Race- Privilege, Relations, Racism, etc.

By the way, is the note in the Africa page comparing Southern Africa to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa accurate?

Edited by CookingCat on Sep 2nd 2018 at 9:09:11 AM

Ah so we got something interesting: The Wall Street Journal is reporting Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has overruled or personally weighed in on last second decisions regarding controversial accounts including the accounts of Alex Jones and Richard Spencer.

I’m not surprised. The platform is such a garbage fire when it comes to preventing violent sexist harassment and racist harassment, this seems consistent.

Nobody answered my question above?

So was he prevented more action or the opposite?

I don't think any of us knows.

It's... not exactly clear-cut. If you look at this table, South Africa, Botswana and Namibia rank near the top, but there are a bunch of other sub-Saharan countries there too. Being "culturally Western" isn't defined by a clear metric either, except if you measure it by the number of citizens of European descent. I mean, the cultural transfer is dynamic and goes both ways - France, for instance, has been taking in migrants from its former colonies for a few generations now, and their fashion, music and overall culture have integrated into the society - so does that make their ancestral lands more "Western", now that "Western" culture itself has assimilated substantial African influences?

Same thing with the Caribbean, which is usually considered "Western" but has a lot of West African and Indian influences.

Edited by CookingCat on Sep 3rd 2018 at 7:07:45 AM

Fox gets put on blast for their running a classist and racist story on Geoffrey Owens and African American former actor and cast alumni of The Cosby Show

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-shaming-of-geoffrey-owens-and-the-inability-to-see-actors-as-laborers-too

We would have to define first what is strictly “Western” and “African” before we can make an evaluation on that.

In my opinion, since “Western” doesn’t limit itself to continental boundaries (the American continent, Phillipines and Oceania are proof of that) there is a higher likelihood that “Western” can assimilate “African” influences without losing its basic tenants.

If we were to argue on “French” and “African” on the other hand, that’s another discussion.

So, something's happening and I know it's a pretty niche topic for this thread, buuut I think I need a moment to get this off my chest. Apologies for the TL;DR-less rambling.

My swing dancing instructors are organising a pretty major event this October, and one of the people they're bringing in to teach is Ksenia Parkhatskaya, a Russian dancer who's been a fairly divisive figure within the community for the past seven years or so. First things first: she's damned good at what she does. But she's also taken criticism for a string of performances in... ugh... blackface and body paint, and for a Facebook post she made◊ about getting her hair tressed in Senegal.

So... yeah, talk about that awkward moment when someone whose work you admired turns out to have built their resume on some hella racially insensitive stuff. If it's not straight-up, Get Out!-style profiteering off black bodies, that is.

She has since taken down the offending videos, posted apologies and expressed her admiration for African-American folk culture (aaargh why did I bring up Get Out!). And she hasn't really engaged in another instance of blackface since 2013, the hair incident notwithstanding.^note It later emerged that a Senegalese dancer/hairdresser offered to do it for her, and it caused no trouble in the country. The latter has earned her suspicion of whether her stated commitment to cultural awareness was genuine, and some African-American dancers I've talked to online thought that the wider community should cut her off for the repeat offence. Others thought that as a Russian, she shouldn't be judged by American standards of cultural awareness. Personally, I think that we ought to be supportive of people who are trying to improve themselves. That doesn't make what she did okay, and I find it even more troubling that there are members of the community who saw no problem and thought that she shouldn't have been pressured to change.

I guess that we in the swing dancing community will never get to leave the baggage of cultural appropriation behind. After all, it's a historically African-American art form that was recently revived by white hobbyists (albeit with the help of its surviving pioneers) and then spread around the world just like it did in the Roaring Twenties. It's a diverse, fairly tight community - all the instructors go to the same competitions and camps.^note Those of you who follow Lindybeige might have heard of the Herräng camp in Sweden, for starters. Last year we had a major #MeToo moment involving several big-name dancers, and when a senior French instructor that my instructors had worked with was outed as a Weinstein-tier predator, they were very quick to condemn him and organise a talk on the community's sexual harassment issue.

But that was a pretty clear-cut case. We knew who the monsters were. Race issues are different. We're all engaged in some degree of appropriation. My community is Asian (with a decent number of exchange students and expats), and though we get occasional talks on the whole African-American heritage thing from visiting dancers, we're always a few steps removed from the issue.^note I'll be honest and say that I don't actually know any African-American people outside of online communities. Sudanese and Somali-Australians, yes. Professional expats from the continent, yes. Folks from the cultural sphere that gave birth to this thing, nope. We've always had kids who adopt gangsta aesthetics on social media and throw around that word like it's funny. Some of it is casual anti-black racism - I've been a casual racist, and I'm still learning my own blind spots - but in a community as global and diverse as this one, there's obviously a lot of dancers who are just Innocently Insensitive and just don't have the vocabulary or historical knowledge to engage with its African-American roots in the correct way. Ksenia's blackface is a pretty dramatic example, but there are many other ways that racism could still slip into our homages and discussions. And some of us still can't be bothered to change. Which brings me to my question(s).

How do we deal with cultural insensitivity? With people who aren't cross-burning racists, but still believe in race essentialism and stereotypes or can't be bothered to drop the racist jokes? Is it ever okay to apply social and career pressure to someone to get them to change, or should we just let people figure things out in their own time? And is it unfair to continue scrutinising people like in Ksenia's case after they've made their apology, or is it necessary to hold them accountable to their commitment to improve? I'm not a fan of Tumblr-style callout culture and brigading, but I'm not fond of a world where people don't feel a responsibility to question their own morals, either. Would like to hear your opinions on this.

If they don't learn or apologize after being called out...to hell with them.

If they apologized and it seems sincere...you can forgive if you want, but don't feel obligated to do so.

When people fuck up, nobody has to forgive them even if they apologize. And I say this as someone who has fucked up plenty of times — I've been forgiven on occasion and on other times I have not been forgiven. I feel extremely fortunate whenever the former occurred and have gone "yeah, that's pretty fair" when the latter happened.

I find the difference between cultural insensitivity and homage to be pretty complicated as is, and prefer to assume that people can learn and should be forgiven for misdeeds and ignorance. Also, the US centric nature of callouts about cultural insensitivity does worry me. Because it tends to perpetuate attitudes where your aparent ethnic background determines what you can and can't wear or how to style your hair or in which festivities are you allowed to participate. Even if members of the community dress you or invite you to participate it can sometimes seem to outsiders like you are being thoughtless. And I don't like that.

Cultural exchange is how cultures evolve, the expression of diverse backgrounds is what makes me proud of my country, even with all its follies.

The problem is that the things called out are rarely that innocuous once you look at the context. And sometimes it does not even need that.

Systemic racism is insidious like that.

Systemic racism is a problem to be tackled, sure, but my concern is more with cases of individual callout, not criticism of private firms or institutions who perpetuate the injustices in question. You might argue that each individual case doesn't exist in a vacuum and I concur, there are many cases where someone gets offended and regardless of context and attacks the supposed perpetrator of injustice. As someone on the outside looking in, I am bothered by that.

Let's not forget that this discussion started by talking about how to treat someone who wore blackface as part of her swing-dancing routine. That's pretty blatant and awful cultural appropriation.

While Tumblr may be a different beast (I'm not a huge fan of it so I don't visit it), I've found that generally, when people call out others for appropriation, the context of the situation proves them right about it.

It does not help that there has been so much cultural appropriation throughout history. It is not a recent phenomenon at all.

True, the blackface was wrong, but that is where I draw the line, hairstyling shouldn't in my opinion be considered a repeat offence at all.

If it was just the hairstyling, maybe. But again, this person did blackface too. It was part of a pattern of bad behavior from this person. And she even later admitted she fucked up.

The question eagle was asking was whether or not she should be forgiven and given another chance.

My advice is this: do what you want. Forgiveness is ultimately a personal decision. Maybe you want to forgive and give the person another chance. That's fine. Maybe you think they don't deserve one and should live with the consequences of their fuck up. That's fine too. No one is entitled to forgiveness after a fuck up just because they apologized.

Edited by M84 on Sep 5th 2018 at 10:13:39 PM

Which was why I brought it up as an example of where the lines blur together. It wasn't an issue during her time in Senegal, but in Western societies where black folks are subject to systemic discrimination, it's common for black women to be singled out and attacked for their "unnatural" hairstyles. So when she flaunted it on Facebook, it understandably left a bad taste on many people's mouths. And because the swing community is still working to bridge its African-American roots and its international present, there's a big question on just how attuned international participants should be to the American framework of cultural sensitivity.

My concern in the end is less about her as an individual and more about how to consistently tackle cultural insensitivity in the community, honestly.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Sep 5th 2018 at 7:21:34 AM

If international participants want to be a part of something with African-American roots, they need to be respectful of those roots.

Forgiveness is ultimately personal, I cannot deny that.

In this case, i cannot separate my geographical context from my opinion at all, black culture and music are greatly important in my cultural background, I understand the issue of black hair being seen as somehow wrong in a majority context, and I try to criticize the people who think that, but there is a difference between those who would force an afrodescendant to change their hairstyle to suit their prejudice and someone who likes it and styles it that way, these two group of people don't have much overlap here where I live, and to think that the latter are guilty like the former I cannot fathom.

But you can at least understand why people who live in places where there is significant overlap of those two groups might have a different opinion on the matter.

And in this situation at least, it's not unreasonable for the American-centric view to be the one that matters, since we are talking about an African-American practice here.

A good comparison I saw was when people said folks in Japan didn't care about the white washing in ghost in the shell.

At first glance, this can be easy to read as " psh, ignorant americans and their us-centrism"

But if you go a layer deeper, you realize that there was a different situation with Asian-American folk, who would have far more issue with it because of what they were surrounded with. And that their experience is fundamentally different than those who live in Japan or any other country in East Asia, and their opinions are not interchangeable.

And that's really important to keep in mind when dealing with this sort of thing, imo.

Sure but there does become the question of who gets to claim ownership of said roots, the Africans or the African-Americans?

I’m not sure if African-Americans get to tell African-Africans who they can share their culture with.

Do people of foreign decent in the West have the right to tell people in other countries what they can do with their culture?

Where is the line between African-American (or Japanese-American) culture and African culture, because African-Americans are still Americans, with all the privillage and culture power that that entails when dealing with Africans.

Edited by Silasw on Sep 5th 2018 at 3:04:41 PM