Profiling: It's Personal
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP
Discussion Topics

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan, Transcend Art and Peace
Created: December 3, 2001
Latest Update: December 3, 2001
Faculty:
jeannecurran@habermas.org
Olivier at tapcourse@yahoo.com
takata@uwp.edu

Labeling by any other name . . . .

Journal entry by jeanne

Copyright: Jeanne Curran, Susan R. Takata, and Individual Authors: November 2001.
"Fair Use" encouraged.

Profiling is labeling, labeling "Others" by some status characteristic that one can easily identify, an accent, a skin color, a harido, a scarf of a particular color or style. The stop is made in profiling precisely because you share the status characteristic of the perpetrator being sought, not because you have done anything to create reasonable suspicion that you represent a danger.

In profiling, labeling, racism, sexism, and all other forms of identifying people by status characteristics we treat "Others" as though the status characteristic they share is indicative of their actual beliefs, attitudes, actions. All of these approaches are means of categorizing people, and then reacting to them as categorical "Others," as though "others" were somehow all alike. Martha Minow speaks of the dilemma of categorizing in the law. Categorical thinking assumes a linear kind of thinking that applies at a macro level. Women do . . .or do not . . . Minorities do . . . or do not. . . Each time we categorize we mistakenly include and/or exclude some . . . Perhaps we could tell that these "Others" are not all alike if we looked beyond the status characteristic to local narratives. But we rarely have the time to do so, if we are categorizing for bureaucratic efficiency.

Labeling hurts. It hurts up front and personal. As we seek a paradigm shift away from adversarialism, we are all going to have to learn to be more sensitive to the harms we inflict on one another.

I'm going to take advantage of Kara Cain's suggestion that talking does help, and I'm going to share with you two recent e-mails. Then, we'll try to find together some way to transform our discourse into something closer to mutuality.

On Monday, December 3. 2001, Denise Scurlock wrote:

hi jeanne, I went to the department of sociology to discuss the new instructor and dr. ryave asked me who was my favorite teacher for sociology. i said jeanne. he just looked at me and laughed, and said a lot of students said they haven't learned anything in her class i responed and said i learned a lot on her site. HE STILL LOOKED AT ME AND LAUGHED.

Tyron Turner wrote in late November (I'll verify the date later):

hey jeanne, yesterday i had my grad evaluation with ryave and you were the focus of our meeting. ryave said that i was taking too many of your classes which he didn't really approve of.

Kara says it helps to talk. Research verifies that. And part of the therapy of talking is not repressing the harm, refusing to be complicit through denial. We need to talk about labeling and colonization and racism and sexism as they happen to us, up front and personal. And those of us who are harmed thereby are going to need to follow some of the lessons of critical race theory. We need to make the harm up front and personal, as Patricia Williams does in her piece on how it felt to be locked out of a popular store one night because she was black.

I don't know why our Chair doesn't approve of a graduate student taking my classes, or why he laughs and finds it unreasonable that I could be someone's favorite sociology teacher. But I know it hurts. I know more than that. It makes me very, very angry.

It also makes me very, very angry that after I've worked so hard in theory, he says I can't teach theory next Fall. Why not? Because I refuse to give tests? What does he really know about how I grade, and how hard I work at how I grade? And if he doesn't know, does he have the right to "disapprove" of me without knowing?

Profiling and labeling and all the other categorizations by status characteristic function on quantitative data, how many people with that characteristic do X, or Y, or Z, or whatever else we don't like? She has that status characteristic, so we don't like her, or approve her, or whatever. That's a macro perspective. But Alan couldn't take a macro perspective. He's an ethnomethodologist. In a micro perspective, you would need to know something about what I teach to conclude that I don't teach anything. And shouldn't there be some evidence? Or does one get to just say that lots of students say they don't learn anything? Was any attempt made to question those who did learn something?

I remember the time he told me that his friends didn't like me, and that nothing I did would matter. They would interpret anything I did to prove that they were right. In politics, where I came from back in the early seventies, I learned that you can tell what your opponent is going to do by what he accuses you of. Now I wonder if I shouldn't have listened to Dr. Ryave, and known what he, not his friends, was going to do.

Now, that accounts for my anger, my pain. But it doesn't solve the problem. Maybe, just maybe, the problem is not mine to solve. Perhaps what I am do is what Patricia Williams has done. Describe the pain, describe the harm, and refuse to keep it quiet any longer, refuse to be complicit through denial.

Hey, I think it helped, Kara. I feel better. And thank you, all of you, for being there to talk to.

Suggestions on what to do? Well, I've counseled you "Say it. Tell them not to slam the door ever again in your face." So I should take my own advice, and say "Don't ever intimate to a student again, that you don't approve of my teaching or that students don't learn anything from me. For one thing, you swore to me when I was Chair that you would never say such a thing. "Liar, liar, pants on fire!" I heard that in a movie. But it feels about right. Kind of like a third grade argument. And somehow I just don't want to get caught up in that kind of hassle. But I don't think that excuses me from saying, "Don't do it anymore." I guess I hoped someone else would do that for me. But when it comes right down to it, we can't escape unpleasantries that way.

Well, at least that helps clarify what I've got to do tomorrow. Say "Don't do it ever again." But that doesn't move me back to a technical level. It does a little, to try to consider what's happening theoretically. But I'll have to think on this some more. I got stopped, just because of who I was on some status characteristic. I'm not even sure which status characteristic it was. And the stop was done in front of people. People I happen to like, and people whom I want to like me. So I'm embarassed. I'm angry. Is there some way to understand why this could happen when it can't be me, because he doesn't know me. That's status characteristic, macro perspective stuff.

It's after midnight, and I'm exhausted, and this distracted me from finishing the reports of learning. Now I have to get up early tomorrow to finish them. Oy!