What are we, like, 12?

Obviously, when we are talking about people who are truly in love and not just “truly in love”, I agree with her.

But I hear this argument also from people–male or female–who have their latest flavor of the month and can’t handle any critique of what is obviously a poor decision.

I’ll say the same thing I said on Jenn’s blog–Of course, women, and men, and everyone else, have a right to make their own decisions. However, that freedom is a not a freedom from consequences to actions.

Just as I love my students and would love to do anything for them, I cannot make a world for them where self-absorbed behavior is rewarded with beautiful consequences.

I respect people’s right to make aversively racist decisions in their own love lives, but I can’t wave a magic wand and make it a good choice.

Other Asian sites push the Asian pride thing, but I think this site is the only one where the members possess both intelligence and courage enough to truly analyze the situation. In most cases, I think IR is the issue that causes emotions to stifle rationality. I was disheartened today to see this on one of the up-and-coming Asian American blogs. It addresses the issues of misogyny, which is very real in certain areas of the old country or among people who immigrate from the old country, but the blog author takes it a step further by lumping the angry and intelligent with the angry and stupid.

She writes:

And why do you then try to guilt-trip us and call us brainwashed when we become fully acculturate in American society and partake of all the opportunities western society affords us - including dating and eventually marrying the person we truly love regardless of race and ethnic background?

I understand that a lot of these women face people who attack them based on their relationships, but we don’t. We’ve always been open to anything, and many of our long-time members are involved in IR. I have very good friends who are of the AF/WM variety, and we’re all cool with it (and yes, they all agree with our points too). But for some reason, a lot of people live in a Manichean world of black and white–”You’re either with us or against us!” They’re okay with us being a site that focuses on race, but they just don’t want to listen to any serious discussion about race, even if certain racial patterns affect us.

You said it best right here:

There’s nothing racist about recognizing a race-based social reality, something advocates do anyway when they form their race-based groups.

For these ideologists, it’s a kind of racial Stockholm Syndrome: they know things need to change, but they don’t want to abandon the status quo which they have been working with for so long. What it creates is a situation where people love to complain about how bad things are, but they don’t want to do anything to change the situation.

In a ethnic majority constructed, ethnic majority filtered society, it is very easy for those used to being good thinkers in other areas to fabricate a ethnocentric framework to support their aversive racism through their monoperspective.

So it’s rational, but utterly wrong and steeped in privilege.

On the sexism issue, the additional argument is that as an entity in a patriarchal society, we are therefore, by default, infused with sexism. I would agree with interpretation–in the same way that the society where racism is rampant, being a really well-meaning special white boy doesn’t mean that you have avoided being infused with racism.

However, with that in mind, the question is not, “Is an organization sexist?” That’s a label that’s slapped around aimlessly to draw arbitrary lines. It’s no coincidence that it tends to be minorities and extremists who receive these labels in mainstream discourse.

The question is “What is the organization ACTIVELY doing to address issues of sexism within itself and in the general society?”

We could, like anywhere, improve. However, we have a number of active members who are extremely active organizers for feminist and gender-free movements, you as admins have sought to gender balance, and in general as a group we tend to take a humanist perspective on all of these issues.

Nice post, by the way.