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JK Rowling slammed for asking if she can be Black if she likes “Motown & fancy myself in cornrows”
(www.lgbtqnation.com)
this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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I think this up for semantic dispute. While they may not be definitionally racist, they are still partaking in a well known institution of racism. Also, the interpretation of action is more important to determine if something is racist than the person's intent. It doesn't matter if they didn't mean to hurt people's feelings if their actions do in fact cause people to be upset.
I think the issue stems from the fact that black Americans have a fairly unified history of institutional racism that isn't present in something as vague as gender. Have women been historically oppressed in America? Of course, but that discrimination was not measured out consistently throughout different cultural groups.
Rowlings is trying to frame gender identity as something as codified as cultural identity, when that's simply a false conflation. She seems to be crowning herself a representative of all "real" women, as if women throughout history have experienced institutionalized sexism equally.
Imo she is of the same league as "feminist" who fought for suffrage in South Africa in the 30's, the ones who were perfectly happy with black women not being able to vote until the 90's, because they didn't represent the idea of what a woman was to the people in power.
I did specify people, not person. I very much doubt there's going to be several members of the public that would be disturbed by the pony tail scenario.
My point was that the person doing the actions that may be interpreted as racist, aren't the person who gets to decide if their actions were racist or not. That is up to the group of people interpreting the actions.
Also, I don't mention prison at all?
You don't have to have awareness or intent to participate in racism. I don't know why you are interpreting this as if it was a legal issue rather than pertaining to human decency?
If you somehow "accidentally" wore enough makeup to look like you were casted in a minstrel show, I'm sure someone would question your actions. If you somehow actually had no idea about the racism implicit in your actions....once informed, any decent person would change their behavior.
I think you are giving a bit too much benefit of doubt to this idea that it's easy to accidentally get mistaken for a racist.
There's a difference between integrating with a community and claiming that you are a different ethnicity. I don't think that has much to do with cultural appropriation.
I think that's quite pedantic, there are very few countries where racism alone will land you in legal troubles, let alone in jail.
Even if we examine the countries where it is punishable by prison time, I doubt the citizens of those countries would "accidentally" dress in black face, and I doubt you could provide me with one incident of someone ending up in jail for "accidental" racism.
Unquestionably untrue. Legality has no historic basis in morality or ethics, it's simply a means to control/organize social hierarchy.
Your argument is semantic in nature. What's the difference between being a racist and participating in racism? If you are against desegregation because it would negatively your property value, are you a racist? Well what would you typically call someone who is vehemently opposing desegregation?
Because culture and ethnicity is not just about the color of your skin, It's a shared history of lived experiences. Even if you could genetically change the melanin content of your skin, you did not grow up being treated as a Black American, you did not experience the same institutional systemic racism as the minority group you are aping.
Again, this is falsely conflating gender identity with ethnic identity. Women of different cultures have vastly different shared experiences than women of the same culture.
While race is a human construct, so is law, economics, and government. The implementation of these social constructs creates very real shared experiences that bond a community together in a unique way.
More like, you aren't a part of my culture because my culture is in large part a result of systemic abuse over the color of my skin, and you have never shared that experience.
Again, gender is not a culture, it's part of of every culture.
I think defining a culture down to pigmentation while ignoring the hundreds of years of systemic abuse is quite upsetting to most minority groups. It really sounds like youre supplementing your idea of your own ethnic identity onto others. Ethnicity tends to be less important to those whom are a part of the ruling ethnic majority, because you haven't experienced what it's like to be a minority. You don't understand what it's like when your ethnicity is how you are judged.