Cool, I've been wanting to link to that. On the one hand, I get it. There's this expectation that because they're black public intellectuals, they're de facto tutors for whites who want to be woked, and that's a lot of work. I got a tiny bit of this when I was posting about having cancer, and I'd get these very sweet messages from people I didn't know at all wanting to talk about cancer. Guess when I'm least inclined to have the energy to do that! At a certain volume, I'm sure I would have become annoyed, but for the most part you just stay polite.
ON THE OTHER HAND, I found the whole thing pretty churlish, too. You're a black public intellectual, and it's not fair, but dealing with well-intentioned but ignorant white folks is just going to be part of your life, so stop complaining.
It might just be a quantity issue.
1: I think what make it hard to take is the quantity of emails from white people wanting explanation/forgiveness combined with the quantity of emails from white people telling them they are stupid, affirmative-action hires, with the occasional death threat thrown in.
I could see how that could be annoying.
OTOH I was heartbroken that Jamelle Bouie said that he wasn't my black friend. I blew $4 on your stupid newsletter, you could at least pretend!
I read Bouie's blog a hundred years ago and have this false impression that we know each other because of it.
ON THE OTHER HAND, I found the whole thing pretty churlish, too. You're a black public intellectual, and it's not fair, but dealing with well-intentioned but ignorant white folks is just going to be part of your life, so stop complaining.
There's a thing where I get unsympathetic with the sort of left-wing activisty discourse that I'm usually on board with, and it's around this issue. It's hard to state with precision, but the attitude is like that thing about jazz -- "If you have to ask, you ain't never going to know." You get people saying or implying that anyone who wants or needs education on left-wing political issues has demonstrated that they're useless because if they were decent people who meant well, they'd already know all the relevant stuff.
There are certainly disingenuously faux-ignorant people who deliberately or semi-deliberately clog up discussions and waste time, and they should be ignored with hostility. And even sincerely well-meaning ignorant people should be very aware that no one they don't know owes them any attention or any help learning anything.
But just because you aren't owed help, doesn't make it wrong to ask for it. Lots of people don't mind educating strangers (like, the internet is largely occupied by people dying to give out free advice. Not good advice, necessarily, but advice), and if you ask for help politely and reasonably, and take no for an answer with good humor, I don't think approaching people to talk about racial issues that are giving you difficulty is any wronger than asking for help on any other category of problem. (Although, yes, obviously, tiresome for the public intellectuals getting bombarded with requests for help.)
But they don't want help, right? They want approval and validation from the Official Keeper of You're-Not-Racist Stickers.
That said, the linked piece is mostly perfectly reasonable, in that it's people complaining about approaches that are specifically stupid or overly intimate or otherwise unreasonable. If you're trying to get advice/education from a stranger about anything, it's on you to be polite and sane.
I'm arguing with something that wasn't in the Slate piece, but that I think would be an easy, superficial takeaway, that white people interacting with black people in the hopes of getting some kind of education about race are violating some kind of bright-line rule: if you're not already seriously woke with nothing much else to learn, you should keep off the subject entirely. And that seems like a mistake to me.
7 crossed with 6, but yeah. Someone who's just looking for validation from their Imaginary Black Friend should STFU. Someone who's really looking for information/education/other perspectives, though -- no one owes you their attention, but it's not necessarily a bad thing to ask for it.
Most of this could be avoided if people would stop that annoying habit of discussing their feelings. Cram them deep down inside where they belong.
For opening day of deer hunting this year, we went up to a farm in northern Wisconsin. It was a super weird experience generally (being the only woman among mostly gay, Trump-voting and Libertarian hunters) but one thing I had to do was explain to my friend (MF) why he was wrong to expect his black friend to be super nice about his apology. I guess MF had apologized to his friend about always asking to touch his hair because MF had read some article that pointed out it was racist. His friend accepted the apology but then posted an article about absolving white people's guilt and MF took it as a personal attack*. Which yeah, probably. Anyway, the whole time I was like 'Is this real? There must be a hidden camera. How does MF not know this and how is he acting like the stereotypical clueless white dude?'. I'm still not sure it wasn't an elaborate joke at my expense but I did take it seriously and tried to explain what I could.
*Isn't it his job to make me feel better about myself after I apologized?
my friend (MF)
That is so not what MF translates to in my mind but that's ok because it improves the story.
If anything you said stuck, it sounds as if you were useful, at least?
Most of this could be avoided if people would stop that annoying habit of discussing their feelings. Cram them deep down inside where they belong.
Hear, hear. Remember, witnessing other people experiencing pain or sorrow makes the same neurons fire in your brain that fire when you yourself experience pain or sorrow. Therefore, publicly displaying negative emotion is the equivalent of smoking in a crowded indoor area.
Which means acting is the same as e-cigarettes, if we're allowing analogies.
11: Yep - works both ways!
12: Yeah, I hope so. I know we're all in our bubbles so it's unsurprising that his and mine don't overlap very much. But I did expect his bubble to have a bit SJW in it based on his age, occupation, and sexuality. It was tiring to be the SJW for a weekend and now I want my cookie.
I'm no longer miserably behind on all of my deadlines, and vacation starts in 36 hours -- yay. So naturally I'm going to argue with this thread.
The point I took away from the linked piece was that for many black professionals, "doing your job in public" results in an avalanche of demands for emotional labor that is not the same as the demands for expertise and/or opinion that any given journalist, expert, or public intellectual might get.
It's not the same in terms of intensity and frequency, not the same in terms of enwhitledness, and not the same in terms of the personal cost of dispensing it. The fundamental difference is the expectation that one is supposed to perform gratitude and provide absolution for people who are still coming to realize your basic humanity.
I don't think that means that people who fail to use the exact right terminology should get smacked down, or that nobody can ever ask anyone for help or enlightenment. Just that the phenomenon being described is one that I witnessed many times (and unfortunately committed more times than I care to admit), and I don't think it does anyone any good to conflate it with doctors-being-asked-to-diagnose-you-at-a-party.
It's possible I'm feeling especially irritable about this because I just heard a well-meaning-but-often-clueless interview by a white journalist with Wesley Lowry about his new book on Ferguson/BLM. If I was grinding my teeth through parts of the interview, I can't imagine how he felt.
Oh also, no feelings were had. Just a logical discussion of how people could experience things differently based on variation in input and outputs, including frequency of each.
But it's tiring to present something emotional and heartfelt as logical. I mean, this wasn't a particularly emotional discussion for me but we also talked a bit about things that I do feel deeply about. I don't think me getting emotional would have helped my argument but, I don't know. My main emotion about most of this is scorn and disbelief at people's stupidity and short-shortsightedness so maybe not the best emotions to bring out?
"Scorn" is becoming my go-to emotion also.
I have to agree with Witt at 16 - it's more than just the asking for validation and explanations. I follow a lot of these guys and gals on the twitter (and have met Gene Denby IRL), and there's this...familiarity that happens when you're interacting in these spaces that people mistake for genuine back-and-forth relationships. People will communicate with twitter and podcast 'celebrities' as if they are their close, personal, intimate friends, and then when those 'celebrities', who get 100, or 1000 of these contacts a day, don't respond in the way that the fan (because at the end of the day that's what we are, NOT friends) deems sufficiently personal or responds in a way that doesn't correspond to said fan's expectations, it gets uncomfortable fast.
And that's BEFORE the added burden these fans put on this particular group, who in addition to mistakenly believing that they're "friends" (a la taylor swift and her followers), get the added burden of having to be everyone on twitter's "black friend" that can be pointed to as some sort of weird online version of "I can't be racist because I read/follow/retweet Ta-Nehisi Coates".
From the linked post:
Harris: What kinds of things are [your white friends] wondering about?
The biggest one with me is they read something by a black person who sees something differently than I do.
I feel like this infects the whole 'woke' frame on the cultural left. Black intellectuals on the left spectrum don't actually all agree on what Ferguson, or Trump, or Obama's Presidency's means for the politics of race. And their disagreements on those issues usually mean they also disagree on what white people should be doing to be good allies. And what applies there applies equally to gender, sexual orientation, etc. There's no set of already delimited right opinions on cultural identity issues that you can simply arrive at through proper self-education and empathy.
No snark, satire, sarcasm or kidding here. I have genuinely felt, and fortunately suppressed the urge to apologize to nearly every black person I've encountered for the existence of Trump and his supporters. I'm ashamed to be a white person in this country.
I'm not ashamed. I'm still livid that the archetype of "middled-aged PA white guy" is some barely literate fuck who can't get a job and, from the pictures, is clearly going to die of either high blood sugar or bad meth.
This is probably not the most politic of emotions, but really that guy can go fuck himself with a coal dildo.
I don't think higher quality meth is much better for you.
I would think that higher quality meth would be just medical-grade amphetamines. It certainly sounds safer.
Meth ain't cocaine or heroin, it was about 75% cheaper with plenty OTC competition, and building customer trust and repeat business is more valuable than any profit from adding baby laxative.
Signed: Walter White
20: Yeah, it seem like a lot of the stuff they talk about in the Slate piece is very specific to Twitter, even though the general issues apply more broadly.
Prescription pills rather than over the counter.
I read the linked piece when it was posted. I can't imagine asking a black person for help with racial relations, or for that matter, asking most "experts" about anything, or attempting to gain from someone's else's painful experience....except when mediated by print etc.
Cease with the personal contact, STFU, listen and read. We have an Internet, a Wikipedia, The New Inquiry.
Here's a start
This is Tessa McMillan Cottom responding to Coates encomium to Obama, linked from LGM because "Throttle Jockey" and "drexicya," black, show up in comments.
Coates was a little more critical of Obama than I expected, but the very long piece was mostly how the Obama years made Coates feel real nice. I am happy for Coates. Really. Not.
While I am there, Eric Foner on Obama, radicalism, and movements
I can't even imagine being a public/semi-public figure on Twitter. It works just fine for me as a guy with like 30 followers who can use it to read stuff by 30-40 people whose stuff I find interesting (plus ~70 people I followed at one time for some reason and haven't been annoyed enough to unfollow).
I understand why journalists use Twitter so much, but it sure sounds like unpleasant experience.
Twitter gave us president elect Trump. It can go die in a fire.
The progression of 33/34/35 is amusing.
There's a thing where I get unsympathetic with the sort of left-wing activisty discourse that I'm usually on board with, and it's around this issue. It's hard to state with precision, but the attitude is like that thing about jazz -- "If you have to ask, you ain't never going to know." You get people saying or implying that anyone who wants or needs education on left-wing political issues has demonstrated that they're useless because if they were decent people who meant well, they'd already know all the relevant stuff.
It reminds me, one of the lines in Katha Pollit's post-election column that I found depressing was this:
We thought we were stronger and more numerous than we are, and that made us insular and arrogant. As Jeanette Sherman wrote on Facebook the morning after Election Day, "Over the last several years, I've heard a steadier and steadier drumbeat of 'it's not my job to educate you' from so-called progressive activists. In many ways, this election shows why, if you are an activist, that is precisely your job."
I understand the reasons why people say, "it's not my job to educate you." -- it's exhausting and frequently unpleasant and everybody needs to be able to say, "no, I don't have energy for you right now" some of the time. But, clearly, there is a lot of work that needs to be done.
I understand the reasons why people say, "it's not my job to educate you." ...
Maybe the real problem is more like
"Don't reach out for me," she said
"Can't you see I'm drownin' too?"
I first became aware of the "It's not our job to educate you" slogan about 10 years ago. At the time it struck me that, as political* slogans go, it kind of sucks.
* As opposed to therapeutic or self-help.
"It's not our job to think up good slogans."
30: I don't think so at all. It's just even more public on twitter. But being asked to speak for your race if your race isn't white but most people in the group are comes up a lot in semipublic contexts. That doesn't mean it isn't generally well-intentioned, but I can see how it can get exhausting.
That said, I don't engage in a lot of conversations that I might otherwise because it really does feel like it would be nearly impossible to try get involved without being treated like I'm intruding, which in some cases I probably would be. The activist advice I've seen that I think goes over much better than "not my job to educate" is when people say that sometimes it's just better to listen and see what you pick up on. You don't have to perform your consciousness or whatever immediately or ask for an audience to it.
"It's not our job to educate you.": I've been willing to say "we have explained this to you and your persistent ignorance is willful and obstructive." But then people complain that that's too combative to be activist.
If activism is supposed to win hearts and minds, sure. But what if it should only bolster those who agree with you while demoralizing those who disagree?
A lot of the Slate piece reads to me as "I'm not your magic Negro." A lot of white people don't know any black people, but the folks in that round-table (twitter-fest?) all fit the stereotype of the movie/TV magic Negro*, or appear to: wise dispensers of wisdom and truth to the perplexed and unenlightened. It's not at all surprising people want to get closer to them. They might be given the red vs. blue pill choice, or be shown what's behind the poster in Shawshank.
* Obvsly including Obama, which explains a lot of his popularity among white voters.
Over the last week at work we've had a few social events where I've gotten to know the new person on our team a bit. I'm kind of used to the economic utilitarian type showing up in my field (tech), mixed with a dose of libertarian thinking, but I didn't quite expect it from the black Canadian.
Keeping eye-roll to oneself is honestly a fine thing. I've done it. It wasn't that hard, and I imagine the would-be objects of my eye-rolling were happier to be indulged than they would have been to be upbraided.
There is now an idea that there's a pretty strict way to be a good ally, and the main thing you have to do is not ask any questions that might help you do it, because then you're asking for cookies or making people do emotional labor or whatever. It strikes me as unhelpful and self-indulgent, but now I'm tone-policing.
I guess I will read the rest of the article.
Or, what a lot of people already said, looks like.
"It's not my job to educate you" is probably not the firmest, and most solid of grounds, to argue for increased investment in education. Like, if everyone should just be expected to figure things out on their own, at home in their pyjamas, maybe: why even hire teachers?! So expensive, and then there are the unions....
"It's not my job to educate you" is actually quite libertarian, come to think of it.
"It's not my job to educate you" agree the authors. Guys, you are three journalists who write or broadcast prolifically about racial issues and a sociology professor.
You know who else believes that "It's not my job to educate you, and BUGGER OFF" is a valid response to questions? IT professionals.
You know why? Even if it is, in fact, your job to educate the users, scale matters. After some threshold, more volume of interruptions (trivial ones from your point of view) is going to mean more crankiness.
But then, look at the triumph that is IT security and tell me "the users should read the goddamn help file and leave me alone!" or "if we could get everyone to configure PGP e-mail this wouldn't be a problem!" hasn't been a fucking disaster.
Maciej Cieglowski was saying the other day that journalists *hate* interviewing IT people and especially security specialists because they're cranky about anyone who needs complicated concepts explaining, and they insist on covering everything with green and black skulls and behaving like teenagers.
49 and 50 look like good examples of why analogies are banned. Those black intellectuals might not mind educating people if they could pontificate at leisure about the topic from an angle of their choosing, after having had hours if not months to prepare their arguments, and give bad grades to the people who aren't paying attention. Being asked for their take on a news story, and not just their own take but with some subtext of speaking for their race, is very different.
Blame them for using a glib phrase like "it's not my job to educate you," I suppose, especially if they are educators in some sense, and I think anyone who actually wants an active Twitter presence is insane, but I can see why they get annoyed by this pattern.
While I started the griping along these, I think 51 is righter than 49-50. Everyone has the limited amount of energy they have, and shouldn't have to feel obligated to tend to people they're not in a personal relationship with that makes it appropriate. Being a black intellectual doesn't make you responsible for doing any amount of education and reassurance some random wants you do to, and being annoyed and frustrated by the impositions is reasonable.
But still, what Smearcase said in 46. Reasonable appeals for help/education in being a better ally aren't necessarily a wrong thing to do.
Those black intellectuals might not mind educating people if they could pontificate at leisure about the topic from an angle of their choosing, after having had hours if not months to prepare their arguments
Three of them write for Slate. Yes, please go on about how it is unfair to expect them to communicate except in the form of authoritative pronouncements which are the result of many months of careful study and consideration.
Having actually read the first part of the linked piece, I think that "It's not my job to educate you" is really missing the point. It's not "educating" they are complaining about. It's managing white peoples' emotions. That is, making sure they (we) feel happy. Which is very different.
"It's not my job to educate you in such a way that you never have to feel a sad" is a very different thing than saying "It's not my job to educate you."
55 suggests Moby may have achieved comity between TNC and your favourite crusty old right-wing professor shouting about trigger warnings.
I don't think I had many crusty right-wing professors. I had brunch with an old professor of mine just this past Sunday, but he's been retired for a decade and I didn't ask about politics.
57: Except, of course, that it is the right wing professor's job to educate their students, and trigger warnings aren't about anyone feeling sad.
Also, what Moby said in 54. The dismissive 'it's not my job to educate you' wasn't in the Slate piece -- the writers weren't bitching about polite, reasonable inquiry, they were bitching about white people looking for validation from them. As public intellectuals (or whatever you call someone who writes for Slate), educating the public may be their job, but one-on-one reassurance that you're one of the good ones for every white person who approaches them isn't.
(or whatever you call someone who writes for Slate)
Usually "asshole presumptive", but I quite like Bouie.
and a sociology professor
I don't know if she says it in the linked piece, but she's said it's her job to educate students, not any random person who shows up in replies/messages/emails with questions. It's the expectation that because she writes for the public too, unlike many professors, therefore she must educate all the public at any time they want, how they want, that's a problem.
Anyway, I thought the "it's not my job to educate you" subthread was more about a certain kind of activist response, not necessarily about this article.
You know how I'm always about staying on the original topic.
62: Well, I started it. And I did say that I wasn't exactly talking about the article, but the article did make me think about the activist response that annoys me -- it's close enough that confusing the two is wrong, I think, but a sort of natural mistake.
I think the activist response comes from a "more Catholic than the pope" impulse. Being worn out and annoyed by ignorant people wanting to be educated is perfectly natural, and they're tiresome and annoying in proportion to how culpably ignorant they are, and how bad their manners are about it.
Complaints about that are reasonable and fine, and that's the category the linked article is in. And white people thinking about contacting a black public intellectual/writer/whatever should be thinking about complaints like that, and checking themselves for whether they're being tiresome and annoying along those lines.
But turning those complaints into a brightline rule that anyone looking to someone more knowledgeable on an issue of race/gender/whatever is doing something wrong is jerky in itself, and shuts down people who are really trying to be on the right side of things.
Also, what Moby said in 54. The dismissive 'it's not my job to educate you' wasn't in the Slate piece
I was going to say that.
I don't know if she says it in the linked piece . . .
Here is the closing exchange in the linked article:
Demby: It's a callus I think we take as a given, though. We've been thinking about this stuff -- in our professional and personal lives -- for a while. Tressie has five degrees in it!
McMillan Cottom: Just two, smarty pants. And yes -- I just can't accept the extra work given I'm already underpaid in my actual work. Too many black taxes!
Bouie: Right. I was just saying to someone recently that people vastly underestimate the extent to which our lives are filled with a level of racial stress most white people simply couldn't deal with.
Demby: And we're having conversations with people who are sometimes well-intentioned and just starting to wade into these conversations and grapple with these ideas. And so it's hard to figure out where to start, because we're not in the same place.
Bouie: What's more, there's often an implicit demand that we presume their racial innocence.
Harris: That "innocence" is really just willful ignorance in about 99 percent of cases, I'd say. To Gene's point about not being in the same place, one final question for you all: How best do we deal with the well-intentioned folks who are in our lives already (and not Twitter/FB ghosts) and not scare them away but also not give up too much of our souls in the process? Because it's draining, obviously, to be the racial confessor. You are not priests or therapists -- you did not sign up for this.
McMillan Cottom: Well, I'm a little different here. My job is to teach the willfully ignorant, to a certain extent. I teach race 101 for my day job. I refuse to teach it in my personal life or even to my colleagues and peers. That's a privilege of my job, though. I can make a semilegitimate claim that my colleagues are responsible for knowing this stuff in a way I couldn't in other jobs. A prerequisite for being my friend is that you can't be precious about things that are really life-and-death issues for me. If you can't deal with me talking honestly about racism, then we aren't friends. And in my public role I've evolved on this. I only owe people as much good faith as they extend to me. Part of that good faith is Googling before you waste my time because you value me and my time.
My momma always said that until people asked the right question, they weren't ready for the right answer. If you ask me a broad, unspecific, basic-ass question, then you aren't ready for a serious answer from a serious person.
Bouie: That is an approach I might have to adopt.
But turning those complaints into a brightline rule that anyone looking to someone more knowledgeable on an issue of race/gender/whatever is doing something wrong is jerky in itself
At least when it comes to activist culture online, a pretty solid rule is "If something, no matter how reasonable its original motivation, can be concerted into an excuse to behave like a jerk, it will be".
I'm glad for the quote in 66, because I read this when it came out, and hadn't recalled my exact response. But seeing the conclusion, I remember: it did sound to me suspiciously like, "why does the public keep bothering us public intellectuals?", but then McMillan Cottom really nails the landing with "I only owe people as much good faith as they extend to me."
Going back to 1, there's an extent to which any public intellectual/expert on Twitter* is going to get talked at by people who don't meet MMC's standard, but, if white Americans wanted black public intellectuals to be more patient with them, they shouldn't have been so shitty all these years. I'm not even being facetious: don't ask favors of people you've been crappy to. Tweeting a n00b SF question at Scalzi or someone is silly/obnoxious, but it's not disrespectful in the way that asking "But why don't black people just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like my grandparents did?" of MMC would be.
68* There was also an aspect of this during the heyday of blogs, when things were much more democratic, such that an actual credentialed expert (e.g. BdL), a clever nobody (us, I guess), and a complete rando were reasonably likely to interact on a fairly level playing field. But Twitter ISTM encourages drive-bys in a way that's different. If you're a needy white person looking for absolution from Jesse at Pandagon, you've almost certainly read enough of his posts to be at least a bit woke. But if you follow Bouie on Twitter, a huge chunk of the content is relatively shallow comment/hot takes on current events and other conversations, not nec. anything that would cause a follower to clue in. Point being, it's very easy to engage shallowly in a way that was less true on blogs.
Which is why, of course, blogs are inherently superior.
I took a look at that Eric Foner article bob mentioned in 32. It's got one quote in it that struck me as seriously wrong:
The day The New York Times endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination on the grounds that Sanders wasn't pragmatic enough, my students discussed the antislavery movement. "What exactly constitutes political practicality?" I asked them. For much of the 1850s and the first two years of the Civil War, Lincoln--widely considered the model of a pragmatic politician--advocated a plan to end slavery that involved gradual emancipation, monetary compensation for slave owners, and setting up colonies of freed blacks outside the United States. This harebrained scheme had no possibility of enactment. It was the abolitionists, still viewed by some historians as irresponsible fanatics, who put forward the program--an immediate and uncompensated end to slavery, with black people becoming US citizens--that came to pass (with Lincoln's eventual help, of course).
Calling Lincoln's approach harebrained does serious injustice to the man and his strategy. The first two parts (gradual emancipation, with possibly some monetary compensation to slaveowners) is pretty close to how a bunch of the Northern states had abolished slavery in the early 1800s. If it weren't for Eli Whitney, one could have imagined that the Southern states would have gradually followed their example later on. The third part (setting up colonies of freed blacks outside the US) was already happening to a certain extent in Liberia. Some safety valve like that was probably needed in a peaceful abolition program if you ever wanted to get buy-in from Southern whites, who were terrified of what giving voting rights to the newly freed slaves would do to white political control in the deep South.
Could a program like that have been passed in 1860? No. Neither could immediate abolition. But Lincoln was planning for the long game, even though he did float the above as a bit of a repeated trial balloon.
What Foner is leaving out is the main part of Lincoln's slavery policy, which had also been a key part of the Republican platform for years: the determination to prevent any further spread of slavery to the territories. If Lincoln could accomplish *that*, he would ensure the eventual abolition of slavery over time, as more and more free states were organized and joined the Union without offsetting slave states. And unlike abolition programs, Lincoln had a very good chance of enacting that prohibition during his presidency. If a subsequent President didn't reverse that policy, slavery was going to be doomed in the long run, at which point something like his peaceful abolition program might become more politically acceptable to Southern whites looking for a way out. Southern leaders understood that too, which is why they chose secession once Republicans demonstrated that they could elect a President without any slave state votes.
I just saw a story which is remarkably on point for the article in the OP.
In two parts
1) Margaret Cho Emailed Tilda Swinton Over Doctor Strange Controversy: 'I Felt Like a House Asian'
Margaret Cho has been vocal about the erasure of Asian-Americans from Hollywood films, ... apparently she also had private conversations with Swinton herself. "Tilda eventually emailed me and she said that she didn't understand why people were so mad about Doctor Strange and she wanted to talk about it, and wanted to get my take on why all the Asian people were mad," Cho tells Bobby Lee on his podcast TigerBelly. "It was so weird."
Earlier today, we reached out to Swinton's rep Brian Swardstrom for a comment, and boy did he give one:Since you asked for a response to a story you published today about the substance and tone of a correspondence between Margaret Cho and Tilda Swinton, Tilda offers you the entire unedited and only conversation she has ever had with Margaret - with her gratitude for the opportunity to clarify and with all good wishes to all.
My take:
1) Swinton comes across as lovely. Trying to do the right thing, and to be sensitive in her e-mails to Margaret Cho.
2) That said, in the language of this thread, it does seem like Swinton was asking for "racial absolution" from Cho and I can understand why Cho would find the whole thing a little weird and make some uncharitable cracks about the whole thing.
3) When people talk about how scary it can be to ask questions about racial topics, this could be an example -- I could easily read it and think, "if Swinton got that reaction to those e-mails, I don't see how she could have been more polite. It's safer to just not say anything."
4) Part of the issue is that it doesn't appear that Cho and Swinton new each other previously, and Swinton did reach out because Cho was Asian-American and involved in activism and Swinton clearly felt comfortable contacting her without having done much reading/research prior.
It's a perfect example of the messiness of the issues in the OP.
Following up my 70 after looking up more info on Foner, it's probably a little arrogant of me to be disputing the historical analysis of a famous historian who has focused (among other things) on the early history of the Republican party when I am nothing of the kind. Which means he knows damn well what the Republican platform was on the expansion of slavery and just chose not to mention it. I've read a bunch of contemporary documents by Lincoln and various Southern leaders, but it's possible that I'm misreading the political dynamics somewhat, or that Foner was just trying to illustrate why Lincoln couldn't get his first version of gradual emancipation enacted.
66: Thanks, that's the quote I was thinking of.
Having read a few of Foner's books, but not the recent stuff linked here, I don't think anyone at Unfogged has pointed out anything he doesn't know. That doesn't make him right to leave it out of the recent pieces - which I haven't read - but I'm guessing he knows what he's doing.
Uh, Margaret Cho is clearly a lying piece of shit. Swinton did everything right, asked for discretion, which Cho pretended to grant, and then Cho trashed her anyway. 32% of child molestors are more honorable than that. I hope someone remakes The Joy Luck Club with Swinton playing every role.
75 last made me laugh. Margaret Cho does come off badly in this, and I'm predictably a fan. WHAT IS ASS MASTUH?
If it was only the email exchange, I'd say they both come off well. As it is, I can't care about anything Marvel does.
Cho completely and uncharitably mischaracterized the entire exchange. No wonder Swinton released it.