From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: WARNING: Stealth African Marauding soc.motss
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 92 04:53:40 GMT


In article <1992Oct11.223503.27820@seq.uncwil.edu>
drollin@seq.uncwil.edu (David A. Rollins) writes:

>Gary, I found your response very reassuring.  You expressed
>my sentiments.  

And in many regards, you expressed mine.  This underscores
an important point, I think.  I'm not going to talk about
Donald here, I've had my say on that, enough for now, anyway.

It's you, this time.  I was quite put off by that "gay
rhetoric" thing and made no secret of it.  But I very much
liked what you said -- the main part of it -- in this
posting.  And this is part of my point.  People are complex
creatures, all of us.  We almost never are monolithic.  Some
of us may be more or less predictable on this or that topic,
but this is no great surprise, after all.  In the end, we
like what we like and we don't like what we don't like.

More to the point, we tend to like the views we agree with
and don't like the ones we disagree with.  By and large, you
understand; of course, there are occasional exceptions.

Maybe it's just me, or just my method, but I think I usually
pay pretty close attention to what people say.  Sometimes
that creates misunderstanding, because I might look too
closely at what they say, at the trees rather than the
forest, so to speak.  The reason is pretty simple, though:
it's how I teach myself things.

But it's been my experience over quite a few years, that a
real liability, or at least a potential one, lies in this
approach, because not seldom people think, if you disagree
with or question something they say, that you're disagreeing
completely with them or rejecting everything they say.

This little preamble is not to say you are such a person,
but it is to head off any impression that because what I saw
as a derisive edge in your other posting bothered me, that I
would be looking to jump you elsewhere.  This is decidedly
not the case.

>I communicate with others in these forums to express my
>ideas and to exchange ideas with others.

You have that in common with a great many people, I think
with *most* of the people here.

>Were it not for instances like these, nobody would know what
>race I am or what anybody's race is, for that matter.

Yes and no.  There's lots of kinds of knowing, many parts of
it not directly visible here.  And it isn't only the
relatively rare outburst (I assume that's what you mean by
"instances like this") that reveals a fact like someone's
race.

Let me get the obvious things out of the way first.  I'm
sure I'm not the most broadly acquainted person here.  I can
barely imagine that being anyone other than Steve Dyer.  But
I "know" more than 500 people here in the email sense (my
email database has 800 people in it, but that includes about
100 colleagues and about 200 people I know from other
contexts.) And of that 500, I know about 100 face-to-face,
or maybe 120.  Now in fact, I don't know the sexuality or
the race of some of the 500, though I think I do know
everybody's gender.  The reason is, in most cases it doesn't
matter too much, because it's never been a *main* part of
the exchanges.  But I do know the racial heritage of all the
people I know face to face, because unlike sexuality, it's
visible.

The overall point is: just because something doesn't seem
known doesn't mean it's unknown.  Important too, is that
this connection (soc.motss) isn't the only one that's
relevant.  *Tons*of email (weighing virtually nothing :-)
flashes around the world every day between many of these
people who post here and between some who are here but don't
post.  Practially every day I get mail (three times so far
today) from somebody I never heard of before, had no idea
they even existed.

So all of this is an addendum to your idea that people don't
know these things; quite often they *do* know, actually,
just in non-obvious ways.

>I have friends of all different races, and I and my friends
>never give our racial differences a thought.  Who cares
>about race when you are friends?

Nothing wrong with that at all, if your friends and you are
relaxed and enjoy one another in that way.  

But to provide a contrast, I have friends of all different
races and when we are together we jabber about race all the
time, just like we jabber about all sorts of things.  My
officemate is Chinese, from China; we are constantly talking
about our very different cultures.  Imagine what a great
pleasure it was to lend him my copies of the Chuang Tsu and
the Tao Te Ching, which of course he knew about but had
never seen (this happens to be a bilingual edition, with
lovely Chinese calligraphy, excellent translations in
English (my officemate's English is unbelievably good), and
nice photographs by a woman I happen to know from years ago
(Jane English).  His predecessor here was Indian, from
India, and when he left to go back, he gave me his schoolboy
copy of the Mahabharata, which I'd never read.  With both of
these young guys and indeed with virtually every nonwhite
person I know, race and associated cultural and language
matters are *very* frequent topics.

>Now, if there were a topic that seemed decidedly more
>relative to Black people, and some White person had
>complained, I think that many Black participants would come
>out of the woodwork to condemn him.  I see nothing different
>here.

Quite right, of course.  But it's also true that when racist
or sexist remarks are made here, as they occasionally are,
the instant respondents are not only of the offended race
or gender.

>Unless a post is obviously a racial attack, there can be no
>such thing as a topic which is racially exclusive.

This doesn't seem inclusive enough, so to speak.  I think
there *is* a culture here, one that *mainly* reflects
backgrounds and cultural biases that are *chiefly* informed
by the culture of white males.  I know that isn't quite what
you were talking about, but I think this dimension needs to
be added, and I was thinking about this this afternoon
not wrt to race but wrt to sexuality.  Melinda touched on it,
in talking about the maleness of the place.

I can remember as a kid, going into just about any bar that
happened to be handy to have a beer on a hot afternoon
(adult kid, obviously).  But you couldn't *drag* me into
those places now, because they are *too* straight; I just
don't want to be there, it's too alien, as I experience it.

Madison, Wisconsin is one of the most liberal towns in the
whole country.  But it's *very* white (91%, I think), and I
know black people who've said they just have to get out of
here to go to Milwaukee or Chicago or even Rockford, just to
see a mass of black faces.  I can readily understand that,
and I think something of that flavor might be associated
with the whiteness of soc.motss, as I know it is for many
women regarding the maleness of soc.motss.

So I've always felt a debt of gratitude for those non-white
and non-male people who *do* hang out here and take part in
things, because there must be times when it is a terrible
drag and hard to put up with.  This indeed was part of what
I took Donald to be saying, too.

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson
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