Before we get underway, I want to make sure readers understand that comments that assert or imply that racism, ethnic stereotyping and/or sexism don’t exist will be deleted, as will comments that seek to minimize the impact of oppression or deride or dismiss those who call attention to how privilege and oppression are manifested. Repeated comments to this effect will result in bans. This space is intended to be explicitly anti-oppression; if you would like to debate the existence of oppression in its various forms, I can’t stop you, but I also won’t provide you a venue. There are, unfortunately, countless other places that will not only allow but gleefully welcome your defense of privilege. Find one.
Today’s post by my best bucko has me thinking about perceptions of emotional expression and how those perceptions are constructed in large part by racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes.
Many other bloggers have covered the fact that Serena Williams did not do anything more spectacular or horrifying than what John McEnroe did on our televisions for years on end. I wouldn’t have known the first thing about tennis when I was a kid if it weren’t for McEnroe’s theatrics. Apparently this isn’t obvious to millions of privilege-blinded white folks, but it really should be: the reaction to Serena Williams’s outburst simply cannot be divorced from whatever lurks in our collective subconscious about black women’s anger.
It was in talking about that this morning with my husband that I stumbled upon something again that I’ve thought about before but haven’t really been able to elucidate before. The black women in my life have always been significantly more restrained in their expressions of emotion than I have. And I’d have to be a complete jackass to think this isn’t about the fact that I am given nearly unlimited freedom to express what I am feeling, without fear of repercussion. That is not to say that women, as a group, are not subjected to messages and consequences about and for our expressions of emotion. Do it too much and you’re “hysterical;” do it too little and you’re a cold bitch. So I do get some of that, obviously – the patronization and/or chiding from men, the policing from other women, etc. But at no point have I been considered dangerous or scary – which would certainly carry the risk of much more tangible repercussions (like jail or job loss) – as black women in particular are.
Pause for clarification: I am talking in black-and-white terms in this post not because all people of color are black people, and not because white people don’t have a whole slew of stereotypes ready to be foisted upon the bodies of other people of color, but because Serena Williams is black (and Kanye West is black, and Caster Semenya is black, and Michael Vick is black, and the President of the United States is black, and white people seem to be having a collective temper tantrum about black people right now). I do not at all mean to ignore or excuse the way that racism impacts other people of color or pretend that white people don’t engage in racism against people of color who are not black. I wanted to make that explicit because I think white people often think we don’t need to examine our racism beyond that which we perpetrate against black people (not that we examine that too much either); and I think we very often erase other people of color entirely.
The other thing I have been thinking about this morning, relative to all of this, is that on the occasions when someone even bothers forming an opinion that includes ethnicity in any way relative to my admittedly sometimes explosive expressions of emotion, it is to relate it to my being part Italian. I hear this a lot, actually, especially when the emotion being expressed is anger. (Probably not unrelatedly, I usually hear it from people who are not in any part Italian.) This is interesting to me for two reasons. One: it seems that despite my having a [bastardized] Eastern European last name and the pastiest skin ever seen on a person of Southern Italian/Sicilian heritage, people do immediately remember the Italian part the minute I take someone’s head off, and obviously that has to do with stereotypes about Italians, which maybe less obviously to some people (namely, people who have not read “Are Italians White?” which everyone should read) has to do with Italians historically (and, to a MUCH lesser degree, currently) being perceived as “dark” and other. So on the one hand this is kind of an insult, but certainly one that I can tolerate, because while I claim Italian-Americanness as a significant piece of my heritage and a significant influence on who I am, I am white (as are Italian Americans in general, including those with higher percentages of Italian in their blood – and don’t even get me started on how weird that whole thing is, anyway). And so I am a beneficiary of white privilege, period, and therefore in no real danger of measurable harm due to people clinging to lunkheaded notions of Italian hotheadedness. I mean, I’m not going to lose my job or be cracked upside the head by a cop because I am immediately perceived to be a threat because of my ethnicity. The worst thing that could happen to me is I spend a couple of minutes being irritated, but what else is new. (Also, as my blog’s name and header indicate, I’m clearly not all that concerned with whether people draw those lines. But matters of reclamation and performance – and the amusing backstory of my nom de plume – are also going to have to keep for another time.)
Second, though, and this was the newer of the realizations this morning, I suspect that this attribution of my flamboyance-in-anger to my ethnic heritage is one of those winky-nudgey ways that white people write each other passes for shit that we not only do not write passes for when POC do it, but for which we excoriate and pathologize them. Bear with me as I try to write through this (I am working, lately, on trying to go ahead and work through stuff instead of waiting until I deem it absolutely perfect before saying it – since I’m usually wrong about whether it’s perfect anyway). The tone in which these comments are usually made is kind of… head-patting. It says, “Aww, she can’t help it, she’s Italian!” (Let us set aside for another time the way this intersects with gender and how I believe this is harmful to all women and how I suspect it was specifically harmful to the more-Italian, newer-to-whiteness-and-America Sicilian women farther back in my genetic line.) Contrast that with the way that black anger is experienced and talked about by white people. You get the occasional hippie being condescending about that, too, but more often you hear a whole lot of biting, fearful, angry “these people” bullshit, right? (Think back to how most white parents talked about the LA riots in the 90s, and I bet most of the people reading this will understand the difference.) This isn’t to say that my expressions of anger are things for which I should be chided, rebuked, punished or sat down for a talking-to, and frankly, I dare you. My point is that we understand it when I throw a fit. And even if I threw that fit at an inappropriate time or place, the vast majority of people I know would go, “Yeah, well, the situation was fucked up, though,” and a couple of them would chuckle, pat me on the head, and go, “You’re so Italian.” I strongly doubt that if, for instance, a judge made an exceedingly stupid call about something I did, and I flipped out Serena-style (as I very likely would, by the way), people would be saying about me the shit they’re saying about her.
And for all I know, Serena Williams is as Italian as I am, actually. I mean, who the hell knows? I was no more born in Sicily than she was. But no one reaches into the specifics of Serena Williams’s ethnicity (or that of any other black person – we just perceive them as monolithically “black,” despite all we damn well know about how much sense that makes, or doesn’t) to find her an excuse, though. I get excused. The gift comes wrapped in condescension and sexism, with a little splash of leftover ethnic stereotyping, but I get the gift because all white people get that gift in some packaging or another. I think that’s worth examining.