knowing it before you see it
7 May 2010 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouWhen I did that post about my neighbors unexpectedly demonstrating every cliché when it comes to hidden racism, at least one person observed that being mostly unaware of anime styles makes it harder to assess the question at hand ("why do anime characters look anglo?"). I mean, if you don't even really know what anime characters usually look like, you probably wouldn't feel too confident taking a stand on whether (or how) the question is valid or offensive, because you're not sure about the specifics.
A few days after doing that post, I was reading an architectural magazine when I came across an article featuring three different landscape designs by the same firm. The second project, a Japanese-influenced front garden, was titled, "I think I'm turning Japanese... I really think so".
I think I stared at that page for almost an entire minute, trying to wrap my head around the notion of using the catch phrase from a thirty-year-old pop song. Hell, I barely recall the song -- although the refrain is certainly catchy enough and has become a sort of iconic phrase in its own right, if divorced from whatever context there is of the song -- and while to some extent I could identify that my annoyance had something to do with the trivial context of the landscape article itself, I couldn't articulate why, exactly, my offensive-statement alarm bells were clanging.
I don't mention that to get into the wherefors of the article's title, but as illustration for how difficult it can be, sometimes, when instinct tells one that something is not-okay, but the lack of articulate logical explanation renders one unable to explain to someone else what's wrong. And I do think it's important to understand why, and to be able to explain it, or else one's left with sounding like that oft-quoted judge in one of the landmark obscenity cases, who declared he couldn't say what obscenity is, only that he knew it when he saw it.
To know it when you see it requires that you see it, after all, and if you don't know what you're looking for (or don't understand what you're looking for), then likely you may never find it. And since I can never pass up a chance to deconstruct anything I don't fully and cogently grasp, here we go.
My theory's that such potentially offensive statements (like my neighbors') requires several inter-connected processes. All of which start with -- and therefore sometimes cloak the entire process as -- something relatively innocuous. Nothing more than asking a 'simple' question about an item, behavior, or whatever that's unfamiliar.
Think of any art style and there's probably something in there that would make you say, on first reaction, "why is that drawn/portrayed that way?" Like, say, the trend in Hispanic art to have distorted perspectives on street scenes, or in Indian (Asia, not America) styles where the characters are always drawn in profile. Calling attention to this can be completely innocent. (Unless the tone isn't, frex when the question's phrased like, "all the people drawn are wearing stupid flowery skirts, what's up with that?" -- in which case, the derisive attitude is pretty obvious from the get-go.)
From the position of unfamiliar-observer, the next step is one that seems to be universal: attempting to understand by relating what-you-see to what-you-know. Everyone does this. It's human, in my experience, whether you're Japanese and visiting an American household that has a scroll on the wall and assuming immediately the scroll is Japanese, or an American visiting Sweden and hearing hej and assuming everyone's greeting you with an American hey. Or overhearing dialogue in a language you don't know: somewhere in there, your ear is going to twig on a like-sounding string of sounds and suddenly you're 'hearing' a word in your own language.
Neither of those behaviors are, in my opinion, necessarily racist in and of themselves; they're really just human reactions to unfamiliar settings, behaviors, languages, images, and so on. Where it gets really sticky is when ignorance, coupled with the need to relate unfamiliar to known, gets wrapped up together with a proprietary tape. The unfamiliar observer draws a line between this element and a similar, known element in white/American culture and, by dint of familiarity, cannot 'see' that element as anything other that white/American.
Let's take this completely out of the realm of anime/fandom, and use a different style in the example. Hmm. Here's one: the Chicano Movement (although I admit I'm biased in using this as an example because it's also one of my absolute favorite 'schools' of art, ever and ever). Take a look at these images.
1: Death of Rubén Salazar - Frank Romero
2: Quinceañera (15th Birthday) - Carmen Lomas Garza
3: Tacos, 1996 - Margaret Garcia
All of these above paintings have cars in them, and distinctly Detroit-steel-styled cars, at that. That 'proprietary tape' binding it all together is a perspective that see those familiar objects, and -- as a member of the white culture -- then identifies those objects as sole possessions of white culture.
Both "white people have large eyes" and "those are american cars" requires that the observer ignore that these items or behaviors could be true of other cultures/peoples as well. In other words: the observer, here, is moving from "this is similar to my culture" to "my culture has primary claim on this" to "my culture has the only rightful claim". This proprietary attitude in turn sets up the conclusion that anyone else's use is thereby automatically an attempt to co-opt one's culture.
To break it down into parts:
1. observation: Chicano artists depict white-identified object(s)
2. unspoken intermediary assumption: only white people (and people who want to be white) use/own/are that white-identified object
3. conclusion: when Chicano artists (or Japanese mangaka) include those objects, it means the artist is trying to be white.
Note: this works in all directions, don't get me wrong, although the more an object's widely adopted into the observer's culture, the less likelihood of this reaction. Frex, Volvos have been available in the US for going on fifty years; someone driving a Volvo may get snark about being middle-class, but they're not likely to get accused of wanting to be Swedish. Just like 'futon' is a loanword so totally adopted that having a futon bed, now, isn't going to raise any American eyebrows, really -- those are more associated with loft-livers and college students than anything formally 'Japanese'. Wearing a kimono, or decorating with scrolls, however... not quite so thoroughly adopted. The latter two will, I've found, are more likely to provoke the process, as "that's Asian" --> "you're co-opting Asian things" --> "you're one of those people who secretly wants to be Japanese."
[Aside: I'm never sure whether to be amused or remain baffled, seeing how I've gotten this "you wannabe Japanese!" response based on having scrolls... that are Chinese. Talk about making the assumptions and illogic really freaking obvious.]
Most people I've met stop there; until my neighbors' email I'd never experienced the next step first-hand, which is to take the proprietary and either/or assumptions to the point of an (il)logical corollary. That is, having concluded that the adoption of apparent white-identified (by the viewer) items/behaviors is a sign of co-opting white culture, that this co-option is mutually exclusive with one's own (non-white) culture. The corollary of "you're doing this to be white" is "you don't not want to be non-white".
Again we're up against something that's a human kind of assumption, if you just look at this tiny part of it. When we co-opt something, on a personal level, it's often because we're dissatisfied with what we have and/or are doing, and want to try someone else's method. That goes for everything from "my handwriting is messy, so I'll mimic this person's style because I like the way their 's' looks" to "employers don't take me seriously but they do take him seriously, so I'll wear suits like he does" to more insidious facets like "people assume a ___ accent indicates stupidity/laziness/etc so I'll get rid of my accent and sound like so-and-so instead".
Thus, when we see someone adopting a thing, behavior, belief, etc that we don't see as 'innate' (or deep-seated, if you prefer nurture-terms) it's not unlikely that we'd naturally figure this self-chosen adoption is a result of dissatisfaction.
And it's not a big jump from "I'm dissatisfied with what I get because I'm X" to "I hate being X and would rather be Y".
Each step, independently, may not be intentionally malicious. After all, it's all-too-human to relate the world one does know, to this new and unfamiliar world (or artwork, or language, or belief system, or etc). Outside the proprietary facet, I'm more likely to consider the question ignorantly offensive and treat the person as someone who'd understand the conflux of mis-steps, with a little education.
That education is best delivered by turning the argument inside out. "So basically, when I hang a Chinese scroll on my wall, I'm 'adopting' Chinese culture and therefore by definition 'loathe' my birth-culture?" Of course not, the speaker would reply, and if in that moment they realize the contradiction in their conclusions, we have a winner. Okay, a not-loser, at least, in that the person's (hopefully) less likely to make the same mistake again, or if so, to be able to catch themselves at it and start towards self-correcting. They're attuned to the logic, now, and the illogic, or at least on the path to attunement.
The problem children are those who who can't see the bind, who refuse and/or aren't able to grasp their cultural/racial bias. That, I'd say, is where you can draw the line between those who've swallowed the hidden racism in a culture versus those who are blissfully, even willfully, drowning in that racism. To you, their response misses the point, but to them, the point doesn't even exist to be missed. They can't even comprehend the premise. They cannot conceive of any culture worth emulating other than their own.
Tangential to this -- and ending up wrapped up in it, thanks to those hours of moving big honking rocks -- is the latest debacle with whotsherface, the Harvard student who couldn't just speak her racism but then had to go and write an email to make it absolutely, positively clear just how racist she really is. (Also, so we're clear: I'm setting aside the issue of whether or not, scientifically, race 'exists' -- since there's plenty out there that has little to no scientific basis yet is of major impact in our daily socio-cultural lives -- and there's no question 'race', like 'sex', has the biggest impact.)
Now, I've seen plenty of the furor and discussion online about whether it's okay to criticize someone who's just "innocently asking questions" and defense of the girl, however misguided, as "just playing with ideas" and so on. Sure, I'm all for questioning the prevailing authority, in nearly any instance, becomes sometimes that really is the best way to get a handle on an unfamiliar/complex issue: to work it out for yourself. There's also plenty of times that the prevailing wisdom is wrong, and questions are one of the best ways to discover that wrongness.
Thing is, if you look at her argument -- much like the anime-big-eyes argument or the Chicano-detroit-steel argument -- it's not just that she's rehashing questions that have already been answered, even definitively. It's also that Miss Harvard Student isn't even being philosophically or logically honest about it. Basically, she's saying she's arguing devil's advocate (and we'll ignore for a moment that this, in itself, is a huge flag of both derailment and privilege) -- but she's only playing devil's advocate for the position in which she's personally invested. It's a false advocacy, which becomes obvious once we deconstruct the process.
So let's set our variables as:
X = white
Y = black
Z = some measurable behavior, trait, or skill
...and then solve for X. (I'll let it pass with only minor note that this phrasing is intentional, seeing how algebra traditionally "solves for X" just as Hollywood's idea of conflict is always "solve the white guy's burden".)
You take those three values, and you can come up with these three possibilities as concerns the quantity of Z:
X = Y
X > Y
X < Y
The prevailing socially-acceptable (PC, if you wish) position is the first: X = Y, that is, X and Y have equal amounts of Z. In longhand: whites and blacks are equally intelligent, or equally athletic, or equally articulate, or whatever.
The question raised by whotsherface was the second, of X > Y: X has more Z than Y. If she were truly 'playing around with ideas' and trying to 'reach a satisfying conclusion on her own terms', why'd she stop there? She -- like so many other racist debaters hiding under cover of just "playing around with ideas" -- skips the third stream: that X has less Z than Y.
For the argument to be truly philosophically honest, one should endeavor to ask all the possible questions. Not just "is it true that X and Y are equal in terms of Z," but also "what if Y is greater" and also "what if X is greater". The fact that she not only left off this third postulation -- hell, didn't even seem to realize that the postulate might even exist at all! -- says to me that this isn't someone genuinely arguing the point to get a handle on the issue. This is just someone who's trying to justify the racist interpretation of how X and Y relate in terms of a quantity Z (that X is greater), because it didn't even bloody well occur to her that there might some other way one could rearrange the variables.
The same goes for so many bloggers busy discussing her, whether for excoriation or for acclamation, blissfully disregarding that there might be any possibilities other than either "white and black have equal Z" and "white is more Z than black". Their own hidden racism, just like whotsherface, blinds them to the actual dishonesty of their discourse.
Frex, in talking about anime illustration styles, one can't stop at "anime styles have nothing to do with Anglo appearances at all" (I'd call that X = Y) and "anime styles are emulating Anglo-ness" (X > Y). To wave the banner of 'just playing with ideas' or 'exploring something unfamiliar' requires having the Intellectual honesty to also ask whether the evidence indicates that "anime styles are mocking Anglo-ness" (X < Y).
Except... when was the last time you met a newcomer to anime who said, "wow, all those big eyes... is that because the Japanese really enjoy making fun of Anglos? Is this some kind of hating-America thing going on?"
I'm not sure there's a way to always know it before you see it, or to even know it when you see it. But it does seem to be a pretty good rule-of-thumb, at least IMO, to consider all the threads of an argument, and all the conclusions possible from the assumptions -- and, of course, the assumptions (hidden and obvious), themselves. And to remember that it may be innocent to ask why X = Y, but the real offense comes when one assumes that the only 'greater than' possible is X > Y.
To claim the defense of true intellectual curiosity and honesty, one must play it all out rather than stop at a comfortable racism-feeding point. One must keep going, all the way to the end, to consider that one's own 'greater' just might possibly be 'less than', in someone else's eyes.
A few days after doing that post, I was reading an architectural magazine when I came across an article featuring three different landscape designs by the same firm. The second project, a Japanese-influenced front garden, was titled, "I think I'm turning Japanese... I really think so".
I think I stared at that page for almost an entire minute, trying to wrap my head around the notion of using the catch phrase from a thirty-year-old pop song. Hell, I barely recall the song -- although the refrain is certainly catchy enough and has become a sort of iconic phrase in its own right, if divorced from whatever context there is of the song -- and while to some extent I could identify that my annoyance had something to do with the trivial context of the landscape article itself, I couldn't articulate why, exactly, my offensive-statement alarm bells were clanging.
I don't mention that to get into the wherefors of the article's title, but as illustration for how difficult it can be, sometimes, when instinct tells one that something is not-okay, but the lack of articulate logical explanation renders one unable to explain to someone else what's wrong. And I do think it's important to understand why, and to be able to explain it, or else one's left with sounding like that oft-quoted judge in one of the landmark obscenity cases, who declared he couldn't say what obscenity is, only that he knew it when he saw it.
To know it when you see it requires that you see it, after all, and if you don't know what you're looking for (or don't understand what you're looking for), then likely you may never find it. And since I can never pass up a chance to deconstruct anything I don't fully and cogently grasp, here we go.
My theory's that such potentially offensive statements (like my neighbors') requires several inter-connected processes. All of which start with -- and therefore sometimes cloak the entire process as -- something relatively innocuous. Nothing more than asking a 'simple' question about an item, behavior, or whatever that's unfamiliar.
Think of any art style and there's probably something in there that would make you say, on first reaction, "why is that drawn/portrayed that way?" Like, say, the trend in Hispanic art to have distorted perspectives on street scenes, or in Indian (Asia, not America) styles where the characters are always drawn in profile. Calling attention to this can be completely innocent. (Unless the tone isn't, frex when the question's phrased like, "all the people drawn are wearing stupid flowery skirts, what's up with that?" -- in which case, the derisive attitude is pretty obvious from the get-go.)
From the position of unfamiliar-observer, the next step is one that seems to be universal: attempting to understand by relating what-you-see to what-you-know. Everyone does this. It's human, in my experience, whether you're Japanese and visiting an American household that has a scroll on the wall and assuming immediately the scroll is Japanese, or an American visiting Sweden and hearing hej and assuming everyone's greeting you with an American hey. Or overhearing dialogue in a language you don't know: somewhere in there, your ear is going to twig on a like-sounding string of sounds and suddenly you're 'hearing' a word in your own language.
Neither of those behaviors are, in my opinion, necessarily racist in and of themselves; they're really just human reactions to unfamiliar settings, behaviors, languages, images, and so on. Where it gets really sticky is when ignorance, coupled with the need to relate unfamiliar to known, gets wrapped up together with a proprietary tape. The unfamiliar observer draws a line between this element and a similar, known element in white/American culture and, by dint of familiarity, cannot 'see' that element as anything other that white/American.
Let's take this completely out of the realm of anime/fandom, and use a different style in the example. Hmm. Here's one: the Chicano Movement (although I admit I'm biased in using this as an example because it's also one of my absolute favorite 'schools' of art, ever and ever). Take a look at these images.
1: Death of Rubén Salazar - Frank Romero
2: Quinceañera (15th Birthday) - Carmen Lomas Garza
3: Tacos, 1996 - Margaret Garcia
All of these above paintings have cars in them, and distinctly Detroit-steel-styled cars, at that. That 'proprietary tape' binding it all together is a perspective that see those familiar objects, and -- as a member of the white culture -- then identifies those objects as sole possessions of white culture.
Both "white people have large eyes" and "those are american cars" requires that the observer ignore that these items or behaviors could be true of other cultures/peoples as well. In other words: the observer, here, is moving from "this is similar to my culture" to "my culture has primary claim on this" to "my culture has the only rightful claim". This proprietary attitude in turn sets up the conclusion that anyone else's use is thereby automatically an attempt to co-opt one's culture.
To break it down into parts:
1. observation: Chicano artists depict white-identified object(s)
2. unspoken intermediary assumption: only white people (and people who want to be white) use/own/are that white-identified object
3. conclusion: when Chicano artists (or Japanese mangaka) include those objects, it means the artist is trying to be white.
Note: this works in all directions, don't get me wrong, although the more an object's widely adopted into the observer's culture, the less likelihood of this reaction. Frex, Volvos have been available in the US for going on fifty years; someone driving a Volvo may get snark about being middle-class, but they're not likely to get accused of wanting to be Swedish. Just like 'futon' is a loanword so totally adopted that having a futon bed, now, isn't going to raise any American eyebrows, really -- those are more associated with loft-livers and college students than anything formally 'Japanese'. Wearing a kimono, or decorating with scrolls, however... not quite so thoroughly adopted. The latter two will, I've found, are more likely to provoke the process, as "that's Asian" --> "you're co-opting Asian things" --> "you're one of those people who secretly wants to be Japanese."
[Aside: I'm never sure whether to be amused or remain baffled, seeing how I've gotten this "you wannabe Japanese!" response based on having scrolls... that are Chinese. Talk about making the assumptions and illogic really freaking obvious.]
Most people I've met stop there; until my neighbors' email I'd never experienced the next step first-hand, which is to take the proprietary and either/or assumptions to the point of an (il)logical corollary. That is, having concluded that the adoption of apparent white-identified (by the viewer) items/behaviors is a sign of co-opting white culture, that this co-option is mutually exclusive with one's own (non-white) culture. The corollary of "you're doing this to be white" is "you don't not want to be non-white".
Again we're up against something that's a human kind of assumption, if you just look at this tiny part of it. When we co-opt something, on a personal level, it's often because we're dissatisfied with what we have and/or are doing, and want to try someone else's method. That goes for everything from "my handwriting is messy, so I'll mimic this person's style because I like the way their 's' looks" to "employers don't take me seriously but they do take him seriously, so I'll wear suits like he does" to more insidious facets like "people assume a ___ accent indicates stupidity/laziness/etc so I'll get rid of my accent and sound like so-and-so instead".
Thus, when we see someone adopting a thing, behavior, belief, etc that we don't see as 'innate' (or deep-seated, if you prefer nurture-terms) it's not unlikely that we'd naturally figure this self-chosen adoption is a result of dissatisfaction.
And it's not a big jump from "I'm dissatisfied with what I get because I'm X" to "I hate being X and would rather be Y".
Each step, independently, may not be intentionally malicious. After all, it's all-too-human to relate the world one does know, to this new and unfamiliar world (or artwork, or language, or belief system, or etc). Outside the proprietary facet, I'm more likely to consider the question ignorantly offensive and treat the person as someone who'd understand the conflux of mis-steps, with a little education.
That education is best delivered by turning the argument inside out. "So basically, when I hang a Chinese scroll on my wall, I'm 'adopting' Chinese culture and therefore by definition 'loathe' my birth-culture?" Of course not, the speaker would reply, and if in that moment they realize the contradiction in their conclusions, we have a winner. Okay, a not-loser, at least, in that the person's (hopefully) less likely to make the same mistake again, or if so, to be able to catch themselves at it and start towards self-correcting. They're attuned to the logic, now, and the illogic, or at least on the path to attunement.
The problem children are those who who can't see the bind, who refuse and/or aren't able to grasp their cultural/racial bias. That, I'd say, is where you can draw the line between those who've swallowed the hidden racism in a culture versus those who are blissfully, even willfully, drowning in that racism. To you, their response misses the point, but to them, the point doesn't even exist to be missed. They can't even comprehend the premise. They cannot conceive of any culture worth emulating other than their own.
Tangential to this -- and ending up wrapped up in it, thanks to those hours of moving big honking rocks -- is the latest debacle with whotsherface, the Harvard student who couldn't just speak her racism but then had to go and write an email to make it absolutely, positively clear just how racist she really is. (Also, so we're clear: I'm setting aside the issue of whether or not, scientifically, race 'exists' -- since there's plenty out there that has little to no scientific basis yet is of major impact in our daily socio-cultural lives -- and there's no question 'race', like 'sex', has the biggest impact.)
Now, I've seen plenty of the furor and discussion online about whether it's okay to criticize someone who's just "innocently asking questions" and defense of the girl, however misguided, as "just playing with ideas" and so on. Sure, I'm all for questioning the prevailing authority, in nearly any instance, becomes sometimes that really is the best way to get a handle on an unfamiliar/complex issue: to work it out for yourself. There's also plenty of times that the prevailing wisdom is wrong, and questions are one of the best ways to discover that wrongness.
Thing is, if you look at her argument -- much like the anime-big-eyes argument or the Chicano-detroit-steel argument -- it's not just that she's rehashing questions that have already been answered, even definitively. It's also that Miss Harvard Student isn't even being philosophically or logically honest about it. Basically, she's saying she's arguing devil's advocate (and we'll ignore for a moment that this, in itself, is a huge flag of both derailment and privilege) -- but she's only playing devil's advocate for the position in which she's personally invested. It's a false advocacy, which becomes obvious once we deconstruct the process.
So let's set our variables as:
X = white
Y = black
Z = some measurable behavior, trait, or skill
...and then solve for X. (I'll let it pass with only minor note that this phrasing is intentional, seeing how algebra traditionally "solves for X" just as Hollywood's idea of conflict is always "solve the white guy's burden".)
You take those three values, and you can come up with these three possibilities as concerns the quantity of Z:
X = Y
X > Y
X < Y
The prevailing socially-acceptable (PC, if you wish) position is the first: X = Y, that is, X and Y have equal amounts of Z. In longhand: whites and blacks are equally intelligent, or equally athletic, or equally articulate, or whatever.
The question raised by whotsherface was the second, of X > Y: X has more Z than Y. If she were truly 'playing around with ideas' and trying to 'reach a satisfying conclusion on her own terms', why'd she stop there? She -- like so many other racist debaters hiding under cover of just "playing around with ideas" -- skips the third stream: that X has less Z than Y.
For the argument to be truly philosophically honest, one should endeavor to ask all the possible questions. Not just "is it true that X and Y are equal in terms of Z," but also "what if Y is greater" and also "what if X is greater". The fact that she not only left off this third postulation -- hell, didn't even seem to realize that the postulate might even exist at all! -- says to me that this isn't someone genuinely arguing the point to get a handle on the issue. This is just someone who's trying to justify the racist interpretation of how X and Y relate in terms of a quantity Z (that X is greater), because it didn't even bloody well occur to her that there might some other way one could rearrange the variables.
The same goes for so many bloggers busy discussing her, whether for excoriation or for acclamation, blissfully disregarding that there might be any possibilities other than either "white and black have equal Z" and "white is more Z than black". Their own hidden racism, just like whotsherface, blinds them to the actual dishonesty of their discourse.
Frex, in talking about anime illustration styles, one can't stop at "anime styles have nothing to do with Anglo appearances at all" (I'd call that X = Y) and "anime styles are emulating Anglo-ness" (X > Y). To wave the banner of 'just playing with ideas' or 'exploring something unfamiliar' requires having the Intellectual honesty to also ask whether the evidence indicates that "anime styles are mocking Anglo-ness" (X < Y).
Except... when was the last time you met a newcomer to anime who said, "wow, all those big eyes... is that because the Japanese really enjoy making fun of Anglos? Is this some kind of hating-America thing going on?"
I'm not sure there's a way to always know it before you see it, or to even know it when you see it. But it does seem to be a pretty good rule-of-thumb, at least IMO, to consider all the threads of an argument, and all the conclusions possible from the assumptions -- and, of course, the assumptions (hidden and obvious), themselves. And to remember that it may be innocent to ask why X = Y, but the real offense comes when one assumes that the only 'greater than' possible is X > Y.
To claim the defense of true intellectual curiosity and honesty, one must play it all out rather than stop at a comfortable racism-feeding point. One must keep going, all the way to the end, to consider that one's own 'greater' just might possibly be 'less than', in someone else's eyes.