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parvati_roma
Joined: 30 Mar 2004
Posts: 8068
Location: Italy
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 Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 3:16 am Post subject: |
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To Dave - re the last few posts on the previous page: believe me JW and I don't normally go around discussing other people and their personal life-stories in this way around here, it's an absolute "first"! and the last thing either I or John (can guarantee at least that...) would ever want you to feel is that we're cold-bloodedly dissecting you and your family ... like a couple of mad wannabe-scientists attacking a strapped-down frog! Point is that although we've never met either you or your family in person your story is so dramatic you've managed to get us both extremely "emotionally involved" with you all, empathizing-sympathizing every whichaway, living it all as though we too were part of it, involved in it .. really taking it all to heart - which means trying-trying-trying to understand everyone at once from the "inside" then wracking our brains to find a path through the psychological labyrinth ... that's why at this stage we're not taking the discussion all that much into the direction you yourself pointed to: the social i.e. racial-historical part. That can come later as it's comparatively more "abstract" to discuss (of course not "abstract" to live, not "abstract" to experience - just a bit more "abstract" to discuss...) - while your own story, your family story is so very much alive and kickin' and ....human-all-too-human? so full of present emotion pain and conflict... so it's triggered off all kinds of nerves memories and identifications.
_________________
“Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.” Mahmoud Darwish |
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davemyers
Joined: 11 Apr 2008
Posts: 151
Location: P.NW.
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| Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 9:18 am Post subject: |
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... I dialed my parents(mother and step-father)phone# a couple of weeks ago... I thought that "maybe" they, or my mother herself, might have moved more into a space where we could civilly dialogue... they both picked up separate phones, simultaneously, I identified myself, there was a brief pause, and then dead air... I then called my step-father's younger brother(by several years), who is a lutheran minister(and a clerical councelor), who lives in a state nearly 1000 miles from where my mother and step-father are in the s.e., and we had a very pleasant 90 minute conversation... uncle bob and I have had "several" 90 min.+ phone conversations since my move to florida in mid dec. of 2001, although the first time I called him was after a cable t.v. program that discussed some of the details of my family experience had aired for the second time in 2003.(I did not have the courage to call them "before" its first showing, but assumed that because it was broadcast on a cable channel that they might not see it anyway...I spoke with my step-father the day before its 2nd airing, and had asked them to please give me a call after they watched it... and when there was no call forth-coming , I had no doubt then, that the gloves were off).
I had hoped that I could maintain a line of communication through him, and even though we've since had some wonderfully comprehensive phone conversations in just the past couple of years(the previous had been in late 2006 while I was still in orlando), he does not seem able to crack any kind of in-road... this seems incredible to me...
Am I "that much" out of touch with the "emotional damage" I've caused them, by the public airing of a lie, they perpetrated?.. or is this phenomena an honest, unadulterated, "look" in-side the "true" state of affairs of our us racial dialogue??
_________________
...in life, do what-ever you want to do, but do it perfectly...
Last edited by davemyers on Thu Apr 24, 2008 7:07 am; edited 1 time in total |
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johnwilkins
Joined: 15 Apr 2002
Posts: 4718
Location: West Coast
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| Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 1:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Dave Myers wrote: | | Am I "that much" out of touch with the "emotional damage" I've caused them, by the public airing of a lie, they perpetrated?.. or is this phenomena an honest, unadulterated, "look" in-side the "true" state of affairs of our us racial dialogue?? |
Probably a degree of both. In your racial dialog, somebody has to be wrong. In your case, you place the wrong squarely on your mother; and, apparently you don't spend much time acknowledging any of the good things your white family did for you. It's as if it has vaporized from your memory, and I sincerely doubt that your entire family experience was one of sheer bitterness from being a toddler to being an adult. On the other hand, you seem to be spending time with your black family that didn't raise you, didn't provide you with economic support and so forth. For the white people who did make those sacrifices, I'm sure the pain they feel is quite real. It's not that they probably wouldn't say, "Gee Dave, sorry... we made some mistakes." They probably would. However, you aren't seeing that they went through a painful situation too. Your mother lied to your father for decades about an affair she had... what does that do to trust between them? Your step father is trying to forgive your mother for that, and in some ways you are telling him that he shouldn't. So instead of looking at the pain they caused you, and feeling a degree of sorrow and sympathy for the suffering they put you through, they start seeing you as both ungrateful and downright mean spirited. Whether that is right or wrong; true or false isn't really the question. It's one of how you would be perceived...
In this forum, from my experience so far, there is only one "proper" way to talk about race... yours. Yet, you still seem quite reluctant to express what those views just might be... you suggest a need for "framing," but that seems to be... and I'm just guessing at this point... a way of making another point of view wrong before the dialog starts. ... As I said several times now, if you want to be heard, you have to acknowledge that you and blacks in America have no monopoly on pain, oppression, and so forth... but you certainly had a very nasty dose of it.
Nobody is saying you felt no pain, nor that you have no right to be hurt and angry about it. But to say that nobody else felt any pain, or that the things they did were merely an exercise of privilege is stretching the rhetoric to its breaking point in my view.
See the similarities in the experience you and your mother have endured? She decided to tell the truth after years of lies...and while she gets some relief, she faces rejection for it. You are doing exactly the same thing my friend... you are telling the truth to gain some relief for yourself, but you are facing rejection for it. The truth in your case and in your mother's case isn't wrong... it's that you have to acknowledge the whole truth, and I'm afraid you haven't done that yet in a two-fold way. One, your mother suffered and she sacrificed for you even though she made some very serious errors in the course of her life; and your actual father wasn't there to provide any type of real support--but since you now apparently identify as black, all is forgiven in this department... see what I mean? He did some things wrong too. Should he have been cheating on his wife when he was married and had kids? That's also a lie, but he's not called on to answer for it, and I'm sure from your mother's viewpoint, this just seems unfair... again, I'm not saying I can't see your viewpoint. I can, but you need to cut people a little slack.
_________________
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery |
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davemyers
Joined: 11 Apr 2008
Posts: 151
Location: P.NW.
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| Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 2:05 pm Post subject: |
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... it seems, that my actions/non-action is being viewed as being, un-thoughtful, towards my mother and step-father's state of affairs, when, in fact, I've taken great pains to exercise patience... both before(I'll use the date that my mother told me the name of my father, 6/86), and after I had re-located to fla. in 12/01, only to realize that they were "still" in deep denial...
"placing blame", onto my mother would be illogical... she made the choices that "she made", because they made the most sense, at the time... and once she, took the plunge, in her experience/reality, there was no other re-course... I came to terms with that years ago.
... in connecting and talking with members of my fathers family, I've attemted to get a feeling for the kind of man that my father is, and the kind of parent he was...
I could never deny that my mother and my step-father did "all that they could do"... to make our lives "normal".
I spent several months living with them, before moving into my own place in orlando, and was shocked by my mother's obduracy... and by my step-father's passive-aggressive complicity with-in the "dynamic".
_________________
...in life, do what-ever you want to do, but do it perfectly...
Last edited by davemyers on Thu Apr 24, 2008 7:09 am; edited 1 time in total |
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johnwilkins
Joined: 15 Apr 2002
Posts: 4718
Location: West Coast
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| Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 5:51 pm Post subject: |
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| Dave Myers wrote: | | ... it seems, that my actions/non-action is being viewed as being, un-thoughtful towards my mother and step-father's state of affairs, when, in fact, I've taken great pains to exercise patience... both before(I'll use the date that my mother told me the name of my father, 6/86), and after I had re-located to fla. in 12/01, only to realize that they were "still" in deep denial... |
That's a pretty long span of time to be in denial. I really can't speak to the race portion of the matter, and I suppose that I'd have a difficult time coming to any other conclusion if I were in your shoes.
| Dave Myers wrote: | | I spent several months living with them, before moving into my own place in orlando, and was shocked by my mother's obduracy... and by my step-father's passive-aggressive complicity with-in the "dynamic". |
From afar, it doesn't strike me as out-and-out racism. It strikes me as a psychological defense. Lies are a defensive mechanism, and sublimation often is too. Sometimes abusive parents have rage at an oppressive boss, and come home to take their hurt, anger and depression out on their wives and kids--they save their jobs upon which the family depends, but they destroy the family in the process. In your case, you are forcing not just a racial question, but a bunch of the others that your parents just don't want to face. That's not so much the Edgar Allan Poe story, but more along the line of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne.
A part of "white" culture if you will is that you are an "Illegitimate" child. That sort of implies that you are somehow "wrong." Historically, what it meant was that you were not legally entitled to inheritance. So a Lord of the Manor for example sleeps with one of his subjects, and has a child by her. His first born son to his lawful marriage lawfully inherits his title, not the illegitimate child--even though the illegitimate child might indeed have been born first. This immediately created a class distinction for the illegitimate child--except perhaps in cases where the child already comes from a wealthy family. This sort of cultural legacy hasn't even begun to be addressed. It's only coming to the fore now, because there are so many broken homes these days.
As I said before, you are not dealing strictly with race. You are dealing with sex before marriage with one person while engaged to another person; you're having sex with someone who is already married and already has children; and, you are dealing with an inter-racial matter... and it all comes to a head, because your mother did get pregnant.
On top of it, there is this double standard for men and women. What man has had to wear the scarlet letter? Women lose in this transaction big time. I assume she feels that it is manifestly unfair. However, I would also assume that she might still hold women who have pre-marital sex outside of wedlock with married men are probably not the world's most upstanding people. So she has to maintain this wall of denial, or her identity and values fracture.
She told a huge lie to keep her family together. That's one of the things I often call liberals on... that they may do something that is wrong, but they consistently excuse it as the wrong was done in furtherance of good intentions, and so they never have to address the harm they cause. Their good intentions, in their internal dialog, absolves them of both wrongdoing and of an obligation to make amends.
If you want to raise it to a cultural level, look at the fight for the Democratic Party's nomination: Barack Obama is a very articulate speaker with an inspiring message. However, he has only two years of experience at the federal level of government, and no executive experience. He does have experience as an organizer, and as a state assemblyman. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has been involved in politics in mostly subordinate roles for nearly 35 years, and she has more than 6 years experience at the federal level in her own right. Politically, she's also relatively inexperienced. However, the resentment is set along race/gender terms. Keep in mind that black men had the right to vote--in spite of rather obvious forms of oppression in Southern states--before women had the right to vote. The Clinton campaign is utterly mystified that they could actually be losing to Barack Obama. They just cannot believe it. Men come before women; and black men come before white women. Drives 'em bananas.
See how pv puts it?
| parvati roma wrote: | | regardless of the more or less "virtuous" physical-origin of her tot: by the time the tiddler is four or five, whatever titillating transgression there may have been "at origin" has been not only more than expiated, by then it's probably been totally forgotten as well... Rolling Eyes - like a tiny fragment of butterfly's wing buried under... a whole mountain of diapers! |
Spoken like a black widow spider... As far as that goes, anything their husbands have done or not done doesn't matter either. At that point, they're quite content to show you the door... just leave your house and as much of your paycheck behind as the court requires... and don't expect any sympathy... you won't find it from courts, men, women, children, etc. Momma is always right, even when she's wrong.
Not sure I can help you there... logic certainly isn't going to help...
_________________
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery |
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parvati_roma
Joined: 30 Mar 2004
Posts: 8068
Location: Italy
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| Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 11:46 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Spoken like a black widow spider... |
 I've been called many many things in my time JW including a few on this forum - but never a "widow spider", black or white! Can't stop laughing, tooo funny... OK it serves me right I guess, appropriate tit-for-tat payback for my having sneakily but with full awareness-of-implications decided to flash the not only male-belittling but generally more-than-a-little-sinister Great Fertility Goddess card at you - Astarte/Cybele/Hecate = "Parvati" as Kali! ... 
... by way of oblique subliminal-annoyance payback for what I perceived as the likewise-subliminally gleeful way you'd started flashing the Scarlet Letter at Dave's ma. 
........
More seriously, though, JW - and quite apart from suchlike gender-war mindgames: I think you're 100% correct in drawing Dave's attention to the crucial role played by the "Scarlet Letter" mentality in the dynamics of his family drama. Which is not only about racial tensions and attitudes - like you, I think the components are 50% "scarlet letter syndrome", 50% "race syndrome". Both can be devastating - and in Dave's family they're clashing head-on.
Result: an impasse, plus a heck of a lot of slammed doors: so keeping in touch indirectly , through other relatives - just as Dave has told us he's doing - may well be the best/only possible course for now.
_________________
“Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.” Mahmoud Darwish |
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FC Mellon
Joined: 15 Apr 2002
Posts: 4404
Location: SoCal
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| Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 12:32 am Post subject: blueprints...we dont need no stupid blueprints |
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As we all know, any open sore(s) need time to heal properly else the scarring can be more permanent than necessary. It is easy for me to suggest forgiveness when I am a hypocrite myself within my own confines when it comes to a friend or a family member who I feel has also done me wrong as I am sure many, if not everyone, have had these decisions to deal with. My heart and soul tells me to forgive while my mind has not always been mature enough to truly understand my own suggestions sometimes. Time can usually heal all wounds no matter who is at fault or who needs to be forgiving whom. But sometimes if we abuse time we may find time has escaped us again and/or others when it comes to another opportunity to show the love which is sometimes needed by ourselves, or others too. I personally have tried to maintain that I love everyone in the world but I do not necessary love everything one does. And many times I have allowed myself to have my heart broken again and again. But, you know what, if this is what it takes to keep my own inner peace then I truly believe it is worth the effort in the final analysis. Though I also realize that this does not mean one needs to keep putting themselves in a position to keep getting hurt by another/others who may not understand this path. Dave, or any other who may be suffering, know that there are many souls also going through what you/we are and keep the internal faith there are those out in the world who truly know you and who truly love you for what/who you are. We all make huge mistakes sometimes as we all need forgivess by another/others and it is this forgiveness by ourselves, or others, which can/will eventually heal our wounds. Keep The Faith...even if this faith is entirely within your own makeup/soul...I truly believe you will feel better about things at some point down the road which we all usually find ourselves stumbling on at some time. I have maintained for a very long time that I live by the philosophy of N+1....that whatever N does to me I will give back the same plus one more just to put an exclamation at the end for my internal peace. But I have to admit that no matter how tough I think I am, or how tough I want others to believe I am, I usually wind up forgiving the one who wronged me even though I piss myself off sometimes for being this easy. As I have grown older and my wrinkles on my face get more pronounced, I find I need a roadmap to understand these wrinkles, while looking in my own mirror, to find my soul sometimes because sometimes I feel so lost and broke(n) that I cannot even pay attention or even care if I ever want to when it comes to some of those memories. Ah, but do not forget...it is these memories which help us remember and learn...or at least it should. So Dave, in the end we all just must find ways to find happiness within or we will find ourselves being without...and who wants to be without? 
Peace and Love Bro!! 
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elitism--humanity's greatest enemy and greatest regret... |
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parvati_roma
Joined: 30 Mar 2004
Posts: 8068
Location: Italy
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| Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 2:26 am Post subject: |
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| FCM wrote: | | It is easy for me to suggest forgiveness when I am a hypocrite myself within my own confines when it comes to a friend or a family member who I feel has also done me wrong as I am sure many, if not everyone, have had these decisions to deal with. My heart and soul tells me to forgive while my mind has not always been mature enough to truly understand my own suggestions sometimes. |
True words and wise, FCM - they certainly ring true for me too, though in my case it's my soul hand-in-glove with my mind - meaning the detached-analytical part that's capable of stepping back to get a wider perspective and appreciating the ironies of human flare-ups - that starts telling me "cool it gal, lay off - time to start forgiving... remember your own conscience ain't always exactly 100% pure-as-driven-snow eh?" ... whereas it's my heart - meaning the fiercely-passionate seat of emotions that sometimes sing sometimes moan sometimes growl - that finds it hardest to forgive-and-forget past sources of pain.
.........................
Back to Dave's story and its implications. Not too far back on this thread, JW had asked a few questions which - reading back - I find Dave had already answered in his opening post, and what he says there does make it clear exactly how big a part exposure to "white American" race-attitudes had played in it all.
I'm also very interested in the "being biracial in America" aspects as to me, identity = sum of all one's parts both present-personal-individual and stretching back in time - meaning all one's various roots, all one's various heritages - which seems particularly hard for mixed-race Americans to do as they're pushed by both sides ("blacks" no less than "whites") to identify as "either A or B" - no third-ways, no fourth-ways, no sum-of-parts... which means if your ancestry is interwoven the social pressures - on both sides - try to force you to deny some part of your being, some part of what's made you "you"??
On another thread, some time back I got into a discussion with another poster (Cheryl, asfaik the forum's one-and-only other regularly-posting lady - she's one of JW's "liberal" bugbears-in-chief around here... not only a US Dem but a female !  ) which wandered into some of these issues - the main thread's basically about separatist nationalism i.e. the most literally-explosive form of ethnicity-as-identity politics in Europe and elsewhere... which I guess is a kind of "first-cousin topic" to what we're talking about here so Dave may find it interesting? - but the most strictly-relevant part of what I posted there (in response to having been implicitly-and-explicitly accused of justifying/pushing a "quasi racist" blood-and-soil ethno-nationalist line ... ) is this:
| parvati_roma wrote: |
(...)
| Cheryl wrote: | | I also think that American culture assumes assimilation (part of the difficulty in our current discussion on immigration) in a way that European culture does not (part of the difficulty in your current discussions on immigration). I do think that the blood-and-soil model is much more prevalent in your culture, even in your posts, even though I recognize that you'd prefer reconciliation. So your models for reconciliation move through settling the blood-and-soil issues and (perhaps unthinkingly) use blood-and-soil metaphors to talk about the processes. |
There are marked perception-differences involved but the splits are not quite that simple, positing a binary split (Europe=blood-and-soil, US=assimilation ) is deceptive. Note the various "multiculturalism vs assimilationism" squabbles - sez-who that "European culture" is unitary? For instance, the French are heavily assimilationist, the Italians too are assimilationist - our primary national/nationalist identity-marker is/was language-not-genetic-homogeneity - although given the huge importance of extended-family ties here in both culture and economic structure, unlike the French we feel duty-bound to "welcome home to grandma" any and every stray grandkid/great-grandkid - even if not currently Italian-speaking - from our many and variously-located diaspora-zones in the event they fall on hard times i.e. get kicked out pogromed or economic-collapse-starved; and I'd say the Germans are still kinda blood-n'-soilist by instinct (note heavy barriers to assimilation of Turkish, Italian and Greek worker-immigrants)...
Anecdotal addition on further-north "germanic zone" attitudes: a Lebanese translator+small-businessman friend (i.e. born here works here married here holds Italian passport but nevertheless self-identifies very emotionally as "Lebanese") told me he was checking out the idea of moving his family to Scandinavia - he has relatives in Sweden - as the pay-scales=economic opportunities are so much more enticing up there; came back after a week or so saying "nah it's useless up there unless you're blond and blue-eyed - they're all oh-so-polite but you come up against this invisible wall: all the best opportunities jobs and contracts go to their-own-kind by unwritten law, if you're olive-skinned or darker you get the tablescraps"... so despite its innumerable faults, he concluded that Rome's a far better place for him and his family to live. |
| parvati_roma wrote: | (...) My personal impression when in the US was there's still a lot of "silent electricity" and unspoken mutual-fear-and-hostility under the verbal PC-surface of US race relations... could hardly be otherwise given the relative recentness of the abolition-of-apartheid etc etc? Here - speaking from central Italy - there seems to be a lot less physically-perceptible "electricity" and physical-type ... call it "mutual unease" ...involved, despite the truly unconscionable amount of crudely-expressed prejudice n' discrimination - not to mention exploitation by overcharging landlords, under-the-table employers etc and general kicking-around so many African immigrants get subjected to here.
But from just a few decades back, here's an example I personally witnessed of extreme skin-racism in the US, it seems almost reminiscent of the India caste-system's contact-pollution religious beliefs? It happened back in the very-early seventies, I was with my parents in Jamaica where my father was working on a UN agricultural development project - we were staying in a fancy condo where most of the residents were from the US southern states. A UK family also staying there had a two-year-old girl tended by a Jamaican maid, the weather was so hot the child was suffering badly from heat-rash so the mother encouraged the maid to take her into the condo pool for frequent dips and play with her in the water ... an' the US condo-residents became totally hysterical: contact with the maid's blackness was polluting their water! Just can't imagine that happening here. |
| parvati_roma wrote: |
(...)
| Cheryl wrote: | | For example, back in the 1980s, riots in England and a police chief on the tellie sounding like Bull Conner about them nasty immigrant blacks, who we Americans wouldn't even consider "blacks." It's not that bad now, but I am constantly shocked ... |
The first part of that statement is clear enough and I quite agree that race relations in the UK are far from idyllic... but I still can't quite grasp the meaning of the second part I underlined.
In particular, what do you mean by "who we wouldn't even consider "blacks"? The rioters were visibly of several different races and skin-hues but the police chief's diatribe focussed solely on the Afro-origin (or partly Afro-origin) component? Or the rioters all - or almost all - had very dark skins but were from a geographic area the US race-definitions scheme doesn't consider valid as a place-of-origin for being classified as "black"?
Re the official US definition of "black":
Quote:
| Quote: | | "The term Black or African American refers to people having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa."(*) It includes people who indicate their race as "Black, or African Am.," or provide written entries such as African American, Afro American, Kenyan, Caribbean-American, Nigerian, or Haitian. |
(... thereby excluding people-having-origins-in-any-of-the-Black-racial-groups-of-Oceania-and-Asia such as Dravidians and Melanesians... same-identical skin-colour but definition-barred from placement in the US Black-box! Wonder why? ...)
(...)
But even the present US-census system of "racial categorization", which FAIK tidy-mindedly syphons all the world's many-and-various ethno-complexities into 7 neat little "boxes": White/Black/Native American/Asian/Pacific Islander//Other/Two-or-More-Races [check one], can find it hard to cope with fine-tuned Caribbean geneological-identity complexities of the "Well on my mother's side I'm around 3/8ths Bengali 1/8th Portuguese and on my father's I'm roughly a quarter Welsh and a quarter African" type? (... quoting a helluva-bright n' hyper-ironical, mostly self-educated highschool-dropout 17-year-old Canadian kid of Trinidadian origin I became friends with on a previous forum that got closed down... he was my "mentor" in my early internet-forum days back in 2002/2003, used to quote Brzezinski at me and first wised me up to the dastardly-dealings of the ISI! ... still miss him - OrdoAbChao-where-are-you-now???? * waving * )
Guess Ordo would be technically racially-classifiable in the US "Two or More" box these days, like the majority of people in/from the Caribbean? (Btw, the original term for Caribbean immigrants in the UK was the archaic-geographic "West Indians", not the skincolour-coded term "blacks" - which I think first got introduced into UK usage via US "Black Pride" terminology some time in the militant 1970s?) Nonetheless, I still find it somewhat hard to imagine - even in the US - a heavy-breathing police chief fresh from riot-squad truncheon-cracking on mostly Caribbean-origin young rioters PC-venting his venom-steam against the dastardliness-n'-depredations of "them nasty mixed-ethnicity immigrants"... ?? ... which to me, oddly enough, sounds somehow even more offensive due to hyper-sinister "disapproval-of-miscegenation" implications???
(...)
P.S. Italy - unlike the US and UK, and I think Australia and Russia too? - doesn't foresee any kind of racial/ethnicity classification system in its censuses, official records etc, at most it keeps statistical track of resident-foreign-nationals-by-country-of-origin but pays no official/statistical attention whatsoever to the race/ethnic-origin of its citizens- think the same applies to most of continental Europe... France, Germany, Spain etc? There'd be an absolute furore if anyone tried to introduce anything like the US/UK system here... which unfortunately does NOT imply a corresponding absence of racial/ethnic/regional taunts from discos, soccer stadiums and public toilet walls.
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Ball back in Dave's court... 
_________________
“Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.” Mahmoud Darwish |
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johnwilkins
Joined: 15 Apr 2002
Posts: 4718
Location: West Coast
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| Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 6:47 am Post subject: |
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| parvati roma wrote: | | ... by way of oblique subliminal-annoyance payback for what I perceived as the likewise-subliminally gleeful way you'd started flashing the Scarlet Letter at Dave's ma. |
I wouldn't call it glee, as I said quite clearly that there is more than one person feeling pain here, and Dave wasn't particularly sensitive to that. Going back to his first thread was useful.
| Dave Myers wrote: | | My four younger siblings had also been told the same story, and had to explain the same things to their friends when asked why they had a brother who was black... "Hey, did your mother fool around a little bit??" I remember how much that hurt me when I heard it, and I'm sure that they felt just as badly when they did... nonetheless, this was a "subject" that we never discussed as a family, not once, at least in my presence. |
See, this is exactly what happened. In the very next sentence he says...
| Dave Myers wrote: | | I was taught through my observations of my mother and step-father to keep quiet about things that I wasn't sure about, and I was also taught to ignore the obvious. |
My point to Dave was simple: you are still ignoring the obvious. And the purpose of the scarlet letter is to note that he's the one flashing it without particularly realizing that this is what he's doing... He wants to have a simple discussion about race...
| parvati roma wrote: | Back to Dave's story and its implications. Not too far back on this thread, JW had asked a few questions which - reading back - I find Dave had already answered in his opening post, and what he says there does make it clear exactly how big a part exposure to "white American" race-attitudes had played in it all.
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The other story side tracked me as it didn't include what Dave mentioned in the opening post. So yes, it does make sense now. He was the odd man out and was undoubtedly singled out and picked on. School fights, etc. started probably mostly by the white kids, and Dave usually getting the blame--a basic sense of unfairness.
| parvati roma wrote: | | I'm also very interested in the "being biracial in America" aspects as to me, identity = sum of all one's parts both present-personal-individual and stretching back in time - meaning all one's various roots, all one's various heritages - which seems particularly hard for mixed-race Americans to do as they're pushed by both sides ("blacks" no less than "whites") to identify as "either A or B" - no third-ways, no fourth-ways, no sum-of-parts... which means if your ancestry is interwoven the social pressures - on both sides - try to force you to deny some part of your being, some part of what's made you "you"?? |
This is where I take some exception to Dave's argument. Am I Catholic? Or am I Protestant? Am I Irish or English? Or Norman... My experience is that in America I'm white, but in the UK I'm not. If they know my first name, I must be an Irish Catholic in Ireland. If they know my last name, I must be an English protestant. In England, I'm either English or Norman. They pick you off pretty quickly by nothing more than your name. Yet, in the states, you can have a name like Donovan McNabb, and it doesn't necessarily imply that you are an Irish Catholic IRA sympathizer. As I said, my mother tried to get me to go to Irish dancing class, and I would have none of it.
Dancing like a white man
I have a friend who makes fun of Michael Flatley--he gets up a mock Scotish accent and says, "And now, I will dance like a white man for you..." and he starts stomping the floor... it is absolutely hilarious. But when I was a kid, it wasn't funny at all. Some of those guys wore kilts, and to American boys, that's a dress... and as you probably have guessed, that would turn you instantly into a f*g, which gets you pounded in the school yard. Better to scream "God Save the Queen" and face mild punishment at home...
| Dave Myers wrote: | | Is there any other way(besides the attrition of the old guard) to achieve this?? |
To this question, I think attrition is basically part of the answer. You can't expect someone like John Lewis to adopt a happy stance on race. Henry Louis Gates Jr. tries to explain segregation to his kids, and they just roll their eyes. In some cases, I don't know if sensitization to the past's nastiness is such a great idea for little kids. It seems to breed resentment. In some respects, Dave is one of the last of his kind: a black kid growing up in what was once a totally white culture. That really is not the case in America anymore. In fact, it was at the time that Dave started school that the 1965 Immigration Act was past by guys like Ted Kennedy, which stopped the racial preferences for European immigrants. So the Northeast stays mostly white, but California is not majority white anymore. It's a plurality. Hispanics, and Asians constitute a big part of our population. Blacks are an also ran minority here now.
At any rate, Dave's watching an old guard hold onto it's vestigial faithful marriage, no hanky-panky purity. So I think he's really in a jam trying to have a discussion on race. I'd like to hear what he has to say about Obama's candidacy. A lot of the feminist cabal in the Democratic Party holds that he's only where he is today, because he is black--that his poll success is due to a desire by Americans to seek atonement for a racist past.
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davemyers
Joined: 11 Apr 2008
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| Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 8:14 am Post subject: |
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... Mr. Obama, is on a very short leash...made up of temporal links that have been "added", resultant of the positive "gestalt" impression he has formed/created with "white america"... of this, he is well aware.
... as I've previously stated in my own discussion forum at www.discussrace.com , the actual "semantic construction" of our "racial" dialogue and collective "understanding", is "un-developed"... under-developed, and must evolve...
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FC Mellon
Joined: 15 Apr 2002
Posts: 4404
Location: SoCal
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| Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 10:00 am Post subject: peppered with no salt? |
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Dave,
After visiting your website at www.discussrace.com and after reading your comments about your past experiences and realizing your inheritance is both black and white that you appear to offer mostly, if not only, black-related articles on your site. By only addressing only perspectives of Black experience/understanding am I to understand your White makeup experience(s) are/is being somewhat shunned for reasons you care to discuss?
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parvati_roma
Joined: 30 Mar 2004
Posts: 8068
Location: Italy
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| Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 10:36 am Post subject: |
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Yay after much digging on Dave's form I actually found what looks like a/the(?) relevant thread !
Soooo... quick selection to bring the most relevant bits into focus:
| Cindy wrote: |
Why have discussion on race if you do not consider yourself black or white
.... I was listening to your story on NPR tonight and found it to be quite interesting. (...) I heard you say on MPR; you do not consider yourself African American, you consider yourself just a man. That\'s great if that is truly how you feel and if that is truly how you feel, why even discuss race? What is there to discuss if you do not identify yourself with a race? Just confused at what direction you\'re going in?
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| Dave Myers wrote: | | Hi Cindy, as a consequence of the very short amount of wordage that I was able to use, substantiating my viewpoints, during my NPR interview with Ed Gordon(1/27/06), I will now , add to my perspective... In that...my stated self-image is that of, \'a man\', I am efforting to position myself with-in the wider purview of my current under-standing... the socially \'accepted\' racial realities in America, not-with-standing, part of my message is being formed to de-bunk the mis-perception(s) that have grown-up around the artificially engineered(Marxist, et al.) stratifications with-in the institution(s) of capitalism... |
That's right in JW's court...
Another poster chimes in:
| EnigmaticQue wrote: |
Dave, what I think you\'re doing is admirable, perhaps-I\'m still wondering. Because we live in such a race conscience society is your opposition to racially defining yourself is a worthwhile goal or not.
\"Why bother?\" could be the question you ask yourself each morning. What great point could you be making that is worth the daily humiliations and personal (not to mention emotional) punches endured.
Who would really care one way or the other if you\'re black, white or polka-dot as long as you have something logical to check in one of those boxes on the form, huh?
I listened with interest to your story on NPR and thought perhaps, here\'s a guy that could have really been screwed up but instead he choses to demonstrate how wrong the rest of are in our assumption that race is the first and last thing we are.
I asked my students (I teach in a small, almost 100% Black charter school) during the recent MLK celebration, \'Discuss what is more important to you - being African American or being American.\' I was disheartened by their almost unanimous response: it is more important to be a color. |
And a last quote from Dave:
| Dave Myers wrote: |
(...)As I continue with my reading and research into the history of the making of America, it seems incredible to me how Blacks in America have continued to suffer, in a general sense, from the mis-understandings created, going back to the Colonizer\'s need to legitimize and perpetuate the continuance of chatel slavery, to the re-subjugation of the emancipated black population in the south under Jim Crow... then as social pressure \'forces\' the powers-that-be to enact \'civil rights\' legislation in the mid-60\'s, we begin to see an inverse action with the Black prison population rising steadily... Does White America have the need to keep its\' finger on Black progress and empowerment ?? Has \'ANYTHING\' really CHANGED?? |
So that's a starting point - my reading being you don't want to be totally defined-as-a-person by either half of your two history-heritages, you want to feel your personal way to "being all you are and can be" ... to "build" yourself the best "Dave Myers" you can, to the very best of your abilities? And to be able take on/absorb the Afro-American part of your heritage you've been doing a lot of exploring, a lot of reading, a lot of listening, a lot of thinking....
.... and the more you've found out about how Afro-Americans have been - and to some extent still are - treated in the USA, the stronger your indignation and sense of injustice have grown?
BUT - do you think what for lack of a better word I'll call the "afro-american community" itself is generally on the right track? Or maybe in your view, are they doing/have they done some things right some wrong? If so - which?
And - are you "for" or "against" factoring-in the "marxist-type" interpretation (i.e. slavery apartheid and racially-selective imprisonment are "really" just another form of class-based economic oppression - Proletarians Of The World Unite)? If it's eliminated, wouldn't that leave the poorer and less-educated strata of Afro-American society even worse off, with nothing left but the purest racism ("counter-racism") to try to "rebuild" with : i.e. both as sole explanation-for-the-past and as "remedy" for the future?? - a view of US society as divided essentially into two non-reconciliable hostile camps - the "racist oppressors"= winners and the "racism-oppressed" = losers, exclusively on the basis of geographic origin and historical "role" - with skin-colour restored to primacy as supreme "recognition-marker" ? Or "innate good" vs "innate evil" - only Black can be Beautiful 'cause Whitey is BAAAAD "by nature"... an' the Chinese were right to believe that blue/green eyes "signify" wickedness and cruelty... ??? Try carrying all that to its logical consequences and extend it for a century or so.... Yuck ... it makes the the Albanians vs Serbians thingy look almost idyllic by comparison. 
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“Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.” Mahmoud Darwish
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davemyers
Joined: 11 Apr 2008
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| Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 10:41 am Post subject: |
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...of course, you "could" form that impression by viewing my experience... short-sightedly.
... my "social" , world-view is derived via a similar myopic inculcation, and forced-feeding of euro-centric values, as most of the rest of us in the west... is this "something", that I am efforting to "extract" myself from??
Indeed.
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parvati_roma
Joined: 30 Mar 2004
Posts: 8068
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| Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 11:06 am Post subject: |
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NB - seen from here, the "eurocentric" values people get force-fed with in the US are essentially an Anglo-Germanic narrative not a "eurocentric" one - in fact they go on and on about how the "Western" world is the ultimate flower of civilisation and absolutely everything/everyone to the east and south of the US/UK was/is always has been and always will be inferior and benighted by definition... especially if poor.
For instance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
| Quote: | . Western thought as we think of it today, is shaped by ideas of the 1900s and 1800s, originating mainly in Europe. What we think of as Western thought today is defined as Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian culture, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and colonialism. As a consequence the term "Western thought" is, at times, unhelpful and vague, since it can define separate, though related, sets of traditions and values:
The Christian moral tradition and respective set of religious values;
The humanist tradition and set of secular values, often with rationalist, anti-clerical beliefs;
Less acknowledged but equally as important was the influence of the Germanic cultures whose people overran Western Europe beginning in the fifth century AD and effectively became the rulers of Western Europe into the modern age, first in the form of the Goths and the Vandals and later in the form of the Franks who unified the West |
Here "the Germanic cultures whose people overran Western Europe" are known as the "Barbarian Invasions": they massacred millions, stole or destroyed everything in sight smashed everything they couldn't understand ... thereby precipitating the previously highly civilised lands of Southern Europe and North Africa into centuries of bleak poverty and mass-illiteracy - they also invented apartheid/racism : when they conquered parts of Italy they demanded tribute but did none of the things the local administrators had been expected to do with tax-revenues under the Roman system such as keep aquaducts-roads-ports-sewers-irrigation systems etc etc in good repair - so it all rapidly fell into ruin and the population was decimated by hunger cholera and malaria! Plus here they even introduced apartheid laws prohibiting intermarriage between the germanic "super-race" and the locals at all levels of society...so as not to soil their barbarian bloodline I guess?... Guess they did the same thing in North Africa - to keep the visigoths "unstained" by berbers and phoenicians/punics?? thankfully that didn't last long here though, so after a while the illiterate "lordly" invader-exploiters were assimilated into the "Latin" population and adopted their language and customs - at which point they even started learning how to read and write, yay! - but it took this country hundreds of years to get back to anywhere near the state of civilisation it had been in before the invaders arrived. Despite all the destruction  they'd caused, we finally managed to start restoring our own culture and civilisation in the later middle ages and renaissance - thanks essentially to the books preserved in the libraries kept by the far more civilised Arabs, Byzantine Greeks and Persians.... to which they'd usefully added some fine thinkings writings and discoveries of their own.
(OK OK that's a standard-issue "Mediterraneanist" venting-rant, local equiv. of "Afrocentrism" - I readily admit it's slanted ...but there really is quite a lot of truth in it... indeed quite a lot of truth in ALL the "non-Western" narratives... not hard to find equivalents on Indian Chinese Arab etc etc forums... all stress their own "particular" truths achievements and historic experiences of oppression/devastation: it's by adding up the fragments you get the "whole picture".)
| Quote: | | There is debate among some as to whether Eastern Europe is in a category of its own. Culturally Eastern Europe, although having mainly eastern orthodox and Islamic influences, is usually more or less accepted into the 'West', mainly because of its geographic location in what is mostly Europe (and cultural ties). It, however, does not fill the traditional economic and living standard criteria which one associates with "The West".[2] |
See what I mean? The "West"(TM) is not a civilisation it's a cartel.
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“Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.” Mahmoud Darwish |
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davemyers
Joined: 11 Apr 2008
Posts: 151
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| Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 2:52 pm Post subject: |
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...I agree...thanks for the clarification(smile)...
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