“It is commonplace in this age of “reverse discrimination” to believe, for example, that blacks are the least reliable witnesses as to what actually happens to them in a racist society, since their view is always already tainted by the very fact of their blackness and their “oversensitivity” to such issues. Similar claims have been made about women and issues of sexual harassment, for example. Indeed, over dinner earlier this summer on my back deck, a white gay male friend whom I have known over my five years in Chicago queried me as to whether I thought that my ready investment in seeing race at work meant that I might see it functioning in places where it might not actually be significantly present. I marveled at the ease with which my friend jumped to the ready possibility or conclusion that my “obsession” with race might produce a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. His disinclination to believe me was amazing.
But his ability to call up so readily the rhetorical form that his disbelief assumed signaled to me that something in our societal ways of thinking about black people had not only brought us to a place where this gesture was commonplace, but also where the logic undergirding it could be viewed as neither slanderous nor offensive. Such logic operates on an implied gross fundamental fallacy, of course. That is, if the people who are the most obvious victims of particular forms of discrimination (in this case racism) are also the most readily disqualified as witnesses to those same forms of discrimination, then according to such logic only those people who are not victimized by racism (i.e., whites) are the ones who are, indeed, the best and most reliable witnesses and judges to what actually happens to those racial “others” in our society. So what we have effectively done is to rhetorically de-authorize or de-legitimize the victims of discrimination in our society from ever being able to speak authoritatively about their own experiences of discrimination.”
- Dwight A. McBride (via wretchedoftheearth)
But his ability to call up so readily the rhetorical form that his disbelief assumed signaled to me that something in our societal ways of thinking about black people had not only brought us to a place where this gesture was commonplace, but also where the logic undergirding it could be viewed as neither slanderous nor offensive. Such logic operates on an implied gross fundamental fallacy, of course. That is, if the people who are the most obvious victims of particular forms of discrimination (in this case racism) are also the most readily disqualified as witnesses to those same forms of discrimination, then according to such logic only those people who are not victimized by racism (i.e., whites) are the ones who are, indeed, the best and most reliable witnesses and judges to what actually happens to those racial “others” in our society. So what we have effectively done is to rhetorically de-authorize or de-legitimize the victims of discrimination in our society from ever being able to speak authoritatively about their own experiences of discrimination.”
- Dwight A. McBride (via wretchedoftheearth)