White musicians and "artistic" use of the N-word: A Discussion and Social History

hmmm gee maybe if there was some way we could tag posters' racial characteristics... you could put a little Star of David next to all my posts if that would make you comfortable (whether or not Jews are white people is highly contentious)

ps I am not fat

xp

res has brought a whole new level of energy to thread, kudos

Before res ruins this thread, I just wanted to say this --

As far as the discussion about American children goes: this is a largely white country with ideas about things like beauty and intelligence and normality that privilege white people. Those ideas are encoded into everything around us. The bulk of them are practically invisible to us. They don't have to be malicious or explicit for children to soak them up. They can work by omission or via ideals. They're the culture we live in, the water we swim in. Of course that's what children pick up, whether it's making them think less of someone else or think less of themselves. That's not going to be escapable until our culture has changed way more dramatically than we can sit here and imagine.

In the meantime I think most of the work of correcting that is maybe less about really small children -- like Shakey says, it's immensely complicated, and will involve mistakes and embarrassment, because children can't just suddenly become geniuses about this stuff -- and more about dealing with kids who are old enough to start working through the subtleties and questioning what they've soaked up thus far.

(I mean, it's way more straightforward to explain to a small child how people from different parts of the planet look different, no big deal, than it is to start explaining the whole history of why people who look a particular way all live on the other side of town, or have less money than you, or whatever else.)

nabisco OTM

Plus, babies' conversational abilities are somewhat limited.

I could speak perfect swahili when I was born but forgot it all by my second day out of the womb

(Shit now I'm dissing babies on this thread)

children can't just suddenly become geniuses about this stuff

I think a certain little motion picture called Baby Geniuses begs to differ

But you have to admit that something is severely lacking at a white man's convention about race relations.

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:53 PM (10 minutes ago)

white men relate about race like this

And for the record, when I say it's encoded into everything, I'm not saying we live in some dystopian racist nightmare (I guess that depends on your standards), just that it's threaded through all the smallest things around us. We've gotten better and better about being aware of the big obvious things, but isn't not like the entire culture can just magically forget the whole deal.

right, and that was more what I was saying, that as disguised and disavowed as it certainly was nowadays, the racial delirium was still prevalent in American culture, and young children were still picking up on it at an alarming rate. Except that I was way more pissed off about it (being a white person, that is...having an unearned head start tends to bruise the pride.)

I don't think I've actually addressed the OP on this so I'll just say that I have never heard a song by a white person that contains the n-word that I found defensible. The Lennon has always made me cringe a little (a tad condesecending to women and a tad insensitive to blacks) but I wonder if Costello's usage in 'Oliver's Army' (the Cromwell reference sounds a little over the top to me, too) doesn't reference the language of a certain kind of British soldier.

In the meantime I think most of the work of correcting that is maybe less about really small children -- like Shakey says, it's immensely complicated, and will involve mistakes and embarrassment, because children can't just suddenly become geniuses about this stuff -- and more about dealing with kids who are old enough to start working through the subtleties and questioning what they've soaked up thus far.

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:00 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

xp I do tend to give MES a pass on The Classical; something about throwing the word "obligatory" in there always implies in my mind that he's saying that certain groups of people need to be marginalized in order for society to structure itself, which along with the rampant misanthropic (twelve ppl in the world, rest r paste) & and anti-national (classic British attention to the wrong detail) vitriol, makes it seem very much like scouring social satire.

One great way to deal with little kids wrt racism is to have lots of friends who are different than you - then your children stand a better chance of hanging out one on one or in small groups w/people of different races even before the positive or negative institutional atmosphere of pre-school or kindergarten.

being straight-up with your kids about the fact that race and racism do exist in the world, even from an early age

look for me the problem is what does "being straight up that race and racism exist in the world" amount to when we're talking about 2-4 year olds, because what these studies show is that by the time they get to kindergarten racist stuff is already getting ingrained in their heads. So how do you talk to someone who can barely talk themselves about things that are really difficult and complicated to talk about...? Like how do you verbally counter stuff that is developing non-verbally?

xp

One great way to deal with little kids wrt racism is to have lots of friends who are different than you - then your children stand a better chance of hanging out one on one or in small groups w/people of different races

the problem is that the studies directly contradict this commonly held liberal belief - kids in integrated classes actually were MORE likely to hold racist predispositions.

I will try to find some links, my wife has been pretty up on this...

In the meantime I think most of the work of correcting that is maybe less about really small children -- like Shakey says, it's immensely complicated, and will involve mistakes and embarrassment, because children can't just suddenly become geniuses about this stuff -- and more about dealing with kids who are old enough to start working through the subtleties and questioning what they've soaked up thus far.

nabisco otm (once again)

http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2009/09/11/colorblind_myth/print.html

This seems like the kind of thing that people of the color-blind school would like to get behind: Just raise a kid in an environment where race is no big deal, and your kids will see race as no big deal. But unfortunately, they say, things don’t often work out that way. Several long-term studies quoted by the authors have shown that the more diverse the school, the more likely it is that kids will self-segregate. As a result, says University of Austin’s Rebecca Bigler, who considers herself a huge supporter of integrated schools, “Going to an integrated school gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”

wife has a link to actual study somewhere, but I may not get it for a little awhile...

ike how do you verbally counter stuff that is developing non-verbally?

― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:24 PM (18 seconds ago) Bookmark

Wow you guys are waaaaaaaaaaayyyy off the original thread topic (sorry, just checked back in).

kids in integrated classes actually were MORE likely to hold racist predispositions.

I mean before school/pre-school. My little nephew's best friend is the son of my sister's best friend and they're Korean Americans.

I'm not saying that will preclude him from developing racist attitudes or thoughts but it may be less likely that he develops them about Koreans.

Several long-term studies quoted by the authors have shown that the more diverse the school, the more likely it is that kids will self-segregate. As a result, says University of Austin’s Rebecca Bigler, who considers herself a huge supporter of integrated schools, “Going to an integrated school gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”

wife has a link to actual study somewhere, but I may not get it for a little awhile...

― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:29 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

kids in culturally uniform environments self-segregate anyway. they ostracize one another and form cliques, etc. we just don't worry as much about such behavior as we do about racism.

"...along which to organize their self-segregation."

lol my daughter's half-Korean playmates have (apparently) never been told about their Korean heritage.

yeah I dunno it's just worrisome, I try to make sure she has a range of playmates but it's a social landscape littered with landmines out there, no one wants to feel their kid is being tokenized and whatnot. In a weird way, parents complain about racial disparity on either end - I've heard white parents complain that their kids' playgroups are too white, and latino/black parents complain that their kid is the lone minority, so there is a weird self-segregation that goes on, where the white folks wanna be all integrated and the other minority groups want to keep to themselves (to retain cultural pride/continuity, shelter their kids from racism, who knows what else)

xp

As a non-parent, I am amazed at the amount of landmines you have to negotiate but if you do it in the right spirit, I think it tends to lessen the chance that your kids will turn out to be sociopaths.

This seems like the kind of thing that people of the color-blind school would like to get behind: Just raise a kid in an environment where race is no big deal, and your kids will see race as no big deal. But unfortunately, they say, things don’t often work out that way. Several long-term studies quoted by the authors have shown that the more diverse the school, the more likely it is that kids will self-segregate. As a result, says University of Austin’s Rebecca Bigler, who considers herself a huge supporter of integrated schools, “Going to an integrated school gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”

I went to a v racially diverse elementary school and I don't feel like I saw that much self-segregation going on. Maybe I just didn't notice it. But I mingled with anyone of any race and didn't really develop conceptions of race beyond what people looked like until later on. (Then again I was an aspie rube who until first grade thought the only difference between genders was hair length. Then I saw a girl with short hair and realized there must be something else going on.)

It actually took me forever to realize that some white people might hear this word a lot, used casually, and then wind up thinking of it as a casual word they can "reframe" in a song. That honestly took me a while to realize. Because, you know ... if you are black, you're not really going to hear white people use this word in person in a way that's not extremely non-casual and/or aggressively pointed at you. I'm not sure white people who choose to use it have, like, a reciprocal realization along those lines.

was about exactly this just the other day, actually, when i heard one coworker had called another a "black mf" (twice, ugh). the incident was sort of a weird life-before-my-eyes flash of all the casual racist shit i've heard, all the "i'm-not-racist-buts", really, really angering, saddening. (curious about the homo perspective on this wrt casual gay bashing--cuz i know i hear a lot of it--and i mean gay isn't the color of your skin so god i bet ppl sit through so much of that horseshit. right there in front of them. and as infuriating it is to me as a hetero, i just can't imagine...)

the tendency to excoriate ian mackay kinda sticks in my craw, too.

i know this is a minor thread in this discussion, but i have to say. in my experience, ian mackaye's weirdness about race has tended to register on the radar of people of color i know much more than among white people. which is not particularly surprising, whatever. i know he means a lot to people, but the part of this that gets weird is how defensive white fans of his sometimes get when people point out his weirdness about race.

it's not really about excoriating him, but i will admit that i've never been able to get into minor threat/fugazi/whatever in the way a lot of my social cohort was into those bands because i found statements he had made about race...alienating. again, i know people love him but he's not jesus.

lol "minor thread" geddit. (that was unintentional)

if those dead sea scroll guys ever dig up that flipside interview with jesus, we're in for a shocker.

From a 2007 MySpace interview I just found:

Ian MacKaye: Another example, Minor Threat has a song called "Guilty of Being White." I grew up in Washington D.C., and at the time I was growing up it was 70 or 75 percent black, I went to a junior high school that was 95 percent black and I was beaten up for being a white kid. I wrote a song about how I thought it was wrong to beat me up for the color of my skin. Writing a song that was an anti-racist song. And yet fifteen years after I wrote that song I was in Poland and I had a white power skinhead guy thank me for writing such a great song about the white race. So you can see that the context has a lot to do with everything. In some ways to answer your question I feel like to hear this lyric I'm like "Wow, I wouldn't write those lyrics the same way again." But I wouldn't have the opportunity anyway. I love those songs. I stand behind them all.

"So you can see that the context has a lot to do with everything" just seems like a way to avoid talking about any specific lyrics in the song that are kind of clueless about the way racism operates in American history and in the culture more generally. I find it heartening that he wouldn't write those lyrics again, but it still seems like an insufficient response.

I was also surprised by how willing people were to give Ian MacKaye a pass. Reading the MRR interview, what sticks out most for me is actually what comes in between the two quotes that were singled out on this thread:

throughout my entire life, I've been brought up in this whole thing where the white man was shit because of slavery. So I go to class and we do history, and for 3/4 of the year slavery is all we hear about. It's all we hear about. We will race through the Revolutionary War or the founding of America; we'd race through all that junk. It's just straight education. We race through everything, and when we'd get to slavery, they'd drag it all the way out. Then everything has to do with slavery or black people. You get to the 1950's, they don't talk about nothing except the black people. Even WWII, they talk about the black regiments. In English, we don't read all the novelists, we read all the black novelists. Every week is African King's Week. And after a while, I would come out of a history class, and this has happened to me many times, like in junior high school, and you know that kids are belligerent in junior high, and these kids would jack my ass up and say, "What the fuck, man, why are you putting me in slavery?" To me, racism is never going to end until people get off this whole thing. It's going flim-flam, back and forth. When people will just get off the whole guilt trip... First, all the white people were like "Fuck the niggers", and all of a sudden, it's "The black man is great. We love him. We're going to do everything for him," all the time. It's never going to get anywhere, because one generation it'll be the KKK, the next generation it'll be the Black Panthers. Now we see the KKK come back in again, more popular. I think the best way we're going to have to deal with it is that if I am able to say "nigger" without everyone gasping, and if I'm able to say that word, because I don't have any problems with that word.

(Also, I'm not white and am way the fuck skinny.)

holy shit, ian

Also, these:

And I'm just saying I'm guilty of being white - it's my one big crime. That's why I get so much fucking shit at school, that's why I cannot get on welfare in Washington, most likely. That's why when we took the PSAT's, when Jeff checked off the black box, he got awards, he got scholarships, he got all kinds of interest, but when he admitted he was white, all that was gone...

I: No, I'm saying if someone made you constantly feel guilty, what do you think that may result in?

D: A resentment..

I: Thank you. And what would that resentment lead to? You just go right back. They're going to beat me over the head about African kings and stuff to the point where I'm going to say "Well, fuck the African kings. And fuck the black people too. Fuck all this shit. I've had it, blah, blah, blah..." Guilty of being white.

I'd tend to give him a pass on that because it's a common enough resentment borne of youthful myopia, and it's asking a lot of a kid to have some larger perspective when he's getting beat up.
It's the "purity of violence" stuff that gives me the creeps.

19 isn't that young!

ian mackkkye

i dunno 19 is just outta the cocoon imo. how long prior was he still being beaten up? god of all the idiot things i probably said when i was 19.

but that debate aside, that interview there was from 2007, SO LIKE UM

There's a pretty terrible Joe Jackson song called "Battleground" from his Beat Crazy LP which is totally relevant to this thread. By "terrible" I mostly mean terrible-sounding -- it's a sort of talking-reggae type of song very much in the vein of Linton Kwesi Johnson -- though I'm sure the words are just as embarrassing as I remember them being (though which I probably didn't completely know what to make of them at the age of 15 TBH).

there was so much fucked up "thinking" going on in the hardcore/straight edge world going on at that time - not giving him a pass whatsoever but shit was ugly in a ton of ways - a lot of it was just garden variety adolescent zombiedom, but in my experience full-on eighties hardcore esp sxe was a hair away from lord of the flies shit at the best of times - kind of a brutal environment that pulled out some awesomeness for sure but real ugliness like ian's racial shit too

woah that interview was 2007? fuck

So like I said before: fuck Ian MacKAye

the myspace quasi-apology interview is from 2007. the horseshit raving about African Kings one is from a long time ago.

er, the myspace one was 2007, i'm not sure on the one Sundar was quoting--which was a holy mother of a quote

xpost--A HA

i've always had trouble squaring the part of me that thinks minor threat rock with the part that wants to dick punch ian mackaye

The easy resolution to that is to dick punch Ian MacKaye and then feel slightly guilty about it years later, in the privacy of your own home.

I have that problem with tons of shit from around then. rollins & jello are dick-punchable too.