My favorite quote from Ahmed is on page 56: “Attending to the politics of hate allows us to address the question of how subjects and others become invested in norms such that their demise would be felt as a kind of living death.” This is one of the phenomena I noticed during the life I led before going back to school, and one of the topics I hoped to explore in my formal studies. I find her explanation a little hard to follow, but I think she makes at least a couple of points that are useful. One is that people tend to become emotionally invested in social structures and institutions that they (or perhaps their ancestors) created, so it is not only the threat of loss of economic or political power which drives the opposition to waves of immigrants or to any group whose presence threatens the established mode.
While one can analyze the psychological aspects of the
individual who performs a hateful act, such understanding is never to be used
to excuse the performance of that act. It
might be a predictable aspect of human nature that, when a pre-existing ratio
of demography or political power begins to transform, those who had been in the
majority are going to feel threatened.
They are not justified in acting on that emotion – hate is not a crime,
but certain acts that are indicative of hate are crimes. At this point, she
moves on to discuss the effects of hate on the objects of hate, and abandons
what, to me, would be equally interesting – any discussion of how this
predictable (normal) response to shifting population dynamics could be managed
in such a way as to minimize its likewise predictable effect of violence and
sickness.
As the Matsuda quote (p.58) points out, racist and hateful
acts have real effects on their objects – there are numerous studies which
support this assertion – therefore I am puzzled by the criticism leveled on the
following page, with which Ahmed concurs. Butler is saying that the effects of
hate speech/signs are not determined in advance, and I think she means that
reactions to hate speech vary between individuals, but I doubt Matsuda meant
that every person who becomes the object of a racist act will react in the same
way. I think the meaning of Matsuda’s assertion lies in statistically
demonstrable effects – not immutable physical laws. The participants in Kim’s
research are examples of how the effects of racism are differentially
distributed. Depending on individual sensitivity and the environment in which
they were raised, the effects of racism in the United States had different
effects on the adoptees.
The adoptive parents may have thought (and still think) that
they can, by their own “color-blindness” or by exposing their child to Korean
culture, that they can protect them from the difficulties of being an Asian
child in a white family, in a white community. I think the essential problem
here is that the parents do not really know what is going on out there. Unlike,
say, the African-American parent who has lived with racism and discrimination,
and so can offer their child counsel born out of experience, the white American
parent has never encountered what their child will inevitably encounter on the
faces and in the actions of their schoolmates, co-workers, and chance public meetings.
During my master’s research on men in the 19-25 age range, I
interviewed a well-to-do white woman who worked for the government in the area
where I conducted my research. I was interviewing her for background
information on the history of city policies, school environments, et cetera.
She had two adopted a children, a girl of Latin descent, and an African-American
boy who happened to be in the age range I was studying. I was struck by the
optimism of her view, which we discussed in the interview, on where race
relations stood in the community. She wanted her son to participate in my
research, but he was not eager and ethical concerns would have complicated such
participation. However, I had opportunity to observe him with his peers at the
skate park, and I also interviewed leaders in the Black community there. I do
not think that everything was as copacetic as the well-to-do white mother
wanted to believe.
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