I think a lot of people would read “neutral zone” and think of something like a *safe* zone–a place where race and gender is acknowledged (or not), but isn’t overemphasized or used against anyone. Race and gender *can* be big factors in social interaction, but they don’t *have* to be, not all the time and particularly not on the internet.

Also: the best (or most productive) conversations that involve race and/or gender usually happen when no party is being antagonistic or holier-than-thou.

Exactly how is this essay “poorly written”? Can you do better? Or do you just feel that these topics are unimportant?

And Brian Lin — Really? You think it’s the “wang” that makes men (in general) more able to lift something? Get real. This issue’s been covered and solved by science and biology long ago. Find something else to create a “meaningful” argument about.

For instance… why do men and women have different bathrooms? Is it because of scientific reasons or cultural?

Or how come physical labor is seen as being male activity does having a wang really make men more able to lift something?

Zach: “I’ll jump over the difference between gender and sex (a lot of work in gender studies over the course of the last 19 years holds that BOTH are socially constructed)”

How does that work? How is biological sex a social construct? Perhaps it’s arguable that the ways in which we view sex as a category are influenced by social constructs, but we’re not exactly a self-pollinating species, are we?

“Class, sexual orientation, nationality… All of these are things everyone has! All of these are things that cultures place value on, things we get fed stereotyped messages about constantly, things that are the very building blocks of our identities. These are things people take into account when we look at first impressions. These are things that affect how people interact with each other.”

I differ with this in that I don’t think class and sexual orientation and nationality and even identities are possessions, singularly owned and carried around on our backs like what one influential antiracist essay called the “invisible knapsack” of white privilege (presumably full of “Tintin in Africa”). Instead I think it’s more useful to talk about these things as social relationships and as ideological formations. I don’t want to get too jargony, but the danger in thinking about these as possessions lies in A) forgetting that they’re all socially contingent even if they have real, immediate material effects – like getting lynched or gay bashed or exploited by your boss. I think in some ways, talking about these as possessions implies a fixity that may not be indicative of how these processes really work and may also imply, for some, fault – “why can’t so and so transcend his race like Obama,” etc.

One other thing I want to raise is that race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and citizenship aren’t equivalent to each other, and nor are they isolated – instead they’re mutually constitutive and constantly intersecting and shifting processes. Hegemonic understandings of blackness have historically been constructed in relation to histories of free and unfree labor, notions about peculiar and pathological sexual desires and behavior which elide certain histories and grossly distort others, etc. Similarly the idea of the “American family” which was hegemonic for much of the last century and which serves as the basis for some political arguments is predicated on certain implicit ideas about who is an american, about what proper relationships look like, and about the place of the family within society, etc.

The “we’re all a little racist” idea comes from the same place as “we’re all a little sexist.” We have been taught that blacks/women/men act like this, not like that. Learning via generalization is easy, and it’s also where stereotypes are reinforced. Those generalizations may be true on a macro scale, but on an individual scale, there is a good chance that they are not.

Yeah, I used to believe this too, until I had kids of my own, and saw from birth how strongly wired we our.

“No one should get eyes rolled at them just for bringing a subject that has such a major impact on their life to the table.”

Only if they assume that, because they feel that way, that everyone else must. Just because you’re a racist, don’t leap from that statement to “we’re all racists,” and not see a chorus of eye-rolling.