Let’s see a show of hands of people who think Patricia Arquette meant to offend anyone in her call for equality for women.
None? Ok. Let’s move on.
I’m not getting into the myriad of squabbles and nastiness disparate factions have launched at each other since her remarks, not going to comment on it, don’t give a shit, not taking sides, not going to read up on it, TL:DR and don’t give a fuck. So don’t think this post is making a statement about anything other than I don’t think Arquette meant to offend anyone and thought she was doing the right thing with her acceptance speech. In case you forgot, she was winning the ultimate award for her profession, and tried to do something nice with that moment she could have reserved for herself. I hope she’s learned her fucking lesson.
And if this bullshit is a prelude to the 2016 Democratic primary, I’m voting for Bernie Sanders and just pretending the rest of you people don’t exist.
Pogonip
How about a pupdate?
elmo
Splitter.
schrodinger's cat
You need to post this thrice to make your point
Kylroy
“I hope she’s learned her fucking lesson.”
To wit: never talk about this in public. Ever.
geg6
Thanks, John. I’m with you.
And how funny that I thought this was going to be about Bibi, for some reason. :-)
BillinGlendaleCA
Have you changed the onion on your belt recently John?
Pogonip
@BillinGlendaleCA: You’re supposed to change the onion? Why didn’t you tell me that in 1978?
Violet
Divide and conquer wins every time. Why would people who benefit from being allies focus on shared goals and recognize possible human slip ups when they can scream and pout in various corners while wingnuts and 1%ers rape and pillage the country and the world? What fun would that be?
Keith G
@Pogonip: Steph Curry with the Obama pups…best pup pic evah?
And three barks for John’s non-opinion opinion.
Kylroy
@Violet: But you see, the 1%ers don’t *respond* when we say bad things about them. It’s so much more rewarding to yell at people whose feelings we can actually hurt.
Betty Cracker
No doubt Jon Chait is interpreting this as vindication for his “PC is the scourge of liberalism” broadsides, but I still say it’s a tempest in a teeny-tiny teapot. Not that it can’t be amusing — or even instructive — in its own way. I’ve learned things and guffawed and winced in horror and scoffed in disbelief, etc. But at the end of the day, if you ask anyone who doesn’t have her nose in Twitter or the blogs all day what it’s all about, you’ll get a blank stare. And that’s a GOOD thing.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Amen Brother! My first thought when I heard the next morning about all the controversy was “isn’t it just like liberals to fall into infighting and take offense at someone championing one of their causes, because said person didn’t champion all their causes.” Her intentions were good. Parsing the exact language of a couple of ad libbed speeches looking for something to be offended by, when you support her overall cause, is just stupid and short sighted.
Bobby B.
Rosanna Arquette in “The Executioner’s Song”,those cutoffs and knee socks, mmmm…
Oh, Patricia Arquette? never mind.
raven
Fuck em if they can’t take a joke.
raven
@Bobby B.: Patricia Arquette in Boardwalk Empire.
Linnaeus
Imani Gandy takes a different view on this.
trollhattan
@Bobby B.:
Confess I never thought Patricia would become the famous one. Never had a hit song written for her, for one thing…
Kryptik
I suppose I should be glad I haven’t delved into this rabbit hole yet. My enmity for American Politics is still at a boiling point today.
Richard Shindledecker
No argument from me brother!
kc
So has Patricia Arquette officially surpassed Jimmy Carter as History’s Greatest Monster?
trollhattan
@kc:
She singlehandedly set back all the Wimmenz for YEARS. So, yeah.
daveNYC
This is about the most relevant thing I can think of regarding the circular firing squad that resulted from those remarks:
“So, Lone Starr, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”
— Dark Helmet
Seriously, what is it with the instinct to say “STFU, you needed to be more inclusive.” as opposed to “She’s right on the money, and we need to go further because while women are being screwed, minority women and LBT women are even more screwed so we need to work together to bring equality to all women.”
Yeah there’s some nasty history there, but you either get over that shit and start getting things done, or things ain’t gonna get done.
Liberty60
My feelings as well. As if the slightly less oppression of one group invalidates their alliance with a much more oppressed group.
jl
I detect a lot of North-WV-panhandle-white-guy-boor-one-cat-and-two-dog-owner-ism in Cole’s post. And he should be ashamed.
The rancor is unfortunate. It would be nice if no one ever misspoke in their extemporaneous remarks, and no legions of kibbitzers with access to social media said a lot of dumb and mean things that made the situation worse. But that is not our world.
I think this kind of discussion is not a disaster or some awful horrible thing that is a disease of liberals (aka the Chait thesis). Look what goes on over in the reactionary side of our political loony bin.
The discussion is a good thing, and I hope people can get over the misunderstandings and hurt feelings.
And I do not give a one moldy dog turd who the hell Cole votes for in the 2016 primary.
Trinity
This.
Woodrow/Asim
Between this and his dumb-assed J-Lo twitter shot, I think Cole needs to sit on his hands and think a bit more about some of this business.
Of course we “infight”. Of course there are times when we don’t all agree. WTF kind of bollicks is “oh, she meant well?” LOTS OF PEOPLE MEANT WELL, EVEN AS THEY HURT FOLKS.
Look, there’s history here. There’s friction between the groups that her comments brought out. Living history — ask bell hooks about working with White Feminists. Read Audre Loure on her struggles. Or Mikki Kendall, for a contemporary voice. Or, for that fuckin’ matter, Elon James White — whom I pretty sure everyone here knows. And that’s just around the racism issue, that I can speak to because her words hurt and depressed me greatly.
If I, and others, don’t speak out, then what good is a voice? If I don’t express my honest emotions — like you just did, John — what the hell good is fighting for rights?
Zandar
You’re lying.
And I don’t think she misspoke at all.
jon
@Betty Cracker: Her onstage comments were great, her backstage comments were not so great, but Chait certainly did see vindication as he listed the “angriest reactions” and focused on things that really don’t seem angry so much as disappointed.
cat
“This Is ALL I will Say About Those Pricks in the Judean People’s Front”
No its not. You say this every damn time.
ruemara
Let me see. Misrepresentation of a valid critique: check. Blame for anything negative because you’re not allowed to criticize: check. Dismissal, because how dare you anyway: check.
Nice coalition of the willing. When Guiliana Rancic has a better take on what to say when you unwittingly commit an offense than very smart political types, you’ll know the apocalypse is nigh.
It is silly, because just saying, ” I see your point in what was said, even though I don’t think it was intentional. It’s something to think about.” is a bridge too far for the most nuanced group ever.
Marc
@jl:
This is a good illustration of what I think Chait was actually talking about: namely, that the focus on aggressive call-out culture ends up hurting the left because it always leads to bitter infighting. Which we’re already prone to even in the best case.
Those of us old enough to remember saw the same damn thing in the 80s and 90s, and it had the same consequences: people who had a lot in common ended up hating each other and spending their time looking for reasons to be offended. What’s really depressing is that it’s difficult to see how this particular cycle ends well – in the 90s Clinton and company were able to reclaim power by pushing against the PC of their day as a way of reassuring moderates that they were reasonable. But by that time a tremendous amount of damage had been done to liberalism (in the Reagan era young people were more conservative than their elders, in no small part because the PC wars completely discredited the left.) I’d hate to see this wave have the same history.
lol
Yes, it’s POC, especially WOC, being marginalized once *again* who are the real problem here. (particularly when Arquette followed up with a “I can’t be privileged – I grew up poor!” on Twitter)
For fuck’s sake. This post and the comments are just further proof. “Black women need to shut up and get with the program.” Is Jonathan Chait a guest-writer now?
lol
@Marc:
So what you’re saying is people on the bottom should shut up because the ones up top might decide to press the boot down a little harder if they get heard?
JPL
Although I listened to her acceptance speech and I liked it, I chose not read everyone’s opinion about the other stuff.
It’s snowing and has been for a few hours. It’s not sticking yet though, yeah!!!!
jl
@jon: If Chait now aspires to be the Fournier of the left, that would be too bad, since he can write useful pieces on some topics (unlike Fournier).
Monala
One thing I find disturbing is that a lot of white folks are expressing their hurt about the reaction to Arquette’s remarks (with such false comments as “I just learned that white feminists are history’s greatest monsters” and “this is why white people should never comment on race” – false because critics of Arquette’s comments, at least here on BJ, have not stated any such thing), all why making the claim that people of color shouldn’t be expressing their hurt, because that divides liberals and hurts the causes we’re championing. Interesting…
SatanicPanic
So glad I have no idea what this is about.
jl
@Marc: Humans are humans and you cannot get rid of misunderstandings, squabbles, you cannot get rid of suspicions between different factions in a large diverse movement, so I don’t see the point of worrying too much about it.
The debate over this I have seen seems much healthier and more constructive, and conducted with more mutual understanding and good-will, than what went on in radical groups decades ago and what I see among the reactionaries today.
I think what we have among lefties and liberals is pretty damn good, historically speaking, and until we find a way to change human nature, I am not going to waste my time worrying about things that I have no clue how to remedy.
Seems like there are prominent people who worry excessively over these sorts of discussions who do think that they have a wonderful remedy, which is that everyone should agree with, and defer to, them. Which ain’t gonna happen, so, forget them. They don’t really have anything of value to add.
kc
All this aside, if Bernie Sanders ran, I’d vote for him in a primary . . . is that wrong?
trollhattan
As folks tire of the Arquette (non)story you might want an amuse bouche from erstwhile Republican useful tool Ruben Navarrette, here with a fresh dish of “Oh yeah, Hollywood Liberals are SO racist you guys.”
Kevin
I just don’t understand what the controversy even is. She asked for equal pay for women…and that made some women who also want equal pay mad because reasons?
Someone wanna give me Coles Notes version of what this is about? If it’s simply she didn’t say “equal pay for woman, including POC and LGBTQ and cis and ….” instead of saying “equal pay for woman”…then I don’t care, just ignore my question.
Marc
@lol: No, I’m saying that taking a nasty attitude like yours ends up antagonizing the hell out of other people. As opposed to trying to understand what they’re actually saying and looking for common ground – you’re throwing a lot of buzzwords and slurs in my direction and twisting my words into things that I didn’t say.
lol
@SatanicPanic:
TLDR: Arquette called for POC and GLBTs to get on-board with women on gender equality. Black women, lesbians, etc were basically “Hello, we exist and btw, it’s white women who keep voting against it and for the GOP”. Then white people got worked up and screamed “WHY ARE YOU SO ANGRY STOP CRITICIZING ME!!!!! STUPID PC LIBERALS”
lol
@Kevin:
She said POC and GLBTs need to get on board with the program.
lol
@Marc:
You literally said “liberals need to watch what they say or else”.
Amir Khalid
On this, I agree more with Imani than with John Cole.
Marc
@jl: I understand that. We have a more nuanced and broader understanding that comes from hearing a wider range of voices, and we’re richer for it. But the impulse to assign the worst to others is getting more and more common and more and more severe over the past couple of years. I can see it in comments in places like this – BJ has always been a lot more level-headed of a place than other spaces on the left. I can see in the frequency of mini blow-ups like the one here, and in the sheer rate at which people seem to announce that they’re offended by some particular choice of wording.
There is a contradiction between asking for sensitivity while looking hard for ways to be offended (for example, by choosing to interpret ambiguous language in a negative light.)
Kerry Reid
@lol: And then the White Man Who Voted with the GOP for most of his life reverts to his usual YOU ALL NEED TO SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP THAT’S WHY! line of reasoning.
Goblue72
@Woodrow/Asim: Because you wind up shooting off in 50 different directions and accomplishing nothing.
Nobody is talking about wage equality and instead everyone is getting into navel gazing arguments over whether Patricia Arquette is or is not sorta racist.
Good job progressives! You’ve done circle jerked yourselves into irrelevancy again!
SatanicPanic
@lol: hmm, so Chait is jumping up to defend Arquette, I assume
sharl
As a white dude in possession of a privilege card with most of the boxes checked – I’m missing the coveted “Child of Royalty” and “Child of Indulgent & Filthy Rich Parent(s)” – and with a certain amount of the privilege blindness that comes with that good fortune (classic Louis CK, 2m30s), I tread reeeeeal carefully on stuff like this.
Yeah, I would be too boring to ever make it as a successful blogger.
And following up a bit along the lines of Linnaeus (#16), here is a bit of what occasional front pager Elon James White said on this:
Mike J
It’s moronic to argue over who is more oppressed when the goal is to make everyone less oppressed.
Violet
Maybe someone needs to start a hashtag campaign like “#WeAreInItTogether or something like that. Commenting that yeah, maybe there’s history and maybe Patricia Arquette didn’t say things as well as she could have or maybe she unwittingly exposed White Privilege, but it’s not going to derail us because We Are In It Together as we work to make the world better, promote equality and justice.
Marc
@lol: You literally didn’t read what I said. If someone says something ambiguous, or words something poorly, you can attack them as a bigot – or you can enter a dialog with them. A lot of internet political dialog is in a state of moving perpetual outrage, and it rapidly gets toxic.
It’s the equivalent of yelling at your partner every time that they say or do something that you could interpret in a negative light. Right or wrong, no good comes of it.
MomSense
@ruemara:
Agree, completely.
jl
@Kevin: As far as I can figure from what I read, and youtube of her backstage comments, some people interpreted her comments as a demand that other disadvantaged communities sacrifice their agendas to work for women’s rights, and suggestions that (white?) women’s rights movement had done more but gotten less than other groups.
I think it is a lot of fuss over extemporaneous remarks, but I don’t see how it has been horribly destructive. I think discussions like this can be constructive.
If you only pay attention to tweets and blog comments by nasty people with no impulse control, then it might seem destructive and nasty. But were Imani Gandy’s comments nasty and destructive? I don’t think so.
And thing occurs to me is that there seems to be a real fall off in blog comment troll activity recently. They must have gone somewhere, and did they just quit and give up the pay? When you see a really nasty and provocative (in a bad way) anonymous social media comments from a self-identified liberal, how do you know it was really made by a real liberal, sincerely, and for free? Some no doubt are, but I wonder if all of them are.
Roger Moore
@Woodrow/Asim:
I think the reaction is also important. It seems to me that Arquette’s comments were divisive to start with- pitting women against people of color- but there have been precious few white people backing up the people of color who pointed that out. Instead, there has been a lot of closing of ranks, making of excuses, and complaining about divisiveness and circular firing squads.
jl
@Marc:
” more and more severe over the past couple of years. ”
If that is your honest perception, then I sincerely believe that you are just paying more attention now than before.
Linnaeus
@Marc:
I see this claim made from time to time, and to be honest, I’m skeptical of the magnitude of effect that the so-called “PC wars” had on the left (broadly speaking). The roots of the conservative resurgence in American politics are varied, and many of them were already well in place before political correctness became a thing.
There’s a couple of mistakes that I think stem from a tendency to view the alleged problem of political correctness too uncritically:
1. A narrow definition of “political correctness” to only encompass left-wing discourse. But one could argue that we’ve had political correctness for quite some time in America, but we just didn’t call it that: red scares, COINTELPRO, post 9/11 jingoism, etc. And these, I’d say, were more damaging to the American left than anything that happened on a college campus in the 1990s.
2. Not interrogating right-wing claims of political correctness and taking them at face value. A lot of “PC” was blown up and exaggerated by right-wingers for obvious reasons of political self-interest with little real understanding of what they were complaining about and why.
kc
@Violet:
They’d be accused of “violent erasure” or something like that.
Hal
This is the issue. Not Arquette asking for equality, or speaking out on gender inequality.
This royal (white) we in which she is speaking. We owe her and other white women like her? It’s a clunky statement that makes it sound like LGTB people, people of color, etc haven’t been supportive of women’s rights and she’s taken it upon herself to call everyone out. Look to your fellow upper class white women and men, they are the ones trying to restrict your rights.
SatanicPanic
@jl:
Which actually kind of happened before- the abolishionist movement and the woman’s suffrage movement parted ways after the Civil War because they couldn’t agree on what to focus on and some prominent feminists went on to give racist speeches. But maybe we’re all better than that now.
lol
@Marc:
Go take a look at Chait’s “angriest” reactions piece. Only thing you’ll notice is that the reactions aren’t actually angry, just disappointed. But a white person got criticized so Chait has to ride to the rescue and deem it an angry attack by some PC liberal clearly out of their mind.
There was an attempt at a civil dialogue and almost immediately the reaction was “SHUT UP AND STOP ATTACKING WHITE PEOPLE ANGRY BLACK WOMAN WHY DO YOU HAVE TO ALWAYS MAKE THIS ABOUT RACE!”
So go fuck yourself if you can’t take criticism.
Rex Tremendae
There are plenty of bloggers who *write* for a living who have written stupid things, and they have time to edit before hitting “post.” I think you need to give people some leeway with spoken comments.
jl
@Marc:
‘ in no small part because the PC wars completely discredited the left. ‘
I’m too young to have understood or followed the early liberal PC wars, particularly wrt feminism. But you are talking about things in the 80s and 90s? I think what you say is completely wrong.
I don’t remember huge PC wars that dominated everything else, I don’t remember the left being completely discredited, and to the extent it was discredited, I don’t remember internecine PC wars having much to do with that.
kc
OT: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/02/the_next_republican_attack_on_voting_right_democrats_should_fight_for_a.html
kc
@kc:
I generally hate Slate, but that article makes some good points.
kc
@Hal:
It surely was a clunky statement, tone-deaf in many ways, but she has clarified that she meant ALL women, including women of color.
You may not be aware of that, though if you’d read the other threads about this Mnemosyne has posted about it multiple times.
Cervantes
@Linnaeus:
In part:
Put another way: Women who vote for Republicans should ask (if they don’t already know) who the primary beneficiaries of Affirmative Action have been lo these many years.
Chrs
@Linnaeus:
I would add the VSP consensus Paul Krugman constantly rails against, the “Shape Of Earth – Views Differ” and “both sides do it, but conservative are worse” tendencies of the media to give equal airtime to every idiotic, thrice-discredited GOP inanity just in the name of “balance” which they never extend to the liberal side of the aisle. Quite possibly the most severe form of “political correctness” of our day.
Cacti
Since I’m not a member of any of the groups in this dispute, I can say that from an outsider’s view, I can see why Arquette separating “gay people” and “people of color” out from “women” was a bit problematic for the female half of the first two groups.
The solution? I dunno.
John Cole +0
@lol: One more time, since the first didn’t stick:
I don’t know how I can be any clearer. I don’t think she meant to hurt anyone and thought she was doing the right thing. That is LITERALLY all I am saying.
Chrs
@jl:
I’m not old enough to remember the alleged “PC Wars.” In my lifetime, “political correctness” has always been the right’s weasel word for non-bigoted dialogue and objections to bigoted dialogue. Actually, that’s the charitable interpretation. Quite often, it’s just an epithet that they don’t even understand, but throw at Democrats regardless of context because, like “socialist” and “communist,” it’s a word they associate with them.
ruemara
@kc: yet, she has not said “I’m sorry, I see how that can be hurtful.”
Look, I loved her statement s on stage. Loved it. Backstage, she divested me of my femininity, and established a narrative of POC & LGBT people sitting passively as white women went to bat for them. She infantalized us. This is like thinking The Help is a documentary. We’re not asking for much, just acknowledgement that we have been here at these struggles from the beginning. Much love, but, no I’m not here to cover for bull.
Linnaeus
@Chrs:
Yes, this too. The scope of expressible opinion in most media outlets in the US is pretty narrow.
eyelessgame
I didn’t have any clue what this was about, except something about “intersectionality”. So I went and looked at a transcript of her comments – She wants women, and people of color, and “men who love women” to support equal pay for equal work. And in all honesty I went “aha, people must be upset because she excluded gay white men!”
Then I went and looked up what people commented about. The problem is apparently that she counted women of color twice.
I’m being facetious, but only a little. But I guess the important thing is who’s offended. If gay white men aren’t offended by being excluded, I guess that’s up to them. Certainly people have the right to be offended and hurt if that’s how they feel.
Shygetz
@lol: You left some out–some black women, lesbians, etc. were like “Hey, we exist” and Patricia Arquette said “When I said ‘Women’ I meant all of us” and black and LBGT women said she had to understand and be sensitive about the history of marginalization of “intersectional” groups (not scare quotes, just an uncommon word used in a highly specialized manner) in rights movements, and Patricia’s defenders were like “Uh-uh, how’s about you gotta listen to the words she actually said” and then it all went downhill. Now you’ve got some WOC, LGBT women and other “intersectional” groups going “who needs white feminists anyway” and some white feminists going “Ummm, you do if you plan on getting anywhere in the next hundred years or so” and USA Today publishes a story about the Left eating its own while various right-wing mouthbreathers are passing around the popcorn.
Personally, I find it all depressing. I understand that intersectional concerns are not just an esoteric topic of minority studies courses, but issues real people deal with. On the other hand, pick your shots a little better–Patricia’s off-hand backstage remarks could easily be seen as calling out black men, LGBT men, etc. to pick up the plight of the women, both within and outside of their movements, a reading which she later confirmed in her tweets. And yet we give her remarks the least charitable reading so we can “educate” her on intersectionality (which I find a bit presumptuous, given her experience as a religious minority, a woman and poor–intersectional concerns are not limited to race and sexual identity).
JPL
@Hal: oh just f.k…. I heard her to say equal rights for woman. Read into what you will. Gender equality is an important issue.
Cervantes
@Marc:
What does “in no small part” actually mean here? Assuming for a moment that “young people were more conservative than their elders” then, how much did it have to do with, say, their economic prospects, as opposed to Allan Bloom and “the PC wars”?
And as for the above-mentioned assumption, we could look at it, too, I suppose.
@Marc:
Here we agree.
jl
@Chrs: I agree. I guess both of us became politically aware in more or less same era.
Most of the alarm I have seen or heard in media about the supposedly notorious liberal PC has been reactionary agit-prop lies or lazy BS information-editorial product pumped out by corporate media.
Looking for the reactionaries’ version of lefty PC wars is like going on a snipe hunt after too many drinks around the campfire.
Cervantes
@John Cole +0:
Not meaning to hurt anyone is nice.
And not too many people think they are doing the wrong thing.
OK.
kc
@ruemara:
She should say that, and I wish she would.
Belafon
“It’s time for all the women in America, and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that
we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”
Considering that women are currently under attack right now more than gays – look at the number of bills being issued restricing women’s access to health care, and court rulings allowing it – and you can understand her point.
Regarding blacks and women, we’ve seen that fight here – who’s had it better: blacks who got the vote after the end of the Civil War or women who actually got to vote when they gained the right – and it’s a faulty choice. We should be fighting for both of these, because, on the Republican side, they are not separate, and for black women, they are not separate.
jl
@eyelessgame: I think the fuss is about her interview backstage after the acceptance speech. You can find it on youtube.
lol
@Shygetz:
You say it’s presumptuous and yet…
eyelessgame
… and my comment makes even less sense because she also said “gay people”. And yeah, some people fall into three of her categories, and thus don’t feel like they belong in any of them, and yeah, it’s an awkward, unfortunate way to phrase it.
askew
I am voting for Sanders or O’Malley any way as Hillary represents everything I can’t stand about politicians, politics and spineless Democrats.
It’s too bad that Arquette still doesn’t understand what she said was so offensive because she was the only acting winner that I was actually rooting for on Oscar night. I’ve been a fan of hers for years and even watched Medium for her.
Belafon
@Shygetz: To be fair to her one last time, giving a speech at the Oscars would be stressful, and trying to get all your thoughts exactly right would be hard. And as the Doctor would say, that probably sounded better in her head.
jl
@John Cole +0:
Dear Mr. Cole.
You run a blog. ‘Literally all you are saying’ is never literally all you are saying.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions,
Yr faithful srvnt, & etc.
jl
Peale
@jl: Yes. But apparently people with poor impulse control includes Elon James White. Does Elon appear to lack impulse control?
Cervantes
@eyelessgame:
Well, you’re right: that is being facetious.
askew
@ruemara:
Yeah, Rancic’s 2nd apology shows that she got it. I have no doubt that she was facing a lot of heat at E! to make a statement after her co-worker called her out for her racially tone-deaf comment, but she still understood that she offended people and sincerely apologized for it.
I am having a hard time understand why people who have a valid reason to be offended by Arquette’s divisive comment are the ones in the wrong here. I see a lot of white people who are really not getting it and as a white woman, it’s pretty offensive.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
That’s a pretty good rule to live by.
askew
@Monala:
That is a perfect summation of what’s happening and I am gobsmacked seeing this unfold this way. I truly expected better from commenters here.
TS
@Belafon:
And it’s white women – voting for GOP legislatures who are allowing this attack to continue.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Hal:
This is where I keep getting stuck — because she prefaces it with “men,” it seems to me that the “people of color” and “LGBT” people she’s referring to on the second half of that sentence are men of color and gay men. I think a habit of using inclusive language actually tripped her up, because she was trying to say all women, and also men from these other groups that women from those groups have worked on behalf of. I really, really don’t think she was calling for minority groups to “give back” to white women, and yet that’s the interpretation that many people seem to have taken.
And it also kind of bothers me that there doesn’t seem to be any room for Arquette to be allowed to clarify what she said. If she thought she was saying one thing and her critics heard it as something else, does it require a full apology based on what people thought they heard as opposed to what she meant? To me, that’s like telling her she has to lie about what she said rather than being able to say, Sorry I was unclear, this is what I meant.
Last, I think there are two separate issues here: the essays and the Twitter storm. Most of the essays I’ve read have explained the issue pretty well. Most of the tweets, not so much. Just as Arquette was not able to get her point across in such a short amount of time, Twitter is a very bad forum for explaining what went wrong in her speech and devolved into name-calling pretty quickly.
Chrs
@Monala:
@askew:
Yeah… I had no freaking idea what this was about, literally just googled it to find out what she said, and I have absolutely no trouble understanding why people were pissed, nor do I find it objectionable that they are. I’m also white, male, and straight, so I don’t think I’m being oversensitive because of my personal background, but YMMV.
Cervantes
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Who is the “we’ve all” in what’s quoted above?
Keith G
Dear god.
I guess in the new America everyone must apologize to someone about damn near everything one does because there will be a portion of folks who are bothered by a statement and just can’t get their minds right until apologies are offered.
Obama talks about the crusades and fee fees are pummeled and true Christians are hurt. How far can this go? let’s see…
Granted, the website this came from is just fuckin nuts, nonetheless the idea remains that in our society being hurt is the new entitlement and outrage is a pastime and it is making us dumber by the hour.
Thanks internet and…
Thanks Obama.
Cervantes
@Keith G:
That was the old America, too, but the changing definition of “everyone” may be confusing to some.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@ruemara:
I do think that, given the storm, it would probably be a good idea for Arquette to make a longer (non-Twitter) statement saying that she thought she was including women of color and LGBT women in that statement but she can see how people took it the wrong way because she misspoke and she’s sorry she wasn’t more clear.
ruemara
Yes. Yes it requires an apology. It requires an apology that recognizes how what was said could be hurtful. It recognizes a disregard for the roles of WOC & LGBT people in fighting for equity for all. And it also means it would be great if poc weren’t being told you shouldn’t be offended because we have mutual enemies, you should have a tacit understanding that you were included, even if it sounded like you were being excluded. And if you did, your to blame for the entire progressive movement not getting it’s shit together in identity politics. Now excuse me while we work on women’s pay equity, which is what’s important.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): we completely agree.
lol
@Keith G:
Replace “gypped” with “jewed” and then tell us how there isn’t a problem with what she said.
ranchandsyrup
i think that this is how things have to proceed, unfortunately. good intent only takes one so far. let’s all take the lesson.
Chrs
@Keith G:
Huh, the example of something that it’s outrageous and ridiculous to get offended by, and that no one but an oversensitive thin-skinned emoprog brainwashed by the political correctness police could possibly take offense to, is… the modern world’s “I got Jew’d?”
I didn’t see that coming.
Cervantes
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Her “mis-statement” and the various attempts to explain (“whitesplain”?) it remind me of nothing so much as an old Southern acquaintance who kept saying that “We southerners nowadays have nothing against black people.” It took him a while to understand his “mis-statement,” too.
Chrs
@lol:
Gosh darn it to heck, comrade.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Cervantes:
Sorry, I need the full sentence. I’ve read my comment over three times and I can’t find that phrase.
Keith G
@Cervantes: No. I disagree.
I think our connectivity has amplified the emotional responses of the unsteady.
Cervantes
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
When I said it was quoted above, I meant here in this comment to which you were (apparently) responding.
Obviously, the quotation is from Arquette.
Keith G
@lol:
@Chrs:
Don’t shoot the messenger.
Or should I apologize?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Cervantes:
If you think she’s lying in her Twitter statements when she said that she meant “women” to include all women, then say so. I think her backstage statement is sufficiently ambiguous that your interpretation is not the only possible one.
Cervantes
@Keith G:
You’re quite right: we disagree!
No need to hash it out; if either of our perceptions change, so be it.
AxelFoley
@Woodrow/Asim:
This.
jl
@Peale:
” Yes. But apparently people with poor impulse control includes Elon James White. Does Elon appear to lack impulse control? ”
I don’t agree with most of what White says about this. But I missed it if he is calling people names, or saying hurtful mean things. There is a difference. Unless I have missed something, I would not say he has poor impulse control.
Edit: too be honest, I am puzzled about the intersctionality talk, more than disagreeing with it.
Cervantes
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I don’t think (or not think) anything of the sort. You generously offered an interpretation of some of her words. I invited your interpretation of some of her other words. That’s all.
Chrs
@Keith G:
For what? For saying that the use of a racial term as a synonym for shifty, fraudulent, un-good behavior in the same way people used to use “Jew” was no big deal? Up to you. Despite what they say about the Political Correctness Police, it’s not like anyone’s going to knock on your door at three in the morning and drag you away to a gulag for not doing so.
Keith G
@Cervantes: You are wise beyond your years.
Heliopause
May we take this as a principle of yours going forward? That if someone didn’t intend to offend then it’s all okay, or at least mitigates the offense?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Cervantes:
“We’ve all” meaning all women, including women of color fighting for racial equality and LGBT women fighting for gay equality. It’s asking for men in those movements to pay it forward and support women in their group in fighting for gender equality.
If the problem is that Arquette is “whitesplaining” to men of color and gay men that they need to support the women of their groups who supported them, that’s a different argument that I haven’t seen anyone else make yet.
Keith G
@Chrs: Like I said, I was just forwarding the summary/characterization of the FLOTUS quote without endorsing either the quote or the blogger’s evaluation of it.
am
I remember when the internet was too hard for stupid people to get on it. That was nice. Almost all comment sections & all of CNN have recently made it onto the “too stupid to waste precious moments of life on” list.
Cervantes
@Chrs:
Would you agree that many people who use the word “gypped” do so without knowing its origin? If so, would you say that makes a difference?
(Not asking about Michelle Obama’s use of the term but I will say that I thought she knew better; and that everyone makes mistakes.)
Cervantes
@Keith G:
These days, almost nothing is beyond my years.
Marc
On the subject of what “PC” was like in the 80s: I’m coming from a place where it was strong and toxic, and I freely admit that this impacts my perspective. I grew up in a very liberal family, politically active, and we moved in activist circles. But what was really striking to me on a personal level is that virtually every family member eventually got antagonized, and things (especially in academe) really did get far out of whack. I remember my sister – progressive by any reasonable standard – having a terrible problem in a feminist literature class, where the entire exercise in her telling was constructing a hierarchy of oppression, and she ended up getting basically shouted down in the class with the support of the professor. My wife, also very liberal, found herself surrounded by a table full of people for getting her words tangled up in some way (I forget the particulars after the decades, but it left a massively bad taste in her mouth, of the “I am not a feminist” flavor.) I didn’t get personally slammed in a serious way, but I knew a lot of people who did. And there were big, ugly public things like the Tawana Brawley case.
It seemed to blow over for a while and we seemed to be able to work together and focus on common ground – at least in the Bush years. But when you see the same bad habits coming back again, and when you saw their feedback in the people around you so directly, it’s hard not to get down about it.
Chrs
@Keith G:
In that case, all good – and I apologize to you in turn for jumping to conclusions. But while the blogger’s response might have been over the top, it’s hardly an unreasonable thing to get offended by. Just like I’m sure some of the responses to Arquette have been ridiculously over the top, but there actually is something there worth taking exception to. People aren’t just getting offended for the fun of it.
Shygetz
@lol: “Privilege” doesn’t only refer to white privilege. As a wealthy woman talking about equal pay for women, I imagine she is accused of SES privilege constantly, to which a rejoinder responding to her background is perfectly valid. Again, you take the most uncharitable interpretation of her remarks and run with it.
mike with a mic
I like being a Democrat when the party is out of power. The moment we get even the slightest bit of it it turns into Greenwaldian purity parties, Salon.com circular firing squads over privilege, claiming Zelda is racist/sexist/anti animal, ban Colbert, holy wars over who is the most oppressed, and all sorts of other idiocy.
It’s identity politics at it’s worst. Even worse, a lot of people turn into the literal version of what people like Limbaugh claim liberals are all about. Plus every single group will throw economic issues for the middle class and poor out the window if they get their specific pony, damaging the party and movement even more.
The first presidential election I could vote in was 2000, for Bush. Those 8 years turned me into a Democrat because Republican voters were… well nuts. These 8 years have convinced me that the people voting for my time are just as fucking crazy, from the opposite direction.
Which is why I have not plans on voting in 2016.
jl
@Marc: I think may be you are projecting then? Part of my family is same way, but crosses a very wide political spectrum. I saw with my own eyes that PC squabbles among the reactionaries just as bad or worse than among the liberals. The reactionaries were frightened intolerant people, so less endless discussion but more bellowing, talking over each other and insane meaningless excommunications from the House of All Truth in that part of the family, which eventually got splintered into a a bunch of endlessly feuding wingnuts. Good for the liberal side, since they spent more time arguing with each other than engaging the liberals.
Thank goodness other sides of my family were not like that at all.
Marc
@jl: The 1984 and 1988 elections were incredibly depressing. It wasn’t just that 84 was a rout and 88 wasn’t close. It was that liberalism in general was just in a complete state of chaos, with a lot of energy directed at internal disputes. And you could see this play out at levels from the national political level to the personal one. Reagan was able to be so effective because liberals couldn’t muster a coherent response at all, and internal politics on the left had a lot to do with the splintering and fragmenting that was so damaging.
Cervantes
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
So you think Arquette meant to suggest that “all women” have “fought for” the rights of “people of color”?
Perhaps she meant “all progressive women”?
Martin
You must be one of the wankers from the Judean Popular People’s Front.
MomSense
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I think part of the problem is that Arquette’s comments at the press conference after her award speech were all too familiar. There are a whole lot of white feminists who often try to speak for all feminists and do not realize that the experience of being a woman is different for white women, women of color or women in poverty. I have seen some really offensive and bizarrely paternalistic and entitled behavior by white feminists directed at women of color who are feminists.
I think a good example of how feminist women can interpret the same thing differently is in the response of Melissa Harris Perry to Michelle Cottle’s article about Michelle Obama as a “feminist nightmare” Here is a link. http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/michelle-obama-no-ones-feminist-nightmare.
We all make mistakes and say things that aren’t what we meant to say or say things that reveal that we have some gaps in our education or understanding. I don’t think Ms. Arquette meant to say something hurtful or dismissive but unfortunately she did. I know that a lot of my learning has been the result of saying and doing really stupid things. I wish I could take those things back but I can’t so I try and learn from them and not repeat them! I’m also trying to just apologize when my mistakes cause upset to someone else. It sucks sometimes but that’s life.
Marc
@jl: I can’t speak to internal disputes on the right flank, agreed, and I am admitting that my background has something to do with my responses. But there were a lot of people like me – and to minimize our experiences is not warranted. Personal attacks generate hatred, not reflection, in the targets. The trajectory that we’re seeing in these debates is virtually a carbon copy of the 80s – the topics vary, but the song I hear remains the same.
Keith G
@Chrs:
.
In general, I wonder if the VTA dopamine system of some folks has adapted to the point where it provides rewards for the proper amount of expressed righteous outrage.
If there are some folks who get off on rage, I suspect many can get just the right amount of a pleasurable tingle when they are able to judge others as being in error.
“J’accuse!!”
Shygetz
@ruemara: Unless you can point to where she specifically and unambiguously excluded or marginalized WOC/LGBT women, then aren’t you taking offense not to what she said, but to the interpretive frame you applied to her words? Is your interpretive frame the only rational one, or are there other interpretations that would fit her words and the context of her comments sufficiently and are not marginalizing to WOC/LGBT women? And does she bear responsibility for the interpretive frame that you choose?
John Cole +0
@AxelFoley: Isn’t that precisely what I am trying to fucking do? Not comment about it. This was a preventative post. I took no sides other than to state I don’t think she meant to do ill towards anyone, and am not goingto talk about it. I don’t have anything to offer on this topic and all I want to focus on is electing a Democrat to every office possible. End of story.
FFS, it seems like it’s not enough that not only do I not comment, I have to not comment while also agreeing with everyone about what they are commenting on.
I HAVE NO COMMENT OTHER THAN THAT I DON’T THINK SHE WAS TRYING TO HURT ANYONE.
And before Heliopause tried to drag me into additional commenting, I think generally assuming your allies didn’t mean harm with their comments is a good thing. Don’t you? Obviously it doesn’t mitigate any harm they may actually have done (WHICH I AM NOT GOING TO GET SUCKED INTO), but I think that not assuming the worst is not that terrible a thing to do.
Except with Republicans, in which I automatically assume the worst.
jl
@Marc:
” and to minimize our experiences is not warranted ”
If you feel personally scarred from the experience, I would not minimize that.
The political BS in that part of my family was distressing to me and left some emotional scares.
But I think a mistake to equate public discussion with what went on in one’s own family.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Ugh. I am a lesbian, and no, I didn’t feel her comments about LGBT were problematic. I didn’t and don’t impute the idea that LGBT means males. I believe her assumption is that most women are straight, and that IS TRUE. It is also true that I have spent more energy fighting for LGBT rights, than gender equality. That is true of lots of lesbians. So, I viewed her speech as a reminder that all of us in the community need to keep some energy in the fight for pay equality too. I think there is a tendency for some people to just ASSUME they know what she meant based on their own sensitivities. I don’t think that those assumptions are necessarily valid.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@MomSense:
I think Arquette was excited and emotional and speaking off the cuff backstage, which is why it ended up sounding like she was simultaneously including and excluding WOC (so are they “women” or “people of color” or what?) It was one of those constructions that sounded better in her head — as you can see, my attempted rephrasing above wasn’t much less awkward.
I think she probably is at least somewhat aware of the problem of exclusion given that she addressed it on Twitter but she misspoke in the moment, which I too have done many a time, though usually in front of a much smaller audience.
@Shygetz:
I think that, like all of us who have accidentally said stupid things and only realized afterwards that they were offensive or hurtful, Arquette should probably apologize for unintentionally offending people. It’s like apologizing for stepping on someone’s foot in a crowd — you didn’t do it on purpose, but it makes society run more smoothly if you apologize for accidental injuries.
Woodrow/Asim
@Marc: What’s funny is, I used to think like that. I really spent a lot of mentally judging/policing people in liberal circles.
What changed? I got (partially) out of my own ego, and listened. Sometimes to angry people, but — and I confess I got really lucky — to some folks willing to sit down and really share their opinions on a lot of these issues considered “extreme”, the issues that get the angry expressions. It helps, in these conversions, that I’m a PoC, a privilege in some ways, as is me being male.
Then I read, and researched. And, well, all the above changed my mind. I try to, to this day, remember that the anger I received, as much as it hurts, isn’t about me, it’s about a system. That’s very much key to these discussions, and why Cole is very off in his “I’m just sayin'” approach.
tybee
@raven:
pretty much
BruceFromOhio
Yes! So let’s grind it into dust, smear each other with it, smash all the windows, curse out the neighbor’s kids, and then set ourselves on fire!
ruemara
@Shygetz: yes, that’s what I’m doing because her quotes that are all over the place are too ambiguous but I get a dopamine rush from being offended.
And, Lord, Cole. You have picked a side. You’re on Twitter for pete’s sake, talking about it. You’re just not going Nicole Sandler nuclear.
jl
@jl: I should have checked White’s twitter feed before i typed my comment. I have no clue what is going on with him and the bitchy pundit (? those are the two who are arguing, right?) over there.
David Koch
–
Jonny Scrum-half
What do you mean, “you people”?
srv
Jeez, John, did you NOT learn anything the last time you ranted about this Amanda Marcotte woman?
eemom
These.
For all the dumb shit some people here have nothing better to do with their lives than fixate on, this episode should win its own Oscar.
samiam
Who are you trying to kid clueless Cole. Given half a chance you will vote for the person Griftwald tells you to vote for…which would be Rand Paul.
Keith G
Using this as a jumping off point. Who would she be hurting?
Over 16 million children in the United States live in poverty. That next Monday, as most of them journeyed hungry to their underfunded schools, was Arquette hurting them?
Millions of Americans still do not have adequate medical care. Was Arquette hurting them?
In this brutal winter weather, tens of thousands of our elderly don not have the resources to keep their living space reasonably warm. Did Arquette hurt them?
Tennessee, Texas, North Dakota and other states are making it all but impossible for poor women to fully exercise reproductive choice. Has Arquette hurt them?
Some middle class and upper middle class holders of economic privilege (when compared to their fellow citizens I have listed above) want to play purity police.
They need to step away from their keyboards, walk to the other side of town, and scope out what the real battle is.
johnnybuck
The lesson here is that the woman should have taken her award and thanked her director like everyone else does, and walked off the stage. End of story. It is impossible to say anything political in this country without offending someone and it’s best to just keep your mouth shut.
Saves you a lot of headache.
mike with a mic
@samiam:
And then buy encryption software from his ebay founding money maker. And you can’t forget, then turn over the internet to corporations and privatize it, so the government isn’t running key parts of it and can’t see everything on it like they have since it’s inception!
Anybody buying into Greenwald is beyond help right now.
Sophie
@ruemara:
Oh please. I’m sorry, but I think this must be posturing.
I’m a woman and non-white and non-straight, and I wasn’t infantalized or erased. I didn’t imagine that somehow the words “women” and “people of color” and “gay people” were mutually exclusive, and that my existence was being nullified. I understand perfectly that my life is a Venn diagram. I belong in three intersecting circles. And I belong to all the groups (except men) that Arquette mentioned.
I understand that, and so does everybody else. Everybody.
No one — no one on this earth of at least normal intelligence — hears a statement like Arquette’s and actually falls out in confusion and shock, thinking “but…but…which am I? I belong to more than one of the groups she mentioned! I’m being erased!”
Nobody really thinks that way. If you’re a gay Jewish guy, you don’t hear references to Jewish people and gay people as implicitly denying your existence and your reality as a both. You know that “Jewish people” is a group and “gay people” is a group, and they’re different and have different histories and different agendas, even though you belong to both of them.
As a woman, I am part of the group “women,” and I suffer gender discrimination, and I support women’s rights. My ethnic group is another thing entirely, and while it has its own history and struggle for acceptance, a concern for women’s rights have not been a part of the picture (even though half of us are women!). The movement for gay rights is also distinct from women’s rights, and not all gay people who care about gay rights give a crap about women’s rights.
Arquette was simply saying, off the cuff and in a hurry, “hey, we’ve fought for gay rights and civil rights, so it’s time for us all to get on the same page with women’s rights.”
And everybody knows that. Everybody.
wasabi gasp
Turned kinda offensive towards white women.
FlipYrWhig
Mostly this is a lesson in why Twitter is horrible.
msdc
@sharl (quoting Elon James White):
But this only applies to white feminists (or white liberals in general), right? Intersectionality for thee but not for me.
Coalitions are always made up of different groups of people pursuing their own wants/desires/causes. Winning coalitions are made up of people who support their allies’ causes, and ask their allies to support theirs in return. Patricia Arquette understands this better than most of her critics.
Also, disparaging the very concept of allies is a genius strategy when your group makes up at best 12 or 13 percent of the electorate.
Wobblybits
Back after a long hiatus and well this topic, it’s pretty simple. Her intention may not have been to exclude or offend anyone, but her words backstage were problematic. It may have been that she was nervous, who knows.
Scamp Dog
Speaking of people getting a raw deal, today is National Adjunct Walkout Day. 3/4 of higher ed faculty are part-time hires, although they’re usually teaching full time, just at more than one school. I’m one of them.
Colorado is a “right to work” state, so we’re not walking out, but we had a table up in the main hallway at Front Range Community College, and got a generally favorable reaction from students and non-managerial faculty. I planned on at least discussing the topic with my students tonight, but they’ve cancelled classes due to a snow storm. Friday then!
Another Holocene Human
Okay, so I jumped out of the conversation because I felt like I wasn’t helping, relying too much on personal anecdotes and vague conversation and not really adding anything. Imani said it all better than I ever could, look at her twitter feed for the last two days and also her blog posts to rhrealitycheck, http://rhrealitycheck.org/ablc/ and she also reiterates some of the same ideas on TWIB Prime last two shows which are available freely for download. It’s not about tearing Patricia Arquette down, it’s about building the movement up. We are capable of having this conversation. Cole, TBogg, Chait, Lambert etc tuning it all out because somebody dropped the word “intersectionality” onto twitter? You’re not helping.
The Blog Dahlia
i’m a blind left-handed Chinese Hindu-speaking communist gay black woman and arquette just threw me under a whole fleet of buses.
Wobblybits
Cut myself off. Anyways, as I was saying, it’s not her intention that people are having issues with, it’s her words. Instead of becoming very defensive, a simple acknowledgement of the problematic wording of her statement and a clarification of her comment would have squashed it.
Kerry Reid
@Woodrow/Asim: Cole is also close to 50 but judging from that tweet, still is confused by the difference between possessives and contractions.
The Blog Dahlia
@FlipYrWhig:
It’s also a lesson in why progressives never win.
Hal
When I rich white woman stands on stage and says; “It’s time for all the women in America, and all the men that love women and all the gay people and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now”, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the groups she, a white straight woman singled out as not being “us” to say, um what?
Yes, she clarified and her clarification gels with some of the points I think most people were making and making calmly and rationally. Simply pointing out that Arquette has privilege. As a white person in America, as a rich white woman, and as a recognizable, successful actress, she has privilege, and there is a lack of recognition in her initial statements backstage of that privilege.
I don’t think Patricia Arquette is horrible and I don’t think people who were questioning what she meant think she’s some closet racist or homophobe. I think the ultimate point is to say even when you are an ally and all for equality, even when you yourself suffer from some sort of inequality, if you are a person acting from a point of privilege, equality for you does not necessarily mean equality for everyone else in the same boat.
Another Holocene Human
@ruemara: fwiw I support your statements and don’t believe you’re feigning offense or whatever
I’d say more but I’m getting actually for reals agitated about this. Like apparently everyone in this conversation is not dealing with the same set of facts. It’s like arguing with wingnuts.
Bobby Thomson
@schrodinger’s cat: I see what you did there.
Another Holocene Human
@Hal: It’s like all the supposedly progressive allies who are shouting down the people who pointed out that her remarks were problematic and why are really getting me down way more than anything she said.
Also there’s more projection going on than 50 multiplexes, on the internets and off.
cokane
the problem with much of liberal activism today is not that it’s too focused on pc-ness nor that it’s too focused on circular firing squads. it’s that so much fucking energy and words and paychecks are spent on activists who do not do anything.
much of liberal activist energy is basically now spent patrolling the media — television, music, social media as if that’s the only space that now matters. media outlets like these are useful tools for activism but they should not be the endgame of activism. criticizing what some asshole said on twitter or what some best actress said on the tee vee does not advance the rights of regular citizens. liberal activists need to get off the fucking keyboard once in awhile, i swear
Patricia Kayden
@kc: Not quite. There is still Obama. Don’t forget the drones and Snowden.
Another Holocene Human
@Keith G: Saying there is a problem with what she said is not the same thing as saying she’s hurting somebody. I’m sure somebody online immediately went off with some attention seeking “Patricia Arquette is hurting feminism” but I haven’t seen it.
All of this mishegas is going on on twitter and blogs where the grownups chit chat, who knows what is going on in the wilds of youth tumblr. I surely don’t care. (If I had to make a bet, I would put money on the notion that the youngs do not give a flip about the Oscars.)
Patricia Kayden
@Shygetz: Do her attackers really believe that Ms. Arquette is racist or homophobic? She simply misspoke and has clarified her backstage commentary. There is no reason to continue to beat her up about a misstatement.
Sigh.
Another Holocene Human
@cokane: What’s happened is that the old gate-keepers have lost their power and media like twitter, vine, etcet are allowing previously excluded voices to have a voice. So now we’re having this conversation about this pervasive white supremacist gestalt (I guess again, maybe there was some talk about this in the 70s). It’s an uncomfortable conversation but it totally has to happen. Otherwise we are going to stay stuck where we are and where we are is not cool.
FlipYrWhig
@Sophie:
This.
@The Blog Dahlia: I don’t know if it’s that, exactly. But I really don’t see the appeal of being the first one to shout OOH YOU FUCKED UP NOT A REAL ALLY. And that’s apparently the dominant mode of interaction among socially-politically-invested left-ish, smart-ish people on Twitter now. SMH.
Diana
Fox News was appalled by what Arquette said:
http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2015/02/23/3625777/fox-friends-bashes-patricia-arquette-advocating-wage-equality-appalled
And if you’re agreeing with Fox News, either you’re wrong or Fox News is right.
And I don’t think it’s likely that Fox News is ever right….
FlipYrWhig
@Another Holocene Human:
What’s happened is that a bunch of aggressive loudmouths now have a new way to egg each other on. This notion that it has something to do with “previously excluded voices” and is thus righteous and virtuous is a profound confusion of user, medium, and message. It becomes a pretext for bullies to gang up. Just because the bullying takes place with a veneer of smart people’s words like “privilege,” “intersectionality,” and the lovely “-splaining” compounds doesn’t redeem it. It’s awful people being awful and amplifying each other’s essential awfulness.
eemom
@Keith G:
All of that too most heartily seconded.
Utterly mind-blowing, this bullshit.
The Blog Dahlia
@FlipYrWhig:
Progressives have had this issue for a while now but jesus titty-fucking christ does social media make it crazier. I’m surprised anyone gets any work done at all with all the bitching.
Another Holocene Human
@Shygetz: ::smdh::
So what did it mean when Arquette quoted the pay gap for white women? Also, I don’t understand how you can slice and dice what she said to the press later in a way that isn’t full of fail, go ahead and try that as a thought experiment, I mean it only gets worse, if “women” includes queer women, women of color, then “gay” and “black” exclude women as a category?
Jeez, I’m tired, her off the cuff description of history is so wrong in so many ways I don’t even know where to start with that. And now we’re psychoanalyzing anyone who stands up and says, hey, that’s not factually correct.
Like fuck yeah this conversation isn’t easy, where do you think all those creepy wingnuts come from? They feel a discomfort over issues like race and run away! Into the hidey-hole where there’s a cheap, simple, painless “explanation” for everything in the world that requires nothing of you AND paints you as the victim of whatever and therefore righteous.
Another Holocene Human
@The Blog Dahlia: Well in my real life in person activism despite facing a lot of common issues our progressive groups are badly siloed, even the labor groups although there is some crossover there. Maybe the most integrated are the social justice religious alliances. Otherwise it is silo city.
Apparently white progressives can’t face these conversations, can’t listen to Black progressives but have to tell them what they should and shouldn’t care about. The degree of discomfort is so bad that some of the campus groups I have interaction with had a threeway latino-labor (mostly but not exclusively white)-black student group EXPLOSION over support for DREAMers. Like some of it is childish and stupid. But the grownups are even more segregated in a way and talking to each other less. It’s very disheartening. These are real meatspace problems that the progressive movement has. It is NOT confined to twitter.
mclaren
A lot of them don’t. Many commenters on this forum are either sock puppets paid by the Koch brothers, or JTRIG operatives paid by the Pentagon to spread disinformation.
cokane
@Another Holocene Human: whatever you say dude. yelling at people on twitter hasn’t closed the wage gap so far nor has it stopped black incarceration, but i guess if you keep trying the results will be different, right?
Another Holocene Human
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah, no. I read Imani’s twitter feed for the last two days. It’s easy to change the subject to stupid kids bullying each other in the tumblrverse but this is not what this is about at all. Like I said, Imani said it all, also Mikki (Karythian) on the TWIB Prime that posted today talked about her career and gatekeeping which is part of why I brought that up, also thinking about what happened with Jezebel, which she didn’t bring up. Nobody’s being bullied but some people are seriously overreacting. Just like some white guys can’t take the thought that a Black dude is more capable than them, apparently some white women can’t have their feminism criticized by a Black lady, even if she’s very calm and not angry at all.
Another Holocene Human
@cokane: I guess the whole #ferguson movement didn’t happen because it wasn’t run by the white liberal institution
I was cheering when New Yorkers took to the streets in protest over that cop getting off for killing Eric Garner, but I guess I should have kept the faith pure and strong because that shit all happened on twitter and twitter is for crybabies and bullies and wasting the energy of the movement, am I right?
Another Holocene Human
y’all pissing me off too much today, I’m out. peace.
FlipYrWhig
@Another Holocene Human: The thing about “uncomfortable conversations” is that they sort of rely on good faith and good intentions on both sides, not a dedication to sniffing out the worst faith and the worst possible intentions (silencing, othering, aggression, etc.). Taking an uncomfortable conversation and actively making it more uncomfortable is probably counterproductive, no? The “conversation” model needs some trust built into it.
Diana
@Sophie: amen
Diana
@msdc: more amen
Diana
@Another Holocene Human:
“It’s not about tearing Patricia Arquette down, it’s about building the movement up.”
That may have been what was intended, but is that what’s happening?
The Blog Dahlia
@mclaren:
The hard part about being paid by JTRIG is the fuckers pay you in British pounds. Or perhaps I’ve said too much.
Sophie
Here’s Arquette’s backstage call for all of us to unite for women’s rights, which some find so objectionable:
If you diagram the sentence, here is the list of people that she’s calling on to fight for gender equality now:
-All the women in America
-All the men that love women
-All the gay people
-All the people of color
—-[subclause] that we’ve all fought for [could be modifying some or all or none of the previous clauses, but extemporaneous speech is messy]
What strikes me is how inclusive she’s trying to be, just sort of rattling on. That’s how it sounded to me when I heard it and it’s how it reads to me now. She uses the word “all” more than any other, and it seems like she’s trying to cover the bases.
AxelFoley
@Hal:
Bingo.
The Blog Dahlia
@Another Holocene Human:
The people in NYC who took to the streets over Eric Garner’s death didn’t do so on twitter. They actually took to the streets. Same thing in Ferguson.
Keith G
@Another Holocene Human:
The second block is from the ABL post you linked to earlier. Sure seemed to me that this passage was meant to characterize in a specific way the actions of the particular white woman we have been discussing. I am thinking that this is not a gold star.
Fine. So be it.
As I saw Arguette’s comments in real time and as I read her follow up comments in the wee hours of Monday (I stayed up late), I saw nothing to be energized about except that I agreed with her focus as it seemed rather standard progressive fodder. She is an ally. She wants the lives of those trapped in poverty to get better. She wants the structural processes that have economically oppressed most women to be confronted.
Quite standard, not really original stuff.
But little did I know that I was watching the White Feminist Industrial Complex in all of it’s soul sucking glory.
I asked a series of questions above. My point being: There is real hurt and mass dysfunction out in the non-internet world that punishes the poor on a daily basis. That is what Arquette wanted us to pay attention to, but some financially secure (by comparison) keyboarders would rather we pay attention to Arquette.
That’s a shame.
Linnaeus
@FlipYrWhig:
At the same time, I can understand the frustration of some who believe – and not without merit – that the burden of good faith, patience, and understanding always seems to fall on them.
FlipYrWhig
@AxelFoley: She’s saying women have fought for other people’s causes, so they should fight for women’s causes. Kind of anodyne. Kind of… intersectional. It’s a weird statement to turn into an act of aggression that demands retaliation in kind.
Bobby Thomson
@FlipYrWhig: T
THIS
FlipYrWhig
@Linnaeus: Well, sure, but if that’s how you feel, you want a confrontation, not a conversation. “I want you to hear me and then face up to what’s wrong with what you just said, and I’m not backing down until I’ve said what I came to say, and if you feel bad afterwards, good, my work is done.” Maybe that’s right. Maybe that’s necessary. It’s just not the same thing as a conversation.
Bobby Thomson
@Keith G: Yeah, the idea that this:
is “calm” and “not angry” is wrong. There’s truth to it – but also a self-reinforcing loop of hostility.
ETA: and I agree with what FlipYrWhig just said. Confrontation is important, but don’t pretend that’s not what it is.
The Blog Dahlia
@FlipYrWhig:
This, unfortunately, is true of a lot of people. Self-righteousness is not activism, nor is it an acceptable substitute.
Linnaeus
@FlipYrWhig:
Conflict and conversation are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
And someone who may want to confront me about why she or he thinks what I’ve said is wrong may be doing so because they’ve seen too much of “well, my intentions were good, so it’s up to you to make me feel better about that.”
Are there better and worse ways to go about these conversations? I think so. But that doesn’t relieve me of the burden of trying to understand why someone might confront me the way they do because of my own intentions.
WaterGirl
@lol: I grew up saying “gipped” – I had never seen it in writing until this thread – and I had absolutely no idea that its origin was related to gypsies and therefore could be seen as a slur.
How can a person possibly know? “jewed” is a different story because it’s obvious.
Bonnie
I think there is a back story that none of us are aware of–or if we were aware of it, we have forgotten. I think it is based on the time when Sony had all its emails hacked. Some emails were found from top Sony bigwigs that stated that Meryl Streep should never get the same fee as Robert de Niro. The essence of the conversations was that no actress is equal to any actor regarding salary. But, I could be wrong. It was obscured in the amount of stuff that was being leaked. It was just something I found interesting as I am sure Meryl Streep found it interesting, too. I cannot supply links because my whole month of January was spent trying to save the life of my beloved kitty, Mazurka. She was put to sleep on Groundhog Day; and, I am still very sad.
FlipYrWhig
@Linnaeus: Me, I give a lot of leeway to good intentions no matter how sloppily they’re executed. Then again, I’m a white dude, so no one tries very hard to silence me.
jl
@FlipYrWhig:
” It’s a weird statement to turn into an act of aggression that demands retaliation in kind. ”
I’m a white guy, so maybe shouldn’t have stayed completely out of the conversation. But some comments about ‘here goes that wild lefty PC stuff again’ dragged me in.
I can see how her statements would cause some hurt feelings. To my ear, in her remarks back stage she made an implicit and odd contrast between women and people of color (as if half of the latter are not women?). Also some comments that indicated a kind of grievance that other groups had gotten resources focused in their causes and made progress that women had not, which I also found odd, and not that accurate (there was an attempt at an equal rights amendment, after all).
I think you are correct,confrontation should be called confrontation. Some of it is a confrontational conversation. If people feel aggrieved and are pissed and they express it, it is better to work it out in open. The feelings of grievance and hurt are not going to just go away magically if somehow you could get people to just be quiet.
I still think how liberals and lefties handle it is better than alternatives we see, including reactionaries in the U.S.
satby
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: oh thank you. I was beginning to think I was the only one who interpreted it that way.
cokane
@Another Holocene Human: i already dealt with this point in my original post. your strawmanning shows you are clearly only interested in shaming other liberals. which kind of proves my original point about the current-day focus of self-styled liberal activists. slacktivists like you and imani arent really doing anything constructive
satby
@Sophie: and I agree here too.
Monala
Relevant Twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/andreagrimes/status/570682522704719872
Monala
And the Twitter discussion links to this article about voting demographics for Wendy Davis: http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/11/05/white-women-lets-get-shit-together/
David Koch
Shameful.
Patricia Arquette’s inflammatory statement was intentionally made to distract people away from Greenwald and to cover up for Obomber.
Fine Swine
Jesus Facepalming Christ, people. She’s an ACTRESS, making statements in the heat of an emotional and stressful moment. She’s not an academic versed in the most up-to-date inclusive language (FWIW, I’d never heard of “intersectionality” either, although I tend to dismiss the academic jargon as bullshit, even in my own field). She tried to bring attention to something we all think is a problem, but perhaps didn’t do it in the most artful possible manner. Life will continue.
Linnaeus
@FlipYrWhig:
So do I. And, like you, I’m a white guy, so I have the luxury or (dare I say it?) the privilege of being able to do so as you rightly point out.
I should say that I’m not even necessarily agreeing with Arquette’s critics (or at least not all of them). I haven’t seen all of the reactions to her and maybe some of them were over the top. But one reason I linked upthread Imani Gandy’s piece on this is because I take seriously what she says on these topics and I think that she is, despite her moniker, one of the least angry “angry” people I’ve read when it comes to some very fraught issues of race and gender. I thought it was a good thing to read for those who might be inclined to reflexively eye-roll the whole brouhaha.
I think some back and forth on this stuff is, in general, a healthy thing, even if means things get messy from time to time. And I have no problem talking about when things get too messy. That’s part of being in a coalition (as Bernice Johnson Reagon might say) and I don’t see it as a significant problem. I certainly don’t think that these dustups are “the reason” why progressives don’t win (keeping in mind that sometimes they do) or even a major reason why “they don’t win”.
Cervantes
@Linnaeus:
Could not agree more.
300baud
@John Cole +0:
It may be all you literally said, but it’s not everything your statement meant.
Note your title. By commment 2, somebody thinks this you mean this to be about splitting. Who would you like us to think are the splittists here? I’m guessing it’s not Patricia Arquette.
But by talking only about her intent, you are expclictly not talking about the effect. And then you say, “Let’s move on.” Meaning you believe that her intent is the only material thing. Which it mainly has been to straight white feminists. But given what she said backstage, plenty of people reasonably think that her intent is not the only thing that matters. And by asserting that we move on, it looks a lot like you’re denying that view.
If you want to say nothing on something, say nothing. Otherwise, talk about the whole thing. When you don’t, it’s easy to reinforce the status quo, as you did here.
Plantsmantx
I don’t think she meant to offend, either. I don’t think she gives enough of a shit about the people she was talking about to even consider whether or not they’d be offended.
Omnes Omnibus
@Plantsmantx: Yes, I am sure she doesn’t give two shits about her sister (formerly her brother) Alexis.
Phoebe
@Amir Khalid: Me too. I sympathize with anybody’s desire to not care about some nitpicky dustup over what somebody said, but as a nit-picker I’m also tired of being told I’m caring about the wrong things, or caring too much about the little things. I saw the show, and yeah she meant well, but it hit me like “Enough with the black people” — which is particularly galling in a year when every day brings fresh new evidence of horrible shit I didn’t know about against black people that just dwarf what white women have had to deal with. We got burnt at the stake, sure, a couple of us, but not lynched in the same numbers, I’ll just say. Meh. It also brought to mind the whole “It’s OUR turn!” anger of Hillary Clinton supporters during the 2008 primary. Which was just, yuck. But yes yes yes, she means well, I’m sure, which is exactly why, as Imani points out, she should be happy to hear how her comment came off, because she means well and, I’m sure, cares.
Have I bothered to go find out what her reaction to the reactions has been? No, because I don’t actually care about her feminist evolvings or whatever; I just don’t like being told how to react. I think in this sense J Cole and I are as one.
Plantsmantx
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ok. That possibility isn’t out of the question.
I got more than a whiff of PUMA from her backstage remarks.
Omnes Omnibus
@Plantsmantx: I’ll admit, as a middle aged, straight, white guy, that I didn’t hear anything offensive in her comments. I will also, as a middle aged, straight, white guy, defer to those who did. I, due to my background, probably have a tin ear for this type of thing. OTOH, I tend to believe, given the circumstances of her comments and her family background, that her words came out wrong and that was all. I try to give people who are on my side the benefit of the doubt. YMMV.
Betty Cracker
@mike with a mic:
Say, here’s a thought: Instead of richochetting between poles of disillusionment because fellow voters are assholes, why not evaluate how the actual elected officials of each party discharge their duties and make your mind up based on that? Stuff like which party is more responsible about taxes and spending, which has been more apt to start pointless wars, which is most likely to contribute to or alleviate the sum total of human misery, etc.?
TooManyJens
@Bobby Thomson: Keep in mind that the piece you’re quoting was written, not primarily about Arquette’s remarks, but about the response of (mostly) white feminists to the critique of those remarks. Which has basically consisted of people losing their ever-loving minds and calling anyone who critiqued the remarks (no matter how rationally and calmly) divisive, oversensitive, outrageoholics, the reason the Left never wins, etc.
If there’s ever a time when people of color are allowed to say “that hurt me” to someone on the left without being considered the problem, I frankly haven’t seen it yet.
sharl
@TooManyJens: Very well stated; especially the closing sentence! Between this and the exchange between Linnaeus and FlipYrWhig upthread (ending at #214), it helps bring things into focus pretty well (at least for me!).
On a completely different matter, you (TooManyJens) and any other denizen of central Illinois might be interested in comments 58, 59, 61, & 63 in the next thread.
Hillary Rettig
Bingo.
Cervantes
@sharl:
For me also.
pika
@Linnaeus: Nice Reagon cite! She says: “That’s why we have to have coalitions. Cause I ain’t gonna let you live unless you let me live. Now there’s danger in that, but there’s also the possibility that we can both live–if you can stand it.”
That, along with her statement that if you’re not threatened to your very core you’re not doing coalition, is something John should read.
As usual, though, I am late to the thread because I go to bed very early, and no one will read this :(
TooManyJens
@sharl: Oh, thanks for the heads-up! It would be fun if we got an Illinois meetup together.
@pika: I read it. :)
lol
@WaterGirl:
What you say is “I had no idea that this is a slur. I’m sorry I used it and I’ll refrain from using it again in the future” and not “OMG, get a load of these PC liberals who think gyp is a slur, what morons!”
Chris
@Cervantes:
Yes, and yes. Like you said – everyone does make mistakes (which I would assume is what Michelle Obama did, by the way). But that doesn’t change what the term means, and if a few people get outraged at the racial slur, it’s hardly unreasonable, and the way to react is… basically, what LOL just pointed out above.
Uncle Ebeneezer
Nailed it. Thank you.
To me this is pretty similar to what we saw with #CancelColbert and Charlie Hebdo (the outrage over the fact that anyone would dare to call their work racist/sexist/islamophobic, not the attacks themselves.) In both cases it was mainly PoC complaining and White People responding by telling them they don’t get it and being outraged about it. As Imani noted in this podcast, the freedom to criticize and call out instances where people get something wrong (especially when it relates to the goal of being more sensitive and inclusive to the most marginalized people) is supposed to be a feature not a bug of the Left. It’s essentially our version of peer review for offhand remarks of precisely the type where unexpected biases and simple carelessness are most likely to slip out, and it goes with the territory once a person decides to opine on matters of Social Justice.
Amber
You go off the rails with “meant to offend anyone”. Of course she didn’t mean to offend anyone. This is the canard that individuals pull out all the time and that I often see blasted on this very blog. Intent DOESN’T matter; the result does. This is at the heart of all those non-apologies like “I’m sorry if I offended anyone…” bs. The fact she, Arquette, still doesn’t see what she said was wrong, which means she – and others – are not stepping back, learning from the experience and developing understanding.
Another incident that happened around the Oscars that shows such a difference is Giuliana Rancic and her comments on Zendaya Coleman dreds. Rancic ‘didn’t mean to offend’. What she realizes is that it wasn’t her intent that mattered. This is the response of someone who acknowledges what she did and has shown she is learning form it – http://www.upworthy.com/wait-is-this-real-life-youve-never-heard-a-celebrity-apology-like-this?c=ufb1.
nastybrutishntall
I grew up in the hood. Single mom with mental illness and a drug habit. Always on the verge of homelessness.
I’m white.
Black kids would gang up on me and beat me down, making fun of the stupid white way I talked. Also called me “faggot”, though, to the best of my knowledge, I’m comfortably hetero. In fact, if it weren’t for all the POCs calling me a fag, I probably wouldn’t have ever heard the word.
So should I be offended at Arquette, or at her loudest detractors? I’m having trouble with the progressive centrifuge sorting out the sediment of my privilege. Please help.
lol
How privileged am I? Is there a grand calculus? A formula with a score, so I know how to enter conversations with, say, a middle-class multiracial gay woman, to avoid shout-downs? Because shout-downs happen. I’ve been “white guy who doesn’t know shit” forever, in every feminist and AA studies and semiotics class I attended with rich gay kids, rich black kids, rich women, none of whom what I knew about growing up economically marginal and disadvantaged, about fearing for personal safety on an hourly basis, and I was never allowed to speak much about it. So eventually I avoided these discussions. I agree that the era of white male hegemony should end as quickly as possible. But please forgive me if I think everyone is acting without ego. People defend their turf. People get righteous and don’t listen. People have blogs. People need to get paid y’all.
A pox on all of us. Humans suck.
/kidding
Amber
@Sophie: That’s not inclusive. That is actually exclusive. There aren’t gay women? (they are called lesbians!) There aren’t female women of color? Basically her view is of a white woman and that “all the others” need to fight for her/us (I’m a white woman btw). That’s exclusionary on its face in the fact she completely erases all the women who are not white and straight. As if women of color and gay women somehow have it easier or something when in fact, their intersectionality makes it even harder for them in society to find equality.
Kathleen
You should vote for Bernie because he’s the best candidate, no matter what the rest of them do. Not out of pique, as an affirmative choice.
sharl
@nastybrutishntall: Naw, humans DO suck rather frequently, as individuals and in groups.
I once had a interning summer student who grew up “in the hood” and described getting beat up every day by other kids. He was the son of a German immigrant single mom – divorced from a U.S. serviceman and living in an AA neighborhood (Anacostia, DC), just getting by – and as such, that white kid was “different” in his environment. Sounds like that was your situation.
These exceptional, outside-the-norm situations are vexxing, maybe not unlike those fathers who get royally screwed in child custody proceedings during divorces. Such fathers truly exist, and in absolute numbers, there appear to be a fair number of them. But – contrary to what MRA assholes claim – their numbers are dwarfed by the single mothers who don’t get the child support they need, whether due to bad judicial rulings or inadequate enforcement of a decent ruling.
We’ve been discussing big picture stuff here, i.e., things that are generally true for racial (here especially), social, and economic classes of people. Rules and “social justice” arguments are almost always driven by what is generally true. But for us as individuals living our day-to-day lives, it is always worth remembering that exceptional situations, like yours and my long-ago student Mike, always exist out there. Unfortunately I don’t see how solutions arrived at for general situations can be fashioned for unjust circumstances that are outside the norm. And yea, that sucks… But we as individuals have to pick up the slack in those situations, whether as colleagues, bosses, teachers, etc., and understand the specific circumstances as best we can.
I am curious about your hostile classroom experiences. Was that in elementary and/or high school, or was it post-secondary? [Or all of these?] And was the abuse permitted or facilitated by the instructors? There was discussion here on that sort of thing here recently (29Jan, Betty’s noonish Open Thread), and Linnaeus linked to a rebuttal of something former front pager Freddie de Boer wrote. I don’t know whether that is relevant to all the crap you apparently had to put up with, but in general it seems that something could have been done in those classroom situations. But of course, I don’t know enough to say, nor have the expertise to make such a call. Being in the peanut gallery is easy.
I hope things are much better for you now.
Socrates
Joseph McCarthy is alive and well and living on the political Left.
sharl
@Socrates: I’ll bet you’re also unhappy that those ungrateful coloreds won’t let you say n*gger without complaining about it, while all those hippety-hop rappers can go around saying it freely – and with their pants halfway down their asses!
Ah, where did the Good Ol’ Days* go?
*statement not applicable to those who never really had such a time