The Passion of the Moral Mind

Yo, Is This Racist? suddenly erupted onto my Facebook feed recently,* for the first time in months.

Anonymous asked: I came across this libertarian who said she didn't believe in women's rights but individual rights.  Is it safe to say she's a bigot?

Bigots, always think they’ve found some kind of rhetorical loophole that allows them to ignore the obvious nature of existing inequality, that the reason people who aren’t total pieces of shit support “women’s rights” or “black rights” or whatever, is because those groups of people (and others) have fewer rights than the people who control everything, and that allows them to pretend that people who want more equality in the world are over-reacting, or even that we need “men’s rights” or “white pride” or whatever.

It’s telling, however, that if someone only espouses any rhetoric about equality in support of the PEOPLE WHO ALREADY HAVE FUCKING POWER, they miiiiiiiiight just be complete piece of shit bigots, or, I guess, if you want to be nice, so fucking stupid and clueless that they’ve been fooled by this pathetic argument. Could be either, I guess.

It occurs to me that I haven't mentioned a book I read lately that I found really useful: The Tactical Uses of Passion: An Essay on Power, Reason, and Reality,** by the anthropologist F. G. Bailey.  I hope to read some more of his work, but what I want to bring from The Tactical Use of Passion is Bailey's distinction between what he calls "the moral mind" and "the civic mind":

The moral self excludes, we argued, ideas of right and duty.  But it is evident that such phrases as “not oneself” and “above oneself” make sense only if we measure performance against the rights and duties expected of the person.  In some of these cases displays of emotion (for example, being “beside oneself”) indicate a flaw in the self, an inadequacy.  A person who is beside himself is unable to undertake the responsibilities that normally attach to his status.  Often the judgment means that he is absolved from guilt: “He could not help it.”  Evidently this self, unlike the moral self, is validated by accounting procedures.  It is the “civic” self and it includes an element that is apart from emotions, either dominating them as a control or standing as a rival for the use of available avenues of expression.  In other words, the “civic” self signals that a mind is at work.  Let us look at situations in which this idea of the self controlling emotion (rather than being revealed in displays of emotion) appears [51].

... What reasons could be advanced to justify such an image of the weakness of rationality and the strength of passion?  First the moral self carries its own defenses in that it is rooted in the passions and is therefore immune to rational arguments.  It has a facility for twisting and rendering unintelligible negative messages from outside the relationship: a jamming device, so to speak.  This, too, is a kind of façade: a pretense that the real world can be left to go its own way.  It is also a shield keeping away what Weber calls” the cold skeletal hands of rational orders” and “the banality of everyday routine” [77] ...

I hope it will be fairly clear why Andrew Ti's outburst brought Bailey's discussion to mind.  Bailey doesn't consider the "the moral mind" to be bad; it's one way to organize and prepare for action.  "The civic mind" comes on the job when goals and directions have been decided by "moral" means, and it's time to figure out how to get to the goal.

The thing is, in a narrow technical sense, that Libertarian Lady was correct.  Civil Rights, for example, are rights of the individual, not rights of a group.  But facts should never get in the way of a good ragegasm.

So I take Ti to be exercising his moral mind, waxing passionate for Righteousness.  But my civic mind is at work now, and I'm reminded of some of Sartre's remarks on anti-Semitism and irrationality:

I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti-Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc."  Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies.  They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge.  But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.  The anti-Semites have the right to play.  They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.  They delight in act­ing in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.  If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.  It is not that they are afraid of being convinced.  They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

I recognize the syndrome Sartre was writing about here, and I think this applies to Ti no less than to the "libertarian" he's discussing.

* To be honest, not all that recently.  I'm trying to clear out some posts from my backlog from the Drafts folder.

** Cornell University Press, 1983.

Nothing Says "GLBT Ally" Like Homophobic Language

First one of my right-wing acquaintances shared a meme with a quotation ascribed to George Orwell: "The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it."  Interestingly, Orwell apparently didn't say this.  I found one source online which claimed it came from A Collection of Essays, which sounded iffy but turned out to exist -- it just didn't include this sentence.  (It's available as an e-book online, which made it easy to search.  Amazon's "Look Inside" didn't turn it up either.)  Wikiquote reports that it hasn't been found in Orwell's works, but did appear (not attributed to Orwell) in a "conservative" opinion piece that defended the right-wing shock jock Michael Savage as one of those who speak the truth.  Even if Orwell had said it, my friend wouldn't have agreed with him about who speaks the truth and who doesn't.

Then the item above appeared in my news feed from Yo, Is This Racist?  Maybe even funnier.  Again, the irony is delicious: calling for a homophobic and/or misogynist epithet to show one's solidarity with downcast, downtrodden gays. The person who submitted it as a question to Andrew Ti's tumblr missed it entirely, as did Ti.  Thanks, guys, but no thanks.

I'm Your Fetish

I'm starting to notice a pattern in Andrew Ti's treatment of racism and dating.  This went up a few days ago on Yo, Is This Racist?

Variations on this question have come up before, but I don't believe that Ti has ever explained "the difference between fetishizing a race and sexual orientation."  Maybe because he's too young to remember when homosexuality was officially classified as a mental illness, the fetishizing of a sex.  Yes, I wrote "a sex," meaning males or females.  "Sexual orientation" is not about gender.  Many people seem to think that the word "sexual" in "sexual orientation" refers to erotic desire or intercourse, but it means which biological sex a person desires erotically.  The misunderstanding leads to such confusion as some people claiming that pedophilia is a "sexual orientation," though children are not a sex.

Recently I watched The Loving Story, a 2011 documentary about Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and a black woman from Virginia who married in Washington DC in 1958, because the District of Columbia permitted the marriage of whites to blacks.  The state of Virginia didn't, and they were ultimately arrested and forced to separate.  Eventually they took legal action, and their case went to the US Supreme Court, which in 1967 overturned all laws against interracial marriage.

As I've pointed out before, Loving v. Virginia was not decided on the understanding that the Lovings had a racial orientation, perhaps genetically determined, which impelled them to seek love in the arms of a partner of another race.  No one seems to have argued that their personal psychology, driven by biology, had anything to do with the case, or the validity of their marriage.  Such arguments routinely feature in current arguments about same-sex marriage, however, postulating that gay people's inborn nature renders us incapable of heterosexual marriage, so we must be allowed to marry homosexually.

I think Ti's underlying assumption is that biological sex is somehow more fundamental than race, so that crossing racial lines is easy and something that anyone might do, but sexual difference is a barrier that can only be overcome if you are radically, biologically different: same-sex love, desire, and eroticism are so repellent that you have to be practically a different species to experience such things without revulsion.

Two things need to be borne in mind here.  First, objections to interracial eroticism have, historically speaking, taken for granted that whites and blacks are virtually different species: that persons of African descent were so different from persons of European descent that the latter would find the caresses of the former intolerably repulsive; and that if they did manage to overcome this repulsion, their intercourse would be barren.  The word mulatto, used to refer to the offspring of white and black parents, means "mule," and implied that such children would be sterile.  Many educated whites believed this, even as they sired children on their black slaves.  Similarly, the belief in natural interracial repulsion was always belied by the many people who showed no such repulsion, and seems to have been more wishful thinking than anything.  The similarity of the rhetoric to antigay propaganda, which posits that sodomy is inherently revolting and that no man could be interested in another man's hairy butt, is hard to miss.  Part of the idea in both cases is probably to demonize those who managed to transgress: miscegenation and sodomy are disgusting, so only a monster could commit either one.

Second, despite all the rhetoric one hears nowadays about "sexual fluidity," many people forget or rule out in advance the possibility that anyone could engage in sex with someone of the "wrong" sex for their "orientation" and enjoy it.  This idea was for a long time a pillar of gay Christian apologetics: when the apostle Paul claimed in Romans 1 that male-to-male desire was against nature, he must have been referring to natural heterosexuals who had homosex against their nature, out of sheer wickedness and perversity, and not to those whose nature forced them to have homosex because they couldn't function with other-sex partners.  But in fact many people are not so rigid, and are able to enjoy sexual relations with persons of either sex under the right circumstances.  I think it's extremely ironic that ostensibly pro-gay people would be in agreement with antigay bigots on this point, that homosex is naturally repugnant to true heterosexuals: they only argue that gay people are biologically different from heterosexuals, and so can enjoy what heterosexuals could not.

I'm not sure I believe that there are many people who have a "racial orientation" towards only one "race."  There might be, but I believe the barriers to interracial romance are mostly cultural, and the number of people who leap those barriers are evidence of that.  I've pointed out before how people like to absolutize relative differences, so that when I dated a few Asian men, for example, many white people chortled, "You sure do like the Asian boys!", even though the non-Asian men I've dated far outnumber the Asians, and I was accused by some Asian men of being a rice queen, which I never bothered to deny.  Both groups assumed that I was, in Andrew Ti's words, fetishizing just one race, without bothering to find out if that was true.

Also ironically, many "politicized Asian gay men" demonized eroticism between Caucasian and Asian men; one, quoted here, claimed to have proven that white men who wanted to date Asian men were closet pedophiles.  It seems not to have occurred to him that he was casting Asian men as children, and that Asian men who wanted to date Asian men would by his logic be just as pedophilic, or at best merely playing Doctor instead of having mature sex.  That such blatantly racist, not to say delusional thinking, had so much currency among "politicized Asian gay men" for a while -- it seems to have faded in the last decade -- didn't speak well for them.  And does anyone else remember Spike Lee's movie Jungle Fever, which postulated that eroticism between blacks and whites can only be exploitative curiosity, simply because he said so?

Still, I don't think it would be illegitimate for anyone to "fetishize just one race."  I think Ti is implying that romantic / erotic desire is properly rational, which I think is obviously absurd.  There is no good reason why I'm attracted to one person rather than another -- to this man rather than that woman, to one man rather than another man.  (I understand that Ayn Rand believed that desire was rational, that two rational people would naturally be drawn to each other, and I think Ti would be appalled to learn that he's echoing her ideas.)  I don't have to have a good reason to be attracted, or not, to a given person, and he doesn't have to have a good reason to be attracted, or not, to me.  On another occasion Ti ranted that "'personal preference' can be racist as fuck," which is probably true, but why would Ti want someone to date a racist who was, moreover, only dating them to try not to be a racist?

I'd like to know how (or if) Ti distinguishes between "fetishizing" desire and acceptable desire.  His furious refusal to explain himself indicates to me that he hasn't thought that far ahead.  I fully agree that people should treat their sexual partners as human beings rather than fetishized objects, but objectification seems to be so widespread as to be virtually the norm, and much of popular culture is built around it.  One gay Asian-American man published an article in 2000, during the heyday of the rice-queen frenzy, in which he said that he'd always dreamed of finding himself a white prince, but he'd seen the light and was now going to date (fetishize?) Asian princes only.  How about dating human beings, instead of living in a Disney animated feature?  (In the same issue of the magazine in which that article appeared, there was another piece exulting that increasing numbers of white American women were dating Asian-American men.  Who was fetishizing whom there?)

Still, my point is that I'd like Ti to explain why he thinks it's okay not to date persons of a given sex, but not okay to reject persons of a given race.  Or vice versa: why "fetishizing" a sex is okay but "fetishizing" a race is not.  His reliance on rhetorical questions indicate that he doesn't have a good reason for the distinction.

Orientals As We Think of Them Today

This turned up yesterday on Yo, Is this Racist?

A lot of problems here. Andrew Ti's correspondent seems to think that "negro" is inherently a racist word, and if it used to be "perfectly acceptable" it was only because "that time was significantly more racist than the present."  We didn't know any better then, because those were primitive times.  This is completely absurd. "Negro" was the preferred word among politically aware Americans of African descent for much of the first half of the twentieth century, so it was positive and not racist. That didn't mean that the US wasn't a racist society then, or now. Nor does it mean that "Negro" stopped being the normative word for people of African descent because the US became less racist. (I don't think I agree that the US is less racist than it was fifty years ago.  Maybe so, maybe not -- I don't know how you'd measure it.) What it means is that white Americans looked down on non-whites no matter what they were called, though whites took for granted their own right to call non-whites what they wanted to call them.

It's same story with words for people who copulate with other people of their own sex.  In the United States toward the second half of the twentieth century "gay" was our own chosen word for ourselves, which upset a lot of heterosexuals, who accused us recruiting an innocent little word for our own degenerate purposes.  But it also upset a lot of homosexuals. Within our own circle, we've disputed what word to use for ourselves for over a century. Uranian? Urning? Bugger? Sod? Queer? Sapphist? Lesbian? Androphile? Gynophile? Homophile? Gay?  And of course, within a few years "gay" became a negative word in the schoolyard, and younger gays thought it had always been one.  Well, who was going to teach them the history?  They weren't going to learn it in school.

There are similar controversies surrounding people who speak Romance languages.  Latino?  Hispanic?  Hispanohablantes?  La Raza?  I've run into a fair number of well-educated people (too well-educated, maybe?), Anglo or other, who throw hissyfits over these terms.  Some object to including Brazilians in the Latino category, though Brazilians speak Portuguese, a language that is, like Spanish and French and Italian, derived from Latin.  And just yesterday I saw a meme on Facebook to the effect of "I'm Mexican, I'm not Latino or Hispanic!"  Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's bullshit.  So is yowling that "'Oriental' is a rug, not a person!"

"Oriental," on the other hand, was applied to people whose principal language wasn't English to begin with. They would have referred to themselves with words in their own language, and they had their own terminology for foreigners, much of it unflattering. The word "Orient" means "east" or "eastern," so an "Oriental" is an inhabitant of lands to the East, and has no negative connotations in itself. Western Europeans used the words sloppily, using it of the whole Asian landmass from the Mediterranean eastward.  When people from these parts of the world learned English, they learned English words for themselves and their countries.

There was considerable displeasure as many of these countries threw off the colonial yoke and their intellectual classes rejected the ways in which they had been viewed by their former owners and masters.  A large body of scholarship and lore had been generated by Westerners in the service of imperial management, which of course viewed the subject peoples as a management problem: how to keep them in line, how to keep them loyal and grateful and obedient to their sovereign.  The late Edward Said wrote a very influential book, Orientalism (Random House, 1978), which I read a long time ago and need to reread.  (The main thing I remember now is a certain amount of homophobia; but as I said, it's time to reread it.)  Like Michel Foucault's work on the history of sexuality, Orientalism quickly achieved canonical status among people who found it more useful to wave around than to read.  It also garnered some criticism; I remember finding useful Aijad Ahmaz' critique of Said in his In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures (Verso, 1992).

What upped the ante was the emigration of people from Asia to the imperial metropole, be it Europe and the British Isles or the United States and Canada.  By now I've read a fair amount of academic writing about the Asian-American experience, especially by the generation that arrived in the US after the 1960s and probably includes Andrew Ti's parents.  White racists were never too busy focusing on black and brown people to forego tormenting Asians as well.  (There's always room for racism!) Whether they were called "Oriental" or "Asian" was the least of the problems of Chinese in the early 20th century US whether they were hiding from Immigration (how do you say la migra in Cantonese, I wonder?) or from white lynch mobs.  And the children of the post-1960 immigrants, whether they were born abroad or in the US, have the typical identity problems that children of immigrants have.  On one hand, they want to assimilate, indeed to disappear, and there's the small difficulty that assimilation would mean adopting white racism, one of the oldest traditional American values. That won't do, which I believe explains the confusion that permeates so much writing about race by Asian-Americans.  During the sports media fascination with Jeremy Lin, Andrew Ti wrote that "NBA fans have almost no vocabulary with which to talk about him."  But it's not only NBA fans who have almost no vocabulary which to talk about race.  Or about many other vexed categories.

Why not just borrow a slogan from queer Foucauldians and say something like "Asians as we think of them today", or "the modern Oriental'?  Words are important, but until we can think beyond them, we'll be trapped by them.  I think that going beyond the words was a major part of what Foucault was trying to do.  It's paradoxical, but words are both terribly important and not very important at all.  Andrew Ti and his correspondent are both making the very common mistake that words contain meaning, so that  words like "negro" or "oriental" or "faggot" are essentially problematic.  But since words may change their meanings radically over time, that belief is obviously false.  The problem isn't the word "negro," it's racism.  And fighting racism is much harder than merely declaring this or that word out of bounds.

Me for You and You for Me

Over at Yo, Is This Racist? Andrew Ti has been grappling with the question of interracial dating.  He's even broken his normal rule against follow-up questions.  It started here:

Anonymous asked: Why is it racist to say you just dont find blacks attractive? Its a matter of personal preference, in my opinion, but my friend keeps saying its racist.

Yo, dipshit, are you seriously unable to grasp the concept that “personal preference” can be racist as fuck?

... and continued here and here without really adding anything.

This is all really ironic, because as often as not white people who do date interracially will be accused of racism, of objectifying and exoticizing and colonializing and degrading their non-white partners; or, in the case of their non-white partners, collaborating in their objectification.  For example, in his Global Divas (Duke, 2003), Martin Manalansan IV reported:

In a 1993 presentation to the Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY), a gay Asian group in New York, Gene Chang, a student at Columbia University, transported the rice queen phenomenon into the realm of the psychopathological ... He suggested that the rice queen’s desire for Asian (young and young-looking) men is really a mask for pedophilic tendencies. He supported his contention by graphing the “incompatibility of physical attributes” (height, age, penis size, and so on) between Asians and Caucasians in personal ads. Chang further explored the exploitative and “imperialist” possibilities of encounters between a Caucasian and a young Asian by examining mainstream gay porn films. He contended that the Asian gay man is relegated to passive sexual (as insertee) and social roles (i.e., masseur, houseboy, and so on). What is interesting in this presentation is Chang’s leap from his “findings” of corporeal asymmetry mapped out in personal ads to the contention of a rice queen's real pedophile identity.  Using statistical techniques and graphs, Chang charted the differences between Caucasian and Asian gay men in personal ads in terms of average height (two inches), weight (thirty to forty pounds), and age (fifteen to twenty years). He directly equated such differences with actual power inequality in gay Caucasian-Asian sexual politics [84-5].

This was too much even for Manalansan, who pronounced Chang's views "faulty" (while allowing that they are "prevalent ... among the growing number of politicized Asian gay men").  Chang's methodology is basically that of someone like Paul Cameron, the eminence grise of antigay pseudoscience on the Christian Right.  Manalansan admits that "these same 'radical' views construct the Asian gay man as devoid of agency" (85); I would add that on Chang’s logic, gay Asians who want older, bigger, hairier Caucasian men would be suspect of covert gerontophilia, if not bestiality.

(Incidentally, the gay Asian men I've known laugh to scorn the claim that rice queens are all tops.  But that's another post.)

I don't deny that there's racist stereotyping in a lot of sexual discourse; we live in a racist world.  This can be true whether you're attracted to people of other "races" or not: I don't know if it's universal, but it's clearly very common for people to generate expectations and fantasies about a person's personality from his or her looks. But that's a problem in people's intraracial sexual attitudes and interactions too.  As I've written before, nobody is attracted to everybody in their nominal pool of potential partners, be that pool defined by sex or class or race or any other attribute, and the reasons for interest or lack of interest are neither rational nor up for discussion.

What we do owe each other, I propose, is basic courtesy.  Yet it seems that many people, not all of them men, believe aggressive rudeness is the way to another person's heart.  Maybe it works some of the time: I recall seeing a batch of stories of how some heterosexual couples met, in which a recurring theme was Hate At First Sight; at some indefinable point Hate turned into Interest and then to Love.  I've never experienced such a pattern myself, but it seems to work for some people, at least sometimes.  Other people think that fetish talk (as I'll call it for lack of a better word) works.  In another one of the diatribes against rice queens that proliferated in the 1990s, a gay Asian writer quoted an obnoxious racially framed come-on he'd received online; when I read it to a straight white woman about my age, she snorted: He should see what women get!



(It's worth remembering, if you've seen She's Gotta Have It, that there's not a lot of detectable difference between the "dogs" and the "decent men" Nola accepts as boyfriends.)

On the other side, rejections should be made with courtesy.  "No, thank you," is enough.  There's no good reason to detail what is wrong with the person you're turning down.  I've had some strange conversations with (usually) gay men who, when called out for vilifying effeminate men, or older men, or fat men, or men of color, would insist that they had nothing against such men -- they just weren't attracted to them.  But we hadn't been talking about dating to start with; it was their wish that such men should not be visible in the Community, and shouldn't be having sex with anybody.  Now, that's bigotry.  I would tell them that I wasn't saying they had to date men they weren't attracted to, and they would flail around incoherently.  There's a difference between lack of romantic interest and wanting certain people to disappear altogether.

And yet, the only conclusion I can draw from Ti's position is that he believes people should date people they aren't attracted to, or don't want to date for some other irrational reason.  No one has to have a good reason for not wanting to date me, be it my age or my race or my general repulsiveness.  But if he goes off into a racist or ageist or other rant, he can expect that I'll give him a hard time for that.  By then I'll have retracted any invitation I might originally have offered anyway.  I suspect this ties into something I've written about before: the widespread belief that other people, especially hot people, should look past my meager looks and bone me for my personality -- but I don't have to.

So it doesn't matter why you're not attracted to someone who's attracted to you.  If you feel the need to tell me how repulsive people in your suitor's group are, though, I will probably have something to say about it.  I'll probably conclude with words to the effect of: I don't see why they'd have wanted to date a bigot like you anyway.

I also suspect there's something of the old "I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me for a member" hangup going on here, the assumption that sexual desire is necessarily predatory and exploitative.  (Except when it's put on a pedestal and spiritualized, just as unrealistically.)  Sometimes rationalization and projection are involved: I'm not attracted to him, so he must want me for something bad.  And everything bad you can imagine is probably involved some of the time: some people do want to use you, others want to be used by you.  But you could say that about any human interaction.

Curiouser and Curiouser

At Yo, Is This Racist?, Andrew Ti botched another one.

Black women are quite right to complain when white women think they're entitled to touch black women's hair, generally without even asking permission first, just grabbing.  I find that incredibly weird myself, being very inhibited about touching people, especially strangers.  And whites' refusal to consider that they should respect black people's boundaries is racist: it bespeaks a sense of entitlement, that They exist solely for Our entertainment and benefit.  I'd have thought that white women, who are expected to serve men in the same way, wouldn't have so much trouble grasping this, but evidently not.  Black women (or anyone else) don't even need to give a reason for not wanting to be handled.  Those who doubt this should try reading the ultra-white Miss Manners; I don't know if she's ever weighed in on this particular infraction, but as a general principle people have a right to their boundaries and to refuse, politely, to answer questions about them.  (I do remember a Hindu woman who asked MM what to say to people who grilled her about her style of dress.  The proposed answer was along the lines of "It is not my custom to discuss my appearance."  "It is not my custom to explain why you should keep your damn hands to yourself" would be a close analogue, I believe.)  Or as this blogger wrote,

I realized that, much like explaining how things work to a man who has just asked a woman if he can touch her breast and then balking when she says no, I could not be bothered to explain to another adult why my body belongs to me. When it comes to my hair, or any part of my body, if the answer is “no” that is something that you need to accept. Period. And I am not here to explain those basic facts of life to you.

Still, it is worth pointing out that this stand, which seems so commonsensical to me, seems to be a modern, Western, even specifically American one.  Just for comparison, try this passage from Before the Closet: Same-sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America (Chicago, 1998) by Allen J. Frantzen.  As a young and closeted GI stationed in South Korea from 1971 to 1972, Frantzen

frequently spent time with Korean military and police personnel, easier for me than for many GIs because I spoke some Korean.  I used to find the demonstrative curiosity and affection of these men exciting.  In summer, sitting in a tearoom or riding on a ferry between Kanghwa and the small islands to the west, I would talk to the police or marines who regularly patrolled streets and the coastline.  Most Korean men have little body hair.  Some of the men I knew were fascinated by the hair on my arms and legs and, without asking, used to touch me.  Nobody -- least of all good-looking men in uniform -- had ever stroked my arms or legs.  They expressed delight and surprise while, in some embarrassment, I tried to explain that many Westerners were the same as me, even as I derived pleasure from this contact that differentiated me from most men, Western or Eastern [303].

One article discussing the issue reported that

White respondents online have commented that black women who have this type of reaction are being too sensitive. They counter that when they travel and are in the minority as whites, their hair draws similar curiosity. It is not meant as disrespectful.

Language like "too sensitive" is always a giveaway of offended and rebuffed privilege.  Yet it seems clear that it isn't only white people who feel entitled to touch people who look different.  I'd have to know more about the specific cultures being referred to before I could say whether such touching is "not meant as disrespectful."  Is it okay to touch other locals out of curiosity, or are only funny-looking foreigners fair game?  (This matter relates to this one, which I'm linking to partly so I'll remember to write about it later.)

But that doesn't change the fact that the black women who are complaining about white women trying to grab them aren't foreigners.  It's certainly courteous for a tourist to allow him or herself to be inspected and fondled, but it's quite another thing to be assaulted by a fellow-citizen while waiting for your double latte at Starbucks.  I'd like to ask if they touch the hair of other white women they don't know.

On the other hand, this is racist:

Hair does not mean the same thing to white women as it does to black women. Hair for us is a physical indicator of the ways in which we are different. It is no accident that the first black millionaire, Madame CJ Walker sold hair care products. Part of female beauty has always included long flowing locks, and for black women who have  gravity defying hair, that refuses to be tamed, this can be extremely problematic. To mess with our hair, is to mess with your safety; much of who we are is invested in our beautiful audacious locks. 

It's racist because it assumes that white women's hair has no significance for them.  Two prominent early warning signals of racism are 1) positing an absolute divide between one group and another; and 2) ignoring the differences within each group, which usually are greater than the differences between them.  Not all white women assign equal power to their hair (neither do all black women), but haircare products for white women are a major part of commercial advertising.  (Does she or doesn't she?  Beautiful hair Breck.  And so on.)  The symbolism of women's hair is all over white folklore too.  If "Hair for [black women] is a physical indicator of the ways in which we are different," though, white women's fascination with black women's hair isn't at all inappropriate, rather it's a recognition of the audacity of black women and their hair.

Still, contrary to Andrew Ti, curiosity itself isn't racist.  It's another one of those human universals.  There are big differences, cultural and individual, in the ways people express their curiosity, and children are trained from an early age about what is okay and what isn't.  (Don't stare.  Don't point.  Don't ask rude questions.)  It follows from this that white women's frequent obnoxiousness about black women's hair is itself a cultural value, an expression of white privilege: they've absorbed the message that it's okay to treat black women as if they were critters in a petting zoo.  In this country, with its tradition of white racism, that can't be excused as simple curiosity, and black women's reluctance to be petted by white strangers shouldn't be reduced either to over-sensitivity or to mystical audacious power.

Ti overlooked a couple of things, though.  One is that, as far as I can tell from the question, this young woman hasn't yet touched her therapist's hair; her manners aren't that far gone, and to this point she's only guilty of curiosity, not racism.  And curiosity isn't wrong.  Another is that the woman whose hair she wants to touch is her therapist, who's being paid to deal with people's often inappropriate feelings and impulses.  I'd advise her to tell her therapist, and let her therapist explain to her why she won't let her do it.  If she can't do that, she really shouldn't be a therapist.  Strangers aren't obligated to educate me; therapists are.

This item bugged me especially because it reminded me of Ti's earlier outburst against a presumed white person asking about the propriety of using his scanty store of Chinese words in a Chinese restaurant.  Part of the trouble is the limitations of Ti's format, where hiphop slang and one-liners substitute for discussion.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and it seems that more often lately it doesn't.  It's noteworthy that it's Ti who evidently thinks that being different equals not being "normal," and that that's a bad thing.  (The black women writers I've quoted above would disagree: they see their difference as superiority.)  What are those of us who aren't normal supposed to do, then?

My Fellow Humans

I love Andrew Ti (including, but not limited to, that way).  His tumblr Yo, Is This Racist? is smart, funny, and mean.  I've been surprised and delighted by the off-the-wall but still on-target answers he gives to tricky questions.  But today he pissed me off with this one.

There could be several reasons why someone would do shit like that, but I can't think of any bad ones at the moment.  Maybe someone might believe that the waiter will be all THANK YOU FOR BEING ONE OF US.  But that seems to me a relatively benign reason, if naive.  I can't see what is ever bad about trying to use any words one knows in a foreign language, and trying to discourage it is a bad thing to do.  Maybe even racist.

I speak decent though not fluent Spanish, much weaker French (both from high school, but I've used Spanish much more since then), a little bit of Russian (I took three semesters at IU during the 80s, but have hardly used it since then), a tiny bit of Korean (only one semester), and stray words and phrases in Japanese, German, and even Cantonese and Mandarin.  One of the things that drove me crazy about my fellow students in Russian was their reluctance, even refusal, to say a word in Russian when I encountered them outside of class.  If I greeted them in Russian, most of them would grimace and say "Hi."  This was less of a problem when I was studying Korean, since most of the other students in my section were Korean-American kids who were taking the course for their foreign-language requirement, expecting it to be an easy A.  It wasn't always, because they'd usually stopped speaking it when they entered school, and though they understood it when it was spoken (since their parents still spoke it at home), they'd gotten out of practice speaking it.  My Korean friends, by contrast, encouraged and helped me to speak and write, and I was more motivated than most of my classmates because I wasn't taking the class for a requirement, I wanted to learn Korean.

It is intimidating, though, the first time you try speaking a school-taught language to a native speaker.  John Holt wrote about that somewhere: you don't really believe in your gut that this is real until you say something to someone and find that it works: they understand, and you even understand them.  My first-year high school French class used a dialogue-based approach with recordings, and Madame Cohn told us the joke about the student who visited France after their first year.  "How did it go?" the teacher asked when the student returned.  "Not too well," came the reply, "I couldn't find anyone who knew the dialogues."

There was a Cuban kid in my second-year Spanish class, so I was able to talk to him sometimes for practice.  He told the teacher I did pretty well, which was reassuring.  (He grew up to be a stereotypical fascist Cuban exile, alas.)  But when I encountered some Mexican kids, migrant farm workers, near Plymouth the following summer, they said they couldn't understand me.  I don't think I believe them, my Spanish was better than average for a high-school gabacho.  Maybe they just didn't want to be bothered, which is their right.  But I was also right to try to talk to them.

When I'm in South Korea, I use the little Korean I have, and it improves as much as one could expect over the course of the four weeks I usually spend there.  No one says "Thank you for being one of us," of course.  What they say is "Oh, you speak Korean?  You have a good accent."  Which isn't just being nice, I know I have a good ear and good pronunciation.  The only problem is that people believe at first that I can speak more than I actually can, because I can get out basic phrases accurately.  But no one has ever said Who do you think you are, trying to pretend you're Korean?

As for English in Korea, though, like any visible foreigner I attract people who want to try their English on me.  Some are old people who worked for the US military when they were young.  Some are like the college student who politely asked me on the subway if I minded talking to him for a few minutes so he could practice.  Others are like the middle-school girls who say "Hi!" and then dissolve in giggles.  Are they racist?  Possibly; many Koreans are racist, in Korean terms, but if so it doesn't hurt me.  Do they hope I'll say "Thank you for being one of us?"  I doubt it.  The kids are like kids anywhere: poke the strange thing and see what it does.  The adults have more complex motives, some of which is probably just the satisfaction of having an opportunity to use their English.  (That's one reason I enjoy speaking Spanish: now that I can think in Spanish instead of having to translate laboriously in my head before speaking, it feels good to be able to do it.)

Why do I want to learn Korean, or any other language?  I don't remember why I got interested in Spanish, but it goes back way before high school.  My mother had studied Spanish in school and remembered quite a bit of it, so I practiced with her at home sometimes; I know she encouraged it.  I took French because our school was abandoning Spanish and Latin, and I thought Why not?  I took second-year Spanish and first-year French at the same time, which I wouldn't do today, but it worked fine for me then.  I picked up Japanese phrases from a non-Japanese boyfriend who was a Japanese major.  I took Russian because I'd become friends with, and developed a mild but not debilitating crush on, an American student who was majoring in Russian history.  It wasn't that I hoped that learning Russian would get me into his pants (and it didn't), but listening to him talk about Russian got me interested in Russian.  (I get interested in things easily.)  I took a summer class in German because my Significant Other at the time needed it for his language requirement, and he had a weird block against learning foreign languages that left him in tears when he tried, so I took the class with him to help him learn.  Besides, I'd wanted to study German for a long time.  I took up Korean because I'd become friends with some Korean students at IU, started learning about Korean culture, and got interested in it.  (See above.)

Why would someone want to use the only Chinese phrases they knew in a Chinese restaurant?  There are probably numerous reasons, as I said before, but I'd do it because I know that so many Americans think it's a friendly gesture to pull up the ends of their eyes and chant Ching Chong Ching Chong! when they meet an Asian, or that it's Communist (or Politically Correct) for an American to speak any language but American.  Actually learning and using even a few phrases of another person's language is a gesture of good will at the very least.  It's a kind of contact, as Samuel R. Delany developed the concept in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue a decade ago: "contact" means interaction between strangers, usually in an urban context, that has no aim except the pleasure of recognizing and enjoying common humanity.  (As opposed to networking, which has the aim of doing business, building a career, and so on.  But remember the risk of the false dichotomy: the two can and do overlap.  Networking is probably more pleasurable for everyone involved if a bit of contact is exchanged.)  I wouldn't say Xixi to a waiter in a Chinese restaurant with any goal in mind except a moment of contact in Delany's sense.  I try out my Korean in a Korean restaurant because I'm interested in other people and that's one way of showing it.  (In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, one character asks another: “Do you think love is the greatest emotion?” “Why, do you know a greater one?” asks the second. “Yes,” answers the first, “interest.”)  It would be better to learn more than just a couple of words, but a couple is better than none.

A couple of weeks ago, someone wrote to Yo, Is This Racist?, asking if her dad was racist for telling her she couldn't dress up as Mulan as a kid, because she was white.  Ti dodged the issue with "Honestly, it would be problematic for someone of any race to dress up as any character from that racist-ass movie." 

This connects to issues of cultural appropriation that I won't go into today, and I guess I can't blame Ti for not wanting to open that can of worms either.  Is it racist if little white kids want to be rappers?  What about little Asian kids?  Ti does, I believe, and I've got the CDs to show the popularity of rap in South Korea. There isn't a clear dividing line between "race" and "culture," but I'm really suspicious when anybody tries to raise and reinforce barriers between cultures and between people, and on the most charitable reading I can't see Ti doing anything else in those posts.  We need to encourage white Americans to learn and use other languages, dammit, not discourage them.