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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mi’jo and I were laughing
ha,ha,ha–
when the gum he chewed
fell out of his mouth
and into my hair
which, after I clipped it,
flew into the air,
on the back
of a dragonfly
that dipped in the creek
and was snapped
fast by a turtle
that reached high
and swam deep.
Mi’jo wondered
what happened to that gum
worried that it stuck
to the back of my seat
and Mami will be mad
when she can’t get it out.
Meanwhile, the turtle in the pond
that ate the dragonfly
that carried the hair
with the gum
swam South on Saturday
and hasn’t been seen
once since.

The subject of my past came up again recently. Two of my students were in my office on Monday. One of them, a regular reader of this blog, remarked that based on what she heard from her classmates, I still had a reputation as a professor who had slept with his students. The other student remarked that he had heard much the same thing. Both were quick to say that their classmates generally seemed to know that this behavior was in the past, but that some had their “suspicions” that I might still be up to no good, as it were. We all laughed together, and I gently assured the students that what I had once been I was no longer.

I certainly don’t advertise that I was wont to sleep with my students, but I don’t hide it from it either, for the reasons I’ve made clear time and time again. Sexual and romantic relationships between professors and students currently under their supervision are invariably unethical, regardless of the age of either the student or the professor. Relationships between professors and their former students need to be entered into with caution, particularly if the student involved is likely to be in need of a letter of recommendation or is still on the campus. And my general caution about age-disparate love affairs applies here as well. As I have said and will continue to say, for a three-year period in the mid-to-late 1990s, until I got sober in the summer of 1998, I had a series of unethical relationships with students. I deeply regret my behavior. As part of my amends to those whom I hurt, I helped write the campus consensual relations policy . And I have continued to speak out on this issue.

It has been a dozen years since I last crossed that line I ought not to have crossed. In that time, I’ve worked damn hard on good boundaries. And I’ve been a public and forceful (and, unfortunately, insufficiently humble) advocate for safe, non-sexual mentoring. I have little sympathy for those who continue to defend the indefensible exploitation of the teacher-student relationship. I was wrong, deeply so, when I slept with my students. And though it might seem wise to not mention these Clinton-era transgressions of mine again, I think there is value in pointing out the deeply problematic nature of these relationships to new generations of faculty and students, even at the risk of my own mild embarrassment.

One more link to a post I’ve written: A follow-up on student crushes — what not to do

I wrote about the subject of colleges assigning different-sex students to the same dorm room in 2006 in this post. What troubled me then was not that folks would seek out roommates of the opposite sex. What I wanted was to encourage bonding with one’s own gender. Boys who find it difficult to relate to other males; girls who’ve found relationships with other females to be characterized by competition and judgment — these were, I argued, the sort of young people who could benefit from confronting their own discomfort with living with the same sex. Rereading that post three and a half years after I wrote it, I wince at my willingness to be so prescriptive of what young people need. And while I stand by my conviction that we do need to do more to encourage some young folks to fight through their fears of bonding with those who share their biology, I’m much less willing to insist upon it.

I’m thinking about this because the Los Angeles Times, a few years late to the party, ran a front-page article yesterday on what is no longer as much of a novelty as some might imagine: Mixed-gender dorm rooms are gaining acceptance.

The number of colleges offering the option increases each year, though the total number of schools at which it is possible to room with someone of the other sex is still only about fifty. The Times profiles the situation at nearby Pitzer College (an institution to which I have seen a number of my best and brightest transfer over the years), and interviews students there and at my alma mater, Cal. (In the 1980s, the innovation at Berkeley was bathrooms shared by both sexes. After the first week, having women walk past men standing at urinals became old hat.)

What heartened me was the willingness of so many young people to separate the idea of close physical proximity from sexual intimacy. The assumption of an older generation, of course, is that the power of desire is so overwhelming that it makes uncomplicated friendship (or, simply, roommate-ship) impossible between two heterosexual young people of different genders. Read the comments after the Times story; lots of predictions of rape and distraction. The myth of male weakness raises its head in the thread over and over again.

The comment that caught my attention was this one from someone called “cmfreedom”: I guess “gender-neutral housing” means asexual. I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted! Bold is mine.

What impressed me about the young people in the article is the same thing that depressed me about cmfreedom’s remark. Our dominant cultural narrative is the discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire. We believe that men — particularly those of college-age — are so in thrall to raging hormones that they are constitutionally incapable of seeing women as anything other than sex objects. The peddlers of the discourse sneer contemptuously at those who insist that men are, in fact, are both quite capable of self-regulation and frequently not as sex-crazed as their elders believe. To claim for men the capacity to exercise control, to insist that young men do not all think about sex every seven (or sixteen, or thirty-five) seconds is to invite derision. (more…)

A reader named Catherine writes:

I was raised in a very conservative Evangelical community (as in, I never wore a pair of paints until I was in my early twenties and had to ask permission from male authority figures to go on a date with a guy.) Because of this, I entered adulthood with very concrete ideas about gender and my identity was formed within those roles. But perhaps more importantly, my sense of purpose was inextricably yoked to this gender-definition.

My break with my religious tradition was precipitated, almost entirely, by my move to feminist ideals…Becoming a feminist created for me not only an identity crisis, but also an existential and spiritual crisis. What was my purpose on this planet if not to fulfill my gender-dictated role? In the crisis precipitated by this sudden purposelessness, I floundered desperately. I lost all that I was, but was reborn into someone who I would like to believe makes an even greater contribution than I might have made had I remained within those gender roles.

What Catherine wants is more discussion about how to cope with the “existential and spiritual crises” that emerge and the loss that is often felt when one lets go of the security and certainty of traditional gender roles.

It’s more or less axiomatic that the secular feminist left has little regard for conservative Christianity and its insistence on separate spheres for men and women. It’s also true that it’s very difficult for those same secular feminists to recognize the pain and the loss that can accompany the journey from fundamentalism to egalitarianism. Why mourn one’s oppression, they wonder? Why shed tears (unless they are of joy) at wriggling out of what seems to outsiders like a confining straitjacket?

The answer goes beyond the obvious truth that we all tend to mourn the loss of youthful certainties. Traditional societies offer women clearly defined roles and responsibilities. The roles may be subservient, the responsibilities may be primarily domestic, but within the confines of the home and relationships, “traditional” women can both wield a certain kind of power and derive an undeniable sense of satisfaction. In a society that sees men as clueless when it comes to cooking or laundry, in a culture in which men are expected to be unable to care for themselves, women’s willingness to nurture is celebrated. The work may be arduous, the horizons limited, but the rewards are not mere phantasms — they are real.

In one of my many theological peregrinations, I ended up spending a great deal of time with some conservative Southern Baptists who opposed the ordination of women. One of my good friends was a young woman — with a first-rate degree from a Christian college — who made it very clear she wanted to be a “pastor’s wife.” I was in a more rightward incarnation than I am today, but not so far right that I had abandoned my feminism. I asked her why she didn’t want to be a pastor herself. We had the usual exchange of New Testament proof-texting, and after that proved (as it always does) to be a complete waste of time, she remarked to me, gently, “Hugo, you seem to think that pastor’s wives are little more than servants to their husbands” My friend, who was originally from Tennessee, remarked that the pastor’s wives she knew growing up really were co-ministers with their husbands. They counseled couples and children, discussed theology and budgets with their spouses, and were key resources for the entire congregation. “They had every bit as much power as their husbands”, my friend insisted, “they just wielded it differently.” (more…)

We are a society that has grown fond in the past decade of polemical tracts from across the political and theological spectrum. The Christian marketplace groans under the weight of books calling for reform and transformation of one sort or another. Few in the church look at contemporary Christianity and say “Yes, this is exactly what Jesus intended.” But even fewer make a coherent case for what the church ought to look like, and of those, hardly any do so with the grace and the winsomeness of Gulley.

A little over a decade ago, I read John Shelby Spong’s Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Though as a liberal evangelical, I shared most of Spong’s progressive views on sexual liberation and economic justice, I winced at the former bishop’s tone. Spong hectored and belittled those who clung to more traditional views; he couldn’t resist mocking those for whom the Virgin Birth and the resurrection were precious articles of faith — and fact. Spong did little to win the hearts and minds of traditionalists; rather, despite his good heart and his excellent politics, he became an easy target for them because of his tendency to be so relentlessly intemperate. I’ve been waiting ever since for a progressive manifesto that argued for the same end goal — but did so with a far greater respect for those who continue to hold conservative views. My wait is over. (more…)

A Message to Po Chui-I

In that tenth winter of your exile
the cold never letting go of you
and your hunger aching inside you
day and night while you heard the voices
out of the starving mouths around you
old ones and infants and animals
those curtains of bones swaying on stilts
and you heard the faint cries of the birds
searching in the frozen mud for something
to swallow and you watched the migrants
trapped in the cold the great geese growing
weaker by the day until their wings
could barely lift them above the ground
so that a gang of boys could catch one
in a net and drag him to market
to be cooked and it was then that you
saw him in his own exile and you
paid for him and kept him until he
could fly again and you let him go
but then where could he go in the world
of your time with its wars everywhere
and the soldiers hungry the fires lit
the knives out twelve hundred years ago

I have been wanting to let you know
the goose is well he is here with me
you would recognize the old migrant
he has been with me for a long time
and is in no hurry to leave here
the wars are bigger now than ever
greed has reached numbers that you would not
believe and I will not tell you what
is done to geese before they kill them
now we are melting the very poles
of the earth but I have never known
where he would go after he leaves me

I was married at 27 to my college sweetheart. This man checked all of the boxes dreamed of on the surface - doctor, boy scout-esque from a nice family - all of the family, etc. were thrilled when we were married. However, quite quickly after the wedding things fell apart and he told me essentially that he was not ready to grow-up and had to go find himself. I picked up the pieces, moved to another country with a business opportunity, and started over.

When does it become counter productive to engage in flippant relationships? Am I listening to society too much, or not enough to my gut?

Though I am fond of marriage (I’ve done it four times), I don’t think lifelong monogamous commitments are the only sort of relationships worth pursuing. I’ve come to believe, instead, that at different seasons of our life we may need different sorts of relationships to help us grow. And one of the most important kinds of relationships we can have after a divorce is with a “transition figure” who can help us process the lingering wounds and doubts that almost always remain in the aftermath of the end of a marriage.

I’m not talking about using people. I’m not talking about relying on one’s own pain as an excuse to deal cavalierly and recklessly with another human being. One basic dating maxim for grown-ups: our past history of suffering doesn’t vitiate our responsibility to avoid hurting others. It’s not enough to simply say “I’m on the rebound, watch out!” and then, having broken the heart of the person with whom we rebounded, to exclaim “What did you expect? I was on the rebound!” Nothing we’ve endured gives us the right to disregard our responsibility to consider how a sexual relationship we’re having may affect the other person emotionally. Misleading another person into believing that what is temporary might turn out to be permanent is bad form indeed, particularly for those old enough to know better.

That said, I think there’s a distinction between a “rebound” and a “transition relationship”. The difference lies in three things: our willingness to assume complete responsibility for our own actions, our honesty — in both word and deed — with the other person about what we can and can’t offer, and our own internal clarity about what purpose this relationship plays in our life. If we’re scrupulous about these things, “transitional relationships” which are time-limited but intense can be enormously healing for those who have them. (more…)

Jonah Goldberg has a piece this morning with the whoppingly patronizing title “Where Feminists Get it Right.” (Don’t get excited, folks. Hell remains unfrozen.) Jonah concludes his piece, which largely focuses on the now-familiar yet ever-depressing litany of abuses against women in the less-developed world, with this gem:

Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow. “Liberate” men from those expectations, and “Lord of the Flies” logic kicks in. Liberate women from this barbarism, and male decency will soon follow.

Give Jonah credit. He’s not blaming women directly for their failure to civilize men. Rather, he’s blaming certain cultures that fail to give women sufficient authority with which to do their civilizing. But that doesn’t change the basic problem in his argument, based as it is on pseudo-science, Victorian sentimentality about women’s “nature”, and a William Golding novel about pre-pubescent boys.

As I sigh at Goldberg’s piece, I think about an email I got from my friend Emily. She recounts a Facebook exchange she had with a female friend of hers, a fellow Christian. Em’s friend posted on her status update that she was “really disappointed w/the female human species.” When Em inquired why, and whether her friend was also disappointed in men, she got this response:

It appears as if men are weaker when it comes to sex, money, power. With that I am realizing that it is the women that should be held at a higher standard because we need to set the tone for our weak counterparts. If women looked at themselves as holy temples and didn’t allow anything less than excellence this may force men to step up their integrity and priorities…

We could go through the gospels, pointing out over and over again the places where Jesus demands that men show self-restraint comparable to that demanded by women. But I’m not just interested in responding to a fellow Christian. Rather, what concerns me here is one of the most troubling aspects of the myth of male weakness: it creates an atmosphere in which both men and women feel justified in policing other women’s behavior.

If men cannot control themselves, and women can, then it is (as Emily’s friend suggests) women’s task to set the limits for men which men cannot set for themselves. All bad male behavior, it quickly follows, is invariably a woman’s fault. We’re all familiar with the loathsome notion that a cheating husband or boyfriend deserves less ire than the woman with whom he cheated. (The “he couldn’t help it, but she ought to have known better because she’s a woman” theory). The end result is a culture of mistrust and hostility among women.

A great many of the young women I work with claim to have trouble liking other women. Call it the “most of my good friends are guys” phenomenon, which is sufficiently common as to merit a word other than “phenomenon”. Many young women — even in feminist spaces — will list the countless ways in which they have felt judged, policed, or betrayed by other women. Many will say things like “I expect men to let me down. But when a woman hurts you, it’s worse because she doesn’t have an excuse.”

The point that feminists try and make in these discussions is that the myth of male weakness is at the very root of this internalized misogyny. The logic is inescapable. The less self-control women believe men have, the less they hold men responsible. The less they hold men responsible, the more responsibility they ascribe to themselves and to other women. The less they believe in men’s capacity to self-regulate, the more hostile they are trained to become to any woman who seems unwilling to engage in the rituals of female self-policing. At its most extreme, every mini-skirt becomes not only a threat to the fragile order women have established for mutual protection, it is perceived as an act of both betrayal and hostility towards one’s sisters. The hisses of “slut”, “whore”, and “bitch” soon follow. (more…)

I learned today from a Facebook friend that Ratemyprofessors has released its 2009-2010 lists of the top profs in the country. Where I was was ranked first in 2008, I’ve tumbled to 25th. My dismay is, well, infinitesimal. Here’s the real news: the top 50 hottest professors in the USA include no fewer than seven from Pasadena City College.

The lists are compiled from student ratings across the nation for both two-year and four-year institutions. It’s worth noting that no other college or university had more than two of its faculty members selected for the top 50. The “roll of smolderingness” includes the following colleagues of mine:

#4 David McCabe, Education
#8 Russell Frank, Languages
#9 Lynora Rogacs, Philosophy — and my office-mate!
#11 Derek Milne, Anthropology (last year’s #7)
#25 your blogger, History
#38 Charlene Potter, English
#40 Tamara Arida, Sociology

Question: does this say more about the faculty — or the students — of Pasadena City College? As for me, I am proud to relinquish my title. (I have no idea what methodology made me #1 in 2008 and makes me #25 now.) But I can’t wait for Monday, when I can begin to tease my office mate (3rd hottest female professor in the country) as mercilessly as I was teased last year.

And with that, a return to serious blogging next week.