Why I Want to Get the Fuck out of Georgia # 278

Yesterday was white privilege day in my public speaking classes. This is always a trying day for me; blatant racism that refuses to recognize itself is present from a good number of students. How’s this for white privilege: 50 students and I had the ability to spend an entire class period talking about racism without a SINGLE black student present. (I didn’t have any last semester either). For a state with a significant black population, this is not right.

To be fair, my first class got it right away, several students took on the main points and supported them with appropriate arguments as to why white privilege is important to acknowledge. It went so well I even forgot to share my statistics of structural racism I’d prepared to support the points. The second class did not go so well…

When confronted with strong opposition to the idea, I shared some statistics including that people with “black-sounding names” were less likely to get call backs for interviews. One student got hung up on relating “black-sounding names” to “stupid-sounding names” as a way to mask her racism. Shanequa didn’t get fired because she’s black, she got fired because she has a stupid name. Are you fucking kidding me? (Apparently MS Word is racist too since Shanequa isn’t in the spell checker.)

While racism is of primary importance, I also emphasize other privileges. Before class, I have them come up with a list of 10 privileges they have for some other aspect of their identity (sexual orientation, gender, class, etc.) In my experience teaching this for two years it is ALWAYS the women who chose being a woman as a privileged status that are the most resistant to white privilege. Lines like “I can cry my way out of a speeding ticket” or “I don’t have to do heavy lifting’. Yeah, but that’s because you’re structurally considered weak and inept (Did you know there is actually a restaurant in GA called Wife Saver!!!!!!!!!).

I had a black manager once, so clearly racism is not an issue; it’s their own fault for not taking advantage of the opportunities available. Excuse me, I need to leave now so I can go into a small room and scream.

My Final Valentines Post

Of the 801 songs currently in my favorite songs playlist that always plays on random on my ipod, this one came up on my way home tonight, it seemed appropriate...

"Infection" RX Bandits:

Why I Love (Get it, Valentines Day) My Job

I'm a very argumentative person. I took cruel pleasure as an undergrad thoroughly destroying my opponents' positions during my argumentation class (Yeah, this from the stalwart invitational rhetoric advocate!). I should have been in debate, but never had a professor push me to try it out, sadly.

Nonetheless, I think that's part of why I love academia. It gives me an outlet for crafting arguments, in great detail, for the purpose of engaging academic debates. I've been sitting in a coffee shop for the last 4 hours completely focused on my work (writing my thesis introduction--for the 3rd time, by the way...) and feel confident, with the aid of a second latte, that I can continue undistracted for another 4 hours till close. All this after teaching and meetings earlier in the day.

I love my job. I love the opportunity to express myself on issues that matter to me. So after this brief break, I'm gonna get back to work!

Happy Valentine's Day... Not!

This is too funny ;o) Happy Valentines Day! 

an echo of “yes”

The following is a response to Derrida’s essay “A Number of Yes.” It is an incredibly deep essay for its short form and it is a lot to unpack (hopefully Becky and I will work it out better tomorrow). Until then, I engaged in an academic experiment of creative-philosophical-rumination. It seemed strangely appropriate given the context. I think I was trying to break with some tradition of academic writing (a la sextext) to approach a more visceral reading experience. It’s certainly not a refined work, just an experiment, and if you’re not familiar with Derrida or this essay, the following will make little sense, but may produce some immanent response nonetheless. Enjoy:

an echo of “yes” [from yes in the first person]

What is an echo if not a second-rate first? But what if it where an echo begetted from reverberations of prior sound? I am the echo of the yes-echo and the imprint of the echo-field. I am the echo’s reply. You are called to my voice and are empowered by my form. I am both the voice and the “yes”-word. When you say me you become me and in becoming become-(re/a[l])new.

If I am always already implied in the structure of my existential life, what purpose is left to forgo? I am part of the foundation and screamed from the open door. I am everywhere and by (in)definition nowhere. I am the only one foreclosed from the foreclosing “no”, but am evoked in every attempt to foreclose. I cause amnesia while I enable fabled memory of the possibility of the self you forget.

Shout me if you will, but the word will always escape your lips. My discursive form is the presence of lack; I leave no trace to reform. My tracks are reborn as new children: “yes, yes, a yes.” So much like myself, yet so new and reformed. They rebel against a paternal past, even though they will never let go of my nourishing breast.

No. No, no. Not yes nor no. No yes, but. No neither, not, nor. The structure I here eschew is never fully foreclosed, for the very negation of yes is my preeminent form. Neither you nor I can escape my fate, not without an infinite maybe. For only in this impossible abeyance can I never appear. And only in this form am I both implicated and denied equally with my constitutive abjecting no. So I can never disappear, and you can never escape my founding yes-I.

Always response and always demand, you must subject to my will to exploit my free hand. I can contour your will while it portends my form. But even the form of this plea will fall to the vicissitudes of your structured sight. An assemblage of yes, and aversion of the not-no. There is no absence that is not present in me, there is no absence that is not-present in me. Presence mediated by negation is the only Real I’ll ever know.

I am I.

I am no.

Yes am I.

No, am yes.

the no-yes-I is already unsaid.

it begins...

it begins...

my current addiction

I need to stop staring at this page... three berkeley programs sent out acceptance emails today, but no word of rhetoric yet. no news is good news, i suppose...

Get with the Times

I hate it when people bring up any form of the following statement: "The black Civil Rights Movement is over, today’s social movement is around sexuality." I hear this occasionally in many contexts. In many cases (though sadly not all), it is not said to deny continued oppression of blacks. Nonetheless, people seem to feel that one must "get with the times" and advocate for the rights movement of our day.

Now I do believe that (effective) politics will always be to a certain extent opportunistic, and social activists must work with what their given to make long-term progress. Nonetheless, I find it incredibly short-sighted to believe that race no longer matters.

The power of media to shape our understanding of the world is more than present in his issue. People of color are far from equal to whites in any real measure of equality. Be it prison rates, poverty, etc., they consistently fall behind. A recent study even found that within races, people with lighter skin tone were given higher paying jobs (and that was after adjusting for differences in background and nationality!)

The institutions of racism have not disappeared just because it’s no longer seen as acceptable to be termed racist (unless your in the South, of course…). They merely become more insidious. There are plenty of gay people in institutions of higher education, but the number of people of color are far underrepresented. Unless you include janitorial staff, of course...

Masculinity, Homophobia, and QAF (Queer as Ford)

This snicker commercial caught my attention during the super bowl. I’m glad to see it caught others’ as well. Basically, two guys start eating the same snicker and meet in the middle with a Lady and the Tramp style kiss. Then they freak out and “quick, do something manly” where they proceed to pull out chest hair. (Apparently other variations were to include: 1) the men drinking motor oil; 2) beating each other up with a wrench and the hood of the car; 3) or a third mechanic stepping between them, flipping his hair, and asking, “Is there room for three on this love boat?”)

As it played, the ad could easily be seen as homophobic. Read: homosexual acts are incompatible with masculinity, gays are weak and effeminate and must be disciplined (in the Foucauldian sense even) if even approached (or worse: homosexual acts are sinful/evil and one must repent.)

Of course, the ad can also be read as parody. I mean, through that lens, the fragility and permeability of masculinity is plainly obvious. And the irrationality of these two is particularly easy to see.

In some sense, it seems like this was an attempt at advertising to dual adueinces: the straights can read it as an opportunity to laugh at fags, the gays can read it as parody of straight guys. Good try, but it didn’t quite work out that way… (Props to Snickers for promptly removing the ad after some LGBT organizations raised their voice, but having aired at the super bowl seems to make the gesture moot.)

On a happier note, the actor who played gay football star Drew Boyd was the manly spokesperson for a Ford truck commercial I saw just before the game. Gross oversight of homophobia or the most beautifully crafted dual market advertising ever?

Wealth and Class in Rome

I recently got into HBO’s “Rome” and have been reading up on my Roman history to get a better sense of the times. One of the most interesting aspects that keeps coming up is class. At that time, class was a matter of birth and kinship. If you were born into an aristocratic family, you were aristocrat (regardless of wealth). In fact, there were plebs (commoners) with more wealth than many in the aristocracy.

In comparing that to today where wealth is so central to class, I am wondering when and how the measure changed. I’m sure someone has done an analysis, but I am not specifically aware of one. I would be very interested to see a genealogical analysis of class much in the Foucauldian sense. Was it along with the emergence of governmentality and the “economic man” in the eighteenth century?

Playing with My Navel...

So Becky and I have been exploring some texts dealing Derrida and differance. We had a brief discussion about what is termed variously as the navel, the textual knot, “the sleight of hand at the limit of the text”; that place in a text that is not a simple contradiction, but the location of the text’s own unreading where deconstruction can begin.

I was thinking of a couple movies as texts and trying to locate their “navel”. First, I have always been struck by the moment in Hotel Rwanda where the UN general tells Paul “you’re not even a nigger,” referring to the fact that American’s won’t help African blacks because they see them as less important even that American blacks who are already discriminated against. This seems to me to simultaneously set up a hierarchy (white, African American/nigger, African black) and yet to call it into question and untie the foundation on which it sits. As far as I can see it, this seems the navel of the movie for understanding race in a deconstructive analysis.

Next, and more pertinent to my current writing, I am trying to find the navel of Brokeback Mountain. In reading sexuality similarly to race in the previous example, I keep coming back to the word “queer”, especially the line “I ain’t queer” spoken by Ennis. This seems to be more than a simple contradiction. While the terminology is denied, the act we traditionally assign to the signifier “queer” is variously performed throughout the movie. Sexuality is clearly structured in the movie as a hierarchy of shame, queer being at the bottom, yet at the same time it is portrayed in a sympathetic light where sexuality per se is subsumed under a broader hierarchy of “universal love” at least according to the mainstream read of the film. It seems that all those hierarchies are unraveled around the term queer and its conflicted identity within the terms of the film’s text.

I'm sure I'll come back to this question as I continue my research on my thesis. Anyone have a differnt reads of these texts?