E367: Writing and Diversity

The Problem with Generalizations

The topics that Rebecca Solnit brought up are important to recognize, and her way of displaying them demands attention. The topic of women being held down or ignored is not a new one and will not be insignificant for a long time. She is an advocate for women to receive equal respect from men. And she wants it done in a non-violent way.

“This is a struggle that takes place in war-torn nations, but also in the bedroom, the dining room, the classroom, the workplace, and the streets. And in newspapers, magazines, and television, where women are dramatically underrepresented.”

Solnit mentions two specific experiences she has had with “explaining men” who she felt were being superior or argumentative because of the fact that she was a woman. In these examples, both the Aspen man and the translator for Tariq Ali, I feel she was correct in assuming they treated her differently because she was a woman, though I have a difficult time chalking all similar situations up to gender superiority. Her argument is powerful, and it is evident that these issues definitely do exist, but by generalizing (all men, all women) it seems to invite criticism from readers.

“Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”

Though she addresses that not all men explain things to women the way they would to a child, it does stir the pot a bit aggressively. The valid and persuasive arguments she makes are dulled by the overlying assumption that she generalizes men, just like she feels generalized by men. In my experience, I do not automatically assume that men are going to talk down to me, and I have had very few instances of this happening to me. I struggle to think of an example when I have been in that type of situation. The whole piece was excellent, and for someone who feels similarly about women’s rights as Solnit I was able to buy into her rally. However, for someone who does not share her claims, it might be easier for that person to disregard (or even argue) her statements because of her generalizations.

The Big Uneasy

This article reminds me of Ta’Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me because it draws from many complex issues that are or have been occurring within the past decade as far as social justice inc concerned. One thing that Heller notes as important are the recollection of times this up and coming wave of professionals have encountered. The kind of country that this particular age group has developed in he says has a high activist agenda. The groups of young woman and men we are watching take office now have been raised during tense times and have sharp conservative perspectives because of them. Coates wrote Between the World and Me as a letter addressing his young son to warn him of all the trouble this country has and will cause to a young Black man trying to make a name for himself. This seems similar to many First-Gen, minority, low-income, or underrepresented students around the country who are coerced into these university systems but still constantly have to bare the pressure of all of the other larger systems that we find ourselves belonging to because of our social status. As we step further and further into our adulthood and closer to the practices that elicit opportunity we are understanding that unfortunately the structures that rule the ‘real world’ remain unchanged, they just transpire on a more discrete level. Older generations might mark us as oversensitive yet we see it as a fight that we did not choose to take part in. Within the generation that is currently blossoming are various new identities and ideals that are unconcerned about the feuds and tensions of the past, it is frustrating to have to continue cleaning up when we do not feel associated with these evils. We are much more concerned with innovation and creation especially while we have all kinds of readily available technology and networks that were unavailable before.

Male Mediocracy

The praise of Male mediocrity in society is nothing new.

Men are celebrated for achieving everything from the bare minimum to actual successes. Even for the most basic of human actions, men are constantly praised in society. They are allowed to be and expected to be confident, loud, assertive, and prideful. The same cannot be said for women, however. Male mediocrity is praised and celebrated while female achievements are downplayed and criticized.

If a woman is confident, she is “vain.” If she is assertive, she is “bossy.” If she is a working woman, she is “selfish.” If she is a stay-at-home mother, she is “lazy.” Women are held to unattainable and insurmountable standards by society. In order to be taken seriously, they have to be the best. Unfortunately, even if they are the most qualified person in their field, as Rebecca Solnit explains in “Men Explain Things to Me,” women are still belittled and not taken seriously.

I know there is the common argument of “not all men” and all of its variations. While this is true, not all men perpetuate these gender inequalities, however, enough men, either knowingly or unknowingly benefit from these views, creating and continuing this double standard. As Solnit puts it, her life “is well-sprinkled with lovely men, with a long succession of editors who have, since [Solnit] was young, listened and encouraged and published [Solnit],” however, her life is filled with “these other men, too,” the ones who belittle and ignore her.

As a woman, Solnit’s article hits close to home. What shocks me is how similar the female experience is when speaking to men. This is particularly evident when she recounts a conversation she had with a man.

“He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his authentically grainy wood table and said to me, ‘So? I hear you’ve written a couple of books.’
I replied, ‘Several, actually.’
He said, in the way you encourage your friend’s seven-year-old to describe flute practice, ‘And what are they about?’
Solnit

Despite Solnit’s obvious achievements, she is still spoken to as a child. This experience is demeaning and insulting. Solnit is an adult woman with remarkable skills and successes, yet to this man, she is nothing more than a silly little girl. He then goes on to smugly explain the “very important” book he had read to Solnit.

Unfortunately for this man, what he does not realize at the time is that Solnit actually wrote this book he is trying to explain to her. As a woman, I relate to this story, as I have also fallen victim to the dreaded “mansplaining.”

Though I agree with and relate to the majority of Solnit’s piece, I take issue with her points towards the end of the article. Here she discusses the issues of violence against women. She argues that “women women acquired the status of human beings when these kinds of acts started to be taken seriously, when the big things that stop us and kill us were addressed legally from the mid-1970s on” I, however, do not think society has reached this point yet. As made evident from countless verdicts of “not guilty” for male defendants against women (Brock Turner, for example) and the constant attacks on the reproductive rights of women, women are most certainly not seen as human beings the way men are. Like Solnit, I am hopeful that one day men and society will change to protect and support women, I am not convinced this will happen in my lifetime.

Not So Little

When reading Solnit’s piece, I couldn’t help but feel some sort of childhood connection with the argument she was making. Her point in that some, not all, men have a distinct way in which they talk to women is one that I have noticed from an early age, but only recently hear essays and articles about.

I grew up in an immediate family of my two brothers and I, and an extended family of majority male cousins, both older and younger than me. I have always been spoken to by family and friends as the “little girl” of the family, even now that I am 21 years old. While I understand that some family members speak to me in this way because I am one of the only girls, I’ve noticed how this can carry over into how they converse with me on educated and opinionated topics. This viewpoint on me solely because I am a female has led male family members, my dad and older uncles in particular, to view my thoughts on certain topics as incorrect or lead them to feel as though I do not know what I’m talking about. While there are many topics that I do need educating on, I have mainly noticed their need to stop me and explain is largely when it comes to my opinions. As a way to keep peace, I do not speak out about how this form of speech impacts my decision to add to family discussions or the fact that I then feel my opinions are incorrect.

“Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.”

I instantly connected to this quote and thought of my dad and how many of our important conversations went. Whether it be about topics from school, worldly issues, how to best budget my money while in college, or any other conflicting views, his side was always explained to me and my side was deemed incorrect. While this can also be blamed on the age gap and my dad’s need to share his wisdom from experience, he explains his viewpoints differently to me than he would to my brothers. The tone is much more childlike and gentle, but in a way that feels like that is the only way I will understand what he is trying to say. Rather than stating his side and having a conversation, he backs up his claim and explains why mine is wrong. With peers of my age group or slightly older, both men and women, I have never experienced this sort of conversation. I would not imagine telling my own father or peers of my age that their opinion or mindset on an issue is wrong and these are the reasons why.

I understand that in my dad’s eyes I will always be his “little girl”, however I think there comes a time where you can keep this viewpoint and also understand that I am capable of making my own informed decisions, without needing to have the logic behind it being explained. I’d prefer to have conversations where we can both have our opinions, share them with each other, and not have one side be right or wrong, as he does with many other people.

P.S. love my dad he’s a great guy

Class, Wed, 10/02

UD as “Literacy Sponsor”

[The President’s] priorities include: enhancing students’ success, investing in intellectual and physical capital, fostering a spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship, building an environment of inclusive excellence and strengthening interdisciplinary and global programs.
“President Assanis Reviews Top Five Priorities with Faculty and Staff“, UDaily, 2/17/2017.

Nathan Heller, “The Big Uneasy”

How do the politics of inclusion play out “on the ground” of a US college campus?

Fastwrite

Go to a point in Heller’s piece where he quotes a particular individual who is speaking in a way that you either admire or find troubling. Be ready to tell us why.

Safety and Engaging with Difference (John and Jennifer)

Of Interest

EJ Dickerson, “How a Small-Town Bakery in Ohio Became a Lightning Rod in the Culture Wars“, Rolling Stone, 7/18/2019

To Do

Wed, 10/02/4:00 pm: Group B responses to Solnit.
Thurs, 10/03, 4:00 pm: Everyone else reads Group B’s responses and comments on at least two.
Fri, 10/04, class: We will use those responses and comments to structure our discussion of Solnit.
Mon, 10/07, class: Read Jamaica Kinkaid’s “A Small Place”. I will lead our discussion.
Mon, 10/07, 4:00 pm: Group C responds to Roxane Gay.
Tues, 10/08, 4:00 pm: Everyone else reads Group C’s responses and comments on at least two.
Wed, 10/09, class: We will use those responses and comments to structure our discussion of Gay.
Thurs, 10/10, 4:00 pm: Everyone emails me a one-page proposal for their final project.
Fri, 10/11: Fall “Break”.
Mon, 10/14, and Wed, 10/16: No class meeting. Individual conferences with me.

Unity in difference or hyper-vigilance of oppression?

Heller starts by recounting the happenings at Oberlin College where student activism is threatening the established “liberal matrix”. Recently, Oberlin College has seen a whole host of student backlash; including food fights, and student letters protesting faculty. He goes on to mention several significant liberal – arts schools who are struggling to cope. Over the course of the article, Heller interviews many involved in academia on both sides of the debate. It must be said that debates of this kind are often a slippery slope. Therefore, you’ll notice, Heller largely refrains from giving his own opinion. And instead opts to consider as many view points as possible.

This article was quite hard to digest, considering the range of points of view from individuals qualified to weigh in on the topic. I am left, in a sense, wondering about the state of self-expression. If we continue to suppress and nit-pick for inconsistencies who will be left to speak? Who will be willing to risk sharing their opinion in this climate?

Wasn’t free self-expression the whole point of social progressivism? Wasn’t liberal academe a way for ideas, good and bad, to be subjected to enlightened reason? Generations of professors and students imagined the university to be a temple for productive challenge and perpetually questioned certainties. Now, some feared, schools were being reimagined as safe spaces for coddled youths and the self-defined, untested truths that they held dear.

Scared Safe

Safe spaces are an interesting concept that is a place or environment where a person or category of people can feel confident that they won’t be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment, or any emotional or physical harm. Many people are drawn to a safe space because the spaces that should be safe for them—such as home, school, community—are not safe for them and they want to be around people are in a similar situation as them. There is also making a publicly occupied space such as a school campus, a recreational center, and such areas a safe space—as a well to reassure the occupants that they will be safe during their time there. The basic structure of a safe space is positive, but only when it occupies a space and isn’t occupying someone’s whole life.

Although, I know I should focus on the article by Heller, I found his piece to offer too many viewpoints and opinions and different facts of similar problems where I found myself unable to coherently focus on a topic. I decided the only way I could write without feeling overwhelmed was finding someone speaking about the same issue, but a little bit narrower.

A few years ago, Van Jones, a CNN political contributor, spoke at David Axelrod’s institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. During this 80 minute discussion, that included S. E. Cupp, Axelrod brought up that he had hosted President Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, the week before that discussion. Students protested the event, saying having him on campus normalized the Trump Administration. Axelrod, who disagreed with the students’ outcry, asked for Jones’ opinion on the protest.

Van Jones proposes two idea about safe spaces—a positive and a negative one. There’s the idea that a campus should be a safe space that is free from sexual harassment or physical abuse, or any kind of hate speech that’s targeted—this is the normal definition of a safe space and is in no way harmful and should be adopted. Then there’s the idea that these student are being “safe ideologically” and think they need to feel good all the time—almost putting a blanket over their eyes to anything they disagree with. Jones’ explains that he doesn’t like the second idea as it assumes that we don’t care about people’s emotional safety and wellbeing. Instead of criticizing those who want safety, we should be pushing people to be stronger. Passionately, he says, “I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym. You can’t live on a campus where people say stuff you don’t like?!”

He goes on to speak about his parents and other older black Americans who dealt with far worse adversities such as beatings and dogs, but nowadays people cannot deal with a mean tweet. Which is true, there is still adversity today, but it not as nearly bad as it was fifty or sixty years ago. All these students grew up with President Obama as their first president they knew and grew up believing times have changes. So any instances where that shiny optimism cracks, like Tamir Rice or the transgender military ban, it’s really disappointing. But, then again these students have grown up dealing with a mass shooting every week in their schools, their churches, their concerts, or their supermarkets. And with that we have tried to harden ourselves because it hasn’t stopped and we’ve learned to get used to it—which makes us furious. So are these students still lacking adversity and hardship?

Continuing on with more passion Jones says, “You are creating a kind of liberalism that the minute it crosses the street into the real world is not just useless, but obnoxious and dangerous. I want you to be offended every single day on this campus. I want you to be deeply aggrieved and offended and upset, and then to learn how to speak back. Because that is what we need from you in these communities.”

I do agree that students need to hear and absorb and deal with ideas that aren’t similar to their own. It’s one of the ways to truly gain intelligence. How can you learn if you stay in a bubble of what you believe if you can’t understand the things you don’t believe? But, I also agree that the students, who pay insurmountable funds to attend college, should have some sort of say in what their campus does. And if they fight back on certain things that they don’t like, does that truly mean they are weak and ignorant—closing their eyes and ears to all things scary?

The students were protesting that the school was normalizing the Trump administration—an administration that unarguably promotes hatred and negative messages—and as a student, I don’t know if I would want my school to give a platform and allow someone that took part in that hatred. It would have been different if a professor played a video of someone from Trump’s white house to spark discussion or if a student-run republican group invited him to speak at one of their events. I feel like it’s even different than bringing a member of Bush’s cabinet because I don’t think it’s an issue of disagreeing with political ideologies, but more about possible the inflammation or spreading of a negative rhetoric. But, then again, if we don’t listen to such negative rhetoric, how would we ever understand to combat it? It’s an interesting balancing game that is going to take a while to truly understand.

Van Jones’ talk: Van Jones’ Excellent Metaphors About the Dangers of Ideology Safety, Jon Haidt, https://heterodoxacademy.org/van-jones-excellent-metaphors/

Response to Heller

In “The Big Uneasy,” by Nathan Heller, many different opinions about student activism are acknowledged. Heller specifically talks to students and faculty from Oberlin College located in Ohio. Heller doesn’t mention much about his own opinions on the issues discussed, he just mentions a bunch of other conflicting ideas and then leaves it up to the reader to determine what they want from the interviews that he conducted. I think that the main issue of this article was where to draw the line when it comes to student activism. If you’re too hard on the students then they will fight back, however, if you’re too easy on students then they’re not being challenged enough.

“A president’s job is to push past contradictions, while an activist’s duty is to call them out. The institutions that give many people a language and a forum to denounce injustice are, inevitable, the nearest targets of their criticism.”
Heller

The whole point of college is to challenge its students. Heller mentions that there are some people who believe that if a college protects its students from unwelcome ideas, then that college isn’t doing its job in preparing its students for the real world. I’ve heard this term “real world” so many times in my college career and I have yet to fully grasp its concept. What is the real world and what makes it so different from college? What will happen if students don’t face enough challenges in college and are then thrown into the real world? I don’t know if I agree with this huge distinction between college life and the real world because it almost diminishes all the experiences that students have during college. What you face during school aren’t “real” challenges. However, Heller mentions some examples of students who facing some very real challenges.

One student, Megan Bautista shares that exposing herself to opinions that were different from her own just exhausted her. She tried to engage in activism outside of campus but due to the impact on her grades, this idea quickly fizzled. Students tried to compromise with the college asking for activism to be looked at like a job that should be paid, or by having a minimum grade that the college couldn’t go below while their students were involved in activism outside of campus. These ideas were rejected and students felt like they had to choose one over the other because doing both seemed impossible.

“Today they are told that they belong there, but they also must take on an extracurricular responsibility: doing the work of diversity.”
Heller

There are students who feel like they aren’t being reflected in their college community. Jasmine Adams leads a discussion about Oberlin’s indifference towards racial oppression. Adams, as well as other students, bring up the issue that they feel like they are being forced to conform to the standards of their college and these standards don’t reflect what they have experienced in the real world. They aren’t going to change who they are for four years of their life just to satisfy the college’s expectations.

The problems that students are facing on campus extend to the faculty as well. One teacher, Wendy Kozol, had to disband the class because the class seated themselves by race and weren’t communicating with each other. Another teacher, Roger Copeland, who has been teaching at Oberlin for over 40 years, noticed that his teaching style wasn’t being well received by his students recently. He spoke sharply to a student once who reported to the dean that Copeland was creating “a hostile and unsafe learning environment.”

Heller mentions a lot of different views about student activism that all seem validated. It’s hard to organize my own thoughts on this idea because I feel like in order to understand what’s happening, I have to respond to each individual that’s mentioned. There are a lot of issues that are talked about that seem circumstantial, but bring each issue to light and the school is having to deal with students clashing with teachers, teachers clashing with students, and students clashing with students. Which, I guess is all ok, if the point of college is to challenge its students right?

Activism at School

In Nathan Heller’s article “THE BIG UNEASY” publish in the New Yorker, he addresses many points of view on the activism taking place at universities, and especially, Oberlin College. He began by citing examples of this activism through – what is mostly comprised of Liberal-Arts educations – the changes that universities and colleges alike had to go through in order to appease its students. For example, Yale was told that they had to avoid offensive Halloween costumes for the sake of it denouncing transgressive expression. Harvard also went through many changes, one of the more impactful ones being that they had to change their “house masters” to faculty deans in fear of it being offensive. Finally, Bowdoin student, Heller notes, were punished for wearing sombreros to a tequila party. With this information at hand, I think it to be incredible that so many people are so offended by so many things these days. I am not justifying anyone’s actions and I am certainly not agreeing with or denying the wrongdoing of any of these actions, but I find it incredible to see how coddled so many young people are today. A quotation I found to be interesting on the matter was,

“…arguing that young people taught to embrace “vindictive protectiveness” were being poorly educated for the challenges of the real world. Shielding students from the unwelcome ideas was unhealthy for the workforce and the democratic commonweal,”

I agree with this statement wholeheartedly. I do not think that this statement could be any more accurate than it is.

I believe this statement to be true because in the workforce, not everybody is going to see eye-to-eye on everything. Most people will not respect one another and most people are only there to work for themselves so that they can earn enough money to support their family and themselves. There are a few natural-born leaders who make everyone feel like a unit and address issues properly, however, that is definitely a small minority. But, to go back to my argument of sorts, if we are not teaching people how to deal with adversity and how to deal with people who do not like them, then what are we teaching people about how to deal with the real world? Socially, how can they survive? How can someone survive who is easily offended? I am not saying that people who are offended easily can succeed or survive in a social climate. But, I am saying that if one does not learn to have thick skin and be able to deal with adversity, then they will be dealing with a lot of anger and sadness and not a whole lot of optimism or happiness about being who they are. If I have offended anyone with my previous statements, I apologize and am always open for a discussion about it. However, truth be told, I think it is a bit ridiculous that I even have to include an apology to begin with. Just trying to start an interesting discussion!