Being a little older (and wiser) I sometimes think back to those days after 9-11, and before we invaded Iraq, and the stories that were told about the threat that was posed by Saddam, the axis of evil, etc., etc. With hindsight it’s easy to say, “What the heck!?!”

I’ve been having my own WTH moments lately on social media, so I thought I’d glue it all together in a single post. Hope it turns out better than this:

Please beware that the language at some of these links is not family or work friendly…

Threat inflation and misogyny

It seems like when a white women raises her voice, and some hard questions, this gets equated in the minds of some men as being the moral equivalent of a roundhouse punch. Don’t believe me, let’s look at what a leader in the financial sector had to say about Senator Elizabeth Warren, and somehow does a non-segue from accusing her of being too angry to an accusation (unsupported by any facts) of “violence”:

Warren Buffett Says Elizabeth Warren Is Too ‘Angry’ And ‘Violent’ With Rich People | ThinkProgress:
“In the end we do have to work together… And it does not help when you demonize or get too violent with the people you’re talking to.”

Keep in mind that this is from a man with a relatively benign personality in his milieu. You wonder what someone with less tact and a higher AQ is saying. No really I don’t because here is what the denizens of the men’s rights movement say…

The internet is full of men who hate feminism. Here’s what they’re like in person. – Vox:
“I’ll make you a bet, hundred dollars,” Max tells me the first night we hang out. “If both of us stood up on this table right now and started yelling what we think about feminism, somebody might tell you to shut the f*** up. But they would lynch me.”

Really?!? Lynch an upper-class white man for criticizing feminism. I haven’t been to Chicago, but having lived in some pretty liberal parts of the Golden State, I was puzzled because I just can’t picture it. I think what these men are doing is a form of threat escalation. If a woman disagrees, that’s equivalent to slapping, if she yells, that’s the same as a punch, and if she uses profanity, well that’s a kick in the you know where. If more than one of them disagrees with you verbally, that’s a lynch mob.

Whitewashing blacks outta history

And that brings up the other issue that has preyed upon my mind of late, the whitewashing of history. Somehow this gem from Tumblr, MedivalPOC comment, came my way. It’s a discussion about the proper place of African Americans in historical fiction, specifically, why were there no black characters in the “Agent Carter” series which brought up the typical, there were no black professionals in New York City in the 1940s and they would only have been “the help”. I highly recommend reading the comments in the link above, as the writer is really good, and grounded in history, but here was my 2 cents:

At the traveling exhibition of Norman Rockwell art, they had a good background piece on some of the editorial policies in the period (1950s) that no doubt were in place in the 1930s and 1940s. Basically, blacks could not be portrayed except as “help”. I think part of why folks think that blacks were only “the help” is because the only images white mainstream America had of blacks at that point were “the help”. The only black workers they saw were “the help”. The professionals were not frequented by whites, and had largely or only black clientele. The labor and economic reality was whitewashed by the popular media, and those false images persist today.

We often forget that informal practices like those listed above and de jure residential segregation, were a way of life not just in the post-reconstruction South, but throughout America.  When I posted this link on Facebook about red-lining in 1940-50s Portland, OR, a relative chimed in about the San Gabriel area in the 1950s

When Grandma and Grandpa lived in LaCanada they had a maid named Marie. I remember when she was helping with a big Thanksgiving meal, probably about 1955, and Grandpa had to take her home right in the middle of everything. She had to be off the streets in Glendale before the sun went down, which was about 5:00 in November. I went along, and I remember we dropped her off at a bus stop. I don’t know where she actually lived; maybe my cousins remember more. Shocking to think about it now, to say the least.

I think I can guarantee she wasn’t living in Glendale, or a whole lot of other communities in the area and there were likely laws on the books, in addition to restrictive covenants on private property deeds.

How these two things come together

This re-writing of African American (and American) history intersects with other more troubling areas of threat escalation, where folks who are oppressed are then turned into a source of threat. It’s those sorts of judgements that lead to African American men (and women) being described as “monsters”, “animals”, and I’ll just stop there because it’s depressing. This is where white women sometimes jump on board this band-wagon and need to stay off that wagon train.

I remember a conversation with a fellow African American male teacher who was in a conflict with a white female professor. He made complaints about his grade he had gotten (with some justice) and she said she felt “threatened” by him. He is a person of great conviction and has a strong personality, but has always been professional and appropriate. I chuckled, because we both knew the score. When a black man argues strongly, no matter how cogent his argument, or how reasonably put, some folks will convert “questioning” to “threatening”. That’s what made this so funny, because if there is a scintilla of anger in your tone, no matter how justified, it’s taken as a threat of violence so you learn to lower the “threat” level. But, as we see here, sometimes that’s not enough.

Tangentially related, but also striking me as odd was this bit on the second page of this GQ story on the men’s rights movement about male rape (rape perpetrated against men), which is something I do believe happens, but I thought it odd that all of the examples given by supporters were…in Africa?!? Really, those were the only examples you could come up with? I know there are examples here in America, so bringing up Africa makes me just wonder what point they are trying to make.  What Kind of Man Joins the Men’s Rights Movement?

Image Credit: No More Sake by Matt Reinbold, on Flickr