Nipposexual 3: Damned if you do...

[imomus]

artysmokes raised a very interesting point in our discussion of nipposexuality yesterday. "Personally, I've never fancied a black woman, but I'd be horrified if someone levelled accusations of... racism at me [for that]," he said, pointing up a simple but puzzling Catch-22: it's both racist if you do fancy someone of another race, and racist if you don't. The only way out of the accusation of racism is to say that race plays no part in your attraction to, or lack of attraction to, the otherly-raced person. And so we get the somewhat absurd spectacle of someone trying to pass off a big tangled knot of historical, cultural and racial features as nothing more than personal attributes. "It's not her Japaneseness that I like, it's the fact that she has lovely dark hair and eyes, and makes great sake teriyaki, and wears lovely kimonos at obon... In the end, though, she's just a unique individual, and all the other stuff is just a bonus."

I often think it's terribly sad that the identity politics movements of the 60s and 70s, which were all about discussing matters of race and gender and using them as criteria for analysing the world, became, in the 80s and 90s, the complete opposite: a way of saying "Shut up!" If Artysmokes risks being called a "racist" for either fancying or not fancying a black woman on account of her race, all his accuser is really saying is "I don't want racial considerations to be an issue in this conversation at all. My use of the term "racist" is the final statement in which race is the structuring concept that I want to hear in this discussion. Shut up about race!" And so identity politics, which in the 60s and 70s was very much an invitation to have a discussion about race and gender, became, in the 80s and 90s, a way to close those same discussions down. What started as an initiative to foreground and spotlight the concepts of race and gender became a call to sweep them under an extremely large and dark carpet. Far from advising you to join the Black Panthers and structure your entire life around racial struggle, today's conservative liberationist wishes to liberate you from the concept of race itself; he will often tell you that race, as a scientific concept, doesn't exist at all.

But wishing don't make it so. Race and gender are sociological facts, whatever they may be to science. After being foregrounded by identity politics in the 70s, they were deconstructed in the 80s. Then, by means of benign-sounding ideological tropes like equality of opportunity, the uniqueness of individuals, the commonality of all humanity, and blindness to race, colour or creed, race and gender were shown out of the hotel lobby, frogmarched down the service corridor, and set to work in the kitchen, out of sight. It's not that these things instantly stopped determining the lives and histories of people. It's just that we didn't talk about them, because we felt strongly that they shouldn't determine the lives and histories of people.

So successful were concepts like "racism" and "sexism" at taking race and gender off the conversational agenda that attempts were made to create other taboos in their image: "rockism" was meant to make rock music go away, and "homophobia" to make either prejudice against gays, or, more sinisterly, gays themselves in all their difference and particularity, disappear into the woodwork. But think of all the neologisms that weren't coined! All the missed opportunities to stigmatize! Nobody has invented the reproach "marketist" for anyone who attempts to say that marketers have specific attributes rather than being "individuals, same as everyone else". No, marketing is "unproblematical" and doesn't need to be deconstructed. Carry on marketing! Nobody calls "businessmanist" those who single out businessmen and say they have unique attributes, either good or bad. You're still allowed to say "I want to marry a businessman" rather than twist yourself up in knots with constructions like "He needs to wear a suit and be savvy with money and go out daily to wheel and deal and bring home the bacon, but I wouldn't say that necessarily means I'm saying he needs to be a businessman. I mean, there are lots of people who meet those criteria who aren't businessmen at all. I'm not being businessmanist about this. You know, scientifically speaking there's no evidence to say that a businessman is different from any other human being. And people who say businessmen are hot are being just as offensive, reductive and patronising as those who say they're not."

In aggregate, then: deconstruct everything or deconstruct nothing. Make everything taboo, or nothing.

Comments

[nickink.livejournal.com]

"By the same logic, to ban golly dolls may remove an insensitive image of a black person from the culture, but it also removes an image of a black person from the culture."
I've been following all of these comments with fascination and want to say thanks for providing another thought=provoking forum. By and large, I'm with you on most of the points you're making, but I'm having trouble accepting this trend of thought. Isn't the point about golly dolls and the like that they are representations of (and offensive to) one group but created by another ? Isn't it better to remove that image in order that space be available for the group to represent itself ? I am reminded of a reasonably recent post of yours which indicted the use of western models on Korean and Japanese billboard ads.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The meaning of gollies is ambiguous. Generally, things are offensive only if they're meant as such, and I don't think gollies were; they were an affectionate (and naive) portrayal of black people for children at a time when real black people were extremely rarely seen in Western cities. They were an element of exoticism. Now, of course this was the other side of a coin whose head was imperial. And as the West became more guilty about its colonial past and slavery, it controlled its own imagery more carefully. This "control" also contained mixed motives and ambiguities: by erasing the embarrassing golly images, the West erased an evidence of its crime and its naivete. It also stopped its white children playing with black toys, as well as lessening offense to black people. Oh, and it's possible that it was also the West that told black people that the golly image was (in a "definitive and final reading") offensive. Were all black people always offended by golly dolls? I doubt it; I'm sure there were mixed feelings. So in a sense we could say that the offense of the golly doll was as much created by the apology as the original statement. I'm sure most black people would prefer financial reparations for slavery than the erasure of a cultural sign like the golly doll, especially if they feel that that erasure is just part of the invisibility of signs of their difference.

[(Anonymous)]

Stop being a fag. Gollywog.

[(Anonymous)]

Financial reparations? For something that happened before they were born?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It was on the agenda in the Clinton years, it's not longer being talked about in the Bush years. So, just as the insult with golly dollies (as I will now call them, to be even more faggy) is in some sense created by the apology, so the construction put on slavery differs from administration to administration.

[(Anonymous)]

"... so the construction put on slavery differs from administration to administration".

Sorry, what's the connection between gollywogs and slavery reparations?

And why use a word like "construction" in this instance? Why not say something like "so the thinking on slavery...", or something. You'd sound much less pompous that way, much less like you were ardently trying to sound au fait with current theory - perhaps trying to cover something up -your phony erudition perhaps? Your lack of anything truly meaningful or of value to say maybe?