Lucky White Girl

Frog mummies

Remember that underground frog zombie I mentioned digging up last week?  Well, I don't know if this is the same one because this one was in the backyard and my dog Sadie found it but here is a frog mummy.

As always click the photo to enlarge.

We asked my neighbor who's a wildlife education teacher about the underground frog and she says (it's a toad) and they do burrow into the ground when it's hot and dry and they don't have the energy to look for food.  They go into a state of torpor until it cools off and rains.

Interesting, huh?

Who this blog is for

Because of the nature of some recent comments, I feel the need to clarify who this blog is for.  I also edited a new comment policy (link to the top left) to reflect this clarification.

This blog is obviously not for racists, neo-Nazis, or right-wing conservatives.  That goes without saying but I want to add also that this blog is not even for people who would not consider themselves any of those things but also believe some version of the following:
    a.) racism is a thing of the past.
    b.) feminists are unreasonable/out-dated/man-haters and sexism is no longer a problem.
    c.) people of color can be racists too. there is such a thing as "black racism" or the systemic oppression of white people by people of color
    d.) capitalism is generally a good/benign system (or could potentially be made into one) because it weeds out those who cannot compete.etc.

I might add more examples later, but the point is that I don't want to take on the job of educating every person who comes in here on Racism or Sexism 101, even if they are honest seekers.  I may be sympathetic to you --we've all/most of us been there, more or less.  But I just don't have the time or energy to do that.  That's not what this blog is for.  Vegankid and others have started a blog called Allywork to do that for questions on racism and white supremacy, so the comment policy post directs people to go there.  I'm not sure if there's a similar place for sexism, but if I find it, I'll link to it.

This blog is for me to work out/refine/enhance my own feelings.  It assumes a certain amount of knowledge/political point of view.  I didn't write this movie review, for example, for people who think feminists are nazis.  I wrote it for feminists and for people who are pretty mainstream, who might not have noticed how sexist the film was.  And I didn't write this post for people who think fascism is a valid political system or that George W. is great promoter of democracy.  There are, I'm sure, other places for those things but Lucky White Girl, is not one of them.

So I hope that helps clarify some things.  Thanks for listening.

tattoo me

Shift ---> keep awake.

Life works like a manual transmission, ya know?  Sometimes you have to shift gears.

I've been needing to shift gears for a long time now.  I'm going to shift a similie for a metaphor now too and say I've been sleep walking for the past year.  Or two.  Since I came back from Colombia.  But let me tell you, sleepwalking fits well with grad school.  In fact it may even be necessary.  If you are too awake, you will not stay and finish your degree.  You'll leave and go do something.  And maybe that something will be so overwhelming you'll have to go back to sleep again.  That's okay.  Just don't sleep forever.  Remember to wake up.

Please God help me to always remember to wake up! 

I just saw a movie that woke me up again.  It's called Sophie Scholl, you've seen it?  Go see it.  It's about the White Rose which is a story that has had a huge impact on my life.  If I ever have a kid, I will name her Sophie. I had a book about the White Rose, written by Sophie and Hans' sister who survived and preserved some of their letters.  The book might be out of print now, but if you don't know the story the links above should help.  And do go see the movie.  Maybe it will cause a shift in you too.  I needed a shift.  I desperately needed it.

After the movie I left thinking one thing: we are not doing enough.

Shift.

See the thing about Sophie Scholl that haunts me so much is that I can just so identify with her situation.  Being someone who looks around the world and realizes a.) how beautiful it is and b.) that the greatest threat to the peace and security of that world is your own country and the crazy old white men who run it.

We are not doing enough. 

Shift.

The difference between Hitler's Germany and Bush's US is ... what?  Some of the methods?  We're way more subtler today both in our techniques and our language.  Invading and occupying foreign countries?  Oh yeah, we got that.  A threat to our neighbors?  Definitely.  Killing people we think are not valuable?  We've got that too.  Is it less systemic?  No.  It's differently systemic.  Six million is a lot at one time, at one place, in the same way, true.  We haven't done it like that.  We do a little here and a little there, with both direct and indirect means but they are nonetheless systemic.  How many depends on when you start counting.  How many millions died in southeast Asia during the Vietnam War?  How many died in the wars and dictatorships we supported in Latin America throughout the 80s?  How many people in the Majority/Third World starve because we don't leave them enough resources to live, get sick because we don't want to share our medicines with them, or sweat their lives away to make our clothing?  All Holocausts are equally terrible, equally disturbing.  We have to recognize that we place more value on some people's lives than on others and we, yes, us, you and me here today right now expect to sacrifice other people --other people!-- so we can have this standard of living, this particular (false) expectation of security (whose security??)!

So tell me again, what's the difference?

Shift.

The difference between Sophie Scholl and the other members of the White Rose is ... what?  That they were young enough not to have lost their sense of outrage.  They were outraged enough that they sacrificed their own lives to resist.  Nonviolently.  Sabotage the weapons, their fliers said.  Sabotage the weapons.  How can we sabotage the weapons of the world superpower today?

Shift  ---> keep awake!

I walked home thinking about internal resistance.  Rebellion from within.  It was easy for the Allies to be against the Nazis.  It was hard for the Germans to do so.  It is easy for people of color to hate white racism and supremacy.  It is hard for white people to do so.  It is easy for victims of Empire to hate imperialism.  It is hard for those of us who benefit from it to do so.  Internal resistance.  Rebellion.  Insurrection against moral wrongs, even when they benefit us.

Keep awake!  What Jesus told the disciples waiting in the garden.  Keep awake!  Don't fall asleep.  Don't become complacent.  Don't forget.  Never, ever, ever forget!  And it's not enough to feel gratitude for those who struggled in previous generations.  It's not enough to be grateful to them for doing what they did.  They only started something we have to continue.  It never stops.  We're not the beneficiaries, just the next in line.

I DID IT!!!

Oh. My. God.  I'm actually done.  I did it!  30 pages.  "Anarchy and Power in International Relations/hips" is finally here.  A full 17 hours before it's due! 

This one was a doozy.  Not like the other one that just seemed so straightforward, it wrote itself.  This one, I tried to do too much I think: present an overview of post-positivist feminist epistemologies, a brief summary of the history of the IR field and a review of some of the major feminist critiques all before finally getting around to THE POINT which was basically my own critique: that the whole anarchy assumption is a load of crap.

Wow.  I feel like I just gave birth or something. It was a lot of work and a long time in the making and now here she is: my baby.  Not that she's finished or anything.  I really have to do some more research, add some pre-emptive responses to some critiques I can kinda foresee my professors making, maybe organize it a bit better and revise this one part where I cited this old article I found from the 80s that made a very similar (but substantively different!) point.  But generally.  She's finished enough for tomorrow.  THANK GOD.

This paper really was different.  I didn't feel like I was just trying to fill up space to get the required number of pages.  Actually I was trying to condense to fit it all in and keep it from being overwhelming.  But it wasn't that I was using too many words, I was using too many ideas and not enough words and it was still too long.  But I think I did in the end.  I think more or less, it's there.  It's a 30 page paper and dammit if this ain't a thesis material I don't know what is!

sheesh.  anyone want to hear about anarchy and power in international relations/hips?

Frog zombie

This is just to say that underground hibernating frog zombies exist in gardens in Florida.  I know because I just saw one.  I had a little plant that needed to be in the ground so I whipped out my spade to dig a hole for it and along with the dirt I pulled out a frog.  Or a toad.  He was completely under the ground and he appeared to be in a state somewhere between dead and alive.  I felt badly for unearthing him so I watered the garden (and him) to make him feel better.  I hope it's okay.  Did anyone else know of the existence of underground frog zombies lurking in gardens?

History's influence

Hey again.  I keep posting every coupla days but still don't consider myself done with my hiatus.  I just wanted to say two things:

Sea Ganschow emailed me in regards to some interesting conversations that happened a while back about white "culture" and it turns out in all those conversations I missed her blog and her posts (which actually sorta started the whole thing!) and but anyway like I said the conversation happened a few weeks ago and it kinda got usurped by the Duke rape thing but it's still very interesting and pertinent conversation I think.  I think a lot of what both Sea and I were saying was misunderstood.  'Cause it's not like we were saying "white culture is bad".  That's way too simplistic.  We were just saying that white people have a particular history that includes racism and genocide and that that past still affects us today.  Not that we're "guilty" of the "sins of the fathers" as Hugo says but that the sins of the fathers still *influence* us and we have to deal with that influence by recognizing where it comes from and NOT by expropriating other people's cultures because we as white progressives are ashamed of our own past. 

And it's true that there is no one monolithic white "culture" but I think that kinda gets us off on a different track.  Maybe "culture" isn't the right word.  Just that there's something like a common set of beliefs and values that may not be culture per se but is something common to all people who have that shared history of racism and genocide.  Anyway, just go read her post, and her blog.  She's very good.

One down! One to go!

Done!  I'm done!  I am finally done!  30 pages:

The Politics of Poverty and the New Freedom.

for the multidisciplinary seminar Trade and Human Rights Law in the Americas.

And --fair warning the following can be seen as self-centered egotistical horn-tooting -- I think it's really good.  I mean, I think it's damn good.  Like publishable good?  Sure, if I could find an outlet for 30 page term papers! lol...

No, but seriously.  I am super proud of this paper because I really think that these ideas have never been layed out like this before.  I mean people have talked about different ways of measuring poverty before, sure.  But no one, that I know of, has really explored in depth the political consequences of those different ways of measuring poverty from a social movements perspective.  I mean I think it would require some more in-depth researching just to be sure but I really think this is my thing.   Which means at the very least don'tcha think? ... a thesis!  Or at least the basis for one (I'm sure they have to be longer than 30 pages, eh? and some parts need to be developed way more than they are) 

But I'm doing the non-thesis option for my MA.  It's too late for a thesis for me. And anyway this is sorta too outside my subject area.  I think.  No, not really.  I mean, I could make a good case for it not being outside international relations.  I think.  I don't know! 

All I know is that I worked damn hard all semester and tomorrow I'm going to turn in the paper that, of all the papers I've ever written, I am most proud of.  At least until I write my other 30 page term paper, Anarchy and Power in International Relations/hips.

Sick? Pathological? Inhuman?

Oh just go read this.  Go read this.  I can't even speak.  I can't even ... oh, gross.  We don't have a word in the English language for someone like this.  I can't get my head around it.  Is this person still walking around?  I mean, I think people in Durham county are in danger.  That's one sick puppy, as Rachel said.  He's threatened to kill people, ferchissakes!  I mean, good God, y'all!

[ breathe ]

Okay.  I'm okay.  You know what?  I can't do this anymore.  I have to take a break.  I have 3 weeks and two 30 page term papers to churn out and I can't read stuff like this and expect to be in any decent emotional space in which I can work.  I can't do it. 

This blog is on hiatus until further notice. 

Carnival time!

(with witty names)

Big Fat Carnival  and  The Carnival of Empty Cages  and the Carnival of the Feminists is now up too.

And the decision is...

... okay, so it wasn't a hard decision.  It's a 3 month paid internship with Habitat for Humanity in Chile.  They pay my airfare and living expenses plus a $2000 stipend!  How can I pass that up?  Plus it's good resume experience.  I'm gonna be on the job market here soon.  I gotta think about these things.  And 3 more months will really solidify my Spanish skills.  And dude.  It's Chile.  They have an awesome new president.  They have mountains.  They have the driest place on the planet. And it's the birthplace of Pablo Neruda.

I gotta go to Chile.

barb. 

in Chile. 

barb in Chile ?

yeeeeeaah.... okay.

Yes, it's crazy here

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"Our biggest concern is keeping people out of the trees and off the light poles" said police spokesman Keith Kameg.

Gainesville went mad last night.

It's actually kinda cool.

Go team!

Ha!  That's so funny!  I go over to Bitch | Lab and read her post on Linda Alcoff's article/chapter called "What should white people do?" and this paragraph caught my eye:

"Every individual, I would argue, needs to feel a connection to community, to a history, and to a human project larger than his or her own life. Without this connection, we are bereft of a concern for the future or an investment in the fate of our community."

And I said:

Right, of course, but the question is who is your community? I *do* feel very connected but I feel more connected with humanity as a whole rather than with one particular grouping of humanity. I know that sounds idealistic but I really feel no particular allegiance to white people, the U.S.A, Scotland (where my grandma’s from) or anything else besides maybe activist/social agitator type people. It’s that last category I guess that really gives me a sense of history, that makes me feel like part of something larger than myself. I see myself as part of a long wave of a historical resistance movement.

"movementS" I should say.  Not one particular movement, just people who resist (i.e. underdogs --see below!)  But anyway, I just wrote that paragraph about not identifying with any one particular group and I realized the irony of TONIGHT.  What's happening tonight?  Duh!  The Gators are about to win their first ever national championship basketball game!  I'm about the only person in town not watching it but someone just called to tell me they're 10 points up right now.  And for those of you who haven't known me for years, this is really unusual.  For me to actually be rooting for the team.  But I am.  I really, really want the Gators to win tonight.  And it's not just because I saw Joakim Noah's sexy knees walk in front of the car a few months ago! 

Part of it is 'cause I have a weakness for the underdog.  They tell me that UF has NEVER ever won a national championship game.  They've made it to the Final Four twice before but lost both times.  The other team has won like eleven times!  Rooting for the underdog is one of those things the U.S. likes to fantasize that it's all about.  Something about beating the English way back when.  (yeah, we're still not over it!)  This is something I actually LIKE about us (responding to recent criticisms that I'm too negative)!  Our preference for the underdog.  And it's precisely because of this that I can't ever feel much allegiance towards this country (as simply the nation-state I happened to be born in) or towards white people generally.

So go ponder the irony of that one!   Maybe it's not ironic at all.  But let me ask you: who's your team?

[p.s. I have added a new category: "Whiteness/White Studies"... 'cause I'm gettin' all into this whole concept of "whiteness" now]

Great/Awful news!

Ok, remember that internship I talked about applying for way back towards the end of last year? 

And that interview I practiced for a few months ago?

Well, yesterday they sent me an email saying I wasn't selected.  But that's okay because I only felt badly for like 2 seconds and then breathed a big sigh of relief.  I sorta like the idea of having the summer OFF.  Plus GIL and I are in a weird space of re-evaluating our relationship and doing a lot of personal work which I think requires a certain amount of personal space and reflection time.  Not doing the internship would fit in real well with that.  Having a whole summer to re-evaluate where I am in my life, how I feel about my relationship with my significant other, where I want to be going with everything. 

Plus part of me looks forward to a summer off because it's been a long time since I've had time to read for fun.  I have a stack of fiction books I want to go through that I got at the last library book sale and another stack of non-fiction books on non-IR stuff (racism, some mainstream feminist stuff I never got around to etc.).  It would be really nice to spend the summer reading and thinking and emoting, wouldn't it?  So i was relieved that I didn't get the internship.  It made my life easier.

So that's why I feel conflicted now that I've gotten a second email, basically saying that the first was a mistake.  They did pick me after all.  Habitat for Humanity picked me to go to either Chile or Paraguay.  I have to formally accept by WEDNESDAY!  Oh my.  My life just got suddenly a lot more complicated.  (funny, I hear that lives have a tendency to do that on ya!)

Two Announcements

1.) The Radical Women of Color Carnival is up at blac(k)ademic!

and

2.) If you've posted on the Duke rape case and have been getting lots of accusations by supporters of the team about how they're "innocent until proven guilty", read this post by Ampersand.  It's a really great response.  About the difference between a courtroom standard and an individual having a personal opinion:

Nothing about the American system of justice requires ordinary citizens to refrain from having opinions; and it's not inconsistant to want Courts to adhere to "beyond any reasonable doubt" while holding my personal opinions to a less stringent standard.

About the difference between morally guilty and legally guilty which

"sends the message that it’s not really rape if they can get away with it.

And if you didn't already know there's just so much evidence that a rape clearly happened, you really have to put your head in the sand to defend the actions of the team.

Gender: Substance or attribute?

Judith Butler is wowing me with feminist philosophy, saying that gender is an attribute not a person's substance. 

What's the difference?  In class last week my prof said her prof used to hold up a piece of chalk and ask the class what it was.  It's chalk, they said of course.  And what are its attributes?  It's white.  It's dusty.  It's breakable.  Chalk is the substance.  White, dusty and breakable are its attributes.  (So what's the difference then?  Isn't a thing just the sum of its attributes?  If you take away white, do you still have chalk?  Sure.  There's colored chalk.  If you take away dusty do you still have chalk?  Sure, there's "dustless" chalk... but if you take away ALL the attributes?  What's left?  What is the essence of chalk?  I don't know.  I'm only on chapter 2.)  So aside from that, what Judith Butler is trying to do is to get us to think about gender in terms of attribute versus substance.  Here is a person.  Here's their gender-parts.  Is that person their gender or is gender an attribute of that person?

She says most of us, even/especially? feminists, think of gender as something inherent in a person's personhood.  And that's wrong, see?   Gender is an attribute.  And to prove it, she uses psychoanalytic theory to  help us understand how we begin to think of gender.  That's nothing new; Freud did the same thing.  And this is where I began to lament the fact that I didn't pay more attention to old fellow in my undergraduate psych class.  (So fair warning: if you want to read Butler review your Freudian theory first!) 

Freud, she says, got it wrong.  Remember how the dude had this thing about the Oedipus and Electra complexes?  Yeah, well, it has to do with that stuff.  About the infant identifying first with the mother ('cause that's where the food comes from I guess) and then having to either disassociate himself from her if he's got male genitalia or to associate herself as similar to her if she's got female genitalia.  Something like that, I think.  Anyway, that's how Freud says we end up with particular gender identities and their respective gender roles and all that [apparently].  (How he explains how some people don't end up with gender identities that match their biological genitalia, I don't know).  Well, here's what that online study guide says about Freud:

Freud's story works hard to be unitary and coherent, to tell a connected story about how gender is formed. It does so by repressing certain elements, excluding them from the story. One of the ways it achieves this is to repress or exclude ideas of simultaneity and multiplicity in gender and sexual identity. According to Freud, you either identify with a sex OR you desire it; only those two relations are possible. Thus it's not possible to desire the sex you identify with--if you are a man desiring another man, for instance, Freud would say that's because you REALLY identify with women.

That is, Freud would say that it's your feminine disposition --your identification with the female disposition-- that desires men, not your masculine disposition.  For Freud, only opposites attract.  (Why do you think he'd make such a silly assumption? ;-)  When Freud's talking about the Oedipal and Electra complexes he's saying [I think] that the child not only has to choose between two object choices (male or female for the other) but between the two sexual disposition (masculine or feminine for herself).

Now she started this part of the book by talking about Freud's thing about melancholia being the ego taking on the attributes of the lost love.  It internalizes the other. At first I totally didn't get this but Butler says this has something to do with us taking on gender identity when we connect it up with the incest taboo. Ok?  Listen up: so the boy-child is in love with his mom, right?  But the incest-taboo says to him, no, kid, you can't do that.  What does he do? 

"In the case of a prohibited hetereosexual union, it is the object [the mother] which is denied but not the modality of desire [desire for the opposite] so that the desire is deflected from that object [the mother] onto other objects [other women].  But in the case of a prohibited homosexual union, it is clear that both the desire and the object require renunciation and so [get internalized].

The loss of the mother as a result of the incest-taboo for the boy-child means he either internalizes her (identifies with her) or he switches to identifying with his father and thus "consolidates" his masculinity.

And that the choice, Freud says, will depend on the strength or weakness of the masculine or feminine within that person.  Why?  He doesn't really say.  That's just that's the way that 19th century heterosexual white male saw things.

But that 19th century heterosexual white male also admitted he doesn't know what exactly this "feminine" or "masculine" essence is really. 

This is where Butler jumps in.  Is the masculine or the feminine is a result of the choice or an effect of it?  "To what extent do we read the desire for the father as evidence of a feminine disposition only because we begin, despite the postulation of primary bisexuality, with a heterosexual matrix for desire?"  She says that these masculine and feminine dispositions, as Freud calls them, have heterosexual aims, that is, they intentionally normalize heterosexuality and pathologize homosexuality.  Why assume from the outset that the desire for the female object is not just as feminine as the desire for the male object?

At this point it reminded me of Adrienne Rich's essay On compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence, which I read as an undergraduate, and that was the first place I encountered the idea that it could actually be MORE natural for women to bond with other women and that it takes some work to get us to bond with men at all... -wait, was that that essay? or am I mixing it up?  So I go and re-read that essay and it's there sorta, but I thought I remembered it being more explicit.  I'm not sure.  My brain is all muddy from thinking about this stuff.

Anyway, that was just part three of the 2nd chapter and I'm still not quite sure how this connects back up with substance or attribute.  But she says that these so called "dispositions" are really just "traces of a history of enforces sexual prohibitions".  Which means.... ??? [to be continued]

Comment policy

1.) Comments are moderated. If yours is snarky, mean-spirited, or hateful towards other members of our human race, I won't publish it.  Please don't waste your time or mine.

2.) If yours is a basic question about sexism, racism or white supremacy or anything else that I've answered a hundred times and which you can find out the answer for yourself if you do a little research, I might publish it, but I won't answer it.  Check my FAQs   or, for introductory information on white racism see whiteprivilege.com and check out the suggested reading list at allywork.

Hope that helps clarify things!  Welcome to Lucky White Girl!