I’ve been thinking about the concept of Safe Spaces lately.

Two things have spurred this. First, a little bit after Mandolin posted her (excellent) ‘Mandolin Replies to Seelhoff’ thread, we were chatting via IM, and she expressed dismay, wondering whether there could ever be an environment that could serve as a safe space for both radfems and transfolk. Second, Bean’s post here, in that same thread, in which she says (among other things):

I do not believe that this thread, or indeed any thread on this blog, is a safe place for me to participate, nor do I believe that there would or even could ever be any sort of productive discussion here.

After reading this, I started poking around the Intarwebs, looking for a well-done definition of what safe space is and how to build it. I haven’t yet found something useful.

The idealist in me says that it must be possible to create a space that feels safe for disparate groups of people. On the other hand, if part of the creation of a safe space is that the people within that space need to be able to speak what they feel to be true about their oppression, will that, of necessity, mean that the space is unsafe for those they feel are their oppressors?

I think that this is part of what’s going on with the whole trans/radfem debate. Many transfolk (rightly, I think) do not feel that any space where their declared (sex or) gender is up for debate can be considered a safe space. Many radfems (also, not unreasonably) do not feel that any space where they’re lambasted for engaging in radical feminist analysis can be considered a safe space.

I’m not interested so much in continuing the trans/radfem debate . . . god(dess) knows we’ve hammered that shit out ad infinitum. My concern is much more with how we go about creating a safe space for maximum inclusion, and to what degree that’s a desirable goal.

By way of another, less apocalyptically controversial example, it may be impossible to create a space that is safe both for homosexual folks and members of the religious right. And maybe that’s okay, because I don’t care whether members of the religious right generally feel safe joining a discussion. But although I may disagree with them until the sky falls, I very much do care that radical feminists feel safe.

So I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t know if there is one. What constitutes ’safe space’ anyhow?

Thoughts?

In another ignorant white people moment, we have this comment from Elizabeth Edwards.

As her husband trails Clinton and Obama in national polls, Elizabeth Edwards has been an outspoken critic of his opponents. Last month, she said her husband would be a better champion for women as president than Clinton and more recently said, “We can’t make John black, we can’t make him a woman. Those things get you a lot of press, worth a certain amount of fundraising dollars.”

Some of her other points in the full AP article are legitimate, but this quote is just nonsense.  Being white and male doesn’t get a candidate press?  Being white and male makes it hard to raise funds?  If this is the case, then why is it that out of the field of nearly 20 major candidates only 2 are not white and male.

The quote seems to suggest that Clinton’s gender and Obama’s race are why they get media attention and financial supporters.  I’m not saying that the gender and race angles haven’t been covered, but to insinuate that that is the reason for their early success in fundraising and polls is unfair.  Perhaps they are both getting attention because people like what they have to say.  Maybe Clinton is getting attention because of her tremendous name recognition.  Maybe Obama has hired a creative and talented campaign staff. 

If white women, women of color, and men of color have been so successful at running for President then why have white men been the only ones to win? 

This certainly isn’t going to help Edwards move up in the polls with white women and people of color (he’s already doing poorly with African American voters).  I was thinking about voting for Edwards, but if the campaign is sending Elizabeth Edwards out to make these types of comments, John Edwards is moving down on my list of preferred candidates.

Very interesting article by Glenn Loury in The Boston Review.

To read Part 1, go here.

You have to wonder what kind of research he did and how he did it. Did he interview women? Create a list of all the possibilities he could imagine and ask them to check off on a list “all descriptions that apply?” Did he talk to men, get them to narrate their sexual philosophies and techniques? Did he observe what he wrote about firsthand, somehow get permission to stand behind a wall constructed so that he could spy on the couples who had agreed to be his informants? Or did he just make it all up? It’s impossible to know, but when Sheikh Nezawi wrote The Perfumed Garden in the sixteenth century–it was translated into English by Richard Burton in 1886–he devoted an entire chapter to “The Divers Names of the Virile Member.” Some are self-explanatory, like Generative Organ, Hairy One or Bald-Head. At least one, The Pigeon, is interesting as a metaphor because of the way it feminizes the penis: “It is so called because, after having been swollen and at the moment when it is returning to its state of repose, [this kind of penis] resembles a pigeon settling on its eggs” (54). In most cases, however, Sheikh Nezawi treats the male genitals synechdocically, making it clear that, in describing certain kinds of penises, he is also describing the men to whom they are attached. Here, for example is The Creeper:

This name has been given to the penis because, when it gets between a woman’s thighs and sees a plump vulva, it starts to creep on her legs and pubis, then, approaching the entrance, it continues to creep until it has taken possession. When comfortably installed, it penetrates completely and ejaculates. (59)

And here is The Knocker

It is thus named because, when it arrives at the door of the vulva, it gives a light knock; if the vulva replies and opens the door, it enters; but if it gets no reply, it knocks again until successful. By knocking at the door we refer to the rubbing of the penis on the vulva until it becomes moist. The production of this moisture is what is called opening the door. (59)

My son will soon be nine years old. Especially during the first years of his life, when he began to learn the names for the parts of his body–though I am aware the question is relevant even now–I thought a lot about how the way we talk about our genitals in this culture expresses and, in part, creates the way we feel as a culture not just about the male body, but also about sex and the people we have sex with. Never before had I been confronted on a daily basis with the realization that someone else’s understanding of who he was, of what it might mean for him to live in his own body, hung quite literally on my every word.

When he was two, for example, my wife would tell me stories about how he occasionally got erections when she washed his penis in the bath. “I don’t like it like this,” she told he would say, starting to cry. “I want it to be soft,” and he would try to push his penis down, which of course did not have the result he desired.

One night, I happened to be home when this happened, and I walked into the bathroom to find my wife crouching at the edge of the tub, talking to our son in a very soothing voice, while he sat with the water running behind him, breathing the last gasping breaths of what had obviously been a two-year-old’s very heavy cry. When my wife explained that he was crying because he’d had an erection, I leaned over the edge of the tub, took our son’s face in my hands and said, “Sometimes my dool gets hard when I don’t want it to. I just wait and it gets soft again. You do the same thing. Don’t get upset. Just wait and it will go back to being soft.”

My son’s eyes widened with a feeling so big it left him speechless. I kissed his cheek and walked out, back to whatever it was that I’d been doing. Later, my wife told me that after I’d left the room, he’d turned to her and said, in Persian, which is her native language and was his dominant language at the time, “Maman, dooleh baba sefteh!” (Mom, Dad’s penis gets hard!) We puzzled briefly over what, specifically, he might have meant, and I tried to remember if, when I was a boy, any of my adult male relatives had talked to me about my own body in a similar way, offering themselves as a reflection of my biological maleness and the stance I might take towards it. I don’t think anyone ever did, but I did recall a moment when I was no older than six or eight in which I caught a glimpse of what I might have learned if someone had.

My father and I were in the locker room getting ready to leave the beach. His back was to me and he was talking about something I couldn’t listen to because he was naked. My eyes wandered among the whorls of black fur that ran from the nape of his neck, along his shoulders and arms, down is back and into the dark cleft of his buttocks. When he turned around, I could see where the hair of his back met the hair of his front in the bush between his legs. His penis hung like a pendulum, swinging slowly between his thighs when he walked, and I wondered if it got hard like mine did, if he played with it like I’d begun to do. I wanted to run and throw my arms around him, to pass through his skin and know what it would mean to live with such size. I was hungry with the prescience that his body would someday be mine, that my body was his in the making.

Read the rest of this entry »

This Post Secret movie, is beautiful:

My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it. Sometimes more than I can handle. And it’s not just mine. Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they’re too busy with their own.

Buffy - Earshot

I love post secret - and it does make me think about Buffy.* Each person who writes in a secret is reaching beyond themselves, trying to do something with their pain, trying to make a connection. People read the site and feel less alone. It’s not much, it’s not enough, everyone who writes in deserves so much more than to have their work read, to realise they’re not alone, but it’s a start.

*But then looking at linoleum sometimes makes me think about Buffy

I’m going to be doing some baby bloggings again — although no more huge photo series, I’m afraid (too time-intensive). But some of these photos are too cute not to blog. :-)

Hey, y’all.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area (the far northeastern tip). Mandolin lives in the Bay Area too. So does Cassandra (of the kick-ass Cassandra Says blog).

I’ve got an idea so crazy it just . . . might . . . work.

Let’s have a picnic and get together for Bay Area feminist bloggers/commenters and their friends. We could do it in Golden Gate park (Personally, I favor the Botanical Gardens) on some Saturday afternoon when everyone’s available.

I’ve been chatting with so many of you folks (for years in some cases) that it would be great to meet you in person and feed you potato salad!
This is a good idea! Who’s with me?

This one from the AP “Whites now minority in 1 in 10 counties.” Couldn’t this headline also be “Whites majority in 9 of 10 counties”?

And it is really funny given the discussion that Rory and I were having in this thread. I was telling him how there are many places in the northern tier of this country that are nearly all white. He was asking me if it really was that rare to see a black person in (rural) areas of the north. Here’s the comment I left. You should check out the graphs in the pdf files:

It’s not so much rare as it is concentrated into segregated areas in and around major cities. Check out page 6 of this pdf file; the map is the percent white for various counties (some would say it underestimates % white because it include Latinos who identify as white, but it demonstrates the general point). Look how many counties are 90-99% white–notice how most of them are in the north. In many states like Ohio, you can spot the counties where the bigger cities are because they are not darker blue.

Now check out page 6 of this pdf file. Look how many counties have fewer than 5% black. For that matter look how many states have no counties where more than 4.9% of the population is black–Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Hawaii. You have a few states where all but one or two counties are less than 5% black, but the dark blue counties are pretty much all in the south.

Now I was specifically talking about Blacks, not people of color broadly. But there are still many counties, probably the majority where people of color are less than 10% of the populations. Even the graph, pictured in association with the article, could just as easily have made my point about how many counties are very white.

If you read the article, you would like there is a huge Latino invasion, but is 1 in 10 impressive. I don’t think so.

“My Daughter’s Vagina” is the title of an essay I wrote about five years ago that was published online here but that I have never really felt comfortable with as a finished piece. Not too long ago, I came up with the idea of serializing the essay on my blog as I revised it, and so here I am. I originally had in mind that I wanted say a few things about the nature of the essay, but I think that, for the most part, it’s better that I just let the piece speak for itself. I will say that “My Daughter’s Vagina” is long, around 27,000 words, and so I will have to ask for your patience in letting the piece unfold at the pace that I am able to set for revising it; and I will also say that the goal of the piece is not to argue any particular position, but rather to raise questions about gender, sex and sexuality and explore them from within my own experience as a man in this culture. The narratives in the essay are deeply personal and very revealing, and do not always show me in the kindest of lights. I hope you will understand, therefore, that while I am perfectly comfortable reading and discussing good faith critiques of how I understand my experience in the essay, I am not going to tolerate any comments that even remotely resemble personal attacks on me or on anyone else who chooses to comment. Other than that, I am, for now, going to leave the comments section open to all comers. So, here goes:

My Daughter’s Vagina, Part 1

The first time a woman opened her legs long enough that I could look for more than the few seconds it took to bend to her with lips and tongue, or to climb up blind into her and start moving, I crouched between her thighs to get as close as I could, and I remember even now how the words began to list themselves in my head: pussy, beaver, twat, slit, fur, love muscle, muff, quim, cabbage, snatch, box…and all of them but one felt inadequate; and that was the one I wanted most not to use, not even to think, the one I’d come to understand as degrading of my lover by its very existence; and yet, somehow, no other word but cunt captured in my imagination the wet and hairy wildness, the pungent and disheveled and untamed and multi-shaded pink and red and brown and flesh-colored and even deep violet beauty of what I was looking at. I’d seen pictures of course, plenty of them, had discovered as a young teenager that I grew hard at the sight of them, but those images of carefully coiffed, sometimes completely shaven, meticulously arranged specimens of female genitalia were, I suddenly understood, so obviously composed, so clearly intended as artifice, that I felt, looking at my lover, as if I were seeing a cunt for the first time.

The more I stared, the more uncomfortable she became. “What are you looking at? Is something wrong down there?”

And when I didn’t respond right away, “Answer me!”

“You’re beautiful,” I answered, and I know it sounds like something out of a romance novel, but the words came in a whisper, and I looked up at her and I smiled, and then I tried in everything I did next with fingers and my lips and my tongue to make sure she knew I meant what I’d said; and when she asked me to fuck her, her words, not mine, tears–but how do I write this without sounding like I’m bragging? How do I make you see that this memory, even more than it makes me feel good about myself (which of course it does), humbles me and fills me with awe and gratitude–tears were filling her eyes. It was, she explained as we lay together afterward, the first time a man had told her she was beautiful “down there,” much less made love to her in a way that convinced her he really meant it.

“And all those other times,” I wondered to myself. “What had I meant then? What had she understood my meaning to be?”

///

The fundamentally alien universe that a woman’s experience of sex is to me. That mine is to her. So fully do we romanticize heterosexual lovemaking as a communion of souls, a synthesizing of opposites, the fulfillment and expression of our deepest emotional needs, that it’s easy to forget just how inaccessible the interior landscapes of male and female sexual embodiment are to each other. Or, perhaps more to the point, how strongly this romanticization invites our forgetfulness, encourages, even mandates that we refuse to see just how deeply, when it comes to sex, physical differences divide us.

When I began this essay, I was teaching an independent study project in creative nonfiction with two women, each of whom wanted to write about gender and sexuality, exploring specifically the meaning and consequences of the childhood sexual abuse she had survived. One of the books I asked them to read was Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, which is too often, and inaccurately, understood as arguing that heterosexual sex is by its nature–man penetrating, woman penetrated–a tool of the patriarchy and therefore exists almost solely to demean and exploit women. Given the way Dworkin writes, this is not a difficult misreading to come to, especially for college sophomores who are encountering her ideas for the first time, and so when my students asked me whether Intercourse should indeed be read that way, I suggested we discuss the following quote from the section called Occupation/Collaboration: “The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people–physically occupied inside, internally invaded–be free […]?”

Easy to misinterpret and dismiss–after all, how can a woman who willingly has intercourse be understood as having been occupied and invaded, with all the connotations those words carry of warfare and colonization?–Dworkin’s question is less about any given woman’s personal experience of intercourse than it is about the nature of female identity. For while a clear distinction exists in most people’s imagination between a woman’s experience of rape and her experience of the kind of intercourse to which the term lovemaking is meant to refer, focusing on that distinction tends to obscure the fact that heterosexual intercourse is also generally understood in our culture–perhaps along with menstruation–to be the defining moment of femaleness and womanhood. More to the point, and this is what I understand the crux of Dworkin’s question to be, if a woman cannot be understood to exist fully as a woman until her body has been “physically occupied inside, internally invaded” by a man, then it doesn’t really matter how tender and/or loving and/or intensely pleasurable intercourse is for her. The freedom of her body was already compromised, by definition, not merely before she had sex, but even before she was born. If, in other words, intercourse is what makes a woman a woman, or, perhaps more precisely, if what makes a woman a woman in patriarchal culture is her capacity for being genitally penetrated–which means intercourse is both an expression and confirmation of her gender–then the question arises whether the difference between the kind of intercourse most people describe as lovemaking and the kind we call rape can accurately be described as one of kind. Maybe, Dworkin is asking, this difference is more properly described as one of degree, since in each case a woman is fulfilling the mandate of her socially prescribed gender identity.

I’d come to class prepared with references to passages in my students’ own essays that helped to demonstrate the validity of Dworkin’s question, but something in their eyes told they’d already gotten it and that to say more than what I have paraphrased above would have been both superfluous and self-serving. For now matter how important I thought Dworkin’s question was, it would never mean the same thing to me as it did to them, and so I fell silent, letting the room fill with the gap of otherness that had opened between us; and it was in this silence, watching the faces of these two women who had placed their trust in me both as a teacher and, given what they wanted to write about, as a man, that my imagination made the leap that was the starting point of this essay: Had I lived a different life–that of my parents, for example, who married when they were in their very early twenties–one of those two women was young enough that she could’ve been my daughter. I don’t mean that I felt fatherly towards her, or that she saw me as a father figure, but this abrupt awareness of the age difference between us brought me back to a conversation my wife and I had been having about whether or not to conceive a second child. I thought about how, if that still-hypothetical offspring turned out to be a girl, she would grow up–I would have to raise her–in a world where the validity of Dworkin’s question inhered, inescapably, in the fact of her body. I thought about how I would, from the first moments of her life, face this daughter across the same terrain of difference that was separating me from my students, and I thought about how, precisely because she would be my daughter, that silence would not be an option.

“And so what,” I almost asked myself out lout, “what will I say to her?”

 Cross-posted at It’s All Connected.

I’m still not certain if I like this caption; if I think of a better one, I might change it.

Greetings, all, I’m Myca!

Hi there.

With Ampersand stepping down from his lofty blogging throne, he’s asked me to make the leap from moderator to co-blogger, so although most of you have more or less known me for some years now, I thought an introductory post would be a good idea.

SO: I’m a long-haired, polyamorous, feminist, agnostic, Mac-using, role-playing, Gaiman-reading, left-wing, philosophy-studying, theater-attending, computer-gaming, kinky, sexually dominant, art-film loving, ren-faire participating, quirky, outdoorsy geek dreamer. And I’m a white guy.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so that type isn’t as uncommon as you’d think.

My primary interests are feminism, leftist politics in general, geek culture, civility of debate, and sexual freedom issues, so that’s mostly what I’ll be posting on, but I’m of course always interested in learning more about things I know little about, so you may see the occasional “Huh, this is confusing to me,” post too.

EDIT: Oh, hey, the blogs I regularly read:

Feministe
Pandagon
Bird Brains (The IDT Weblog).
Cassandra Says
I shame the matriarchy
let them eat pro-sm feminist safe spaces
The Washington Monthly
Philosoraptor

EDIT the second: I’m crossing out polyamorous, since I’m in a monogamous relationship sort of. *grin* Long story.

I’ve decided New Zealand needs to export Maurice Williamson, one of our opposition politicians. Maurice Williamson recently joined the debate on the ‘obesity epidemic’:

If some people can’t lose weight no matter what. how come there were not fat people in the Nazi concentration camps?

Concentration camps? Of course that’s the solution to the ‘obesity epidemic’ why didn’t anyone think of it sooner. That’s the way to make my body socially acceptable.

Although rest assured Maurice Williamson doesn’t actually want to put us in concentration camps:

When Sainsbury asked Mr Williamson on air if it was wise to use such an analogy, the MP replied: “Maybe it wasn’t”.

But he said it was a good example of people getting a very low level of nutrients and working hard.

“No one’s saying put them in a concentration camp but it is important to know that if you are working hard burning calories and not taking them into your mouth you won’t put on weight.”

He does understand that people died from having a low level of nutrients and working hard doesn’t he?

I’ve gotten several lovely emails in response to the “White Lies” cartoon. This one is notable for its rigorously narrow focus:

Your looks are jewish, your work is jewishily inspired and intended. The results of your agitprop are of benefit to jews alone. You are a jew.

Damn straight my looks are Jewish! At least some of my work is directly inspired by my Judaism. I’m fine with my work benefiting Jews (although I’d be kinda disappointed if no one else benefited). And yup, I am a Jew.

So I’m guilty on all counts, and yet… was any of that supposed to be derisive? It’s as if someone told me off by emphasizing how handsome, likable and well-groomed I am. If that’s the best you can think of for an insult — then for God’s sake, insult me some more.

Along similar lines, one of the folks on this racist site comments:

“Oh, its just another fat liberal man who was deprived of attention during childhood and does whatever he hs to to get his fill, just like Micheal Moore!”. JUST like the big MM.

Oh noooooo – I’m likened to an incredibly successful and popular Oscar-winning movie director! Oh, the horror, the horror!¹

Next they’ll insult me by telling me how great I smell…

1. And thank goodness only stupid right-wingers would respond to a cartoon they don’t like by making fat jokes about the cartoonist! Good thing us feminists would never do that, right? Right? Oh, uh… never mind. (back)

I’ve decided to take a leave from blogging so that I can spend more times on other things in my life.

Partly, I’m taking more time for my health. I’ve been exercising about 43 minutes a day¹, but once you include the time spent preparing, showering afterward, etc., it’s over an hour a day no longer available for blogging.

Mainly, though, I’m spending more time cartooning. I could say I’m more valuable as a cartoonist than as a blogger — and that’s probably true — but I don’t really choose my priorities that way. The truth is, after years of feeling more driven to blog than to draw comics, I’m now feeling the reverse.

I’ll still post my political cartoons here on “Alas.” And occasional cartooning-related posts. But although I won’t disappear from “Alas” entirely, I won’t be writing any non-cartooning blog posts. Nor will I be fully participating in the comments, because that turns into a huge time-suck. (But I do read all the comments left about my cartoons, and I really appreciate the large majority of them.)

It’s been a delightful five years (!) of blogging; I thank everyone who’s made it so great. And maybe I’ll feel like blogging again, someday. But for now, I’m more excited by the prospect of a good ink line than a good link farm.

1. Precisely the length of an hour-long TV show once the commercials are cut out — what an amazing coincidence! (back)

Tariq sent me this link from a NYT article, which I later read in my backlog of post vacation newspapers.  The article discusses Dr. Mary Bucholtz’s research on the connection between nerdiness and whiteness.  The article says,

Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.” 

Later the author, Benjamin Nugent, makes the following argument based on Bucholtz research,

By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white. Bucholtz sees something to admire here. In declining to appropriate African-American youth culture, thereby “refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which white youth cultures are founded,” she writes, nerds may even be viewed as “traitors to whiteness.” You might say they know that a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having. On the other hand, the code of conspicuous intellectualism in the nerd cliques Bucholtz observed may shut out “black students who chose not to openly display their abilities.” This is especially disturbing at a time when African-American students can be stigmatized by other African-American students if they’re too obviously diligent about school. Even more problematic, “Nerds’ dismissal of black cultural practices often led them to discount the possibility of friendship with black students,” even if the nerds were involved in political activities like protesting against the dismantling of affirmative action in California schools. If nerdiness, as Bucholtz suggests, can be a rebellion against the cool white kids and their use of black culture, it’s a rebellion with a limited membership.

I personally would like to read more about the methodology of the researcher before I make too many criticisms of the actual research, but at the same time, I worry that this research and the article could be misinterpreted.  It could be misconstrued as saying “black people are hip, cool and in style.” One problem potential problem with making any generalizations from this work is that the research comes primarily from California schools, which are not representative of the US.  The reporter also doesn’t discuss the distinction between being in a predominantly white school, a mixed school, or a predominantly Black/Asian/Latino/American Indian school.  I suspect the racial make-up of the school could make a difference in how race and nerdiness or hipness is constructed.  I’m not sure exactly how nerdiness is operationally defined in this study, but it seems to me to be more a set of behaviors and images that transcend race.  Additionally, if we are talking about nerdiness, we also need to address it’s counterpart coolness/hipness. 

I’m not sure we should want any racial group to be cool or hip after all fashions come and go.  For example, a few years ago many pop culture pundits were talking about the “Latin explosion.”  According to the “Latin Explosion” proponents, Latinos were hip and cool, and they were taking over American pop culture.  This claims was based on the success of about 4 or 5 musical artists and actors.  Do 4 or 5 people really make a trend?  Not really.  In fact, just a few years later you don’t even hear about the Latino explosion, unless it’s some bigot lamenting how many Latino immigrants are entering the US.  Does this mean that Latinos aren’t hip and cool anymore?  Would we ever hear the claim that whites and whiteness are hip and cool?  Probably, not. 

One reason whites aren’t cool, hip or trendy is that we are always in style.  Cool whiteness is usually coded as the All American or Preppy style and it is epitomized by thin white people with blond hair and blue eyes¹.  Perhaps hyperwhiteness, whatever that is, is not cool.  I have heard people on occasion pejoratively say–”That’s so white.” But what is most striking to me is that in American culture there are always white celebrities and pop culture icons who get to define the trends.  There are a few token blacks, Latinos, and Asians as pop culture makers, but whiteness always gets a place at the cool kids table.  In fact, it seems like many people of color aren’t really cool until they are embraced by the “mainstream,” which is usually a code word for whites.  Two artists that exemplify this are Jamie Fox or Queen Latifah, both of whom have been well established actors and musical artists for at least 15 years.  Now that they are embraced by a whiter audience; they are Hollywood A-listers.  Some would use this example to say, “Well, many Black Americans were way ahead of whites in noticing how cool these two artists are.”  I’m reluctant to make such a claim because I think cool is a moving target, and it is obviously very subjective.  Moreover, if being cool means being in style or being someone who is very popular than it is mostly whites who dictate coolness because there are more whites here in the US than other groups and whites disproportionately own and operate media outlets and other businesses that strongly influence coolness.  So, if black people get high cool points from pop culture makers, it’s because a critical mass of whites say black people are cool not because black people see themselves as cool. 

The other question I’m left asking is, “What about black nerds?”  I know some, and of course, most of us know America’s favorite black nerd Steve Urkle.  Are they labeled nerds because they allegedly “act white” or is it something else?  To me it’s something else.

Unlike Blacks, Asians don’t fair so well when it comes to the hip and cool portrayals in pop culture.  The last time I checked “the racial stereotypometer,” Asians were scoring very high on nerdiness.  I’m not sure how the Asian students fair in Dr. Bucholtz’s research, but I’m having trouble imagining that whiteness is considered less cool than Asianess, given the very common racist stereotype that Asians are nerds.  I suppose one could argue that Asians are stereotyped as both cool and nerdy, but it is clear that many portrayals of nerds and geeks include the token Asian². 

I don’t know exactly what this author’s methods or study found, so I can only comment on the New York Times write-up about her research, but I personally think that most of what defines nerdiness is not racially coded–wearing thick glasses, being clumsy and nonathletic, being bookish, and being socially awkward.  To the extent that race enters our discussion of nerdiness it is more about racial stereotypes than it is about racial realities.  Thus, we need to tread lightly into this territory, focusing on how racial stereotyping creates images of hipness and nerdiness.  We also need to discuss how media and business influence pop culture, keeping in mind that most businesses and media outlets are run by whites and those arbiters of taste are catering primarily to the tastes of a predominantly white audience.  If we don’t make this clear, then many people in the audience, are going to come away from the article saying yeah blackness is hip and cool, and whiteness is not.

1. Undoubtedly, this is class coded was well–middle and upper income whites get way more cool points than working class or poor whites. (back)
2. My own sense is that Asian cultural products are considered cool, but Asian people are not as cool.  I haven’t studied this, so it is just a anecdotal observation. Perhaps the same distinction could also be made for African Americans–African American cultural products are cool, and African American people are not as cool. (back)

(Larger version can be viewed here.)

This is actually a cartoon from years ago, which I just redrew this week. Here, for comparison, is the original cartoon:

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Wow.

This was what I was waiting for. This is a story of scope and shape that you couldn’t tell on TV, and it’s a story worth telling.

The Chain is the story of the slayer who is working as a Buffy decoy underground. We see her becoming, learning and doing and dying.

She tells her story in fragments, as she’s dying. We get moments out of place, people we don’t know asking her questions, and there are huge gaps in the story. She’s trying to convey her experience and she doesn’t have time to tell her life.

She’s trying to convey one idea with her story - the importance of working collectively. She learns with the slayers, she learns what it means to work together, that it’s actually amazing. Then she goes underground, and they build something together: her, the fairies, the slugs, the ravenclan and the thing that looks like a leaf-blower. We don’t know the details, but we know that she forms relationships that matters. We see some of the joy that comes from working together.

Regular readers of my blog will understand that this would have been enough to make me absurdly happy and forgive the art.* But Joss gets to explore an idea that he could never explore with Buffy the character.

Because in reality it’s not about individuals, even great leaders. It’s not about Buffy, (or Che Guevara, Sylvia Pankhurst, Jock Barnes, Rosa Parks…) - “there’s millions of people go into making a name. People facing things they couldn’t imagine they would.” It’s the workers who go on strike, not the leaders whose work matters. In every movement the people who you’ve never heard of are as important as those whose faces get on T-shirts.

Then at the end, is the bit that made me cry:

The real questions run deeper. Can I fight? Did I help? Did I do for my sisters? My Comrades, Children, slimy slug-clan… There is a chain between each and every one of us. And like the man said, you either feel its tug or you ignore it. I tried to feel it. I tried to face the darkness like a woman and I don’t need any more than that. You don’t have to remember me

When I’ve been killed by an underground demon who is holding by body above his head (which I hope won’t happen for many years yet) that’s how I will judge my life.

* I loved the comic so much that my usual complaint about drawing is relegated to a footnote. Could we have one comic where a female character doesn’t get naked for no reason? I also thought the slayers looked too generic, the one punk girl the exception which emphasises the similarities.

Then there was the line that this slayer needed her breasts padded to imitate Buffy. It was unnecessary, but also completely ridiculous. We can see the slayer’s breasts right there in the panel, we know what comic book and SMG Buffy look like; she didn’t need padding.

Byron at proletblog has always been a fan of wikipedia, an enthusiasm I don’t really share. I’ve written a bit about this before. But since he’s started writing about wikipedia and history:

As of yesterday I’m back at university, had my first lecture of the new semester yesterday which includes all the basics, what text book to buy, what times the tutorials are, and of course, a stern warning on the evils of Wikipedia, according my history lecturer Wikipedia is not to be trusted, in fact she was adament that if any of us cite Wikipedia we would fail the course.

I have no objection to that policy - although partly for the mundane reason that once you get to university you shouldn’t be citing any encyclopedia.

There’s the common argument against Wikipedia, which is it’s unreliability. In the article on the miner’s strike:

Folk singer Billy Bragg wrote several songs dealing with the strike as a current event, namely “Which Side Are You On?”

That’s not an error that anyone who had a background in unions, let alone labour history, could make. The error was pointed out on the talk page in 2006, and still hasn’t been fixed. Obviously errors aren’t limited to Wikipedia - everytime I read a general history of New Zealand I go looking for errors in my area of research - but that sort of error shows that the author(s) do not have any depth of knowledge, or context in the subject they’re writing about.

But my objection to Wikipedia as a font of historical knowledge is much more fundamental than that. As the article Byron linked to said:

. Despite Wikipedia’s unconventionality in the production and distribution of knowledge, its epistemological approach—exemplified by the npov policy—is highly conventional, even old-fashioned.

I would go further, and say it was conservative, and privileged the knowledge and experiences of the powerful over the knowledge and experiences of those without power.

Here’s an example from the Talk page about the miner’s strike. Someone asks:

people who were not there who work for a news paper take credence over people who were there, but didnt work in the media? I can provide quotes to living people,NUM activists,strikers,miners for quotes, but this would not be allowed?

Someone else responded

No, this is precisely the sort of thing which will not do - please read the verifiability policy and the reliable sources guidelines. Reporting something which someone said to you is not good enough - that’s original research, which is forbidden.

Radical historians have fought hard to expand historical record beyond what people have written down. You cannot do radical history when you privilege what’s written in newspapers about a strike over the experiences of people who participate.

If we’re looking at open source history we need to dream bigger than a better version of Microsoft’s Encarta. Wikipedia’s policies against original research, its priviledging of published sources, and its belief in objectivity, means that it will always be limited, and reflect the history of the powerful. We need to move beyond that, we need to do original research, write about people’s experience, and most importantly, we need to have a point of view.