You missed my point. I was poking fun at the idea that my support of a given cause can be quantified that fashion. The closest I come to announcing cred was this:
I disagree it’s analogous. King was calling out white people who used their pulpits and news rooms to cast aspersions on activists’ attempts to pull off things like the Montgomery bus boycott. Anything that upset the apple cart of Main Street was too much to them. These white people weren’t racist enough to hold counterprotests at the sit-ins or anything. But they reserved more critical opinions for the “trouble making” protestors than the lawmakers and law enforcers who created the conditions they were protesting.
That’s not what we are talking here. I’m not seeing any self-professed allies condemning boycotters of this game. People are being judged as “less ally than thou” for not participating in the boycott, and people are taking issue with that. But I don’t see any self-professed allies imploring people to stop the boycott in the manner that moderate white people did in the 60’s.
I know, sorry if I implied otherwise. It’s your hypothetical game purchaser in that example who’s cred-touting on the basis of their donation being more financially significant than their game purchase, not you personally.
ISTM that that’s nitpicking a superficial difference disguising a more fundamental similarity. More fundamentally, in both cases the “moderates” or “lukewarm supporters” or whatever are being more vocally critical, and apparently more personally affronted, about the activists allegedly being “too extreme” in their activism than about the bigotry the activists are objecting to.
And in both cases, the activists are saying “Yeah, you are not actually as much on my side as you think you are.”
Good question. I actually once stayed at the Trump hotel in Chicago (we had to use up some airline miles and thought it’d be fun to go somewhere fancy; it was fairly disappointing in that regard but not really relevant here) back before he announced for president but was still known to be a right-wing dick and into the whole Obama Birther thing. I didn’t think much of it at the time because I didn’t think much (quantity, not quality) of Trump either. Even at the time, I’d say that the hotel building itself was a very nice building but didn’t feel bad saying it because Trump obviously didn’t design or build it.
These days I wouldn’t stay at a Trump property because the past eight years have poisoned that well beyond redemption in my eyes. Heck, even if he divested himself of a property, I’m not sure I would bother unless it was rebranded and stripped to the studs for remodeling.
If someone I knew said they stayed/golfed at a Trump property, and I otherwise knew them to be a supporter of the same things I do, I might inwardly roll my eyes a bit but not immediately assume they don’t actually care about those things. I’d also be curious about their motives though.
Nope. One is a continuum (extreme racism to very little) and the other implies a binary (ally vs non-ally).
Believe it or not, there were racist white people who functioned as allies to the Civil Rights Movement. LBJ is the most notable example. I’m sure he wasn’t a fan of a lot of the hijinks of MLK and friends got up to, but he showed up in other ways. See also Abraham Lincoln.
Different things are different.
Just because activists in one situation had a point doesn’t mean another group of activists also have a point. The actual details do matter.
Where are you getting that (ISTM artificial) distinction? King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” clearly identifies three distinct categories: namely, the openly white-supremacist “Ku Klux Klanner” types; the “white moderates” who are nominally in agreement with antiracist goals but whose chief concern seems to be the alleged “excesses” of antiracist activism; and the comparatively few “white brothers” who “have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it […] have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful ‘action’ antidotes to combat the disease of segregation”.
I still think that that’s a very apt parallel to the distinctions discussed in this thread between open transphobes, self-professed trans “allies” who seem to devote most of their activist energy to criticizing trans activists for being too “alienating” instead of transphobes for being transphobic, and actual trans allies.
Arbitrarily defining one of those classifications to be a continuum and the other a discrete binary seems to me inaccurate and obfuscatory.
Why are you treating King as having the definitive word on describing racist white people? That letter clearly is expressing frustration with a certain type of white person equipped with a self-image that blinded them to their own complicity in oppression. He wasn’t setting out to describe an entire taxonomic framework for racist white folks.
As a black person, I’m telling you that historically, my community has seen racism as a spectrum more than discrete categorical bins. During the most racist times of our era, assuming all white people were racist at varying intensities was a safer bet than assuming the well-meaning ones were without blemish.
A previous debate, and my opinion on basically the same question (see also, no ethical consumption under capitalism):
~Max
I’m pretty sure most marginalized groups feel that way about outsiders. “Ally” is a useful word, because it conveys a meaningful goal, but it’s not binary. I have joined the Black employees’ group at work as an ally (because when the groups were set up, i went to check them out, intending to join the LGBT group, and a Black coworker asked me to join the Black group, which was explicitly looking for allies as well as Black employees’.) I try to be a decent ally, but i don’t fully understand the issue, etc., and I’m sure I’m an imperfect ally. I’ve gotten a lot from the group, though, and I’m glad they encouraged me to join it.
I never said he had “the definitive word” on the topic, but his words on the topic were what we were talking about, remember?
ISTM that you haven’t been able to persuasively refute my argument, so now you’re pivoting to “let’s leave King out of this”.
I don’t dispute that racism and all other forms of bigotry can be, and usually have been, viewed as a continuous spectrum rather than as a set of absolutely discrete categories. The transgender activists whose views on trans allyship are being discussed in this thread seem to view transphobia in the same way, for that matter. Nobody with any extensive personal experience of bigotry imagines that there’s such a thing as being 100% untouched by its influence.
However, it’s still useful in certain contexts to assign approximate categories to certain levels and types of bigotry, as in King’s example.
I think your argument is a pretty shabby attempt at comparing MLK’s frustration with racist white people doing racist things to Sterling et al’s frustrations with people who choose to buy the HL game.
Sorry I don’t think this argument is a compelling one. Racist white people doing racist things is not analogous to abstaining from a boycott. MLK’s letter doesn’t support these comparisons.
Oh, there’s definitely a whole lot of frustration expressed in Sterling’s video with transphobic people doing transphobic things. The whole gamut of them, from mocking and misgendering right up through demonization, death threats and actual assault and murder.
But they simultaneously recognize, as King did, that it’s also frustrating to have to cope with the supposedly “helpful” criticisms stemming from “shallow understanding from people of good will”.
And an important distinction: The video makes it very clear that the form of “shallow understanding” that Sterling’s frustrated with is not people merely choosing to buy and play the HL game. The frustration is with all the HL purchasers who are expecting Sterling and other trans activists to validate their choice and reassure them that it’s not problematic in any way.
Again, we are talking about judging people’s allyship based solely on them buying this game. Not on anything else.
See last paragraph of previous post; sorry, took too long to edit before you had replied.
I watched the video and perfectly understand the argument made. It’s not unclear at all. Sterling thinks its an act of bigotry to buy a game that further enriches someone they consider a bigot.
This no where on the same plane as what MLK wrote about after being jailed for his activism.
I don’t think you’ve got their point as clearly as you think. What they’re saying, in so many words, is “Buy the game if you want to, but stop asking me for validation/endorsement of your choice, or asking me to accept your self-serving rationalizations for buying it”.
As Sterling remarks, verbatim, “No, buying the game doesn’t make you a transphobe, and I’m tired of hearing the self-martyring whinging about that.” (16:57) They have a detailed and complex analysis of why and how supporting this game is in fact providing support to Rowling’s transphobia activism. But clearly what they’re most pissed off about is the fact that so many people for whom that fact doesn’t really matter are trying to pressure Sterling into agreeing that it doesn’t really matter. And I can’t really blame Sterling for declaring that they won’t.
Adams has come out as a segregationist, because in his view, Blacks are a hate group and all white people should get away from them.
Cleveland Plain Dealer is dropping the Dilbert strip: “This is not a difficult decision.”
And right before that…
“This is why you aren’t an ally if you buy Howard’s Legacy.”
Then at 17:08: “I’m saying you’re not an ally. You handed in that card in because you couldn’t do the barest minimum, you couldn’t make the simplest stand.”
Then at 17:36: “That’s what you do. You empower a fascist supporting transphobe,”
Reasonable people can disagree with these statements, and it’s actually unreasonable to argue otherwise. Again, as I mentioned before, one of the biggest allies of the Civil Rights Movement was LBJ, whose racism is well documented. If allyship was truly contingent on being able to make the “smallest stand”, then he would not fit the bill and neither would many other white people, including abolitionists.