Hugo Schwyzer

I’m sticking an entire post below the fold, and leaving the comments turned off. It’s pretty damn stream-of-consciousness, and though I am as sober as can be, I may regret this post in the morning. It’s been a very emotional day.

In a week in which issues of race and class have come to the forefront of the feminist blogging world like never before, I’ve also spent most of the past two days sitting on a hiring committee for a new African-American Studies professor. As part of the hiring procedure, each candidate is asked to give a fifteen-minute mini-presentation on a topic selected by the committee; the candidates are provided with the topic 48 hours before the interview. For this position, the topic had to do with contemporary perspectives on how the traditional analysis of the so-called “Middle Passage”, in which slaves from Africa were shipped to the Western Hemisphere, may distort the reality of the African-American experience.

I’ve listened to a dozen presentations, almost all of them gleaming and brilliant. I’ve heard familiar information given new emphasis; I’ve heard analysis I never considered before. I’ve heard everyone from Cornel West to Eeek-A-Mouse to Booker T. Washington quoted. And I’ve heard anecdotes of brutality so immense that despite their familiarity I felt physically ill. I’ve been on many hiring committees in the past, and never been so stirred as I have been these past two days.

In a break today, I cried in the men’s room after one presentation. That’s supposed to be the task of the person being interviewed, not the committee co-chair.

Jill Filipovic is not much past half my age. But in a long, passionate post tonight on Feministe, she says some things about white privilege and blogging that have rocked me very deeply. Writing about all that we in this disparate cyber-community have been coping with in recent weeks, she says:

…when you’re a feminist blogger there are a lot of people who are attacking you and rooting for you to fail. Those people train you to react in a certain way: Do Not Engage. That’s typically my rule, too, in dealing with people who are out to attack me and bring me down. The hard part comes in when it’s time to tease out the legitimate, loving, constructive criticism from the many, many hateful and nasty emails, comments and links that we read every day. Feminist bloggers deal with a lot of shit. But that isn’t an excuse for interacting with other feminists in the same way that we interact with right-wing trolls. And, yeah, sometimes other feminists can be total assholes too; we are certainly not exempt from assholery. But the calls for inclusion, and for a version of feminism that recognizes and respects the lives and experiences of all women, are not assholery. They are not unwarranted attacks. They are loving. They are building. And sometimes, to build what you want, you have to tear down what’s already there. A feminism that embraces white middle- and upper-class women is already there. I am entrenched in it. Sometimes, that tearing-down can feel very personal. But that’s my problem, not the problem of the people doing the work.

Bold emphases are mine. I’m not only entrenched in it, I take money from the state to reinforce and maintain it. The fact that I am paid reasonably well to teach gender studies, to teach feminism, gives me the special privilege of being compensated to do what so many others do at far greater cost and for free. And I ought to be doing a better job.

I’ve been teaching nearly fifteen years and blogging for nearly five. My evaluations are good, my blog hits are as high as ever. But reading Jill — and so many others — in the ’sphere, reflecting on what I have been hearing from my potential future colleagues hour after hour, leaves me filled with a sense of frustration at how little actual growth I have been able to achieve. I piss a lot of people off, as Jill and every other feminist blogger does. And I’m guilty of being frequently unable to distinguish between righteous criticism of my privilege and the ugly hostility that comes from a steady troop of anti-feminist men’s rights activists.

I am very good at civility, and tend to substitute a certain pompous charm for serious engagement — at least on issues of race and class. And I do that because I realize that, at my core, I have a really nasty racist streak. No, not a sheet-wearing habit. But where I have succeeded in unlearning so much of my male privilege, and been willing to rethink my entire acculturation as a man, I have willfully refused to reject, renounce, or even seriously reflect upon my whiteness. And the rage that my writing engenders in people whom I admire is frequently a result of that evident, self-indulgent, willfullness.

Yeah, I get plenty of hits. But I’ve also chased a lot of people I respect from this blog, not because I have a pompous style, but because of this ugly attachment I have to class and race privilege. And if this blogging project of mine is going to survive, if I am going to continue to grow as a teacher, it must change.

I just got home from dinner with my wife. As I’ve mentioned before, my wife is of mixed-race; her mother is Colombian, her maternal grandfather African. Being married to a woman of color doesn’t make me any less of a bigot, and I’m not playing the card that says “I can’t be racist if my wife isn’t white.” But as I looked tonight at the woman who will, God willing, someday soon be the mother of our children, I shuddered to think of my future children growing up with such a consciously, stubbornly, maddeningly biased father.

This is not self-deprecation serving to mask a plea for reassurance. Despite the title of the post, I don’t expect most people to give a fuck whether I cried today or not. Proclamations of sensitivity are worthless; we all know cruel people who weep at dog-food commercials. I’m tired of being one of those people whose sensitivity is so carefully tuned to some and not to others.

So I’m not giving up blogging. But something has got to change. I’ve got to get better, much better, not to increase my readership but because my future children and my current students desperately need me to be the kind of man I am not yet, in words or actions, choosing to be.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that recovery from bad behavior happens. And if there’s another thing I know, with nearly ten years clean and sober, it’s that it happens in community. Preferably with a sponsor. So I need an anti-racism sponsor, and my project is to find one. I’ve got some ideas of where to look on campus. If I can have a boxing coach and a Pilates instructor to make my body hard, if I can have a spiritual director to teach me how to deepen my relationship with God, I sure as hell can have someone who will help open my eyes and kick my ass until I surrender forever the privileges to which I so viciously and viscerally cling.

I’m not going to take a blogging break. But I am going to work at being much, much better. Talk is cheap, of course, and I know that I have a long way to go to prove that I am capable of real change around these issues that constitute my massive, embarrassing, indefensible blind-spot.

In the meantime, read Jill’s post. And read How to Fuck Up by Portly Dyke. I needed that tonight too.