I'm certain our readers already know that Amanda Marcotte recently wrote a book which was published by Seal Press, a publisher that focuses on works by women writers. It's intended to be humorous, satirical and um, blunt - pretty much everything we've come to expect from Amanda.
At her blog, Amanda uses quite a bit of retro-looking artwork to go with her posts. It's usually old ads featuring women and/or women's products that are slightly tweaked to have them poke fun at the attitudes they espouse. Things like Lysol Douche ads (how we survived as a species I'll never know) and other ridiculous products. Given that practice, Amanda and Seal decided to use some old comic book images in her book that would go along with the title, It's a Jungle Out There. Campy, cynical, ironic - the essence, in my opinion, of Amanda's writing.
Unfortunately, old comic books contain some of the most offensive racist and sexist images our culture has ever produced - the other great source of these types of images being the classic Warner Bros. cartoons. The sexist imagery was actually what they were looking for, since their intention was to use it satirically. But the racist overtones of the images went right past the people at Seal Press and Amanda; my understanding is that all of them are white.
Amanda has apologized, Seal Press has apologized. In neither case was the apology of the sort where people are sorry that someone was offended - a type of "apology" that should be known as the Republican's Sorry or something like that. They both owned up to the pernicious, blinding effects of white privilege. Seal Press has already redesigned the book and issued another edition without the images. I can't think of another public apology that has been as forthright and clear as what Amanda and Seal Press have done here. It's actually a bit shocking; apologies in our culture, no matter the reason or source, are now carefully worded to convey no actual remorse on the part of the person apologizing except that other people failed to properly understand what they clearly meant. No responsibility is taken, because people seem to believe that taking responsibility is the same as admitting some sort of legal or financial liability.
But these apologies have not been enough, and I've basically had it. This ties in to several things I've been reading and hearing over the last few months, both in the blogosphere and in real life; I'll discuss them in more detail below the fold.
The problem with It's a Jungle Out There has been linked to another fight people have been waging primarily in the feminist blogosphere over Amanda's alleged plagiarism of the work of one brownfemipower, who you might guess has been blogging from the perspective of being a non-white woman in America. The whole thing is confusing as hell, but it seems that Amanda was at a conference where brownfemipower gave a talk, after which Alternet published an article by Amanda on the same subject. Therefore, plagiarism.
I don't have links because I really am confused by the whole thing. brownfemipower decided to stop blogging over this issue and wrote a post which left me more confused about the issue than before I got to it - which is much more likely to be my fault than hers. In fact, if anyone has some place to which they could point us for a recap on this, I'd appreciate it. I had to follow probably ten links to find a post that had the decency to refer to Amanda by name instead of what is, in my opinion, the very juvenile moniker Person [X]. I mean, make the charge or don't, but don't disguise it.
I read one post - again, I have no idea where I read this; I'm not trying to disguise links - claiming that Amanda has a history of racism in her writing, and that Pandagon never deals with issues of feminism and race. Astute readers will remember that Pam Spaulding writes for Pandagon, that Pam is a woman and that she is black. And that she writes about feminism, and race. But I've not seen Pam mentioned at all in any of this; she's been entirely sidelined and ignored. She even has a post on the issue in which she talks about how she's not been a part of this at all. Given Pam's relationship to Amanda, her status as a woman of color and her status as a blogger and commentator outside of the blogosphere I can only imagine that sidelining her has been intentional since her work at Pandagon and Pam's House Blend is discomfiting to those who want to paint Amanda as a callous racist.
All of the above to say that I do see a tendency to refuse to acknowledge the sincerity and legitimacy of anyone in a privileged group - whites, males - when they make a mistake and apologize for it afterward. Not when they issue the Republican Sorry, but when they take it on the chin and apologize. It's a "one strike and you're out" mentality, and it deeply disturbs me.
Because in the USA, whites and males have been conditioned from birth to make certain assumptions, to say certain things, to have a profound blind spot to the realities of what it means to be a woman and/or a person of color in this culture. I'm not making excuses for those who would call a black man "boy," or even those who would refer to a women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos." There's a lot of words and phrases that are clearly wrong, even to knuckleheaded bigots like the Freepers or the ones at LGF. They use terms because they're offensive, not because they don't know any better.
But there's also a lot of offensive imagery in this culture that hasn't yet been fully outed - such as old comic book panels. And if white and/or male progressives are going to accept try to understand and actively support the anger and resentment that women and/or people of color feel to phrases, images and practices which we have been taught are innocuous, then to be just starkly honest I'd like to be cut a little bit of slack. I'm going to make mistakes. Amanda is going to make mistakes.
To wit: I'll watch various comedians on Comedy Central or HBO On-Demand, and I find myself laughing at gay jokes, rape jokes, jokes about domestic violence, even jokes about race, although I'm much better at filtering those out. I'm troubled whenever my son plays with my daughter's dolls or puts on her dress-up clothes. I get nervous in neighborhoods where whites are a minority. I even tend to assume that a minority driver of a car near me won't be a good driver, and how utterly cliched and lame is that?
And so on. I'm a white man in America, and I've been taught by this culture from my birth to be that way. I'm going to make mistakes - for the rest of my life, I'm going to harbor prejudices, I'm going to overlook injustices, and I've already spent years intentionally trying to overcome this. I cannot get rid of my pre-judgments. It's impossible. And I'd appreciate it if my fellow progressives would offer up a little bit of grace on that.
But there's another side to this. And this other side means that if I'm going to ask for grace regarding my unfortunately-entrenched biases and prejudices, then I'm going to have to own up to them when they're pointed out. I'm going to have to not only work on changing my habits and thought processes, I'm going to need to show real progress on it. I'm better about it than I have been; I don't tell the types of jokes I listed above, and I don't watch comedians again who tell them. I do a pretty good job of not laughing at garbage like that when I'm in the presence of those who do. I recognize that I have bigoted and sexist attitudes and I intentionally try to not let those attitudes make me into a bigot and a sexist.
When I make mistakes on this blog, I fully expect to be called out on them, and I will apologize for them. I hope that people won't decide that making a mistake of this sort disqualifies me from the progressive coalition. Obviously if I keep on doing the same thing or never admit to what I've done, that's another issue. But from what I've seen - correct me if I'm wrong - Amanda in particular has done everything possible to make things right, and she's still being vilified over it.
The liberal/progressive community is a strange beast. We've got all kinds, and unlike our political counterparts, our continued existence and success relies upon accepting those who are different, no matter how different those differences might be. For example, I've seen some pretty outspoken atheists declare their appreciation for religious liberals, declaring them allies in a common fight, and I've greatly appreciated it. What we need is much, much more of this. We need to have a better understanding that while I might be some knuckle-dragging Neanderthal who doesn't want his son to wear his daughter's frilly dresses, I'll never deny my son the right to be who he is, whoever he is, and I'll never campaign or vote for any politician or law that seeks to enshrine heterosexuality in American law.
We need to work a lot harder at understanding one another, at giving one another the space we all need to grow. It's not too hard to spot the fauxgressives among the progressives even if we don't automatically and eternally reject someone after one mistake. Ideological purity only occurs in groups of one, and there's too much work to do to waste our time on that.
