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".
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"?
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.
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.
In The Shame of a Nation Jonathan Kozol addresses a disturbing fact that poor minority students in America attend schools that are criminally underfunded, labeling this an apartheid in America.This inflammatory label implies that this gap is somehow a culturally and politically enforced, an insult to those in South Africa who endured an actual apartheid. I feel that the use of of such language is simply a way of gaining attention to his book, but more than being annoyed with Kozol's language, I feel that this diagnosis focuses on symptoms of a problem rather than the root of problem, which is not the "nation", it is as a fellow classmate mentioned, the individuals that make up this nation. This segregation speaks to the mindset of the individuals that make up this nation. I find the following Chappelle skit funny and sobering in the way that it places one stereotype in the place of another and contrasts inequalities between socio-economic groups that exist in America, and in this case, the legal system.
It is not about throwing money at the problem, which may be a good start, but it is about changing the fundamental values of Americans and the way that they engage with relationships with each other. This is a multi-component problem that is made up of relationship between individuals within these lower socio-economic groups as well as the way that the rest of the American population relates and interacts with these groups.
Despite the fact that we live in a limited democracy, I feel that the government still represents sentiments of the people and that it will get away with serving the needs of one group at the cost of another if it can get away with it. Kozol is doing some good in that he is his calling for the government to be held accountable for its decisions, a central tenet to a democracy, but at some point the people who elected these officials need to be held accountable for themselves and their viewpoints and it is this area that Kozol avoids. Wal-mart is a pertinent example, instead of just deriding Wal-Mart for its poor practices, we also hold the people that economically support it and therefore its practices accountable as well.
Historically, human reaction to other humans that they would consider enemies has been dehumanization. By making these other individuals devoid of any characteristics that they may empathize with, they can commit (or allow) the many atrocities that dot the landscape of human history.
In America today, a similar occurrence that is likely a remnant of America's twisted version of chivalry where white men had to protect white women from the animal nature of the black man, has happened or I should say has continued and extended beyond racial borders to encompass a broad socio-economic group, poor people are dangerous in America.
These people are dangerous!!!!!
With the growing gap between rich and poor, an increase gap in the reliability of the haves and have-nots has broken down further, perhaps even to the point of royalty vs. peasantry. A primary reason that the injustices that Kozol describes continue is this rift in society where somehow poor people's lives are worth less than those with all the money. The social factors that have contributed to the this extend far beyond scope of this discussion could easily likely require a book (which I am by no means qualified to write). My next piece is that rich/white people are often so quick to engage that guilt complex that is seemingly becoming more and more standard in today's population. I would posit that this reaction occurs so swiftly that it completely ignores the people that they feel "empathy" and comes right back around to the individual feeling the guilt. Then some sort of charitable contribution or action is made and that guilt recedes to the back their consciousness. (I am aware that I am lumping many people together, the same crime I may hold against others.)
In the same vein as the guilt I mentioned above, but in an opposing manner, I feel that many minority groups (I can only speak for African-Americans) are quick to lay the blame for their current status on others rather than looking to solutions to actually fix that current problem. My grandmother could have gone on being a poor sharecropper and beget another generation of alcoholic and poor negroes, but she saw a solution for getting out of the situation and drilled into her kids the importance of critical thinking and an education, despite the fact that she only made it to 8th grade herself. Since I am sitting here typing this on a Macbook Pro, writing for a class for which my parents pay out-of-state tuition, I think her message got through to my dad. Now, Dr. Hobby raised a good point the other day in class, asking if I felt that my family was an exception, and the answer is yes, but it does not have to be that way.
Empowering children at an early age with critical thinking skills, rather than teaching to a standardized benchmark is a great starting point, a part of which Kozol captures, "If the road does not lead to Rome," said a woman, "we don't want it followed." "Rome", she said, "is the examination children would be given at the end of a specific sequence of instruction."(Kozol, Pg. 111). If you blindly lead a horse to water, will it ever find it again? Thinking back to my childhood, my parents always asked me why I was doing something. What did I hope to get out a certain activity? They stressed that every decision has a consequence, whether it be positive or negative. I once told my dad that I wanted to be "free", he told me that I was free to walk to the end of the driveway and make the decision to turn right or left at my own discretion, but not to come back! While extreme, I will never forget the lesson that taught me.
I feel that we patronize kids by not allowing them to think for themselves, giving the rules to follow with some abstract consequences. I could have stayed at home, got all of my meals, clothes, my car, my college paid for or I could have left and struck it out on my own, it was purely my decision. It is obvious that others may not have the same incentives or consequences, but the approach is worth something. In the middle ages the concept of child did not really exist, rather kids were seen as little adults. Although this is also extreme, this is somewhat useful in that we stop "babying" our kids and make them understand (perhaps before becoming young adults) what is truly at stake and what they can do. This may seem harsh, but the role of the parent in nature is not to be friends with their child, but to teach them how to one day fend for themselves. No this is not bashing parenting or pointing fingers, I feel that anyone, be it a tutor, mentor, teacher, parent, etc. can do these very same things.
Yep, like many others in our class this is my first blog. Personally, I feel it a bit self-indulgent to have a page devoted to my own ramblings, but considering that it is merely a drop in the dumpster of junk that is the internet, I guess I can go right ahead.
Anyways, I liked how we began our class discussion with the meaning of life and what it meant to each of us. One of my usual problems with this topic is the ego-centric manner that we humans approach this question; that self being our individual self or collectively as humans.
Yes, Star Trek IV sums up my feelings quite nicely on this point. In the film, aprobe is causing critical damage to the Earth, almost totally ionizing the atmosphere. Spock concludes that it must be a message from an intelligent race. McCoy asks if they are saying hello to humans, but Spock points out that human arrogance assumes the message must be meant for them.
Tragically, our perspective is inherently flawed by our own existence, objectivity is an illusion, but to accept this and move beyond it, is the only way to step back from a cliff for which awaits the free-fall of nihilism. I feel that we must understand that we have limited sphere of relevance, that is minute with respect to others, like the supra-organism that is Earth.
Anyways, Erwin Schrödinger encapsulates much of the early discourse on the matter meaning, writing DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become god), similar to the Vedantic axiom Atman=Brahman. I wonder whether he had Descartes in mind as well, because this gels nicely with his musings in the Second Meditation, in which he declares, "So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind." (Med. 2, AT 7:25). So it follows that If we define our own existence, than we must define the meaning of that existence ourselves. It also kinda explains why we collectively and as individuals are unable to consistently think beyond ourselves
Examined Life I found many of the thinkers featured to be pretentious and at times disconnected with society, but I found Dr. Appiah to be refreshing. He for the most part avoided intellectual jargon and abstractionism and heads straight for what I think is the crux of our problem, we have quickly expanded beyond social structure of small groups until relatively recently to these communities that have 300 million-1.5 billion members. I agree that the problem is that we now have obligations to individuals whom we have never even met, and that is a challenging task.
I Have a Dream Foundation I am excited that programs like this exist, because I believe that influencing kids at this young and programmable, ahem excuse me, formative period, sets them up to more aggressively pursue interests outside of their immediate surroundings and have a perspective outside of there current environment. While we can talk about funding battles and the logistics of school, I strongly believe that if we plant a thirst for learning in a student's mind and a self-confidence to achieve we will have already won more than half the battle of getting "at-risk" kids into higher learning institutions without even coming near the mess of red tape that is the bureaucracy of our government.
