Archive for the 'Race' Category

Black women, white men

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 25, 2007
in Links, Marriage, Race and Relationships
. 5 Comments

I’m tired this Friday afternoon. I was supposed to do my Eaton Canyon to Mt. Wilson summit run this morning (a 19 miler, all hard trail, a mile’s worth of elevation climb) but ended up breaking off the ascent a little before the top. I still logged 16 miles, but it’s been a long time since I didn’t finish what I set out to do. Not how I wanted my first long run since turning 40 to turn out, but on the other hand, it’s evidence of wisdom that I didn’t push through my exhaustion and end up making myself sick.

I’m behind on a variety of projects, and I’m hoping to catch up this weekend. It’s my wife’s birthday tomorrow, however, and we have a variety of happy things planned. I won’t let my various other obligations stop me from honoring my most important commitment.

Speaking of my wife, someone sent me a link to this blog: Black Female Interracial Marriage. Evia hosts the blog, and describes herself and her project:

I’m an African-American woman. My blog explores my interracial marriage to a white American man and offers provocative commentary, discussions, articles, and media regarding intraracial and interracial relationships and marriage options for black women.

Evia is interested in discussing black female/white male relationships, and her blog provides an astonishing list of links to famous (and not-so-famous) marriages and relationships that fit that racial model. The discussion in her comments section gets rather heated from time to time, but her posts — and the comments — are worth the read.

My gorgeous soon-to-be-another-year-older wife is of mixed African, Colombian, and Croatian ancestry. She’s got as much claim to the title of “African-American” as, say, Barack Obama. No, folks, you don’t get a picture; I zealously and faithfully guard my wife’s privacy at her request. I briefly blogged about the racial dynamics of our marriage here.

Given that race has been a hot topic in feminist blogging circles lately, I thought linking to Evia’s blog was a good way to finish out the week.

See y’all Tuesday.

The Shirley Chisholm model: some thoughts on feminism and racism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 24, 2007
in Feminism, Race and Teaching
. 37 Comments

So I’ve been thinking — hasn’t everybody this week? — about the intersection of race and sex and the broader feminist movement. As I mentioned on Monday, a debate over the merits of Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism has metastasized into a painful and often bewildering discussion about the ways in which white feminists unintentionally marginalize the voices of women of color. I’ve linked to some of the posts on the subject; from more recent posts, here’s Brownfemipower’s, and here’s Sylvia’s.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about the intersection of race, class, and gender in American history and contemporary society. Though it doesn’t always show, I’ve read a book or three on the subject and sat through, gosh, dozens of seminars and symposia. I’m old enough to have read the first edition of This Bridge Called my Back not long after it initially appeared.

But I’ll admit that for most of my life as a pro-feminist man, I’ve worried that too great a focus on the Great Crime of racial oppression in this country meant a marginalization of what I grew up believing was the Even Greater Crime of the exploitation of women. My mother was a huge Shirley Chisholm fan, and supported the first black congresswoman’s famous 1972 campaign for the Democratic nomination. Chisholm, who died in 2005, was often asked whether she considered her sex or her race to be the greater obstacle to her success. She was unequivocal in her response, quoted from the New York Times obit:

“I’ve always met more discrimination being a woman than being black,” she told The Associated Press in December 1982, shortly before she left Washington to teach at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. “When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men.”

Bold emphasis mine. I remember reading the original quote from Chisholm in the early 1980s; I think my mother may have brought it to my attention. I can’t tell you how formative Chisholm’s frank discussion of the race/sex dynamic was for me. Though I ought to have known better than to allow one remarkable black woman’s words to form my entire world view on which “ism” constituted the greater oppression, I have to say that for the last quarter century, whenever the discussion of the racism/sexism dynamic comes up, I immediately quote the lines above.

Anecdotally, I will say that most of my female students of color nod their heads vigorously when I share — as I almost always do — the Shirley Chisholm story. Most of my students today were born more than a decade after Shirley ran for president, and yet their experience of both racism and sexism has left many of them convinced that while both have tremendous power to hurt, the latter has served as the far greater impediment to their full acceptance as human beings. Those who think Shirley Chisholm is describing a different era than our own (an era where Stokely Carmichael could say that the “proper position for a woman in the movement is prone”) ought to come and listen to the stories told by the young women of color I have in my classes.

I recognize that to be doubly or even triply-oppressed is difficult. On campus, all of our student groups meet at the same time each week: Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon. An aspiring white feminist will have less trouble choosing how to spend that hour; since her sex is the only source of her marginalization, she’s fairly likely to choose a women’s group. A young woman of color may experience more conflict: what to do when the Black Students Association or MEChA meets at exactly the same time as a feminist forum? The sense I’ve gotten is that many of my young women of color feel at times that they are being forced to choose between two parts of themselves, and that hurts. Their “brown brothers” are oppressed for their brownness, not their maleness; their “white sisters” are held back for their sex, not their whiteness. When you’ve got one single hour per week to spend with one single group, when you’ve got just one dollar to give to your club of choice, choosing between brothers and sisters is hard.

And yes, I know that well-meaning white feminists can be unconsciously racist. I can’t tell you how often I’ve had a young white woman in my classes make disparaging remarks about Latino machismo, for example. My Latina students frequently squirm; they recognize much truth in what their white classmate is saying, but they feel protective and defensive about their brothers, their fathers, their heritage. Too often, white feminists overtly or obliquely ask women of color to turn their backs on what white feminists assume is a culture so steeped in misogyny that it cannot possibly be redeemed.

What I’ve realized from the whole kerfuffle over Jessica’s book is that I continue to let my views on the race/sex/class intersection be formed almost entirely by the “Shirley Chisholm analysis.” I think Chisholm was telling the truth about her own experience, and I think that her experience is still that of the majority of young women of color in contemporary American society. 1972 and 2007 are far less different than some folks would have you believe. But where I’ve gone off track is in my insistence that we keep the focus of our justice work more narrowly focused on gender oppression, assuming that in the end, all women regardless of race or class or sexual identity or physical ability are marginalized and mistreated in more or less the same way. After more than twenty years of reading (and teaching) Anzaldua and Lorde and hooks and Moraga, I ought to know better.

Note: Comments that are either overtly racist or overtly anti-feminist will be deleted.

A note on language, misogyny, and Don Imus

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 11, 2007
in Feminism, Race and Sports
. 13 Comments

I have very little to add to the discussion of the Don Imus controversy. I’ve been reading what everyone else has to say, and though many wise and good points are being made by many wise and good people, a couple of posts I’ve seen jump out at me.

From last Friday, here’s dNA’s piece at Halfrican Revolution: White Supremacy Outsources its Vocabulary. (H/T Pam at Pandagon).

It is impossible to understand our current ease with sexism in the public sphere, especially towards black women, especially over the issue of hair, without discussing the spread of Hip-hop… Hip-hop has granted black men greater access to white women. It has also granted white men greater access to black women; make no mistake, your teenage son, little brother, or husband is tuning into the “booty channel” (also known as Black Entertainment Television) when you’re not home. The attitude towards women in mainstream Hip-hop is that women are commodities, an attitude that mimics attitudes towards gender in greater American society, a fact made obvious by any beer commercial.

What has happened here is a subtle, unspoken agreement between black and white men that black women and their minds and bodies are owed as little respect as the minds and bodies of white women. This happens even as overt racism towards black men in the public sphere becomes more and more accessible. This happens because on some level, black men know we cannot be seen as men unless we effectively subjigate, commodify, and exploit black women.

A black man like dNa can say that in a way that I can’t.

Listening to right-wing talk radio yesterday, I heard a few folks doing their best to deflect attention from Imus by attacking the degrading portrayal of women in hip-hop culture. I winced as I heard that, largely because the hosts (John and Ken here in Los Angeles) seemed less interested in defending the dignity of black women, and more in absolving a fellow white male talk-show personality. But dNa’s words carry more weight, as do Pam Spaulding’s at Pandagon. This isn’t merely because dNa and Pam are African-American, though of course their heritage does give their words a special and undeniable legitimacy. It’s also because in the end, the most effective critiques of any cultural movement must come from within. When progressive black bloggers are willing to draw a connection between Imus’ “nappy-headed hos” remark and the larger issue of the degradation of black women in both hip-hop and mainstream culture, then we’re arriving at a teachable moment.

Audre Lorde, surely one of the great feminist writers of the last half-century, famously remarked that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Words like “bitch”, “ho”, and yes, “nigger” (in any of its myriad spellings) are words first uttered by the masters; they are words that cannot be redeemed. It is a terrible illusion to imagine that authentic empowerment can ever come by appropriating the language of the oppressor. The attempt by some feminists to use words like “bitch” and “cunt” in a positive light only ends up giving misogynists a sense of entitlement to keep on using them. The ubiquitous use of racial slurs by hip-hop artists gives the Don Imuses of the world cover. It gives them permission. It makes the utterly indefensible seem less egregious, largely because hip-hop has done such a good job of deadening our sense of outrage. (This of course, is antithetical to what hip-hop was supposed to do: I may know more about the history of bluegrass than of rap, but wasn’t hip-hop supposed to arouse righteous indignation? Wasn’t it supposed to be a soundtrack of liberation?)

Unlike most folks weighing in on this controversy, I was a fan of Rutgers basketball long before their wonderful Final Four run. I’ve been a C. Vivian Stringer fan for years. From a basketball standpoint, I consider her one of the five greatest coaches in the history of the women’s game (my other four: Summitt, Auriemma, Barmore, Conradt. Goestenkors needs a few more years). She’s certainly the greatest coach currently working who hasn’t yet won a national title. I loved her team’s improbable run through the tournament; the defensive job they did on LSU in the semi-final was a thing of beauty.

I watched the tape of the Rutgers press conference yesterday. I saw and heard the pain in these young women’s voices. And I saw and heard that this multi-racial team was hurt far more by the “ho” word than by “nappy-headed.” Two quotes that stuck out for me:

One player, Kia Vaughn, said that unless a “ho” is defined as someone who has achieved a lot, Imus misspoke.

“I’m not a ho,” the sophomore said. “I’m a woman and someone’s child. It hurts. It hurts a lot.”

..(Essence) Carson, like her teammates, also talked about good that could come from the controversy.

“We can finally speak up for women. Not just African-American women, but all women,” the junior said.

Not just African-American women, but all women. Good on you, Essence Carson. Good on you for your dignity and your athletic prowess, and good on you for seeing that at its core, the real evil in Imus’ words lay in their misogyny.

I don’t much care whether Imus is fired or not. But during his two-week suspension (which certainly seems minimally appropriate), let me suggest we all go through a similar period of self-reflection. Let’s think about the words we use, the music we listen to, the casual insults we allow our friends to slip out unrebuked. Let’s suspend — for the length of the Imus suspension — the use of any media that uses degrading, hostile, soul-crushing language towards women.* Let’s not allow the skin color or the sex of the artist who uses the language to act as a shield from our criticism. What goes into our ears, what we sing along to in the car — it helps define who we are. We cannot compartmentalize; we cannot claim to live lives of justice and kindness while listening to a soundtrack of objectification and exploitation. We are what we eat, we are what we wear, we are what we listen to and watch.

And if you’ve never done it, consider going to support your local college women’s basketball team next year. At most levels, it’s more entertaining than the men’s game (and I’ve watched a hell of a lot of hoops in my day).

*NOTE: I’m making this commitment with my own musical choices. I just took the Guns n’ Roses song One in a Million off my Itunes shuffle. I have no love for hip-hop, but I love me some Axl Rose. Still, if we’re gonna lead by example…

A note about race and manners

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 12, 2007
in Family, Movies, Race and Traveling
. 13 Comments

A good weekend all around.  We went to see Venus last night; Peter O’Toole was indeed as terrific as advertised.  I enjoyed the film more than my wife did; as hostile as I generally am to older men-younger women romances, I bought the challenging, often squirm-inducing aspects of the story.  And I appreciated that it was surprisingly unsentimental.

I’m thinking this morning about handshakes, perhaps because I dreamt about them last night. 

Actually, I’m thinking less about handshakes and more about manners.  I grew up in a family in which manners were very much part of our civil religion.  “A gentleman always makes other people feel comfortable” was a central maxim of my childhood.  There was a good deal more about making others feel relaxed and welcomed than there was about “standing up for the truth”.  Our kind of people could hold a wide variety of views on religious and political matters, but OKOP always were raised to master the social graces.  (My dear uncle Stanley, a noted Communist and philosopher whose work is still widely read, regularly went to meetings of the radical left dressed impeccably in a Brooks Brothers suit.  He could betray his class,  but not his upbringing — if that makes any sense.)

In my childhood, we were regularly told that “if you have good manners, you can go anywhere.”  My grandmother told us that a gentleman (or a lady) should be able to have tea with the Queen in Buckingham Palace; a gentleman or a lady should feel equally at home on a stool in a dive bar in the Mission District.  “If you have lovely manners”, she told us, “you can go anywhere and fit right in.”  (I’ve sat on a lot of barstools in my nearly forty years.  I still await my invitation from Her Majesty, but my grandmother’s point is well-taken.)

I think manners popped into my head because I was also thinking about race, particularly after reading this article in yesterday’s paper about interracial relationships on television.  It’s an interesting piece about the ways in which the current crop of television depictions of interracial romances tend to minimize or even ignore some of the very real pitfalls that such relationships can present.

I’m married to a woman who is of mixed ancestry; she can “pass” for white, black, or Hispanic.  Our children, when they are born, will be a glorious mix: indigenous Colombian,  Jewish, English, Scots-Irish, Croatian, Nigerian, German, Flemish, Welsh, Czech, Spanish.  And I can’t help but wonder whether or not they will they will appear “white”.  My love, of course, is not conditional on race or appearance.  But I know that we live in a world where perceptions about race can still be very powerful. I know that we live in a world where “blackness” is still charged with significance.  And I know that if my children appear to be black, they may face a certain set of obstacles in the world that they will not face if they more closely resemble their European heritage.

What does this have to do with manners? In my family (which was entirely white in my childhood, much less so now), we were told again and again that “if you have good manners, people will welcome you anywhere you go.”  I’ve been to five continents and most corners of this country, and I’m happy to say that my grandmother’s words have proved true.  But I also know that folks around the globe notice my pale blue eyes before they notice my manners.  I have had friends very close to me whose skin is darker than mine and whose easy graciousness surpasses my own.  They have not always had the welcomes I have had. 

I will teach my children many of the lessons I learned.  We will work on chewing with the mouth closed; we will learn to master increasingly complex table settings.  We will learn that the key to good party manners is not being interesting, but being interested.  We will definitely devote several hours to handshake instruction, teaching that firm, polite grip that avoids the twin disasters of the “dead fish” or the “bonecrusher.”  And if they’re like their father was, my children will find the lessons boring and exasperating at the time they are taught; they will come to be immensely grateful for them.  And oh God, how I hope that they will live in a world where whatever their outer appearance, those manners will serve them well and cause them to be welcomed wherever they go.

And just maybe, they’ll get invited to Buckingham Palace.

 

 

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.

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.

More on righteous anger

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 19, 2006
in Christianity, Faith, Feminism, Memories and Race
. 110 Comments

I got a long, very kind e-mail  yesterday from R. Giskard, the commenter here formally known as "Uzzah."  He writes about several topics, but poses a serious question:

…the sheer venom I see bounced around the blogosphere by Feminists and MRA’s is pretty disheartening and makes me question whether studying about or being more active is Feminist/MRA issues is something that I might want to pursue more as an interest. . You may have gathered from some of my posts that I am a Christian, and a fairly non-violent person and I avoid anger as a negative emotion that eventually leads to hate and more anger. I find anger distasteful and maybe that too is one of my privileges as a white male in this country, that I don’t have to get angry at every little slight, but I do indeed try to avoid it and re-mediate that anger if possible. As a Christian, I feel that is also the right thing to do. And it’s the right thing for me.

But let me ask you a question. At what point does “Righteous Anger” go over the line? When does that anger turn to unhealthy (and un-christian) hatred? At what point does it turn you from the oppressed, to the oppressor?

R. Giskard is equally critical of both men’s rights advocates (MRAs) and feminists.  (My experience tells me that neither side likes being compared to the other.  The vast majority of participants in these conflicts tend to think that "their side" has the greater decency, insight, and sense of fair play.)  And he’s right, of course, that telling everyone to "tone things down" and "not be so angry" is often the tactic employed by the privileged who fail to understand what there is to be so angry about.

There are a couple of issues that Giskard’s question raises for me.  The first is this: how ought a Christian participate in the kind of battles we see so often here and elsewhere in the ongoing "gender wars"?  There are a number of Christian feminists out there — and some of the MRAs are also people of profound religious faith.  The majority of voices on both sides, however, seem to be decidedly secular.  And there’s a discourse that exists in both camps that is fundamentally suspicious of the Christian message that warns against the deadly and destructive effects of anger.

Within both the MRA and feminist communities, there is a strong hostility to those who preach a message of "gentleness, meekness, and charity" (presumed Christian values.)   The MRAs (at least in the forums I read) talk incessantly about the need to "awaken men from their stupor", and the importance of "getting angry!"  Anger is the fuel on which most movements for social change run, and I know that quite well.  And of course, there are plenty of voices across the vast feminist community who urge a similar great awakening of righteous wrath.  Virtually everyone believes anger has a place.

If there is a special obligation that Christians have in these discussions, it certainly isn’t to avoid anger entirely.  Jesus got angry.  Righteous anger — anger directed at injustice — has its place.  But the Christian also has, I am convinced, a special obligation to express his or her anger with the minimum amount of venom and hate.  We’ve got to distinguish between individuals and the causes they represent.  I can hate porn, and at the same time, do everything I can to establish friendly common ground with the pornographer.  I can be enraged at those who deny the reality that it is women who are the primary victims of domestic violence, but I must work to separate my anger at their views from my anger at them as human beings.  They are still my brothers, whether they consider themselves to be so or not.  The Christian obligation is to recognize that anger at institutions and policies and ideas and behaviors is acceptable — but anger at other human beings (even if they seem to manifest all that we loathe) isn’t.  In the heat of battle it’s a heck of distinction to make, but it’s a mandatory one.

I’d love to have coffee with all of you, frankly.  Sociopathic Revolution?  Angry Harry? Mr. Bad?  Joshua Dearing?  Yeah, I’d like to sit and talk face to face, away from the keyboards and the monitors.  I’d like to be able to shake your hands, feel your flesh, look you in the eye, and break bread (or a Starbucks biscotti) together.  (Of course, there are so many feminist bloggers whom I am dying to meet as well!  Someday, someway, in New York or Los Angeles or Indianapolis or Ottumwa or Delray Beach or Vicksburg or Spokane, we’re gonna have a big ol’ convention and schmooze for hours.  I’ll be in ENFP heaven!) 

It’s possible to be righteously angry with a friend over coffee.  I’ve been called to account many a time in coffee shops by people who loved me but who were furious at my behavior or at my views.  I’ve been challenged and provoked in love time and again, and I’ve learned to return the favor.  Whenever I’m confronting someone, I always try and pick my words carefully.  My instinct as a people-pleaser is too often to avoid conflict — but in the face of evil, avoiding conflict is a sin.  On the other hand, when my blood starts boiling, it’s immensely tempting to mix into the righteous anger a huge walloping dose of bile and sanctimonious rage.  It’s easy to slip from a loving rebuke into genuine hate — and it’s twice as easy when one can’t actually see the faces (or know the real names) of the people with whom one is locked in "hostile dialogue."

The other great question is, of course, is this: is it possible for a privileged white man whose faith teaches him that hate is a sin to speak with any authority to those who aren’t privileged, white, or male — or who do not share his faith?   I am a man who has suffered a great deal in my life.  I am also someone whose sufferings have been almost entirely self-inflicted.  I have known misery and pain and rage, but those were linked to chemical inbalances, personality disorders, and addiction. I have not experienced genuine institutional injustice.  I have not been a victim of assault or rape.  I have not experienced any meaningful discrimination.  And so my primary experience of anger is private and personal.  To me, sin is an individual issue that manifests individually — I have a harder time seeing the way it shows up in structures and ideologies.  (I have a Ph.D., thanks, and I have read Walter Wink and Michel Foucault and everyone in between, so I am not saying I don’t grasp this stuff intellectually.  I just don’t feel it viscerally the way many of my friends on both sides of the gender divide seem to.)

Sorry, R. Giskard, I haven’t answered your question, not really.  This has been more of an idle musing (like so much here).  But in recent days, the "heat" around this blog has been turned up, the comments section has gotten nastier, and I’ve felt myself struggling more with anger than I have in a while.  I’m praying for discernment this morning.

“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.

Unequal weapons on the pitch: a partial defense of Zidane — UPDATED and REPOSTED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 12, 2006
in Aggression and violence, Men and Masculinity, Race and Sports
. 27 Comments

A reader named Amber recovered this post via Bloglines.  Yay!  Thanks, Amber!  Comments are lost, however.

Like millions of other folks across the globe, I’ve spent the last three days reflecting on the extraordinary actions of Zinedine Zidane in Sunday’s World Cup Final.  I can’t imagine that there’s a reader in the blogosphere who hasn’t learned of the astonishing head-butt.  On Sunday, in the immediate aftermath of the match, I wrote:

I’ve been a sports fan since childhood, and in thirty years of watching every imaginable athletic activity (this was the seventh World Cup final I’ve seen on TV), I cannot think of any incident as shocking as Zinedine Zidane’s mindless, inexcusably violent head-butt in the latter stages of today’s match.  It’s as if in the midst of their last Super Bowl appearances, Joe Montana or John Elway were to have viciously kicked a poor defensive lineman in the groin.  I’ve never seen an athlete of such caliber completely lose his head in circumstances as vital and important as these.  It strikes me as one of the most self-destructive moments I’ve ever seen in sport.  No words — no matter how ugly or vicious — could have justified the violence and thoughtlessness of Zidane’s reaction.  I’m sad for how this will forever color his legacy.

But I wonder.  Zidane is set to speak today about what it was that the Italian player, Marco Materazzi, said that triggered the head-butt.  According to the lip-readers hired by the BBC, Materazzi told Zidane "you’re the son of a terrorist whore" (among other things) before Zidane turned on him.

We all know the old saying: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me."  It’s quite possible that no other childish nursery rhyme is more fundamentally wrong-headed than that one!  And it’s also worth noting that the power of words to hurt is racially and sexually charged. 

In my fantasies, I am a great soccer player.  Now imagine that I was on the pitch on Sunday, not as clumsy Hugo Schwyzer, but as an athlete of Zidane’s caliber.  I am a white, Christian, heterosexual male.   What on earth could Materazzi say to me?  In the great arsenal of insults, Western culture doesn’t have derogatory language for white, Christian, heterosexual men.  The only way to get at me would be to feminize me (call me a "pussy") or "homosexualize" me (call me "queer"), but those would be terms that wouldn’t go to the core of my identity.   Materazzi’s power to injure with words would be considerably reduced. He could also call me the "son of a terrorist whore", but the epithet "terrorist" has no culturally significant meaning when attached to someone of my background.

When a white man and a man of color are playing on the pitch, no matter which European language they speak, the white man will have more "weapons in his verbal arsenal" than his rival.  Leaving aside gendered and sexualized insults, what power do the words "honky" and "cracker" and "redneck" have to hurt compared to, say, the word "nigger"?  If you call me a "cracker" (a term more accurately used to refer to poor rural whites), I’m going to laugh — there is no history of violence and hatred behind the word.  If I call a player of African descent the "n" word, I’m going to expect a different reaction — not because he has less self-control than I do but because of the extraordinary legacy attached to that term.

There isn’t a single term in English that you can use that attacks me for being who I am.   Put bluntly, the word "cunt" has more power to hurt than the insult "prick"; the word "nigger" more power to hurt than the word "honky", the word "faggot" more power to hurt than the word "straight."  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" — indeed, if I happen to be a privileged white male using Western European languages!

It is dangerous for whites, particularly white Christian men, to suggest that players like Zidane (who is of African descent and is a non-practicing Muslim) ought to be able to control their tempers better.  While all of us will be insulted at one time or another in our lives, it is absurd to suggest that all of us are equally vulnerable to racial, sexual, or religious slurs.  To be an African Muslim man, as Zidane is, renders one at the least doubly vulnerable to verbal attack.  And it is the height of arrogance for those of us who have never experienced these sorts of psychic injuries to demand constant self-control from those who have.

Mind you, in the end, I think Zidane deserved the red card.   Head-butting has no place on the pitch.  But I favor red cards for racial, religious, and gendered slurs as well — and if necessary, I favor giving them retroactively.  If FIFA can give a retroactive red card to Germany’s Torsten Frings for a punch he threw after the game with Argentina, they can certainly give one to Materazzi if his abuse is verified to have been racial, ethnic, sexual, or religious in nature.  When black players in Europe are pelted by banana peels or peanuts or monkey calls when theirs is the visiting team, award their side a penalty kick.   We need to be as strong and decisive in confronting verbal violence as we are in confronting head butts.  To do otherwise is to ignore the reality that words are genuine weapons, and in a racist culture, those weapons are unevenly distributed.

UPDATE: Of course, there’s another theory (Bernard-Henry Levy partially made it in the Wall Street Journal, h/t Rusty Parts): Zidane was tired of being the hero, the great man carrying the weight of a world’s hopes, tired of always being elegant and beautiful.  His head-butt was a "I’m a man, just a man" moment — a refusal to play the role he had been assigned and a impassioned plea to be seen as a human being.  Levy writes:

Yes, a man, a true man, not one of these absurd monsters or synthetic stars who are made by the money of brand names in combination with the sighs of the globalized crowd. Achilles had his heel. Zidane will have had his—this magnificent and rebellious head that brought him, suddenly, back into the ranks of his human brothers.

That may not be far off, and it certainly arouses tremendous sympathy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A reflection on chivalry, female vulnerability, and male decency

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 10, 2006
in Chivalry and performing gender roles, Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Race and Sexuality
. 50 Comments

I may be among the last of the feminist bloggers to take on the now-infamous Duke Lacrosse Team Rape Case.  If you’ve managed to avoid hearing about it, start here and then make your way through the femosphere.  There’s lots of good commentary out there.   What is not in dispute is that an African-American exotic dancer was hired by members of Duke’s lacrosse team to perform at a party.  What is in dispute is whether or not she was raped.

It’s not available for free, but both Amanda and Jill have excerpted extensive sections from a David Brooks column in the New York Times on the subject of the Duke lads and the notion of chivalry.  Brooks is apparently worried that a focus on "identity politics" (discussing the privileged white members of the lacrosse team and the fact that the dancer is an African-American single mom) is obscuring what he sees as the real issue: the loss of manners, chivalry, and self-restraint.  Brooks writes:

The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That’s why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.

Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920’s, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis

Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.

Jill and Amanda do an excellent job of taking the Brooks piece apart, and I suggest reading both posts in their entirety.

I want to focus on another aspect of the whole discussion, one that Brooks raises indirectly but which continues to come up in contemporary laments about poor male behavior: the notion that feminism is directly responsible for the loutish, irresponsible, and often violent behavior of today’s young men.

According to this thesis (supported by romantic illusions about the past), women’s vulnerability is inextricably linked to male responsibility.  In the "good old days" (whenever they were), women had fewer rights, opportunities, and protections.  Economically, physically, and sexually, women relied more on the protection of men.  This vulnerability forced men to "step up"  and act as courtly protectors of their wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters.   Chivalry was a necessary construct to protect fragile women and girls from violent and predatory men.  The thesis has all the usual attractions of the complementarian lie: that women and men are created for radically different purposes, and society functions best when each sex stays within the strictly defined boxes that God and nature have prescribed for them.

Of course, feminism made the fatal mistake of empowering women.  In the last forty or fifty years, women have gained a plethora of rights; women have access to birth control, to education, to economic opportunity.  As women have become more powerful and independent, the thesis goes, men began to question not only old chivalric codes, but the whole need for self-restraint.  Why should men continue to protect women when women insist on being able to take care of themselves?   The greatest benefit of the "old ways" was that a man could have his ego and his self-esteem boosted by knowing that he was needed by the fragile, delicate, vulnerable women in his life who relied absolutely on his strength and self-control.  But the more freedom and autonomy that women gain, the less men feel needed and the less compunction they feel to control the "tropism towards barbarism" that Brooks refers to.  Thus when women are raped by individuals or groups of men who care nothing for their dignity and their humanity, the feminist movement is only reaping what it sowed.

First of all, this myth is based on a historical lie. There was never a time when "chivalrous" gentlemen treated all women equally.  From the era of courtly love in the middle ages to the antebellum South, gentlemen had very different codes of conduct with women of lower classes than they did with their own.  In other words, there never was a time when a working class woman of color would have been well-treated by a large group of privileged young white men.

But from the standpoint of those of us who love and care about men, there’s another equally insidious lie in this theory that male responsibility is contingent upon female vulnerability.  It is deeply, profoundly and tragically cynical about men and the ways in which we become full and complete human beings.  Now, I’m not denying that men have violent and lustful impulses (though the extraordinary number of women who report similar desires suggests more and more that this sort of behavior is not only linked to male biology).  And I’m not denying that in the not-so-distant past, men were encouraged to exercise self-control in order to protect vulnerable and fragile women.  What I am denying is what Brooks seems to be implying: that if we want better behaved men, women will need to surrender some of their hard-won rights and freedoms.

A pro-feminist strategy for male accountability cannot be based on appealing to men to return to some sort of ancient code of chivalric conduct.  It can’t be based on tired Jungian narratives in which every man gets to think of himself as a "knight in shining armor" protecting "damsels in distress."  Mind you, I think there’s a lot of value in reclaiming old stories and myths; obviously, they speak powerfully to young people. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with challenging young men to be brave, even "heroic"; as is clear from my earlier posts, I think there’s a lot of good in teaching self-restraint and consideration for others.  But those laudable lessons of self-restraint must be separated from disastrous messages about female vulnerability.  Women of all occupations and ethnic backgrounds deserve respect, not because they are fragile women but because they are human beings made in the image of God. Indeed, other men deserve that same degree of courtesy and compassion, not because of or in spite of their sex, but because of their inherent value and worth as human beings.

I’m absolutely with David Brooks that we should be teaching character everywhere.  In the schools, in the churches, on the playgrounds, in the media.  By character, I mean integrity and compassion: the integrity to match one’s private behavior behind closed doors with one’s public pronouncements; the compassion to see all living things as valuable and deserving of care, not of exploitation.   That’s not a message for men only, or for women, but one we all need to hear over and over and over again.

Pro-feminism and Christianity stand together on this.  We both reject the notion that "boys will be boys", and we reject the notion that violent/lustful/destructive behavior is women’s job to control or redirect.  Though Scripture is filled with stories of men who struggled with their nature (David chief among them), it is also filled with stories of men who are powerful role models for kindness, generosity, self-restraint and selflessness.  This Passover and Easter week, I think particularly of the "two Josephs" I love so well: the Old Testament Joseph, who in the story of Potiphar’s wife shows us that a man can exercise sexual self-control, and the New Testament Joseph, who faithfully and lovingly marries a woman pregnant with a child that he knows is not his own.  Neither man bases his behavior on the actions of the women in his life; both live lives of love and self-restraint based on fidelity to God and their commitment to other human beings.  Joseph and Joseph are reminders of what all men are called to, and they are reminders of what it is that we can lovingly but firmly demand from our fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons.

I am an imperfect human being. But my duty to love my wife more than I love myself, and my duty to all of my brothers and sisters in the human family, is not based on my perception that they all need my masculine protection.  It is based on a fundamental understanding of the dignity and worth of creation.   That understanding, not some tired old class-based chivalric code,  is what the lads at Duke apparently lacked.

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.

White guilt, religious zeal, and nature-worshiping misanthropy: why I am confused about immigration policy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 29, 2006
in Christianity, Class, Politics and Race
. 15 Comments

Everywhere I go this week, folks are talking about the great immigration debate.  My students, my colleagues, my friends — even s