Great White People Book Club: stumbling on our false cosmopolitanism

lori’s meaning was lost in translation by most of you– you’ve all been outrageous toward her.

I too am scared and bewildered by people who forward mass hate-email (for that is what most of those are). without considering that someone in their address book might be offended or hurt by such ignorance. These 'jokes' are too often veiled threats and invitations to stigmatize the “other” beyond the offensive words, whether the forwarder realizes it or not. Why otherwise good people spend their valuable time spreading hatred is beyond me – does it make them feel better about themselves? Classic bully tactics, or fear?

Thanks for your comment Judith.

How do I test the waters in a new online environment?

Often I take into account how I came to be in that environment. I joined SheWrites the week it launched, having heard about it through a fellow American writer — a no-nonsense professional. That introduction itself gave me confidence in the founders and their mission. I have joined other writing/publishing/expat groups at ning networks that have had less professionalism and experience, and when I do, I take into account that larger picture when I determine how much time I will spend in a place and what my goals are there.

Just ran across this 2005 post “Principles for Evaluating Websites”, which mentions among other things that your relationship with a site is one built over time and you need to keep adjusting the level of trust you award to it.

I do this. No response to blog posts. No or weak activity in interest groups. Spammy connection requests. Rudderless admin. All of that adds up to a lack of value for me. As for the quality of the thinking and performance of groups of people in these networks (or on bulletin boards, etc, to Twitter accounts or Facebook or LinkedIn connections and groups), those determinations are made over time. Worth it? My kind of place? Lotta nutty stuff and exclamation points? I leave some groups immediately when flag-worthy behavior occurs. Others I try to engage and see what happens — because the entire community is not visible, only the people currently posting are visible.

I find people use jokes to express opinions they don't care to be held accountable for — as if protesting “it was a joke!” is all the defense needed when the sentiment draws negative attention.

However, as Sarah Melamed wrote in “No Ethnic Joke” for expat+HAREM back in May, very specific cultural jokes are difficult to translate when you're not a member of that culture. That may be why people who do not see the world in the terms of Lori Tharp's post did not find anything funny about it.

Thanks for participating, Jocelyn, and reminding us in your own post in this blogring that generalizations ('Chinese food', 'White people') may be easy and ultimately meaningless, but they're not harmless. They can prevent us from finding out more because we believe we already know.

Oh, Anastasia you're so right on, to begin with TED and end with SheWrites, two remarkable efforts, and yet a world apart. One a platform provided for the spreading of worth while ideas, the other a business venture with a brilliant marketing plan, a storefront with a welcoming porch.
You ask, where I as a xenophile stumble Online. Let's say I try not to go there, but that's the thing, you stumble when you least expect to lose your footing and you do that when you feel at ease, comfortable, safe. *
I can't help but think of my past as a designer and dramaturge and actors' coach in the multicultural (called “minority* theater by government subsidizers) in the Netherlands.
The only people who ever called me a racist were white outsiders who were appalled to learn I gave the Antillean and Suriname actors an earlier call time (yep I doubled as tour manager too) then the white actors. Something I'd been told to do by the two directors, African American Rufus Collins, and Suriname Henk Tjon (both of blessed memory), who knew the whites would in general be punctual, the Latin folks would not.

Thus, as a xenophile I've stumbled outside the group that I wanted to get to know, the group that opened itself up to me, and I think it's pretty much the same Online. You never quite know whether the facade covers the content.
In order not to stumble Online it pays off to always be alert, to check out earlier threads, to test the waters. I've been had on Twitter, when a seemingly profound twitterer turned out to be a phisher or crank.

What do you do to test the waters?

Interesting post, Anastasia. Sometimes it seems the very people who say they're against xenophobia or against segregation are the ones who end up stumbling over their own efforts to fight it, creating more xeno-confusion in the process. Instead of complaining, parodying, or segregating… if the same people would focus on their core goals and aim to excel at what they've already set out to do, they could achieve their original objectives and make a strong and positive statement, without counteracting their own efforts with the controversies they inadvertently create.

Beautifully said, Anastasia. Your post last week on gender bending with James Chartrand was another reminder to me that we are not as advanced as a society as we would appear to be. I must admit that my particular brand of xenophilia usually leads me into much more positive discussions than what I found at She Writes, however the experience was so surreal I was equally fascinated to read the various comments that seemed to me to come from an alternate universe. It was invaluable to realise how many people still see life in black and white. Without awareness we can't begin to address the issues at hand, can we?

I like that you mention “how it resonates with our human soul,” because it's kind of like tuning into a frequency when we read something online. We don't know the writer's intent, we deduce. We infer. And there is chance for misunderstanding, but it is an opportunity to learn how people react to what we say. We imbue our words with meaning that could be used for helping or hurting. Somehow we learn to wrestle with our interpretation and the writer's intent and hope to find a middle ground. I'm putting my bets on finding what we having in common, rather than what makes us different. That makes us catalysts and alchemists rather than victims and bullies.

When I read that on She Writes, I thought it was a joke as well…but I didn't think it was a massively successful joke at the time, and I was left with sort of a weird feeling about it. Online stumbling is a very interesting question: I've gotten a lot of negative feedback from somethings I've published in another language, not my own (and not my translation), and I have spent the past few months feeling slightly bruised by that. It is very tempting, as Anastasia brings up, to cluster around your own like-minded group of fellow expats, or cooking writers, or what have you…but she's right to say we need to go beyond that.
Thanks, as ever, for the thought-provoke.

I hate to be the one to say this, Anastasia, but you completely missed that her hook for the post was a joke. She was parodying the white writers that say “I love black people,” et cetera. She made this clear. You are the polarizing force here, slamming a black writer for doing her best and reaching out. Get off your f-ing soapbox and smell the espresso, will ya?