Forest Hills Cemetery (October 2014). Photograph by Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook.
The week got away from me folks, and I will not be posting on Uprooting Racism today. Look for my notes from section #5 next week (11/7). In the meanwhile, I’ll off to the New England Archivists’ fall symposium tomorrow in Newport, Rhode Island. I hope whatever y’all are doing with your weekend, it will be one of rest and renewal.
This week’s round-up brings us more food for thought around labor, life, and how the two fit together…
[E]Coco Papy @ Persephone Magazine | Bandaids Ain’t Options: Freezing Eggs and Facebook.
Facebook and Apple claim to be about corporate family friendliness, and yet neither company offers in-house daycare or daycare vouchers, aren’t offering flexible leave, a decreased pay gap, or any of the social conditions it takes to actually raise children. Furthermore, they still place the onus on child rearing on women with the incentive of egg freezing. It’s not progressive or family friendly. It’s kind of gross.
Paul Boag @ Smashing Magazine | You Are Not a Machine. You Are Not Alone.
Many of us struggle silently with mental health problems and many more are affected by them, either directly or indirectly. {Geek} Mental Help Week starts today and we would like to help raise awareness with a couple of articles exploring these issues. – Ed.
…Me, a grown man. A respected figure in my field. A success. Standing on the doorstep of my parents’ house, crying to my mum like a small child. This was the breaking point for me, the minute I finally realized I had depression. In fact I’d been depressed for over a decade. Burnt out. Used up with nothing left to give.
It had started back in the late nineties when I took a job with a dot com. I had a boss who was a bully, plain and simple. He shouted, he threatened, he manipulated. I stood up to him, but it drained me. Every day was a battle.
He was replaced, but the next guy wasn’t much better. He used to put me in a room with the company’s investors and make me present to them. He knew I was a good presenter, so when things got tough he would wheel me out. But he would sit next to me through the meetings kicking me under the table when I said something he didn’t like.
Jos Truitt @ The Guardian: Comment Is Free | Trans people need more than beloved celebrity spokespeople. We need equality.
President Obama’s executive order last summer protecting transgender federal employees from anti-LGBT discrimination was a good start, especially as it resulted in Thursday’s ruling in favor of Tamara Lusardi, a transgender civilian US Army software specialist. The US office of special counsel decided that she was targeted with gender-identity discrimination by the Army when her co-workers required her to use a single-use, gender neutral restroom, referred to her as “sir”, “it” and by her birth name and refused to give her work.
But we still have a long way to go to win employment protections for all trans people. While federal employees are protected in general, a huge loophole exists in that trans people are not allowed to serve openly in the military – so Lusardi can work for the Army, but she couldn’t serve in it unless she stayed in the closet ( a position in which many trans people find themselves).
The Diane Rehm Show | Women and Online Harassment.
[from the complete transcript]…Well, there’s an incredible amount they can do under existing law. And exactly as Danielle said, some of the actions against Anita and Brianna rose to the level of threats. The denial of service attacks of course were intentional hacking and harm to people’s presence online where there were defamatory statements made about them that — you know, to Kickstarter and other business modules. We already have laws against those. None of those actions would harm the First Amendment. …
Michael Hiltzik @ The L.A. Times | U.S. income inequality is bad, but wealth inequality is a bigger problem.
Wealth inequality is also an artifact of income inequality; the two trends work together to magnify the former. As the bottom 90% struggle to make ends meet on stagnant incomes, they’re unable to accumulate savings. “Today, the top 1% save about 35% of their income,” the authors write, “while bottom 90% families save about zero.”
Strong measures will be needed to reverse this otherwise inexorable trend, they write. “Ten or twenty years from now, all the gains in wealth democratization achieved during the New Deal and the post-war decades could be lost. While the rich would be extremely rich, ordinary families would own next to nothing, with debts almost as high as their assets.”
Yuki Noguchi @ National Public Radio | Behold the Entrenched – and Reviled – Annual Review.
Performance review season is nearing, and if that makes you break out into a cold sweat, you’re not alone. Studies show between 60 percent and 90 percent of employees, including managers, dislike the performance evaluation.
Some companies are starting to look at alternatives, but the performance review is pretty entrenched.
“They’re fraudulent, bogus and dishonest,” says Samuel Culbert, a management professor at UCLA who does research in dysfunctional management practice. “And second, they’re indicative of and they support bad management.”
Lisa Peet @ Library Journal | Librarians Embroiled in Lawsuit Alleging Sexual Harassment.
(well, no, actually, the lawsuit alleges libel … but I do appreciate that Peet explores the broader issues raised by the #teamharpy situation…)
One positive repercussion of Murphy’s lawsuit, and de jesus and Rabey’s responses, has been to mobilize further discussion about harassment and marginalization in the library world. Librarians have been speaking up to share their stories; after the 2014 ALA conference, children’s and teen librarian Ingrid Abrams created a survey asking about harassment incidents, and documented the results. “I don’t think people know how wide-spread harassment is at conferences,” she wrote on her blog, The Magpie Librarian. “When I relayed [my] story…most male librarians were shocked. Female librarians expressed sympathy and then usually shared similar (or worse!) stories with me. However, I am not naive enough to believe that those who identify as female are the only ones who are harassed, intimidated, threatened, or even physically attacked at conferences. Homophobia, racism, transphobia, and able-ism can also occur.”
s.e. smith @ this ain’t livin | Race Flipping and Expectations In Fiction.
Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots is one such example, a totally flipped world in which whites are slaves and indentures, while people of colour are the dominant members of society. Unlike the horrifically racist Save the Pearls, Blonde Roots is a commentary on social attitudes about race and the slave-owning era in England (where it’s loosely set, with considerable variance). It’s about wild, pasty-skinned tribespeople brought in hand by an enlightened, dark-skinned people – and about the desperate emulation of Black traits, a desire to pass as Black.
It’s a sharp, incisive, and at times deeply painful debut novel that explores the Transatlantic slave trade from an entirely new angle, challenging the reader to think about the history of slavery, and race, from an entirely distinctive perspective. Her book is designed and calculated to make white readers deeply uncomfortable, and it does, in a glorious, clear, wonderful way that makes it impossible to avoid certain truths of our collective past.
Maggie Zhou @ Model View Culture | A Code of Conduct Is Not Enough.
The push for adoption of anti-harassment policies at tech conferences has been a success: since 2010, hundreds of conferences have adopted an anti-harassment policy, many of them based on an example policy on the Geek Feminism wiki. Thanks in large part to anti-harassment policy advocacy by the Ada Initiative and other organizations, an anti-harassment policy is the done thing these days.
The introduction to the Geek Feminism wiki’s example policy states, “Simply having an anti-harassment policy can prevent harassment all by itself.” Indeed, the widespread adoption of conference codes of conduct is often considered a victory in its own right by tech culture activists.
Unfortunately, it isn’t enough, and harassment at conferences continues. While it’s true that the existence of an anti-harassment policy or code of conduct can discourage the worst offenders from attending an event, or encourage some attendees to think more carefully about their behavior while there, we’ve seen firsthand that a code of conduct alone is not remotely sufficient to prevent all incidents of harassment and misconduct from occurring.
As always … got links? Send them in via email, Twitter, or comments and we will include them in next week’s round-up.
Welcome back! This week’s read-along covers the whole of Part II: The Dynamics of Racism (p. 78-114). For previous installments of this series, please see the Uprooting Racism page.
I’ve been thinking a lot, recently, about how the work of rectifying injustice and inequality can feel — whether you’re tackling a given issue from a position of privilege or a position of oppression — like an overwhelming task. And how the overwhelming-ness of the task can be a roadblock to actually making headway because we imagine that whatever we do won’t be enough or the right thing. Obviously, there are ways to abdicate your responsibility to work for social justice, and ways to screw up. I’m sure many of us screw up before we get out of bed in the morning, in this regard. But rather than getting stuck on the question of where to get started, I’d like to suggest that we re-frame the work as one of lifelong habit. The habit of questioning, challenging, revising, reconsidering. We can signal openness to, and awareness of the need for, change in a lot of small, everyday ways. I think it’s particularly important to treat the work of inclusion, and discussion/rectification of injustice, as necessary and unremarkable, something to be done without fanfare because it is the right thing to do. We don’t get special points for doing it, because it’s what we should all be doing habitually, in every facet of our lives.
With that general reflection, on to a few specific thoughts sparked by this week’s reading …
The Enemy Within
This section revisits Kivel’s earlier point that a society divided by racialization has, basically, been magicked by a “don’t look here!” spell … cast by the economically privileged. Economic injustice, Kivel argues, is a cause that could bring people together to create a more equal, just society — a cause that would go far in repairing the damage done by institutionalized racism.
Consider this recent Washington Post piece on the “new gilded age.”
According to the columnist, Matt O’Brien, “the top 1 percent now own over 41 percent of all the wealth in the country. That’s the most since 1939.”
I don’t have much by way of insight to offer here, except that I do agree with Kivel that economic insecurity for “the rest of us” is a timely issue. And to the extent that income inequality is distributed along the faultlines of race, it’s a deeply racial issue as well.
Fear and Danger
Being afraid is not the same as being in danger (80).
As Kivel points out, people of color are vastly more likely — as recent instance of police brutality have demonstrated — to be victims of violence at the hands of white people than white people are to be victims of violence at the hands of people of color. This doesn’t stop white people from projecting our own acts of violence on the communities we are conditioned to fear.
Geographies of Fear
In what areas do you feel routinely safe? Why?
How safe do you think people of color feel in those areas you feel safest in?
I was, thankfully, never taught to fear big cities qua city — nor was I taught to fear rural areas qua wilderness. As a teenager, I remember jogging in the woods alone; I remember riding my bike home from work and school in the late evening; I remember my parents only ever locking the house on Christmas Day — seriously! I didn’t have to worry about remembering a house key until I was living on my own. Seven years later, I still resent locks on the doors.
So, no: I didn’t learn to fear black men on the street. I have never felt particularly endangered as a woman walking home unaccompanied at night in Boston.
But this, too, is a mark of socioeconomic, racialized privilege. Because I don’t have to worry that the police are going to stop me and ask me where I’m going, arrest me in my own neighborhood, or shoot me in the back.
Exotic and Erotic
In this section Kivel talks about the intertwining of racism, violence, and sexualization. By happenstance, a member of the Amiables group had just, the morning I read this section, sent me Tressie McMillan Cottom’s piece on the sexualization of black women’s bodies, circa the Miley Cyrus “twerking” episode. I excerpt at length because I think it’s important for us to remember how these things — race, violence, sexualization — map differently across different bodies, and operate in different types of social situations. Notice how gender, race, and sexual identities intertwine in this situation in ways that are indissoluble from one another, in ways that must be understood not as “about” race or class or gender or sexual identity but about all of those, and more, wrapped up in a specific alchemy of power imbalance that meant white people felt entitled to a black woman’s body.
At a Franklin Street pub one night [my partner and I] were the only black couple at a happy hour. It is one of those college places where concoctions of the bar’s finest bottom shelf liquor is served in huge fishbowls for pennies on the alcohol proof dollar. I saw a few white couples imbibing and beginning some version of bodily grooving to the DJ. I told my partner that one of them would be offering me free liquor and trying to feel my breasts within the hour.
He balked, thinking I was joking.
I then explained to him my long, storied, documented history of being accosted by drunk white men and women in atmospheres just like these. Women asking to feel my breasts in the ladies’ restroom. Men asking me for a threesome as his drunk girlfriend or wife looks on smiling. Frat boys offering me cash to “motorboat” my cleavage. Country boys in cowboy hats attempting to impress his buddies by grinding on my ass to an Outkast music set. It’s almost legend among my friends who have witnessed it countless times.
My partner could not believe it until not 30 minutes later, with half the fishbowl gone, the white woman bumps and grinds up to our table and laughing tells me that her boyfriend would love to see us dance. “C’mon girl! I know you can daaaaannnce,” she said. To sweeten the pot they bought our table our own fishbowl.
My partner was stunned. That summer we visited lots of similar happy hours. By the third time this scene played out my partner had taken to standing guard while I danced, stonily staring down every white couple that looked my way. We were kicked out of a few bars when he challenged some white guy to a fight about it. I hate such scenes but I gave my partner a break. He was a man and not used to this. He didn’t have the vocabulary borne of black breasts that sprouted before bodies have cleared statutory rape guidelines. He didn’t know the words so he did all he knew how to do to tell me he was sorry this was my experience in life: he tried to kick every white guy’s ass in Chapel Hill.
I’m also going to take the opportunity to say, if you aren’t familiar with McMillan Cottom’s work on race/class/gender in higher education and occupational stratification, you should definitely remedy this situation.
In particular reference to our ongoing conversation about legitimacy, professionalism, and inclusion, I recommend “ ‘Who the Fuck Do You Think You Are?’: Academic Engagement, Microcelebrity, and Digital Sociology from the Far Left of the Matrix of Domination” (PDF), which is an exploration of how black women, specifically, are challenged on their assertion of expertise and authority.
The Myth of the Happy Family
Because of violence and unequal power, we are not equally privileged or equally safe within our families (95).
This section is about family; it also about community groups — say, colleagues in a close-knit department — and the way in which some members of the group may be excluded, out of step, even abused by others in the group. Such a dynamic, antithetical to human thriving, is not always obvious to members of the group for whom the status quo works quite well thank you very much. And those who speak up to call out the myth of collective happiness are often punished or otherwise ostracized (perhaps sued?).
I think it’s good to be aware, over all, of when we are in a position to speak up / call out and when we are in a position where we are likely to either overlook or disbelieve those calling out the unhealthy dynamic. Our position relative to those who hold power in a given situation will shape how we hear, and respond to, dissent.
In the context of the archival / library / information sciences professions, this often takes the shape of policing the boundary of our professional norms — who has a right to participate in our professional community, what credentials one needs to be considered “one of us,” what ethical practices are expected, what expertise needed, etc. Some of this boundary policing is healthy — we don’t want an archivist to consider it ethical practice to grant preferential access to collections based on a researcher’s politics, for example. Some is not — as when people get hyper-defensive about younger professionals, or in discussions about credentialing.
Beyond Black and White
The final chapter of this section is about language, and about how so often discussions of race in America are reduced to black vs. white, when in fact whiteness is a privileged racial position relative to many different experiences of racialization by those we collectively term “people of color” (a term Kivel uses, while also acknowledging its problematic nature).
I like how Kivel acknowledges that within communities, terminology is often in flux: internally, we often experience disagreements about what language to use to describe our collective experience — the labels which bring us together for collective political organizing, or describe the characteristic by which the broader society identifies us as similar.
I see echoes, for example, in my own experience of language to describe myself and other sexual minority groups collectively. When I helped form the roundtable for New England Archivists meant to support discussion around issues of human sexual and gender diversity within archival collections and the archives profession, one of the first debates was whether we should use “queer” as an umbrella term, or whether we should stick to the alphabet soup of LGBTQ (or similar). We ended up formally going with LGBTQ after several members expressed discomfort at reclaiming the “queer” terminology; though our blog is now called Queer!NEA, we retain the LGBTQ Issues Roundtable group name.
All solutions are imperfect, yet I like Kivel’s gentle point that there is a vast difference between imperfect respectful language and disrespectful terms, such as racial slurs or other derogatory language. For example “illegals” or “illegal immigrants” are disrespectful terms in the context of human migration; “undocumented” is perhaps an imperfect term, but at least indicates very specifically the relationship of an individual migrant to the state (which has the power to document, and pass judgement on, human movement across political boundaries).
It’s getting late and the cat is ready for me to set the computer aside and come to bed — so I’ll leave it there for this week. If you’ve been reading along, or this post has prompted reflections on its own, I do look forward to hearing your thoughts!
This week’s links seem to have much to say about gender and how not to be a jerk about gender. I think a lot of the “how not to…” advice could be generalized out in the basic premise to other types of margin/center interactions as well.
Jennifer Allaway @ Jezebel | #Gamergate Trolls Aren’t Ethics Crusaders; They’re a Hate Group.
I do not say this to make the people of #Gamergate seem any more important, or effective, or powerful, or to give any sort of new credence to their ideas. Rather, this is just a structural designation: as immediately dismissible as their tactics and stances might be (at least to anyone who has not become victim to them), I believe it’s important to note that group was formed like a hate group and functions like a hate group in every way.
Let me walk you through my reasoning. The framework I’m using here comes from Linda Woolf and Michale Hulsizer’s 2004 study “Hate Groups for Dummies: How to Build a Successful Hate Group.” In Woolf and Hulsizer’s analysis of the structure and process of building a hate group, they identify four essential elements: Leadership, Recruitment, Social-Psychological Techniques, and Dehumanization.
Melissa McEwan @ Shakesville | On Communicating More Effectively With Women.
4. Because of the way cultural dominance/privilege works, marginalized people are, by necessity and unavoidability, more knowledgeable about the lives of privileged people than the other way around. Immersion in a culture where male is treated as the Norm (and female a deviation of that Norm), and where masculinity is treated as aspirational (and femininity as undesirable), and where men’s stories are considered the Stories Worth Telling, and where manhood and mankind are so easily used as synonymous with personhood and humankind, and where everything down to the human forms on street signs reinforce the idea of maleness as default humanness, inevitably makes women de facto more conversant in male privilege than men are in female marginalization. That’s the practical reality of any kind of privilege—the dominant group can exist without knowing anything about marginalized group, but the marginalized group cannot safely or effectively exist without knowing something about the privileged group and its norms and values.
This is Not a Pattern | Way Men In Tech Are Unintentionally Sexist.
We have all internalized harmful stereotypes about women — it’s part of growing up in a culture that inculcates gender roles from a very early age. Our culture has deeply-embedded patriarchal power structures (ditto racist and classist and ableist and transphobic and homophobic and so on…) that we all absorb and have to intentionally question and deprogram. We all, regardless of our background or our conscious beliefs, have implicit biases that affect the way we see the world.
Groups that are dominated by one sort of person tend to develop ways of talking and thinking that implicitly center the identities and experiences of that one sort of person, which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, because it communicates to outsiders that they are different (at best; unwelcome interlopers or second-class citizens, at worst). It can introduce, or exacerbate, the further self-fulfilling prophecies of impostor syndrome and stereotype threat. It can put pressure on people to conform to a certain type in order to succeed.
I already shared this one via email with the Amiables, but here is Satifice | White Women As Default Librarian #gsisc14.
Discussions of the professionalization of librarianship must mention race. It is just as important to how the field and profession are constituted and created as gender. Librarianship might be devalued because it is women’s work, but it is valued because it is white women’s work. Both of these realities operate at the same time. This generally holds true for any discussion about how ‘women’ entered the workforce… as if Black women and other women of colour hadn’t already been forcibly working for centuries under colonialism.
In many different panels and talks, there was repeated mention about bringing in or using feminist ethics/epistemology/discourse within librarianship to do make the field better. And yet, for the same reasons I resist (white) feminism, I have to say I’m largely unmoved and unimpressed by the necessity of this based on what I heard yesterday. By assuming white women as default woman and librarian, by assuming that white women’s experiences within the field are universal and generally applicable, I find myself deeply unclear as to what changes feminism could possibly bring about within the library.
And if you haven’t already, do check out the tweet stream from #gsisc14…. some excellent discussions regarding gender, sexuality, and the information sciences.
And finally, perhaps in counterpoint to some of what Satifice has to say, my friend Diana writes about libraries as spaces we can appropriate to combat inequality…
Diana Wakimoto @ TheWakiLibrarian | Blog Action Day 2014: Inequality.
It is almost too overwhelming to know where to begin writing about inequality, so I’m going to zoom in a bit to libraries. Most of us have heard or seen the horrible statistics that show just how unequal the division of income and goods and medicine and opportunities are spread around the world. I’m sure some of us have contributed to charities, non-profits, and other organizations dedicated to helping fight inequality, in its many forms, in many places around the world. And I know some of us have volunteered time working with organizations whose missions are to help others. Trying to rectify inequality can seem like an impossible task and I know that it causes some people to give up hope, to throw up their hands, and to let others take point. But that isn’t the way to make the world better, but I understand the feeling of desperation and hopelessness and cynicism. So today, I’m not going to reiterate statistics or offer a way to fix the world (not to mention, I’m not sure how to do that), but I do want to talk about libraries and why I truly believe our work is vital in helping individuals succeed.
As always, if you have links you’d like to share in the weekly round-up, please Tweet, email, or leave suggestion in comments.
My wife and I are off to a conference in Maine this weekend, so I’ll be returning to the Uprooting Racism read-along next Friday. In the meantime, a few things you might be interested in:
1. #TeamHarpy is still seeking witnesses, signatures, funding, and signal boosting. Joe Murphy has still not dropped the lawsuit, so the the two librarians, nina de jesus and Lisa Rabey, continue to face the reality of this hostile environment every day. Consider supporting them at whatever level, in whatever manner, you feel able.
2. #StopGamerGate2014 has been trending on Twitter the past few days (content note: the hashtag timeline contains a lot of anti-#StopGamerGate2014 tweets as well, fair warning) as women in gaming / tech continue to face a wave of hostile, violent abuse and threats of physical harm for participating in … the world. A longform read about this pattern of gender-based abuse can be found at The Atlantic:
The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women
by Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly…All of this raised a series of troubling questions: Who’s proliferating this violent content? Who’s controlling its dissemination? Should someone be? In theory, social media companies are neutral platforms where users generate content and report content as equals. But, as in the physical world, some users are more equal than others. In other words, social media is more symptom than disease: A 2013 report from the World Health Organization called violence against women “a global health problem of epidemic proportion,” from domestic abuse, stalking, and street harassment to sex trafficking, rape, and murder. This epidemic is thriving in the petri dish of social media. …
3. The long shadow of racialized housing continued in the ongoing foreclosure crisis is highlighted at The American Prospect by Nathalie Baptiste in Them That’s Got Shall Get:
What sets Prince George’s County apart from other upscale regions is that most of its citizens are black. No other majority-black counties in the United States are even comparable in terms of numbers of educated citizens and middle-class incomes, but when the economy crumbled, so did the dreams of many homeowners living in Prince George’s. And despite promises of help by President Barack Obama and lawmakers, seven years after the housing bubble burst, the county’s foreclosure crisis has only slowed, not abated.
As the wealthiest black-majority county in the United States, Prince George’s has long represented the pinnacle of black success. The county’s median household income is $73,568—a full $20,000 more than the median household income of the United States as a whole. Only 7.1 percent of U.S. firms are black-owned, but in Prince George’s that number stands at a whopping 54.5 percent.
I hope you find these thought-provoking. I’ll see y’all back here next Wednesday and Friday.
This weeks’ links are a mix-n-match of stories revolving around labor exploitation and our work environments.
Paul Campos @ Lawyers, Guns and Money explores the change over time in the correlation between educational credentials and household income, 1973-2013:
It would be something of an understatement to say these statistics call into question the enhanced human capital theory of educational attainment. Instead, they are precisely what we would expect to find if educational credentialing is a positional good: one whose value must invariably deteriorate as it becomes less scarce. (Currently, somewhere between a quarter and a fifth of 25-34 year old college graduates are earning less than the median high school graduate of the same age).
Aliqae Geraci is polling MLS grads regarding their student loan debt. If you have already, please consider completing her anonymous online survey; also take time to read through the aggregate results:
Like the Ph.D. Debt Survey, the M.L.S. Debt Survey publicly documents the debt accrued over the course of professional training – in this case, the professional training of librarians. Unlike the Ph.D. Debt Survey, M.L.S. Survey respondents inhabit a financial aid landscape where full funding is not an operational assumption.
Selena Larson @ readwrite looks at a recent women-in-tech failure you may have heard about, the “male allies” panel at the Grace Hopper Celebration 2014, and points out the many ways in which the male panelists were tone-deaf on the subject of discrimination in their industry:
Missing, of course, were any women to field the questions the men so gingerly talked around. The panelists exhibited little genuine sense of self-awareness, and while the men said existing tech culture needs to change, they offered only stale encouragement, and had little to say about any of the repercussions women and other outsiders can face when they do “speak up” or “tell people their story” or “lean in.”
Trust me: People who are not white males already know very well that they have to be “twice as good as them to get half of what they have,” as the saying goes.
By contrast, other panels and talks throughout the day forthrightly addressed the issues that can arise when, for instance, women advocate for themselves and ask for career advancement. One talk entitled “Winning At The Game Of Office Politics,” specifically focused on how women are consistently passed over and denied recognition for good work.
Radio Boston did a segment on Thursday of last week looking at gender diversity in the workplace:
The happiness-productivity balance is a perpetual challenge of the modern American workplace. Managers want to foster their employees’ well-being while boosting the bottom line. You wouldn’t think that these goals would be in opposition, but a study recently published in the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy illuminates something that can have a significant — and opposite — effect on both: gender.
The study, “Diversity, Social Goods Provision, and Performance in the Firm,” finds that employees express greater levels of satisfaction and well-being in same-gender workplaces, but they’re more productive in mixed-gender environments.
There was not a full transcript I could find, but you can access additional information at Radio Boston’s story page.
Intern Labor Rights is holding a rally in New York City today against the exploitation of unpaid interns:
Each year in New York State tens of thousands of young people take on unpaid internships, hoping and believing that they will gain the training necessary to get jobs and begin their careers. The vast majority find themselves untrained and exploited. They are the victims of Wage Theft!
Danah Boyd @ Apophenia as pulled together some frameworks for understanding the future of work that might be of interest:
Technology is changing work. It’s changing labor. Some imagine radical transformations, both positive and negatives. Words like robots and drones conjure up all sorts of science fiction imagination. But many of the transformations that are underway are far more mundane and, yet, phenomenally disruptive, especially for those who are struggling to figure out their place in this new ecosystem. Disruption, a term of endearment in the tech industry, sends shutters down the spine of many, from those whose privilege exists because of the status quo to those who are struggling to put bread on the table.
Karishma @ Persephone Magazine explores the way in which privilege and nostalgia operate to make inclusion feel threatening to those for whom mainstream
When whiteness is the default for both decades of television and the pioneering 90s kids’ television, why wouldn’t male whiteness be the default? As national demographics shift and the TV landscape slowly diversifies to match, the overall rhetoric and dominance of nostalgia is further complicated by a perceived shift in power and loss of said power by white men. Klickstein and men like him use this nostalgia to refer back to the good ol’ days when whiteness was stably centered as the default for everything, including television representation. These men use diversity as an example of the purported struggle of white men in society, and in doing so, they fail to recognize their own privileges and power in comparison to these diverse groups.
John Walker @ John Walker’s Electronic House wrote a thing about #GamerGate that resonated with some recent conversations on Archives & Archivists regarding politics in history and the archivists’ responsibilities regarding objectivity:
GamerGate would like to see the politics taken out of games coverage. This statement deserves an essay of its own, but I want to try to address it quickly here. It is a fallacious statement, whether by design or misunderstanding. One cannot remove the “politics” from anything. Let’s take an imaginary example:
There’s a new game out, called Koala Fighters XVII. It’s a game about an elite squadron of fighter pilots, who are taking on the menace of the invading koala hordes. In it, throughout, are cutscenes showing bare-breasted women being kidnapped by the evil koalas, threatened with torture and death, to be rescued by the amazing gang of pilot men. The game is, obviously, brilliantly well made, featuring some of the best koala shooting action ever seen in a game. However, when reviewing this game, gaming site Poltaku comments on how the nudity and sexual stereotypes are disappointing. Meanwhile, Sensible Gaming Reviews, leaving the politics out of games coverage, doesn’t say anything of the sort, not seeing the feature necessary to mention. GameBros4Ever, meanwhile, reviews the game and comments on how brilliantly the breasts are animated, and how great it was to feel like a powerful man in the cockpit of the plane.
All three reviews are inherently political. Choosing to mention this specific feature of the game is a political decision, whether to condemn or celebrate. And crucially, choosing not to mention it is a political decision too. Not thinking it worth mentioning, also, is born of a political position on the matter. Indifference to something of importance to others is, of course, a political position. You cannot “leave the politics out of games coverage”. Politics are inherent. What is instead meant by this demand is, by its nature, “Leave politics I don’t adhere to out of games coverage.”
Wanting games coverage that doesn’t take issue with, for example, sexualised images of women (or men) is wanting coverage of a specific political leaning. It’s a desire for a specific political position to be taken in games coverage. Which is fine! But it’s not, in any way, leaving politics out of it.
…And of course the pretense that it’s about neutrality is patent nonsense. By requiring neutrality on those specific subjects, such as anything regarding the representation of any group of people, it is a tacit endorsement of the opposing political position. The desire to mute criticism of the representation of women in a game is a tacit endorsement of the representation of women in the game. And again, of course, anyone is absolutely entitled to endorse that representation if it is their position. But it’s a position.
And finally, if you have not yet read Kathy Sierra’s searing indictment of the culture of gender (and other identities)-based harassment and violence on the Internet I suggest you do so now. Anyone who wonders why women on the Internet seem, at times, to jump at shadows: We know, There but for absolutely no rational, avoidable reason go I. The year Sierra was trolled offline and out of her career was the year I began actively blogging and the year I began graduate school in library and information science. For me, as for many women who work as librarians, archivists, and associated information professionals, this culture of violent misogyny and the everyday spaces of our networked careers, are (or are in continual danger of becoming) one and the same:
I now believe the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following”, “liking”, “favoriting”, retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid”. Apparently, that just can’t be allowed.
From the hater’s POV, you (the Koolaid server) do not “deserve” that attention. You are “stealing” an audience. From their angry, frustrated point of view, the idea that others listen to you is insanity. From their emotion-fueled view you don’t have readers you have cult followers. That just can’t be allowed.
You must be stopped. And if they cannot stop you, they can at least ruin your quality of life. A standard goal, in troll culture, I soon learned, is to cause “personal ruin”. They aren’t all trolls, though. Some of those who seek to stop and/or ruin you are misguided/misinformed but well-intended. They actually believe in a cause, and they believe you (or rather the Koolaid you’re serving) threatens that cause.
Read the whole thing at Wired.
As always: If you have links you would like to see shared in the food for thought round-up, please Tweet or email them to the Amiable Archivists for curation.
Welcome to part three of the Uprooting Racism read-along. This week, we’re considering the second half of “art I: What Color Is White?” — “The Economic Pyramid” through “Who Is a Victim?” Following the personal-assessment half of this section, the second half asks us to consider how our whiteness shelters us from many of the negative experiences that people of color face in the United States.
The Economic Pyramid
As of 2007, the top 1% of individuals in this nation (overwhelmingly white) controlled 43% of the wealth; the bottom 80% of individuals (majority people of color) controlled only 7% of the wealth. Sandwiched between the top 1% and the bottom 80% was an upper-middle-class population (19% of individuals) who control 50% of the nation’s wealth. Kivel’s point is this:
With wealth so concentrated at the top, most white people have much to gain from working with people of color to redistribute wealth and opportunity. However racism often keeps poor, working-, and middle-class white people from identifying their common struggles with people of color. Feelings of intra-racial solidarity keep many white people focused on our racial connections with people at the top rather than our economic connections with others lower down (43).
Bringing it back to our professional home, I am reminded of this past Tuesday’s #critlib chat about labor within and across libraries, Storified by Annie Pho (@catladylib). I become increasingly convinced listening to my colleagues in the archives and library science professions that attention to labor and workers rights is a key issue for our generation of workers at all levels — and that any discussion of diversity, inclusion, inequality cannot meaningfully take place without addressing the material inequalities that exist in the U.S.
The Costs of Racism to People of Color
Here is my list of the costs that Kivel recounts. If you are a white person reading this, consider how many of these types of micro- and macro-aggressions you have recently observed, heard about on the news, read about on social media, etc.
If any of these aggressive acts against people of color seem to be exaggerated or no longer current (“that might have happened in the past, but…”) consider the center-margin dynamics of privilege, discussed in the next chapter, which make a lot of this “invisible” to those of us who live more buffered, centralized lives.
The Culture of Power
To illustrate his point about the dynamics of power and privilege — that it naturalizes privilege for those populations whom it benefits, encouraging them not to be aware of their privilege, not to see the effects of the culture that privileges them (on one side) have for non-privileged groups (on the flipside) — Kivel uses the analogies of gender and age:
I often don’t notice that women are treated differently than I am. I am inside a male culture of power. I expect to be treated with respect, to be listened to and to have my opinions valued. I expect to find books and newspapers that are written by people like me, that reflect my perspective and that show me in central roles. I don’t necessarily notice that the women around me are treated less respectfully, ignored or silenced (47).
We’ve had a fairly clear demonstration of this in the library and information science world recently with conversations about codes of conduct and harassment, where people in relative positions of privilege were surprised to hear that anyone experienced harassment or was made to feel unwelcome in professional spaces, while others of us nodded along — we’ve been there, experienced that, sounds familiar. It all depends on how and where you’re taught to look, or learn to look.
I knew a gardener, once, who was responsible for caring for a children’s garden. Once a week, he’d walk through the space on his knees to see what the green space looked like from the height of those whom it was meant to provide delight and learning. Much like adults who work with children in our adult-centric culture need to go out of their way to learn how to “see” from a child’s perspective, we Euro-American white folks in a white-centric culture need to learn how to see the invisible culture of power that surrounds, shelters, and buoys us up.
Kivel offers a few questions “you might ask yourself to identify the culture of power and its appearance” in any given space (49):
Most of us will be quick to notice the indications in a given space that we are not in power. For example, a university hall in which nine out of ten portraits are of white male presidents, with perhaps a token (recently-painted) white woman is a visual cue to me (a white woman) that “my” perspective has been added in a latter-day effort at diversity within that space.
We may be less attuned, unless we intentionally make it a habit, to notice situations that may favor us to the detriment of others — for example a broken elevator that isn’t fixed. I once overheard a colleague joke about how during renovations they’d decided to suspend elevator service to some floors “forcing all of us to become more fit!” I was appalled by that erasure of any staff or library patrons whose dis/abilities temporarily or permanently precluded their using the stairs to reach the now-inaccessible floors. At the time, I was in a social setting — the story was told as an “amusing” anecdote — where I felt constrained to speak up about this oversight, but to this day think of it and wish I had intervened and pointed out the dis/ableism, not to mention fatphobia,
As white folk, we need to intentionally work to unravel the protections white-centric culture has woven around us, encouraging us not to see the ways in which people of color are excluded from the spaces of our lives, the arc of our narratives. The questions above can help us begin, or continue, to do just that on a daily basis.
Entitlement
I would actually argue there are positive and negative senses and expressions of entitlement. I believe that all human beings should feel entitled to certain social and material goods. We should feel entitled, for example, not to be beaten by an abusive spouse. We should feel entitled to equal protection under the law. We should be entitled to a childhood and old age — heck, any age! — free from poverty. We should absolutely be entitled to affordable, accessible, respectful, and expert healthcare. In short, call me a socialist idealist radical what have you, but I believe that we should all grow up expecting — feeling entitled to — basic human rights.
What Paul Kivel is talking about here, though, is the kind of entitlement that stems not from equality — “all people should have access to…” — but rather from privilege — “I am entitled to have access to …. because I am …”
I am better educated…
I am more rational…
I worked hard to get where I am…
I need to get there on time…
White entitlement is the sense of deservingness we have that does not stem from a shared sense of humanity, but rather a sense of being a more “civilized,” more “advanced,” more “disciplined” or “industrious” people. The only things, I would argue, that we should ever consider ourselves to deserve as entitlements are those things which we are ready to advocate extending to all people regardless of their life situation.
The Costs of Racism to White People
If you had to list some of the ways you (as a white person) have lost in a world tainted by racialized thinking and organization, what might you list?
You can read Paul Kivel’s checklist on his website. Here are a few examples from that list
I would note that a common theme running through these checklist items is a loss of relationship. The loss of an opportunity to recognize and connect with another human being — whether that relationship (or potential relationship) is with people similar from or different from ourselves in one or more ways. A racialized world creates barriers, as does a world with rigid hierarchies of age, gender, class, nationalist, and other vectors of inequality.
Retaining Benefits, Avoiding Responsibility
In this chapter, Kivel asks us to consider common ways of avoiding collective or individual responsibility for the inequalities of a racialized world. His stages of avoidance run as follows …
Denial … “We live in a post-racial society! … it’s not that the African-American community in Boston is being racially profiled, it’s just that black people are more likely to be criminals.”
Minimization … “Well, okay, maybe some profiling has been happening, but we’re continually working to make it better!”
Blame … “We can only do so much when people of color continue to commit crimes at higher rates than white people!”
Redefinition … “It’s not racial profiling, it’s smart policing!”
It Was Unintentional … “Gee, we just stopped to talk to this random black guy on the street …but then he came at us with a knife!”
It’s All Over Now… “Segregation and police discrimination are totally a thing of the past — we have regular trainings now!”
It’s Only a Few People … “Officer Smith has a long and troubling arrest record; we have investigators looking into his previous use of force while he’s been put on paid leave.”
Counterattack and Competing Victimization … “American citizens just don’t understand how hard it is for cops working the beat every day; they gotta make these split-second calls and no one’s ever going to be perfect. We’re the ones in actual danger out there!”
“Thank You For Being Angry.”
I’ve actually been using this tactic more and more recently thanks to becoming more aware of tone policing. Privileged white mainstream America values politeness, measured, anti-emotional behavior. Particularly in this era where rhetoric about political partisanship runs high, the discourse of “civility” and “balance” has come to hold powerful sway.
In short, I call bullshit.
The first thing we should be saying when someone expresses a strong emotional reaction to injustice, to violence of any kind taking place in the world, is to say thank you for your anger. Or, as Kivel writes:
When people of color are angry about racism, it is legitimate anger. It is not their oversensitivity but our lack of sensitivity that causes this communication gap. People of color are vulnerable to the abuse of racism every day. They are experts in it. Most of us rarely notice it. [Anger] is tremendously draining, costly and personally devastating for people of color … They often end up losing their friends, their livelihoods, even their lives. Rather than attacking them for their anger, we need to examine the layers of complacency, ignorance, and privilege we have put into place which require so much outrage to get our attention (68).
As white people, we should be amplifying and supporting those angry voices of analysis, and becoming allies in the project of change.
It’s Good to Talk About Racism
In the #critlib chat I linked to above, one of the points I made — hashtag added by a friend! — was that a simple act of labor solidarity that relatively privileged supervising professionals (such as myself) can take is to speak about inequalities in the workplace:
#critlib RT @feministlib: A1 I’ve also found that explicitly speaking about labor conditions, making that a non-taboo topic is important.
— Stephanie Sendaula (@sendaulas) October 8, 2014
Similarly, Kivel points out that that the more we speak about the act of racialization, structure of inequality, and individual acts of bigotry, the safer we collectively make the world for people of color. “Talking about [racism] keeps us from passing racism on to our children [by normalizing it]. Talking about it allows us to do something about it” (69).
However, we also need to be mindful of what language we use to speak. The phrase “Illegal aliens,” for example, has powerful racial connotations and is neither accurate (no person is inherently illegal) nor helpful. “Politically correct” is another coded term that Kivel points toward, for as he points out “people who use these words claim to be concerned about freedom of speech but avoid addressing issues of discrimination and harassment” (71).
I winced recently when an archivist used the phrase “politically correct” to describe the term “African American.” I think what she meant was that “African American” is commonly-accepted language but was not necessarily a phrase that made sense to retrospectively describe a collection of records in which the individuals identified themselves as “people of color.” The challenge of cataloging historical materials for optimal discovery is, of course, a complicated one. This past summer I spoke with a historian of working on 19th century African American history of told me that he had learned over the years that when searching for commissioned portraits of enslaved African Americans he had to look not only for “slaves” but also for “servants” — not appropriate language to our modern ears, yet a reality of working with historical materials is often that the language used then is not what we would use now. And we must be over- rather than under-inclusive in both describing and searching collections, particularly when looking for the histories of under-documented folks.
But … the term African American described as “politically correct” by a member of our profession? We need to stop doing that. Because by doing that, by using the term “politically correct,” we invoke a whole reactionary movement that aims to resist the gains made by marginalized peoples in self-description. We need to pay attention to the words we use and the worlds that exist behind them — we need to speak with awareness, and with the goal of “holding the space” for others quite different from us to speak for themselves with clear and carrying voices.
Join me next week for the first half of “Part II: The Dynamics of Racism,” p. 77-114.
Trouble at the Kool-Aid Point | Kathy Sierra @ Serious Pony:
I now believe the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following”, “liking”, “favoriting”, retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid”. Apparently, that just can’t be allowed.
“For Your Smudging Purposes” | Dr. Adrienne Keene @NativeApprops:
So w/these “good” relationships w/museums & tribes: Does the museum have a protocol for welcoming Native ppl into the space?
— Dr. Adrienne K. (@NativeApprops) October 1, 2014
On Allying Myself with #Teamharpy and Others | Nicholas @ Information. Games.:
I don’t like to describe myself as an ally. It feels more like a marketing campaign than a positive action. Still, I don’t have a better term to describe collaborating with the oppressed to work towards justice. With the way the world is organized, I’m much more likely to benefit from injustice than to be a target of it. So, when I read@evilangela’s words about this on Twitter, they resonated.
@evilangela: “Ally” only has any meaning when used as a verb. As a noun, it’s meaningless, self-congratulatory bullshit.
I’ve also been thinking about nina de jesus’ clear and sharp words about finding herself on the front lines of a fight for justice. She framed her involvement in a way that helps me frame my support.
On Sexism, Sexual Assault, and the Threat of the ‘Non-Bro’ | Robyn Pennacchia @ deathandtaxes:
I remember her warning me that activist men fighting the good fight could be just as bad, sexism-wise—if not worse— than non-activist men. Because they think being counter-cultural and progressive gives them “a pass” that other men don’t have. “Don’t forget–Angela Davis.” she said.
“Whatever, mom. EVERYTHING IS NOT THE SIXTIES, OK? Things change! Times change! Not everyone is Jerry Rubin.” I said.
Activist Fired After She Posts Video Berating Family For Flying Mexican Flag | Jonathan Turley:
Businesses have wide latitude in punishing employees for private conduct, though some states have laws protecting some forms of speech and employment such as voting and political activities. We have a new such case involving a woman in Ontario who shot and posted a video of her berating a neighbor for flying a Mexican flag. The video caused many to be understandably angry with Tressy Capps, who didn’t seem to see how obnoxious she appeared in her own posted video. However, it has not escaped her employer, which proceeded to fire her.
A Story About Bootstraps | Melissa McEwan @ Shakesville:
White USians (particularly, though not exclusively and not universally) subscribe fully and uncritically to the narrative of bootstraps and the promise of the American Dream and the myth of opportunity. Anyone (except oneself, naturally) who fails to achieve, including other whites who had the terrible sense to be born poor, with disabilities, to abusive parents, and/or in some other potentially success trajectory-fucking circumstance, is personally blamed for their lot and—even in spite of obvious innate incompatibilities with the unjust, inflexible, kyriarchal, privilege-rewarding system by which we’re meant to achieve “success” as if it’s a level playing field—is suspected, and frequently openly accused, of simply failing to work hard enough.
The Problem With Nice White Ladies ™ | Satifice:
Why are Nice White Ladies™ a major problem within librarianship? A significant portion has to do with respectability politics. They wish to have ‘discussions’ and appear ‘reasonable’ when it comes to certain things. They believe that, if we are having a discussion, that this means that a consensus or agreement necessarily must follow, otherwise the conversation is unproductive. They truly believe that, just by showing up and doing their jobs, they are helping the world and doing good.
A New Labor Issue: Control Over Time | Miriam Zoila Perez @ ColorLines:
In a new book, “Unequal Time,” sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Dan Clawson argue that workers’ control over their time is a crucial labor issue that deserves more attention. “Most the conversation about inequality is about wages—and that’s a really important discussion,” says Gerstel. “But time is a key way to talk about inequality.”
For “Unequal Time,” Gerstel and Clawson studied four professions within what they call the medical-health sector: doctors, nurses, emergency medical technicians (EMTs) and certified nursing assistants (CNAs). Their research emphasizes how class and gender impact who has the most control over their regular work schedules and time off.
Remember! You can always add links in comments, Tweet @amiablearchivists, or email amiablearchivists [at] gmail [dot] com.
For explanation of this read-along see the Uprooting Racism page.
Welcome to the second week of Uprooting Racism. Today we’re reading the first section of “Part One: What Color Is White?” the section exploring whiteness as a racialized category, and how being assigned whiteness by society confers privilege both individually and across generations. Below are my reading notes, organized by chapter.
Let’s Talk
We [white people] assume we are white. It may seem like I’m stating the obvious. Yet there is something about stating this obvious fact that makes white people feel uneasy, marked. Why notice? What’s the point of saying, ‘I’m White.’ (p. 9)
I’ve learned over the years to be in (imperfect) awareness of my whiteness. I grew up in a majority-white community, went to a majority-white college and graduate school, and married into another white family. I work in a majority-white workplace, in a majority-white profession. It’s actually on the Internet — that place where we were all supposed to magically transcend our gendered, racialized, class-bound, dis/abled, otherwise marginalized selves — that I actually learned the lesson of habitual self-recognition; the naming of identities, privileges, and marginal selves. I’d be curious, demographically, if people who came of age within networked publics have learned to catalog their identities more consciously due to having to identify themselves with language and labels in online spaces.
“I’m Not White”
Some of the white people [at a workshop] said, ‘But I’m not white.’ I was somewhat taken aback because although these people looked white, they were clearly distressed at being labelled white. (p. 10)
If, when you move down the streets of major cities, other people assume based on skin color, dress, physical appearance, or total impression, that you are white, than in US society that counts for being white. (p. 11)
What parts of your identity does it feel like you lose when you say aloud the phrase ‘I’m white.’? (p. 11)
My Euro-American heritage is — as far as my family genealogists can tell — German, Dutch, and Scottish. I grew up in a community in which Dutch heritage was, on some level, presumed for most white folk and white my strawberry blond hair and blue eyes I never would have passed for anything but white. That I didn’t think about being white as a child is, actually, one of my strongest reminders that I am white: the invisible social privilege of being white, and of thus not having to learn about racial inequality as a function of survival.
I don’t think I feel I lose any particular aspect of my identity in naming my whiteness, though I think (in the past more than now) it has been hard to hold whiteness (racialized privilege) in tension with my more marginalized aspect of self (home-educated, queer, female, politically leftist in a deeply conservative community, agnostic in a community of committed Christians). Intersectional thinking has taught me a lot about how to understand contextual margin/center dynamics and be able to understand white privilege without erasure of other ways in which I am not privileged within U.S. society.
“I’m Not Racist”
Just as it’s not useful to label ourselves racist, it is not useful to label each other. White people have committed some very brutal acts in the name of whiteness. We may want to separate ourselves from them by claiming that they are racist and we are not. But because racism operates institutionally, to the benefit of all white people, we are connected to the acts of other white people. (p. 15)
Y’all seen Jay Smooth’s “How to Tell Someone They Sound Racist,” right? Let’s refresh:
(On a side note: This works for so many -isms! Substitute [marginalized experience here] and you can confront people strategically on their classism, sexism, ableism, religious bigotry, transbigotry, anti-gay arguments, etc., etc. so forth and so on. I think of this strategy in basically any internet conversation ever. Including certain conversations recently on and about a certain listserv.)
“To the benefit of all white people.” It sucks, but we can’t get away from the fact that — as people who are read as “white” — we benefit from the accrual and continued violence and prejudice of other white folks. We need to name it when we see it — but not in an “I’m not one of those white people,” ways. More in a, “What you said was racist, quit it” way. To one another.
What Is Whiteness?
I grew up learning that racial categories were scientifically valid and gave us useful information about ourselves and other people. (p. 21)
How can you respond to people who say that there are specific differences between races? (p. 21)
I would say, “as a child of the 1980s, I didn’t grow up believing racial categories were scientifically valid…” except of course that there are still plenty of people today who believe there is a scientific validity to racial theories.
While I would have reflexively rejected the notion of biology-based racial inequality as a child (I was very much into “fairness,” and inequality isn’t “fair.”), I probably wouldn’t have had an evidence-based argument to hand. I thank my reading in feminist and queer theory for my skepticism regarding scientific studies, actually, since feminist scientists and social scientists, women and sexual minorities have repeatedly documented the ways in which what is “known” through science is very often flawed by confirmation bias: we expect to find (gender, sex, and racial) difference, and thus design studies using definitions that enable us to confirm our beliefs.
I think I do lack the “elevator speech” about science and how it has been used to structure racialized difference over the past several centuries. As a historian, I am very aware of the historical context of the concept of race, and how the boundaries of various race categories have flexed over time (for example that the Irish were at times considered “black”). Like gender performance or sexual behavior, what racialized identities signify about an individual person varies wildly from place to place — and interacts with all of the other ways in which our identities are embedded within society. These understandings of historical context and social construction of identity are so interwoven into my ways of thinking at this point that I’m unsure of how effective I am at arguing with “the opposition.” In my experience, I have very little success arguing with “the opposition” when it comes to gender or human sexual variety either.
If anyone following this read along has been successful at prompting thought on this front, I would like very much to hear what your approach entailed.
In this chapter Paul Kivel explores the “clusters of meaning” around whiteness — how it signifies not just one’s supposedly “superior” embodiment, but also more classical cultural identities as well: Western Christianity, American, and Masculine (“Blonde — the best kind of white!“). When you put Western Christianity, American citizenship, and (presumed straight) masculinity together, you’re looking at a construction of racial superiority that actually takes an incredible amount of work to maintain. As Kivel observes:
Word and Pictures
A chapter on the racial coding of language and image — how the villains in films are often seen in the dark, for example, while those coded pure and good are dressed in white or light colors, filmed well-lit, etc.
Calls to be mindful of our language often bring the “political correctness” crowd out of the woodwork, but I think it is important to consider the origins of words — I’m a word nerd, among other kinds of nerdery — and at least since stumbling through the process of learning not to call God “he” have first-hand experience of how possible it is to change habits over time. “Lame,” for example, is a pejorative I’ve been working to drop from my casual conversation, as are references to negative ideas or actions being “crazy” or “schizo.” We have other words, more precise words, we can use to express that something is a poor idea, is boring, is whacky or inconsistent. I’m not perfect with this — I’m sure you could do a keyword search on my blog and find numerous uses of “crazy” or “insane” to mean “what the hell is wrong with this person?!” — but I’m working to get better at this. And racialized language is something we need to be mindful of, too, particularly as people who benefit from white privilege.
White Benefits, Middle Class Privilege
It is not that white Americans have not worked hard and built much. We have. But we did not start out from scratch. (p. 32)
I grew up middle class — maybe even upper-middle. Three of my grandparents and both of my parents had gone to college. For three generations of my family there have been people with advanced, professional degrees and doctorates; grandparents and parents have owned their own homes, not had to rely on public welfare programs (apart from social security and medicare). I married into a family in which homeownership and higher education were similarly part of adulthood, though on a slightly more precarious scale. Despite the fact that my current household is living paycheck to paycheck, our multiple masters degrees, extended family assets (representing a social safety net of sorts, should we need it) and cultural capital position us to hang on — even if only by our fingernails — to a middle-class existence in the midst of a teetering, toppling economy.
Have y’all read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” (The Atlantic, 21 May 2014). It’s the sort of thing I feel white Americans ought to bookmark and re-read on a quarterly basis for awhile until it actually sinks into our psyches and forces us to initiate a nationwide movement to effect reparative justice in this country.
White Benefits? A Personal Assessment
On Paul Kivel’s website, you can find a version of the white benefits checklist that appears in Uprooting Racism. Some sample benefits to consider while thinking about our own family histories (with my own responses in bold):
Your ancestors were legal immigrants to this country during a period when immigrants from Asia, South and Central America or Africa were restricted.You live on land that formerly belonged to Native Americans.
Yes and yes. (Doesn’t the second “yes” apply to pretty much everyone in the U.S.?)
Your family received homesteading or landstaking claims from the federal government, or if you or your family or relatives receive or received federal farm subsidies, farm price supports, agricultural extension assistance or other federal benefits.
I don’t actually know about this one; at least one set of great-grandparents were farmers during the New Deal so I would suspect so.
You lived or live in a neighborhood that people of color were discriminated from living in or you lived or live in a city where red-lining discriminates against people of color getting housing or other loans.
Again, I would suspect this was at least informally true of the (entirely white) “historic district” neighborhood I grew up in, and I live in Boston now, where there has been a virulent history of race-based “red lining” and other forms of discrimination in housing.
You or your parents went to racially segregated schools.
This one is not the case, for either my parents or myself.
UPDATE (10/3 10:51am): It was pointed out to me on Twitter that above I describe growing up in majority-white communities and attending majority-white schools. So perhaps a better answer to this question is that I experienced de facto segregation. Neither I nor my parents experienced the formalized policies of “whites only” segregation, which is what I took Kivel’s question to mean. However, it could be read both ways, and yes, in college and graduate school I did my formal learning in majority-white spaces.
You live in a school district or metropolitan area where more money is spent on the schools that white children go to than on those that children of color attend.
Yep. No question.
You live in or went to a school district where the textbooks and other classroom materials reflected your race as normal, heroes and builders of the United States, and there was little mention of the contributions of people of color to our society.
I didn’t go to formal school until college, so didn’t use textbooks. My parents worked hard to ensure our books and other media were diverse — though I’m sure there is always room to do better. In part because of some of my early outsider status, I’ve approached history from the outside in throughout my scholarly career, which has been a good de-centering exercise. I imagine those opposed to the new A.P history exams would be appalled.
You attended a publicly funded university, or a heavily endowed private university or college, and/or received student loans.
I attended a private college for both undergrad and graduate student, made possible by my father’s employment with the college (undergrad) and federal student loans (graduate school).
Your ancestors were immigrants who took jobs in railroads, streetcars, construction, shipbuilding, wagon and coach driving, house painting, tailoring, longshore work, brick laying, table waiting, working in the mills, working as a furrier, dressmaking or any other trade or occupation where people of color were driven out or excluded.
Most likely. What I know of my immigrant ancestors’ occupations, they included such work as horse trainer, millner, farmer, and postmaster.
You have received a job, job interview, job training or internship through personal connections of family or friends.
Yes.
I encourage you to read the whole list and complete it (mentally or actually) yourself.
Next week we’ll be reading p. 43-76. Please do join in reading along!
Stuff for you to chew over in the midst of checking in with #teamharpy.
In the Boston area with a flexible schedule? MIT is hosting a symposium on Challenging Technical Privilege this Friday (October 3rd):
Silent Technical Privilege occurs when those who “look the part,” or conform to society’s stereotype of what a tech-savvy, number-crunching programmer or engineer looks like, receive the benefit of the doubt or implicit endorsement in technical settings. The flipside of Silent Technical Privilege is Stereotype Threat, and other hidden obstacles that those who do not fit the profile often experience in pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education or technical careers. Women, particularly women of color, have been largely marginalized and underrepresented in STEM. On October 3, we will convene a symposium of researchers, industry representatives, students, and other nationally-recognized experts to discuss how Technical Privilege, Stereotype Threat and other forms of Implicit Bias contribute to this underrepresentation. This interactive symposium will ask how Technical Privilege, Stereotype Threat and other forms of Implicit Bias contribute to this underrepresentation. We aim to highlight, elaborate, and develop strategies to address these issues.
If you can’t attend, you can follow along at #techprivMIT.
Ashe Dryden | “Why Aren’t More Companies Putting Their Weight Behind Diversity Initiatives?“
In a world where a business’s bottom-line comes before anything else, industries profit from the unequal treatment of their employees. Marginalized people often have to go above and beyond the work being done by their more privileged coworkers to receive the same recognition. The problem is readily apparent for women of color, who make between 10 and 53% less than their white male counterparts. The situation is such that compensating people equally is seen as a radical act. In maintaining an undervalued workforce, businesses create even more profit.
satifice | “On (Failing) to Break Into LibTech“
Some of the jobs I’ve applied at appear entry-level… but only, it would seem, if you already have computer science degree (or some comparable educational background). Yup, I’m talking about the unicorn job postings. “We want someone knowledgeable in metadata standards, digital scholarly communication, experience in the org’s ILS, ability to code in PHP, XML, HTML, CSS, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, etc and so on, is an experienced sysadmin, blah blah blah”. So, if this is entry level, then it precludes people like me. I don’t currently have all these skills, but some I’m trying to get, others I’d love the chance to learn, and all of them are interesting to me.
And finally, I think we have some #critlib folks in our group already — but I though I’d boost the weekly discussions of critical pedagogy and librarianship here. Next Tuesday (10/7) the discussion will be on “Labor solidarity within and across the library: librarians, paraprofessionals, ‘staff’ workers, student workers.” You can find out more here.
Amiable Archivists' Salon 