Skin Tone Markers

I'm a white guy. I've expressed that before (for a certain value of guy). And while I come from an area that's poorer than shit, and I myself am poorer than shit, that doesn't mitigate the privilege society awards to me for being the color that I am.

I've come along way in acknowledging that privilege, but I probably still have miles to go before I sleep. Today, I was reminded of just how far I've come, and just how blind some people are to the concept of privilege (and how insidious racism actually is capable of being). I was reading this narrative, and there was a little part of it that struck me:

Decades ago, in graduate school, a professor and I chatted as we prepared for a holiday party in the English department. I made decorations, digging around in a box that was loaded with miscellaneous art supplies – colored pencils, dried out markers, and broken old crayons 

“Nice crayon,” my professor said as I colored a poster.
“What?”
“What color is it?”
I turned the crayon around in my hand and read: “Flesh.”
“Got a problem with that?”
I was stumped. “With what?”
“Miss Grant, I think you’ve had just about enough gender studies courses,” he said. “How about giving a little more thought to race?”

I am an amateur artist. I used to have a lot more artistic talent than I do today; I've squandered it, but drawing is still something that I occasionally do for fun. I was drawing before I was writing; I stopped drawing sometime in early college, which was about the time that I started to pick up in my writing. I traded one talent for another, you might say. Today, a lot of my art is done in Daz Studio, and with 3d rendering. 3d rendering, with some help from photoshop, has its advantages. At the same time, though, I'm restricted in what I can and can't do (because I can't design my own models, and the selection of primitives, or basic shapes, isn't very broad) in a way that I'm not when I draw.

I still have a pile of primsacolor markers. I actually have several boxes of them; I still use them. I love primsacolor; they're my favorite type of marker, because they make smooth strokes and I can "layer" progressively darker colors, to create the illusion of shadow and depth in a picture. If you've followed that link, you probably see the prismacolor markers are expensive; one marker sells for 3 dollars. I probably have over 200 dollars worth of markers that I've collected over 5 or 6 yeas of art work, including Christmas gifts. Eventually, it just got too expensive. That's another reason I don't have many hobbies other than writing anymore: writing is free. Everything else costs money I don't have, and time I can't waste.

Reading the narrative above reminded me of a time when I was relatively young - I want to say this happened about 6 or 7 years ago, maybe even 8. I was sitting in my mom's room, and I was organizing the markers according to color type (so, these were greens, these were oranges, these were reds, etc). I had them all nicely organized, and I was going through the various color groups with my mom. I even had a group I called "skin tones." Unfortunately, that "skin tones" group was a rather restricted group - just like the "flesh" crayon in the narrative above, my "skin tones" were all various shades of pale. Blondwood (not peach; prismacolor peach is a lighter shade of this very vivid pink and only works if you're coloring the skin on a pig), Tan, Creme, Brick Beige; the one thing they all had in common is that they were all pale (with, as the case with some, yellow underscoring them). Browns had their own category, which I called "earth tones". 

I did not even register that. I just didn't. I erased an entire group of people and replaced them with dirt.

I recognize it today. I no longer separate my markers like that. I don't have a "skin tone" category, since I can use just about any marker ranging from creme to my dark browns* to represent skin tones (if I did break it up properly, that category would be about 75% of my maker total). I don't even break them up; they're all lumped in two boxes sitting in the corner of my room, but when I did after that, they were done strictly by color: blues, oranges, yellows (which included blondwood, creme, and brick beige), browns, blacks, whites, grays, reds (which included the umbers) and so on and so forth.

It took my mom pointing it out to me that how I was dividing the markers back then was racist. And the irony of that is my mom is not an egalitarian; she will admit she is a racist individual who does not like Black people**. It's never been very prominent, and I've only seen it on display once or twice. So I'm still not entirely sure, reflecting back on that story, how it turned out the way it did, and why, of all people, she was the one to point that out.

But yes, this is what people mean when they say you have privilege. It was nothing malicious on my part. It was not me intending to erase an entire population, completely and utterly, and prioritize "Earth colors" over them (which is stupid in retrospect; "earth colors" are everything from brown to blue, with green, orange, yellow, and everything else thrown in the mix). It wasn't me intentionally expressing some unconscious dislike for individuals with dark skin (which include more than just Africans; this includes Dravidians, some Pacific Islanders, Australian Natives, and some Southeast Asian populations, among others).

It was ignorance. That's all it was. And it doesn't excuse it at all; but it's like any mistake. You pick up and you learn from it. And that's what I did, and that's what I'm still doing.

* Dark brown is as dark as I can get when I'm using markers. If I wanted to create a darker skin tone (I know they exist) then I would do something like "Dark brown, dark umber, black", but I'd never use black as a solid, base color for a picture (because I rely on going from "light to dark" to create the illusion of depth, and there's not many colors darker than black. Also because I ink my pictures using black ink, which complicates it just a touch).

** My mom, and a few people that I know, makes a distinction between "good" black people and "bad" black people. It's a distinction that, growing up, I never understood. I point it out every time it gets brought up: If they're lazy good for nothings, why not just call them lazy good for nothings, since that's what we call whites who are like that (and don't get me started on passing judgement on people like that; until you understand their circumstances, you cannot morally make these judgement calls about people), instead of calling them niggers? And guess what? They don't have an answer, and it's because they don't know why, other than it being blind habit.

Maybe I'm the reverse. Rather than blaming the poor black people for the collapse of my neighborhood, and the collapse of my city, I'm more apt to blame the rich white people, since they're the ones with the money, the power, and the capability to come in and help us fix it - but they actively chose not to, and instead, continue to exploit poor people, black, white, Asian, Native, and any other group. Somehow, I feel the reverse is less acceptable socially, even though it's definitely the more moral of the two. And it's definitely not, like I heard some brain-dead libertarian tell me, "economic discrimination" because they have more money. Nobody chose to be black. You chose to be rich. You have all of the responsibility that comes along with it; the first thing Spiderman teaches is us that with great power comes great responsibility; money is power in this society. You don't want that responsibility? Give up the power, and the money with it. Stop being rich. It's a lot easier to stop being rich than it is to stop being black.

The TRUE Middle Class Scored a Victory In Wiscousin...

Unfortunately, the actual middle class just got fucked over something fierce. It's like how anything good for TRUE America, the REAL America, is disastrous for the physical, corporeal United States (I should start up a corporation and trademark "True America/n", "Real America/n", and "True Middle Class" so I can laugh when I send cease and desist orders for trademark violations to the stupid people who run around saying this garbage).

I aimed to rant about how frustrating this thing is; I whip-lashed today between "well they deserve it for voting him in" and "how do we know this wasn't a case of fraud? In the lead up to the election there were all sorts of rumors of freelance right wingers out in the field lying about who could and couldn't sign the petition, or destroying petitions, of stuff along those lines - there was an entire FB page devoted to it. How do we know these people not only stopped there (providing they started at all)? How do we know they didn't fuck with the votes, too? And more importantly, isn't it really sad it's even gotten to that point?" I suppose as your country spirals down the toilet to 3rd world status, rigging elections becomes a natural thing, and I'm just jumping the gun (maybe).

I'm friends on FB with a group called "Being Liberal". You can gasp in awe now; I know that comes as a total surprise. Now that we're done, I occasionally get updates on my news feed from them. One of them was a letter that family members of a fellow friend received; the back story behind it is that they live in West Bend, WS., and they got this letter in their mail box today:

Because Being Poor wasn't Humiliating Enough

The United States must have some kind of envy towards poor people. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but there's just something about being poor that means you become the envy of the middle class. Everyone goes out of their way to talk about multitude of different ways that they want to make your life miserable, and this fellow from The Daily Caller is no exception.

I'm not all that familiar with the Daily Caller, but because they let a publication like this on their webpage, I'm going to assume that they have a mild right-wing bias. Lately, it seems like we're seeing a furious attempt to reinstate the power of masculine authority - putting the father in the Fatherland, as it were. Attacks on POCs, attacks on trans and gays, attacks on women's rights, xenophobia, a strong nationalistic bend with a worship of men who were nothing like the people being worshiped, the merging of corporate interests and "heroic capitalism" with the "grassroots" movement... why, if I didn't know any better, I'd suggest that these folks were fascist. But they're not, clearly, because they say they're not. And that's all that matters, because you'll be damned before you can convince them that they're wrong about the historical truth about the positions that they hold.

I digress. This guy from the Daily Caller is a piece of work. He believes that poor people who have to survive on government assistance - who don't have it hard enough as is - should be punished even more. They should have a scarlet "P" stamped on their forehead. It's their fault for being Black Latino poor (don't you dare tell me that's what I'm thinking when I say "poor", you racist liberal). The Right has turned out a parade of monstrous, sociopathic clowns over the last 10 or so years - so much so that the Joker would feel right at home, if he hadn't made it clear that he was an "American villain" when he refused to join forces with the Red Skull. Brion McClanahan is little different, with the exception of the fact that he'd readily jump at a deal to work with the Red Skull.

When Your Government Sells You Out...

What happens when the law becomes illegal? When the government, in an act that can only be described as a proto-fascist power-grab, way over steps it's bounds and, as an end result, threatens to imprison anyone, indefinitely?

The United States is the proto-typical police state. I know there's a lot of readers out there in the developing world who scoff at that, but the U.S. has always been this way, since it's very founding. Our police have been militarizing since the birth of the so-called "War on Drugs" - we have an almost military-like police, if not a military police system in place, accountable only to it's own and nobody else. The legal system is turning from a legal system against people because of their skin color to against people because of their economic class. On top of all this, theofascists have been trying since the beginning of the Civil War and even earlier to inject their pitiful little god into the government.

Well, today, the U.S. Senate sold us out.

An amendment that would limit military detentions to people captured overseas failed on Thursday afternoon. The Senate soundly defeated a measure to strip out all the detention provisions on Tuesday.

So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.
It would be one thing if the military was clamoring for the authority to become the nation’s jailer. But to the contrary: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opposes the maneuver. So does CIA Director David Petraeus, who usually commands deference from senators in both parties. Pretty much every security official has lined up against the Senate detention provisions, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who worry that they’ll get in the way of FBI investigations of domestic terrorists.

The Word Game

Redefining words is fun.

You know what's even more fun that redefining words?

Changing or restricting their meaning so you can use them to silence opposition.

Ur-Fascism: 28 Signs, 2 Essays

And it goes without saying that the Untied States pegs all 28 of them.

Cultures and Costumes

As usually, I'm probably one of the last to pick this up, but that's alright. I'm not trying to win first place - I'm not trying to win much of anything here. This is just my personal little area to sound off on what I feel is wrong, right, or otherwise sideways with the world we live in.

Ever since I've become aware of it (a while back; becoming atheist first alerted me to Christian privilege, having a few gay friends and being genderqueer myself alerted me to cisgender, straight, and indirectly, male privilege, and having explored what other people feel based on skin color by reading their blogs and through my own character in a novel I'm working on has alerted me to White privilege. Being mentally ill and unashamed of it has alerted me to neurotypical privilege. If you name a way to segment a population, there's a privilege for that. The rest fell into place from there), nothing has been more irritating to me than watching someone with no clue about their privilege in society run off at the mouth about it.

I've often said it before. I love the privilege I get for being male, cisgendered (until I open my mouth), believer (until I open my mouth), straight, and White. I love it so much I want to share it with as many people as I can, because they deserve it too. That's what equality is about; it's me giving you what's awarded to me while I keep it, so we can be on an even keel. We're a long way from there, but inch by painful inch, we make progress.

So when I ran across this - "We're a culture, not a costume", I couldn't help but support it.

And then I read the comment thread. By this time, you'd think I would know better, but still...

Not Your Father's 99%

The Occupy Wall Street movement is a legitimate, grass roots organization. You can tell because of the high level of initial disorganization. This blog supports the Occupy Wall Street movement, not just because it's author is one of the 99%, but because solidarity is a necessity in this world, when the predatory upper class is constantly looking for a means to hold down the lower class.

Marxist theory is probably the best way to explain how this works. See, in the Marxist view of history, there are three classes: the poor, the middle, and the wealthy. Contrary to popular belief, the wealthy are not the bourgeois. That's a title reserved for the middle class - that is, the shop owners, the employers, etc. According to Marxism, history is nothing but one long struggle between the ruling classes (the bourgeois, who answer to the wealthy) and the proletariat, or the poor people who are exploited by both the bourgeois and the wealthy, repeatedly. Different individuals have taken this in different directions, although I find that Lenin was amazingly accurate in his predictions of what would happen when commodities find themselves controlled by one group of people, or when banks become private enterprises (read his essay, On Imperialism, for a more thorough view.)

I'm not going to spend to much time on Lenin or Marx. I wanted to bring them up because the current OWS movement highlights the ongoing division of the rich verses the poor that's been happening ever since humans developed an economy for their society (and even before that; the god/desses only spoke to certain people, and faith is a currency all it's own, more potent than any paper bill or gold coin minted in history). This is the same vein as the Bonus Army or the Wobblies; it hasn't become the Peasant Revolution of the 1380s yet, and with any luck, it won't morph into a full blown French Revolution (despite what I've heard people say, I don't think it'll go that far. I doubt that we'll see a Lenin-style October Revolution. But if it does, dibs on manning the guillotine. I'd rather be behind it than under it.)

Instead, I found one of those typical responses that pissed me off, so I'm going to look at that. I just wanted to make it very plan and very clear that, as a student of Marx and Lenin, I understand how class warfare works, how it's shaped the history of humanity, and how I'm not scared to admit that I've read either man (dismissals of my arguments on their faces because of who I'm influenced by will be laughed at and pitched aside with the other ad hominem garbage. The most vocal critics of Marx and Lenin don't know a thing about either man or what they said to begin with, and usually resort to making things up anyway.)

So, let's take a look at this thing that's gotten under my skin.

Right-Wing Pundits Are Wrong About Everything (Example #232,120,100)

For those not caught up to speed with what's happening in London, there's a series of riots that have been happening (or perhaps it's one continuous riot) over the last five days or so. While the reasons are complex, and I don't have a full grasp on British politics, I can sum it up the best I know how as it follows: London is burning, some people have been hurt, the cause is austerity measures (read: open economic warfare on the poor), David Cameron reminds me of Adam Susan from V for Vendetta, and the Right-wing Media in America is using it as yet another chance to make themselves look like fools. While I can't speak for the full depth of British Politics, the BBC article I linked to above is very in depth on the matter. I'll trust the BBC before I trust any American News Outlet any day of the week.

While I can't dissect the full reasons behind the riots, due to my inexperience with the British political system and the danger inherent in watering it down or simplifying the causes, what I can do is analyze the impact that the riots have had on the political right in this country (this country being the U.S.) This article by the Guardian (another news outlet I'd trust before I trust any American media source, but not before the BBC) does a good job of recording the Right-wing noise-machine's reaction in this country to the riots, for me to pull apart and mock viciously. So, here we go.

Don't Call It a Recession - We've Been Here All Along

Optimism is down.

Last month, in the middle of the debt ceiling brouhaha, some canny trader got word from inside of Washington that the debt deal was not going to be all it was cracked up to be and, with a 10-to-1 return ratio slapped down a 1 billion $U.S. bet - against the credit rating of the United States. Shame nobody knows who it is, because they slapped all the money down on the futures market, when nobody was looking.

Oh, yes, the credit rating.

For the first time in the history of credit ratings, the United States has lost it's AAA credit rating. As of Friday, August 5, the Standard & Poor's downgraded the perfect credit rating of U.S. Treasury Bonds from AAA to AA+.

Let Me Take A Look In My Crystal Ball...

Ah, yes. The future. That wonderful time that I'm sure will be pleasant. Eventually. However, it seems to me that there is a very vocal segment of the American population that doesn't want a future. And these people have gotten into power, and they're making policies in a not-so-veiled and not-really-well-though-out attempt to stop it. So, following the whole economic crisis we had this past weekend, I've been prompted to take a step back and look at the direction we're heading. Keep in mind, some of this stuff I've been predicting now since the early part of the century (2004/6 at least.) I predicted the rise of something similar to the Tea Party. I know it has no bearing now, because I have no proof, but let met make a similar set of predictions/promises based on what's happening now. Let me look into my crystal ball at the future, and show you what I see. And trust me. It's not pleasant.

Pardon Me While My Anti-Americanism Shows

There's something deliciously comical about the whole debt-ceiling debacle. It's like watching a puppet master who's two sizes smaller than the puppet he's controlling hold an entire nation at gunpoint by putting  gun to his own head.

This is what happens when you perpetuate lies. This is what happens when you abandon anything remotely resembling reason to a small and vocal ~20-25% of the population who better serve society locked away in an mental asylum than electing leaders. Somehow, this small, 20-25% of the population managed to get their hands in situation far, far larger than anything they could ever wrap their childish, n00bish heads around. Boehner has somehow become the adult, and he's trying corral a group of smug, self-righteous children who believe that they're right and are utterly impervious to little things like "truth" and "reality."

Marxisocialcommienaziism

The last post got me thinking about class antagonism. I didn't touch too long on it because I wanted to get into taking apart the word "militant" and the projection associated with it, but now that I've got some more time, I'm going to look into this class antagonism more.

The funny thing about living in America today is how many people are willing to open their mouth and spout off about stuff that they don't have the first clue about, like their opinion is somehow made fact because they wrote it (in crayon, misspelled) on a sign. Or if you clap your hands, you too can indeed make the red ones go faster. I call this Grot Physics. They live, eat, and breath thought-terminating cliches with such elegance, and practice blackwhite like all doubleplusgood proles, Big Brother would be proud of them. And, of course, there's the weapon's grade projection that goes along with that, which probably makes it easier for them.

But, upon reflecting, one thing becomes clear. Not only are these people not the sharpest tool in the shed, but they're also poor. When they open their mouth screaming about socialism, using it like a child does a "naughty word", screaming about unions, screaming about public education, and screaming about X, Y, and Z (the letters as variables, not the French agents), what they're really doing is hurting themselves. As a liberal, this has given me pause many of times. You want to reach out and get through to them - preferably with a heavy iron object. "I'm trying to help you, stupid!" is the common thought that goes through my mind. And it's not like they don't want to be helped; oh goodness no. The problem is that they're already think they're being helped. And that's a big problem.

Let's turn back the clock for a minute. During the days leading up to the American War of Secession (it's not a civil war, so let's stop referring to it as one, shall we?), escaped slaves finding their way on the underground railroad was a common thing. They would escape from their rich owner's plantations and either find freedom up in Canada or stay in the North. Naturally, this hurt the plantation owners, who were loosing their "property". Which, in most cases, meant they wanted it back. So who did they send to get it back?

They gathered together gangs of poor, White southerners and told them "go get these slaves back." And those poor, White southerners did.

Let's take a look at this dynamic for a minute. You have, on one end, the rich southern plantation owner. He's rich, and he has land, and he's living the high life with all his slaves. On the other end, you have the slaves themselves, who occupy a low status in society, and you have the poor Whites, who are arguably just a touch more free than the slaves are. Now, obviously those poor Whites resented being poor. I know I resent being poor. They wanted a piece of the pie. Modern Conservatives call this "the politics of envy," with the notion that you're just better off being poor or being a slave. And those rich White plantation owners probably weren't keen on giving them that slice of pie. So what's the logical thing here to do? There's a lot more of us, if you count those Black slaves, than there are of those rich White plantation owners. Solidarity, brother! You may be Black and I may think you're the cursed Child of Ham, but you know what? It only makes sense here for me to ally with you to get things done.

And the plantation owners realized that. So they when the slaves started escaping (they'd been escaping from the beginning), those wealthy plantation owners went to those poor Whites and told those poor Whites,"go get my slaves back." There's a power dynamic at work there: those poor Whites are suddenly given more power than the Black slaves had. If they started working with those Black slaves, that power dynamic would go away. Thus, any solidarity that might have existed (providing one was able to ignore all of the other factors at play) was completely shot. And the rich heaved a sigh of relief.

Hit the fast froward button to the present: This same dynamic is at work today. Remember how I said that the teabaggers and the conservatives already think they're being helped, when it's clear to anyone they're not? That's because the rich in this nation - the corporations, the millionaire bankers, the political leaders - have convinced them that they don't need that help, in much the same way that the wealthy plantation owners convinced the poor Whites that they had power: focus on an imaginary enemy. Usually, this enemy is what's best for you in the long run, because what's good for you as a poor person in the long run is bad for me as a rich person in the short run. Thus, things like socialism, unions, and public services become the villains, even though they're designed to help people like the very same individuals who are protesting it. It's the poor being used by the rich to keep the poor poor. If you look hard enough, you'll find this same sort of thing repeated throughout history time and again: the elites, whether they be priests, kings, barons, dukes, financiers, industrial barons or billionaires, have always managed to take a segment of the poor - usually the lower middle class, but also the functional middle class if times are tough enough - and convince them that anything designed to help them (like nationalized healthcare) will somehow hurt them in the long run.

Do you agree with me on this? If you do, congratulations, you're a proponent of Marxist theory. And now you, unlike those poor-to-middle class Whites who are being rallied by the wealthy, actually know what the term means. Of course, education is the first key to combating this; if people knew, if they were learned in these subject matters, they would see. But they're not. And the elites with the power know that, and as long as they can keep these people uneducated and poor, they can keep these people on their side, acting against their own best interests.

Militantly anti-Cheese

While I have yet to read the article in full, this article from the Guardian about Michael Grove's calling the teacher's unions in Great Britain militant resonates with me. I'm not British, I'm American, but I'm always interested in seeing what's happening in other countries around the world. After all, no man is an island unto himself, no matter how hard Howard Roark bitches otherwise or how desperate Galt is to remove himself from society. The same is true for countries as well - humans form a loose super-organism; the net of humanity is interwoven. What affects one of us will affect all of us.

I'm not going to comment on the article; I'm just going to comment on the overview of it. I come from a very strong union city, and I'm very pro-union. If that surprises you, slap yourself. You're reading the wrong blog. Unions are a basic embodiment of this thing called "solidarity" - that is, we're never stronger than when we're together, and that net of humanity, the great human super-organism, is never stronger than when it's united in solidarity. When you take care of your neighbor, you take care of yourself. History is full of class-antagonism; the poor have been continually exploited by the rich and the wealth, and unions are just one way that we can twist the system in our favor. After all, there's a lot more of us on the low end than there are of them on the high end; enough to tip the scales in our favor.

But this post isn't really about the unions. The heart of what I want to talk about is that word: militant.

Apparently, Mr. Gove has been taking lessons from the Right here in America. As a politician, they select their words carefully, and "militant" is one of those words that get used whenever you want to apply a negative connotation to something: militant gun-nuts, militant Christians, militant Pro-Lifers - see how easy that is? Unfortunately, like all polispeak, the actual meaning of the word itself is lost to the political connotation it carries. A "militant" is a person who takes up arms and actually fights for something. The definition itself is very neutral, which is as it should be. But the connotation is not, and there's a reason why Mr. Gove, like so many right-wingers here in the United States, chose that word to describe the teachers' unions for walking out: he's backed in a corner, and he's attempting to appeal to populism. This word gets used a lot by the political right: militant gay-rights activists, militant abortionists, militant liberals, militant this, militant that; anything I disagree with becomes "militant", because it's a thought terminating cliche that carries a few metric yottagrams of negative connotation along with it. It's like "patriotism" and "freedom" - they way they use the words in almost everything they do, you'd think they were compensating. But they aren't - what they're doing is a psychological defense mechanism called "projection" - they're the militants - militantly anti-union, militantly anti-choice, militantly anti-freedom, anti-poor, anti-human - but because they can't bring themselves to admit that, they paint their opposition with the term to make themselves feel better. "We're not militants," they say, "it's those other people who are militants."

Of course, I'm probably giving them too much credit. Their leaders and puppet masters are certainly thinking like this; they've got their base wrapped around their finger if they're insane enough. But it's the appeal to authority and the use of thought terminating cliches that keep their base from thinking at all: whenever you encounter someone claiming that the unions are "militant", or anyone is "militant", ask them "militant in what way?" Odds are, they're just parroting a claim and they'll try and dodge the question, like good puppets do.