speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

Taking Sides
can't think of a more ultimate vulnerability for women. I'm somewhat
surprised that women feel so strongly about participating in a
men's event, rather than attempting to come up with an event that
addresses women's needs." 17
If neutrality is willful blindness and individual choice is always
constrained, the responsibilities of power cannot be fulfilled by
simple deference to the oppressed. Contrary to Arnold Toynbee's
naive faith, they are not always morally superior. Quite the contrary,
subordinate people typically express their powerlessness by directing
resentment away from the dominant, who are too remote or
frightening, to more vulnerable targets: rural Southern whites and
urban ethnics at African Americans, African Americans at Jews and
now Koreans, West European workers at immigrants, East Africans at
East Indians, Southeast Asians at Chinese. Middle class women cope
with the patriarchal division of labour by hiring working class
women, often women of colour, as housekeepers, thereby reproducing
class and racial inequality. Black men respond to racial
subordination by oppressing black women in popular music, blaxploitation
films, and of course sexual and domestic behaviour. Black
women feel doubly degraded when black men enjoy white female
pornography—or even form romantic relationships with white
women. 18 And people of colour are not immune to homophobia.
When the GLC "Positive Images" campaign sought to increase
respect for gays and lesbians in schools in 1987, a spokesman for the
Haringey Black Pressure Group on Education retorted that "homosexuality
is something that has been introduced into our culture by
Europeans; it is an unnatural set of acts that tend toward genocide."
Some members joined with the neo-fascist New Patriotic Movement
under the banner "Gays=Aids=Death." 19
Some oppressed not only participate in the subordination of others
but also are complicit in their own, internalising and legitimating the
dominant rationalisations for privilege. If women did not support
Phyllis Schlafly's patriarchy the feminist movement would have
made greater progress. 20 Clarence Thomas's racial self-hatred and
meritocratic apologetics echo those of other racial minorities who
have made it. 21 Sometimes betrayal reflects overwhelming pressure.
After joining the Derbyshire police at 19, Shaun hid his homosexuality
for 17 years: "I called it the canteen culture. Heavy drinking,
womanising and doing all the things that heterosexual males are
expected to do." He married at 24, fathered two children, and
maintained the family facade, although his wife knew he was gay.
For seven years he was a vice squad detective, often entrapping
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