I feel like I have learned an enormous amount from the RaceFail posts. I have not engaged, except to occasionally thank people, because as I have watched other people make mistakes I would have made and be quite rightly corrected, I was able to understand the importance of just sitting back and listening, Of learning without burdening others with my slow steps.

But I face a dilemma. I am an academic, a grad student anthropologist, and I am writing papers and presenting at conferences. I have a responsibility to incorporate racism. I simply cannot sit back and listen, my career depends on me speaking up. And the big reason that this IS my career is because I WANT to speak up and make change.

That means that I'm going to try to make my slow steps public. It means that I'm going to try to benefit, professionally, from attempting to be anti-racist. And even though I am certainly not a white person whose social network is made up exclusively (or even predominantly) of white people, and even though there are WoC who write and work on issues related to racism who are helping me check my work, I am still painfully aware of how much of a novice I am in recognizing my privilege.

My problem is by no means a new one. Even though I'm not trying to speak for others so much as for myself and the world I want to live in, my failure, because of my privilege, will hurt others more than me. I am going to f* up, and I am going to hurt people in the process. And it is a fact of my privilege that I will be able to do this and it probably won't hurt my career. But the alternative, making my career about something else, is much worse. I feel called to educate. I feel called to make change for social justice. And I believe that it is my moral obligation (as a human being, as a Christian, as a future-mother of future-children of color, as well as my personal calling that I am morally obliged to follow) to make my life about this.

So, I am uncomfortable. As I should be. Discomfort is not fun.

--

P.S. Feel free to pat me on the back, this is MY lj, after all. However, if you're going to suggest that it's not a big deal that I'm going to hurt people, or that I shouldn't worry so much about my privilege, please refrain and read some of the amazing stuff by brilliant people on why that is not the case.

ETA: also feel free to disagree with me. Duh.

Okay, so there's like a million awesome school things to talk about today. So awesome, in fact, that I have to list them. (A great opportunity for a pretentious list, too! Can this day get any radder?)

(adviser) I met with SS today. She is a total beast. I've been wanting her on my committee but she's been in the field all year and wants to KNOW ME before she jumps on board. So, I'm taking her class on Women in U.S. Health next semester.
I want her because these are the research interests she lists: Identity, ethnicity and community in health care; United States; HIV/AIDS; governmentality; access to health care; social movements; gender and sexuality. Did I really not immediately identify her as THE NUMBER ONE PERSON I TOTALLY HAVE TO WORK WITH?
And I read one of her articles on the "Politics of Recognition" and she talks about getting away from bounded notions of identity and "cultural competence" in health care and towards a participatory model based on reciprocity and getting target communities involved in their health care instead of some hierarchical, "here's what your people need" approach. And, can we just review? Her work is totally theoretically grounded AND applicable in meaningful (politically engaged) ways! *dorky cry of glee*
And when I met with her? I was totally cogent talking about my research! 

(bootstrap bullshit) After that I went to a talk about welfare queens. That is, the scholar - a prof who opened by telling about her teenage pregnancy, domestic violence, and use of welfare - debunked a lot of the ideas held about what mothers on welfare look like. She presented all of these amazing women - most women of color - who fate had shit on, standing up and getting degrees and pulling themselves out of poverty. She challenged the problematic scapegoating of teen moms, and the awful oxymoron of saying teen moms are too immature to be welfare recipients (cuz they'll just spend it on fake nails) - it was all very relevant to the lit review I did last semester. The PROBLEMS were that she really didn't ultimately combat the problematic bootstrap myth, the neoliberal discourse of choice, that underlies all of this demonization of poor women. And she reinforced a couple of things about Latinas (specifically that Mexican American families don't want their daughters to be educated). But, she said some really important things about higher education as, economically speaking, the best route for gov't intervention for poor people.

(committee) THEN I met with SL, my prof in the History of Anthro Theory and told him about my secret intellectual idea about writing an article type of thing defending tenure. I have this whole thing in my head. With a little more cross-cultural research, I think it could be really good. And it would be very differet from my main research, which could be good for showing my depth down the line.

(dissertation) And then there was ANOTHER talk, this one about undocumented students, and making schools safer places. They basically compared the problem with "color-blindness" (that is, teachers pretending that their students "don't have a race" and thereby erasing their identities and their real lives) to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell approach to legal status. On the one hand, I'm with it. On the other hand, however, I think that community work has to happen alongside this, because getting kids talking about legal status with OTHER kids who might tell their Border Patrol mommies and daddies is not cool. Also, I have my doubts about school as a safe space for immigrant kids of color, regardless of this silencing of legal status. I mean, as long as gang involvement is linked to immigrant status and ethnicity, and as long as suspected gang members are being targeted for policing (e.g., "go home and change that shirt, there's too much blue on it!"), I doubt that creating spaces for students to talk freely about a (stigmatized) legal status is very helpful. HOWEVER, the idea that there should be an oath for teachers protecting them from having to share information about students that might incriminate them seems like a pretty good one to me, as long as it puts no other student in danger.

(ethnography) And so I've been thinking about my research again, and I'm pretty excited about it, but that will have to wait for another entry since this one's already too long!

I never thought I'd go giggly for a structuralist, but it just goes to show that my brain is being blown open and my prejudices are beginning to spill out.

Marshall Sahlins' lecture "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of 'The World System'" is (at least at this point - I'm only 1/8 of the way through) about the roles of "so-called peripheral peoples" in shaping the "modern global order" (5). I'm not going to talk about the paper, but I did want to reproduce his seventh footnote, found on page 6, here in full.

"The 'mystique of Western domination' encompasses a whole series of related propositions, ranging in value from absurd o false, and including: (1) that before the expansion of the West other peoples had lived and developed 'in isolation' - which just means that we weren't there; (2) that the historic adaptations they were compelled to make to one another do not count as such, for everything then was 'pristine' and 'indigenous'; (3) that their interaction with the West however has been a qualitatively different process since (4) European power uniquely destroys the ancient harmonies and coherence of these exotic cultures; and (5) in the process of their 'acculturation' or assimilation to the West their own cultural distinctiveness is irreversibly extinguished."

Agree or disagree, I am friggin' thrilled that statements like this are coming up in my reading.

Do I regret not reading this woman before applying to grad schools? Oh hell yes.

Which is not to say that I would have applied to Columbia to work with her instead, her area is very different from mine, but she is also a genius. Amazing. I'm in love.

The quotation from Writing Women's Worlds that made me happiest today:

"Telling stories, it has seemed to me, could be a powerful tool for unsettling the culture concept and subverting the process of "othering" it entails."