Apparently Barack "isn't black"

[crackerjack]

OK, fair enough. But later she asks:


and answers herself:



So the colour of Obama's skin clearly *is* significant. Why, then, the anger over the question as to whether he's black or mixed race?

Bollocks, just replied in detail then lost the post.

Wasn't disagreeing with you - just busy and thought i'd throw in that little fact bomb.

 

[nomadthethird]

I think that suntanned was used as an insult in the sense that it describes Obama in a way that is both not correct (well, it may possibly be technically correct but you know what I mean) and not the way that he would probably describe himself. Is it racist? I don't really think it is but he's guilty of something close to racism by both insulting someone and alluding to race at the same time.

Re Italian people and racism--sure, there is a lot of racism among southern Italians where people don't have as many educational opportunities or whatever. And maybe a lot in Italy in general. But there's also the idea floating around that there's at least some mixture of black heritage with Sicilian and southern Italians, given some of the wars that were waged and the proximity to northern Africa. I have relatives who have black textured hair and are very dark.

So Berlusconi is clueless about current norms, but maybe he meant the "suntanned" comment as a measure of solidarity with other darker-than-whites. Sounded terrible.

 

[john eden]

You're exactly right. That's what this place is. Be careful or you may piss off the "oldest" posters and they'll coup, and try to find some way to annoy you out of existence with their self-righteous crusade to "stay on topic" or "keep things civil."

Thin skinned people and the internet, a match made in heaven!

I'm constantly amazed by your saintly patience with us, nomadthesecond.

 

[jambo]

Matt tries to explain politely why you're getting the responses you are, and you just come back with more of the same.

Enough of the martyrdom, please.

This began because you started in with the PC accusations - a loaded term, as you must be aware - since when you've been acting like the kid in the playground who keeps getting his lunch money nicked. Either dish it out and take it, or do neither. Don't complain when arsey posts meet with arsey responses.

*sigh*

More of the same being what? My response is polite, I state my opinion and make an effort to clarify what matt b has maybe misunderstood of what I'd said. Dreadful.

You've fixated on 'PC accusations'. I've explained the sense in which it was used. It was rhetorical and informal. I coined the phrase 'PC high ground', excuse me, perhaps I should have said 'moral high ground' but it conveys the same thing - taking a stance for what is and is not morally acceptable.

 

[crackerjack]

Re Italian people and racism--sure, there is a lot of racism among southern Italians where people don't have as many educational opportunities or whatever. And maybe a lot in Italy in general. But there's also the idea floating around that there's at least some mixture of black heritage with Sicilian and southern Italians, given some of the wars that were waged and the proximity to northern Africa. I have relatives who have black textured hair and are very dark.

So Berlusconi is clueless about current norms, but maybe he meant the "suntanned" comment as a measure of solidarity with other darker-than-whites. Sounded terrible.

 

[nomadthethird]

To be fair, Kenya's probably pretty sunny, so you can see how SB's confusion arose.

To be fair I have no idea what Jambo's points are most of the time.

 

[nomadthethird]

I'm constantly amazed by your saintly patience with us, nomadthesecond.

I thought you were supposed to be a "mod", John Eden, and as such above this sort of snide, bitchy, semi stalking, behavior.

 

[nomadthethird]

lol

 

[Mr. Tea]

I thought you were supposed to be a "mod", John Eden, and as such above this sort of snide, bitchy, semi stalking, behavior.

Nah, he's far too busy scooting around on his Lambretta, looking sharp in his Fred Perry threads...

 

[jambo]

So Berlusconi is clueless about current norms, but maybe he meant the "suntanned" comment as a measure of solidarity with other darker-than-whites. Sounded terrible.

Yes, it's possible.

I'm no fan of Berlusconi (to say the least) and it's a dumb thing for representative of a country to say but this is not uncharacteristic of a way in which older Italian people sometimes talk about dark skinned people. Italians can be quite dark themselves you know. It is usually meant as a compliment.

From the original post I made that matt b didn't understand.

And from a little later:

It may have been intended in a disparaging fashion but not necessarily. I already mentioned that Italians, who can be quite dark themselves, sometimes use that sort of description for dark skinned people and it is not meant negatively. Please consider that this is a cultural mishearing on the part of (PC) UK or American ears.

So that would be one of the points I actually made twice now.

 

[nomadthethird]

Yes, it's possible.


From the original post I made that matt b didn't understand.

And from a little later:


So that would be one of the points I actually made twice now.

Yeah, but Italians also use the term "moulinyan" (eggplant) for black people and in southern Italy there's quite a bit of unchallenged racism. It's even worse among Italian-Americans because they came to the U.S. and had to fight for jobs against black people.

Edit: Looks like the real spelling is mulignane.

 

[matt b]

Yes, it's possible.


From the original post I made that matt b didn't understand.

I didn't say it was, I said it could be. But no matter

 

[droid]

And the ironic comment of the month award goes to (drumroll)....

Thin skinned people and the internet, a match made in heaven!

I thought you were supposed to be a "mod", John Eden, and as such above this sort of snide, bitchy, semi stalking, behavior.

Congratulations.

 

[nomadthethird]

And the ironic comment of the month award goes to (drumroll)....





Congratulations.

Do you think that I'm offended? Because I'm not.

 

[nomadthethird]

Look, one snide comment deserves another. Who gives a shit? I will not be losing sleep over any of this. In fact, I'll probably forget everything that I posted here within an hour or so.

It's just the internet. Don't expect people to take your bitchy, snide comments and not return them in kind. If this is your biggest issue in life today, some snide comments on the internet, count yourself luckier than 99% of the world and move on.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The following may sound kerazy, but it's true.

A couple of weeks ago I was out at this bar and got chatting to the toilet attendant, a Nigerian guy in late middle age whose 'day job' was playing saxophone - in fact he used to play sax in Fela Kuti's band. Must have been between gigs, I guess. He's still touring and showed me his performer's card from an opera he'd played in at the Scala (not the night club near King's Cross, the actual Scala in Milan), and had lived for a while in Italy, or at least toured extensively there, but decided he wanted his kids to grow up in Britain because he found so many Italians are just openly racist towards black people.

Most interesting night club toilet conversation I've had for an age, anyway.

 

[nomadthethird]

*sigh*

More of the same being what? My response is polite, I state my opinion and make an effort to clarify what matt b has maybe misunderstood of what I'd said. Dreadful.

You've fixated on 'PC accusations'. I've explained the sense in which it was used. It was rhetorical and informal. I coined the phrase 'PC high ground', excuse me, perhaps I should have said 'moral high ground' but it conveys the same thing - taking a stance for what is and is not morally acceptable.

Jambo, yours and Poetix's insistence that anyone who believes in "social construction" theories (and doesn't agree with you) is some kind of PC strawman is part of what contributed to this thread completely derailing and losing coherence. That's because "PC" accusations are entirely spurious, they're always intended only to dismiss a *person* rather than a claim, and they're not worth taking seriously.

If you want to be taken seriously, talk seriously about claims. Don't take your own anti-PC moral high ground. It's equally stupid as what you seem to be criticizing.

 

[jambo]

I didn't say it was, I said it could be. But no matter

Sorry matt b, I don't mean to perpetuate any snideyness or bitchyness but you said it could be what? I'm actually not sure what you mean.

If I might say so, this:

I'm no fan of Berlusconi (to say the least) and it's a dumb thing for representative of a country to say but this is not uncharacteristic of a way in which older Italian people sometimes talk about dark skinned people. Italians can be quite dark themselves you know. It is usually meant as a compliment.

Was the major part of my post to which you replied:

thanks once again for your insightful comments

or i don't understand what the chuff you're on about. what points are you trying to make?

Which business did precipitate the greater part of the ensuing nonsense here.

Is what I said there really that unintelligible?

 

[jambo]

Jambo, yours and Poetix's insistence that anyone who believes in "social construction" theories (and don't agree with you) is some kind of PC strawman is part of what contributed to this thread completely derailing and losing coherence.

I don't insist on anything of the sort. Not at all.

People treat 'social constructions' (perhaps I should say 'ideas about things' to avoid further prejudicial controversy and confusion with some formal movement of 'social constructivists') as real so they have real effects. They are as real as many other things. But that's not what this is about anyway.

That's because "PC" accusations are entirely spurious, they're always intended only to dismiss a *person* rather than a claim, and they're not worth taking seriously.

The PCness I was referring to was in the Times article getting worked up about the use of 'suntanned'. I referred to PC informally in a rhetorical question to crackerjack. To me this is an issue of 'political correctness' in that some people have decided that it is not a 'politically correct' term to use.

If you want to be taken seriously, talk seriously about claims. Don't take your own anti-PC moral high ground. It's equally stupid as what you seem to be criticizing.

I'm not taking an anti-PC moral high ground. I was suggesting that it [the use of the word 'suntanned' in this instance] was perhaps not so much of a transgression as had been suggested.

Hmm?

Is it possible to sack the italian people for repeatedly voting this cunt back in?

Is it more 'racist' than calling for a whole nation to be sacked because of one monster? Less PC than using the word 'cunt'?

 

[waffle]

So the argument here is not that gender "is not real" (while biological sex "is real"), but that gendering "realises" sex, fixes its co-ordinates within a gendered reality. Much of the scientific discourse on biological sex is strongly contoured by the discursive limits of the gender system, as Joan Roughgarden has argued quite persuasively.

Heteronormativity reaches "all the way down" into the way we construe how bodies function and what they can do.

I'm reminded of the still somewhat paranoid obsession with a 'homosexual gene' (those 'evolutionary psychologists' again), but no corresponding obsession with a 'heteronormative' gene, or a 'bisexual' gene, or a 'non-sexual' gene, or a 'trans-sexual' gene, or a 'transvestite' gene, with the scientific discourse itself anthropomorphizing 'sex' everywhere.

What I'm trying to indicate is that arguments over whether or not something like race "is real" don't really gain a lot of traction in this kind of situation: and I don't think that saying that some things are more real than others helps very much either - unless one can describe how this variation in intensity of existence is governed, and how it is possible for it to change.

Yes. What 'de-ontologizes' all of this too - whether sex or race - is, ironically, biogenetics itself, because if genetic (re)engineering is able to reduce the human psyche to an object of manipulation ( what someone like Heidegger feared as the 'danger' inherent in modern science and technology), to fundamentally reconfigure and reduce a human being to a natural object whose physical features can be altered, then it is not just humanity which is retrospectively problematized and undermined, but nature itself is lost, is 'denaturalized.' It is not just sex and race, as (voided) master signifiers, that then destitute the discursive consistency of gender and 'skin colour', respectively, but nature itself can longer be invoked as humanism's stabilizing MacGuffin (that 'unfathomable dimension of ourselves' we call 'human nature' goes the way of the present financial meltdown). Those who perceive a basic incompatibility between their biological and psychic-discursive identities can already directly manipulate such a symbolic blockage: for instance undergoing a sex-change if someone believes their gender to be 'trapped' in the wrong sex (not so easy in relation to 'colour', as Michael Jackson's tragic surgery revealed). This reaches its 'discursive limit' when a parent is permitted to 'choose' the sex of her/his child: all becomes merely contingent.

Coming back for a moment to Butler: the general sway of the argument is that gender performativity is the iterative discursive inscription through which a body's sex* is made to appear as coherently organised, the guarantor of the body's integrity. (An unsexed or ambivalently-sexed body is incoherent from the standpoint of the gender system: an object of horror, a hyper-eroticised repository of nasty/nice surprises). There are bodies and languages, and discursive inscription is what naturalises or "ontologises" bodily dispositions, so that sex appears as ontologically stable.

Definitely ...

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