Via The Edge of the American West, here’s a fairly remarkable clip from everyone’s favorite daytime talk show, The View:
Apparently the annoying blond, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, is the show’s outspoken conservative, “a woman who will not let her voice be compromised,” according to the show’s website. I seem to recall seeing other clips of her defending the indefensible (various Bush policies) and freaking out about evolution. She’s not a great political mind.
This conversation, though, is pretty great. Hasselbeck is an asset to the show because she says what a lot of its viewers must be thinking, and in this case she provides an occasion for a teaching moment from Whoopi Goldberg and Sherri Shepherd. I think Whoopi, in particular, is fantastic here, and it strikes me as really valuable that this fairly frank discussion of a racial issue could take place on The View, a show where the co-hosts must all at least pretend to “love each other” and follow the rules of conversation that apply to a group of female friends gathered for coffee.
Is an Obama presidency going to “force many people to confront the cultural dynamics of race in ways that are unsettling, and, again, likely salutary,” as Ari writes at TEOTAW? Maybe. I work with a guy who thinks Obama is a secret Muslim who has a plan to institute reparations for slavery when he gets elected. This guy’s probably unreachable; he doesn’t even realize what a racist he is. And I can see a lot of white people reacting to Whoopi’s lesson on “different worlds” the same way they reacted to the demands of civil rights activists in the ’60s: Those Negroes are never satisfied; they’ve had so much just handed to them; why are they always stirring up trouble?
And yet. The good liberal in me has to believe that the more open, respectful discussion our country has about race, the more we can hope to make progress.
i agree- whoopie did a good job.
i haven’t watched that show before but now i think i understand why they burn through hosts so fast.
there is no way i could have a conversation with that hasselbeck lady every day, no matter how much i was getting paid.
I actually saw this clip last week when it was broadcast as news on CNN.com. I was also surprised by the frank nature of Whoopi’s responses to Hasselbeck’s points.
For me, the only real annoyance came when Hasselbeck breaks down. Do you think that was a defense mechanism, or was she really that shaken up by being so severely schooled?
I think she freaks out because people really hate having their privilege pointed out to them. A lot of white people really earnestly want to believe in this bootstraps crap, that they deserve their successes, and they also endure hardships of their own, so it’s really difficult being told that they have no idea what it’s like to be discriminated against. If they’re successful, they want to believe they’re no more successful than any equally talented person of color, and if they’re not successful, it’s really damning to be told that they had advantages that someone else didn’t. I think it takes a long time and a lot of deep soul-searching to get used to looking at your own demographic privilege.
It’s one of the reasons women feminists are often (rightly) suspicious of male feminists. No matter how much thinking and feeling and empathizing dudes do, can they ever imagine the full experience of what it would be like to be encouraged, your entire life, to signal weakness and amenability, or to be afraid of rape or deep sexual shame, to constantly be pressured by everyone to have babies, and then to leave your career for those babies? Or to be sexually threatened on a daily basis? None of these experiences are insurmountable, individually, and plenty of women overcome them, but what male feminists (and misogynists) often lose track of is how much women are shaped by the daily experience of being a woman, that there are parts of that systematic oppression that become a part of you, as intrinsic and unshakable as eye color. And while I’d never again speak to any man who told me I “had” to, say, wear makeup and high heels and speak in a tiny voice in order to be attractive, I do often wear makeup and high heels and speak softly, because that’s one part of who I’ve been made to be.
And when men are confronted with that difference, the only response they can have is either (a) That’s totally unfair! or (b) I rend my clothes with symbolic guilt for my people! And neither response makes anything better. No one’s asking them to do anything but be aware and not to perpetuate it.
I know it’s really clumsy to draw the race/gender distinction like that, because they’re very different situations in that way, but it’s the sort of regularized social control I know more about from personal experience. In the race situation, especially for African-Americans, the daily interaction with suspicion, condescension, and hostility does a certain amount of social policing for the white power structure by creating the expectation of certain kinds of “appropriate” black behavior. And for someone like Hasselbeck, it’s totally unthinkable why a black person would use the n-word in their private life and she “can’t” use it against them.
What Hasselbeck doesn’t get about racism, and what most men don’t get about sexism, is that we aren’t pointing out the effects of privilege so that the people who are so casually oppressive can tell the people they’ve oppressed how to behave in the future, except in the opposite way. (”Oh yeah, we used to call you the n-word, but now we’ve decided you’re not allowed to say it.” “Oh yeah, we used to say you needed to wear lipstick in order to win our approval, but now we’ve decided you’re not allowed to wear it if you want our approval.”) And no one wants to hear the boring self-excoriation bullshit either. (”OMG, I’m white and my people have oppressed black people in this country for hundreds of years; now I’m going to be friends to every black person I SEE. I’ll undo everything we’ve done wrong!”) Pointing out privilege is really upsetting because there’s nothing the dominant culture can *do* about it except be aware and stop trying to police everyone. The annoying thing is less a word, in itself, or the prescribed social performance, in itself, but the attitude that The Man knows best, whether right or wrong.
I think Jesse Jackson is a hypocrite, with all the hand-wringing about the n-word and then using it in a media setting. And I say, as a white English teacher, that some of my students defend the n-word as reclamation when they seem to be using it to oppress one another (when a frenemy does poorly on a test, when a girlfriend doesn’t do what the guy wants, etc.). And I don’t allow performances of hate speech in my classroom, where I am the one in charge. But I’m not in charge of people outside the classroom, and I have to trust that people know their own lives and choices and circumstances better than I do. They know what they mean by words in their own community better than I do.
In NYC, people tend to take their in-group reclaimed “hate” speech public all the time, in ways I am not in charge of. Some of my gay dude friends yell “faggot” at each other. Plenty of Jewish people I know make anti-Semitic jokes at one another. And the more privileged among them say they don’t care who makes those jokes or uses those epithets, because they can’t be hurt by them. They want me to laugh with them, but I guess I don’t find it very funny anymore. It’s not my job to tell them they can’t make the jokes, though.
How do you you really feel (A White Bear)?
Hah! I knew I should have asked AWB to do a guest post for today.
Well, I’m not sure what to do about it, of course. While teaching, I’ve heard students casually use certain kinds of hate speech against their own group in a joking way, and while I’m really glad they don’t feel that language is oppressive enough to treat it as especially hurtful, I’m pretty sure there are other members of that group in the room who don’t feel it as being so casual.
This summer, one of my students was talking about another professor during the break, and being really casual about talking about his Jewishness, like, “I forget his name; it was something really Jewish. I hate him.” I happened to know this student was Jewish, but doesn’t signify as Jewish publicly, so no one else knew. And there were other students in the room who were Orthodox, and probably a lot more used to hearing stuff like that in anti-Semitic contexts than the guy who said it. One of those students kind of looked at me like, “Huh?”
Do I step in and stop a conversation among students and say something self-righteous about how “We don’t identify ‘names’ as Jewish in this room”? Or do I let it go and pretend I didn’t hear it? Do I pull the “Huh?” student aside and tell her, “Oh, it’s alright; he’s Jewish too!” (which argument I don’t even buy, myself)? Do I pull aside the guy who made the comment and privately discuss it with him?
As a teacher, it is sort of my job to be a bit neurotically sensitive about these things. Luckily, as an individual citizen, it’s usually not my right to step in unless there’s an obvious intent to cause harm. In this particular case, I let it go–we talked a lot about anti-Semitism in the book we were reading at the time, and I felt my views were known–but I don’t know that I did the right thing, if there even is a right thing.
A lot of that video is lost in those female rules of conversation. These standards (however loose they are) work in the coffeehouse, but they don’t translate well to video. As an outsider listening to the conversation, as opposed to sitting in the circle, I got lost several times.
I like Obama. I like that he reminds me of the tiny bit of racism in me because I need to be reminded of it to work on getting rid of it. I’m not going to pretend to have a coherent opinion about the N word or how it’s used in our society or what the status of blacks as a race is today. I do know that Whoopi is the strongest voice in this conversation, and I like that.
Why am I often the last comment? Is it because I read this right before I go to bed? It makes me feel sad.
I’ll help you out, Kate!
Wow, I never thought I’d see the View on TGW. Dave, you’re full of surprises.
So interesting, A White Bear, what you said about how much people hate having their privilege pointed out to them. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with otherwise kind, sensitive people that never led to mutual understanding because those people were very uncomfortable with that idea.
I’m Mexican-American, which always casts these conversations a little grayer (or brownish?) — it turns into “who has suffered more?” as we start pulling out our oppression cred cards. What a stupid game, but I haven’t yet figured out a better way to have a conversation about my ethnic background and why it’s made me such an untrusting, introverted, snarky individual. (AND WHY I’M TOTALLY JUSTIFIED IN BEING THAT WAY! Just kidding. Sort of.)
Anyway, my only impressions of the View have come from out-of-context statements by Hassleback and Baba Wawa about nursing. They came off as insufferably backwards, prude, misinformed, idiotic I’ve never wanted to see the show. But now I feel like I’m missing out on Whoopie golden moments.
So here’s something somewhat related — this blog is written by a guy who lives in Park Slope. He posted a bit about the show:
http://www.blognigger.com/
Oops, meant to post this link as well:
http://dearfamousasshole.blogspot.com/2008/07/blognigger-guest-post-whoopi-goldberg.html