On being the only white person in the room (Part I)

My sense of responsibility as a politicized white person, I believe, rests with holding other white people accountable.  I know that my skin privilege means other whites will listen to me and, often despite my gender, see me as an authority figure simply because I am white.  This is powerful stuff when it comes to teaching about racism and structural inequality - we often expect people of color to care about racism.  Due to the complexities of white privilege, white people carry more sway with other whites when we care about racism.  The flawed logic is, I suppose, since racism benefits us whites, then if a white person cares, it must matter!  (Because, of course, if the people who have been historically, socially, and politically oppressed for centuries and, as a result, remain extensively marginalized today care, well, that's really not our problem.)

I have made a surprising discovery about this during the past semester, however.  Well, several, actually.

Let me explain.  Many of you know that I took a Race Theory course in the Africana Studies department.  I chose this class for many reasons...the most important of which was that I still felt I had so much to learn about race, and I wanted to build in a structured time to continue reading and discussing the literature.

But I had other expectations of the class, too.  The thing is, in my department, I could easily claim 'mastery' in race studies without ever taking a class on race.  And I could easily go about my entire graduate career without ever taking a class with black people.  To my knowledge, there is only one(!) black person who is a matriculated graduate student in my department.  This is not uncommon nationally.  Black people are severely underrepresented in graduate studies - and the Africana Studies department is a safe space that centers the experiences of blacks.  Most white people - including myself - are often uncomfortable in a room full of black people.  But if we merrily go about our lives without ever intentionally spending time with black people, we will remain uncomfortable and miserably ignorant.  Part of being a politicized white person, dear readers, is spending genuine and meaningful time with people of color.  It also, in my case anyway, means taking classes with them.

So there I was, a random white Sociology student taking an Africana Studies class.  On the first day, I walked up the stairs and into the hallway, and who did I see standing in front of the classroom door?  One of my students from my summer class.

Taking a class with a former student?  Oh, no, that's not awkward at all.

We all sat down and the professor introduced himself.  He asked us to go around the room and share why it was we were in this class.  As we went around the room, most folks gave vague answers about how they were here because they wanted to take a theory course (it was required for their master's).  But my former student, a black woman, shocked me when she said, "I wanted to learn more about intersectionality, which I started reading about this summer," then she gestured to me, "with my professor over there, like race and gender and Patricia Hill Collins, things like that."

OMG.  Besides the false title (but please, God, one day!), I was floored when she named my class as having an impact on her studies.  I had always felt that I was there to politicize white students.  It had never occurred to me that I would - or even could - politicize students of color.  This isn't because I felt I should only focus on white students, but because I knew I might not necessarily be an authority figure for students of color, and I certainly would not be an identifiable role model.  That was my first discovery - that white teachers can still cultivate a political sociological lens in students of color.  Or more specifically, that I could.  And really, dear readers, if I was able to get just this one student to think about her experiences as a black woman through an intersectional lens, well, then, I am a very humbled sociology instructor.

Here was my second discovery.  This one, sadly, is a major downer.

After introductions and reviewing the syllabus, the professor wrote "RACE" on the board in all caps.  He turned to us and asked, "what is race?"

"Skin color," someone shouted.  "Ethnicity," said someone else.  "Biology," another added, "you know, like your ancestry, or the origins of your people."  Each time an answer was offered, the professor dutifully wrote it on the board.

Yes, dear readers.  This class of mostly black folks believed "race" really meant skin color, ethnicity, and biology; in that order.  When "skin color" came out, I thought, well, I'm sure they just meant that it's often determined based on skin color, or that the perception of skin color and other phenotypic aspects are usually used as the measuring stick for race.  But then "ethnicity" was added, and I was like, wait a minute!  Seriously?  I mean I had just written a paper on how race and ethnicity are two different (but interrelated) things!  No way!

So when it came to "biology," (Biology?!  BIOLOGY!?!  What the hell, people?!) I just couldn't stand it.  I had wanted to sit quietly and not be that obnoxious white person that takes up space and pretends to have all the answers for people of color.  But I had just done this same exercise a few weeks ago for my summer class, and my teaching instinct (or obnoxious white person...probably both) was rearing at the bit.  As smoothly and unobtrusively as possible, I raised my hand.  "It's a political and social construction."  The professor added "social categorization" to the board.  "What else?" he asked.

"Your religion!" someone shouted.

Here is the second discovery I made: Not all people of color have a race analysis.

I was blindsided by this over and over and over again during my Race Theory class this semester (more to come on this in Part II of this post).  It's not that I haven't seen this before, but it has always been in undergraduate students of color - not my colleagues.  This was a room of very well-educated people of color!  They were graduate students and still thinking race was skin color and ethnicity and your ancestry!

It seems naive of me now to have been so shocked.  As a white person, I have spent most of my life around mostly white people.  But I have also probably spent more time around people of color than many white people, and all this time, I never realized the honor I have had of only really being around radical people of color.  Or at least, I've only ever talked about race and politics and oppression and all that with people of color who were already progressive.  Even if we were different races and they were more than happy to call me out and hold me accountable for having lighter skin, we already saw each other as allies.  We already shared a vision of a liberated world.

And I assumed, through my white privilege education, that to be white meant to be oblivious to racial inequality (which it generally does) and to be a person of color meant to already have a nuanced view of structural inequality.  Or even that women of color would automatically be able to speak to living at the intersections of hierarchies.  Repeatedly throughout the semester, however, I found this was not the case.  Someone else would say another icky problematic thing and inside I'd cringe, "Nooooo!  But that's what the oppressor wants you to think!"

It dawned on me that I needed to recognize the ways in which people of color are not automatically able to speak to their experiences in a way that will disrupt or dismantle the systems that oppress them.  It seems obvious now, because it makes total sense - people of color are not supposed to be able to spit hot flames of fierce sociological mindfulness.  That's not how the game works.  It works by convincing them that they are on the bottom because they deserve to be there, that race is real.  Not just the social consequences of race (which are very, very real!), but "race" itself as a construct is real.  Being born a person of color means you are still socialized by the same institutions as white people.  Like many, many, many others, the students in my class already believed the myths.

Now, to say that not all people of color have a race analysis doesn't mean that they are not all experts on their own experiences as people of color.  They will always know best what it is their lives are like, and what it is they need.  Their voices are the ones that we as white people must listen to, and listen closely.  This was an incredible challenge for me these past few months - to hear the truths through the bullshit that has tried to snuff them out.  Many times I failed at this.  Many times I wondered why I was there, or what the hell I thought I was doing.  But see, the point is not to revel in the beautific wonder of being an awesome white person with active-listening skills, but to confront and engage with the hell white people have left in our wake.  The point is at least, at least,  to try.

Ra-ra-ra-racism!

It is the holiday season, dear readers, and I attended a Yankee swap gift exchange the other day to celebrate.  You know, the kind where you open presents and then steal other people's presents if you like them better than the one you got, all in the name of Jesus.  If you are strategic, you bring a crappy gift (bonus points if it's from the As Seen on TV store).  If you are a sucker like me, you bring a nice gift and walk out with one of the crappy gifts.  It's all very American, really.

Being a sucker doesn't bother me so much - I'm too deeply programmed by middle-class white woman hospitality (it's not "being a sucker," it's "making sure others are happy!") to dwell on that.  But what did stick with me that night was an incident that is, sadly, a common occurrence in everyday life if you are the kind of person who happens to get out bed every morning: the Vaguely Racist Comment (VRC).  Oh, VRCs!  They come up when you expect them, they come up when you least expect them, they come up when you are neither expecting nor not expecting them.  They are always, as a matter of principle, uttered casually, and, also a matter of principle, extremely difficult to challenge.  They are usually in public spaces where it would make you stand out in a bad way if you were to do anything other than nod, or smile, or laugh, or pretend they didn't really just say something vaguely racist (and by vaguely, I mean overtly).  That is the brilliance of racism - it is so embedded in our social exchanges that it seems like common courtesy to just go along with it.  The nature of racism is that it makes those who call it out appear to be the rude ones.

That's the thing...sometimes I'm one of those rude people, which may explain why I don't have a robust social life.  I realize I'm really not that much fun to be around, because the vast majority of our cultural humor is predicated on social inequality.  And I'm one of those Debbie-Downers who doesn't laugh.  Or I try in some awkward, flailing way to intervene.  It doesn't matter how many VRCs I've witnessed...I have yet to have a beautific teaching moment come of one.  It almost invariably ends with me laughing tersely and saying something like "I don't know about that, y'all" and then people change the subject before they have to think too hard about how much they benefit from racial inequality.

That's the typical script, anyway, and the incident at the Yankee swap was no exception.  We were halfway through opening the gifts when the VRC slipped - nay, strolled out into public conversation: the white man beside me announced that he wished he could have brought an Obama Chia Pet.

These are hard moments for me, dear readers.  Perhaps you have encountered them too.  You hear a white person say something like, "I wish I could have brought an Obama Chia Pet," and the room of almost entirely white people erupts in laughter, and you aren't exactly convinced that, deep down in their heart of hearts, they really know that an Obama Chia Pet is racist as hell.  In fact, you are fairly sure they don't. 

Here is evidence.  As the laughter was dying down, I added "Not a good idea!" with an awkward laugh (I know, I know...my VRC interventions need polishing).  For the sake of a more personal challenge, I noted to the white man beside me who had made the comment, "You know, there is this great video clip of the white guy who made the Chia Pet saying "I don't know why this is racist!"  I said this with a tone that implied that of course this man beside me knew it was racist, and surely he would find additional sad humor in the fact that the white guy who designed it would be so tragically misled.  But that's not what happened.  What you want to happen is never what happens.  Instead, another white man across the room said "I know!  I don't know why either!"  (Crap!  I didn't curb the racism...I gave it wings!)  And then a white woman added, as if this was a sufficient explanation to close the conversation, "They have one of every president!"

And then the next person started opening their gift and any chance of a beautific teaching moment (if there had been any chance at all) was crushed by the opening of a leg lamp nightlight.  (Gah!  Intercepted by the Vaguely Sexist Present!  How many interventions am I supposed to handle by myself?  Sweet Mother of God, I'm only one angry white woman!)

And so I wasn't able to say what it was I really wanted to say, or have an honest conversation about why, yes, an Obama Chia Pet really is racist.  With the exception of two international students from China, we were a room of well-educated white people...it is definitely a problem for a white person to bring an Obama Chia Pet for another white person to open up as a hilaaaaarious Yankee swap gift.  Even on its own, no matter the race of the gifter or giftee, the Obama Chia Pet is super problematic.  Because I wasn't able to state why to the well-intentioned white people at the Christmas party, I will do so here.

Let me tell you, if you didn't know about this already, Obama's head has been made into a Chia pet - the controversy surrounding it is portrayed in a disappointing way in this CNN video.  It's one thing that he's the president, "not a damn plant!" as the black woman in the video so aptly denounces.  But it is Obama's blackness the makes this Chia pet so horrifying.  Yes, the Chia company offers Chia pets of other presidents' heads...but all of our other presidents have been white.  Only Obama's Chia Pet lets you grow the Black president of the United States an Afro.

And Black hair is distinctly political.  It has been stigmatized and eroticized, degraded and objectified.  Black hair has a history of oppression, parody, mimicry, marginalization.  It has been straightened and hot-combed, pulled and stitched, 'relaxed' and greased until it is believed to resemble the highly prized, wavy, shakable locks of whites.  It has been caricatured in minstrelry, front porch jockey statues, social Darwinist drawings, and pimp and seventies-hippie Halloween costumes.  Black hair is not neutral territory.  We finally have the first Black president, but just as Hilary Clinton can be reduced to a nut-cracking feminist who doesn't know better than to stay out of the public sphere, Obama can be reduced to an Afro-growing plant for your "desk, home, or school."  (Yes...let's be shamelessly public about our race-based mockery, shall we?)  The commercial - where owning the Obama Chia Pet is said to be a "symbol of Liberty, Opportunity, Prosperity, and Hope" and allows you to make the statement that "I'm proud to be an American" - could be on SNL or the Onion if the Chia company weren't taking itself absolutely seriously.  The only 'statement' the Obama Chia Pet really makes is that white people still feel at Liberty to Prosper off every Opportunity to parody Blackness.

The thing is, if I had really said these things at the Christmas party, I would have been written off as "taking things too seriously," even by those people who I know probably agree with me.  It is a Christmas party after all.  Time to be generous and good-spirited and to pretend oppression is the stuff of fairies.  And I would have further cemented my reputation as the wrong person to invite when you want to have a good time.  Which is unfortunate, because I do enjoy having a good time...for some reason my version of 'good time' doesn't always match with the 'good time' had by the people I work with.

And I know I can't challenge everything.  We can't call out ever VRC, or else we'd never stop to breathe.  If people of color stopped and said something every time they experienced racism, they'd never get through their day - being a vocal white anti-racist makes this startlingly clear.  I have to remind myself to walk the line between challenging other white people and not trying to prove that I'm a good white person, taking on the burden of racism as if I have any idea what that means or that it is up to me to 'save' the people of color.  When VRCs arise, I'm never entirely sure which side of the line I'm on...the point is really just to remember that the former can easily turn into the latter.  We must never be too self-congratulatory.  But I also believe there is such a thing as being too silent.

Also, white antiracists can't just write off anyone who isn't perfectly politicized.  We can't afford to alienate all the well-intentioned white people we know who issue VRCs.  The only way we cultivate future white antiracist allies is to prod them just enough so that they do not shut down entirely and we are not entirely complicit to public racist discourse. VRCs really aren't made for teaching moments, even if we want them to be - those happen at a later time, when you are away from the public spaces where paranoia of accountability prevents any honest discussion.  Sometimes you can only write out what you wanted to say, even if you didn't get to say it to the people you wanted to say it to.  At least it will have been said.  And that has to be enough, at least for now.

On blogging and change

Last August, I was asked to start a blog as part of a class requirement.  At the time, I was anxiously uncertain.  I've never thought of myself as a blogger, or as a potential blogger, or as someone who would ever in their little life do anything remotely blog-like.  Part of it is my general aversion to social media...I cling to the idea of a quiet, inward life that I share with actual friends.  You know...in person.  As in, not on the internet.

But it was also largely because I had no idea why I'd do it.  As far as I saw it, there were three kinds of blogs.  The first are the genuinely awesome blogs that have been around for a long time and work collectively with multiple writers.  In that sense, me starting a blog would be like starting another non-profit - why would I try and go out on my own when thousands of others are already doing what I'm doing, but better?  Wouldn't it be smarter for me to just link up with another blog?  Shouldn't I be the bigger person and resist individualism, here? 

The second kind of blog are the grounded, personal kinds of blogs my friends have made to connect with other friends while they embark on their adventures.  I was not leaving a well-paid corporate job to couch surf to the midwest, nor was I traveling to South America for two years, or anything at all romantic worth blogging about.  My life is comparatively quite simple, really.

The third kind of blog, which most blogs are in my opinion, is pure self-promotional navel-gazing.  I don't know why, but I was fairly sure that if I started a blog, it would be like that.  It seemed to me that writing about my thoughts and feelings on a public cyber format for the multitudes to read seemd kinda...conceited.

But then I started blogging, and you know what?  I realized that it didn't have to be self-aggrandizing after all!  In fact, blogging came shockingly naturally to me.  Rather, I should say, writing comes quite naturally to me, and blogging is just a more public form of writing.  After working out the early kinks of the Academic Voice I'd straight-jacketed myself into over the years, I unearthed a warmer, more casual voice.  I remembered how much I had loved to write, to find the narrative, to arch the narrative back to a meaningful point.  I remembered how to discover these points as I was writing, to start writing without really knowing what I was saying until I knew I had already said it.  And remembering the sense of aliveness in writing, not for an assignment or because I had to, but out of the love of it.

More importantly, I soon found that I had.  Something.  To.  Say. 

And (ah, here comes the aggrandizing!) I feel as though this blog has been some of the best scholarship I've produced in graduate school.  If not the best, it has undoubtedly been the most meaningful.  It keeps me fresh.  It keeps me thinking.  It keeps me honest.  It challenges me to put out to known and unknown public eyes truths that I am not always so sure of, and others that I feel profoundly to be certain.  It has called on me to articulate in old and new ways a progressive vision of the world.  It has reminded me that the part of me that believes in fighting for this newer, better world has not been snuffed out by the academy, or upstate New York.  It has reminded me of why I came here, and what I will do when I leave.

Writing this blog has shown me that there is a fourth kind of blog - the kind where the dorkish among us work out our vision.  It's okay with me if no one reads it.  It's okay with me if I spend an hour writing a post instead of volunteering.  It's okay with me because life is, after all, a strenuous briefness, and I still have a lot to think about.

I'm not sure how long I will maintain this, but I am committed to riding it out a long as it still seems worthwhile.  And during this week where we seem to suddenly remember to be gracious, I thank you, dear readers, for joining me in the struggle and the celebration of the blogosphere.

Resentful giving

Shortly after I first moved here, one of my neighbors - let's call him Bill - knocked on the door.  It was evening time, pouring with rain, and the sun had long since gone down.  He wanted my roommate, Paul, to drive him back to the mall to return a television he'd bought that he decided he didn't want.  Paul wasn't home, so instead I called Bill a cab.  We chatted for a few minutes until the cab came, and then he went on his way.

This was my first mistake.  Afterward, Bill became a regular visitor.  He'd knock on our door at least twice a week asking for any number of things.  Rides.  Bread.  Coffee filters.  Light bulbs.  Eggs.  Batteries.  He always promised to 'return the favor,' and never did - it's not that we ever expected or asked him too.  At first it was a nuisance, then it came to feel invasive.  Bill liked to sit on the front deck of our apartment (he lived in the adjacent apartment, so it was technically a shared stoop) and he'd go off on long winded stories whenever we left or entered the house.  I found him harmless until he started calling me his girlfriend and telling me how he was going to marry me.  Then I stopped answering the door.  When Paul wasn't home, I kept all the lights off except for my bedroom so Bill wouldn't think anyone was home.  I dreaded exiting and entering the apartment when I saw his shadowy figure on the stoop, and a I felt similarly every time the doorbell rang and I hid in my bedroom.

After about six months at this apartment, I moved.  Now, Bill was not the only or even the primary reason I moved, but he was certainly a pretty good reason.  Bill showed me the luxury of having a space whose boundaries and possessions were not challenged.  My class privilege now allows me the wonders of an apartment where nobody ever asks me for anything.

But there is more to the story than just me cashing in on my class privilege and relocating.  Bill was a middle-aged black man who I'd gauge as working class.  Bill reminded us of our race and class privilege in an uncomfortable way - by asking us for stuff, and us being too white-bread polite to say 'get off my porch and stop asking me to give you stuff I bought for myself, jerko.'  So we enabled him to keep asking.  We felt used and put upon, but neither of us told Bill that we'd rather him not consider us his own personal corner store anymore.  I think that's because we believed we should give Bill what he asked for, even though we didn't want to.  Bill saw two white graduate students and figured we could probably spare these things.  And we could.  To be honest, I'm fairly sure Bill could have, too.  But that's really not the point.  He asked, we gave...although we weren't very happy about it.  That is the point - why were we giving so begrudgingly?

Let me tell you another uncomfortable story.

I never give money to people who ask me on the street.  And I mean no one - I don't even donate to charity causes.  This is a decision I came to many years ago, although it is not one that has gotten easier with every refusal.  I remain as nervous and awkward and inwardly scrutinizing about saying 'no' to financial assistance or charitable giving on the street as I have always been.

There are panhandlers who pop up from time to time on the main street by my current apartment. There is a middle aged white woman, always cleanly dressed, who has asked me rather politely for money upwards of two dozen times in the year and a half I've been here.  Even though I always refuse her, she asks again and again, even when I cross her path multiple times in the same afternoon.  I hadn't seen her for a while, but she was stationed by the laundromat earlier today.

First, let me say that, after I refused her for the first time on my way out of the laundromat, I went out of my way to avoid refusing her again, to the point of walking all the way around the block to get back to the laundromat.  I realize this is ridiculous.  I felt ridiculous doing it.  But that is how deeply the ickiness of class consciousness sits with me, to where I would walk considerably out of my way to not have to 'deal with' the discomfort of refusing her.  (Never mind the discomfort she likely feels in constantly asking and being refused.)

When I left the laundromat again, I saw her a few paces away and prepared myself for another refusal.  But a different panhandler, one sitting on the bench beside the laundromat, got to me first.  He is another regular, a white, middle-aged man who was disheveled, dressed in dirty clothes, and did not appear to have bathed for some time.  I'm fairly sure he has sustained brain damage from many years of substance abuse.  "Can you spare some change?" he asked, his garbled voice hinting as much.  I chirped my usual, "No, sorry!" and marched onward.

I thought after just witnessing me turn down this man, the woman wouldn't bother.  But as I walked by, she piped up.  "That's why people won't give me money."

I paused, not sure if she'd said what I thought she had said.  "What's that?" 

"Him looking like that; people not taking care of themselves.  That's why people won't give me money."

"Oh."  I laughed nervously, then raised my bottle of detergent in a half wave.  "Well, take care!"

So I'm really not good at these things.  Reflecting on them gives me that twisty feeling inside, because I'm not happy about turning down these folks and I'm also pretty certain I'll continue to turn them down.  And I do realize I'm being hard on myself.  We all have the right to a quiet, safe home life and to not have to speak to people we don't wish to speak to or give money when we do not want to - some of us, however, have greater access to this than others.  Some of us can opt out of walking on the main streets.  Some of us do not have to leave the house to wash our clothes.  Some of us can drive cars instead of taking public transportation.  Some of us can avoid living where poor people live.  Some of us can avoid being poor.

What struck me, though, is how the woman blamed the other man for ruining her business.  I'm decent and he's not, she seemed to be saying.  How will people give me money if they associate me with him?  As I walked away from the pair, I wondered whether there was a hierarchy of panhandling.  We know that resentment is directed down the class hierarchy, not up - and the woman, rather than see an ally in the man, saw him as a drain on her game.  We resent the presumed imposition of the poor in the same way the woman resented the imposition of someone who was - visibly, at least - poorer that she was.  It's interesting to me that she thought that wearing nicer clothes (she was dressed better than me, but since I was in sweats, that wasn't saying much) would mean a higher yield.  I wondered if it was true - does looking more 'respectable' make it easier to give?

Then I remembered Bill.  Nah, I thought.  It's always a pain in the ass. 

And then after I thought that I felt pretty heartless again.

I see two sides to this resentful giving.  The first is the classist part.  We only want to give when we feel like it, when it suits us, when we don't have to be contaminated by the process of being begged or goaded.  The begging and the goading taints the high-minded philanthropy we fancy.  Their asking feels like an imposition - because it is an imposition.  It is an imposition on our privilege to gallivant through life without being put upon to give anything up.  "This is my money/batteries/porch!  You can't have it!"  That sort of unfortunate childishness.

The second side is perhaps more forgiving.  Because people with a whole lot less than me are also asked by the Bills and panhandlers to give, and I doubt they are happy about it all the time, either.  Sometimes we do have to (gulp) say 'no.'  Giving can be endless, and unless you can detach any emotion from your bread or your money, it's always going to result in resentful giving.  It's on us to do the reflective work to figure out where it is that we will give, and how.

Short-term payments are reactive and stunted...they ensure the system lives on...and sometimes if we do give, we have to be at peace with that, too.  The point is to always be doing other things that will, hopefully, make it so one day no one will have to ask.

The rainbow paradox

It's time for a gay post. 

That's right, dear readers - the time has come for me to talk about gay things.  A gay confession, of sorts. 

I don't tend to talk at length about being a lesbian, and in fact, that's probably part of the problem.  I am miserably out of practice at being 'gay.'  I don't think I ever really learned.  I came out some time ago, but my attempts to interject myself into what was the gay/lesbian social space at my university was an abysmal failure.  The idea of "lesbian community" at the time was weekly screenings of The L-Word.  I can only recollect one meeting of the gay/lesbian student group that I attended, and what I remember is being overwhelmed by the hip-hop music blaring in a room packed with bobbing white heads and the Costco-sized jug of lube given away via a raffle.  No, no, no, I was not cut out for this.  My "anti-porn feminism" workshop at Pat Califia key-noted conference organized by the gay/lesbian student group pretty much destroyed any chance I had at being considered down with the social scene.  Oh, the irony!  I was just too feminist to be a good lesbian.  And it's true - I wasn't interested in the meat market...I wanted change. 

That's not to say that I skipped out on gays and lesbians entirely.  I just got along so much better with straight feminists (which makes sense, because, after all, I used to be one).  When I moved for graduate school, I made the promise to myself that, as long as I felt safe, I would not conceal my relationship with my partner.   For the most part, that has been true.  But after my disillusionment with the lesbian/gay scene at my undergrad, and after realizing that it's pretty much the same as the lesbian/gay scene every where else, I never really pursued any organizing agenda around that part of my identity. As one of my lesbian friends said recently, "I'm out, but I'm not rainbow!"  To put it plainly, I never planned on being a professional gay. 

But now things have changed.  I am embarking on a lengthy project studying the intersections of whiteness/white privilege with being lesbian, gay, and bisexual.  There is no way around it - I am writing a 'gay' dissertation.  Through this project, I have had to acknowledge and confront my own internalized homophobia.  The ferocity and rapidity with which it rages has caught me off guard...I did not expect for it to still have so violent a grip on how I see myself and other lesbians and gays.

It began when I first decided, yes, I would take on this topic for long term research.  It took a lot to get to that 'yes.'  Not because I didn't think the topic was substantial, sociologically awesome, and very much worthy of study, but because I had three looming fears.  1) I was afraid of studying myself.  2) I was afraid of studying my partner and our relationship (we are an interracial couple).  3) I was afraid of writing a 'gay' dissertation.  Those fears delayed my commitment and prevented me from feeling at peace with what I had chosen.  I still wonder what I've gotten myself into.

Flash forward a month.  I was at the library, up in the stacks, checking out the selection.  I realized I was in the lesbian/gay section, because all the books had LESBIAN and GAY written in gynormous letters as their titles, and pictures of kissing white people or outlines of naked bodies or leather chaps on the covers.  I'm fairly sure that rainbows spewed out of them every time I turned the page.  This aisle, for some unfortunate organizational reason, is positioned right beside the stairwell, so every time anyone walks up the stairs and onto the floor, they would face this aisle.  More specifically, they would see me amid a pile of rainbows.  As I was looking through these books, I was hyper conscious every time I heard footfalls on the stairs.  What if they see me?

The saga of the rainbow books continued.  When I checked them out, I put them face down on the counter.  When I walked with the books, I was aware of whether or not the cover or spine was visible, and even, at times, tried to casually conceal them.  It would be comical if it weren't true.  (Actually, you might still think it is comical, and you'd be right).  When I returned them, I glanced up awkwardly at the librarian as they flipped them over, suddenly wondering - do they think I'm a lesbian? 

The illogic of these thoughts did not escape me.  Many lesbians would like to be thought of as lesbians, because that is indeed what we are.  Why would it matter if the librarian thinks I am a lesbian when I am one?  But it is not so simple - the question "do they think I'm a lesbian," is not "do they think I am a woman who loves women" but "do they associate me with all of the stereotypes of a stigmatized group."  Do they think I am those stereotypes.  And what is difficult about that thought is that my first reaction was that I did not want to be associated with the stigmatized group.  This was a difficult moment to swallow. 

Flash forward another month.  I am asked by a stranger in the laundromat who I am, what I do, etc.  He has a doctorate in civil engineering, and he wants to know what I'm writing my dissertation on.  "Oh, race relations," I say.  This is a variation of what I have said to many different people.  "Oh, racism."  "Oh, race."  And if they are more of the sociological persuasion, I might say "Oh, white privilege." 

You see, I keep leaving the gay part out.  Or perhaps, more aptly, closeted.  It is far easier for me as a white person to say that I am writing about race than, as a lesbian, to say I am writing about gays and lesbians.  Writing a 'gay' dissertation means I've been faced with outing myself far more regularly than ever before.  And I have to say I have been found wanting.  There is the illusion of safety in passing, or at least the illusion of safety in no one pressing you to announce your sexual identity - and they, poor hapless creatures, don't even know that asking me about my dissertation is asking me my identity, even my politics.  But the few times I have said it to someone who is not lesbian or gay, I can tell from their faces that they know that is what I am saying.  My elision of the "gay part" has been a way of avoiding those facial expressions.  I have been trying to escape those moments.

I see a paradox here, a double-bind - do I out myself and afford greater visibility to all gay and lesbian people but risk social censure (or worse), or do I closet myself and perpetuate the marginalization of gay and lesbian people but feel, in that moment, safe?   There is no easy answer - neither is all that comfortable.  I do know that one is probably the braver, higher, more ethical road, for myself and for other women who love women.  And it's not the road I've been taking. 

In other words, I might have to start being a little more rainbow.

Wayward scholarship

Several weeks ago, a professor posed this question to visiting speakers: Is there radical potential in the university?

The speakers, both professors with progressive bents, seemed to believe there was.  I, young cynic that I am, am not so sure.  And I grow increasingly convinced that there is not.  This is not just in light of the recent horrifying budget cuts applied to our College of Arts and Sciences, upon which so many scholars of more well-endowed universities have pontificated, although that is a pretty good reason to cement my doubt.  The divestment of public, state and government funds to public higher education is a message that comes through loud and clear - you're on your own, sweetheart.

We are on our own.  I want to address here that sense of on-our-ownness, specifically in the context of graduate life, specifically graduate life that is not adhering to what graduate life is 'supposed' to be.

First, let me state plainly what graduate life is like in all its tragic glory.  We all know graduate life, regardless of politics, is one where we are indeed on our own.  And being on our own isn't pretty.  It involves spending days indoors in your pajamas without bathing (what's the point?) frantically skimming piles of books and writing about what you just 'read.'  It involves either a lot of coffee, a lot of sugar, a lot of alcohol, or a lot of pot, depending on who you are; for some, graduate life involves a religious devotion to all four.  It involves watching a lot of bad television programs or reading a lot of terrible manga and vainly justifying it under the guise of ethnography and content-analysis.  It involves spontaneous eruptions into tears and woeful pity parties that devolve into more sugar and bad television to distract yourself from the fact that accomplishing anything will require more time alone in your pajamas frantically reading and writing about what you read.  When not working all the other jobs required to make rent, it's like the life of a depressed, well-to-do housewife, without necessarily being depressed or well-to-do or married or even having much of a house.

There is an element to graduate student isolation that makes me wonder whether I am a little crazy.  Really, something has to be wrong with us to willingly sign up for this.

Such isolation is built into the system.  Any semblance of community is a thinly veiled strategy for personal advancement.  We are encouraged to collaborate...insofar as it is better for our individual CVs ("Sure, I'd love to barely tolerate you for the next 18 months while we try to get a publication out of a topic we are both only superficially interested in!").  We are encouraged to go to social gatherings...insofar far as it a way to network for future employment ("You are so hilarious, Professor Famous!  I bet it would be a riot working for your semi-famous friends at Prestigious University!").   Like Kirsch's distinction, you realize soon enough in painful ways that, even if you are friendly with everyone in your department, you sure ain't friends.  You can meet with folks and ask for feedback all you want, but in the end you still have to write your papers on your own.

No matter what, trekking through graduate school is always ultimately up to you.  And the bar that is set (publish! present! publish! be awesome at everything! publish again! beat out 400 applicants who are just like you for the one reputable job in your field!) is not one the majority of us will ever meet.

Now, I assure you I was prepared for this.  I knew the muck I was getting myself into, but you see, that didn't bother me.  I wasn't going to be a traditional scholar, so why worry?  My greatest fault has been that I actually thought I could scrape through unaffected.  Although I steeled myself early on to not fall for what I was 'supposed' to be, by golly, I have been constantly reminded of what a powerful, seductive force the ideal type scholar is to be reckoned with.  It is impossible to focus on what is real and good and meaningful when immersed in an institution that is breeding you to be something else entirely.  To not be what it is expecting of you - and there are no other alternatives - is to be a failed scholar.  It is very difficult to hold on to why is is you are here when confronted with such a conclusion.

Failure, of course, is determined by how we measure success.  I realize I am not necessarily a failed scholar.  I do think I am a wayward one.  But to be a wayward scholar requires a strength that I'm not entirely sure I possess.  It is not a romantic path.  Being a wayward scholar means being the angry person who keeps making everyone talk about unpleasant topics like structures and hegemony.   It means challenging people who by all definitions you don't have much of a right to challenge.  It means spoiling fun times because you cannot turn off your sociological mindfulness.  It means the lines between what you study and what you live are completed and utterly blurred.  It means really, actually, genuinely believing that the point is not to study the world, but to change it.

It means...well, very often being on your own.

It's not that I have hopes for finding radical potential anywhere else.  An organizer recently told my partner that there are two possible paths: you either are lucky enough to find a financially sustainable means of organizing for social justice (and these jobs are few and far between, and hardly financially sustainable), or you find a job that pays the bills and devote the rest of your time and energy to social justice, maybe even shifting the structure of your pay-the-bills field along the way.  Most of us will have to content ourselves with the latter, as there isn't much radical potential in any institutional complex, whether it be higher education, non-profits, or the corporate sphere.

Wayward scholarship doesn't have to mean isolation, but let's not kid ourselves.  We do have to account for it as a very possible and likely side effect.  Such isolation, however, may not last forever - social justice communities take a long time to build.  Our home will not be built and ready for us to move in wherever we plop down.  We must build it ourselves, stone by stone, until at last we realize there is finally a roof over our heads.  That is the point - we are trying to build our homes.  We are trying, as my partner says, to build a world in which we can be whole.

I have come to the conclusion that there is no radical potential in the university.  No indeed.  The radical potential lies within ourselves, and we must always fight to keep it from being killed off entirely. 

My Money Story

Next semester, like some of you, dear readers, I will be taking my first ever class on class ("Class, Poverty, and Politics").  "Class" is usually added into courses on gender or race or sexuality, but rarely granted its own semester-length seminar.  It is also the social location I have done the least amount of personal work on, and therefore what demands the greatest reflexivity and accountability.

The professor of the spring course recently recommended Classified: How to Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use it For Social Change! to those of us interested in checking ourselves on our privilege.  My copy arrived last week, and one of the exercises of its workbook-style format kept me up very late the other night in thought.  The exercise asks its reader to recount their "money story."  How did we come to our class privilege?  Most importantly, the exercise asks us to re-examine our money story after we tell it to be sure we are telling the full story.

In the spirit of full accountability, I am writing my money story here on this very public blog.  My intention is to return to this entry at the conclusion of the spring semester and reassess my money story to determine whether I have left anything out.  I plan to reflect on what I am about to write with the deeper understanding I expect I'll have next spring, when I'll be better able to fill in the gaps.

And so it begins like this.

My family's money is of very recent development, at least as far as I know.  I do not know too much about either of my parents' lineages.  I doubt that class status was ever static and linear in either of them, but I am not aware of any great wealth (although my paternal grandmother is the daughter of a British colonel and spent her childhood in India, which makes me wonder about the colonial legacy of my family, regardless of income).  For their privacy, I will not go into too much detail about my parents' childhood experiences, but I will try to share as much as is needed in order to explain where we are now.

My mother grew up working-class, although additional difficult family circumstances meant her experience sometimes vacillated into working-poor.  She is the third of five children raised in a little town off the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Canada.  Her parents divorced when she was twelve.  My father grew up middle-class (when there was such a thing...I don't know if a 'middle-class' exists anymore in the way my father experienced it) to parents who had lived through a war-torn England.  They moved to a town outside of Toronto when he and his sister were just toddlers because of a job opportunity for his father, a railway electrician.  Money was tight, but there are markers of a middle-class existence that come up in old pictures and stories that my father tells.  For example, for a time they had an above-ground pool, and my father had braces when orthodontic work was at its most barbaric (his twin sister, however, did not receive braces).

Both of my parents joined the paid workforce quite young.  My father was a paper boy and bagged groceries.  My mother baby sat and worked in retail.  My parents married when my mother was 19 and my father was 21 (they just celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary a few weeks ago).  Neither was encouraged or expected to go to college, and neither did.  For a time, they lived paycheck to paycheck.  Once, they borrowed $5,000 from my dad's father, and, when they tell my sister and I this story, they always stress how they paid it back with interest.  They moved occasionally to chase increasingly higher salaried jobs for my father, who worked in the hardware business and found upward mobility in the marketing side.

This is blurry part of the story for me.  I realize in writing this story that there are important steps that I do not know, but have simply accepted as what is.  How did my father go from bagging groceries to jet-setting across the country?  What were the rungs of the ladder, and how long did he spend at each?  I do not know.  What I do know is that my father's social location was the wind at his back as he was upwardly mobile in his industry.  A white, heterosexual male, he was mentored by other white, heterosexual men in superior positions.  A man of color would not have had the same opportunities my father received, nor do I believe my mother would have been afforded the same mentorship.  This is not to discount the incredible toil and time my father has dedicated to his work, but rather to account for the context in which his toil and time were more likely to yield financial reward.

This is the part of the story I do know.  In the early 80s, my father received a job offer from a company based out of Louisville.  After much red tape, they were able to work out a high skills visa for him to move to the United States with my mother.  This was especially difficult to do since they did not have advanced degrees...I doubt such a visa without higher education is even possible now.  I don't doubt, however, that the fact he was a white married man from a rather non-threatening Canada facilitated what is a very trying bureaucratic process.  My twin sister and I were born shortly afterward.   Due to the conditions of the visa, my mother could not work.  This meant, however, that I had the great privilege of an at-home parent throughout my childhood. 

I have said to my parents before that we were wealthy during this time, although they disagree with me.  I still stand by this assessment.  I'm sure I can think of endless examples that marked our wealth.  We took spring break trips to major U.S. cities every year, and for a couple of years we went to a rather lavish resorts in Virginia.  We went to plays.  We belonged to a country club.  We swam, did gymnastics, played piano, golfed.  I did all these things as a child without any thought to the finances it took to do them.  We had health insurance, orthodontic work, and access to developmental and physical therapies when we needed them.  We were always pushed to succeed academically and given the necessary tools to do so. 

For the sake of full accountability, I must tell you that I am strongly resisting an overwhelming impulse to clarify that we weren't 'really' wealthy, because wealthy people are the people who go to boarding schools and have horse farms and drive Porsches and never have to work a day in their lives.  It is very difficult to resist this impulse.  I know I must tell you the harder, colder details without cushioning the stark truth to class privilege.  None of us have to have trust funds or be due for any whopping inheritance to still be wealthy.  Wealth is much more flexible than so rigid a caricature; moreover, it is always easier to see the people who are ahead of you than the multitudes you've left in your wake. 

Now, the rest of my money story.

My sister and I both made it into a traditional public middle school, which was determined via a lottery.  Entering this middle school was essential, because it tracked us into what were considered the "better" public high schools.  This was ephemeral however, because shortly after we started sixth grade, my father's company experienced a hostile takeover, and he was laid off.

My father took a new position with a substantial pay cut.  We moved to a town of what was then about 50,000 in eastern North Carolina.  My father stopped wearing suits and ties and cologne.  And traveling - he was home constantly, and we were, too, as we stopped taking vacations.  This was a difficult time for my family, but I would say we were still definitively upper middle class.  We were still very comfortable.  We still played piano and belonged to a country club.  I knew from the trailer parks we rode through every morning and afternoon on the bus route that not everyone lived like us.  Plus, money works differently in a mid-sized southern town than in a large southern city. 

By the time my sister and I were looking at colleges, both of my parents were self-employed, my mother in real estate and my father still in hardware marketing.   My parents supported me financially throughout the college search, application, and selection process.  At the time, my father felt deeply ashamed that he could not send both my sister and I to private university without going into substantial debt.  Instead, my sister and I attended a prestigious public university, debt-free (poor us!).  They supported us through summer interships, study abroad programs, and expensive student housing.  Perhaps the greatest evidence of my class privilege is that I majored in English and minored in creative writing...and I aspired to be a professor of English despite the consequences.  And then my parents supported me through applying to graduate programs, and later they fronted the moving costs when I selected a program and relocated to upstate New York.

And here I am, in graduate school, my 'money story' the bricks in the path leading to where I stand now.

I am afraid I have painted too simple of a picture, as class is not so uncomplicated, nor have the struggles that my parents have faced been so sweetly surmounted.  But my point, of course, is not to defend the struggles, but identify the simplicity and ease with which class privilege works, unquestioned, in the lives of those who have it.  Although I am almost entirely self-sufficient now, I know that the many tools along the way facilitated, if not outright allowed for, my current position.  Even though I make about one and half times the poverty level as a graduate student and have taken on student loan debt of my own, I still understand myself to be upper middle class.  To be a graduate student itself is an elite form of low-income existence.  I carry my class privilege with me always, regardless of my income. 

I will return to this post next May to see if I have done this story justice.

What super powers have to do with standpoints

If you had a super power, and that super power could be either to fly or to be invisible, which would you choose?

Think for a moment about your answer...and when you have it, think another moment about why this might be your preference.

My sister asked me this a few weeks ago after it was going around her office.  Turns out answers are rather gendered - women tend to say they'd rather be invisible, while men tend to say they'd rather be able to fly.  I had already answered "invisible," so it was too late to pretend otherwise, but my sister had responded with the same.  She said that the male coworkers who were asking this question indicated how weird it was all these women wanted to be invisible - the only justifiable reason they could think of for why anyone would want to be invisible was to spy on others, namely women, namely sexually.  But women aren't inclined to be invisible so they can spy on naked women.  Women are inclined to be invisible so they can live their lives in peace.  Imagine, getting your groceries without changing out of your pj's!  Walking downtown past the bars without a second thought!  Running alone!  In the woods!!  At night!!!!

Social locations, as Edmonds-Cady (2009) explains, are different than standpoints.  The locations are the social positions we occupy - race, gender, class, sexuality, etc.  Standpoints emerge from the experiences we have based on the privilege or oppression of these positions.  Our social positions inform our standpoint, the lens through which we view and interpret the world.  Edmonds-Cady sees a standpoint especially as a "critical perspective that marginalized or oppressed individuals may have about the ways in which unequal power relations operate within society."  Through looking 'up,' or centering the world through the lens of the marginalized, we are better able to understand how privilege and oppression work.

It is when we are looking through a privileged standpoint that we miss the greater picture.  In the case of Edmonds-Cady, for example, the white allies to white and black welfare recipients commented on the 'militancy' of the black welfare recipients, because "their own privileged access to resources may have led to their tendency to be more comfortable with policy advocacy as opposed to direct confrontation."  Similarly, in the case of the men who thought it was strange so many women were picking the creepy super power, their own acceptance and expectation that invisibility would be used to violate women's privacy (because surely that's what they would use it for!) imposed an incongruous judgment on women who choose invisibility.

It seems that when we think about the way we see things, we must note where we are standing.

On not knowing what the readings are talking about

The single best piece of advice I received upon entering graduate studies was from an advanced student in my program: don't do all the reading.  In undergrad, I read everything.  Looking back, I'm not really sure how, but I definitely know I did it with a hardy sense of academic ethos and righteous integrity.  I know this because when the advanced grad student informed me that the best thing I could do for myself would be to not do what I had always been doing, I immediate recoiled.  What?!  But won't they know?!  I envisioned the professor's red laser beam eyes boring into mine cyborg-style, the statistics generated from my lying pupils revealing that I was a delinquent student.

As I started my graduate studies, however, I quickly realized I wouldn't be able to keep it up.  Very often we are responsible for hundreds of pages (if not more) a week - it would be impossible to thoroughly read it all on top of outside research expectations, work duties, family and household obligations, and, you know, the necessary stuff like sleeping and eating and bathing once in a while.  So I started to...well...not read all of it.  And once I absolved myself of a sense of guilt and shame about that, my life began to be much more manageable.

You must be careful, of course.  The advice is not to not read anything important, or to give up reading entirely.  That would be the antithesis of good graduate work.  You have to read.  You simply must read something.  If you don't love reading endlessly and writing endlessly about what read, you will not like graduate school, my friend; no, you will not like it at all.  We are intent on being scholars, after all, so it's pretty much obligatory that you like the weight of book in your hand and the way your campus library smells (mmm!  reading!!).

No, the point is that you must read strategically.  You must learn to read as little as you need in order to have a thoughtful, reputable, coherent opinion on the matter, while also having a few moments to spare for grocery shopping.  (Preparation for comprehensive exams is especially good for this.  Your definition of 'reading' is increasingly liberal when you have an eight page, single-spaced list to knock out in a few weeks.)

And yet, there are times when you cannot get away with not reading everything.  Classes that test you on points from the reading, for example (oh, the tricky way of getting undergrads to read!).  Or classes that ask for intensive, reflective class discussions on the readings (oh, the tricky way of getting graduate students to read!).  When you are expected to publicly blog about the readings, you certainly can't skim them.

But sometimes actually doing all of the readings means you trip up on issues that would have slipped seamlessly by you had you been blissfully avoiding them.  If anything, doing all of the reading illuminates what you don't know.  And I am not afraid to acquiesce when I am wrong or to admit I don't know what I am saying, as recently noted.  I am not afraid to admit when I don't know what someone else is saying, either.

This week's readings dealt a double whammy in that respect.  I was pretty excited by Wilson's (2004) title, "Gut Feminism."  I had visions of a reappropriation of Bush's 'gut leadership,' where we could conceptualize a feminism that was instinctive and heartfelt.  Shazam!  Feminism from the gut!  That sort of thing.  It could probably make feminism a lot more approachable to people who are cooler than academics (which is most people, sorry), and might incline us to get out of our heads once in a while.

Turns out Wilson was actually being literal.  As in, talking about the gut.  "Gut Feminism," it seems, is about how we shouldn't overestimate how the body and the mind (psyche) work together, or underestimate the role of the bodily/biological in our theorizing.  I think.  Right?  I really don't know.  Maybe.  I am also clueless as to what it has to do with standpoint theory, which is the topic of our other two readings.

But Michaelian's (2008) "Privileged Standpoints/Reliable Processes," is even worse.  As I wormed my way through it, I kept stopping and asking myself, "wait, what did I just read?"  I mean, let's start with the abstract of the corn.  "Meta-epistomology"...okay, maybe.  (Alright, I'll admit it - that's actually kinda cool.  Standpoint theory is definitely meta.)  But "process reliabilist first-order epistemology?"  What the hell?!  I realize Michaelian is trying to bridge theoretical strategies, but there has got to be a simpler way to say this. Can anyone offer a clarification?

I welcome any input from my classmates on what these readings are talking about.  (That is, of course, if you do all the readings).

What The Princess and the Frog has to do with binary thinking

 Disney fan or foe?  It seems there are only two choices.

Last week I showed Mickey Mouse Monopoly to an undergraduate Race, Class, and Gender course.  It was the first time I had seen it, too, and it was a rather shocking upheaval of all of my cherished childhood Disney movie favorites.  Granted, I've long since recognized that the corporate behemoth that is Disney has not had dismantling binaries as its first priority.  But it's been a long time since I've seen or thought about many of the films I loved as a child, and it's pretty horrifying to look back at them given what I know now.  I mean, Ariel gave up her voice for legs and a dude!   She was, quite literally, silenced by heterosexuality.  And sure Belle was an avid bookworm who rejected Gaston's advances, but (as a social worker in Mickey Mouse Monopoly laid out) Beauty and the Beast is essentially a domestic violence narrative.  Belle is able to see the 'tenderness' in the Beast after enduring starvation as punishment, numerous verbal assaults, and witnessing her father being dragged away and thrown out into the snow.  (If you just hold out long enough through the abuse, girls, he'll be a prince in the end!)  Mickey Mouse Monopoly goes on to document the racist depictions of Blacks (as crows and apes in The Jungle Book, as gorillas in Tarzan), Latinos (as chihuahuas in Oliver and Company), and Asians (as Siamese cats in The Lady and the Tramp).

Interestingly, the scholars depicted in the film stated that, in criticizing Disney, they ended up taking on a greater risk than they had expected.  Disney is largely accepted and believed to be wholesome fun, and those who critique it are denounced for daring to suggest otherwise.  To criticize Disney is to be branded the murderers of children's joy.

I've grown fairly distant from the Disney animated films (although I have seen most of the Pixar movies, which is pretty much the same thing), and I wondered if anything had changed in the nearly 10 years since Mickey Mouse Monopoly was released.  I decided, hey, why not?  I'm a glutton for punishment.  So I watched The Princess and the Frog.

There has been considerably controversy surrounding The Princess and the Frog because it features Disney's first black princess.  Disney notes (often and loudly) that went to atypical great lengths to not be racist misrepresent blacks.  After complaints by various folks in the black community, Disney changed the title of the film from "The Frog Princess" to "The Princess and the Frog" to avoid making it sound like Tiana was frog-like.  They also changed the lead character's name from "Maddy" (too close to "Mammy") to "Tiana."  They axed Tiana's occupation as a maid and changed it to waitressing.  The male romantic interest - Prince Naveen - was originally white, but it looks like they just tinted him to be Creole.  Disney even took on Oprah Winfrey as a technical consultant to, well, to put it plainly, check in with a famous black person about some of their plot decisions.

Despite these changes, many unfortunate stereotypes and insinuations remain.  These have been blogged about at length elsewhere, including the fact that Tiana spends more time (23 minutes versus 17 minutes) on screen as a frog than as a human and that the evil character is a Voodoo witch doctor (who looks suspiciously like Prince). 

I would also add what I think are the most predominant problems in the film.  The primary story arch is that Tiana wants to fulfill the shared wish of her and her (now deceased) father to open a restaurant.  Tiana idolizes her father, and her mother (although living) is a background character.  When she teaches Naveen to cook, marries him, and opens a restaurant with him, it looks creepily like she's filled the empty space left by her deceased father.  She is a hard-working, industrious, independent, tireless young woman, and I don't know why she couldn't have the restaurant all by herself.  Prince Naveen is spoiled and accustomed to having servants brush his teeth for him.  Why does the first black princess typify the strong black woman caricature and end up with a lazy prince?  She requires him to complete her story arch - that of a poor little (black) girl without a (black) father who will have male guidance once again when she marries a (light-skinned black) man.

The second major problem is even more insidious.  As a little girl, her father told her that wishing on a star is not enough - it "can only take you part of the way."  She must help her wish along "with some hard work of her own," and then she "can do anything you set your mind to."  (Meritocracy lives!)  She works her ass off to raise the funds to buy property for the restaurant, but must learn the lesson of the difference between what she wants and what she needs.  What she "wants" (her own restaurant) is not enough without what she "needs" (heterosexual romance with Prince Naveen).  I am not kidding.  This is the take home message of this film.  Then it ends with a song about how "dreams do come true in New Orleans."

For those of you with kids of your own these days, I have no idea what you show them. 

The point in writing all of this is to say that, when reading the message boards in response to The Princess and the Frog, I saw they were packed with perfect examples of binary thinking (see Feminist Reverberations, Scott 2002).  Those who criticize the film are Debbie-Downers and reverse-racists.  Those who support it are racist bigots and apologists for Disney.  Invectives lobbed from either party further cements factions.  Clearly I shouldn't be expecting an open dialogue on internet message boards, but the ease with which someone who expresses frustration at the portrayal of blacks in the film is told they are being "so unfair" to Disney, who valiantly "took great pains to avoid being racially insensitive" is mind-blowing.  Disney perpetuates this with its "with-us-or-against-us-plus-don't-forget-we-cleared-it-with-Oprah!" stance.

What I would add to Scott's critique of binary thinking is that, given the structures of privilege and oppression woven into all examples of binary thinking, one 'side' generally has more power and force than another.  (In her example of Palestine and Israel, we can all say quite certainly which 'side' is a less dangerous one to take in the United States).  In the case of The Princess and the Frog, it's very easy - and accepted - to claim that black people are being reverse-racists when they barely open their mouths to mention that they are being inaccurately and dangerously portrayed.  (A great blog entry about this power differential and why the black critique of the film matters can be found here).  As in the case of the scholars behind Mickey Mouse Monopoly, you can't do much critiquing when you are up against a global industry that has, more or less, dominated children's imaginations and sense of play for nearly a century. 

To critique something doesn't mean you hate it (well, at least most of the time).  It does mean you want to change it.  When we encounter binary thinking, perhaps it would serve us well to think about what it is each side wants to have changed.  In the case of Disney, the answer is not very much.

And that should be all the answer we need.

A confession (also, Harry Potter!)

I first heard (or noticed) the word "discourse" my senior year of undergrad in a graduate level Literary Theory course.  It was a terrible class, and I had no business being there.  I was far too much of an activist to sit around 'deconstructing texts' and be told week after week that our words are merely utterances that hinge on no reality.  Every time my cold, aloof professor uttered "discourse" or "discursive," he didn't seem to hinge on any reality, either.  To be honest, I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

It's been several years since that horrible class, and I have moved into the social sciences where 'discourse' is used only slightly differently than the humanities.  But my growing familiarity with academic lingo means I have heard "discourse" used thousands of times since then and, out of context clues or just habitual use, am more comfortable with coexisting with it.  Once in a while I even catch myself using it, and I see people nodding their heads, so I must have caught on sometime ago.

Here is my confession: I'm still not convinced I know what "discourse" means, or why the hell we use it.  (My cordial apologies to Foucault).  I realize this is a dangerous confession.  Years from now, someone will find this blog, send it to the news outlets, and the Chronicle of Higher Education will trot out a story about how "academic admits to being an ignoramous!," and any semblance of an academic career I might have will be destroyed.

I am only half joking.

I do believe that "discourse" is one of those words academics all pretend they understand when they really don't, as indicated by Bacchi's (2005) "Discourse, Discourse Everywhere."  In this article, Bacchi notes the many scholars who mistake discourse theory for framework theory, or conflate discourse use with being constituted through discourse, or who use discourse indiscriminately to refer to wide and varying phenomena.  I've probably done all three.  I'm not saying "discourse" isn't an awesome idea (if it is what I think it is), but that I'm just gonna go ahead and say I am not interested in being one of the academics who pretends she understands what it really means anymore. 

The irony of me suggesting that discourse "really means" something is not lost on me.  The irony that the attempt to secure a "'correct' definition of discourse" is an inevitable failure because "the whole idea of discourse is that definitions play an important part in delineating knowledge" is not lost on me, either.  Leave it to an academic to come up with a term that resists definition.

The elusiveness of the word is perhaps one of the reasons I literally cannot fully grasp it.  It also is a word that smacks of the jargonese that makes some folks feel like theory is not their domain.  I am further suspicious of "discourse" because, in my experience, it leads to us spending a whole lot of time talking about agency, and very little talking about power.  Or if we do talk about power, we end up talking about agency in response to power.  Either way, discourse is like the horcruxes of Voldemort...they are everywhere, but you don't know exactly where they are or what they look like until they start to burn a hole in your skin or erupt from an old woman's body.  And then you have to go out and find all of them but really you're just like, arghh, I just want to kill Voldemort already!  But the horcruxes are Voldemort, see?  Just as he's a horcrux user, he's also, like, totally constituted by the horcruxes.

I realize I just made an extended Harry Potter metaphor.  That hypothetical Chronicle of Ed story keeps getting better and better!

All of this is to say that I agree with Bacchi's conclusions in favor of "reflexive framing," and "discourse" will still pop out of my mouth from time to time, and will likely also make it into my dissertation as an obligatory reference.  There may be a time when I look back at this post with shame and embarrassment for ever suggesting that I didn't know what I was talking about.

And that's just the point - perhaps we should examine not only how we use discourse indiscriminately, but why we do.  We should always be intentional about the jargon we chose to privilege, and for a moment, let's entertain the possibility that "discourse" may have achieved hegemony within academic work.  And if anyone would like to deconstruct that, I say have at it.

Theory is for everyone!

This past week, in my Race Theory and Social Thought class, a black woman in her first year of an Africana Studies masters program announced to the class and our professor that she doesn't like theory.  "I'm not interested in all of that," she said, gesturing to the air above her.  "I'm not good at that theoretical stuff.  I don't get it.  I mean, it's fine and all, but I just don't do theory.  I'm interested in the practical, what's real."  She pounded on her desk, indicating that the desk was real and theory merely abstract particles.

The professor (a black man) responded by pointing out the importance of theory for critical thinking.  We don't have to enjoy critical thinking - sometimes we don't like something, he seemed to indicate, because it can be difficult or uncomfortable.

While perfectly valid, his response was not addressing the fundamental misconception in the student's expression.  She was making the mistake of assuming theory to be intrinsically dense and unwieldy, yes.  She was making the mistake of assuming theory to be entirely divorced from reality, double yes.  But the most critical mistaken assumption she made was to believe that she herself was not already a theorist.

I know that there is often knee-jerk resistance to that idea - that we are, each of us, theorists.  This is for good reason, largely because the academy has done an admirable job convincing non-academics that they are not theorists.  Theory is deemed the domain of the professional intellectual, and this is no accident.  The academy has created a cannon of literature, stamped "theory" on it, and wiped its hands of the matter.  (Not an academic?  Oh, that's too bad!  If you're lucky, maybe someone will do you the great honor of dropping by and translating your petty common ideas into golden nuggets of theoretical wisdom one day!)

In positing itself as an interpreter (or, more likely, reinterpreter, or, better yet, re-writer) of The Other, the academy has managed quite the colonialist wake of stolen knowledge.  Given its history, it's no wonder some students, especially those who do not look or sound like what we have conceptualized as a "theorist," would distance themselves from theory.  Black women are especially susceptible to such a distancing, regardless of black feminist inroads into the academy (as detailed by Griffin 2005).  "The fights over canons and curricula were in fact struggles for power," Griffin notes, but just because "the academy [has become] yet another location, another site in the centuries-long battle against white supremacy and patriarchy," doesn't mean that that battle site is a winning one.  It sure doesn't seem so to students like the one from my Race Theory class.

Further more, academics are complicit in misinterpreting such theoretical foundations.  Griffen chronicles the many theorists (even scholars of color) who have accused black feminist writings for being "more practical than theoretical" and having a "debilitating reliance on experience."  Where is such a student as the one in my Race Theory class supposed to find herself among such divisive bickering?  The arguments lobbed at early black feminist writings as 'essentializing race' miss the point entirely - race and gender are experienced as essential identities when you are treated as if these categories are essential to you.  The student in my class understood theory to be what rejoinders to black feminist thought have suggested, not black feminist thought itself.  Theory is experiential.  To say otherwise is self-delusion, if not self denial.

As educators, we are responsible for healing this gap.  We must guide students into seeing the way they (much to their dismay!) have been preaching theory all along - that their theories are the foundation for not only their lives, but the lives of others.  On the opening page of Weaving a Family, Rothman writes, "It would be a mistake to read academic language and think it is devoid of values, feelings, or experience.  It is no less a mistake to read the vernacular and think it is devoid of theory and research."  Many theorists (their mothers, for example) may not sound like they imagine or have been told a theorist should sound.  The theorists they are most likely to be exposed to and told are authentic theorists really do seem distant from their lived realities, even if they aren't (coughMarxcough).  When a student tells us she just "doesn't do" theory, we must, must, must tell her that she already is.

"Theory" may also be a bad name for a cool idea.  When we say we have a theory outside of academia, we usually mean we have an idea, a hunch, a thought.  "Theory" in the academic sense is so much more than a hunch.  Theory is about articulating our truths, verbalizing our material conditions and lived realities, spitting hot flames to ignite a darkened room.  The words you speak is the theory you live.

Theory is for everyone, if only because theory is by everyone.

All together, now, can we all say "activist?"

Last week, Professor Greg Squires visited our campus to give a lecture on his new book, There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina.  Now based at George Washington University, he was decked out in his D.C. attire - navy blazer, powder blue collared shirt, no tie.  Before his departmental lecture, he met with interested graduate students to offer advice on how to best address public issues in our academic work.  It quickly became clear that he is one of those guys who looks like the embodiment of upper middle class, white hegemonic masculinity, but is really, on the inside, is not.  It's like "white bread D.C." is his Halloween costume, if you will.  That's not to say that he doesn't endorse academia, but that he didn't see why we couldn't all do work that promoted justice within the academic realm.  He promoted the idea of "doing good and doing well," which translates to doing "good" things for those outside of academia while doing "well" professionally (writing awesome papers, publishing in awesome journals, getting awesome contracts with awesome editors...you know, just being all around academically awesome).  Squires told us we must work to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," all the while "advance an agenda worth advancing."

After his brief monologue encouraging us to comfort and afflict, the table opened for student questions.  I asked him how he was able to balance being an activist scholar with the institutional pressures that may make it difficult to do activist work.
 
Oops.

All his talk of changey hopey stuff doped me up, and I forgot a cardinal rule of disciplinary academia: never say 'activist.'  Because no one is an activist.  They might "disrupt" or "destabilize," they might "challenge" or "counter," they might even do "good" or do "justice," but they never, ever, ever are "activists."

He immediately went into back-tracking mode.  We can't be viewed as activists, he told me.  Being perceived as an activist undermines our ability to do 'good' work.  There is a danger of being seen as too much of an activist, which is that no one will publish you and your work is discounted in and outside of your discipline.  He then told a story about being in a court case where the bad guys were demanding that he say he was an activist scholar to the court, but then he turned the tables on them by saying what he had just said to me - that he can't be an activist because then he wouldn't be able to act in his own self-interest (by that he meant publishing in the best journals), and that the only activist in the room was them (the bad guys) because their activism blinded their view to other perspectives.

In many ways, I understand.  Squires, like any professor, can't afford to be perceived as an activist - "activist" has a taint of agenda-pushing (as if that's a bad thing) that shuts doors and closes ears.  But activism doesn't seem quite what he made it out to be.  Sudbury and Okazawa-Rey define "activist scholarship" as "the production of knowledge and pedagogical practices through active engagements with, and in the service of, progressive social movements."  That sounds fair enough.  No 'blinding' or journal shunning there.  But I know it's not necessarily what people presume of you when you identify as an 'activist' - instead, it's all the things Squires said in his answer, and for that reason Squires does not.

I can't help thinking though, that there can't be anything that wrong with saying we are 'activists.'  If anything, I wonder what we lose by not saying we are activists.  It means it stays that bad thing no one wants to say they are, even though everyone's secretly (or not so secretly) doing it.  For Squires to distance himself from it speaks to the marginalization of the word, because surely Squires in the most comfortable place of all of us to claim "activist."  As my partner said to me upon hearing this story about Professor Squires, "If he can't say he's an activist, who can?"

Then I realized...maybe only someone like Squires (white, upper middle class, totally hegemonic, I mean let's be real here) can be like Squires.  He had said he didn't see why we couldn't all do work that promoted justice within academia, but really we can't all do justice work so easily within the academy.  First of all, some folks don't make it to academia...either academia has never been a place for them to find justice or academia has never been a possibility.  Second, some of those that do don't stay because they quickly realize they are not welcomed or don't fit the ideal type of an academic (who looks and talks a lot like Squires).  And third, some of those who stay aren't able to do justice work as easily as Squire suggests. They are perceived as agenda driven because they are not white, or not male, or not straight, or not middle class...they are branded activists because they are 'the other' and dare to theorize on their otherness.  They cannot so easily do good and do well.  For some of us, doing good means we will never do 'well,' at least not in the eyes of the 'best' journals and editors.  Squires can do this work and it can be "good" and published in the best journals...and he can still safely assure us he is not an activist, if only because he is presumed to have no stake in the matter. 

But we all have stake, don't we?  Indeed, that what leads, each of us, no matter our positionality, to...act.  While I agree we desperately need more Squires in academia, people who fit the academic mold and yet are willing to promote social justice in their work, we must also broaden our idea of what "doing good" and "doing well" mean, and who has greater access to either of them.

Mistaking friendliness for friendship

In "Friendship, Friendliness, and Feminist Fieldwork," Kirsch describes the problems that arise when, through developing the rapport necessary for interviews and ethnographies, participants "mistake a good interview fora  therapeutic situation."  Feminist scholarship has encouraged rapport and minimizing the distance between researcher and the researched, but Kirsh warns that such a pendulum can swing too far. Our participants can sometimes forget or repress the understanding of an interview space and divulge information they may later wish they hadn't, or may also feel a sudden sense of betrayal or anger and wish to shut down an interview for being too personal, even if they had been answering more personal questions all along.  Researchers, too, can be duplicitous (even if unintentional) by establishing rapport only to up and leave when the information is collected. 

Kirsch reminds us that it is our responsibility as researchers to be extremely cautious about what we are promising when we build rapport, because "friendliness" can be easily mistaken for "friendship."  Our scholarship is almost always not founded on long term relationships, but rather "simulate the context of relationships" where "the flow of information is one-sided."  In order to resolve the potential disregard for the emotional effects participants may experience, Kirsch suggests that we ask for consent again at the end of an interview, allow for our participants to set boundaries, and "respect - and expect - participants' silence, distance, and withdrawal."  Rather than see consent as something static and one-timed, we should conceive of consent as ever renegotiable.  Rather than see all of our participants as people we should 'like' and enjoy being around, we should always remember that "our interactions with participants are most often based on friendliness, not genuine friendship." 

What struck me most about this article was it suggested about the lack of genuine friendships we collectively seem to have.  What passes for friendship in our lives is often rather surface and superfluous...we have mistaken friendliness for friendship with 'friends' who aren't researchers, too.  We are so hungry for authentic relationships that when a researcher comes along with a long list of questions about us and all the time in the world to listen to us answer them uninterrupted, we think we're BFFs.  Establishing greater boundaries between 'friendliness' and 'friendship' is not only not only necessary for more ethical and honest research, but it is necessary for sustaining deeper, more lasting friendships in our everyday lives.  We should all have people surrounding us who offer us the "undivided attention, sincere interest, and warmth" afforded by an ethnographer, but without actually dashing off to write up a study picking apart what we just said.  While I agree with Kirsh that such boundaries are crucial to our research, I also wonder if this also means many of us just need better friends, or - more importantly - need to be better friends.

Our bodies cannot be contained

A good friend of mine went to her annual physical last spring.  When she was weighed, it was evident that she had lost nearly 10 pounds since her last visit the year before.  My friend is petite and sinewy, and had always had slender build as long as I have known her.  She has also always been a generally healthy eater, opting for veggie options over red meat and consuming smaller portions because she doesn't like feeling 'full' or getting that heavy, stuffed sensation after eating a large meal.  Instead, she grazes throughout the day whenever she feels hungry.  Most notably, as far as I know, she has never passed up dessert.  (I have seen this woman not buy a $10 t-shirt that will stay in her wardrobe for years because it is "too much money" and then plunk down $8 on a piece of specialty cake and gleefully savor it for the ten minutes it's on her plate.)

In the past year, however, she had taken up regular walking, occasional jogging, and hip-hop and belly dancing classes.  She had also been working longer hours, and was perhaps experiencing more stress than the year before.  Whatever the reason, dropping ten pounds meant something different for her than many people - she was now nearly 100 pounds.  And, according to where her weight and height fit in a standardized chart the doctor referred to, my friend was a disordered eater.  The doctor's tone was was stern and accusing.  "You have a problem," the doctor (a woman) said.  "You need to get help."

My friend talks about this experience with a considerable sense of trauma.  No matter her protests to the contrary, the doctor was certain she had "a problem."  My friend did not know herself to have an eating disorder, as she has never starved herself or thrown up food she has consumed.  She doesn't have any preoccupations about being fat, and has never asked me anything along the lines of "do I look big in this?"  or "does my stomach bulge in this shirt?"  But her statistics were speaking for her, and the doctor chose to believe those instead of her proclamations. 

"What could I do?" she said to me when she relayed this story.  "I fit the profile."  She is white, middle class, and a young woman in her early 20s.  These are the people we think of when we hear "eating disorder," and they are the people who are usually treated for such a disorder, even though eating disorders are not inherently white or middle-class issues.  The doctor presumed she must have been in denial about her disorder.  Likely she has been lied to before.  I wonder, also, whether the doctor has leveled other wrongful accusations in the past...perhaps she feels as though she can't afford not to.

So my friend was assigned to a nutritionist, who prescribed larger portion sizes as the antidote to her weight loss.  Within a few months, most of the weight had returned.  Overall, she has been glad to have had the opportunity to see a nutritionist, something many of us would likely benefit from, but still feels pained by the experience with her doctor, to the point of not knowing if she will return to her practice.  She was embarrassed about returning to a doctor who was certain she "needed help" and facing someone who was convinced that she had "a problem," but she was also wary of trusting of a doctor who did not listen or respect her self-narrative.  Sometimes we need a doctor to doubt us, to read between the lines, in order to help us.  But what happens when need a doctor to believe what we are saying is true?  Or at least, for the sake of our dignity, treat us as if we are the experts of our own lives?

I share this because we cannot forget that to standardize something does not mean we have accounted for every possibility of the human experience.  We are far more diverse and varied than any standardized system can accommodate.  This is especially poignant considering the interpretations of "disordered eating."  Authority intervention, as Hatse and Honey (2005) indicate, is often predicated on a subjective idea of what "normal" eating is.  To be diagnosed as having an eating disorder is not always the same as actually having disordered eating, as my friend experienced firsthand. 

In their study of anorexia, Hatse and Honey face the difficulty of setting a sampling frame given the standards of objectivity forced upon subjective opinions and experiences.  They note that "diagnoses [of anorexia] were often inconsistent and changeable," and subject to revision at the doctors' will.  "To brand a girl anorexic without consent was to deny her selfhood," Hatse and Honey write, but they were not able to accommodate for the "complex spectrum" of disordered eating experiences because of the institutional pressures of doctors and the ethics board.

As one ethics officer says, rather shockingly, "The girls are anorexic.  The fact that some girls don't agree with their diagnosis doesn't mean they're not anorexic."  Hatse and Honey later explain how ethic committees, like medical science, "grew out of a positivist tradition," where a "universal, rational subject" is presumed.  To trust the diagnoses implicitly was to "privilege clinical diagnoses over girls' views," but was a necessary precondition for achieving access to doctors' patients under standardized ethical circumstances.

In defining their research population, Hatse and Honey face a paradox - once defined, they "erased the particular and individual differences among potential participants," thereby missing a core tenet of research ethics: "respect for persons."  Although Hatse and Honey push for greater collaboration with both the ethics board and the doctors, they argue that a more collaborative approach should be possible and a greater eye for diversity should be accommodated by medical and ethical practices.  Unlike many other researchers, Hatse and Honey do not view the ethics board as an impediment to their study, but a means of ensuring a necessary protection of their studied population.  The problem is when the necessary steps to getting the ethics board's stamp of approval means sacrificing a more holistic, humane, and authentically ethical treatment of their participants.
 
As researchers, we must navigate bureaucratic and positivist standards when we know they will limit our ability to account for variable experiences.  No doubt, such standards are forced to reconcile their failure to say much about anything when faced with outliers who are really a lot like everybody else, in that they are not at all like anyone else.  Because when we set limits and standards and ranges, we constantly find that humanity leaks through the cracks.  Our bodies simply cannot be contained.  Our charge as researchers is not to recapture them and squish them back inside, but to witness, document, and account for their liberation, thereby, perhaps, finding our own.