From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: How White? (was Re: WARNING)
Date: 12 Oct 92 15:31:29 GMT
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison


In article <1992Oct12.031823.29080@reed.edu> nelson@reed.edu
(Nelson Minar) writes:

>I'm not asking *why* soc.motss is a particularly white
>forum.  The reasons for that are pretty clear - Usenet is
>heavily white, and in particular there aren't many clearly
>identified non-white voices on motss.

I pause on "clearly identified." The sexuality of voices on
soc.motss is often (very often) not clearly identified, and
that doesn't pass for a reason that soc.motss is
particularly gay and lesbian.  I know you mean clues for the
clueless, but being clued is sometimes not all that useful,
rather just extra information that doesn't do much.

>Most of my own postings are perforce from a "white point of
>view" (what this phrase means is an intersting question, but
>slightly tangential).

Yes, it is an interesting question.  What is a white point
of view?  And apart from *being* white, what would make your
views or anyone else's "white?" Perforce, you said; I don't
see how that works.

>I suspect most white motssers are in the same position.

I'm not trying (it comes to me naturally :-) to be
difficult, but I can't tell what position you're referring
to.

>I see nothing to apologize for here.

I find this an odd comment.  Why shouldn't we be beating our
brains out looking around for things to apologize for, where
by that I mean things that are really broken and could be
fixed.  It seems to me if more white people took as their
default assumption, "I'm the problem," rather than "<x !=
me> is the problem," broken things would get fixed faster.
Not all the problems are things white people, per se, can
fix, but many of them are.

>Statements such as "soc.motss is white-dominated the same
>way it is male-dominated" or "soc.motss is white-dominated
>the same way the rest of the usenet is straight-dominated"
>are somewhat useful, because they make obvious the
>extrapolation we should all be working on.

Agreed.

>But I can't work from "straight-dominance of Usenet" to
>"white-dominance of soc.motss".  I experience these two
>phenomena in very different ways.

It's not that I don't believe you, it's your report of your
own experience.  Admitted differences to one side, there
seem to me to be a number of parallels there, enough to
latch onto and get at least something out of it.

>When I read some clueless straight person's posting on a
>newsgroup, I'm quickly aware of the exclusion of queers
>because I myself am queer,
>
>and so I directly experience being left out.

But a person doesn't have to *be* queer to experience that,
I think.  I agree that we have a *kind* of experience one
has to be queer to have; after all, that's tautological.
But the substantive content of experience is not a
foreclosed option simply by virtue of not oneself belonging
to an aggrieved class, is it?

>I am not black, so I can't get the analogous feeling.

You can only be what you are, obviously.  But surely
you don't mean to say you can't have a useful idea
about what another person is experiencing by using
such analogies or any other means available to
you to empathize with that person?  I'm not trying
to badger you here, but instead to find out why and
how my thoughts on these things differ so markedly.

>The comparison between "male-dominance of soc.motss" and
>"white-dominance of soc.motss" is a little more helpful for
>me, because the analogy is more direct.

>I am not female, so my understanding of male-dominance has
>to be second-hand.

What I'm after here, in a general way, is to question each
of these underlying assumptions.  I'm relying heavily on my
own biases and convictions, to be sure.  So why do you say
"has to be?" There is a sense in which quite obviously a man
is not a woman, and I am referring less to sex and gender
than to sensibilities and life herstory here.  So yes,
second-hand in that sense.  But that sense is so limited
and so limiting as to be virtually useless.

Fortunately, you can understand things in a not-first-hand,
not-second-hand way.  Directly, in other words.  In your
heart, in your mind, as a result of *everything*.  To take
an not very encompassing example, I don't have to be a
woman, or anything like a woman, or even to like women, to
understand pretty fully and completely how repellent "all
you need is a good lay" is.

>It seems like it should be easier to extrapolate from this
>to another second-hand awareness, white-dominance.

I am quite sincerely mystified that you say it's anything
*but* easy.

>But for me to achieve this similar understanding of
>white-dominance, I'm going to need to read discussions about
>this dominances here in motss.

What?  Why here?  If I depend on soc.motss to tell me about
white dominance, I'm not going to get very far.  This is too
white a place to expect to find out much.  There are
resources here, to be sure, but the keys to understanding
white dominance on any very useful scale lie elsewhere.

>And that was the point of my question.  Donald seemed
>interesting in discussing the problems with motss, and so I
>asked the question I wanted answered: In what way does motss
>reflect the whiteness of most of its members?

Anyone who wants to discuss those problems can certainly
raise the issues.  But there's a question, I don't think
only in my mind, about doing that.  It would be a little
like a woman showing up in soc.men and saying, "Listen, how
come all you boyz are such sexists?" The parallel isn't
exact, I admit, and I don't think soc.motss is so very
inhospitable as all that.  But then, perhaps I wouldn't;
even empathy has limits.  We've had the parallel discussion
about the hospitableness of soc.motss for women, several
times.

>I've pointed out one potential example - the discussion of
>Marlene Dietrich as an icon.

I don't get that.  You're saying that because she was white
she can't be an icon for people who aren't?  She would be
for anyone who's really into film, I think.  That's like
saying Langston Hughes can't be an icon for you, whereas I
would think he would be for anyone who loves poetry or
Frederick Douglass would be for anyone who loves freedom.
Let me say at once that I am not especially literate in
matters of African-American history, but these things are so
widely available that not to have enountered them somewhere
along the line seems unusual to me.  By far the greater
component of my awareness in such matters, such as it is,
comes from being around black people, which in my own case
has been a matter more of luck than of effort.

>What are others?

>What would constitute a discussion of particular relevance
>to non-white people?

As Steve mentioned, it makes sense to defer to nonwhite
voices for answers to those questions, with the proviso
that it's got something in common with the question we
as gay people get so annoyed about when somebody shows
up here and asks, "So what do you queers *really* care
about, anyway?"

Complicated, isn't it?

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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