dagblog - Comments for "Failed Outrage? How to Best Humanize 'The Other'"

Yes, appreciating you

artappraiser — Sat, 21 Sep 2019 01:39:12 +0000

Yes, appreciating you spending time on refocusing, especially appreciate pointing out the complexities of meaning in "dehumanize." (Actually got me thinking how even hate does not necessarily always equal dehumanizing, you can hate someone you consider an equal or superior!)

You are correct, I think, to point out that about Americans not liking dehuminization as a technique, a majority Americans of the mid-to-late 20th C for the most part don't like to dehumanize even those they detained as enemies much less immigrants. There was great pride in the exceptionalist idea that we were supposedly the humanest victors in WWII, hence all the outrage and distress over things like the Mylai massacre and torture during the Iraq years. Like to be known as the good guy, not the scary guy. I would also throw in here the stereotype of the overly friendly and talkative American in jaded Europe, a stereotype that most Americans weren't ashamed to be labeled with. It is that same kind of friendly chatter about commonalities of entertainment, or boyfriend or children woes in the beauty parlor, that we are talking about as humanizing.

Good point about factory workers, too. I think of how it was a downfall of 1970's lefties and hippies like myself to think of them as dehumanized nicompoops, slaves to the man (rise up you've got nothing to lose but your chains...yadda yadda) That was often counter productive, they were proud of themselves and their jobs. Perhaps part of humanizing is a willingness to share weakness/troubles/problems with the other, that is where empathy grows. Not sympathy, empathy. Sympathy is an unequal situation.

Dehumanize doesn't

ocean-kat — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 18:04:06 +0000

In reply to Failed Outrage? How to Best Humanize 'The Other'

Dehumanize doesn't necessarily mean that we view them as less than human. It's just means subjecting them to degrading or demeaning conditions. It can mean both, as in Nazi Germany where Jews were both treated brutally and considered less than human. But dehumanize is often used to refer to conditions that are brutal without considering those so treated as less than human. The first time I remember encountering the word it referred to factory work as dehumanizing. But those mostly white workers at the time weren't considered part of a subhuman race. Jail is often referred to as a dehumanizing situation yet we don't think of prisoners as subhuman.

We've spent too much time focusing on this small point from the article because rmrd has latched onto it. Imo conflating the degrading conditions of these immigrant camps with seeing them as less than human was a small flaw in an otherwise interesting article. I thought of the article as examples of how one can awaken compassion in people by highlighting similarities between people. One can awaken compassion that can lead to changes in brutal conditions while still having people wanting to restrict immigration. I think that's closer to many people's view. Many want to control immigration, see the immigrants as human beings in distress, and would like them to be treated with compassion, humanly. Dehumanize was a poor word choice since it is so easily conflated with viewing the other as less than human.

And there's a lot of

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 07:43:13 +0000

In reply to My gut reaction to what you

And there's a lot of stereotyping based on skin color - Ethiopians are not much like Nigerians are not much like Jamaicans. How does it help to lunp them all in together?

My gut reaction to what you

artappraiser — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 06:03:10 +0000

In reply to I remember Black Ethiopians

My gut reaction to what you are bringing up is: it's a bit of progress when skin color has nothing to do with it! If identity gets delinked from race and splinters into ever smaller identity groups, eventually we'll get to: individual identity, which to my mind is: the only rational way to be! That's my druthers, but ask a shrink, I'll bet they'll agree. Lot of mental anguish and toxicity in this world is due to DNA-related tribalism, otherwise known as familial ties Your father's and grandfather's pieties and sins: bah. They can betray worse than any other. And geez, skin color, it has nothing to do with nothing.

It's like The Guardian reads

artappraiser — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 04:50:32 +0000

In reply to Failed Outrage? How to Best Humanize 'The Other'

It's like The Guardian reads Digby's blog (wisely deciding to go with pictures instead of words)

Lovingly told by @katanchevskaya and @SarahDadouch https://t.co/Z1Njt5kECV
— David Lepeska (@dlepeska) September 20, 2019

Instead of living in 1965,

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 04:22:00 +0000

In reply to It is 2019. It is sad that

Instead of living in 1965, how about dealing with a) the article I posted and b) the solution it proposes as an alternative to business as usual.

I've wondered how cops can be filmed punching and banging a black guy's head into the pavement over and over without immediate outrage from police themselves and even cutting through the usual conservative v liberal/GOP v Dem framing, as just 1 of many alarming examples.

I don't eat meat. To me, most ways of treating feed animals are pretty abhorrent and obviously cruel. But for people who eat meat, any objection is immediately subconsciously viscerally countered with "yeah, but we have to do it - how else will we get meat? And yeah, it sure tastes good". So screaming at them that meat is murder is useless - they've accepted murdering livestock is a cherished worthy thing to do. Even letting them get to know the animal islargely useless - we as humans know that livestock pets and friends will be slaughtered despite their gooey endearing eyes.

But with humans, the abattoir is not a foregone conclusion, though the kneejerk predefined reactions are there. How to tell the background story of the guy on the ground, how to make that Black or Hispanic immigrant a Pilgrim or first settler at Williamsburg with all the respect or at least acceptance that goes with it, how to make them real people with a tale and a family and love and values and anecdotes and worth, rather than a statistic and a shadow of yet another stereotype and culture war, or an oft overhyped and misleading economic and/or cultural threat?

Little old white ladies love these romantic tales, old shriveled white men are suckers for personalized rags-to-riches-or at least survival tales. Why not give them some, rather than the continued insistence of "you must let us in, you have to treat us right", with the contempt for the message's audience. Turn the guy on the ground or waiting at the border from cattle to an underdog worth rooting for, helping, going out of our way for. What's their Clint Eastwood, tear-jerker role?

I had to laugh at the lates outbreak of Cgris Matthews said 'colored'" Clint had this in a film, black couple broke down in the desert, he this old white drug mule stops to help them but uses the archaic expression "you colored people", not out of meannewss but of old habit, and they're ready to go ballistic. Educate the other to think exactly like you? Or educate the other to first acknowledge your existence, right to exist, value of your day to day struggles and needs and then views? What's the real achievable goal here?

I remember Black Ethiopians

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 03:53:19 +0000

In reply to I would like to return to

I remember Black Ethiopians were none too pleased to be lumped in with every other Black group in America. How many identities does the Melting Pot (tm) have room for?

Huh? Wtf are you talking

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 03:48:19 +0000

In reply to The purpose of the project is

Huh? Wtf are you talking about?

I would like to return to

artappraiser — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 03:17:32 +0000

In reply to Failed Outrage? How to Best Humanize 'The Other'

I would like to return to what Tom Sullivan was talking about in his post on Hullabaloo. And hopefully raise the level of the discussion a little to the point he is making and remove it from the single myopic focus of Afro-American citizens grievance against American white citizens privilege or not. Which is not at all the same thing because those are all Americans.

{Forgive me but I feel I need to bring up some inconvenient points as examples for a correspondent on this thread: I think there are actually some subset of Afro-Americans in L.A. who have called Iranian or Arab immigrants towel heads, and I have seen examples displayed in Afro-American movies. I think there are Afro-Americans who have resentment against Chinese immigrants taking up places at colleges, because they are not Americans of long standing. I think there are Afro-American soldiers in Afghanistan who may think of Taliban as less than human. The problems of Afro-Americans are not at all the point here! Perhaps the problems of how African Americans treat African immigrants to the U.S. might apply, that would be more apropos.]

It was as regards the case of foreign refugees and migrants who wished to come to Australia being stuck in faraway godawful camps which dehumanized them. And many Australians dug in their heels about letting these people in, wanting to keep Australia for Australians already acclimated to Australian culture and these foreigners being in camps some of which were quite brutal, just dehumanized them further, as people very easy to turn down for entry.

The group that Sullivan is writing about found that it was much easier to convince current Australians (of all colors) to accept the foreigners as new citizens if they spoke about mundane, common human stories. To prove basically to the gut reaction of Australians that "they are just like us" and they wouldn't be so hard to live with, they will not change the culture but assimilate to it. Whereas seeing them in the dehumanizing camps made them seem like different, desperate scary people with griveances and perhaps political axes to grind about their old country. Hence, a story about being tortured in prison is not a good "sell." It's still a scary person from a scary culture, someone that might be so fucked up that they may never assimilate. Whereas if they can talk some pop culture, or some human commonality about loving their family, they seem more real and less frightening.

Now take that point and step it up some. Let's talk about Australian culture! And how it differs from others. And what is normal to it. I just ran across this wonderfully complex and nuanced post by a person with black skin in Australia, who explains how it is not the same as being an Australian black, and incredibly, it is in response to gaffes along these lines by Roxane Gay in her visit to that country, being an American and not understanding how Australian culture might differ:

Are there Black people in Australia?’

By Natasha Guantai ( a teacher of English, History and Philosophy at a secondary college in northern Melbourne. She blogs on issues of race, identity and colonialism at guantai5.wordpress.com.)
10.Mar.15 @ Overland.org.au

Acclaimed author Roxane Gay is currently touring Australia. A couple of weeks back, before leaving the US, she tweeted ‘Are there Black people in Australia?’ Not an unreasonable question, you might think, considering that she is a Black woman likely to be speaking on race while in Australia.

Yet, the tweet was met with concern that she was questioning the existence of Indigenous people in Australia. Gay clarified, ‘I mean, like people of African descent’. There were plenty of people willing to share their limited knowledge of African Australians, There were also many who felt that Gay’s follow-up only compounded the offence of her first tweet, by implying that Indigenous people are not Black. Gay apologised.

This twitter exchange is the result of a collision between two narratives of Blackness. In much of the world, ‘Black’ refers to Africans, or to members of the African diaspora, often in the context of a country in which whites are dominant. Thus we have Black Americans, Black Canadians, Black British, etc.

In the dominant Australian narrative, Blacks are regarded as Aboriginal. This is a narrative with little space for non-Indigenous Black Australians. Barack Obama, who like me had an absent Kenyan father, is Black American. But, according to the main Australian narrative, I am not Black Australian.

When I was young, non-Indigenous Blacks were treated as anomalous. In recent decades, following an increase in Black migration, non-Indigenous Blacks have increasingly been cast as migrants: probationary Australians who are required to prove themselves to ‘real Australians’ through displays of gratitude and compliance, and who are judged ineligible to speak with authority on Australian experience, regardless of whether they are actually migrants.

This subsumption of non-Indigenous Blacks into the category ‘migrant’ obscures the fact that we have a distinct racial identity – as Black. I have had non-Black migrants speak on my behalf regarding my Black identity. These migrants assume to speak for me because they assume that as I am Black, I must be a migrant. But I do not share their experience of being migrant any more than they share my experience of being Black. I do not even have the same racial experience as Black migrants or their Australian-born children. Unlike many African migrants, I have not been racialised in a non-white country.

My experience of being Black in Australia is also different from that of migrants of African descent who were born in other white-dominated countries such as the US or UK. I have not been racialised as Black within the context of another country. There are Aboriginal people who tell me that they use ‘Black’ as a way of highlighting their experiences as a result of, and in contrast with, white Australia. Similarly, I am Black primarily due to my relation to white Australia. My experience, while obviously different from that of Indigenous Australians, is nevertheless of an Australian Blackness.

Gay’s critics felt that her apparent equation of Blackness with the African diaspora implied an ignorance, even an erasure, of Indigenous Australians. The dominant Australian narrative has the same effect in the opposite direction. The African diaspora has been on this continent from the beginnings of British colonisation, but the narrative that limits being Black Australian to being Aboriginal obscures this fact. Other Australians do not have their racial identity overwritten this way – least of all white people, the originators of this narrative.

As Roberta Sykes explains, ‘Black’ is inclusive of all Black people. While I understand the offence that Gay caused through her choice of language, I am also grateful that Gay asked whether I exist. She has brought attention to the fact that Black Australians of African descent have been overlooked and misrepresented in this country. Neither migrant nor Indigenous, we are also Black Australians.

That was your corn, you didn

artappraiser — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 03:15:46 +0000

In reply to Squirrels are evil. One year

That was your corn, you didn't just grow it, you babied it for a whole season, made sure it had everything it needed, watched it come to maturity and offer you back a gift as its rightful parent. And the lazy ass squirrels just came and stole it, gorged themselves on ill gotten plunder. Probably destroyed the whole plants and left ears they didn't even eat, left half bitten on the ground. That's the way I see it.

And they're stupid, they steal and wreck stuff they don't even like. They'll take a bite off a tomato and throw it on the ground because they don't like the taste. Worse than rats, I tell ya. I'm real prejudiced. Especially the red ones--they are vicious and arrogant.