Privilege & Passive Racism

sometimesdee wrote:

The world's "most desirable face" is pretty much all white (and light-skinned Latina). Duly noted.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...?

A cosmetic surgeon tracks which celebrities people want to look like, and they match culturally-approved biases furthered by the media. Said media is then complit in labeling the result "the most desirable face," despite that having nothing to do with any of the actual data.

Oh, wait: I was about to say that it sounded like one of the pseudoscience things that the British tabloids print on slow newsdays, where they throw unquantifiable stuff into maths-looking formulas and say they know how to calculate the perfect school principal/pizza/shopping trip. Turns out there's a reason why it sounded like that: the original article was in The Sun.

Yeah, this says more about the people who came up with it than it does about desirable faces.

Gremlin wrote:
sometimesdee wrote:

The world's "most desirable face" is pretty much all white (and light-skinned Latina). Duly noted.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...?

A cosmetic surgeon tracks which celebrities people want to look like, and they match culturally-approved biases furthered by the media. Said media is then complit in labeling the result "the most desirable face," despite that having nothing to do with any of the actual data.

Oh, wait: I was about to say that it sounded like one of the pseudoscience things that the British tabloids print on slow newsdays, where they throw unquantifiable stuff into maths-looking formulas and say they know how to calculate the perfect school principal/pizza/shopping trip. Turns out there's a reason why it sounded like that: the original article was in The Sun.

Yeah, this says more about the people who came up with it than it does about desirable faces.

Why not both?

sometimesdee wrote:

The world's "most desirable face" is pretty much all white (and light-skinned Latina). Duly noted.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...?

https://twitter.com/Stormzy1_/status...

sometimesdee wrote:

Why not both?

You're right, of course.

Gremlin wrote:
sometimesdee wrote:

Why not both?

You're right, of course.

Do I detect sarcasm?

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20...

Is a Nazi tattoo on a cop's forearm a big deal? The head of the Fraternal Order of Police doesn't think so.

sometimesdee wrote:
Gremlin wrote:
sometimesdee wrote:

Why not both?

You're right, of course.

Do I detect sarcasm?

No. It's just me overthinking things, and you putting it more succinctly:

Spoiler:

There's a lot to unpack in that story, and I figured that if I wasn't explaining myself clearly I probably didn't need to keep muddying the waters. And you probably know all this stuff. But if it helps clarify things, this is more or less what I was thinking:

- The "study" is a marketing fluff piece put out by a cosmetic surgeon, and taken seriously by The Sun because that's what British tabloids do. The Frankenstien
- The Sun, you might recall, only recently stopped publishing daily "Page 3 Girls". And is currently owned by Rupert Murdoch. They, like the Daily Mail, get a lot of traffic out of pushing beauty norms that make their readers insecure, because that makes for strong clickbait.
- A report that implies that you have to look like a conglomeration of these specific women is right up their alley, because no one on the planet measures up.
- Nearly all of the celebrities chosen for this were white, none were black.
- If this is an honest reporting of what the people who wanted cosmetic surgery wanted to look like it reflects badly on the narrow-mindedness our celebrity culture and what looks people want to imitate.
- Given that it originated as a fluff piece, and the surgeon interviewed explicitly said that he basically only uses it as a vague starting point, I think calling it "honest reporting" is a stretch.
- Other news agencies took up the article and discussed it like it had some kind of objective meaning. Most of them didn't examine the hidden assumptions in the thing, they just accepted the framing of the first article and started arguing about the details.
- So it says bad things about the racism in celebrity culture (who didn't celebrate non-white looks), the cosmetic surgery industry, the British tabloids, and the other media who reported on it uncritically.
- Good news is at least some people are willing to call it out as a problem.
- There's already a huge problem with non-white facial features, hair, body types, and so on being thought of as lesser. (I'm pretty sure you can come up with lots better examples than I can.) This doesn't help.
- Near as I can tell, none of the white reporters or news anchors thought about bringing up the obvious racial elephant in the room.
- Or that most of those names on the list are American celebrities, mostly Hollywood. And Hollywood and the film industry have their own racism elephants that fed into it. (If movie stars had more diverse looks, for example, maybe people would bring up a wider variety of examples.)
- The beauty-industrial complex is it's own can of worms, but even just looking at film industries there are big name non-Hollywood movie stars who aren't white Americans. (There's still plenty of racism to discuss there, too, of course.)
- I've probably spent way too much time trying to unpack the layers of what was originally thinly disguised advertising that was specifically designed to insinuate that no woman on the planet measures up.
- They were either completely blind to the racial component of what they were saying, or they were deliberately using measurements that excluded non-white examples. (The whole report was an arbitrary, mostly meaningless metric.)
- And that goes for the journalists who reported on it without examining it, too.
- I'm not sure which is worse, and really you're right: it was a combination of all of the above.

Paleocon wrote:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20...

Is a Nazi tattoo on a cop's forearm a big deal? The head of the Fraternal Order of Police doesn't think so.

I assume he'd have no problem with this tattoo either then?

IMAGE(https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7418/10762500735_cd653af83e.jpg)

IMAGE(http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/davidbeckham/46398751/16203/16203_600.png)

Some background context: Lena Dunham interviewed Amy Schumer and some comments Lena made about her experience at a Met gala brought up discussions of white feminism and stereotypes of black male misogyny.

http://www.lennyletter.com/culture/i...

LD: You and I were literally sitting across from each other at the Met Ball, and it was so surreal to get to do that.

I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, "That's a marshmallow. That's a child. That's a dog." It wasn't mean — he just seemed confused.

The vibe was very much like, "Do I want to f*ck it? Is it wearing a … yep, it's wearing a tuxedo. I'm going to go back to my cell phone." It was like we were forced to be together, and he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie. I was like, "This should be called the Metropolitan Museum of Getting Rejected by Athletes."

So reading the interview, I have no idea how the guy in the first tweet came to that conclusion.

nel e nel wrote:

IMAGE(http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/davidbeckham/46398751/16203/16203_600.png)

Some background context: Lena Dunham interviewed Amy Schumer and some comments Lena made about her experience at a Met gala brought up discussions of white feminism and stereotypes of black male misogyny.

http://www.lennyletter.com/culture/i...

LD: You and I were literally sitting across from each other at the Met Ball, and it was so surreal to get to do that.

I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, "That's a marshmallow. That's a child. That's a dog." It wasn't mean — he just seemed confused.

The vibe was very much like, "Do I want to f*ck it? Is it wearing a … yep, it's wearing a tuxedo. I'm going to go back to my cell phone." It was like we were forced to be together, and he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie. I was like, "This should be called the Metropolitan Museum of Getting Rejected by Athletes."

Lena apologized later.

sometimesdee wrote:

Robear wrote:
Not sure that Britain has really been in the forefront of the struggle for a classless society...
I'm not sure what your point is.

Expecting The City to pay more than lip-service to the idea of an egalitarian workplace seems pretty weird, given the history of class in England, and the extreme rich white male privilege in the financial markets there. I have zero surprise that this goes on, and little faith that it will change anytime soon.

Paleocon wrote:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20...

Is a Nazi tattoo on a cop's forearm a big deal? The head of the Fraternal Order of Police doesn't think so.

Getting discussed elsewhere, but I think it's worth noting that the FoP leadership exists specifically to take the side of the cops in any given situation. It's their union. (Not that I agree with him.)

For what this means to the passive racism thread: Our systems are set up to defend themselves, even against attempts to make them better.

Yet Kapernick's socks are spurring a boycott.

Yet Kapernick's socks are spurring a boycott.

sometimesdee wrote:

Yet Kapernick's socks are spurring a boycott.

His socks are making for "a hostile work environment." And Blacks, who have to worry about a hostile everything environment, f*ck them I guess, right, cops?

You know who experienced a hostile work environment? Charles Motherf*cking Kinsey.

Stengah wrote:

So reading the interview, I have no idea how the guy in the first tweet came to that conclusion.

It ties into the problematic history of the oversexualization of black men (and women), and the fear that white women frequently have/project onto them. America has a long history of lynching black men for just looking at white women the wrong way.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Lena apologized later.

Yes I'm aware, but that doesn't change the fact that Amy doubled down on a sh*tty stereotype of black men being sexual predators, and claiming 'statistics' to back it up.

This is an interesting conundrum. Do you deny Amy Schumer's agency by claiming her lived experience is wrong - that Latino and African American men are worse at catcalling than white men, or do you claim that there is a real and unique (by degree) problem with how Latino and African American men treat women in public?

Seth wrote:

This is an interesting conundrum. Do you deny Amy Schumer's agency by claiming her lived experience is wrong - that Latino and African American men are worse at catcalling than white men, or do you claim that there is a real and unique (by degree) problem with how Latino and African American men treat women in public?

Amy Schumer's lived experience is at best enormously anecdotal, and more realistically, an artifact of fallible human memory mixed with unconscious and implicit biases.

Which isn't to say that she's wrong, but your "conundrum" is a choice between anecdote and hard data.

You can take her claim at face value, but her claim, at it's base, is that Amy Schumer gets catcalled by non-white dudes more than white dudes.

Currently I'm not aware of any data showing that incidence of catcalling is roughly equal among ethnicities. I'm not really aware of any data at all; rather a bunch of anecdotes claiming 1) experiences like Amy Schumer's and the ones in that Hollaback video are bullsh*t and actually racist, or 2) men of nonwhite ethnicities are more likely to catcall women (of all skin color). Specific call outs to men of middle eastern descent.

A fair question, for sure, Seth, but I think the fact that Schumer specifically says 'satistically' when she made that tweet is where the problems arise. And as you said, there's really no hard data to back that up. I don't really follow either Dunham or Schumer, but they both apparently have had lots of casually racist incidents/comments in the past.

It's also something I've seen - anecdotally - over the years, where there is often claims by white women about how they feel 'unsafe' around men of color, and usually cite some sort of oversexualized BS.

nel e nel wrote:

A fair question, for sure, Seth, but I think the fact that Schumer specifically says 'satistically' when she made that tweet is where the problems arise. And as you said, there's really no hard data to back that up. I don't really follow either Dunham or Schumer, but they both apparently have had lots of casually racist incidents/comments in the past.

It's also something I've seen - anecdotally - over the years, where there is often claims (most often by white women) about how they feel 'unsafe' around men of color, and usually cite some sort of oversexualized BS.

Indeed, the link I posted above at least mentions that it's possible the perception that more nonwhite people catcall is a clear symptom of white anxiety, and it may be true. I'm re watching Girls at the moment, so Dunham's brilliant capacity to capture the lives of abhorrent self absorbed white millenial women with utterly insulting attempts of being progressive is fresh in my mind. Her assumption that she was important to Beckham in any way is pretty typical of what I would expect. She truly is gifted at humanizing terrible people.

My anecdote is just another anecdote, but in a sampling of maybe 100 people a week at a restaurant not known for hookups but often chosen for tinder dates, I haven't noticed any more or less aggression from men based on skin color. Just noticed that men, generally, are gross.

Seth wrote:

My anecdote is just another anecdote, but in a sampling of maybe 100 people a week at a restaurant not known for hookups but often chosen for tinder dates, I haven't noticed any more or less aggression from men based on skin color. Just noticed that men, generally, are gross.

Yeah, my experiences was from when I was DJing, and it was often around the context of white women who liked hip hop, but were uncomfortable going to parties/clubs that catered to black crowds because they would get hit on/rubbed up on/etc. (granted that gets into night club territory, which also veers into rape culture territory). It also often overlapped with conversations with colleagues that were told at various points in their career to 'stop playing rap music'. Which was basically understood as code for 'we don't want (certain kinds of) black folks here'.

Seth wrote:

This is an interesting conundrum. Do you deny Amy Schumer's agency by claiming her lived experience is wrong - that Latino and African American men are worse at catcalling than white men, or do you claim that there is a real and unique (by degree) problem with how Latino and African American men treat women in public?

I think you claim her lived experience in this case as irrelevant. I think the focus on 'lived experience' is in its capacity to make the world better. What if she is right? Does it make the world a better place to know that?

Maybe the job of a white woman here is to signal boost whatever non-white women are saying. If this problem Schumer is experiencing is systemic, there will be enough non-white female voices saying it that Schumer doesn't have to be that voice.

Hispanic culture does have its Machismo problem, which most commonly manifests in catcalling.

Refusing to let someone project their own experience onto an entire race is not denying their own experience. That's absurd and feels like a weird attempt at "gotcha!"

Considering Schumer's history of fetishizing black men... this issue is way too complex for us to properly parse.

So often the cloak of privilege affords me the opportunity to see a discussion and say "My name's Paul, and this is between y'all." This is one of them.