Today's Keyboard Smash
Feb. 6th, 2021 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksI'm going to post this here, rather than on tumblr where the drama discussion is actually taking place, because I don't feel like taking my digital life in my hands. Wading into any discussion over there feels like bringing a knife to a gunfight. But it's been on my mind and I want to say something.
There's been a lot of back and forth about the current TikTok trend reviving interest in sea shanties. It's kicked off both another culture war and a reintroduction of the concept of filk to the popular consciousness.
POC have been pointing out the racist and imperialist historical context from which the songs originally sprang. The various trading companies plundered other people's homelands for resources, including but not limited to the people themselves as slaves. The romanticism of the sea et al is insufficient to overcome that reality.
History buffs have pointed out, in turn, that these songs were work songs alluding to the abusive practices of the companies carrying out the racist/imperialist work of plundering. Or, more accurately, profiting off some other poor bastard carrying out the work.
And I realized something: we on the hellsite tumblr dot com have successfully reproduced amongst ourselves exactly the dynamic desired by companies, governments, and other structures of power through history. To whit, that oppressed POC and poor working whites should be pitted against each other at all costs, because said power structures would be absolutely fucked if we ever got together and started cooperating.
Poor whites are told, "hey, at least you're better than [insert marginalized/exploited racial group]." The "nice" version of this is the white supremacy that says you'll always be better than those people, stick to your own kind, preserve your culture, etc etc. The more hostile (to the white people themselves) version is "at least we don't treat you like those other ones, look grateful and keep your mouth shut." In any case, there is someone to look down on and oppress even worse than you are, so you never quite get resentful enough to realize who is oppressing both of you.
POC, meanwhile, get so shit on by poor whites, they obviously have no reason to see them as potential allies. All of their struggles for liberation end up being conducted by them alone. White allies would have access to resources they don't, not to mention just the added strength of numbers, but white people refuse to show up to the party.
In a sense, it's only fitting we have a revival of these historical conflicts and narratives at this time. We just spent a year watching the BLM movement continue to struggle against not just the oppressive power structures themselves, but also against the indifference and disapproval of reasonably comfortable white people. White people who don't like marches, protests, riots, vandalism, shouting, or anything else than even remotely inconveniences or distresses them. No matter how much more important and urgent the topic of those protests might be, huge swathes of average white people will insist the uproar is the problem. They'll ring their hands more over broken windows than over dead (black) bodies.
Meanwhile, we've watched major corporations and billionaire CEOs rake in money by forcing employees to work during a pandemic without adequate safety measures. Companies and individuals both have seen massive increases to their worth even as millions needed unemployment benefits to survive. Wealth inequality is at staggering levels. People with the lowest paying jobs have been required to keep working to meet basic survival needs, even if their employers did not or could not provide PPE or structural changes to keep them safe. Hollow offers of support made the nightly news for months on end, as citizens in lockdown applauded and sang for "essential workers," yet no additional material support, like better pay or benefits, manifested. Just bread and circuses, really.
(A sidebar here to note that many of those essential workers have been POC themselves, thus hit by a glorious one-two punch.)
Never would there be a better moment to band together against our shared enemies. Instead, we're picking fights about the moral implications of liking old songs as sung by kids in their bedroom for a virtual audience on an app. It manages to be both historically important and absurdly petty at the same time.
Full disclosure: I'm personally pleased to see this interest in shanties and other related song forms, having loved "pirate songs" since I was a teen. People are rediscovering the concept of filk in general and the joys of scifi filk in particular. People are suddenly interested in reviving folk music traditions for the age of Amazon warehouses and sweatshops, because it turns out our forebearers in industrial labor were on to something. I want to see us harnessing this art form for a new generation. I don't think doing so inherently glorifies or replicates the exploitation of non-white populations that was baked into the original context of some of the songs. So I'm not without a dog in this fight. I'm also white, so I'm hardly the authority on what does or does not qualify as art too tainted by racism to be recovered/reclaimed.
But more than anything, I want to see us, for goddamn once, not shit all over the people with whom we have common cause. To see us choose to do something better and more useful than fall all over ourselves in our eagerness to tear down the other poor bastards trying to get by under the same system screwing us over. To see radical solidarity, to see voices literally raised together, in defiance of powers that are perfectly happy to crush all of us under the same boot.
There's been a lot of back and forth about the current TikTok trend reviving interest in sea shanties. It's kicked off both another culture war and a reintroduction of the concept of filk to the popular consciousness.
POC have been pointing out the racist and imperialist historical context from which the songs originally sprang. The various trading companies plundered other people's homelands for resources, including but not limited to the people themselves as slaves. The romanticism of the sea et al is insufficient to overcome that reality.
History buffs have pointed out, in turn, that these songs were work songs alluding to the abusive practices of the companies carrying out the racist/imperialist work of plundering. Or, more accurately, profiting off some other poor bastard carrying out the work.
And I realized something: we on the hellsite tumblr dot com have successfully reproduced amongst ourselves exactly the dynamic desired by companies, governments, and other structures of power through history. To whit, that oppressed POC and poor working whites should be pitted against each other at all costs, because said power structures would be absolutely fucked if we ever got together and started cooperating.
Poor whites are told, "hey, at least you're better than [insert marginalized/exploited racial group]." The "nice" version of this is the white supremacy that says you'll always be better than those people, stick to your own kind, preserve your culture, etc etc. The more hostile (to the white people themselves) version is "at least we don't treat you like those other ones, look grateful and keep your mouth shut." In any case, there is someone to look down on and oppress even worse than you are, so you never quite get resentful enough to realize who is oppressing both of you.
POC, meanwhile, get so shit on by poor whites, they obviously have no reason to see them as potential allies. All of their struggles for liberation end up being conducted by them alone. White allies would have access to resources they don't, not to mention just the added strength of numbers, but white people refuse to show up to the party.
In a sense, it's only fitting we have a revival of these historical conflicts and narratives at this time. We just spent a year watching the BLM movement continue to struggle against not just the oppressive power structures themselves, but also against the indifference and disapproval of reasonably comfortable white people. White people who don't like marches, protests, riots, vandalism, shouting, or anything else than even remotely inconveniences or distresses them. No matter how much more important and urgent the topic of those protests might be, huge swathes of average white people will insist the uproar is the problem. They'll ring their hands more over broken windows than over dead (black) bodies.
Meanwhile, we've watched major corporations and billionaire CEOs rake in money by forcing employees to work during a pandemic without adequate safety measures. Companies and individuals both have seen massive increases to their worth even as millions needed unemployment benefits to survive. Wealth inequality is at staggering levels. People with the lowest paying jobs have been required to keep working to meet basic survival needs, even if their employers did not or could not provide PPE or structural changes to keep them safe. Hollow offers of support made the nightly news for months on end, as citizens in lockdown applauded and sang for "essential workers," yet no additional material support, like better pay or benefits, manifested. Just bread and circuses, really.
(A sidebar here to note that many of those essential workers have been POC themselves, thus hit by a glorious one-two punch.)
Never would there be a better moment to band together against our shared enemies. Instead, we're picking fights about the moral implications of liking old songs as sung by kids in their bedroom for a virtual audience on an app. It manages to be both historically important and absurdly petty at the same time.
Full disclosure: I'm personally pleased to see this interest in shanties and other related song forms, having loved "pirate songs" since I was a teen. People are rediscovering the concept of filk in general and the joys of scifi filk in particular. People are suddenly interested in reviving folk music traditions for the age of Amazon warehouses and sweatshops, because it turns out our forebearers in industrial labor were on to something. I want to see us harnessing this art form for a new generation. I don't think doing so inherently glorifies or replicates the exploitation of non-white populations that was baked into the original context of some of the songs. So I'm not without a dog in this fight. I'm also white, so I'm hardly the authority on what does or does not qualify as art too tainted by racism to be recovered/reclaimed.
But more than anything, I want to see us, for goddamn once, not shit all over the people with whom we have common cause. To see us choose to do something better and more useful than fall all over ourselves in our eagerness to tear down the other poor bastards trying to get by under the same system screwing us over. To see radical solidarity, to see voices literally raised together, in defiance of powers that are perfectly happy to crush all of us under the same boot.
