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Holy cow, it's summer so how did I get so far behind? (Knitting. The answer is knitting, and jigsaw puzzles.)
Kati Stevens, Fake: Free early reviewer book. An extended musing on the concept of “fakeness,” mostly taking the position that there’s nothing wrong with fake things that aren’t frauds. Replicas in museums, for example, don’t bother her; they serve conservation goals by allowing current publics to experience artifacts/fossils without letting the real things deteriorate. And body alteration is fine and just as real as anything else; she points out that “Baudrillard [with his criticism of the unreal] would be a terrible person for anyone with a prosthetic to encounter.” Prosthesis, Stevens contends, is “already humanoid. The prosthesis’s entire reason for being is to service the body ….” Contradictions are everywhere: “If man is made in the image of God … Man is the first cheap knockoff.” Stevens gets self-contradictory in arguing that virtual reality would seem as creepy as cloning if we hadn’t encountered it first as/in entertainment, even though (a) we encountered cloning there too, and (b) she then argues that clones and robots are scary because “we have met ourselves, and there is no reason to think anything made in our image would be better than us,” which doesn’t apply to virtual landscapes. Stevens also is a fan of sex workers and sex tosy: “by demanding nothing of the customer but legal tender, their so-called ‘inauthenticity’ allows the customer to be himself, to be authentic. He does not have to cyborg himself, try to trick the prostitute or phallus into fucking or loving him—he has paid with cash instead of his identity.” That seems to undervalue the role of power and the differences between using a sex toy and hiring a sex worker. Stevens doesn’t like faked orgasms, though; unlike other proxies for body parts or relationships, they aren’t honest about their limits/un-“real”ness. Fake orgasms are frauds. But she insists that, in the era of Trump, it’s important to remember that good v. bad, real v. fake, and what I like v. what I don’t like aren’t synonymous.
Kristin Lawless, Formerly Known As Food:And here’s a screed against artifical/industrial food, lacking nutrients that used to be found in more traditional plants/animals and full of chemicals whose long-term effects we don’t know. It’s a terrifying book that takes the position that all the individualistic actions that (especially wealthy white American) people take, like buying expensive organics, won’t really help in the absence of systemic reform. She says that if you’ve ever taken antibiotics or had a C-section or if your mom or grandma did then your microbiota won’t be good enough to transfer to your baby via breastfeeding, but at the same time she goes on and on about how awful it is not to breastfeed. Just because something is “natural and biological” doesn’t, in fact, make it available to everyone. And I was also unhappy with “some research seems to indicate that the state of the mother’s immune system is the determining factor in whether her child will be autistic”—from the refrigerator mother to the incubator mother?
Before societal transformation, Lawless argues that you should still eat only whole and intact foods, like a whole egg and not like non-fat milk. It is plausible that we don’t know about all the long-term effects of chemicals that affect hormones, and Lawless cites evidence that they don’t follow ordinary dose-response curves such that the low doses we’re all constantly exposed to might have different and worse effects than high doses. Beyond banning these chemicals, Lawless thinks major economic and social changes are required, including anti-poverty, pro-child care reforms.
Midas Dekkers, The Story of Shit: If you like florid language and discussion of the pleasures of taking a dump, this book is for you. It’s a tour through many European sources that celebrate defecation and related bodily functions, along with various “facts” about the digestive system. Did you ever think about the fact that everything you digest is, in some sense, vomit? Yeah, it’s that kind of book.
Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism: DiAngelo is a white woman who does diversity training, so she has a lot to say about white fragility—the demand of white people that racism only be discussed in ways that are comfortable to us, which means not at all. Whiteness, Michael Eric Dyson writes in the introduction, has a power that is greater for its unspokenness: “it is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied.” He continues: “For most of our history, straight white men have been involved in a witness protection program that guards their identities and absolves them of their crimes while offering them a future free of past encumbrances and sins.” Sounds about right.
I was struck by DiAngelo’s observation that there’s no term corresponding to “passing” to describe the ability of a white person to pass as a person of color, highlighting the direction of power in a racist society. Likewise, whites raised in all or nearly all-white environments may describe themselves as “sheltered”—but sheltered from what, exactly? Shouldn’t we consider growing up in such an environment more damaging because there’s less insulation from racist media representations and other myths? And those sheltered spaces for whites can be sites of extreme, even fatal, danger for people of color, like Trayvon Martin. One major dynamic she identifies is that whites use the language of physical danger—trauma, attacks, etc.—to describe how they feel when racism is openly discussed by people of color or even white diversity trainers; we feel like we’re the ones in danger, and this contributes to our sense of wounded innocence while playing into the racist narrative that people of color are dangerous and violent.
For many white people, even a small amount of racial stress is intolerable, triggering anger, fear, guilt, argument, and withdrawal. “White fragility functions as a form of bullying; I am going to make it so miserable for you to confront me—no matter how diplomatically you try to do so—that you will simply back off, give up.” DiAngelo locates part of the problem in the ideology of individualism, which allows white people to exempt themselves from the effects of socialization. Talking about how we’ve all been inculcated with racist ideas violates this ideology, so it’s received as an insulting generalization. DiAngelo also runs through various other arguments, e.g. “I have black friends.” As she points out, she identifies as a woman and is married to someone who identifies as a man, but she would never claim that her relationship means she lives a “gender-free” life, given the depth of gender as a social construct. I got a helpful prompt that “I’m an extrovert and talk over everyone” is not a good response to criticism about cross-racial interactions, because a woman of color who sees me as just another white interrupter has a valid point.
DiAngelo has a lot of practical advice for white people, along with a fair amount of Race 101. She talks about building racial stamina to deal with the sense of threat that comes with identification of our acts that participated in racist dynamics. Having a person of color trust you enough to tell you that you did something racist is significant—if they didn’t think you were reachable, they wouldn’t bother. “[W]hite people often define as respectful an environment with no conflict, no expression of strong emotion, no challenging of racist patterns, and a focus on intentions over impact. But such an atmosphere is exactly what creates an inauthentic, white-norm-centered, and thus hostile” environment for people of color. There’s also a chapter on “white women’s tears”—especially on how they reorient a narrative to be about her trauma and her needs. It’s not that you can’t shed tears, she advises, but given the history especially surrounding violence to black men and the fact that black people who express any emotion at all are seen as dangerous, try to do so in private/redirect the conversation to the core issues. (White men, by contrast, mostly manifest their fragility through assertions of dominance and “devil’s advocate” positions.)
Kati Stevens, Fake: Free early reviewer book. An extended musing on the concept of “fakeness,” mostly taking the position that there’s nothing wrong with fake things that aren’t frauds. Replicas in museums, for example, don’t bother her; they serve conservation goals by allowing current publics to experience artifacts/fossils without letting the real things deteriorate. And body alteration is fine and just as real as anything else; she points out that “Baudrillard [with his criticism of the unreal] would be a terrible person for anyone with a prosthetic to encounter.” Prosthesis, Stevens contends, is “already humanoid. The prosthesis’s entire reason for being is to service the body ….” Contradictions are everywhere: “If man is made in the image of God … Man is the first cheap knockoff.” Stevens gets self-contradictory in arguing that virtual reality would seem as creepy as cloning if we hadn’t encountered it first as/in entertainment, even though (a) we encountered cloning there too, and (b) she then argues that clones and robots are scary because “we have met ourselves, and there is no reason to think anything made in our image would be better than us,” which doesn’t apply to virtual landscapes. Stevens also is a fan of sex workers and sex tosy: “by demanding nothing of the customer but legal tender, their so-called ‘inauthenticity’ allows the customer to be himself, to be authentic. He does not have to cyborg himself, try to trick the prostitute or phallus into fucking or loving him—he has paid with cash instead of his identity.” That seems to undervalue the role of power and the differences between using a sex toy and hiring a sex worker. Stevens doesn’t like faked orgasms, though; unlike other proxies for body parts or relationships, they aren’t honest about their limits/un-“real”ness. Fake orgasms are frauds. But she insists that, in the era of Trump, it’s important to remember that good v. bad, real v. fake, and what I like v. what I don’t like aren’t synonymous.
Kristin Lawless, Formerly Known As Food:And here’s a screed against artifical/industrial food, lacking nutrients that used to be found in more traditional plants/animals and full of chemicals whose long-term effects we don’t know. It’s a terrifying book that takes the position that all the individualistic actions that (especially wealthy white American) people take, like buying expensive organics, won’t really help in the absence of systemic reform. She says that if you’ve ever taken antibiotics or had a C-section or if your mom or grandma did then your microbiota won’t be good enough to transfer to your baby via breastfeeding, but at the same time she goes on and on about how awful it is not to breastfeed. Just because something is “natural and biological” doesn’t, in fact, make it available to everyone. And I was also unhappy with “some research seems to indicate that the state of the mother’s immune system is the determining factor in whether her child will be autistic”—from the refrigerator mother to the incubator mother?
Before societal transformation, Lawless argues that you should still eat only whole and intact foods, like a whole egg and not like non-fat milk. It is plausible that we don’t know about all the long-term effects of chemicals that affect hormones, and Lawless cites evidence that they don’t follow ordinary dose-response curves such that the low doses we’re all constantly exposed to might have different and worse effects than high doses. Beyond banning these chemicals, Lawless thinks major economic and social changes are required, including anti-poverty, pro-child care reforms.
Midas Dekkers, The Story of Shit: If you like florid language and discussion of the pleasures of taking a dump, this book is for you. It’s a tour through many European sources that celebrate defecation and related bodily functions, along with various “facts” about the digestive system. Did you ever think about the fact that everything you digest is, in some sense, vomit? Yeah, it’s that kind of book.
Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism: DiAngelo is a white woman who does diversity training, so she has a lot to say about white fragility—the demand of white people that racism only be discussed in ways that are comfortable to us, which means not at all. Whiteness, Michael Eric Dyson writes in the introduction, has a power that is greater for its unspokenness: “it is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied.” He continues: “For most of our history, straight white men have been involved in a witness protection program that guards their identities and absolves them of their crimes while offering them a future free of past encumbrances and sins.” Sounds about right.
I was struck by DiAngelo’s observation that there’s no term corresponding to “passing” to describe the ability of a white person to pass as a person of color, highlighting the direction of power in a racist society. Likewise, whites raised in all or nearly all-white environments may describe themselves as “sheltered”—but sheltered from what, exactly? Shouldn’t we consider growing up in such an environment more damaging because there’s less insulation from racist media representations and other myths? And those sheltered spaces for whites can be sites of extreme, even fatal, danger for people of color, like Trayvon Martin. One major dynamic she identifies is that whites use the language of physical danger—trauma, attacks, etc.—to describe how they feel when racism is openly discussed by people of color or even white diversity trainers; we feel like we’re the ones in danger, and this contributes to our sense of wounded innocence while playing into the racist narrative that people of color are dangerous and violent.
For many white people, even a small amount of racial stress is intolerable, triggering anger, fear, guilt, argument, and withdrawal. “White fragility functions as a form of bullying; I am going to make it so miserable for you to confront me—no matter how diplomatically you try to do so—that you will simply back off, give up.” DiAngelo locates part of the problem in the ideology of individualism, which allows white people to exempt themselves from the effects of socialization. Talking about how we’ve all been inculcated with racist ideas violates this ideology, so it’s received as an insulting generalization. DiAngelo also runs through various other arguments, e.g. “I have black friends.” As she points out, she identifies as a woman and is married to someone who identifies as a man, but she would never claim that her relationship means she lives a “gender-free” life, given the depth of gender as a social construct. I got a helpful prompt that “I’m an extrovert and talk over everyone” is not a good response to criticism about cross-racial interactions, because a woman of color who sees me as just another white interrupter has a valid point.
DiAngelo has a lot of practical advice for white people, along with a fair amount of Race 101. She talks about building racial stamina to deal with the sense of threat that comes with identification of our acts that participated in racist dynamics. Having a person of color trust you enough to tell you that you did something racist is significant—if they didn’t think you were reachable, they wouldn’t bother. “[W]hite people often define as respectful an environment with no conflict, no expression of strong emotion, no challenging of racist patterns, and a focus on intentions over impact. But such an atmosphere is exactly what creates an inauthentic, white-norm-centered, and thus hostile” environment for people of color. There’s also a chapter on “white women’s tears”—especially on how they reorient a narrative to be about her trauma and her needs. It’s not that you can’t shed tears, she advises, but given the history especially surrounding violence to black men and the fact that black people who express any emotion at all are seen as dangerous, try to do so in private/redirect the conversation to the core issues. (White men, by contrast, mostly manifest their fragility through assertions of dominance and “devil’s advocate” positions.)
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