Identities: Part Two - Mistaken Identities

I dreamed about Amanda Palmer a couple of nights ago. I never dream about famous, notorious, or widely known people. I rarely even dream about real people I know. I don't know why. It's just one of those things, like the fact that I dream in technicolor or that I used to have this recurring dream about a city.

But the Amanda Palmer dream was probably caused by this blog post on Tiger Beatdown. AP or AfP as she likes to style herself has been showing her ass a lot lately. I was pretty through with her following her critique of product placement in a Lady Gaga video (the extremely interesting "Telephone", w/ Beyonce). I mean it was fine for her to criticize the product placement. I'm annoyed at the way products creep into every possible medium, sitting quietly (or not so quietly) there in the background (or right up in the front row).

What was not so fine, however, is that when pushed by someone about her simple-minded critique, she went on to stick her foot in her mouth clear through to her small intestine by tweeting the following:

ironic product placement is only ok if you take no money & beyond that give all the income to something ironic. like the Klan

Excuse me? To the Ku Klux Klan? Aside from the intensely problematic use of irony here, who in her right mind could think that giving money to the Klan, for any reason in the known universe, is a good idea?

This is hipster racism. It's so common that it's (almost) not shocking. It made me decide that I'm not spending another thin dime on AfP's music. But she wasn't done.

A few months ago, I had read that she was doing this new project with Jason Webley, called Evelyn-Evelyn. They were presenting themselves as conjoined twins, playing an accordion, in a very late 19th or early 20th century style. At the time I thought it was creepy, but thought little more about it, until I read this post about ableism and this new act was clearly way worse than creepy.

AfP hears (I guess) about the post and rather than take the opportunity to act like a grownup and admit to getting something badly wrong, AfP called out the fan-mob, who harassed and threatened the blogger. But worse yet, she went on Australian tv to say that she was being harassed by disabled feminists.

Wait one minute. Aren't you a feminist, Ms AfP? Aren't you a member of this big crowd of folks who are interested in social justice? I mean, aren't you?

And I realized I didn't really know whether she was or not.

It's easy to read feminism or at least a woman's pov in her music and she's written on her blog about issues that seemed to be feminist, such as the huge variation in how women respond to abortion. But on the other hand there's some transphobic material too, like "Sex Changes" on Yes, Virginia. AfP seems to be someone who's engaged in the issues of our time, insofar as they apply to what she wants to do as an artist, but not someone who thinks about these things very deeply or care very much at all.

I didn't think she was not a feminist when she did the racist tweet, because sadly there are many white feminists who are fairly clueless about antiracism. But when she identifies her critics as "disabled feminists" that tells me that she doesn't see herself as a member of our big fractious assemblage and I was a fool and a fan to think that she was.

I'm probably still a fool about a lot of things, but I'm not a fan anymore.

Identities: Part One - Stories We Tell

So my pal, George, and I have this pact, that we'll both start posting on our blogs once a week. I promised that I was going to post more in 2010 back in January and you saw how well that went. But since this is a pact and all and since I don't want George to get the moral high ground here, I'm going to write.

I've been thinking about identities for a whole bunch of reasons that I'll spin out in the next few posts. I'm starting this one with stories, because the thing that got me started thinking was a story, a memoir, written by someone I know. I'm not going to name him and if you want to know what the book is, email me or something.

At any rate, this memoir covers his growing understanding, professionalism, and love of his work. It's also a political memoir, insofar as he links the (very worthwhile) work he does to his political consciousness as a left radical punk back in the eighties. It informs, as he tells us readers, the choices he makes, the way he goes about his work, even his choice of work. That's all very well and good and it makes for a nice, neat story.

I was reading the book over a weekend when Laine and I had gone up to Tahoe with some friends. They went skiing. I planned to keep the wood stove stoked and read all weekend. When I pulled out the memoir, one of them said, "Hey, that's X. I used to know him at Cornell. He went out with a friend of mine." *

I went to Cornell as a graduate student. Like many universities, Cornell has a pretty substantial lefty community. There are housing co-ops (I used to live in one). There is every shade of radical, enrolled and not, hanging around the campus. But there are very few poor kids attending the university. So X had gone to Cornell, had graduated from one of the Ivies, but didn't seem to feel that worth mentioning in his memoir.

Why?

Because it makes for a more complicated story. Rather than the working class guy (as he intimates, though never quite claims) who starts out ignorant of his new job, who learns and explores and becomes an expert through his hard work, he's a guy with some privilege who starts out ignorant of his new job, who learns and explores and becomes an expert through his hard work.

What's the difference? Privilege.

I've talked with working class whites who have told me about how hard it is to put themselves forward in a group (could be work, could be school) of upper class people. I know as a middle class African American (from the last century**) how hard it can be to feel at home among the privileged. How we second guess ourselves, how we're not sure of how to be, how watchful it makes us. How timid.

This is not to say that it's an impossible hurdle, that a working class guy couldn't have done it. But he'd have to push himself to take risks that the privileged never even think about.

The other reason X tells his story as a simple one, is because it doesn't occur to him not to. He doesn't notice his privilege because he's like a fish in water about it. He doesn't think about how some things are easier for him because he was a man who could go to Cornell, who grew up in Marin (yeah, he mentioned that, but I didn't take it as a marker of wealth because, believe it or not, there are poor people in Marin). He's good, as far as I can tell, on economics and on basic feminism and anti-racism.

He's a good man, but he tells himself a child's story about his life.

Does that matter?

Well, maybe not. It's not like he's trying to put something over on people, not consciously anyhow.

But maybe it does matter that we don't see ourselves completely, that we allow our blind spots to let us build these ideas about ourselves as simple people, with easy to understand motives. It's not true and it makes us shaky allies when we can't seen the borders of our privileges or even the privileges themselves.

Hi George! The rest of you, go over and take a look at his blog. It's a good one.


*It's a very small world.
**This makes a huge difference.