The Event : How Racist Are You?

[massrock]

As regards a little harshness, you have to consider what you can do to simulate the effect of pervasive systemic discrimination in the space of a one day workshop. It's definitely not a big deal, certainly not with adult volunteers.

Something else that distorted this though - it seems obvious that quite a few of the participants were approaching the experience through the lens of their expectations of Reality Television. Notably this wasn't the people most aware of being affected by real issue, of course. Actually that probably adds a whole other level of overmediated gormlessness to break through...

 

[nomadthethird]

Seems a rather childish simplification to me. I can't see how you overcome racial tension by labelling the white man the racist problem.

Oh yes, it's a complete mystery why we'd do that, given the hundreds of years of slavery, oppression, imperialism, and colonialism much of the world endured at the hands of white Europeans.

 

[nomadthethird]

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[baboon2004]

Are we saying that racism isn't a problem in Jamaica for example? That you don't find gangs of racist Asian youths on the streets of the UK? That the Chinese hate the Japanese. The question isn't 'are white people racist?' it's 'are people racist?'.

Well yes, but racism hinges upon power. In the world we live in, historical circumstances have been such as to ensure that white people have much greater access to power that people who are not white. This is of course a contingent factor based upon circumstance - the question is really "are the power-wielding group racist?", and that group happens to be white people.*

People who don't understand that have such a tenuous link to reality that I can't even argue with them.

You can't seriously be saying that "gangs of racist Asian youths on the streets of the UK" (not the last words that would come out of Nick Griffin's mouth, to be honest) are in an equivalent universe problem-wise as the tacitly racist structures in this country that mean it is far more difficult for non-white people to get anywhere in life? Any idea WHY Asian youths might not be too fond of white people???


*of course this is inflected by class and gender etc as well.

 

[baboon2004]

As regards a little harshness, you have to consider what you can do to simulate the effect of pervasive systemic discrimination in the space of a one day workshop. It's definitely not a big deal, certainly not with adult volunteers.

Right on. People who have a problem with it should imagine that being their experience every day. Which is the point of the exercise.

I don't think the programme was perfect by any means, but any discussion of how oppression works on a whole array of different levels, (and how members of the majority will systematically deny the experiences of the oppressed, and tell them they're imagining it all) is fine by me. It's frequently a taboo subject, and is one of the ways in which oppression is self-sustaining (which is why it's taboo, of course).

 

[Mr. Tea]

Well yes, but racism hinges upon power. In the world we live in, historical circumstances have been such as to ensure that white people have much greater access to power that people who are not white. This is of course a contingent factor based upon circumstance - the question is really "are the power-wielding group racist?", and that group happens to be white people.*

People who don't understand that have such a tenuous link to reality that I can't even argue with them.

You can't seriously be saying that "gangs of racist Asian youths on the streets of the UK" (not the last words that would come out of Nick Griffin's mouth, to be honest) are in an equivalent universe problem-wise as the tacitly racist structures in this country that mean it is far more difficult for non-white people to get anywhere in life? Any idea WHY Asian youths might not be too fond of white people???


*of course this is inflected by class and gender etc as well.

But how much "power" does any one ordinary white person have? A person who may in effect belong to a local ethnic minority if they live in, say, a mainly Asian area? That person isn't magically invested with invulnerability from the prejudices of others just because they have the same skin colour as Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

Of course you can frame all this in the wider context of white prejudice and the legacy of colonialism, but pretending that prejudice is something that only white people are capable or that when non-white people feel it, they have a good reason for it, isn't going to help reduce racism and inequality in general.

And to compare someone to Nick Griffin even for mentioning these issues is pretty lame, TBH.

 

[allegiant]

you have to remember that is the same as a scruffy rugby player picking up a child from school.

Her input throughout the entirety of the exercise was astoundingly nescient for an educator. The aside that she made about a child grazing its skin was particularly unedifying.

 

[droid]

But how much "power" does any one ordinary white person have? A person who may in effect belong to a local ethnic minority if they live in, say, a mainly Asian area? That person isn't magically invested with invulnerability from the prejudices of others just because they have the same skin colour as Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

Of course you can frame all this in the wider context of white prejudice and legacy of colonialism, but pretending that prejudice is something that only white people are capable or that when non-white people feel it, they have a good reason for it, isn't going to help reduce racism and inequality in general.

IMO, her point isn't so much about 'racism' it's about 'privilege'. What she does is remove privileges that are automatically conferred on whites, and are so taken for granted that most white people fail to even recognise or acknowledge they exist. In this regard her experiment isnt about racism in the tribal sense, its about racism in the structural sense.

Try walking down the street with a disabled person - the amount of negative micro and macro gestures from other people is extraordinary, and its something you simply can't appreciate without having some experience of it. I think the severity of her manner and technique are a worthy attempt to simulate the effect that a lifetime of structural racism and marginalisation can have on a person.

 

[nomadthethird]

But how much "power" does any one ordinary white person have?

I think the ABC News video I posted earlier demonstrated pretty well how much power ordinary individual people have when they decide to stand up and do something about discrimination.

After a while, individuals add up to groups.

You have to understand, this whole exercise is being performed initially during an era when Martin Luther King is being shot/assassinated for peacefully demonstrating.

Watch the videos on youtube. She makes some great points about the white "media" response to that whole ordeal.

 

[Client Eastwood]

I wonder what is it like to be at a bar and people all around are getting served and you have been waiting longer and you know the barman is aware of your presence

what is it like walking down the road with a white woman and be able to see nvc subtitlies that most people would miss

what is to like hear a hurtful word like n***** or p***, its so much more than the sum of the letters

what it is like to be and old man and be told to fuck off home having worked most of his life in this country

what is like to be disabled

what is like to be in a minority

what is it like to come from a country where other people have ruled the host nation and know your people have been beaten killed and made to serve

 

[baboon2004]

But how much "power" does any one ordinary white person have? A person who may in effect belong to a local ethnic minority if they live in, say, a mainly Asian area? That person isn't magically invested with invulnerability from the prejudices of others just because they have the same skin colour as Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

Of course you can frame all this in the wider context of white prejudice and legacy of colonialism, but pretending that prejudice is something that only white people are capable or that when non-white people feel it, they have a good reason for it, isn't going to help reduce racism and inequality in general.

And to compare someone to Nick Griffin even for mentioning these issues is pretty lame, TBH.

I wasn't comparing him to Nick Griffin! I just said that that particular phrase ("gangs of racist Asian youths on the streets of the UK") is ridiculous scaremongering of the type that would fit squarely into BNP scaremongering. Where are these "gangs of racist Asian youths" who are terrorising the country? And generally, the attitude that 'we' are so far from having any racialised tendencies, and 'they' are the only ones who do (be 'they' BNP supporters or whoever),is part of the problem anyway. I will admit to having had racialised preconceptions about people that I've sat down and been appalled at myself for having - but race and the idea of the 'Other' etc is so ingrained, certainly in British society, that I defy anyone truthfully to say otherwise (may not be true for those who have grown up in very mixed areas, I understand, but personally I didn't).

As for being a local ethnic minority in a mainly Asian area:
(i) Last time I looked, the Asian population of Britain was 6 per cent or so. I imagine growing up white in Southall might not be the most comfortable experience in the world, and never said that it wouldn't be. But I propose that: White people who are discriminated against living in Asian areas are often living in pretty poor areas, hence the fact they can't move to another adjacent white area where they would feel less discriminated against (which would surely be the gut reaction in a 90 % plus majority white country, no?). Thus in this case the general oppression of poverty imposed from above on Asian and white alike becomes the overriding factor in this case. Of course race is intersected with class massively.
(ii) The bureaucracy and institutions that control the lives of those people are still white-majority. Who's going to get the better deal when going to the police, for example?

White skin does give a certain level of power, in terms of instantly evading the numerous negative stereotypes that are attached to black and south Asian and east Asian people, and anyone else who isn't white. I think you're vastly underestimating what it means to belong to the majority in a country. Again, of course class is a huge factor too.

"Of course you can frame all this in the wider context of white prejudice and legacy of colonialism, but pretending that prejudice is something that only white people are capable or that when non-white people feel it, they have a good reason for it, isn't going to help reduce racism and inequality in general."

Of course you can frame it like that, because that's the reality of how the global system was set up, and it was set up to eternally perpetuate white power structures.

I wasn't saying that only white people are capable of prejudice, but that the programme in question brought to light many subtler forms of racism in a society such as the UK which white people generally don't like to confront, because they illustrate the difference between living as a white and a non-white person in this country. Anti-white prejudice is much easier to escape, except in cases where you can't because of poverty (as above).

I think you'll find the occasions where non-white people are told they're imagining things when they have genuine reason for feeling racism, vastly outnumber the occasions where non-white people claim racism, and don't "have a good reason for it".
Edit: the previous post expressed this point more eloquently than I have done.

 

[baboon2004]

IMO, her point isn't so much about 'racism' it's about 'privilege'. What she does is remove privileges that are automatically conferred on whites, and are so taken for granted that most white people fail to even recognise or acknowledge they exist. In this regard her experiment isnt about racism in the tribal sense, its about racism in the structural sense.

Try walking down the street with a disabled person - the amount of negative micro and macro gestures from other people is extraordinary, and its something you simply can't appreciate without having some experience of it. I think the severity of her manner and technique are a worthy attempt to simulate the effect that a lifetime of structural racism and marginalisation can have on a person.

A very well-made point. Actually, two of them.

Stigma operates in all kinds of different ways structurally, and it's precisely the denial by the majority that these mechanisms exist, that allows the stigmatised group/individual to be kept as stigmatised.

Irving Goffman - 'Stigma' - brilliant book on this. What he suggests by way of conclusion, is that eternally keeping 'identity politics' separated into race politics, gender politics, disability politics etc, is self-defeating, when the structures of stigma/privilege operate in almost exactly the same exclusionary and madness-making ways in each case.

 

[Tentative Andy]

Try walking down the street with a disabled person - the amount of negative micro and macro gestures from other people is extraordinary, and its something you simply can't appreciate without having some experience of it. I think the severity of her manner and technique are a worthy attempt to simulate the effect that a lifetime of structural racism and marginalisation can have on a person.

Interesting thread, but this confused me quite a bit. To me 'negative micro and macro gestures from other people' (if they were directed at someone because of skin colour rather than disability) isn't to do with 'structural racism', it's an example of personal racism.
Structural racism, to be a meaningful phrase, I think has to refer to racism incoded in rules, laws, and perhaps in the most generous interpretation in conventions which have the force of a rule. Behaving rudely or strangely to someone in the street because of their skin colour I find hard to view as the direct application of a structural rule in this way.

I'm getting similar impressions about the show. I've not yet managed to watch it - I am going to try to although part of me is rather wary. But from what people are summarising here it seems to work by simulating structural racism - that is, applying rules which priviledge one arbitrary group and dispriviledge another.
This is in itself somewhat misleading, as in this country we have managed to go a long way, if perhaps not all the way, to abolishing this kind of direct racial discrimination by law. But it confuses things further because what it aims to do is reveal personal racism on the part of the volunteers, that is expose racist beliefs that they had previously denied having.
Am I getting the wrong end of the stick here? Because it sounds like the show is trying to do two things at cross-purposes to each other.

Edit: watching the show via Droid's link (thanks!), already my worries are being confirmed. They summarise her project as 'aiming to simulate a racist, apartheid-style regime': the problem with this is that racism in Britian today does not operate in anything like such a simple, law-enforced way, so the experiment is not simulating anything very relevant to our society. If they'd wanted to explore and expose current racial tensions, then they should have designed an experiment which matches the subtler ways that racism currently operates in the UK.
Will update again when I've seen more.
Edit edit: another general problem that occurs to me is that's it dangerous to assume that the way someone may end up behaving under extreme psychological conditions is their 'true' nature, and even more so to assume that it relates closely to how they behave in day-to-day life. As has pointed out, everyone is racist to some extent (and I certainly wouldn't excuse myself from that), it seems to be an unfortunate fact of human psychology. But due to a combination of reforms in the law and changing social conventions, many people have learned to 'repress' their racism (prob not the best word but couldn't think of a better one) in daily conduct, whearas the experiment creates conditions where it can reign unchecked, which is again not very relevant to real-world conditions.
Still more: I agree with those who have said the fact that the eye-colour division in this case leads to all of the non-white participants ending up on the priviledged, persecuting side seems problematic. Firstly, because it tends to undermine the claim that the division is truly arbitrary (like real-world racism); given that they would have had information about the volunteers in advance, it looks like there is actually a plan, a guiding design behind the division, and the way that she first addresses the brown-eyed group seems to confirm this. It's also a problem becasue it makes it in part about 'getting your own back' for the day, which is both a distraction from the main stated project, and probably not helpful for the people involved in the long run, because once they are outside of the experiment again they won't have anything like that kind of direct power.

 

[don_quixote]

i really want to smash that teachers face to fucking pieces. ARGH. so fucking pious and safe in her cosy little fucking world.

 

[droid]

Interesting thread, but this confused me quite a bit. To me 'negative micro and macro gestures from other people' (if they were directed at someone because of skin colour rather than disability) isn't to do with 'structural racism', it's an example of personal racism.
Structural racism, to be a meaningful phrase, I think has to refer to racism incoded in rules, laws, and perhaps in the most generous interpretation in conventions which have the force of a rule. Behaving rudely or strangely to someone in the street because of their skin colour I find hard to view as the direct application of a structural rule in this way.

I'm suggesting that discriminatory attitudes are built it at a societal level. That we are conditioned to percieve certain categories of people as 'normal' and certain categories as 'others'.

 

[Mr. Tea]

IMO, her point isn't so much about 'racism' it's about 'privilege'. What she does is remove privileges that are automatically conferred on whites, and are so taken for granted that most white people fail to even recognise or acknowledge they exist. In this regard her experiment isnt about racism in the tribal sense, its about racism in the structural sense.

Try walking down the street with a disabled person - the amount of negative micro and macro gestures from other people is extraordinary, and its something you simply can't appreciate without having some experience of it. I think the severity of her manner and technique are a worthy attempt to simulate the effect that a lifetime of structural racism and marginalisation can have on a person.

Sure, I appreciate that - should make it clear I didn't see the programme and was responding directly to baboon's post.

 

[Tentative Andy]

I'm suggesting that discriminatory attitudes are built it at a societal level. That we are conditioned to percieve certain categories of people as 'normal' and certain categories as 'others'.

Yes OK, I understand you now - what you are talking about is of course a massive problem, indeed I would say that along with, and probably even more than, personal racism, it is the primary way that racism operates in the UK today.
I might want to find a different term for it to distinguish it from the kind of structural racism I was discussing - perhaps 'cultural racism', because I think it's ultimately a matter of cultural hegemony which allows the racial majority to present itself in myriad, subtle ways as the 'normal' group and to present racial minorites as abnormal others. But the terminology is a side-issue, I guess, not the most pressing one.

However, again I have to say that the experiment doesn't seem to directly deal with this kind of racism (you didn't yourself directly claim that it did, I realise). Instead it simulates a kind of structural racism enforced by law - this vastly simplifies and distorts the modern reality (in Britian) in a way that doesn't seem very helpful to me.

 

[Tentative Andy]

Going to start a new post for the rest of my responses, as the first is already too long -

Just watching the bit where the brown-eyed group are told what they are expected to do, and some of them walk out in protest. I agree with people who were saying that first lad to go came over as pretty smug and studenty, but the personality aspects aren't what it's all about. The white brown-eyed people who dissent from their role are presented - both by the teacher and by the presenter and psycologists who are monitoring and interpreting for us - as doing so because they are uncomfortable with opressing fellow white people, and as therefore secretly racist.
This overlooks the possibility that they might be uncomfortable opressing people based on arbitrary physical differences in general, or indeed uncomforable with opressing people full-stop. (And isn't the experiment officialy centred around eye-colour not skin-colour anyway?) Of course, we can't know for sure what's going on in their heads (and neither can the people running the experiment), and it's a plausible interpretation in some cases. But to argue that refusing to participate in simulated racism is automatic proof that you are yourself a racist seems like somewhat backwards logic to me.
Edit: now she's telling the remaining brown-eyed volunteers that 'all they need to do is act white'. So it the experiment is about white and non-white colours after all? The methodology seems so confused already. Plus she's very strongly directing the course of her experiment towards her desired outcome. Which, y'know, might be fine in itself if she's convinced that it's an experience that will lead people to be less racist, or more aware of racism, or whatever, by the end of it. But it does mean that the experiment can't be simultaneously revealed as obejective excercise in revealing people's true racial attitudes. Those who go along with it are behaving how they are being told to behave.
Edit again: five minutes more and there's already loads of things I could say, but will leave it till the end now, otherwise will take me all day to watch it.

Update: finished now, my main reaction is that the both the experiment and the programme framing it came over as very confused about what exactly they were trying to achieve. Some interesting things came up, but I didn't feel like it gave any coherent insight into the issue of race in contemporary Britian.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Where are these "gangs of racist Asian youths" who are terrorising the country?

Well there are some in Whitechapel, for sure. A mate of mine had to hot-foot it when he and his friends were set upon for no reason by some Asian lads near Brick Lane, which incidentally is the location of a pub that was firebombed in a racist attack a few years back. That's without even mentioning the recent upswing in anti-semetic incidents, which is hard to pin entirely on yer traditional far-right skinhead element. I read in the paper the other day about a school that had become almost entirely segregated into white and Asian pupils, where a white pupil was attacked by a gang of Asian kids who left him brain-damaged. The school refused even to say if they thought it was a racially-motivated attack! Can you imagine them doing that if an Asian pupil had been attacked by an all-white gang?

Obviously these kinds of incidents happen far less frequently than racist incidents in which a black or Asian person is the victim, but to dismiss them is only going perpetuate prejudice and inequality in the long run.

Then there are prejudices that don't even directly involve the white majority directly: tensions between blacks and Asians for example (which led to rioting in Birmingham a couple of years back), or even between Africans and West Indians; employers finding difficulty with the 'cultural insensitivity' (read: racism) of some recent immigrants from the new EU states; anti-semetism among a lot Muslims...

And generally, the attitude that 'we' are so far from having any racialised tendencies, and 'they' are the only ones who do (be 'they' BNP supporters or whoever),is part of the problem anyway. I will admit to having had racialised preconceptions about people that I've sat down and been appalled at myself for having - but race and the idea of the 'Other' etc is so ingrained, certainly in British society, that I defy anyone truthfully to say otherwise (may not be true for those who have grown up in very mixed areas, I understand, but personally I didn't).

Sure, agreed: clearly the fact that someone doesn't vote BNP doesn't mean they're free of prejudice.

As for being a local ethnic minority in a mainly Asian area:
(i) Last time I looked, the Asian population of Britain was 6 per cent or so. I imagine growing up white in Southall might not be the most comfortable experience in the world, and never said that it wouldn't be. But I propose that: White people who are discriminated against living in Asian areas are often living in pretty poor areas, hence the fact they can't move to another adjacent white area where they would feel less discriminated against (which would surely be the gut reaction in a 90 % plus majority white country, no?).

OK, I take your point, but the make-up of the actual neighbourhood you live in has far more impact on your life than some more-or-less abstract statistic about the whole country. That there are hardly any non-white people in, say, Cornwall or north Wales or the highlands of Scotland is neither here nor there to someone who lives in Birmingham or Leeds or London.

Thus in this case the general oppression of poverty imposed from above on Asian and white alike becomes the overriding factor in this case. Of course race is intersected with class massively.
(ii) The bureaucracy and institutions that control the lives of those people are still white-majority. Who's going to get the better deal when going to the police, for example?

White skin does give a certain level of power, in terms of instantly evading the numerous negative stereotypes that are attached to black and south Asian and east Asian people, and anyone else who isn't white. I think you're vastly underestimating what it means to belong to the majority in a country. Again, of course class is a huge factor too.

Sure, agreed again, with the proviso about local vs. national 'majorities'.

"Of course you can frame all this in the wider context of white prejudice and legacy of colonialism, but pretending that prejudice is something that only white people are capable or that when non-white people feel it, they have a good reason for it, isn't going to help reduce racism and inequality in general."

Of course you can frame it like that, because that's the reality of how the global system was set up, and it was set up to eternally perpetuate white power structures.

I didn't mean to say that it shouldn't be framed like that, just that we should be wary of saying things like "Any idea WHY Asian youths might not be too fond of white people???"; many people have legitimate grievances, some more than others, but it's up to you to find a legitimate outlet for those grievances and try not to blame everyone of a certain ethnicity for things that are (or seem) unfair. Because you can always ask "Any idea WHY an East End Jew might not be too fond of Asian youths???", and then "Any idea WHY someone with family in Gaza might not be too fond of Jews???", and so on and so on.

(Yeah yeah, easier said than done, obvs.)

 

[Tentative Andy]

i really want to smash that teachers face to fucking pieces. ARGH. so fucking pious and safe in her cosy little fucking world.

This, btw, I can agreee with. For fuck's sake!