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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: October 8, 2004
Latest Update: October 8, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Background Theory for the Discussions We Were Having:White privilege; Bush as "stupid"; "we know they're going to close MLK, so why bother?; not enough nurses in California, so hospitals in danger of closing; obesity, agency and the social construction of control; nation-state and sovereignty and international law. Lecture notes from Thursday.My notes cross classes, but I'll try to conceptually relate them to each of your classes. They're not in any particular order, just as they came into my head, remembering.
white privilege
Delphine brought this up in women and poverty, explaining how she had felt the same terror, hopelessness, horror in white neighborhoods where she stood out by her color, and felt the rejection, questioning, horror of being completely excluded simply because of your color. Cheryl had expressed that feeling at finding herself in a cul de sac alley in a ghettoized neighborhood.
My response to Delphine was that she had just described what white privilege feels like if you're not white. To be completely excluded with nothing you can do about it sparks a terror in us akin to not being able to fly in a fight or flight situation.
We call it "white privilege," but that's from the perspective of the excluded. Those who are privileged are almost never aware of the privilege because it isn't like a lottery prize you've won. Instead, if you're white, in a white social context, you can walk into the room and no one notices. If you're not white, you're suddenly visible, noticeable, and can't slip into an anonymous safety zone. Kind of like being a celebrity for all the wrong reasons, and unable to escape the papparazzi.
There's a short, readable, new book out: White Privilege(by Paula S. Rothenberg. Worth Publishers. 2005. ISBN: 0-7167-8733-4, pbk.), dedicated to Peggy McIntosh, who wrote the first article (in Images of Color, Images of Crime), on how hard it was as a white to get in touch with white privilege. In Richard Dyer's The "Mattter of Whiteness," Chapter 1 of White Privbilege, he says:
"There has been an enormous amount of analysis of racial imagery in the past decades, rangng from studies of images of, saay, blacks or American Indians in te media to the deconstruction of the fetish of the racial Other in the texts of colonialsims and post-colonialism. Yet until receently a noable absence from such work has been the study of images of white people. . . ."This essay is about the racial imagery of white people --- not the images of other races in white cultural production, but the latter's imagery of white people themselves. This is not done merely to fill a gap in the analytic literature, but becase there is something at stake in looking at, or continuing to ignore, white racial imagery. As longas race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as longas white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people."
Ibid, at p. 8-9.
Notice how close this comes to my discussion yesterday of norms and counternorms. As long as we think of the world in terms of white and non-white we are locking ourselves into the unstated assumption Dyer identifies that white people have no race. This constrains our language and thought to those terms, those assumptions, and makes it harder for us to come up with new perspectives as non-white people creating imagery of white people.
Remember that I used the example of war and peace as the norm/counternorm we're locked in for foreign policy. If I can only describe peace as not-war I face the same dilemma non-whites face in breaking away from the linear pattern of norm/counternorm thinking about whites. My reference here comes from a discussion on KPFK on the Abrahams. Abraham-Hicks suggested the unconsciously imposed constraint of thinking along norm/counternorm. Notice this isn't your usual scholastic reference. Be self-reflective, not arrogant. Why can't Hicks offer me insights in her inspirational literature, that I can then transfer to my own knowledge of theory? Because she's not an academic, of course. I think the expression is Oh, pooh!" jeanne
Bush as "stupid"
No, no, no. No one who gets to the position Bush holds is stupid. Maybe he's nice, maybe he's malevolent. I can't know him because he is well protected from my prying eyes and gossip-loving nose. I know only what I am permitted to see and hear in staged appearances.
I know, I know. He mangles the English language. But which of us doesn't? Especially in "senior moments?" Bush is inarticulate in Stanford English. Guess they didn't teach that at Yale and Harvard. But zillions of us are funcitionally illiterate, so why do we think it's so funny that Bush trips over his language. Bergson would say because we are so grateful that wasn't us, and so relieved that WE WOULDN"T DO THAT. Gee, I've been meaning to talk to you about arrogance. Self reflection can cure a lot of prejudices. jeanne
More soon.
