Archive for the 'Ethnicity' Category

Contra Arizona: in defense of ethnic and gender studies, and in defense of resentment

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 16, 2010
in Ethnicity, Favorite Posts 2010 and Feminist Pedagogy
. 13 Comments

I’m in San Jose Airport, waiting for a flight back down to Southern California. It’s been a whirlwind three days with family and friends in Carmel, San Francisco, Yountville and several places in between.

Much has been made, and rightly so, of Arizona’s recently passed law banning the teaching of ethnic studies courses in public schools. The wording of the bill, signed by Governor Jan Brewer, barred the teaching of courses that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people; are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group; advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals”.

The second of those three points is a valid one, but it’s a straw person. In my quarter century in academia, I’ve never seen an Ethnic Studies course that wasn’t welcoming of all students — including those whose ethnicity was not the subject matter. I took a number of Ethnic Studies classes at Cal in the 1980s (particularly in Chicano Studies, where I took courses with Cherrie Moraga, Norma Alarcon, and Gary Soto); in at least one of those, I remember being the only white feller in the class. And I was never made to feel unwelcome, nor did I ever get the sense that the courses were filled with “insider information”. I loved my Chicana Feminism class (taught by Alarcon), and appreciated that I was neither ostracized nor patronized by the professor or my fellow students. The work I did in those classes began with my willingness to suspend my own suspicion, to avoid the temptation to be defensive, and to recognize the multipliciities of privilege that had shaped my worldview. I bring the insights I learned in those courses into my own teaching every damn semester. Teaching a student body that is close to 80% non-white, I can say with certainty that I would be a much poorer and less imaginative professor had I never taken those courses.

I’m concerned that the Arizona law represents a serious threat to Women’s Studies as well. It’s obviously impossible to teach my primary gender course, Women in American Society, without talking about the ways in which women — as a class, and not merely as individuals — have been oppressed. What many consider the founding document of First Wave feminism, 1848’s Declaration of Sentiments opens its third paragraph with words that might cause trouble under the Arizona diktat’s first requirement, that resentment ought not to be promoted against any particular group of people:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

The use of the singular is a rhetorical device, modeled on the Declaration of Independence. But it drives home the point that sexism has been both institutional and highly personal: it has been taught in the schools and in the home; it is promoted and defended in public, and lived out cruelly in private. Men as a class — and men as individuals — have oppressed, exploited and marginalized women for centuries. This is as much a fact as two plus two equalling four; no rational person, confronted with the evidence, could deny that fact. The degree to which that sexism remains a problem in the Western industrialized world is a subject for debate, but that it existed at all, and existed for a very long time, certainly isn’t. And no one, perhaps particularly a woman, can absorb the history of how women of all classes and backgrounds were brutalized and silenced by systems and by loved ones without being filled with something very much like resentment.

The very word resentment is important: it comes from the Latin sentire, “to feel”, and from re, meaning “again”. Resentment means to feel again — or, more loosely, to be reminded of old injuries. To teach history well, we who serve Clio must be agents of resentment, stirring up anger and grief as we demand that the wounds inflicted in the past be remembered, and even felt, again. To be a woman or to be black has historically meant a particular vulnerability to injustice. Those students who have no sense of the past (which is to say, almost everyone before they study history) need to connect themselves to the experiences of their ancestors, feeling their pain as well as their joy. That is what it means to “resent.”

Conservatives ask that students take pride in the accomplishments of the Americans who came before; the authorities in Texas have done all that they can to rewrite our history to encourage uncritical adulation of manifest destiny and the American project. To encourage pride is to encourage an emotional response to history; to encourage resentment is the same thing. Whoever we are, we can find much in the history of our forebears to give us pride. But an honest account of the American experience will make clear that for most of our history, those who weren’t white men generally suffered far more than those who were. To ask that the less-pleasant aspects of the past be expunged for fear of stirring up negative emotion is profoundly irresponsible and profoundly at odds with the job of the historian, which is to invite both intellectual and emotional responses to the narrative of what was.

If we Americans are who we say we are, we are surely secure enough to lay open the books and tell the darker aspects of the national story with the same rousing passion with which we tell of our triumphs. And if we do that, there will be a great deal of resentment on the part of those who identify with the abused, the victimized, and the ignored. That is exactly as it should be.

I’m a history and gender studies professor. I stir up resentment. The day that stops happening is the day I’ve begun to fail at my job.

Every damn box: filling out the census

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 18, 2010
in Ethnicity and Race
. 4 Comments

I can’t begin to say how much I genuinely enjoyed filling out our census form this week, and writing down my daughter’s name. Her first census; my wife’s fourth, my fifth. Since my Colombian-born mother-in-law lives with us, she was included as well. It is her fourth census since immigrating to California just weeks before my wife was born.

And my wife and I had fun checking off the various boxes around racial identity. My wife, mother-in-law, and daughter were noted as having “Hispanic” origin, and we wrote in “Colombian” for each. My wife checked both the “white” and “black” boxes, honoring her mixed heritage (her maternal grandfather was from Africa), and we did the same for Heloise’s identity. My mother-in-law wanted to be noted as black and Colombian, but not white.

Three of my daughter’s four grandparents are white. Heloise would, under the “one drop” rule of the Old South, have qualified as an “octoroon”. It seems like so little, and yet Homer Plessy — the plaintiff in the famous 1896 Jim Crow case that bears his name — was also an octoroon. The discrimination and segregation he endured led him to file the lawsuit that would ultimately fail. As any historian of race will tell you, those with the same amount of black heritage as my daughter have known their share of bigotry. And because of that history, and because they asked, the census bureau will know that my child is black — and white. And she is much more than that as well.

When she is older, I will quote to Heloise — when the subject of her ancestry comes up — a line my great-great-grandfather wrote in his memoirs: My children, let your modest pride be this: you come of sturdy stock. He wasn’t referring to the size of our frames. Rather, he was rebuking gently and in advance any notions of aristocratic pretension that might arise. Heloise will learn that, and be reminded of another (not entiirely true) family saying as well: “Dukes don’t emigrate.”

She already has a few words in Spanish and English (when she wants my wife’s breast, she points and says “leche”). We hope to keep her bilingual, and just as importantly, to keep her a citizen of the world. She belongs not to America, nor to Britain, nor to Colombia, but to something bigger and grander. At some point, I’ll inflict on her Edward Abbey:

My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation’s history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language or culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.

(On the rare occasions when I hear the call to place my hand over my heart and recite what American schoolchildren are still regularly compelled to say, that’s what I mutter under my breath. Politely, in an OKOP way.)

And knowing my family’s way, within another century, should we still have such categories on our census forms, my daughter’s grandchildren will be entitled to check every damn box.

Good Girls Marry Doctors: a new project about daughters, feminism and the diaspora

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 16, 2010
in Books, Ethnicity, Family and Feminism
. 3 Comments

This past weekend I got an email from Josephine Tsui, a Mills and University College London alumna. Josephine and Piyali Bhattacharya have started a web project called Good Girls Marry Doctors, a site for diasporic women from East Asian, South Asian, and other non-Western backgrounds who are working to reconcile their feminism with their family traditions. Josephine and Piyali are putting together an anthology: Retaining Control, Negotiating Roles: South and East Asian Diasporic Women and their Parents, and are looking for submissions. Here’s their call:

Are you a good girl? You know what we mean: you listen to your parents, there’s no gossip about you in the “community.” Or are you a bad girl? Were you caught smoking in high school? Did you marry that white boy against your parents’ wishes?

We ask you to contribute your story to a forthcoming volume: “Mama Says Good Girls Marry Doctors.” This book focuses on the pressures on South and East Asian women who have grown up in North America to be “good girls.” It seeks to collect the stories of such women, and their traumas, victories, and defeats as they face the control that their immigrant parents try to exercise over them in relation to the choice of a partner, or a career, or their freedom. We want to know how negotiating these pressures affects young Asian diasporic women, their relationship to feminism, to their parents and to their partners or siblings.

We do not seek academic essays, but creative non-fiction pieces, narratives, reflections and personal histories and memoirs. You can tell your own story or that of a friend or relative. As Asian women who have experiences such issues ourselves, we want this volume to bring a range of stories out in the open and available to other women who are facing these issues.

More details at their website, and make sure to check out the blog Josephine and Piyali have started.

Josephine kindly notes that she found this post of mine from early 2009 to be particularly helpful: Peer mentoring, young Armenian feminists, and mapping a route out. It was a post of which I was proud at the time, and am happy to say that I’ve had some good success putting young women from that particular culture together to share strategies for negotiating a path to both freedom and cultural preservation. I got some very nasty emails after that post appeared, mostly from young Armenian men (and a few parents) who were incensed at what they saw as a crude assimilationist agenda. (One of the only times I’ve ever received a physical threat serious enough to consider reporting it to campus police came in one of those emails.) I emphasized to them what I emphasized in my post: it’s not cultural betrayal to insist that women’s individual happiness matters. It’s not cultural betrayal to offer support to young women from traditional backgrounds assistance in discerning what of modern feminism they want for their lives — and what they don’t. It’s not ethnocentric to encourage slightly older women who have had some success in mapping a route “out” to mentor younger women who are unsure of the way. If I can quote myself from one of the posts below:

… if feminists can agree on one thing, it’s this: the collective sacrifices of your parents, ancestors, and culture do not trump your own personal right to be happy.

Some related posts of mine:

Some lengthy thoughts on feminism, traditional families, contingent happiness and daring to disappoint

Dating to Disappoint: the Bulworth Solution

Dare to Disappoint: Cheering on Sandra Tsing Loh

“Kindly Remembrance”: of faith, ancestors, and debts to the past; a long post in response to Daisy B.

To go anywhere and do anything: more notes on marriage and class

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 15, 2009
in Class, Ethnicity and Marriage
. 20 Comments

In Monday’s post about the bitter loss of shared dreams, I didn’t address the issue of class and status brought up by the original posts from which I quoted. Several of those who commented did bring up issues of dating outside one’s SES (socio-economic status), and I wanted to return to that aspect of the issue.

I’m married today to a woman who is, on both sides of her family, the first to graduate from college. My wife grew up poor, the daughter of an Afro-Colombian mother with a third-grade education and a father who, for all his kindness and good intentions, was hardly a reliable or consistent presence. Starting when she was eight, my wife worked with her mother cleaning houses and offices before and after school, enduring racial abuse. Her mother, who eventually made a small living as a seamstress, stressed education as the key to rising out of poverty, and my wife embraced that. Somehow, my mother-in-law found the money to buy soccer uniforms, to pay for dance lessons, to pay for the tools that my wife could use to begin her climb into a different social and economic world. My wife worked hard, won scholarships, took out loans, and eventually graduated with honors from the University of Southern California before heading into what has been a very successful career in business management. From both an ethnic and socio-economic standpoint, our backgrounds are worlds apart.

Like many immigrants who are part of the first-generation to “make it”, my wife supports (and now that we are married with completely blended finances, we support) a very large number of people within an extended family who have been less fortunate than ourselves. We send money to our Colombian relatives, paying for medical operations and schooling and clothes. We support cousins in this country as well with little bits here and there. We’ve recently moved to a larger house, not least because we are moving my mother-in-law in. My mother-in-law will get to spend lots of time with her adored granddaughter, and we can provide for her. My wife was and is her nest egg, and my beloved has always known and cheerfully accepted her responsibility to repay her mother’s years of backbreaking work.

This is not how I was raised. In WASPy families — OKOP — ageing parents do not move in with their children. They move into retirement communities with multiple levels of care, gradually becoming more and more reliant on professionals until they slip gently — or sometimes, not so gently — into the next world. I’ve grown up hearing from my mother, my grandmother, and countless other relatives the insistence that “I will not be a burden to my children when I’m old.” My own Mama has carefully designed her finances and her insurance policies to provide for the maximum degree of autonomy and comfort when the time comes. Heck, in our family when mothers come to visit, they stay in a hotel even when a guest room is ready and furnished; such is the near-reverent respect for “not causing an inconvenience.” It seems cold to outsiders, I suppose, but not to us. And of course, it is economic privilege and a social ethos of individualism that undergirds this way of life.

So we know in our household that we will care for my mother-in-law for the rest of her life, but we will not have the same responsibilities with my own mama. We know that we will be giving financial help to many members of my wife’s family, but unless some stunning reversals of fortune come along (heavens forfend), we will not need to do so for mine. There is no resentment, of course. Privilege is not virtue, after all, and in our home we know the difference. The fact that our respective families have different histories and different levels of resources is hardly an obstacle to a successful marriage. My wife and I both derive great pleasure from being able to share what we can with those who need it, and there is absolute unity in this regard. Continue reading ‘To go anywhere and do anything: more notes on marriage and class’

Of wise WASPs and wise Latinas: some thoughts on Sotomayor

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 10, 2009
in Class, Ethnicity and Teaching
. 9 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write about Sonia Sotomayor for weeks now, and have received two requests to do so.

As virtually everyone paying attention to the news knows, Sotomayor has been nominated by the president to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the retirerement of Justice David Souter. The confirmation process is revving up. And Judge Sotomayor is taking particular criticism for her oft-repeated remark that a “wise Latina” would often reach a better conclusion than “a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” The right has cried “racism”, and the National Review has lampooned Sotomayor’s Latina wisdom with a particularly unfortunate and bizarre cover.

There are nine judges on the US Supreme Court for a reason. (That number fluctuated a bit in the early years of the Republic.) One rather obvious, if unstated, rationale for having nine is that it is just about the right number to ensure that vigorous debate can take place amongst the justices. The presumption is that debate is necessary because no single judge, no matter how erudite and insightful, can arrive at the best conclusion on his or her own. The right outcome is arrived at communally, through dialogue and argument. And each justice brings to that argument his or her law clerks, his or her legal training, his or her philosophical orientation — and his or her life experience. The greater the diversity of life experience and perspective among the nine, therefore, the greater the chance that the most just outcomes will be reached.

I live and teach and work as a white man. A very particular kind of white man, too. My father was a European war refugee, my mother from an archetypally WASPy American family with roots on this continent stretching back to the mid-17th century. (I’ve written about those roots here and here). My skin color, my family history, my education, and my class shaped my world view; they helped make me who I am. So too did my own life experiences. I’ve been formed by privilege, yes — but I’ve also struggled with addiction and been hospitalized against my will many times. I’ve tasted a very particular kind of despair. I’m a more compassionate man as a result. One could say that — and on some issues I would say — that “a wise sober alcoholic with years of recovery” has a better perspective on some issues than someone who hasn’t had to walk down that particular road. And if there’s a court case dealing with issues of addiction, it might be helpful to have a recovering addict in the conversation. Continue reading ‘Of wise WASPs and wise Latinas: some thoughts on Sotomayor’

Peer mentoring, young Armenian feminists, and mapping a route out

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 22, 2009
in Ethnicity, Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy, Mentoring, Pasadena City College and Youth
. 2 Comments

About 15% of our students at Pasadena City College are of Armenian descent; Pasadena is part of the axis of the great Armenian Diaspora centered in nearby Glendale. Indeed, one of the periodic and cheerful debates we have ’round here is whether to classify Armenians as “white” or something else. My favorite form is one used at Glendale Adventist Hospital: there is one box to check marked “Caucasian” and another box marked “Armenian”. Some folks desperately, desperately need a lesson in basic geography! (If we’re going to start naming ethnic groups after mountain ranges, can I please be a mix of “Alpine”, “Pennine”, and “Sierran”?)

In any case, my women’s history course always seems to attract a disproportionate percentage of Armenians; on average, 20-25% of the women who enroll. And I’ve become familiar, after sixteen years of teaching here, with the particular brand of chauvinism that is so much a part of this otherwise marvelous culture. When it comes to the strictures of the modern double bind, no group seems seems as burdened as young Armenian-American women. Based on what I’ve learned from hundreds of students over the years, the pressure is uniquely overwhelming. On the one hand, most of my Armenian students are expected to study hard and do well in school and pursue the traditional careers of the first-generation upwardly mobile: medicine, law, engineering, business. (Gender studies is discouraged as a major.) On the other hand, there is a tremendous encouragement towards early marriage as well: no ethnic or religious group whom I have ever taught has as high a percentage of nineteen and twenty year olds with engagement rings on their fingers. (And yes, I’ve taught passels of Mormons, and anecdotally, they are less marriage-focused than first-gen Armenians).

Young Armenian women are generally expected to be beautiful (most wear make-up to school), to be feminine, and, it goes almost without saying, to be virginal until marriage (or at least, until engagement.) All dating is to be endogamous at the risk of rejection, ridicule, and rage. And even the best and the brightest young women are regularly told by their parents — I hear this story every semester without fail — that they can “forget” about going to university far away. The cultural rules require young women to live at home; USC and UCLA are filled with Armenians who would have loved the chance to go to Berkeley or Duke or NYU but who have been told in no uncertain terms that moving away is “not what a nice girl does.”

Some of my readers may be annoyed at this point. Is this another in my continuing series of posts that argue for the middle-class WASP virtues of self-discovery and autonomy at the expense of tradition and family? Is this another cluelessly elitist paean to the glories of daring to disappoint one’s parents? Maybe. But it’s based mostly not on what I think, but on the veritable catalogue of anguish and frustration and ambivalence I have heard from legions and legions of young Armenian-American women. And a few years ago, I got an idea about a sensible and culturally sensitive way to approach the problem. Continue reading ‘Peer mentoring, young Armenian feminists, and mapping a route out’

Changing student demographics

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 03, 2008
in Ethnicity, Feminist Pedagogy and Pasadena City College
. 0 Comments

My women’s history course had its first class meeting yesterday. Though I don’t know yet how many students will stick with the course, I had a record number of men show up for the class. Since I started teaching the course in 1995, males have averaged 10-15% of the students in each class. 30% of those who showed up yesterday, nearly a third, were young men. There will be some drops, to be sure, but it looks promising that this might be a record-breaking semester.

Mind you, it’s not “all about the menz.” The last thing I want to do is measure the success or failure of a women’s studies class by how many male students complete the course! But though it is to be expected that the majority of the students in the class will always be women (the student body at PCC is 58% female as it is), it’s nice to see anecdotal evidence that more and more lads are becoming comfortable with taking a course like this.

I’d also note another demographic shift. For years and years, my women’s studies courses were much “whiter and blacker” than my other classes. At PCC today, Latinos make up just over 40% of the student body, Asians/Pacific Islanders about 30%, whites about 15% and blacks less than 10%. Though those numbers were reflected in Western Civ course enrollments, my women’s history classes tended to attract lots of white — and lots of African-American — women. Fewer Hispanic and Asian students took the course, presumably because of greater cultural conservatism within those communities and because of higher percentages of students for whom English was a second or third language. (My women’s history course features more readin’ and writin’ than my survey classes.)

But just in the last two years, the demographic for my women’s history class has “normed” with the overall college population. In particular, I’m seeing more and more foreign students (on F-1 visas) from Latin America and East Asia enrolling in the course. I always had plenty of these students in my Western Civ classes, and it’s not as if there’s been a huge change in the college’s overall student population. It seems plausible that there’s a growing receptiveness among students from non-white and non-black backgrounds to courses like women’s history. I’m pleased, of course, and will do my best to continue to adjust the syllabus to meet the needs and interests of this changing demographic.

Work, family, culture, and success: some thoughts on Asian and Latino achievement

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 16, 2008
in Academia, Ethnicity, Pasadena City College and Working
. 10 Comments

In summer school, the gap between what I want to do and what I have time to do yawns particularly wide. I’m lecturing five hours a day four days a week, and that doesn’t count prep time. I’m not complaining, mind, just sayin’ that it makes it hard to get the blogging in that I would like. I’m trying to work up a longer post on feminist Christian sexual ethics, but that’s going to be delayed for a while.

Just a quick link to an interesting Times story this morning: Trying to Bridge the Grade Divide in L.A. Schools. Hector Becerra’s Column One offering explores the wide (and, some say, rapidly widening) success differential between Latino and Asian students in California high schools. Becerra visits Lincoln High School in East Los Angeles, a famous institution with a large percentage of both Asian and Hispanic students, and interviews both teachers and kids about the “achievement gap.” At Lincoln, Asians are 15% of the student body — and 50% of the enrollees in Advanced Placement classes. Virtually all of the students, regardless of race, come from working-class, first-generation immigrant families; socio-economics alone do little to account for the disparity.

Lots of familiar explanations crop up, with differing cultural expectations usually topping the list. Continue reading ‘Work, family, culture, and success: some thoughts on Asian and Latino achievement’

Loving the whole earth, loving the single place: a long response to Gregory Rodriguez, quoting Abbey and Hauerwas

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 27, 2008
in Books, Christianity, Environmentalism, Ethnicity, Globalism and Traveling
. 5 Comments

I normally like the perspective that L.A. Times’ columnist Gregory Rodriguez takes. But he wrote an op-ed eleven days ago that really irked me: Rootless to a Fault. Here’s a portion of it:

Here in the U.S., highly skilled workers and wealthy entrepreneurs from around the globe contribute mightily to this nation’s productivity and creativity. Their presence in our cities, and ours in theirs, has fostered a greater appreciation of global cultural diversity. It has spawned a vibrant cosmopolitanism that broadens our collective concern for people who live beyond our borders.

But this cosmopolitanism is not without its dark side. Increasingly, many of our big cities’ creative elites — both native and foreign-born — see themselves as citizens of the world. Our intellectuals are exploring the declining significance of place in the new globalized world order. And this brave new world cries out for an answer to the question: Does a person who swears loyalty to all cities and nations have any loyalties at all? I’ve always been struck by the fact that the same people who rightly criticize multinational corporations for having no sense of responsibility to place never seem to express the same concern about the equally “unplaced” creative elite.

A few years ago, I was at a fancy dinner party and found myself the only one at the table who held only one passport.

Rodriguez goes on to make a jarringly wrong premise: those who see themselves as “citizens of the world” are somehow dramatically less engaged in civic activity than those whose horizons are smaller and whose loyalties more narrowly defined. He opines:

Without denying the benefits of globalization, we should remember the beauty and strength of parochialism.

It’s all well and good to love the world, but real social solidarity is generally found on a smaller scale. And it’s not just the unskilled immigrants we should be concerned about. We need to find ways to encourage the highly skilled ones to form a sense of attachment and commitment to their new homes. On top of that, we natives must remember that there is no honor in escaping engagement by becoming a citizen of the world.

First off — and I could be wrong — I smell a tiny whiff in Rodriguez’s piece of an old anti-Semitic canard: the notion that the “wandering Jew”, cosmopolitan to a fault, undermines the stability of whatever society in which he finds himself, because his loyalties are eternally elsewhere. Though that is surely not Rodriguez’s intent, there’s no denying that jeremiads against “jet-setting elitists” who have no commitment to place are not new, and that in the past, many of those attacks have been aimed quite explicitly at Jews. Gregory ought to have known that.

But what I resent about the piece is the notion that loyalty to the world and all of its creatures is somehow incompatible with deep concern for the well-being of particular places. Rodriguez posits what is frankly a monstrously false dichotomy: parochial and engaged or cosmopolitan and unconcerned. Indeed, I assure Greg that there are those among his readers who are devoted to Los Angeles and its well-being without feeling any need to elevate the needs of L.A. above those of the entire planet!

I am a dual citizen, holding UK and US citizenship. My brother, his wife, and children hold a serious array of passports: Mexican, Austrian, British, and American. I have many friends who also have two nationalities, and I have a few acquaintances who have three. And no, we are not all part of some transnational global elite. I’ll be waiting a long time for my invite to rub elbows with the super-rich at the Davos Economic Forum. Of course, my dual citizenship is not without significance to me: it not only gives me and my family options about where to work and live, it reminds me that I do indeed have multiple loyalties and multiple commitments. But my devotion to any one place is not less because of a devotion to many. I have been fortunate to have been able to see much of the world, and am fortunate to have friends and family scattered across many continents. But that sense of belonging to the globe rather than to a country doesn’t mean I am any less passionately devoted to the well-being of Pasadena, or to my students, many of whom have never been on an airplane much less outside of the Western Hemisphere. Continue reading ‘Loving the whole earth, loving the single place: a long response to Gregory Rodriguez, quoting Abbey and Hauerwas’

Sunday night thoughts on whiteness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 27, 2008
in Ethnicity and Race
. 11 Comments

I got home from my run in time to catch most of Jeremiah Wright’s speech at the NAACP convention in Detroit. I’d heard him a few times before, but was mesmerized by what he had to say tonight. I can’t find a full transcript online yet; if someone has one available, I’d be grateful for a link in the comments.

The fellow who introduced Dr. Wright used his first name repeatedly, evidently driving home the point that Barack Obama’s pastor speaks as part of a prophetic tradition that goes back as far — or farther — than the first famed Jeremiah. Those who splutter in righteous indignation at the reverend’s now-ubiquitious “God damn America” sermon would do well to reacquaint themselves with the Old Testament biblical tradition. I’m sure that this point has been made by many others, but it deserves repeating: prophetic language has political implications, but is not the same as political discourse. Only someone with a poorly-formed theology could assume that God will not punish America as he punished His beloved Israel. If God could allow the holy city on the hill, His beloved Jerusalem, to be sacked repeatedly; if he could permit and perhaps even will the first and second temples to both be destroyed, if his prophets could suggest that that destruction was earned and deserved, then it is jingoistic hubris to say that God holds the United States in higher esteem.

Watching Dr. Wright early this evening, I thought about the discomfort so many white Americans have with frank expressions of black anger. I thought as well about this comment by Fred, written in response to this post. Fred:

Maybe it is a matter of semantics, but I do not completely understand your comment on whiteness. “I have willfully refused to reject, renounce, or even seriously reflect upon my whiteness.” Skin pigmentation is an immutable trait, so what is there to reject or renounce. Should people also renounce their “blackness”? Or is “whiteness” some kind of euphemism for being a racial bigot?

When I wrote about “whiteness”, I wasn’t writing about my ethnicity or my skin pigmentation — but rather about a specific kind of privilege. One of the best-known short explanations of what white privilege is comes from Peggy McIntosh: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. (A few years ago, Amp at Alas, A Blog posted his marvelous update on male privilege, riffing on McIntosh’s work.) When I write about renouncing whiteness, I am not talking about rejecting my European-American heritage; I’m talking about doing everything I reasonably can to avoid unconsciously benefitting from the system that McIntosh so effectively describes. Continue reading ‘Sunday night thoughts on whiteness’

Andrea Smith denied tenure

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 04, 2008
in Ethnicity, Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy, Race and Teaching
. 37 Comments

Brownfemipower has taken the lead on reporting the story of Andrea Smith’s denial of tenure at the University of Michigan. Read here and here, and see the report in the Chronicle of Higher Ed here.

It’s a strange case. Smith had been given a joint appointment in American Studies and Women’s Studies at the Ann Arbor campus; ’twas the latter department that nixed her promotion while the former supported her tenure cause. She’s also the director of the campus Native American Studies Center. Few of us are privy to the details of her file, and the Women’s Studies department at Michigan has not commented on why it has denied Smith tenure. But to those of us familiar with Smith’s published work, the decision is inexplicable. Her book Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide is a master-work of both advocacy and feminist scholarship, and is used in women’s studies courses across the country. (It’s on the short list of books I’m considering rotating in to my women’s history syllabus).

At research universities, the proven ability to publish is a critical part of getting tenure. So many assistant professors struggle to get anything notable into print; Smith has already done so by producing a text that is not just interesting but fundamentally ground-breaking. She’s got another book coming up: Native Americans and the Christian Right, which is available for pre-order.

Of course, being able to publish is not the only prerequisite for tenure. Teaching counts for something, even at mammoth state institutions. But the statement released by faculty and students at Michigan (available here, in PDF format) makes it clear that Andrea Smith has immense talents as a teacher and mentor. Her students and colleagues are asking that letters in support of her tenure case (which has been appealed) be sent to

* Teresa Sullivan, Provost and Executive VP for Academic Affairs, LSA, tsull@umich.edu
* Lester Monts, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, LSA, lmonts@umich.edu
* Mary Sue Coleman, President, PresOff@umich.edu
* TenureForAndreaSmith@gmail.com

Anyone who reads the feminist blogosphere is aware that the most painful struggle of the past year, played out in so many places, is over the issue of the intersection of racism and sex. A number of prominent women of color have written, time and again, of feeling marginalized or ignored by white feminists. Whatever your feelings on the issue of race, gender, and intersectionality, it’s disastrous PR to have the Smith denial come at the hands of the Michigan Women’s Studies department. To a community of activist women of color, many of whom are already suspicious of the bona fides of white feminists, the Smith decision can only serve to increase a sense of cynicism about the prospects for real inclusion.

I’ve never met Andrea Smith or heard her lecture. I wouldn’t recognize her on the street. But I’ve read her work and been galvanized by it. I’ve chatted with people who have worked with her and heard her speak at conferences. Anecodotally, everyone I’ve heard from says she’s not merely a competent and inspiring teacher, she’s an extraordinary one. Her more than one-dozen published, peer-reviewed essays, her edited anthologies, and above all, her first masterwork “Conquest“, are building blocks of a tenure file that would put those of virtually any other junior scholar to shame. The Women’s Studies department at Michigan surely has its reasons, but until it makes those reasons clear, the shock and anger and alienation generated by their denial of tenure to Andrea Smith will continue to spread. And that’s bad news for all feminists.

And here’s hoping that if Michigan doesn’t come to its senses, someone else (are you listening, USC?) makes a nice offer. Soon.

Stuff White People Like

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 20, 2008
in Ethnicity and Links
. 13 Comments

I’m late to the party, but count me as a big fan of “Stuff White People Like.” Check it out for yourself; the entries on dogs, divorce, veganism, and marathons are spot on.

In a not-entirely dissimilar vein, here’s my old Happy WASP boy post.

White men teaching feminism to women of color: a post about class, privilege, and the need for humility, curiosity, and flexibility

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 28, 2007
in Class, Ethnicity, Feminist Pedagogy and Race
. 19 Comments

With the re-emergence of the Full Frontal Feminism discussion this past week, I’ve been called to reflect on the challenges and privileges that come with being a middle-class, heterosexual, Christian white man who teaches gender studies. (I say “gender studies” because, even though PCC still has no such formal department, I teach courses on Women’s History, Men and Masculinity, Lesbian and Gay History, and “body” history.)

I’ve written about the problematic nature of my role as a man teaching feminism before. Here’s part of what I wrote three years or so ago:

I do acknowledge that having a man teaching women’s history to a class filled with women (and always at least one or two other men) is problematic. I know just how important it is that young women have feminist role models who, in both their work and their private lives, can live out feminist principles. But higher education is not just about providing role models! It is about the principle that knowledge itself has no sex, and that all human experience is equally worthy of study by all human beings. When we limit the teaching of women’s studies to women, we send the message that this subject is not, somehow, worth the time and attention of male academics. This does not mean that a male teacher confers a legitimacy his female colleagues do not — though some students may perceive it that way. But it does mean that it is immensely counter-productive to “ghettoize” (I use that term carefully) an academic discipline by suggesting that only some folks can teach it.

… “being a woman” does not guarantee compassion or empathy with other women! Women of color in the feminist movement have spent years having their concerns marginalized by their white, upper-middle class sisters. What makes a wealthy white woman more qualified to teach her Latina and African-American sisters than, say, a Latino man — or for that matter, a white man? Feminists who insist that the oppression of sex transcends racial and economic discrimination do a colossal injustice to the experiences of both men and women of color. My point is simple: if we are going to take a teacher’s sex into account, we must also take his or her race into account — and that sets up a slippery slope towards the extreme Balkanization of academic disciplines.

Of course, most of my critics in the “feminist/womanists of color” blogosphere haven’t said “Hugo can’t teach women’s studies merely because he’s a middle-class white Christian male.” Too suggest otherwise is to erect a straw-woman to knock down. What is clear is that my pedagogical decisions (like assigning Full Frontal Feminism in the way in which I did, and managing the discussion the way I did), combined with my maleness and my whiteness, raises a number of questions about teaching, feminism, sex, race, and power.

I don’t know what it’s “like” to be a woman. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up poor, or to grow up non-white, or to grow up in a religious minority. Sometimes, even in recent days, I’ve made the classic white male liberal mistake of trying to establish my progressive bona fides by the classes I took taught by radical women of color, or by talking about my marriage to a mixed-race woman. That’s a cheap and ineffective strategy, and it tends to infuriate the very people I’m trying to convince. I can recite the books I’ve read, I can name-drop until the cows come home, and it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve got a tremendous amount of white privilege.

I’m forty, older than most of the folks who’ve been involved in this debate. I’ve been teaching gender studies here at PCC since 1995, my third year at the college. And even after all this time, I know I still frequently “don’t get it”. Unlearning the acculturation to privilege is painful, it is hard, and the hardest and most painful thing about it is it never, ever ends. Every time I start to “believe my own press”, and begin to imagine that I have become a particularly enlightened being, a person who has transcended his class, his culture, and his sex, I am brought rudely back to earthly reality. I have a penis and a Y chromosome, I am melanin-deficient, and my speech and my bearing reflects a carefully-bred confidence that comes from privilege. Whether or not I think my sex or my race or my class matter, my students (almost none of whom share that particularly constellation of privileges) are likely to see me as a very familiar sort of figure: the older white man who knows a lot (or thinks he does) and is eager to enlighten them.

My women’s studies classes average 45-50 students now (before 2004, I taught in a smaller classroom and had only 30-35). I need to cover women’s history in America from the pre-Columbian era to five minutes ago, and I need to cover contemporary women’s issues — especially feminism — at the same time. I have 75 minutes twice a week in which to pull this off; I have no teaching assistants. The room is too crowded to have us sit in a circle, and the size of the class means interactivity will be severely limited. Lecturing, therefore, is going to be the primary pedagogical tool; that’s of necessity as much as of inclination. The students do write journals, they do initiate discussions from time to time, but most of the time, it’s me talking to them. I make my lectures as captivating as possible, and when I’m “on”, I’m a pretty damn good orator. Which is fine, except that having a middle-class white man strut and fret in front of a classroom that is made up primarily of first-generation female students of color doesn’t do much to undermine the patriarchy. The more I exhort, the more I inspire, the more I risk reinforcing something very traditional.

I can’t do anything about the size of the class. (Indeed, because it is a popular class, I was asked to consider moving into a larger lecture room that accomodates 150. I turned down the offer and asked for two smaller sections instead, and was told that wasn’t feasible.) And I can’t do anything about my maleness, my whiteness, or the fact that I grew up in Carmel, went to prep school (though I was kicked out!) and live a moderately comfortable life. But there’s still a lot I can do, even with the limitations of a large class size and my own privilege. And the chief thing I need to continue to do, and to get better at doing, is to remain teachable.

Actually, that’s not quite enough. As I was reminded this week, “remaining teachable” is essentially passive. It asks those who want me to change to do the work of teaching me. Perhaps it would be better to say that I need to work on three things in particular: humility, curiosity, flexibility. The arguments over Full Frontal Feminism haven’t changed my mind about the usefulness of the book as a highly accessible primer. But the arguments have reminded me to be a better listener to criticism, more humble about my role in facilitating learning, and to be more actively curious in seeking out alternative views to provide to my students. I need to better, too, about being flexible. Like most ageing academics, I get attached to the “way things have always been done”, and tend to be loth to update my syllabi.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I teach gender studies courses because I want to raise up young feminists. I want to inspire men and women alike to become informed agents of personal and collective transformation. I want them to reflect upon the past — and upon their own lives. I want the result of that reflection to be a strong sense of responsibility to themselves and to others. I want them to be committed to justice for the vulnerable and equality for all — but I also want them to begin to liberate themselves from self-doubt and self-loathing. I believe that personal happiness and public virtue are, in the end, deeply compatible (as a Christian who grew up listening to my mother’s lectures on Aristotle, I could hardly believe otherwise!) And in the end, I want my students to be happy, free, kind, independent, and good. That has been my goal for a very long time.

My male body, my family background, and my white skin have opened many doors for me. I cannot close those doors retroactively. I’m not ashamed of my masculinity, my heterosexuality, or my class. (See the OKOP post.) But I’m not inordinately proud of these things either. Privilege is not the consequence of virtue. It’s simply a fact, and it’s one of which I have to remain perpetually cognizant. Sometimes, privilege will blind me, and I will need help to see the right path. But in the end, privilege is both an advantage and an obstacle to good feminist teaching. And as long as I am aware that it is a double-edged sword, and as long as I remain committed with evangelistic zeal to my students’ growth, I’ll do a good job.

That is, if I work harder at humility, curiosity, and flexibility.

The “Full Frontal Feminism” controversy again, and a call for suggestions

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 26, 2007
in Blogging, Books, Ethnicity and Feminism
. 61 Comments

I’m grateful to the Reproductive Health Reality Check blog for reposting this morning my little piece on early motherhood and “false intimations of tragedy.”

And while I was away for the holiday, Jessica Valenti put up a short link at Feministing to my post from several weeks ago, one in which I reported on my students’ enthusiastic responses to her Full Frontal Feminism.

Many of the prominent “women of color” bloggers in the feminist blogosphere clearly don’t read my blog regularly. They do read Feministing, however, and starting on Thanksgiving a number of folks began to weigh in. Old criticisms of Jessica’s book reappeared, as well as strong words about my pedagogy. See here, here, here, here, and here.

I suppose another post is due sometime soon on what it means for a middle-aged, middle-class white man to teach women’s studies to mostly female, mostly non-white, mostly working-class students. I’ve dealt with that topic in previous posts, but I’m happy to bring it up again, and I will do so this week or next.

I did want to respond to one particular challenge that appeared in this comment. Michelle writes:

IMO You need to directly connect your students to the discussions that have gone on about this on the web.

IMO you need to do this by actively, directly and respectfully collaborating with the actual people who have offered these critiques. You know who they are, yes?

So. Ask them: What specifically would they like your students to read and in what format? Ask them and then assign it. What questions would they like your students to discuss based on this situation? Ask them and have those discussions in your classroom (with respect, not to discredit them and you know what I mean). What kind of follow-up, if any, do they want to see? Ask them and do it.

It is indeed too late for me to revisit FFF this semester (I have only four class meetings left, and every second of those is packed). But I’m going to accept Michelle’s challenge for the spring semester, beginning in February, when I will once again be assigning Full Frontal Feminism to my classes. In the spring, I will teach the book again. I will also assign a packet of criticisms of the book — indeed, I will do what I have been taught to do since I was an undergraduate, which is to “teach the controversy.” Assuming that the critics of FFF leave up their posts, I will provide links to those pieces, and actively encourage my students to participate in the broad discussion that this book created. That discussion will take place in the classroom, but also — I hope — online.

A few of my students read my blog, most don’t. Perhaps I erred in not informing my students about the controversy surrounding Full Frontal Feminism. Though I am absolutely convinced that my students’ generally enthusiastic responses to Jessica’s book were both genuine and uncoerced, I think it makes sense to expose them to other voices. I’m going to continue to assign and recommend FFF, but I’m very interested in “teaching the controversy” — which means collaborating with vital and interested figures in the blogosphere (Jessica herself, BlackAmazon, Brownfemipower, and so on).

My main syllabus for the spring is already set, folks, so please don’t ask me to change my assigned readings. But suggestions on how to structure a rich, civil, and productive exchange with my students about race, sex, feminism and the controversy that this one particular book has generated would be very, very welcome. You can email me at dochugoboy(at)hotmail.com, or put comments below here.

Denial and recognition: some long thoughts on the Armenian genocide resolution

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 18, 2007
in Ethnicity, Politics and Teaching
. 10 Comments

I have this post about “Nice Guys” (a subject about which many in the feminist blogosphere have written over the years) percolating in my head, but it will have to wait for tomorrow or Monday.

As most know, the House was scheduled to vote soon on a resolution concering the Armenian Genocide. It now appears that vote may be put off.

Mr. Bush, who as a candidate in 2000 criticized what he called a “genocidal campaign” against the Armenians, said lawmakers had better things to do than be caught up in the past, pursuing legislation that has unsettled an important ally.

“With all these pressing responsibilities, one thing Congress should not be doing is sorting out the historical record of the Ottoman Empire,” Mr. Bush said. “Congress has more important work to do than antagonizing a democratic ally in the Muslim world, especially one that is providing vital support for our military every day.”

Backers of the resolution said they would push ahead despite mounting opposition and try to rally support for the declaration, which they said was essential to deter future genocide and protect America’s credibility in speaking out against brutality in places like Darfur and Myanmar.

I teach and live in the heart of one of the largest communities in the global Armenian diaspora: hundreds of thousands of Armenian-Americans live in the Glendale-Pasadena region. My congressman, Adam Schiff (no relation to the fictional Law & Order DA) has been one of the chief proponents of a genocide resolution. Here at Pasadena City College, we have a huge number of students of Armenian descent; I have heard one administrator, speaking off the record, suggest that nearly 65% of “white” students on this campus are Armenian. (My students, who tend to assume that “white = Northwestern European” rather than literally “Caucasian”, generally don’t label Armenians as white. The college does.)

Since 1993, I’ve taught Modern European history here. Every semester, I cover World War One in considerable detail. But when I first started teaching at PCC, my focus was entirely on the causes of the war — and on the catastrophe that was the Western Front. I talked about the Somme and Verdun, and skipped over the eastern campaigns very quickly. World War One was not my primary field (my training was as a medievalist), and my inclination was to focus on the better-known Western story. My second semester at PCC, a very bright and vivacious young Armenian-American woman named Lori came to my office and challenged me: “Why aren’t you teaching the Armenian genocide when you teach World War One?” Lori was in her second semester with me, and had been in the first women’s studies class I ever taught, and had no trouble confronting me about what she regarded as a serious oversight in my syllabus. Continue reading ‘Denial and recognition: some long thoughts on the Armenian genocide resolution’