Two noughts add up to a nought...

[sami]

Huh. Based on this sample alone, I would have voted for this guy: Humphrey-Muskie, 1968. Humphrey came into the race late, having won no primaries, and won the candidacy at a disordered Democratic convention following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

Transcript (by me):

Voice of young man in audience: Mr Vice-President, how do you expect to gain the respect of the American people in the event you're elected?

Then-Vice-President Hubert Humphrey: "Well, I think, by my record of public service... When a man says that he thinks that the most important thing is to double the rate of convictions, that he doesn't believe in and he condemns the Vice-President, myself, for wanting to double the war on poverty - I think that man has lost his sense of values. You're not going to make this a better America just because you build more jails. What this country needs are more decent neighbourhoods. More educated people. Better homes. Uh, if we need more jails we can build them but that ought not to be the highest objective of the, a Presidency of the United States. I do not believe that repression, alone, builds a better society. Now if Mr Nixon can close his eyes to that, then he doesn't have enough vision to be President of this country. And that's why I've said what I've said.

Applause.

Voiceover: Humphrey, Muskie. There is no alternative.

If only at some point in the last forty years, or the last four hundred, the idea that repression alone doesn't build a better society, had really caught on.

I mention the centuries with a reason, because the history I'm studying right now includes the era when the modern police force was invented, and almost immediately turned into an instrument of social control, to keep the lower classes in their place. And, too, the era in which the notion of criminal justice went from deliberate savagery (the idea being that, though many crimes were left unpunished, those who were punished should be punished harshly and very much in public, to serve as an example to others), to the form we follow now - the surety, not the severity, of prosecution. Neither seems to work all that well.

Though the Bloody Code was cheaper, because imprisonment just wasn't how it was done. You were flogged, you were pilloried, you were executed, you were publically humiliated - but you weren't locked up. And they were making no pretense of trying to prosecute every crime. And charging someone with a crime could be expensive to the plaintiff, and in any case, people wouldn't prosecute if they didn't think the criminal who had wronged them would be deserving of the punishment they would receive.

Of course, sometimes this became "community justice" anyway. One man who wrote against the King was pilloried, and pelted with flowers instead of rotten produce or stones by an approving populace. Just about anyone who was convicted of deviant sexual crimes (either interfering with children, or, sadly, homosexuality) had a near-certainty of being stoned to death in their time in the pillory.

An interesting digression on this, actually, is the death sentence: Many crimes were capital crimes, at the time, but only a minority of those convicted of a capital crime were generally executed. Why this was is a matter of some historical debate (isn't everything?), but (my view, fairly well supported by evidence and historiography) was that the following things were major factors in this:

1) Past a certain point, too many executions would shift public opinion from "that bastard deserves to hang for what he done!" to "just about every day someone else swings at Tyburn - do they all deserve it? What if it's me or someone I love next?" Balancing public opinion on this stuff was quite important.

2) By granting clemency and reducing death sentences to transportation, the judges (who were of and represented the upper classes) could seem merciful and kind - despite the fact that the sentence they were giving was to send people, chained in ships which could be more-or-less just like the slave ships (including the women, children, and high death rates), to servitude in distant, harsh conditions, frequently for very minor crimes. In doing so, they reinforced a paternalistic class-power structure to their own benefit.

3) While, at the same time, more-or-less retaining the legal right to kill off anyone who was too much trouble. Which they did. At certain points in this period, habeas corpus was suspended. (This is never, ever a good thing.) There was, in place, a fairly thorough system of oppression.

I think one of the most interesting things about English history is the frequency with which there weren't revolutions. Negotiating the path from absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy by a process of gradual adaptation, overall, is kind of impressive. Especially when you factor in religious upheaval and the other countries of the British Isles.

(Of course, reading the history of Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries kind of makes you hate the English a lot, but I'm a sensitive woman of the 21st century and have only occasionally mocked my English classmate for her nationality - which, since she gives as good as she gets, including to the Glaswegian lecturer, is All Good Fun.)

It's that interesting thing about context, and power relations. It's easy to make light of casual racism when it's taking place in another country altogether, where participants are in fact on equal terms now - and when each target is represented equally as well. My lecturer can make snarky jokes about the Scots because he is Scottish; I can make snarky jokes about the English-in-history because the English were the dominant power group, I'm part-English, and so on. Whereas no-one has made a single Irish joke, because in the period we're dealing with, the Irish were the victims of some serious, comprehensive wrongness that just doesn't allow for humour.

It reminds me of a section from Mock the Week's first episode. Relevant: Dara, the host is Irish. John is English. The show is English.

Dara O'Briain, on an EU referendum: There is photographic evidence, of course, that vote-rigging took place in the referendum in France. [A picture comes up on screen of two women with their arms raised, revealing hairless armpits.] With armpits like these, there's no way these two are French.

Audience laughter.

John Oliver: Is that not - I'll go out on a limb here - a little bit racist?

Dara: It's a tiny bit racist, but not as much as the next one is racist.

John, laughing: Oh, okay, I'll look forward to that.

Dara: The next one is actually painfully, hideously racist on many many levels. It hits them repeatedly with a shovel and a pike at the same time, the next line. Do you want to hear it?

John: I love casual national hate. Come on.

Dara: It's fantastic. And it's not even my national hate. I quite like the French! The Irish get on very well with the French! It's your national hate. Anyway, I'm here, I'll play your game. All right! I'm willing to try and mix. Okay! A recent survey revealed that all of Europe sees the French as rude, smelly, and obsessed with sex and food. One Frenchman replied: "Piss off! I'm busy eating garlic off my girlfriend's nipples."

Audience laughter and applause.

John: No!

Audience response dies down.

John, pointing at the audience: Shame on you!

On the bright side, it's been years since any of these countries went to war with each other, when it used to be a near-constant; frankly I'll take making catty jokes about other European Union countries while still actually maintaining the EU as greatly preferable. (Besides, even if the racist jokes aren't funny, the snark about the racism itself often is. For instance, in this section, the jokes Dara is reading off the autocue aren't funny, but John Oliver's reactions are.) But that's the thing - the history behind this hate is of war between approximate equals, not one of oppression of one group over another.

It's interesting to look at the way this more-or-less represents progress: First violent, bloody warfare, for centuries on end, culminating in two World Wars that touched every continent except Antarctica; then, peace, uneasy at first, then more calmly, but tinged with vicious national stereotyping and hatefulness that gradually becomes jokes almost nobody really takes that seriously - then jokes that also get called out as racist. I wonder if this evolution will continue till the jokes become entirely harmless, the kind that acknowledge difference without implying either side is superior. That would be good.

But even if that takes centuries - and it might, because the grievances and hatreds have had centuries to build - I can live with that, because European countries only tend to invade each other by accident these days.

Heh, I'd forgotten that the next section of this episode of Mock the Week includes the serious discussion of who would win in a fight between an owl and a tiger. The argument: the owl would win. Every time. John Oliver explains to Linda Smith how the owl would adopt Ali's rope-a-dope strategy, letting the tiger swing itself out then flying down to peck it, while Dara simulates the fight with his hands. It is hilarious.

... No, I don't quite understand how I get from one point to another either.

Comments

[naraht]

(Besides, even if the racist jokes aren't funny, the snark about the racism itself often is. For instance, in this section, the jokes Dara is reading off the autocue aren't funny, but John Oliver's reactions are.) But that's the thing - the history behind this hate is of war between approximate equals, not one of oppression of one group over another.

This is an interesting question, though, because if you subscribe to the "racism is privilege plus power" then jokes about approximate equals aren't racist at all. The British media seems to subscribe to a different definition of racism than the anti-racists of Racefail do. I remember when an English man was beaten in Scotland for supporting the wrong football team and it was described by the BBC as a racist hate crime. Certainly attitudes towards the Poles are often described as racist.

Now, this wouldn't fly in the US, definitionally. (Although prejudice against Spanish-speaking people might be described as racism whether or not they were white.) There are a lot of sticky issues regarding the definition of what is a different race and how that definition has changed over time. But by no means can English people in Scotland be seen as an oppressed group. And "racism against white people" is a veeeery sticky topic to bring into a wider discussion of racism.

Back to Mock the Week, I think that the comedy works on a lot of levels and I don't think it would be funny if it were actually racist. "Casual racism" in my mind means "thoughtless, unconscious racism" rather than "pointed and intentional airing of national stereotypes." If it were a BNP spokeman talking about the Poles it wouldn't be funny at all.

But even if that takes centuries - and it might, because the grievances and hatreds have had centuries to build - I can live with that, because European countries only tend to invade each other by accident these days.

Given that those hatreds do still have significant effects and do still sometimes result in wars--Kosovo, for example--I rather think it's up to the Europeans to decide whether they can live with them.

[sami]

I don't actually subscribe to that definition of racism, really. I see why people use it but I'm not sure, as a definition, it really helps any more than it hinders. Partly because it leaves us lacking in vocabulary with which to address race-based hatred between equals, which - while not the same kind of problem as the racism that includes oppression - is still a problem, and partly because it makes it too easy for racists and quasi-racists to dismiss the discussion.

Let's say we're trying to persuade person P of an anti-racist argument. (For ease of pronoun, P will be male.) If we define racism as "power + prejudice" (which is what I usually see it listed as) or as "power + privilege", then there's a very high risk of a problem. If P does himself feel that he is not possessed of power - P is poor, P is unemployed, P feels that life has treated him harshly and is bitter and miserable. P has been subject to Republican "Southern Strategy" wedge tactics, or P just grew up in a racist society and has internalised a lot of that... P is not going to be convinced that P's actions are racist, and the argument gets derailed by arguments about class and Appalachian oppression.

And the argument gets sketchy for any kind of relevance if you're, say, calling someone racist for perpetuating inaccurate stereotypes about Haitian vodoun (which is a whole huge Thing I have a bee in my bonnet about, but anyway), then if that person lives in Iowa then how do you make a persuasive argument that they have any specific power relative to Haitians?

So to me, racism is about prejudice based on race or ethnicity (since they're not quite the same thing). There are different degrees of racism, with different degrees of hurtfulness, and there are different ways to handle racism once you identify it in yourself. My parents both grew up in South Africa (though my mother spent some time in Scotland as well). South Africa, of course, is renowned for its institutional racism. My parents grew up with that, and of course, it affected them.

However, they knew it, and moved to another country so their children wouldn't grow up in South Africa too, and worked *very* hard throughout my childhood to keep us from internalising racism the way they had. Obviously they weren't able to do it perfectly, but they raised me to think about it, to recognise it, to try and unpack the assumptions as comprehensively as I could - and to think, too, about the likely automatic responses from racists (conscious or un-) to what I do say and think. Hence, I'm reluctant to use arguments or theoretical constructs that I can see being easily dismissed.

(My mother's reaction the first time I told her I was dating a non-white person was kind of hilarious. She looked sort of shocked, and I could see the realisations cross her face: that her immediate reaction was negative, that this was racist, that this was not who she chooses to be, followed by a slightly strained congratulations, after which she faked being okay with it until she actually was.)

Given that those hatreds do still have significant effects and do still sometimes result in wars--Kosovo, for example--I rather think it's up to the Europeans to decide whether they can live with them.

But Kosovo was *not* the ethnic hatreds of roughly-equals who have been going to war with each other for the last thousand years and are now in formal alliance with extensively interwoven national interests. That was a product of decades of violent ethnic repression and intra-national ethnic tensions - a very different kind of thing indeed.

Also, bar the very large question mark over whether Britain is part of Europe, Europe is part of my identity - it's where my ancestors come from and where my family, with the exception of my parents and sister, live. (It's also where I specialise, as a historian, and historians can get notoriously proprietary about Their Areas.) Whether war between European states is a matter of jokes or violence is really quite important to me. And if the choice is between those two - and right now, it very much seems to be - then I'll happily state that anyone who would rather have yet another Anglo-French war than yet another stereotype joke is wrong.

And the thing is, the jokes have been getting less vicious over the years. Compare the ones in Mock the Week to one Rowan Atkinson did (to great hilarity from the audience) years ago, in which he cites a list of road death tolls in European countries, and follows with: "Alarming as [these statistics] are... they are just not enough. There are over sixty million degos in Spain! Four thousand just doesn't register!"

The rest of the piece involves more ethnic slurs, and an exhortation to try and make sure as many Europeans die on the roads as possible if audience members should go to the Continent on holiday or encounter tourists on British roads.

These days, that just wouldn't be acceptable.

Progress.

[naraht]

Partly because it leaves us lacking in vocabulary with which to address race-based hatred between equals...

Prejudice? Xenophobia?

Let's say we're trying to persuade person P of an anti-racist argument. (For ease of pronoun, P will be male.) If we define racism as "power + prejudice" (which is what I usually see it listed as) or as "power + privilege", then there's a very high risk of a problem. If P does himself feel that he is not possessed of power - P is poor, P is unemployed, P feels that life has treated him harshly and is bitter and miserable. P has been subject to Republican "Southern Strategy" wedge tactics, or P just grew up in a racist society and has internalised a lot of that... P is not going to be convinced that P's actions are racist, and the argument gets derailed by arguments about class and Appalachian oppression.

Yes, but the fact is that P does have power relative to blacks in his society, whether he accepts it or not. There are issues of intersectionality--obviously President Obama has more power than he does--but if you compare P to a poor unemployed black man from Appalachia then the situation is clear. Any anti-racist argument that doesn't point out that fact really isn't complete. Racists and quasi-racists dismiss the discussion because they don't want to hear it, and so simply not telling them is really unhelpful.

But Kosovo was *not* the ethnic hatreds of roughly-equals who have been going to war with each other for the last thousand years and are now in formal alliance with extensively interwoven national interests.

Fair point. It's just that it is European and I wanted to mention it because there's more going on in the continent than relationships between the big powers in Western Europe.

Also, bar the very large question mark over whether Britain is part of Europe, Europe is part of my identity - it's where my ancestors come from and where my family, with the exception of my parents and sister, live. (It's also where I specialise, as a historian, and historians can get notoriously proprietary about Their Areas.)

I don't want to get into one of these discussions where we wave our Europeanist credentials around, because not being European it starts to seem rather pointless. Given that there is still very significant prejudice against Eastern Europeans in Western Europe, for instance (think of the BNP and their attitude towards Poles), I don't feel right about saying "I can live with it." The simple fact is that I don't have to live with it, one way or the other.

[sami]

Prejudice doesn't really seem quite apt, to me; xenophobia has a very different meaning in my dialect.

Yes, but the fact is that P does have power relative to blacks in his society, whether he accepts it or not. There are issues of intersectionality--obviously President Obama has more power than he does--but if you compare P to a poor unemployed black man from Appalachia then the situation is clear.

I don't disagree at all - but, you see, when you have to start having that argument, you've gone off the tracks and you're going to have trouble getting back to your original point. Whereas if you don't get into that point, you don't have to start arguing hierarchies of hurt. You also don't have to have the argument about "reverse racism" - instead of arguing about whether it's racist for a black person to have a universal dislike of white people, you can say okay, that is racism, but it's not what we're talking about (and also, it's almost certainly a reflection of what it's like for that person to live under systemic racist oppression and offence from just about every white person they encounter, so the problem is still white people, here).

It's just that it is European and I wanted to mention it because there's more going on in the continent than relationships between the big powers in Western Europe.

True. But not what I was talking about. :)

With all due respect and fondness and all that, you're in danger of doing that thing, where someone is all "but how can you talk about THIS when there's this OTHER thing that's SO MUCH WORSE!" Sometimes I want to think about the ramifications of the change in approach to making jokes based on stereotypes between nations on a roughly equal footing, and not have to think about ethnic cleansing. Or the BNP.

These things are things I care about; you don't have to, if you don't want to. It doesn't mean I can't also care about Kosovo, or Eastern Europe, or any of those subjects, just like pondering racism on the scale of jokes about the French on English panel shows doesn't mean I can't care about MammothFail (I suspect it's well-established by now that I do), and caring about MammothFail doesn't mean I can't care about Darfur.

Saying I can live with English-French cattiness doesn't mean I'm saying I'm just as content about the racist bile of the BNP or the Daily Mail - I'm just saying I'm okay with two countries who are now of roughly equal stature, but have spent quite a lot of the last few centuries at war, being catty at each other. No more, no less. I'm not even saying it's an inherently good thing - I'm just saying it's an improvement over all that's come before it.

It's not really about Europeanist credentials, although Europe does matter to me. I'm fully capable of caring quite a lot about things that don't affect me personally. (See: Well, MammothFail.)

[naraht]

Sometimes I want to think about the ramifications of the change in approach to making jokes based on stereotypes between nations on a roughly equal footing, and not have to think about ethnic cleansing. Or the BNP.

Okay. It sounds like you were talking about the relationship between England and France rather than the European Union as a whole. I agree that it's entirely justifiable to focus on that issue; you just might have made it a bit clearer that this was all you were talking about. Because when I think about white-on-white prejudice in Europe, my mind goes to different places.

As for the definition-of-racism argument, it's probably not a productive one to have here and now...

[sami]

No. Especially in case trolls come by following MammothFail links. I don't want to suspend all non-Mammothfail posting in my own journal, but I also don't want to provide ammunition for any trolls who hit the other posts. (The one about Bujold, especially, seems to be getting linked disconcertingly widely.)

[naraht]

Er, I've just edited my last linkspam to take out the link to this post. Because, yeah, now that you point it out, it's not related. I think I've been operating on automatic pilot a bit with the linking. Sorry.

[(Anonymous)]

Partly because it leaves us lacking in vocabulary with which to address race-based hatred between equals...

Ethnocentrism?

[sami]

Not even close. If I assume that, say, everyone must have heard of Rolf Harris because he was really really famous in Australia and Britain, that's ethnocentrism. If I assume that someone is a smelly, sex-obsessed asshole just because they're French... that's racism.

[acari]

I'm with you when it comes to English/French animosities, or even, taking my country as example, German/French ones. But you seem to completely disregard Eastern Europe. I'm not neccesarily talking about the Balkans even. I find German stereotypes about Poles not at all funny. I'm from the German/Polish border region, I have heard them all. And there's also still a lot of mistrust when it comes to Russia.

I agree with you when it comes to Western Europe, but I'd say Eastern Europe is not yet included in the list of countries considered completely equal therefore the stereotyping is not yet harmless and funny.

I find it strange using the word racism for modern inner-European prejudice. Personally, I'd only use that word to describe anti-migrant or anti-Roma sentiment.

[sami]

Yeah, but where inequality exists, it's a very different thing. Eastern Europe is a lot more problematic, I agree, and from my knowledge it doesn't seem to be in the place where jokes have become a safe outlet for residual animosity.

It could be a bit of a dialectal variation, I guess; in England and Australia, racism does apply that way, because prejudice based on being from different parts of Europe has been a very real problem in the past.

And it's a manifestation of racial hatred even if it's the English making jokes about the French - it's just that since it's historically a very recent innovation that the French and English aren't spending really amazing amounts of time trying to kill each other, it's like there's just a buildup of residual animosity that needs to find an outlet somewhere, so the resentment doesn't pile up again until another war starts.

But the power equivalence is *important* for this kind of thing not to be vile.

In an odd way, it's sort of like how my best friend and I have conversations that, taken out of context, people would probably think were signs that we hate each other - we frequently impugn one another's characters, the virtue of each other's mothers, and just insult each other. However, we know that we love each other, and so my BFF can say things to me she would kill anyone else for saying, and vice versa.

Only with less love, in the case of England and France.

[naraht]

Yeah, but where inequality exists, it's a very different thing. Eastern Europe is a lot more problematic, I agree, and from my knowledge it doesn't seem to be in the place where jokes have become a safe outlet for residual animosity.

Right. And you were sort of talking about the European Union as if inequality didn't still exist within it, even though it does include most of the Eastern European countries.

[sami]

No, I didn't. I said:

On the bright side, it's been years since any of these countries went to war with each other, when it used to be a near-constant; frankly I'll take making catty jokes about other European Union countries while still actually maintaining the EU as greatly preferable.

I would argue that, in context, "these countries" clearly implies the countries that I was already talking about, which is, in fact, mostly England and France, and in general terms, I had specified countries which are on roughly equal terms nowadays.

Extrapolating from there to Kosovo and oppressed countries in Eastern Europe and the implication that somehow I'm in favour of racist stereotyping of marginalised European ethnic groups because I think the evolution of Anglo-French and similar relations to the point where it's jokes instead of warfare and the jokes themselves are getting called out for their racism is a good thing...

... makes me tired. Because I haven't been interacting with you long, but I like you, so far, and I really don't want to get into an argument where I have to defend myself against implications of ethnic prejudice or defend my right, now and then, to think and write about things that aren't in any way related to attempted genocide - at least until people make a point of bringing up Kosovo and Eastern Europe and Poland and Roma.

[naraht]

Extrapolating from there to Kosovo and oppressed countries in Eastern Europe and the implication that somehow I'm in favour of racist stereotyping of marginalised European ethnic groups...

Whoa, whoa, whoa. I hope that's not what it sounded like I was implying because I certainly didn't mean that. It simply wasn't clear to me in the passage you quoted above that you were only talking about England and France and their near neighbors. That's all.

I think we've had misreadings on both sides here, so probably better to leave it here?

[sami]

I think I was over-reaching somewhat, but that was starting to be what it felt like. I apologise for taking it too far though - having a bit of an out-of-spoons error this evening. Difficult day.

Thanks also for taking the link out of the racefail post - I know being the links-person is hard work, and I admire your efforts, but yeah, this one's not related and would probably qualify rather as derailment to be included with the rest.

[naraht]

I hope your day (or evening) improves...

[trs80.ucc.asn.au]

I think one of the most interesting things about English history is the frequency with which there weren't revolutions. Negotiating the path from absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy by a process of gradual adaptation, overall, is kind of impressive. Especially when you factor in religious upheaval and the other countries of the British Isles.

I remember being slightly shocked when I learned that the UK doesn't have a formal constitution, and wondering how that worked. Further reading, both on Wikipedia and here, has almost convinced me that there's great strength in the flexibility it grants parliament in adapting to democratic pressures over time. Complaints that Australian premiers and the PM are becoming more presidential is pretty hilarious when you realise, as wikipedia notes:

The relationship between the President and the Congress reflects that between the English monarchy and parliament at the time of the framing of the United States Constitution.

which can also be said of the Governor-General, Australian parliament and Australian constitution.