I’m sorry. Plain and simple. I didn’t pick the offensive imagery in my book, but I should have caught it sooner than now. I didn’t and there’s no excuse. It was my first book, I was excited and happy, but I needed to have a more critical eye. I would do anything to remove racist images from the first printing of the book if I could, and I am relieved and happy to say that they will be removed from future printings. Seal Press has their note of apology up too, and they accept full responsibility for these mistakes. I really recommend reading it.
I can understand why anyone would choose to boycott a book with these images, and I respect that choice. Hopefully, once they are removed, people will reconsider supporting the book if they like the content. I, for one, will be ripping the pages out of my copy but keeping them as a reminder to be alert. Thank you to everyone who’s engaged in a conversation that’s been tough for me but productive nonetheless.
This is pretty much what I’ve got to say. I welcome your feedback below. I imagine things might get pretty intense, so I may not choose to say much more than this, but know that I’m reading and listening and respect your thoughts very much. Once again, I apologize for the images, my overlooking them, and any hurt this may have caused.
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And thank you. The book will now go back on my wishlist.
w000t…
Book ban!
The first print is now a collectible item!!!!
It takes a lot to admit you’re wrong– especially in the public eye.
And thank you for showing what a REAL apology looks like and not offering one of those “I’m sorry if you were offended” non-apologies.
Yup. I think that’s all people wanted. Kudos.
I’m very happy to hear that subsequent printings will be released without the offensive imagery. Though I still think the folks at Seal and Perseus stink to high heaven for not getting this the first go round. How hard would it have been to photoshop the totally effed-up stereotypical brown primitives out of the chosen comic panels?
By the way, aside from the atrocious design, it is Cracking Me Up so far.
I certainly understand your being sorry. But boorish white guys waving breif cases and golf clubs would not have conveyed the sense of danger you were probably going for. There is nothing funny about racial insensitivity. But what are you going to do? Native Americans on the war path? Drunken Hells Angels? I guess we have to go with the little aliens from the cinematic triumph Mars Attacks! I say judge the author on the whole body of work, not a few illustrations.
I am so relieved to see you apologize here.
To an extent I can understand how an illustration like that could end up in the book, as part of the theme of campy 1940’s era jungle comics, which were full of racist portrayals of black savages. But to include such an image without comment shows an extreme error of judgment. And considering how much respect I have for you and your writings, it would me mightily disillusioning for this to go uncommented on.
So, I’ll just repeat what others have said, and say thanks for showing integrity to apologize.
But boorish white guys waving breif cases and golf clubs would not have conveyed the sense of danger you were probably going for.
Are you serious?
Like I said in the thread at Feministe, that’s not a kitschy and ironic use of racist imagery. If that were actually the point, the purpose of the images, OMG, that would not make it okay.
The use of images of scary black native men to convey a sense of danger is a blatantly RACIST use of racist imagery, wherein the racist message is the point. Offensive. Very, very offensive. And in reflecting that racist message, it perpetuates it.
Amanda’s not defending those images that way. It would be nice if her readers didn’t either.
Well done, Amanda.
Everyone makes mistakes; it’s when we realize it was preventable and hurt others that a choice has to be made- do we ignore it quietly, as not to make the situation worse, or speak up? I think you made the correct choice.
brian, I think that Seal’s post is enlightening as to what happened.
brianb99c April 25, 2008 at 3:23 pm
But what are you going to do? Native Americans on the war path? Drunken Hells Angels? I guess we have to go with the little aliens from the cinematic triumph Mars Attacks! I say judge the author on the whole body of work, not a few illustrations.
… ripping out entire set, getting new series of illustration, hopefully match and artistically coherent, see legal department if it’s clear. If not return to step one. ..maybe.
…and people wonder why nobody makes money on books anymore.
“But what are you going to do? Native Americans on the war path? Drunken Hells Angels? I guess we have to go with the little aliens from the cinematic triumph Mars Attacks!”
Nazis are just about the only safe target - as long as they are a pure evil target with no examination of anything that might behind their “cause”, or cause anyone to realize they were (obviously sick) people.
Other than that, there’s not much…
OTOH, I watched Star Wars: Episode 1 on Spike (sorry!) last weekend, and all I could see were all of the racist proxy images spread throughout, starting with Jar Jar Binks and going downhill from there. It was worse than I remembered…
Thankyou. And a straighforward apology, too.
Is there any word on whether the already-printed books will be recalled?
Just FYI - I just visited the amazon.com page for the book adn a number of people are leaving 1 star reviews based upon the issue with the illustrations vs. content of the book.
Just sayin’
Good for you, Amanda. It takes a lot of courage to own up to one’s mistakes.
Perhaps there’s one useful thing that’s come of this: namely, it can serve as reminder (to people who need such a reminder–i.e., white people like me) of how ingrained, and hence possible to overlook, racist iconography remains in our culture.
Although I hadn’t seen the illustrations until they were documented at feministe, I have the sinking suspicion that had I seen them in the context of the book, I wouldn’t have been troubled by their racist import. If I thought about it at all, I’d probably have seen it is a legitimate use of irony or camp reappropriation. Whereas if the imagery had involved different but equally offensive stereotypes (say, where the people the protagonist is facing down are drunk Irishmen or Shylock-esque Jews), I’m sure I would have thought: what the f are they thinking, to use these images as representations of a generic “inhospitable environment”?
Dude, if you really want to scare people, you should put pictures of Jerry Falwell and those creepy anti-choice guys on the chapter headings. Antonin Scalia works, too.
The reprint will have no have illustrations inside the book, I do believe. It’s going to 2nd printing right now, so that’s the simplest way to fix it.
Antonin Scalia works, too.
http://img1.picturewizard.com/1326728/0/Scalia.jpg
I watched Star Wars: Episode 1 on Spike (sorry!) last weekend, and all I could see were all of the racist proxy images spread throughout, starting with Jar Jar Binks and going downhill from there. It was worse than I remembered…
OT, but I’ve been wanting to rant about it to fellow feminists for a while:
Here in NY there’s a subway ad for Spike’s airing of the holy trilogy/ies which depicts Princess Leia in the gold bikini, bound by the neck, with the caption “Because Gold Bikinis Never Go Out Of Style”.
Seeing that really made clear the fact that Leia is basically Jabba the Hut’s rape-slave. It also put the fetishization of Carrie Fisher in that scene in a whole new light for me, it being the only part of the three films where Leia is depicted as a victim, or even particularly sexualized.
Dearest Amanda,
You do not “suck”.
In fact, I think you are totally awesome.
I didn’t even see the racism in the pictures either. I read Twisty’s post about the whole BFP-Seal Press-Amanda thing yesterday and I was really struck at the time by Twisty’s point about when you are a member of the privileged group, even if you are a person who actively struggles *against* benefitting from the situation, you still benefit. I was struck by it in the abstract, though. Today, I was struck by it in the particular. I really, really didn’t see the racism til it was pointed out to me. THEN I saw it, oh boy did I see it! and I was so ashamed of my blindness. It’s amazing how, if you don’t do it and don’t see it, you don’t know that it happens…lot like some of the guys discussing the whole Open Source Boob crap, who haven’t ever done it and nobody’s asked to grope THEIRS so..! We don’t wanna be those guys, eh?
I have Amanda’s book on reserve at Borders and I’m going to ask them to hold my copy and exchange it for a second printing when that comes out.
God, Ugly in Pink, did you have to do that to me? I was hetero before that picture.
I hope, Amanda, that you will take this and the last month’s events as impetus to examine your privilege and prejudices. If we’re serious about feminism being for all women, we white feminists need to accept that racism is just as entrenched in the feminist movement as it is in the larger society, and accept our responsibility to change that.
Good for you for being able to apologize so graciously. And the trolls here and elsewhere “defending” your “right” to be racially insensitive are really grossing me out. That’s no kind of defense I would want.
I aim to please (lesbians)!
Aha! The gay agenda! I see what you did there.
Just ordered my copy.
This lurker is happy to see this post.
You didn’t do anything wrong.
Context is important.
The images would have a racist message if used with a racist text.
The images don’t have a racist message in the context of “It’s A Jungle Out There.”
Indeed, white privilege is deeply rooted. It takes concerted effort to sensitize oneself (if one is white, that is) to recognize it, both in oneself and in the world around one. Hell, my husband and son are Asian, and sometimes I forget they’re not white like me.
It does take vigilance to remember that not everyone has the same background assumptions and experiences I have.
The images don’t have a racist message in the context of “It’s A Jungle Out There.”
Only if you assume that the jungle is, in fact, filled with black cannibals who will attack you.
Seriously, did you actually look at the pictures? They were going for irony, but it really, really didn’t work.
Thanks, Amanda. I got my copy in the post last week and was startled by the illustrations.
I like all the words though, and I hope you write another one soon.
Amanda, I’m sorry that your first book had such a bumpy beginning. I look forward to reading the new version as I have enjoyed reading all your bloggings in the past.
Context IS important. The context of this book’s title underscores the racism of the images. I wrote on feministe:
I don’t find the images problematically sexist in the context in which they are presented.
However, as Holly says, “I cannot automatically extend that same benefit of the doubt to a feminist book’s take on racism and use of racist images.”
Particularly because of the book’s heading “It’s a Jungle Out There” which implies that what feminists must fight is whatever is represented as being the enemy in the jungle. Crocodiles? Okay. Although one can still make the argument that using colonialism/expansionism as the underpinning for a metaphor to describe the “battles” of feminism is inherently problematic (as kiki makes). But racistly depicted indigenous peoples? This clearly crosses the line. It suggests that what feminists need to conquer is dark people; it reinforces the displacement of white male patriarchy onto brown men, a dynamic we see as clearly politically relevant in current events where white men’s patriarchal leanings are depicted as less bad and pervasive than those of looming outsider brown men. (Be glad for our {purity balls, polygamous rape farms, lack of representation for white women and WOC in government, enablement-through-war of the rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of brown women}, at least they aren’t {machismo, brown men raping white women, mandatory headscarves, etc.})
The context of the book and its title itself underscores — not ironicizes — the problematic racism of these images.
Thank you, Amanda. I am sure this was difficult to write, and yet it was absolutely necessary. I am delighted that a new edition without these images will be forthcoming soon. Brava to you, and to Seal, for moving so quickly and unequivocally on this.
Oh my Eric Jaffa, this is not a good time for that. No more gasoline on the fire please. Splitting hairs over whether the images are merely racist imagery or convey racist intent is not a swell idea, especially when Amanda herself is apologizing.
This is an adult and mature apology. That about sums it up. Saying “I’m sorry” without ifs ands or buts is as difficult as it gets.
Hopefully this thread won’t get “pretty intense.”
Oh, heh, I didn’t already post what I thought I had.
This apology is great. I remain really excited to read the book!
I remember the kerfuffle with the first cover design. Seeing some of the interior art, yeah, it’s kind of the same issues all over again.
my thoughts remain the same. it’s a shame that this would distract anyone from the actual content of the book, and yeah, better to just ditch the cheeky images altogether than to let this become a distraction.
perhaps better would be lifting diagrams from a Jungle Survival US Army manual: escaping from quicksand, removing leeches, a sectional diagram of the dreaded Candiru, instructions on staring down something from genus Panthera.
Seriously, people. The woman was good enough to acknowledge her mistake and apologize, so stop trying to take that from her.
Eric Jaffa April 25, 2008 at 4:06 pm
The images don’t have a racist message in the context of “It’s A Jungle Out There.”
no, the images themselves are pretty self explanatory. They are pretty bad. It’s racism/colonialism.
But my reaction is more: yeah, that was really dumb. *roll eyes* Otherwise the text is fighting a good cause, and that’s the main thing. They redo the entire set because of that anyway. The book is fun.
Next book would have tons of material to tackle, for sure.
By “people” I mean “willfully blind racism-defenders.”
Amanda,
I’m glad that you’ve apologized for the imagery. I’m still looking forward to reading the book - I’ve had like eighteen incidents in the past couple months where I’ve thought, “I should email Amanda about this. Does this happen to everyone in the South? Maybe she wrote about it in that book of hers!”
So I’ll order a copy, hoping that lessons have been learned all around. I’m sure many of your readers (myself included) have been duly reminded of white privilege and latent racism, and our responsibility to aid in their elimination.
Amanda - you are an inspiration. Thank you for the book (which IS great!) and for the apology too. I have much to learn, including how to expand my critical eye.
karpad April 25, 2008 at 4:31 pm
perhaps better would be lifting diagrams from a Jungle Survival US Army manual: escaping from quicksand, removing leeches, a sectional diagram of the dreaded Candiru, instructions on staring down something from genus Panthera.
argh..no. those sketches are so ugly and boring.
there GOT TO be some feminist illustrator looking for some work right? Come on… (I love nice illustration. I like looking at pictures.)
Third edition maybe? with expanded comment?
Whenever I say something “anti-white”—usually in response to something, shall we say, “pro-white”—I always end up holding my forearm up in front of my eyes, pinching the skin on that forearm, and saying: Crap! Dammit! I’m white!
I consider it a saving grace that I have some Tsalagi blood inside me.
But that “white” part truly irks me.
What to do? What to do?
Great post. Still looking forward to my copy’s arrival and reading your book!
Hmmmm… i can’t seem to find the pix on the inside of the book posted on the web. Anybody got a link?
Now, if people were upset about the COVER, it’s “get a fucking life” time. HUMOR, what a concept. Something conspicuously in shortage over at Feministe, IMO.
Apart from the pictures, I totally loved your book - it made me cry with laughter in parts! I’m glad to hear it will now be printed without the offensive images. Keep doing what you’re doing!
Do you mean it?
When you’re sorry for the racist imagery that your book capitalizes on, that will make you money, does it make you pause and consider the other ways in which you, as a beneficiary of white privilege, may have allowed or perpetrated racism? It’s really easy to apologize for something when it’s obvious - but so many people stop at the obvious and never move on to self-reflection.
So. Do you mean it?
Eric, there are links over at Feministe. I’d put one here but I’m really hoping we can get past this incident…
O si yo, invisible. same here.
It’s a good day to die.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKTaN-HtRk8
I want nice illustrations …I love pictures …waaa…… Come on feminist artists.
if people were upset about the COVER, it’s “get a fucking life” time.
That’s what I thought before I clicked over to the post at Feministe. I was kind of like, Goddamn, NOW WHAT??!!11!
glass to see you addressed this, AM. Your post is much better Seal’s attempt at an apology.
It’s good that you’ve admitted to this one and apologised. I hope this doesn’t sound patronising, but I think that the way this incident occurred - through complete blindness by everyone involved - underlines the way racism plays an unintended, but very real part in editorial decisions; could both you and Seal Press see how that extends to recent WOC complaints about both your writing and their publishing, and cop to the whole phenomena as well as just this one incident?
Eric,
The most problematic images are here: http://dearwhitefeminists.wordpress.com/update/
Thanks Amanda.
I’m a fan of campy retro images myself, and if it had been me, I don’t know that I’d have seen the images as anything but silly outdated concepts, or thought about their potential to offend. Something for me to think about, I guess.
I’m waiting to buy it until it’s released up here in Canada (want to shop local). But I’m looking forward to reading it.
I agree. Excellent apology; well written and evidently sincere.
that will make you money, does it make you pause and consider the other ways in which you, as a beneficiary of white privilege, may have allowed or perpetrated racism?
Oh, look, here we are back at “get a fucking life”.
I work for a TV show that perpetuates a lot of racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc. stereotypes. From time to time, I have considered quitting (and it’s always possible that someday a line will be crossed and I really will).
I take it upon myself to point out the bigotry when I see it, but since I’m not the executive producer of the show or anything, it often doesn’t get changed.
So I guess you could say I make money from racism, sexism, etc. But then again, I have to eat. There are precious few jobs that come completely free of the hatred that is completely and totally ingrained in our culture. And in the media? Good luck with that…
Oh, and irony of ironies, it is mainly the lily-white, well-connected, and trust-fund-bearing (PRIVILEGED) ones among us who have access to said jobs, because they tend not to pay much. People who lack privilege in a variety of ways have to deal with this a lot more, because they have less access to money and connections, and less freedom to leave a job or change careers. Less power within their fields. Not to mention being scoffed at simply because you are a woman or a person of color or a lesbian (or what the fuck ever) for speaking up in the first place.
So, sorry, the idea that having to reconcile oneself with career-related racism/sexism/homophobia/whatever that is outside one’s control doesn’t actually correlate to how privileged you are, sorry.
There are some in that very first link in Amanda’s post. And, yeah, the pictures in question are worthy of inclusion with Superdickery’s Propaganda Extravaganza comic book covers, except that Superdickery is actually presenting their images as being in bad taste.
You are taking quite a bit of heat from some of the commenters at Shakesville. Melissa hasn’t weighed in yet, but very few people seem ready to disown you. Live and learn and move on.
Yay Amanda! I will read your book this weekend, but I am glad you’ve cleared the air and agree with many others that your statement was thoughtful and brave. It takes a lot more courage to do this than to rip people apart anonymously.
It’s definitely ‘collectible’ item now… heh.
This is really interesting.
Can we collectively prove that at least one thread on this topic doesn’t have to devolve into people bludgeoning each other?
Excuse me? White priviledged? Did I choose to be born to a white couple in a 1st world country? No. Did that little girl you saw on the news choose to be born to a “black” couple in a 3rd world country? No.
That’s all I have to say.
Hey, squashed is right! I have a racist copy of Amanda Marcotte’s first book! Now all I need to do is get it signed and I am going to be a millionaire when we get old!
You’re obviously trying to do the right thing, and I’m glad. But it’s still not clear to me, after the whole gorilla cover incident, why the images weren’t obviously a problem to you or anyone else who saw them pre-publication.
When we tell men to “do their own homework” about male privilege, we sometimes leave them puzzled or angry because they don’t know anyone to explain it to them personally.
As we all know, that doesn’t mean every feminist has as her/his job to explain feminism to everyone who doesn’t get it. But it does mean they’re still stuck in ignorance so long as they don’t push themselves out of their comfort zone.
It looks like you’re getting that end of the stick now. Reminding yourself of it with a couple of pieces of paper out of your book is probably not enough.
A quick parallel: People don’t learn to speak a language by listening. They learn by speaking it and making mistakes. You learned feminism by speaking it. You’ll have to learn real racial equality by speaking it, too. Not by just learning “what to avoid,” ‘cos clearly that didn’t work.
Can we collectively prove that at least one thread on this topic doesn’t have to devolve into people bludgeoning each other?
Yeah, sorry.
It’s just that the whole “…and you have the nerve to make money from this?!” angle really bugs me.
Foucault April 25, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Hey, squashed is right! I have a racist copy of Amanda Marcotte’s first book! Now all I need to do is get it signed and I am going to be a millionaire when we get old!
look. man, you are not seeing this right. If she ever run for president 20 yrs from now…
You’d be rich! There is a special spot in ebay I already claim. So it is now in my interest for Amanda to get insanely famous or rich, then run for president.
.. then. Ka–ching!
I think I have to run my own viral promo, to make this scheme fly.
I can’t resist the irony. Is that what you call it?
I sang this song with my 4 year old grand-daughter the other day. She blew me away with the mispronunciations and the accusation that I didn’t know all the words.
She was right. Her heartfelt solo had me “remembering”, though.
Apology accepted.
Sorry. The song: God Bless America.
Forgive a dumbass.
the opoponax:
What. What? You think privileged people, as a group, are MORE likely to take low-paying jobs? That’s absurd: privileged people do their damndest to keep hold of their privilege. That’s why men earn more than women and occupy the vast majority of all boardroom seats, while corralling women in the Five Cs, remember?
Thene April 25, 2008 at 5:35 pm
What. What? You think privileged people, as a group, are MORE likely to take low-paying jobs? That’s absurd: privileged people do their damndest to keep hold of their privilege. That’s why men earn more than women and occupy the vast majority of all boardroom seats, while corralling women in the Five Cs, remember?
this is the part I usually say, shove that theory where sun doesn’t shine. It makes no sense
the end logic of your statement would be : a) Amanda is making tons of dough out of this book. b) total and complete white male domination toolz c) Amanda helps oppressing women.
Hey. everybody knows I made a lot of dubious statements and theory, but even I can’t come up with those without giggling. (Who’d gonna believe THAT?)
Come on, srsly. That’s some serious stuff yer smoking ….
tho’ I wonder how far I can get saying Amanda is the woman oppressor.
Burning Prairie,
I think I’ve seen you before, somewhere.
Thene said: “… through complete blindness by everyone involved …”
“Complete blindness” does not describe whoever at Seal Press initially approved of these illustrations, despite Seal Press’s apology (’we were not thinking’). When publishers select “retro” racist imagery as supposedly “ironic” humor in order to make a text more marketable, such publishers are consciously targeting those elements of a white audience who would see “retro” racist imagery as “ironically” humorous, i.e., the publishers are consciously targeting white racists, whether or not such an audience is aware of its own racism. African-Americans in particular do not find “retro” racist imagery “ironic” or humorous because they can attest from their own experience that white racism is still ongoing. So Seal Press, in selecting these illustrations for their “ironically” humorous appeal, was consciously targeting a white racist audience (unconsciously racist or otherwise) to the exclusion of an African-American audience, presumably in the belief that a white audience would include more purchasers with the disposable income to buy this book and that appealing to conscious/unconscious white racism through “ironic” humor would be the quickest way to increase sales to a white audience.
To increase sales by appealing to a target audience’s worst instincts (i.e., their anxieties) has been a standard strategy of retailers and advertisers since at least the 1920s.
I note Amanda Marcotte’s apology and I’ll assume that she herself was not aware of the strategy behind the publisher’s selection of this “ironic” racist imagery. But the explanation by Seal Press that they “were not thinking” does not wash. Seal Press was thinking very hard indeed when they selected this imagery. But this time they were caught on it.
My long-winded comment is meant as an explanation to other commenters here who think these illustrations are simply innocuously “ironic” humor to which some readers are over-reacting, or that Seal Press was simply blindsided by its own insensitivity. In fact, these illustrations are not innocuous and Seal Press was not merely insensitive. Seal Press was being extremely sensitive indeed, but to the wrong audience. Consumers need to stay aware of that.
I’m an African American woman and I am not offended. Having read the explanations, though, I can understand why some others are offended, but I’m still not. I’ve read this blog for two years now, I didn’t think anything of it.
But I am glad the images will be removed so that the message of her book can be received.
I didn’t say it before, but I’ll say it now: Congrats on the book, Amanda.
My point really had very little to do with money and more to do with self-examination, but everyone feel free to tell me that Amanda wasn’t writing this book for profit, but rather out of of the noble feminist proselytizing goodness of her heart. My daddy wrote a book that made no money too, but it still helped him get a better job down the damn road. So whatever. I’ve heard the argument, but color me skeptical.
But really - apologizing for the obvious is easy. This is obvious, much as the gorilla cover was obvious. I am unconvinced that AM has learned anything from this debacle, except maybe that defending one’s own racism makes people angry, so it’s best to apologize before they come with the torches and pitchforks. That’s not exactly groundbreaking.
You’re obviously trying to do the right thing, and I’m glad. But it’s still not clear to me, after the whole gorilla cover incident, why the images weren’t obviously a problem to you or anyone else who saw them pre-publication.
If nothing is ever enough, why should anyone try?
I’m also curious how I can get my own thought police credentials.
Pre-print runs are just what this is supposed to catch. You get to see the book as it will print. Illustrations and warts in all their glory. Not to be confused with a ‘galley proof’.
Still though, if it was supposed to be comedic, then what’s the problem?
Women all seem to think they are ‘Jane’ and able to swing from trees and handle the world by the balls. Yes it reinforces the ‘have cleavage will travel’ idea but it does help in foreign countries sometimes.
Now if the book wasn’t meant as comic in any way, well, there be a problem then…
But you can’t please all the people half the time so you have to be careful.
Hell, I was one third watching some movie on IFC last night and I look up and see full frontal female nudity. No big deal. Well, after a few minutes the guy is on a chair and then it’s full frontal male nudity with his flapper flapping in the wind. Well, and then it’s the flapper meeting the female naughty bits and wow. What the hell was I almost watching.
The wife accuses me this morning of ‘making her watch hard core foreign porn’ last night… HUH! I wasn’t even watching it. Somethings you just never know… It made me slightly uncomfortable but then in America, how many times do you see full frontal female nudity and well full male nudity in the same movie and not in a greasy porn palace. ICK…
Whatever…
You can’t please half the people so why try. She normally likes a little beefcake in movies… To much beef and not enough cake?
Still, pre-print samples are probably mandatory and it sounds like that printer has punked people before…
(M-I-L wrote a book. The publisher tossed all her graphics. She got a pre-print sample and nearly had a cow on the spot. Demanded they changed the horrid graphics and hers made it back in as if by magic. Strange how the publishing biz works…)
Never trust anyone with your work. You are the better judge of what it should and more importantly shouldn’t look like…
No one will watch your back better than you…
Sorry if I added to much in the prior post…
Amanda,
I’m a little disturbed by how much close to an echo chamber this thread seems to be. I appreciate the apology and must join in the d’oh chorus as a white feminist who has a hell of a lot to learn. In trans activism, where I spend a lot of of my time, we are pretty hard on allies. We expect a lot, and we give very little by way of pats on the head for acknowledging cis-privilege. In this context I think it is important to note that trans activism tends to be pretty white and college-educated. Interesting how white-led movements can demand more from allies and get it, isn’t it?
The point I’m trying to make is that I don’t think you or I or other white feminists should get cookies just for saying sorry, no matter how much we mean it. And all these (mostly white, I’m guessing) people are giving you cookies by buying your book now. What a benefit to you and all you had to do was say “sorry.” But how does it actually help feminist POC? The proof is in the doing, not the feeling bad. I am trying really hard to be kind here, b/c I have great respect for you and credit you as one of the few primary voices of my early feminist education. But education, self-education, is where I think you need to go right now. I’m honestly very scared to confront my own racism. I know my foot’s gonna go in my mouth way more times than I want to think about. But I’ve been inching into it b/c I know it needs done, b/c it’s what I’m demanding from others in other arenas, and I better not be a hypocrite when I speak from my own authority on things I do know and tell people that they need to figure it out. I hope that there is action behind these words. Thank you.
You’re not sorry.
This was pointed out to you well over a year ago. And what did you do? You laughed. You mocked. You ignored.
Anybody who buys your apology is a fool.
“Still though, if it was supposed to be comedic, then what’s the problem?”
Implying that feminists will win equality by conquering scary black men is not funny? Just a guess, that. It could also be that everyone except privileged white men has no sense of humor, damn it.
Thank you for posting this. Yours was the first feminist blog I started reading, and it pained me to see the latest controversy and it pained me to see the pileup.
Wow, that sucks. No way anyone who actually reads this blog could think you have a racist bone in your body.
Still kind of ironic that you tried to write a book to disprove the stereotype that feminists have no sense of humor and you end up getting crucified by feminists with no sense of humor.
If nothing is ever enough, why should anyone try?
How about because it’s the right thing to do?
If you wrong someone, you apologize. Whether or not they accept your apology — and they have every right not to — you still apologize.
Because it’s the least you can do.
Thene, I want to point out that opponax wasn’t talking about all low-paying jobs. They were talking about low-paying jobs in the entertainment industry. The movie/tv business is almost completely populated by white people with trust funds or other sources of income and one of the reasons is that to get into the business requires working for very low (or no) pay and very long hours (in jobs that people line up to get). Aspiring writers and directors often don’t work at all and are not paid for the work they do. This makes it a pretty privileged group.
Wow, that sucks. No way anyone who actually reads this blog could think you have a racist bone in your body.
Really. Not a bone? Not a bit? Not even in the foot, not even a delicate metatarsal of racism, or a thin vein running through the body?
Gimme a break, Mr. My Dog. White privilege displays itself as racism. Or do you ignore the existence of white privilege?
invisible-I comment a lot over at Shakesville.
Brooklynite April 25, 2008 at 6:07 pm
If you wrong someone, you apologize.
except this is not “someone” it’s a concept of ethnicity. Represented by several people. The whole dynamic is delicate and consists of a lot of mis-understanding.
I tell you what. List what you want Amanda to apologize! I DARE YOU.
I can deconstruct it to anything I want. You demand racial harmony out of this exercise right? Now I want to see what you gonna have to say …
I guarantee you, you’ll get tangled really deep in confusion.
invisible-I comment a lot over at Shakesville.
Burning-I no longer go there.
I’m a little disturbed by how much close to an echo chamber this thread seems to be.
Em, I think it might be because people are shell-shocked from the past few days. No one wants to feel like they’re kicking someone while they’re down. I can think of many productive discussions we need to have. Soon. But I know I’m in no kind of headspace to do it today.
FWIW, I didn’t decide to buy the book because she apologized.
Amanda, I’m glad you apologized. As someone who has gotten great joy from your writing for however long now (and has been wishing you success in your efforts to succeed in a very competitive field) I’ve been… well, I guess distraught is the best word for it, over the past few weeks, as Victorian as that sounds. If I had a fainting couch, I might have made use of it.
I hope that we can all find a way through this mess.
I just wanted to quote that for emphasis.
Also, I suspect many of the harsher critics are staying away on purpose.
Aw, hell. I might as well put my cards on the table.
Amanda Marcotte, I’m just about through with Pandagon because of the BFP-Seal Press-Jungle Images fiasco. I don’t think you’ve behaved very well, and I figure that in the bloggotubosphere actions speak louder than words in the particular sense that as someone without her own blog and who wasn’t going to buy your book anyway (no offense, but you ain’t exactly Molly Ivins), the best thing I can do to “punish” you for behavior I disapprove of, in hopes of causing you to change via incentives, would be to boycott your blog - reduce your readership, and therefore your influence - until I see some proof that you’ve actually learned something, not to mention had a change of heart.
And here’s what I consider learning something:
1. Going back and addressing the BFP scandal properly and thoughtfully on your own blog, and really thinking about the charges laid against you by all kinds of feminists, not to mention other RWOC who identify by other terms.
2. Not publishing with Seal Press any longer. I assume you will write more books in the future, since that’s how you make your living, and hopefully by now you’ve realized, 1, Seal Press isn’t very good at picking up on their own racism, and neither are you; 2, if you want to improve on that, you should probably try publishing with somebody who’s smarter than you about this; and 3, Seal Press doesn’t look a whole lot better than you do, right now, so it’d be a nice symbolic step to show that you really, really want to change.
3. Just generally showing a level of thoughtfulness about intersectionality before Nicolas Kristoff or the lawyers of the ACLU decide that issues facing POC are important.
and a bunch of other things I’m sure you can think of more easily than me.
I’m signing off now to begin punitive boycott, effective now. Just doing my part on the intertubes.
Alexandra April 25, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Gimme a break, Mr. My Dog. White privilege displays itself as racism. Or do you ignore the existence of white privilege?
nope. A couple dumb mistakes maybe.
But throughout period of time and Pandagon blog archive shows, she has put effort. Several difficult race issues. It’s easy making blurb on comments during slow weekend day. Try doing it on long term blogging program! That takes effort and commitment.
Making asshat general comment is easy. But trying doing it over period of time and learning something.
What have YOU done? Show me.
Alexandra April 25, 2008 at 6:20 pm
the best thing I can do to “punish” you for behavior I disapprove of, in hopes of causing you to change via incentives, would be to boycott your blog - reduce your readership, and therefore your influence - until I see some proof that you’ve actually learned something, not to mention had a change of heart.
yahhh….kinda idle threat if you don’t own big blog. I mean, I can bring blog connections too, big friggin deal. Name your size, I’ll try to match it.
Em, I know you didn’t mean to sound this way but … if an apology for a specific action is not good enough because it doesn’t help a group of people, what’s the point of apologizing?
I actually think this is a big problem with our society as a whole, though. I’m not sure if it’s because we’ve heard a lot of insincere apologies or if it’s just our good old American assholery, but we (speaking as an entire nation) have made it virtually impossible for people to apologize for something and move on.
I think that this specific issue of the images in the book really only requires the apology and the promise to be less dense in the future. The rest of it is a separate issue that needs to be addressed separately, though I know people are trying to fuse them together.
“I demand you stop everything Right Now, including readings, signings, eating, sleeping, travel, and any other thing up to and including taking a shit, so you can address my concerns in detail. You will do this without taking any time for reflection, introspection, discussion with people whose opinions you trust, or any of the other things an actual human being might find helpful when smacked in the face with a humbling realization. I will not tell you in any useful detail what my concerns are, keeping at least some in reserve against the possible need to pounce on you again. If the patriarchy is not utterly destroyed within 12 hours of your response, I will smear you all over the internet.”
Amanda, I loved your book. Period. I’m sorry Seal Press chose such offensive imagery. And really, those pages were just an onstacle to reading your hilarious book.
“The best thing I can do to “punish” you for behavior I disapprove of, in hopes of causing you to change via incentives, would be to boycott your blog - reduce your readership, and therefore your influence - until I see some proof that you’ve actually learned something, not to mention had a change of heart.”
You’ll recognize Amanda at the next reading because she’ll be the one wearing a hair shirt and flagellating herself with whips and a ball in her mouth.
I hope Alexandra is not a MOC (mother of color) because she sounds like a real piece of work.
Don’t let the door hit you, as they say…:)
This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently: the realm of public apology. And I think that generally speaking it should become a rule of public discourse: to request an apology from a public figure should require that the terms of that apology, and/or penitent actions, be specific, enumerated, and published. Otherwise, you can just give infinite crap to someone by moving the goalpoasts each time they try to apologize. So I pose this as a question (without any of the insulting tenor I may have implied above). Those who feel Amanda has not sufficiently atoned for her actions, what would you like her to do?
Squashed, don’t go picking a fight with me. I’m not in the mood.
If Amanda did nothing to apologize for, if she wronged no one, she shouldn’t apologize. That wasn’t Hector’s claim, though, and it wasn’t what I was responding to.
Hector said that if your apology isn’t going to be accepted as enough, you shouldn’t offer it. I say that’s bunk. I say if you do someone wrong, you should, at a minimum, apologize, even if that apology won’t be accepted as “enough.” Even if you know that apology won’t be accepted as enough. You apologize, and then you figure out what else you need to do to make things right.
An apology given does not impose any obligation on the receiver. An apology is not a negotiating tactic. It is not a chit.
But that’s just me. How were you raised?
Brooklynite:
I think Squashed was responding to the impression that I got from a couple different comments, that there was something Amanda should do, not merely say, to demonstrate that she truly had no intent to profit from/encourage/allow racism.
Brooklynite April 25, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Squashed, don’t go picking a fight with me. I’m not in the mood.
did I ask about your mood? keep it real.
you ask for apology, LIST specifically your demand.
You are blustering, because you KNOW EXACTLY, where this gonna lead. Nowhere.
Just commenting briefly to clarify — I’m white. I’m not a woman of color. I got white privilege. I benefit from it. Sometimes I do and say stupid racist things. As someone who is white and is working on being a decent, anti-racist human being, I feel it’s important for me to call out other white women. I do this because it’s the right thing and it’s the least I can do.
But whoever commented about how you hope I don’t have kids — damn, quit with the ad feminam attacks, man. That’s just nasty. Not to mention the speculation about my sex-and-sprog life.
Brooklynite April 25, 2008 at 6:46 pm
An apology given does not impose any obligation on the receiver. An apology is not a negotiating tactic. It is not a chit.
who you speaking for? yourself? black men? Black? entire minority?
You can’t even spell out your own personal demand, let alone speaking for entire race.
So, I for one am suspicious, you really don’t know what you are asking. I am curious, slightly annoyed, and wondering.
“Just commenting briefly to clarify — I’m white. I’m not a woman of color. I got white privilege. I benefit from it. Sometimes I do and say stupid racist things.”
That explains a WHOLE freaking lot right there.
Alexandra April 25, 2008 at 6:52 pm
I do this because it’s the right thing and it’s the least I can do.
How you gonna “reduce” a blog influence if you don’t own a big blog? lol. I want to now that. Everything else you say doesn’t matter right? Who cares if you are right or wrong if you can’t carry out your threat.
From what I notice, because of some stupid thing Amanda did with her WP. This blog is pretty impervious to standard blogging attack.
But maybe you know some big tricks that hasn’t been around. …
just wondering, how you gonna carry out your threat. I mean, how big is your blog anyway? you know… want to know if you are keeping it real or not.
So I wasn’t going to comment on this post when I was linked to it (primarily because I was expecting the comments to be an echo chamber) but I can’t quite manage to keep my mouth shut after reading some of things people have said in response to your apology.
For those that don’t know I’m the guest blogger at ABW that wrote Seal Press, Amanda Marcotte…Proof That Feminism And Racism Go Hand In Hand and I’m starting to get some less than pleasant feedback to my post that’s all about telling me just how mean I am to say the things I’m saying.
And yet as I look around this blog and look at the responses to the post last year about the original cover art for the book I am absolutely and utterly convinced that the racism in feminism isn’t being challenged or identified anywhere near often enough. The wealth of privilege I see in the idea that Amanda should not have to face any anger for not speaking up about the images (or for mocking those that first tried to call out the racism in the original cover art) is almost staggering.
Where exactly is the outrage that WOC are dealing with racism inside the very movement that’s supposed to be welcoming us? Where is the acknowledgement that WOC are not having the same experience as white women? Or the recognition that white privilege is a blanket that covers white women too? Oh wait, I know what’s happening here, I slipped up and believed the hype about sisterhood and solidarity when the truth is that feminism was never really for or about WOC. It’s all about white women having the right to be oppressors too. Don’t believe me? Just look at the art that Amanda found ironic and Seal Press thought was a perfect fit for her book.
I’m sorry that I don’t have time to read all 98 (thus far) comments so maybe this has already been brought up, but…
When the cover was being criticized as racist, this is how you responded to those criticisms in the comment thread:
Feminists critiqued the racist imagery on the original cover (which was similiar, but not identical to critiques of the images inside) long before the book was published, and you called that “joy-killing”.How can anyone take this apology seriously knowing that??
I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out exactly what’s being discussed at this point in the thread.
Squashed, I didn’t demand an apology, or reject this one. That’s the first thing. I’m not black. That’s the second thing.
Other than that, though, your interrogation of my demand for an apology on the basis of my blackness is pretty much spot on.
I’m going to drop this now, I think. There’s nothing to be gained from semantic squabbling in this particular thread.
Karnythia April 25, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Where exactly is the outrage that WOC are dealing with racism inside the very movement that’s supposed to be welcoming us? Where is the acknowledgement that WOC are not having the same experience as white women?
but in term of exposure and issues that has been brought up to public attention, the “book cover” is pretty small. I estimate about 40-80K unique impression.
On the other hand if you dig around pandagon archive, the amount of race issues that has been brought up can easily reach 500K to 1M impression.
So, then the question: how many books do you think has been sold? a couple hundreds?
Basically, you are ignoring a couple hundred K’s impression that deals with race issue and getting angry about things over few K.
HOW BIG is YOUR BLOG? (translation: I bet there are a lot more post here reaching MORE people and bringing about racial issue than you EVER can muster online.)
I try to see what blog size you have. It’s not even a bleep. Small and insignificant. (so on balance, tackling racial issue, I can ignore what you have done as trivial compared to pandagon archive)
Brooklynite April 25, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Squashed, I didn’t demand an apology, or reject this one. That’s the first thing. I’m not black. That’s the second thing.
STFU. then. I demand as non white person. Cause you don’t know what the hell you are yapping about.
“The wealth of privilege I see in the idea that Amanda should not have to face any anger for not speaking up about the images (or for mocking those that first tried to call out the racism in the original cover art) is almost staggering.”
Hi Karnythia,
I cited your quote here earlier as one of the attacks on Amanda that bothered me–because I thought it had not yet been established that Amanda (a feminist) equals a racist. I wanted to hear her side of the story. But I don’t think your post was nearly as “mean” as some of the other stuff I read today. It was your opinion, and that’s how you felt.
In listening to your side (the side of many women of color and their white friends) on Feministe, I could hear your anger and frustration. I heard pain and frustration and anger especially in BFP’s post, about how she felt dismissed and left to fend for herself, “JUST DO IT SPICS, JUST DO IT.”
Actually, that line brings tears to my eyes, and I am not a very sentimental person. I don’t know the history of that controversy, but it sounds like BFP has good reasons to be angry at *someone.* I don’t know enough to understand if she has good reasons to be angry at Amanda.
But I think it is good to feel angry and to voice anger until you get it out of your system. For this reason, I was especially sad that BFP left the blogosphere because she sounded like a pissed off person with a purpose, and that is often quite rare. But I just wanted to apologize if I made it sound in quoting you that you should be quiet, or not be as angry.
Karnythia April 25, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Here is a big STFU. Count how many feminism blog make post about Hillary’s race baiting or supporting Obama.
This not to mention outright racism by a lot of feminism blog.
Think about that. You can pumping yourself up over the illustration. But I guarantee you, you don’t know what the hell you are doing except doing pile drive.
(this is serious, because there is massive blog war pulled by Hills team. )
Wow, Amanda, you should be really proud of the Pandagon audience you have cultivated. Some of these flippant and dismissive comments about people *daring* to take issue with those images or needing to get a life…enjoy this fan base you have created for yourself, I think you have reached “Wonkette” status now.
invisible-oh. why not if you don’t mind me asking.
I just want to point out that it is *not* the responsibility of the offended to create a list of specific demands to get back in their good graces. It is never the oppressed that need to do the heavy lifting of figuring out how to mend bridges.
As a white woman I find a good rule of thumb to be imagine a similar argument coming from a man about feminism. Does it always work? No, but I do think it prevents me from making some stupid justifications for my actions. If you are confused about how to act appropriately you should educate yourself: read, attend workshops, ask questions. But dont demand anything, it is your job to figure out how to get educated and not offend.
RES: I stand corrected. This isn’t really what I’ve been thinking of, and I’ll need to reconsider my comment.
Squashed, my LJ gets a lot more readers than the people on the friends list. And I don’t just blog there or solely under this screen name. But that’s neither here nor there when it comes to the actual issue at hand. I find it very telling though how entrenched you are in attacking Amanda’s critic’s readership size and not in discussing the apology or the reason she had to make it. If all else fails I guess you’ve decided to insist that this issue doesn’t matter based on the numbers regardless of the reality that this has wider implications than just what is on the Internet today.
You’re right, but “what can I do to make things better?” is a good place for the offender to start
RES April 25, 2008 at 7:17 pm
I just want to point out that it is *not* the responsibility of the offended to create a list of specific demands to get back in their good graces. It is never the oppressed that need to do the heavy lifting of figuring out how to mend bridges.
No FUCK that shit.
I WANT to know what the hell are these people demanding. Already a white dude acting high demanding this or that, fine. But what the hell does he know about being colored?
I am personally CURIOUS, what these outrage is about. It seems to me, so far there has been a lot of white people voicing black concern like they own the scene. Then not sure what they are saying …
Well? what is it?
Squashed,
Are you just here to say rude things then? Because I’m not seeing a whole lot of critical thought in your comments or much examination of the issues. Feel free to ignore my work, I know I’ll be ignoring yours from here on out.
Amanda,
I’m not sure if you know the answer to this, but if you do: I’d like to get the book through Amazon, but would like to avoid receiving a copy of the first printing. Should I wait a bit?
Karnythia April 25, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Squashed, my LJ gets a lot more readers than the people on the friends list.
number . say the number. Words don’t mean jack. This is pure metric. (see, do you even KNOW what you are doing? Stop being reactionary. Things are pretty ugly around here lately. It’s unusual. specially when it comes to certain issue.)
“If you wrong someone, you apologize.”
Can I be a bit crass and point out that Amanda isn’t the only person in the past two weeks to have wronged someone?
I don’t see the line for the confessional. Odd.
Hell, I’ll admit I said some nasty stuff about Ilyka late last night at Hugo’s place which he thankfully deleted. Too little sleep, to much grinding old axes. Sorry Ilyka, that was stupid and out of line. Should have taken my own advice about treating people as people.
Alexandra:
If you want to stay and talk feel free. If you want to leave leave, nobody is stopping you. But please not the 3-hour speech about how you’re inching out the door or some dramatic going-away post where you make sure to get all your digs in. You seem nice enough, no harm in sticking around.
Apologizing is a first step, yes. But if you ask someone to walk a mile can you berate them the second they put the first foot down?
Karnythia:
“I also see people talking about the need to give Amanda Marcotte a safe space from which to respond.”
Those “people” were me alone, and I don’t speak for anyone but myself. I’m not even a freaking feminist. Please do not use my words to smear other people.
I’m just one guy. I am not the representation of any sort of problem with white feminists, and half the time I’m fighting with white feminists myself.
Everyone deserves a safe private space, especially among friends. That’s my philosophy. Amanda does, you do, everyone does.
“And I know I am absolutely not capable of much in the way of diplomacy or tact…”
You are one of the most diplomatic and tactful commenters I’ve seen. But this is the second time I’ve seen my comments used as some sort of supposed represenation of a viewpoint that in truth I alone am espousing.
Margalis != white feminists. Not even close.
I’m sad to say at this point that “I’m sorry” doesn’t cut it for me on this whole debacle, beginning with your unacknowledged intellectual theft from BFP and ending with this imagery in a book with your name on it. I’m simply too angry and disappointed in you to be able to read your work anymore. Unfortunately, that means that for the time being, at least, I will have to give up reading my favorite blog, but for me it’s worth it for the principle.
I am a feminist and an anti-racist ally, and both roles are equally important to me. To watch this whole thing go on without any real consequences to you, Amanda, while other people are badly hurt, actually driven off the web, infuriates me.
For now, this is goodbye.
I am glad you posted an apology about this. I’m surprised Seal Press didn’t pick up on it earlier, but I’m glad they’re apologizing too.
It’s really, really weird for me personally because the whole “Amazonian white woman vs. the savages” thing comes out just as I confirmed once and for all that one of my many Caribbean ancestors was Arawak if not Carib/Arawak and spoke the Arawak language. He had a life-changing experience almost 110 years ago to this day when he traveled down the Demerara River in Guyana. The imagery from the book is doing a number on my stomach, and I’m not sure I can offer an opinion more detailed here without blowing up. Maybe I will on my own blog. I don’t know.
I do think the whole debacle with you and BFP is a more insidious and pervasive problem than you think it is. I’m still incredibly hurt by your responses to people’s anger over that, and to mend the fences that aren’t permanently blown up, you’re going to need to step away from the blogosphere, come back when you’re not so raw and really try to assess what others have said. That includes the people who are angry.
Karnythia April 25, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Are you just here to say rude things then? Because I’m not seeing a whole lot of critical thought in your comments or much examination of the issues. Feel free to ignore my work, I know I’ll be ignoring yours from here on out.
Welcome to the internet.
If your blog is small. don’t act so big and pretending your work is significant. You are not. Nobody cares.
So then the question, what is important in term of result for this and that issue from numerical perspective. (since you can say the number, I take it you can’t say it. thus, you are making a strategic mistake. You are the one being used.)
Margalis,
You weren’t the only person I saw speaking about giving her a safe space though you were the first. And I can’t count feminism as a place that’s full of friends for WOC. This is the latest in a long string of incidents (and not just from Seal Press or Amanda) that has made feminism a very inhospitable place for WOC.
Karnythia April 25, 2008 at 7:32 pm
This is the latest in a long string of incidents (and not just from Seal Press or Amanda) that has made feminism a very inhospitable place for WOC.
this blog is an ally. pretty big one too. You have to consider your action. reverse it immediately. at least until you have seen the archive. check first!
Mnemosyne
April 25, 2008 at 6:34 pm:
“I think that this specific issue of the images in the book really only requires the apology and the promise to be less dense in the future.”
“Requires,” maybe. But there’s certainly room for more than that, and since it seems to me that Ms Marcotte’s apology and contrition are sincere, it wouldn’t at all surprise me if she were willing to do a lot more. And what better venue than on her own well-known blog?
For one thing, this is, at the very least, a “teachable moment” for a lot of us.
I’m a white male, of middle-class background — with all the unearned privilege that entails, and much of the ignorance that often accompanies a sheltered upbringing. One of the main reasons that Pandagon is on my daily-read list is that I learn what I might not so easily learn elsewhere.
So now, many of us — and people far more committed to and involved in all kinds of activism than I am — can now learn a necessary (and for some of us long overdue) lesson or three. I’ve been dimly aware for a long time that there’s been a lot of tension within the women’s movement about race and class. All the way back to the beginning, there have been accusations of historic feminism’s essential uselessness to, or outright betrayals of, women of color and women without the luxuries of a college education, let alone a pampered upbringing.
There’s lots of room for some progress to be made here, using this situation as a jumping-off point, if everyone’s willing to do the work involved.
Good. God. Squashed. Shut. The fuck. Up.
Karnythia,
I think your comments on the matter, here and at ABW (and at Heart’s for that matter), have been thought-provoking and excellent.
These are some fun comments. More than one proud white “feminists” doesn’t feel these images are racist. Amazing. This whitey wonders what planet you folks are on.
Amanda, the excuse that you didn’t catch the cartoons before now sounds a little far-fetched. I’d be more apt to believe that you just made a mistake in judgment.
Karnythia April 25, 2008 at 7:32 pm
You weren’t the only person I saw speaking about giving her a safe space though you were the first. And I can’t count feminism as a place that’s full of friends for WOC. This is the latest in a long string of incidents (and not just from Seal Press or Amanda) that has made feminism a very inhospitable place for WOC.
how to check archive insert this at the end of complete name ‘ …/2006/08/” that should bring monthly view.
very important. CHECK archive, you are attacking an important ally.
Karnythia:
I understand. The safe space I was referring to was a live flesh-and-blood conversation among friends, not a website. I encourage you to read the thread where I said those words to Hugo. They don’t mean what Holly took them to mean. (And I’d tell her myself, but I’m banned from Feministe…)
Also what Mandolin said.
and:
I get it. Calling out Amanda allows you to atone for white privilege. I didn’t know this whole controversy was All About You And How Your White Self Can Help End Racism.
“Karnythia April 25, 2008 at 7:32 pm”
trace out who starts this outrage and create map of attack.
(this blog should be protected, not attack)
I was glad to see this apology posted. Those images were vile.
I know this has been a horrid time for you, but I can’t say that without acknowledging that the blindness which led to the original selection of the images is even more horrid and hurtful to the people who are sidelined when such things are treated as if they don’t matter - in this case POC. Being called out on privilege can never be as painful as being overlooked and made invisible due to the privilege of others.
I’ve learnt a lot about my own blind spots from watching the fallout over the last few weeks. That can, in the long run, only be positive for me. I hope that in the long run this can be positive for you as well.
It would be nice if all the people reading this thread at Feministe, Shakes and other places would come HERE and engage instead of sniping from their own bunkers.
This is just silly. We don’t need three simultaneous threads so each clan to get their digs in.
How to map interconnect attack
simplest use technorati to find pattern. (use icerocket to find spike)
http://www.technorati.com/blogs/pandagon.blogsome.com?reactions
When someone sells their book, they pretty much give up a lot of input on the cover, the interior and the title. I have seen a galley of it’s a jungle, and there was no interior art and a very blank green cover with the title. That said, obviously AM saw cover previews, but it is more likely she never saw any of the interior design elements as those are picked and put together by the publisher, and the author is essentially cut out of the process.
In some ways it is very similar to the way movies are handled, in that directors may put the movie together but a movie studio is allowed to cut and paste and market and brand however they want. To a certain extent input is allowed but alas, you sell it, it’s gone.
I appreciate your apology AM, thanks for taking full responsibility.
I know this has been a horrid time for you, but I can’t say that without acknowledging that the blindness which led to the original selection of the images is even more horrid and hurtful to the people who are sidelined when such things are treated as if they don’t matter - in this case POC.
Without commenting on the issue, I confess that I’d like to see a lot more of the actual persons of color and what they have to say on this issue, as opposed to all the white people who seem to be popping up to condemn Amanda on their behalf.
I mean, I don’t know from privilege, but I was pretty sure that setting yourself up as the spokesperson for a minority you’re not a part of was one of them.
I think BeaTricks had a concise and accurate view of some of the comments.
That minute amount of batshit is potent
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I’m a WOC that has shown up to critique this entire mess. I know there are others discussing it in closed space to avoid dealing with derailers like the ones I’ve seen popping up in open threads like this one.
Mnemosyne
“Em, I know you didn’t mean to sound this way but … if an apology for a specific action is not good enough because it doesn’t help a group of people, what’s the point of apologizing?”
If I owe you three dollars, what’s the point in giving you the first dollar? One dollar isn’t good enough, right? But it’s part of what makes something good enough. The other two dollars would make it good enough.
In this case, the apology isn’t enough. Just learning what to avoid isn’t good enough — that’s the kind of thing that eventually becomes “what more do you people want?”
Building understanding and true empathy through real work on her internalized racism is what comes next. That would make it possible for Amanda to avoid these things for the most part without having to have them explained to her over and over.
Maybe that’s not enough for everyone, but I think it’s probably the most useful thing Amanda can do at this point.
NB, saying Amanda has internalized racism isn’t a slam. I have it, too. Most people in the US do, just like we have internalized sexism. Our job is to recognize it and scrub away at it when we see it in ourselves or others.
I mean, I don’t know from privilege, but I was pretty sure that setting yourself up as the spokesperson for a minority you’re not a part of was one of them.
Exactly. It’s one thing to be white and call out racism where you see it. It’s another thing entirely to make silly threats of starting a boycott by using the megaphone provided by a non-existent blog and hoping people of color (who are the legitimate victims in all of this) will let you hold the banner in the Racism Awareness Parade.
Squashed and Chet-
I am not trying to represent any views but my own– as a white antiracist activist. If you want to see POC views on Amanda’s book I would recommend you seek their blogs out, because I seriously doubt at this point many of them feel comfortable coming into this space. Once again that is only my view of the situation–not to be taken as me being a spokesperson for anyone else. Reading the feministe post Amanda links to and the trackbacks is a good place to start to hear those viewpoints. As I stated previously if you want a viewpoint of someone seek it out, it is no ones job to hand you what you want to know.
Yeah squashed, why ARE you messing with Karnythia???
She came here to say something, she said it, and you’ve been bugging her about her blog size ever since.
Forgive me if this sounds rude, but this is not a penis contest. I think some people are actually trying to communicate.
Also, the idea that only people with a large readership matter is ridiculous. But maybe I am mis-reading your own agenda??
If you’re curious, Chet, you can start here, or here, or…
hmm, I wonder why so many of these women aren’t commenting on Pandagon right now?
I also don’t understand why the cover has a representation of the reader as a blond, with huge boobs and no waist?
I apologise if my statement came across as me casting myself as a spokesman for POC. I meant to cast myself as an ally, nothing more. I meant it as an acknowledgement of what I’ve been reading on the blogs of POC reacting to this.
That’s possibly another privilege blind spot for me to work on, and I will, but you seem to be asking that white feminists who want to do ally-work don’t comment at all. How does that help build bridges?
Doesn’t it?
Agreed. I’ve seen a lot of white women parroting language they think WOC want to hear like they are up for some kind of ‘best most anti-racist white woman of the year’ award.
And so it’s clear, I’m not talking about constructive criticism of what everyone agrees was a bad decision to include racist pop art from the 50s in this book. I’m not talking about engaging in a conversation about white privilege, blindness or racism. I am talking about the empty parroting of anti-racist language by white women in an attempt to win an anti-racist badge. There was a lot of that going on at Feministe in the original book promotion thread. The one-upping and the self-satisfied moral superiority in some of those posts is amazing. I mean, isn’t there something wrong when a white woman EXPLAINS racism to a woman of color or tells her to shut up because she is not in agreement? Makes my skin crawl.
Yes
Karnythia the problem we have (or I should say I have) is that so many of the nastiest commenters turn out to be white men and women and they are the ones steering the entire conversation.
I mean it’s a little absurd to hear a bunch of white men and women moaning about how horrible white men and women are. And to have person after person talk as if they represent all people of color, then sheepishly admit they are white themselves.
If women of color don’t feel comfortable talking in the open or are simply done with Amanda fine, but this looks a little too much like “fuck Seal Press” where what the women of color actually meant was quickly obscured.
Chet,
I’m an actual, real-live woman of color. I’ve also been a commenter on Pandagon for a couple of years. After witnessing Amanda’s response to the earlier imbroglio, I removed Pandagon from my blog feeds. The response here to the illustrations is a good indication that I made the right choice.
Man that sucks.
Your life must feel like an episode of curb your enthusiasm right now.
JoAnne April 25, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Building understanding and true empathy through real work on her internalized racism is what comes next. That would make it possible for Amanda to avoid these things for the most part without having to have them explained to her over and over.
Do you have license to practice psychiatry. Or did you make those up? Have you even checked Pandagon archive?
One dumb move does not erase what her previous bigger works.
Brooklynite.
142 blog reactions
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estimate traffic size: sub 150 unique.
This n00b better shut up quick.
Blogging is not like penis size, squashed. Bigger does not always mean better…
Hi Mnem. I get what you’re saying, but I don’t know that I have a great response to it right now. I think the images are crappy, but I also agree with you that taken alone they could have been a big oops and a teaching moment instead of adding to the rapidly growing mess. In point of fact, I was on temporary blog hiatus when everything ’started’ with BFP, and reading after the fact I’m not sure I still understand all of it well enough to offer a more holistic view of the past few weeks and what connections there may be. In addition, I remember the flap over Jessica Valenti’s book cover and I think that people are forgetting exactly how little control authors have over anything in their books but the actual words. The offense here is really Seal’s and that IS connected with the BFP issue. Amanda’s sin in this particular moment, as far as I can see, is the same one I committed: seeing the images and going “Huh, sorta racist,” but not taking the thought any further. I have the luxury of that being my own private fuck-up to learn from, but she doesn’t.
You’re right also in that I think we (by which I mean women, POC, LGBT, the poor, the differently abled, and anyone I forgot) are pretty jaded by apologies these days, and right or wrong, I think we expect more when one of our own (by which I mean feminists and allies) says I’m sorry. It’s especially difficult in this situation b/c Amanda is famous for her swagger, and it’s carried her through a lot of crap and has become a calling card of her style. So even in an apology people are seeing arrogance and defensiveness (whether I do probably doesn’t carry much weight, seeing as how I’m white). FWIW, I don’t think it’s half bad, as an apology goes. But–and here I still think we’re in agreement–’moving on’ means the education I was talking about. I think an apology is a starting point. The forgetting is up to the forgiver. The offender has work to do. I didn’t see any promise of that, which concerned me, selfishly, b/c I genuinely and deeply enjoy Amanda’s writing and have learned a great deal from it. I really should be old enough not to be surprised when my idols fall short, but it seems to be a particular failing of mine.
I’m not exactly sure of your background, but like I said in my first comment, my responses here are influenced by being trans. I’ve been there, spitting white-hot at some clueless maroon who either doesn’t get it or doesn’t want to hear it, and it was that experience that really taught me how little I know about other ‘isms, racism in particular. (I never experienced that in regards to sexism, and I blame the gender crap for giving me a very atypical experience with that.). If I am going to demand high standards for LGBT allies, it’s only fair I try to meet them myself as an ally to others. So I am not trying to speak for WOC here, but just give my justification, bolstered by my own experience, for my comment to Amanda and why I believe it’s important she focus not just on apologizing but on what comes after.
As a longtime Amanda fanspinster, I would just like to say that she has contributed much to the sport of patriarchy-blaming, and that we’ll be following her future career with considerable interest.
I think this apology was a good start and I hope AM will use it as a springboard to re-examining issues of appropriation and lack of acknowledgment of the work of women of colour.
I mean it’s a little absurd to hear a bunch of white men and women moaning about how horrible white men and women are. And to have person after person talk as if they represent all people of color, then sheepishly admit they are white themselves.
Yes. This whole thread (and overall controversy, btw) devolved into a humongous white guilt orgy with everyone falling all over themselves in condemning Amanda in order to get on the “Totally Awesome Non-Racist White People List” that they think POC keep in their back pockets. Calling for boycotts earn them a very special gold star.
I swear to ceiling cat, The Onion will someday satirize this whole fiasco, lemme tell ‘ya.
(the following comment is meta, and reflects my views on the situation. Of course, I do not have these views in isolation, many factors contribute to them)
Some people are really upset. For some this is just another example of how the feminist movement leaves them behind. For me, this is an example of another left-wing circular firing squad. When someone who is basically on your team pisses you off don’t take your ball and go home. Guess what? People disappoint you. Sometimes someone with a bigger audience than you is going to say things that are wrong or piss you off. But when you all get out the torches and pitchforks (this is a reference to the angry mobs from monster movies) you just make it hard on everyone. I think that some of the critics here (most actually) were critical and fair. I think Holly’s post (excepting her “leaving feminism” remark) was very fair. Sound and constructive criticism. But a lot of other bloggers, commenters, etc, have just gone of the rails here. Someone put some offensive pictures in a book: its not the end of the movement, not the end of progress for women of color and its certainly no reason to give up in despair.
In my opinion this shitstorm (one that a couple hundred people have participated) is kind of freaking me out. I can’t comment on people’s feelings, but I have to say that these things seem to crop up in the blogosphere from time to time and I find them disturbing. I’m sure Amanda has no completely adjusted to being a “public figure” which means you are going to have a few people who completely hate you at any given moment.
Sometimes with good reason, of course, but when you are just some person it takes a lot of effort to piss off more than five people at once. But when you have an audience like the a-list bloggers are starting to attract you can, with one mistake, piss off hundreds of people. But those people also have a soapbox, and the situation can snowball quickly. Further, on the internet little things get big fast when a few people with small audiences get their readers excited. My most direct experience with this was with the users of Flickr. One day yahoo decided that flickr users would have to log in with their yahoo, rather than flickr, ids. It was done because the flickr user management stuff wasn’t scaling well and was costing a lot to maintain, for very little benefit.
Well, a couple of flickr users posted on their blogs that they didn’t like it. Then some other people picked up on it. Then someone mention chinese dissidents. Pretty soon there were petitions, people quit flickr in anger. People wrote impassioned posts about the situation. Clearly people were getting really upset about the thing. Eventually it blew over, but for a while it was madness.
Now, most people can see that this was a pointless protest, who cares how you log in to flickr? But for some people (I think six or seven thousand joined the protest group, out of the 10-20 million registered users of flickr) this was a huge deal. It got picked up in the tech press for a while.
I guess what I am trying to say is that internet “dust ups” seem to have a self-magnifying effect and its hard to really say how significant they actually are. Does Amanda’s book really have much impact on “the movement”? Maybe, but she’s going to need to sell a lot of copies before it even hits the radar of most feminists. (I guarantee that the vast majority of self-described feminists do not know who Amanda, Jill, Holly or twisty are).
Guarantee? Really? B/c I the majority of self-IDed feminists I know are white, college-educated, and have internet access. And whether or not I run across them on the feminist blogs, I’m pretty sure they’re aware of them.
squashed, waving the stats stick around is pretty pathetic, as is the n00b taunt.
Brooklynite and Amanda have been discussing and debating online since before blogs existed actually, as have I. We were even all regular posters to the same USENET newsgroup once upon a time. Brooklynite is not a n00b just because he has an infrequently updated LJ.
Amanda is talented and a highly prolific blogger. Not everybody else is as prolific, or has quite the same facility with words. Doesn’t mean that they don’t get to join discussions.
To amazon users: Can it be assured that if you put the book back on your wishlists right now, they won’t sell you the racist version?
** Know what’s really interesting? It’s mostly been other feminists that have called out this book for its illustrations, but the race bloggers who are already clambering about how feminism is racist have decided that this proves all feminists are racists. You’d think that when a race activist denounces feminism they’d figure out sometime that they’ve just handed their shared oppressors a key to oppress half of their respective race.
As for trying to measure ratios of how much a feminist blog talks about feminism vs. talking about racism, you’d think somebody would notice that 3 to 8 posts a day makes somebody’s chosen field an activism a full time job.
I can see how this got past Amanda for only 2 reasons:
1) Amanda, and other bloggers who’ve called her out for this Seal Press issue, have repeatedly used 40’s/50’s style comic book parody/satire images before, most nobably that one showing a housewife spraying something, captioned “Smells like bullshit!” After a while, they all look the same. Then you get an illustrator going along with a genre of illustration you’ve used time and time again, and you go “oh, they must have read my blog and are choosing a theme I’ve done before.”
2) She rushed. She rushed and rushed through the final stages of publication and whadyaknow, an accident happened.
So, yeah. Amanda did something stupid. Very stupid, even. But you know what? I’m not going to stoop to hating somebody for being weak. I feel if I did that, I’d have too much in common with the oppressors, the white-Christian-men. As a white man, I had damned well better watch that shit carefully.
It all seems to go back to a few posts I have saved as very important bookmarks. Punkassblog’s My System of Oppression Has a Bigger Cock Than Your System of Oppression, and Andre Lorde’s There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions.
Yeah, there’s a problem with some white privilege issues in feminism. Just like there’s a problem with male privilege in race activism. Both problems are just as big and just as important, just as damning and just as humbling.
If I had to make a choice about who’s being more of a hypocrite, though, in the blogosphere, it’d have to be some of the race bloggers, because as of yet I haven’t seen any feminist anywhere decide to attack race activism because of male privilege in racial circles.
Bothering me equally are both the inability of many race bloggers to talk about teaching black men to stop hating women because it means hating black women too, as well as feminists who can’t talk about white privilege and are afraid to talk about black men hating black women out of fear of being accused of saying black people do anything bad as a trend.
Because activists of all kinds have overly cautious attitudes about criticizing a demographic that overlaps their own.
So. I do something to bring all women up a step. Because white women are already higher on the ladder than black women, the disparity between white women and black women remains statically the same, even though the disparity between black women and white men decreases.
Add another part: “mens rights activists” and white supremacists alike frequently complain that as women’s/minorities’ pay goes up, white men’s pay goes down. Some blame it for the downfall of society. fact is, a company has only so much profit to share with its employees, and raising women’s pay means taking it out of men’s bonuses. There is always the assumption by the privileged group that their pay was always appropriate and they’re not receiving anything extra for being the privileged, so they must simultaneously try to defend their luxury and thus widen the gap between them and the oppressed, and at the same time try to convince the world that the disparity doesn’t exist.
Going back, I think we find that many people believe that when women in general are risen up a step, the men of both the privileged and oppressed go down a little. But because of that magnitude of the divide between ethic and white, the disparity between white women and white men is given a weight by their height above ethic people so that it’s relatively less than the disparity between ethic men and ethic women. To black people, changing the gender status quo has more radical effects than to the whites.
This may seem true. The question then is, does the feminist have the duty to compensate acts of female empowerment with a greater number of acts of ethnic empowerment to compensate for the gap they have allegedly increased between white women and ethnic people of both genders?
No. If the topic is misogyny, then you deal with misogyny. If it’s both, than you deal with both. But you can’t say that every time we deal with misogyny we’re hurting ethnic men and that the ethnicity in question needs special compensation. Especially not when dealing with misogyny becomes a full-time job, as it clearly is with Amanda Marcotte. How many times have we read Amanda, Jill, Holly, Jen, or another feminist blogger talk about how much something made them want to throw up? How many anti-depressants they’re on?
I don’t know about you, but I just can’t bring myself to release my inner rage against somebody who’s job, the very thing that brings them a living, makes them depressed enough to manifest other physical ailments. I’ll hold them accountable, but I won’t denounce they’re whole field of activism in their name.
Em, this is pointless of course, but almost all of the people I know are college educated and have internet access. The majority of them are also white. That doesn’t mean that most people fit that description. Most people don’t read blogs, including feminists.
Do you mean it?
When you’re sorry for the racist imagery that your book capitalizes on, that will make you money, does it make you pause and consider the other ways in which you, as a beneficiary of white privilege, may have allowed or perpetrated racism? It’s really easy to apologize for something when it’s obvious - but so many people stop at the obvious and never move on to self-reflection.
So. Do you mean it?
You know what really pisses me off about this post, Alexandra? It’s that you appear to believe Amanda Marcotte was apologizing in bad faith, not because bad faith apologies are in character for her (which they aren’t), but merely because she’s a member of a ‘privileged’ group.
Privilege confers a blind spot upon those who hold it, but that doesn’t mean they have weak characters merely because they fall into that trap betimes.
Let she who is without sin cast the first stone.
I’m having hella lot of trouble getting a comment to go through. Can’t get the captcha right for the life of me, and I thought I just did but when the page refreshed my comment wasn’t there. If there’s moderation, plz tell me?
I am missing something. While I am really glad that Amanda and her publisher decided to change the artwork in the book (I am African American, but completely overlooked the obnoxiousness of it because I am exposed to that kind of thing so often: beautiful, powerful white person/savage non-white person). I am not feeling necessarily injured. It is definitely a teaching moment for everyone. It is so easy to overlook something like these cheesy illustrations because it speaks to unconscious assumptions that are taken for granted.
But I laughed out loud at the agonizing and pearl clutching going on at a couple of other blogs. The over the top “How couuuuuuuld you Amandaaaaaaaaaah!” (queue Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce voice) totally misses the point. The point is that it is still too easy to slip this stuff by people unnoticed. Because we still have this kind of thing engraved into our subconscious.
Yes, it is awesome when you catch yourselves perpetuating racist fuckery and you call each other out on it. Good on you. But can we take the drama down a few notches?
there are blog people and then there is everyone else. in many ways this whole little culture we have here is a world unto itself. i know many, many internet-friendly feminists who have been shocked to find there’s even such a thing as I Blame the Patriarchy.
That said, i can’t help but shake my head at this. Feminism shall not end. The fight against racism shall not end. This is seriously, people, a hiccup. One which Amanda is now aware she caused, or at least facilitated. And for which she has sincerely apologized.
For those who seem to think she doesn’t mean it, and is a secretly giddy closet racist who will go on her merry racist way…can i borrow your drugs? they’re clearly more potent than mine.
We don’t need to eat our own. There’s a sea full of sharks in line for the privilege.
just sayin.
DAMNIT. I can get the captcha right but my comment never appears.
also, i would like to second this:
i know there are lots of bad-faith apologies out there. but that should make the sincere ones easier to spot. i do hope you come here and post a lengthy mea culpa every time you catch your privilege showing, that we might all ask you, endlessly, DO YOU MEAN IT? i mean, you’re privileged too. so naturally all that you say bears a smelly kind of taint…
I think Amanda Marcotte’s apology for the racist pictures in her book may be more-or-less sincere. I am not sure, however, that I think she’s learned anything from anything else she’s been called to the carpet about recently. This is why I was asking about how much she “meant it”. Because you end up a hypocrite if you’ll apologize for the obvious and the easy, but not for the insidious and difficult.
sigh. there was a first comment as well, but i guess it didn’t make it through. ah well.
Yes, it is awesome when you catch yourselves perpetuating racist fuckery and you call each other out on it. Good on you. But can we take the drama down a few notches?
Thank you! I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what bothered me most about this manufatroversy, but your comment sums it up perfectly: the drama - some of it doesn’t stem from genuine emotion over the offensive drawings, but from a desire to see an ideological opponent silenced by tarring her as a racist.
tigtog April 25, 2008 at 9:04 pm
squashed, waving the stats stick around is pretty pathetic, as is the n00b taunt.
Brooklynite is not a n00b just because he has an infrequently updated LJ.
He doesn’t exist except for a small bleep. In term of racial issue, I seriously doubt he can show he has done much impact. No traffic number == nobody reads nor cares == no impact.
(that on top of somebody else threatening to sink a blog. well, how is he going to do it without showing number?)
Stephen, thank you for saying what’s been bothering me, as far as the circular firing squad issue. (Caveat-I’m a white guy and working on the enlightened bit. I didn’t have a dog to pick in this fight, and have only very recently become aware of some broader issues here with this and the brownfemmipower dustup). From what I’ve seen, there’s been some people seriously hurt from these experiences and it’s been horrible to read about. I hate that these fractures exist and that they’ve deepened the last few weeks.
Shakespeare’s Sister had a great blog promise on this a while back acknowledging that racial blindness was a problem at times, and asking for people to teach them and help them how to to do things better on this issue.
I thought it was spot on.
J I want to be able to listen to a civil and enlightening discussion on the issues here, instead of an anger-filled meta-analysis on what Amanda should have done or how long it’s taken her to apologize. To be fair, I’m probably asking to much, from a position of privilige here. I acknowledge that.
I don’t have a clue on what’s going to make things better, and I’m hesitant to suggest possibilities given my ignorance here. I feel like there should be a greater…not discussion. Awareness. Blog Trust building, team building, if what you want to be is part of a movement. Make efforts to understand each other. Not my blog, I don’t know the score here.
I’m just tired of reading several different blogs I like and respect and quite frankly have taught me what little I do know about greater social awareness bash the hell out of each other. I get enough of that with the elections.
How does this get fixed?
*sighs* A bit incomprehensible here. Sorry folks, I swear I had a point here.
I can’t speak for anyone else, and, as a white woman, I certainly can’t speak for WoC, but personally I’ve been reluctant to comment here since it’s pretty clear that criticism of anything related to Amanda is unwelcome. I totally understand that this is her space and her friends have her back, but I think it’s unfair to chastise critics for not commenting here when the response has historically been to dismiss them as jealous haters, rather than actually engage in conversation.
Amanda, I think your apology here was clearly the right thing to do. I am surprised and disappointed, however, that Seal Press didn’t anticipate that the images they chose would be problematic, particularly in light of the discussion of the original cover last August. The impression they give is that they changed the cover to quiet the critical voices, but didn’t take the opportunity to actually understand why people thought the gorilla+woman picture was offensive. Their apology just confirms that they were oblivious, and it makes clear to me that coming from my own position of white privilege, I need to take extra care about the images (and words) I take for granted. However, I would have expected that a supposedly progressive publisher was doing that already.
i guess i missed the part where amanda and holly became ideological opponents…this is actually the most confusing part thus far.
I think Amanda Marcotte’s apology for the racist pictures in her book may be more-or-less sincere. I am not sure, however, that I think she’s learned anything from anything else she’s been called to the carpet about recently. This is why I was asking about how much she “meant it”. Because you end up a hypocrite if you’ll apologize for the obvious and the easy, but not for the insidious and difficult.
I interpret this as her apologizing only when she’s actually sorry. And when she actually does apologize for something, it isn’t a half-hearted “I’m sorry you were offended” affair, but a real apology – a rare and dying breed in politics.
I doubt this will stand me in good stead, but I wouldn’t have apologized for those images. I would have removed them in deference to the sensibilities of my readers, but I would make it perfectly clear that I wasn’t offended. They’re iconic images – relics from another time when trashy jungle comics (replete with racism and sexism) were all the rage.
The illustrations were almost ironic, and I like that sort of thing.
All this fainting drama over what amounts to a thoughtless mistake actually makes dialogue between different groups harder to maintain, because everyone is walking on egg-shells around each other for fear of giving offense rather than being straightforward.
I finally realized what was bugging me about the piling on: It is bullying and it is abusive. Feminism and anti-racism are not about smug self-satisfied people trying to make other people feel like shit for their sins of omission. Amanda has made a sincere apology and taken sufficient corrective action. She does not need to fall on a sword, put on a hair shirt, or climb Mount Ararat on her knees.
I would like to suggest that those who feel that they have the right to make specific demands of Amanda take a look at their own mistakes and character flaws first.
As a wise man once said, only the sinless can throw stones at the sinner. Focus on getting the beam out of your own eye before you start ordering others to remove the mote from theirs.
Peggy, Seal Press is actually just as capable of fucking up as you are.
And they are also just as capable of correcting their mistake.
Hey folks, I was MIA but I finally weighed in. Amanda, great, thoughtful post.
You know, I’m glad (but not very surprised) that you’ve responded to this issue so well.
(PS: Reviewed the book on my blog; I’m not a very good reviewer, so I didn’t bother to trackback or anything. But both of my readers now know of my favorable impressions.)
Considering all the times Amanda and the armies of righteousness have gone after a villain and continued to stomp on their head long after they’ve stopped moving, I hope the pile-on continues.
Some people never did get to the mirror stage, did they?
“I’m a white guy and working on the enlightened bit. I didn’t have a dog to pick in this fight, ”
Uh…
Let me offer you a hint bro. When women are fighting, don’t say you don’t have a dog in the fight. Right?
Here here, Hector. It is good that we are talking about this. But lets not get too smug and shitty. I am seeing a lot of “I am so much more racially aware than this, I would NEVER have done such a thing”. Which is annoying, and probably complete bullshit.
Calling out Amanda allows you to atone for white privilege. I didn’t know this whole controversy was All About You And How Your White Self Can Help End Racism.
Word. There’s no flagellation like self-flagellation. Especially when you don’t even have to flagellate yourself, but can offer some other privileged person up in your place for the punishment you think you deserve. All the self-indulgence without the guilt. Absolutely disgusting.
Apologies TomK. I’m in the middle of finals this week, and those words were ill chosen.
Amanda, I’m sorry for you. But in the end, I suppose it’s just easier to kowtow to that crew of wankers instead of trying futilely to stand up against their insatiable need to find something to complain about and their utter lack of even an awareness of what a sense of humor is.
They just cannot handle the fact that you’re more successful than they because you’re funny, and that articulate mockery is a much more appealing, and effective, mode of criticism than impassioned anger. So they have to find a way to bring you down, and when bogus accusations of plagiarism didn’t work, on they went to almost equally bogus accusations of racism.
And whereas a “hey, on the next printing, could you change the drawings?” would have generated a nice conversation and some solidarity, instead we have to have the Circular Firing Squad of the Ruffled Feathers. Bored now. As I’ve said before, it’s no wonder the patriarchy keeps steamrolling progressive values.
Anyone who understood camp or irony would either laugh or go over the top and start putting little dancing tiki men on their own blog. Hell, appropriate the jungle men and turn them into a symbol of power. But they’re not that clever, and they’re not funny at all, and nobody will ever want to publish what they have to say, because they’re dull and tedious and scattered, more concerned with bringing one of their own down than with attacking the real enemy.
It was a nice apology, though I highly doubt it will get them to stop tearing you down. Just stay above it, instead of engaging with them: they want you to present yourself for further rending.
I do not know how anyone thought those images were funny/clever/a good idea in the first place.
I do not know how anyone CONTINUED to think that after the initial problems with the front cover image.
I do not know how to take yet another, “oops, sorry” apology which, given the cover, given the BFP debacle, just seems trite and insincere.
I do know I do not intend to continue reading Pandagon.
I do not know how anyone thought those images were funny/clever/a good idea in the first place.
I do not know how anyone CONTINUED to think that after the initial problems with the front cover image.
I do not know how to take yet another, “oops, sorry” apology which, given the cover, given the BFP debacle, just seems trite and insincere.
I do know I do not intend to continue reading Pandagon.
I’ve never eaten human meat before, How does it taste to gnaw on one of your own?
tastes just like chicken
I am just catching up with everything that happened today, and I have to say…people do tend to have VERY short memories.
Amanda seems to convey that this disgust with the painfully cruel and racist imagery is a new problem that no one saw coming, when that is clearly not the case http://pandagon.blogsome.com/2007/08/20/book-cover/#comment-443306
Here not only did Amanda know, but the usual crowd of “yes mandy’s” also diverted from the issue of the offensive nature of the cover and inserts. This whole issue could have been avoided LAST SUMMER. But it was laughed at, and money hungry hands pushed the issue under a rug.
Seal Press’s halfassed-totally off tangent-downplayed-cheap-lazy “apology” is also not helping.
It’s really sad that once again POC and especially WOC have to take a hit to get people to see the light.
And while I’m at it, what is up with these public apologies. There are accidents (hey I’m sorry I stepped on your shoe) then there is dumbassery that ANYONE could clearly see would have a stupid ending (I’m sorry I paid for a hooker to cross state lines and got caught, I’m sorry I referred to Obama as “that boy”…)
The excuse of “I was thinking/didn’t know/heat of the moment” doesn’t work when you make your living off of the public.
Ignorance IS NOT and excuse. It never was and never will be.
All of this coming of the heels of the Seal Press WOC debacle is so ugly too. I am beyond words of anger for them.
And yes, I am a WOC and I hope to one day publish a book of witty feminism. Ironically enough Seal Press was on my list of publishers to seek out.
No more!
After Amanda was accused of listening to BFP’s speech and writing it up as her own, an accusation that was clearly false, I don’t know how to take another “oops, sorry” apology.
Oh wait, there was no apology. My bad.
Again, can we stop pretending that Amanda is the only person to have done something wrong in the past couple weeks?
Answer: resounding no, of course.
Being me means never having to say your sorry. Apologies are for suckers.
It makes me deeply (oh why doesn’t English have a word for sad, angry and feeling as if one is going to vomit all at once) that a group of people at a publishing house and a supposed progressive could put those images in a book and feel good about it*
Your apology is weak and the damage has been done, in my opinion. I have no reason to believe that your words will speak to me when you fully admit you saw nothing wrong with the imagery used to support them.
*As a WOC, I can totally imagine a scenario where someone involved with the project saw the pictures as a mistake, regrettable, or as I do, disgusting and disturbing, but was either afraid to speak, or ignored when s/he did. I really hope at least one person involved with this project did, or I have even less hope for the world than I did when I woke up this morning. This was awful to have to see.
Yes, it is awesome when you catch yourselves perpetuating racist fuckery and you call each other out on it. Good on you. But can we take the drama down a few notches?
Lisa, that was truly the best line I’ve read and I think I’ve read a couple of thousand posts on this at this point.
I think that Amanda’s apology is appropriate and necessary considering the images that were used. I must admit that truthfully I had no visceral reaction to the cartoons whatsoever. I wondered why and after some thought realized that I looked at them, got the point, which I believe was a humorous take on the chapter, and stopped analyzing right there. I think that’s white privilege in action. I didn’t identify with anything in them and there was nothing I found personally insulting. I do understand that they are insulting, I don’t doubt that for a minute. I think though that, that requires explanation if you’re white. Because when you’re white a whole lot of this stuff just isn’t that big a deal. But I think part of being a good ally is being willing to listen and understand when something is hurtful to the people you want to ally yourself with.
I think that in the charges of appropriation, which I take seriously and believe are absolutely reasonable that it’s very much the same thing. I think that part of what’s happened is that yes, that charge ended up mixed in with charges of plagiarism and Amanda reacted in a knee-jerk reaction that definitely made the situation worse. When I read what BfP had written my own take was that yes she was pissed, not necessarily directly at Amanda, but about the fact that something she and many people of color had been trying to bring to the forefront was finally getting attention that was well deserved, but that these people who worked so hard on the issue was being disappeared. I don’t think she blamed Amanda directly for this, I don’t think she thought Amanda had done this deliberately. She went to great pains to neither mention her by name or accuse her plagiarizing.
I would hope that Amanda would look at what happened with the illustrations in her book, at how easy it was to only read the images to the point of “these are funny and they illustrate the point”, without being conscious of the fact that the further context was racist and wrong, and realize how easy it is to appropriate something with the thought that it’s in the zeitgeist and something worth writing about, and make the people who’d been pouring their hearts into the issue disappear. Not deliberately, not with malice but simply by not realizing that the privilege that she couldn’t even see made her unaware of how this would feel to people who felt shunted aside.
How tiny can I be, Squashed? I’ve got my own personal troll running internet searches on me.
Hey, ma! I’ve hit the big time!
It makes me deeply (oh why doesn’t English have a word for sad, angry and feeling as if one is going to vomit all at once) that a group of people at a publishing house and a supposed progressive could put those images in a book and feel good about it*
Your apology is weak and the damage has been done, in my opinion. I have no reason to believe that your words will speak to me when you fully admit you saw nothing wrong with the imagery used to support them.
*As a WOC, I can totally imagine a scenario where someone involved with the project saw the pictures as a mistake, regrettable, or as I do, disgusting and disturbing, but was either afraid to speak, or ignored when s/he did. I really hope at least one person involved with this project did, or I have even less hope for the world than I did when I woke up this morning. This was awful to have to see.
pretty tiny. 110K google links on 4 yrs or so archive.
It makes me deeply (oh why doesn’t English have a word for sad, angry and feeling as if one is going to vomit all at once) that a group of people at a publishing house and a supposed progressive could put those images in a book and feel good about it*
Your apology is weak and the damage has been done, in my opinion. I have no reason to believe that your words will speak to me when you fully admit you saw nothing wrong with the imagery used to support them.
*As a WOC, I can totally imagine a scenario where someone involved with the project saw the pictures as a mistake, regrettable, or as I do, disgusting and disturbing, but was either afraid to speak, or ignored when s/he did. I really hope at least one person involved with this project did, or I have even less hope for the world than I did when I woke up this morning. This was awful to have to see.
actually, make that pretty fucking tiny. it’s not even worth bothering. My guess is ~100 or so.
http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=http%3A%2F%2Fbrooklynite.livejournal.com%2F&btnG=Search
Not even your ma cares if you blog or not apparently.
Is it just me, or is it weird how many anti-feminist trolls shrieking at the sidelines here?
Again, thank you for the apology, Amanda. I think it was well-timed and apt.
Lisa: That’s obviously true. I just like to think that people who are directly involved in progressive causes would be better at it than my fairly clueless self.
felagund: I apparently don’t understand either camp or irony, because I don’t get how those images were appropriate. The jungle woman, sure. She’s strong and fierce, even if she is shaped like a barbie doll. I can see how she fits a hip and funny feminist text. But the white woman saving white men from stereotypical native African savages? Not so much.
squashed - speaking of priviledge: the size of one’s blog does not correlate with character or validity of opinion.
And while I don’t know why you’d care, I’d be surprised if my blog generated more than a dozen readers in a week - mostly the same dozen.
imma repost from feministe, since i appear to have muddled threads somewhat regarding some of the arguments thrown around.
there is a perverseness to the fact that Amanda Marcotte basically got her precious career off the hard work of a white guy who decided to let her sidekick until he decided to gift her his blog audience. She would never have even gotten Pandagon’s built-in audience and bully pulpit if not for the kindness of a white man, quite literally. Not to mention free bandwidth/server space from a boyfriend (since, you know, the tech industry isn’t full of race and gender biases all over the place, and stuff.)
This whole thing is just not surprising. She can’t even recognise the privilege in the access she was GIFTED, and didn’t have to earn. And so she of course expects to be forgiven (and given money) for these racist images sliding by.
The apology isn’t enough. Too little, too late. Same as Seal Press wanting people to keep buying their whitened-up booklist due to the reputation of the old, out of print work they did back when they WERE happy to publish more than just whitegirls. “We used to let YOU PEOPLE WRITE FOR US, SO GIVES US MONEIES NOW!”
No thanks.
This is just another white woman getting a little something for herself courtesy of white guys hooking her up and other white people saying she’s all right because THIS TIME she said sorry (kinda). And aren’t YOU PEOPLE grateful enough that you got a piece of an apology?!
I’ve read her writing. I find it intellectually sloppy and inconsistent, as well as plain rude for rudeness’ sake. I can name easily 50 other feminist bloggers (white women and WOC) who are better writers and get probably as much traffic. The internet is vast, and technorati linking doesn’t tell the whole tale, nor sitemeter reports. Once you have about 100 people linking to you, you are playing in the same zone as the people with 1000 linkers, because you have a decent amouont of repeat traffic, possible more than the big-dogs who have a lot of hit and run traffic that beefs out their numbers.
That little ramble there was for the clueless people who think pandagon is the only large audience to be had in bloglandia and that nobody replying to these posts gets a large audience as well. It may not overlap, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Lot more people on the internet than the narrow white demographics represented by most of the white femblogosphere.
And that’s why this whole debacle is just depressing. She’s not the only person with a lot of readers and that both Seal and AM’s defenders are SHOCKED to find out that there is a thriving and extensive audience of POC (with blogs! with readership in the 1000s and 10000s!) and allies out there who will just not tolerate this lazy, aversive racist claptrap is just…white people suck, film at 11.
and this is apropos of nothing, but that Christian libertarian Amanda loves to hate, Vox Day is on a third printing for his book with no tour and a smaller audience, and the entire text available for download. maybe this is for those who think smaller audiences ‘aren’t relevant’.
I seem to remember a white woman saying that, somewhere….
I really don’t see that the reaction to the pictures is justified or proportionate. They’re campy and retro. I’m not a skinny blonde barbie-looking girl but that doesn’t mean I take offense to the purposely campy image. Campy images are generally used ironically, poking fun at how things used to be perceived or represented.
I’m a feminist who has no problem discussing white privilege and appreciates anti-racist work and multiracial organizing. AND I look at the picture of the barbie lady with an alligator, and then read these comments, and I think, there’s a lot of overprocessing going on here.
“It’s a Jungle Out There” has jungle-related images? Wow. Surprising. And if the photos are meant to be campy, the POINT of camp is that it was always not real, making fun of how people tried to portray things in an idealized 50’s style sort of way, which was never reality. So to me, I see the images and don’t think she’s telling us that successful women have to be blonde-haired buxom white Barbies and spear alligators…just as I don’t think she’s telling us that the workplace is populated with enemy dark-skinned men in tiki masks.
Nobody cares if your opinion is valid or not. Nobody reads it. ….who cares. it’s irrelevant.
Thene, I want to point out that opponax wasn’t talking about all low-paying jobs. They were talking about low-paying jobs in the entertainment industry.
Looong way up there, but I went to yoga and then watched an episode of Buffy and missed all this.
Actually, that’s not what I was talking about at all.
In my original post, above, I was talking about jobs (in general) where you magically never have to deal with the idea that you might be making money from sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. These jobs tend not to pay very well, which means the only people who can afford to hold them are folks with trust funds or wealthy spouses. People with the privilege never to have to question which is more important — dinner or politics.
Though I have to say that the main thing that bugs me about the meme that Amanda, or any Officially Denounced Feminist, should not be paid for her work, is that it underscores a really fucked up truth about women, even us feminists. We think the women’s work is so worthless that we shouldn’t even be paid for it. You might deserve some cash if you manage to be Teh Perfect Feminist, never fucking up or pissing anybody off. But all that actual work of researching, writing, editing, etc? Women are not worthy of that, apparently.
I mean, really. I would bet money that every so-called feminist who bitches about the NERVE of Amanda to potentially make money from this book would not begrudge Bill O’Reilly a penny.
yet another commenter April 25, 2008 at 10:58 pm
And that’s why this whole debacle is just depressing. She’s not the only person with a lot of readers and that both Seal and AM’s defenders are SHOCKED to find out that there is a thriving and extensive audience of POC (with blogs! with readership in the 1000s and 10000s!)
a blog with 10K readers would ranked inside 3000 globally. very visible. There is no feminist blog around that ranked. Pandagon is the biggest in fact, inside 1500.
Nice to see an apology.
Are you going to apologize for your past racist and sexist statements?
Right now, we have seen you, your words, your actions offend:
liberals, libertarians, conservatives.
straights, gays, lesbians, transgendered.
women of color.
copyright holders.
Amanda, you are a complete fucktard.
You bully people, you misrepresent what they say, you smear them, you lie about them.
We both know this has been documented.
Your supporters claim that people upset with you are just angry white guys. But you know that’s not true. And so you drag even your supporters down into the cesspool you swim in. Shame on you.
You are a douchebag.
“I’ve read her writing. I find it intellectually sloppy and inconsistent, as well as plain rude for rudeness’ sake. I can name easily 50 other feminist bloggers (white women and WOC) who are better writers and get probably as much traffic.”
This is just a question, but why is it that so many people seem to have a hard time writing out “Women of Color” or “People of Color?” If you’re going to use acronyms and abbreviations for everything, then let’s see some racial balance here. Start calling “white women” WWs. “Feminist bloggers” can be “BFs.”
I am just wondering why everyone refers to brownfemipower as BFP? And to women of color as WOCs? It is sort of dehumanizing in a way to be an acronym, don’t you think? Like a BLT?
squashed, where’s your blog? where’s your impact? i notice you don’t appear to have one and can only reference material from when pandagon had a different audience.
links decay on technorati after 180 days. feed-readers are not easily measurable.
you don’t want a bunch of hit and run ‘uniques’. you want a core of ‘repeats’.
why does anyone who comments here ‘not count’? we’re all commenting on a large blog with a decent bit of traffic. hundreds will see our opinions, so by your own inaccurate and miscalculated metrics, all the opinions in this thread count.
again, YOU have NO BLOG.
0 uniques.
0 repeats.
YOU DO NOT COUNT BY YOUR OWN METRICS.
hey, groupie needs lingo, for the hip and ins
WW is used in the infertilisphere, so unfortunately, i cannot use that acronym as often as i’d like. that’s my main reason for not using WW for whitegirls.
the question of acronym use is actually a pretty interesting one, but probably beyond the increasingly bizarre scope of this thread.
Foucault writes:
This is just a question, but why is it that so many people seem to have a hard time writing out “Women of Color” or “People of Color?” If you’re going to use acronyms and abbreviations for everything, then let’s see some racial balance here. Start calling “white women” WWs. “Feminist bloggers” can be “BFs.”
I am just wondering why everyone refers to brownfemipower as BFP? And to women of color as WOCs? It is sort of dehumanizing in a way to be an acronym, don’t you think? Like a BLT?
OY. I’m going to guess it’s because we’re being racist.
yet another commenter April 25, 2008 at 11:10 pm
why does anyone who comments here ‘not count’?
Anybody who has very tiny blogs can’t get outraged about Amanda not doing racial issue. Because traffic wise, pandagon front page exposure will simply outsize any tiny blogs.
Any mirth the size of sub 1000, who acts like they matter on racial issues related to feminism, should stop pretending like they are big deal.
They are NOT.
Any sub 500 blogs should stfu, because they are irrelevant. Nobody reads it and nobody cares. Try gaining relevancy first.
Translation: unless you can show number: Pandagon crew has done quite a few thing online on racial issues.
there is a perverseness to the fact that Amanda Marcotte basically got her precious career off the hard work of a white guy who decided to let her sidekick until he decided to gift her his blog audience. She would never have even gotten Pandagon’s built-in audience and bully pulpit if not for the kindness of a white man, quite literally. Not to mention free bandwidth/server space from a boyfriend (since, you know, the tech industry isn’t full of race and gender biases all over the place, and stuff.)
If I post this in seventeen different blog comments, it makes it true.
If I post this in seventeen different blog comments, that makes it true.
If I post this in seventeen different blog comments, then it MUST be TRUE.
….
Drat. Forgot to click my heels, so I have to start again. If I post this in seventeen … but maybe somebody will notice me and I’ll get blogads???
Does anybody else get flashbacks to the Dr. Bronner’s bottle when reading Squashed’s posts?
ALL ONE OR NONE!!1!!11!!!!ONE!
yet another commenter April 25, 2008 at 11:10 pm
why does anyone who comments here ‘not count’?
let’s just say, everybody knows your blog is shitty and nobody reads it. so, stop inflating numbers like you are on top of the world. You are not. Everybody knows who is on top.
It’s listed.
Yet another, you are trying soooo hard to get hits … you must be sooo desperate! Pathetic really.
Go write something more meaningful than your fictionalized history of Amanda. Please.
As for the book, the images made me very uncomfortable. Vile is a good word, inexscusable too. But the bullying and pile on that has happened in an attempt to turn rage into power is just pathetic and must stop. It isn’t the least constructive. Save it for those who can’t even notice or apologise for their stupid - limbaugh, coulter, etc. These jerks will never possibly be allies like those who are being abused here.
I’m so thankful Amanda apologized, and did a real apology.
It’s been humbling to watch, because I don’t think I would have noticed the racism in those pictures. Guess the take-away lesson is that I need to work on seeing my own privilege. I’d hope that Amanda, after this and the bfp thing, would do some work on hers as well.
Peggy, camp and irony are funny *because* they’re based on inappropriate images or words or thoughts. The whole point is that by placing the inappropriate thought in a place where it doesn’t belong (e.g., racist caricatures of jungle people from long ago in a postmodern book about third-wave feminism), it neutralizes the power of the original structural relationship. In other words, putting the jungle men in the book is really mocking the kind of white explorer types who imagine the inhabitants of the jungle as savages, not the inhabitants themselves. You’re playing with the structural relationship that originally created the image.
You’re taking the images too literally as representations. The real savages are the people controlled by patriarchy.
and this is apropos of nothing, but that Christian libertarian Amanda loves to hate, Vox Day is on a third printing for his book with no tour and a smaller audience, and the entire text available for download.
Um, just out of curiosity, why do you have a link to Vox Day on your blog? And why, on dog’s green earth, would you call Amanda’s writing “intellectually sloppy” when you link to the likes of Vox Day? Seriously. WTF?
the opoponax April 25, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Does anybody else get flashbacks to the Dr. Bronner’s bottle when reading Squashed’s posts?
yeah. it’s amazing isn’t it how everybody’s ego suddenly deflate when knowing there is ranking. Jeebus, the noise generated from the irrelevant people.
The level of righteousness is amazing.
At least we now knows everybody’s place.
Is it possible to charge an extra dollar and make the cover a little thicker, or maybe do that fold-over thing? The cover warps like a MF after a few days, so I have to keep the book walled in between other books. It’s ironic imagery.
yet another commenter April 25, 2008 at 10:58 pm
I’ve read her writing. I find it intellectually sloppy and inconsistent, as well as plain rude for rudeness’ sake. I can name easily 50 other feminist bloggers (white women and WOC) who are better writers and get probably as much traffic.
start naming them. We are waiting.
Once again that is only my view of the situation–not to be taken as me being a spokesperson for anyone else.
See, not being their spokesman would mean not popping in here with proclamations about who is and isn’t comfortable posting here. I mean, just a thought.
I think it has to do with the standard stock Seal uses, based, I would guess, on what their printer makes available to them at an affordable price point. A lot of their books are pretty cheaply printed.
Though this is the first time I’ve seen such a shitty overall design from them, or such an obvious lack of oversight (though apparently there are rumors this has happened before?). Which concerns me, considering the recent changes at Seal.
i have a lot of other links on my blogroll. might give some of them a tumble. vox is interesting and yes, more intellectually coherent (about things that are not Christianity).
i used vox’s print run success to illustrate the point that having a bunch of people link you on technorati doesn’t necessarily measure influence. vox has far fewer links, but sold out more swiftly, despite offering the whole book for free.
another example would be tucker max, the dude who writes about all the drunken antics he gets into. that guy has very few links, but he makes 10k per month in ad revenue, so his traffic must be ok, even if by squashed’s metrics, it’s ‘pathetic’ and ‘doesn’t count’. additionally, nobody would publish his books, so he self-published and sold, well. he sold more than any feminist blogger who’s been published will anytime soon. i think he may actually have sold a million copies.
again, that’s influence, and it’s not measured by the ’stats’.
as for my blogroll, i don’t link to people i like, i link to people whose writing i like or who are offering a perspective that needs to publicised more (in my presently small way, one might suppose).
i kinda like this sockpuppet squashed, who didn’t respond to the fact that amanda had a tiny, no-traffic blog herself until…a white guy let her post on his bigger blog.
and for that matter, squashed apparently thinks pandagon, alone of all blogs in the world, started out with exactly this much traffic and hits and didn’t have to earn them over the years.
it’s very, very interesting that squashed thinks that kind of thing. notice squashed didn’t check how long various blogs had been around, or look at historical stats over time.
and again, WE ARE ALL POSTING HERE. BY HIS OWN METRICS WE ALL COUNT AT LEAST IN THIS STUPID THREAD.
BTW, I apologize for being a severe Book Design nerd. There aren’t many of us out there, and this is, like, my one moment to actually get to talk about book design with people who might actually care, for once.
I apparently don’t understand either camp or irony, because I don’t get how those images were appropriate. The jungle woman, sure. She’s strong and fierce, even if she is shaped like a barbie doll.
And in the campy context, Peggy, who do you think her adversaries are going to be? Aliens? Nazis?
Again, without weighing in on the racism in the images - which is there, in the same way it’s racist to show a black family in a KFC commercial - I really have to wonder why anybody is surprised. When the art direction is basically “Tarzana of the jungle”, what did you all expect?
Apologising for this was a good first step, but … I feel like you’re attempting to make it in a vacuum. It doesn’t address your dismissive and, frankly, immature remarks over the book cover or the appropriation whatnot. It does suck to be called on priviledge. It sucks to be wrong. But it sucks more to be wronged.
Anyway, I hope you truly take a good, long look at all of this and carry away some new awareness of how people of colour, intentionally or not get forgotten all the fucking time.
This is wrong in, like, four dimensions of wrongness. It’s like some weird creation myth.
Thx to Foucault for explaining who “BFP” was.
I can understand why anyone would choose to boycott a book with these images, and I respect that choice. Hopefully, once they are removed, people will reconsider supporting the book if they like the content.
I hope you can also understand why WOC would find little to entice them in a book authored by someone with such an egregious blind spot that she couldn’t see blatant racism staring her in the face from the pages of her own book.
amanda had a tiny, no-traffic blog herself until…a white guy let her post on his bigger blog.
I’m kind of sick of this meme.
Granted I was never a regular at Mouse Words, nor was I an early reader of Original Recipe Pandagon.
But isn’t it more accurate to say that Amanda went from being just one writer on a blog that wasn’t explicitly feminist, and turned it into one of the bigger sites in the feminist blogosphere? Which is really something. That’s like the equivalent of getting an editorial position at The Believer and ultimately morphing it into Bitch.
For that matter, if all feminists are officially tainted by Teh Wyte Mayunn if they accept gigs from white guys, that basically means we have to boycott all media. Sounds fun, eh?
Very little creative output from feminists exists completely outside the influence of white men, as unfortunate as that is.
yet another commenter April 25, 2008 at 11:56 pm
it’s very, very interesting that squashed thinks that kind of thing. notice squashed didn’t check how long various blogs had been around, or look at historical stats over time.
there is nothing worst than old shitty blog that goes nowhere and nobody cares.
We’re still pretending that Amanda was the only person to have done anything wrong here?
Stay classy internet.
“All this fainting drama over what amounts to a thoughtless mistake actually makes dialogue between different groups harder to maintain, because everyone is walking on egg-shells around each other for fear of giving offense rather than being straightforward.”
Sooo racism is just a thoughtless mistake.
I feel so much better now thanks.
That really takes the sting out of the names I get called, the jobs I get turned down for, and all the other “thoughtlessness” I deal with daily.
Nice way to blame racism on minority groups there. I mean, unless our offense doesn’t make dominant priveleged white people uncomfortable it’s US making the dialogue hard to maintain, right? Our reactions can’t be the correct one, it’s just fainting drama.
Nice.
have a lot of other links on my blogroll. might give some of them a tumble. vox is interesting and yes, more intellectually coherent (about things that are not Christianity).
Well, now I regret eating the troll bait.
Sorry, everyone.
*hangs head in shame*
Amanda’s writing has been really helpful to me over the past few years. I disagree with her sometimes kind of drastically about music, but apart from that, I’ve found her to be really right on a good 95% of the time, and not infrequently genuinely enlightening. I’m a white man from a middle-class, hopelessly reactionary, and violent home, which all adds up to a certain amount of privilege, a whole set of really warped received wisdom, and a lot of anger. Amanda has become one of the people I look to for a certain kind of guidance and articulation of things that I can’t get across myself. It’s no exaggeration to say that my mom probably has Bill Donohue’s home phone number, and Amanda’s response to his treatment of her last year was really kind of inspiring (not a word I use every day) to say the least.
Well, all of that is kind of mushy personal stuff (albeit sincere mushy personal stuff). None of it really excuses this situation. I have to admit, I’m a little confused about how it was possible to do at least two book readings (and post about them) without noticing (or writing anything about) those images. I almost wonder if she wasn’t sort of mesmerized by the aesthetics of the thing and able to ignore the substance because the form was so nice (which, to answer a question that was raised several months ago, is so much of why many of us can’t stand hipsters in general).
Well, here’s hoping something productive comes out of this. My life as a Recovering Catholic has taught me not to have too much faith in anything beyond my own control, but I retain at least a modicum of (naive) trust in Amanda’s integrity.
Who’s the “white guy” in this story? Jesse Taylor isn’t white.
For that matter, if all feminists are officially tainted by Teh Wyte Mayunn if they accept gigs from white guys, that basically means we have to boycott all media. Sounds fun, eh?
You know what’s even funnier? Jesse Taylor invited Amanda to Pandagon years ago. The kicker: Jesse Taylor ain’t white. LOL.
Keep trying, haters.
I can understand why anyone would choose to boycott a book with these images, and I respect that choice. Hopefully, once they are removed, people will reconsider supporting the book if they like the content.
You should also understand, then, why WOC would believe the book has little to offer them when the author can’t even see blatant racism when it’s under her own nose in the pages of her own book. The art angers me, yes, but what’s even more disappointing and depressing is the fact that so very many “progressive” white folks who claim to be allies failed to see an egregious example of racism until it was pointed out to them.
I physically recoiled when those images loaded on my screen. How could you not notice, especially after the book cover fiasco? What the hell is wrong with you people?
Jesse Taylor invited Amanda to Pandagon years ago.
And then, it was like, “WHY are you writing about WOMEN??!?!??!?!?!” Or the ever-classic, “Silly girl, talking about girl stuff…when is Jesse going to post about the awesome MAN STUFF?” Or, “Can’t you write a post on politics without the girly stuff?”
I loved the “Imna take my ball and GO HOME!” people who were mad when Jesse left.
Everybody makes mistakes. This was a bad mistake and its hard to imagine someone as sensitive as Amanda making it. But it happens. We all do or say stupid things that reveal culturally ingrained prejudices. All of us.
In my mind there is no question that Amanda is a good person doing good work. I don’t see any reason to doubt her sincerity in her apology.
Felagund: I think that only works as irony if it’s clear to everyone that 3rd wave feminism has transcended racial issues, and that the readers of the book are aware of that fact. I don’t believe that to be the case. And that’s why those offensive “ironic” t-shirts can be so insulting - many people see them and think “ha ha yeah, that’s true”, not “whoa that racist image is so last century,” and if you are wearing one, I have no way of knowing which camp you fall into. If Amanda had written about race and pop culture, I might agree with you about the ironic use of those particular images. However, her book about sexism and feminism for what is likely a predominantly young white readership, where lack of racism is not a given.
Chet: dangerous alligators? rampaging elephants? poachers come to kill the gorillas in the mist? You are right, though, that the jungle theme limited the options - and that’s something the art designers at Seal Press should have been aware of. And some people have indeed pointed out that the theme is problematic in and of itself. Sorry I don’t have the links.
Okay, dumb question —
I’m a white male person. I have no doubt that my unconscious privilege will cause and has caused me to make major errors.
Am I allowed to apologize, or does my race and gender combine to make any errors I make essentially unforgivable?
If the former, great. We’re all people, we all make mistakes (even very large ones), and let’s try to contain the damage and move forward. If the latter, that’s fine — I’ll keep doing what I think is best, but I won’t be nearly as effective or useful, because I won’t have access to feedback from the folks I’m ostensibly trying to empower.
Not something I have control over, I guess.
Weirdly, the inclusion of the racist, “campy, retro” images in Amanda’s book seems almost purposeful by some entity at Seal; maybe in an unconscious way, but it still feels sinister. Why is it so hard for white people to comprehend that maybe, underneath all our social niceties and self-deception regarding race that we… might… actually hate/be afraid of POC?
~And even though I totally don’t think this is what happened, wouldn’t something like this be the perfect way for someone- like someone who hates feminism- to fuck up feminist solidarity, infiltrating a feminist organization and causing problems by pulling some racist shit? In a way, I kind of wish that was actually what happened, instead of just some white women doing what white people do.
Weirdly, the inclusion of the racist, “campy, retro” images in Amanda’s book seems almost purposeful by some entity at Seal; maybe in an unconscious way, but it still feels sinister. Why is it so hard for white people to comprehend that maybe, underneath all our social niceties and self-deception regarding race that we… might… actually hate/be afraid of POC?
~And even though I totally don’t think this is what happened, wouldn’t something like this be the perfect way for someone- like someone who hates feminism- to fuck up feminist solidarity, infiltrating a feminist organization and causing problems by pulling some racist shit? In a way, I kind of wish that was actually what happened, instead of just some white women doing what white people do.
I’m kinda bothered by the litany of demands that are called upon Amanda to do in order to redeem herself; or get back her feminist mojo. Apparently, profusely apologizing and removing the images from the next print are not enough; she must do this, this and this, and in that order.
The images are definitely not appropriate, and I appreciate her apology and removing the pictures. After that, it really is up to the reader to decide whether or not you continue to support or her, but asking for further acknowledgment and defense and motive and so on, seems like beating a dead horse.
This by no means do I think that incidences like this should be glossed over; in fact, that Amanda was called out on was especially important, because sometimes the cause that your fighting for can seem like the only one that matters and as result, as she was pointing out her cause, she unconsciously exploited another.
Maybe it because for the first time the very real possibility of a black man or woman in the White House, or the fact that sexism and especially racism has been swept under rug for decades; emotions are right on the surface and the infighting between historically disenfranchised groups seems a bit more frequent and frankly, counterproductive. I am going to take a lesson learned from this and move on; and will continue to read this blog. I think there enough divide that is going on in this country; I’d rather take a united front and support feminists whose ultimate goal is to make a this world a better place for everyone than to write anyone off.
…until the lawyers of the ACLU decide that issues facing POC are important.
This is a new criticism to me–while the ACLU certainly isn’t on the side of hate-speech codes, I was under the impression they were pretty good on the domestic issues that bloggers such as BFP have been writing about, particularly immigration/detention/prison that have been largely neglected by white feminists. Is there some dispute I’ve missed?
It’s just complete ignorance. The ACLU work on these issues far predates nearly all the WOC blogs. (If not all)
Demonizing the “lawyers of the ACLU” is just wow. When you are doing the work of right-wingers you’re doing it wrong.
On a semi-related note, the person who signed me up for the ACLU was a young black woman. Damn those ACLU lawyers!
First of all, I really do enjoy reading your work.
And secondly, as a fellow writer I can see how things like this can be overlooked. Oh, the stories I could tell you. I once worked for a company that sent a magazine on colleges to every high school student in the state, and it almost had a pregnant teen on the cover. Needless to say, school administrators were none too happy.
I don’t agree with those who try to justify the images in any way. I think all anyone was looking for was an apology.
The harshness from others over this, however, is a bit much. Often people do not understand how easy it is just to overlook something.
It’s also possible to overcome this (read up on the illustrations on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for example).
>>off the hard work of a white guy who decided to let her sidekick…
Gee, last I heard, Jesse T was a black guy.
We’re still pretending that Amanda was the only person to have done anything wrong here?
I’m not pretending anything, but as this post is about Amanda and her apology, yeah, that’s what I was talking about. I’m sorry, I don’t think snidely implying anyone who ever has anything less than glowing to say about you is merely jealous is the best reaction to being called out for being wrong. And she was wrong in the way she’s handled … oh, just about everything, from the initial book cover debate to the brownfemipower thing to refering to this thing as the “latest dust up.”
Or am I supposed to like. Pretend both “sides,” whatever they are, are … what. Equally wrong?
Or do you mean I should’ve mentioned how Marc was being a giant douche too? ‘Cause that was pretty wrong.
Bah, forget it. I’ll leave, and never darken your towels again.
Amanda,
I guess I’m way out of step with all but a few of the comments here, but I see nothing for which you should apologize.
I understood the irony and the humor in the illustrations: a strong heroic woman triumphs over benighted retrograde men. Drawing these images in the style of 40s and 50s comic books was an attempt (and a successful one at that) to poke fun at your own image and at those guys who think that feminists are Amazonian warriors.
Viewing the images out of context and focusing on their racial aspects is like reading Huck Finn and getting all upset because Twain uses the word “nigger” a lot, often in an ironic context to make a point about the attitudes of people using the word.
The whole affair reminds me too of another comic controversy, that of the Danish Mohammed cartoons, the point of which was to comment on how Mohammed’s teachings had been twisted by a crazed violent minority into a blueprint for terrorism. Those cartoons had their critics in the non-Muslim world, people who clucked nervously about how insensitive they were.
You are not responsible for people’s failure to understand the intent, humor and irony in the illustrations. Someone somewhere would surely find something “offensive” in whatever images were chosen for the book. If the men in the illustrations had been Europeans, for example, I’m sure that you’d have been criticized for promoting violence against men, for ignoring the sexism of non-white societies, and for being a castrating bitch. Like my mama always told me, if you go looking for trouble, you’ll usually find it.
Stop berating yourself.
I use it b/c I’ve seen women and people of color use it for themselves. I thought it was preferred. If it’s not, I’ll type it out.
I don’t know what’s preferred. I’m not condemning the acronyms, and figure they are just another manifestation of Orwellian newspeak (MSM = mainstream media; POTUS = President of the United States, etc…)
But to me, WOC and POC *are* dangerous forms of shorthand/newspeak because they make it very easy to “forget” the materiality behind the referent.
When you say “Amanda Marcotte,” I think of a real person whom I recognize from photos and who I have seen and briefly interacted with in the flesh. When you say “POC,” I think of a computer code, or something equally abstract.
For days, I was trying to imagine what BFP looks like (this name sounded like a sandwich to me), and then I discovered somewhere that BFP is brownfemipower. I still can’t imagine her as clearly as I can imagine Pam Spalding and Amanda Marcotte, but brownfemipower is a start for me. I like it better than BFP.
But I am an English major, so I like words in general. Again, I am not trying to make a statement; I just had a question about whether or not others find POC and WOC and RWOC (radical women of color?) sort of alienating?
My problem with Amanda’s apology - and I’m not alone - is that while she apologizes for the images, she says nothing about the bigger pattern which led to using those images.
A pattern which has been discussed at length since Seal Press had its confrontation with Blackamazon then Amanda caught flack over the brownfemipower post.
Two confrontations which, unlike most other blogging and feminist dustups online, got no official post on Pandagon. Amanda posted about the LJ open source boob project - but not brownfemipower.
Amanda did confront it in comments sections in several places - but that’s not the same. In the hierarchy of blogs, an official post is genuine acknowledgment - keeping it in the comments seems evasive.
I know unfair accusations were involved and being a target is an unpleasant defensive situation which makes it very hard to say the right thing. But Amanda only addressed on the false arguments and denied there was a real larger problem.
Even just in terms of blog dynamics, this seems unwise - if you have a group of allies who are mad and feel excluded and rumors are involved, then include them in a post while at the same time debunking the rumors. Of course, it’s easy to see this when it’s not your authority being challenged, but that’s supposed to be the blogging left’s virtue - not just ignoring things in hopes they go away.
And with this prelude of Seal and Amanda trying to deny they had a problem - having to make apologies now looks far worse. Especially since this didn’t happen in a vacuum - Amanda and Seal already had to change the cover after criticism. It is reasonable to ask why no-one noticed the black people in those pictures and remembered the discussion which had just occurred. This wasn’t an impulsive blog post - it’s a book. Then, after the recent flamewars emphasized the issue once again, why not notice?
More importantly, why not make an apology which acknowledges the greater context. This is like someone sitting in a car wreck holding a whiskey bottle and apologizing for poor steering.
It’s time to put it all on the table - in fact, as I’m sure any seasoned blogger will say - in situations like this, putting it all on the table gives you some control over it.
Hell, even that open source boob guy managed to recognize and apologize for the entire dynamic in a short amount of time. It would really help if Amanda did the same. To apologize and say nothing more will seem like stonewalling.
We’ve become a culture obsessed with prosecution. No one can make an honest mistake without being vilified and dragged by the hair through the public square. What nonsense.
Amanda, thank you for this.
Plenty of people are still angry. They’ve got a right. The only thing to do about that is to show by your actions and further writing that you mean what you’ve said here.
Justin @ 204, I pretty much agree with what you’ve said.
BeaTricks April 26, 2008 at 12:33 am
For that matter, if all feminists are officially tainted by Teh Wyte Mayunn if they accept gigs from white guys, that basically means we have to boycott all media. Sounds fun, eh? // You know what’s even funnier? Jesse Taylor invited Amanda to Pandagon years ago. The kicker: Jesse Taylor ain’t white. LOL.
I was going to post the youtube interview, before she is gone. too bad.
Punditus Maximus April 26, 2008 at 1:19 am
Okay, dumb question —
Am I allowed to apologize, or does my race and gender combine to make any errors I make essentially unforgivable?
If the former, great. We’re all people, we all make mistakes (even very large ones), and let’s try to contain the damage and move forward. If the latter, that’s fine — I’ll keep doing what I think is best, but I won’t be nearly as effective or useful, because I won’t have access to feedback from the folks I’m ostensibly trying to empower.
I think it’s about informing, having conversation, and generally trying to understand what others are. It’s nothing fancy.
But this flap is definitely not a good spot to try that since it’s mostly pure flame war, blog egos at play. This is just basic blog stuff that happens to use feminism and race. But the subtext is pure ego of several players.
Factual clarification: No one drew the images anytime in the past century. They were taken from Marvel comics from the 50s, with full permissions from the owners of the images.
I’m glad that you apologized, Amanda. I’m not going to “thank” you because that’s patronizing, but I’m glad just the same. I’m glad because I saw how this would support a meme I disagreed with, but its just the same indefensible on its face. I appreciate that no effort has been made by you or Seal Press to defend it. I think some efforts to explain how it happened have been taken as an attempt to defend, but I really think an explanation of how a mistake happened is a crucial part of any apology and is how a person can access its sincerity. I don’t think Seal was trying to justify themselves as much as explain how this happened. That’s a sign of respect for the pain they’ve caused and effort to be transparent in admitting the mistake. I’m glad that happened. That’s really all I have to add.
It makes me deeply (oh why doesn’t English have a word for sad, angry and feeling as if one is going to vomit all at once) that a group of people at a publishing house and a supposed progressive could put those images in a book and feel good about it*
Your apology is weak and the damage has been done, in my opinion. I have no reason to believe that your words will speak to me when you fully admit you saw nothing wrong with the imagery used to support them.
*As a WOC, I can totally imagine a scenario where someone involved with the project saw the pictures as a mistake, regrettable, or as I do, disgusting and disturbing, but was either afraid to speak, or ignored when s/he did. I really hope at least one person involved with this project did, or I have even less hope for the world than I did when I woke up this morning. This was awful to have to see.
“It makes me deeply (oh why doesn’t English have a word for sad, angry and feeling as if one is going to vomit all at once) that a group of people at a publishing house and a supposed progressive could put those images in a book and feel good about it*
Nauseated?
Revolted?
Also, with respect to whether or not someone in the publishing house recognized the racist content of the images before they went to press, I think this may be a question of education. Many of us who read “progressive” blogs have spent years if not decades in higher education, and particularly in the liberal arts. We teach about sexism and racism, we’ve had graduate level courses on sexism and racism, and we write about these issues in our own work.
I don’t know how much university background the designers at SEAL have, and suspect that they do have some level of university of college education, but perhaps they majored in Design or Graphic Arts or a field with less exposure to critical analysis? I don’t say this as an excuse, but simply to throw it out there that lack of awareness can result in lack of sensitivity.
They said they plan to take some racial awareness/sensitivity training courses in their area, and I take them at their word on that. I can’t imagine that SEAL wants another screw up like this one on record…
“there is a perverseness to the fact that Amanda Marcotte basically got her precious career off the hard work of a white guy who decided to let her sidekick until he decided to gift her his blog audience. She would never have even gotten Pandagon’s built-in audience and bully pulpit if not for the kindness of a white man, quite literally.”
Others have already pointed out how incorrect this statement is. But I guess facts just don’t penetrate when you are on a “sacred” quest to tear somebody else down…
“Not to mention free bandwidth/server space from a boyfriend (since, you know, the tech industry isn’t full of race and gender biases all over the place, and stuff.)”
…and the underlying Rovian accusation that Amanda screwed her way to the top is only natural considering the target is a woman. A successful woman. A woman who dares to live her life outside the template the patriarchy has predetermined for her gender.
I would say it’s clever, but it’s so obvious, so cliché, and such an incredibly obvious sexist attack…
If you want to tarnish Amanda, why not try something new for a change?
“This whole thing is just not surprising. She can’t even recognise the privilege in the access she was GIFTED, and didn’t have to earn.”
…and why not just claim that Amanda just isn’t talented enough to make it on her own? That she’s incapable of “earning” her “access”? If she’s so untalented, why would anybody buy the book? Or read the blog? Privilege will only get you the chance - it won’t give you the success. You feel she has no talent. Obviously others (many others) feel differently.
“And so she of course expects to be forgiven (and given money) for these racist images sliding by.”
…cause it’s all just a big plot to loot unthinking feminists so Amanda can live in splendor or some such bullshit. It couldn’t possible be that she has legitimate things to share with the world…
“The apology isn’t enough. Too little, too late. Same as Seal Press wanting people to keep buying their whitened-up booklist due to the reputation of the old, out of print work they did back when they WERE happy to publish more than just whitegirls. “We used to let YOU PEOPLE WRITE FOR US, SO GIVES US MONEIES NOW!”
…right. Because it’s Amanda’s fault the world is fucked up. My god, have a sense of proportion.
Mistakes were made. Lessons were learned. See what comes out of this incident before deciding that it’s all a giant plot against POC by evil white people who are only pretending to be progressive…
A. M. is not a racist.
She is, however, not nearly as humane or thoughtful as she or her fans (as distinct from *supporters*) would like to believe.
(Her public persona isn’t, anyway. She may be a very different private person. Most of us will never know.)
She often puts Coolness before Cause; so this sort of mis-step was almost inevitable, I think.
Few will agree, esp. here. But maybe this event will give some readers pause.
Hopefully, she’ll be less incautious in future, and re-examine her assumptions and methods.
And perhaps help to build a community rather than a cult.
Autonym April 26, 2008 at 10:07 am
It makes me deeply (oh why doesn’t English have a word for sad, angry and feeling as if one is going to vomit all at once) that a group of people at a publishing house and a supposed progressive could put those images in a book and feel good about it*
and I grow quiet hearing
how many of both of our tomorrows
lie waiting inside it to be born.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19804
I’ve been having the same reaction. : )
I’m sort of sad to admit it, honestly, but as someone who works in publishing… I understand how this happened. I’m sorry it happened, and I understand why it’s a problem, but I understand how it happened. To start with, I don’t know a single editor who works fewer than 60 hours a week. Overworked people make mistakes, plain and simple. Then there’s the groupthink/committee decision making process, particularly as regards jacket design. Then there’s that thing that happens when people get carried away by an idea or a design and their enthusiasm is so infectious that everyone else gets carried away, too. There’s the enthusiasm of the first-time author (for example, I’ve actually had people say to me, “this book is my baby” — and mean it — an extreme example, to be sure, but it’s happened more than once) combined with a lack of an intuitive sense of how far a publisher can be pushed. And of course there are the financial issues, profit margins on books being as thin as they are, so there’s always that pressure to get things out now, so that the damn things can start selling.
There also seems to be this sense — and I had it before I started working in publishing — that books never go to print with mistakes in them. Actually, it happens all the frickin’ time.
I tell you what, though — watching all of this has reminded me to be a lot more careful in my own work, to be aware of this stuff. Not that I was unaware before — but this reinforces it. Of course, I mostly work with really dry history books that no one will ever read… so I don’t think I’ll run into a problem quite like this one.
Okay. Enough book-nerdery for today. : )
Amanda, I imagine right now the ferocity of these condemnations of your book have you feeling pretty low, and some of what’s been said here and elsewhere has been pretty nasty. But I think you should keep up your work, regardless of how embarrassed you are right now by this mistake. Many people appreciate your view on many issues, even if (like me) we don’t always agree with you.
I also would have thought people would have a better grasp of your sense of humour than this - you use 50s images to attack conservative ideas all the time, and unless you disown the “it’s a jungle out there” motif, the images are going to be colonial. It’s where the phrase came from. Even Grandmaster Flash used it. But maybe because I’m Australian I just have a better grasp of irony than most of your more humourless American commenters.
Amanda,
Just logging in to say you’ve done the right thing and apologized, organized a better second printing, and learned a lot about how inbuilt the marginalization of non whites is in our society. Now you can move on, and you should move on. The movement, such as it is, is full of well meaning and very angry people each with their own bit of turf to defend. sometimes what they have to say and tell you is important, sometimes its semi important, and sometimes its just plain nuts. In this case a very serious error in imagination and judgement was called to your attention. You apologized, took action, and learned from it–as did SEAL press–and now you’ve done your part. People who are seriously interested in whatever struggle they are interested in will turn their attention to something a little more important than whether an ally made an error. They may even choose to work a little harder on, say, the Ku Klux Klan or McCain’s continued invocation of the scary Hamas menace. There will always be some people who let the ease of internet bitching carry them away and they will continue to hammer away at you for dissapointing them. But eventually they will turn their ire on someone else.
This is not to say that I don’t agree with the original criticism, or consider it serious. I do agree with it and consider it serious. I also believe that it came out of a kind of “taking as read” the marginalization and mocking of “savages”–seeing it as something that is, by definition, passe and passed instead of everpresent in our public discourse. Years ago, when I was at college, some frat tried to “raise consciousness” about violence against women by publishing a xerox photo of a “savage tribal guy” with a classic “bone through his nose.” The line underneath it was “not all savages look like this” and the implication was “white frat boys can be dangerous too and we white frat boys have to be aware of our own sexist behavior.” Boy, were those guys surprised that the xerox wasn’t actually seen as all that illuminating or funny. I thought then that these guys needed some serious education and I think they received it. This kind of ironic reversal of sterotypical images is a very delicate dance and it can’t really be done by priviliged white people. But that being said, it was an error of judgement and a learning moment for lots of us.
Keep writing and working, Amanda, and don’t let the criticism get you down.
aimai
“Amanda, I imagine right now the ferocity of these condemnations of your book have you feeling pretty low, and some of what’s been said here and elsewhere has been pretty nasty. But I think you should keep up your work, regardless of how embarrassed you are right now by this mistake. Many people appreciate your view on many issues, even if (like me) we don’t always agree with you.”
From what I’ve seen over the years, Amanda is tough, tough as nails. She’ll come back, better than ever.
She’s destined for great things…
I agree with aimai, this is another example of how using conservative images to make progressive points can easily go wrong. It seems easy, but sometimes it requires more judgement than we realise.
I think talking about that is much more interesting than having a huge ranting flamewar about whether the writer is an unreconstructed racist, when the truth of that matter is patently clear.
A discussion of this issue could make an interesting foreword to the next edition. And if you can work it into the jungle theme, may I suggest zombies? They’re pretty politically neutral, they fit the conservative cretin theme, and they’re mostly white. Good luck finding zombies in the jungle though…
That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say?
When I see a post examining how you fucked up, how privilege plays into it, how it’s indicative of larger issues in the feminist movement, in such a manner to educate all of the privileged white apologists that have supported every racist thing you’ve said and done in this entire debacle (’cause it’s more than the pictures), maybe then I’ll believe that you’re sincere.
Seriously… I’m a straight white male with some class privilege, and I get it… why is it so hard for white feminists?
But maybe because I’m Australian I just have a better grasp of irony than most of your more humourless American commenters.
Or maybe you’re just more ignorant of the sensitivities around race than most US residents? Amanda has apologised for publishing a book with rascist images, it’s probably best not to try and downplay her apology by claiming the illustrations were ironic, and didn’t really need an apology. It’s a further insult to those who were originally offended.
HAVE said first edition…unread
probably just ‘cause I’m crazy about Amanda.
Looking …just now..”Well, yeah, mebbe”
But really..”pretty fucking sterotypical for anyone
who grew up buried in all sort of of comic books.”
And Edgar Rice Burroughs….too, of course.
So I’m kinda with Pam..an’ old [not Pam!] an’
desensitized or never properly sensitized at all.
Much ado about nuthin’.
Oops…forgot a word I just learned..gotta do this.
So…
“Much ado about a normative nuthin’”
Can’t sleep at night ? Going to vomit ?
Talk about playing into stereotypes about drama queens.
I second flashheart - zombies. Zombies, robots, and Nazis are the three things that are always kosher to go up against in video games, so maybe it would be similar for illustrations. Plus zombies/undead/inferni resemble McCain more than a little bit…
boring.
1.) the symbolism has no context. It simply is running away from reality.
2.) shouldn’t it be about new possibilities and new symbolism? Or at least using old imagery to create better understanding.
Um, aren’t zombies tied to voudun/voodoo practices and thus quite ripe for similar colonialist/imperialist interpretations as “things the scary dark people might do to us white folks”? The way to save the jungle motif, IMHO, would be to concentrate on the predatory beasts, although even there you can run up against the critique that taking the actually-exisiting human population of Africa out of the picture is itself a racially dicey move (see King, Lion, The).
gadabout:
“We’ve become a culture obsessed with prosecution. No one can make an honest mistake without being vilified and dragged by the hair through the public square. What nonsense.”
I think you really hit the nail on the head here. There is something really disturbing in a lot of the comments above. I am a little suspicious of those that list a series of demands or rush to complete condemnation of Amanda forever and ever over this.
Amanda made a mistake and she apologized. None of us are infallible. Amanda’s mistake and apology should be used to create an honest dialogue around the blind spots of race among progressives, a dialogue that moves beyond persecution of a lone blogger by the awareness that we are ALL capable of making these kinds of mistakes. The bickering and vilification displayed in many comments accomplish nothing.
This incident has reminded me of the limitations of the social systems of the progressive blogosphere. With everybody rushing to jump on each other and pass judgment, I think many forget the agenda of social change and instead move toward a kind of display of self-superiority.
great now we can forget all about being an ally to woc bloggers, or immigrant women, and go on with our pretty white lives. cuz how could anyone have possibly seen the racism in those images anyways?
*group huggg*
*barf*
Google “Resident Evil 5″. Black african zombies. Quite a mess.
Thanks for the apology, Amanda. And do keep up the good work.
I’m a bit surprised at the vitriol in some of these comments. Mistakes were made, certainly. But surely there are better targets to attack than Amanda Marcotte.
James Frumm and Felagund are right Amanda, you’re being attacked by people who are not smart enough to understand fundamental semiotics. Twain is a good beginner lesson for those who don’t see the the value in doing it this way, where it came from and why it’s needed. Meanwhile do you dumb it down for the clueless and offended or will you stay the course, knowing that your popularity might necessarily dwindle as a result? This seems to me the fundamental issue. You are going to be misunderstood.
I tend to think of this whole debacle of an indication of how much race relations have improved. Somehow I doubt anyone in MLK’s day would have had time for a 300 page discussion of this.
That being said, I’m utterly flabbergasted that those pics managed to get into the book. Heck, even Vox Day is surprised at this!
It’s not that they’re not *smart* enough. They’re perfectly intelligent, and well-educated. It’s just that most of them have no sense of “play,” both in the normal sense and the poststructuralist sense of the word. It’s really one of the real paradoxes I often observe in very serious liberal intellectuals: even though you’d think they’d be all about mixing up identities and messing with binary oppositions, they’re some of the most rigid thinkers around. Camp and irony and messing around with structures just to point out how artificial those structures are is completely outside their range of acceptable discourse. They’re not fun, goofy people, and they don’t understand that they’d be more successful at addressing the issues that concern them if they could have a sense of play about it. So they can’t not take cornball fifties jungle imagery as anything other than a direct representation of what they think Amanda believes. And it enrages them that anyone would find it funny, because they can’t grasp that finding it funny doesn’t necessarily mean dismissing the underlying issue.
“They’re not fun, goofy people, and they don’t understand that they’d be more successful at addressing the issues that concern them if they could have a sense of play about it.”
I am fun and goofy, and I find the images on Amanda’s book quite “funny,” in many ways. The first time I saw the book, I distinctly remember thinking, “This is a joke, right?”
There’s no racism on the front cover: just a busty blonde fighting a crocodile with a white guy running around in the background. I thought the blonde was amusing and campy, and not at all what I was expecting from a “serious progressive” blogger! But that’s exactly what I liked about it.
The racism inside is pretty far-out. I can understand why it is hurtful to people. At the same time, though, I tend to “dis-identify” with many so-called “toxic” images, so that even though they hail me (as a woman), they don’t literally represent me and define me (as a sex object, pin-up girl, etc…)
And I think one can laugh about these images and still critique them. I can imagine a class discussion that could accommodate students’ pleasure (with comics in general, with the book’s texts and style, with camp, etc…) at the same time as it analyzes and questions *why* we find pleasure in hurtful images and objects.
Racial and gendered melancholia, anyone?
Hard to say. I haven’t read the comic or know much about the comic. (ie. what the full images are about.)
I mean what is enjoyable about comic is combination of story telling and wild drawing, right? (I might find that comic rather boring and generic, or wildly interesting.)
Amanda, I’m glad you’ve apologized. (FYI: real-life woman of color here, agnostic about most of the BFP/appropriation stuff but pissed about the images).
For the people who say the images are “ironic”: where’s the irony? Seriously, explain it to me. How are the images ironic? How is saying that they are any different from Don Imus claiming that his “nappy-headed hos” comment was a “joke”? Declaring an insult to be a joke or irony doesn’t make it so. It looks to me like the folks defending the “irony” are basically saying “but we know Amanda and she’s not racist so the images must be ironic” which is exactly what people were saying about Imus.
Irony is Jonathan Swift: the irony of “A Modest Proposal” lies in the fact that, though English politicians would never actually advocate that the Irish eat their babies, they would advocate stuff that’s nearly as bad with a perfectly straight face. Irony is Stephen Colbert: everyone knows that “Colbert” is a character, and a buffoonish character at that, and furthermore his lines often undercut themselves (for instance, “I don’t see race. People tell me I’m white, and I believe them, because I belong to an all-white country club).
I don’t see irony here.
That said, I would echo the opoponax when s/he says that demanding political purity of income (i.e. making absolutely sure you’re not profiting off of racism/sexism/whatever) is an exercise of the extremely privileged.
Sooo racism is just a thoughtless mistake.
No. Here’s the deal as how I recall it.
Amanda wrote a book.
A publisher accepted the book.
The metaphor of a woman surviving the jungle was selected to describe the book.
The publisher chose the original cover art.
Amanda was all happy about the book being accepted and getting a cover, but she had an uneasy feeling of reverse hubris.
The cover offended many people of goodwill for its unintentional (as far as we know) racism.
Amanda said, “Just as I had feared — this happiness wouldn’t last.” People interpreted this to mean various unpleasant things about Amanda’s character.
People said, essentially “This racism has to go, how could you, you reek of white privilege, etc.”
Now at this point Amanda made what is a fundamental problem — I am not a racist; I did not intend for the cover to be racist, therefore the cover is not racist.
But people wisely told her — the racism of anything is in the eye of the beholder. The cover is racist even if you are not.
Amanda took this to heart and communicated these objections — my book has a racist cover! this cannot stand! — to the publisher.
And, the publisher went to a certain amount of trouble to change the cover to remove the racism.
There should have been peace in the valley once more.
But, unbeknownst to Amanda, the publisher did not change the interior art to remove the racism. At this point, she did not even know what the interior art looked like.
The book is published with racist interior art. At this point, my reaction would have been “Shit! Fuuuuuuuuuck! I told them how and why the cover is racist; why did they stick those similar racist images inside?!?” Because I know what it is like to have one’s best efforts fail, to the disappointment of many.
So Amanda apologized. But, as I see it, not because she didn’t learn the appropriate lessons, not because she is still a thoughtless mass of white privilege, but because despite her best efforts, racist images ended up inside her book. Therefore, although racism is not a thoughtless mistake, neither is a thoughtless mistake racism.
You’ve got nothing to be sorry about Amanda. This is why Bush has been in power for 8 years; lefties get bogged down on details and bullshit. That’s a wingnut type of outrage.
Well, the images are actually quite ambiguous as “a narrative.” I don’t think they are in sequence in the book, but I’m not sure, The first image inside the book has the busty blonde holding a dagger at close-up to the viewer, whereas three (seemingly white) men in the distance attempt to sabotage one another. They’re all dressed Western-style, and one is not sure if they’re fighting over her, or if she is going to kick all of their asses…
The second image has a white guy who has been captured by the natives and tied to a stake. The busty woman is again in close-up to the reader with her spear raised; in the distance are the Natives, running towards the pit where they’ve tied up the white dude. It will clearly be Ms. Wonder Bra against the Natives… Who will win?? Will she rescue her “damsel in distress?”
In the third image, she’s swinging across the water by vines and the natives are shooting arrows at her ropes. A white guy in the distance runs towards the hostile natives with a gun…
In the fourth image, which accompanies the title “Post-Feminism My Ass,” we get a nice close up of the busty blonde’s curvy posterior. She looks good in short shorts.
There’s a swarthy fellow coming out of his hut, but he doesn’t look native. Maybe a biracial figure of some sort?
In the fifth images, it’s the girl and Noah’s Ark, all her jungle animals following her: gorilla, lion, and elephant. Kind of like Amanda and her flock.
The final image is the now famous one of Blondie kicking the masked native in the head while her white male friend sinks in the water.
Basically, the blonde seems to be the toughest thing in this book, visually speaking (in terms of the narrative). I can understand why someone without adequate sensitivity to race and gender would have thought that these images “complement” Amanda’s text. I mean, it’s hard to do, but not unthinkable.
Meh….
They could be shape shifter mutants, enacting bad jungle drama from the 50’s.
You don’t know that, because the missing panels contains key story where the aliens are shifting back to their blob form behind the curtain.
And what appears as jungle drama was really some sort of intergalactic anthropological experiment, audience test of some sort, to learn about human interaction.
I’m thinking this is more of a “Sorry I got caught” apology rather than actually being honest-to-god sorry.
As has been pointed out, several times, you even mocked the images that you used, saying, and I quote -
“We had a running bet on how long it would be before people saw the sexism and not the irony.”
Not just that, but you still have that strike against you regarding the appropriation scandal. Which you have never stated anything about - just merely denied and whined and talked about “my precious, darling career.”
While some of the people in these comments may agree with me, I’m sure there are just as many white males who are reading about this and the concerns of WoC, and are immediately getting angry that their precious white woman is being called out by all the angry WoCs.
If this qualifies as hipster-brand irony, at the expense of WoC, then it seems that hipsters really have a lot to learn about privilege and such.
But then again, I’m probably going to be told “Get a sense of humor” by the Marcotte readers in here, or (as Karnythia dealt with), some asshole trying to deflect the focus of the conversation to “blog readership” because actually getting to the root of the problem would be too much like right. (And to add, readership isn’t the most important thing - those blogs that aren’t getting a big amount of readership from white people were obviously getting some readership by Marcotte.)
Amanda wrote:
Does that make my first edition a Collector’s Item?
Look, I’m not exactly a fan of Amanda’s philosophy, and my book review is not shaping up all that positively, but seriously, this sounds a lot like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union scolds of the Prohibition movement. The cover and interior art were from some 1950s era comic book or escapist novel, because Amanda loves that campy stuff. To me it was just as racist as the original proposed cover — that is, not racist at all unless you assumed that a gorilla somehow meant a black male, which says more about the viewer than the artwork.
Basically, my response is: lighten up, people!
A. April 26, 2008 at 7:51 pm
But then again, I’m probably going to be told “Get a sense of humor” by the Marcotte readers in here, or (as Karnythia dealt with), some asshole trying to deflect the focus of the conversation to “blog readership” because actually getting to the root of the problem would be too much like right. (And to add, readership isn’t the most important thing - those blogs that aren’t getting a big amount of readership from white people were obviously getting some readership by Marcotte.)
if getting readership is that trivial, we wouldn’t have media problem or blog brawl on some lousy book deal now would we?
keep this in mind: attention span is precious commodity. And sustaining audience interest is VERY difficult skill.
That is to say: you can’t get your “big deal/mind blowing/socially smart” idea on your own can you? You don’t have the skill!
Have you even looked at the images?
http://dearwhitefeminists.wordpress.com/update/
don’t tell people to lighten up when they are the ones being hurt by the portrayal! how would you feel when a guy makes sexist jokes and tells you to lighten up? that’s about the most ridiculous privileged thing to say ever. but i guess it’s okay since you’re not the one being hurt by them, right? oh, yeh, that’s exactly how privilege plays out.
immediately getting angry that their precious white woman is being called out by all the angry WoCs.
I was bullied as a kid and I recognize bullying when I see it. The more the bullied one complies, the more the bully demands. I don’t see how bullying advances feminism or stops racism.
because 6000 comments later you guys still can’t agree on what is racist or who is racist. And most of you still call “women of colour” “wocs”, clearly you are all very aware of the racial sensitivities. Is this the new conversation on race which Obama promised us?
Now it seems even zombies are out of line because of their voodoo origins and the fact that the 5th Resident Evil movie has black zombies. See the racism dripping from a franchise which took 5 movies to make the bad guys black - and did it in Africa!
I mean really, if anyone wanted to give the impression that the problem is not race but a certain person’s success, this is really exactly the way to go about it.
because 6000 comments later you guys still can’t agree on what is racist or who is racist.
You guys? You may not have noticed, but the people in this thread can’t be lumped into a single group. There are two obvious groups, those who think rascist pictures are wrong, and people like you, and your mates, who think rascism is ironic and funny, and should be defended.
How much damage are you people willing to do to the arguments against using racist stereotypes in the media for the sake of making Amanda look infallible?
Don’t bother arguing with the sexist troll Dana. There are intellectually honest people to talk to much more worth your time.
It’s extremely ugly to see how many people are letting their prior dislike of Amanda ooze out. What exactly do you expect her to do? If you hate her that much, why don’t you just write her off as an incorrigible racist instead of endlessly nagging her about whether she’s “really” sorry?
She made a mistake and apologized. She sounds genuinely sorry to me. I get that that disappoints people who were spoiling for a fight and are annoyed that she’s giving in. For fuck’s sake, go away now and fight with someone who’s going to engage with you.
And yes, I’m defending her as a regular reader and a fan, and I’m very much biased in her favor. What you idiots don’t seem to get is that I’m not a fan because I know her from Adam. We’re not friends. I’ve never met her and likely never will. I’m defending her because I’ve read a whole lot of what she’s written and believe her to be a genuine person acting for the sake of good, and that’s why I’m a fan in the first place.
“Now it seems even zombies are out of line because of their voodoo origins and the fact that the 5th Resident Evil movie has black zombies. See the racism dripping from a franchise which took 5 movies to make the bad guys black - and did it in Africa!” - flashheart
I don’t know if you’re being serious here, but the commenters who made those points about zombies were doing so tongue in cheek, to communicate that the so-called *angry mob* (language about which, BTW, sounds eerily reminiscent of *some* folks complaining about the *political correctness police*…just saying) would likely even get angry about zombies, because some zombies have not been white. They were not comments made by individuals genuinely interested in identifying and addressing racism in popular imagery.
Further, please lay the distraction attempts to rest re: the use of WOC/POC. These are terms used by bloggers of color in their own spaces and elsewhere, and I have not seen any of them denounce this practice when white commenters in those spaces have used the terms. About two minutes’ worth of exploring some of their blogs would clue you into this, but hey, I guess you’re happier staying here.
“Further, please lay the distraction attempts to rest re: the use of WOC/POC. These are terms used by bloggers of color in their own spaces and elsewhere, and I have not seen any of them denounce this practice when white commenters in those spaces have used the terms. About two minutes’ worth of exploring some of their blogs would clue you into this, but hey, I guess you’re happier staying here.”
Actually, I don’t feel that the WOC/POC issue is a “distraction.” Although I am perfectly happy as a white feminist to call women of color “WOCS,” doing so makes me feel almost as uneasy as I do when I hear young black or latino kids calling each other “nigger.” ‘
To me, WOC signals that I don’t have the time to actually type of “women of color.” I don’t go around calling white feminists “WFs” so why should I call women of color WOCs? I’m reminded of a portable Asian grilling device each time I type this term, and POC is worse: I think pox, pock mark, etc…
Language, like imagery, is coded. If people of color are fine with being POCs, then power to that term and I will continue to use it. But I wonder how brownfemipower became BFP and if that was her choice or some lazy person’s way to save time when writing about her work?
“And yes, I’m defending her as a regular reader and a fan, and I’m very much biased in her favor. What you idiots don’t seem to get is that I’m not a fan because I know her from Adam. We’re not friends. I’ve never met her and likely never will. I’m defending her because I’ve read a whole lot of what she’s written and believe her to be a genuine person acting for the sake of good, and that’s why I’m a fan in the first place.”
junk science - thank you for saying that. Well put…
There is a lot more to Amanda than some exaggerated caricature of privileged white womanhood…
Charity April 26, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Further, please lay the distraction attempts to rest re: the use of WOC/POC. These are terms used by bloggers of color in their own spaces and elsewhere, and I have not seen any of them denounce this practice when white commenters in those spaces have used the terms. About two minutes’ worth of exploring some of their blogs would clue you into this, but hey, I guess you’re happier staying here.
Who dies and appoint you the content police?
And my point, Foucault–while I like language too and agree it is important–is that if you want to know how women of color feel about the acronym, you might try visiting the blogs of some women of color, and actually engaging with them, rather than pontificating and speculating into air at Pandagon, where it has been made clear that very few of these women feel welcome and are likely to be here to address your questions. I don’t know how every woman of color feels about the acronym, I can only address my experience using the term in their spaces. If you want to know, ask the people you are purportedly concerned about. It may be more offensive to be speculated about in the abstract (even if your concern is *what is correct*), as if one does not exist / cannot be directly engaged with…don’t you think? Try and be honest about this.
I do think your analogy equating the term WOC with the term you used is WAY OFF, in my own personal opinion. But please, again, I can’t stress this enough, don’t take MY word for it.
Likewise, squashed!
Well. just point me to a WOC blog that uses a lot of POC and WOC in it.
I can then create twenty sock puppets and change their minds about the word POC and WOC.
lemme guess: you can’t link one now.
Charity April 26, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Likewise, squashed!
nice comeback attempt. But that was pretty weak, since it didn’t even connect. need to work on that comedy skill.
“If you want to know, ask the people you are purportedly concerned about. It may be more offensive to be speculated about in the abstract (even if your concern is *what is correct*), as if one does not exist / cannot be directly engaged with…don’t you think? Try and be honest about this.”
Try to grapple with your own internal contradictions. You are telling me not to speculate about this term here because women of color may not like being thought about in the abstract–but you’re also telling me that women of color don’t read or post on Pandagon. By my estimate, you are basically ignoring about thirty commentators or so.
Since you are clearly an expert on women of color and their blogs, why don’t you recommend a few good ones and I will check them out? I am not being sarcastic here. I read about two blogs in the world and that is it. I don’t have time for more usually, but feel like now might be a good time to expand my invisible blog roll.
Since you are clearly an expert on women of color and their blogs, why don’t you recommend a few good ones and I will check them out? I am not being sarcastic here. I read about two blogs in the world and that is it. I don’t have time for more usually, but feel like now might be a good time to expand my invisible blog roll.
Aren’t attitudes like this why feminists came up with the whole ‘men shouldn’t demand to be spoonfed’ meme?
“Aren’t attitudes like this why feminists came up with the whole ‘men shouldn’t demand to be spoonfed’ meme?”
Sorry if I sounded aggressive, but now I am just annoyed. First, I am not a man. Secondly, I am sincerely interested in checking out some women of color’s blogs. However, I am tired of white women coming along and telling me what women of color want and how I should or shouldn’t act in the imagined gaze of the elusive woman of color.
I will try to follow the http links of some of the people (POCs) who posted on Feministe, and here.
And I wasn’t trying to be spoon-fed; I just wanted someone’s opinion on where I might start. I am not really into blogs in general because most people who have them seem to be self-centered asshats– and bad writers. But every once in a while, I encounter people who seem to care about issues more than (or at least as much as) they do about themselves: Pam and Amanda are two of those people.
I don’t think FlipYrWhig was, Charity. But you’re probably right about Margalis.
As for my not being sensitive to racial issues in the US: I just spoke to my partner, an editor, about this issue and she thinks those pictures wouldn’t get past the production stage at a reputable Australian publishing house. They’re sensitive to these things, it would seem… but yeah, you guys keep at your excellent debate.
What really gets me is why this conversation couldn’t have happened in private, between the main blog actors involved, say through email, and then Amanda could have had a chance to do a nice polite post about what an insensitive person she is. All of this would have blown over with not just the seeming of solidarity but the actual fact of solidarity. Friends, as Jill said, may occasionally have to tell Friends to do better - but do they really have to scream it from the rooftops?
Whether “wocs” (sounds a bit like wogs to me…) is insensitive or not, it is jargon. It hides meaning and elides difference, because the phrase it shortens is meaningless. Not all women of colour have the same interests, and phrases like “woc” serve to hide that important point. It’s at times like this that the jargon comes out, because when people are angry for nebulous reasons they need non-specific attacks.
I mean really - “reinforcing the stereotype”, “insensitive”, “women of colour” - these terms are so vague that you might as well just write “I’m miffed” and leave it at that.
As for my not being sensitive to racial issues in the US: I just spoke to my partner, an editor, about this issue and she thinks those pictures wouldn’t get past the production stage at a reputable Australian publishing house. They’re sensitive to these things, it would seem…
That’s the point, your parther, and Australian publishing houses would think the pictures are unacceptable, but you were happy to give them a pass as ‘ironic’ because you have a sense of humour and all Americans take things too seriously. Did you tell your parther you think the pictures are fine, by the way?
I don’t think they’re “fine”, by the way. I think they use racist, colonialist imagery. But I am charitable enough to give Amanda the benefit of the doubt. I can see what she (or the publisher) was trying to do on the “it’s a jungle out there” theme, and that they messed it up. It was a silly mistake, well worth an apology but not worth this scorn and anger. As others have observed before, it’s easy to go too far when trying to use ironic and kitsch imagery, particularly when you are trying to use copyright-free imagery on this particular theme. Since I am not humourless, I can see that this was an attempt at humour on that theme which went wrong.
What I don’t understand is why so many people were willing to assume that this was deliberate, to take sides so quickly, and to broadcast their concerns instead of first working them through quietly. It smacks of bad faith.
When I see a post examining how you fucked up, how privilege plays into it, how it’s indicative of larger issues in the feminist movement, in such a manner to educate all of the privileged white apologists that have supported every racist thing you’ve said and done in this entire debacle (’cause it’s more than the pictures), maybe then I’ll believe that you’re sincere.
What Max said. I’ve been a fan of you and Pandagon for awhile, and enjoyed your acerbic style. However, your dismissive comments in August to the critics of the original cover art of your book, in addition to your failure to address the BFP appropriation issue on this blog — to me they indicate arrogance and unwillingness to examine the blind spots that your white privilege bestows. I don’t mind the former quality on its own, but the latter is unbelievably hypocritical in a feminist, and really disappointing.
Several of your peers (Jill is a great example) have written thoughtful posts examining and owning their white privilege and the hurtful — regardless of intent — contributions they have made to the marginalization of POC in the feminist community. That you have not done so, or even acknowledged that your behavior might have larger implications within the feminist movement cheapens your apology. And frankly, it’s soured me on your blog, which is too bad, as it was my favorite; but when I read your posts now, I have the uncomfortable feeling that I’m part of a self-congratulatory audience composed primarily of white feminists, that I’m tacitly endorsing the overlooking of POC, and I don’t like that feeling.
If I hear that you have written something more extensive, thoughtful, and honest on racism and privilege, I’ll be glad to return. Otherwise, though, for what it’s worth (and I realize it’s not worth much), I don’t think I’ll be reading anymore.
Jill Filipovic will say anything, and sell out anyone if she thinks it make sher look good. When Amanda is back on top Jill will be slobbering over her once again. If that is your “great example,” good riddance.
I second the lack of a moral center. Not that I know Jill personally, but when I read her post on this controversy, my first response was to barf. And then I hung myself.
But I was delighted to see that *her* critics and respondents are also telling her that she’s an everlasting ass-hat full of unexamined privileges, and that she will never be able to self-destruct quite enough for them to be happy with her.
So now we can head off to Alas, to attack Ampersand for the racist sexist porn he sells! Right, class? Let’s go!
*crickets chirping*
Yeah, didn’t think so.
danadocas asked:
Better than that: I have a copy of the book! But, I did follow the link in Amanda’s original, and saw the chapter covers to which Holly at Feministe objected.
Oh, puh-leeze! We heterosexual white males — you know, the masters of teh patriarchy — are about the only “safe” subjects for jokes any more, in large part because most of us laugh right along with the jokes, if they’re funny.
The images were 1950s camp, nothing more, and you are hurt by them only if you let yourself be hurt by them.
Dana,
I find it fascinating that your response to this is “Racism only hurts if you let it” which really says more about you than the people who were offened by the offensive images from the 1950’s. You know that time when overtly racist images were very much in use. Or are you one of those people that thinks “Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarfs” was put out as a joke?
Karnythia, it’s DAna, for fuck’s sake. Expecting sense out of him is like….expecting sense out of him. Whiny white guy who takes this topic to complain that white guys are the butt of jokes. MY GOD THE HORROR OF PUNCHLINES! Won’t somebody think of the white guys?!
sticks and stones may break my bones …
“The images were 1950s camp, nothing more, and you are hurt by them only if you let yourself be hurt by them.”
Dana, you may remember (or heard of) Amos ‘N Andy, a radio show - featuring white men pretending to be stereotypical black characters in a situation “comedy” - which later was made into a television show that ran from 1951 to 1953, whose sole saving grace was the casting of African-American actors instead of white men in blackface.
Wikipedia - “The show was repeated in syndicated reruns until 1966 when CBS acquiesced to pressure from the NAACP and the growing civil rights movement and withdrew the program.”…1966!…
Now imagine if somebody took clips from the TV show to “spice up” a documentary about a completely unrelated topic, like the US economy.
Can you see how offensive that would be?
Amanda says she did not see the other pictures until she got the actual printed copy of her book. I believe her. Her publisher claims they didn’t realize how offensive the images were until the protest/dustup. That’s possible too (we have nothing but their word for that).
But we can’t dismiss people’s negative reactions because we are white males. We can pretend that there’s nothing to be upset about if there are people who are upset. They have a right to their feelings whether we understand them or not.
If Amanda had produced a book documenting the history of racist images in popular American media, that would have been an entirely different situation. But they weren’t
Removing those images is the right thing to do. It’s too bad they were in the book to begin with, but that’s water under the bridge.
While I think there was a lot of piling on (Amanda seems to have a great many “admirers”), it’s also obvious there are a lot of people who were genuinely upset.
Taking people’s feeling into account, even (or especially) when we can’t understand why they feel the way they do is a mark of maturity. It’s also the key to better understanding, and eventually changing our society into what we all would like it to be…
Foucault, I am not telling you you can’t speculate. I am suggesting that since you are curious, there are ways of satisfying your curiosity, rather than acting as if the real people we are talking about don’t exist, and are just theoretical concepts, and the best we can do is wonder or dissect terms amongst our white selves. This is feeding into systemic problems that you yourself observed, and that yes, I feed into as well.
How can I read *I’m not being sarcastic* as true when you are snarkily referring to me as an *expert on women of color blogs*? Come on. Now, I’ll let squashed take back over since he seems to live under this bridge permanently.
“I find it fascinating that your response to this is “Racism only hurts if you let it” which really says more about you than the people who were offened by the offensive images from the 1950’s.”
“Whiny white guy who takes this topic to complain that white guys are the butt of jokes.”
What ginmar said…
Karnythia, please don’t let Dana dissuade you from reading Panadagon. Dana is one of our resident trolls (no where near the worst), and some of us have adopted him as a sort of project, in an attempt to drag him into the 21st century.
Dana is not a bad person, at least not intentionally. He, like may of us, is often blind to the privileges he has in this country by simply being a white male.
He does not represent Pandagon…
Racism only hurts if you let it is exactly like saying, “Just ignore it, it’ll go away.”
What I don’t understand is why so many people were willing to assume that this was deliberate, to take sides so quickly, and to broadcast their concerns instead of first working them through quietly. It smacks of bad faith.
flashheart - There’s more than one issue happening. It’s not just the images in the book, but the issue of possible appropriation from BFP as well, and from what I’m reading, I think that’s the bigger issue, which actually leads to the even bigger issue of white feminists, intentionally or unintentionally, appropriating work from women of color. Which, in my opinion, is something that we should talk about.
I, too, would like to see Amanda address this and the concerns that are raised, not because I think it’s important, but that it’s important to address this no matter what.
FWIW, I am a fan of Amanda and Pandagon, and I hope that she will address this issue, because it’s serious.
ginmar April 27, 2008 at 9:14 am
Racism only hurts if you let it is exactly like saying, “Just ignore it, it’ll go away.”
one has to fight racism. But empty outrages is pretty useless. There has to be some concrete positive action. Not everything is about yelling back. There is art, there is wit, there is music, literature… etc
Plus. talk is cheap.
“I, too, would like to see Amanda address this and the concerns that are raised, not because I think it’s important, but that it’s important to address this no matter what.”
Amanda did make several comments (incendiary though they might have been) at Feministe regarding BFP, WOC, immigration-and-racism, “appropriation” controversy. She just hasn’t posted anything here about it…
I think she said her piece about it already…
This had to be done, but “sorry” is simply not good enough.
What are you going to do? Meaning, what action will you take?
Are you sorry because your plans got f*cked up, and then you’ll retreat back into your space of privilege?
Are you sorry because you are sickened by anyone associating you or your work with racism, and then you’ll retreat back into your space of privilege?
Will you, in your mind, write off the critiques as typical angry black women (when many of us are neither black nor women, but are in fact really, really angry), and then retreat back into your space of privilege?
Will you continue to appropriate the work of women of color without recognizing their work, or even their existence?
Or will you step up and do something about it? Will you act? Will you leave your realm of comfort and privilege and actually work for justice for all women - rather than just for the accolades of “liberal” white women?
Probably not, based on what I’ve seen over the past months. But I can hope…
Dana’s not a bad person? The guy who ignores bad things, and tries to elevate his gluttony to the status of a poor person’s starvation? Really? He’s so indifferent to reality that it amounts to wilfull blindness. He didn’t get that way by accident.
I was on holiday when the bfp thing happened, I had a bit of a look at it today, and I really can’t see the issue is quite what people are making it out to be. The article didn’t exactly have many fresh or original ideas in it and - no offense - most of them were considerably older than bfp’s contribution to the “debate”. Also, the article was clearly written primarily as a response to a few topical newspaper articles, not a regurgitation of others’ theoretical models. It employed a broad theoretical model of immigration, the development of the police state, etc. which is well established and absolutely non-unique - Candide’s Notebooks, for example, have been describing it far more eloquently than either brownfemipower or pandagon for years. The idea that Amanda should credit particular people for an analysis which has been going around since the 80s at least seems pretty over the top to me. Maybe you guys should get out and read a bit more theory or something.
As for the previous “uproar” about the cover - why assume the worst about someone? Could it not be that she made a recommendation to Seal Press after that but they didn’t follow it, and Amanda never bothered checking? It’s a management issue, and this is Amanda’s first book - what does one expect in such a situation? The suggestion that it is all deliberate is bad faith, as far as I can see.
ginmar, I guess I’ve been around too many people like Dana. He may say hurtful things and hold hurtful opinions, but they are a product of a certain place and time.
If we help him see this, maybe he can be salvaged. He’s no skinhead, no white-power advocate. He’s just living in privilege he doesn’t fully perceive and doesn’t full appreciate.
I guess I’m not ready to write him off…
I’ve seen too many people like him, period, and he doesn’t display any sign of wanting to change. I don’t know how old he is, but he’s just going to get worse, frankly. Although he may respond differently to you than he does to me…you do have a male screen name, of course.
“Although he may respond differently to you than he does to me…you do have a male screen name, of course.”
Obviously one of MY blind spots…
Dana and I have had words in the past. But nothing unforgivably serious.
And I may be projecting my desire for his improvement - in way he reminds me of my dad (not a lot, but enough)…
If anyone is still looking at this thread…
I have the Chiller channel on. They are showing Creature from the Black Lagoon. Set in the Amazon jungle. Featuring a white woman (in a bathing suit) menaced by a horrible monster. In the “Black Lagoon”.
I enjoy it as a period piece, featuring all sorts of ’50’s-era cliché stuff.
I don’t take it seriously - but should I?…
(BTW, I’m serious about the question…)
“They are showing Creature from the Black Lagoon. Set in the Amazon jungle. Featuring a white woman (in a bathing suit) menaced by a horrible monster. In the “Black Lagoon [. . .] I don’t take it seriously - but should I?…”
What color is her bathing suit?
Just kidding. And perversely enough, I am sort of in agreement with the much-disparaged Dana. Images in themselves are not inherently painful; they become painful because of the memories and associations they carry, and because one can “identify” with certain figures in the image.
But some queer theorists have put forth theories of *disidentification* that I find very productive and compelling. Some of you might want to put this book on your wish list:
http://www.amazon.com/Disidentifications-Performance-Politics-Cultural-Americas/dp/0816630151
Sounds great. I’m doing a bit of a personal horror festival at the moment, I’ll have to include that. And I like this bit from the wiki article.
According to producer William Alland, the idea behind the film was originally thought up by an unnamed Brazilian director whom he met at Orson Welles’ house. The unnamed man spoke of a friend of his who disappeared in the Amazon in the attempt at filming a documentary on a rumoured population of fish people.
I love that movie, but I remember a friend of mine who couldn’t read Gone With The Wind because of the racism of the book, which was an accurate depiction of the attitudes of the time.
Argh. HIt blaspheme too fast. Her attitude, I have to say, was educational to me, much as my attitude toward certain works of film and literature has not been taken seriously by former friends of mine—-because I couldn’t stand the sexism in their favorite works of art and it was either MIckey Spillane or me, which is what it comes down to, isn’t it? As I get older, I find that more and more old favorites are unpalatable to me any more. How many people noticed the sexist stereotyping in To Kill a Mockingbird, where the gleeful Freudian stereotype of the hysterical, lustful, sexually frustrated, lying bitch is eagerly used by a female writer?
The Gone With The Wind book is pretty rough regarding white privilege and Black subservience, much worse than the movie. And the “Stockholm Syndrome” aspect of the misplaced loyalty of the O’Hara family slaves is more blatant and disturbing.
I was able to read the book up until before the child dies, and then I had to stop. I can’t handle the death of children.
But what does it say that I can wade through the huge stinking piles of racism, but the (white) child’s death is too much for me…?
Privilege is all too easy to overlook for those who have it…
I was raised to believe an apology included some mention of how I would behave in the future and apply what I’d learned from my mistake. I think there’s a hint of that here, but it’s not spelled out.
Amanda, I read your blog briefly a few years ago and quickly stopped, and I’ve never enjoyed your comments on other blogs. Normally, I would just keep that to myself, but if you are interested in learning and growing from this, I feel maybe I should tell you why:
I’m white, but I grew up poor. Your theories on feminism didn’t address half the issues I have faced in my life. When people tried to gently point out what you were missing, you tended to get defensive instead of listening. That made you, to me, not a good ally.
If I, a white woman, felt that alienated by you just because clearly you don’t know what it’s like to be poor while facing sexism, imagine how alienated women of color would feel. Because every privilege you strip away from an individual multiplies the difficulties they have winning any freedom from their oppressors.
I hope you are listening to your critics rather than your sycophants. I hope you will really, really think about this and develop a fire in your belly that makes you feel sick when you realize, “Whoops, I’ve left behind some women Unlike Me in my attempt to fix the world for women I identify with” - because you are going to make those mistakes. We all do, myself included. The difference is how quickly you apologize and do something about it when you realize you’ve erred.
I work for a TV show that perpetuates a lot of racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc. stereotypes. From time to time, I have considered quitting (and it’s always possible that someday a line will be crossed and I really will).
And that’s why I have an annoying day job instead of being the successful screenwriter everyone in film school said I would be if only I would learn that “your lead character has to be a white male.” Stop trying to justify yourself and take responsibility for the choice you made. nd you made it. Own it.
ginmar and MikeEss, I agree with you entirely on those observations. As an English major who appreciates literature but has also studied feminist and critical race theory and criticism, I just don’t respond the same way to many works I used to enjoy - the writing of James Thurber, many of my favorite movies like _The Matrix_. Even Shakespeare grinds on me. I just went to a student production of Clifford Odets’ play _The Big Knife_ and could hardly stand the stereotypical sexist bullshit and normalization of violence against women.
I guess recognizing sexism and racism and what have you shouldn’t render a person incapable of appreciating “classical” or older art or literature or film. But I know that I’m now unable to appreciate it in quite the same way. And I think … that’s a good thing.
“If I, a white woman, felt that alienated by you just because clearly you don’t know what it’s like to be poor while facing sexism, imagine how alienated women of color would feel.”
Not that it will matter, but I don’t think you know very much about Amanda’s background if you really believe that statement.
Amanda is not one of the Bush Twins, Paris Hilton, or any number of other shallow scions of rich white privilege. But maybe you think being raised in some West Texas
hell holesmall town to be an example of (monetary) privilege…MikeEss, you seem to think that because she wasn’t posh, she wasn’t privileged. Privilege isn’t either/or - it has layers. Compared to someone who started working at age 14 to support her family and never had a chance to go to college, Amanda is privileged and so am I. Compared to someone who had an expensive illness all her life, Amanda and I are both privileged. Compared to someone who grew up wildly rich, able-bodied and without abuse or neglect, Amanda and I are both underprivileged. Why a lot of her posts left me thinking, “Here we go again - another solution that wouldn’t have helped my mother or me in the situation we faced”, I don’t know.
But why her responses to commenters left me feeling like, “She’s not listening”, I DO know. And that’s what I’m concerned about. Solidarity doesn’t require fully understanding everything every woman is going through. It’s about listening when people point out how you’re actually not helping them. I’ve been called on my ignorance before, and I fought my defensiveness, apologized, and took action to make amends.
That’s all we can do. I’m seeing the apology here - really little and really late, IMHO. I’m hoping it’ll be followed by more soul-searching (as she seems to suggest) and improved action in the future. I wish her well.
And I must humbly say I only hope I don’t end up doing exactly what I’m criticizing her for at some point in the future, because we are ALL at risk of making these mistakes ALL the time. That’s why listening to each other is so important.
If you choose to change those pics because you find them offensive, no problem.
But don’t let yourself to ever be silenced by anyone, particularly the left. If they are your true friends they will not demand PC conformity on ideas.
BetaCandy, honestly for me, Amanda’s pedestrian roots make me support her efforts even more strongly. She’s not coming to her opinion from an ivory-tower upper-class POV. She’s seen what lack of education, lack of birth-control, and the heavy thumb of the Patriarchy do to all of the powerless, but especially women.
I’m sure Amanda will take this experience and turn it into something good. I’ve seen her do it before…
“And I must humbly say I only hope I don’t end up doing exactly what I’m criticizing her for at some point in the future, because we are ALL at risk of making these mistakes ALL the time.”
Here, here. I feel like that every day…
BetaCandy April 27, 2008 at 3:04 pm
MikeEss, you seem to think that because she wasn’t posh, she wasn’t privileged. Privilege isn’t either/or - it has layers. Compared to someone who started working at age 14 to support her family and never had a chance to go to college, Amanda is privileged and so am I.
What’s the big deal then? You personally can’t measure the exact damage beyond your musing either. You have no direct experience.
I am pretty sure the few hundred pages that has reached out are only read by group of well read not dirt poor group of people.
I don’t see you protesting starbucks for buying coffee beans that use exploitative labor. That has far bigger effect than these pages.
I’d like to know where these guys are when it’s Hillary Clinton.
I’m just re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird and the portrait of Mayella Euwell is dovetailing precisely with the Freudian portrait of the scorned woman who cries rape in Susan Brownmiller’s takedown of Freudian theory in Against Our Will. It’s eerie. And it ruins the book for me. Funny how some people are liberal when it comes to men and anybody but poor women.
Regarding the class thing, well…..I’ve been poor all my life and I feel entirely left out of too many feminist discussions. I just don’t have the vocabulary or the time. Yeah, say something or other is a great book, but it advocates traveling to Italy for an uplifting experience, and all I’ve got is Target and the local library. Where’s the enlightenment for me and women like me?
A. April 27, 2008 at 5:27 pm
So, as I’ve said many times before - when a white woman is in trouble, be it by her own creation or not, I gotta love how some of the guys here just automatically jump on her bandwagon without paying attention to everything that is going on. Even better is the fact that these same white males are trying to make it about them.
you are the one screaming about racism, but when asked about what you’ve done and presented with numbers showing who is doing what, get angry. Then go on jibbing about grand theory and meta talk.
What’s that got to do with actually solving racism. Endlessly showing how great your talking skill on ‘privilege’?
Show me concrete stuff that you yourself has done. Demanding other people to do it is easy. Spouting out big theory on comment thread is easy. I can just paste entire wiki and get same result. You are not doing useful analysis either, just puffing up ego.
Show me you are able to reach the mass, bridge gaps, tell story … etc. To the wider public. (you can. You are too busy with your “safe space” and patting each other on the back.) That’s all you can do with your expensive education?
Talking about ” privilege “
I’d like to know where these guys are when it’s Hillary Clinton.
This is a fair question. It actually connects with the issue raised back in August — extending the benefit of the doubt to someone. Then the benefit of the doubt was: person who propagated racist idea was not necessarily racist, but needs to have racism of idea pointed out to them.
Does Hillary deserve the benefit of the doubt for anything she says or does during the campaign that appear to be … well let’s say unfair?
Factors arguing not:
35 years experience
Intimate partner who has been there and done that and can advise her
Huge staff including “chief strategist” and others who have fallen on a sword for her.
Factors arguing yes
(Please fill in; I am an Obama fan)
Yes. This whole thread (and overall controversy, btw) devolved into a humongous white guilt orgy with everyone falling all over themselves in condemning Amanda in order to get on the “Totally Awesome Non-Racist White People List” that they think POC keep in their back pockets. Calling for boycotts earn them a very special gold star.
I swear to ceiling cat, The Onion will someday satirize this whole fiasco, lemme tell ‘ya.
KKK Grand Dragon takes noted feminist blogger to task.
…”Lacks sensitivity to our plight as Southern white men…”
Marcotte apologised, and promised to do better.
It’s unbelievable; people are tying themselves up in knots over freaking chapter illustrations???
What about what she wrote? Doesn’t that count? Or do you guys just read the pictures?
And she apologized, and the book is being reprinted! What more do you want?
Good grief.
I honestly cannot believe the number of people here who have claimed that the use of racist imagery was some form of intentional irony, and who have chided others for not getting “the joke”, or to “lighten up”.
In order for something to be intentionally ironic/satirical, you have to consciously use a hyperbolic image or concept to point out an absurdity. That is not the case here. Seal Press has already said that they missed the racism — that they “were not thinking”. Amanda has said that she didn’t “catch it”.
That’s not ironic/satiric use of racist imagery.
It is blindness to racist imagery, which is based in white privilege — and blindness to white privilege has been precisely at the heart of all the issues about the cover, appropriation, and now, the artwork.
As I’ve watched this thread evolve over the past few days, the demonstrations of white defensiveness in the face of confrontation have actually surprised me (although I suppose they should not have) — it is simply astounding to me that progressives or feminists would defend these images in any way, much less in the ways that they have.
In many ways, these attempts at defending the indefensible are becoming more troubling to me than the initial problem — because they clearly demonstrate that the problems of marginalization of people of color and blindness to white-privilege (which in some cases here looks willful) are, indeed, widespread in the feminist movement — at least as represented here.
Witness the most recent comment: “It’s unbelievable; people are tying themselves up in knots over freaking chapter illustrations???”
No. That’s not all that it’s about. The illustrations are a final, extreme cap to a series of comment-threads and events involving many blog-communities. I imagine that, if it had been just the illustrations, you would have seen the type of commenting that occurred last August about concerns over the original cover. Concerns were expressed then in what were, in my opinion, fairly measured tones.
People are not “tying themselves up in knots over freaking chapter illustrations” — they are expressing reasonable complaints about blatantly racist chapter illustrations. Amanda and Seal Press have acknowledged the illustrations as racist and offensive.
how to fuck up
Maybe somebody ought to show that to Amp.
The whole point is that by placing the inappropriate thought in a place where it doesn’t belong (e.g., racist caricatures of jungle people from long ago in a postmodern book about third-wave feminism), it neutralizes the power of the original structural relationship.
Nonsense. How the fuck does it do that? It can only do that if you assume that third-wave feminism and the postmodern era are free of the racist caricatures that existed long ago, which they’re not. The racist ideas depicted in the cartoon do “belong” in this time as much as in the bad old days, unfortunately.
In other words, putting the jungle men in the book is really mocking the kind of white explorer types who imagine the inhabitants of the jungle as savages, not the inhabitants themselves.
Asserting this does not make it so. Where’s the mockery of the white explorer types? It’s the natives that are presented as the threat, not the white guy. There’s nothing in the image to suggest that the white guy is mock-worthy.
You’re taking the images too literally as representations. The real savages are the people controlled by patriarchy.
And you don’t see a problem with using dark-skinned caricatures as a symbol of “people controlled by the patriarchy”? Because I surely do.
It would have been funnier and more appropriate if the white heroine were depicted fighting off feral white businessmen waving briefcases. Or Dick Cheney. Now HIM I wouldn’t want to run into in a jungle.
The whole point is that by placing the inappropriate thought in a place where it doesn’t belong (e.g., racist caricatures of jungle people from long ago in a postmodern book about third-wave feminism), it neutralizes the power of the original structural relationship.
Really, this whole idea makes no sense at all and totally misunderstands humor: Imus wasn’t “neutralizing the power” by using the inappropriate phrase “nappy-headed hos” where it doesn’t belong (on a contemporary and popular radio show). If Hillary Clinton uses the term “nigger” in her speeches, she won’t be “neutralizing the power” by using the inappropriate word where it doesn’t belong (in a 21st-century campaign that has a black man and a woman as major candidates). Using inappropriate words out of context isn’t necessarily funny or subversive at all.
LadyVetinari April 28, 2008 at 9:42 am
are you putting A.M in the same category as Imus? Seriously?
You seems to confuse one amateurish mistake of a first time author, a friend who has fight many hard issues to words by unrepentant bigot?
wow, and who is going to stand next to you if you shoot everybody who has fight hard when people know in the future you just gonna mouth off about every possible thing?
At best the entire issue of chapter illustration is over bad taste by somebody who has put a lot of work on issues that is dear to everybody. And you want to make this as if it’s exploitation of race, oppression and what not?
Have you criticize other books as hard that is more harmful? You better be able to show one, or else I will start thinking your intention is about something else.
PortlyDyke April 27, 2008 at 11:59 pm
People are not “tying themselves up in knots over freaking chapter illustrations” — they are expressing reasonable complaints about blatantly racist chapter illustrations. Amanda and Seal Press have acknowledged the illustrations as racist and offensive.
at issues is the outrageous demand and attempt to make this case as if “blindness” is worth more than pulling prints and issuing an apology. People are spouting off all sort of words and accusation as if AM is complete racist.
It’s a question of proportion.
Just because everybody is bloggers doesn’t mean the entire world operate like it is a blog. Fix your world view. There are things to consider when pulling book out.
What’s more these people who scream and yell turn out to be mostly “white” and most hasn’t done meaningful action in their blogging archive before.
talk is cheap. Show me stuff.
squashed — portly d. is not trying to pile on Amanda. She is focusing on the white privilege that keeps people from seeing the racism in racist images, and the inability of the privileged to acknowledge that the images contain racism even when pointed out to them.
This does raise an important hypothetical issue: is an image racist if it doesn’t offend people of color? ( A couple such commenters posted in this thread they were not offended by the book’s illustrations.) I would argue that white people cannot impose their judgment on others either way: offensive or not-offensive, racist or not racist. Be scrupulous — it’s considerate — but don’t use your scrupulosity as a stick to beat others with.
Hector B. April 28, 2008 at 12:13 pm
squashed — portly d. is not trying to pile on Amanda. She is focusing on the white privilege that keeps people from seeing the racism in racist images, and the inability of the privileged to acknowledge that the images contain racism even when pointed out to them.
the only logical conclusion of your statement is A.M is a racist and you have to refuse to acknowledge what she has done in the past. (ie. that the illustration cover is about a fairly contained mistake instead of the magnitude people see it)
that is why I say:
- do people who is screaming right now has done comparable work, tackling racism via online publication? (the right to say : Amanda is total racist)
- Or ability to claim that A.M “blind spot” is so large that she is practically a racist. (What about all her previous work?)
note that these illustration: at most reaches several thousand people who are VERY aware, educated, and not at all potentially will be persuaded to perpetuate racism.
It’s all about proportion: if people who now claim they are fighting racism, yet is abut to bring down pandagon who has shown long term work on various racism issue, they better show they worth more than pandagon work.
because overall, this yapping is damaging the cause instead of advancing anything.
a mistake is a mistake. If measurable effect is known and rectify. Nobody can demand more. Spouting up big hypothetical theory is useless.
(most people who comment are nothing but armchair theorists, loud mouth bloggers, spouting sophomoric theories. The loudest probably hasn’t done jack in real live regarding racism or race relationship except getting loud on the blog.)
Talk is cheap.
the only logical conclusion of your statement is A.M is a racist
No.
1. portly took the focus from Amanda, and put it on the commenters as well.
2. Being a racist requires intent on one’s part; whereas even people who would never intentionally hurt a soul can say racist things or propagate racist images, because they don’t see the racism.
3. Seeing the racism is an ongoing process, because it requires seeing things from some one else’s POV.
Oh my god.
What were you thinking? What were they thinking? What the hell is wrong with people? Why the hell would anyone think this is acceptable? Why? Why would you do this? If white, privileged feminism has made ANY progress acknowledging people of color, this blows it all to hell.
Stop subverting our attempts at progress. Just fucking stop it already. I want to read this book and I want to like it but it is completely impossible for me to do either. LOOK AT THE PLACE IT IS COMING FROM, and after all the questionable parallels between your work and the thoughts of BrownFemiPower! There are not words to explain the sheer scope of FAILURE; on your part, on your publisher’s part, and on the part of the people who are oh-so-keen to overlook it all!
I am so embarrassed I can’t even express how embarrassed I am. You blew it, every last one of you. Sit down with some bell hooks and don’t say a goddamned thing until you Get It. You don’t speak for me. You don’t speak for us.
Oh, my god.
Hector B. April 28, 2008 at 12:44 pm
right. but since we can establish strongly that amanda has done difficult racial issues, it is not possible to say she intentionally be a racist.
The one has to say, okay so that book illustration is an honest dumb mistake. How many have been printed, who have potentially see them, etc. What’s the damage and what’s the fix.
The actual illustration itself, it seems to me in the range of thousands. Mostly read by young educated crowd. Very aware that this is a mistake.
But, that’s the illustration/book part. At this moment, I believe the subtext is “revenge” over brownfemipower shutdown. It’s an ego play.
Hector B. April 28, 2008 at 12:44 pm
the only logical conclusion of your statement is A.M is a racist // No.
I don’t know how you can say “no” when you say this:
“the inability of the privileged to acknowledge”
and square it with the fact that the book is taken out along with apology. If they admit nothing wrong, why pull it out and issue an apology? You did suggest that Amanda is not a racist right?
So, it seems to me, it’s about “wording” then.
squashed — if I hurt you unintentionally you are still hurt. If I slipped on a waxed floor and accidentally hit you in the mouth I would still apologize even if it wasn’t my fault. I wouldn’t just walk away.
“This does raise an important hypothetical issue: is an image racist if it doesn’t offend people of color?”
Hector B., I think an image must be considered racist if it underlines popular negative stereotypes of a group, whether anyone is offended or not. The idea of people-of-color-as-savages is damaging to people of color; therefore an image that reinforces that idea is damaging. Personal offense should be avoided, but I don’t think it’s the primary issue.
sure.
But I can’t get angry at you when you incidentally smack me when you slip on wax floor.
But if you smack me after you insult my mother, I probably blow your head open.
and since we are discussing art object (not something that physically hurt somebody, but causing emotional distress) then it is also different.
It is mental process. I don’t deny that racism imagery hurts people. But we know almost everything about that illustration. Who print it, approximately how many, Why they print it, who might see it, etc. The scope is known. action has been taken, apology posted.
I seriously doubt anybody can find those image 6 months from now, maybe nobody will even remember abut this flap. (hell, 2 weeks from now, everybody will drank their ass off and can’t remember jack.)
(I completely fucking hate cultural studies. This fracas is a proof. They all should be sent to forced labor and reeducation camp. Completely incapable of comprehending real world)
I had often wondered where the term femiNazi came from.
Now I know.
squashed,
I’m trying to understand why you’re so emotional about this. While I don’t think you need to treat everyone with rainbowed puppy gloves you’re being kind of a dick, and I don’t understand why.
You admit the images are racist but…that’s it. What about the fact that this is the second time this has happened? Amanda has apologized and removed racist art from this book once already - can you really not understand why it frustrates people to have to relive this? Can you really not understand how this latest incident suggests she and Seal Press weren’t really paying attention the last time?
Do you not see this point about a repeating ignorance as valid or are you just not interested in discussing it and its implications?
“I didn’t pick the offensive imagery in my book, but I should have caught it sooner than now”
I’m sure it’s been said by now but how in the world did you not notice it until so late? I guess i just don’t understand how a self-proclaimed feminist writer could miss something SO racist and so obvious? I’d love to accept your apology and i’m really struggling to understand all this (the current situation you’ve found yourself in as well as numerous others) but it’s really difficult not only to accept your words but also to identity with the same feminism you do at this point.
Just looked on Amazon and I can’t see the pictures described. Have they gone from there?
Even though this appears to be a justified apology a lot of people are using it as an opportunity to beat up on Marcotte. That’s pretty pathetic, frankly. Try focusing on actual problems.
Amanda has apologized and removed racist art from this book once already - can you really not understand why it frustrates
peopleAmanda to have to relive this?Fixed
Hector - you didn’t answer my question, though I guess your decision to opt for a cutesy response rather than anything of substance is all the answer I need.
Thanks, Amanda. That’s a concise, eloquent apology. All anyone should need.