Archive for the 'Ethnicity' Category

A very long post about Los Angeles, an Eagles song, nationalism, history, self-reinvention and the “club versus country” debate

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 30, 2007
in Class, Ethnicity, Favorite posts 2007, Memories, People, Politics, Race, Sports and Traveling
. 7 Comments

A week ago Sunday, my buddy Leo and I ran up the El Prieto trail and the Brown Mountain fire road. Though we’re usually part of a larger group, we were alone that day. Leo was recovering from a marathon, and I was feeling well-rested, so I was actually able to keep up with him for a change. (In his late 50s, Leo still regularly runs marathons just above the three hour mark and has finished his share of 50 and 100-mile races).

We talked about books, history, ideas. When I run with some friends, we talk about love and marriage and family; when I run with others, I argue politics or theology. A few friends, like Leo, are interested in all of these topics and more. In an early morning chill, we began by reflecting together on the burden of the past.

Leo was born just after the Second World War into a Polish refugee family. He was raised in West Germany. Much like my late father, a dozen years his senior, Leo has that sense that many war refugees have — a sense of never quite belonging, a sense that perhaps at any moment, he might have to pack his bags and leave again. My father, born in Vienna, raised in rural Berkshire, spent nearly fifty years of his life in California without ever truly feeling at home here. He didn’t feel fully at home in Austria or England either. Leo and my Dad knew each other, and were fond of each other. When I got married a year and a half ago, they spoke German together at our wedding.

But we didn’t just talk about my Dad or about Leo’s similar sense of not quite belonging. We talked about the San Gabriel Mountains we both love so much. As we neared the Brown Mountain summit, I said to Leo “Isn’t it interesting to think we are the only members of our family ever to be here? None of our ancestors ever stood where we are standing right now.”

“Yes”, Leo replied, “it’s liberating.”

And I’ve been thinking about that for nine days now. I’m a historian by trade, of course; I have devoted my scholarly and professional life to the study of the past. I’m a dual national, holding a UK passport, and am a regular visitor to the land that gave my father’s family shelter and the land my brother calls home. I love to visit what some folks call “old places”, filled with a rich sense of history. When I tramp through the hills of Devon, or run through the streets of Vienna, I feel as if I am surrounded by ghosts. Not evil spirits, mind — just an extraordinary cloud of witnesses of all who have lived and died in these places. And when I am in those places where my ancestors lived, I feel the weight of their fears and their hopes and their expectations all around me. It’s not always unpleasant, but it’s always there.

Even when I go home to Northern California, I feel surrounded by a sense of family history. On my mother’s side, my family came to the Bay Area for the Gold Rush more than a century and a half ago. We’ve had a country place in the hills northeast of San Jose since Rutherford Hayes was president; by the standards of this state, that’s some ancient history. My maternal great-grandfathers both went to Berkeley, and when I was a student at Cal nine decades later, I felt them all around me. Now, don’t get me wrong, sometimes it is a wonderful feeling to feel so connected to a place. But at other times, it is exhausting in ways I find difficult to describe.

What makes me a Los Angeleno in my mindset is my fascination with self-reinvention. I love that I am surrounded by hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, who call somewhere else their truest home — but have nonetheless come here, to this basin with its beaches and valleys and hills — in order to start something new. They’ve come here to escape the burdens and obligations of the past, the sort that linger in the old places even after the old people have gone. They’ve come here to escape the “things are the way they are” mindset. They’ve come here to replace the fatalism and superstition of the old places with a relentless optimism about their own potential and the possibility of global transformation. They’ve come here to get away from the ghosts of Holocausts and World Wars and rigid class distinctions. They’ve come here to run on mountain trails upon which their ancestors never set foot.

(I’m listening to the Eagles “The Last Resort” right now on Itunes. Appropriate.)

As I’ve said, I love to visit the old places. My doctorate is in medieval history, for heaven’s sake; I spent many happy hours doing research in the shadow of my favorite building in the western world, Durham Cathedral. But it’s not just the damp and gloom of old Europe that makes me glad I live in this sprawling, metastasizing megalopolis. It’s the sense that I always get in the old places that humans and animals are limited and constrained by the story of the past. (As the Eagles sing in the song to which I’m listening: “where the Old World shadows hang heavy in the air.”) Their sense of themselves is related not only to place, but to the past story of the place. And just below the surface, there often bubbles a raw xenophobic nationalism that I find fascinating but repugnant.

Leo and I talked a lot about nationalism and place and history. We both love soccer, and we both are World Cup fans who go pretty nuts every four years. But especially after this last World Cup, I’ve begun to have some misgivings about “country” based sporting events. In professional football of the world kind, one great conflict that always comes up is the “club” versus “country” debate. When English players are playing for Premiership teams and training for a major international event, it’s hardly feasible for them to be 100% present for both sets of obligations. (Think of how angry folks in Newcastle are over the injury that an overworked and exhausted Michael Owen sustained last summer while playing for England in Germany.) The traditional wisdom is that athletes should put country over club, national pride over transitory professional obligations. I disagree completely.

I watched the England-Portugal World Cup quarterfinal match last summer in a state of grief and rage. My father, whose family had been rescued from Hitler by English generosity, had died days earlier. And England played a piss-poor match that they deserved to lose. But I, a dual national in SoCal, found myself working myself up into a nationalistic frenzy while watching the game. Under my breath, I said several embarrassing things about the entire Portuguese nation; my rage at a certain Cristian Ronaldo turned quickly into a temporary fury at all things Lusitanian. I calmed down within minutes, but from reading the BBC’s message boards after the game, I know that others were not so restrained. The racist bile that flowed last summer was appalling.

I’ve decided I prefer “club” soccer now. Though I am no fan of Manchester United, I love that Wayne Rooney and his nemesis, Ronaldo, play together. I love seeing a Premiership side take the pitch with eleven players with nearly as many passports. In the mercenary act of playing for pay rather than for national pride, these men do more to advance the cause of peace and understanding than they do when they wear their country’s jerseys on a global stage. Even when nation-based matches are played with mutual respect between the players, the fans themselves are often whipped into emotional frenzies in which ancient bigotries suddenly and shockingly reemerge.

I have my allegiances in sports. I “hate” the Dallas Cowboys. I “hate” Arsenal (of the London clubs, I support Spurs). But those aren’t ethnic hatreds. To put it bluntly, there’s a world of difference between cursing “those f-ing Gunners” after another loss in the North London derby, and cursing “those f-ing wogs” after England loses to a nation whose players (for the most part) have much darker skin than those who wear three Lions on their chests. Club rivalries have notoriously led to violence, but not to wars. In a club rivalry, you shout insults at another fan because of what he wears; in national rivalries, you shout insults because of who he is. There’s no question that the latter is more dangerous. (Now, OKOP don’t shout insults. Our disappointment is subdued, masked, drowned behind thin smiles and private tears. NOKOP rage is public, ours is sublimated.)

(Parenthetical aside: One of the things I love about Los Angeles: we don’t have an NFL team. Here’s an American football fan hoping we never get one! How delicious to live in a city where everyone’s allegiances are elsewhere! I get a smug satisfaction from living in a place that doesn’t need a team to call its own, but can rely on quirky whims to select which club to root for. My youth group kids are holding a Super Bowl party; some will root for the Colts and others for the Bears, but their allegiances are based on uniform colors or affection for a particular player rather than a loyalty to place. I like that.)

But even as I write this this morning, I know better than to claim that I live beyond history. My fascination with “personal growth” and transformation, my longing for new beginnings, my personal narrative of starting over — this is part of my own family’s legacy. What prosperity and success we have had comes from good luck (we got here first and stole more), but also from something that may be coded into our DNA: a longing to go further and further west. Pioneers and survivors are in my blood; I am descended from those who were willing to leave rather than stay. (This brings to mind a snippet from a Caedmon’s Call song: “I come from a long line of leavers.”) I am descended from those whose fascination with the new trumped their loyalty to the old. It would be hubris to suggest that I am the first in a long line to want to start over somewhere new, to liberate myself from old rules and old obligations and old animosities.

Leo and I had a good run that Sunday. And yes, we talked about all of this and more.

“Narratives of suffering overcome”: admissions essays and a lamentable trend

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 27, 2006
in Ethnicity, Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 36 Comments

It’s a frantic week around these parts. The deadline for applications to all University of California campuses is November 30, and I have a great many students who are desperately finishing up their personal essays. UC doesn’t ask for letters of recommendation or examples of scholarly papers; the only thing they want — besides grades and test scores — are a series of personal essays.

It’s been a decade since California did away with affirmative action by passing Proposition 209. Race can no longer be considered as a factor in admissions to public universities, a change that seems to have led to declining black and Latino enrollment at the most prestigious schools (Berkeley and UCLA). What the end of affirmative action has meant, of course, is a huge rise in the significance of the personal essay. While a student’s ethnicity is no longer automatically factored into an admissions decision, a student is free to mention their racial background in their essay. And judging from the large number of essays I see (I am often asked to help craft admissions essays), an exceptional number of my students do just that. The hope, apparently, is to make a legal, oblique appeal to “diversity.”

This is not a post about the wisdom or merits of affirmative action. But count me among those who has always considered class to be as important as race; I’m a fourth-generation Cal grad from an educated, prosperous family. I’m also white. Obviously, I didn’t need or deserve any affirmative action from the state; my culture and my class had already bequeathed to me more than I deserved. But I went to school with a kid whose parents were Spanish — pure Castillian — and wealthy as could be. He shamelessly (and accurately) checked the “Hispanic” box back in the affirmative action days; I also went to school with poor whites from the Central Valley. Descendants of “Okies” and “Arkies”, they shared my skin color but not much else. Race is often linked to class, but not inextricably.

In any event, I digress. My point is that far too many of my students insist on writing essays that I can only describe as “narratives of suffering.” About half of all the essays I see are blatant appeals for sympathy, usually based on a constellation of socio-economic, racial, and historical factors. Some of these essays are poorly written, but many are actually quite good. They all follow the same game plan: tell the reader about all the obstacles you’ve overcome. If your parents are immigrants, mention it. If one of your parents drinks, or is in prison, don’t hide it — wallow in it! If you moved around a lot, if you grew up surrounded by drugs or violence –share, share, share! It’s the modern version of the apocryphal story about “walking fourteen miles every day to school, in the snow, uphill both ways.” It’s shameless, it’s vulgar, it’s repetitive, it’s tiresome,and it seems to work.

I’ve been in the teaching game long enough to notice that these “narratives of suffering endured and transcended” have gotten much more common in recent years. I did notice a sharp uptick after the end of affirmative action in 1996, but it would be wrong to suggest that only ethnic minority students employ this technique today. Even the relatively small number of my students who come from what might be thought of as “privileged” backgrounds (white, middle-class families where college education is a multi-generational norm) have fallen prey to the seductions of competing in the “suffering Olympics.” If one’s family wasn’t disadvantaged economically, perhaps an inspiring tale of battling anorexia will suffice. (Indeed, the “let me tell you all about how I overcame my eating disorder strategy” is one I’ve now seen three times in the last few years. It suggests a trend.)

I can’t remember much about what I wrote in my college essays when I was a high school senior twenty-two years ago. (I applied to just two schools: Cal and Vassar.) I think I wrote mostly about my love of history. They weren’t very interesting essays, but I remember being told that the point was to convince an admissions committee that I could write well and that I had a certain amount of intellectual ambition. And though I was hardly underprivileged, I was a chubby, clumsy, unpopular teen who grew up as a child of divorce. By the time I was a senior in high school, my problems with alcohol and depression were already emerging. I am sure that had I wanted to, I could have crafted a serviceable sob story, demonstrating both my facility with the English language and my capacity to transcend my own special and important misfortunes.

So, my beloved students, I’ll be happy to read your essays before you pop them in the mail this Thursday. I want you to do well, and I hope you get in to the school of your choice. Write whatever you (and your counselor, who probably knows the admissions committees better than I) think best. But if you want my two cents, talk about your accomplishments, your goals, and your dreams outside of the context of your own narrative of disadvantage and oppression. I’m all for sharing stories, mind you! But when appealing for admission to a selective university, consider that constructing a narrative that is obviously designed to elicit sympathy is, well, pretty poor show.

Race, class, Halloween, and the old Hyundais on Prospect Avenue

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 1, 2006
in Ethnicity, Feminism, Race and Youth
. 14 Comments

I’m gonna push a button or two with this one:

Tuesday afternoons, I meet with Stephanie,  my Pilates trainer, at 5:30PM.  After she and I finish up, I usually do a short run around the Rose Bowl and through some of the streets that constitute the "rim of the bowl" in the Arroyo Seco.  Last night, of course, was Halloween, and so I found myself running through the streets negotiating my way through hordes of little trick-or-treaters.

The area immediately south and east of the bowl is a wealthy one; some of the most beautiful and historic Craftsman houses lie on Prospect and Grand Avenues.  Normally at 7:45 on a Tuesday night, the streets are quiet.  But last night, there were cars honking and children squealing and flashlights flashing.   Many of the houses on these most expensive of streets were decked out in the most complex and spectacular Halloween finery — ghosts hung from trees, stereos blasted spooky organ music, huge carved pumpkins dotted the manicured lawns and walkways.

The cars gave it all away.  The trick-or-treaters on Prospect Avenue were driven in by their parents.   Though ethnicity was difficult to discern in the dark while doing an up-tempo workout, the predominant voices I heard were all in Spanish. A street normally known for its Benzes and its Land Rovers was now dotted with aging Hyundais and Toyota pickup trucks.  The disparity between the homeowners who were opening their houses to little devils and princesses and the trick-or-treaters themselves was obvious and remarkable.

It’s an oft-discussed phenomenon in Los Angeles, and perhaps elsewhere: poorer folks in "rougher" neighborhoods would rather drive their kids several miles in order to take them trick-or-treating in more affluent, presumably safer residential areas.  Fear of crime is obviously one factor; prosperity another.  Buying loads of candy isn’t cheap; decorating a house really well takes more time, money, and energy than many working-class families may have.  The promise of safer streets and fuller bags stuffed with bite-sized Snickers bars is evidently irresistible. It certainly was last night as I ran along streets where the average recent sales price tops the $2 million mark.

Perhaps some strange, unspoken part of the social contract is at work here.  Pasadena is a race and class-stratified city, with great prosperity and genuine poverty within a stone’s throw of each other.  To put it bluntly, if on any other night huge numbers of people of color descended on the whitest and wealthiest of neighborhoods, banging on doors and making demands, the police department would be out in full riot gear before you could say "boo!" But on October 31, it’s understood that those who have much have a special obligation, an obligation not only to hand out candy but to go to great lengths to create remarkably elaborate spooky spectacles to entice and awe the little ones.  And they have one other obligation: the obligation to feign fear from the little monsters who come knocking, while suspending their very real fear of the dark-skinned, flashlight-toting parents who lurk at the gate.

On this one night, at least, no one asks the hulking teen from West Altadena, clad in his long white t-shirt, tattered blue hoodie, and baggy shorts that hang to the knees, what he’s doing on Prospect Avenue after dark.  It’s obvious what he’s there for: he’s got his little sister (Tinkerbell?) and even littler brother (an enchanting pirate?) by the hand as they toddle down millionaire’s row, each in full expectation of sugary welcome rather than bitter suspicion.

It was a short run last night through streets I know well.  But the memory of what I saw and heard will linger with me.

Time is money, money is time: reflections on class, fun, and volunteering

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 30, 2006
in Ethnicity and Feminism
. 3 Comments

Typepad is, once again, in full-on "wonky" mode.  It is very annoying.

I read this post at Lauren’s and the post here that inspired it.  The question revolves around whether "fun" is largely subject to class and patriarchal culture — read Lauren’s post to understand a particularly powerful "yes" response.

It would be absurd to say that the blogosphere is a classless environment.  On the one hand, it’s hard to tell from reading a particular blog what the owner’s financial circumstances are.   The look and design of a blog may reveal more about the creative skills and technical expertise of the individual blogger than of his or her finances.  But when the subject turns, as it did at Lauren and Twisty’s, to "fun" and "recreation", then yes, class issues become evident.

Reading Lauren’s post, I was reminded of something my mother always said — and still says — to me:

"I don’t know if time is money, but I do know that money is time."

What mama means by that is this: the goal of time may not be to make money, but perhaps the greatest gift of having money is time.  Time to think, time to take leisurely walks, time to train for marathons, time to exercise, time to read novels, time to travel, time to write books and create chinchilla charities and volunteer.  When I was in college, I was expected to work during my summer vacations (and I had many jobs, including working a 2:00AM-10:00AM shift for the Carmel Dept. of Public Works).  But during the school year, I wasn’t expected to have a job.  Some of the free time that gave me I wasted; some of it I spent taking long walks and reading, reading, reading.  I had time to reflect, time to absorb, time to simply "be."  It was a magnificent gift my family was able to give me.   Money and class were reflected not in my clothes or my wrist watch but in the hours I was able to spend in coffee shops or lying under trees.  Money made time, and my life would not have been the same otherwise.

Now that I am older, I feel an obligation to be a "good steward" of both time and money.   While volunteering is not a luxury of the prosperous, the more resources one has, the more time one can give to one’s community.  For example, my wife and I have housecleaners handle many tasks around the home; among the things we do with the "time saved" is volunteer with elementary age children in South L.A. two days a week (that’s her gig) and work with a high school youth group (my primary volunteer responsibility.)    And then there’s the chinchilla charity and other less regular volunteer opportunities.

The old "to whom much is given, of whom much is expected" adage is loaded with class implications.  It is easy to make fun of the traditionally female "professional volunteers" of an earlier era.   Groups like the Junior League and others raised money for hospitals and for the homeless, visited the sick, tutored in under-performing schools.  Yes, they sometimes did so in pearls and sweater sets.  Yes, they often went lunching or shopping when they weren’t volunteering.  But for the most part, they used their time and money to make the world a fundamentally better place — and in cities and towns all across this country, the benefits of their "community spirit" survive.  Many of the older women I knew growing up lived this life: not "earning" a living, but running the non-profit boards, manning the soup lines, organizing the benefits.  They used the time that their money gave them, and they used it wisely.

Until the revolution comes, and while Jesus continues to tarry, those who have had the good fortune to benefit from the system have a moral obligation to share.  Tithing to charity is part of sharing (and going above the 10% tithe has been a successfully met goal for us in ‘06); tithing "time and talent" is also, I am convinced, an ethical responsibility.

And working to create a society where more people have the luxury of time to create and invent and rest is absolutely vital.

“Your wife is quarter nigerian? Nice.”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 31, 2006
in Colombia, Ethnicity, Family, Marriage and Race
. 14 Comments

Four posts in one day today…

On August 22, I put up some links, including one to this excellent post on interracial relationships and children at Alas, A Blog.  I wrote, almost as an aside:

Someone recently asked me what my wife and I would tell our children (when, deo volente, we have ‘em) about their ethnic heritage.  The long answer: Indigenous Colombian/Jewish/Nigerian/English/Croatian/German/Austrian/Scotch-Irish/Czech/Welsh/Spanish. Short answer: a beloved child of God and two adoring parents. 

It’s funny: my wife is only one-quarter African (what would, in a racist era, have been called a "quadroon"), but that’s the one-quarter that seems most fascinating to most folks.

As if to prove my latter point, Everchange wrote a comment this morning:

your wife is quarter nigerian? nice.

Now, as it turns out, Everchange is a Nigerian blogger, which helps me put the comment in context.  I admit, that before I clicked on the comment to find out who this person was, I was deeply annoyed.

My wife is one-quarter African.  I don’t post pictures of her as I wish to protect her privacy.  To most people, she appears to be of mixed race.  Folks often ask her (or me) about her ethnic heritage.  When I give a full answer, it’s amazing how often folks fixate on the African quarter.   I sometimes hear:

Wow, she doesn’t look black. 

or, alternatively:

Yeah, I can kind of see it in her.

Both are verbatim quotes from our acquaintances.  The last one was particularly infuriating. Is blackness an "it" to be seen?  My wife’s father was born in Montana into a family of Czech-Croatian ancestry (think Willa Cather novels), but hardly anyone focuses on that aspect of her heritage.  That strikes folks as dull by comparison!  Her mother’s mother is mestizo Colombian, which also seems less intriguing than her mother’s father’s Nigerian background.

Race and ethnicity is not my field of expertise.  But I’ve been amazed, over the year of our marriage and our several years of dating, how my wife’s perceived "blackness" and her African heritage are regularly singled out by my family and friends for unique scrutiny.  It’s certainly reminded me of why using the term "exotic" for human beings ought to be a misdemeanor! 

Even in multi-cultural greater Los Angeles, black-white marriages and romantic relationships seem to attract significantly more attention and fascination than Asian-white or Latino-white or Latino-Asian couplings.  It’s not surprising, of course, given that black-white relationships have a unique and special history, a history often charged with sexual stereotypes and horrific abuse.  But it’s still quite eye-opening to encounter it as part of one’s own life.

Children can look like both their biological parents, neither of their parents, or one of their parents.  Or they can closely resemble a grand- or great-grandparent.  It is with some curiosity — and trepidation — that I muse over how our future children’s visual appearance and skin color will affect how they are perceived in the wider world.

“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, OKOP/NOKOP 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.

Some thoughts on crisis pregnancy centers and telling the truth

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 1, 2006
in Abortion, Body, Christianity, Ethnicity, Faith and Feminism
. 35 Comments

It’s May Day, the start of a new week and a new month.  I’m hoping it will also usher in the return of  regular blogging from Hugo. 

Today is, of course, the national "Day Without an Immigrant".  It’s too early to tell whether large numbers of students here at PCC (the student body is made up largely of immigrants and their children) will participate by boycotting classes.  Given that I missed three out of four of my teaching days last week, and that I am far behind in the syllabus, I have no intention of cancelling class or of devoting lecture time to the subject. I’ll let readers know if my attendance is affected.

Amanda at Pandagon has an article on crisis pregnancy centers published at Alternet: Exposing Anti-Choice Abortion Clinics.  She sent me a link to it, and I’d like to take this opportunity to break my long-imposed hiatus from discussing abortion issues on this blog.

I’ve been struggling for years with my own feelings about abortion.  More than on any other issue, my faith and my feminism, my heart and my mind lead me to contradictory conclusions.  When I talk about it, I end up waffling and equivocating.  Unlike some Catholic Democratic senators, I’m not frantically trying to please two diametrically opposed groups; I know damn well my agonizing ends up annoying and, ultimately, alienating both pro-life and pro-choice activists.   I’d be far better off pretending that my views were more solidly on one side rather than another, and thus at least assuring myself of some allies!

I’m not yet ready to weigh in on the larger issue of whether or not abortion should be legal.  But I can write a bit about how troubled I have always been by the topic that Amanda addresses today: the deceptive tactics used by so many "crisis pregnancy centers." Here’s the website for Austin Life Care:

LifeCare Pregnancy Services is a non-profit pregnancy center committed to providing women and men with accurate, up-to-date information in order to make informed decisions about pregnancy, sexual health, and relationships.

Unlike Amanda, I’m very sympathetic to the goals of these crisis pregnancy centers.  Frankly, I’d like to see a great many more young women keep their babies and put them up for adoption, or commit to raising them themselves.  It’s why I’ve always supported greater private and public financial support for programs and institutions which make it more socially acceptable and economically viable for the young and the unintentionally pregnant to commit to raising their children.  Of course, I break completely with my friends in the pro-life camp over the issue of stigmatizing unwed motherhood!  I’ve always thought that ostracizing unwed mothers while opposing abortion was a disastrous contradiction; I know very well how shame is often a strong impetus to choose to terminate a pregnancy "before others find out."

While abortion remains legal and accessible, I feel strongly about supporting those organizations that offer alternatives to women who are interested in carrying a child to term and either arranging for an adoption or keeping their baby themselves.  There is surely a place in the market for groups that seek to reduce demand for abortion by making these alternatives more financially viable.  But I feel strongly that those of us who offer alternatives to abortion must be absolutely frank with our potential clients and their unborn children.  Pretending to offer abortion referrals, for example, is a heinous and indefensible abuse of the trust of women at a particularly vulnerable time in their lives.  I have never been able to support the work of those crisis centers that do not offer full and complete disclosure of their goals and agenda up front.

I know that many of my pro-life friends believe that when it comes to preventing abortion, ends are justified by means.  If the only way to get a baby saved is to pass off your clinic as one that actually offers abortion, they argue, it’s worth doing.  But as Christians (and almost everyone in the crisis pregnancy movement is Christian), we must remember that to follow Jesus is to match our language and our lives.  The means we use to accomplish any goal must be radically congruent with the ends we seek.  If we want to reach women with the truth that there are alternatives to abortion, we must be worthy of their trust.  How can a young, pregnant girl considering abortion trust an agency that misled her to get her in the door in the first place?  If we are going to commit — as we should — to helping young women discover options that honor life, we must do so candidly and openly.

If I were running a crisis pregnancy center, I’d use a slogan like this:

Confused about abortion?  Looking for alternatives? Crisis Pregnancy Center of Hicksville is here for you.  We are committed to you and to  your unborn baby.  Let us help you to find a way to make a choice that can give both you and your child the opportunity for a lifetime of happiness and possibility.

That, I think, would be honest and straightforward.  My pro-choice friends might still not like the insistence that every fetus is a human person worthy of life, but they would surely have far greater respect for us if we in the consistent-life camp would insist on truth in advertising in everything we do.

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.

“Lana lacks humility”: a note on sexism and letters of rec

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 22, 2006
in Ethnicity, Feminism, Modesty and Teaching
. 34 Comments

Boxing lessons continue to go well.  We started work on the upper cut today; doing it with the left is difficult — I can’t quite master the hip movement that accompanies it yet. My body feels completely recovered from the marathon — I’m lucky that I usually can get back to my normal exercise routine in 48-72 hours after a long race.  Some folks have told me that’s a sign of good conditioning, while others grumble that it means I didn’t push myself hard enough.  I worry, at times, that it’s the latter.  But I was in a suitable amount of anguish in the latter stages of Sunday’s LA Marathon, and though I was slow, I did make a reasonable effort.

Anyhow, a student named "Lana" came to see me yesterday.  Lana took a couple of my classes last year, and distinguished herself as a truly outstanding student.  Lana immigrated to this country from Russia just a few years ago in her early teens, but her mastery of English has become nearly flawless and her accent is only slight.  She’s applying for transfer to a couple of very fine colleges, and asked me to write a letter of recommendation.  I wrote a glowing and enthusiastic one.

Lana came to seem me yesterday about another professor’s letter of rec.  One of my colleagues in another department wrote a letter praising Lana’s abilities, but after a brief recitation of her accomplishments and intelligence, added, "Unfortunately, Lana lacks humility."  He gave Lana a copy of the letter — after having mailed the originals off to the schools to which she is applying.

Lana was understandably upset, and wanted to talk about several things.  Was it appropriate, she wondered, for this professor to put this in his letter?  Should she write him a note about it?  And perhaps equally important, did I think that what he said was true?

By the time Lana was done telling me the story, I was quite cross with my colleague.  First of all, the issue of "humility" itself, which seemed charged with sexism and ethnic bias.  Lana is about 20.  She’s an immigrant from a family that came here with virtually nothing not so many years ago.  She’s also a young woman, and she’s ambitious and eager to succeed.  She’s not a grade-grubber; she earned her As easily.  But she’s got big dreams and she’s not shy about sharing them when prompted to do so.  She will raise her hand to ask questions, will challenge a professor with whom she disagrees (she took me on more than once!)

My colleague, like myself, is a middle-aged white native-born Christian male with tenure.  His views on politics are notoriously conservative, as are, apparently, his views on young women and their deportment.  What he calls "lack of humility" is code for what I’m fairly confident he sees as Lana’s unfeminine ambition, her willingness to speak up for herself, her eagerness for a better and more prosperous life for herself and her family.  (She’s also Russian, and without getting into ethnic stereotypes, I can say — having had a whole mess of wonderful students from that society — that theirs is definitely not a culture in which modesty and quiet self-deprecation are celebrated virtues for either sex!)  I cannot imagine that my colleague would have written the same comment about a male student.  I suspect, though I admit I have no evidence for this, that if he writing about "Dmitri" instead of "Lana", he might praise him as "driven and outspoken and ambitious".

So I told Lana I didn’t think she "lacked humility" in any meaningful or important sense. I also told her that I felt it was a whoppingly inappropriate comment to put in an academic letter of recommendation.  She’s not applying for a job as an etiquette teacher; she’s applying to competitive colleges where she wants to earn a degree in business.  Even if she did lack humility, I told her its absence will likely prove an asset to her in her future professional work!

I haven’t decided yet whether to confront my colleague. If we were friends, I’d be on him in two seconds flat (after, of course, getting Lana’s permission to discuss the matter with him.)  Yesterday, I wrote about my penchant for politeness — and while it’s true I value civility, if someone’s upset one of "my kids" (either a student at PCC or a teen at All Saints), I’ll be in the offender’s face lickety-split.  But Lana expressed no interest in having me talk to him, and I don’t know him well at all.  Besides, the damage, such as it is, has already been done.  I did my best to reassure Lana that I believed in her unconditionally, and that I believe that most college admissions officers will not take the line about humility seriously.

On a related note, I always tell a student up front if I can’t write a glowing letter of recommendation.  If I’ve got reason to doubt a student’s character or academic potential, I tell them as soon as they ask me to write a letter.  That way, they can decide in advance whether or not they want me to be one of their recommenders.  I also always give a copy of the letter to my student, even if he or she has waived access to it.  I don’t ever say things behind people’s backs I wouldn’t say to their faces, and that goes for evaluations as well as for private gossip.  I think that’s a good rule for my colleagues to consider.

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

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 14, 2006
in Ethnicity, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Feminism, Relationships and Sexuality
. 17 Comments

Okay, I really like this post I just wrote.  Sorry, it’s long.  I won’t have another long one up for a couple of days, though, so if you’re willing, wade through. Thanks.

In a comment below last Friday’s post about virginity and expectations, a wonderful former student of mine named Connie writes:

Hugo, my question is this, how do we deal with the pressure of knowing our parents sacrifice so much so that we can succeed?

My parents have always given me everything I ask for and expect nothing in return except that I excel in my academics so that I can be successful, live a good life and help them out when they get old. What frustrates me is that this seems like such a simple request that I should be able to fulfill it with ease. Yet, because the notion seems so simple, there is more pressure and if I can’t do something as simple as studying and getting good grades, I am a failure. Having an education is simply not enough. I have to be at the top of my class. Sometimes I wonder if that’s part of my parents’ paradigm or mine because I am always striving to be the best. I guess I fear letting my parents down if I settle for average and as a result, I let myself down. I just want to be happy but I can’t be unless my parents are. I love my parents immensely and am forever grateful for everything they’ve sacrificed for me, I would just like to prove that to them and give them something in return.

Connie fits into the same demographic of many of the students I’m writing about: the child of Asian immigrants, raised with one foot firmly in this culture and another elsewhere, trying so hard to live up to what are, as she makes clear, intense and sometimes overwhelming expectations.

I’ve thought a lot about what it means to teach feminism to a classroom filled with young women whose parents believe that their daughters owe them something. It took me a long time to come to grips with just how crushing those expectations are that women like Connie describe. (I was fortunate: my parents told me that while they hoped I would do well, they would be perfectly satisfied if I merely earned the "gentlemen’s C".  Yes, when I was at Cal in the late-80s, some folks still used that expression without a trace of irony!)  And while male students from certain working-class or immigrant backgrounds also are hit with the burden of parental expectations for success, they usually get to escape the simultaneous requirement that they be virginal while earning straight As!

For so many young women from these backgrounds, sexual purity is less about a private spiritual decision and more about honoring an obligation to a mother and father who have invariably sacrificed so much so that their daughter could have a "better life."  Most of my first-generation students at the community college are acutely aware of just how hard their parents have worked to give them the chance at an education and a promising career.  Though their parents may or may not have strong religious beliefs, they almost always teach their girls that pre-marital sex represents a threat not merely to their daughter’s personal success but to the well-being of the entire family.  Just as in the most tradition-bound of societies, a daughter’s virginity is still all- too-often powerfully connected to the hopes and dreams and sacrifices of a mother and father who have come so very far and worked so very hard for a better life.

And virginity is also of course a symbol for all of the other things a dutiful and hard-working daughter owes to her parents.  In most traditional cultures, daughters and daughters-in-law will be the primary providers of elder care.  Connie writes that her parents expect her to take care of them when they get old. Of course, they’d probably like her to get married and give them grandchildren.  And if she marries a man from a similar background, his parents may expect their daughter-in-law to care for them when they become elderly.  And she’ll do this while holding down a terrific job of which her parents can be suitably proud, and being an excellent mother to their grandkids.  And somehow, women like Connie describe this as "a simple request"!

So you deny your sexuality through your entire adolescence, and put off sexual relationships until you’re finished with college.   Ideally, you find the husband (whom the ‘rents hope will be from the same ethnic group) just as you begin to climb the corporate (or medical) ladder.  You have kids while somehow holding down the job.  You prepare marvelous meals that reflect the best traditions of your ancestral cuisine, your hair and makeup are immaculate, your body is trim, your husband is kept happy, and two sets of doting grandparents are given well-behaved children.  You then begin to care for those grandparents while still holding down the job, still raising the kids, still cooking the superb whatever from the old recipes, still keeping your husband happy.  Sister, ain’t nothing simple about it!  From a feminist perspective, it looks like one long litany of sacrifice, one long list of obligations, one long reminder that as a dutiful daughter, wife, and mother, one’s happiness is always contingent on the joy one brings to others.

I think I’m fairly close to accurately describing the pressures with which so many of my students contend.  But identifying the problem, and enumerating the pressures, is not the same as offering a workable solution.  And of course, there isn’t an easy solution.  Just as many folks have told me this week that when it comes to my comment policy I can’t please everyone, so too many of my students will have to make the hard choice to either continue to exhaust and deny themselves or to choose to rebel.  And it’s my explicit hope that they will choose the latter.

In advocating rebellion, I am not advocating dropping out.  I’m not advocating reckless or self-destructive personal behavior. I am advocating that these young women begin to ask themselves the hard question: what do I want?   I want them to begin the immensely difficult task of silencing those nagging internal (and external) voices that urge self-denial, endless sacrifice, endless sublimation. I want them to talk to each other, to seek support from other young women in similar straits — to plot strategy, share family war stories, and offer encouragement to take the first tentative steps of feminist rebellion.  This "feminist rebellion" will look different for different women.  For one, it might involve telling Mom and Dad she wants to major in history rather than chemistry or business.  For another, it might involve learning to masturbate — without guilt.  For another, it might involve choosing to move out rather than stay at home as her parents expect.  For another, it might involve bringing home a young man from a different ethnicity.  Or bringing home a girl.  If the parents are Catholic, it might involve becoming a Pentecostal.  Or if parents are Presbyterian, it might involve becoming a Buddhist.  The one thing all of these rebellions will have in common is that they will be small steps towards self-discovery and towards personal growth and joy.

Usually at this point, the young women to whom I’m directing this interrupt me:

Hugo, it’s so easy for you to say all of this!  You’re a man, you’re white, you have no idea just how hard it is to ‘rebel’!  You don’t understand the consequences of what you’re saying; you don’t have any idea of how much guilt I’ll feel if I disappoint my parents!

In one sense, they’re right.  I can’t truly know what it’s like to be a first-generation female college student, carrying the hopes and dreams of my parents and my ancestors on my shoulders, on my heart –or on my hymen.  Sure, I’m privileged in ways that I probably don’t even fully understand.  But I do believe that at the heart of the feminist project is this: women ought to have the right to pursue happiness.  That happiness will manifest differently in the lives of different women; some will find their most sublime joy in marriage and motherhood while others will find it in on an archaeological dig while others will find it in the arms of another woman.  And 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.

I do not hold this belief in contradiction to my Christian faith.  Rather, it is reinforced by it.  In Matthew 10:35, Jesus makes it clear that service to God is always more important than duty to family:

For I have come to turn  a man against his father,a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.

While Jesus is referring specifically to what it will cost to follow Him, the broader implication is clear: in the final analysis, there are things that matter more than loyalty to one’s parents.  Honoring mom and dad is indeed one of the commandments, but honor is not a synonym for obedience.  The Christian journey is partly about discovering the unique purpose for which we each were made, own’s own unique role in building the Kingdom; the feminist journey is about essentially the same process.  Though both feminism and Christianity are about building community, they are also about an ultimately solitary journey of transformation and joy.  As a Christian and a pro-feminist, a teacher and a youth leader, I want to build community while encouraging young folks to set out on their own personal journeys.

I have no illusions that the feminist project will be an easy one for most of my students.  But the choice, ultimately, is often a stark one: a lifetime trying to live up to a crushing set of obligations or a series of difficult but ultimately liberating confrontations with one’s family.  Those confrontations don’t have to take place all at once; some rebellions will be private and small and secret while others will be major and dramatic.  But in the end, big or small, these rebellions need to happen.  And we who care about feminism, who care about the lives and the happiness of young women, have to not only encourage rebellion, we have to walk with them through it and be with them as they cope with the fallout of telling the truth about their own wants, hopes and desires. To the best of my ability, that’s what I’m trying to do.

In the end. we can comfort ourselves with this: the greatest way we can honor our parents may not be through living up to their hopes and expectations.  The greatest way in which we can honor them is to choose to live lives of personal happiness and public service.  Their sacrifices, like the sacrifices of their parents before them, were not in vain if we reject their values: our personal choice to be happy, even if it scandalizes and bewilders our family, is nonetheless a testament to all that they gave up for us.  Whether our parents accept that or not, we can use that thought to encourage and reassure those who are tormented with guilt or doubt about claiming their own happiness on their own terms.

But it still isn’t easy.

A note on Asians and contradictions

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Hugo Schwyzer
on March 13, 2006
in Ethnicity, Feminism and Sexuality
. 25 Comments

Much going on this Monday morning.  A former student of mine writes in in regards to Friday’s post on class, race, virginity, and so forth:

Thanks for your post today about immigrant second-generation women, cultural expectations and feminism. I’m not sure if your students are first generation (born in another country), 1.5 generation (born elsewhere but immigrated before age 8) or second-generation (U.S.-born) but I related to the scenario. I’m 37, American-born Chinese and lots of Asian American women still live with the contradictions you outlined in your post.

I just wrote to let you know about the consequences of these cruel, contradictory expectations placed on Asian American girls and women. Asian American women ages 15-24 have the highest depression and suicide mortality rates of any race or gender in the U.S. Asian American women over 65 have the highest suicide mortality rate of any race or gender. We have eating disorder rates twice that of whites (according to the Aug/Sept 05 issue of Audrey Magazine). According to the most comprehensive sexuality study in the US conducted by the University of Chicago, Asian Americans have the hghest abortion rate in the US due to low teenage birthrates and low out of wedlock birthrates. See http://www.arthurhu.com/index/abortion.htm. Asians are often not included in studies so the Guttmacher Institute for example does not say Asians have the highest rate of abortion. The mental health studies and eating disorder studies were done by Asian American mental health organizations.

I hear often from my Asian students in my women’s studies class that abortion rates are very high in their community.  As one young woman put it last year:  "We have to have abortions if we get pregnant, because the consequences for an out-of-wedlock birth are more devastating.  With abortion, our families can pretend we are all ‘good girls.’" 

Just repeating what I hear.

A long post on tradition, virginity, success, feminism, and a nonsensical double bind

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 10, 2006
in Class, Ethnicity, Pasadena City College, Sexuality and Teaching
. 69 Comments

Yesterday in my women’s history class, we began making our way through Joan Brumberg’s The Body Project.  I’ve been using the book for years and years, and it’s a huge hit with my students each semester.

It is Brumberg who first drew my attention to statistics about menarche, marriage, and the loss of virginity.  She points out that a century ago, girls menstruated for the first time at an average age of 16 and got married at an average age of around 21.  Today, girls menstruate at an average age of just under 12 and get married for the first time at just over 25.

(A quick note about statistics.  The problem with teaching statistics — especially with something like menarche — is that very, very few folks end up being "average".  Almost every girl seems to have a sense of herself as being "early" or "late"  — a Goldilocks effect, I suppose!)

Here’s where it gets interesting.  A century ago, the time between the onset of puberty and marriage was but five years; today it’s close to fifteen. If a contemporary young woman is trying to "wait" until marriage to lose her virginity, she is waiting — in a very real sense — three times as long as women did in her great-great grandmother’s era!   She’s got three times the frustration of coping with unexpressed sexual feelings and longings, three times as long to struggle to live up to a cultural and religious standard of purity.  Forget trying to live up to the standards of one’s ancestors; today’s young women who remain committed to virginity are trying to accomplish something that has, from a demographic and physiological standpoint, never been achieved before.

My class is 75% non-white, and of those, most are first-generation Americans.   (Latinas and Asians make up two-thirds of the young women in the course; given the demographics of the area, many of the remainder are first-generation Armenians whose families have arrived from Iran, Lebanon, or the former Soviet Union.)  Yesterday, I asked them the following questions:

1.  How many of you have parents who want you to be virgins when you marry?

2.  How many of you have parents who want you to go to college and get a degree before you get married?

3.  How many of those same parents also want you to be skilled at cooking and cleaning in order to attract a husband?

After half the class had raised their hands to all three questions, I asked them a follow-up:

"Based on what you’ve read in Brumberg, and based on what you’ve experienced in your family, how does it feel to be asked to do something no one in your family has ever been asked to do before?"

The answers came pouring out!  Many of these young women are the first in their families to go to college; they’ve often been raised by immigrant parents with a tremendous faith in education.  Most of these families have embraced at least one aspect of feminism: the notion that women have a right to education, and perhaps an obligation to become economically self-sufficient.  (Most of my students have been warned by at least one older adult to "get an education so you won’t have to rely on a man.")  But even as they’ve been encouraged to do what women in the past were not able to do (go to school and earn at least a bachelor’s degree, if not something higher), these young women are still being given a message about sexuality that is as traditional as the one that their grandmothers received in little villages in Michoacan and Martuni and Mindanao and Mae Hong Son.  And to top it off, their bodies (and the concomitant emergence of sexual desire) are developing earlier!

Over and over again, students say things like "Wow, do you know my mother?"  Everyone laughs. It’s not that they think that I’m personally so insightful, it’s that they’ve never realized just how absurd — and historically unique — the bind is into which they have been placed.  Their ambitious yet culture-bound parents are extolling a crushing set of contradictory ideals; they demand daughters who can be domestically proficient, financially independent, professionally autonomous, yet traditionally demure and asexual until marriage!  No wonder so many of these young women appear so damned tired!

Some of my students make it clear (explicitly or obliquely) that they are rejecting their parents’ values.  Some have rebelled more successfully than others; the guilt in the faces and voices of some is painfully evident.  Others are still making heroic attempts to live up to all of the hopes and dreams and values of their parents and their culture. Some have internalized these values to the point that they can claim them as their own, but most — when made aware of their unique historical status as the first generation to face this particularly brutal constellation of pressures — get appropriately ticked off.

In so many traditionally-minded families, there is still an unfortunately explicit connection between virginity and success.  In the semi-mythical old days that the abuelas and the po-pos talk about, a girl who had lost her virginity before marriage would lose her opportunity to make a good marriage  — and that could mean a life of struggle and poverty.  In the modern equation, the fear is of single motherhood.   Having children outside of marriage while still young and uneducated is the contemporary stigma, one that all too often guarantees long-term financial hardship.   In the old days, virginity might attract a good husband; in the modern age, these girls are raised to believe, abstinence is the surest guarantee that they’ll be able to finish college and become self-supporting without being burdened by a child.

During these discussions, some of my white middle-class students (especially those from secular backgrounds) sit aghast.  Raised by affluent baby-boomer parents who took them to Planned Parenthood when they were 16, the stories they hear from their classmates of color bewilder and horrify them.  My privileged ones have never had to equate abstinence with success; their parents have never asked them to spend more than a decade as a physically sexual being without any outlet for their God-given desires. These young women express sympathy; some make the unfortunate mistake of issuing derogatory remarks about how appalling these "backwards" cultures are in which their classmates have had the misfortune to be raised.  (I try and nip that sort of thing in the bud.) 

After years and years of these discussions in my immensely diverse community college women’s studies classes, I’ve become convinced that we’re dealing with a vital feminist issue here.  My younger — and not so young — sisters are trying live up to conflicting and contradictory imperatives that ask them to have a foot in two completely different worlds.    As one of my students, a 20 year-old from an Armenian immigrant family, put it a semester or two ago: "My family dreams of me as their brilliant, virginal, medical doctor daughter — who drives her own Mercedes, makes amazing baklava, has a perfect figure and has never kissed a man until she meets her husband."

If I were teaching at Wellesley or Vassar, that young woman might not be speaking for the parents of over half of of her classmates.  But here at Pasadena City College, she is — and as a result, the feminist curriculum has to be tailored to speak to her and those like her.  Before they can become articulate activists for a global feminist agenda, these young women need to find the voice to speak out against the cruel and nonsensical double binds in which they have been placed.  They need teachers who will encourage them to demand the right to be full and complete human beings.  They need to be encouraged to offer each other support, to build feminist community, to help each other escape the crushing and contradictory burdens that weigh upon their minds and bodies.  The culture tells them they need to be Superwomen; in a feminist classroom, they can learn to say "No" to the pressure and say "Yes" or even "Hell, yes!" to their deepest and most basic desires.

Is an almost middle-aged heterosexual Anglo man from Carmel by-the-Sea the right person to lead these discussions?   Who knows?  I may not be able to empathize with the majority of my students, but that doesn’t mean I can’t share some simple statistics, ask some simple — and provocative — questions, and then facilitate the ensuing firestorm of discussion.    And from that discussion, I can only hope what all teachers hope — that my students will find the inspiration and the tools to begin to make real changes in their lives.

Note:  There are some obvious similiarities to the experiences of young conservative Christian women of any race who are also trying to manage both education and delayed marriage on one hand and traditional ideas about purity on the other.  This post at Thursday PM is very powerful; a young Christian woman asks exactly the right question:

What if denying healthy sexuality is just as harmful to the psyche and self image as engaging in unhealthy sexual activity?

Another post, that one.

Further notes on Crash, car accidents, and race

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