhere out there in internet-land, some very knowledgeable dermatologist is screaming and pulling out tufts of her hair. I apologise. But I'm now note really interested in knowing the real reason.

The reason I struggle with the term is this: why define yourself in reference to the colour of your skin? It's so strange. That's how other people define you.


If you grew up in Asia where everyone is predominantly 'coloured', it's not quite something you think of. Where I grew up, the spectrum of colours were wonderful and varied: kids of expatriates (Scandinavian, American, German etc); incredibly close Malay friends; loved my weekly dose of prata from the Indian man at Clementi; and even among the Chinese, our skin tones just go all the way from really fair to pretty dark. But if I'm mobilising or trying to talk about the issues of my community - and in this, I am talking about ethnicity and race and perhaps the larger Big Asia concept, why do it on the basis of our skin colour? It's so... prescriptive and obvious. Like calling men 'People with Penises'. Yes, it's accurate, but unless it's loaded with historical significance for you, it becomes very artificial. Actually, why not 'People with colour'? It makes it sound much more like an attribute rather than the identity itself. Oh... but I suppose QPWC would be a bit hideous to pronounce.

The interesting thing about our discussions last Saturday was that Shinen mentioned he was told he wasn't a person of colour when he was first in the U.S. And that changed somewhat later. And while people who have more than a certain level of ceratone in their skin are all subject to varying forms of discrimination, I suspect the Asian perspective is distinct from the other two groups within the label of POCs. Still, I hope that Asian voters were part of the incredible change that happened in the US recently. One striking observation made from the results of the recent election is this idea of Black and Hispanic voters now reaching a critical mass to be heard and that the Republican party needed to throw off its 'Grand Old Party' tag to become more inclusive and less extreme. And maybe in this case, the term People of Colour is something to be embraced. But in Australia, I'm not sure if our political warfronts are drawn in the same way. I would feel somewhat uncomfortable aligning myself with People of Colour against People of Non-Colour on election issues. As a side note, my secondary school teacher would balk at the use of 'Colour' to describe Black (which he called a shade) - but that's just art I guess.

I've bonded with people over Cartoons we watched as kids, our complete confusion and blinding fear-terror-fear of Heidegger, a love for the collection of the Ian Potter Museum, and a common apathy towards exercise. But I've never gone, OMG, you've obviously got a certain percentage of ceratone in your skin, we have SO much in common, we have all this dialogue we need to get into. That's not to say people who look a certain way aren't made to feel a certain way about themselves. And to pretend that skin colour doesn't matter is, perhaps, a little naive. But skin colour doesn't define a culture, and I probably have more in common with someone of a different skin tone (brown, blue, white, fuchsia) who grew up reading similar books to me, watching the same movies, had parents in similar occupations, travelled to certain places than I would because we share the same skin tone. And I think this difference becomes very obvious when you get enough critical mass in, say, an Asian community. Very quickly, it fractures into groups based on language spoken at home, food preferences, dress sense, earning capacity etc. So my hope is that while this group continues to be in contact with, and a part of the QPOC movement, I don't want to be defined by it. I'd like this to be a colouring book because it represents this idea that, yes, we're going to be talking about colour, people of colour, but that it's open, and blank enough to embrace anyone regardless of how they're defining themselves... and that the issues and the dialogue and the comments are sufficient enough to paint urgency, completeness and a vivid picture of what it means to be us: this complex beast of people with differing needs and identities, living and wanting to share the same page.

Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia

Eight years ago, in 2004, when I was 19 (almost 20), I read this book:

Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (Duke University Press Books, 2003)

and wrote a review about it on amazon.com (I gave it 4 stars)

Given that the book's gamut of editors and contributors are mostly Melbourne-based, I figured it would be good to revisit this work by re-publicising it here... I haven't read the book since 2003, but here is a repost of my old amazon.com review, verbatim...






"Extremely Comprehensive, August 7, 2004

The most enlightening thing that this book has done for me was to get me to recognise how the term "Queer" can be just as hegemonic and oppressive as compulsory heterosexuality. The essays written about queer sexualities in Asia reveal an even more complex understanding of the workings of human sexuality than Western Queer discourse would be inclined to argue for.

As we enter an age of a new colonialism with the spread of Western culturally subversive attitudes and ideologies through various forms of mass media such as the internet, magazines and television, sexuality in Asia is changing its shape in response. I loved Tom Boellstroff's essay "I Knew It Was Me: Mass Media, "Globalization," and Lesbian and Gay Indonesians," on the 'gay' and 'lesbi' communities in Asia that came to occupy their subject-positions through an appropriation of the English terms 'Gay' and 'Lesbian' within the Indonesian cultural context, with a different set of definitions.

The essays on Japan were extremely thought provoking for me, as they bring up discussions on Japanese women's "Yaoi" (homoerotic boy-love stories and depictions), "Nyuhafu" (the Japanese transgendered, who occupy unique socio-economic positions in Japanese culture), the aesthetics of Japanese fiction when viewed and commodified by the Western gaze, "Kawaii" (or 'cute') as a possible form of subversive female identity by the masochistic embrace of child-like femininity to the extreme, and the adoption of a Japanese aesthetic in order to make an extreme genderqueer porn by Taiwanese-American filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang.

I enjoyed the essays on Singapore and Malaysia as well, having come from the region myself, as they discuss a unique embrace of a new hegemonic "Asian values" as a defensive response to the growing cosmopolitanism of the country which those in power feel brings in countercultural Western sexual values.

My only disappointment was the essay "Syncretism and Synchronicity: Queer'n'Asian Cyberspace in 1990s Taiwan and Korea" by Chris Berry and Fran Martin, because of the fact that it was primarily a list of statistics to showcase broad points, when in fact the actual number of people covered in these statistics was too small to make any generalised comment on the queerscape of these two very different countries. It became less of a comparison of these two nations more than it became a tedious and unsuccessful attempt at compare and contrast.

All in all, however, it is an incredible read, and a very well-researched book that I had difficulty putting down once I picked it up."

Incidentally, some of the editors of Mobile Cultures also edited the 2008

AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Gender and Sexuality
(Illinois University Press, 2008)

Here is a blurb from Hares & Hyenas describing this book:

"A multidisciplinary, multicultural reassessment of gender and sexuality in the Asian Pacific
This interdisciplinary collection examines the shaping of local sexual cultures in the Asian Pacific region in order to move beyond definitions and understandings of sexuality that rely on Western assumptions. The diverse studies in AsiaPacifiQueerdemonstrate convincingly that in the realm of sexualities, globalization results in creative and cultural admixture rather than a unilateral imposition of the western values and forms of sexual culture. These essays range across the Pacific Rim and encompass a variety of forms of social, cultural, and personal expression, examining sexuality through music, cinema, the media, shifts in popular rhetoric, comics and magazines, and historical studies. By investigating complex processes of localization, interregional borrowing, and hybridization, the contributors underscore the mutual transformation of gender and sexuality in both Asian Pacific and Western cultures. "

Could be worth exploring (I haven't read it... (yet?)) in a later post... 

:)

One of the most powerful images I've seen in a while

One of the most powerful images I've seen in a while. Dwayne Booth (who illustrates under the name Mr. Fish) came up with this graphic to accompany the truthdig article on 'the War on Gays' by Chris Hedges. Hedges believes that even as the queer community progresses in our rights in the cities, we've left behind our peers in rural areas who are finding it harder and harder.

In America, the refusal to acknowledge class struggle has led to a 'spreading of hate' and what Hedges calls an 'empowering [of] the increasingly potent culture of hate'. It's particularly telling that President Obama, in accepting the nomination, observed '[b]ut we don't think that government is the source of all our problems – any more than are welfare recipients, or corporations, or unions, or immigrants, or gays, or any other group we're told to blame for our troubles.' Even as America counts its votes today, I think it's worth pausing to reflect on how powerful a statement that is.

What perhaps is interesting about this emergent culture of hate is that it permeates even the communities that have traditionally been victimised by it. As Queer Asians we understand a little of this, we experience as Asians who are Gay and Gays who are Asians... and I feel the antidote here is exactly what Miyuki is looking at: visibility. It's about putting a face and voice to humanise and grow identity in the minds of our multiple communities. What was striking about the Tyler Clementi suicide was that the people involved were Asian. I feel really let down that my community would do these things. Such utter shame. Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei. Gaysians around should've been particularly vocal about denouncing this kind of behaviour.

The Truthdig article is worth reading. Click here.