this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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chapotraphouse
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I can understand to an extent why Dr. Harris would be so insulted by his daughter embracing that ethnic stereotype in an interview. From talking to this one guy at work who came from the region (maybe a generation younger than Harris), the whole politics of respectability were very important to those generations that came of age in a post colonial world.
The use of that stereotype for w cheap joke certainly demonstrates his daughter's profound lack of understanding of that perspective and the context from where it developed.
I'm not saying I agree with it or it's ok, I just understand and was explaining a bit the context in which it came from. The conservativism implied by it is quite stiflingly oppressive and it showed when I talked to this man: the way he would speak down about people who didn't meet his standards.
The contradictions in this self-professed communist's way of thinking were laid bare in my conversations with him. I came to understood that his way of thinking about liberation of the oppressed, while having a strong foundation in understanding the nature of colonialism was glaringly deficient in a drive to challenge the other heiarchies of oppression that you imply in the above comment. The man's way of thinking ultimately makes for an incomplete understanding of what a liberatory struggle should be, since in the case of some in that generation, their respectability politics reproduced those heiarchies of oppression that subsequent generations of left theorists strongly criticized as being part of an intersection of oppressions that should all be dismantled to achieve that egalitarian society that is the goal of Communism.
It's ultimately why I could never consider the man to be a comrade: because of his strong adherence to the oppressive cishet patriarchal heiarchies that we criticize here on this site. And I was quite disappointed with that, because before I got to know him more and understand this, I thought I had found a comrade in the workplace.