Links – 2009-04-08
Complied by Latoya Peterson
WireTap – Ask a Sex Goddess: How Do I Address Privilege with My White Partner?
I am a brown-skinned woman of color, and I have been dating a white man for almost 8 years. Our different ethnicities have never really been a problem, but lately I have been noticing a disparity in the way we see each other that really bothers me. We went to college together, and after we graduated, I worked really hard, long hours with a number of different non-profits, and because of that I now have a successful career as a consultant. My partner, on the other hand, worked as a bartender for 2 years. When he decided he did want to work at a non-profit, he got the first job he applied for, and within a year he received a promotion.
And yet, when we argue, he accuses me of always getting what I want. He says that everything comes so easily to me, that I don’t have to try. And yet he clearly has more social privilege than I do. He doesn’t see how hard I work because he doesn’t have to work hard. And because I feel that this is very much about our backgrounds, I don’t know how to address the issue. How do I have this conversation with him? How do I help him see this disparity?
Counting people is harder than it looks. The 2010 census is morphing from sociological project into a political one: conservatives are crowing about the dangers of tallying “illegals,” and activists are seeking policy changes to guard against undercounting.
Immigrant advocates are leveraging the threat of an undercount to press for immigration reforms, warning that aggressive crackdowns drive undocumented immigrants further underground. An estimated 3 percent of the Latino population was undercounted in the 2000 census.
The Women’s Media Center – Intervale Green Apartments: Green, Affordable—and for Low-Income Women
By 2004 Nancy Biberman believed it was the right time to take on another daring venture. This time it would be a new green low-income apartment building with beautiful amenities.
Welcome to Intervale Green Apartments. Quietly but clearly it engages in a dialogue with the old psychology and social policies that say the poor don’t need beauty—just basics. But Biberman understands that beautiful places change people’s attitudes, reduce stress, improve productivity, and also give people hope.
Examiner.com – Can Pilates Help Reduce Cellulite?
Moreover, studies have shown that caucasian women are more susceptible to cellulite development, whereas African American and Asian women are less susceptible. Just as darker skin tones — those with more melanin — display a stronger resistance to UV rays, so to do darker skin tones show more resistance to cellulite development. As the levels of melanin, and thus skin tones, can vary greatly among caucasians, an individual’s susceptibility to cellulite development will depend on genetic make-up. The more an individual tans naturally, the more melanin in their body, and the more resistant to cellulite development they naturally are. Redheads with blue eyes have the least amount of melanin in their bodies, while African American women with dark eyes have the most.
Sepia Mutiny – We Are Fatter Than We Think We Are
An African-American friend of mine on Facebook recently jubilantly posted a link to this article about a recently-discovered problem with the BMI Index, a number widely used to determine body fat levels — whether people are underweight, healthy, overweight, or obese.
The BMI index was calculated with reference to caucasian body types. But people from different ethnic backgrounds have bodies that might be constructed slightly differently, so one BMI might not accurately determine everyone’s body fat level. [...]
The good news for African Americans and bad news for Asian Indians [in, in short] people who are ethnically “Asian Indian” (desi, South Asian, etc.) are on average approximately six percent more overweight than they previously might have thought.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Alston wrote:
If white women are more susceptible to cellulite, and cellulite is unattractive, I wonder why they are the standard of beauty that other (Other) women can never achieve.
Posted 09 Apr 2009 at 3:45 pm ¶
Jess wrote:
I saw the link to Ask a Sex Goddess and had to agree with her advice. I am a socially-constructed mostly-white person married to a woman of color.
And one thing that makes it hard to talk about how identity shapes you is when it gets framed as an argument — “My oppression is worse than yours” — a kind of personalized oppression olympics.
The key thing to remember is that if you are in a relationship with someone with more privilege than you, is that they didn’t make the world that way, and it is never their fault that it is so. I mean, nobody asked me where I wanted to be born. I know that most of what I have is blind luck. But I can’t apologize for it anymore than I can claim credit.
More to the point, it’s really important to separate issues between people and political problems you all can’t do anything about. I know “The personal is political” has become a cliche, and I think a lot of the time it’s horse-pucky and an avoidance strategy for people who don’t want to look at their own behavior viz. the person actually standing in front of them, rather than an abstraction.
When you are involved with someone, they aren’t “a PoC” or “a white person” they are someone you love with a name and a face.
That is, I try to understand where the issues are between my wife and I (which we can solve by changing what we do) and the ones that are bigger than that and should not affect how we feel about one another.
The worst thing to do, it seems to me, is say “You can’t ever understand me because of X.” Because it means that the other person is left asking “Well, why should I ever bother trying, then? What’s the point?” And framing not understanding something, or seeing things in a different way. as a character flaw. Those things push people out and exclude, no matter who does them. And I can’t see that that is terribly helpful in any relationship.
Posted 09 Apr 2009 at 5:09 pm ¶
Cecily wrote:
If they made sense or were attainable, they wouldn’t be beauty standards!
Posted 09 Apr 2009 at 5:17 pm ¶
Jess wrote:
ALso, by the way, the cellulite article has a gaping hole.
The authors (who don’t seem to have any scientific or medical training) say that since darker skinned women are less vulnerable to cellulite, it must automatically be connected to melanin levels. This is not so. There might be a correlation between darker skin and cellulite, but I can think of a number of other factors that would account for AA women being less susceptible to it.
Diet for one. (I saw no evidence they controlled for that). Or perhaps differences in the way fat is metabolized. West Africans in particular have a higher rate of lactose intolerance, for instance, which would have all kinds of implications for fat/sugar metabolism (certainly it would mean you would eat less of any fatty milk products). How much melanin one has would have little to do with that.
Sorry, this kind of stuff bugs the science geek.
Posted 09 Apr 2009 at 5:23 pm ¶
Embarcadero13 wrote:
I’ve dated many a person from many a racial and cultural heritage. It appears the only ones that truly do not understand “privilege” are the white ones. I give it to them that they try, and I do not see them as the “oppressor.” But after a while, the ones I’ve dated just want to change the subject.
Some feel like they are already more enlightened than many of their white peers and so they’ve “earned” the right to disengage from the conversation. Some genuinely have nothing to add but sympathy, and others are just overcome by guilt to the point that they feel racial conversations are a “chore” that they must put up with.
When in these relationships, I’ve simply made sure my social and familial network is strong with POC and those who do understand my plight, such that the strain on the relationship does not become unbearable.
At this point, I no longer pursue long term interracial relationships with Caucasian people (unless we count Jewish, which is cool). But I still support POC who do choose this route. My advice is just to stay true to yourself, and put your partner in environments where they are the minority. It helps. A lot.
Posted 09 Apr 2009 at 6:42 pm ¶
Embarcadero13 wrote:
* correction: It appears the only ones that truly DID NOT understand “privilege” HAVE BEEN the white ones. *
Posted 09 Apr 2009 at 6:43 pm ¶
Karen wrote:
it has less to do with melanin and more to do with the type of bodies that sub-saharan (and therefore african ancestral) usually are. and why. kinda like the whole butt, no butt thing.
of course it’s not the melanin alone, genius.
Posted 09 Apr 2009 at 6:58 pm ¶
Jess wrote:
@Karen–
I know it isn’t about the melanin, and you know that. But the way the thing is worded a lot of people won’t.
That was my beef with it.
Posted 09 Apr 2009 at 8:23 pm ¶
Chris Chambers wrote:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6365320.html
Post -election redneck-conservative derangement syndrome aimed at Asians, for a change. We black folks and Barack need a brief breather. ..
Posted 09 Apr 2009 at 8:24 pm ¶
Slush wrote:
I thought “the personal is political” went the exact opposite direction, not that it means your life should be analyzed indirectly via a political lens, but that you should try to live according to the political ideals you express. I guess it obviously must go both ways. But the latter means that if I believe there is personal, structural, endemic, etc. racism in our country, then I need to acknowledge its role in my own life and my own relationships and try to eliminate it there first.
Posted 09 Apr 2009 at 10:18 pm ¶
Jess wrote:
@Slush– that’s part of it’s original meaning I think, but too often people use it as a way to avoid thinking about what the real problems are.
Deconstruction is all very well but you can take it to a point where it blinds you as much as it illuminates. It can prevent you from seeing people as they are rather than as political caricatures. So I am rather wary of it these days, at least as applied to personal relationships.
The letter to Ask A Sex Goddess struck me as a guy who was taking out his frustration on his partner (not good). But a discussion of privilege would actually be avoiding the issue in some ways– the real problem is he’s just pissed off and doesn’t know how to process it.
There is a political component in what he sees as his role as a man and all that but the first thing to deal with is taking shit out on people. That’s the root, as it were. When he says “You have had it easy” he isn’t mad at the person he says that to, I bet. He’s mad at something else. The trick in any relationship IMO is figuring out what you are really mad at. A big chunk of the time it isn’t the other person at all.
Posted 10 Apr 2009 at 9:38 am ¶