Truly Outrageous

Just in case you don’t get that joke, you can check the video and Rich’s expert analysis over at fourfour.

In the breaking news category, I feel I should mention Bush’s vow to veto hate crimes legislation just passed by the House and under consideration by the Senate. Why? Because it’s ‘unnecessary and constitutionally questionable’, of course. According to who? The religious right, of course. I tell you what, I’m doing shots in George Orwell’s honor tonight, because dude must be rolling in his grave the way these idiots are invoking 1984 and claiming that ‘expressing your opinion’ (that you are a racist, sexist motherfucker) will get you arrested. Considering the higher profile of police brutality this week, that’s pretty despicable. Luckily Rachel explains it in nice, plain language for them.

Hate crimes legislation does not curtail freedom of speech, so if the conservative Christian activists want to have public protests denigrating women, gays, lesbians, and transgender people, they can do so. However, if they commit a crime in the process of their “protest” and that crime is motivated by bigotry, they could get a harsher sentence. But they have to commit a crime. So they can say God hates women and gays all day long, but if they decide to go and beat up a women/gay man/lesbian/transgender person while yelling I hate bitches, fags, and dykes. The prosecutor will now have the option to take on a hate crimes charge to the assault.

Looking at the structural, and individual, implications of this deeply rooted, ‘constitutionally protected’ hatred, Amp has a pretty intriguing post up on August Wilson’s play Fences. The play, and Amp’s reflections on it, explore how racism complicates masculinity, something I didn’t really get to address in my recent post.

Fences is also a story about how masculinity, and the overlap between masculinity and racism, can warp people. Troy is consumed by his own need to “be a man,” and if at all possible to be the biggest man. He tells extravagant stories in which he wrestles Death to a standstill; his best friend falls comfortably into what can only be described as a sidekick role; his wife describes him as filling a house merely by walking into it.4

Nevertheless, Troy’s principle route to establishing and maintaining his manhood — a legendary career as a baseball slugger — was closed off to him by racism. His second route to manhood, being a dutiful husband and provider, is something he’s second-rate at; he gets by hauling white people’s garbage, but he was only able to buy a house by taking, or perhaps stealing, money from his mentally disabled brother. And Troy’s third route to manhood — a long-time adulterous relationship — ends up destroying his claim to being a good husband and father.

Amp notes that he was unable to find much discussion in essays and reviews of the play addressing the problematic masculinity of its protagonist; I’d like to add that I hope to see more discussions of the topic, and maybe contribute a bit more myself.

The topic I’ve been talking about most recently — activism in daily life — is also under discussion elsewhere in the blogosphere. Kugelmass has a great post tackling theoretical engagement with the term ‘radical’ and its drawbacks — you absolutely should read it, and check out the comment thread. One point he raises that think deserves more attention is the question of who ‘radical’ really applies to these days:

Our lives are already striated by real, irreversible, involuntary change. Calling something like the Internet “radical” is pointless, because the word is actually inadequate. Radicalism is finally the rhetoric of defeat; ultimately, the entities that want the most change, the fastest, are corporations. I’ve seen a corporation turn an entire forest into a field of pampas grass in the space of a month; I’ve seen a handful of them re-form the whole business district of a town in a year. Corporations uproot populations and “create jobs” to take the place of native economies. They introduce new products, new technologies, new additives, new fertilizers, new markets, new kinds of international politics. An excess of history makes a corporation suffer. It can’t afford old employees, outmoded practices, waterlogged bureaucracies, or obsolete equipment.

Ilyka, meanwhile, talks about the turn-offs that come with activism for some progressives. She brings up three good points, but I’d like to focus on her response to the first, as it’s the one I’ve been thinking about: People feel they cannot contribute effectively to solving the problem. Ilyka discusses the kind of liberal-guilt approach to spurring action, concluding (naturally) that guilt-trips are not a good strategy for long-term mobilization, which I of course agree with. But somehow this derails into the idea that altruism is a myth.

People aren’t altruists by nature and, bad news here, they’re never going to be. You can guilt ‘em temporarily; you can nag one or two suckers into linking your small-but-deserving blog on their blogrolls. But most people want to own their efforts and they want to be rewarded for those efforts because they earned them, not because someone inspired them with the importance of blah-blah-community.

I’m no fan of guilt-trips, but I have to disagree with this, because I think community is not just a concept to frame above our beds, it’s something tangible and, also, very fluid. Look how passionate disagreements become on blogs, for example (escalating to Wars, even!) — because people are invested in the communities they participate in and depend on. Ilyka herself acknowledges this in mentioning that commenters at Pandagon are what got her thinking about this topic. Even acknowledging the small number who would show up and say, ‘Why are you whining about this?’, or something to that affect, she can’t ignore them:

But I think from reading some of these angry comments–you know, it’s true: You learn as much from your critics as your fans. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to kick the critics in the pants on a daily basis, but I have to grudgingly acknowledge that they serve a good purpose sometimes.

I also think that a movement, a community, a group or friends, whatever, does acknowledge and reward its members. Take the Carnival of Feminists for example, which moves sites every edition and does a terrific job of cataloguing the current moods and concerns of the feminist blogging community (or at least, more and more, a representational sample). I think appealing to the social nature of people doesn’t have to be about guilt or ‘moral duty’; social justice is, for me, just as much about making my life better as anyone else’s.

Which is why, ultimately, I value Ilyka’s post and her taking this on — I’m not interested in simple answers. Right now, I’m making plans, and I’m excited about this discussion and the places it can go, on- and offline.

Have a great weekend!