The Private Table

So Rob Thomas, the lead singer of Matchbox 20/the Smooth guy/solo artist, is on Twitter. He's posted about buying patio furniture and going to the studio and listening to mixes and his music of the day and where he's eating dinner with his wife and how the grocery store in the suburb where he lives isn't open late enough at night. And one of the things he does is a photo scavenger hunt, where he lists several things that people should take pictures of, then post to Twitter so that he can see them and give applause. It's just silly, but Twitter is for fun, for celebrities, so why not?

Except Monday night, he posted this:

tuesdays photo scavenger hunt: 1) something 'goth' 2) a hot tranny mess 3) someone picking their nose. (link)

He then used it again a few hours later to link to his choice of "winning" photo in that category, once more to correct the link and a fourth time to announce that he'd corrected the link. Which prompted me to say, in reply to him (the @ behind his name indicates I'm talking to him)

@ThisIsRobThomas Also FYI, the word "tranny" is very uncool. It's a pejorative. if it's self-descriptive it's sorta okay, but otherwise no. (link)

His reponse to that:

@AmadiTalks eddie izzard is a transvestite. the hot mess in that picture is a tranny. (link) note

That just bothered me. There are a lot of names and words that you could sub into that sentence, and it would be just as ugly. The ______ is a _____ and s/he's okay, but _____ (who is the same thing) isn't okay, and therefore s/he's a [insert slur here]" idea doesn't sit well with me. It's a justification argument. And in this case, it's particularly off-putting because the justification here is that the person in that photo wasn't visually pleasing in their efforts at wearing female dress, so on that wholly subjective basis, it was "appropriate" to Rob to call zie by that ugly, belittling, insulting word.

And that? Isn't cool. It's not cool for transpeople (of any stripe), or gay people, or people of color or anyone else, and it's especially uncool coming from a person of privilege. (In this case, cisgendered heterosexual privilege.) So I twittered back.

@ThisIsRobThomas By that logic if my looks/speech/whatever displease you, you're "justified" in calling me a nigger. A slur's a slur. (link)

And it's true. Chris Rock had a whole bit in his comedy routine for a long time about the "difference" between black people and niggers. And it all came down to subjective judgments of how people look/dress, how they speak, and what they did. It was justification. And he was wrong. But it was Chris Rock. And like it or not, when the slurs are coming from "within" it's a lot different than when they're coming from "without." If Dane Cook had started spouting off about black people vs. niggers, the response would've been very different, and it should have been.

But more to the point, Rock was right, in that the line between acceptable and not acceptable, between "Appropriate Minority We'll Support (but not too much)" and "Inappropriate Minority Who Can Be Belittled" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. But I'm not particularly willing, especially when that belittling is happening in a public forum, to stand idly by and let it happen without speaking up. And that's what I did today, and yet, I don't feel any better for it. Probably because Rob's response to me was:

@ AmadiTalks careful. that chip on your shoulder may tip you over. (link)

Ignore, deflect, make it about me and not about him, the typical behavior of someone who has been called out and told that they've said something bigoted. (As we've seen time and again during RaceFail '09.)

At that point, jackandahat [JournalFen] got involved and went back and forth with Rob a bit, defending me and the point, and eventually got a pseudo-apology out of Rob (and no admission that he was wrong) but not before Rob said:

@JackAndAHat you DON'T choose to be gay. you DON'T choose your ethnicity. you CHOOSE to put on high heels. medgar evers rolls in grave. (link)

Do you see what he did there? Because I brought, for better or worse, race into the mix, he decided to namecheck Medgar Evers, a Black civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1963 for his work for the cause of equality.

As if Medgar Evers would be on the side of someone using disparaging language to denigrate a marginalized person.

FAIL.

My follow-up response to his last reply to me got eaten by Twitter (some things are being "eaten" by the database in the last 36 hours or so) but it still lives in my Twhirl buffer. I said:

I do have a huge chip on my shoulder. It comes from privileged people who use their power to aid oppression of disadvantaged minorities.

And now I'm sitting here with a very sour taste in my mouth. I liked Rob. I liked his silly, peek into the every day life, occasionally overly-revelatory twitterings. I've liked his music. But now? I'm not following him on twitter any more and I've moved his songs out of my main playlist. Maybe one day I'll be able to come back to them. Maybe even one day I'll come back to him. But for the moment, I don't want anything to do with him. Such is the downside of having "too much" access to someone essentially inaccessible. You find out that they're a bit too human, and all the shine is immediately extinguished.

Eddie Izzard is, himself, on Twitter now. I was very tempted to @reply to him asking him if he approves of cisgendered people using that slur and then invoking his name in the way that Thomas did, but I didn't think it was a good idea to drag him into the middle of it, and if I'm honest, I was afraid of his answer. Back to main text.