I tend to skip any news story that has the word ‘hipster’ in the title, thinking that it will deal with some trivial and ephemeral social trend that I am not part of nor wish to be part of and that will have disappeared by the time I learn what it is by the process of news osmosis. What I basically knew about the word ‘hipster’ was that it was used pejoratively against people who tried to differentiate themselves from their peers by adopting some lifestyle that was supposedly ironic and avant garde but could just as easily be described as pretentious.
But the term ‘hipster racism’ suggested something more significant and so I clicked on to this article by Arwa Madhawi titled Is Lena Dunham’s ‘hipster racism’ just old-fashioned prejudice? to see what it was about. It led with a story about Dunham’s defense of a writer on her show who had been accused of raping a 17-year old. The accuser is a person of color and Dunham was seen as following the trend of believing the charges brought by wealthy white women while doubting the stories of others.
Dunham’s defence of Miller (for which she has now apologized) caused an immediate backlash and sparked calls for women of colour to “divest” from Dunham. In a statement which went viral, the writer Zinzi Clemmons talked about how, as a student at Brown University, she’d known a lot of people who’d moved in the same circles as friends of Dunham. Wealthy, well-educated liberals, with parents who were influential in the art world.
“Back in college, I avoided these people like the plague because of their well-known racism,” Clemmons wrote. “I’d call their strain ‘hipster racism’.”
So what is hipster racism?
Rachel Dubrofsky, a communications expert at the University of South Florida, told the Guardian that hipster racism is the “domain of white, often progressive people who think they are hip to racism, which they mistakenly believe gives them permission to say and do racist things without actually being racist”.
Another key tenet of hipster racism, Dubrofsky notes, is that it is veiled in irony. “I think hipster racism emerged as we saw an increase in ironic, self-reflexive humor in popular forms of media.”
Examples of hipster racism are everywhere: as Dubrofsky notes, “the sheer ubiquity of [it] is remarkable.” And because hipster racism is often characterized by “humour” it tends to be pervasive in comedy.
“Some of the most popular white women comedians are terrible hipster racists,” Dubrofsky says. In August, for example, Tina Fey appeared on Saturday Night Live to talk about white nationalists marching on Charlottesville – which she did while making a joke about Thomas Jefferson raping his 14-year-old slave, Sally Hemings, calling her “that hot, light-skinned girl over by the butter churn”. Amy Schumer is known for making jokes like: “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.” Sarah Silverman has worn blackface on a number of occasions; she has since said publicly she deeply regrets it.
If you are someone who belongs to the dominant group socially, economically, ethnically, and otherwise, you are treading on treacherous ground if you think that you are so enlightened about an important issue that you can talk as if you are a member of a community that does not have your advantages.
Hipster racism is thinking that you can use someone else’s culture as a prop.
Another pervasive example of hipster racism is the staggering number of white people who don’t seem to understand that there is no ironic way to say the N-word if you are not black. Earlier this month, the author Ta-Nehisi Coates was asked at a panel about whether it was OK for white hip-hop fans to rap along when they hear black rappers use the N-word in songs. As he eloquently explained: no, it’s not.
“When you’re white in this country you’re taught that everything belongs to you,” he said. “You think you have a right to everything.”
Hipster racism is thinking that you have a right to the N-word, that if you – a liberal with black friends! – use it, somehow it isn’t offensive.
Madhawi writes that while the term may be new, what underlies it goes far back.
Hipster racists are, of course, not to be placed anywhere near neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and your run-of-the-mill hard core racists on the racism spectrum. They do abhor racism and would like to see it eliminated and are on the right side of the barricades, so to speak. But what the adjective ‘hipster’ denotes is that they are unwittingly trivializing the experience of groups to which they do not belong and cannot truly understand. And the danger is that if and when they are called out on it, they may react defensively and in the process retreat to a more conventionally racist position.
Why not? They (in the person of Dunham and her ilk) strike me as identically clueless, unapologetic and (and this is the key one) actually racist as Richard “punched” Spencer.
Yeah, and I abhor chocolate biscuits. That’s what I tell myself as I stuff another one in.
Stop right there. You’re letting them off the hook. “Unwittingly”? Dunham knows exactly what she did because, as the article you quote relates, she’s done it before and keeps on doing it, interspersed with her by-now-predictable not-pologies.
Best we don’t call them out on it then? Er, no.
“Hipster racist” is just two syllables longer than “racist”, and the extra word makes it worse, not better, not more defensible, not more forgiveable and absolutely does NOT place these garbage on “the right side of the barricades”, unless they’ve snuck there undercover.
I may have to borrow this phrase -- it describes perfectly something I’ve been thinking about for a while but didn’t know how to express, not about “hipster racism” but what I can “unconscious white supremacy by inference” (I know, I need a more pithy term.) The majority of people don’t consciously believe that POC are innately inferior to white people, but they do unconsciously believe in a “just world.” So when they hear about POC having higher rates of incarceration, poverty, etc., they don’t see it as evidence for systemic discrimination, they just assume that poor “life outcomes” reflect lack of ability or poor life choices. Of course, the inescapable inference is that POC are more likely to commit crimes, less intelligent, don’t work as hard, etc., so naturally people who are aware of these issues assume that people who deny systemic discrimination are covertly arguing for white superiority. In fact, they’ve never consciously acknowledged that white superiority is the logical corollary of their belief in a just world, even though it unconsciously colors (no pun intended) their thinking, which is why they get so angry when they’re accused of racism. I try to explain this to people, not to make excuses for these “unconscious white supremacists,” but because a) it’s useless to try and argue someone out of a belief they’re not even aware they hold, and b) “they may react defensively and in the process retreat to a more conventionally racist position,” as you put it so well.
Calling it “hipster racism” tries to make it a special form of racism, and therefore worthy of some kind of other consideration.
This weekend a friend of mine and I watched The Hateful 8 and had a pretty long discussion about hipster racism -- Tarantino’s suspicious fondness for sexualized abuse of women and use of racism as a trope in his movies. It’s not edgy or cool, it just makes his movies beautifully choreographed assholery.
Personally, I prefer the straight-up flag-waving white supremacists. They’re easier to spot and they don’t lie to themselves as much.
I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone is racist (and sexist,and …ist). It’s just how our brains work, It tries to deal with the information overload of having to deal with billions of individual human being by summarizing and compartementalizing information based on easily distinguishable characteristics, a.k.a. stereotyping.
Once you see this, you realise there are three kinds* of people in the world:
1) The ones who realise this and are okay with it (white supremacists, etc…)
2) The ones who realise this and are not okay with it, and try to minimize their inate racist/sexist/whatever… tendencies (sometimes decent people)
3) The ones who don’t realise this (hipster racists, and many others)
I have a deep distrust of anyone who claims they are not a racist, eventually they end up saying something like “I don’t want to sound racist, but… ”
*) Yes, I realise I am doing the same thing here.
I agree, Robert79. I tend to not talk about isms generally, because my own ism… tendency eventually shines through and I then feel like a hypocrite. I often find myself thinking isms, but I continue to try not to act out.
In continuation. We are taught a lot of rubbish as children: family and society’s values of the time which will change as the decades mount up. I’ve come to consider growing up and striving for adult status involves learning which of those ‘innate’ values we’ve been programmed with are now obselete or are damaging to ourselves and/or the society and learning to act better despite how ‘natural’ they may feel. I’ve found for me it’s a continual battle.
robert79@#4:
It tries to deal with the information overload of having to deal with billions of individual human being by summarizing and compartementalizing information based on easily distinguishable characteristics, a.k.a. stereotyping.
I agree with this, though I call it “labelling” rather than “stereotyping” -- we need to assign concepts to groups, because otherwise we have to re-define everything every time we try to do anything. Then, we’re trapped in a gigantic sucking pit of linguistic nihilism: we can’t say anything is anything, it’s all just stuff.
Hipster racism comes about because we have to have words about different kinds of people if we’re going to talk about racism at all. And suddenly we’re talking about “all XXX people” for any given XXX and we’re stereotyping madly.
In a conversation with a Southern friend (who’s lived in NYC for 40 years and vows never to return), I came to realize that the expression “poor white trash” is inherently racist and have stopped using it.
I’ve always enjoyed how the sitcom The Office uses anti-racist, anti-sexist, etc. humor to mock racists, sexists, etc. I suppose this could be viewed as hipster racism, sexism, etc….
Seems like a useful designate, following on the heels of “Yuppie Racism”, that was the child of whites who fled to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s.
http://jbs.sagepub.com/content/21/4/445.extract
I don’t think so. “Hipster racism” comes about because calling a nice clever rich successful white woman who at times made the right SJW-like noises just “racist” hurts a little for the people who’ve put her on a pedestal. So they qualify it, and by implication soften it, try to excuse it.
When someone uses irony as an excuse, I often wonder: what’s the difference between a punch in the face, and an equally hard but ironic punch in the face?
Identically racist. Really. No difference at all in degree between the two? Sure mate.
Yes.
Not identically violent, and certainly not identically brazen and open about it -- but yes, just as racist.