A couple of days ago, nubian posted about some drive-by ignorance:
white person: i have a question. since you are darker (she grabs my arm to demonstrate that i am darker than her–as if had forgotten that i was black), do you get hotter? i mean, you know how if you wear black, you retain more heat.
(i stand there in amazement after listening to this woman “other” me into some kind of sub-human anamoly, whose body functions automatically differently than whites, and in such a negative way–trying not to go into angry black woman mode and really understand her ignorance, i continue the conversation).
me: um, i don’t know.
white person: well, it would make sense that you do. since, black clothing makes people hotter, it would make sense that black skin makes you hotter. i mean, don’t you think it makes sense?(at this point, i am ready to punch her in the face and ride away on my schwinn, “accidently” running over her in the process–but yet i still stay and try to understand her ignorance–but i start to fumble over my words cuz i really don’t know how to respond to this racist theory being told to me right in my damn face. does she not realize that skin and clothing are two completely different things?).
Maybe you were never this stupid, maybe you have been this stupid, maybe you are still this stupid.
I’ve been thinking, without much success, about how to discuss the larger question people are responding to, which is not, “Was this person not very stupid?” but, “What’s so bad about these kinds of questions? It’s not like she meant to hurt nubian’s feelings. She was just curious.” In the meantime, two threads have been created, and the people on them probably have better answers than I do. But here goes:
Amanda at Pandagon picked up on one problem, which is that this white person assumed that nubian knew what it was like to be white. I think that even if this question had been asked in some way that covered only nubian’s subjective experience, it would still be rude.
It’s hard to order thoughts about why it’s so rude, because irritation gets in the way, and because there will be three responses very quickly, to wit: “But sometimes people really do need to know!” “I don’t mind doing it,” and “Suck it up, sweetie, such is life.”
There is a point at which each person must take responsibility for their ignorance. While education may well be the problem of the non-privileged group, it is not their responsibility. They have to carry that burden because people like this woman are too busy making asses of themselves to do for themselves. They don’t care enough to know how ridiculous they seem. They don’t have to, because their ignorance doesn’t really hinder them in any way. At that point, malice doesn’t really matter. Neglect works just fine. Nubian is right to point out the mindset involved in going up to a black acquaintance and asking her if she gets warmer with that skin of hers. If she really needs to know, she has plenty of other ways to find out.
These kinds of questions also carry an insidious belief about difference. When someone asks, “But, how do lesbians have sex?”–an example that has cropped up on both threads–the questioner doesn’t want to know whether or not they do it standing up. The questioner assumes that the known difference implies a wholly different way of relating–in fact, that the potential for romantic intimacy is scarce or absent altogether. The line of questioning that concludes with, “Doesn’t that make sense?” assumes things that are based on the belief that her body is different enough from a white woman’s body as to be almost a different species. Despite knowing that people with darker skin live all over the planet and don’t seem to be dying of heatstroke in droves because of it, the fact that nubian is a person of color makes it impossible for this woman to think clearly about her life.
Many people in this lifelong situation–nubian included, probably–have made a considered compromise between attacking this kind of ignorance and attacking the privilege that permits it. Such is life, and no one knows that better than someone who posts on her blog about fielding stupid questions from random strangers. Everyone has to answer that question in his, her, or hir own way. “I don’t mind,” “I’ve never been offended,” are non-answers. There is no universal standard on when the interrogee is justified in snapping someone’s head off, particularly one that potential interrogators can come up with. It’s all an imposition.
So, I grew up in Idaho. There was one Black family in the town I grew up in, and I only knew their son obliquely. I think we had a few classes together. Consequently (I still live in Idaho), I have had very little experience with African-Americans. It hasn’t so much been economic segregation that’s kept me away — it’s the vast white sea of the midwest, which has really isolated me.
Consequently, I’m tremendously nervous around most people of color: not for “traditional” racist reasons, like fear of crime, but my own fear of my own behavior. I know, mostly, what to avoid. But I’m absolutely sure that a certain portion, even most, of my behavior, is easy to interpret as racist because it looks — anxiety, weird circumlocutions — like how I imagine a racist would act, which makes me even more self-conscious. But I can’t get out of it either by explaining myself, which is oversharing, or reassuring the person I’m talking to that I’m not a racist, which is idiotic. I’m already socially awkward in person, and I realize I come off oddly, but it’s much worse when I have good reasons to overthink what I say before I say it.
This isn’t a problem I feel I can solve by just rejecting additional privilege. I can assert that I do, or have, or would like to, but it’s a problem that’s much more technical than just asserting something, or believing something, or wishing to believe something. In order to not come off as a blithering racist, I need to be confident that I’m not inadvertantly being an ass. And what that means is experience. Which means socially awkward experiences with PoC who don’t have a responsibility to teach me anything, even if it’s “teaching” where I don’t ask a single stupid question.
I posted anonymously on nubian’s blog — a kind of off-the-cuff comment where I wished someone ran a goddamn 1-900 line that answered the kind of dumb-ass questions that, for me, have sometimes helped bridge a gap that I am fully aware exists. And while I could just shut up, listen, and try to be a good ally, that leaves a huge question for me about whether I actually would be an ally when the rubber hits the road; whether my judgement would be clouded by my own stupid, awkward feelings.
Anyway. That may be oversharing, and it may reveal more about me than the actual issue, and it may not provide any useful insight, but it’s something I deal with.
– ACS
The question itself is kind of stupid because, as you point out, there’s no way for nubian to compare her internal sense of temperature to anyone else’s. But as a subject to speculate on and wonder about, it’s not stupid at all. The difference in heat absorption between dark and light colors is well known, and it certainly does make sense to suppose it applies to skin as well as clothing.
More generally, there’s nothing racist about noting an obvious, undeniable difference and speculating about the logical consequences of that difference. (Impolite certainly, but so is any unwelcome personal question or comment.) To say this treats the other person as a “sub-human anomaly” or “almost a different species” is a completely unwarranted leap.
Outraged as a child by racial injustice, I have spent my life trying to wrap my head around what it means to be of a different race. I minored in minority studies in college. I’ve read more civil rights books than a lot of civil rights lawyers. I am a frequent reader of a lot of “black” blogs where race is discussed often and by people of all colors. But the truth is that I’m never really going to know what it’s like to be someone else. No matter how hard you try, how much you squint your eyes and try to see, it just ain’t gonna happen.
So what I’ve learned is to allow “people of color” (because it’s not just a black/white issue, there are a thousand racial/ethnic prejudices out there) their own experience and never try to co-opt it. I can try to be sensititve to it. I can listen closely to what they say, but I can’t be one of them. Because I’m not.
The hardest lesson for me was learning that I have no right, zip, zero, nada, to have any input in the agenda of any civil rights organization I support. I didn’t get this until I thought about being in a meeting of feminist and having some male come in and start telling us what we needed to be doing. I’d be outraged. So my role is to be open, to be supportive, to stand when the line is drawn in the sand.
This woman was stupid. But I can understand her stupidity. It might even have been born of really good intentions. I’ve learned to be wary of my own good intentions. The road to hell is thus paved…
I don’t _entirely_ agree. I would say that, absolutely, to have no right whatsoever to presume input. You can, however, be granted that right, and then it applies only to the group that grants it, and only as long as they extend that invitation. There are out-groupers that really get, some better than many in-groupers. But no out-grouper has the right to make that determination for themself.
On the point of the main post — I think a big part of the problem is presumption. The asker presumed the right to ask a personal question of the askee, and assumed they had the right to an answer. And presumption, boys and girls, is a function of…?
That’s right. Privilege.
“There is a point at which each person must take responsibility for their ignorance.” And one should, of course, do this by not asking questions.
Good call.
My general feeling on these sorts of questions is that if you have to ask me something stupid about my hair or my skin, you probably don’t have enough non-white friends. And you might want to branch out a bit. I’ve found that one develops a working knowledge of other people when you spend enough time in their company, without having to ask crap like that.
ACS, I just really feel the need to say that Idaho is not the midwest. Not nohow.
I mean: I’m in the most ethnically homogenous part of the country, separated from the most ethnically diverse part of the country by the Midwest, in the same sense that the US is separated from Britain by the Atlantic.
– ACS
“There is a point at which each person must take responsibility for their ignorance.” And one should, of course, do this by not asking questions.
Good call.
I’m in a bad mood, which is why I had to delete, “Listen, [obscenity],” from the beginning of this post five times.
Look: Google. Wikipedia. Bookstores. The local library! If this stupid, stupid woman really wanted to know whether or not black people melt like Dove bars in the sun, or whatever, she had thousands of options available to her that did not involve bothering nubian! Believe it or not, there are reams of published information out there, most of them a keystroke away. It’s not hard to find information on what melanin is, how it works, and why some people have more than others. It’s also not hard to find information on how your body regulates its own temperature. She could have found and used that information, thereby taking responsibility for her ignorance. She didn’t. Ergo, privileged asshole.
I follow Rex’s lead here. The question was rude and in a fashion stupid, partly for the reason given. But, rude does not equal moronic. She does not thing whites and blacks “functions automatically differently” in irrational ways. She is raising a logical, if perhaps clueless, idea that she reasoned from actual experience. This is not akin to thinking blacks are better dancers or have problem with math or something.
You don’t go around asking strangers such questions, but if it was a friend or maybe someone you are being friendly at school with, who knows? Totally false unanimity leads to certain groups getting sick because hey, “I” am not lactose intolerant, so it would be racist to assume a member of x group might be.
The color/heat deal is not quite akin to lesbians having sex either. In fact, correct my ignorance here, but some lesbians do feel that “sex” between two women very well might be different in some ways because the same sex, especially when dealing groups like women who have power relation issues in society with men, connect in a somewhat different fashion. In other words, yeah, maybe a different way of relating in some fashion. This can be a good thing, of course.
I think this is an interesting case of the possibility of major misunderstandings, sometimes started by small ones that are magnified given all the baggage one side or the other has to carry around, often in some way caused by the other side.
That question leaves me scratching my head — I’m trying to imagine how I might react if asked that, and genuinely? It seems like a valid question, except that it’s one I wouldn’t be able to answer because obviously I don’t have an experience to which to compare it. So if asked I’d probably say something like, “I don’t think so, I mean I’m always freezing cold and have to wear sweatshirts all the time,” or if I was more on-the-ball, I might ask whether the asker gets colder since she doesn’t have the melanin content to retain heat.
It might be a silly question, but I really don’t understand how it’s offensive. The grabbing-of-the-arms would have intruded on my personal space and possibly offended me, but not the question itself.
Sarah:
I think the point is that, given that her behaviour was intrusive, there were both smarter and more tactful ways to find out what she wanted to know. She chose not to use them. Presumably because it was easier to jsut ask Nubian, and never mind the tactlessness or the intrusiveness. *That’s* why it’s rude.
And as Nubian herself pointed out, it’s gratuitously “other-ing”.
–IP
Aww common, ‘nubian’ is woman after all. Give her a break.
A lot of people on several blog threads are missing the point. As someone who was I think at Nubian’s mentioned, would you ask a jewish person with a big nose if they could smell better? Maybe there’s an honest scientific question there about the greater inner surface area of the nostrils or something, but it’s just not something you would ask.
Hi, sorry for the thread hijack, but apparently Lauren posted on one of my posts a little while ago, and I only just now found the comment. Tell her I apologize for not responding sooner.
Anyway, as I said on Nubian’s blog, I think there are ways for two people of different ethnic backgrounds to discuss intercultural issues. This, however, wasn’t one of them. It comes down to simple propriety. If you don’t know the person well enough to know for certain that you’re not going to cause offense, don’t open your mouth. Making a direct comment about the color of someone’s skin like that is just tasteless.
It sounds to me like the person asking the question has very poor social skills to start with, and on top of that might not be all that bright. She’s effectively asking you to compare your body temperature to hers. Why does she think you’d have any more knowledge of her body temperature than she would have of yours?
So it certainly strikes me as a really dumb way of asking the question, unless this was a roundabout way of propositioning you. But I don’t see how honestly wondering whether dark skin absorbs more heat than light skin can be obnoxious or racist; it’s a sensible question, the kind of thing a four-year-old might ask Mommy. Asking someone with dark skin, in certain contexts, might not be racist in my view–depends on how you ask and how well you know the person. But you know, I can think of much less conspicuous ways to check skin temperature than asking a really bizarre question like that.
And for anyone who doesn’t know the answer to the legitimate physics question buried in this woman’s very rude inquiry, and is dying of curiosity:
(1) Yes, darker skin absorbs more heat from non-infrared sunlight, and other light, than lighter skin. This is why polar bears have black skin. If you’re pale and bare-shouldered and standing next to a dark and bare-shouldered friend under direct bright light, his/her skin will feel a little hotter to the touch, at least for the time being, and at least in my experience. However…
(2) Skin, both light and dark, reflects visible-spectrum light. Cotton does not. Skin, both light and dark, reflects infrared heat. Cotton does not. So dark skin doesn’t get dramatically hotter under direct sunlight in the same way that dark T-shirts get dramatically hotter than light T-shirts under direct sunlight.
Notice I said darker skin versus lighter skin. This isn’t really a racial question; a tanned white person’s skin will absorb more heat than a light-skinned black person’s skin, for obvious reasons. Which is one more reason why the woman’s question strikes me as a little strange.
Cheers,
TH
Just to clarify my very clumsy first two paragraphs above: I’m not saying the woman wasn’t asking a racist question. I wasn’t there, and if Nubian says that it was racist, I’ll most certainly take her word for it. But if I were hanging around with a darker-skinned friend and really wanted to know, I’m confident that I could have brought up this question in a non-racist and non-intrusive way.
Cheers,
TH
Kim: My general feeling on these sorts of questions is that if you have to ask me something stupid about my hair or my skin, you probably don’t have enough non-white friends.
Since, in consequence of having few or no non-white friends, you have artlessly committed this petty gaucherie, the person to whom you have addressed your rather dumb question isn’t going to be your friend either; instead she’s going to want to punch you and run you over with a bicycle. Well, there’s another alternative for people whose current social skills lag due to their insufficient pre-existing stock of non-white friends, and that’s to avoid conversation with non-whites altogether.
Picking up on Amanda’s and Tom Head’s points:
I would’ve just said to her, “you probably know better than me… Do you get hotter when you’re tanned? Do you retain more heat in August, when you’re nicely tanned, than in May, when you’re pale as a sheet? ” And then I’d proceed to ask her about what it’s like to have light skin, burn so easily, change skin tone, etc, in such a way that she would feel as othered as she made me feel.
Inmature and petty, but boy, would it feel good ;P
it’s kind of like if i went up to a woman on the street and grabbed her boobs and said, “i’ve always wondered – do these help you girls float when you go swimming?”
Some questions aren’t really inquiries. When someone asks what lesbians do in bed, they’re usually not sincerely seeking truth. More often, they’re making a statement in the form of a rhetorical question: “Lesbians don’t have real sex. They’re weird.”
I don’t think Nubian’s colleague was implying anything derogatory about black people. That doesn’t mean her behavior was acceptable. Racism is about disrespect. If Nubian’s colleague felt more free to shoot off her mouth around Nubian than she would around, say, her white male advisor, then there might be some racism at play.
Weird hypotheses cross our minds all the time, but normal people don’t just blurt them out at random. Can you picture the same ditzy person approaching a white guy with a similarly half-baked musing: Your bald spot is shiny. Shiny objects reflect light. Does that mean that your head is less likely to get sunburned? Does the shininess insulate your brain the way the polar ice caps insulate the earth? I mean, it makes sense, right?
Racism can make people more likely to shoot off their mouths.
“A lot of people on several blog threads are missing the point. As someone who was I think at Nubian’s mentioned, would you ask a jewish person with a big nose if they could smell better?”
The original question was ignorant and certainly no one should put up with that kind of ignorance, but to me it appears more of a science question from a stupid person. It may have been intended otherwise I don’t know I didn’t read the original post.
The comment above is quite offensive though- ” jewish person with a big nose”
Why Jewish person with a big nose, a more apt and less telling of the prejudices of the person who wrote that comment would have been “person with a big nose”.
I mean I am assuming Nubian has dark skinned so the question may have had certain validity, but to assume the person with the big nose would be jewish humm.
So, the comment is quite offensive, the actions noted in the original post are just ignorant …. and maybe just about science.
Unless I don’t understand how light works, wouldn’t cotton be a deep void of infinite darkness if it didn’t reflect visible spectrum light?
white person: hey kortney, how’s it going?
me: it’s going great, now that the weather is nice. it is sooo hot outside. it reminds me of summers in california–aside fom the beaches that is.
(we both chuckle)
white person: i have a question. since you are darker (she grabs my arm to demonstrate that i am darker than her–as if had forgotten that i was black), do you get hotter? i mean, you know how if you wear black, you retain more heat.
I don’t know other people’s experiences, but it’s pretty difficult to describe the sensation of one minute being you… whoever you are – phd, mom, athlete, spelling bee champ, pregnant and can’t wait to deliver, business person – whoever it is, thinking you are going along like any regular person, interacting with others, being you… and in the next minute having all that completely stripped away by a question such as this, making you… um… something else completely. Or maybe just nothing else.
This, of course, not being the first time… it’s just added on top of the ‘how do you wash your hair?’s and the “but why would a black person sunbathe?’ and the ‘I hear black babies change color after they are born, is this true?’ and the… well, one could (seriously) go on and on and on and on and on. Sometimes there may be a sense of amusement at the question, although usually always combined with puzzlement and at least a low buzzing anger (one may wish to run over the questioner with the bicycle, but most dont).. And, of course, the lack of “you”ness, because that’s been removed.
The question was racist and insensitive and dehumanizing, in my view. And no, non-white people are not super prickly, and don’t require special classes to learn how to speak to, even if one has never been around other cultures at all… regardless of a persons color or culture, treating them as individuals, as who they are instead of as Black Person or Asian Person (etc) works just fine. Just think, form a close enough relationship and maybe some will be able to see how a person washes their hair for themselves!
Umm, I was paraphrasing this person (actually from the Pandagon thread and not Nubian’s as I had mis-remembered).
So it was you that made the assumption. Sheesh.
The Stupid White Woman wasn’t necessarily assuming that Nubian knows what it’s like to be white. Again, I’m not saying she wasn’t being racist. She probably was and even if she wasn’t, she was still out of line.
Still, it’s not totally absurd to think that a person from a minority group who works in a predominantly majority setting would have had more opportunity to observe members both groups, and therefore have some perspective on whether one group is more sensitive heat than the other.
You don’t have to know what it’s like to be white (or black) in order to say “I haven’t noticed any systematic differences in how people react to the heat. It’s not like my family breaks out shorts while white people are still wearing parkas.”
Knife, that was idiotic wording on my part. My apologies. Yes, it does reflect SOME light; I didn’t mean to say that black cotton T-shirts have their own event horizons… :P
Cheers,
TH
Funny you should pick that example. I am a Jewish person with a big nose. When I read the original post, I thought about what kind of a question someone might ask me that would be analogous, and that’s exactly what I came up with.
I would find it interesting and not at all offensive, unless the questioner was an obvious bigot who was clearly trying to bait me.
(And the answer is, “probably not.” My wife’s petite WASP nose can pick out a cigar smoked by someone two cars ahead in traffic; I barely register one in the same room.)
[...] got hotter in the sun because her skin is dark. My first thought on reading the set-up of Piny’s post on Feministe about discussing of Nubian’s [...]
plucky punk writes:
Hey, what does personal hygiene have to do with any of this?
(I’m sorry–OLD joke, but I couldn’t leave that one hanging…)
Cheers,
TH
I once lived in an area where i was the only caucasian (sp?) woman. And i was asked, more than once, about how i styled my straight hair. I was asked how i coped with the heat, because i was so pale. I had kids come up to me in shops just to touch my skin because they had never touched a white person.
Were those people racist, ignorant, or just curious?
Megami, was this is in the states?
(i stand there in amazement after listening to this woman “other” me into some kind of sub-human anamoly, whose body functions automatically differently than whites, and in such a negative way–trying not to go into angry black woman mode and really understand her ignorance, i continue the conversation).
Okay, listen. If the objection here was that such is not a polite question to ask, I’ll agree with you. But if you are saying that it is racist to wonder whether black people absorb more heat, or that it is racist to assume that their body functions in any way different from white people’s, you are essentially promoting ignorance.
The fact of the matter is that people of different races do have bodies that, on average, function differently from people of other races. In the case of skin color, darker skin tends to absorb more light (ultraviolet and visible I don’t know about infrared), on the surface, and also lets less ultraviolet light make its way to the deeper layers of skin. This is why lighter-skinned people sunburn easier. This actualy has greater physiological implications, as it means that it is harder for darker-skinned people to get vitamin D from sunlight but easier for them to avoid sunburn from a given amount of UV exposure. In fact, I do believe that black people are more likely to have vitamin D deficiency than whites.
But as a general rule, though, it would make sense for two groups of people whose ancestors lived for hundreds of generations in different environments to have physiological differences that adapt them better to their environment. So yes, there will be physiological differences between, say, Icelanders and Africans.
So while the way she handled the situation may have been rude and even racist, her thought process was not. It is in no way racist to assume that people of different races will have bodies that, on average, function a little differently, particularly if the two races have existed for long periods of time in radically dissimilar environments.
It does make some sense – but how can two people really measure and compare how hot they “feel” in any detail fine enough to be useful? How can a black person know what feel “normal” to a white person and be able to judge if he/she feels hotter in comparison?
I am very light skinned — people ask me similar sorts of questions. In fact I do have more problems with heat and sun than most, but because I am used to being prepared for heat and sun, I end up, on particularly bright sunny days, the one outside having a ball — and people ask: “you’re so light, and I’m darker, how is it that you are able to stand the sun and I’m not?”. I just figure that I should be happy I get to be the referent and the center of attention — but I guess when you are a red-head you get used to certain things.
Actually, the comment which struck me was the reference to “why would a black person sunbathe”. Every time my girlfriend comes back from Israel or otherwise has been outside a lot she gets barraged with “I never knew black people tanned” — she does find it tiresome if an understandable thing about which to be curious.
As to the coloration and heat question — it is my experience that dark skin really doesn’t get much hotter than light skin. Darker hair, OTOH, certainly does seem to get hotter than lighter hair. This person who asked the skin question may very well have felt someone’s hair of a different color than her own on a hot day and realized — wow! his/her hair is of a different temperature than mine!
So it is, in a sense, a fair question. The bigger question is one of tact. Sometimes tactlessness is merely tactlessness. But sometimes it is a sign of something a bit more sinister.
I come at this from a completely different perspective, so keep that in mind: I teach literary journalism, a field founded on equal parts intense curiosity and research. One of the first and most crucial lessons I impart to my students is to never be afraid to ask a stupid question. I use as an example a story, possibly apocryphal, about John McPhee when he wrote Annals of the Former World. It goes something like this:
Everyone who met McPhee thought he was an idiot. He walked around pointing at every pebble, stone, rock formation, sand bar and blade of grass and asked “What’s that?” then “How’d it get here?” Eventually he gleaned enough information from these working geologists to start discussing their work with them, reading the technical papers they wrote, and immersing himself in the life of a professional academic geologist. The key word here is “immersion.” And immersion has to start somewhere.
The thing about situations like the one nubian describes is that if her interlocutor had read a couple of books and then asked the same question–only this time with a sound but still amateur understanding of how human skin works, how it regulates body temperatures, &c.–nubian would no doubt have found the question presumptuous and reacted, rightly, by asking where the questioner got off asking a quetion s/he already probably knows the answer to. “Why do you even need to ask me?” she’d respond. And rightly so, since the question would be presumptuous, not to mention awkward and condescending in ways reminiscent of racist early 20th Century anthropology.
The real issue here, I think, is how to ask such a question in the first place. How does one scale that first wall which prevents the ignorant from acquiring much-needed information easily. What I always tell me students is that it’s a matter of presentation, plain and simple. Are you asking the question honestly and openly, in a way that communicates a desire not merely to acquire information but understand the individuality of the person from whom they acquire it. What I sense here is the questioner considered nubian a “representative,” communicated something like:
That said, I’m an intensely curious person myself, interested in all aspects of the human experience in a personal, not sociological sense. So I’m always asking questions like this…and answering them for that matter. For example, I can now give people a taste of how deaf I am by saying “Check this site out and tell me which ones you can hear. Finished? Alright, I can’t hear a damn one of ‘em…” It may be that I feel more comfortable asking such questions because I’m more accumstomed to people asking them sans racist/racialist overtones. But I like to think I’ve concocted a system others can use. Try it and tell me what you think, or think about it and tell me if you’d be offended if I “used it” on you. (I say this seriously, since it’s worked for the crop of kids I’ve had so far, but there’s no knowing whether that’s success or some statistically improbable fantastic string o’ luck.)
And also, what were the social and cultural consequences of people like you being treated as exotic specimens in that setting? Did it put additional burdens on white people trying to break into powerful, mostly-nonwhite professions, for instance?
I’ve been in various places where, for one reason or another, I was made to feel like an outsider despite or (very occasionally) because of the fact that I’m white. But it’s a special kind of problem that black people are made to feel like outsiders on college campuses and in other sites of power and authority in American society. It’s not the same as when white people are made to feel like outsiders in majority-nonwhite spaces, because majority-nonwhite spaces don’t tend to be the halls of power. If white people get sick of having their hair groped or whatever, they can usually leave those spaces without suffering dire consequences. But Nubian has to stay in majority-white settings if she’s going to achieve her career goals. It’s very hard for a black person to become a doctor or lawyer or college professor or business leader or high-ranking politician or pretty much any kind of powerful person without having to spend significant amounts of time in places where whiteness is considered the default race. And the opposite is not true for white people.
So I would say that your neighbors’ behavior probably didn’t bolster white supremacy, while Nubian’s colleague’s behavior did.
Anyway, I don’t think internal body temperature (which is what is going to heat you up, no?) is affected by skin color at all. In fact, if it was, I would be more inclined to say it was the other way around.
I’ve lived in mixed neighborhoods pretty much all my life (different parts of the country, sometimes more heavily this or that culture than any other, but still mixed) and just from observation… in spring, soon as the weather even gets a little warm (many) white people break out the shorts and the tee shirts, flipflops and so on, while (many) black or other persons are still in long sleeves and pants. Of course, there are also black people who are in at least shorts all winter long and white people who put on a sweater in 80 degrees and think life is only perfect when the weather is in the triple digits. And Asians, Latinos etc vary in the same way.
It’s a silly question, racist in its assumptions, on par with the “do black people sink when they swim” nonsense (which some people still believe, and still ask about).
It was in Papua New Guinea, so a majority black population. Yes, the social situation and questions of authority etc. are very different than black people in the USA (or here in Australia for that matter). I guess the analogy i was going for is maybe the white person in the original situation was ignorant or just curious and gauche, not racist; just as i didn’t consider the situations i was in situations of racism, just curiosity.
(i DID suffer racism for being white in some situations, but that was very overt, and not really relevant to this discussion).
Scott Eric Kaufman says:
Volunteering a question that illuminates your own bodily differences isn’t the same as being abruptly asked about them by someone else. Additionally, your personal question isn’t really about the person you’re asking if the purpose is to share how deaf you are. Flawed analogy.
Blue, the analogy’s “flawed” because it isn’t there. I wasn’t drawing an analogy between being asked a question and volunteering information; I was discussing how such questions could be asked in a manner in such a way as to create the impression that someone is “likably ignorant,” i.e. that the questioner asks to rid themselves of ignorance, and puts him- or herself on the spot in order to do so. I understand the desire to declaim in online fora, but really, I think if you read my post with a wee bit of generosity you’d see that I attempted to ask–and even ventured an answer–to a question which contains offenses in its every last nook and nuance. Sometimes such questions need to be asked, and what I wrote above was meant to be open up a conversation about how that could be accomplished.
I mean, I can almost see the invisible ink “NEXT!” scrawled after the “Flawed analogy” fragment. Is this a conversation or the DMV? Because if it’s the latter, you’re right, I have “R79.” I am at the wrong the window…
So the other day my wife and I were talking about what end-of-the-year presents to get for my son’s teachers, and she suggested getting sunscreen for Ms. X. “I don’t think she could use it,” I said. “Don’t black people get sunburn, too?” she asked. “I don’t think so…” and we talked about how we could find out whether or not it was appropriate to get sunscreen for an African-American without asking Ms. X directly. Because that would be rude.
Asking someone about his or her biological functions is a violation of personal boundaries. (Note that in nubian’s story, the verbal boundary-violation was accompanied by a physical boundary-violation: “she grabs my arm to demonstrate that i am darker than her”.) It’s like greeting a colleague who just came back from the bathroom and asking them about the consistency of their stools. There are cases where such a violation is appropriate (e.g., a doctor talking to a patient), but this is hardly one of them.
I dont think I would be bothered if someone asked what it was like to have my skin type. I mean you do live differently with different skin and hair colours. You have different experiences and do different things with it.
My mom had black hair and black irish meditiarian skin. She doesnt need a hat in summer like I do when out in the sun and needs very low factor suncream. She has even used tanning oil when younger. Her skin gets darker and lighter brown. I need max factor skincream, to cover up and wear a hat to avoid sunburn and scalpburn. I have the lightess skin colour you can have and red hair like my dad. I get some freckles around my eyes, while my sister gets loads. Neither of us tan we just get red then back to pale. My mom has moles on her arms which I was always curious about because they were so different to freckles.
[I found out later that freckle patterns are based on a complex gene which depend on which ones you have give you freckles in different place. Which is cool.]
Looking at this incident I wonder is it just the same curiosity about being anything different. Ie different nationality, gender, sexual preference religion. I never was bothered when people asked me questions and I enjoyed learning about them.
Saying that, I didnt meet anyone of a differnet race till secondary school. They were so exotic and you would be so curious. When I started travelling around Ireland and seeing how they did things different in other countys it was very cool. Limerick had all sorts of foreign people living there. In my home county you could name the people from other countrys living in our area. In limerick people follow different customs than at home.
I found it very fun in college and work, finding out about the different countrys and difference religions. Hearing from an egyptian muslem about ram-a-dam (dont know how to spell it) and telling him about catholitism and paganism. Talking to a chinese guy about chinese history and china and telling him about Irish history. It was very cool. I think you can only learn by asking questions even the dumb ones.
Stupid. Presumptuous. Ignorant. Intrusive.
Not racist. Racism is defined as behavior which is based on racialism, the belief that some races are inferior and others are superior.
The question had nothing to do with inferior/superior.
As somebody or other said, nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. Ditto being “other”. You can be other, but you don’t have to feel any particular way about it unless you have a problem being yourself.
[...]
6.19.2006
Brickbats and Brick Walls
Posted by piny @ 11:57 am
So my post about nubian’s post occasioned a lot of comments to [...]
– Seth Gordon
Indeed, it’s amazing how many problems would be avoided if people would remember some basic lessons of tact.
Anyway, in case you are still needing to know, the answer, btw, is yes. Although those with darker skin typically are less likely to burn (and do need more UV exposure to make requisite amounts of Vitamin D, assuming they aren’t getting such in, e.g., fortified milk), it is still very possible for a black person to get sunburned. Indeed, the correlation between sun-sensativity and skin color is not 100% — I’ve known people who are quite dark who burn — they just develop a deep tan afterwards. And I’ve known people who are pretty white and don’t really burn but don’t tan much either.
Similarly, for example, my girlfriend’s eyes are more light sensitive than mine even though her eyes are dark brown and mine are blue: all I need is to wear a hat to cut down on glare and UV-blocking lenses in my glasses. She cannot go out in the sun without sunglasses to block non-glaring vis-light as well as UV and glare.