*dies of the stupid*

[alixtii]

Oh yes, (systemic) sexism and racism don't exist outside the United States at all, do they? Feminism is simply just a part of some American agenda of cultural imperialism, and everyone knows that Western Europe is a utopia when it comes to gender and race issues. (Apparently everything I've read in the New York Times--not to mention The Guardian--is a big fat lie. Who knew?)

Really, how does one respond to that?

Comments

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

Oh god, I just read that. I *hate* it when the cultural difference card comes out like that! I am restraining myself from posting there right now to say 'no honey, I'm British and I live in American and guess what? Sexism at play in both cultures. And racism too' because clearly other people have already said that to her and she isn't paying attention! The trouble with that argument is that it's impossible for an average American to respond to; if they're conscious of the privilege that their belonging to the hegemonic culture gives them, they have to cede the point even when it shouldn't be ceded.

The longer I live in the US and study systems of oppression intensely, the less I trust my knee-jerk desires to relegate race and gender oppression to American culture. It is more blatant here in some ways, and it has a different history, certainly; but the analyses that have developed from the histories and social movements around race and gender in America show up some pretty major similarities when they are applied to British culture. Having just spent two weeks with my British family in the US, I seemed to find myself discussing racism a lot (when they would notice the racialized class dynamics in who the service workers they were interacting with were, for example) and pointing out frequently that it really wasn't as different as all that back home, albeit with different sets of immigrants etc. Though as I've said to you before, for us class is often quite separate from race and has its own enormous esoteric superstructures.

Something else that came up constantly on my trip was my aunt's continuing experiences of sexism in the high-level business world which she occupies... Yes, in the UK.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

if they're conscious of the privilege that their belonging to the hegemonic culture gives them, they have to cede the point even when it shouldn't be ceded.

Exactly! I mean, I know that the UK isn't a feminist paradise, but despite having lived there as a student for four months the only specific criticisms I can knowledgeably make would still be at way too high a level of abstraction (they have segregated bathrooms!) for them to be taken seriously. And so the entire conversation is effectively shut down.

Plus I can recognize the signs of denial-of-systemic-injustice well enough--I've seen it in plenty enough of Americans--to know when that is what is going on and not an actual cultural difference, even if I knew absolutely nothing about British culture.

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

I can recognize the signs of denial-of-systemic-injustice well enough
That's it exactly, isn't it? *sigh* And it makes it so hard to talk about the *actual* differences in construction of race, class, gender etc across cultures even when they seem quite similar on the surface, which is a very interesting topic.

Unrelatedly, I totally want to know where and when you were in the UK for four months! :)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Fall 2004 I lived in London in the West End (Gower Street, to be specific) as part of my study abroad.

Now, London's simply too cosmopolitan to really learn anything meaningful about its culture without, I don't know, joining a club or something (and I did spend a decent amount of my time exploring the city)--I learned more about British culture by watching British TV than anything else I did while I was there, I think.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Hi, fellow Brit here.

I've seen the cultural differences thing mentioned a lot as well, and I've used it myself because sometimes it feels as if the differences are more important than the similarities. I think most of the problem comes from, as you say, the overtness of the issue in the U.S. Not sexism so much, but definitely racism. All American discussion of race seems to concentrate on the physical appearance division between black and white and everything that follows from it, whereas in the UK it is all about cultural differences, accent (surprise surprise!) and is tangled up with class issues (surprise, surprise, surprise!) and appearance is only used as an initial visual marker in a few cases where it happens to apply. As such, the analysis of Americans can seem very wrong-headed when I try to apply it to my own world, which leaves me feeling excluded from the discussion. I was driven mad recently by an attempted discussion of racism where all the examples I tried to bring were dismissed because they did not strictly follow the American defined black/white divide, and attempts to renegotiate the terms for discussion were dismissed as racist in themselves. And if I am pushed into losing my temper (which let's face it, can happen in such discussions!) I may well start to dismiss everything a Yank says as based in their own ignorance of our culture. Yet as you say, many of the underlying structures are in fact held in common. For example, in terms of an analysis based on the historical experience of slavery, an American's analysis of how 'whites' feel about 'blacks' is obviously of very little relevance to Europeans, but their analysis of how black people of Caribbean origin feel about 'whites' may well be very pertinent indeed.