Lucky White Girl

Who's studying who? And where? And when? And how?

I spoke to two of my profs today.  It went well.  It was interesting.  I went to set up my committee again since 2 of 3 of the profs that were on it are gone this semester.  But I also wanted to feel out their perspectives on my prospects for further schooling (i.e. getting into and succeeding in a PhD program somewhere eventually). 

One said that the biggest obstacle that would impede me from getting into a good program would be that Incomplete grade I mentioned below.  It made my GPA fall from a 3.8 to a 3.3.  Not good.  "Remember a C is failing in gradschool" (She always says that; it's sorta like her slogan).  She asked about my GRE scores and I couldn't remember them but I said I guess they were good enough to get in here and she said that's true (UF's a pretty good school for what it's worth).  She said the most important thing would be to explain that incomplete.  "Tell them what your GPA would've been without it".  And also I might find a program that's less numbers-focused, especially if I end up studying in South America.  "Maybe your life story would be qualification enough". 

Overall, I felt like the talk with her was very positive.  She's very kind and extremely supportive.  I'm kicking myself for not having taken a class with her earlier.  (I'm in a class with her for the first time this semester).  I think my gradschool experience would've been entirely different if I had hooked up with her my first semester.

The other prof, whom I've known for a lot longer, didn't ask about my GPA (so he may not know how low it is) said that my biggest impediment to doing a docorate would be the same one that caused me to take so long to finish my MA: it's a huge commitment, he said.  "It's like a full-time job".  You have to be fully involved in it.  I know.  I haven't been fully involved here.  I started out being fully involved.  Full-time student, eating, drinking and breathing academics.  No friends outside the department.  No life outside of it either.  I hated it.  I got A's and B's that semester but after that I said no more full time.  Better to have a balanced life.  Community.  Friends.  Even work.  But it has taken me six years to finish.

The other thing he said, which was so interesting I kept thinking about it afterwards in the library was his reaction to my idea of studying outside of the country.  Or specifically studying IR (lnternational Relations) outside of the country.  Basically, he said don't do it and expect to get a job in this country.  Unless out of the country means Oxford or Cambridge.  Then he told me about his trip to China a couple years ago (one of his books got translated into Chinese) and he said he was asking around there about what is International Relations for them in China ('cause it's interesting to see how people in different countries view this field which is very US dominated, ya know?) and he said that he found out that they were reading Waltz and Keohane and all the same (US) theorists we read here.  So, don't assume that studying IR in another country means that their version of it wouldn't be just "an American import".  I told him I thought I'd be sensitive to those kinds of things since the whole point of studying elsewhere to be to gain a wider perspective than we tend to get here (we read pretty much just academics in the US and Canada with an occaisonal Brit or German thrown in).  But later on, as I said, I kept thinking about this (about his reaction, about how no one here in the US would hire me if I studied IR anywhere in the majority(third) world and I decided that it was all the more reason why I should want to do so!  Here's my revelation:

I want to study US (the US and us, the people, the phenomena of Empire) from the perspective of the Majority World (as much as it's possible for me to do so). 

You see normally, in this field, the more common thing to do is to sit here within the US and study other people's countries.  So we read books about Africa written by some "Africanist" who is some dude in the US talking about "failed" African states!!  What's wrong with this picture???  Other disciplines like sociology, cultural studies and lit theory are shocked to find that most IR people don't even consider this to be problematic!

Mine is a very Marxist (specifically, standpoint-ish) view which is probably why it might sound so radical in my field, but the point is... I think it's interesting that there's such a huge gap in this field and I think it's interesting that its foundations are so shakey theoretically for so many reasons and most of them don't even notice.  I just see a lot of potential here, ya know.  And I'd like to examine it more.  That's all.

Other than that, as for PhD work, he said the big thing is writing skills; they're hard to come by.  I said I felt quite confident in my writing skills, it was my person-to-person intercommunication skills that can sometimes be lacking.  He said that's relatively easy to overcome so I took that as a good sign.

So the upshot is, well, there still might be some possibilities for such a career path in the future.  And there are some interesting things to think about as far as me doing IR for another significant chunk of my life.  It's something to think about.

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]

A very long detour.

So Bitch | Lab had an interesting post this morning... one of those smack-yr-forehead kind of revelations.  She's thinking about psychology and she encounters this little snippet of someone describing white culture:

"White people don’t sleep with their children. They don’t play much and they don’t hug much. They don’t laugh much. And they spend most of the time trying to look good. We have beautiful cribs and curtains. We don’t have much connecting going on."

Which is a pretty common critique of what'd probably be more accurately called North American white culture, though it's not Bitch's experience:

Oh. My. Dog. I’m not white! This is so not the way I remember growing up! This is so not how I have and we live our lives. Christ! Sonshine still hugs me and he’s my grown up little boy! I don’t think Sonshine stopped wanting to hold my hand while we walked into a grocery store together until — umn — uh — calculatin’ — lessee. Yeah, he’d have been about 12-13 years old....

But fits my family fer sure and lots of others.  When I was in Colombia I was dating a guy who had a family very UN-like this and I was so enamored.  I loved his family more than him, he complained, and it was probably true.  I mean they actually had these family get togethers where his dad and uncle would play the guitar and sing and we'd be all dancing in the living room.  Geez.  I have never been with a family like that before!  When I was passing through Bogota I could actually stay at his house, share a room with him (and his brother!) and we'd have sex there and it was all just fine.  Can you see now why I wanted to stay?

Anyway Bitch grew up in a family like that.  It wasn't so foreign to her:

I find it hard to believe that most white people are walking around without living in huggy, lovey, touchy families.

All of us? Most of us?

Is this a class thing?

...[maybe] people lead these messed up childhoods and that explains so many of our structural issues such as race, glass, gender [?]

... I guess I’m trying to figure out: what’s a fair claim to make about white people and whether or not we, as a group, lack loving, touching, close families? And, is this a reasonable explanation for expropriation of other cultures?

I think by that last part she means is it a reasonable explanation for why white people so often expropriate other people's cultures.  At least that's how I took it.  So I think this is really interesting 'cause there's at least four questions here: One, is there such a thing as white culture?  Two, is it typified in non-touchy-feely family relations?  Three, does that play a role in our fucked-upness*?  Four, is it a class thing?  So, I say this:

I don’t think it’d be a class thing ’cause I was definitely working class growing up and I almost never saw my dad and there was very little touchy-feely stuff with my mom.

[I was the 5th kid and she spaced us out over 20 years so I can see she was a little tired by then! lol]

Once I was older she was working too and I was pretty much on my own. so I suspect it’d be more a white america thing than a class thing. but whew knows?

Also, I suppose it’s a fair enough claim about white people's culture in that, like any generalization, there are folks who don’t fit the mold and the idea is that it -hopefully accurately- describes a general cultural pattern. I mean, I think it’s fine to make generalizations about a group of people’s culture. It only becomes problematic when you make generalizations about something INHERENT in that group of people, right? Culture isn’t inherent. Anthropologists study it all the time. Although I guess it’d be more accurate to at least say “white American” culture as opposed to white European, or Irish culture or recent white immigrant culture (like the Polish-American communities in Chicago)…

And, is it a reasonable explanation for (a white tendency to the) expropriation of other cultures? I suppose it could be part of it, eh? I mean, there’s definitely a good argument for the soul-less-ness of “white American culture” and I think that’s why you see a bunch of new agey white people “discovering” a Cherokee grandmother (it’s ALWAYS Cherokee and it’s ALWAYS the grandmother -someone oughta do a study of the genderisms of that cliche) and adopting a psuedo-”Native American” spirituality, going to sweats and all that. I mean I can definitely understand recognizing the emptiness of our cultural heritage and wanting to have something different. I just wish they would decide to help create a better white american culture rather than expropriate someone elses. … then, again, how does one person create a culture? I dunno.

So maybe we can't CREATE a culture but I can certainly understand the need to have SOMEthing to fill the gap.  Human beings are social and cultural animals; that's what we do; we operate in groups, we define ourselves in groups, we identify with the group.  So what can we -those of us who recognize the emptiness of typical North American white culture- do to sate that desire for a cultural heritage we can be proud of, for a culture we -as progressives- can identify with?  I guess I might need to clarify that I'm talking about something more than not hugging our kids here.  I'm talking about the legacy of racism, colonialism, imperialism, genocide etc.  And I'm certainly not talking about denying these parts of our past.  I'm saying:

1.) we have to recognize the price we have incurred for what we have done over the years to our brothers and sisters we categorized as different "races" [Hernan and Vera say in their book White Racism, that "Racial categories form part of this Eurocentric culture of off-the-shelf taxonomies that classify and organize certain features of the social world into a coherent whole.  In this sense racial categories are... part of the social blueprint" of white people.] Part of that price is that we now have a cultural heritage that is incredibly painful and hurtful and embarrassing (to say the least). 

2.) the way to respond to the realities of our culture and cultural heritage (that range from being spiritually empty and meaningless to a very real alienation from an enormous segment of the human population) is NOT to discover ways to dis-claim/deny our whiteness (find that Cherokee grandmother to erase your guilt) and appropriate other people's cultures/spiritualities but instead to recreate our own culture. 

History is not over, folks.  We white people do have a horrible past, maybe we have a horrible culture but it's not a finished product.  Culture is a process.  We are still creating our story.  We can make it a painful, beautiful story of redemption, of reconnection with the rest of humanity.  So look back, yes, recognize the past, but don't forget you have to look forward too.  And whether looking backward or forward you have to have a wide-angle lens.  We have to see at least hundreds of years at a time in order to get things in perspective.  Looking at the short term is a distortion.  We are the star-bellied sneetches and we did some horrible things but now we have the gift of potential redemption in front of us.  What an exciting time to be alive!  Of all the periods in history to have been born white, the 21st century is such an exciting time to have been placed!  A potential turning-point in history!  Our grandkids could look back and say "wow, and YOU were there, mama!  You saw the story of white racism and did not turn away.  And now things are different for us.  We are not so ashamed to be white anymore because the story of white people is the story of redemption!"  What a beautiful story!  And then our grandkids' grandkids will ask, "What was white?  What was black?  What was race?"  And we will smile sadly from beyond the grave and think, "it was just a very long detour".

Technorati tags:

racism, race relations, whiteness

White.

"Identity blogging" as tiffany at blackfeminism calls it, is a very interesting phenomenon... I see this as a manifestation of standpoint feminism (the way you see the world depends on your socio-economic position within it).  So to contribute my part, here's why this blog is called "Lucky White Girl".  (I just like to do this every now and then.)  It was inspired by this post by brownfemipower over at Women of Color Blog, who says,

"I know that women of color *must* centralize their identities in their politics. We get attacked and violated *because* we are Chicana, Mexican, Indian, Asian, black, Iranian, Arab, etc.

And white people should do the same.  Because our tendency is to deracialize ourselves, NOT see or acknowledge our race and therefore forget the privileges that come with it.  We get jobs, admitted into universities, promotions, the benefit of the doubt etc. because we are white. 

That the why behind the "white girl" and why not just "Lucky Girl"?  "Lucky Girl" wouldn't make much sense.  It would say this is a blog about a person who just happens to be lucky.  That's not what I'm talking about here.  The luck is because of the white.

So why not just "White Girl" then?  Since the luck is connected with the white technically "Lucky White Girl" is redundant.  Well, just because I feel it's worth pointing out.

See, white is like the default setting, white people often don't say "white".  When we see someone walking down the street and he's a middle aged white guy, we don't say hey, look at that middle-aged white guy.  We say hey look at that guy.  If he was African-American, on the other hand, we probably say hey look at that black guy.  Sometimes I try to toss it up a bit.  "Hey!" I say, reading the newspaper over breakfast with friends, "white-on-white crime is really up this year!"  or "Watch out for roving bands of white guys in suits when you go downtown today."   It's funny but it also reminds white people I'm around to be aware of their race.

But it's still not enough just to be aware of one's race, even to be a white person who talks about race and whiteness.  "White Girl" doesn't say anything about the consequences (read: privileges) of being white.   I have earned none of this.  Which is a good lesson in grace and humility.  As well as racism.

 

White privilege includes not seeing racism

It's been awhile since I've written about racism, though it's something I tend to think about it at least once a day.  I'll see someone, white or black, do something, having a hard time, having a certain kind of interaction with someone else of a different race and I'll wonder what role race plays in that particular situation.  I feel badly for not writing about this more often because racism is such a huge contemporary daily encounter that I named this blog after one of its byproducts.  Lucky White Girl, for any new readers who haven't read my about page, refers to the privilege of having been born with light-colored skin.  It's supposed to be a reminder that every experience I blog about here is directly affected by that privilege.

Angry White Kid's blog deals these hard questions almost daily.  Here's a good example: a post posing the question of finding the line between rejecting white racist culture and the unsatisfactory appropriation of other people's culture (e.g. adopting Native American spirituality etc.)  The comment by "burgess" is even better. 

You know, these are hard, painful questions and one of the privileges of being white is that we don't have to ask them.  We don't have to deal with racism on a daily basis, or even think about the problem if we don't want to.  When we walk into the room and everyone there is roughly the same color we are, we can pretend that race doesn't exist.  We're the default setting.  It's only when the one person of color walks in that they bring the race question with them, like it or not and it may remain unspoken but it's still there and it's still palpably felt by everyone in that room, especially that one person of color.  White racism is not a pleasant part of our history/identity to deal with so I really applaud Scott (of Angry White Kid) for doing it.  It is necessary, painful work if we are to ever heal this rift.

As I said over there, the way I see it, inter-racial relations are like a relationship on a global scale. We white people are one part of humanity who has severely damaged our relations with the rest of humanity and now we have the long, slow process of healing that broken relationship. It's going to take a very long time and a lot of work and we won't do it perfectly but we shouldn't give up. We can heal this rift and it'll take a lot of listening, a lot of empathy and good intentioned people on both sides generations to do it. This is just the beginning.

There are no white people anymore

Regina has a great thought-provoking post over at her blog, Chicana on the Edge, called There are no white people in Chicago which made me want to expand the comments I left over there and write a little more here about yet another way white racism hurts white folks too.

Regina wondered why, when she was growing up in California being just plain "white American" was the ideal.  Everyone wanted people with different heritages to assimilate and some did willingly shedding their ethnicities at the door in pursuit of the American dream.  There was a lot of talk about the "melting pot".  Today, where she lives now, in Chicago, there seems to be less of that.  People who look like the just plain old "white American" that was the ideal twenty years ago now claim this that or the other heritage (Scots-Irish, German, Polish, Croatian etc).  Giving the exception to those who really are more recent immigrants from those locales (especially the large Polish communities that exist up there in Chicagoland) what we're talking about here are folks like me, who come from a mix of various European ancestors and have to go back several generations to dig up anything pertaining to a specific cultural background.  It seems recently no one wants to claim the identity of plain old "white American".

Why?

I think white "mongrels" (if you'll pardon the term) feel a deep emptiness that comes from a lack of a consistent (i.e. identifiable) cultural heritage that other people --people who still have their cultural heritages in tact-- don't have. Traditions are such an important part of human nature and identity, when we lose them, we feel it.  What this phenomena -this urge to claim a cultural identity shows, I think, is how important traditions and heritages are. That's why assimilation is so harmful. People lose touch with the ancient traditions of their homeland, wherever that may be and they are lost.  We no longer talk about assimilation as much and the melting pot analogy has shifted to the salad or stew analogy, a great dish that is made up of a mix of seperate but complementary ingredients, each retaining their own identity but enhancing and mixing well with the others.

I think many white people who come from a nebulous background try to fill this gap left by assimilating so well by going back, as far back as necessary to find some kind of homeland, some traditions, something to identify with. It's mostly a relatively harmless phenomena, I think.  Members of my own family identify to a great deal with the Scots, emphasizing the heritage of one of my grandmothers who was a 1st generation immigrant to the exclusion of the other grandparents who were not.   There's no harm in that that I can see.  It's a little rude to the other grandparents I think but they're all dead so no one much minds.

I look at white people and I have great compassion, not just because I myself am white but because I see a people who have a history of bloodshed and aggression against other people and that has to hurt.  It does hurt.  It takes a certain strength of character to face that history head on, not to shrink from it, not to pretend it's not there. It is a great big beautiful challenge.  Because if you can take something as ugly as a history of racism and turn it around into an act of redemption, what more beauty and fulfillment in life could you ask for?  All over the world people today are beginning the act of recovering from the past.  What's your past?  What's your burden?  Can you find the redemptive power of suffering?  Can you face the truth of who you are with all its joys and sorrows?  If you can, then no matter what your history is, you are a full human being.

What more can you hope for than that?