Do the Ends Justify [the Meanness of] the Means? What are the Values and Practices of the Internet Blog-and-Comment Culture?

DO THE

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?

A friend recently reminded me that a blogger colleague of hers insists on a strict set of values and practices at her blog: no insults, no ad hominen attacks, no disrespect, no tearing down of other human beings to build oneself up. The blog is defined as feminist and that understanding of 'feminist' is one I grew up with. Audre Lorde took issue with stuff Mary Daly wrote; Andrea Dworkin and Audre Lorde had very different perspectives on the erotic; Dworkin and MacKinnon weren't on the same page with what happened to their anti-pornography ordinance in Canada, but that didn't mean they couldn't be respectful of one another. Audre Lorde wrote explicitly about the need for oppressed people to find respectful and compassionate ways to engage across differences such as race and sexuality. Alice Walker has demonstrated an increasingly rare form of compassion for people who structurally oppress women. See this piece for more, from her blog:

http://alicewalkersgarden.com/2009/12/a-letter-to-tiger-woods-from-alice-walker/

I don't see much care, respect, or mutual regard on the internet any more among people who are not the most socially dominant. Or, even, among those who are--to each other. Insults fly easily. Disrespect and snark is the increasingly defaulted mode of communicating disagreement.

The whole of contemporary Western society, of many societies, is set up to infuse spoken and unspoken acts with misogynist hatred and degradation. When women notice and speak out about it, the act of objecting or resisting or organising against such misogyny is itself termed another form of hatred: misandry. I don't believe objecting to one's people being denigrated as a class by another more powerful class of persons constitutes a form of hatred. Self-love on the class level is not hatred. Resistance to being used and abused on grand and grotesque scales isn't hatred either. So we have to be careful about how language is used to mean anything at all.

In my own experience, any challenge to white power and entitlement by anyone who isn't white is considered an insulting thing to do--to whites. As noted above, the same holds true for women's serious challenges to men's unearned and lethal power over and against women and girls. It makes sense, in a perverse sort of way, for the uplift and mutual support among members of an oppressed group to be portrayed as action that is hostile to their oppressors. Such a portrait of marginalised and subordinated people by those who exploit and assault them is part of how social dominants maintain control and power over them/us. The very use of the term "uppity" for politically active anti-racist African American men and women and for anti-sexist women across race is proof enough that trying to get where white men are structurally located is not acceptable to most white men. The amount of anti-feminism among men across race demonstrates men's contempt not only for women but for women's efforts to be free of men's dominance. Andrea Dworkin, among other feminists, noted that whether women resist men's dominance or not they will still be degraded by men. This truism applies to many oppressed people and is reason enough to resist and organise revolutionary strategies of social change.

I have tried to create a blog space that is free of snark but I have failed at times. I think I used to be a snarkier person than I am now, only in part because I see it taking over what were once reasonably compassionate zones of discourse. Snark is "in". I've never been one to do what is fashionable, especially if it is part of how the status quo stays empowered. But another reason for doing away with snark is that I've come to see the raced and gendered dynamics of snark and self-satisfied insult-hurling. It wears thin, in my experience, as a way of communicating important ideas and political challenges. If I had it to over again, I might withdraw all the insults I've hurled at MRAs here. Not because I think MRAs are respectful of women or care about being respectful even among themselves. I see most MRAgendas as profoundly dangerous to women and I've seen how bullied MRAs are among each other. I guess I now see how being snarky towards MRAs is practicing their own well-honed values.

I just want to opt out of the pattern of anti-feminist disrespect and degradation. It isn't what brilliant radical feminist authors and activists like Audre Lorde and Alice Walker taught in their own work.

I believe in having role models as long as we don't turn them into idolised G-ds. I've been accused of doing just that with the use of a term I occasionally have used here, "Lorde knows..." My point in bringing Audre's last name into the term wasn't to pretend she wasn't human. It was to note that her humanity was as divine as anyone else's, and so why not say "Lorde knows" instead of "Lord knows"?

I understand Audre Lorde and Alice Walker to be deeply human beings. I studied their work to understand what "feminist ethics" means, in practice, in daily life. It means, in part, not participating in bully-culture.

A lot of what I've seen men and whites do is bully other people to bolster their/our own already structurally well-supported sense of self. Of course any individual's sense of self may be worn down by verbal or physical assaults against them. Or by various injustices flowing from institutionalised heterosexism, racism, and misogyny. People with white power don't necessarily have the powers afforded people who are heterosexual and male. Men are degraded socially by class, race, and sexuality if not by gender.

Among males and among whites, I've seen many hierarchies develop and how the values of social dominance infuse interactions designed to have a few control the many.

I was bullied for seven years in grade school. I felt the emotional burn of humiliation and the visceral fear of being beaten. I generally avoided being hit but not always. I'm not into physical fights. I was called a coward for not fighting boys. "Cowardice" in male supremacist and masculinist world is often understood to be akin to "pacifism". As I recall from my early life and accounts since of the era, white male hippies were called misogynist names by old-fashioned patriarchal white men who believed real men shoot and kill one another--well, not one another necessarily, but shoot and kill men and women of color in many parts of the Americas and across Asia. I was too young to be part of hippy culture but I did grow up with an erotic aesthetic build on the idea that males could be gentle and caring people. One of the boys who bullied me when I was young was degraded at home by his father. I didn't know this at the time. I kind of wish I had, as it might have helped me despise him less. That I despised him wasn't evidence of me being a man-hater. It was evidence of me trying to find some way to feel better about myself by distancing myself from him and his hurtful behavior.

On MRA sites over the years, I've seen little to no evidence that any of those men value care and gentleness. I see how the culture of bullying, meanness, and self-aggrandisement pervades particular disagreements and overall discourse. I see how terrorism and threats of gross brutality are collectively passed off as appropriate treatment of those they disagree with.

The last time I engaged with an MRA on this blog, I did so with the understanding--his and my own--that we would attend to each other's perspectives with regard and respect, no flame throwing, no verbal assaults. I regret he ducked out of the conversation. It was indeed refreshing to have one like that with someone I strongly disagree with on several points. See the links just below for more of that. They are from the blog in late May and early June of 2011.

http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2011/05/can-enemies-become-allies-conversation.html

http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2011/06/enemies-or-allies-part-2-of.html

http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2011/06/can-enemies-become-allies-conversation.html

http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2011/06/are-womens-rights-also-human-rights-for.html

Some women have written to me privately about how much bullying there is among white self-defined feminist bloggers and commenters online. Facebook, in particular, can be a vicious place to hang out in: I go there rarely. I know women who have been driven out of there by other women who apparently valued being very mean and hurtful. (And by men too. Lots and lots of men.) The women who have written to me don't or won't speak out against the very patriarchal practices (their determination, which I agree with) of woman-demeaning and woman-hurting done by white women; they don't want to be more targeted for harm and degradation than they already are by people they want to believe are on the same side of their political struggles.

I've witnessed some white women engaging in the very threatening tactics of the men's rights activists they claim to oppose and be so different from. According to some radical feminist women of color I know, they are behaving in similarly cyber-terroristic ways in the name of doing feminist work. I can't say for sure but I don't believe Audre Lorde, Andrea Dworkin, or Alice Walker would call such behavior "feminist". Alice is still alive and perhaps somewhere in her work she addresses this directly. If you know of such passages, please let me know of them. Some of Andrea's and Audre's work is still being published and somewhat available to be read. I'll refer you to their writing to verify my hunch and not to rely my own suppositions about it.

Meanness, callousness, and cruelty weren't feminist values according to every feminist activist and writer I grew up reading and adoring--unless I greatly misread their work, of coure. Given what I've witnessed early in my life and more recently, I currently understand being mean and cruel as definitionally white and male supremacist ways of being human. And while anyone can participate in such behavior, the practice of it seems to only reinforce and maintain white and male supremacist power not ameliorate, mitigate, or eradicate it.

I don't mean to put value on a liberal kind of humanistic kindness or on "civility", which as I understand it, is a dishonest and despicable form of covering up the bloodiness of a society's genocidal and gynocidal practices by appearing to be 'good-natured' and 'reasonable' in the classist, racist, misogynist sense. I admire oppressed people who don't prioritise caring about oppressors over caring about the oppressed. And all of the most radical activists I've known personally didn't make it their practice to consider any class of people inhuman, no matter how entitled or oppressive.

I've encountered some white women, mostly women who don't identify as radical feminist, who consider men to be less-than-human. When I've asked them if they'd advocate a political perspective that supports women of color viewing whites--men and women, as less-than-human, they don't answer the question. I believe this means they don't see how lethal and horrific the power of their institutionalised whiteness is. I've encountered men of color who believe they are more oppressed than women of color. When I note that men of color systematically assault women of color in their homes and beyond, they don't respond.

More startling still, I've encountered many white men--heterosexual and economically-empowered at that--who believe they are the most oppressed and put-down group on Earth. To this there isn't much to say, really. Such avoidance of knowing how other people live demonstrates a kind of self-centeredness and willful refusal to empathise with people-not-oneself. Meaningful intervention into such normalised sociopathy, unfortunately, is difficult for me to imagine. I've certainly not had much luck shifting that kind of political self-unawareness and spiritual myopia through conversation. I attempted to address these issues with James Huff in the posts linked to above but he disappeared before we got that far.

I wish us all luck and strength as we find ways to radically transform a very mean society into one that cares about humanity and all life on Earth, off-line if not also on.

A Few Thoughts About Speech and Freedom

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There have been many conversations that were begun here but not finished. The most glaringly recent example is what appeared to be a good discussion with MRA James Huff, on politics and reality. But he decided to not show up for the rest of it after an initial engagement here.

He didn't send any email explaining why he was leaving the conversation: James, if you read this, please let me know why you decided to duck out in such an irresponsible way. For all the free speech rights you enjoy, you've become shockingly silent. Why is that? (I hope it's not due to family illness; but if it were, you'd surely have been able to let me know that.)

This is typical, in my experience, of men who fight for men to have more not less rights, more not less power, more not less social advantages and entitlements. Men speak up when it suits their own interests but get quiet in the face of sustained challenge to the patriarchal power they have and enjoy exploiting.

In my country, rich white publicly heterosexual men are fighting tooth and nail to make sure none of 'em are taxed one bit more than they already are--including taxed just the way that poor and working class people are taxed; that is, without loopholes, without corporate welfare, without access to the meaningful and fair use of laws, lawyers, and all manner of economic systemic help that benefits the rich while punishing (and never privileging) the poor. There are actually ads on television from Big Oil stating that taxing Big Oil and other mega-industrial energy companies would be a bad thing for "us". Why? Why is it bad for us if they pay what they owe, just like every poor US American? How does reducing national debt work against the interests of poor and working people? (It might mean that the interest rates on the debts poor and working class people carry would be lowered, after all.) Are energy conglomerates' wealthy stockholders and CEOs more important human beings? Are the rich entitled to better, less economically terrifying lives than poor people? (I know that the wealthy believe this, but is it right, just, or true?)

In my country, those who state that a man or men have raped them are immediately accused of lying and are made to prove they were raped. Men who lie about never having raped anyone ever don't get scrutinised by media and the public; they are not ever made to prove they didn't commit rape, once or many times. To speak out about rape is to be immediately accused by white male-owned, white male-dominated media of committing the "crime" of speaking out against rapists.

In my country, white, het, and male supremacy are so intimately and intricately embedded in values, practices, and social structures that even to state opposition to those values and practices, whether interpersonal, institutional, or both, is not, in and of itself, a meaningful form of activism.

As I've discussed here in the past, me stating views about things, as I often do, does not necessarily constitute radical activism in my opinion; it functions, perhaps, as a place for such activism to be brought into recognition and regard. (I've written about this before.) Actively and meaningfully supporting the struggles of oppressed people (with accountability to the oppressed) to gain power, liberation, and freedom from those people and systems that harm them is meaningful activism to me.

I hope in the coming months to link to far more activist efforts globally--to the organised struggles of Indigenous people, radical women of color, Feminist Lesbians, and white women. Their speech-through-action needs a larger public stage.

This blog centers on the struggles of women globally to support their work and to publicly analyse and challenge the powers that harm women unrelentingly. But it is the work of women on the ground, not in cyberspace, who are the front line in feminist struggles. More power to them.

When you hear or read pro-oppression speech, note how it frames up discussions; note how it uses ideas like "objectivity" and "rationality" and "science" to bolster its truth-claims. Note which of many forms of masculinist Eurocentric supremacy are embedded in such terms. (See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, and Marimba Ani, Yurugu:An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, for much more on this.)

When you read books about "the history of [something]" note whether it assumes that only those who write and get published constitute the tellers of the history being described. Note how many poor women of color are the tellers of both history and truth. And please remember that poor women of color across sexuality and region are the majority of the world's population; they are not what white men call them: a minority. White het men are a minority within a minority of white men: they just get to speak so much, so often, with such overwhelming authority, that we think there are more of them than there actually are.

When we encounter efforts to attain freedom, what are we wanting freedom from and what are we wanting freedom to do? And, most especially, who is the "we"? Is our sexual orientation assumed to be normal and natural, or is it generally socially despised, exploited, or ignored? What color and gender are we? Where do we live? What sorts of privileges do we have?

Beware of the "we" that won't own or name their own structural and social privilege. They likely don't speak for the majority: poor women of color globally who are not without privileges and power but usually without institutional support, without leadership roles within nation-states, and without published books written in their own voices, detailing their own regional and personal-political struggles.

Living Under The Same Roof: On The Waltons, Familiarity, and Awareness of Whiteness

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I've been a fan of The Waltons TV series since it began airing in the early 1970s when I was just a kid. It ran for nine seasons and it has been re-airing, in sequence, over the last many years, on various cable networks. Currently it's on Hallmark Channel which is showing three episodes a day, Monday through Friday.

Originally it aired weekly. So in a month I'd see about four programs. These days I can see a whole season of shows in about two weeks! This is an entirely different way to take in the program and allows me to see things that I'd missed when my viewing of the program and tracking of the on-going plot lines was spaced out. I can now notice patterns of speaking, expressions each character says that eluded me back in the day; being a kid and adolescent also meant I was seeing through entirely different lenses, developmentally. The youngest girl, Elizabeth, is currently grown up into a young adult in the episodes airing this week. One of the people in her many-sibling'ed family is her next older sibling, a brother named Jim-Bob. When he is about to do something really unwise, like fail a science test so he doesn't have to be valedictorian of his high school graduating class because he's afraid of being a leader, she's there to tell him she's ashamed of him. That assessment from his little sister is enough to get him back on track, to push through inner obstacles to his own success or overcome impulses to be grossly irresponsible.

Elizabeth is the moral center of the family which has lost its grandparents and parents as key characters. I hadn't realised this when I originally watched the show in the '70s.

There's a lot I didn't track, I'm realising. Just as the hue of the floral-patterned fabric on the stuffed living room chair and how it is similar to but not the same as the pinker floral pattern of the fabric on the couch. I can see with greater regularity which photos adorn the mantelpiece. I can see what clothes they tend to wear.

As you probably know, you REALLY get to know someone when you spend a lot of time with them, in person. Especially living under the same roof.

“The same roof”, for me right now, is functioning as a kind of metaphor for familiarity among humans.

I grew up around mostly white people. I had opportunities to be around people who were Black but in the place where African Americans and whites co-existed, they didn't get to know each other well. Cultural and class differences, as well as the prevailing antagonistic force of white supremacy, kept Black students at my junior high school separate from most whites. Life was more comfortable that way, I imagine, for the students of color. It was surely more comfortable for the whites, who so clearly preferred to congregate only amongst themselves. This need was projected onto African Americans by the white students, and this has become a stereotype—not of whites, but of groups of people of color of the same ethnicity: “they” tend to “keep to themselves”. And whites don't?

My whole life, through to this day at this hour, I've watched whites keep to themselves while not exactly having the awareness that whites do this more often than other racial groups. I've watched whites be open to getting to know people of color but not under the same roof—not with any great degree of familiarity and bonding. There have been exceptions: one of my female white family members married a man who is Latino. He's the only Latina/Latino person in my family. The white family welcomes him, but not without noticing that he's not “like us”. They do their best to put aside his difference, which usually means they distort and misunderstand what that difference is. The difference, primarily, is one of political location. They are hard-working poor white folks; he's a hard-working man without white privilege. They don't see his difference to them in those terms at all.

Yesterday on The Waltons, there was an episode I didn't remember seeing when it first aired. I'm wondering if I saw it but couldn't let in what it was dealing with. I would have been living with white Christian family then, under the same roof, and the episode was about Jason's girlfriend, Toni, and her being Jewish. The family took this news strangely—making Toni feel strange about being a Jew. Their behavior didn't make them feel strange about being Baptist.

The episode dealt really well with that form of anti-Semitism. I was intimately aware of that level of it as I've gotten exactly the same form from my Christian family members. As I think I've told you before here, I'm the only gay male and the only Jew in my white Christian-majority, white Christian-dominant family. And those in my family who identify as Christian are not “secular” about it. They believe they are “right” about who god is. They believe everyone needs Jesus in their lives—their Jesus, that is; not the real Jesus.

When the Walton siblings acted strangely, Toni felt estranged from the family she was growing to love. Jason felt like they were coming between him and his new love. But one of his brothers, Ben, felt like she was coming between Jason and his family. Ben was the one to behave in ways that came across as most anti-Semitic, although to him it was only fear of losing his brother. What his behavior was to Toni and Jason was anti-Jewish because it made Toni feel like an invading outsider, and it showed no capacity to understand his own behavior as problematic and insulting to her.

I've been around Christian whites a lot in my life—sometimes living under the same roof as them. When I talk about them to other Jews—of any color—what I find is that we can relate to all the many ways W.C.'s have of making Jews feel strange or like we're outsiders invading their precious spiritual-moral terrain. They tend to view themselves as superior, although not necessarily out loud in so many words. It's implicit in most of what they do when encountering someone who isn't Christian but who is identified or affiliated with another religion.

In the last several years, most of my closest friends have not been white or actively Christian. One woman is Jewish; most of the people I know well were raised in homes that were Christian-identified but the women don't identify with Christianity; they, like me, find it to be oppressively heterosexist and misogynistic or otherwise insulting to their humanity.

I don't view Christianity one way. The ways my family members practice it, for example, is very different than how my white feminist lesbian mentor practiced it. There was almost no resemblance at all. They were of different denominations, but the whole attitude about Christianity was radically different. My family needs it—they need it to be something for them, to stabilise their lives. My mentor didn't need it; she embraced it because it held some meaning for her. She brought her wisdom to her faith; my family chooses to believe any wisdom they have comes from Jesus, not from their own mind or the world itself. They worship a male god who lives in the sky; my feminist mentor did not. In fact, she prayed to and honored The Goddess, or Goddesses. My family wouldn't regard her as Christian at all, for that and many other reasons.

What has taken me a long time to see is how whiteness works, in part because I never got enough self-awareness to see how it was operating in my own behavior. Being Jewish and white has been both an opportunity and obstacle to seeing how my own white actions function to protect the power I hold for being white—power that is held for me institutionally, made available when I wish to utilise it.

What I find is that if you grow to know someone or a situation intimately, the details of how it operates become clearer than if you keep that reality at arm's length, or check in with it only every now and then. But intimacy without the ability to analyse what you're experiencing can leave you like a fish in water—utterly unable to describe what wet feels like.

James Huff, an MRA who has not been in contact with me for a couple of weeks now, had written to me his observations about Black and Brown people in the U.S. I haven't published them here because I view them as domineering and dehumanising. He thinks his views are accurate and appropriate. He thinks Black and Brown people can be summarised in ways he'd find unacceptable and bigoted if anyone did the same to his people. That's part of his domineering power: to think he gets to contain people in his observations without being willing to allow others to do the same to him and his.

If the problem were being misunderstood, that'd be one thing. But if the misunderstandings and mischaracterisations are part of an overall program to keep people down, economically and politically beneath others, that's something else that must be radically changed. To deny that's the function of the distortions is to engage in one form of protectionism of the system of oppressive harm that folks on top get to deny. White men deny it by not being able to describe what it means to be white and men, in the political and structural senses of those terms.

What I see now more clearly is that one of the ways white people along the hierarchy of gender do to keep power in whites' hands is to pretend their whiteness has no political meaning or social substance. One of the places I've seen this is at a blog called Rad Fem Hub.

Another time, I may post more about the ways they do that. What they do is exactly what white men do, although as they are women they don't do it coming from the same place as the men. But what they do is classic in revealing how white privilege and entitlements work to keep power invisible exactly at the same time it is being exercised in racist ways. I've been hoping white women would call them out, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon, as whiteness is a very strong political bond few whites want to break.