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July 12, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
28:14
This Week in Stupid (12⧸07⧸2015) - Special White Guilt Edition!
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Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 12th of July 2015.
And I'd like to give a big thank to Shoe on Head for covering last week's While I Was Away.
This week is going to be a very special episode as we focus entirely on racism and white guilt.
Now, one of the first things you'll hear from social justice types is, well, racism is no longer overt, it's covert.
It's all very subtle.
In fact, it's all things that you wouldn't really think are racist in any way, such as Instagram filters.
So people often think of technology as inherently unbiased, but that's just whitey talking.
Photography obviously has a history of racism, and we're not talking about the people taking the photographs.
We're talking about the technology that is used to capture and develop those photographs.
So because of choices that are made in development and production of photographic materials, photographers' tools are left with inbuilt biases.
The tools have a bias.
So the way that that racism operates aesthetically is to neglect or in extreme cases erase whoever is not white.
In the 1950s, for example, Kodak measured and calibrated skin tones in still photography using a reference card featuring Shirley, a white model dressed in high contrast clothing.
Ultimately, Shirley ended up being the standard for image processing in North American photography labs.
It didn't matter if the photo in question contained entirely black people.
Shirley's complexion was still treated as the ideal.
Now, this was done entirely because the owners and manufacturers of Kodak products wanted to be racist.
They hated black people more than anything in the world.
It wasn't anything to do with cost or time or any weird extraneous factor like that.
No, it was down to their hatred of the darkies.
Kodak's film was so racist that when director Jean-Luc Goddard was sent on assignment to Mozambique in 1977, he flat out refused to use Kodak on the grounds that its stock was quote racist.
Exactly, it's racist.
It's about hating black people.
It's not about black people and white people having different physical attributes in certain areas that force people to make technological changes, otherwise you don't get quite the same result.
Which is exactly what London-based artist Adam Bruomberg, who co-produced a 2013 show of photos taken though polaroid film, explained to The Guardian.
Because God is a racist, he made human beings completely different.
And not only that, he set up the physics of the universe to disadvantage black people.
Black skin absorbs 42% more light than white skin.
So if you have a photograph with two women, one black and one white, if the photographer adjusts the light so a black woman doesn't resemble a dark blob with white teeth, the white woman, as a result, will become so light that her intensity will be blinding.
Which is, of course, as any good progressive knows, light discrimination.
To answer your next question, yes, light is indeed racist.
Montre Aza Missouri, an assistant professor of film at Howard University, explains how she teaches her students that the tools used to make film, the science of it, are not racially neutral.
Because science is racist as well.
At least the science of filmmaking and photography.
Missouri says that there are ways to illuminate the complexity of darker skin tones without oversaturating them, such as opening a camera's apertures one or two notches to allow more light to permeate the lens so it reflects off the subject's skin.
Still, most American film stocks were not built by or made for people of colour.
So what does that mean for Instagram, which prides itself on allowing users to filter photos so they look like they were taken from a Polaroid or a Kodak?
Kodak is now bankrupt, but is Instagram continuing its predecessor's myopic vision?
Their vision for racist photography.
So to test this theory, our author gathered a few models of various ethnicities to see how the filters affected their skin tones and inevitably changed their appearances.
That's right.
They decided to apply the RAISE filter, a whitewashing filter that's designed to imitate Kodak cameras to various models and surprise, surprise, it whitewashed them.
Racism confirmed.
The model was also confirmed to be deeply racist themselves, because when they were shown this side by side, they simply said, oh, it lightens me more than I realized.
But there was nothing about this alteration that startled her.
She wasn't startled that when you applied a whitewashing filter to a picture of something, it made it more white.
As a white woman, seeing her skin lightened doesn't carry much cultural baggage or threatened her privileged place within society.
That was exactly the reason.
She wasn't just like, well, that was exactly the result we would expect after applying such a filter to any photograph.
When this was done to a picture of an African-American woman, the result was, quote, astounding.
When asked, the person said, ew, this is completely whitewashed.
If you can believe it.
The colours of my lipstick and dress are very muted, and I look entirely too bright.
If someone didn't know me, they could mistake me for being much more fair-skinned than I am.
I don't like it.
And the answer to that was obviously, well, I'm afraid it's fucking mandatory, because Instagram is racist.
Every photo must have this filter.
In fact, wait a minute, what is this nigga doing off the plantation?
In another experiment, a woman of Haitian descent appreciated how the filters cleared her dark circles and blemishes on her face, but she wished the colour was retained.
Nothing about looking at these pictures surprises me.
I really don't think filters give you that much of a choice, but to be at least a little lighter, no, it's really difficult to whitewash out all of the blemishes and dark circles on your skin and still retain an unwhitewashed colour.
So at this point you're probably thinking, well, Jesus fucking Christ.
Instagram is clearly run by a group of white supremacists.
Can nothing be done to stop them?
To which the answer is, of course, not in this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
They have in fact introduced a new filter to whiten things called Lark.
A filter that Instagram says is going to brighten and enhance.
Although the author's tests only involved five subjects and two filters, and she thinks her experiment might not be conclusive, I think we can all agree that this experiment is conclusive because it's shown her that when Instagram filters brighten skin tones, those changes have both racial and cultural implications.
So what's the next step?
Well, I would say good old-fashioned lynching.
Should we forgo filters altogether?
How can we do that?
They're mandatory.
Studies show it's not that simple.
We look for likes and comments in our photos to demonstrate interest and engagement in our lives.
According to Georgia Tech and Yahoo Lab researchers, filtered photos are 21% more likely to be viewed than unfiltered, and 45% more likely to receive comments.
So basically, if we want to be attention whores, the last thing we can do is not whitewash our photos because of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
This is just, this is how the system gets you.
Not only is it obsessed with erasing black people from photographs, as Instagram has proven, it's also busy appropriating culture from everything, everywhere.
Do you think, for example, white people invented cooking meat over hot coals?
Well, you'd be wrong.
Until they saw a black person doing it, no white person in the history of white people had ever cooked meat over hot coals.
I swear to God, this is the first line of this article and I don't, I'm not sure I can say it with a straight face.
Barbecue is a form of cultural power and is intensely political.
I'm just mulling that over.
I just I'm wondering in what kind of reality a barbecue becomes political.
It's cultural.
It's a cultural rules like no other American culinary tradition.
Sauce or no sauce, which kind of sauce, chopped or not chopped, whole animal or just ribs and shoulders.
The politics are astounding in barbecue culture.
I can't believe there aren't like barbecue channels or barbecue pundits.
But to be fair, if, you know, we were going to get political about barbecues, that's something I'd vote for.
I can't say this with a straight face.
The barbecue was made by enslaved Africans with inspiration and contributions from Native Americans struggling to maintain their independence.
See, it's the barbecue is a common point, a focal point by which the poor oppressed people of colour can band together against whitey.
The common cultural narrative of barbecue, however, exclusively assigns its origins to Native Americans and Europeans.
The very etymology of the word is said to derive through both Carib through Spanish.
Barbacoa, to roast over hot coals on a wooden framework.
Well, that must be nonsense.
There's no way Europeans ever managed to roast meat on hot coals.
Or, from Western European sources, barbe aqué, cuqué, I don't, fuck French.
Head to tail, which fits nicely with contemporary ideas of no waste eating, consuming offal.
Does it have to fit nicely with any kind of ideas?
Can't that just be what they called it?
And some American barbecue masters have taken to attributing the innovation of barbecue to their German and Czech ancestors.
But those people are really fucking white.
I mean, maybe the kind of olive-skinned Spanish could have done it because they're not quite as white as the Northern Europeans.
But to say that Northern Europeans invented something is fucking racist.
I'm going to read this next paragraph just verbatim, without comment, because, well, you'll see for yourself.
If anything, in both etymology and culinary technique, barbecue is as African as it is Native American and European.
Though enslaved Africans have largely been erased from the modern story of American barbecue, and best our ancestors are seen as mindless cooking machines who prepared the meat under strict white supervision, if at all.
At worst, the barbecue is something done for the enslaved.
As if they were being introduced to a novel treat.
In reality, they shaped the culture of the New World barbecuing traditions, from jerky in Jamaica to anti-cuchus in Peru, to cooking traditions in the colonial pampas.
And the word barbecue also has its roots in West Africa among the Hausa, who used the term barbaki to describe a complex of words referring to grilling, toasting and building a large fire, singeing hair or feathers, and cooking food over a long period of time over an extravagant fire.
So take that, white Europeans.
Social justice has decided that your explanation of white people inventing cooking meat over hot coals is nonsense.
Only black people can have invented that.
And you have clearly stolen their word.
And frankly, they want you to give it back.
Now the next sentence is presented entirely in earnest as well.
So don't laugh.
Enslaved Africans and Native Americans had a lot in common, culinarily speaking.
They had been cooking and eating in similar ways despite an ocean between their civilizations.
That's right.
They too had been building fires or using hot coals to roast meat.
If only white people had been able to innovate in this way as well.
Obviously they couldn't, so they just stole it.
Thus, in colonial and antebellum North America, enslaved men became barbecue's master chefs.
Woodcuts, cartoons, postcards and portraits from the portraits.
Who did a portrait of some guy doing a barbecue?
From the period document, the role the black chefs played in shele who cook on barbecues are chefs now played in shaping this very American and especially southern staple.
Working over pits in the ground covered in greenwood, much as in West Africa and Jamaica, but not in Europe, it was enslaved men and their descendants, not the bubbers of today's barbecue pit masters, I assume that means white people, that innovated and refined regional barbecue traditions.
If anything, German, Czech, Mexican and other traditions in South Carolina, Missouri and Texas were added to the base created by black hands forged in the crucible of slavery.
I never thought anyone would actually describe barbecuing meat as being a product of slavery.
I just didn't think it was possible.
Barbecue is now widely recognized as a staple of the American culinary canon.
So much so that at least three national holidays, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day, are associated with it.
Barbecue is laced with the aspiration of freedom.
But it is seasoned and flavored by the people who could not enjoy any freedom on Independence Day for almost a century.
It's just one of the many tragedies of history that barbecues were invented by black slaves which were then appropriated by white colonialists.
It's what can you do?
What can you do?
I mean, I suppose you could complain about white people dressing up in clothes that they didn't invent.
Like the Boston Museum of Fine Arts cancelling a kimono dress-up event after being accused of racism.
It's racist to wear clothes that your culture didn't create.
Here is Exhibite A, a person who is white and therefore obviously racist.
She is dressing up in a kimono on purpose.
The Museum of Fine Arts Boston has apologised for and discontinued an ill-advised program that gave rise to demonstrations and was deemed culturally insensitive.
The museum had staged a recurring in-gallery event in which museum goers dressed up in kimonos inspired by a Claude Monet canvas depicting his wife in a similar robe because she was clearly a giant fucking racist and was doing it as a method of taunting Japanese people as she appropriated their culture.
Which is why many observers found the whole affair to be an exercise in Orientalism and exoticism.
Those things don't sound bad to me, but then what do I know?
I'm not as progressive as I could be.
But the thing is the kimonos will be available for the visitors to handle, but not wear.
I mean, is there any real difference?
You know, you're still taking that culture away from the Japanese people who can no longer make use of it.
And how do you know that someone won't just put it on in a flagrant act of racism?
The museum gave a remarkably long apology, and they ended it with, We look forward to continuing the museum's long-standing dialogue about the art, culture, and influence of Japan.
Like the unrepentant racists that they are, you're not allowed to look at Japanese art.
You're appropriating it with your eyes.
Look away.
You're not allowed to wear their clothes.
Put them down.
What do you think you're fucking doing?
So frankly, it must be self-evident by now that, frankly, white people are the worst.
And it's totally okay to say this in a public forum, which is why many white women are simply choosing not to be white.
Just like this top American Indian scholar outed as a fake Indian.
How awful for her.
I bet it was a white person that outed her as well.
Following hot on the heels of Rachel DeLiesel, Andrea Smith, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, has drawn attention in the wake of this incident for those who say for years she's falsely claimed to have Cherokee blood.
I don't see what that's got to do with anything.
Genetic heritage is a social construct.
But obviously, the evil right-wing media is making a real big deal about this, because Smith is recognized as a significant scholar in her field.
She routinely appears as a featured scholar at major events.
Well, I can't see why a white woman pretending to be an American Indian and then going to speak to American Indians about what it's like to be an American Indian is a problem.
I mean, what are you guys, bigots?
Her career has largely been defined by her supposed American Indian identity.
Besides her academic work, she also helped create the organization Insight, which describes itself as a collection of, quote, radical feminists of colour.
Holy shit.
Well, that is unfortunate.
She's also been active in the Indian group Women of All Red Nations.
Oh my god.
Maybe white people really are the worst.
Obviously, it's the white male capitalist patriarchy that's preventing her from being a Cherokee.
In this case, a Cherokee genealogist who says he researched her heritage and found absolutely no evidence of it being in any way connected to the Cherokee tribe.
But reason and evidence are tools of the white male capitalist patriarchy.
And so this didn't deter her from simply continuing to claim that she is Cherokee or allowing other people to do so.
Just like her sister who not only falsely claimed Cherokee heritage, but was also getting a fake tribal ID card.
Luckily for the professor, the University of California Riverside says it's not bothered because it's against the law for them to be racist, which is weird for a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
They say Professor Smith is a teacher and researcher of high merit who on that basis earned a tenure faculty position at UC Riverside.
The University of California is precluded by law from considering an individual's ethnicity in any hiring or advancement decisions.
It's almost like they think we live in a fucking meritocracy.
Those bigots.
So needless to say, with black people and Native Americans being the saints who are walking amongst us on the earth, and white women deciding, look, it's just better to choose to become a woman of colour, we are of course left with a plague of angry white men.
How racism, gun culture, and toxic masculinity are poisoning America in tandem.
Dylan Roof is just the latest in a long line of men clinging to a dangerous ideology that spiraled out of control.
It's if only he chose not to be white.
But look at him there, just being white on purpose, just unrepentantly white.
Just, I can't believe the cops are protecting him.
Just hand him over to the mob and I'm sure they'll do what's best.
Dylan Roof was not silent before he murdered nine black people in their church, shooting and reloading multiple times, destroying their bodies with his white rage.
White racial terrorist Dylan Roof told his African American victims why he was going to kill them, as though it was a type of forced civic duty and obligation.
Roof said to his victims, I have to do it.
You rape our women and you're taking over our country and you have to go.
A superficial reading would suggest that the hour is simple to decipher.
Roof is channeling his white nationalist understanding of America as a country synonymous with and exclusively for white people, which means white people obviously agree with this.
This is the logic of the phrase that America is a white man's country.
The hour also signifies the control and possession of white women's bodies and personhood by white men, to which all white men obviously agree.
You see, what people often fail to understand is that Dylan Roof was the elected king of white people, and so anything he did or said is representative of white people as a whole.
The idea of black men raping white women is a centuries-old white American fancy.
Oh, steady on, Stormfag.
Jesus.
It is the justification for the lynching tree, which again, all white people approve of.
Where thousands of innocent black men were made into, quote, strange fruit.
The lynching tree also reinforces a cultural lie that white women are the most desired among all others.
Sorry, white women, now you're kind of ugly.
No wonder a lot of them are transitioning into Native American women, who are far more attractive.
This also tries to conceal how many white women from both before the founding of the United States through to the age of Obama, the age of Obama, bloody hell.
Really?
Willingly, Jesus fucking Christ.
Willingly have had relationships with black men.
Surely that's all of them, even the ones that were raped.
A perfectly banal observation that nonetheless enrages white supremacists, which really is a sentence that's one word too long.
Nationalist and politically chauvinist ideologies tend towards patriarchy and sexism.
White nationalism is no exception.
As such, Dylan Roof's white racial terrorism is an act of violence, and one that is grounded in a particular understanding of gender.
Male or female are designations of human, sexual, biological difference.
Masculine and feminine, however, are social constructs and nothing else that are not fixed, which change over time and in response to particular arrangement of social and political power.
Here, gender is a type of performance, in its most binary and simple form, as a given person acts male or female, and toxic masculinity is a performance that emphasizes violence, control over others, sexual aggression, and a lack of emotion and vulnerability.
Dylan Roof, with the guns, violence, resentment, right-wing politics, and racism, is the extreme embodiment of toxic white masculinity.
Well, you know, I can see why so many people would transition away from being white.
If you thought, for some reason earlier, that I was joking when I said a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, you're, well, you're in for a treat.
I'm going to read this all verbatim again, because no comment is necessary.
The colour line is not separate from gender.
The two are deeply connected one to another in the United States and the West more broadly.
Dylan Roof's performance of gender involved an understanding that he should have power over and was inherently superior to people of colour because of his own skin colour.
Moreover, as understood by his racist political ideology, Dylan Roof was granted an additional claim on power and authority because he is a man.
Roof's racism and sexism thus intersect in what philosophers Carol Pateman and Charles Mills have described as racial patriarchy.
This is a system of racial domination in which people of colour are subordinates to whites.
It is also a relationship where white men have more power than white women.
But all white people have a higher place than any person of colour, either male or female.
Women of colour occupy the basement level of a society organized around a system of racial patriarchy.
This system, in its most unapologetic and honest form, is the dream of white nationalists.
Well, this person sure knows a lot about white nationalism, but there is one very important question that needs to be answered.
Can one be a feminist and also a white nationalist?
I think probably yes.
If you can be a Muslim feminist, then why couldn't you be a white nationalist feminist?
Roof's actions were those of the angry white man on steroids.
While his feelings of toxic white masculinity could have been insulated by the relative privileges of being born into the middle class, he was instead suckered into a sense of white racial victimology, entitlement, and identity politics by right-wing media and online racist propaganda.
Well, I'm convinced, if there's one thing that the right wing is very good at, it's identity politics and victimology.
Of course, guns are the problem, really.
As seen with Dylan Roof and other mass shooters, a group in which white males are grossly overrepresented.
As if they're somehow keeping out brown people from doing mass shootings of their own.
Such as Elliot Roger, not actually a white man, but Adam Lanzer, he was and the Columbine Killers and James Holm.
Toxic masculinity and a sense of aggrieved white male entitlement is central to their decision to commit acts of mass murder.
Well, fuck.
So what can white people do?
I mean, apart from the ones who have transitioned out of being white, you've got a bunch of them who probably think it's racist to become trans niggers.
So they're just kind of stuck being white people.
I mean, they were just born wrong.
I mean, that's something they really should have considered, isn't it?
Let's be fair.
But at least they're feeling guilty enough about it.
I do think all of us people of colour should watch white people cry about white privilege in a new MTV documentary called White People.
Because this is in no way a symptom of a terminally ill civilization.
A new MTV documentary called White People purports to ask me very uncomfortable questions about white privilege and white frustration.
It documents the perceived struggle that white teens and 20-somethings have in coming to terms with being racists.
Dakota, a 22-year-old from a small town in Virginia, for example, has a moment of awakening when he joins a historically black college.
Another student by the name of Katie is convinced that being white prevented her from receiving a scholarship to Grand Canyon University, which is crazy.
Why would the white patriarchy have, I don't know, non-white quotas or something?
So if you're a fan of Pulitzer Prize-winning executive director Jose Antonio Vargas, or do you just enjoy watching white people cry?
This one may be for you.
Well, who doesn't like watching white people cry, am I right?
And they deserve it.
They completely fucking deserve it.
Every single last one of them.
Just because they were born hundreds of years late to have taken part in the genocides or slavery or whatever else we're blaming them for, they still have earned it by virtue of them being born into the wrong race and often into the wrong gender.
Which is presumably why CNN decided to cover social media joke hashtag take us down.
Is it satire or is it hate?
That seems to be the question behind social media hashtag take us down, which is being used maybe to ultimately poke fun at the concept of white male privilege and to embrace it.
Well geez Louise, CNN, I don't know.
How white was the person who created the hashtag?
The news here is that white people need to die.
And the problem with white people and me, I'm part of this.
I'm actually considering killing myself as a political act.
Basically, I think the most important next step for the future of Western culture is to just circumcise it.
It's hard trying to do things for the greater good.
I feel like I might end up doing more harm in the long run.
Hate.
Definitely hate.
There's no indication there whatsoever of any kind of satire, and there never will be CNN.
What you're looking at, in fact, is probably a white nationalist in what I think can only really be described as hipster drag.
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