Month: September 2014

You would think after all the years of interdisciplinary academic programs being developed that we would have reached a time when we weren’t still so divided. But we are. We are stuck in our silos at the expense of social justice. Here are a few examples of what I’m talking about, and then I’ll talk about why I think it’s such a problem. Oh, and by the way, if you’ve read the “Silo” series by Hugh Howey (starting with the novel Wool), then you’ll be able to visualize the problem I’m talking about.

I attended Netroots Nation in Detroit in July 2014; this conference is considered the biggest progressive conference of the year. It was amazing, and I learned about various progressive issues, activist strategies, and more. However, I didn’t meet one other college professor, of any discipline. And I only met a few K-12 teachers. Almost everyone there was either a blogger, journalist, activist, and/or political candidate, and they all seemed quite invested in social justice. Where were the scholars, the college professors, and the K-12 teachers?

In April 2014, I attended a conference at Yale Law School called “Re-Envisioning Race in a ‘Post-Racial’ Era: New Approaches in Critical Race Theory.” All of the panels and presentations were inspiring and informative. The audience was almost primarily law faculty, law students, and practicing lawyers, even though anyone who follows current events who doesn’t have a law degree would have gotten so much out of the conference. Where were faculty, grad students, and undergrad students from other academic disciplines? Where were the high school teachers? Where were the activists unaffiliated with an academic institution?

We are doing such a disservice to the cause of social justice by cutting ourselves off from conversations and interactions with like-minded people who could teach us something valuable. We seem to congregate in conferences with people who have similar graduate degrees or similar positions. I’m certainly not discounting the value of that. For example, many of the classes I teach are composition, and it’s very helpful for me to spend some of my professional development interacting with other composition instructors at community colleges in order to share best practices for achieving our common goals. However, that can only be a piece of my professional and personal growth, only a small piece of the larger project of social justice. We have to think less about what discipline we’re in or what our job is and think more about what larger social problems we want to come together to discuss, analyze, and at least begin to resolve. How can we possibly know if the solution we come up with will work if we are only sharing it with people who have the same graduate degree as we do, who have the same type of job we do? I need to be able to talk to people outside of the discipline of English and even outside of academia altogether to know if my solutions even make sense.

Much of my blog (and my book project) is devoted to stereotypes that divide us, that keep us separated, that prevent us from coming together to form coalitions. I’m trying to raise awareness about those stereotypes so that we can dismantle them and build coalitions around common interests. I think something similar is going on here when it comes to divisions between academic disciplines and divisions between scholars and activists. We’re divided, for various reasons, some of which are not ill-intended, but the result is the same. We don’t come together across disciplines, across careers, to discuss the concerns that we share.

However, I did notice that as soon as the news from Ferguson spread across the country in August, it seemed that there were connections being forged across disciplines, across all types of communities. We can’t lose that momentum, and we can’t wait until a tragedy of that scale to make it happen. We have extremely serious problems that we need to tackle, from systemic racism to economic inequality to homophobia to climate change. We need to think about developing more issue-oriented conferences, open to anyone who is interested, that can foster dialogue and prompt change. I’m looking forward to attending Facing Race in November, where I hope to experience just that.

Until then, I’ll be sharing my ideas at UCLA Law School’s Critical Race Studies conference later this week on the 20th anniversary of Cheryl Harris’ law review article “Whiteness as Property,” which has had a tremendous influence on my thinking. It prompted me to envision a conversation between Harris and Joyce Carol Oates, particularly through Oates’ 1980 novel Bellefleur. While I don’t think that literary scholars are engaging enough with critical race theory, and I’ve been trying to change that, I’m hoping that I can inspire critical race theorists to see the interdisciplinary connections with literature, so we can begin to emerge out of our silos and work together for justice.

In my last blog, I explored white resistance to the idea of “white privilege” in discussions about racism, post-Ferguson. I wrote that in late August, Bill O’Reilly questioned the existence of “white privilege,” and that I wanted to examine that but that I also wanted to look, this time, at how he introduces a question about “Asian privilege” to discredit the idea of “white privilege.” O’Reilly rattles off a bunch of statistics about unemployment, high school graduation, single-parent homes, and household income to show that every time, blacks were the least successful, whites in the middle, and Asians the most successful. O’Reilly then asks sarcastically, “So do we have Asian privilege in America?” He goes on to argue that Asian Americans are the most successful people in the US because they take personal responsibility, they overcome obstacles, they work hard, and their families stay together.

First, I want to be clear that various writers have already responded to O’Reilly’s reference to “Asian privilege”; there have been several excellent critiques, including “Bill O’Reilly’s ‘Asian Privilege’ Disgrace” by Marie Myung-Ok Lee of Salon, “What Bill O’Reilly Gets Wrong about Asian Americans” by Kevin Wong, also of Salon, and “Bill O’Reilly and White Privilege” by Charles Blow of the New York Times.

Second, I would like to add to this conversation by connecting O’Reilly’s comment to a larger pattern in our culture. O’Reilly is hardly the only person perpetuating this stereotype. We often hear comments about Asian American students being better at math than anyone else, and that’s just another manifestation of the same damaging stereotype.

So, what exactly is the problem here? What’s wrong with celebrating Asian American success? In fact, that’s not really what is going on here. O’Reilly was using Asian Americans as a weapon against blacks, and that is the fundamental divide and conquer phenomenon that I am trying to examine, raise awareness about, and ultimately dismantle with this blog.

To begin, O’Reilly’s words reinforce the stereotype of Asian Americans as the “model minority.” While a “positive” stereotype might not seem like a big deal because it’s positive, that very mindset just makes it all the more damaging because it goes under the radar. This stereotype was created in the late 1960s and clearly continues to be perpetuated to the present day. Many scholars have demonstrated this phenomenon, including Frank Wu, Neil Gotanda, Mari Matsuda, Sumi Cho, Robert Chang, Angelo Ancheta, Helen Zia, and Robert Lee. The media latched on to the notion of the “model minority” starting in 1966 (not coincidentally, the height of the black power movement), when two prominent news articles established the success of two groups within the Asian American community, Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans respectively, at the expense of other racial minorities. On January 9, 1966, the New York Times Magazine published an article titled “Success Story, Japanese Style.” Consider the words used to describe Japanese Americans here: “better than any other group in our society,” “exceptionally law-abiding,” acting with “perseverance” and “unaided effort,” with a “family life both strong and flexible.”

On December 26, 1966, U.S. News & World Report published an article titled “Success Story of One Minority Group in U.S.” Again, consider how the very beginning of the article establishes the notion of the model minority: “At a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese-Americans are moving ahead on their own—with no help from anyone else.” The article reinforces this idea throughout with words to describe Chinese Americans like: “obedient,” “model of self-respect and achievement,” who “depend on their own efforts—not a welfare check” with “traditional virtues of hard work, thrift and morality.”

These articles unabashedly established Asian Americans as the “good” minority. And, if there is a “good” minority, there must be a “bad” minority. Both of these articles identify the “bad” minority and so does O’Reilly, but many other references to Asian Americans as the model minority are silent on the flip side of this stereotype, leaving unspoken the identification of the not-so-model minority that Asian Americans are being compared to. However, just because it’s invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there. That’s the particularly insidious dynamic of this stereotype.

The stereotype of the model minority is shockingly powerful. In one move, it can perpetuate these powerful ideologies about race and class: anyone who works hard can be successful, our society runs on a meritocracy, racism is pretty much over, the federal government does not need to get involved in addressing racism (because it’s pretty much over), Asian Americans are a homogenous group who don’t experience any serious problems, anyone who continues to complain about racism is simply not working hard enough and spending too much time complaining, and we all just need to move on.

Such a stereotype denies the existence of racism against Asian Americans. And if there’s any doubt that such racism continues, just take a look at Deepa Iyer’s piece from the other day on “13 Years After 9/11: A Reflection on Resilience,” which discusses the serious challenges that Asian Americans continue to face.

I’ve written about the model minority myth, its origins and its continued persistence in our media and popular culture, in much more detail in my book project (still in need of a publisher). This stereotype does not get enough attention, and it is often still taken for granted as the truth rather than as a divide and conquer strategy that perpetuates systemic racism and the status quo. We need to raise awareness about this divisive stereotype, dismantle it, and build coalitions around common interests.

It’s not often that the concept of “white privilege” is the focus of the mainstream media. It took the shooting of unarmed black male teenager Michael Brown and the devastated community of Ferguson to show the world the brutality of systemic racism and economic inequality. Over the past few weeks, as the news media has highlighted incontrovertible data about the unequal treatment of African Americans, there have been several valuable articles and blogs about the way white privilege operates in our society today. To mention just a few, the New York Times, AlterNet, The Root, Salon, and Slate have published insightful commentary and analysis on the basic idea of whiteness and white privilege.

However, not surprisingly, we’ve also seen a considerable backlash to this discussion of white privilege. As Bill O’Reilly said recently during his editorial, “Talking Points does not believe in white privilege.”

This type of resistance to the idea of white privilege is what I’d like to focus on here.

There is a knee-jerk reaction by many whites to the notion of white privilege, and they think, “But I don’t feel privileged…” That’s where the resistance starts to develop because I’m not sure that anyone actually feels privilege as a sensation; therefore, it’s easy and convenient to deny. The resistance can build further when whites compare themselves to other racial groups. Even if they do recognize that they are treated better than members of other racial groups, they can chalk it up to deserving that benefit because of working hard, being smart, somehow earning this privilege. Anything else would fly in the face of the basic notion of the American Dream, that one has control over one’s destiny through hard work.

Bill O’Reilly proclaimed that “African Americans have a much harder time succeeding in our society than whites do” not because of white privilege but because they lack “stable homes and an emphasis on education.” He argued that if African Americans “overcome obstacles” and take “personal responsibility,” they would be successful. The problem, he maintains, is with them, not with white privilege or anything systemic. (I will save his reference to “Asian Privilege” for a future blog post because it will take some time to critically examine the model minority stereotype he upholds.)

So, where does that leave us? I don’t anticipate ever changing Bill O’Reilly’s mind, but I do think for many other whites, we can get past this resistance. What makes the difference? I think history helps. I think if more whites understood the history of whiteness, and the way that whiteness has been used as a weapon, that would help. No white person alive today created whiteness or white privilege; it’s not about holding white people today responsible for inventing whiteness. Acknowledging that white privilege exists and that you benefit from it is not the same as saying you created it. In addition, acknowledging that white privilege exists does not minimize a recognition of how whites can also be marginalized, via socio-economic class, gender, sexual orientation, etc.  However, denying that white privilege exists is a problem.

If we take the time to look at the history of whiteness, we will see that whiteness is not a stable, monolithic category; it’s crucial to understand that the question of who is allowed to be white varied from one historical period to the next, from one law or court case to the next. That history shows us that whiteness is not something natural or innate but something that society created, more specifically that those in power created to hang onto their power. White skin is not inherently meaningful, just like the shape of one’s ear is not inherently meaningful. Meaning had to be created and attached to whiteness, and that meaning evolved. For many years, the Irish, for example, were not considered white, and then that changed for a variety of social, political, and economic reasons. The same goes for Italians and many other groups. The definition of white evolved, and it’s still evolving. That means we can have some say in what it signifies; that means we can resist it, separate “white” from “privilege” and build a more just society.

(A few excellent resources on this history include: The History of White People, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, How the Irish Became White, and Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror.)