White fantasy: the poor POC
Dec. 16th, 2009 07:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseI try not to read racist literature and generally a little research is handy enough in revealing when a book is going to be full of it beforehand. Unfortunately, while I was in high school I was subjected to one blatantly racist piece of claptrap, chosen for an English Literature class by a teacher who was quite the condescending racist herself. Though seeing as the teacher was the sort who’d congratulate POC on speaking relatively good English, even if they’d been born and raised in England and had a regional accent, I shouldn’t have been too surprised. But I was young back then and had honestly liked to think that that teacher was an aberration.
The book that was chosen for that class was Sumitra’s Story. It’s a book that even at the time I decried as nonsense stereotype though in a rather less articulate fashion. I recall stating, when asked for an opinion in class, that the story was completely unreliable because it was a blatant stereotype. What I can add to that now is that while stereotypes do exist this was one that lacked any sort of authenticity. In fact there was very little in this children’s novel about a Ugandan Asian Hindu family that actually indicated that they were in any way Ugandan, Asian or Hindu beyond their eating curry every so often. And though I didn’t know it at the time it certainly didn’t win any authenticity points for there to be this concept of an ultra Indian family where to prove this some characters had classical names from Hindu mythology, other’s had things like Gujarati terms for their family position, one had a Vietnamese name and one of the girls had a male name instead.
The little editorial backstory is that the book story is based on a friend of the author’s but I’m pretty convinced that that’s a lie. Either the author has never met any Ugandan Asians or Hindus, which is what I’m hoping just for the sake of my sanity, or they did and completely ignored everything that that friend had to say. Or, said person was such a good ‘friend’ that the author didn’t bother to remember their actual faith or country of origin because if the country of origin or faith were given differently I could just about believe that the book told the story of a worst case scenario for a Pakistani Muslim family.
One of the major sticking points I have about the family being Ugandan Asians who escaped Uganda to come to Britain is their sheer lack of class. They behave like the sort of people that, to translate a Burmese phrase we’d say ‘come from the villages’. They have a narrow, insular outlook on life and what appears to be a complete lack of common sense or much intelligence. These are not traits that are associated with those who make it out alive when it comes to political unrest, but it is a pervading Western fantasy. And it’s one that really makes me wonder about the white folks who make this assumption. I knew someone like that once and could never understand why they wanted to know where my money came from all the time. In retrospect it’s obvious: I was destroying their fantasy by having a father capable of paying for my university expenses, having made it into the same university as them, having received a good education and so on. I wasn’t meant to be like that: I was meant to be poor, stupid on top of being uneducated and only there because the university had taken pity on me, which, considering the institution, was about as likely as Herr Pope announcing that he’s actually a woman and/or Mary Magdalene.
The fantasy of the poor, invariably stupid, POC escaping their native country for any number of reasons is a bizarre one when you really think about it. Because it’s not the poor, resourceless POC that tend to make it out alive. They’re the ones who end up suffocating in the backs of sealed lorries or dying of starvation and heatstroke in fishing boats on the high seas if they even make it that far and aren’t just gunned down as they make a desperate, hopeless run for the border, because even death is better than living on in the hellhole that they’re running from. These are not the people who generally survive: everything is against them because they don’t have the resources be that monetary or via connections to get out and without any sort of protection are easy to hunt down. They don’t get out: they die, in droves. And despite the fact that they die in waves there are always other people trying to escape right behind them because it’s worth risking death to escape the terror that they’re running from.
This is of course the story that white folks like to hear because it allows them to reinforce the hierarchy. They get a nice example of how POC shouldn’t be allowed to run their own countries because of course we’re all assholes to each other, a ‘noble savage’ POC to congratulate on reaching ‘civilization’ and the extra reinforcement that all POC come from the lowest rungs of society. This is incidentally why the Christian churches are all over the Karen tribe: they’re oppressed, they live in villages and they’re Christian. Other groups like the Shan on the other hand can get fucked because they’re Buddhist and can look out for themselves or, god forbid, the ethnically Burmese because everybody knows we just spend our time oppressing the Karen and possibly hosing each other off trucks during the Water Festival.
Thus this fantasy justifies white privilege in the form of concerned racism which is why the reality tends to be met with hostility. The reality being that it tends to be an awful lot easier to get out of a country with yourself and your family intact if you have the finances and contacts to facilitate this. It’s also far easier to establish yourself again if you have the finances, contacts and advanced education to do so. The individual who, by way of example, comes to England already speaking English well, from an educated background, who arrives greeted by already established contacts and who is prepared to take that medical position out in the middle of nowhere for a few years will pretty soon metamorphosize into the parent who sends children to good schools, overseas universities if they so choose and flies their own parents across the globe bi-annually to visit far flung family. The people who make it across those international borders alive tend to be the ones with the means to and even if they’re not bringing their wealth out with them they carry the advantage of an educational and cultural background designed to allow them to move in international circles. Maybe they’re not trilingual with diplomatic experience like their parents, maybe there are no military embellishments or aristocratic titles that can be carried overseas but they are still at a distinct advantage. These are families with stories tracing back to royal courts, governorships and diplomatic missions. These are grandparents who recall narrow escapes during the war, parents who recall foreign boarding schools, children who spend years convincing their parents that there are more than two professions overseas. These are not people who worry about where the next mouthful of food will come from or if they’ll find shelter tonight. The ones who don’t have to make that often fatal attempt at escape and instead stroll leisurely out of the country are the ones who make it away in bulk. They don’t flee: they emigrate. They don’t arrive on the other side helpless, without allies and very little idea what to do with their new found freedom other than go back to worrying how to feed their families; they go to work, they buy a house, they send their children to good schools and so on.
The vast majority of people who get away easily, and occasionally go back for visits, have the resources to hit the ground running. Which of course contradicts that hierarchy of privilege. When the children of these immigrants are competing academically against the white kids it’s on a level field, and they have it hammered into their skulls that you not only have to compete, you have to utterly crush your opponents. If the white kids get 50% in a test they have to get at least 90%, if they don’t they’ll end up with tuition until they do. When they take up an instrument, and they will, when the white kids stop at Grade III or at maximum Grade V they have to surpass that even if they don’t really want a career in music. When the white children speak with regional accents the POC children had well better be mindful of their Received Pronunciation. The list goes on, and diversifies depending on grouping but it all amounts to the same thing: the vast majority of the POC competing at the same level with the middle class white kids have had the very same head start. The colour of skin doesn’t take away all the background attributes of someone’s upbringing.
Actually, considering that my complaint here is about those ‘concerned’ racists it would be worth my pointing out that as a general rule the middle class tends to spawn these people the most. As far as class distinctions and a little stereotyping goes the working class and the upper classes tend to have a fair amount of dignity and intelligence: they’re not the people looking for some other group to put down to make themselves feel better. It is a classic study in group reinforcement behaviour in attempting to find another group to disparage. Even when it comes to the basic human respect angle oddly enough it’s the middle class ‘concerned’ racist, while they’ve realised that it’s unfashionable these days to look down on someone openly for the colour of their skin, though they’d moved on to fetishing skin colour instead, who still seems to fail at not actually indulging in racist behaviour anyway. These are people who are looking to shore up some issue more often than not and to do this they try rather desperately to find someone else to look down on. They’re already moving in circles where the barriers to entry are set at such a level that only other middle class folks can enter into that arena, they’re actively selecting for middle class or higher company so it always surprises me that they don’t realise that the only people they’re interacting with do meet their class criteria. They’ve also conflated skin colour with class for some inexplicable reason which I can only imagine must be because they foster dreams of the halcyon days of slavery because I can’t think of any other sensible reason. I suspect that in part at least their racism probably stems from the huge cognitive dissonance caused by their applying one set of criteria, in this case wealth, and expecting it to filter out another, in this case skin colour. In reality it’s a bit like saying that you’re a vegetarian and then expecting to be served strictly vegan food or perhaps as a better example saying that you can only eat ḥalāl meat and then being annoyed when you actually get some.
Thinking about it it’s pretty obviously that the middle class racists are just trying to find another way to be racist. These days they can’t just call us all ‘darkies’ and tell us to GTFO so they have to say that we’re poor, uneducated, another other means to keep us out of their sacred white space, which tends to backfire spectacularly since the vast majority of POC who do escape terrible situations overseas with relative ease are the ones who can very obviously afford to.
The book that was chosen for that class was Sumitra’s Story. It’s a book that even at the time I decried as nonsense stereotype though in a rather less articulate fashion. I recall stating, when asked for an opinion in class, that the story was completely unreliable because it was a blatant stereotype. What I can add to that now is that while stereotypes do exist this was one that lacked any sort of authenticity. In fact there was very little in this children’s novel about a Ugandan Asian Hindu family that actually indicated that they were in any way Ugandan, Asian or Hindu beyond their eating curry every so often. And though I didn’t know it at the time it certainly didn’t win any authenticity points for there to be this concept of an ultra Indian family where to prove this some characters had classical names from Hindu mythology, other’s had things like Gujarati terms for their family position, one had a Vietnamese name and one of the girls had a male name instead.
The little editorial backstory is that the book story is based on a friend of the author’s but I’m pretty convinced that that’s a lie. Either the author has never met any Ugandan Asians or Hindus, which is what I’m hoping just for the sake of my sanity, or they did and completely ignored everything that that friend had to say. Or, said person was such a good ‘friend’ that the author didn’t bother to remember their actual faith or country of origin because if the country of origin or faith were given differently I could just about believe that the book told the story of a worst case scenario for a Pakistani Muslim family.
One of the major sticking points I have about the family being Ugandan Asians who escaped Uganda to come to Britain is their sheer lack of class. They behave like the sort of people that, to translate a Burmese phrase we’d say ‘come from the villages’. They have a narrow, insular outlook on life and what appears to be a complete lack of common sense or much intelligence. These are not traits that are associated with those who make it out alive when it comes to political unrest, but it is a pervading Western fantasy. And it’s one that really makes me wonder about the white folks who make this assumption. I knew someone like that once and could never understand why they wanted to know where my money came from all the time. In retrospect it’s obvious: I was destroying their fantasy by having a father capable of paying for my university expenses, having made it into the same university as them, having received a good education and so on. I wasn’t meant to be like that: I was meant to be poor, stupid on top of being uneducated and only there because the university had taken pity on me, which, considering the institution, was about as likely as Herr Pope announcing that he’s actually a woman and/or Mary Magdalene.
The fantasy of the poor, invariably stupid, POC escaping their native country for any number of reasons is a bizarre one when you really think about it. Because it’s not the poor, resourceless POC that tend to make it out alive. They’re the ones who end up suffocating in the backs of sealed lorries or dying of starvation and heatstroke in fishing boats on the high seas if they even make it that far and aren’t just gunned down as they make a desperate, hopeless run for the border, because even death is better than living on in the hellhole that they’re running from. These are not the people who generally survive: everything is against them because they don’t have the resources be that monetary or via connections to get out and without any sort of protection are easy to hunt down. They don’t get out: they die, in droves. And despite the fact that they die in waves there are always other people trying to escape right behind them because it’s worth risking death to escape the terror that they’re running from.
This is of course the story that white folks like to hear because it allows them to reinforce the hierarchy. They get a nice example of how POC shouldn’t be allowed to run their own countries because of course we’re all assholes to each other, a ‘noble savage’ POC to congratulate on reaching ‘civilization’ and the extra reinforcement that all POC come from the lowest rungs of society. This is incidentally why the Christian churches are all over the Karen tribe: they’re oppressed, they live in villages and they’re Christian. Other groups like the Shan on the other hand can get fucked because they’re Buddhist and can look out for themselves or, god forbid, the ethnically Burmese because everybody knows we just spend our time oppressing the Karen and possibly hosing each other off trucks during the Water Festival.
Thus this fantasy justifies white privilege in the form of concerned racism which is why the reality tends to be met with hostility. The reality being that it tends to be an awful lot easier to get out of a country with yourself and your family intact if you have the finances and contacts to facilitate this. It’s also far easier to establish yourself again if you have the finances, contacts and advanced education to do so. The individual who, by way of example, comes to England already speaking English well, from an educated background, who arrives greeted by already established contacts and who is prepared to take that medical position out in the middle of nowhere for a few years will pretty soon metamorphosize into the parent who sends children to good schools, overseas universities if they so choose and flies their own parents across the globe bi-annually to visit far flung family. The people who make it across those international borders alive tend to be the ones with the means to and even if they’re not bringing their wealth out with them they carry the advantage of an educational and cultural background designed to allow them to move in international circles. Maybe they’re not trilingual with diplomatic experience like their parents, maybe there are no military embellishments or aristocratic titles that can be carried overseas but they are still at a distinct advantage. These are families with stories tracing back to royal courts, governorships and diplomatic missions. These are grandparents who recall narrow escapes during the war, parents who recall foreign boarding schools, children who spend years convincing their parents that there are more than two professions overseas. These are not people who worry about where the next mouthful of food will come from or if they’ll find shelter tonight. The ones who don’t have to make that often fatal attempt at escape and instead stroll leisurely out of the country are the ones who make it away in bulk. They don’t flee: they emigrate. They don’t arrive on the other side helpless, without allies and very little idea what to do with their new found freedom other than go back to worrying how to feed their families; they go to work, they buy a house, they send their children to good schools and so on.
The vast majority of people who get away easily, and occasionally go back for visits, have the resources to hit the ground running. Which of course contradicts that hierarchy of privilege. When the children of these immigrants are competing academically against the white kids it’s on a level field, and they have it hammered into their skulls that you not only have to compete, you have to utterly crush your opponents. If the white kids get 50% in a test they have to get at least 90%, if they don’t they’ll end up with tuition until they do. When they take up an instrument, and they will, when the white kids stop at Grade III or at maximum Grade V they have to surpass that even if they don’t really want a career in music. When the white children speak with regional accents the POC children had well better be mindful of their Received Pronunciation. The list goes on, and diversifies depending on grouping but it all amounts to the same thing: the vast majority of the POC competing at the same level with the middle class white kids have had the very same head start. The colour of skin doesn’t take away all the background attributes of someone’s upbringing.
Actually, considering that my complaint here is about those ‘concerned’ racists it would be worth my pointing out that as a general rule the middle class tends to spawn these people the most. As far as class distinctions and a little stereotyping goes the working class and the upper classes tend to have a fair amount of dignity and intelligence: they’re not the people looking for some other group to put down to make themselves feel better. It is a classic study in group reinforcement behaviour in attempting to find another group to disparage. Even when it comes to the basic human respect angle oddly enough it’s the middle class ‘concerned’ racist, while they’ve realised that it’s unfashionable these days to look down on someone openly for the colour of their skin, though they’d moved on to fetishing skin colour instead, who still seems to fail at not actually indulging in racist behaviour anyway. These are people who are looking to shore up some issue more often than not and to do this they try rather desperately to find someone else to look down on. They’re already moving in circles where the barriers to entry are set at such a level that only other middle class folks can enter into that arena, they’re actively selecting for middle class or higher company so it always surprises me that they don’t realise that the only people they’re interacting with do meet their class criteria. They’ve also conflated skin colour with class for some inexplicable reason which I can only imagine must be because they foster dreams of the halcyon days of slavery because I can’t think of any other sensible reason. I suspect that in part at least their racism probably stems from the huge cognitive dissonance caused by their applying one set of criteria, in this case wealth, and expecting it to filter out another, in this case skin colour. In reality it’s a bit like saying that you’re a vegetarian and then expecting to be served strictly vegan food or perhaps as a better example saying that you can only eat ḥalāl meat and then being annoyed when you actually get some.
Thinking about it it’s pretty obviously that the middle class racists are just trying to find another way to be racist. These days they can’t just call us all ‘darkies’ and tell us to GTFO so they have to say that we’re poor, uneducated, another other means to keep us out of their sacred white space, which tends to backfire spectacularly since the vast majority of POC who do escape terrible situations overseas with relative ease are the ones who can very obviously afford to.
