The Internet's 'Misogyny Problem' - real or imagined?

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Yeah, that's a hell of strawman argument. No one here has said that the Black-Chinese racism isn't racism, nor does anything think that.

The difference comes from what we see that racism as originating from. You think racism is just individuals being racist; we think it serves to reinforce power structures in society and originates from those structures. That doesn't mean that individuals cannot be racist, or that minorities who experience racism cannot themselves perpetuate racism. What you fail to understand is that this example of Black-on-Asian racism is actually a reproduction of a White-originated racist hierarchy, it's not something invented by or perpetuated by the Black who's being racist against the Asian, nor does its existence elevate Blacks above Asians in the way that White racism elevates Whites above other races in society by doing things like setting the dominant culture (their own) as the default "acceptable" one. That's the difference.

 

[Senethro]

That's only true at an institutional level. At an individual one it's BS.

If a black store owner kicks out a Chinese customer because he "doesn't like his kind here", the store owner is the "group in power". It takes a bizarre amount of doublethink to argue that it is in anyway different from a white store owner kicking out a black customer because he "doesn't like his kind here". If you actually think these two instances are "different forms of racism", I can't debate with you, because you are insane.

Its going to depend on if the store is located in China, US or an uncolonised/successfully decolonised, affluent part of Africa.

 

[Flying Pig]

Yeah, that's a hell of strawman argument. No one here has said that the Black-Chinese racism isn't racism, nor does anything think that.

The difference comes from what we see that racism as originating from. You think racism is just individuals being racist; we think it serves to reinforce power structures in society and originates from those structures. That doesn't mean that individuals cannot be racist, or that minorities who experience racism cannot themselves perpetuate racism. What you fail to understand is that this example of Black-on-Asian racism is actually a reproduction of a White-originated racist hierarchy, it's not something invented by or perpetuated by the Black who's being racist against the Asian, nor does its existence elevate Blacks above Asians in the way that White racism elevates Whites above other races in society by doing things like setting the dominant culture (their own) as the default "acceptable" one. That's the difference.

I was with you until the last part: it's possible to have several layers of disadvantage in a society. I'm thinking of a place like South Africa, for example, where you can have a hard time from white people for being black or from black people (and white people) for being the wrong sort of black. You can imagine 'black culture' being shaped in the same way as 'culture' in general to project a certain image of 'blackness' which favours a particular subset of the 'black' people.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

Yeah, that's a hell of strawman argument. No one here has said that the Black-Chinese racism isn't racism, nor does anything think that.

Sorry to ask this, but given the use of semantics in this thread, I kind of have to. Is Black-Chinese racism racism, in your opinion?

 

[trader/warrior]

Its going to depend on if the store is located in China, US or an uncolonised/successfully decolonised, affluent part of Africa.

Indeed it does vary from place to place, country to country. I think my main objection to the institutional racism side is that from the way they are framing it seems like they see one universal institution of white people opressing everyone else.

Europeans have an impressive record of hating and persecuting eachother based on ethnic background, in my own country there has been institutional opression and racism towards the Sami for centuries as well as other people now most likely considered white but then as racially inferior like jews, gypsies and traveller peoples, even finns. There are countless others like japanese discrimination against Chinese and Koreans or Han chinese against Uighur or other minorities. To me these are all examples of institutional racism, so in the example with the shop-owner you cannot say that the two cases are different unless you have additional information on the setting.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Sorry to ask this, but given the use of semantics in this thread, I kind of have to. Is Black-Chinese racism racism, in your opinion?

It's not a separate kind of racism from the White-originating racism against those people, it's just being reinforced by different people in that specific instance. But it is racist, yes.

I was with you until the last part: it's possible to have several layers of disadvantage in a society.

So do I, that doesn't mean that they're created by or benefit the people between the bottom and top rungs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

Intersectionality (or intersectionalism) is the study of intersections between forms or systems of oppression, domination or discrimination. An example is black feminism, which argues that the experience of being a black female cannot be understood in terms of being black, and of being female, considered independently, but must include the interactions, which frequently reinforce each other.[1]

This feminist sociological theory was first named by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, though the concept can be traced back to the 19th century.[2][3] The theory suggests that—and seeks to examine how—various biological, social and cultural categories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, caste, and other axes of identity interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels, contributing to systematic injustice and social inequality. Intersectionality holds that the classical conceptualizations of oppression within society, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and belief-based bigotry, do not act independently of one another. Instead, these forms of oppression interrelate, creating a system of oppression that reflects the "intersection" of multiple forms of discrimination.[4]

A standard textbook example of intersectionality theory is "the view that women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity".[5] A secondary textbook definition approaches intersection theory a bit more broadly as "the interplay of race, class, and gender, often resulting in multiple dimensions of disadvantage".[6] Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated, but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.[7]

Intersectionality is an important paradigm for sociology and cultural studies, but difficulties arise due to the many complexities involved in making "multidimensional conceptualizations"[8] that explain the way in which socially constructed categories of differentiation interact to create a social hierarchy. For example, intersectionality holds that knowing a woman lives in a sexist society is insufficient information to describe her experience; instead, it is also necessary to know her race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, etc., as well as society's attitude toward each of these in order to fully understand her position within society.

The theory of intersectionality also suggests that discrete forms and expressions of oppression are shaped by one another. Thus, in order to fully understand the racialization of oppressed groups, one must investigate the ways in which racializing structures, social processes, and social representations (or ideas purporting to represent groups and group members in society) are shaped by gender, class, sexuality, etc.[9] While the theory began as an exploration of the oppression of women within society, today sociologists strive to apply it to all people and to many different intersections of group membership.

 

[brennan]

The difference comes from what we see that racism as originating from. You think racism is just individuals being racist; we think it serves to reinforce power structures in society and originates from those structures. That doesn't mean that individuals cannot be racist, or that minorities who experience racism cannot themselves perpetuate racism. What you fail to understand is that this example of Black-on-Asian racism is actually a reproduction of a White-originated racist hierarchy, it's not something invented by or perpetuated by the Black who's being racist against the Asian, nor does its existence elevate Blacks above Asians in the way that White racism elevates Whites above other races in society by doing things like setting the dominant culture (their own) as the default "acceptable" one. That's the difference.

And since we all want to oppose racism, what the hell does any of this matter?

Does anyone here not want to work against both individual and institutional racism?

If not then what the blazing hell have the last two pages achieved except muddy the waters in this discussion?

 

[Hygro]

Those who don't recognize the difference fall victim to false narratives of racist black who keep "playing the race card" to get unfair advantage. That's a big thing politically here--white people doing reinforcing racism, black people getting fed up, white people get indignant and say the black people are playing the race card, and then people who think they are against racism side against the black folks' claim because those black people are racist for playing the race card and it just makes things worse.

 

[Gori the Grey]

From Cheezy's quote:

Intersectionality is an important paradigm for sociology and cultural studies, but difficulties arise due to the many complexities involved in making "multidimensional conceptualizations"[8] that explain the way in which socially constructed categories of differentiation interact to create a social hierarchy. For example, intersectionality holds that knowing a woman lives in a sexist society is insufficient information to describe her experience; instead, it is also necessary to know her race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, etc., as well as society's attitude toward each of these in order to fully understand her position within society.

Well, if you add class into the mix, the whole thing unravels (and by whole thing, I mean the effort to frame whole races and genders as oppressors and others as oppressed).

Because as soon as you add class, one can ask: What about a man, a straight, white, able-bodied man at that (so, advantaged on many levels by the reigning systems of oppression), but one who is poor? No doubt he's better off than a disabled, black lesbian who is also poor. But where does he stand on the social hierarchy relative a rich, black, able-bodied lesbian? a rich, black, straight woman? a rich, gay, able-bodied Hispanic?

Race, gender, and sexual orientation are not commensurate with class in systems of oppression.

If systems of oppression are your thing, that is. This kind of talk:

Intersectionality (or intersectionalism) is the study of intersections between forms or systems of oppression, domination or discrimination

has the effect of flattening the richness of social interaction to suggest that it is primarily, or even fundamentally, or even solely a matter of oppressors and oppressed.

Hygro's got a point that I want to respond to at greater length, but I gotta run.

 

[aelf]

I obviously meant that those two particular kinds of racism were identical, not that all forms of racism are identical (I don't know how you got that). And I'm absolutely not interested in arguing semantics - in fact I hate semantic debates. What I'm arguing against here is the use of semantics to obfuscate the discussion. Semantics are being used by one camp here to deny that some forms of racism committed by blacks against non-blacks are identical to some forms of racism committed by whites against non-whites. That camp is using elaborate and nonsensical semantic arguments to deny that this is the case, even though it's transparent to any reasonable person that it is.

There's nothing really obvious about what you said earlier. You did not explicitly say that your example has a distinguishing quality and is not meant to make a universal point about racism. We got into the whole semantics debate, by the way, partly because you and a number of other posters had a problem with that kind of thing - that Cheezy did not explicitly say that he did not deny the existence of other meanings of racism in regular parlance.

Those who don't recognize the difference fall victim to false narratives of racist black who keep "playing the race card" to get unfair advantage. That's a big thing politically here--white people doing reinforcing racism, black people getting fed up, white people get indignant and say the black people are playing the race card, and then people who think they are against racism side against the black folks' claim because those black people are racist for playing the race card and it just makes things worse.

This.

Also, insisting on the equivalence of all racist acts between different groups ignores the power structures that make huge qualitative differences in the impact of racism on people. If you disagree with this or with Hygro's point, then you simply can't be debated with because, as luiz puts it in his ever-eloquent style, you're insane.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

And since we all want to oppose racism, what the hell does any of this matter?

Does anyone here not want to work against both individual and institutional racism?

If not then what the blazing hell have the last two pages achieved except muddy the waters in this discussion?

Indeed. Which makes me wonder why the concept of institutional racism is being so hotly contested...

And it is being contested, despite the rhetorical "approval" of it in principle. For if racism is institutional and not merely interpersonal, the the institutions is where the battle must be raged, not interpersonally. It also divests individual actions of intolerance of what would otherwise be called "racist" qualities, as when a Black calls a White a "cracker."

Otherwise, witness the paralysis resulting from the inability of anyone to do anything to actually combat racism, since even pointing out racism becomes racist, and the intolerance of intolerance becomes an equal evil to the initial intolerance. It solves nothing, it leaves everything as it is, and it perpetuates the existent racism.

Well, if you add class into the mix, the whole thing unravels (and by whole thing, I mean the effort to frame whole races and genders as oppressors and others as oppressed).

Erm, no...class would just be another layer of intersection.

Because as soon as you add class, one can ask: What about a man, a straight, white, able-bodied man at that (so, advantaged on many levels by the reigning systems of oppression), but one who is poor? No doubt he's better off than a disabled, black lesbian who is also poor. But where does he stand on the social hierarchy relative a rich, black, able-bodied lesbian? a rich, black, straight woman? a rich, gay, able-bodied Hispanic?

It's not a matter of deciding who is "more" or "less" oppressed. The purpose of intersectionality is to unravel assumptions about privilege and oppression as mutually exclusive attributes. In different ways and different situations, different people experience different levels of privilege and abuse, depending on how different identities intersect; a poor, white man has a great deal of privilege, but also experiences forms of oppression; a rich black woman, likewise. It's useless to try and do the math of who is "more" oppressed and who is less, because all these forms of oppression are tied together and must be combated together. We can be allies in different ways now.

Race, gender, and sexual orientation are not commensurate with class in systems of oppression.

I assume you are probably a straight white male then, to be able to think this is true.

Also, that's basically the topic of this thread, sooooo blanket declarations of fact like this are worth nothing.

If systems of oppression are your thing, that is. This kind of talk:



has the effect of flattening the richness of social interaction to suggest that it is primarily, or even fundamentally, or even solely a matter of oppressors and oppressed.

Actually intersectionality gives our understanding of oppression extraordinary depth. It was flat before, where one was either privileged or not, end of story. Now we can all understand how we benefit or suffer from social interactions in different ways, which allows us to better analyze the methods of oppression, how to fight them, and also to see our own privilege in contrast to those oppressions, and thus to understand the experiences of the oppressed better.

 

[Traitorfish]

I don't know, I think Gori's criticisms are valid. Privilege theory is a theory of representation, of how certain experiences are normalised and certain experiences are other, and it provides some very useful theories so far as that goes, but it isn't a theory of social relations. It explains indifference or acquiescence to oppression, but it doesn't actually describe how oppression functions. In that respect, it is severely limited.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Nor is it intended to stand on its own, either. We don't have to trade in one methodology for another.

 

[Traitorfish]

Privilege theory certainly doesn't stand on its own, but I'm not sure if most of its proponents have a clear idea of whether or not it's intend to, or how it relates to other theories. They usually end up falling back on other theories, on some sort of Keynesianism or post-Marxism, but it always remains somewhat disconnected from their arguments about privilege, asks us to polite step over the points where the two do not really mesh. And I think the problem is that a lot of privilege theory comes from a particular sort of postmodernism for which representation is reality, for which no other sorts of explanations are necessary for even desirable. It's built as a total theory of oppression, but it doesn't function as one, and the only apparent way to salvage its insights (which are real and valuable) is reducing privilege theory to a tool for other, more powerful theories, which proponents of privilege theory do not strike me as over-ready to do.

There are a lot people out there who claim that white privilege is not merely the ideological structure racism, but the actual cause of racism, and that the solution to racism is the elimination of privilege. Likewise male privilege, straight privilege, and so on. Privilege theory is for them a total critique of existing social conditions, a new Marxism, and it is a theory absolutely unsuited for the lofty role they attribute to it. I think that means that even those of us who find value in privilege theory should remain very critical of it.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I think that's a valid critique of Privilege Theory in general, but I don't think that most Marxists use it in that way. Liberals absolutely do misunderstand it (surprise surprise, because they have no class analysis), but I usually see it as a lens applied within Marxist theory to enhance the relief of a specific situation, not as a general substitute for a Theory of Society as such.

 

[Winston Hughes]

I don't know, I think Gori's criticisms are valid. Privilege theory is a theory of representation, of how certain experiences are normalised and certain experiences are other, and it provides some very useful theories so far as that goes, but it isn't a theory of social relations. It explains indifference or acquiescence to oppression, but it doesn't actually describe how oppression functions. In that respect, it is severely limited.

This touches on what is, for me, a vital point with regards to the topic at hand and a whole range of other discussions.

Without question the most valuable concept I came across when studying sociology was that of 'lenses': various analytical perspectives through which the same information can be interpreted in different ways, giving a richer, deeper view of the whole subject. The essential properties that make such lenses useful are not only those that make them different from one another, but also those that make them different from the far messier, less internally-coherent perspectives from which we view the world when not engaged in academic inquiry (which is, after all, an attempt to reduce an impossibly complex reality to more-easily-describable generalisations). If they are to generate interesting results, the lenses must necessarily be rather extreme, and tight in their focus.

There is always the possibility, however, that an observer continuing to use the same lens over time comes to forget that he's looking through a lens at all, and ends up treating the view therein as if it represents the whole truth of a subject. Here, the lens can lead the viewer to an understanding less complex and nuanced than if he'd never adopted any particular analytical perspective in the first place. This does not, of course, render that individual's perspective useless to us; on the contrary, amongst history's greatest minds there are more than a few who were exceptionally narrow in their thinking. Although their overall understanding of a subject may have been narrower - and, in that sense, less 'true' - even than that of the average human in the street, the relentless focus of these thinkers enabled the discovery of things that might have remained hidden, or the creation of things that might have remained unimagined.

Where we must be very careful, though, is where we see larger groups starting to treat an analytical lens as if it offers the whole truth of a subject. The appeal here is natural enough: clean, neat answers to questions that otherwise seem almost frightening in their complexity, given the sheen of authority by their roots in academic inquiry, and reinforced by a self-affirming sense of belonging (and, for issues of moral import, righteous purpose) within the group. Here, in contrast to those radical thinkers whose narrow-mindedness encouraged broader discussion, the emergent group-think can all too easily become dogmatic, with dissenting views treated not as opportunities to develop one's own understanding, but rather as threats to be destroyed.

As the twentieth century has made abundantly clear, the greatest of all dangers to free thought emerges when a group of this type achieves absolute power over a society. Given the backing of law, the narrowest viewpoint spawns the most monstrous policy. But there are also a host of lesser dangers, not the least of these being the descent of what might otherwise be productive discussion into oppositional hostility. That is to say, what usually happens when you try to talk about gender on the internet.

tl;dr - Check your perspective.

 

[Hygro]

Really good post, Winston.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

It was a great post until the thinly-veiled Arendt-esque statements about "morally evil 20th century regimes that threaten our precious liberalism" came around, then in became questionably myopic, which is ironic because it's an attack on someone else's supposed myopia.

 

[Hygro]

You can take the allusions to mean what they are intended to mean, but I'm going to take it totally literally and slide past that

 

[Gori the Grey]

@Cheezy. Your comments reordered so that my responses can themselves constitute a developing argument.

It's not a matter of deciding who is "more" or "less" oppressed.

You’re right, privilege theory is in the end not that nuanced. It posits that there are just two kinds of people: privileged and oppressed. That’s the flattening I’m talking about.

It's not a matter of deciding who is "more" or "less" oppressed. . . .

you say, and then almost immediately unsay it:

The purpose of intersectionality is to unravel [how] different people experience different levels of privilege and abuse.

And in operation this lens (thank you, Winston) functions to identify some groups as categorically privileged and others as categorically oppressed.

Here’s the kind of thing I’m targeting, Cheezy:

Men are the oppressors

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13242130&postcount=102

I have no objection to the claim “Patriarchy tends to advantage men and oppress women.” I acknowledge the existence and continued operation of systematic sexism. But more crude formulations like “Men are the oppressors” make the members of a group out to be categorically the direct agents of the oppression that patriarchy effects, when you know on some level that this is not true from the fact that you are a man devoted to contesting the operations of patriarchy.

Likewise, the fuzzy thinking of your first post in this thread:

There's no sexism against men. There is against women. That's why the abuse toward them matters.

Not the first sentence, which has by now been sufficiently contested and rebutted on this thread, but the illogic of the “that’s why.” Abuse matters because it’s abuse, regardless of the person toward whom it is directed toward, no?

One might argue “abuse of women matters more because women also face sexism.” But your phrasing suggests that abuse matters only because of sexism.

So watch how the flattening I'm talking about works in action:

Actually intersectionality gives our understanding of oppression extraordinary depth. It was flat before, where one was either privileged or not [my emphasis], end of story. Now we can all understand how we benefit or suffer from social interactions in different ways, which allows us to better analyze the methods of oppression, how to fight them, and also to see our own privilege in contrast to those oppressions, and thus to understand the experiences of the oppressed [my emphasis] better.

Intersectionality could provide extraordinary depth, if it didn’t so regularly slip into the essentializing of your antepenultimate and penultimate word, which suggest that there are some people who are, simply and entirely, oppressed—an identifiable group: the oppressed. (With, of course, the concomitant identifiable group of oppressors: men--straight, white men.)

Erm, no...class would just be another layer of intersection.

I’ll save my response to this for a later post, since this post is already getting long.