From: "laohu - -AT-Home" <laohu-AT-home.com>
Subject: White men et al.
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 23:36:52 -0500


A fair amount has been posted on this list the last few days in which a
comment about “white men saving brown women from brown men” has featured
prominently.  I am not familiar with the original context of this
observation, but, as it stands, it strikes me as facile, reductive and,
ultimately, superciliously condescending to both brown and white of both
genders.

Here is a ridiculous teleology.  On the assumption that white men marry or
date brown women to save them from brown men, then it should likewise be the
case that brown men and yellow women marry or date so that yellow women may
be saved from yellow men; or that black men and red women marry or date in
order that red women be saved from red men; or that white men and black
women marry or date to save black women from black men?  Or, to be more
specific, if a white American man and an Indian woman get married or date –
is the ‘telos’ of the man’s action that she be saved from Indian men?  If a
black man from Botswana and a white woman from Iceland get married or date,
is his agenda to save her from Icelandic men?  If an American man brought up
in Sweden and a Chinese woman brought up in Taiwan get married or date, is
the ‘telos’ of the man’s action that she be saved from Chinese men?  How
about a Peruvian man and a Spanish woman?  a Bulgarian man and a Russian
woman?  a Danish man and a Norwegian woman?  a rich man and a poor woman?  a
short, fat man and a tall, slim woman?

Are any of these women even autonomous human beings?

Is it possible that all these people get married or date for the rather
ordinary and uninteresting reason that they are in love with each other?
Well, without -- and even with -- an endless and narcissistic deconstruction
of ‘love’ and the obligatory attempt to tuck a circumscribed version of same
into a procrustean Western bed, I suppose that the higher hermenauts who
sail this list will snicker hegemonically at such a naïve aetiology for
unions of this kind.

Finally, in that original formulation about “white men saving brown women
from brown men,”  why is it that it is “white men” who are made the marked
category here?  *Quelle suffisance!*  How are we to know that in such unions
it isn’t really a matter of “brown women saving white men from white women?”

e b holtsmark - aka jack     äran först och främst
laohu-AT-avalon.net               esse quam videri
                                          aien aristeuein


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