Archive for the 'Class' Category

Another long one about waxing, bodies, class, privilege and OKOP

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 17, 2006
in Body, Class, Feminism, Sexuality and Vanity
. 37 Comments

During the great big "fun feminists" internecine conflict of last week, there was much discussing of "feminist credentials" and whether such behaviors as waxing, wearing heels, and delighting in make-up vitiated one’s commitment to the ideals of the broader cause.  It got to be quite an intense discussion that took in at least a dozen blogs, if not more.

I thought I wasn’t going to post more on this subject, and then I read this long, fascinating piece at Mind the Gap Cardiff: How do I look?  Thoughts on femininity and white middle-class feminism.  I read it hesitantly, worrying it would turn into another Jill-bashing frenzy.  But instead, I found it challenging, and it’s got me thinking about a point that I know BitchLab (not work safe for all) has been making as well:  many of us tend to see everything through the lens of gender, and tend to ignore the class implications of what it is that we’re writing about.

From Mind the Gap:

When we have fights about waxing for example, are we assuming that all women can afford waxing, that waxing is expected of all women in the same way, and that waxing has the same significance for all women? The way in which women experience, or take part in feminine beauty practices, is enormously tied up with class, race, and also sexuality.

The construction of white middle-class femininity and its practices define my experience of oppression, not least because my own family has, over the last two generations, been in the process of achieving middle-class status. My father comes from a working-class family. His mother was a milliner and later a caterer, his father was a merchant seaman, and he was the first in the family to go to university. My mother’s parents were also both from working-class backgrounds and were obsessed with becoming middle-class. My maternal great grandmother drove herself crazy trying to convince everyone that she was white and middle-class (she was neither, but that’s a story for another day), and so the feminine beauty practices encouraged in my maternal grandmother and mother had a lot to do with the pursuit of a middle-class white identity and with erasing marks of race and working-classness.

For example, waxing has clear ethnic implications.  One of my favorite former students, "Armine" (not her real name) reads this blog, and she came to see me yesterday.   We talked about waxing, and about my post two days ago on men’s hairy chests.  Like many of my students, Armine is of Armenian ancestry.  As she herself remarked (her words not mine), "My people are known for being particularly hairy!"   Armine talked about the tremendous cultural anxiety she had been raised with about hair.  From the time she hit puberty, she’d been removing hair from her forearms, her lip, and elsewhere on her body — and she had been encouraged to do this by her mother and older female relatives. She’d also seriously considered rhinoplasty to reduce the size of what she called her "stereotypical Armenian nose".   Her older sister has already had that surgical procedure done.

Armine is quite clear that there is a specific goal to all of this: "We want to look white, not ethnic."  Armine feels that the ideals of feminine beauty she grew up with were primarily white women with "cute little noses" and little or no hair on their bodies.   Here in Pasadena in 2006, she’s engaged in the same practices that the Welsh great-grandmother was in the Mind the Gap post above: pursuing a middle-class white identity and erasing marks of race and ethnicity.  Armine points out that within her culture, it’s possible to balance an intense pride in Armenian heritage with an equally intense contempt for how women from her backgound naturally look.  To paraphrase something she said, "At the same time we were being told to make our noses smaller and our bodies hairless, we were told we could only date Armenian men and we had to never forget the genocide."

While I think that Jill — and other pro-waxing, pro-heels feminists — were rudely and unnecessarily savaged last week, I get the point that Armine, Mind the Gap, and BitchLab are making in different ways.   Brazilian bikini waxes aren’t just something that women do — they are something that women who can afford them do.  And while we generally have no idea how much hair a woman might have in her pubic region, forearm and lip hair (a big concern of Armine’s) is visible.  Its removal is at least moderately expensive and moderately painful, and certain ethnic groups (whose DNA carries the genetic material decreeing that body hair shall be abundant) thus have to work harder, pay more, and endure more discomfort in order to meet an ideal that is still set largely by the white middle class.

This still doesn’t mean that I think anyone, white or not, affluent or not, ought to be racked with guilt over the decision to remove hair from the pubis, climb into stilettos, or apply really good make-up. But not all shoes look the same, and not all make-up looks the same.   A $400 pair of heels often look like a $400 pair of heels; the make-up at an upscale department store is generally better than the Maybelline one buys at the corner drug store.  And a really first-rate waxing job isn’t cheap.  This doesn’t mean that only rich women buy nice make-up or get waxed or wear great shoes.  It does mean that for women on a budget, the decision to spend on these things means less money for something else.  And it also sends a signal to other women about what is appropriate, acceptable, and expected.

Ultimately, all of this raises the difficult question of communal obligation.  To what extent are feminists responsible for the signals they send to others?  To what extent are those signals even under our control?  Jill Filipovic attracts intra-feminist hostility more than most, frankly, because she is a young, pretty, law student living in New York.  She takes trips to Europe.  She goes to parties and has great hair.   Some of these things are within her control, some aren’t, but she gets singled out time and again because she’s both an immensely articulate young feminist and an easy target for envy.  (Flame away, but let’s be candid here.)  Jill has done the vital work of acknowledging her privilege, even while she has pointed out that she is — like so many of her generation — under a mountain of debt.

Folks seemed to take special issue with Jill because it’s clear that she comes closer than virtually any other feminist blogger to a particular middle-class, white ideal for feminine attractiveness.   Unlike her co-bloggers, she does post pictures of herself (in a Flickr account).  She leads a more "visually public life" than many other feminists, blogging under her full name and with many details of her private life laid open.  So when a pretty, young, white female law student talks about getting a bikini wax, it’s going to produce a strong reaction from some quarters.  It’s hard for some people to separate what Jill does from who Jill is.

Though Jill and I are very different, I recognize that perceptions of class and attractiveness function in my own life and work as well.  When I’ve posted about my own body anxiety, for example, I usually get some annoyed comments talking about how "I have nothing to complain about."  When I talk at length about the fact that I work out anywhere from 15-24 hours per week (including private Pilates and boxing lessons) that sends a stark, even grating message about privilege.  My increasingly lean and toned flesh is a testament to my physical work ethic, sure — but it’s also a testament to discretionary time and discretionary income, both of which are associated with tremendous amounts of privilege.   That doesn’t mean I am going to stop running, lifting, Pilate-ing, boxing, or cycling any time soon.  But it does mean that I am going be cognizant of that privilege just as I know Jill is cognizant of hers.

******

On a tangential note, talking about class reminds me of another aspect of growing up WASP in OKOP culture.  One key rule that OKOP follow: talking about class is prima facie evidence you don’t have it.   I remember when I was in junior high school, and I repeated something at the dinner table I had heard earlier in the day. I  can’t remember what I was describing, but I said something was "classy."  An older female relative whom I love very much said to me gentle, "Hugo, please don’t say ‘classy’.  It’s vulgar."  (For OKOP WASPS, few things are worse than being "vulgar.")  The point became clear to me quickly: the people who talked about things being "classy" or about "having a lot of class" were the "anxiously aspiring" who were all-too-eager to try and signify that they belonged in a certain social stratum.  Those who had already "arrived", as it were, practiced a careful, elegant pretense of ignoring the whole idea of class.  Thus the use of the term "classy" was, as far as OKOP were concerned, proof of its absence!

Ticket update: $410

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 16, 2006
in Class and Politics
. 13 Comments

I posted back on September 5 on my genuine gratitude for getting a traffic ticket.  Today, I learned that the cost of the ticket for my illegal right turn will be $410.  It’s a bit pricier than I expected, but nothing we can’t take care of.  Despite the surprise at the number, I stand by what I said:

I’ll pay the ticket gladly when it comes.  It’s not that I enjoy paying fines, mind you.  But I know that the money I will pay will go to help support vital services in the county and the community.   I know that I have deserved innumerable citations in the past for unsafe decisions I’ve made behind the wheel from Pasadena to Perthshire, Carmel to Carmarthen, Fort Lauderdale to Fort William. Whatever the cost of this ticket, it’s a small price to pay for my many mistakes in the past.  And if it has the effect I hope it has, it will remind me to be a more attentive driver.

It does make me realize that it was a great privilege for me to write a long post about my reaction to being cited — without having one of those reactions be fear about how to pay the fine! Better me who can afford it, I suppose, than some other poor driver who can’t.

The first time I got a ticket, for an illegal left turn in West Los Angeles in 1989, the fine was $45.   I had just started grad school, and I worried about how to pay that citation much more than I worry now about the current one.  The difference seventeen years makes…

Amp thinks I hung the moon, and why my traffic is through the roof

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 12, 2006
in Blogging, Chinchillas, Class and Feminism
. 11 Comments

Okay, lesson learned about driving traffic to my blog:

1.  Get involved in one big intra-feminist hullabaloo.

2.  Blog about my penis, where it’s been, and what I did to it.

3.  Get involved in a second big intra-feminist hullabaloo.

Do all three in a three-day period, and presto, I’ve tripled my visitors to this site.  Take notes, people.

Bitch-Lab dedicates a post to me today.  Though I am a bear of exceedingly small brain, I think BL takes issue with what she sees as my insistence on filtering discussions of feminism through a white, middle-class lens.  I mean, jeez.  What’s this crazy WASP dude teaching courses on feminism to classrooms filled with first-generation women of color?  And then name-dropping the prominent feministas whose courses I took in college?  Sorry, don’t mean to be snarky.  Oh hell, maybe I do.

And someone named Funniekins is righteously angry that Amp’s long, comments-open post about his decision to sell amptoons began as a response to me.  Actually, Funniekins is only one of several to express annoyance that Amp’s reply was addressed initially to me, and then to his other critics.  As both Amp and I have explained, that’s because I thought it best to shoot him an email before I posted on Tuesday night about him.  No one else, apparently, did the same.  But this courtesy was clearly an example of white male privilege, the old boys network at work even within the feminist community.  Funniekins writes:

Interestingly, when asked why the fuck Hugo hung the moon, Barry replied:

I picked Hugo out because he is the one person who emailed me personally asking me to open up such a thread.

And there you have it! Public criticism of public actions is most APPROPRIATELY handled only after discreet and private inquiries among men. I’m sorry, I mean, among friends.

Look, I’m the grand champion of mea culpas when it’s called for.  But yeah, Amp is my cyber friend.  We’ve been linking to each other for two years, and I’ve learned a lot from him.  He’s been an immensely valuable ally.  And I think he screwed up big-time on this one issue of selling his blog, and I called him on it.  Do I think I’m a better person because I e-mailed him first when others didn’t?  No.  Did I e-mail him first because he’s a man?  No.  If I were about to take to task a female "blog friend" in a public way (an Amanda, a Zuzu, an HF, a Lauren, a Jill, a Lorie, a Jenell, a Jessica, a Mermade, etc.), I would damn sure give ‘em a heads up first.  Is that male privilege hiding behind good manners?  I really, really don’t think so.

Okay, enough navel gazing.  Watch the soft scrub ad with the chinchilla in it.  That’s the ticket.

Where does the suitcase sleep? More on propriety, morality, and sleeping together

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 27, 2006
in Class, Memories and Sexuality
. 63 Comments

In last week’s post about "sleeping together", I wrote about taking my high school girlfriend for a weekend away at my family’s place in the country.  I mentioned how excited she and I were to get the chance to spend the whole night together in the same bed.  I wrote:

Though according to family protocol, the "luggage stays in separate rooms", I was able to sneak into her room and we could fall asleep together.

It’s been nearly twenty-two years, but I can still remember my reaction when I first heard my late and beloved grandmother (the matriarch of the family and the final arbiter of what was Good and Right) use the phrase: "The luggage must stay in separate rooms."  It’s a line we in the family often repeat today.  When my wife and I were visiting the Ranch for a big family weekend last month, one of my college-aged cousins had his girlfriend up for a visit.  They were each put in different rooms, just as my high-school girlfriend and I had been all those years ago.  But once again, it was made explicitly clear that this was not a prohibition on either sexual activity or spending the night together. It was merely a nod to social convention, but an important one.

I’ve been involved with many people and many different families.  (I’ve not only been married four times, I’ve had four different sets of in-laws.)  I’ve had ample opportunity in these marriages and other relationships to see the various views families take on sleeping arrangements for unmarried couples.  Basically, I’ve noticed most families fall into one of three categories — and I’ve experienced all three many a time.

1.  The most conservative families make sure that the two halves of an unmarried couple not only get put in separate rooms, they make it clear that they are to stay in those rooms all night.  For these traditionalists, pre-marital sex (at least in the family home) is absolutely unacceptable.  I married into one of those families once.  It was very frustrating.

2.  The liberal families cheerfully put even teenage unmarried couples in the same room overnight.  Shortly before I turned 18, I was able to go away with my girlfriend’s family for the weekend to their cabin on the Russian River.  My girlfriend (a high school junior) and I were put in the same room with one double bed.   No one batted an eyelash. It was deliciously exciting, but a bit bizarre.

3.  Then there’s the OKOP way: put the two young people in separate rooms, but ignore any nocturnal traffic.  "Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t patrol the hallways, and make sure your little loving noises don’t wake anyone else!" One of the criticisms often leveled at WASPs of my background is that we are more concerned with the appearance of things than their substance.  We care more for propriety than for morality.  And I suppose, to some small degree, that’s a fair charge.

But honestly, I like the "luggage in separate rooms" policy best.   I’m deeply ambivalent, even when I’m at my most fervently evangelical, about the mandate to remain chaste until marriage.  At the same time, I think that marriage (or domestic partnership) is worthy of special recognition — and one way in which my family conveys that recognition is by not only allowing the couple to share a bed, but allowing their bags to be publicly placed in the same room.   In my family, we don’t police the sexual decisions of unmarried older teens or young adults.  What’s done behind closed doors, whether by 17 year-olds or 27 year-olds, is none of our business.  ("Our Kind of People" don’t ask nosy questions.)  But we also want to send a message that there is something unique and special about marriage and enduring commitment.  Hence, the third option of "separate rooms for the suitcases if not for their owners" seems best.

Thoughts?

Place cards and dinner parties

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 19, 2006
in Class and Memories
. 79 Comments

On a completely different topic than what’s been up here lately: seating arrangements at dinner parties.

Growing up, my family regularly had large dinner parties, particularly around holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July.  From the time I was a small child, I can remember my mother, aunt, and grandmother carefully discussing who should sit next to whom.  At larger gatherings — which could involve up to 50 guests — charts were sketched on notepads.  It was not uncommon to have long discussions about the best way to arrange everyone, and the seating charts would often go through several drafts.

There were some basic ground rules, the most sacred of which was this: couples were never to be seated together.  Husbands and wives were usually put at separate tables, or at least at opposite ends of the same table.  This was also true for long-time boyfriends and girlfriends; the one exception to the rule was when a member of the family brought a new date to a big gathering.  So as not to overwhelm the newcomer, that person was allowed to sit next to his or her lover.

My mother and grandmother explained to me that one of the functions of dinner parties was to get to know people one didn’t always get a chance to chat with.  "It’s not about you being comfortable, dear", my grandmother said when I complained; "It’s about interacting with new people and making them feel comfortable."  Of course, as in every family, there were a few relatives who were considered especially taxing.  So one of us might volunteer to sit next to Cousin Albert and listen cheerfully to his boring stories and endure his halitosis without comment or complaint.  In return for this heroism, he or she who sat with the difficult one might be encouraged to relax while others handled the usually considerable cleaning-up.  The task of sitting next to the dull and the challenging was always rotated, mind you, and I got my share plenty of times.

This emphasis on "being social" was enormously important.  As a child, my grandmother told me something that left a profound impression on me.  She said that when two couples are riding in an automobile, one could always tell their social class by how they arranged themselves.  "Working class" people, I was told, have the men ride in front and the women in back.  "Middle class" people (the term was one of opprobrium) ride as couples, with husbands and wives sitting together.  The "right way" (the OKOP way) was to divide the couples.  I was told that the reason was to ensure that "people got a chance to know each other", and that it was "ever so much more fun" that way!

In college, I read an old sociology book — I think it might have been the (hilarious but discomfiting) Status Seekers — and was horrified to discover that my grandmother’s bit of motoring wisdom  had a slightly different interpretation.  The author of the text suggested that working class couples put men in front to emphasize male dominance, middle class couples sit with their spouses to emphasize the importance of bourgeois marriage, and the aspiring upper class divide up the spouses in order to emphasize illicit sexuality.  I was scandalized on behalf of my very proper grandmother!

So this past weekend, my wife and I arranged a party at a local restaurant to honor her best friend, who has just entered the fourth decade of life. We invited 28 people for a very nice Spanish tapas meal.  My wife, who shares my family conviction about dividing couples at parties, carefully made out the seating chart.  in the original draft, we weren’t sitting near each other.  Indeed, I was to be seated next to strangers, an opportunity I relished.  Meeting new people rather than conversing with familiar ones is one of the obligations of social gatherings, at least according to how I was raised.  But my wife and I made the mistake of leaking word of our seating arrangement, and we were soon besieged with calls and emails from people frantic not to be separated from their near and dear, if only for a couple of hours.  "I won’t come if I can’t sit with my boyfriend", one woman wailed; "Please don’t put me next to strangers", someone else begged.

In the end, we tried to accommodate an avalanche of requests.  But as often happens in these ill-mannered days, our guests arrived at the restaurant, took one look at my wife’s beautifully lettered place cards, and promptly rearranged them to suit themselves.  And of course, the entire dinner party dissolved into little cliques, as the guest of honor’s friends from work, from her school days, and her family members stayed among themselves without showing the slightest willingness to mingle and mix. Worst of all, most of the couples seemed positively joined at the hip, utterly unwilling to move away from the safety net represented by their husband, wife, or lover. 

It was a very NOKOP event.  The vegetarian paella, on the other hand, was really good.

Folks, what do you think?  Is compulsory separation of married couples at social events an antiquated relic of the WASPy upper-middle class? Or is it an important nicety that encourages people to step out of their "safety zones" and expand their horizons?

The obligatory “where were you” post

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 11, 2006
in Class and Memories
. 11 Comments

Since we’re all sharing 9/11 stories today, here’s mine.

Like Lorie, I’ve avoided writing about the events that happened five years ago today because I never felt that the story was mine to tell.  So many people were deeply and profoundly affected by their losses that day; I wasn’t.  I have long felt that my voice would not add to the conversation.

I was scheduled to teach four classes that day, the first one beginning at 7:30AM Pacific Time.  I had woken up just before 6:00AM, and turned on CNN (something I do most mornings) just after the second plane had gone into the towers.  I watched TV until it was time to leave for school; the first tower collapsed while I was in the car on the way to school, the second just as I walked into my first class. 

We had a television in the classroom, and I made the decision to turn it on.  I told the students who hadn’t heard (a surprising number had made it to school that morning unaware), and we sat and watched coverage together.  I told them I was available to talk, and I sat with them all morning as we watched the local NBC affiliate (the only station that came in clearly).  I did the same thing with all of my classes that day — sitting in the classroom, television on, inviting students to sit with me.  If they wanted to go home, I let them go. If they wanted to step into the hall and chat, we did (only a few wanted to talk).  If they wanted to sit and watch the towers fall, over and over again, they could do that with me nearby. 

The only other time I’ve ever interrupted class to turn on the TV for a live news event was in October 1995, when the OJ Simpson verdict was read aloud.  That was a planned event (we’d heard about the time of the jury announcement the day before), and though my students were stunned (and divided), that was a very different occasion.  Both then and on 9/11, I sat with my students who wanted to talk and "process" their feelings about what had occurred.  It was a lot more fun with OJ.

Did I handle 9/11 the right way?  I don’t know.  Some of my colleagues kept right on teaching, some canceled classes and themselves went home.  I couldn’t teach, but I didn’t want to leave the students who might want a comforting presence there to watch with them.  Under the circumstances, I think it was the best I could do.

Thanks, Officer Watkins: reflections on getting a ticket.

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 5, 2006
in Class and Politics
. 17 Comments

This morning on my way to the college, I got my first ticket in a dozen years.

Exiting the 210 freeway, I failed to come to a complete stop while making an otherwise legal "right on red" onto Hill Avenue.  Seconds later, I saw the Pasadena Police  motorcycle behind me, red lights a-flashing.  Instantly, I felt my heart begin to race.  There’s something about being pulled over that’s enormously anxiety-producing! 

But as I brought my car to a stop, I said to myself: "Hugo, you absolutely deserve this ticket.  You know what you did, you’ve done it a thousand times before without being stopped, and it’s high time you got slapped for it."  As I was taught to do by my high school driver’s ed teacher, I kept my hands on the wheel until the officer (a very nice fellow named Watkins) got to my window.  I gave him my license and registration, and answered the inevitable question: "Do you know why I stopped you?"

"Yes", I told him.  "I made a right on red without coming to a full stop."

"That’s right", Officer Watkins said.  "Why didn’t you stop?"

For about one thousandth of a second, I thought about making up some sort of fanciful story.  I thought about techniques I’ve heard for talking your way out of a ticket.  (Mind you, I’ve been pulled over a few times before and let off with a warning.)  But this morning, I knew damned well I deserved the ticket, and I gave Mr. Watkins the only possible, plausible answer:

"I wasn’t paying attention. It’s completely my fault."

I remember the last time I got a ticket: it was September 1994, and I was living in West Los Angeles.  I was pulled over for rolling through a stop sign just north of Santa Monica Boulevard. I deserved that ticket too.  In the twelve years since then, I’ve driven at least 200,000 miles in the USA and Britain.  I’ve owned or leased four or five cars, and rented dozens.  And I’ve broken the speed limit thousands of times, rolled through thousands of stop signs, made at least eight hundred unsafe lane changes, failed to yield, failed to signal, failed to wear my seatbelt.  All without being ticketed once.  Based on the accumulated weight of my motoring sins, I earned today’s citation ten thousand times over!

After Officer Watkins had given me my ticket, I thanked him.  I made sure to do so after I had signed the citation, so he would not confuse my gratitude with an effort to talk my way out of the consequences of my errors.  I told him, honestly, that I had needed a "wake up call."  I also told him that I appreciated the work that he and his fellow officers did, and that I hoped that he would have a safe and happy day.  Had I been in my home town on the Monterey Peninsula, I would have offered my hand — but I decided against it this morning.  In any event, I wanted to make it clear to him that at least one person he pulled over today was grateful to be held accountable, and thankful for these men and women who do such a thankless and yet necessary job.  As a traffic cop, you meet a lot of people — very few of whom are happy to make your acquaintance.  I was happy to meet Officer Watkins this morning, and I wanted him to know that.

I’ll pay the ticket gladly when it comes.  It’s not that I enjoy paying fines, mind you.  But I know that the money I will pay will go to help support vital services in the county and the community.   I know that I have deserved innumerable citations in the past for unsafe decisions I’ve made behind the wheel from Pasadena to Perthshire, Carmel to Carmarthen, Fort Lauderdale to Fort William. Whatever the cost of this ticket, it’s a small price to pay for my many mistakes in the past.  And if it has the effect I hope it has, it will remind me to be a more attentive driver.

Officer Watkins, you may just have saved my life and the lives of those whom I love.  Thanks.

Reprint: The perils of advice, and professorial self-doubt

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 23, 2006
in Class and Teaching
. 12 Comments

I’m on hiatus — at least from substantive blogging — until August 28.  Until then, I’m reprinting favorite posts from 2004 and 2005.

This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education online edition has this rather sobering First Person essay by a Prof. Thomas Benton: An Adviser Without Advice. He writes of running into one of his brightest and best recent graduates working as a cashier at Target:

My former student scanned and bagged the objects as if she was running on a treadmill. She recognized me, and I tried to return her nervous smile. We each asked how the other was doing and said "good." I swiped my card, and she gave me a receipt. There were bored people all around, and the whole conversation was understood in a few embarrassed glances.

"Good to see you," I said, leaving. "Yeah, you too, professor," she said, flatly. I saw her feigned cheerfulness droop a little as she turned to the next customer.

Benton reflects on what he told her when she came to him, a few years earlier, for professional advice:

I should have been looking out for her. She came to me for advice. I told her something like this: "A liberal-arts degree is the best preparation for life in general, but it helps if you also have some specific, marketable skills." I had persuaded myself that I knew what I was talking about. I supported and reinforced her choices. And my vanity was gratified by the thought that I was helping her.

Okay, that is scary! I could have written that paragraph verbatim a thousand times over. I’ll quote his final section at length; bold emphases are mine:

All I have is an instinctive belief in the value of a liberal education without regard to its practical use. I am increasingly sure that it is wrong to encourage students (and indirectly ourselves) to justify the work and expense of education as a prelude to lucrative career opportunities. Yet I know that when so many students undertake so much debt to go to college, the link between education and future income becomes unavoidable.

It seems inevitable, though we are not yet willing to admit it, that a liberal education is becoming a practical impossibility for most young people. Or liberal education earns the justified reputation of something undertaken at one’s peril. Students know they have to make a living before they can appreciate Kierkegaard. They don’t have time to question their beliefs; they are too busy getting their academic tickets punched.

I understand that outlook, but students do not seem to know that even the practical choice is fraught with as much risk as following one’s heart. They seem unaware of how much their drive for "success" is a construction of consumerist pressures. Perhaps careerist choices carry even more risk, since you ultimately give up what you love for the sake of some opportunity that may not exist by the time you are ready to meet it. . I can remember all too vividly the fear of sinking into chronic underemployment and relative poverty, of feeling for the rest of my life the special scorn that socially mobile societies reserve for the people who haven’t "made it." You’re a loser and nobody cares how it happened.

Of course, this kind of pontification can only come from a position of privilege

But what can I offer to my students besides the general advice to follow their talents wherever they lead? "Follow your bliss" and "find your vocation." Those remarks seem as banal and unhelpful now as when they were uttered by the wiser advisers of my youth.

Most of my students at Pasadena City College are from working-class backgrounds. To put it bluntly, I am not. Most of my students are not white. I rather obviously am. Most of my students are first-generation college graduates, while I am the son of two Berkeley Ph.Ds. My kind and fortunate parents paid for my college education; I never had a nickel’s worth of student loans. I teach at a community college, but (and this is hard to admit) I would have been deeply ashamed if I had "had" to attend such an institution out of high school. Slowly, painfully, I am unlearning my snobbery, my elitism, and my privilege, but I confess that it is still a work in progress. (I can say I would not be crushed if a child of mine went to a JC for their first two years, but in all honesty, I would be a bit disappointed). With all that in mind, what from my own experience can I possibly offer to my students? As much as I want to be one, how can I be a satisfactory role model for them?

In the past decade, I have had maybe 70 or 80 students whom I have mentored. They have come to office hours and made special appointments, and they have come time and time again for career advice. Many want to become professors themselves someday. I offer the same sort of airy encouragements that Mr. Benton offered. Indeed, not a semester goes by that I don’t actually say: "Study what you love; the money will follow." Though it has all the depth of a Hallmark card, my students nod their heads appreciatively, confident perhaps that if Dr. Hugo believes it is true, than so it must be. As I do in my teaching, I substitute outer enthusiasm for inner certainty. I can always muster the former. It’s not that I lie to them about their abilities! Rather, I find that I deliberately misrepresent the difficulties of getting tenure-track jobs in higher education. It’s easier to be relentlessly optimistic.

I do have a few former students teaching now at the college level. All are adjuncts so far, waiting and hoping for the appearance of a miraculous tenure-track job. But I’ve run into my share of former students at Target and elsewhere; they’ve graduated from four-year institutions, often with history degrees. I love running into my former students and hearing their stories. But I’ve seen — or imagined that I have seen — embarrassment in the eyes of several of them, as if they worry that somehow they have let me down by working at Starbucks fulltime rather than taking out still more loans to go and get a Ph.D. And I wonder, as Benton wonders, whether all of that encouragement and advice does any good.

Year in and year out, I tell my students that their lives will be better and richer because they know about Alexander, about Antony, about Arius the Heretic. They will be better citizens of the world because they know about Luther, Leibniz, and Lloyd-George. But I went straight from high school to college, and never worked for money while in school. When my classes were over for the day at Cal, I could wander over to Strawberry Glade and read a book and think about life; I could sit in coffee shops and pontificate my day away. My students race off from my classes to their jobs and their families. And then they come to me, asking me to mentor them! I am honored and flattered; it satisfies both my vanity and my longing to help. I am so grateful for the genuine close friendships I have formed with many students over the years. But so often, so often, I wonder: What good am I, what good are we historians, if we don’t have more tangible, practible advice to offer?

Originally published July 19, 2004

More on clothing, class, and the community college

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 26, 2006
in Body, Class, Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 17 Comments

Yesterday’s post about college attire and t-shirts briefly diverted onto a subject of dress and class.  I wrote:

To generalize enormously, the less privileged the background, the more intense the sense of competition among young women.  Far too many young ones grow up with a sense that their sexual desirability is a more marketable commodity than their intellectual accomplishments; this is all the more likely to be true in families where there isn’t a history of women going to college.  (If you don’t believe me, visit any American community college on a hot day — and then visit an elite university in the same weather.  You’ll see more mini-skirts and heels in five minutes at Pasadena City College than you will in five hours at Berkeley or Stanford.  That’s anecdotal, sure, but don’t take my word for it — try it yourself.)  The bottom line: class and sexual competitiveness among women are, to say the least, not unrelated!

Glendenb’s comment was so good I wanted to repost part of it:

I think the difference was between people who saw education as a right and those who saw it a privilege. Among the students at the cc, they dressed in their best (which for some was heels and mini skirt) to show that they deserved the privilege but also to combat a social dis-ease; they were aware that they were moving across a social dividing line and were attempting to prove they belonged. Students who were first in their family to attend college were straddling a social dividing line - breaking from a set of values that weren’t comfortable with the extreme casualness around sexuality, but not yet fully embracing a set of values in which sexuality was (far too often) separated from emotion.

Students at my undergraduate college perceived education as their right – the hedonism, brazen sexuality, deliberate crossing of behavioral barriers that were not crossed in their upper-middle class families were seen as part and parcel of the college experience – the icing on the cake. They didn’t have to prove they belonged at college to anyone, least of all themselves. At the community college, many students were trying to prove to themselves that they deserved to be there. What to my eye was sexualized behavior, was really a more carefully studied mimicking of what was perceived as appropriate collegiate behavior. Clothing choices were made that would help students feel brash, or strong, or confident in ways that students from the upper middle class didn’t feel they needed.

The bold emphasis is mine.  To use the Anglicism to which my passport entitles me, that’s "spot on".

I note this phenomenon is not merely confined to women.  Many first-generation male students, particularly but not exclusively East Asian (PCC is over 33% Asian), are ostentatiously fond of labels, particularly those that they associate with the "establishment."  Every year, even on hot summer days, my classes will be filled with remarkably neat young men in pressed khakis wearing Ralph Lauren, Lacoste, A&F, or even — oh, flashbacks to ’80s preppydom! — Brooks Brothers polo shirts.  The labels are always conspicuous.  Reading Glendenb’s comments, it occurs to me that these young upwardly mobile fellows are indeed mimicking what they imagine to be the appropriate attire of the privileged.  (Only later will some of them transfer to Cal, Stanford, and Georgetown and discover that the real privileged tend to be far more unkempt.) 

The names of many young men — particularly young Chinese from Hong Kong — are often rather touchingly quaint.  This summer, I have — these are first names, mind you — a "Fitzgerald"; a "Woodrow"; three "Benedicts" (my middle name); two "Henrys"; one "Maxwell"; and, my favorite, one "Colfax."   It sounds like a parody of the membership roster of my grandfather’s fraternity, circa 1926!  And at the risk of sounding horribly classist, it strikes me as a rather naive attempt to deliberately appropriate WASP cache.   Imagine all of these parents, newly immigrated, working long hours to clothe young "Winston Wilberforce Chan" in what television has led them to believe is the outfit of success: polo shirts and chinos with shiny penny loafers.   From the perspective of someone who grew up in WASP country-club culture, this sincere attempt at imitation strikes me as, at the least, oddly misplaced!

But as Glendenb points out, those of us who have "made it" and have an easy sense of entitlement ought not to be too quick to judge those who are eager to ascend the social ladder our ancestors climbed for us.  This morning, I’m wearing a pair of slightly distressed women’s jeans and one very bright multi-colored paisley cowboy shirt.  I’ve got a Paul Frank watch on (with Julius the Monkey in Mariachi garb.)  The affect is no doubt garish, and probably — outside of major urban centers — decidedly effeminate.  But I’ve got tenure, and I’ve got the security to know that my authority in no way hinges on whatever get-up I get myself in to.  I can afford to dress for comfort and to honor my own admittedly odd fashion sense.  Even when I was younger, as an undergrad or a grad student, I slouched around Berkeley and Westwood in old concert t-shirts and ripped 501s.    Like most of my compatriots, my certainty that I "belonged" gave me the freedom to be slovenly.  It wasn’t "affected working-class chic"; it was laziness, and a laziness reinforced by the certainty that such sloppiness would not be an obstacle to acceptance in a milieu that was, after all, mine by birthright.

In thirteen years of community college teaching, I’ve learned to be a hell of a lot less judgmental of my students.   I’m not offended, aroused, angered, or distracted by anything my students do or don’t wear — though from time to time, I’ll confess I’m still amused (a reaction I keep to myself as much as possible).  Glendenb’s point is well-taken: what students wear tends to reflect not only their personal style, but also their perception of what college is, and their own ease with being here.  I do well — we all do well — to remember that as we comment on the remarkable diversity of choices our students make each morning as they dress themselves.

“Tell Your Boyfriend I Said Thanks”: some thoughts on women’s t-shirts, class, competition, and sisterhood.

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 25, 2006
in Class, Clothing and Fashion, Feminism and Modesty
. 102 Comments

This summer, at least on the PCC campus, I’m seeing a tremendous revival of the vulgar t-shirt.  Many of my students have the most extraordinarily hostile –and occasionally funny — messages across their chests.

What bothers me most, however, are the ones that play on traditional female rivalries and anxieties.  "Tell Your Boyfriend I Said Thanks" read one I saw in the hall yesterday; "Tell Your Boyfriend to Stop Calling Me" read one from last week (on a different young woman, mind.)  T-shirts like these — and there are others — trouble me more than the ones that read "All American Bitch" or "So Many Men, So Little Time".  Displays of sexual bravado like these may be somewhat embarrassing and juvenile, but they aren’t designed to do damage to other women.

If there is one consistent lament I hear from the women in my feminist studies classes, it’s about the presence of intense competition in their lives.  Not academic competition, but sexualized competition.  As has often been noted here on this blog and elsewhere, this competitiveness on an "attractiveness market" is more intense in a community college with primarily lower middle class and working class students.  To generalize enormously, the less privileged the background, the more intense the sense of competition among young women.  Far too many young ones grow up with a sense that their sexual desirability is a more marketable commodity than their intellectual accomplishments; this is all the more likely to be true in families where there isn’t a history of women going to college.  (If you don’t believe me, visit any American community college on a hot day — and then visit an elite university in the same weather.  You’ll see more mini-skirts and heels in five minutes at Pasadena City College than you will in five hours at Berkeley or Stanford.  That’s anecdotal, sure, but don’t take my word for it — try it yourself.)  The bottom line: class and sexual competitiveness among women are, to say the least, not unrelated!

I realize it’s problematic for a fortyish man from a relatively privileged background to "tut-tut" with annoyance at the realities of the "attractiveness market" on which so many (but by no means all) of my young female students compete.  But as I’ve said over and over again, at least part of living a feminist life is learning not to see other women as rivals.  You can’t be committed to women’s liberation and see other attractive women as one’s enemies.   One of the sad fruits of a sexist culture is the sense of isolation that many women have from one another.  Internalized misogyny and competitiveness do not rest easy with a belief that women ought to be seen as complete human beings.

It’s unlikely, of course, that any young woman is going to be directly threatened by the "Tell Your Boyfriend I Said Thanks" shirt.   But it’s also equally unlikely that the shirt is intended to be interpreted ironically, as a wry commentary on the state of women’s competitiveness and anxiety.  The shirt makes a claim about the wearer and her desirability — and it suggests that attractiveness is a zero-sum game for women.  The sexier girl gets attention from other girls’ boyfriends.   Fear about playing that game — and losing at it — is a major factor in the lives of many of the young women with whom I work.

I’ve had four entries up in recent weeks on modesty, women’s dress, and male self-control. Having insisted six ways to Sunday that lust is always the problem of the luster, I stopped short of saying that we ought not ever consider others when we dress ourselves.  And yes, if what another woman wears makes you feel jealous and insecure, that’s as much your problem as it is for a man who is aroused by the same display.  But I draw a distinction between the accidental and the intentional.  A woman who is perceived as beautiful will be envied — and perhaps even disliked — by a few of her female peers regardless of what she wears.  That’s not her fault.  But if she wears a "Tell Your Boyfriend I Said Thanks" shirt , she’s being quite deliberate about her desire to elevate her own status in a mildly shocking but deeply competitive manner.  For that she is responsible, as in a small but significant way, she’s choosing to be actively hostile towards other women.

“OKOP”, “NOKOP” and Oscar: a long post about class, family, and pride

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 2, 2006
in Class, Ethnicity, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Memories and Race
. 23 Comments

Here on the blog, I’ve touched on issues of race before: just over two months ago, my post "The Happy WASP Boy" generated some fairly heated responses. With tongue only partially planted in cheek, I wrote then:

But here’s the thing I’ve realized in my life:  though there is much that is vacuous and materialistic about North American middle-class culture, that has damn all to do with skin color or ethnic heritage!  I grew up with a father who was a European war refugee and a mother who came from an "old" California family of German, English,and Scots-Irish ancestry.  I spent most of my time with my mother’s side of the family, and they formed my values and my world view. 

Yes, we’re WASPs.  If you want to stereotype one aspect of us, we’re a Brooks Brothers wearing, Bloody Mary drinking, Buick Roadmaster station-wagon driving, fraternity and sorority joining, tennis-playing, mayonnaise and meat loaf eating, Junior League cookbook owning, monogrammed thank-you note writing, Town and Country magazine reading, English horseback riding, debutante ball attending, Social Register listed, pastel polo-shirt or sweater set clad clan.  Without apologies.

There was a lot of discussion in the comments, and it was pointed out to me by several people that my characterization of my family was less about skin color and more about class.  I think I was aware of that when I wrote the post, but honestly, felt awkward about writing about my family and my background in terms of class.  Where I come from, class is hinted at but never discussed: just in blogging about my family in these posts, I’ve violated some rules.  There are certain topics that aren’t to be talked about too openly, and issues of class and money are among them.

When we were cynical teenagers, my brother and I came up with the terms OKOP and NOKOP.  OKOP stood for "Our Kind of People"; NOKOP (obviously) for "Not Our Kind of People."  We used the words ironically, expressing our chagrin at what we saw as the subtle elitism and snobbery of many members of our extended clan.  My cousins of my generation picked up the terms, and at times, the line between the sincere and the ironic use of the acronyms became blurred.  Someone would bring home a girlfriend to meet the family, and she would tie her sweater around her waist instead of draping it over her shoulders.  "So NOKOP", we’d mouth to each other over the family dinner table.   I once brought a friend to a Fourth of July party who wore a "Porn Star" baseball cap.    "She’s nice", said one cousin, "but a bit NOKOP, don’t you think?"  What began as an expression to poke fun at certain elements of class consciousness in our clan became instead a way of reinforcing those same elements.   That’s what happens, I suppose.

Of course, we’ve become a much more diverse family over the years.  Half-a-dozen of us are in interracial marriages with people from a wide variety of social backgrounds.   A great many of us don’t care about the things an older generation cared about; only a handful of my cousins still worry about who’s in the Social Register and keeping up expensive club memberships.  And well over half of us vote solidly Democratic — something that would have horrified our great-grandparents’ generation.  (My mother’s father and his brother were the only members of their entire family who voted for FDR).

For years and years, I struggled to come to terms with whether or not I wanted to embrace or reject certain aspects of my "class background."  At Berkeley, I learned quickly that others were allowed to say with pride that they were the first in the family to go to university — but I couldn’t say "I’m a fourth-generation Golden Bear" without being greeted with rolled eyes and epithets like "f-ing snob".  Those of us who were from "old families" (a favorite euphemism of the upper-middle classes) learned to conceal it — or openly disparage it.  When I lived in a co-op at Cal (I had become the first male member of my mother’s family in a century not to pledge a fraternity), I knew one other gal in the house who came from a similar background to my own.  We both made a conscious choice to make fun of our privileges.  We wore our Che Guevara t-shirts and wallowed in white guilt like pigs in a trough.

My sophomore year in Ridge House, I had a roommate named "Oscar."  Oscar was from a Mexican-American family in the Central Valley; he was the first in his family to go to college.  Oscar was active in MEChA, as well as the society for Hispanic Engineers and Scientists (two organizations that didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but that’s another story.)  He talked with great pride about his family and what it was like to grow up the son of agricultural laborers, spending half his childhood in Michoacan and the other half in rural Fresno County. But I didn’t want to talk about growing up spending my childhood in places like Santa Barbara and Piedmont and Carmel by-the-Sea.  Where Oscar was proud of his family, I was ashamed of what I believed at the time to be unmerited good fortune and privilege. 

Oscar was a smart lad and a good friend; we went to church together.  One day he asked me: "Hugo, why are you so ashamed of who you are?"  I protested that I wasn’t, and he persisted: "You walk around apologizing for being a white boy from Carmel all the time.  It’s getting really old.  Your family is part of who you are, and you should be proud of your roots.  Period.  Even if you can’t pronounce your own name right."  (He insisted on calling me "Ooogo", rather than the English "Hugh-go" or the German "Hoo-go.")

I told Oscar it wasn’t that easy.   I said:  "People admire you for coming from where you’ve come from — they don’t feel that same way about white guys whose great-grandfathers went here.  It’s like I haven’t earned being here."   Oscar laughed and laughed:  "Shit, Oooogo, sometimes I worry everyone thinks I got in here because of affirmative action; you’re worrying you got in here because of your relatives’ influence.   We both doubt ourselves because of our backgrounds, as different as we are — that’s just classic!"  I laughed with him.   

And then I shared with him the terms "NOKOP" and "OKOP", and I believe I made his whole semester.    As soon as I explained the terms to him, he rolled on the floor in hysterics, gasping in two languages.  The English consisted of "Oh, you f-ing white people, you f-ing white people, I love you soooo much". As if this wasn’t bizarre enough, Oscar then picked up the phone in our room and called up a series of his friends from MEChA, telling them about me and NOKOP and OKOP. And if you were around Oscar or his friends in the 1986-87 academic year, you would have heard them using the acronyms constantly, often in exaggerated accents modeled on Mr. Howell from Gilligan’s Island: "Ernie, you ridiculous pocho imbecile, that outfit is soooo NOKOP."

Oscar met my parents and my aunt on one occasion, and was gracious as could be.  Though he and his friends enjoyed ribbing me, he was also sending me a very positive message: I shouldn’t take myself or my family so damned seriously.  Oscar taught me that my "white guilt" and my "working class chic" were both affectations that only reinforced my image as an earnest, clueless, elitist.   More than anyone else, Oscar believed that we are simultaneously products of our family background and our own unique choices.  He urged me to always separate the two, and he taught me that shame and guilt ought only be associated with the latter, never the former.  "Your family’s your family, man", he’d say; "Love them, be proud of them, and don’t pretend they aren’t who they are."

I haven’t heard from Oscar in over a decade; last time we talked, he was back in grad school pursuing a second Ph.D. — and I had just started teaching at PCC.   As he always did, he brought up NOKOP and OKOP.   The last time we talked, I had just gotten my nipples pierced (it was an impulse) and I shared the rather painful news with him.  He shrieked with laughter; "Ooogo, even I KNOW that has to be soooo NOKOP."  I agreed that indeed it was, and that my family would not take it well.   "Man", Oscar snorted, "you’re going to be all right."

I rarely use NOKOP or OKOP except in jest any more; neither do my cousins.  I don’t worry about whether or not my name is in the Social Register, and I’d rather tithe to God than pay dues to the Valley Hunt or the Jonathan Club.  But I don’t pretend, either, that those things were not at least a part of my heritage; I don’t deny my background any more.   My family taught me early on not to boast or brag — OKOP don’t draw attention to themselves.  But Oscar taught me that there is no virtue in being embarrassed by one’s heritage, and he taught me that constant apologies were just another sign of privilege.  Living in happy gratitude for one’s heritage –  with the assurance that one is neither above or beneath any other person because of that heritage — is what he urged. And it’s Oscar’s words I still try and follow these days.

Losing money, feeling good

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 2, 2006
in Class, Clothing and Fashion, Links, People and Sexuality
. 4 Comments

In the file called "People whom I alternately loathe and admire" is the irrepressible Dov Charney, the CEO of American Apparel.  His reckless personal behavior and the over-sexualized ad campaigns for his company have long troubled me; his commitment to social justice and to decent working conditions for his employees have been inspiring.  Some of us are complicated people, after all — and in the case of Dov Charney, I won’t let the good he does obscure the tawdry details of his all-too-public personal behavior in the workplace, and I won’t let the reality of his transgresssions obscure his tremendously positive example to other garment manufacturers.  I like my villains to have a heroic side, and my heroes to have a nasty underbelly.

Dov Charney lost $400,000 yesterday, and couldn’t be happier about it. The Times story is here.

A note on weight, class, privilege, good genes, and virtue

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 7, 2006
in Body, Class, Feminism and Vanity
. 20 Comments

Two big posts on a Friday — not normal.  Can you tell I’m procrastinating?  On what, you ask?  Real writing, of course, the kind that gets submitted.

The posts about eating disorders, culture, and weight continue to abound.  I had my two offerings up earlier this week.  Jill and Piny already had fine ones up; Ampersand has been very busy on the subject and has more today.  All take issue, and rightly so, with this post last Sunday from Anthony at Cosmic Tap which included these whopping paragraphs, words already fisked and refuted by Amp, Jill, and Piny:

So, please, ladies - the girl who has the body the rest of you wish you had is not anorexic. The girl who delicately refuses the eighteen-ounce wedge of deep-fried cheesecake the rest of you dive into after dinner is not anorexic. The girl who is obsessed with fitting back into those size 1 jeans is not anorexic. She’s just thinner than you, knows how to say no to herself, and it makes you jealous.

And parents - please realize that it is the countercultural idea of self-control and self-denial, backed by the occasional dramatic image, that catalyzes enough fear for us to think anorexia poses some threat to our youth. Much like the War On Some Drugs, however – the threat it poses is to our way of thinking, not our health. It is far, far more dangerous to let your spoiled kids eat what they want.

More broadly, the idea of anorexia threatens our view of our bodies, our consumption-obsessed culture, and our deeply held personal ideas about how much nourishment we “need” (read: “deserve.”) Perpetuating the myth of anorexia helps us demonize denial as some kind of blasphemy, rather than looking at our own dinner plates or in the mirror and asking: am I fat? (Probable answer: yes.)

Yikes.  By confusing healthy moderation with the self-hatred and dysmorphia associated with anorexia, Anthony does real harm here. 

That said, all of this talk about self-denial and food has got me thinking.  Specifically, I’m aware of how my own relationship with food has changed and improved enormously over the course of my lifetime.   Thumbnail sketch: I was a skinny child who ate whatever he wanted, and then a chubby teenager who continued to eat whatever he wanted despite the change in his metabolism.  I carried quite a few "extra" until I was in grad school, when an eating disorder suddenly emerged with a vengeance.  Weight fell off me as I practiced radical restriction; I got myself down below 145 (this is 180 pounds) and was widely rumored to have AIDS.  After bottoming out in late 1992, I began a slow return to normal eating.

But what I’ve been doing for the past decade is exercising.  A lot.  And though I love, love, love to work out, I also love that all of this exercise allows me to eat more.  In my head, "denying" myself food when I’m hungry seems sinful, self-destructive, and pointless.  But if I’m running, lifting, boxing, biking, and Pilates-ing — well, then I can eat a lot more without concomitant guilt.   When I’m in workout mode, I’ll put away 4000-5000 calories a day, easily.  (Considerably more on "long run Saturdays".)  Most of it is healthy stuff, mind you, but I eat to satiety most of the time.  I keep my body fit not so much by restricting what goes in, but by increasing my output.  It’s always easier for me to do more than to do less.

Of course, as a Christian environmentalist, I sometimes wonder about all of this consuming I do.  When I go out for three-hour trail runs, frantically eat and shower, and then race off to do an intense hour on the mat and the reformer at Pilates class, only to pump in thousands and thousands of more calories, am I being a good steward of the earth’s resources?  The more I work out, the more I eat,and I eat a lot of things that come in packaging that can’t be easily recycled.  (For example, most days I’ll eat 3-4 Clif Bars in between meals.) The less I work out, the less I eat, the less consuming I do.  It’s a sign of my relative wealth that I can have pastimes that deplete me physically!

On the other hand, working out so much leaves me calm and relaxed and able to focus on others.  Anyone who’s known me knows how anxious and tense I get when I haven’t run in a few days.   Intense exercise drains away so many of my fears, and it also drains away so many of my negative and destructive impulses.  At the same time, it gives me more vigor.   Thus I can tell myself that all of this working out actually equips me to be of greater service to others.  And given that I volunteer many hours a week, I can’t help but think immodestly are benefiting from my increased energy and increased focus.

Anyhow, on to my point: so often, we falsely present the issue of weight as an issue of self-control.  Well, folks, I out-eat most people!  I don’t stop at "one" of much of anything most of the time. I have very, very little will to restrict when faced with tempting foods.  Yet no one ever accuses me of a lack of self-control, because I frantically burn off whatever I put in!  My body seems to be that of a disciplined person, even though my behavior in the buffet line is anything but.  Plenty of overweight folks eat far less than I do.  Perhaps they don’t have a tenured teaching job with a flexible schedule that allows plenty of time for exercise; perhaps they aren’t childless and middle class.   Do my privileges make me better?  Or do they just obscure my lack of self-control?  Why do so many people tell me how impressed they are by my fitness schedule?   What is so laudatory about narcissism, anxiety, and disposable income?

So yeah, I’m addicted to exercise.  That’s a foible, folks — not a virtue.  The fact that I have a resting heart rate of 42 and a body fat percentage in single digits is about three things: good genes, spare time, and an addictive personality hopelessly hooked on endorphins.  But my addictiveness and my good fortune are not particularly praiseworthy.

A long post about white privilege

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 5, 2006
in Class, Ethnicity and Race
. 31 Comments

I was home last night in time to watch the exciting end of the women’s basketball national championship game.   While I have never been a fan of Duke’s men’s basketball team, I’ve always liked Gail Goestenkors, the Blue Devils’ women’s coach.  I like her intensity and her passion, and I am chagrined that she can’t seem to "win the big one."  (Then again, folks used to say the same things about Mack Brown in football and Roy Williams in men’s basketball, and they finally broke through.)   Duke’s 6′7" center Alison Bales was my favorite player in the tournament this year, and in my heart, succeeded in replacing my idol from last season, Liberty’s Katie Feenstra.  (No, don’t get all analytical on me and discuss my admiration for very tall, muscular women who can dominate in the paint.)  In 2007, my favorite will probably be the scarily good Courtney Paris, who I thought had a chance to lead Oklahoma all the way this year.

Anyhow, I want to return — more seriously this time — to the subject of race.  Last Friday, I posted this rather flippant (but partly sincere) ode to my WASP upbringing.  In the comments section, Aldahlia reposted some provocative questions (written originally by Lauren from Feministe) for those of us who acknowledge our whiteness:

1. what does it mean to be white? what does it mean to be White?
2. how has whiteness affected your worldview?
3. how has whiteness affected your educational experience?
4. how has whiteness affected your experience with authority?
5. how has whiteness affected your experiences with people of other races and ethnicities?

Asking the first question with and without "white" in capital letters is a good and provocative start. I’ve understood the lower case "white" to refer to external perceptions about my race and heritage.  Folks look at me, and they see a man who is, unquestionably, white.  They may not be able to tell I have a mix of English, German, Jewish, Scots-Irish, and Welsh ancestry, but my facial features instantly identify me as looking like the same sort of folks who traditionally have power in this country.

I wrote about some of the specifics of my WASPiness last week.  Yes, class and geographic location played a role in my upbringing.  I have cousins in South Carolina and Virginia who share my ethnic background, but grew up with slightly different cultural signifiers than I did.  (For one thing, in my California family, the first alcoholic drink any of us ever have is white wine; for my southern relatives, it’s bourbon or Irish whiskey.)  But when folks look at me on the street, they can’t tell whether I was raised in Carmel or in a trailer park; whether my parents were professors or plumbers.  What they can tell is that I’m a white man, and that gives me certain privileges.

When I was in college, all of my advisors looked like me.   With the exception of the Chicano Studies courses I took with Norma Alarcon and Cherrie Moraga, every single professor I had as an undergrad or a grad student was European or European-American.   In grad school, I could easily have passed as the son of most of my faculty advisors, all of whom were white men (with the exception of the wonderful Marilyn McCord Adams, about whom I must post soon).  Thus it wasn’t hard for me to imagine myself becoming just like these men and women someday — and it wasn’t hard for them to see me as a younger version of themselves.  Did that have an effect on my confidence?  Hell yeah.

When I walked around the Berkeley campus (or the UCLA campus, or anywhere else), no one ever looked at me with a querying "what are you doing here?"  People who shared my sex and my skin color founded these universities and run them to this day. I felt an absolute and unerring sense of entitlement whenever I walked through the quads or under Sather Gate. It wasn’t arrogance, but rather a kind of confidence that came from always being seen as someone who "belonged".  My friends of color could not report the same set of experiences!

In countless ways, my white skin (as well as my sex and my class background) have opened doors for me.  In my life, I’ve been insecure about many things (my neurosis about working out and staying trim gets well-documented ’round here).  But I’ve never, ever, doubted that I belonged anywhere that I went.  I’ve had many "encounters" with law enforcement over the years, ranging from speeding tickets to getting 5150ed a few times in my late adolescence and twenties.  Even when my own behavior was self-destructive and bizarre, even when I needed handcuffs, I was always, always, always, called "sir."  (The last time I drank, many years ago, I remember being briefly handcuffed by a young deputy.  I slurred something along the lines of "I’m not gonna hurt you, buddy"; he laughed and said with remarkable and memorable gentleness, "Sir, we just don’t want you to hurt yourself any more.")  I’ve had black and Latino friends whose self-destructive behavior approximated my own — and they report very different stories of often violent (or at the least, rude) treatment at the hands of the police.

When I walk into a store in a nice neighborhood, even if I’m in jeans and a t-shirt, clerks ask "May I help you, sir?"  I don’t have security guards following me around, wondering if I’m going to shoplift.  When I walk down the street at night, women don’t cross over to the other side to avoid me.  Is all of this because I’m such a swell guy?  Of course not.  I’m a reasonably clean-cut white man, and my skin color opens doors and puts people at ease without my having to say a word.  That’s unearned privilege.

I’m not ashamed of being white.  I would not renounce either my skin color or my background, even if I could.  (Though I wish I wasn’t as prone to skin cancer as I am!)  As I wrote last Friday, I love my family and my heritage very much.  I love the particular traditions and rituals that I associate with growing up the way I did.  I have no patience with those who say that in order to be effective allies to people of color, whites have to entirely renounce their whiteness.  But while I won’t apologize for my upbringing, I can take positive action to renounce my privilege.  There’s a huge difference between being ashamed of one’s family or skin color (which I’m not) and working actively to end one’s own unmerited advantages.

The most effective thing white folks can do, I think, is admit that privilege actually exists.  I have no idea how many doors opened for me because of what I look like, and because of my family background.  When I was first hired at PCC, several people actually said to me "You’re lucky to have gotten that job, Hugo!  I’m surprised they didn’t hire someone of color using affirmative action.  At least you know you got this on your own merits!"  On my own merits?  Puhleeze!  I looked like two-thirds of my hiring committee!  I looked like the professors who had mentored me and looked out for me!  I went to the same university that my parents, grandparents, and great-grandfathers did!  Any unearned advantage conferred by affirmative action pales in comparison to those unmerited privileges bestowed upon me by my appearance and my background!  Of course, I was also hired for my teaching skills and my academic preparation.  My color and class would not, in and of themselves, have canceled out actual incompetence.  But they may well have tipped the scales in my favor when I was given this job I love a dozen years or so ago.

I’ll say it again: I’m not ashamed of my ancestors, my family, or my skin color.  But I don’t deny that these things gave me advantages I didn’t earn.  What whites need to do is stop perpetuating the myth that our personal successes are entirely unaffected by these privileges.  Whenever possible, we need to cop to the reality of these unearned benefits.  We need to embrace programs that seek to level the playing field (such as affirmative action) without complaint or bitterness.  And we need to stop insisting that all of our achievements were based solely on the content of our character, and not also in part on the color of our skin.

The Happy WASP Boy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 30, 2006
in Class, Ethnicity, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Memories and Race
. 48 Comments

Okay, I lied.  Here’s one more post before I go off to a weekend of happy delirium, overeating, snowball fights, and reflective worship with two dozen fifteen year-olds.

So this post at Lucky White Girl led me to this post at Bitch Lab to this post at Listening for Change.  Topic: whiteness.  And at the last of these three blogs, I found this:

Yes, I know as well as the rest of us of the isolation we grew up with. White people don’t sleep with their children. They don’t play much and they don’t hug much. They don’t laugh much. And they spend most of the time trying to look good. We have beautiful cribs and curtains. We don’t have much connecting going on.

Barb at Lucky White Girl wrote:

So what can we -those of us who recognize the emptiness of typical North American white culture- do to sate that desire for a cultural heritage we can be proud of, for a culture we -as progressives- can identify with?

But here’s the thing I’ve realized in my life:  though there is much that is vacuous and materialistic about North American middle-class culture, that has damn all to do with skin color or ethnic heritage!  I grew up with a father who was a European war refugee and a mother who came from an "old" California family of German, English,and Scots-Irish ancestry.  I spent most of my time with my mother’s side of the family, and they formed my values and my world view. 

Yes, we’re WASPs.  If you want to stereotype one aspect of us, we’re a Brooks Brothers wearing, Bloody Mary drinking, Buick Roadmaster station-wagon driving, fraternity and sorority joining, tennis-playing, mayonnaise and meat loaf eating, Junior League cookbook owning, monogrammed thank-you note writing, Town and Country magazine reading, English horseback riding, debutante ball attending, Social Register listed, pastel polo-shirt or sweater set clad clan.  Without apologies.

(I’ve rebelled against my family in some ways, mostly having to do with fashion.  I am the first tattooed man in several centuries of family history.  I’d rather wear Diesel, Energie, and Paul Frank than Ralph Lauren, J. Peterman, or Izod Lacoste.  But I can still "do it up" WASP style; you should see me in my seersucker suit!  My other rebellion, of course, is talking about the family in public.)

Yes, in our family, babies don’t sleep in their parents’ beds.  Yes, kids move away to college when they turn 18.  Yes, when I greet most of my male cousins, we shake hands instead of hugging.   Yes, we don’t raise our voices at the table.  We chew with our mouths closed, keep our hands off the table, and don’t interrupt each other. 

But you know what?  We laugh.  A lot.  And even if we don’t live loud like something out of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", we adore each other.  Where on God’s green earth is it written that the expressive and emotive cultures of the Mediterranean or Latin worlds are healthier than we quieter, more restrained WASPs?  I adore my wife’s family in Colombia (we’ll visit them soon), and I am always happy to be among my friends who come from more "colorful" backgrounds.  (Mine is one of only half a dozen inter-ethnic marriages in the family.) But that doesn’t mean I’m ashamed of having grown up WASPy, of having been raised in a culture that valued understated elegance, self-restraint, self-reliance and a sturdy Protestant work ethic.

News flash, folks: Anglo-Saxon reticence is not a recipe for misery!  It’s not inherently oppressive or misery making, at least no more so than any other way of doing things.   No culture has a monopoly on dysfunction; no culture has a monopoly on healthy child-rearing practices.  My ancestors were fortunate, and some of them probably made their money in ways that were cruel and exploitative.  But the sins of the fathers are not automatically visited upon the sons and daughters!  I can regret what my ancestors may have done without rejecting all of their values, all of their contributions, all of the wonderful pieces of a very real culture they bequeathed to me.

Next month, I’m going to gather with forty-odd family members for Easter.  We’ll eat deviled eggs; we’ll play croquet on the lawn; we’ll wear pink and green and talk Cal football and the stock market and the war; we’ll watch the children hunt for shiny plastic orbs in the grass and we’ll catch up with each other.  There won’t be a lot of yelling. No loud music will be played.  There will certainly be no dancing. No one will get drunk and fall down.  We’ll all be in bed by 11:00PM and up not long after dawn.  We’ll be cheerful, courteous, and gentle.  We’ll have a wonderful time, all without raising our voices once.

At the end of the weekend, when I say goodbye to a few of my male family members, I’ll shake their hands warmly, pat them on the shoulder –  and no more. And they’ll know I love them and I’ll know they love me and we’ve never once said it, nor are we likely to start.  But don’t pity me — I’ll know that I’m treasured, and my family will know I treasure them.  Growing up WASP means that you learn that love is often understated, often silent, but no less perceptible and no less powerful as a result!  I’ve got a culture of which I am deeply proud, and a family whom I love with every fiber of my being. 

Shed no tears for this happy white boy.

UPDATE:  I’ve been away, but quickly going back through the comments I see some dangerous thread drift; I’ve deleted a few at my sole discretion.  This is not a forum for a discussion of race — it’s a post about WASPiness, not "white pride" or the history of race relations. I do promise a more thoughtful post on "whiteness"fairly soon.