interruptions

Jan. 22, 2012 at 3:49pm with 11,880 notes

Reblogged from phredology

a-petro-manifesto:

caffeinatedfeminist:

-You cannot be sexist toward men. Sexism is based on a system of oppression. You CAN be discriminatory, rude, inconsiderate, and/or prejudiced against men but you CANNOT be sexist toward them.

-You cannot be racist towards white people. Racism is based on a system of oppression. You CAN be discriminatory, rude, inconsiderate, and/or prejudiced against white people but you CANNOT be racist toward them.

This is not difficult.

Sexism: [N]; prejudice or discrimination based on sex

Racism: [N]; a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

All straight from the webster dictionary.

Looking up words in the dictionary are…how you say…”not difficult”.

Some people are referring to prejudice or discrimination, some people are referring to a system of oppression. Why don’t you take into consideration what the other person means when they call you a racist or a sexist? These are not terms that are set in stone. Language is fluid and meanings change. Anybody who tries to tell you that either of these definitions are the only correct ones are on the same level of stupidity as homophobes who insist that marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman. Get your heads out of your asses and stop trying to control language to stifle dissenting opinions. Listen to what people are saying and consider what they mean. If somebody calls you a sexist, they might not mean you’re prejudiced against a race, they might mean you support a system that oppresses minorities. Or they might mean you’re prejudiced against one or more races. It’s really damn easy to figure out what people mean. Please just stop trying to control language.

I’m kinda sympathetic to what you’re saying. The idea that one of these definitions is the *correct* one and the other is the *wrong* one in like a lexical or linguistic prescriptivist sense is misguided.

BUT that doesn’t mean that folks are wrong to say that we collectively ought to use the words racism or sexism in certain ways. Language is fluid, definitions change, but one way they change is by being politically contested. “Racism” and “sexism” are powerful words, words with force that’s not reducible just to their semantics. Somebody who is asserting, say, “black people can be racist against white people too” usually isn’t doing so ex nihilo - they have a particular political and/or rhetorical aim in the conversation where this question arises, usually eliding institutional racism, falsely equating certain experiences of white folks with those of people of color, or otherwise taking advantage of the rich set of associations and political presuppositions that those words carry with them. It’s not just, “oh, we mean different things when we use these words so we’re talking past one another”. Trying to shut off those folks from access to strategically useful sites in the landscape of the English language, trying to preserve the unique force that those words carry with them from being diluted and preventing them from being deployed in reactionary ways - I think these are good things. They just shouldn’t be articulated in the lousy ways they sometimes are.