Shaq, Yao and Race

Hee hee... Yeah, I know what you mean.

(nimh, not ignoring ya, but need to think more before I respond.)

I think it might be time to share a little story. Some of you may have read this one before; sorry, if that's that case...

I spent a year as a teaching assistant at a university where PC was (and is) de rigeur. A huge amount of importance is given to correct reference to ethnic groups, sexualities -- whatever.

So, I'm there at the "sensitivity" section of my whopping one day of training for this position which would entail a great deal of unsupervised time with and authority over undergraduates. Part of this exercise was an anonymous free association exercise. The subjects to be associated were words for various groups (who are assumed, in PC fashion, to be homogeneous, and labelling them as though they were is appropriate so long as the label isn't the one anyone used 5 years previously). So you had Asian, Gay, Lesbian, African American, re-entry student (yes, this is a group there), etc.

This was being done in an overheated room right before lunch time, and the "class" was moving very predictably from point to point. The group leader would say a word, and we'd write a response on a piece of paper, fold it, throw it in a hat, and then people would pull pieces of paper out and read what was written on them. It was never explained what the point of this was; it was just something to be endured, I guess.

Anyway, after a few rounds, the word was Mexican. It being free-association, and right before lunch, I wrote "FOOD" on my piece of paper. When it was pulled out, the group was aghast. The other pieces of paper said things like "Tenochtitlán" and "Opressed" and "Cesar Chavez," as though those really were the first things this group of predominantly upper-middle class white Californian graduate students thought when they heard Mexico. Never mind that food is one of the central aspects of culture, symbolic of the geography and miscemization of a people's past, of their adaptation to changing histories -- especially Mexico, for God's sake, whose history and cuisine are both about the tumultuous mixing and reconciliation of various cultures. Never mind that part of the reason I bore this association was that not long before I'd been performed in a production of an agitprop theater piece by José Rivera, where most of the central metaphors pertained to food, or that as part of my History of Feminist Theater course the previous year had focused on a pair of plays by Chicanas (yeah, I did know the language we were expected to use in that room) that went on at great length about the pepper and the tortilla and what they meant to these playwrights.

But I kept mum. Hey, if it makes people happy, go ahead. We did a couple more uneventful rounds, and then "male re-entry student" came up as a category. I don't remember what I wrote. Nothing very eventful. The phrase still doesn't really conjure anything up for me. It really denotes very little. Other people, though, other people wrote things like "arrogant" and "cocky." Somebody had even written "date rapist," which I suspect had a rather more personal than general motivation behind it. And as I raised my hand to offer the meekest, most modest objection I could muster, we were informed that it was noon and time to go to lunch.

So there you go. "Food" was adjuged by the group, by tacit agreement, to be the most offensive response written in that room during that hour.

It's also a university, by the way, where evaluation of students in the arts was frequently very personal and sometimes blatantly sexist. But there you go; everybody knew to say "African-American" instead of "black" (at least once that I knew of in reference to someone who was clearly from another country) and that men might be "Gay" and women "Lesbians," and "transgendered" was to be preferred to "tranny."

Okay, gotta run. 5:00. Time to go get edumacated some more.

Great exchange here - I'll write more later.

patiodog, that's all very familiar to me. I took a bunch of women's studies classes and was forever calling down the wrath of the entire class. (Even the men sat there meekly, not daring to say "Emperor, dude, your clothes are on the transparent side...") I don't remember specifics now -- my objection to the statement "All heterosexual sex is rape" is an obvious one -- but I was a serious thorn in the profs' respective sides.

And I lived in a majorly hippy-dippy housing co-op that was rife with this stuff. For example, there was this lesbian couple who moved in after I had moved out but E.G. still lived there. So I was visiting, hanging out, and they were totally disdainful of me. They were young (~sophomores), recently "out" (quotes 'cause they were the type that shuck a wealthy suburban upbringing by "escaping gender role expectations"), and I was white, hetero, and generally uninteresting.

At some point, I had to deal with one of them, and she answered dismissively, turning her head mid-sentence and then got all impatient very quickly when I asked her to repeat, so I said, "I have to see your face when you're talking -- I read lips, but I'm deaf."

Total attention. Looking at me with new eyes. Body language shift. "Really?!" So excited to meet a real live Disabled person. "Totally deaf? Can't hear a thing? Wow! That's just amazing!"

I'm sure I'm being unfair -- lots of people have strong reactions when they find out I'm deaf, since it's not obvious -- but with her, there was such a strong demarcation between who was worth her attention and who wasn't, and a white hetero "temporarily able-bodied" person wasn't.

Which is a long-winded way of saying -- that stuff sucks. "Food"--> *gasp!* sucks. Taking away the book sucks. No argument from me. Sucks.

This discussion is difficult because I in no way intend to defend that sort of thing. At the same time, it is more complicated than your posts seem to indicate, nimh.

My previous post about the origin of the phrase "PC" starts to address my problem with statements like:



What "PC movement?" There are a disparate group of people who have been lumped by the right into this "PC movement." A PC movement doesn't exist in any real way. There wasn't a group of people in 1979 who said, "OK, let's make everyone PC!" It is almost always a pejorative.

It's like someone who opposes abortion rights writing an article about a drug addict who never uses birth control and just gets abortion after late-term abortion. Someone like that must exist, yes. It's not pure fabrication, no. But is that an accurate portrayal of the pro-choice movement?

There is a vociferous and continuing debate, analysis, and systemic criticism on the subject of race in America. It's not, like, being swept under the rug.



I don't really get this part. You can't discuss racism in a respectful manner? The N word shouldn't be taboo? (Yes, I know, a book was taken away from a teacher. I'm talking about in general.)

Again, "PC" is a conservative construct. The triumph of the "PC" concept has been a conservative triumph. It takes "food"-->*gasp* silliness and lumps it together with genuine issues in such a way that the genuine issues are discredited. Someone says hey, Shaq should be held accountable for saying something racist, and there's a chorus of, eh, don't be so PC. Someone says, hey, Danny Glover can't get picked up by a taxi in New York City and there's a chorus of, eh, don't be so PC.

In other words -- too much of what you call for, the systemic criticism, the analysis, has been successfully wedded to the book-removing idiots when the term "PC" is used. If you use a very narrow definition of PC, the sorts of examples I gave at the beginning of this post, I'm totally against it too. But that is not how the term is used in America, and too many good thoughts and deeds are tarred with that brush.

That's funny, re: the women's studies classes. In the course I took on feminist theater, I was able to distinguish myself by not being a complete pig. See, I'd admit piggish things I'd done and express contrition for them, and I'd be the darling of the class. Sort of a "come-to-Jesus" sort of affair, and very easy to manage in a number of classes there. Interestingly enough, I talked to a lot of the students from that class afterward about their narrative evaluations (no grades at UCSC back then), and the men in the class almost uniformly received better evaluations then the women. Sort of a reverse-reverse-discrimination sort of deal.

It may also be noteworthy the the campus there (at Univ. of Calif., Santa Cruz, such a paragon of political correctness that the term is not generally considered pejorative there, and a sort of mecca for lesbians and LUGs -- lesbians until graduation, whose parents generally bought their cars and many of whom likely have expense accounts now) is probably the most racially segregated I've ever been on. The vast majority of entering black students, for instance, live at Oakes College (the campus is divided into eight "campuses" and a few other outposts of civilization, amidst the redwoods and mountain lions), and the majority of Oakes College students are black. Don't get me wrong -- this definitely isn't explicitly enforced, but the theme at Oakes was "diversity," which would seem to imply that that's where you would feel most comfortable if you're not white. And during my first year there I'd sit outside my room at whitebread Kresge College and watch campus tour groups walk through. For whatever reason, all the tour groups seemed to be homogenous: a bunch of white kids, a bunch of black kids, a bunch of Latinos -- whatever. Probably says something about central California. And the non-white (not a politcally correct term, by the way, since it is said to imply some sort of deficiency) kids would look around them at all the shaggy white kids and, you could tell, write the place off immediately.

Which is understandable, of course. But the University, this bastion of multiculturalism and understanding, does nothing to actually promote any sort of contact or exchange between "cultures." They congratulate themselves on how many courses they offer on writers from wherever, and on their freshperson-level core courses, and this and that, but when it's all said and done there is a very factionalized student body.

Okay, I'm not really going anywhere with this. I'm still trying to piece together, logically, why I agree with a lot of what nimh is writing here -- and with what sozobe is saying.

It's just that, goddamnit, during my freshperson year there I heard all this lip service paid to whatever by a bunch of rich white kids and the (anti)authorities they adored about mutliculturalism and blah-blahbity-blah-blah-blah, but at the end of the year, three of my best friends there -- African-American, Korean, and New York Jew (self-described) -- dropped out or transferred because they felt marginalized. And all three smoked loads of dope and got good evaluations, so in none of these cases were being too uptight for the hippies or too lax in their coursework an issue.

(Hey, wait a minute: maybe they all ran away from me...)

LUG! Ha! I've known plenty of big LUGs.

I just got this email from a friend of mine who I generally consider rational. This kind of thing is part of why I get antsy when "PC thinking" is criticized. There's a LOT of this floating around.

Really? Madison is pretty much PC-central, (uh oh, there goes my case), and I don't think I ever saw it used in a non-pejorative sense. I mean, nobody would say, "I met this woman and she's so PC, it's great!" Or, "Yeah, I'm happy to say I've become much more PC since I got here." It was more like, "Well, the co-op is pretty PC, but the rent is cheap." Or "I know that Sarah is totally PC, but I really think she has a point..."

"Freshperson" Hah!...Patio, you sneaky canine* you!

...*Just in case

boo - "Freshperson" is in the UCSC literature, and it is not a joke.

soz -- You wouldn't really describe a person as PC; that would be considered an insult. But I heard, not infrequently, with tongue firmly in center of mouth, the gentle admonishment "The politically correct term is..." Granted, this wouldn't come from everyone, or even a majority of people, but certain folks consider it entirely appropriate. (Also remember that Madison is able to be liberal within the context of the Midwest. Santa Cruz must distinguish itself by being liberal in the context of the San Francisco Bay Area, which basically means that you have to be really loud about it. And I still love the place, despite my excoriation of its pretentions on this thread. I met a lot of truly remarkable people there, as well. However (in)accurate its claims to ethnic diversity might be, the university is home to a great deal of intellectual diversity -- in addition to intellectual laziness.)

Gulp!

<nodding> OK, I see what you mean. I don't think anyone would do that in Madison un-ironically. There would be at list a hint of an eye-roll, of a "what can I say, you gotta do what you gotta do" apology. So maybe there is one place in the universe more liberal than Madison -- didn't think it was possible.

Joke heard recently: "Madison is the first place where I've voted against the gay black candidate because he wasn't liberal enough."

Some of it is real, and some of it isn't. And there has historically been a fair amount of tension between the university and the town. And of course the tone is changing a bit now that everyone's house is worth half a million dollars and places that used to be bazaar-like hangouts come to resemble strip malls, with no place for a burnout, street kid, or honest-to-god-homeless-guy to cop a squat.

Heh!

I totally believe it, though.

Famous joke: Madison -- 70 square miles surrounded by reality.

Yeah, I know that one. (A past friend of the gf was a Badger, and an ardent cheesehead from Burlington.)

Madison's two seasons: winter and road work.

Thanks, Sozobe and Patiodog, for all your stories. Very interesting. I'm always intrigued by these (ultra-)liberal islands in what is after all a conservative sea - or any "islands" of divergent political-cultural tradition, really. In how they've come about, how they - how do you say - reproduce themselves, generation after generation. I'm surprised already in Holland to hear of a city or area that's continued a distinct pol-cult tradition over generations, even more so in the US, where moving state seems a lifestyle. Madison is Wisc, right? How much of the university town's political colour still goes back to Wisc's old left-wing traditions (Socialists in Milwaukee and all that)? Or is it really more purely a university attracting a certain kind of students with its image over and over again, relatively unconnected to such state traditions?

Anyway, in answer to Sozobe:



Well, to make the example just the one step more general: forget about the teacher and the class and the angry parents, take the book itself. From what I gathered the professor was met with great and fierce heckling on writing the book, period. "You don't write about something like that" as the underlying tenor, because "it's not done". That's where I get antsy.

I can see the argument for tabooing the word nigger in its original use - as a term of abuse or even just as a - by definition pig-headed - form of address. Again, I'm not wholly sold even on that one (but perhaps that's b/c, as a European, I can't quite fathom the traumaticness of the term) - b/c, as a question of personal taste, I'd rather have a loud-mouthed but inconsistent taxi-driver yelling at Pakis one moment and singing the praises of his Pakistani neighbour the next, than the quiet, but unrelenting racial exclusion by the polite. I dunno. Perhaps it's b/c of the city I'm from. People there are said to be rude without parallel, but have a heart of gold. Perhaps it's also b/c of my work, as I work with a group of migrants of different origins, and they're anything but PC in addressing or joking to each other. Or perhaps it's cause I grew up with hip hop ;-).

But I can't reach to where the word is declared taboo, period, even in description, analyses, etc., as in: 'because the word "nigger" is taboo, you can't write a book about how the word "nigger" has been used, either'. For example, we had the discussion on taking the word "negro" out of the dictionary here in Holland, too. That's what I mean with "the taboo on the words illustrating racism eventually making it impossible to freely discuss racism itself". Practically speaking, in my posts here for example, should I replace the word "nigger" by something with asterisks? Why? And how would I ever be able to get across to, say, my children, or students, should I ever have any, what the word means and denotes if I can't actually mention it?

The antsiness goes quite deep, and connects into a great unease about the human urge to cleanse their own history. Taking out the word "negro" from the dictionary, for example, would perhaps soften the blow on the soul for the moment, to those living now - but its erasion from record would obfuscate the harm or hurt it did to future generations, and how would that in the end benefit the Afro-American - or Dutch-Caribbean - culture?

I agree it's a half-finished thought and I don't have enough examples, but I hope you get the feeling of what my unease refers to. There's a bit of intercultural apprehension there, too - the Dutch may already have little awareness of their history, but as a European I still feel a little extra apprehension at this seeming American urge to metaphorically erase / cleanse history and start over again with a blank, time and again - an urge I see refclected in American cityscapes, for example.

It does come up everywhere though ... for example (and I'm interested in how you figure this, then), in much of Eastern Europe, there's been much ado about the enormous number of sometimes huge statues, signs, monuments and the whole caboodle that was left after 1989. To a former political prisoner, for example, it felt like a personal degradation to have to walk in the shadow of that Lenin day after day - it had felt like a humiliation for many years and now they were free, they wanted it out, wanted them out, all out. Easy to sympathise with that. But is erasing the whole historical era from the city landscape a good thing? And doesn't it actually make it harder to face up to Communism's legacies, to what happened, and deal with it?

Fierce fights were staged over a huge EastBerlin Lenin, in particular. In the end, they took it away. I can wholly sympathise with the glee of liberation some Berliners felt at that. On the other hand - apart still from the other Berliners, who experienced it as a personal loss instead, feeling an attachment to the statue as one does to things that were so physically part of your whole life's and childhood's memories, cause they dont really figure into the analogy - I find it extremely alienating that in all of Berlin, for example, hardly one piece of Wall is still standing. The Wall was a symbol of oppression, of inhumanity, of harm to individual well-being, of course. But now that it's just absent-ed - doesn't that deny the pain its victims have felt even more, in a way? And doesnt it make all the more unlikely that their children will ever get a sense of what it meant, a day-to-day reminder and incentive to learn about it? If we keep Birkenau in its original state as a powerful and instructive reminder of the Holocaust, rather than razing it to avoid offending, shouldn't we record "nigger", too, in the dictionary, in a book carrying its name, for parallel reasons?

Just saw this, not sure how I missed it before. Would like to respond in more depth, but only a bit of time just now...

So quickly, I'm not sure my central point was clear -- that the people who are usually accused of being "politically correct" are NOT against the publication of a book called "Nigger." I'm pretty much a politically correct poster child, for the most part -- I've certainly been called that many times. But I'm not against the publication, or discussion, at all.

Oh gosh, hard to do this briefly. But I gotta, so will come back to it.

Well, the problem there is that, like you (i think) pointed out here already, "politically correct" is not usually a term adopted in proud self-identification - it's mostly used in defining others and what they do. And the behavior akin to critizing the author of such a book is very much what is usually described as politically correct - wrongly or righthly - and is what I associate with attacking the expression of offense rather than the roots of offense.

But, yeh, this is murky water of course. Vaguely reminds me of the perennial discussions on socialism. Opponents of socialism who would always attack it by using examples of socialist states or systems or movements that were clearly detrimental, would in turn be countered by proponents who would claim that those cases did not represent "real socialism", b/c they were in fact examples of distorted, perverted, or misunderstood socialism, state capitalism, stalinism or what have you.

looking fw: to see you return here! ;-)

Whew! Finally have a bit of time...

The thing about this discussion is that I think we actually agree on about 98.37%, but it's that last little bit that we're worrying until it's a little sodden lump. What I see as that last little bit is, a) I think it is too simplistic to say that "PC is bad", since the terms have been set by conservatives seeking to discredit people who actually get it, while your last little bit is b) no matter the history, censorship gives you the heebie-jeebies. (Is that about right?)

So that is actually more a matter of emphasis than disagreement, since censorship also gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I think you get my points about discrediting reasonable people.

That's how this part of the discussion started -- the concept of "PC", and whether it is bad. I guess it comes down to the lack of more precise terminology -- do I think "personhole" is ridiculous? For sure. Would I call it "PC"? Probably. Do I think showing respect for Arab-Americans is ridiculous? No. Is it called "PC"? Often. THAT is what bothers me.

A more precise distillation of what disagreement we have is probably whether the "N-word" should ever be used. I have lots of first-person stories from people who tell me the visceral reaction they have when they hear that word. So I choose not to use it. Why should I? The parallel there is more akin to wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Lenin on it, (or Hitler, or someone else who incurs such a reaction) -- I wouldn't outlaw people's right to do so, but I wouldn't do it. It's not nice.

I do hope the distinction is clear -- I would not edit or ban "Huckleberry Finn", I would not keep a book called "Nigger" from publication or out of the hands of students, but I personally will heed the strong reactions of people I know and take the more courteous path. And I will not be shy about telling other people that I think they are being discourteous if I see them using it in what I feel are unnecessary ways, just as I have told people they should give up their seat on the bus for the elderly or pregnant. Thing is, it stops with my telling them; if they don't do it, I'll shoot 'em my patented Withering Glare of Death, but I would never want to make their discourteous actions illegal.

you are absolutely right, obviously, when you say we agree for 98%.

also where you suggest - and i think i wrote it before, too - that what differences we do have, seem mostly a question of feeling: one feels most uncomfortable with wrong A while the other is more unsettled by wrong B, even while both agree that A and B are both wrong.

as for my feeling, i do think it goes a little beyond mere rejection of censorship - i do mean my point, however abstract it may be, of how a focus on getting the offensive out of view risks, inherently, getting the offensive out of the argument, period. which is not what we want.

i don't want people, or myself, to cleanse the bad out, but instead to deal with it. i don't want to, say, stop myself from expressing jealousy (safe example, cause i'm rarely jealous); i want myself to deal with my feelings of jealousy - to keep expressing them (with appropriate explanations) as long as i feel them, but to work on not feeling them like that anymore.

same here, on a societal scale. post-fortuyn, i don't want my fellow-dutch to "hide" their xenophobic sentiments - i want them to express them and discuss them, and what lies behind/underneath them, in open dialogues, in what will hopefully lead to overcoming them; i do not want them to stifle them - cause we've seen what that leads to last year.

if somebody says, well, to be honest, i don't like Moroccans much, at least you can start talking about it - or decide to ignore him; whereas if somebody just acts as if he doesn't feel that way, you'll forever crash into some unspoken rejection that you can't pinpoint, let alone tackle.

but again, all that is instinct rather than elaborate argument. like: some people prefer medicine, some psychotherapy. or something ;-).