#history of race has never been White vs Non-White or Racist vs Anti-Racist. no social history looks like so manichaean

[docholligay]

Chinese Food in The American West

One of the things I frequently come across as a student of the American West* is that people get most of their information from movies and TV and then act like they know things. Wyatt Earp was not a Lawful Good champion who always did his level best even when it was hard to know. (You want Seth Bullock or Bass Reeves). Racism was far more complicated than white vs not white (I’ve talked about this EXTENSIVELY in Strange Empire, so I’m not going to bore you here**). 

And they didn’t just eat steak. In fact, they rarely ate steak. 

Steak as cowboy food isn’t INACCURATE, but it is MODERN. From about the early 1900s on, you had less and less drives and more and more ranchers who were staying put, with less and less hands needed, and so food was grabbed less “on the go.” Cows could be slaughtered and used to feed the family, allowing for more opportunities for things like steak, yes, but also things like chili, a play on sauerbraten, southern-style biscuits. The cattle drives were a real blend of culture and race, and a lot of what we have left as “Western food” owes a great deal to that. 

And if we leave the cattle drives and head into the towns of the American West, as we will today, we find things like oysters, pies, and various things like that. Far more well-heeled than the general expectation. 

I mean, here’s the menu from the Occidental Saloon circa the late 1880s:

Soups

Chicken Giblet and Consumme, with Egg

Fish

Columbia River Salmon, au Beurre Noir

Relieves

Filet a Boeuf, a la Financier

Leg of Lamb, Sauce, Oysters

Cold Meats

Loin of Beef, Loin of Ham, Loin of Pork, Westphalia Ham, Corned Beef, Imported Lunches

Boiled Meats

Leg of Mutton, Ribs of Beef, Corned Beef and Cabbage, Russian River Bacon

Entrees

Pinons a Poulett, aux Champignons

Cream Fricasse of Chicken, Asparagus Points

Lapine Domestique, a la Matire d'Hote

Casserole d'Ritz aux Oeufs, a la Chinoise

Ducks of Mutton, Braze, with Chipoluta Ragout

California Fresh Peach, a la Conde

Roasts

Loin of Beef, Loin of Mutton, Leg of Pork

Apple Sauce, Suckling Pig, with Jelly, Chicken Stuffed Veal

Pastry

Peach, Apple, Plum, and Custard Pies

English Plum Pudding, Hard Sauce, Lemon Flavor

This dinner will be served for 50 cents.

-I got this from the book “Saloons of the Old West” by Erdoes

But none of that is precisely why I’m here, I just can’t stop myself from talking about this, why I’m here is that one of the things I say that often surprises people, is that Chinese food was incredibly common for the, well, common man to eat. There’s very much a conception that we as a non-Chinese American  people did not start eating Chinese food until the 40s and 50s, and its truer that it took longer to catch on in the American East than the West simply as a matter of proximity and choice. 

Not MORE choice but LESS. Part of what made the West so unique, historically, is that the lack of choice and the basic scarcity caused people to work with and patronize people that their general prejudices would have kept them from using back east, because they had CHOICES. But out in the west, less so. There were few choices for a quick, cheap meal on the go. That dinner I just posted above is a lavish affair, and a great deal at approximately $20.00 in today’s money. (Which does not allow for the fact that cost of supplies has gone up and this dinner would most likely be offered for no less than 70 or so today.) 

People desperately wanted something that was cheap and quick, and the other options in the American West were few, far between, and not intensely pleasing. No one had really come up with the sandwich shop as of yet, and in any case, fresh meats and cheeses would have been too difficult for the low-cost supplier. 

ENTER THE CHINESE POPULATION.

If you have read my Strange Empire blogs, I hope you know that Chinese people were a huge presence in the American West, mostly working for the railroad and various mines, but also doing things like laundry, work that was extremely hard but took little in the way of English speaking. They existed in Chinatowns, for a combination of cultural and legal factors, but it’s a misconception that non-Chinese*** people never went to Chinatown. 

People are not new, and it was not unusual for non-Chinese people to use the laundries, tailoring, and other services of Chinatowns while suppressing the rights of Chinese people int he same breath. There were always individual Chinese people any given non-Chinese person liked and did business with. 

In time, they discovered the inherent wisdom of the noodle bowl. 

I don’t mean to suggest that all these early restaurants served was noodle bowls, but that was where it all started. Remember, Italian food had little prominence in America at the this time, as Italian immigration didn’t really get into full swing until the 1870s in America. While there are noodle traditions half of everywhere, and there is nothing new under the sun, what we today would consider a stir-fry bowl was wildly new to most of the non-Chinese folks in the West. That it could be offered up so cheaply, was so filling, and so delicious (more on this later) was a wild revelation. Everyone from simple cowboys (which, fun fact! Was a slur back then!) to mayors were swinging by Chinatowns to try the dishes. 

By the 1920s, chop suey, a fully Chinese American invention derived from the words for “various leftovers” was a hugely popular American food among all sorts. 

Doc, you may ask, was it just that these folks coming through to get medicines or laundry were SO adventurous? Not at all! Chinese restaurants back then actually, in a very short amount of time, realized that their non-Chinese townsfolk were an excellent way to make money as well, and began to adapt and change dishes to better fit the Western palate, leading what we call American Chinese Food today, which is a legitimate foodway I will defend to my death. Unfortunately, none of these menus survive today--the only ones we have are from places in San Francisco, places that were much more posh, and not the subject of this essay. 

There is a scene in Tombstone where Wyatt and his brothers are eating Chinese food, and it’s one of the things people often ask me about, assuming it’s anachronistic. Actually, it isn’t at all--the anachronism is that there’s broccoli in those noodle bowls, which had not yet hit our shores by the time of the OK Corral. Chinese food was a huge hit, Chinese restaurants were doing extremely well, and some Chinese restaurants were even beginning to attempt to print menus in English, with sit down areas, instead of serving simple fare from food carts. 

As the food from these “chow chow houses” grew in popularity, as we can infer from the advertisements of their competitors promising free potatoes with every meal, and other such niceties to entice, there was, as ever there must be, blowback. Anti-Chinese sentiment grew to a fever pitch, and with this came overt pressure for ‘Good Americans” to patronize ‘American restaurants’. The social pressure is actually where we get some of that old racist jargon about Chinese people serving dogs and cats, which people often think was spread by competitors to degrade the Chinese restaurants, which isn’t UNTRUE, but was just as often said sheepishly by someone who couldn’t stop themselves from going and grabbing a noodle bowl or even the American dishes they offered, such as roast chicken or pork chop sandwiches. 

(I won’t comment with anything but an eyeroll on the bullshit of people saying they’re ~allergic to MSG~ okay I’ll believe you when you stop eating processed food, meat, aged cheese) 

It actually kept this type of reputation as being slightly scandalous well into the early 1900s, as being something you ate after the bar, something to be had in the shadows, but it was all for naught, because Chinese food became an important part of American identity. But for all that, no one ever pictures the Lone Ranger chowing down (the American phrase ‘chow’ for food actually comes from these ‘chow chow houses’) on some chop suey, but there’s every reason to believe he would have. American Chinese food is just as American as the Germanically-influenced hamburger. 

(There’s a whole subtopic to go down about Jewish and Chinese communities and Kosher Chinese Food, two marginalized and othered communities coming together, but that’s a WHOLE other topic) 

(Also someone please buy me Chinese food. This shit always makes me so hungry.) 

*The American West is a specific time period, as far as the study of history goes. It covers the period between the end of the Civil War and the New Century, generally, and is, obviously, concerned with the western half of the country. It doesn’t cover stuff like Lewis and Clark (that’s Expansion) or even the Civil War itself, though you cannot possibly hope to study the American West in any level of seriousness without understanding the Civil War. Anyway! I know a lot about America between 1865 and 1900, and am just knowledgeable enough to be dangerous on everything else. Most History nerds are highly specified like this. We’re not as much help to your trivia team as you think.****

**I actually have had little chance to talk about ~European-style xenophobia~ as it played out in the west, because Strange Empire takes a more modern pass at it. But there was a hierarchy of “whiteness” as well, as still largely exists in Europe, land of intentionally clean ethnostates. 

***I use the term “non-Chinese” instead of white because believe it or not, non-white people were not magically free of racism against Chinese people. It was horrific and BASICALLY every non-Chinese person was guilty of it to some level, a wild-ass level of hatred that led to Chinese folks not being able to PURCHASE PROPERTY BY LAW in ENTIRE STATES. Being Chinese or Native in this place and time was your Worst Bet. 

****I actually was on a competitive trivia team, you DO want me.

[liskantope]

Some thoughts on BLM and our current unrest

[Content warning for death and violence and even sexual abuse (although that’s not part of this week’s issue) and, you know, discussion of a current topic that’s very upsetting for many people. I can’t guarantee that the opinion I express won’t be additionally upsetting although I’m hoping for an open-minded rather than strident tone here. Also, it turned out super long. And I didn’t even get around to the protest vs. rioting discourse!]

This post is long, and since Tumblr for some reason has done away with the light horizontal bars separating sections of writing (I can’t imagine why, and I wish they’d bring it back), I’ll adopt the style of Slate Star Codex and The Last Psychiatrist to mark different sections.

I.

(The following hypothetical situation is inspired by the crimes of Jerry Sandusky of Penn State and Larry Nassar of Michigan State.)

Suppose it becomes public knowledge that in many American universities there are officials working in athletics departments who are using their programs to gain access to children and teenagers for the purpose of sexually abusing them. Say it is discovered that this has been going on for decades at most of these universities, with the perpetrators using their privilege and power to keep the suspicions of the higher-up administrators on the downlow. This would of course become a dominating national news item and lead to a public conversation about how poorly structured the system must be at universities to allow for such despicable crimes to go on, how we as a society are putting people in power who care more about their power than about the basic safety of children and teenagers, and so on. If enough people felt like university administrations or state governments were refusing to take action towards dissolving these corrupt systems, or if they disagreed with the actions being taken, there might be full-scale protests or even riots along with the vigils that would take place in any case. I mean, I believe all of this is basically what happened when the Sandusky and Nassar situations broke out some years back.

Now suppose that in addition, when looking at all these horrific revelations from universities all around the country, it became noticeable that the victims of these sex crimes were disproportionately young people growing up in poverty; let’s say fully one third of the victims were growing up in households whose annual income was under $30,000. (I don’t recall the Sandusky case in great detail but something like that was probably true there to a more dramatic extent since he got access to his victims through a program designed for underprivileged children.) This makes the situation feel even more tragic -- don’t kids from low-income backgrounds suffer enough disadvantages already? These monsters that are protected by The System are adept at preying on the most vulnerable, and clearly this (hypothetical but altogether not unrealistic) phenomenon highlights the vulnerability of those who are not economically privileged.

Now in such a situation, class issues would definitely become at least a minor part of the discourse, but I have a hard time imagining that the entire main thrust of the public outrage would focus on classism, even if (and this is something I can’t imagine either!) the only cases being projected by the media to become common public knowledge, out of the whole series of university athletics sex crimes, were the ones where mainly poor kids and teenagers were targeted. In fact, I expect that if any media outlet tried to present the entire thing as being a class issue and implied that it affected only poor kids, there would be a lot of backlash especially on the grounds of this coming across as a big middle finger to the higher-income-background molestation victims. I just don’t see it happening. Primarily, the outrage would be centered on the fact that university administrations allow high-ranking people in their athletics departments get away with despicable violations of young people for decades. The fact that a disproportionately high number of those young people are from underprivileged backgrounds would be treated as sort of a secondary issue, if properly noticed by the broader public at all.

So, if you’ve read this far you probably see where I’m going with this. And I know that the above hypothetical scenario furnishes nowhere near a perfect analogy to what has people riled up right now. But why is it that in my hypothetical nightmare crime scenario, the prevalence of the crime itself (rather than which demographic is disproportionately on the receiving end) is what constitutes the outrage, whereas in the real-life scenario of numerous documented instances of police brutality and murder, the entire thrust of the public outrage is centered on the notion that this is all about racism, that yeah there must be something seriously amiss in a system that lets cops get away with brutal violence towards innocent civilians but pretty much every single statement expressing that sentiment will frame it in terms of racism while the existence white victims of police brutality is essentially never even acknowledged?

From what I can see, in this age where everyday happenings can easily be recorded by random bystanders and the recordings can easily become accessible to the public, we are seeing evidence that a number of American cops are way, way too liberal with lethal violence, either through direct training or through a tendency towards paranoia of how dangerous a civilian under arrest might be or through psychopathic tendencies that attract certain kinds of people to a profession where brutally violent behavior is too easily excused in the courts after the fact. I don’t know to what degree these relatively few pieces of documented footage reflect a large part of the police force rather than just “a few bad apples”, but on some level it doesn’t matter -- an event like the murder of George Floyd should not be tolerated and the fact that many such instances are happening every year seems unacceptable. This is true regardless of whether Floyd’s race actually played any significant part in Derek Chauvin’s decision to apply very excessive force. Then there are statistics to reckon with -- I don’t have the skillset that some have for knowing where to look up data and rationally analyzing it, but to my understanding it’s quite unambiguous that American law enforcement officers kill a lot more people than the police forces of most other countries, and this would seem to point to a serious problem. I have generally heard that in absolute terms, in fact more white men are killed this way than black men, but relative to the ratio of white people to black people, black men are killed disproportionately often. Of course there seems to be no room whatsoever for discussion of any possible reason this could be aside from purely racist motives on the parts of the cops, which is certainly one of my issues with the whole topic, but let’s set that aside for the moment and assume for the sake of argument that this disparity is entirely attributable to anti-black racism. Even with this assumption, does it make sense to present the entire issue of police brutality as a purely racial one?

Here is another analogy to something that is not only non-hypothetical but is an even bigger current situation: the pandemic. It’s frequently been remarked on that Covid19 has been killing at a significantly higher rate among racial minorities. And yet the broader framing of the crisis we’re in hasn’t been that it’s an African-American issue or that every failure of government officials to respond effectively is primarily an instantiation of racism. The racial component of this is treated secondarily, in fact with far less emphasis than the direct crisis which affects everyone in the country even if not in equal measures.

With the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Abery, as with every other story of a cop killing of a black person that goes viral, it’s not only that the narrative frames the race component as the primary issue -- the race component is framed as the only issue. This is done in such an absolute and unquestioning manner that I’m still a little taken aback whenever I see each new “We denounce racism!” announcement from almost every company whose mailing system I’m in: my Unitarian Universalist organization, the university I work for, Lyft, Airbnb, etc., not that any of them actually suggest a plan of action beyond donating to Black Lives Matter and other related organizations.

I think I can answer my own questions about why the narrative is coming out this way. Some areas of social justice enjoy a much more prestigious position in America than others do, and racism seems to dominate all the rest. (I’ve come to see this as a very American thing, no doubt due to the exceptionally dramatic nature of my country’s struggles against racial oppression, although it’s probably the case in Canada as well and maybe to a comparable extent in other Anglophone countries.) There is no surer way to make an issue more hot-button than by framing it as a racial issue, except in the unusual case (as in my Covid example) that the issue is actually of urgent and immediate concern to all citizens. Opposition to something like police brutality could have some momentum on its own, but as motivation for activism it has nowhere near the mighty strength in our culture that anti-racism does. In the hypothetical scenario about child abuse at universities, we have one type of social injustice, economic inequality, which has mostly been relegated to the background in the recent history of social activism (yes, Bernie Sanders has had a significant following, but my impression is that even many of his most diehard supporters get more passionate about racial inequality than economic inequality, at least when it comes to fiscal issues other than health care reform). Whereas child molestation is condemned in the strongest terms by our society perhaps even more universally than racism is (even though this universality makes it less of a cause for energetic activism -- I never hear anyone complain that “we live in a molestation culture” or anything like that). So, issues viewed as racial have far more memetic endurance than non-racial issues or even the exact same fundamental issues when not viewed from a racial angle.

Or, here is another way that I’ve considered looking at it: because police violence happens disproportionately to African-Americans, police violence could be considered to be “an African-American issue”, and since anti-racism activism is already quite a strong force in modern American culture, the issue of police brutality will naturally find an outlet to the public through the lens of African-American issues. Therefore, this is the only angle from which most of us will ever see it.

Of course the obvious thing that someone would surely point out here is that pretty much all of the examples of police brutality we’ve been seeing for years have white people victimizing black people (George Zimmerman did not present to me as white from the moment I first glanced at him, and by many definitions he is a PoC, but I guess he’s close enough to white that people were able to ignore this). Therefore it seems logical to assume that anti-black racism is the only lens to view these events through. Well, it would be logical except that we should all be able to think critically enough to realize that there are probably tons of videos out there of innocent white people being victimized by cops but those aren’t the ones that go viral. In fact, videos of black people being victimized by non-white cops probably also don’t get very far in the memosphere* -- it’s occurred to me that perhaps if the Asian policeman on the scene had been the one in the center of the frame pinning Floyd to the ground, this atrocity might never have become public knowledge!

(*Did I just make up that term? Google isn’t showing anything.)

And honestly, for this reason, I can’t help feeling particularly bad right now for loved ones of nonblack people who were victims of such crimes while being treated as if their cases didn’t exist.

This is not me trying to covertly imply support for “All Lives Matter” here. I’ve never felt the slightest bit of attraction to that counter-hashtag, which has always struck me as subtly obnoxious in implying that Black Lives Matter’s name is equivalent to saying “only black lives matter”, which of course BLM is not saying. Black lives do matter and in many ways still constantly get devalued and it is good that there’s an activist group out there whose main purpose is to stand up for them. But my discussion above does point to a specific issue -- probably the biggest of two or three issues -- I have with BLM. It would be one thing to say, “Police brutality can be considered a black issue since it affects black people disproportionately, so we should form a Black Lives Matter group and include it as one of the things we want to fight against.” Instead, BLM’s rhetoric strongly implies, “Police brutality is entirely a black issue and we’ll round off the entirety of it to racism and make opposition to it our main plank”. (Compare, from an secularist activist group, “Anti-gay bigotry often arises from fundamentalist religion and the justification for anti-gay-rights legislation threatens separation of church and state; therefore we should consider it an atheist/secularist issue and place gay rights issues among our concerns” vs. “Anti-gay bigotry and legislation is simply a manifestation of religion’s attempt to dominate non-religion so we should make opposition to it our main plank and not acknowledge or stand up for gay Christians.” Again, not a perfect analogy, but I hope it shows where I’m coming from.)

II.

I already wrote a post exactly four years ago describing and criticizing what I called “protest culture”. My point in linking to it here is not to revisit the discussion about Bernie Sanders or even the question of protesters’ deep-down motives but to endorse the following paragraph describing the kind of protest activism I felt (and still feel) could be helpful:

I definitely think there’s an important place in our culture for organized protest.  Sometimes we ordinary citizens need to show our dissatisfaction to the higher-ups in a way that they are forced to notice and not ignore.  But I strongly prefer protests that express dissent from a particular action, propose a concrete solution, and include many people who are able to make nuanced arguments in favor of this solution.  If there is no good consensus as to a serious solution, then I’ll settle for some particular action that is being protested against.  For instance, I would have proudly joined the marches against the war in Vietnam had I been around for it, and would have joined the marches against the war in Iraq had I been a little older at the time.  I would consider joining protests against, for instance, particular amendments I feel strongly about.  I did not, on the other hand, feel comfortable with the “99 percent” movement.  What was it expressing a sentiment against, exactly, apart from the very vague notion that a few people at the top screw things over for the rest of us?  (And by the way, I suspect that demonizing the entire top 1% was too heavy-handed; it’s probably only some in the top .01% who have been doing the main damage.)  There seemed to be little organization to this movement, and little common purpose except “let’s protest for the cause of being vaguely left-wing!”  The best argument I remember hearing in its favor was when a student explained to me the main strategy behind the movement: they would essentially fight guerilla-style by occupying large areas for a very long amount of time in a way that the top politicians couldn’t ignore, never, ever giving it up until things change in Washington.  But I was still pretty sure that at some point, the movement would have to die down, and was willing to bet that this would happen before anything changed in Washington.

I’ve never felt as fervently as I do now that too many law enforcement officers in the US are out of control and some kind of reform needs to be done (or at least strongly considered, in a serious conversation) to the system so that it can be effective in keeping them in check and outlawing certain forms of excessive force. There’s a lot I don’t understand about the demands and risks involved in law enforcement, but I really can’t imagine how there’s any possible excuse for what Officer Chauvin did, or for his colleagues who stood by and watched him do it. One reason I’m bringing up everything I did in the section above is that a massive protest movement based entirely on opposing racism seems to me like the exact wrong way to bring about the kind of reform we need, in part because it fails to recognize that the link from the bare facts of these events to possible racist motives is far less direct than the link to the overpowered nature of American law enforcement.

What is a campaign centered on “Be less racist!” possibly going to accomplish? Yelling at the police to be less racist isn’t going to change the behavior of individual cops who might be subconsciously racist but don’t realize it, many of whom are likely to react with defensiveness (because racism on an abstract level is sufficiently shamed in modern western culture that nobody likes to admit to themselves that they’re being racist). It’s even less likely to change the behavior of individual cops who are maliciously racist. It’s not going to change the policies set in place for law enforcement when, in this day and age, it would be highly illegal and unconstitutional to have explicitly racist policies in the first place. (It can be argued that some of these policies are a part of systemic racism, but then in my opinion the activist movement should focus on attacking those specific policies.)

In fact, I can’t think of any situation, however race-related, where I expect it helps to yell “Be less racist!” except for when (1) you are protesting against a particular law which discriminates against people of a certain (minority) race; or (2) you are denouncing a particular candidate or person in power who has explicitly endorsed racism in public or in private. Both of these scenarios are highly rare in 2020. Maybe there are other neighboring scenarios I’m not thinking of at the moment, but I’m pretty sure our current scenario isn’t one of them.

I imagine that if we set race aside for a moment and focus on police reform, by waiting for background information on the Floyd case to come out and piecing together what led to this injustice and pinpointing which factors led to it, a difference could be made. I’m not saying that this should all be done dispassionately, and in fact acting with passion and emotional force is crucial. And I’m not saying that in the wake of such an obvious murder everyone should just stay quiet until more facts come out. It makes sense to cry out in pain and anger as an immediate reaction, and I’m not going to criticize anyone for doing this, especially someone who feels closer to the tragedy (yes, including through shared racial background) than I do. But letting this get immediately drowned in a rampage against perceived racism and only that, against a system that has shown time and time again that it clearly doesn’t think itself racist at all and perhaps (in at least most of its components) has no deliberate intention of being, doesn’t seem likely to produce anything but further acrimony and polarization.

[TL;DR for these last two sections: it would seem like a more effective response to focus on police brutality and overpowered-ness as the main issue rather than making it all about race.]

III.

I forced myself to watch as much of the video of George Floyd’s final hours and minutes as I could. I didn’t actually succeed in finding the full video, and maybe that’s for the best, because what I did see chilled me to the bone and distressed me more than almost any real-life footage I’ve ever seen. I’m not as eloquent as some at putting my raw emotions in writing and don’t know the words to describe how twisted up it made me feel to “witness” an obvious murder of a man whose greatest “crime” was resisting getting pushed into a police car, and to watch him dying one of the most undignified deaths I can imagine ever being forced on anyone. I felt momentarily physically ill and wanted to cry.

Others in my orbit -- mostly white people; my social bubbles have always been disproportionately white and Asian and certainly nonblack -- have expressed a similar emotional reaction to mine except with the added factor of disgust at the obvious racism present. This was just simply not part of my immediate emotional reaction. On a cognitive level I am aware that there clearly has to be some degree of anti-black racism in law enforcement, even independent of classism and other factors, and that could be of some relevance in any individual case (although it would seem very tricky to assess how much). But this awareness doesn’t have time to kick in when I open a video or news story that’s already been presented to me as “another black man killed by racist cop” which reminds me that this is embedded in a particular media narrative and makes me feel instinctively on guard against letting my perceptions be colored by it.

Black people seeing these apparently all feel on the level of deep, fundamental knowledge that this happened to Floyd because he was black and that it’s a fate they have to constantly fear happening to themselves, or at least that’s what the white people around me are constantly claiming. I feel epistemically helpless when it comes to knowing what the “average” (rather than one of those on the forefront of racial activism) African-American’s take on this is, or how fearful the “average” African-American is of the police on a daily basis as compared to a white person’s, especially prior to the age when videos of police abuse started going viral.

But I’m certain that a significant part of the African-American community is right now in a deep pain that I can’t really imagine, because I don’t quite know how it feels to perceive one horrible tragedy as indicative of something that is done to attack a specific minority that I belong to.

I expect that some of them learn about an incident like this, and an incident like the one with Ahmoud Arbery, and feel on the level of social intuition (I think I’ve sometimes called this “social sense”), developed from a web of personal experiences, that these individual terrible choices clearly had a lot to do with the victims being black. I would be a hypocrite to fault someone for reaching a strong conviction based on this kind of social intuition, because I do it myself all the time -- in fact, I often express such conclusions on this blog. I feel less qualified to rely on this social intuition and my own experience when it comes to race issues, but I invoke it all the time on this blog when I talk about male-female dynamics in order to argue on controversial position on gender relations, for instance, because I do have lifelong ample experience with men and women interacting.

If many black people in America have a deep instinctual feeling for the racial aspect of many of these attacks, then I do acknowledge that a lot of that is probably coming from somewhere other than media narratives. It might come from everyday interactions with police, observing that they are stopped and treated hostilely by the police than their white friends seem to be, or who knows what else. And those voices with their explanations need to be at least listened to. I wish it were easier to hear them through all the tribalistic noise and confusion.

So trying to better understand all this is part of my struggle at the moment. This post might not age well -- I wouldn’t be surprised if I view some of my turns of phrase in this section of it with some embarrassment even sometime in the near future -- but I need to commit myself to trying.

Anyway, I guess all of this is to say that my lengthy arguments above aren’t meant to claim that the instances of police brutality we’ve been seeing aren’t related in some way to racism, but that reflexively framing them in terms of racism seems guaranteed to bring only more pain to an already painful situation.

[freedom-of-fanfic]

I have been reading and reblogging some of your posts and wanted to thank you for that detailed account. I have been out of fandom for a while, and antis really baffled me at first. But now I have a question: Could you talk some more about how current antis relate back to the LJ social justice scene and when the morph from debating fanworks to dissing people happened? Thank you!

I’m glad you’ve been enjoying this blog!

I think this reddit post does a nice job of summarizing the history of fandom and how it’s led to our current point. But I’m going to go more into how tumblr’s very structure led to a ‘race to the bottom’ sort of enacting of punishment via social justice.

Almost all of this is from personal observation, having been here since late 2010.

To get more into the actual history of it: Racefail ‘09 is the name given to the big, public 2009 debates about racism in genre fiction (published fantasy and sci-fi), which happened primarily on livejournal and private websites. (Racefail was itself the result of the rising awareness of social justice in the real world thanks to the democratization of information via the internet.) Racefail raised a couple of big questions: were non-white (and non-straight/non-cis/non-male) creators being silenced and erased in published genre fiction? And were the stories being told primarily racist/sexist/homophobic and lacking in representation for non-white/Western cultures (and LGBT+/queer/female stories)?

From everything I’ve read I feel like a lot of good came out of these talks; in particular, it greatly raised the awareness of social justice in genre fiction and fandom spaces - which had been there before, but not quite so prominent.  But one major bad came out of it: it revealed, via the shitty behavior of one member of the genre fiction community, how social justice could easily be used as a silencing tactic by applying arguments meant to dismantle power structures to individuals who may (or may not!) benefit from those power structures.

Fast-forward to 2010-2012 tumblr. LJ has undergone multiple journal purges and partial restorations, been bought out by a Russian company, and - final straw - changed the way anonymous threaded posts were handled, ending its value as a space for anon memes like kinkmemes. Fandom dispersed. A not-insignificant number of us eventually end up on tumblr, and those of us coming from LJ have brought with us a greater awareness of social justice, particularly lgbt/queer culture and feminism.

At the same time, Facebook has opened its doors to everyone instead of only allowing college students to use it. Facebook has almost single-handedly popularized the notion of making your offline life publicly available online.  Gone are the days of keeping your age, real name, and offline identity hidden; we share everything except maybe last names and exact locations.

Tumblr democratizes the fandom experience like never before. Livejournal and forums had moderators; tumblr has none.  Communities are gone - instead we have tags where people gather to talk about shared interests. People who previously felt shut out, forced to be ‘lurkers’ because they had nothing to say, could now have a blog and share the work of others via reblogging. The main way to gain social capital is by having the most followers and therefore the most widespread content.

But tumblr is a weird experience compared to other blogging sites because at the time it was the only one with a ‘reblog’ function. any one post can go absolutely viral and the people who see it beyond your immediate circle will lack the context of the rest of your blog. This means that either every single post needs to be entirely self-contained … or get wildly misunderstood. (Guess which one happens.) It also means that that the posts that spread the fastest and furthest are the short, witty ones or - you guessed it - the controversial ones. Finally, people tend to not fact-check - if something is interesting and seems believable, people reblog it uncritically. Tumblr’s dashboard structure actively encourages people to not leave their dash to look at provided external links - you’ll lose your ‘place’ on your endless-scrolling dash, and the little ‘home’ button in the corner is reminding you how many new posts have been created since you last refreshed. You don’t have time to fact-check.

Controversy without context is polarizing - without the original context, people provide their own context and agree or disagree based on a bunch of assumptions. Tumblr is a breeding ground for this. Opinions don’t get more nuanced - they get more vitriolic, more sharp and quick-witted.  And with people not bothering to fact-check or click linked information, misinformation spreads like wildfire.

The early experience of fandom on tumblr is one of widespread acceptance. Possibly because FB does this, people feel safe to share their age, sexuality, and gender on their tumblr profiles - and those identities get more and more specific as people learn more about gender identities and sexual orientations that are off the gender binary. People spread educational posts about queer/LGBT+ culture, feminist theory, and racism alongside fandom posts.  The importance of minority representation in the media is a hot topic and posts that criticize media for their lack of (or bad) representation get thousands of notes. Social justice theory - fighting the appropriation of colonized cultures by imperialists, promoting the voices of the oppressed over those of the privileged, the right to be angry because of the oppression and trauma you’ve experienced, not tone-policing people who have been hurt, and not erasing the experiences of others - are widely discussed.

A lot of good came out of this, too, but I believe a natural backlash resulted. Earnestly working to promote the voices of the least privileged and trying to avoid silencing or erasure, what started as an effort to even out the social strata gradually became a kind of reversed social strata. People who were oppressed on any axis could not be corrected by anybody of lesser oppression - it was considered to be silencing. People could not say their feelings had been hurt by a marginalized person’s word choice - that was tone policing. 

And this led to a secondary, and probably lesser conclusion: people who identified as ‘privileged’ - that is, white, cis, straight, mentally well, able-bodied, (and male) - felt guilty for all the privilege they had. and the promotion of marginalized voices over their own - the tendency to tell people, regardless of the validity of their points, that if they were privileged their voice did not matter - to escape their privilege, at least on tumblr.

I think we hit Peak Tumblr in 2012-2013-ish. Non-human and nonbinary identities proliferated. Asexuality awareness exploded, as did other lesser-known sexualities and paraphilias.  People wondered what it meant to be trans in a world with no gender binary. People self-diagnosed severe mental illnesses.  And this unto itself wasn’t a bad thing!   Probably many people learned a lot about themselves from the openness and acceptance.

However: there’s no way to know how much of this was from people self-discovering and how much was from people who realized that unless they had some axis of oppression they could point to they could be silenced.  And people were extremely open about these identities as well: despite all of the talk about social awareness, interactions on tumblr suggested that most people still assumed that everyone else was white, cis, straight, able-bodied and mentally well (and therefore completely unaware of social issues and in need of education). And due to how tumblr’s reblogging system could separate posts entirely from the context of the original poster’s blog and personal details, this assumption happened a lot!

Whatever the actual numbers of people who were self-discovering versus self-deluding, this extreme acceptance got its own natural backlash. It wasn’t possible for everyone on tumblr to be oppressed, but everyone on tumblr seemed to be finding some way to be marginalized - they weren’t cis, they were ‘a demigirl’. They weren’t straight, they were ‘gray asexual’.  There had to be some way to distinguish the real marginalized people from the fakers.*

Enter gatekeeping - which seems reasonable enough at first, given the sheer number of people who are claiming to be part of the marginalized club. People start making fun of ‘transtrenders’ and ‘starselves’ and say ‘heteroromantic demisexuals’ are ‘just normal’. People call one another ‘cishet’ specifically to erase their gender identity/sexual orientation.

This environment makes tumblr ripe for radfems, who greatly benefit from people putting limits on what identities other people can have. And radfems feed the gatekeeping mentality, leading to more and more policing of one another on tumblr instead of acceptance.  Instead of trusting others to be honest about their gender identity, sexual orientation, race or mental health, people increasingly decide the identity and experiences of others based on whether or not they say and do the right things.  Conversely, if you say or do the wrong things you are ostracized and your identity is erased using the reverse social strata of tumblr: ’cishet’ becomes shorthand for ‘ignorant asshole’ - and ignorant assholes are not to be listened to.

One no longer has to identify wrongly to have the wrong identity to be worth listening to. One only has to do the wrong thing.

So how does this tie back to debating fanworks vs dissing people?  Well: tumblr isn’t just the home of social justice. It’s also the home of fandom, and these two spaces heavily overlap.

Like our genre fiction friend that I mentioned back at the beginning of this long-ass post, tumblr had already begun - with the best of intentions - to silence people for having the wrong level of marginalization.  And when radfems and gatekeepers entered the scene, one’s level of marginalization became a function of how you behaved.  Now you had to behave right to have the right to be listened to - and fanworks, far from being the exception, are the rule for determining if people behave ‘right’ in fandom spaces.

In other words: debating fanworks/fan opinions and dissing people have become the same thing.  If a fanwork is for the wrong pairing, that makes a person a bad person.  And bad people are only able to create bad fanworks.

This attitude is how you get things like ‘if you ship [x] you’re straight’ and ‘oh, you ship [x], your opinion on this unrelated social justice issue is invalid’ or ‘i’m not surprised to find that this person is [x]-phobic, they created problematic fanworks.’

And that’s where we’re at today.

Man this is much. I’m sorry for your eyes.

*And in case it isn’t obvious, I think policing sexual orientations and gender identities is nonsense - demigirls and gray-ace people count as much as everyone else.

[keshetchai]

I don't know how to phrase this question exactly but please understand that I'm being genuine! ... Do white jews and white converts suffer from anti/semitism? Because I'm not sure if it's a racist issue,,, or if Jewish is even an ethnicity?? ahh i have a lot to learn. I hope this isn't insensitive. thank you

Um I’m a lil low on spoons rn but I’ll try to just…generally answer and other Jewish followers can add on?:

1.) Jews are members of an ethnoreligion. Meaning that the majority of Jews are ethnically/genetically related to each other, but that ethnic group also shares a religion. The exception is generally speaking, converts, who may not be ethnically Jewish. There’s a lot more nuance there but I’m just saying the basics. But yeah you can be ethnically Jewish. 2.) Jewish people existed as an ethnoreligious group prior to the modern idea of races/race in general. Uhhh…basically the concept of human races comes after the concept of a unified Jewish people/identity, afaik. 2a.) Related: early “race” classifications tended to do….weird things! (Hello that’s because racism, obvs) but like in the 18th century a lot of white Europeans classed a lot of MENA people as “caucasoid” - actually let’s be super clear: racist ass 18th century Germans said this. And Caucasoid was divided into Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic. So…Europeans, West Asians (“Middle Eastern”), and North Africans, plus some of India. …conveniently encompassing anywhere that had been Ancient Rome, Egypt, or Greece, basically.

That dude ranked light skinned people at the top of his model and everyone else below - even within “Caucasoid” as a race. KEEP THAT RACIST GERMAN GUY IN MIND. Uh…then other ppl came in and…edited that model.

Most racial categories have some kind of system where people are divided into European, Asian, African, and American (as in Native), plus possibly something that covers Oceania (one person called it the “Malay” race). We….generally speaking have not really gone very far beyond that, at least not in the US, where MENA people are still auto-categorized on the census as “white”. (And because the US government doesn’t…really account for mixing of indigenous ppl with colonizers well, most latinxs are forced to mark themselves as white Hispanics/Latinos if they’re not also API or black or registered native, regardless of whether or not they are say, European-white and Latino or not.)

ANYWAYS throughout history Jewish people have been persecuted for being Jewish and different, and therefore as the concepts of races were developed, the ethnicity of Jews played into negative treatment of Jewish people.

3.) by the time Nazi Germany rolled around, that racist 18th century German guy? They basically said “Look at the caucasoid race. The darker Slavic ones are inferior, and the Semitic people (read: the Jews and only the Jews) and Rroma (who fit under that loose - we include India and west Asia definition) are poisoning the race.” so caucasoid or not by anyone’s older and equally racist definitions, they were not Aryans (the very same Germans that 18th century dude talked about being the height of superiority) and they basically claimed that Jewish and Rromani people were vermin/a racial plague/going to be the downfall of the race, etc etc.

I don’t really know how to best explain this atm but basically whether or not Jews were or are caucasoid or white was an incredibly moot point in Nazi Germany. It did not matter.

4.) Antisemitism was and has always been about hatred of Jewish people, regardless of their skin color or tone or regardless of whether or not “Semitic” was classified under “caucasoid” at any point. White Jews are the victims of antisemitism because antisemitism is about hating Jewish people (even if they are caucasoid, because you have to understand that if someone is using those old and racist terms, they genuinely believe Jewish people are going to be the demise of the Aryans, whom they believe to be the superior Caucasoid people/the “whites” vs the…other ethnic ones).

5.) Basically all Jews - even converts - are the targets of antisemitism because it’s aimed at anyone Jewish.

White converts will usually not be the victims of antisemitism aimed at the “ethnic” features of Jews, but they can and do still face antisemitism.

6.) white (usually xtian) people, historically speaking, may see some assimilated “white” Jews and treat them like white people (until they feel like not treating them like white people, in which case they will stop), but white Nazis will never consider “white” Jews as anything but Jewish.

Since race is a social construct: some Jews can ascribe to whiteness but may have that taken away from them at any point by white supremacist/neonazi groups; Jews are “Caucasian” but can never be Aryan “white”, only “Semitic” and antisemitism means hating Jews; Caucasian is not synonymous with “white” or occupying the status of being “white” in society since plenty of MENA people, Indians, and Jews are not light skinned and aren’t treated as if they are “white” in society; but all white people are Caucasian; and when people say “white” they usually MEAN white as in “looks Aryan/light skinned” but “white” doesn’t actually play out that way socially, and includes non-Aryan but sufficiently light skinned people; Jews might be able to be “white” but they’re never “Aryan” and white supremacists/neonazis care about “Aryan white” specifically.

So like even if some ethnic Jews have white skin and occupy relative white privilege (over darker Jews even) in today’s world, they can still be murdered by white supremacists for not being white.

White converts remain the same race and ethnicity they were previously, but can still be targeted by antisemitism.