Hipster Racism

I had to borrow my room-mates coffee this morning and I gotta say his 'fair trade', 'organic', 'fancy-packaged' stuff is much better then my vacuum packed old-man playing chess outside espresso.

Uh, you know which serves as a kind of introduction to the following links. Since it can be demonstrated that my room-mate is kinna a 'hipster' (though more like a hippie-ster? He plays bike polo and likes charcuteries, and believes in local agriculture and has designer dirty jeans instead of just plain dirty jeans). And I am a cheap Jew, who likes to pay less then 4 dollars for espresso.

But both of us, even if we try to deny it, are somewhere in the universe of hipster, not skinny-jean wearing but certainly downtown-living irony embracing, Flight of the Conchord watching etc...

Which is why this article on Hipster Racism hurts. I have noticed in myself a lot of the tropes that the author suggests are a mask for racism. As in "I am so funny, and so *aware* that I cannot possibly be a racist as I make this hilarious racist joke."

I started wanting to "push the envelope" because I thought a lack of self-insight had led to these awkward moments in multiracial group dynamics. I am thinking the various social justice meetings I used to go to when I was a well-meaning undergrad. At these meetings, humour about identity was pretty much out of bounds. So for example, a person of Asian descent might make a joke about their parents coming off a boat, from an unspecified place, and people would awkwardly laugh and then move along. As a 'hipster-racist in training' I thought at those times, you know if we were less racist then that dude could make all the jokes he wanted about his parents experiences of immigration and the audience would have to get over their discomfort and just laugh along.

Well, I think there was a brief golden moment where that happened. People got to laugh at their own experiences, including experiences that involved racialized identities or being a member of a racist society. We have a lot of 'othered' comedians to thank for that, like Margaret Cho and Dave Chappell for two examples among many.

Now I guess, as in all things the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and things like The Onion's recent spoof sale to the Chinese Company Yu Wan Mei Salvage Fishery Company, has been characterized as racism rather then effective satire. Or the bevy of "stuff_blank_ people like" sites which are really so deeply ironic that half the arguments in the comments section are about whether the sites are meant to offend the group being spoofed, or the un-named group(s) and identities doing the spoofing.

I think ownership is what makes hipster-racism, so ...uh... awkward and immature. Ownership being the idea that a person will only say what they feel confident they can take ownership of. So for example I will never speak with confidence about yachting. I don't know the first thing about it, also I have no links to the yachting community where-ever that is. But for some reason, the hipster POV makes it seem acceptable for people like myself to talk as if they can humorously express the irony of a post 9/11 Muslim experience.

I'd call it the globalization of identity, the mass-consumption of difference markers, maybe it's a form of 'identity shopping'. The basic premise seems to be, if I come from a background that (I believe) offers less fodder for humorous self-examination, if yacht club jokes are all I have, then I'll just borrow someone else's life, and pretend the reason I am doing it is because I am 'cosmopolitan' enough not to be a racist.

Lets use "stuff white people like" as an example. The longest argument I ever read in comments, dealt with whether the writers' were white or of a visible minority, because depending on the writer's origins, the site's function took on different meaning. If the writers were white - then according to the commentors, the purpose of the site was self-criticism, to 'unmask' the various creepy privileged things white people do all the live-long day and tease them for it.

If, as another commenter suggested, the site was written by non-white's then maybe it was a form of hate-speech against white people? Which led another commenter to claim that white people were indeed pretty hateful, and therefore even if the purpose of the posts were to incite hatred against white's it was *still* an anti-racist blog...Somehow from that thread, someone else suggested the site actually was intended to make brown people seem angrier and less tolerant then they actually are, and therefore the site is a well-disguised slam against people of colour and a valorization of all things white...

Complicated. And all this from a site that was supposed to be funny?

Here's my idea.

Instead of calling it Hipster-racism let's call it "difference-envy" and even if it doesn't seem like racism in the traditional sense, it kinda is. That sense of ownership of other people's experiences is an aspect of privilege, the belief that I can jump-ship on what I have gone through in my own life and poke fun at somebody else's experience. Or failing that, I can make fun of my own privileged origins, and hope that by treating myself as though an accident of pigment has led to a uniform set of principles, I can {ahem} satirically-speaking, 'enjoy' the same depersonalization as people born with pigmentation that historically has led to assumptions of specific and uniform cultural experiences. My difference envy is an attempt to assume difference for myself, thereby erasing the very real differences between people of color and people of *no colour* to wit, living with racism.

(I know that one was tough to write and probably makes no sense, read it a few times and let me know what you think)

I have been wondering for a while what the end-game to ironic racism will be. I worry that rather then learning how to learn (fuck that's awkward but that is exactly what I mean) from a human tendency to view other cultures with a weird combination of wonderment and suspicion (at the outset, though by nor means permanently) the end-game of ironic racism, will be be covering-up the reality of people's racialized experiences with humorous pastiche, to avoid the more difficult task of admitting that there are aspects of difference that make people uncomfortable, and that we definitely need to learn from.