Just another blog from a thirtysomething sociology, comic book and video game nerd. Make yourself comfortable under my corner of sky. Minority culture to Zombie Apocalypses- its all game here.
Egg on face moment #2,132 is so bad that the Fox News interview in the link almost equals "gotcha" journalism. The commentator gives him a quote from a general against a policy Santorum assumes is DADT for the same biases referenced tirelessly about "military cohesion" and fairly quickly indicates that animus towards people based on immutable characteristics is the driving theme here.
Without question, this is one of the most important legal cases in United States history. Every semester this is brought up in class when discussing race, or social change, or marital equality and each and every time younger students sit agape- amazed that something like interracial marriage was illegal in their parents lifetimes and not some ancient, distant age where pilgrims wore funny hats. 44 years ago these two good and noble people drew a line in the sand and simply by loving and contesting an archaic law taught us how utterly wrong conventional wisdom can be.
While its refreshing that youth culture seems to be disconnected over the recentness of the changes that grant persons to marry of whatever "race" they choose (I hope to marry a human someday, myself) I always find it a tad alarming that most people in a class of freshmen aged students are so oblivious to the fact that less than a generation ago this was a big deal, that segregation was not only social thought, but legally binding institutional discrimination.
I've heard it said a great deal lately, from thoughtful young trailblazers in their own right, that we'll collectively look back at same sex marriage, Proposition 8 and its subsequent banning and conservative pushbacks as wrongheaded and horrific, the same way many look at Loving v. the Supreme Court of Virginia. As a horrible dinosaur from another age. A reminder of how awful and alien the past can be, and in its own way, how recent and transformative the power of love can be. Its because of the Lovings that I'm convinced the right to marry the human of your choosing is worth changing the world for.
I wanted to share the above outstanding article by BriOut from AfterElton.com. By way of response to the very clever and very pointed piece, I offer the following as an initial salvo into this case of color, power, and perspective (as I posted it on the site):
Like much of the universe now that we have the interweb, I don't look at a lot of print media. OUT is a magazine I've tried to get into (and I suppose I'll have to now that a friend bought me a subscription, randomly) but I DO think its too fluff, too benign. While I haven't combed through this particular list, I remember the one from the year before was pretty inspiring to me at the time. Perhaps the criteria for selection is different...
but lets be honest here. What sort of message is it to give the likes of Ken Melhman kudos for working tooth and nail to disempower gay people while he was closeted to ENSURE his boss could get into office and make our collective lives worse. Sure, thats power...but I wasn't aware we were going to be cheering for the Darkside of the force. This is a farce, and if they want to be taken seriously, they'll not pander to closetcases and Uncle Toms and pretend THAT is in any way powerful.
(1.) I really miss doing social research from time to time- especially the really relevant things like peeling back the social complexity of homophobia in entrenched "hypermasculine" environments,
(2.) The internalized self loathing involved in some of these stories is staggeringly difficult to read about...to have been on the receiving end of it must be emotionally exhausting, I get why it would be safer to stay closeted for the entirety of one's career...but its inexcusable to put that sort of strain on people psychologically in the long term.
(3.) I really need to make a decision about what to do about school over the next month or so...burning the proverbial daylight.
(4.) I'm dubious about whether or not homophobia in sports is waining as much as the article suggests- I brought this up in class yesterday; or more aptly the scenario surrounding the Kobe Bryant "F-bomb" and the rationalizations were mixed and perplexing. Some students did the "he didn't mean the slur as a slur" rationalization, others , the "everybody in sports does it so it must be okay" argument, and still others the "people in the sub-culture (gay people) refer to themselves as f-bombs...if Kobe was gay would it matter?" *facepalm* We're going to have to reboot this discussion it seems...some of them are juuust on the verge of connecting to the idea that slurs and stigma have a purpose, and that purpose is fulfilled based on context.
I showed the group a few skits from the Chappelle Show, and am curious about whether or not they laugh AT or WITH the joke. Is the marginalized group "funny" or is it funny because racism is stupid? I'll update this as we revisit it in class tomorrow. Internalized self loathing seems a good place to begin. Fun times.
Some Sneaker Pimps to get the day going- "Low Place Like Home"
The fine folks of Mississippi's Republican Party, when polled (N=440) about politics and social issues expressed that 46% of them would prefer interracial marriage be illegal. Not shocking, but the implications are telling all the same...
Q14 Do you think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal? Legal 40% ............................................................... 46% Illegal .............................................................. Not sure 14%
Well, it just confirms the idea that unsurprisingly entire pockets of the deep south have through sheer force of will have managed to avoid reality and modernity. It further underscores a much more important idea: that left to popular vote, the ability or right for interracial couples to marry whom the see fit would- if 46% of the sample had its way, be illegal. The collective rights of the American people should never be left up to the musings of a popular vote, as the old biases tend to be pervasive regardless of whether or not we naively expect others to do the "right thing". The "Will of the People"(tm) is not always right or fair. It was, after all, only 1967 when Loving v. the Supreme Court of Virginia decided that Interracial marriage ought to be decriminalized. There are more than one types of American culture, some of which exist in the present, some of which pine for the days past. These sort of intra-generational divides I have a feeling will grow more pronounced as the Baby Boom generation advances. Gay marriage, interracial marriage, the sudden and xenophobic fear of all things sharia...all growing pains social conservatives can't bring themselves get out of the past long enough to see clearly... and seem desperate to counteract at the cost of the liberties of others.
(And the always great Arcade Fire, for your reading and listening pleasure. )
I wrote this in response to a post on the oft clever gay oriented pop-culture site AfterElton in which a mildly innocent writer penned a missive to a Dear Abbyesque Q & A segment about whether his explicitly stated preferences against "dark skinned men" was as his friends were suggesting "racist".
The columnist did a deft job of tackling the sensitivity of the topic, when he cautioned that preferences are to be expected, but openly stating preferences that border on the outright dismissal of entire swaths of the population can be associated with being…biased. Quite a few readers came down staunchly opposed to the idea, stating that attraction is merely an expression of the individual, and that being so “sensitive” to the whining of a minority group was tantamount to the PC police dictating how one feels. It set me to a great deal of thinking on the subject, and left me bittersweet on the overall prospect of preference and privilege.
It is a precarious place, the intersection where race, preference and culture converge. Often we assume our individual preferences are innate and purely our own through no outside influence or social stimuli. Often we consider what attracts us or what fetishes we conform to purely biological or psychological. Its often rationalized "I like what I like, so why overthink it?". While our preferences are in fact owned by the self, the sheer impact and power of the dominant culture on our thoughts and perceptions of ourselves, and the social world we inhabit is casually overlooked in pursuit of our individual preferences. We tell ourselves our ideas are the result of our reasoned choices alone. And if anything, especially in the face of theories like the social construction of reality- we are invariably ...inaccurate about the origins of our preferences.
All of us are shaped by social forces outside the self. The overarching cultures in which we're reared inform us of the meaning we derive from the world at large; we do not know the sky is "blue" until we're taught it, we don't understand the reality in which we live contextually until we're socialized to do so. As it pertains to racial bias in our preferences, its nigh impossible to suggest that we as individuals generate preferences without them being informed and colored by the culture/social environment we inhabit.
Case in point, the always illuminating "doll study" conducted by Kenneth and Maime Clark. The findings in the Jim Crow era South is arguably little different than it is at present. When socialized by the dominant culture, minority children often, as the study suggests, attribute positive qualities to members of the dominant group and negative characteristics to the group they've been ascribed to:
Almost all of the children readily identified the race of the dolls. However, when asked which they preferred, the majority selected the white doll and attributed positive characteristics to it. The Clarks also gave the children outline drawings of a boy and girl and asked them to color the figures the same color as themselves. Many of the children with dark complexions colored the figures with a white or yellow crayon. The Clarks concluded that "prejudice, discrimination, and segregation" caused black children to develop a sense of inferiority and self-hatred. This photograph was taken by Gordon Parks for a 1947 issue of Ebony magazine.
The Clarks' study is as timely now, as the ingrained preconceptions and biases are disseminated through the media and pop-culture (Anderson Cooper's 2010 report on the topic serves as depressing confirmation). Much the way the children in the doll study internalized race and preference, even when it meant rejecting that with their own skin color, a society weaned on ideal types and the customary presentation of heroes, objects of affection and desire and romantic figures that speak to the dominant culture at the expense of other subcultures or ethnic groups that continually fail to see themselves as a part of the broader representation of cultural identity.
The "otherness" of the African-American identity is disjointed, fragmented. Little girls in Stamps, Arkansas grew up in times recent past feeling a certain sort of alienation from the expectations and consideration of the larger (whiter) world around them. Leaving them desperate for legitimate acceptance, the “normal” conventions with which the overarching culture seeks to conform seeming both further away and more discouraging to dare to aspire towards. Navigating a society that rejects both overtly and covertly leaves little unscathed when it regards the internalization of these social norms. And as such, minority communities learn to exist in social environments that typecasts, confines and scrutinizes them; that insists they acculturate to but will not be fully appreciated in the expanse of American life.
Back when I was devoted to OKCupid as something of a high minded “these are supposed to be my people” (nerdy atheist hipsters) social experiment on Internet dating I was really disenchanted by the data they presented on race and biases. It was a stark reminder of all the ways in which having all the commonalities in the world wouldn’t get you past the oh-so-enjoyable kneejerk that is casual racism. It was somewhat devastating at the time, because I was operating under the naive misconception that the people who frequented OKCupid were sexually unrepressed, progressives on the whole. And yes, I’ve recently been informed about a “bridge in Brooklyn”. I’m talking to my people about it...
This bit of data is more interesting…or at least more amusingly presented. But otherwise, it seems to show me how consistently socialization seems to program us to be very similar little lemmings. I’m choosing to attempt to defy that paradigm. (And I despise diet coke and generic “soul food”. And sushi).
