Racism Fatigue
Like I said, the usual. But Wesley Morris at Slate has thrown a new twist into that argument. He (sort of) lays out the argument in favor of the Vogue cover being part of a long tradition of racist imagery depicting black men as primal brutes coming after white women, so he obviously gets it, but then follows that up with, “But even typing that just gave me a headache.”
The problem, you see, is not that it isn’t racist–it’s that all these discussions of racism are boring him.
I, for one, have racism fatigue. I’m wiped out. Between the outrage over Obama’s Jeremiah Wright problems and Bill Clinton’s unbelievable mutation from American’s first black president into Karl Rove, I don’t have the bandwidth to fight Anna Wintour. Seeing that cover as purely racist doesn’t give the people looking at it enough credit. It dates Vogue for relying on the allusion but it also dates us for going crazy over it. Racial hysteria is the old black.
Now, here’s the other twist: Wesley Morris, despite sounding exactly like a textbook example of white privilege in that passage, is not white. Which means, of course, to some of his readers, IF HE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT IT, IT’S NOT A PROBLEM! SEE! HA! TAKE THAT, ALL YOU P.C. HYSTERICS! (See also: Charlotte Allen and sexism.)
You know, on the one hand, I can actually empathize with Morris. There’s a part of me that has “sexism fatigue” these days, because I am so fucking sick and tired of explaining to people why the attacks on Hillary Clinton, 9 times out of 10, are not just about her politics. 8 gazillion people sent me links to stories about Miss Bimbo this week, and I’ve chosen not to write about it because, well… maybe I just don’t have the “bandwidth” to fight sexism in video games right now.
But do you see what I did there? I chose not to write about it–instead of choosing to write an article in which I dismiss other people’s concerns and announce that I am tired of all this talk about sexism, and those who focus on the sexist aspects of sexist things are failing to give people enough credit. We can’t all address every instance of bigotry in the world, and for those of us who are frequently asked to address specific brands of it, it can get fucking tiring. But when you get tired, the thing to do is take a break, not tell other people to shut up and focus on more important things. It’s all important, from the most subtle instances to the most blatant and institutionalized.
And it can be especially important to talk about the subtle things, because that’s where privilege reveals itself most clearly. Any white person who’s neither an idiot nor an asshole can see and deplore the racism in, say, this image. But we can’t all see it in the Vogue cover. So when we start talking about the Vogue cover as part of a long tradition of racist imagery that casts African-American men as aggressive apes, we get a much more useful conversation going. Instead of just a bunch of white liberals saying, “That’s horrible!” and a bunch of white supremacists saying, “No, it’s right on!” we get to see all the grey areas of privilege brought out in the open: those of us who try to be anti-racist and educate ourselves accordingly but still missed the racism there until it was pointed out to us; those of us who sorta see it once it’s pointed out but still think people are making a mountain out of a molehill; and most importantly, those of us who missed it in the first place and, on the basis of that, continue to insist it is not there.
We’ve been talking a lot around here recently about that last category of people, with regard to sexism. And as a woman and a feminist, I can tell you those people are FUCKING INFURIATING. The people who actually live as the subjects of discrimination and hatred are not oversensitive; we are sensitized to the more subtle manifestations of those things, because we’ve seen how they’re wielded against us, over and over and fucking over. So many people have trouble grokking the concept of “privilege” and will respond to having their own pointed out with laundry lists of the disadvantages they’ve experienced in their lives. But privilege, in this sense, is not just about obvious advantages. It is about the luxury of not seeing the subtle shit.
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