Race, Culture, Sex

Here is an example of how notions of race and culture have to be separated. Culture is something that spans "racial" distinctions...it is a system.
An interesting thought might be that:

Just as sexuality is distinct from apparent gender,
Culture is distinct from apparent race.

WARNING: EXPLICIT LYRICAL CONTENT.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L4dTlL_0Qs


All analysis aside of how potentially offensive the content is...DJ Khaled, all star cast--RICK ROSS.

"Beyond the Binary" Scenarios

Scenario 1
Robert is an eighth grade student who often dresses and acts in a traditionally “feminine” manner. One day, Robert wears a skirt and blouse to school. His teacher sends him to the principal’s office with a request that Robert be sent home to change his clothes.

Questions to Consider:
Did the teacher take the right action? Why or why not?

In my view the teacher did not take the right action. The teacher made it a crime for Robert to wear a skirt and blouse. The subjective basis of deciding that the skirt and blouse warranted sending Robert to the principal's office shows how ridiculous the claim is. Why didn't the teacher stop Robert one day when he was "acting" in a feminine manner? Because when people draw the line they betray the fact that the line--demarcating what is appropriate, and what is not--is very hard to draw and requires that a person make a decision about what they will "tolerate." However it is not up to anyone to "tolerate" or "not tolerate" other people's choice of dress, except if that dress had something directly hurtful on it, like if someone was wearing a t-shirt with a hateful slogan. But a skirt and a blouse are generally tolerated at school--it shouldn't matter who puts them on.

What kinds of questions, if any, should the Principal ask Robert?

Maybe the Principal could ask Robert if he's okay--he has just been told that who he is is something not permissible.

Should Robert’s parent(s) or guardian(s) be called? If so, when?

I would say yes, after Robert has left the Principal's office, after making sure that he is not undergoing any immediate trauma. If anything to apologize on behalf of the school and teacher.

What kind(s) of referrals to resources could the Principal or another school employee give to Robert?
They could direct Robert to the nearest LGBTQ positive space.

What should the Principal say to Robert’s teacher? Should the Principal take any disciplinary action against Robert’s teacher?

I think that this teacher needs to think about and question their beliefs and actions not just as a teacher but importantly as a person. I'm not sure about discipline.

What, if anything, should Robert’s classmates be told? I don't think anything, except for an overriding of the teacher's decision and the assurance that anybody can wear a blouse and a skirt at school, or anything else that they feel comfortable in provided it does not hurt anyone.

Scenario 3
Cameron identifies as transgender and would like to use the boy’s restroom at his school. He presents as male and uses male pronouns. When he tries to use the boy’s restroom, he is often harassed and taunted in the facility and school staff and students always tell him to use the girl’s restroom. Fed-up with the harassment, he asks the principal for a gender-neutral bathroom.

Questions to Consider:
How should the principal address Cameron’s situation in a way that is confidential and respectful of Cameron?

The principal should not single out Cameron as the face of a new campaign. If the school is going to implement gender-neutral bathrooms, it should install them everywhere there are binary-gendered bathrooms. Also to treat Cameron's situation as a catalyst for change instead of a problem that needs fixing would be more respectful, not just of Cameron but of everyone else, and would demand a level of respect from all students and staff. That is, treat this problem through its context of a larger problem.

How can Cameron be supported mentally and emotionally in a way that affirms his gender identity?

To install gender-neutral bathrooms--and to direct him to an LGBTQ space, maybe he will find more support there, and the school, by bridging the gap between the school itself and the LGBTQ positive space might show and give its support to not only Cameron but all students.

What should the principal do to train staff about their obligations to protect transgender students from harassment and discrimination?

To make sure that the staff are aware that harassment and discrimination are real problems and occurrences, and to encourage staff to 1) understand their own views/takes on gender, to recognize how they themselves approach students, and 2) to then attempt to understand how others understand gender and on that basis try to encourage a change of mind and heart in students who harrass and discriminate.

What plan should the principal put in place to educate students about transgender issues?
General Assembly/Day of Remembrance/Classroom education

What steps should the school take to ensure that they have safe facilities for transgender and gender nonconforming students?
Security? And a long term goal of building a safe environment through people's personal awareness? This is a difficult question.

“A dictatorship of relativism”

The National Post published an article roughly two weeks ago about the issue that Quebec schools face as they try to determine the presence of religion in the classroom. The article is titled, “Losing faith in Quebec.” The author explains that there is a new course being added to the provincial school curriculum, to replace either the Catholic or Protestant Christian denominational one, and that “Covering Christianity, Judaism, aboriginal spirituality, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, the new course will be mandatory even in private religious schools, most of which receive partial government funding.” The course is called “Ethics and Religious Culture.”

The article introduces Professor Barry Levy, who teaches religion at McGill University. Levy’s informed opinion addresses the consequences of the intent to teach religious knowledge in the proposed course. The article notes that Mr. Levy “considers it a success if his university students have mastered a single religion when they graduate.” Levy maintains: “What’s going to happen in these contexts is it’s going to be totally shallow, totally meaningless. The only message is going to be [that] they are all of equal value. And the people who are genuinely committed can’t buy that argument.”

I find this argument compelling but also of a singular perspective. There is a difference, I feel, between breadth and depth. Religion, I think, only really points toward and perhaps thereby reveals meaning if it is taken up at the deeper level—however, this belief is the result of my own experience with “religious knowledge,” and it has been informed by a particularity. If the new course comes to pass as Prof. Levy prophesizes, then deep religious thinking will be lost, and students will gain a flatter image of a constellation of religions. Yet a new perspective might argue that this very breadth could be what informs a new and as-yet unheard of Ethics, something of a new religion.

I am not sure what form of knowledge this “shallow” course will actually impress upon students, because it might take on the tone of history or anthropology rather than theology. Yet I believe that "religious knowledge" that is characterized by depth not breadth, while it may inform a student’s perspective, does not belong in the curriculum. Just as in my view any denomination should be separate from a multicultural state, anything deeply religious should be separate from the state-run public education system.

So I envision the new course to be like a conventional and contemporary gym class. In gym class, students learn about different sports, they try out a new one every few weeks. They are given an introductory glance at the fundamentals of most conventional athletic and healthy practices and strategies. They learn, for example, the dimensions of the court and the official rules. Yet no student who has only taken gym glass can say that they have really delved into any sport, that they have specialized and learned what it feels like to really know it and to play it, to understand what it even means to know that sport. Granted, there are some generally gifted overall athletes. There are also those that are able to grasp foundational connections common to many religions. My point is that, in the same way that the value of gym class lies in its being an introduction to specific sports and not in teaching the “essence” of any sport, the value of this new class will reside in its breadth, not its depth. A critique of gym class is that it doesn’t teach every sport played across the globe—its focus is on those sports familiar to the dominant culture. Another is that you may get a former football player trying to teach students how to play basketball. So I guess class is like a launch pad. In religion, just as in sport, rising to a new level involves a certain commitment of/from/in/with the individual.

"Reasonable Accommodation" Clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75SPijDmhUc

This clip is interesting on its own, but what I thought was more interesting were the comments beneath it:

frenchcannuck (Reply)
you got more freedom here then in your own country. fallow the laws. you would in israel. you drive a taxi, I hope you speak french to serve or customer that does not speak english.

lionpuppyheart (Reply)
"Freedom" = is being defined, as when we are all equal, have same access to same resources, and protected by same laws..."Freedom" = is when the "one" has the same as the "whole.""Freedom" = is when gays & lesbians have a RIGHT to become a UNION and marry. "Freedom" = is when a male-lawyer, a judge are allowed to have long hair / in a pony-tail while in court before the public.

lionpuppyheart (Reply)
"Freedom" = is when it's beyond our control, as to the fact that you were born as a boy and not a girl, of White-Caucasian and not black, to Irish parents and not Indus."Freedom" = is not being afraid of exposing one-self with his true identity, instead of hiding behind a fake-name..."Freedom" = is being able to publish your opinion. "Freedom" = is being able to accept others' Freedoms. Oh yes, I almost forgot, sorry for getting carried-away, your comment about "following the law":

lionpuppyheart (Reply)
Like you, I follow the law. But, it's about the law itself of being discriminatory, as to why St. -Mary's-Hospital being a Public-Hospital, subsidized by the government, is being allowed to display religion--icons, all over its public-places, including in the patient's room, above his bed? How do these religion-icons at St.-Mary's help performing the Hospital tasks? In which way do they have anything to do with the operation of a Hospital?

lionpuppyheart (Reply)
Are the patients in better hands and are looked after better with the icons than without? Is a taxi of a less of a public-place than St.-Mary's? Are you of a less worth than someone else? The law you want me to follow which one is it "St.-Mary's law" or one which was specifically tailored for me? It's my pleasure replying to you.I hope you are fighting for the same freedom;

lionpuppyheart (Reply)
our young-boys gave their lives in WW2, so that you and I could be free, free to remember, remembering by displaying the Canadian-Veteran-Memorial-Poppy. Finally, as for language I fail to see the connection between language and freedom? Are you implying that our young-boys were all French-speaking? My name is Arieh Perecowicz I'm not hiding behind a fake-name. Please, you may reply with your comment-opinion.

frenchcannuck (Reply)
what ever, your missing the point. ignorance is your vertu

Question for Reflection

Of Levine-Rasky's article p. 147.

4. How is the Holocaust taken up in the curriculum? How does teaching about the Holocaust compare to teaching about Israel? About Palestinians and the Middle East? About other genocides?

In my own experience as a student of the Canadian high school curriculum, I would say that the Holocaust is studied with respect to its connection with WWII in History or "Modern Western Civilizations." Maybe we read the Diary of Anne Frank. There was no coverage of the history of the region known as the "Middle East"--or a particular breakdown of a complex and layered region into contemporary delineations of Israel and Palestine. There was little to no coverage of of other genocides in the curriculum, which in my eyes and many of my peers' is even worse because there are genocides happening today. We have to be very careful in thinking not only about about how we 1) approach a subject, and 2) present material, but what material is actually presented.

Critique of “The Parents of Baywoods – Intersections Between Whiteness and Jewish Ethnicities”

Ironically I approached this article with a sense of vested interest. I never wanted here on the blog to reveal my own sense of ethnicity. I thought it would be unnecessary. However, while I still feel that it should not matter what I look like, what I believe, etc., whatever else is included in an ethnic identity, I thought that relating my personal experience to the text would better show how insubstantial I find many claims to be in making a sort of “anthropology of multiculturalism.” Here in this chapter of The Great White North? someone was describing and analyzing an “ethnic identity” to which I myself subscribe. Perhaps I could show the problems of theorizing cultural standpoints as intersections between categories by using the personal sense of repulsion I felt for a theory that was attempting to theorize a cultural standpoint that I actually and consciously live out. I say actually and consciously subscribe because with my own particular experience with and of Judaism, in some sense cultural identity is a decision. That is the interesting thing with Judaism. It can be whatever you determine it to be, as long as you are given the freedom of self-determination. When you are not, that is, when others determine who you are or the related yet perhaps even more dangerous determination of who you are supposed to or ought to be, the question of identity is no longer a question but a mark of personality.

Perhaps my reading of the article was conditioned by a sensitivity towards and about the identity type that I thought was being defined and identified for readers of The Great White North?. Perhaps it is my “ethnic sense of collective marginalization”—or, in Levine-Rasky’s terms, “experience with fighting discrimination and living in segregation” that leads me to question whether one single article can fairly represent the Jewish experience of Whiteness (141). If I am Jewish, I ought to identify with Levine-Rasky’s claims. If the arguments in this article do not resonate with my own experience, Levine-Rasky’s analysis of Jewish behaviour towards immigrants in “Kerrydale” becomes problematic. Her analysis rests completely on a collective identity of Jewishness, or a “Jewish” response to multiculturalism.

Levine-Rasky at first claims to be skeptical of such an ethnic explanation of behaviour given by her friend Pam, saying: “I believed that I was different than Pam. Pam’s question to me, however, presumed a shared intelligibility between us based on an acknowledgement of everything we had in common…Her question was a request for confirmation that I was a member of her group”(136). While Levine-Rasky does not explicity ask this question in her article, she relies upon a shared understanding—or shared intelligibility—of the cultural stereotype of the Jew. That is, Levine-Rasky analyses the behaviour of an entire ethnic group in 8 pages. She does not try to break down this problematic conception of “her group,” but instead uses it to ground her explanation of Jewish attitude and behaviour towards multicultural education.

Levine-Rasky claims outright to be engaged in an analysis of not just the “intersections of middle-classness and whiteness, but whiteness as refracted through the Jewish ethnic identity”(135). This presupposes that there is in reality one Jewish “lens” that refracts whiteness. There is one Jewish “way of seeing” that changes the whiteness of Jews and whiteness as perceived by Jews. So why, if I consider myself Jewish, did I feel that Levine-Rasky’s lens was slightly out of focus for me? Why did I feel, reading the text, that I needed a slightly different prescription?

In dealing with my own charged reactions to the text, I wondered whether or not we can learn anything about personal experience from written articles that attempt to understand different socio-cultural “Intersections”—that is: 1) whether or not we can in fact first delineate all of the points of Intersection as the intersections of categories constitute personal identities, and 2) whether or not we can, after identifying these points of Intersections, describe and derive explanations for the collective behaviour of an ethnic/Intersectional group and furthermore build comprehensive sociological systems from these explanations of “general behaviour”.

With these concerns in mind, I turned to the text itself. Levine-Rasky writes, in an analysis of two women’s views about the Jewish attitude of prioritizing education:

“Jews hold themselves up as the image of the self-made citizen who conquered barriers and made it. They attribute their success to qualities associated with Jewishness: hard work, dedication to education, high expectations, and independence. These are detached from considerations of when and where the Jews arrived here—the need for their skilled labour, the preference for professional occupations at a time when universities were opening up to Jews, benevolent societies to assist needy Jewish families, and experience with fighting discrimination and living in segregation”(140-141).

I will not here address the faulty premises of how the spiritual conditions of Jewish experience are detached from material conditions of their existence. Nor will I argue against Levine-Rasky’s vision of the collective historical Jewish immigrant experience, or “when and where the Jews arrived here.”

I will ask the questions of:

-- Who are the Jews that Levine-Rasky is describing? Could she be more specific or would that be problematic with respect to coming to a comprehensive conclusion for her argument? When Levine-Rasky writes "Jews" in the context of an anthropological social theory--does it entail every single Jew? Is there a difference between "Jews" in general and specifying "Every Single Jew"?

-- Are these qualities associated with Jewishness real? If they are, I not only as a Jew but as an individual take offense at the level of presumption used to perpetuate a stereotype that explains behaviour. If they are not, then Levine-Rasky’s argument loses its internal soundness. Because how else can Levine-Rasky assemble the data taken from 25 Jews to give a comprehensive explanation of the quintessential attitude? By relying on these very same sterotypes: that is, by taking “qualities associated with Jewishness” and using them together to elucidate a single Jewish attitude.

This attitude becomes a ghoulish caricature later in the text. In a paragraph discussing “clustering,” “survivor mentality,” “little community,” “phobia gestures,” and “ghetto thinking,” Levine-Rasky asks us to consider “the overly controlling Jewish mother always fretting about the whereabouts of her children.” She continues:

“I suspect many Jews of my generation will recognize this habit. Fearing an accident, my former in-laws refused to let their children attend summer camp. The parents of a Jewish boyfriend forbade their two children to fly on a plane together for fear that ‘[G-d] forbid something should happen.’” (145).

While the author herself tells us that this is a stereotype, in describing so vividly these images that come together to create an understanding of the Jew and using them as the foundation for an argument about why Jews ‘keep to their own’ when it comes to community and choices of schools, Levine-Rasky is implying a complicit understanding of the Jewish caricature as characterized by her description. How this can be helpful in understanding the actual experience of Judaism against and within a Canadian backdrop is beyond me. To me the characterization of Jews as an ethnic group creates a chasm between a theoretical ethnic standpoint and individual persons: I worry (what a Jewish trait!) that someone who is not "in the fold" will learn that this is the way all Jewish people are when it comes to these things. They will then, as Levine-Rasky herself does, use this stereotype to formulate an explanation of characteristic Jewish behaviour.

Levine-Rasky explicitly states that “many Jews” will “recognize this habit.” This is dangerous on two accounts: 1), already stated, because this means that there is a Jewish “habit” to recognize, and 2) because Levine-Rasky is herself Jewish. Why this is an issue for me will hopefully become clear in this critique taken as a whole. It has to do with the relation between personal experience and theoretical generalization. In a book that has but one article about the Jewish intersection with Whiteness, it may be that readers from all ethnicities will understand Levine-Rasky’s take to be representative of an entire ethnic experience. Readers may feel justified in believing this to be the case because of how Levine-Rasky makes clear that she is herself Jewish. For some reason, that gives her more credibility or qualification to speak on behalf of the entire Jewish population. Yet as someone who identifies with being Jewish, I am repelled by Levine-Rasky’s writing. This speaks to the extremely pluralistic, I would go even further to say individualistic and personal nature of Judaism which is entirely negated by Levine-Rasky’s generalization of the Jewish character. To me, Levine-Rasky has no more special claim to speak for Judaism or about the “essence” of Jewish experience than any other sociology student, period. And while I may be biased, I would say that no sociology student formulating a theory from a set of data collected from a mere 25 people has any claim to any understanding of any particular position, even one so constituted by “Intersectionality.”

In the final section of her article, Levine-Rasky again sums everything up effortlessly. She explains that

“Jewish identity is ambiguous. Ambiguity is manifest in appeals for Jewish authenticity and for membership within the White, Christian majority. In general, Jews want to sustain dos pintele yid (the Jewish essence) but within the framework of dominant Christian society (147).

Levine-Rasky, whether intentionally or not, portrays the Jew as appealing for membership within the White, Christian majority, and wanting to work “within the framework of dominant Christian society.” I cannot help but think that her portrayal of the Jewish attitude towards dominant Christian society is one that is acquiescent, somewhat harmonious, respectful, and attracted. One might portray the Jewish attitude toward dominant White Christian society in an alternative way, a way which has unfortunately been left out of The Great White North. One might view the Jewish relation to dominant White Christian society by asking oneself the quintessential question that White Christians have put to Jews throughout history: “Assimilate or be killed.”
While the Inquisition is not operating at present in most Canadian cities, the question is one that is constantly posed to everyone who is not an original member of the “dominant White Christian society.” In order to sustain life, in order to make money, in order to live in contemporary North American official society, one must conform to the White Christian way of life. Does it matter to anyone that according to the Jewish calendar, this year is 5767 and not 2007? No, this year Jews and every non-Christian, non-Roman sent their children to schools that start in “September 2007.” Does it matter that those children have “Christmas” and “Easter” vacation? No, every child of every individual and personal ethnic background celebrates Christmas in that it constitutes a Civic holiday.

My point is that as a self-determined Jew living in North America today, just like many Jews throughout ages of persecution, I know about the difference between the official rules of society, set by Christian systems of belief, and those written in the personal code of Jewish Ethics. But instead of resulting in the phenomenon that, as Levine-Rasky puts it, “Jews may feel the risk of their difference or they can forget it, but they want to evoke Jewishness, too, by choosing schools and neighbourhoods that feel Jewish,” this difference, the individuality that comes out of this difference, highlights the importance of an individual interpretation of both Jewishness and dominant White Christian society. That is, no matter who you go to school with, your Jewishness is something that manifests itself however you determine it. But this determination must be something that is undertaken on an individual basis. That is, I come back to what I keep trying to say in the course of this blog: culture means what we make it mean, each for ourselves on an individual basis. The problem arises when we attempt to generalize, and create blanket theories or categories about certain collective experience. For any grouping implies the assumption that everyone who is grouped under that identity will be represented by that identity. And I hope to have shown, through my own critique of Levine-Rasky’s article, that this is most definitely not the case. I repeat: WE CANNOT HAVE REAL KNOWLEDGE OF ANYONE THAT IS NOT LEARNED ON A PERSONAL BASIS. I will not give up my Jewishness nor will I allow Levine-Rasky to speak on my behalf. I speak for my own Jewishness, and in turn I encourage people around me to speak on their own personal behalf. I will not categorize someone by placing them in a standpoint of intersectionality. It is against my own personal Ethics. I am aware that my personal Ethics has partly been informed by the written tradition of Jewish wisdom. Yet to take a generalized definition of Jewishness and in turn apply it to my person, limiting my understanding to that of the “Jewish perspective,” is to make that definition determine who I am. And I reiterate: when others determine who you are or the related yet perhaps even more dangerous determination of who you are supposed to or ought to be, the question of identity is no longer a question. It is simply a title that colours the entire book.

Frideres

Frideres maintains on pg. 44 of The Great White North?:
"Whiteness is defined as part of the human condition and it defines normality"(44).

1. How do you interpret the meaning of the quote? How does its meaning expose a certain truth about the concept of whiteness? Does your definition of the concept prove or disprove (agree or disagree with) the perception of the chapter’s author, James Frideres?

There could be many ways of reading this line, but I would like to focus on the difference between and the difference implied by "is defined" and "defines." Whiteness "is defined" as part of the human condition yet it "defines" normality. That is, while whiteness is only one part or aspect, variation, piece, etc. of the greater "human condition," whiteness involves the position privileged enough to "define" what is considered the norm. I interpret Frideres to mean that while whiteness is on an equal footing with every other race when it comes to race being a factor in the human condition, for some reason whiteness has enjoyed the particular privilege of defining what is considered to be the normal standard.
I think that this is an interesting idea, but I would really like Frideres to ground his claims in real situations. It is one thing to assert that Whiteness has determined normality, but this leads to bigger questions such as if there is indeed one standard of "normality," what is it? I would like Frideres to tell us what "normality" is and then show explicitly how whiteness determines it. Instead he sticks to the region of the theory of Whiteness, where claims about race and the privileges a particular race confers on its members might tend towards proving a point but to me they fall short. Frideres' notion that Whiteness is determined as part of the human condition is interesting within the context of a racialized understanding of humanity--I wonder though if race has such an essentialized relation to who we are as people. I suppose it all comes down to how we define ourselves, whether by racial identities or by the "human condition."

2. Two open-ended questions for Frideres (I am still thinking about the answers):

1. As a teacher, am I occupying a particular place within the structure of systematized white privilege?

2. If so, can I transcend this particular position? Can I do so without identifying myself racially?

2 Part Blog Assignment

Fox, Chapter 8

Fox writes in "Exercises, Assignments and Advice" that as a teacher, when we are leading a discussion about racism or addressing racism in class and the discussion is Silent or Superficial, it is a good idea to ask the class:

"What makes it difficult to have meaningful relationships across the racial divide?" (124).

This is an interesting exercise, because it is a loaded question that I think would and should generate discussion. Sometimes it is easier to formulate ideas in reaction to a given stance.

A lot of ideas are implied in this question, namely "is there one, "the," racial divide?" Is it in fact difficult to have meaningful relationships with others due to people being of different races? Is it easy to have meaningful relationships within each side of a racial divide?
I don't like the question at all, and I don't think it is something that I could ever ask a group of students. But perhaps that is because I rebel against what it implies. So, as an exercise in class, maybe the question is being raised so that people can speak up against it. If it generates discussion, maybe it has worked effectively as an exercise.


Questions for Reflection

1. In what ways does White Privilege enter the classroom?

I would say that we could divide the classrooom into three general contexts: one, the living, material, current classroom environment, constituted by the students, teachers, school organization, and system. The second would be school as an institution of socialization. The third would be what is taught, or the "ideological" classroom, or the curriculum, and learning materials.
White privilege, I would hope, does not enter into the material, current classroom, because as a teacher leading the class it would reflect my own disregard or insensitivity about it. When you wonder a little more about school as an institution, however, it's hard to peel off layers of how historically the system has been predominantly run by white people to find a place completely free from a context of white privilege. I quote rapper T.I.: "School's just a white man's game, and it's ran good" ("Still Ain't Forgave Myself," I'm Serious, 2001). I'm not sure I agree completely with this statement, but perhaps I am overlooking white privilege.
The third place that white privilege would enter the classroom is through the books, media, and other learning materials used to teach. I know that a lot of English literature high school programs in Canada are starting to move in a more multicultural or "global" direction. This was probably a result of the question of whether or not everyone should have to learn a form of white, European-dominated culture and history, and why other cultural histories were not represented in schools. If school is supposed to give students an education in which they can find themselves, the curriculum in many History and English departments has not provided that opportunity.

2. In what ways can you and your students work to articulate and transform the authority of Whiteness?

One way is to encourage a way of learning, instead of encouraging students to learn certain facts. This way, students can develop a critical approach to any material, not to digest and internalize hidden biases, not to accept historical truths as universally valid, and to recognize their place in the world while still understanding that learning is where both the present and past come together. Another way would be to directly talk about Whiteness, or maybe more generally racism, to address the issues in class. A third way would be to make sure that what I as a teacher am teaching is sensitive to a standard of a universal history and open to future possibility.

Tatum Chapter 2: The Complexity of Identity -- "Who am I?"

Tatum writes in Chapter 2:

"The truth is that dominants do not really know what the experience of the subordinates is. In contrast, the subordinates are very well informed about the dominants. Even when firsthand experience is limited by social segregation, the number and variety of images of the dominant group available through television, magazines, books, and newspapers provide subordinates with plenty of information about the dominants" (24).

The question that might be asked is:
Why do white people dominate representations of culture in the media?

But for discussion I would like to ask: Is it understood that television, magazines, books, and newspapers give a fair representation of anyone with whom you would happen to have a "firsthand experience"? Is popular culture actually representative of what is lived on a personal level?

Tatum later writes in Chapter 3 about how her son, watching a Black man running down the street, asked if he was running away from a crime scene. Tatum asserts that his cultural biases were taken from common misrepresentations of Black men in the media. This was something she felt had to be corrected right away. So, using Tatum's terms, if the media does not portray "the subordinates" properly, is it fair to say that they portray "the dominants" in an accurate and fair represenation? Or is media always somewhat of a misrepresentation, and we should be investigating not "the truth" of how one group in society knows about another WITHOUT ANY "FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE," but instead where we really learn about others. When we talk about knowing the experience of others, we cannot overlook the fact that this knowledge should remain at a personal level--for it is there, face to face, that we really get to know people as people, not as a "dominant" or a "subordinate." On a personal level, we look each other in the eye and share our lives, and that is the only acceptable and "true" form of knowledge we can have of anyone else, regardless of whether they are a "dominant" or "subordinate."

Maybe we could address the problem here raised by Tatum by focusing on how and why we are not informed by "first-hand experience." Instead we rely on representations of reality for our knowledge of the world and of others before we even meet them.

Tatum Chapter 3: "Is my skin brown because I drink chocolate milk?"

Tatum writes in Chapter 3:

"In her book Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks relates a conversation she had with a Black woman frustrated by her daughter's desire for long blond hair, despite their family's effort to affirm their Blackness. Observing the woman's dark skin and straightened hair, she encouraged the mother to examine her own attitudes about skin colour and hair texture to see what messages she might be communicating to her child by the way she constructed her own body image"(46).

A question that arises out of this text is: Why do we all feel pressured to transform our natural bodies into artifices of "beauty"? And, more revealingly, what ideal form are we inclined to strive for, if there is a single particular one, and why have we adopted it?

This is one of the most fundamental and pressing questions that we can ask ourselves at any time, in any place. I can't answer it for everyone, but I think that if we all really gave it some thought, we might peel off layers that we put on, or we might feel more conviction for those that we do. But it is one thing to internalize self-destructive ideals without thinking about it, another to be conscious of the way we "carry" and care for ourselves.

And secondly, how much of this hurt (I don't know how else to describe it) can be traced to the way young minds integrate examples that older generations provide into their personal understanding of the "way things are"?

This is again a large question but one that may elicit a greater understanding of our place in between the world we inherit and the way we leave it to future generations. When confronting this issue, my thoughts often turn to lines from Kanye West's "Bring Me Down" (Late Registration, 2005). West maintains:

"You see, if you ever wanted to be anything
It always be somebody that would shoot down any dream
There always be haters, that's the way it is
Hater niggas marry hater bitches and have hater kids."

Unfortunately, we are all fallible human beings, we internalize pain, insecurity, and anger and also are the ones given the responsibility of preserving and propagating human life. The mother described in bell hook's Sisters of the Yam has for whatever reason chosen to straighten her hair, and I think it is very important not to judge her choice as a type of weakness, in the context of what Tatum describes as an "affirmation of their Blackness." Her daughter has chosen to dye her hair blonde. This choice may have nothing to do with negating her Blackness but with affirming some other ideal. Unfortunately, for both women, the ideal form they embody is one that is not natural. But everyone does this, supercede the natural to become an ideal. Hopefully the ideal will be a healthy one.

As discouraging as the predicament may seem, there is hope. This hope resides in the power that we hold as inhabitants of this earth, the power to transform the world we have been given into something better for our children.

West continues in a positive affirmation of this very power conferred by our own responsibility:

"But they gon have to take my life fore they take my drive
Cause when I was barely livin that's what kept me alive
Just the thought that maybe it could be better than where we at this time
Make ya out of this grind before I'm out of my mind."

--http://www.kanyeuniversecity.com/

Reading my last post, I can understand how it might seem that I was making light of a serious subject. In no way was I trying to be facetious. I was frustrated at the dialogue, and wanted to simplify my point and make it as clear as possible. I was having trouble getting my head around the way "culture" and "race" are brought together. It seemed that the more you thought about race and culture, the less sense it made to try to define them.

Yet I do understand how, in a multicultural society, cultural items and representations should reflect the true nature of that society. This is not always the case, and this point was made particularly clear in the reading. We look at prime time television, advertisements, the image of "Jesus Christ," fashion houses, "old boys" clubs--all different reflections and determinating forces of values, and notice how dominant the image of "white" as power or beauty is in many spheres.

I would like to think that this trend is changing. If I understand Berry's point correctly, however, I am led to think about how while it may not be strictly white people in charge in today's culturally dominant or "mainstream" North American society, it has been white people that set the terms of power and how power is to be gained. That is, the major players are not necessarily white, but the game that they must play to be powerful is one whose rules were determined for the most part by white people years ago.

I am thinking now of the documentary in theatres now, In the Shadow of the Moon, about the American astronauts who traveled to the moon in the past century. It strikes me today that all of the 24 astronauts were white men. It was not explicit that this was a cause for concern back when the spacecrafts were actually being built. While this fact glares at you throughout the film, we cannot discount the cultural achievement of actually building the Apollo spacecrafts and going up out into space. That they were all white speaks to something very ugly about the American culture of the time. But the dominant social, economic, and political culture of America sent human beings into outer space. The science behind and experience of space travel was interesting to me, and seemed of primary interest to the astronauts themselves.

Unfortunately the facts speak for themselves but I would like to hope for the future. Whatever culture may come to be, substantially or meaningfully, hopefully we will be open-minded enough not to uphold any one culture over another, or any one race over another. Hopefully we will be open-minded enough not to engage in any form of prejudice, traditional or otherwise.

How the zebra got its stripes

In thinking more about race and racism, my thoughts turned to something that I feel contributes a lot to the discussion. First I considered "black and white difference." I looked at this for awhile:

Here the difference between black and white is clearly demonstrated. We have differentiated black colouring from white colouring.

But then I thought more about zebras, and the fact that the stripes on no two zebras are exactly alike. This made me think more about difference, and what differences are important.

It is logically impossible not to discriminate against individuals in arguments like Dei's. While professing to be "anti-racist," Dei's theory rests on the idea of "whiteness," a general category that groups many individuals under one title, one "race."

Everybody sees the world differently. Categories such as "whiteness" are created to group more that one point of view together. But it is impossible for two different people to share the exact same outlook and not be the same person. The use of categories like "whiteness" overlooks the natural and individual differences inherent between any individuals, whether they are "members" of that "race" or not. Difference is not a grouping together of black and white and comparing the two. Difference is the idea that no two individuals are exactly alike.

The least discriminant system would have an infinite number of categories. Once difference is admitted as being calculable under general headings that group individual difference together, it is left to the whim of a personal judge where the category lines are drawn. Categories used in the way Dei uses "Whiteness" lump together individual subjects. They make them objects of racism, their subjective character being judged by the colour of their skin.

Look at that zebra long enough and you will not help but be amazed!

clarification of Dei's point:

When I said that "...Dei's form of racism, involved his naming of the category "Whiteness" and then applying it to every White person as being something that every White person participates in "deliberately," whether they want to or not..."
I meant more that he names a category "Whiteness," then assigns certain values, practices, and modes of being that go along BY NATURE of WHITENESS, then assigns those values, practices, and modes of being (in his view, being racist) to every single person to whom one could assign the category "White." It sounds like racism to me when anyone starts discussing patterns of behaviour based on the natural dispostion (resulting from a specific position) of race, regardless of what race is being analyzed.
Maybe I am naive in thinking that another route is available to us in countering racism. But to me, to fight racism with more ideas about what a specific race confers on people "of that race" is to perpetuate distinctions and value systems based on race. I don't know how we can, as a "human" race, make racism history, but I really hope that we do.

first response to the concept of "Whiteness"

In the introduction to The Great White North? (Carr and Lund), George J. Sefa Dei writes that

"Racism is about maintaining White dominance and supremacy" (viii).

And later:
"As alluded to, Whiteness cannot itself be essentialized, especially when embodied Whiteness intersects along gender, class, and sexual lines....Notwithstanding these complications, however, it is also equally important to reiterate that there is a systemization and structuralization of dominance within social institutions that perpetuate White privilege and other forms of oppressions "inter-generationally" and/or through time and space, irrespective of class, gender, religious, language and sexual differences, particularly among dominant groups" (x).

Two questions arose for me out of the reading of this introduction. First, I would like to ask whether racism, fundamentally, is not the stigmatization and differentiation, or polarization of a number of people, based on their race. Racism and supremacy seem to go hand in hand; they both segregate or categorize people based on race, and then apply certain values to that race as a whole. Is racism the act of making race an issue? If so, Dei is he is singling out a particular race and identifying that race with a certain quality. If this fundamental definition of racism does not hold, or racism is not about the polarization of people based on race, then Dei must rethink his terms: he cannot define racism based on an idea of "white," because his definition rests on and expands out of a polarization of a particular group based on race. In making claims about what Whiteness does to people who are white, is Dei himself engaging in a form of racism, a racism that is not about "maintaining White dominance and supremacy"?
So is Dei's form of racism, (i.e. his naming of the category "Whiteness" and then applying it to every White person as being something that every White person participates in "deliberately," whether they want to or not) a good sort of racism, something that he thinks everybody needs to do more of?
Is racism ever good?

Secondly, I am trying to understand the notion of "embodied" vs. "essential" Whiteness.

What is the Meaning of "Cultural Identity"?

"Cultural Identity" is an interesting idea because it is the joining together of the idea of culture and that of identity. While sounding simple enough, it is probably a good idea to see how the ideas of culture and of identity interact.

Culture can be described as a collection of ideas or values or "norms" that reaches over many single individuals, that endures over time and informs a collective space. Culture is something greater and more powerful than any individual. It is a world of beliefs about the world to which individuals subscribe and feel a part of. However, it must be asked whether, in the way that "if a tree fell and no one was around to hear it, did it made a noise?", if a culture existed but no one was around to propagate it, does it actually exist?

This is where the question of identity comes in. A culture must be subscribed to by individuals that "identify" with it. Identification is a process by which something is seen as being identical to another. In "identification" as it is applied to individuality, the individual actually sees their self as identical, or at least a part of their "selves" (an idea that opens up a whole other issue about split/multiple identities within a coherent self) is identical, with the ideal of an individual delineated in the perspective of a particular set of norms. So "cultural identity" is the linking together of a collective body of "culture" with an individual act of "identification." What is interesting to ask ourselves is whether we are really in a position to "identify" with cultures. If people argue that culture is something that you are born into and grow up with simply by being in the presence of others in a society, then "cultural identity" would imply a being "without culture" enough to actively identify with it. In this way, identification involves a form of adoption.

What then happens to "culture"? Is culture something we choose? Identification involves some sort of choice, some sort of stepping back and evaluating the singlular "identity" of two separate things. Thus when we talk about what it means when we identify with one culture, more than one cultures, one big "multiculture," we are talking about the way the individual relates to culture, and how culture is changed by who relates to it. The two are brought together in the form of "identification," even though the one doing the identifying is inherently already part of something--a particular position in time and space that is part of a global and all-inclusive history--that can sometimes be left out of the equation. Once we distinguish one culture from another we overlook the inherent paradox of choosing an identity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnk7lh9M3o

This is a great example of how culture is something that anyone can identify with.
And in identification, the culture itself is renewed.