Racism and Sexism: It's Complicated

Great Debates
1

Just got into a huge fight with my feminist wife whom I love dearly. And it was over this:

I asserted that a woman on Facebook saying that I liked football because I was a man was sexist.

I even elaborated that this form of sexism was not the kind of sexism that women have to deal with all the time in ways that completely derail careers and even lives. I agree completely that the kind of institutional sexism that women deal with is a lot worse.

She will use different words: She will say that they are stereotypes, which are not always right but are rarely Wrong (big W). She will say it’s a bias, but bias doesn’t end in an -ism. She will say it’s prejudice, which she concedes is not very nice, but pales in comparison to sexism.

And the same thing goes for racism too in her mind. She feels blacks who stereotype, are biased or are prejudiced when dealing with whites in general or particular whites are doing all of those things but are incapable of racism.

Her logic (which is what makes this a battle of more than semantics) is that they are all not the same thing for a fundamental reason: That one cannot be racist or sexist without power.

I vehemently disagree with this for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, while the country or society or whatever large area we want to discuss is inherently rigged that someone who is a white male will encounter white privilege and maybe not even realize it, there are smaller instances where this definition of power is not about a white male.

For example, our son for several years was the only white kid in his inner city school. For example, when I was a kid, I was one of only a handful of white kids in my inner city school. The shit I put up with (and my son dealt with as well) had little to do with the fact that white people have the majority population and money in this country, it had to do with being a minority ourselves in that admittedly small subset of the country.

(And though I concede it is a small subset, I also feel that as a kid, it’s often all that the kid knows.)

Secondly, I disagree because I can see distinctions when it comes to sexism and racism that are not (pun unintentional) black or white.

There are degrees involved. For example, “Football is such a guy thing” is sexist. But on the scale of sexism, this stereotyping of men as neanderthals who drink cheap American lagers while grunting at other men on TV every weekend is benign. And I admit this.

We will see this caricature come up in beer commercials and laugh. I happen to love football. But I also love to cuddle kittens. I don’t see a stereotypical beer commercial as something that hurts me in the way that more overt sexism hurts a female executive at a Fortune 500 company who wants to take pregnancy leave. I don’t see how this small bit of sexism is on par with that. And I would argue that it’s not even close. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not sexism at all.

It’s the same for racism. A black comedian making jokes about white people is certainly racist, as are supposed positive racial stereotypes such as Asians are smart. But they are far more benign forms of racism than disproportionate sentencing or NYC stop & frisk or lynchings or just generally how shitty an outlook being a young black male in this country can be, even now.

However, since we live in a world of extremists, I still feel the need to issue an important disclaimer:

I don’t think it’s racist that blacks can use the N-word and whites cannot because I understand the power of the word throughout history. I don’t think it’s racist that there is a BET channel. I don’t think it’s racist that blacks are proud that our President is black.

I abhor the so-called Men’s Rights Movement. I think they are ridiculous and most of them at best use selective evidence to enforce their persecution complex while ignoring male privilege. The fact that while trying to back my position in this discussion with the wife led me to MRM sites made me gag.

Maybe is it just semantics. Like the word rain. The word applies to a light mist on a summer stroll that falls on your cheek or it can apply to the terrible storm that caused the flood that took away everything you loved.

There are forms of sexism that are like the light mist and others which are like the monsoon. I won’t even quibble that those with power are considerably more likely to be able to deal the harshest blows, and have done so even more historically. But it’s all still rain.

2

What your wife seems to be glossing over is that no-one is ever 100% powerless. It’s not a nice, clean, stack ranking. Power is relative, coming from a variety of factors and circumstance. Witness, for example, the blowup in the online feminist world over Hugo Schwyzer, where a whole bunch of POC bloggers have been hammering white feminists over their support of that psychopath, against them. It can also be situational, as you and your son experienced.

3

This is nothing more than a war of words. Stereotypes can be accurate, they can be biased, they can reveal prejudices, but the word stereotype doesn’t have to imply malice. Words like racism and sexism have specific negative and malicious meanings. It’s not a matter of degree, it’s a matter of definition … the definitions the words have assumed unto themselves through usage. Everyone means something negative when using the word “sexism”. “Stereotype” is often associated with negative suggestions, but not always. You can say, “Negative stereotype”, and still be accurate, but if watching football isn’t intrinsically a negative thing, and if someone saying it’s a primarily male trait isn’t attacking maleness, then maybe sexism isn’t the best word. Ascribing behaviors to “most” of a certain “gender” isn’t sexist in and of itself. Attributing negative traits to the same group is.

4

This sounds to me more like an argument about privilege. As a male you have privilege she does not have. She however does not have any privilege that you don’t have. It’s not symmetric. The distinction is that exactly one of the two classes of people is in the privileged position. She can have advantages, perhaps, but not privilege. Power is a pretty typical privilege, but not the only kind of privilege. For example, in corporate America, you could be pretty sure in general that the people in your company who set policy would have some firsthand experience with coping with your gender role in the family and reconciling it with your work life, whereas she could not be pretty sure of that.

5

Lots of women like football. Lots of men don’t. The statement “You like football because you’re a man” may or may not be sexist, but it is profoundly stupid.

6

No, it isn’t. Most football fans are men. It does not have to be the case that all football fans are men, or that all men are football fans, for it to be trivially true that men tend to be football fans more than women. It’s a stereotype, but stereotypes are not always false, or always useless.

It does no good, and some harm, to deny the obvious out of a desire to fight male privilege. It just winds up sounding silly.

That having been said, maybe it is “sexist” to say that men are football fans. Who cares, and so what?

Regards,
Shodan

7

I agree that this is about privilege, but I think the argument here is more about the distinction between privilege and prejudice. While they’re often found in the same situations, they’re not the same concept. Being prejudiced is something an individual does. Being privileged is the result of things other people do to the individual. You can be privileged without being prejudiced - a white man who thinks that people are equal regardless of race and acts accordingly is not prejudiced, but when the police leave him alone and go hassle the black man next to him, he’s still benefiting from privilege. You can also be prejudiced while being less privileged, too. That’s what the woman in this story is doing.

Unless you know a great deal more about the people under discussion than is evident in the thread, this is unproven. Male privilege is far from the only kind.

8

I don’t see how privilege affects what is racism/sexism and what isn’t. Perhaps racism/sexism is made more offensive when it comes from a person of relative privilege, but I don’t see how the status of the speaker affects the level of underlying bigotry involved. If anyone is serious about fighting bigotry they should oppose it in all its forms, no matter who it comes from. I have no problem with prioritizing when addressing racism or sexism, but the kind of active hostility some supposedly-privileged people can get when talking about anti-white racism or anti-male sexism is ridiculous. Every five-year-old knows that two wrongs don’t make a right, but according to many adults, the fact that a man might get paid more than his female colleagues makes up for any casual sexism he’s on the receiving end of.

9

I see your point, and acknowledge a level of validity. But I would still personally disagree. The very act of making the distinction promotes an artificial separation of mind, and produces an alienation that is going to be harmful, in itself, to the subset that has the lesser amount of societal power.

It’s like “separate but equal” schools. The very separation itself guaranteed the inequality. The fact that a much larger proportion of men like football than the proportion of women who do only points to the sexism that divides our society in the first place. If there were true sex-equality in this country, such divisions would exist solely on the basis of the truly sex-linked characteristics of men and women.

(That only women give birth isn’t so much sexist as merely biological.)

10

This is the crux of the dispute.

It really is a semantic dispute, although there are other social factors involved.

I believe that the claim first arose in the very late 1960s when various people began pointing to the publications of different black nationalist groups, (such as, but not limited to, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam), and noted that their words were often racist. The defense offered, at that time, (since, by then, everyone agreed that “racism is bad”), was to claim that they could not actually be racist because they lacked power to impose their beliefs on society or even groups within society.

However, by that time, racism already had a widely acknowledged definition that did not include a “power” component. If one exalted or disparaged a person or a group based on that person or group’s perceived race, then one was engaged in racist behavior. Had the proponents of the “power” component been more successful in pleading their case and had the language changed to reflect that, then the word racism would now include that aspect in its definition. However, they were not successful in their effort in terms of the broader society, so the “power” component was never added to the definition in common use. The feminist movement, emerging as a political force at the same time, went through the same discussion, but, again, society as a whole never added “power” to the definition.

Thus, neither racism nor sexism need a component of power to be recognized in society, today. The arguments put forth for a power component did influence a number of people and have been continued to this day among some people writing on those topics. However, they have never made it into mainstream acceptance in the language.
I find such claims to be unpersuasive. The notion that a woman who tells me I am a threat to all women because I am a man is sexist, regardless whether she has “power” over me. A person who tells me that I am not sufficiently empathetic/smart/civil/just/etc. or that I am too callous/stupid/uncivil/unfair/etc. because of the color of my skin or the shape of my eyes is racist, regardless whether that person can exert “power” over me.

The advocates of the “power” component of -isms made their play to shape the language 45 years ago and lost.

I suspect that few persons who have adopted definitions that include the “power” component will abandon their understanding of the terms, so discussions on the topic will rarely have a resolution, but we can always agree to disagree.

11

You’re reading a lot more into my post than is there.

My point was simply that the statement “You like football because you are a man” is dumb.

You might like football because it’s a tense complex game that where fortunes can change on any play.

You might be fascinated by the strategies.

You might like the violence.

You might enjoy the athleticism.

You might enjoy cheering for your team, and being a fan.

But you do not like football simply because you have a penis. This is evidenced not only by the many women who follow the game, but also by the many men who don’t.

12

I was thinking about mentioning this earlier.

I’ve had people tell me that, sure, anyone can have racial prejudices, but only whites (at least in the US) can be racists. To me that seems like BS.

13

The act of making the distinction is the act of observation. Observing promotes nothing. In the example of football, it’s largely in the last twenty years or so that women have embraced major team sports, mainly I think because the younger generation of women are more sports minded, in addition to the greater access of sports on cable, the changes in the seasonal schedules and broadcasts of games, and probably the fact that, with the advent of sports bars …that’s where the boys are.

Regarding “separate but equal”, any remaining separation in percentages that enjoy one sport or pass-time over another along gender lines is a voluntary self-imposed separation, and I doubt any amount of equality will result in equal numbers , say, of women longing to hunt large game to the same degree as men.

14

Well, again, yes and no. Much depends on the style of the observation. The observation can be issued without comment, in which case it could be seen as normative. The difference between, “That man is naked,” and “Holy shit, that guy over there is stark fucking naked!” Both are observations, but one very strongly promotes the notion of nudity as abnormal.

Given that we live in a society where “manliness” connotes a virtue, merely observing something as associated with men or masculinity is, in its way, a promotion.

See the thread on the phrase “That’s mighty white of you.” It doesn’t intrinsically indicate that non-whites are less moral than whites, but the connotation is inescapable.

15

Wording doesn’t guide behavior, it describes it. While the media may influence, in the end, journalism reports rather than directs. You’re discussing word choice, which I reject as the motivator of human behavior … it’s a narrative, but not a script.

16

i agree with your wife, but my rationale is a little different.

Racist and sexiest are HIGHLY loaded terms. I don’t use either lightly. I’ve had people treat me at work in ways I suspect were driven by sexism, but until the behavior has been repeatedly established as sexist, I’m not going near that word. Same with racist.

So the term I prefer for those “men like football” or “why do women go to the bathroom in pairs?” or “black people have a good sense of rhythm” sort of comments is stereotypical. Or bias. Or sometimes prejudice. The people who make those sorts of comments are generally not racists or misogynists and generally don’t need to be branded as such. They may be ignorant or silly.

17

William Randolph Hearst got his war…

I’m far from a Worf-Sapir extremist, but I do hold that words and language have some meaningful influence on our lives. And I wasn’t speaking of journalism, so much, but everyday speech, such as between a man and his wife.

18

I see no basis to support your contention, here. Orwell’s 1984 surely overstated the the possible affects, (or effects), but vocabulary does have an impact on motivations and actions. The whole issue of the suffix -man when identifying occupations was a serious obstacle to women entering the workforce. True, the rules to enter the police force or the fire department was a more serious barrier, but there are numerous accounts of women who did not even consider such occupations simply because when they asked about them as girls, they were told that women could not become policemen or firemen. That the calls for change and the reactions to those calls resulted in the occasional odd situations in the 1980s that were the legitimate targets of humor then, does not change the fact that the language played a genuine role in maintaining social boundaries in earlier decades.

When entire groups of people can be addressed or identified using disparaging language, successive generations grow up with the understanding that such people can be dismissed. It is true that the disparaging language is descriptive of current mores, but its acceptance and use indicates to new members of society that such disparagement is acceptable and proper. This has a real effect on the ability of the group to go beyond those expressed prejudices in order to integrate or assimilate.

19

I politely disagree that words have that kind of power, though I will attest that propaganda is very powerful, but because of the content, not the buzzwords. Slogans can be dangerous, but the ideas transmitted through catchy phrases are usually more subtle than “‘Fireman’ has man in it, so God doesn’t want women to participate”.

I think when people say, “words have power”, they’re referring to the content of the words, not the words themselves. Disparaging words flow from disparaging ideas generated in the minds of destructive people. IMO, censorship does more to damage society than words that are cliche insults.

I do appreciate your thoughtful and profound reply and I intend to give it some more thought.

20

I personally don’t see it as complicated, myself. “It’s not bad when I or people like me do it!” is a very old, very common human pattern of behavior.

It’s also pretty trivially disprovable. The KKK, for instance, is at an all-time low of political power in the U.S. Many states have statutes banning masks worn in public, parades on public streets, secret societies, and other things with exceptions carved out for non-KKK activities, just to be able to drop the legal hammer on any KKK activity. They do not influence elections or public thought in any meaningful way. And yet, people don’t consider them not racist any more.

As to why it’s done? Well, words do have power. For a lot of people, “Racism is bad.” is as far as the thought process goes. There’s not a lot of consideration of what it really is or why it’s bad. So, if you can say “This negative racial discrimination isn’t racism!” with a straight face, you can deflect criticism from people who view being against racism as a tribal marker, if not those people who are against racism because of what it is.