Lots of news and well.....views. the book has been keeping me busy - I started the round of edits / revisions a couple of weeks ago and it has been, while interesting as it's my book, extremely stressful trying to do that and work the day job, which has been pretty brutal. On top of that, I'm still writing for Exclaim! and Blogher.
I covered the most excellent Mastodon / DEP / Red Fang show last weekend, which was fantastic. I bought Red Fang's Murder the Mountains right after. DEP was great - funny, I'm not a fan of their music, but man, they know how to put on a live show. And as I wrote in my review, this was (thank god) the best performance I've seen of Mastodon. Despite the prog / hard rock of The Hunter and Crack the Skye their setlist was pretty heavy.
Racism, Sexism and Metal.......again.
I was going to do a post about the latest drama over Leviathan's Jef Whitehead True Traitor, True Whore, as I read the interview my man Adrien did with him in the December issue of Decibel, and not knowing the story behind the album, was surprised. And disappointed. I traded emails with some of my male colleagues, and we were thinking about doing something, but life got in the way. However, Invisible Oranges has been doing some write-ups on the issue, so I'm cross-posting them.
The last link is what got my blood boiling. It's not the actual post, but it was the commenter's and a link that was put into the post which unfortunately, I clicked on and read before heading to work one day last week. I don't even know if its worth going into again, but I must say, people are fucked.
One of the main issues that I despise about life, is the way how people tend to think that, a) what they observe about life is the only way it must be. Not all straight white men / women are navel-gazing assholes whom securely wrapped up in their societal privilege,feel that whatever they say and think is automatically the way it should be. But for some reason this particular comment thread got me thinking that an unhealthy amount of people are; and b) I wonder if people have a firm grasp of the definition of racism. I think that when you are talking about verbiage - in the sense that people who say nigger are not all racist - unless the context of how they use that word is meant to strip power from the person(s) they are referring to. That power might be in relation to not getting access to opportunities that all people have the right to access. If that word is used in relation to causing physical or emotional harm to others, to devalue and demean them, than yes, that is racist.
The is a link to an interview that some dude did with some asshole in the Invisible Oranges post that got me thinking about this. They were freely using nigger, and yes, both of them were using it in a satirical sense, but it wasn't racist. Bigoted? Ignorant? Prejudiced? yes, you could use one or all of those words. Did it hurt my feelings? No. Did it make me angry? Yes. I commented - and I fully believe this - let them have that interview in a crowd of black folks and see what happens to them. I don't generally condone violence, but sometimes it takes a threat of getting a beat-down in order for some to see what they are doing. I'm at that point because it seems that mature, rational conversations don't tend to work.
To me, it was a glaring display of the resentment felt because white folks are not supposed to say nigger. There are legitimate reasons for this, which people seem to conveniently ignore and instead, whine about 'their rights' being taken away. The main reason about the word being blacklisted being is that historically, when white or non-black folks used nigger against black folks, it was usually followed by racist behaviour. There is a legacy of hate, pain, murder and denial of access to opportunities that are wrapped up in that word. There were and are people in which, when that word was/is uttered, were killed, raped, beaten, and again, denied opportunities ( that every human being has a right to have) that could have benefitted their lives.
But these are 'online' conversations. How much time should we give them? After all, people are writing / commenting from the scantity of their homes. They can spout nonsense, thinking that no one is going to find out who they are, and challenge them. But what happens when these conversations happen in "real life?" I had previously wrote about the asshat who jumped in front of me and called me a 'fucking nigger' at the Kyuss Lives show, and that action and the way he said it, was racist. Why? Because of the venue, because he wanted to tell me that I did not belong in that venue, therefore the denial of my human right to be there. Because even though he might hate black folks and be prejudiced, the action of getting in my face and telling me what he thought of me, was meant to be intimidating - a physical threat.
What is also interesting is that my gender privlege was also stripped away - another issue that people seem to ignore in relation to how racism works. Society tells us that men are to show respect to women. They are not supposed to be as agressive with women as they might be with other men. But when it comes to racism, all social norms are off the table. My gender was not present, the colour of my skin, was. In my book, I talk about this but I'm thinking now, that I should expand on this. Sexism, in relation to the ways how some men treat women - is based on gender. Racism denotes gender, denotes the social norms of how men are supposed to treat women (and children, for that matter) and is soley based on skin colour, a colour that supposedly is wrapped up in a lot of problematic mannerisms and characteristics for white and non-black folks.
Because of the denotation of gender, and more importantly my personal experiences of discrimination being based more on race and racialized notions of black women's sexuality versus simply 'gender,' I felt a bit out of my comfort zone in being 'rah rah' feminist' about this story - there are probably women out there who might have more salient points about this. It's not an 'either, or' situation, but again, I surprised myself. Even though I have been in a situation in which I have been assaulted and stalked my a man, I had to think about how I could react about a situation in which I had felt a bit of disconnection to. There have been times - too many - where I have not been 'treated' like a woman, so perhaps the disconnect comes from that. Who knows?
Before I stopped reading the comment thread on the IO post, someone tried to compare ( as people usally do in these situations) Whitehead's alleged behaviour to the behaviour of black artists, most notably Chuck Berry, as in, well people listen to music made by bad people all the time. This is something that happens all the time, trying to do a (weak) comparison to justify the bad behaviour.
Berry was charged with videotaping women using the bathroom in a restaurant he owned, verus a man who has been accused of beating and raping his girlfriend. What Berry did was creepy and really gross, but as far as I know, he wasn't charged with physically and sexually assaulting a woman. While women were certianly victimized and humiliated, there was no mention of physical or sexual harm in Berry's case.
In this case, it was to say, "see? Black people do it too.' By comparing Whitehead's situation with the actions of a black musician, it was supposed to denote issues of racism in metal. Hip-Hop music is commonly used as a comparison, too. But if a rapper said, "I hate me some motherfucking crackers." that would be offensive - if you knew what 'cracker' or even 'honky' meant, but there is no historical comparison that equates the hate, discrimiation, physical assault and murder surrounding word nigger. If a man is spurned by a woman, it seems acceptable for men to say, 'women are all whores and money-grubbing bitches out to screw you.' But for men, and what I witnessed on the blog posts, there seems to be a lot of rationalization about one person's actions - they seem to be absolved of generalized, genderized and racialized stereotypes. Justifications that is not usually given to women or minorities.
So this is what bothered me about the posts on Invisible Oranges. I am not a scholar. I am simply a writer and yes, while I have an academic background on these matters, I'm not that well-versed. I am an observer; and a great part of my observastional skills comes from my upbringing. I love my metal community. I love the music, and I admire the plethora of people I have met along the way. I know some awesome thinkers, great writers and overall good people. So when I read this shit, it makes me very angry.
I believe that a vast majority of the population are prejudiced. It's wrong, but it is human nature as I said before, it is easier to judge the world through your experiences versus thinking about how other's experiences might differ from yours, but for the love of god, we can still look at people's experiences that differ from ours and let those experienes change our personal outlook on life. Be objective! We, as metal people who should know about what it feels like to be burdened with stereotypical notions about the culture in general, can do better than this.
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