Some thoughts on race, part 4--Tokenism

"Some of my best friends are [fill in with whatever group you're trying to show that you don't dislike, distrust, disdain, etc.]."  At the moment--and probably the original use, it's "black."  

People who used that line thought they were proving their unbiased, not racist, not prejudicial attitudes.  To most people in the "friend" group, it demonstrated precisely the opposite.  #1, no, they aren't.  The person saying it didn't have best friends in the other group.  #2, if they did, it wasn't some, because it wouldn't take many black friends before you'd hear a bit of the frustrations and concerns of black Americans.  Or, #3, they weren't really best friends because the black person kept those difficult concerns private...in the expectation that airing the concerns would just earn rejection or dismissal.

In any case, this is a brand of tokenism--in this instance, engaging or focusing on a small number of people from a particular group as a way of saying you've engaged that group.  

Tokenism is simplistic.  It undermines the complex realities of life.  People are not what their token looks like, and the token isn't even all that you wish the token to be.

Tokenism is unkind.  It reduces people to caricatures, and puts an awful burden on the token individual.

Tokenism is lazy.  It allows you to forgo the work of finding out about people.

Facebook is rife with tokenism right now.  Opponents of Black Lives Matter, or people who are angry that protests have turned ugly and violent (and tend to blame all protesters for that), or people who otherwise disagree with the claims of the protesters, and so on, are posting the material from this or that black conservative and saying, 'see, this black person is against Black Lives Matter (or, the protests, or something else about the myriad claims regarding the issues).'

Some people will even say, "and this person is NO token," which immediately instigates the anxiety that that is precisely what the person is.  Why else would you bother to point it out?

Former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice has been offered in this fashion.  She has various conservative bona fides, she's also black and so her name got dropped in what I've here called the Token way.

She wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post. In it, she was measured and circumspect with her language, but declared "[George] Floyd’s horrific death should be enough to finally move us to positive action." She goes on to explain that "systemic change is necessary to make our institutions more just."

Condoleeza Rice definitely has the conservative credentials--she served the country faithfully under both President Bushes. But she's got black American bona fides as well. She bootstrapped her way to success...out of Jim Crow Birmingham, AL, no less. And she's endured racism is large and small ways.

So, what to do? Should I claim the prize for "the best NOT a token black commentator"? Or should I say, try not to use tokenism in support of your claims?

I'm going with the second one.

Some thoughts on race, part 3--A Colorblindness Redux

Colorblindness, part 2.

This article is a few years old, but it reports a "study finds that adults view [African American girls] as less child-like and less in need of protection than their white peers."

Similar had already been found about black boys. An earlier Atlantic article says, "Asked to identify the age of a young boy that committed a felony, participants in a study routinely overestimated the age of black children far more than they did white kids...Cops did it, too."

I'm not sure I trust claims of colorblindness.

Some thoughts on race, part 2--Is colorblindness a good idea?

I've seen a lot musing on being colorblind, racially. I don't think that's a thing, as they say. Imagine a photo with one lone (pick any "color") individual, a male in this case. Nobody says, "the guy on the left, next to the guy with the red shirt, behind the guy with his eyes closed." Everybody says, "the (whatever the lone color is) guy." And we all get it, we all understand immediately. Innocuous, you say, and maybe it is. But if you're not colorblind there, how do you know you're colorblind when it's not so innocuous?

Go watch the doll experiment for a demonstration of how color-seeing people are.

Furthermore, to claim colorblindness is to miss things. Not only richness, but also some important context. Take "playing the dozens." (Google it, you'll find countless sites discussing it.) A racially colorblind person would miss that this is a uniquely African-American activity. Again, might seem innocuous enough. So black men one-up each other with cutting insults--usually about each other's mothers...so what?

Dig a little further, and you find that the roots of this game go back at least to slave days (and possibly to the W. African societies from which America's African slaves were taken). Then consider that most historians agree the game served several purposes of social organization and engagement.

For one, some historians think that social orderings and conflict resolution among the slaves were partly handled by playing the dozens. Slaves could not fight among themselves--the penalties were heavy, so verbal combat stood in for fighting.

Moreover, historians all agree that field slaves certainly were subordinate to house slaves, so verbal "attacks" were the only thing available for field slaves to express anger and address conflicts. Since it's not hard to imagine the white master's "preference" for the house slave did not extend to allowing physical attack on the field hand (that risks damaging the owner's capital investment, after all) an interesting social order and arrangement among the slaves likely arose--a world with some internal autonomy, so long as a general order and productivity were maintained. Sure, the house slave was higher in the white master's pecking order, but all the slaves knew this or that particular field hand had "won" where it really mattered, by throwing shade on the house slave when playing the dozens. (Yes, I'm using my sociological imagination, in conjunction with the histories, memoirs, etc., I've read or seen.)

Some historians even wonder if parents taught their children a kind of self-control with the dozens. You can't get mad, you can't fight back, but you can turn it into a dozens rhyme (some say that dozens insults should be rhyming, and some even point to this being a precursor to rap).

So, an old verbal combat game that has lasted down to today. It's uniquely African-American in style and intent. And it has some important sociological roots.

I also wonder about its "consequences" today. I'm not saying I like it, but maybe this helps explain the anger and frustration in rap. Other avenues of expression and pursuit of redress feel somewhat blocked--and certainly comparatively less available than for the white people around them, so you turn to something, music, where you can express those things.

And a personal example....I remember being a 17-year-old white suburban kid on an all-star football team drawn from around the area. The team included 3 players from an "inner-city" black school. Whenever we had a break from practice, they'd sit together playing variations on the dozens. I remember them laughing and laughing, and I also remember a creeping anxiety that was basically rooted in wondering if they were laughing at me for some reason.

It's not hard to imagine how, if I'd had a position of power over them, and I'd thought they were indeed laughing at me, I could find them "disrespectful." They were just playing the dozens...it had nothing to do with me.

This is NOT to say that disrespect doesn't ever happen. It does.

I'd say, however, that the cumulative total of disrespect in American history is much greater white toward black than black toward white.

The point is that I don't think colorblindness--racially--is real. And to claim colorblindness is to miss important stuff.

Some thoughts on race, part 1--What does Black Lives Matter mean?

I have a book called How to be a Gentleman. One rule says that unless he's an English teacher, a gentleman does not correct another's grammar.

Well, I AM an English teacher, and I want to observe (not correct, per se) something about grammar.

In the phrase Black Lives Matter, Black is an adjective modifying the noun Lives. Matter is the verb. What about the Lives that are Black? They Matter.

But grammar doesn't necessarily convey the variety of emphases we might want or experience. My son runs the drama club at my school, and he's always telling the young actors to find the word that they want to emphasize--to really hit--in a line.

So, do you emphasize the noun, as if to say that the particular thing (really, person/people) matters? (Go ahead, say it with overemphasis--Black LIVES Matter.)

Almost as if to declare that lives matter...because they haven't as much as they ought. And since you've qualified the thing with black, it's as if to say that those particular lives matter...in ways they might not have previously. Or, do you emphasize the noun lives to say that the thing that matters is the lives? As in, other black things (homes, jobs, cars) matter differently from lives....

Or do you emphasize the verb (Black Lives MATTER), as if to point out something that Black Lives "do" that you--or others--hadn't noticed they do? Or to emphasize that they do that? You know, like, Black Lives Eat, Black Lives Sleep, and Black Lives Matter. Nobody needs reminding that Black Lives Eat, but perhaps the creators of the phrase mean to point out that people may need reminding that besides eating, black lives also matter.

Or do you emphasize the adjective (BLACK Lives Matter), as if to say that a particular kind of life matters?

And, perhaps, that kind of life matters more than other kinds that are not that? The ALL Lives Matter retort apparently answers that last question YES, and is upset about that. Thus, the rejoinder is that ALL lives, not just Black lives, matter...to remind us of the status of "mattering" is for everybody.

But it's not necessarily as simple as that. One could counter that, yes, I'm asserting that specifically black lives matter because to this point they haven't mattered AS MUCH as other lives. I'm asserting that black lives also belong in ALL, where, to this point, they haven't been.

So the different grammatical and expressive emphases load the phrase with different meanings. And your own verbal response to the phrase implies both the meaning you took from the first phrase, and your own reply to THAT meaning. You do elevate one meaning above the others...we all do that. It can't mean everything to you all at once. It might mean everything across a group of people, because each person takes one of the many alternate views, but it won't mean everything equally all at once to an individual.

I suggest that if you want to quickly and emphatically retort that ALL lives matter, you are operating with the "black lives mattering specially, and perhaps greater than non-black lives" definition. As we've seen, that's not the only meaning available. So to assert that's the "real" meaning is to privilege (remember, I think that word is better as a verb) your view against other views of the meaning. I'm confident to say you're privileging your preferred meaning, because I've read, seen and heard plenty of black Americans point out that they are relying on something more like the "black lives matter...though to this point they haven't as much as others" definition,

to which the rejoinder of ALL lives matter really doesn't make sense.

It seems to me that if the phrase were "The lives of black people really matter more than they have to this point," we wouldn't be as confused. There'd be more definitional clarity, and there'd never have been a movement...nobody'd march in a protest under the banner of such a clunky slogan.