Assholes in the news

[Rev. Rye]

To put the problems with that Coke racial sensitivity video into perspective, here’s a guy who sunk 20-30 grand on a sociology degree talking about the problems with it:





I think the fundamental problem here lies in the disconnect between academic language and everyday language. For instance, an everyday person will likely define racism as “race-based prejudice,” while in an academic context, the term tends to refer to what we lay-motherfuckers call systemic racism. It’s how people can say things like “black people cant be racist” with a straight face. If we’re talking about whether or not they’re the ones who benefit from the racist structures that pervade society, it’s a no-shit Sherlock statement. If you’re talking about whether or not an individual black person can be as racially bigoted as an individual white person, it just comes across as sophistry, especially if you’re not familiar with the second definition. 

In this case, while the layman might read “whiteness” and think “someone who looks like they were of recent European ancestry, (but not any other part of the world),” In academia, it tends to be given a far more abstract meaning, one that seems commensurate with “white privilege.” Not simply fair skin or a non negligible chance of growing up to have red or blonde hair, or even shit like enjoying the Blues Brothers and being indifferent to Robert Johnson. It includes shit like being able to look at the Presidents and seeing them look like you. Or, in a more visceral example, being able to encounter a police officer and being able to reasonably expect them to not A) stop you and accuse you of a crime you didn’t commit because “you matched a description” that doesn’t actually look like you except for your race, or B) find some pretext to kill you and get away with it. With this in mind, it’s not hard to see what they’re going for. 

I don’t know if Joyce DiAngelo explained that before she got to that part of the video, but if she didn’t or even if she did and the audience has yet to fully accept this new definition, it’s all but inevitable that this comes off as essentialist bullshit against white people. Shit that, if you said against, say, Black or Asian people, would get you fired and blacklisted by anyone outside wingnut circles. The optics make you (and by extension, the anti-racist movement as a whole) look like shit and in the end, nothing constructive happens, except hopefully you learn from your mistakes.

And maybe some randy on the internet sees it and sees it as evidence that opposing anti-racist activism is somehow different from propping up racism.