Archive for the 'Race' Category

Further notes on Crash, car accidents, and race

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 6, 2006
in Aggression and violence, Class, Ethnicity, Movies and Race
. 4 Comments

I’m planning to pull myself together in the next two hours and make it to school.  One nice thing about being home sick — I get to watch the Wigan-Manchester United match live on Fox Sports World; Wigan is up a goal and I’m very pleased.  They’ve become my new darlings in the Premiership.

But I can keep one eye on the soccer and one on the blog, all the while pumping in the broth and the tea.  I just downloaded Dolly Parton’s "Travelin’ Thru" (which missed out on the Academy Award for best song); it’s free right now (today only) on Itunes.

I’d like to follow up, briefly, on my remarks below in response to "Crash" winning the best picture Oscar.   As much as I enjoyed certain aspects of the well-acted, well-written film, I felt it presented a distorted vision of the Los Angeles I know. 

I am a bit of an oddity — raised on the Central Coast and in the Bay Area, I’m passionately attached to Los Angeles.  Though I think often about retiring to the little town on the coast where I was raised, I’m very happy living in this metropolis.   I’ve been blessed to do a lot of traveling, and I enjoy seeing new places, but I’m rarely happier than when I look out the window as a long international flight drops back into L.A. at night, and I see the sparkling lights of my home sprawling as far as the eye can see.  I feel fundamentally at home here, and not merely in certain neighborhoods.

Los Angeles is a city of freeways, as everyone knows.  In the early 1990s when I was in grad school, some friends and I made a commitment to spend our weekends traveling the county only using surface streets.  We drove from Westwood to Watts to Winnetka, Lincoln Heights to Larchmont to Lawndale, Venice to Vernon to Van Nuys, Santa Monica to San Marino to San Pedro — all without hitting a freeway.  And we didn’t just drive; part of playing the "surface street game" meant going to restaurants and cafes and shops in all the neighborhoods we visited.  We were a multi-racial group ourselves; my first wife (to whom I was married at the time) was half-Chinese, half-Filipino.  With her and my other friends, I learned to eat lumpia and menudo; challah and carnitas and catfish; I ate grits and injera and came to love it all.

Our trips were daytime trips, mind you.  We didn’t take foolish risks, but at the same time, we tried our best not to let prejudices and fears hold us back from new experiences.  For example, I got my hair buzzed in an African-American barbershop on Crenshaw Boulevard; some folks ignored me, others engaged me in friendly banter.  I didn’t feel like I was "slumming" (a derogatory term often applied to middle-class whites who venture into the ‘hoods); I felt like I was trying — humbly and respectfully — to learn, to taste, to know something new and different.

And yes, I had a car accident — the central subtext of "Crash".  I had bought my first car not long after I moved to Los Angeles, a used 1983 Honda Accord.  One bright summer day in 1989, I was transitioning from the 101 to the southbound 110 when a big rig rear-ended a little Nissan a few cars in front of me.  We all slammed on our brakes, but my Honda didn’t stop until I’d rear-ended the Mercedes sedan in front of me.  Ours were the only four vehicles involved; no one was hurt.  Though it was more than sixteen years ago, I remember the other drivers vividly: the big rig was driven by a black man; the Nissan he hit was driven by a Latina; the Mercedes was driven by an elderly Chinese couple who spoke limited English.  We all exchanged insurance information on the side of the road, and as we did so, I began to cry.  I know it was childish, but I was so upset I had done so much damage to my "new" car (the Mercedes I hit had only a scratch, while my Honda was, if not totalled, much more heavily damaged).  The Chinese man patted my arm and assured me it would be okay, while his wife smiled at me wanly.  The CHP officer — Latino — saw that my license still listed "Carmel" as my home address, and by way of comfort, told me he’d grown up in the Salinas area and couldn’t wait to move home to our native Monterey County.

No one yelled.  No one got upset. (Well, I did, but those were tears of self-pity, not rage).  There were no racial epithets, either.  And it never occurred to me that there was anything odd about the civility of our experience that hot morning on the Harbor Freeway.  I’ve had two fender-benders since (one my fault, one not); both involved drivers of other ethnic groups.   And in neither of those instances were harsh words exchanged about our respective backgrounds!

I am quite confident that my experience has not been all that unusual.  (This is not to deny the reality of racism, a reality to which I confess I am often blind.  I know damned well that I can play the "surface street game" with relative impunity because I am white.  I can drive up and down South 167th street more easily than a black man can drive up and down Charleville Avenue in Beverly Hills.  One of us is a heck of lot more likely to be pulled over than the other!)  There are millions of folks in this county in interracial relationships like mine, who have successfully (if not effortlessly) blended our families and our kitchens and our workplaces and our bedrooms.  And in reference to the film’s opening conceit, we sure as hell don’t need to crash into each other just to feel some human contact!  But when we do crash — by accident, thanks — most of us manage to resolve the problem without resorting to ugly caricatures.

I won’t say I’ve been "everywhere", but I’ve done a fair amount of travelin’ in my day, across this state, the country, and the globe.  And with the possible exception of Cape Town, I can’t think of a place I’ve been to where racial harmony amidst tremendous diversity is so evident as it is in my beloved adopted home of greater Los Angeles.  When I think of how "Crash" may have only reinforced the stereotypes of L.A. that outsiders have, I’m angry and grieved.

I’m also mildly grieved by a late Man U goal that has robbed Wigan.  I think I’m ready to teach my night class!

Home sick, and an Oscar disappointment

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 6, 2006
in Class, Ethnicity, Movies, Politics and Race
. 9 Comments

Yesterday morning, both my wife and I woke up with food poisoning.  Hers was mild, mine fairly severe.  It knocked me flat, and though I feel better this morning, am not in shape to teach just yet.

I am going to campus later today to hold office hours and teach my evening class.  I hate cancelling classes without warning.  I know that plenty of students rejoice when they see the little blue or green "class cancelled" notices posted on the classroom door, but I still feel bad that so many make the trip to the college for nothing.  In  the event that students in my 12 noon or 1:35PM classes are reading this — you folks are off today.  Tonight and tomorrow will be as normal.

I was so out of it that I was forced to sleep through most of the Oscars, which was a real disappointment.  I was right about the screenplay, actress, and director awards, but deeply disappointed that "Crash" won best picture.   A film with a few moving and melodramatic scenes, "Crash" left me — and lots of other Southern Californians — saying "This is not a Los Angeles I recognize."  I don’t live in splendid Pasadena isolation, either.  I’ve lived in the LA area for seventeen years, in nine different zip codes (from Culver City to Altadena, Santa Monica to Van Nuys) and four different area codes.  I’m in a happy inter-ethnic marriage that doesn’t simmer and bubble with racial tension, and I teach at a majority-minority college.  I have never once had a racial confrontation in Los Angeles– not even in those explosive days in April 1992.   I "bought" Brokeback Mountain; I "bought" Good Night and Good Luck — hell, I bought every second of A History of Violence; Crash didn’t resonate for me at all, despite some impressive individual performances. 

Kenneth Turan’s devastating piece in this morning’s Times captures my feelings perfectly:

I do not for one minute question the sincerity and integrity of the people who made "Crash," and I do not question their commitment to wanting a more equal society. But I do question the film they’ve made. It may be true, as producer Cathy Schulman said in accepting the Oscar for best picture, that this was "one of the most breathtaking and stunning maverick years in American history," but "Crash" is not an example of that.

I don’t care how much trouble "Crash" had getting financing or getting people on board, the reality of this film, the reason it won the best picture Oscar, is that it is, at its core, a standard Hollywood movie, as manipulative and unrealistic as the day is long. And something more.

For "Crash’s" biggest asset is its ability to give people a carload of those standard Hollywood satisfactions but make them think they are seeing something groundbreaking and daring. It is, in some ways, a feel-good film about racism, a film you could see and feel like a better person, a film that could make you believe that you had done your moral duty and examined your soul when in fact you were just getting your buttons pushed and your preconceptions reconfirmed.

So for people who were discomfited by "Brokeback Mountain" but wanted to be able to look themselves in the mirror and feel like they were good, productive liberals, "Crash" provided the perfect safe harbor. They could vote for it in good conscience, vote for it and feel they had made a progressive move, vote for it and not feel that there was any stain on their liberal credentials for shunning what "Brokeback" had to offer. And that’s exactly what they did.

A long post about liberal white men and apologies

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 27, 2006
in Ethnicity, Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Race and Sexuality
. 51 Comments

There’s been a lot of discussion in the feminist blogosphere about this February 13 post at Definition: "An Open Letter to All the Liberal, Straight Men."  As the comments below the post make clear, the author struck a nerve.

Most days, I don’t like describing myself as "liberal" or "straight".   My background in socialism makes me reflexively uncomfortable with the term "liberal", because I still associate it with 19th century ideas about free markets and the moral superiority of bourgeois capitalism.  In the debased modern sense of the term, I suppose it’s accurate enough for me.

I’m even less enamored of the word "straight."  The opposite of "straight" is "bent", or "broken", and I don’t like to imply that my brothers and sisters in the GLBTQQ community are either of those things.  And, as my friend and hero Richard Mouw has pointed out, I’m not that sure that when it comes to sexuality, any of us are really "straight"!  When it comes to our sexual desires, most of us have all kinds of nooks and crannies and "brokennesses".  I may be a heterosexual man, but Lord knows, I am not straight.   God writes straight, but I’m just one of many crooked lines he’s using to do so, and so are most folks I know.

But I digress.

I had a "yes, no, and hmmm" response to the open letter. Here’s what I liked: the author asks men to resist derailing feminist discussions by talking about the various ways in which males also suffer in contemporary society:

So, first of all, it doesn’t all revolve around you. If I am discussing sexism or the unique difficulties women face, I can understand and appreciate the frustrations that men also grapple with in our society. Really, the problem isn’t so much men and women as the fact that all powerful institutions want to make everyone feel worthless, so that we will do whatever they tell us to. But, for now, I am talking about women and women’s unique position in the world, and it is not about the big picture. It is about us. About me. Your tangents derail the conversation and shift the focus so that the issues I want to raise are ignored. This is the problem.

This is symptomatic of a greater issue: the fact that men are trained to keep the focus on themselves. It’s not the conscious insecurity of the male ego which causes this to happen, but rather, the result in living in a culture which focuses on men the majority of the time. When attempting to give women equal time, and an equal voice, the fifty-fifty split (or, since this doesn’t exist yet in reality, even the attempt to approach it) seems unbalanced and skewed to the minds of many men. Women trying to have an equal voice seem to be silencing the men, simply because the men are not the ones currently talking about the current topic.

Resist the urge to assert yourself in defense of the male voice. We’ve already heard it, and doubtless we will hear it again. Save it until we’re finished. Do it somewhere else.

That’s right on.  Many well-intentioned "liberal and straight" (and some not-so-liberal or straight) fellas I know do tend to enter a discussion about sexism as if it’s an Olympic competition.  If women are to be awarded a "gold medal" for suffering, some men want to ensure that they at least make it on to the podium.   They change the subject of the discussion to the various hardships that straight white men face, and while perhaps acknowledging that these aren’t as severe as those faced by their sisters, these guys still demand at least a bronze or a silver medal in the "suffering Olympics."   It’s an understandable, but tedious strategy.

One reason why so many "nice and liberal" men tend to try and derail feminist discussions is that they are eager and anxious to prove that they "aren’t like other guys."  Too often, young (potential) pro-feminist men seek to establish their bona fides by stressing the various ways in which they happen to be "exceptions to the rule."   One way these guys think they’ll establish their feminist credibility is by explaining that they too know what it’s like to suffer from sexism and stereotyping.  The goal is not always to derail the feminist discussion, but rather to win approval and acceptance.

But saying "Yeah, I understand, but I’m a victim too" doesn’t help the feminist cause.  Men do need to do the vital work of coping with their own very real issues, but we can’t do that by introducing them into a feminist setting.  What we need to do is create specific spaces — like men’s studies classes — for focusing in on the myths, structures, and social obligations that create the "masculine mystique."  We need to find healthy ways to express our very real pain and frustration — and we need to express that pain to other men.  Too often, traditional definitions of manhood force men to only open up to women, thus burdening our wives, girlfriends, sisters and daughters with doing our "feeling work" for us.  While we should indeed share our truest selves with the women in our lives, we need to do more of our emotional work with other men — and not make as many demands on the emotional energy of women, energy that might better be spent elsewhere.

So, in a round-about way, that’s a big "yes" to the letter.  But I have a big "no" too.  The author writes, near the end of her piece:

If you aren’t guilty of the offenses I’ve outlined, you aren’t defensive about it. You’re one of those guys who reads the whole list and nods along and then genuinely apologizes for your gender (while not feeling the need to defend yourself by insisting you do not represent these men).

No.

I don’t believe that any of us, ever, ought to apologize for the actions of others.   I’ve never apologized for all the lousy things men have done to women, or whites have done to blacks, or what-have-you.   We don’t overcome sexism by imposing collective guilt on any particular group.   That doesn’t mean that most men don’t have plenty to apologize for!  We can apologize for all those times we let a sexist remark go unchallenged, because we were too scared of losing the approval of other guys to speak up.  We can apologize for the times we have failed to listen, truly listen, to the pain and grief and anger that the women in our lives have tried to express to us.  We can apologize for the many things we have done or said that have dehumanized our sisters, and we can apologize for what we have left undone.  Frankly, there’s plenty in our own lives for which we need to take responsibility.  But there’s no need, not ever, to issue apologies on behalf of an entire class of human beings.   Though as men we experience privilege collectively by virtue of being men, we must accept responsibility for changing our lives individually.  Blanket apologies won’t do.

In my opinion, men don’t ever need to be made to feel ashamed merely for being men.  We must be quick to identify those ways in which we fall short, and we must be better about taking responsibility for our own actions — and our failures to act.  But it is no crime to be male.  We are not complicit in the great crime merely because we possess a Y chromosome; we become complicit through our own choices, our own deafness, our own selfishness, our own cowardice.  The pro-feminist goal is to help men feel more powerful, not through their ability to dominate, but through their ability to effectively relate as loving equals to women.

In the end, progressive pro-feminist men need to do a better job of truly hearing what our wives and sisters are telling us.  But we also need to do a better job of identifying the sources of our own frustrations and disappointments, and we need to do that in community with other men.   Adding to the emotional burden that our wives and mothers and sisters already carry is not acceptable; learning to tell the truth to other men is.

A Wednesday reflection on race and sexuality

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 8, 2006
in Race, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 148 Comments

We’ve moved my boxing classes to 5:15AM.  This gets me to the office earlier in time to post!

One of my regular readers, Catty, pointed me to this forum and asked me for my thoughts.   The forum contains a long series of rants about Japanese women, particularly those who date gaijin (Western men).  Catty is a Japanese-American woman, and writes in response to the threads at the forum:

I was just wondering, as you are very much a feminist, about a lot of  the stereotyping that goes on, especially regarding asian women.   It’s a combination of sexism and racism, and it’s often perpetrated  by Americans and Europeans that go to asia and come back with stories  of sex tourism or experiences that label asian women in the most  offensive manner.  It’s also interesting to see how many of the guys  that get disenchanted by asian women spout the same tired rhetoric…  like "I thought they were nice (culturally the Japanese can be very  polite), but they’re just uppity users"… somewhat similar to the  MRA rhetoric.

I read through the forum, and thought instantly of Joshua Dearing, who maintains his "Ameriskanks" web page (and its infamous MRA forum).  Dearing vastly prefers to date Japanese women (or any non-American woman), and explains why in tedious detail on his site.  I won’t quote it, but you can read to your heart’s content.

Reading through the forum thread that Catty sent, I was reminded of my days as an undergrad at Berkeley.  Cal in the 1980s had a substantial Asian student body, and white male/Asian female relationships were ubiquitous.  What was noticeable, of course, was that white female/Asian male relationships were far, far less common — so rare that folks on world-weary Telegraph Avenue would actually turn around and stare when they saw such a couple.   Of course, this disparity was the subject of endless conversation and debate.

I remember the rage of my Japanese-American roommate my sophomore year.  He had a twin sister with whom he was reasonably close, so I saw quite a bit of them together.  His sister had a series of white boyfriends, which her brother didn’t mind.  What he did mind was that he — and many of his Asian male friends — were victims of a double standard.  "You white guys all think my sister is so exotic and sexy", he complained, "But very few white girls think Asian men are hot.  We are always seen as asexual nerds, while our sisters are these incredibly desirable geishas."  I’m told that in the last few years, this has started to change, and we are seeing more white female/Asian male relationships flourishing on college campuses and elsewhere, but in the mid-1980s when I was at university, the disparity was overwhelming.

And to be frank, many of the white guys I knew did have a whole set of fantasies and expectations that they brought to these relationships.   Even in progressive Berkeley, they had the stereotype of the submissive Asian female who would make her boyfriend "feel like a real man."  Many of these guys had similar stereotypes about Latinas — they joked about the "fiery" and "spicy" women they were sleeping with.  And not surprisingly, very few white men in college dated black women; like white female/Asian male relationships, those seemed virtually taboo for any number of reasons.

Even after all these years, I confess I sometimes have a hard time with Asian female/white male relationships.  I have to fight the overwhelming urge to be judgmental towards the white guy, assuming that he is living out some sort of fantasy.   I’m a white fella married to a woman of mixed race (African-Colombian-Croatian, and depending on where she is, she can pull off being seen as black, Latin, or white).  So of course, I have no moral objection to interracial relationships!  But something in me still gets a bit suspicious when I see a young white fellow dating an Asian gal.  For whatever reason, I still can’t shake the kneejerk response that he is (like Joshua Dearing) fetishizing an ideal of submissiveness and exoticness.  The fact that I don’t believe the stereotype about Asian women doesn’t mean that I’m still not enormously troubled by men who do.  This is unfair of me, I realize — and trust me, I’m workin’ at it.

At the heart of that suspicion, I’ve come to realize, is that I worry that some American men are seeking out foreign women (not just from East Asia) because they are too intimidated by American women (of any ethnic group.)  Joshua Dearing, for example, doesn’t seem to fetishize Japanese women per se; what attracts him are women who are (he hopes and imagines) unexposed to Western feminism.   Scroll down on his site for a vivid comparison image that expresses this view.  While some Western men embrace the challenge of adapting to increasingly egalitarian gender roles, others long for control and power, hoping to find in foreign women an eagerness to please and a willingness to silence their own voices for the sake of a man.  And thus, while I am working hard to overcome what may be an unfair suspiciousness about all Asian female/white male relationships in this country, my contempt for those men who seek out foreign brides (or who participate in sex tourism abroad) remains strong and pure. 

And above all, all of this is a healthy reminder that those of us who support radical equality for women must keep a global focus, not resting until our sisters from Colombia to Cambodia to Chad have a sense of themselves as independent, autonomous, truly equal human beings.

Hugo’s “white boy teaching outfit”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 2, 2006
in Class, Clothing and Fashion, Ethnicity, Men and Masculinity and Race
. 34 Comments

I’m close to two colleagues of mine, one male and one female; one Latino and one African-American.  I’ve been teaching today in a mustard color Banana Republic t-shirt and blue jeans, and as I was walking back to the office from class just now, I passed these two colleagues in the hall.  As we exchanged wishes for a good weekend, one said to the other "There goes Hugo in one of his ‘white boy teaching outfits.’" 

The other laughed, and I joined in — but now I’m a bit bewildered as to what they meant.  (Several students overheard, by the way.)  I do tend to prefer a casual style (albeit a tight-fitting one), but I’m not at all sure what that has to do with race.  Is it some sort of veiled reference to white male privilege, where a white guy can feel comfortable wearing anything while a professor of color needs more formal attire?   Given that my dress style is often one more commonly associated with gay men, was there a homophobic slur in there as well?

Am I just over-thinking this?  Should I not wear mustard?

Any thoughts?

A note on immigration and women

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 10, 2006
in Class, Ethnicity, Family, Links, Politics and Race
. 2 Comments

Good article this morning in the New York Times: More and More, Women Risk All to Enter the United States.

Some women cross simply to keep their families together and join their husbands after long separations, a situation that has grown more pronounced since the Border Patrol agency began stepping up enforcement 10 years ago. With the border more secure in California and Texas, many people are now being funneled into the rugged territory of Arizona - an effort that virtually requires the help of an expensive coyote to cross successfully.

Yet a growing number of single women are coming not to join husbands, but to find jobs, send money home and escape a bleak future in Mexico. They come to find work in the booming underground economy, through a vast network of friends and relatives already employed here as maids, cooks, kitchen helpers, factory workers and baby sitters. In these jobs, they can earn double or triple their Mexican salaries.

"It remains a story about family reunification, but the proportion of women coming to the U.S. who are not married and working full time has gone up substantially," Professor Donato said. "So we see the single migrant woman motivated by economic reasons coming to the United States that we saw very little of 30 years ago."

It will be interesting to see how — and if — this changes the face of immigration policy.  In urban Los Angeles, we tend to think of undocumented workers as being overwhelmingly male — because it is exclusively male faces we see gathered around lumber yards and construction sites, soliciting work.  But those images clearly don’t tell the whole story.

I’ve had about a dozen students in recent years tell me that they were undocumented.  All but one was female; all but three were from Mexico (the others were from the Philippines, Armenia, and Guatemala.)  The key trick for them is getting financial aid.  Though undocumented students in California, Texas, and other states are eligible for lower "in-state" tuition, that doesn’t solve all financial problems.  In-state tuition, as well as books and housing, can be prohibitively expensive.  There are very few resources for undocumented students, but this MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund) site (in PDF format) has an excellent list of private scholarships for those without papers.

More on teaching and trying to do a better job

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 9, 2006
in Class, Race, Teaching and Vanity
. 8 Comments

In the comments below my previous post about grading disparities and race, La Lubu asks:

…what do you do, as a teacher, to reach out to students from disadvantaged/noncollegiate/struggling backgrounds? How do you communicate to them what it takes to get an "A" in your course, and is this being understood? I hope that doesn’t sound too presumptous, but some teachers simply assume that everyone "knows" what "A" work looks like—and hell, that can vary from teacher to teacher, anyway. Do you encourage students who come from struggling backgrounds to meet with you, discuss their work, and come up with solutions to possible problems that they are having with their assignments? In other words, do you make it clear to your students that you are an ally in their education, not an adversary?

Those are challenging questions.

Sometimes, I think of the job of a teacher as being analogous to that of a football coach.  And as many folks know, conventional wisdom divides good coaches into two categories: great strategists and great inspirers.  The former are often not particularly charismatic, but they have an extraordinary gift for designing the right play.  They are meticulous about planning, and they know the strengths and the weaknesses of their player personnel intimately.  On the other hand, the great inspirers are often not as strong on strategy — but they rely on their motivational skills.  They are skilled at using emotion to drive their athletes.

At the risk of hubris, I know I’m a good inspirer.  But I’m not nearly as good a teacher as I ought to be.  For years and years, I’ve worked on two key aspects of my profession: lecturing and one-on-one mentoring.  I think I’m fairly proficient at both.  I don’t use notes, and can — on command — deliver what I believe to be a compelling and interesting narrative lecture on the AIDS crisis, Bismarck’s alliance system, or the fall of the Roman Republic. I’ve had years and years of practice in the classroom, and years of drama classes before I ever came to the college.  My student evaluations may offer many criticisms, but "boring" and "inarticulate" aren’t two of them.

But I’ve still got so much to do when it comes to helping students, particularly those who are struggling with college work, to be more successful. I know how to give motivational speeches — I’m less clear on how to provide specific tools to help kids fulfill their goals.  Oh, I’ve been to literally dozens of workshops on learning styles, teaching English Language Learners, and so forth.   Though I often make fun of folks who get degrees in education degrees ("Lord, save us from the Ed.Ds"), I admit that some of that derision is misplaced.  Despite the heavy jargon of their professional journals, a lot of the ed people have devoted their lives to studying how students learn — something that I haven’t done.  Perhaps it’s time to give some of their ideas another try.  My bookshelf groans with teaching manuals I haven’t read in years.  (This widely-read classic is my favorite, and I admit it has helped.)

I love teaching and interacting with students.  But while I think I’m doing a good job on the motivational side of the ledger, I suppose I could be doing still more to help my underperforming students do better work.  I always stress that I’m available in office hours, but my experience has been that the students who tend to utilize office hours the most are the "best and the brightest".  They’ve already figured out that coming to talk to their profs is a good idea on many levels, and they are quick to ask questions as to how they can improve.  I’m eager to work with those who visit me, but in that sense I’m once again like the football coach, devoting the bulk of my time to working with the "first string" while spending less time with the back-ups and the bench-warmers.

I suppose I could, ala Luke 14:23, "compel them to come in".  I once tried to make visiting me in office hours mandatory for everyone — but with 280-320 students per semester spread over 7 classes, that proved impractical.  I’m thinking about getting folks to meet with me in groups of 3-4 once or twice a semester, but experience suggests that it will be the students who need help least who will be the first to seek it out, and the most likely to participate enthusiastically when they do come to office hours.

I daydream, often, of how much better a teacher I could be if I had a smaller teaching load.  If I had only three classes a semester, and no research load, I could meet individually with each student to talk about their strengths, weaknesses, fears, and expectations.   This is the great frustration of teaching, a frustration I know is shared by others in this profession.  Most of us, no matter how good we are, are keenly aware of the myriad ways in which we could be better, of the various ways we could do more — if we had fewer students, if we had more time, if we had more energy.  The wise teachers learn to accept that they won’t be able to rescue — or inspire — everyone.  But they don’t let the knowledge of certain failure in so many cases lead to despair or apathy.

I met three new classes today, and I was giddy with excitement.  I’m still so blessed and privileged to do what I do.  I know I’m pretty damn good at my craft, and yet I’m keenly aware I could be still better, still more approachable, still kinder, still more creative, still more committed to the emotional and intellectual growth of the people whom I teach.

A dilemma, and a request for input

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 9, 2006
in Class, Ethnicity, Race and Teaching
. 23 Comments

Well, here’s an ethical dilemma with which I’d like some help.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been quietly keeping track of the ethnic and gender breakdown of my students and the grades they receive.  I do this informally, mind you, and up until now I’ve kept the results entirely to myself.

But I’ve noticed some trends, trends that may speak to my teaching style and unconscious prejudices as well as to the varied levels of preparedness of my students.  But it’s such an explosive issue, that I am not sure I should put my own data out there.  I’m not worried for my job — I have tenure, and proving a bias case against me would be near impossible.  I’ve got data to back up all my grading decisions.  But there’s no question that while I consciously bend over backwards to grade fairly, some groups are more likely to receive As than others.

I’m aware that class and social background often has a racial or ethnic dimension.  I’m aware of the suggestion, widely discussed in recent months, that young men of all races are often less well-prepared for college work.  And my own grading patterns seem to back that up.  I’ve discussed my grading trends with other faculty members, who report similar results.  This helps me realize that if it is bias on my part (which I don’t think it is), I’m hardly alone — at least three of my colleagues report similar results from their students.

Here’s my question:

Given that I have students who read this blog, is it a bad idea to disclose the data?   While I think there’s some potential for fruitful discussion on this issue, especially when it comes to thinking up solutions, I’m worried about the impact on my current and future students.  I want each person who enters my class to be certain that he or she will be graded solely on his or her work, not on sex or race.  (And of course, I have A, B, C, and F students from every background — I am talking broad generalities rather than hard and fast rules.)  Is it possible that I could do real harm — emotional or legal — by mentioning that certain groups are statistically more likely to earn As?

I’d like to hear some thoughts, and I’ll talk about it with some colleagues before I go forward with a post about my findings.  Right now, I’m leaning against putting the statistics out there, but I’m not firmly decided yet.  Polite input is appreciated.

Wednesday links

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 4, 2006
in Colombia, Feminism, Links, Politics and Race
. 2 Comments

Pasadena is a madhouse today with the Rose Bowl game ("the game of the millenium") kicking off tonight at 5:00PM just a mile or so from home.  Yes, we’re going.  I’ll be in full Trojan regalia, my UCLA degrees notwithstanding.   Among other things, love conquers grad school allegiances.

To begin with, a couple of quick links:

Issue 6 of the Carnival of the Feminists is up today at Reappropriate.  Many good links to be found there.

A troubling story about Afro-Colombians and the drug wars.   Racial prejudice is alive and well in Colombia, and the most vulnerable targets of narco-traffickers, guerilla forces, and government troops are  indigenous groups and blacks.  According to the article, of all the world’s nations, only Sudan today has more internally displaced people than Colombia.  As many of my readers know, my wife is of Afro-Colombian heritage; we’ve gone down to South America twice in recent years to spend time with her family in a remote and troubled region.  After much pressure from the Congressional Black Caucus, a tiny portion of US aid to Colombia is being directed to meet the needs of internally displaced Afro-Colombians — but that portion pales in comparison to the massive amount of military aid being sent down.  Then again, my wife’s family (whose exact location I won’t disclose for obvious reasons) are ardent supporters of the hard-line, pro-American administration of President Alvaro Uribe, as are most folks in their small and impoverished community.

Jill has a long and powerful follow-up to yesterday’s post about beauty, women bloggers, and trolls.  She kindly links to my post on the subject.

Also on the subject of looks, female bloggers, and sexuality, read this excellent offering from Barb Howe: Books, their Covers, and the Consequences.  She manages to combine both feminist analysis with writing about Colombia, so the need to link is overwhelming!

Andrea has a long and interesting post On Chivalry, with some points I’d like to respond to soon.

Some quick thoughts on feminism as a “white girl thing”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 1, 2005
in Ethnicity, Feminism, Pasadena City College, Race and Teaching
. 70 Comments

I learned from Amanda that today is "Blog Against Racism" day.

I’ve touched on race many times in previous posts, but I’ve been stumped trying to think of ways to address the topic this morning.  I’d like, I suppose, to marry the issue to my favorite secular topic, feminism.

I’ve been teaching women’s history here at PCC for a decade.  During those years, the percentage of the student body identified as "white" has dropped from around 25% in 1995 to just over 15% today.  I’ve noticed the change in my classes; I had one section of History 1B (Modern Europe) last year where every single one of my students was either Asian or Latina/o.  No whites, no blacks.  But I’ve always had a diverse mix in my women’s history courses, though whites have never constituted an outright majority.

I write this because, over the years, I’ve read in countless student journals that feminism is "a white thing."  Time and time again, I’ve heard from young women of color that their peers and families associate feminism with "trying to be white".  Over and over again, my Latina and African-American students report being told by male peers in particular that their time and energy ought to be flowing towards building ethnic solidarity, not a "sisterhood."  In a majority-minority setting like Pasadena City College, this perception of feminism as being a movement for white middle-class women is one of the most destructive myths I have to combat in the classroom.

I’m quite honest about the fact that in the past, there has been a racist tinge to certain strands of the American feminist movement.  All one has to do is look at the post-Civil War split among suffrage activists over the issue of granting votes to black men, and it becomes evident that the women’s movement has played the "race card" from time to time. 

But the real racism of the contemporary women’s movement lies in the perceived contempt of mainstream feminism for traditional culture.  For example, on more than one occasion in my classes, I’ve had to intervene as white female students launch sweeping denunciations of Latin or black men.  There’s an oft-spoken assumption by many of my white students that white men are "less macho" and thus "more evolved".  Many of my female students of color are thus put in the awkward position of "having to choose" between solidarity on the basis of sex and solidarity on the basis of culture and ethnicity.  This forced choice is not something their white sisters often understand.

Here on campus, we have a Black Students Association.  We have MEChA.  We have countless organizations for various Asian groups.  But on a campus that is 56% female, we do not currently have a viable women’s group.  I’ve seen many of my best and brightest female students, young women of color, pour their time and their energy into ethnically-based activities while showing little or no interest in doing gender-based work.  I ask them, again and again, whether they consider racial discrimination or sexual discrimination to be the greater obstacle in their lives.  Most say racial discrimination, even after I point out that as women, they have an infinitely greater chance of being sexually assaulted because they are female than they do of being lynched by the Klan because they aren’t white!

It’s clear that feminists and their pro-feminist allies need to do a better job of reaching both young men and young women of color.  We do have to be brutally  honest about both the overt and the subtle racism that has tinged the movement in decades past.  And above all, we have to be very careful not to put women in the position of being forced to choose between their culture and their sex!  Too often, the message that my students hear sounds like this:  "You can either live up to the expectations of your culture, or you can be a feminist, but you can’t be both."  Faced with that false dichotomy, most young women of color will choose their cultures; after all, doing so means staying in relationship with their families and men of their own ethnic background.    Too often, we make feminism sound like a life of lonely isolation from one’s family of origin.

We who do feminist work, particularly in majority-minority settings, need to listen to the unique frustrations of young women of color.   Those of us who are white and do this work, as I do, must be especially mindful of our language — it is all too easy for me, I know, to seem casually dismissive of traditional values that are of particular importance in certain cultures!  We must constantly tinker with the feminist message, not to "dumb it down" or weaken it, but to make it more appealing to those who don’t feel represented and included in the feminist story.  And, while never compromising our bedrock convictions about women’s equality and dignity, we need to become more mindful of the great value many women of color place on their unique cultures.  If we’re going to do a better job of reaching an ever-more diverse group of young women, we must stop presenting a message that demands a "false choice" between embracing feminism and embracing one’s heritage.

A note on “types”, attraction, and feminism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 29, 2005
in Body, Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Race, Relationships and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 20 Comments

I got an interesting email last week in response to this recent post on dating.  A reader who asked not to be identified (I’ll call him "Malcolm") wrote a lengthy note on the subject of the dating in the college/graduate school world.  With his permission, I’m quoting a paragraph from his note in which he discusses the interplay of his attraction to certain "types" with pro-feminist principles:

What I don’t like… is that I’ve become shallower in terms of who I go after - when other information is unavailable, appearance makes up the difference. Near the beginning of the year, I mentioned the physical type for which I had the greatest weakness, but mused that it had little or no predictive value for whom I might eventually pursue. Looking over the past year, every dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed girl with whom I had reasonable contact in (Large Public University Town) became a "person of interest". Those of paler hue did not attract my interest at the same rate. I’m not sure if that is actually a problem, but it’s an effect I doubt most feminists would approve of.

Malcolm had many other good and interesting things to say, but I want to focus in a bit on this.

There’s a widespread and patently false assumption that a heterosexual man who embraces feminist principles ought not to have a "type" to which he is drawn.   Indeed, one of the issues that I see coming up in men’s discussion groups over and over again is the problem of physical attraction.  Can one really be a pro-feminist if one is attracted to women based upon their looks?  If one is more attracted to thin women, or blondes, or Asians, or whatever, do these specific attractions vitiate one’s principles?  Many young men I’ve worked with think that in order to be an authentic feminist, a man must be only interested in a woman’s mind, a woman’s heart, a woman’s spirit.  According to this line of thinking, to be too attracted to a woman’s body, or to find one type of body more attractive than others, is evidence of an insufficiently evolved pro-feminist mentality!

Here’s where a simple-minded pro-feminism risks turning into gnosticism.  The gnostics rejected the idea of the body as good, seeing it as a prison for the soul.  Various gnostic heresies continue to abound, and I’ve met some folks on the fringes of the feminist world who still cling to it.  They look at the sexual exploitation of women in our intensely visual culture, and they long for a world where women are seen separately from their flesh.   Dating and mating decisions, they maintain, should be based on intellectual, emotional, political, and spiritual compatibility — not on physical desire.   According to this small but passionate group, those who make choices even partly based on external appearance have failed to evolve sufficiently, and are victims of a corrupted, carnal culture.  And unfortunately, more than a few men and women who are trying to live with feminist principles end up feeling a nagging sense of guilt about what they believe to be their own "superficial" and "shallow" attractions.

But authentic feminism is not hostile to the body, nor to human sexual responses to the body.  Feminism does ask the hard questions about why our culture suggests only some kinds of bodies are worthy of being deemed attractive!  Feminism is critical of the extraordinarily narrow range of women’s bodies depicted as beautiful and desirable in the culture.  But there’s a difference between speaking out against the ways in which popular culture limits the definition of beauty and desire, and rejecting the idea of lust and physical attraction altogether. 

Most of us — not all — have certain physical "types" to which we are often drawn.  While I am not an arbiter of appropriate "pro-feminist behavior" (that would be a laugh!), I can’t say I’m troubled by the fact that Malcolm is attracted to dark-skinned young women.  Now, if that attraction is linked to a belief that those with darker skin might be more submissive (and knowing Malcolm, I don’t think it is), then that would be a problem.   A "type" does become a problem when certain physical attributes are presumptively linked to certain anti-feminist qualities (submissiveness, docility, and so forth).  Most feminists are rightly troubled, for example, by white men who have an "Asian fetish" that is clearly linked to fantasies about submission and sexuality.  But a man who simply prefers brunettes, without attaching any cultural baggage to his attraction, is not violating any vital feminist principle.  We are allowed our individual quirks and our individual preferences, as long as those quirks and preferences are not linked to racist and sexist assumptions that certain types of women "know how to treat a man better."

Ultimately, we are embodied people.  Both my faith and my feminism tell me that our bodies are good and worthy of pleasure and respect.  My faith and my feminism also tell me that our fallen culture sends unhealthy and limited messages about what sort of bodies are most beautiful and worthy of desire.  It is an important part of "growing up" to learn to separate our own unique wants from those that are imposed on us by our peers and society at large.  (My philosophically-minded friends will question where it is that these "original desires" come from, if not from external influences.  Pace, folks, that’s an issue better left to those more inclined to theoretical discussions of the nature of the self.  I’m not qualified or even particularly interested.)   The human family is naturally physically diverse in appearance, and I am convinced we are equally diverse — at our core — in terms of what appearances attract us.  And that’s not a bad thing at all.

A note on Cal, a movie recommendation, and a surprisingly vigorous defense of Michelle Malkin

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 21, 2005
in Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Movies, People, Race, Sports and Vanity
. 43 Comments

It’s not yet 8:00AM, but I’ve already been up three hours.  I felt well enough this morning to do some light lifting at the gym.  I expect to be back to a regular training schedule tomorrow.

It’s a short week, so there are loads of things to do. I always cancel my classes the day before Thanksgiving; the one year I did teach on that Wednesday, fewer than a third of my students showed up.  I’m mystified as to why it isn’t a holiday here at PCC; many of the local K-12 schools do give kids the extra day off.  But a two-day week, as luxurious as it is, just means more work compressed into a very short time frame.  Lots and lots of grading to do, and writing, and so on.

Two notes on the weekend:  First, my Cal Golden Bears won the Big Game against Stanford for the fourth year in a row, a streak unseen since the second FDR administration.  In my four years at Berkeley, we won only once.  For those folks who remember the famous "play" in 1982 (where Cal scored in the final seconds by running through the Stanford band), that victory came at a high price.  Over the next 19 games from 1983-2001, the Cardinal held a 14-4-1 edge over my Golden Bears.  Those were hard years indeed!

Second, my wife and I went to see "Bee Season" last night.  Starring Juliette Binoche and Richard Gere, the film has had generally positive reviews.  My wife and I split on the film — I liked it very much, she didn’t.   Kabbalah is one of the film’s themes, and that had piqued our initial interest.  One thing I can say for Richard Gere — he may not be a great actor, but he’s become darned good lately at portraying self-satisfied, middle-aged narcissists who undergo a dramatic catharsis!

And I write this morning with considerable sympathy for, of all people, Michelle Malkin.  (Hat tip: XRLQ).  The right-wing syndicated columnist, blogger, and commentator is one of my least favorite mouthpieces for the conservative agenda.  I don’t read her blog regularly, largely because I’m not one of those people who takes pleasure in being exasperated. 

But Malkin is an Asian woman, married to a Jewish man.  I’m sorry to say that far more than her white counterparts on the right, Malkin has apparently been subjected to extraordinary sexual and racial ugliness from those whose politics are close to my own.  Last February,  Malkin posted some of the criticism that regularly comes her way; most of it falls into the "yellow whore" camp of nastiness.  This weekend, she posted about it again, as the issue of her race and her marriage resurfaced when she was a guest on a radio talk show.  Malkin, the mother of a kindergartner, writes:

The racist and sexist "yellow woman doing a white man’s job" knock is a tiresome old attack from impotent liberals that I’ve tolerated a long time. It is pathetic that I have to sit here and tell you that my ideas, my politics, and my intellectual capital are mine and mine alone in response to cowardly attacks from misogynistic moonbats with Asian whore fixations. My IQ, free will, skin color, eye shape, productivity, sincerity, and integrity are routinely ridiculed or questioned because I happen to be a minority conservative woman. As a public figure, I am willing to take these insults, but I cannot tolerate the smearing of my loved ones. Because I have always been open and proud about his support for my career, my husband has taken endless, hate-filled abuse from my critics. His Jewish heritage, his decision to be a stay-at-home dad, and even his looks, are the subject of brutal mockery.

Enough.

If you have a problem with my work and what I stand for, go ahead and take me on. Keep calling me whatever four-letter-word makes you feel better when you can’t win your arguments. But leave my family alone.

Well, Michelle, I could have done without the "impotent liberals" bit, as it does knock you back off the moral high ground you’re rightfully occupying, at least on this issue!  Still, I share Malkin’s outrage even as I abhor her political positions.  As a pro-feminist progressive, I’m angered whenever a woman who chooses a public life is attacked with misogynistic rhetoric.  (Heck, I’m happy that Malkin is willing to use the word "misogyny"; some of her colleagues on the right deny that visceral hatred of women still exists anymore in public life).  As a man in a mixed-race marriage, I’m also angry when tired old stereotypes emerge around that issue, as they have in the case of the Malkins.

Though I am obviously not as public a figure as Michelle Malkin, in the past year, I’ve received several hundred "hate e-mails" and hundreds of nasty comments here on this blog.  Because I’ve taken a pro-feminist position and attacked the men’s rights movement, I’ve regularly had my masculinity questioned.  I’ve been called a "mangina" (man + vagina), "pussy-whipped", "a traitorous piece of shit", a "pathetic eunuch", and worse by dozens and dozens of readers.  In a couple of instances, I’ve been threatened — anonymously — with physical violence.  I very carefully don’t disclose my wife’s name or much about her identity, but even in relative anonymity she too has been attacked, at times with racial slurs directed at her mixed-race (African-Colombian-Croatian) heritage.

Above all, my critics use one charge more than any other: self-loathing.  Because I’m so hard on my brothers, because I am so committed to pro-feminist principles, my critics have decided that I must be seething with nearly pathological hatred of my own masculinity.  Over and over again, I’m told by my critics that if I really liked myself — as a man — I wouldn’t hold the views I do.    What’s so tiresome about the charge of self-loathing, of course, is that it is impossible to refute.  How do I prove to anyone — especially on a blog — that I am comfortable in my own male skin?  I’ve given up trying, but that hasn’t stopped the critics.

Here’s where my real empathy for Malkin lies: as an Asian woman with right-wing, anti-feminist politics, she too is tarred with the charge of "self-loathing."  She and I are both accused of actively betraying those who share our sex or our ethnicity.  Her critics assume she’s desperately currying favor with white men, while my critics assume I am eager to be validated and affirmed by women, particularly feminists.   In other words, because our views contradict cultural and social expectations, there can be no legitimate explanation for why we believe as we do.  We are either dupes of our allies (white men or feminists), or we are filled with self-hatred (for our heritage or our sex), or we are simply crass opportunists, using novelty (a woman of color with right-wing views, a straight evangelical man with pro-feminist ones) to attract attention.

If there’s one thing I am clear on, it’s this: one’s skin color, one’s heritage, and one’s sex do not, in and of themselves, impose specific political obligations.  Michelle Malkin, as a woman of color, is under no obligation to toe any party line.  She can be an interesting and effective spokeswoman for her side without being a misguided dupe, a self-hating woman of color, or a shrill manipulator.  I happen to believe that she’s wrong 95% of the time on virtually every major foreign policy, economic, and social issue of our day.  But when she is attacked not for her politics but for her person, she has not only my empathy, she has my vigorous support.

Imperial County — a second election reflection

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 9, 2005
in Politics and Race
. 3 Comments

One county that always interests me is one of the poorest in the state: Imperial County in the far southeast of California, bordering both Arizona and Mexico.  It has a very high Latino immigrant population; and overall is 72% Hispanic.  And just look at how Imperial voted!  The old truism about Hispanics being socially conservative but also fiscally liberal and pro-union is certainly alive and well!  Imperial County voted overwhelmingly in favor of parental notification (Prop 73) , on a par with the most conservative counties, but also voted overwhelmingly against all of the governor’s initiatives, following the solid union line.   Imperial also was one of the few counties in the state to pass Proposition 79, a measure bitterly opposed by big-pharma, and which would have created something closer to socialized medicine than anything we’ve ever seen before in the state.

None of the other 58 counties in the state both passed 73 and 79 by a wide margin and rejected 75 at the same time.  Given demographic trends, I think Imperial County’s results hold a warning for both left and right.  The left must realize that Latino voters,at least in inland areas, trend Republican on social issues; the right must grasp that those same voters are thoroughly Democratic on the fiscal ones.  There’s a certain Catholic consistency to this that’s quite admirable.

Dating to disappoint and the Bulworth solution

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 22, 2005
in Ethnicity, Race and Relationships
. 72 Comments

Rilina links to the Sandra Loh post, and one of her commenters notes that when she first saw the title "daring to disappoint one’s parents" she misread it as "dating to disappoint one’s parents."  Rilina replies:  "Well, many children of immigrant parents do that too. Heh."

This got me thinking.

I’ve often asked my students how comfortable their parents are with the idea of interracial, inter-religious dating.  (I usually ask this question in the gender studies courses as the topic of race emerges.)  The results are predictable.  Very few of the native-born white kids think their parents would mind if they dated someone of another race.  (To be more precise, I’ve never had a white male claim his parents would be upset if he were to date — or marry — a non-white person, but I have had a few white female students admit their parents would be distressed if they brought home a young black man.)   My Latino students generally report that their parents would prefer another Hispanic, but would be comfortable with their child dating someone white, but not black.  My more recent immigrants, particularly Asians and Armenians, almost imvariably report that their parents would be extremely distressed if they dated, much less married, outside of their culture.

This is where my own white liberalism blinds me so!  I get very, very angry when I hear of parents forbidding their children to date someone because they didn’t meet the right ethnic profile.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s pure unadulterated racism.   Real tolerance must be about more than being willing to share public space with folks of other ethnicities, it must also be about the willingness to welcome them into one’s family and rejoice when they become the spouses of one’s children and the parents of the grandkids.  I’m convinced that that’s true, and I admit I see interracial/interethnic marriage as a fundamental social good.  How else can we fully eradicate racial and ethnic prejudice save through mixed marriages?

One of my favorite movies ever made (I own it and watch it over and over) is Warren Beatty’s brilliant Bulworth.   Beatty’s character Sen. Jay Bulworth, in the middle of a television interview with a newscaster named Connie, delivers a magnificent rap on this very subject of race (warning, expletives ahead):

Bulworth:
Rich people’ve stayed on top, dividing white people from colored people. But white people’ve got more in Common with colored people than rich people. We’re just gonna have to eliminate ‘em.

Connie:
Eliminate?

Bulworth:
Eliminate.

Connie:
Who?
Rich people?

Bulworth:
White people.

Bulworth:
Black People, too.
Brown people,
Yellow people.
Get rid of ‘em all.

Connie:
Get rid of them all?

Bulworth:
We need a voluntary, free Spirited,
compatible, open ended program of
procreative racial deconstruction.

Connie:
Uh…

Bulworth:
Everybody just got to keep fucking everybody
till we’re all the same color.

When I heard that in the movie theatre seven years ago, the audience (of mostly upscale whites, as I recall) erupted in cheers and raucous laughter.   I heard a loud "amen", and I think it may have escaped from my lips.   My liberalism was, and in some ways still is, the liberalism of the melting pot.  The historian in me and the Christian in me regard ethnic distinctives (other than food and innocuous holiday customs) with suspicion.  How can we form religious and political unity when we still hold historic allegiances to our own ethnic group, I wonder?  Isn’t Beatty’s Bulworth, for all his madcap vulgarity, absolutely right about the solution?  Aren’t those parents who are adamant that their children marry within within their ethnic and religious group enemies of progress, civilization, and a functioning civil society?  Shouldn’t kids from these parents "date to disappoint", and eventually give their parents grandkids who don’t look like them?

But I’m aware of the weakness of what can be called the "Bulworth" solution.  I know full well that the desire to retain cultural distinctives is not the same as a belief in racial superiority.  For example, for Jews and Armenians whose forebears survived genocide, the preservation of cultural identity has an imperative to it that I don’t always grasp but of which I am not unaware.   In a culture that is predominantly Anglo still, is the Bulworth solution — Hugo’s solution too — another form of well-meaning genocide? Heck, from the perspective of women of color,the Bulworth solution is also problematic.  Everybody just got to keep fucking everybody  till we’re all the same color sounds like a sensible battle cry to me.  But given the history of rape and sexual abuse of indigenous and African women by white men in this country, I’d understand if Bulworth’s rap doesn’t sound so inspiring to some of my sisters.

My generation of my family is, as I’ve written before,  practicing melting pot marriage with enthusiasm.   In recent decades, I’ve seen my cousins marry folks of Latino, Chinese, and East Indian descent.  Some very beautiful mixed-race babies have been born.  I’ll be marrying my fiancee soon, of African-Colombian-Croatian ancestry.  A generation from now, the family photos will be far browner and richer than they were a generation ago.  I celebrate that.  Nothing has been lost, from my perspective, and much has been gained.  But I’ve never known what it is to feel like a resident alien in a strange land, never known what it is to desperately try and cling to the ways of my family in a country that finds those ways alien and impenetrable and anti-modern.   The Bulworth solution excites and inspires me.  But I also wonder if that doesn’t say more about me and my whiteness (and my hero Warren Beatty) than it does about the sensibility of the solution itself.

Race and marriage

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 18, 2005
in Marriage and Race
. 18 Comments

I won’t have time to post again between today and Sunday’s show, but I will have a full wrap-up on Monday morning.  Lots of grading to do today, and if I am going to give student papers the attention they deserve, I need to take myself to a coffee shop (away from the computer and the television.)

I must credit the Stand Your Ground forum for the link to this article from the Guardian:  Whatever Happened to Sista Love?  

According to the most
recent National Survey of Ethnic Minorities, half of Caribbean-origin
men had a white partner, and 40% of Caribbean origin children had one
white parent. In contrast, 80% of Asian men had same-race partners.
"For most of us, the mixing of races is the inevitable result of
socialising in big cities," says the writer Sophie Radice. True. In
fact, white female fascination with black men, and vice versa, is as
old as slavery and stereotypes of the black male libido.

But
what is happening now is not the result of random, individual choice
but a manifestation of a rejection of black women. Sure, you hear all
the cliche rhetoric about "I don’t see colour" or "love is
colour-blind", but not even the person saying it believes a word of it.
The unfortunate bottom line is that most of these "brothers" think
their sistas are an inferior product. What makes the situation galling
is that rather than accept that’s how they see things, the men try and
come up with a thousand reasons why black women are their own worst
enemies.

This is a familiar story in the USA, but I hadn’t realized that it had also become a British phenomenon.  It’s got me thinking this morning.

My  black students are overwhelmingly women.  Outside of my gender studies classes (which are 80-90% female), my courses have roughly equal numbers of male and female students.  As far as I can tell, I have similar numbers of white men and women, Hispanic men and women, and Asian men and women.  But among African-Americans, I have at least three women for every man.  The disparity is notable.   The disparity is also notable in terms of academic achievement.   I’ve quietly kept tabs on the ethnic break-down of my grading; I note that women and men do equally well among all ethnic groups except for blacks.  I’ve never blogged this before, but running some numbers in my office last year I discovered that black women were more likely to earn high grades than any other demographic group with the exception of older (over 40) students.  On the other hand, black males were statistically less likely to earn As.   (Again, for any students who are reading this, please don’t take this as an infallible predictor of future performance!)

As a white male, I’m obviously aware that my own racial bias might play a part in this.  I’ve quietly checked out my grading patterns with a few of my colleagues, and I hear the same things.  We all have our stories of remarkably ambitious, talented, and interesting black women students.  We have far fewer stories of exceptional black men.  (I can think of a couple, but not many.)  It leaves me wondering if rather than internalized racism, it’s the "success gap" between black women and black men that’s the major culprit in black men’s rejection of their sisters as mates.  A little Internet research seems to bear this out.  See here, and here, and here.  Are black men simply intimidated by this success gap?  It’s not a question I am qualified to answer, but I find it interesting to consider.

On the other hand, we see far fewer marriages between black women and white men.    Though I zealously guard my fiancee’s privacy, I have mentioned before that she is of Afro-Colombian descent.  In the traditional language of black culture, she can "pass"; most white folks are actually surprised to discover she has considerable black ancestry.  (Black men and women seem to have a much easier time identifying her as such.  No, you don’t get a photo.).   For the record, I note with some chagrin that many people seem unduly astonished at the "racial aspect" of our relationship.  For far too many people, marriages between white men and black women remain virtually unheard of.   When people ask about my fiancee’s mixed racial heritage, I am always careful to mention the African part first, usually to quickly ferret out any hidden bigotry.  Happily, we don’t tend to run into overt racism — but we do tend to encounter some astonishment from time to time…

Off for coffee and grading.