rivkat: Rivka as Wonder Woman (Default)
( Mar. 10th, 2009 10:50 am)
[livejournal.com profile] popfantastic’s post was really helpful to me, as a distillation of other things I’ve seen around. I have been having many of the standard white woman’s reactions to the recent discussions and fights about race in sff. I’m becoming inured to the use of “fail,” but I still cringe a little at it. And this is connected to what I’ve been trying to think about, which is how I can try to be better at my day job on issues of race. Here, my responsibilities are those of a citizen. Out there, I’m a teacher, and I don’t know how to be an ally in that role, or even how to avoid being an active part of the problem. I’ve read Beverly Tatum, which I felt helped me some, but I’m still searching for more help with graduate-level teaching.

Substance-wise, property and IP are chock-full of situations in which race, class, and gender are outcome-determinative, sometimes blatantly and sometimes less visibly, and I try to talk about those, but where I really fall down is knowing how to teach students who don’t share my background. Historically I’ve focused on increasing class participation by students of color (I’m likely to overestimate how often they participate if I’m just guessing), and it’s uncomfortable to think about other work I need to be doing. Property (the class) generally begins with conquest: Johnson v. M’Intosh, in which the U.S. Supreme Court justified the dispossession of natives on a variety of grounds. This is a big truth of property (the concept), but I taught it badly this time, and probably in ways that silenced people differentially. What I heard was students reaching the cynical conclusion “it’s all about power,” and the cynicism feels like my failure because I want them to see possibilities for change, even if it is all about power and even if pessimism is often justified. I have no idea what I didn’t hear from students who didn’t speak. I really appreciate what I've learned here, and I only hope I can figure out how to learn more in class.
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Only read Is There Anything Good About Men? if you want to be enraged. Highlights for my purposes: pits black men against middle-class white women and judges the black men better -- oops, more creative -- because there is of course only one relevant dimension in creativity, and because we have such stunningly good records of what women created that didn't find a commercial marketplace. Black women -- they don't exist in this account, it turns out. Or at least there was just no opportunity to evaluate their (lack of) creativity. Women in general are just off having babies instead, for lack of interest in other things.

Maybe it's ordinary that a psychologist doesn't know history or feminist theory (and thus thinks that feminism is the ideology that promotes women and men as natural enemies, and that sexism and oppression cannot exist in structures but only in conscious mental decisions), but it's sure depressing.

This was a speech at the American Psychological Association.
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rivkat: Rivka as Wonder Woman (save the cheerleader)
( Aug. 30th, 2007 05:46 pm)
"... it is the business of enticing Turks to violate a tenant of their religion ..."

Public/pubic one expects, but this is a nasty business indeed!

Also, I watched Bring It On: All or Nothing (Hayden Panettiere! Cheerleading! What could go wrong?) and I am sorry to say spoilers, I guess )
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