I spent my high school years much like Rachel Berry. I was in every choir I could get my hands on, I pretty much get every solo handed to me, I even competed solo in the local music festival. I will never forget being on stage during one of the mandatory competitive groups and terribly botching a jump from E to G sharp. It was on a whole note to be sustained over 2 bars, it was a naked note, and my voice cracked. My E was flawless and beautiful, my G sounded like it went through a wood chipper for the first 3 counts.
Today, my voice cracked. I wrote a post that came from a very, VERY personal and extremely painful place. It pissed people off. It came off a pretty decent post. I went from E to G sharp. It went over like a note through a wood chipper.
Much like my Rachel Berry moment, I was flummoxed. I don’t understand where it went wrong, I’ve rehearsed and rehearsed for hours, tooling around with the formula, adding nuances and embellishments. It was to be my ode to my inner pain. It was going to be the beginnings of something much greater, since I got the idea that I should rake every Province over the coals (UnFriendly Manitoba was to be my Requiem Mass). I was going to make my inner bitterness and make it fancy. You know what makes blogging fancy? Being a bitch.
From E to G sharp.
As I sat here on the verge of tears wondering why some people just didn’t get it, and didn’t understand exactly what it was like growing up in a massive shadow, I simply remembered what happened years before. The girl who won that grouping? She sang the song straight. Simple and beautiful. She didn’t need to embellish, to add a trill or lay the vibrato on thick. It was simple. Instead of making things more complicated than they needed to be, she rehearsed the song as is and concentrated on making it a quality piece.
I focused on being provocative, using hyperbole, and an attempt at dark humor when I could have just sang it straight. The thing is? Much like many years ago, it’s done. I own it. Much like that mistake, I will not run from it or try to hide it. I own my words. Should I have left the scathing commentary at home and just exercised my point? Yes. The visual use of kitten blood could have waited for another post. Could I have gone without the generalizations just so I could use exaggeration? Yes. I can apologize for that. Did I have a moment of “what the fuck, if I had to apologize for every offensive thing I ever said I’d never speak or write”? Hell yes. Did that moment follow shortly with “hey, did you maybe cross the line a bit”? Yup. In my efforts to be edgy, I crossed lines and I can apologize for that as well. But it’s there for the world to see and judge. I’m not going to hide it now, because if I ever feel the need to be a bitch for the sake of being bitchy, I can just look at it and remember to keep on task and not drink so much Haterade before I write.
I can apologize to high heaven on the inappropriate things I said, but I cannot apologize for the anger behind it. I will never, EVER apologize for how small the issue made me feel in life. I will never apologize for feeling bitter about just how much this has hurt and affected my life. I can’t apologize for the resentment I feel towards the topic. I won’t apologize for lashing out after years of being subjected to the various humiliations I have gone through. This is a joke to some of you, this is real to me. Just because you never hear it doesn’t mean it never happens. It happened, it still happens in my life and it really fucking hurts. I will never apologize for feeling hurt by this.
I still got second place that day, because I kept going. I won the following year because I sang it straight and didn’t try to hard to be awesome. Some pieces still needed embellishment, but I learned to keep things simple when they needed to be. Much like then, it’s the same lesson now. I can’t promise that everything I write will be without controversy and/or dissent, but in the future I will do without the extras when they don’t need to be there. I tried too hard and I failed in the delivery.
My hope is that those who noticed my fateful G sharp will at least see past the wood chipper noise now, as I will be moving on from my errors.
Marie Anelle, I’m a bit afraid to comment on that other post now, so can I just ask a basic question here?
Do you read in French? Because I’ve heard that Acadian French is quite different from normal French and I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be very difficult when even conjugations and things are different (Wikipedia says you say ‘j’avions’ instead of ‘j’avais’ for example?). And if you do – do you find that reading ‘standard’ French changes the way *you* speak?
And if you don’t, do you find that your range of expression is limited by speaking a language you don’t really read or write? I saw something about the Amish once on German TV and they were speaking German, but none of them could read or write it, so they ended up having a very strange and limited vocabulary, as you can imagine, although I suppose there will have been nuances to it that I, as a standard-German speaker, was not tuned into.
Endora, I do speak French and it most definitely is Chiac dialect. My reading of French is starting to go downhill a bit and it can be challenging to listen or read “proper” French. It hasn’t changed the way I speak and I feel quite funny speaking properly!
Count me among those afraid to comment on the other post, so may I also ask a question? Are Acadians and Quebecois considered different races? I was under the impression most were descended from the French.
Thanks so much — I’m 1/4 Canadian, in my case, from BC.
That’s interesting, thanks for satisfying my curiosity.
One more question – if French is your native language but English the one you usually read and write in, which one do you think you can express yourself best in?
(Excuse the barrage of questions, I am a language geek).
Acadians and Quebecers are the same race, just different cultures.
Endora, surprisingly enough, I can express myself in English better.
Thank you. And thank you for writing that other piece.
Since *headesk* is rightly not considered a thoughtful comment, I will write an actual comment to this post.
I have trouble feeling compassion for someone who feels misunderstood because people called her post racist, hateful and xenophobic. If such a hateful and racist post had been written about any other group or population, nobody would have been thanking the author for it. But because this is a complex issue that few people here can understand (because they haven’t lived the day to day of it), they cannot see the racism or hate or xenophobia; and people who see it are thought to be hysterical and mean.
I don’t think that anybody believes that your actual experiences or anger are a joke. They’re not. But I think that some people wondered if your post was a joke (I myself first thought that the blog had been hacked) because seeing such a racist and xenophobic post on a feminist blog is, to say the least, surprising. When I see people talk this way on, say, CBC’s news site, I just point and laugh then feel sad. But I do expect feminist blogs to be places free of racism, hatred and xenophobia (and classism, colonialism, homophobia, etc.). I wish you had been able to talk about your anger and frustration without shitting on another minority group. I would have welcomed such a post. Nobody has to apologize for her anger or for being a bitch, especially not on a feminist blog, but racism, xenophobia and hatred have to be recognized, which you’ve repeatedly failed to do.
See this paragraph here? “I can apologize to high heaven on the inappropriate things I said, but I cannot apologize for the anger behind it. I will never, EVER apologize for how small the issue made me feel in life. I will never apologize for feeling bitter about just how much this has hurt and affected my life. I can’t apologize for the resentment I feel towards the topic. I won’t apologize for lashing out after years of being subjected to the various humiliations I have gone through. This is a joke to some of you, this is real to me. Just because you never hear it doesn’t mean it never happens. It happened, it still happens in my life and it really fucking hurts. I will never apologize for feeling hurt by this.”
I could have written the very same thing about my experiences with Anglophones, both in Québec and in Canada. And I could write the same thing about my reactions to your post. Because don’t kid yourself, you may position yourself as a member of a minority group, and you are in part, but your speech is that of the dominant/majority group.
The funny thing is that I wouldn’t even call myself a separatist. And I could have said many things about some Québécois-es hostility towards immigrants, being a Francophone with a Polish last name. Or what’s it’s like to navigate between dominant and minority cultures. But your post killed all possibility of dialogue, and it is really a shame.
@JetGirl – I had the same question.
@Marie Anelle – Thank you again for writing your other entry of today, and indeed for the allegory in this one as well.
@gen: I get where you’re coming from, and I take your point that “I wish you had been able to talk about your anger and frustration without shitting on another minority group. I would have welcomed such a post.” So noted.
But a few points you make really bug me:
Because don’t kid yourself, you may position yourself as a member of a minority group, and you are in part, but your speech is that of the dominant/majority group.
Position herself? “You are in part?” Since when do you personally get to determine whether someone is a member of a minority group? The fact that you as a Quebecois are telling Marie Anelle, an Acadian, that she doesn’t have the right to self-identify as part of a minority group or isn’t one according to you is outrageous. That on top of the fact that you say her speech is unacceptable to you because it’s too “dominant” strikes me as exactly the kind of behavior that inspired the original post.
But your post killed all possibility of dialogue, and it is really a shame.
Actually, a whole bunch of folks have been having a dialogue on this issue in the comments thread. The fact that you personally choose not to does not mean dialogue is therefore impossible (although for someone who believes dialogue to be totally killed dead, you seem to have an awful lot to say.)
Gen, why do you keep calling Marie Anelle’s post racist? As a USian, I’m used to that being a very loaded word. Do Canadians use it differently? And if you consider Acadians and Quebecois different races, even though they are both French originally, then where do First Nations people fit in? And immigrants from Asia and Africa?
Or is this a language thing? What is the French word for racist?
Marie Anelle,
One reason I love Harpyness is the posts dealing with personal viewpoints. Looks like this post set some people off. We’ll live and move on. Hope to see more posts from you in the near future .
Well, I wouldn’t call what I’m doing here a dialogue, and certainly not with Marie Anelle. I do have a lot to say, but only a few people are talking about the racism and hatred issue, and Marie Anelle has not responded. Others are thanking her about her post, and asking her questions about Québec politics, as if she is qualified to answer such questions. If she wanted to write about her Acadian culture, she should have done so. Again, I would have loved to have read about that, since I’m interested in the lives and experiences of other Francophones in Canada. But I cannot overlook the racism and hate in her post.
She is part of a minority group, I don’t deny that. How could I? But she is also part of the dominant/majority group in her adoption of its speech, its language (English) and its bashing of Québec as another minority group. French speaking Québec is also both a minority group (with regards to English speaking Canada AND Québec) and a majority group (with regards to immigrants). Being part of BOTH a minority group and a dominant group is far from being unheard of and is something that has been explored by feminists with regards to racism, classism, colonialism, homophobia, etc.
“That on top of the fact that you say her speech is unacceptable to you because it’s too “dominant” strikes me as exactly the kind of behavior that inspired the original post.”
I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by this.
@JetGirl: I don’t consider Québécois-es and Acadians to be different races, because I think that there is only one race: the human race. As such, the concept of race is meaningless in French as applied to humans, and is not used in serious social science (I’m a sociologist, doing my phd in sociology and feminist studies). But racism is still of course a very valid concept. Marie Anelle’s speech, even if she speaks from her minority position, is actually part of a long line of racist and hateful speech towards French-speaking people (in Québec and elsewhere in Canada) by the English speaking majority.
This whole thing is actually making my head implode a bit, because she is part of a French speaking minority and is bashing another French speaking minority, when the actual problem comes from the actions and politics of the English speaking majority. She is working against herself here: by bashing a French speaking minority using hateful speech from the dominant group, she is contributing to the continuing hostility towards francophones in all of Canada. Kind of like when women bash each other when the actual problem is patriarchy. Then what happens? The minority groups are bashing each other, and the dominant group can keep on oppressing them.
Racist in French is ‘raciste’ and it means the same thing as in English- this is not a language issue.
Based on the comments at Marie Anelle’s previous post as well as this, Gen’s reaction seems simply to be one of someone refusing to admit their own privilege. Yes it is confronting to see one’s own group cast as the oppressor, specially when you are yourself discriminated against/ a minority, but that discomfort does not negate the writer’s feelings or experience. Newsflash: just because you are a minority does not mean you or members of your community cannot be racist against other minorities.
Also, a generalized criticism of a group to which you happen to belong does not equal a personal attack on you. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the concept of not making it about you if it isn’t about you in the first place. If you do not personally fit the description given, then odds are she’s not talking about you and you can continue on your merry way safe in the knowledge that you are the very pinnacle of tolerant humanity.
Yes Marie Anelle’s original post went a bit overboard – it was a rant – and she’s apologized for that. I think it’s now incumbent on those who criticized her to take that apology in good faith. I certainly don’t see how she has shut the door on dialog.
@Nadia: “Based on the comments at Marie Anelle’s previous post as well as this, Gen’s reaction seems simply to be one of someone refusing to admit their own privilege.”
What a way to disqualify my own experiences and criticisms as a member of a minority group. I have heard Marie Anelle’s speech all my life. I have said that French speaking Québec is both an oppressed group and an oppressor. What I see here is Marie Anelle denying that she is also part of the dominant group. I get that she is a blogger here so she has the upper hand, and people believe her point of view, and disqualify others. And I’m only a commentator, and a new one at that, so I’m the one who refuses to “admit her own privilege”. I would have hoped that people could recognize racism and hate, but instead they support the blogger who tells another minority group to eat shit and disqualify a commentator who points racism and hate. Even if you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
“Also, a generalized criticism of a group to which you happen to belong does not equal a personal attack on you.”
She talks about Québec in her post. French speaking Québécois-es. Not some of them. All. No specific descriptions. I’m a Québécoise. How can I read her call French speaking Québécois-es “jerk”, “assholes”, etc., telling them, the whole population of French speaking Québec, to eat shit, and not take it as a personal attack? It is a personal attack. And one I’ve had to deal with many, many times. This is not just a rant that went a little overboard: this is hate speech.
The E to G sharp jump is a killer. You sang it naked for all the world to hear, and when it came out wrong you fixed it.
That took guts and so did this.
Keep hitting the hard notes.
@ jetgirl
racist has the same connotations here in québec/canada as in the states. we just add another dimension to it, and we use it when people bash either frenchies or anglos, even though they’re both mostly white majorities (not meaning to erase non-whites here, it’s just that the founding people of canada (brits & frenchies) were mostly white). i guess “linguism” would be a more appropriate/representative term for it, but i just made it up.
@ marie anelle:
i get that this is what you had/have to go through, and it’s hurtful to you. but to drag a whole province of 7+ million people in the mud, that is not trying to “embellish” your text. it’s not trying to be edgy or to have a dark humour. like either gen or stephc pointed out earlier, we get this kind of shit all the time for being quebecers. same shit as you, different province/culture. you wonder where you went wrong? you pissed on us to make yourself feel better. no wonder we got defensive.
@Nadia.
Please explain me : Acadiens do not live within Quebec, they live ASIDE Quebec, a thousand kilometer away, at least. How then can you consider acadiens to be a minority in relation to a Quebec majority ? How is Quebec dominating Acadiens ? Please explain me, someone.
For instance, Marie Anelle talks in her last post about her trip in the Prairies writing : ” You speak some French or mention that you’re first language is French, and almost without fail I would get “go back to Quèbec, you Frenchy!” “.
Who is oppressing here ? Surely not people from Quebec, because the enonciator here is telling her to “go back to Quebec”. Whose fault it is exactly that she suffers that ? The enonciator, or Quebecers ?
For Marie Anelle, it’s not the fault of the enonciator of hate speech. No, « it’s all because Quèbec can’t get over themselves and give ALL French Canadians a bad name » !
This is exactly what Gen said : blaming another (french-speaking) minority group from the oppression received by the common dominant group.
But again, please someone tell me : how do you see Quebec dominating acadians ? I don’t understand, I am sorry.
I find it really disheartening to see people thanking and congratulating her for these two posts.
So @katrinaholloway: Thank you. I’m not assuming that you agree with everything I’ve said, but thank you for seeing racism/linguism/ethnophobia in Marie Anelle’s post.
@StephC
“But again, please someone tell me : how do you see Quebec dominating acadians ? I don’t understand, I am sorry.”
See BeckySharper’s comment at 9:27, she pretty much articulated it perfectly.
Her comment has many point and I am not sure to what you are referring to.
Can you explain it in your own words (without hatred this time, please). I want to understand. Honnestly.
@StephC
From the very beginning, any time that I traveled to Quebec I was made fun of for being Acadian. No word of a lie, everything from my accent to my town was made fun of. I will always vividly remember when this one woman asked me why I talked funny, I proudly announced my heritage and she said “oh, so you’re not REALLY French”. This was not a rarity or a one off. Without fail, every time I visit that province, someone dissed me for being Acadian.
With my dad being in the Air Force and experiencing our forays into English Canada, shit got real for me because now I have people saying that being French Canadian is bad enough, and hey, I’m close enough to Quebec anyway so I was worthy of being mercilessly teased regardless. Because French = Quebec. Added was the “you’re a what? that’s not even real”….and yeah, it fucked me up.
So every time that I spoke, quite nicely I might add, about feeling marginalized in both directions, people would tell me that I have no right to feel marginalized, and my marginalization is not as important as what a French Quebecois goes through, etc. Basically, I was being told that it’s okay to be called names, teased, etc because it’s not as important as Quebec issues.
gen did it with his/her line “Because don’t kid yourself, you may position yourself as a member of a minority group, and you are in part”. That right there. I AM a member of a minority group, I didn’t position myself as such and it’s not “in part”. That was MAJOR erasure on his/her part, and that is definitely not the first time I’ve heard it.
Thank you for this post and the previous one. I’m a white male who was born in Romania and moved to Canada several years ago. I really appreciate a discussion on the issues in my country now and then. I also appreciate your courage in admitting you used the wrong tone but not the wrong opinion.
@Marie Anelle,
First, I would like to thank you for responding to my question and pointing out the real issue at stake here : « feeling marginalized in both directions ».
About your experience in Quebec, you said « any time that I traveled to Quebec I was made fun of for being Acadian ». I agree the experience you described is oppressive, and that the opressor here are some people of Quebec. I encourage you to explore more this experience. When did this happen ? Only when you were young, or also when you were adult ? In the city or in rural areas ? Did this happen in your interaction with public institution, with commercial institutions, or only with individuals ? But again, I believe you in your experience, and I agree that this is an oppressive experience.
But the next paragraph, you mention that when you were going in English Canada, « shit got real for me ». I am sorry, but you cannot put the responsability on Québec for this. The oppressor here, are people from English Canada you met, not quebecers, and not Quebec as an whole. It is really important that you make these distinctions, and not putting all the burden on Quebec people by saying « it’s all because Quebec can’t get over themselves ».
About Gen comment, I don’t think that she was trying to dismiss the fact that you are a member of a minority, but she rather insisted on the fact that you ALSO took the position of the majority/dominant in your post. Surely, you positionned yourself in your post as an acadian, a minority. But you also chose to use the language of our common dominant – english – to express yourself to an english-speaking audience. Moreover, you reproduced the dominant (and well documented) anti-quebec discourse to express your anger towards what is only partially due to quebec « behaviour ». So in your post, you were both a minority/dominated and a majority/dominant.
But again, this is not why I personnaly think your post was innaceptable. It was innaceptable because you threated an whole ethnic group as « assholes », describing us as « immigrant haters », qualifying our political culture as « jerk », telling us to « eat shit ». I maintain this is ethnophobic, hateful speech, and I wish you could have the humility to recognise it, which so far you didn’t.
Can I step in here and make an anecdotal analogy?
I have a friend–we’ll call her Danni–who was born and raised here in the Southern USA. Her family is pretty squarely middle-class, and from a young age she was encouraged to do her very best in school.
She happened to be black (of Caribbean descent).
I witnessed countless small moments (microaggressions in action, boo) where other dark-skinned people dismissed Danni for “acting white,” and light-skinned people treated her like some kind of marvelous performing pet for being “so different from others…like you.”
She had no problem pointing this out to people, but always felt pressured to do it politely, without anger, with a delicate “that statement made ME feel” brush.
Only with certain trusted people could Danni truly give vent to her anger and frustration, to shriek with rage about “black people” and “white people.” She said some excruciatingly vehement things in those rants, but we all knew that she didn’t mean us no matter what our melanin-affiliations. She needed a safe space to vent, to purge her system of the bitter sense of not-belonging before it broke her.
If you read Danni’s story again, and replace “black” with “French” and “white” with “Anglophone,” I think you end up with MarieAnelle’s story. Yes, she threw some really colorful shit out there. If I was Quebecois, or even Canadian, I’d probably be feeling pretty ragged right now. It’s not a pretty picture.
But ugly pictures deserve ugly words, and I think MarieAnelle thought this was a safe space for her to vent her frustrations, to lance the boil in her soul before it ate her alive.
Ok, not Canadian, pass as white well enough that I’m not a minority, but I think I do have relevant experience to address one of these points.
Surely, you positionned yourself in your post as an acadian, a minority. But you also chose to use the language of our common dominant – english – to express yourself to an english-speaking audience. Moreover, you reproduced the dominant (and well documented) anti-quebec discourse to express your anger towards what is only partially due to quebec « behaviour ». So in your post, you were both a minority/dominated and a majority/dominant.
That’s not how it works. A member of a minority lashing out at someone (even if they’re overgeneralizing) does not act as a member of the majority just because their own oppressor is also a minority group.
My grandmother was Japanese. She was daughter of a Japanese soldier during WWII. He served in Nanking. At the same time, her brother, who had immigrated to America as a young man, narrowly escaped being shipped to California and interred.
In occupied Nanking, Japanese soldiers raped, pillaged, murdered, and committed horrors. In America, Japanese citizens were treated like criminals – even the children. In different parts of the world, Japanese people were both oppressors and oppressed.
Fast forward ten years. Now in America, married to an American soldier, my grandmother cannot go to the base grocery store by herself, for fear of racism and mistreatment by the American majority. She also cannot go into Chinatown alone, for fear of mistreatment by another minority group. Are the Chinese minority group suddenly acting as part of the majority? No. Even if they use the same words, even if they use the same slurs – they are still a people who suffered terribly at the hands of the Japanese. Lashing out a Japanese woman, while wrong, doesn’t suddenly make them white. Doesn’t make them oppressors.
Now, that’s an extreme (though true) example. Being called a lobster isn’t the same as the Rape of Nanking. But the fact remains that you don’t get to insist that, by lashing out at someone who has hurt her, she’s suddenly acting as part of the majority. A minority group can lash out at another minority group, sometimes for good reasons without it being some sort of collaboration. You don’t get to erase her experience by insisting that her anger just makes her part of the great oppressor nation. Doing so is a convenient way to ignore her original complaint that she has experienced racism in Quebec. But it’s not fair.
@Marie Anelle:
Like StephC wrote at 11:12, I never said that you were not part of a minority group. My use of the term “position yourself” was not meant as an offense but refers to feminist standpoint theory. My English is apparently crappier than I thought, and I apologize if my use of words was not clear, but to me, “position yourself” is a synonym of “identify”. What I was trying to say in crappy English was exactly what StephC said: that you are both a member of a minority/oppressed group and a member of a dominant/oppressing group, and used the latter group’s racist and ethnophobic voice and words in your post to bash another minority ethnic group. (I’m a her by the way, my real name is Geneviève.)
@Verity Khat: I really appreciate your analogy here. I don’t think the parallels are valid though. In Danni’s case, she is between two ethnic groups, not really belonging to either, and expressing her rage at being excluded from both. In Marie Anelle’s case, she clearly belongs and identifies with one ethnic group (Acadians), while denying her also belonging to the dominant group (English speaking Canada), and using her position in that latter group to bash another minority ethnic group to which she doesn’t belong (French speaking Québec).
But leaving aside those considerations, no one here has tried to erase her experiences of racism in French speaking Québec. I don’t deny them, especially since I’ve witnessed racism in French speaking Québec and even experienced some from my very own ethnic group. I might not have validated her experiences to her satisfaction, but I don’t see why I should dig through the racism and ethnophobia of her post. *She* has refused to recognize the racism and ethnophobia in her post, thinking so little of French speaking Québec that she never considered or cared that some French speaking Québec feminists might read this blog and might also consider it a safe place.
I’m done commenting here. I haven’t slept, I’m exhausted and I have a damn thesis to concentrate on.
@Verity Khat
I agree with you that one can express her frustration that way in a private, trusted place. But this blog is not a private place, it is a public space and for this very reason, it is not innaceptable to express here such hate statements, even if they are rooted in some real frustrations.
@Av0gadro
You said : “a member of a minority lashing out at someone (even if they’re overgeneralizing) does not act as a member of the majority just because their own oppressor is also a minority group.”
That is not my point. I didn’t say she is a member of a majority because her oppressor is a minority (which is a somewhat essentialised perspective). My point is that she positions herself within the dominant group, because she reiterate the dominant anti-quebec discourse, and that aimed her hate speech towards an mainly english-speaking audience.
As for the analogy, I will give you another one, although not fairly appropriate also.
We are in the 1970s. Marie Anelle is a black in some part of United States. Gen and I, and others, are members of another black community in United States, more populous and more organized, a community very active in the Civic Right Movements.
When Marie Anelle comes to our community, she feels oppressed because some of us laughts at the way she speaks, and the fact that she prefers white music, instead of black music. In this moment, yes, she feels oppression by us.
But then, she goes to another « white » community and then, as she said « shit got real for me ». White people starts to yell her, and to tell her to go back home, home for the “white” is not that much her home, but out home, the community where the civic right movement is very strong.
And what she does ? She blames all this oppression, the one from our community ,but also the one from the white; she blames all this on our community only (“its all because Quebec). And more precisely she blames it to the Civic Right Movement that gives, in her perspective, all blacks a « bad names ». So she tells our community as a whole to fuck off, that we are assholes and the are childish do not get over with this historical oppression, and that we close minded because we “hate immigrants” without giving real facts to support this statements.
So tell me, who is to blame in this story ? The few people of our community who opressed her ? The personnal opression of some white people ? The structural domination of white society ? Or her, because of her reactionary and oppressive attitude toward our community as a whole, and more specifically, towards our stuggle for self-determination ?
Maybe all of this. But one thing I am sure is that, no matter what, she doesn’t have the right to call publicly our whole commmunity as « assholes » and she should apologize for this.
Just quick last note for the relationship between Quebec politics and feminism. Progressive feminism in Quebec have traditionnally been associated with the soveigntist movement or least, with the the struggle of self-determination of Quebec People. The women who started the “World March of Women” are now leaders of Quebec Solidaire, a leftist political party who consider themselves as explicitely feminist and ecologist. As I said before, their representative in Quebec Parliament is a feminist man from Iranian origin and was considered in recent polls, as the most popular politician in Quebec.
And one last thing : sorry for my bad english. Unlike Marie Anelle, my prefered language for expressing myself is French, not English, and I always feel to be in a inferior position when I speak english…
So, I think I am also done with this debate.
American folk who are making analogies in this thread – I think that the experience of language based political repression is different in significant ways, most of all in that language in a very immediate and direct way puts up barriers of very elementary understanding. So I think in some sense they are fundamentally not apt, here.
Also, I’ll post about my whole view on Quebec sometime, but I did want to repeat, I think thre is a lot of information missing from this discussion.
@StephC: Who says that a public place can’t be a safe place? We DO all come together in these spaces to speak about our frustration at being marginalized as women, as queers, as trans, as members of ethnic groups, as nationalities. Yes, we should call each other on -ist language, as many of you have done in this case. But the problem at hand should still be discussed, otherwise…wait for it…it’s being marginalized again. We can piss each other off and still talk about it, right?
Mods? Am I off-base here? *IS* this space supposed to be public AND safe?
@Michelle: Eh, I didn’t think it would be a perfect fit, but language barriers and racial identity are kind of a wibbly-wobbly-hinky-pinky mess in this country, so that was as close as I could understand it.
@Verity Khat
Do you consider calling an whole ethnic group as “assholes”, “immigrant haters” and “shitty people” to be hate speech, yes or no ?
I think the issue of language here — the language Marie Anelle writes in, the languages she speaks, the languages commenters write in and speak, etc. — is incredibly important.
To preface, I’m white and a U.S.er, but I also live in Texas, incredibly close to the U.S./Mexican border. I speak English fluently and various versions of Spanish semi-fluently.
Language politics are a daily reality here. The language of the oppressor, who can use which language and why, how choosing one language to express beliefs/opinions — especially about oppression — is almost always meant to be or interpreted as a pointed, political statement.
Gloria Anzaldúa speaks to this in many of her amazing works, especially in Borderlands/La Frontera. It’s long, but I wanted to include a section here because it’s so powerful and I’m sensing related themes in this conversation about Acadians and Québécois:
“Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor Spanish. It is illegitimate, a bastard language. And because we internalize how our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences against each other. . . .
“In childhood we are told that our language is wrong. Repeated attacks on our native language diminish our sense of self. The attacks continue throughout our lives. . . .
“If a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my language, she also has a low estimation of me. . . .
“Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity–I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.
“I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue–my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence” (80-81).
I’m not trying to derail here; I just think Anzaldúa’s words get to the heart of linguistic identity, which also seems to be, if not the heart of Marie Anelle’s original post, at least the heart of the continuing discussion on oppression and minority positionality.
What I understood MA articulating was that as a member of a minority she has been oppressed by both Francophone and Anglophone Canadians – who are respectively a minority and the majority group. Both oppressed, and to my mind it doesn’t matter where or at what age that MA had her “aha” moment. It remains that as an Acadian that MA has been oppressed, and it doesn’t matter by which group (whether minority or majority).
Minority groups can oppress minority groups. This doesn’t mean that if a person from a minority group articulates a sentiment from a majority group that it means that they become part of or position themsevles as part the majority because of that thought.
To my mind that negates any experiences that a minority group member may have of a different minority group, who has had negative, and dare I say it, assholey experiences from interacting with that minority group. Just because those sentiments may line up with what has been expressed by the majority in no means that a minority group becomes part of the majority.
Btw, doesn’t hate speech also have to involve inciting violence, and prejudicial action?
I don’t believe that what MA has written does that. She has put out in the public domain her experiences of Francophone and Anglophone Canada, as an Acadian. MA is not inciting violence or prejudicial activity against either.
See the comments on her previous post for my argument about hate speech.
@gen
I trashed your last comment accusing me of being dishonest because of where I currently live because it was a piece of total bullshit.
I ended up here because my father was in the Air Force, YOU do NOT get to erase MY identity because you pulled the FEW tidbits about my life that I chose to post.
Thanks for proving my point though.
I see that you’ve also trashed several other comments that tried to show the racism and hate in your post.
By trashing my last comment and saying in public that it was a piece of total bullshit, you’ve silenced me and my accusations. And people who read this post won’t be able to make up their own minds and will have to take your word for it. But don’t worry, from what I’ve seen here, they’ll believe you.
And no, in the end, I am not in a position to censor or silence you. You are a blogger on a major feminist blog, and you can trash my comments as you please and people will only hear what you want them to hear. You, though, are in a position to silence me, and you have.
So, thank *you* for proving my *point* about the racism and silencing in your posts and on this blog. Unfortunately, you will silence this comment too.
Y’know gen, if I was all for silencing what people had to say, I wouldn’t have let StephC’s comments stand or the others who have felt the same way.
You have minimized what I have gone through, you have co-opted my experience in one of your comments here (that I have let stand), and you slammed me for my current geography and are now wrapping it up in a “I bet you won’t post this” derail tactic. So no, you haven’t really proved anything.
Either flounce like you said you would, or keep it up, I don’t care. But I WILL get rid of comments that are just a derail.
Also keep in mind that I am not the only one moderating around here and the only comments I’ve deleted so far are two of gen’s comments.
So if anyone else has an issue about their comments being in good standing, remember that I’m not the only one here.
Saying that you will trash my comment is not a derail tactic when I say it in response to your trashing my comments. What it is is not trusting that I will be heard and thinking that I’m writing a comment that is going to be trashed anyway so why bother.
That being said, I’ll be flouncin’ out of here. As I said in my trashed comment: “And now, goodbye harpies and others here. It was fun and instructive until it got all racist and silencing.”