And it ain’t the good kind.
There’s a term, “mansplaining”, that feminists have been (over) using lately. But its original use and definition are still valid despite the many who are misusing the term. “Mansplaining” is where a man explains to a woman what she is supposed to be thinking and feeling about something. If a woman is talking about how rape and how sexual harassment makes her feel, if she talks about how she doesn’t feel safe in many situations where men feel safe, it’s not a man’s job to tell her that the reality she lives in is not the reality she lives in. It’s a man’s job to listen. I’ve never been a woman. I’ve never experienced life as a woman. I’ve never lived the reality that is life for a woman. It would be the utmost in hubris and the utmost in paternalistic arrogance to believe that I know better than a woman what the reality is that she lives every day.
But it seems to me that nowadays we need to make another term as well known as “mansplaining”: whitesplaining. When white people are telling Colin Kaepernick what he should think and feel about the black experience in America… when white people are telling a black mother what she should think and feel about the fact that her 11 year old boy who looks as dangerous as Urkel was racially profiled as a possible drug lookout or drug cut-out by police officers… when white people are telling the black people behind Black Lives Matter that the experience they live every day of having to fear being shot by the police for little reason or no reason at all is not, in fact, the experience they live every day… they are doing the same thing. They are telling a black person what he or she is supposed to be thinking or feeling about the reality that black people live in every day.
Here’s my deal: I’m not a black person. I’ve never been black. I’ve never experienced life as a black person. I’ve never lived the reality that is life for a black person. I know a little bit about that reality because I’ve worked with black professionals in the past and they’ve tried to explain some of what life is like for black people in the United States to me, but I understand that I at best have a minor intellectual understanding of a portion of a much larger picture. It would be the utmost in racist arrogance and idiocy for me to presume that I know better than someone who actually lives that reality what life as a black person is really like in America.
My job as a white person, when a black person talks about the reality he or she experiences every day, is to listen. Not to demean their reality with condescending words and belittling comparisons. If a black woman tells me she fears that the police will racially profile and perhaps shoot her son because they see only the color of his skin, not his science grades and his love of astronomy and his college plans… for me as a white person to disregard and demean her concern would be racist twattle. This is her reality that she is living. She is the one who knows it best, not me. To say that I know her reality better than she does would be, uhm… racist. Because I don’t. Because I can’t. Because I’m not black. Because I do not live the reality that black people live. And to say otherwise bears the implicit assumption that, as a white person, I am automatically superior and thus better qualified to judge her reality than she is. Rank bigotry, in other words, of the white supremacist sort. White people who think that their whiteness gives them a license to tell black people what reality black people are living need to just ‘fess up to their white supremacist beliefs and don bedsheets and hoods, on other words.
And if they don’t want to be lumped in that basket of deplorables, then maybe, just maybe…. they should shut up and listen. It’s not as if black people aren’t trying to say things to us white people, after all. It’s that we’re not listening.
– Badtux the Listening Penguin
Not listening plus don’t wanna listen nor are they gonna listen. This country’s societal issues are getting worse every day it seems.
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It would be a very world if we all would listen first, think second, and then keep our mouths shut.
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[…] Lately, my mind has been playing songs to me — not just the casual earworms, you understand; no, it has a coherent program of its own. I hear Joan Baez singing about Steven Biko with the poignant line, “The outside world is black and white, with only one color dead” – but that is only the opening act. Then my mind does a mish-mash of Simon and Garfunkel and Disturbed singing “The Sounds of Silence” because it does seem we are incapable communicating anything coherent. Frankly, this is because a lot of people are not listening. […]
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If the mansplainers and the whitesplainers actually listened and even began to understand just a little bit, then they might feel the need to do something about it, and that just isn’t going to happen. The vast majority are too comfortable living in their small protected bubbles. And the misogynists and racists are beyond any understanding.
And I hate to have to say I agree with One Fly about where this country is headed.
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[…] But it seems to me that nowadays we need to make another term as well known as “mansplaining”: w… […]
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Di you perchance write this post after reading Kunstler today? (I notice you have Clusterfuck Nation on your blogroll.) Because he uses the words of a purported black man in Baltimore to whitesplain things to his readers. That said, there’s a lot of truth to the notion of “trauma programming” that JHK’s correspondent raises. It applies to lowlifes of any colour, though, including many of the antisocial personality disordered people I encounter at work.
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I wrote it before Kunstler’s post. And I deliberately used the example of a black middle class professional — someone *not* “useless” as Kunstler put it — as an example of a black person who is utterly terrified by the police and by what they might do to her children, especially her male children. There’s a lot of sociopathologies in the inner cities, but that was not the purpose of this essay. The purpose of this essays was to call whitesplainers on their racism, racism that is inherent when you hear a white person say they know how things are for black people better than black people do.
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