Racism in Feminism

This is a topic that I have recently found out about and I can't decide to be horrified by the sheer irony of this situation or really just not me surprised at all. It is laughable that feminism has constantly been equated to racism (Loko Ono's famous quote, "woman is nigger of the world"yet it exists within that very movement. It is interesting how racism can pop up it's head just about anywhere and it dates back to the very inception of the feminist movement. Sojourner Truth gave a rousing speech at Seneca Falls that fell upon deaf ears.

And I call it racism using Tatum's definition of the word, because the first two waves were not interested in lobbying for the rights of all women, just the the white-middle class. But the blame lies not only with the current members of the movement, but additionally minority women have been slow to join because as Paulin Terrelonge Stone writes in "Feminist Consciousness and Black Women": 

Ethnocentrism and racism is seen in many a classic feminist work like, "The Second Sex", by Simone de Beauvoir also relies this master/slave dialogue, invoking the holy and almighty Hegel. And in characterizing slavery and its parallels to the feminist movement, de Beauvoir fails to connect with any sort of minority audience and connect the respective women's experience with sexism. Although, one could also make the argument, that in 1948, how many colored woman would have the education or socio-economic status to access such a text.

Anyways, I don't think I have anything else intelligent to add at this point I just wanted to call attention to this interesting perspective on feminism. In closing I would like to add that this lack of diversity still exists today, and just take a look the recent "slut walks".

Am I confused about ethnicity and race?

This book did not start well for me, after the first chapter on defining terms I think I had already written the book off, as her inconsistencies drove me to a state of hyperbolic state of madness ( I was looping all over the place). I find issue with her examples of racism particularly the passive form, because it has little to do with a "system  of advantage based on race", since I really do not see how laughing a racial joke is merely racial prejudice for one person, then it suddenly is racism if they are of a different color, but moreover what does laughing at a racial joke have to do with a system of advantage? I guess it depends on the joke... Additionally, she distinguishes between racial identity and ethnic identity, defining the latter as a group that is based upon cultural criteria such as language, customs, and shared history, but she doesn't define racial identity or truly distinguish between the two. To me, saying that I am partially black has little to do with my actual skin tone and more with the implied shared history and potentially assumed language and cultural customs. I feel in much of the book what she describes as race is actually ethnicity and she is rather confused herself. It seems that it is ethnicity which is central to much of what she is discussing rather than race. For example when she talks about the development of a racial identity, she says, "the black child absorbs many of the beliefs and values of the dominant white CULTURE...", how exactly is this racial identity development if we are discussing culture? Countless more examples are abound, like the development of an oppositional identity, where the individual goes out of their way to be more "black", are they going out and tanning to get darker? They are purposely displaying more customs and language, which sounds to me like ethnicity once again.

Is Snoop Dogg black or "Black"

The reason that I care so much is that, then the term racism is being misused, because much of the topics being discussed actually seem to be about ethnicity, i.e. language and custom, that it is assumed to comes along with being a certain color. Why is there this overwhelming pressure from society, even Tatum herself for a person of a certain color to come to grips with the general ethnicity that seems to come with being that color. Of course Tatum would have you believe that I am simply in denial, but what is wrong with refusing to acquiesce to the pressure of society, isn't that the trendy thing to do nowadays?  If a black kid is thrown out into the wild and grows up outside of society, are they "Black" or just black? Or are they black then when they return to society they are now "Black"?

Quitting in America

I had mentioned this in class earlier, but I had not got around to throwing this up onto my blog.

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/09/30/new-freakonomics-radio-podcast-the-upside-of-quitting/ 

Anyways I found this interesting in the context of our musings on the American Dream and maybe the whole  "pull yourself up by the boot straps" adage.  A great listen, it examines the motivations of quitting for everyone from washed up baseball players to prostitutes.

They mentioned an interesting trick being employed by the company Zappos, in which after having a week of training, they were offered $3,000 dollars to quit. Of the the thousands who the company has trained, only 30 have taken it. Then almost no one quits in the initial months after training because they’d feel like fools to quit for nothing when they could have quit for money. The cognitive dissonance would be too great. This is the power of resisted temptation.  This takes advantage of the phenomenon that when we sink a many resources into something, we will be slow to abandon it. We even convince ourselves we must love it, the same that fraternities/sororities, sports teams, and the military do to their new members. I wonder if we could somehow employ this in our efforts to find strategies for gap closure and such.

Liberal Arts Degrees for All!!!

Cosmopolitanism is not a novel concept, it predates Christ by hundreds of years and takes its name from the Ancient Greek language. Although we demonstrate quite a bit of arrogant to call our global human community a city of the universe....Kwame Anthony Appiah seeks to reenter cosmopolitanism into the discussion of how to unite a world of clashing ideas and norms, and maintains that it is revelvant, “this neglected and attractive tradition of thought deserves serious attention as a habitable middle ground between liberalism and relativism”. And he does so with simple goal of "making it harder to think of the world as divided between..."us" and them"" because conversations across boundaries will be inevitable. In doing so he will question some abstract yet simultaneously abstract yet fundamental questions like, "how real are values?" and "What do we owe strangers by virtue of our shared humanity?" At the very least, Appiah seeks to open a meaningful dialogue between cultures concerning values rather than sink to a cultural relativism, that refuses to engage with other cultures for the very fact that their perspectives are different and therefore have no place in each others' respective domains.

I may just be fan-boying this video just cuz I like it, but I think it is a great example of cultural cosmopolitism. 








From this viewpoint, Nussbaum's attempt at defining universally what a person is capable of becomes quite pertinent and potentially a vital step in linking individual communities into a global network. While the internet has already linked much of the world together, but these connections have been created in a laissez-faire manner. I feel that her capabilities approach is a noble attempt at achieving one of the goals of  cosmopolitanism, blurring the line the between "us" and them "less". Interestingly, this connects back to my previous post in which I spoke of the dehumanization of enemies by nations and more relevantly socio-economic groups. The idiom that democracies never go war with each other seems to be rooted in cosmopolitism and as such this may be the answer to that problem. So the next question is, how do we achieve this in America? Well a great first answer is in education...which we have already discussed is a problem for many constituencies in America.  Unfortunately, it is our current foreign policy, which revolves around defense of freedom via multi-billion dollar pieces of technology, that is taking precedence over the funding of our schools and hence enlightenment of Americans. So we seem to be stuck in at somewhat of an impasse. For some odd reason in America once you make it out of the primary education system into the realm of secondary education, you are in the best place to be in the world. Not all of these schools are working hard to promote this expanded worldview and dialogue extolled by Appiah, but some are, like good old UNC-Asheville and many other liberal arts schools. Many students avoid these schools looking for short-term returns on a education that perceived to be more valuable for getting a job. With the interest of forging a better world community, I suppose it is the duty of individuals like us, to spread the merits of the liberal arts experience via word of mouth and by our actions.