Civil Rights and Women's Rights

Someone called me the N word...

That video is four weeks old and probably popped up in my video feed shortly after it was posted online. It's some guy I had never heard of before named Trevor Noah.

Me: Oh, fresh faced new young comedian! 

According to Wikipedia: In 2018, Time magazine named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world.

Yeah. Anyway:

I was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia. My recollection is it's something like 49 percent White and 49 percent Black. A quick search says 36 percent White and 47 percent Black and 9 percent Hispanic.

When I was growing up there, I can guarantee you it was not 9 percent Hispanic. Some TV series about gangs in Atlanta traced the birth of gangs to a mere NINE Hispanic kids who formed a gang because they were tired of being picked on equally by Black and White alike.

One of my German American friends who was about a year older than me once told me a Hispanic girl in our high school had a reputation as a "tramp" because she dated both Black and White alike and my friend told me "There aren't enough Hispanic boys for her to only date her race and she saw no reason to pick EITHER Blacks or Whites, so now everyone calls her a tramp."

So I don't know what the ethnic breakdown used to be, but probably a lot closer to my recollection of mostly White or Black and almost no other demographics (in part because don't confuse Southerners with the facts: if you aren't White, the Deep South lumps a lot of mixed race people of color under the umbrella of "Black").

I'm part Native and Native Americans don't want to claim me. Rest assured, NO ONE REALLY wants to hear that my pasty White self with an Irish maiden name is from Georgia, so I watch music videos from GEORGIA, like this chick from Atlanta named Brooke Valentine and her song Girlfight.

I'm not supposed to be interested in Black culture, much less saying "Reminds me of home." So I mostly consume stuff like that privately.

But for whatever reason, YouTube has failed to notice that I am too White to be interested in Black anything and has been feeding me comedians from Africa in recent months who I guess are less bothered by racism or something because they are extremely chill about it compared to most Black American entertainers. Or perhaps there is something lost in translation, I don't really know.

But I've watched a few of this guy's videos and his skits suggest that compared to Apartheid in his homeland, most of the bullshit we have here is pretty tame and rolls off him like a water off a duck. Your racist epithets give him fond memories of his childhood rather than trigger him.

So I watch actual African comedians and I think of this:

Other people seem to think "ice breakers" are completely vacuous, pointless, empty, meaningless fluffy questions that magically lubricate the conversation and get people talking. 

Having spent time as the highest ranked woman on an overwhelmingly male forum, I think of breaking the ice as being more like those giant badass ships of the same name.

Historically in the US, the Civil Rights ("Black" rights) movement and Women's Rights have frequently worked together. 

Frederick Douglass, a very prominent Black American and former slave, had a public falling out with Susan B. Anthony, a prominent White woman in the fight for women's right to vote. He suggested they concentrate their resources on trying to get Black men the right to vote first and she replied to him "You wouldn't trade your skin color and gender for mine."

They never spoke again.

Civil Rights is interesting to me because Black Americans and women in America are frequently fighting similar battles but women are frequently fighting against the tendency to be treated solely as sex objects. I find it helpful to look at how Black Americans talk about their need for rights, respect, equal pay etc. because it helps clarify in my mind where to draw certain boundaries or distinctions as it often is addressing the same issue, minus a lot of sexual stuff.

It's not something I've spoken of much. I get enough open hatred for reasons I don't understand without intentionally stirring up what I know is a hornet's nest in the US.

Black women seem to relate fundamentally differently to their sexuality and to certain social dynamics than White women and most people seem oblivious to it.

Black women in America have always had to work because Black men are last hired, first fired and spend a lot of time in prison, often for the crime of simply being a Black American male.

Most White women subconsciously implicitly accept that White men have more money than other people and her best bet is to marry well. They are prone to using language and making assumptions rooted in some Cinderella narrative of expecting to marry well and Black women make a more explicit distinction between their earned income and their sexual identity.

And I am certain people don't really want me to talk about that. So I mostly haven't, though there is the occasional exception.

My tendency to NOT behave like most White American women is a long-standing source of friction with White American men and informs my opinions of the MMIW crisis.

In one video by Trevor Noah about his mom being shot, he talks about crying. I can't think of ANY man I have EVER seen cry in person except my father.

White American men are not comfortable with emotion. My father was part Native and a two-time decorated veteran who could still mop the floor with you. No one was going to question his masculinity if he cried.

I have read that in Japan, Samurai warriors would wail in their front yard after returning from war to grieve the trauma of war they had experienced.

I suspect this is a cultural difference and Noah may be unaware of that fact and it may impact how his skits get perceived by different audiences.

A lot of sexual politics and gender problems strike me as being strongly impacted by White male discomfort with emotions.

I feel like White America is more okay with the idea of "I had completely cold, unfeeling sex with her in a pointless illicit affair." than with "I feel for her." And it's a culture that tends to assume if you feel for her, you must be sleeping with her and that fact is inherently dangerous because of the influence she exercises over you.

See also: Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.