Beyond Pantsuit Solidarity

This, my first explicitly political post, is directed very locally: to economically comfortable liberal white women, like me, living in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. If what I say applies to other liberal white women living in blue bubble communities, counties, states: good.

We can do better in 2018 and 2020. We need to keep a hanger handy for the pantsuits, though.

Yes, misogyny is real, and yes, pantsuit solidarity is needed. Girls shouldn't have to be informed on national television that they can do anything (if you click on the link, watch to the end)--we all should know it so deeply that it doesn't have to be said. Also, powerful women should not be more vulnerable than powerful men because they have the same careerist, domineering, opportunistic, manipulative, underhanded, disciplined, and unlikeable tendencies. Also, women should be helping each other, along and across every line of race, class, wealth, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, and citizenship status there is.

So what I'm talking about here is just one of those lines: the rural-urban divide. Yes, that's a Cracked article. Read it anyway. Definitely read it if you've already read, "I'm a Coastal Elite from the Midwest: The Real Bubble is Rural America."

Is the rural-urban divide the whole story of what went wrong with this election? Of course not. We have months of figuring that out ahead of us. But it's a big enough piece to be worth addressing as we go forward, particularly those of us who live in "blue islands in an ocean of red" ("Champaign-Urbana Big Outlier in Area Results").

It's not a piece that pantsuit solidarity is equipped to confront. What about women who can't afford the dry cleaning and don't have anywhere to wear a pantsuit anyway?  Who don't want to wear pantsuits? Who don't aspire for their daughters to wear pantsuits? Who have been screwed over by women wearing pantsuits? Who have good reason to believe that anyone in a pantsuit will look down on them? Who find it hard to believe that anything good ever comes of talking to someone in a pantsuit?

It was no more inevitable that the vast low-population tracts of rural America would turn out to be zones of economic depression, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and Oxycontin abuse than it was that chunks of inner cities would turn out to be zones of economic depression, violence, teen pregnancy, and crack addiction. Trying to understand the environment that breeds racism, sexism, and xenophobia with the hope that it can be made less hospitable to those diseases is not a capitulation to them. Laying aside judgment to learn about the risk factors that promote those diseases is not capitulating to them.

Yes, it's complicated, and yes--racism is a cause as well as a symptom of the complex history that has made rural America a source of prosperity for large multinational companies but not for the people who inhabit it.

New York Times

Of the many, many tasks ahead of us, it's on educated, comfortable, left-leaning white women to start this process. To reach out to the women on the geographical and ideological margins of their blue communities. To seek out opportunities for community that aren't centered on institutions of higher learning, left-leaning white congregations, or social activist groups dominated by people like them. To risk discomfort and awkwardness across class lines as well as racial and ethnic lines. To recognize that not everyone regards educational status and book-learning as markers of personal worth and to start genuinely valuing themselves and other people on other terms. To have real conversations that aren't premised on the assumption that we already have the answers. To find the stalwarts who voted blue in red communities and find out what kinds of action they think are needed. I'm sure there's more. That's just a start.

Preserving Intellectual Safe Spaces for White People

It's been a couple of days now since that University of Chicago letter to admitted students erupted all over the media, and I'm still trying to figure out what an "intellectual 'safe space'" is. I've been in and around higher education since 1992, mostly at R1 institutions like the U of Chicago (where, full disclosure, I got my BA). Here are the "safe spaces" I've encountered:

1. A so-designated room in the Women's Resource Center on my campus. I was part of a panel discussion on trigger warnings (more anon) and it was pointed out to everyone at the start of the event. The discussion--which was not part of any formal class--was pretty dry and academic, which I gather is not always the case. Anyway, no one made use of it.

2. Cultural houses on my campus where students of color for whom the predominantly white and privileged campus is not itself a "safe space" can spend time with people who share their positionality.

3. (Not on my campus, that I know of): stickers given for faculty to put on their doors alerting LBGTQ students that said faculty member is "safe" to come out to (e.g., won't "out" them to others or try to talk them out of being LBGTQ).

I'm guessing "safe spaces" like these are not what Dean Ellison had in mind. Closing off these kinds of extracurricular resources would just be mean, and the University of Chicago's own Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (which provides them on that campus) seems to be in no particular danger. I'm guessing it was exactly to exclude such instances that Dean Ellison modified "'safe spaces'" with "intellectual."

So what did he have in mind?  I've certainly heard of faculty using the term "safe space" to demarcate rules of engagement.  As Dean Ellison himself points out, "Civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us, and freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harass or threaten others." Occasionally professors set down guidelines about how what "civility and mutual respect" mean in a classroom; many trust to their own modeling and guidance to convey that message implicitly. It would be really nice if we lived in a world where professors and students alike could be counted on to civilly and respectfully shut down racist comments and behavior as quickly as they would shut down a creationist demanding equal time in a genetics classroom, but any student of color on my campus can tell you that we are not yet living in that world. I have yet to encounter white students who have been censored by heavy-handed efforts to bring it about.

I have also heard the phrase "this is not a safe space" used to signal to students that class discussion is likely to touch on controversial matters in which students may have some personal investment. I'm sure that those applauding Dean Ellison's letter would be glad to hear of it, except that such statements could be taken to be "trigger warnings" and those are, I gather, a bad thing.

The phrase "trigger warnings" seems to be, uh, triggering, to people who aren't themselves in higher education. It provokes a reaction disproportionate to the words themselves, conjuring up nightmare visions of words, phrases, whole realms of inquiry being declared off-limits and pathetic students cowering in dismay. I don't know where this fantasy comes from. I've certainly never encountered it. The terms is, I admit, irritating, but I'm not sure how one teaches disturbing material productively without the concept embedded in it. In fact, I was using "trigger warnings" before they were A Thing. It's just good pedagogy.  When I've taught Eliza Haywood's 1725 novella, Fantomina, for example, there's a scene of sexual violence early in the story.  I've long been in the habit of letting students know it's coming and that we're going to be talking about it in class--not to get them off the hook for reading it, but because a survivor of rape who knows to expect it is more likely to engage with it intellectually than one who gets blindsided by it.  Depending on the nature of the class (I have had the luxury of small discussion-centered classes), I may mention before we start discussion that some students may have personal experience of sexual violence and so connect differently to the scene than those for whom the question, "Is it rape?" is more abstract.

Is that censorship? It may cause a student who has not considered these matters to think twice and look for some textual evidence before suggesting that Fantomina "was asking for it." There may have been rape survivors who choose that day to take one of their allotted absences. Either way, I'm okay with it--I don't see where either outcome vitiates the intellectual process. Acknowledging the intersection between this three-hundred-year-old text and present-day concerns leads to a deeper discussion than does allowing students to uncritically internalize the narrator's assumption that it's ultimately all in good fun--or asking them to pretend that rape is a thing that only happens in the safe spaces of the printed page.

So when I see people applauding Dean Ellison's bold stand for intellectual give-and-take, I'm baffled. Of course, rigorous debate is a good thing in college, as is coming up against ideas that are troubling and challenge one assumptions.  I've blogged about it, in one of my most popular and enduring posts.

It's that one paragraph, though, that undermines the whole enterprise:

Trigger warning and safe spaces are, in my experience, how students of color, LBGTQ students, rape trauma survivors get the support they need to participate fully in the painful conversations that are part of the University of Chicago experience. To take Dean Ellison's words at face value, to assume that he writes out of some rich understanding of the function of trigger warnings and safe spaces would be to sssume that the majority of University of Chicago students are such delicate flowers that the mere acknowledgment that other students come at these matters from different life experience and need different kinds of support constitutes a deadly threat to their ability to engage fully. And one must then echo the many supportive commentators and ask, how are these students going to cope in a world where people of color expect to being taken seriously as human beings? Where trauma survivors expect not to have their experience erased? Where the intellectual enterprise is supposed to take into account the whole of human experience, and not just that of privileged white people?  What a trigger warning Dean Ellison has given!  And what glorious reassurance, that the University of Chicago is a safe place where the world view of white students will be preserved intact and without threat.

But it would be a mistake to take Dean Ellison's words at face value. As I said, above, the "safe spaces" provided by the University of Chicago to its minority students still stand, and I have every expectation that conscientious faculty continue to to frame their subject matter in ways that will encourage participation from all students. All this letter does is make it clear to the mass media and any well-heeled alumni paying attention that the University of Chicago is dedicated to preserving its intellectual-macho brand. The letter also makes it clear to students of color and trauma survivors (both incoming and prospective) that the brand will be preserved at the expense of their access to it.

The whole letter:

Transparency

It needs to be said more loudly than it has: the program in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign did nothing wrong.  You may question their decision to hire Steven Salaita, you may be puzzled by the program's plan to morph into a program in global indigenous studies, you may wish that the traditional academic disciplines gave enough attention to indigenous people to eliminate the need for a separate program.  Sure. Fine. Whatever.  Every innovative academic program has its naysayers. The fact remains: the procedure by which Salaita was selected and vetted was above board, by the book, subject to every procedural check-and-balance the academy has to offer.

http://www.ais.illinois.edu/mascot/news/archive/2010/beyondhistory.aspx

Don't believe me?  It's safe to assume that if there were procedural oversights or irregularities, they would have been splashed all over the front page of the Champaign Urbana News-Gazette by now. But go ahead and FOIA them.  They've been FOIA'ed repeatedly on the matter this year, so the relevant documents are all queued up and ready to go.  

Not Enough and Too Many Degrees of Separation

from The Shade Room (Facebook page)

Wednesday night bible study: that's the part that gets me.  Parts of this story have become all too familiar: black people being killed for all kinds of stupid reasons saturated with racism, white men shooting strangers.  Not comfortable, not okay, not normal--just, it's a thing that happens, that shouldn't, that does.

But Wednesday night bible study?  There was always a lot of church during the summer weeks I spent with my grandparents in rural Indiana. White church. And even if I was often spared the midweek observance, Wednesday night bible study was a fixture on the extended family landscape and daily narratives, an anchor for family stories, a point at which friendships were solidified, plans made, gossip shared. Wednesday night bible study meant that my mother's Episcopalian (she converted in grad school) and then Presbyterian weeks had a gap in them that she filled with choir practice or committee involvement.

The Diversity Question

"You're a white instructor seeking employment at an institution of higher education where the enrollment of white students and the employment of white instructors over-represents the proportion of white people in the population. We recognize that these numbers are a problem for our institution, and though we may well will hire more white people for this job, we want to make sure that those white people we hire see it as a problem, too. So, what steps might we expect you take in the classroom to compensate for the fact that your sheer presence in no way (you're probably cis and lacking a visible disability) contributes to the diversity of our campus?" 

That's not the question that gets asked in interviews. For examples of questions that do get asked when college teaching staff is getting hired, you can google "interview questions about diversity in the classroom"--but at many institutions, they amount to the one I asked above.

On Race and Reading Aloud

I'm sure I'm not the first instructor to have this quandary.

How should a white instructor, who speaks standard American English with the accent of northern white privilege, read aloud dialogue written in dialect, specifically African American Vernacular English?

I love to read aloud, and I love to read aloud in class.  It gives students a shared experience of a certain chunk of text and it reveals the aesthetic pleasures of a text in ways that get lost in the heat of class discussion.  When I'm teaching in my field, eighteenth-century Anglophone literature, reading aloud is crucial tool for helping students approach unfamiliar forms of English.  They can grapple with the Sterne's self-referential ellipses, Wollstonecraft's layered dependent clauses, the seemingly interminable sentences of any writer much more effectively, once they've heard them.  Hearing where to place the emphases, getting familiar with the underlying rhythms of the prose style, makes a huge difference.  Of course, I don't affect an English accent--the students don't expect it, I couldn't pull it off, and it would be weird.