when words lose their meaning*

Diversity.

Example 1: Fashion magazine Love celebrates the diversity of eight of the most “beautiful people” in the world. Is it just me or do they look pretty similar? (via Sociological Images)

Example 2: Visit any business school website and you’ll be sure to find the words “diversity” mentioned somewhere about their student bodies. Yet my friend related to me earlier this year that admissions officers at top business schools told her that they prefer students to have no more than three years of work experience.

Example 3: In our workplaces, in our churches, we comment with smug satisfaction about the diversity present, generally in reference to multilingual capabilities and skin color. But oftentimes, this diversity is superficial at best, a visual characteristic of a group of people who share similar educational background, political views, lifestyles and socioeconomic status.**

A commenter on the Sociological Images blog entry referenced earlier writes:

Media decision-makers know that in 2010, the concept of “diversity” is a useful tool to generate a positive response in audiences, especially when the piece explicitly says, “Hey, this is diverse.” Whether or not there’s discernible “diversity” in whatever they’re labeling as such, the label itself gets the applause.

It’s like putting puppies or daisies in an ad. And it’s a particularly cynical trick they use when they just throw in the word “diversity” to drum up feel-good vibes in something that’s actually quite mundane and not at all groundbreaking, diversity-wise. (Original comment found here)


* I’ve lost count of the number. It might be 7, not counting variations. I should probably make this a tag. Speaking of which, I hate my tags. What I mean when I use them seems to keep changing.
** Not to say that ethnic diversity is unimportant and should not be celebrated, but let’s recognize that there are other forms of diversity that in multicultural America may be more meaningful.

I'm yellow!

and I like yellow butterflies

I have neglected this blog. I suffer from on average month-long writer’s block and this recent one has lasted longer than usual. Perhaps I’ve been distracted by more immediate things—work, house-buying ambivalence, obsessive knitting and hemming my ten gazillion skirts that are too long and hit me at the unflattering mid-calf length. Garbage in garbage out, so I suppose I can complain about nonprofit bureaucracy or ramble at length about the lengths of my dresses, but I won’t put you through that torture. That’s reserved for my husband (who is quite wonderful in case you were wondering).

Today I stumbled upon the Circle Ventures (somehow related to Circle of Hope church) blog post on white guilt concerning this history of the United States with regards to African Americans. It reminded me of how foreign America’s history is to me—the American Revolution, the westward expansion, the Civil War, the Great Depression, WWII, the Vietnam war – all this could be the history of another country. The history of my “nation” is a jumble of Communist and Cultural Revolution stories, the fall of the Berlin wall via our TV set in British Columbia (mildly upsetting because I wasn’t allowed to watch cartoons), Quebec separatism and a president south of the border notable for his extracurricular engagements. When I watch British or American period movies, I might as well be watching a movie about Sri Lanka, or Chile or Malawi.

My ethnicity, my family culture, whatever convenient label you might want to use, pops up in surprising but subtle ways. My husband and I have a now-resolved dispute about the “magic realism” in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (one of my favourite books by the way…), most notably the yellow butterflies that follow around a character in the novel. These yellow butterflies offend my husband’s rational, INTJ sensibilities! For him, they are excessive ornamental flourishes because insufficient information is given to determine what they might mean or symbolize. And I know of a few others who feel the same way. But for me, it completely makes sense that this magic is embedded in the way of narrating a story or of seeing reality and no explanation is needed. While my family did not subscribe to Chinese folk stories, my mother practiced Chinese medicine. In the world where I grew up, sticking needles in a person’s face can relieve paralysis, too much “yang” in my system caused my colds and feeling one’s pulse could discern temperaments and long-term illnesses. And for the most part, I hold that all of this is true. Not true in the Western, rational, scientific sense, but true in another sense. We believe in truths in different ways. And so the fact that the yellow butterflies in the Marquez’s novel didn’t mean anything per se, never bothered me, because it corresponded with my cultural hybrid way of seeing (I can’t believe I just used the word hybrid...).

It’s funny how I’ve come to embrace my Chinese-ness recently, as I generally dislike acknowledging my ethnic background. I’ll smile if someone asks me about China, but the moment someone says something along the lines of: “Maybe you do that because you’re Chinese”, the smile becomes forced and my irritation becomes palpable. I will stiffen even more if someone says something like “You need to understand how being Chinese impacts who you are.”

This annoyance may stem from reading far too many “What’s my identity” “I’m a hybrid” minority novels in college (some of which were actually excellent), but it is primarily a strong reaction against the expectation that I must understand who I am in the context of my ethnicity. White people are not confined to conceive of their identities in terms of their ethnicity, then why must ethnicity be my starting point? What if my race is not the defining characteristic of who I am? Why must we limit the driving factors of our formation to race, gender and class when there may be influences that matter far more?

But I’m lucky. Because though I might occasionally receive awkward comments and rude questions, I have not been significantly marginalized because of my ethnicity. Fortunately for me, the privileges of education and wealth were also handed down to me along with my skin colour at birth. And so I am here and not elsewhere. And this is who I am, not someone else. Mostly Canadian-American well-educated wealthy Christian but with bits of Chinese weaved into the holes.

~

There I did it! My crowning contribution to minority literature. New genre: Chinese Canadian American. CCA literature. Memoirs of my childhood amongst huckleberry bushes, chopsticks, francophones, and ice rinks. Maybe they will even have a CCA studies department!

unequal measures of inequality

My most recent blog entry related to how the manner in which knowledge is produced within the university system is subject to a set of assumptions and methodologies. This became quite evident in this example drawn from my first class in Professor Lamas’ Community Economic Development.*

In looking at these statistics relating to income, taken from the U.S. Census Bureau, what would you conclude about equality in America?

Income of Households 2002

Race/Ethnicity	Income
White alone or in combination	$45,350
White alone	$45,390
White alone, not Hispanic	$47,194
Black alone or in combination	$30,032
Black alone	$29,982

Now take a look at these statistics concerning wealth in America, now what would you conclude?
Median Value of Assets for Households 2000

Race	Net Worth
White	$58,716
White Not of Hispanic Origin	$67,000
Black	$6,166

Percent Distribution of Household Net Worth 2000

Race	Net Worth
	Zero or Negative	$500,000 and Over
White	12.7%	9.3%
White Not of Hispanic Origin	11.3%	10.0%
Black	29.1%	0.6%

In the first case, inequality America is significant but is not of an outrageous proportion. However, looking at wealth, this picture is dramatically different. The median wealth of a white American household is over 10 times that of a black household. Furthermore, three times as many blacks than whites have zero or negative net worth.

The poverty debate both in America and around the world has been framed around the question of income (what one earns) rather than wealth (what one owns less what one owes). Two professors can both earn the same amount each year, but their lives may look very different depending on the inheritance they may or may not have received from their parents.

Because the poverty problem is framed in terms of income, the policy solutions suggested are also directed towards raising income. Our grand solutions to poverty in America seemed centered around raising minimum wages and providing better education (so that people can receive higher paying jobs). But if we were to think of the problem differently, how would our solutions change?

Interestingly enough, the major wealth-based solution to poverty has not been particularly successful. Home ownership has often been promoted as a way of increasing wealth and gaining economic success. However, this has played out into the context of income segregated neighbourhoods, disparate quality of education in public schools, and foreclosures. Home ownership has not created additional wealth especially in cases of stagnant or declining real estate prices or growing costs of maintaining a home.

I'm sure there will be more to follow on this subject.


*In fact, this entire entry is drawn from the discussion in today’s class. I guess you know it’s a good class if I come home and immediately write a blog entry.

what if philadelphia ceases to be philadelphia?

In his novel Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes about changes to the city of Maurilia:

In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits: admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis Maurilia, when compared to the old, provincial Maurilia, cannot compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old postcards, whereas before, when that provincial Maurilia was before one’s eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Maurilia had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.

I find myself with a funny set of wants—I want more college graduates and professionals to stay or to come to Philadelphia, to work here and contribute to the economy, and to make this a better city. Yet I also know that this very revitalization is playing an integral role in the gentrification in my neighbourhood, destroying historic black communities in West Philadelphia.

I deeply desire to see this city revitalized, to become the “next great city”—for its “soul-stirring desolation” as Jonathan Franzen put it, to be turned into soul-stirring hope and community. But when does Philadelphia cease to be Philadelphia? When does some other minor deity saunter in and takes its place and its name, while the old Philadelphia is put in a body bag and dumped into the Delaware River? In hoping for Philadelphia’s life, am I also wishing its destruction?

As Philadelphia changes, the spirit of this city will change. But I want to see the soul of Philadelphia grow out of its sighs and tears and into something wise and beautiful, with history and complexity, rather than see it squeezed out and left to die, while some other young, fashionable imposter comes to stretch its personality over these streets.*


* There’s been an interesting series in the Philadelphia Inquirer on homeless men sleeping, eating, bathing and having sex in Rittenhouse Square. I’ve blogged about this park and my appreciation for the diversity of its users. Sometimes, when I try to imagine what Philadelphia would look as a person, I picture a homeless man, dirty and filthy, staggering through the streets (I have other images too). I don’t want this homeless man shut away in a shelter far, far way—I want him to find a job, build a family and live in a home. As for the Rittenhouse Square issue, I understand the local residents’ aversion to having their local park overrun by homeless at night, and I also understand the need to provide the homeless with more permanent housing options than park benches, but something about excluding before including, hiding before healing, and ultimately separating without ever integrating, strikes me as being the wrong approach. And I hope that we do not take the same approach to the poor (of pushing them out to suburbs rather than including them in a vital way) as we try to bring new life to Philadelphia.
** On a lighter note, I think I may be breaking a significant trend with this post. Have you noticed that I will post frequently for a month, and then I will go on hiatus for the next month before resuming frequent posts again? Somehow, I’ve managed this time to only wait about two weeks before the posts resume again.

I am gentrifying my neighbourhood

It’s frightening how we find ourselves swept up in large social changes. We act, thinking that our actions are our entirely own, only to find that so many others are making the same decisions. I begin to wonder to what degree are my decisions my own (or God’s) and to what degree have I swallowed the ideas, values and assumptions prevalent in society.

I watch the rapid gentrification of my neighborhood—I knew it would happen eventually but I would not have anticipated the speed. To put it bluntly, six months ago there were not this many white people walking around. So property prices are increasing, rents are rising, and houses are being renovated. While I can say that I am part of the neighbourhood’s revitalization, I am also displacing plenty of lower income families, and representing the arrival of yuppies and hipsters.

The gentrification in many ways seems inevitable. And if Matt and I had not chosen to live where we are now, and opted to live in, well, an already gentrified area, the neighborhood would have changed anyways. But that does not take away from the fact that we are part of urban process now that is moving lower-income, underprivileged families further out to the periphery.

So what do we do when we recognize that our actions, by no evil intent, are hurting others? To what degree do we go with the flow and recognize that this may not be one of the battles that we are called to fight and that we are not responsible? (Is that resignation?) Or, how do we stand up against the river when we feel like a little pebble being tossed about in the current?

In some ways this question is a moot point for the time being, as Matt and I have already signed our lease. For the time being, we are called to love and care for our neighbors, whatever ethnic or class background they may be from. But when it comes to buying a house* (something that is on the radar for the next few years), how are we to tread? Even if we try to tread softly, our footprints seem to sink far deeper than we would ever want them to.


* We can’t really afford a house in the wealthier sections of the city. Do we buy a house in this already gentrifying area and continue to contribute to this inevitable process? Or, do we buy a house in a predominantly black lower-income neighborhood and risk setting off gentrification there, because our very presence will change the way that the neighborhood is viewed? (And I question the latter option critically—it can easily be done with a sense of pride and self-righteousness, instead of faith, love, and a specific calling).

on the uses of diversity (2)

or: the entry in which I reveal my political cards (not that it should be a surprise to anyone)

The Economist recently published an article on political segregation. More and more Americans are choosing to live in areas where their political beliefs are in line with everyone else’s:

For example, someone who works in Washington, DC, but wants to live in a suburb can commute either from Maryland or northern Virginia. Both states have equally leafy streets and good schools. But Virginia has plenty of conservative neighbourhoods with megachurches and Bushites you've heard of living on your block. In the posh suburbs of Maryland, by contrast, Republicans are as rare as unkempt lawns and yard signs proclaim that war is not the answer but Barack Obama might be.

At a bookshop in Bethesda (one of those posh Maryland suburbs), Steven Balis, a retired lawyer with wild grey hair and a scruffy T-shirt, looks up from his New York Times. He says he is a Democrat because of “the absence of alternatives”. He comes from a family of secular Jews who supported the New Deal. He holds “positive notions of what government actions can accomplish”. Asked why he moved to Maryland rather than Virginia, he jokes that the far side of the river is “Confederate territory”. Asked if he has hard-core social-conservative acquaintances, he answers simply: “No.”

In the back of my mind, I’ve been wondering for quite some time: do I currently support Barack Obama because I really do believe he’s the best choice for president? Or is it because almost everyone else around me also does (I’m surrounded by liberals :P)? There’s still many months until election time, so there’s time to assess thoroughly and decide. If I end up doing what everyone else is doing, I hope it’s not from following the herd. And if I do decide differently, I hope I’ll have the courage not to hide it from others, because I am worried about what they think of me.*

It’s a pity that there isn’t more contact and dialogue between people of different political preferences. It’s easy to become silo-ed in our own bubbles, comfortably feeling smug with our political opinions, and writing off those who different opinions as stupid/elitist/ignorant/absurd etc… If we are to find some viable solutions to the problems that we are facing, ones that will actually be implemented in Congress and not just dreamed about, we do need to be actively trying to dialogue with and understand others’ opinions. Instead of just writing off another's opinion as wrong, it’s good to ask: What are their assumptions? (As Nick has written about in his blog). And if those assumptions are different, we can ask: why are they different? how can we work through our differences? and how can we continue to respect them in light of their different beliefs?

All this is much harder when we socially separate ourselves from those who have different political preferences from us. Living as neighbors, colleagues or friends, humanizes those “liberals” or “conservatives” or “anarchists” or “socialists”. It becomes much harder to label them and see them under the stereotype of their political preferences.** It puts us in a position where we must at the very least interact with them, instead of having all our knowledge of them be mediated through the internet and the evening news.

The Economist article continues on the dangers of lack of diversity:

There is a danger in this. Studies suggest that when a group is ideologically homogeneous, its members tend to grow more extreme. Even clever, fair-minded people are not immune. Cass Sunstein and David Schkade, two academics, found that Republican-appointed judges vote more conservatively when sitting on a panel with other Republicans than when sitting with Democrats. Democratic judges become more liberal when on the bench with fellow Democrats.

“We now live in a giant feedback loop,” says Mr Bishop, “hearing our own thoughts about what's right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear and the neighbourhoods we live in.”

Voters in landslide districts tend to elect more extreme members of Congress. Moderates who might otherwise run for office decide not to. Debates turn into shouting matches. Bitterly partisan lawmakers cannot reach the necessary consensus to fix long-term problems such as the tottering pensions and health-care systems.

America, says Mr Bishop, is splitting into “balkanised communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible.” He has a point. Republicans who never meet Democrats tend to assume that Democrats believe more extreme things than they really do, and vice versa. This contributes to the nasty tone of many political campaigns.

Interestingly enough:
The more educated Americans become, the more insular they are. Better-educated people tend to be richer, so they have more choice about where they live. And they are more mobile.



* It’s also still up in the air whether or not I will be able to vote in this historical election. I’m still in the process of applying for US citizenship. My civics exam is next week, and if I pass, I’m not sure when I will be sworn in. I haven’t voted before in my life, and so there’s a certain excitement in me about this upcoming election. I think in the past, I’ve taken voting too lightly, or ignored elections altogether, because it was something that I couldn’t be part of. But now, I might actually be part of this so-called democratic system, and I feel this growing sense of investment and care that I haven’t felt before.
** It’s ironic how “liberals” who are so sensitive about intolerance and racism, are rather quick to make generalizing comments about “conservatives”.

Notions of Oppression of the Dead White Male in Today’s “Institutions of Higher Learning”

Subverting Structures of Minority Privilege and Deconstructing Diversity

In this article, The New Learning that Failed (published in the New Criterion), Victor Davis Hanson explores (and criticizes) the reasons for the failure for academic institutions to promote the study of classics (in other words, the so-called Western canon of white male dead authors). He makes several valid assessments on the state of the humanities departments in today’s university. He touches upon the inability to recognize beauty:*

There is no vocabulary left to convey ugliness or near perfection in art or literature—at least none that is not instantly deconstructed to prejudices of race, gender, and class. In a university class, we read mostly poems without meter, rhyme, musicality, or an elevated vocabulary, and novels without heroes or protagonists or even much action; we view art that is far removed from what the eye sees or would wish to see. The result is that our students cannot recognize beautiful things around them or within themselves.

Having studied plenty of minority and post-colonial literature, there’s some really beautiful work written (of course, we never described it using that word) that is well worth studying. But that doesn’t mean that a dead white male cannot write something relevant to us today. And there are plenty of poems without meter, rhyme or musicality, and protagonist-less novels that are excellent, but that doesn’t mean the ones that have them are so antiquated that they are not worth reading.

It’s important to study the writings of dead white males (and yes, there are exceptions), because they have in large part shaped the structure and basis of our society today. If we are to understand who we are now, we need to go back and understand where we have come from. We also need to understand what relevance they might have for our current situation.

Of course, I do believe it’s important to understand other cultures and acknowledge the ways that the Western canon may have omitted them, but if that becomes our sole war cry, then we may soon lose sight of reality:

Theories of exploitation were divorced from the real world. While relatively well-off students anguished in class over perceived gender and radical oppressions, the United States remained the number-one destination of the world’s immigrants fleeing political bias, poverty, and religious intolerance. The first-generation Mexican national who ran as fast as he could from the oppression of Oaxaca, and clipped the bushes outside the tasteful faculty office, instinctively knew and appreciated the advantages of Western culture far more than did the leisured professor inside.

Feminists insisted that Harvard’s president Larry Summers must be fired for insensitive remarks regarding the under-representation of women on math faculties; elsewhere, thousands of honor killings and millions of female circumcisions transpire yearly. In Saudi Arabia, feminism is not second-guessing the remarks of a college president, but simply wanting to drive a car; on the West Bank, it is not being murdered when dating someone your father and brothers don’t like; in the Sudan, it is avoiding genital mutilation; in Iran, it is escaping stoning when accused of adultery. In contrast, Greek learning had emphasized that deeds must match words; otherwise, to paraphrase Aristotle, it is easy to be ethical in our sleep.


Language in the university has lost its connection with reality—a danger that Socrates warned about in his battles with the Sophists and we have seen in our own time with the communist attempt to remake vocabulary to further social and economic agendas. “Diversity” does not mean diverse anything, surely not differences in political thought or ethnic backgrounds, but rather a requisite number of different skin colors. A classroom with three offspring of affluent African-American professionals can be “diverse” while having children of Appalachia or impoverished immigrants from Eastern Europe is not. The “free speech” area may mean that radical pro-Palestinian groups can hand out anti-Semitic literature or Chicano activists may vandalize conservative newspapers, but it is not a place where one can talk safely and candidly about the problems of illegal immigration, or social contributors to the AIDS epidemic, or the need to calibrate affirmative action more on class than race.

…

We, in contrast, have lost all sense of proportion and simply use the self-absorbed yardstick of our own times versus all others. Thus Iraq—not the summer of 1864 or December 1950—is the worst (fill in the blanks) war, blunder, or quagmire in our history or of all time. A flippant campus slur is the most sexist thing ever heard, as if the frontier woman on the Colorado plains without electricity and with eleven sick children never had it as rough. Wounded Knee is tantamount to Okinawa, the loyalty oaths of the 1950s commensurate to the Inquisition. And why not, when the purpose of education now is not to train young minds in a method of disinterested inquiry supported by historical exempla, but to condition them to think in preordained, deductive fashion—in other words, as Sophists rather than Socratics?

We’ve prioritized these assumed values of diversity over the quality and influence of the work itself, and abstained from making value judgments about any pieces of work lest we offend someone. The academy, supposedly a place for honest intellectual inquiry and pursuit of truth, has been overrun by political correctness. As the study of literature becomes more concerned with the nitpicking about notions of gender construction in Dicken’s novels, it loses more and more of its relevance.

Then again, it’s not like this is anything new:

Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question’. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge – to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour – this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.

~ from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters

*Of course, that’s also because we’ve assumed, that literature is a rather subjective matter, like all other things… and therefore, we can’t really say that it reveals any truth of any kind, only that it perhaps produces certain effects and reflects certain notions of prejudices and etc…

everyone else is doing it

I’ve been reading a children’s book on American history and was struck by how recent the civil rights movement in the United States was. For some reason, the days of MLK and Rosa Parks seem far and distant to me, but they happened only a generation away.

When segregation ended in school, black students were taunted, mocked, and physically abused as they entered into formerly white schools. During the bus boycotts in Montgomery, houses were burned, churches were bombed and blacks were arrested en masse and put into jail. It wasn’t just a few stray individuals, but large portions of the society, many of whom were culturally Christian, that inflicted such violence. Attitudes and action that are so clearly “wrong” for us were completely acceptable then. They were the pattern of their world.

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

I think that verse of scripture is often used nowadays to refer to excessive drinking and drugs and promiscuous sex. But I think “the pattern of the world” runs much deeper than a set of external behaviors. What accepted actions of our society today will be judged harshly in the future? What assumptions and attitudes do we hold today that will be deemed completely wrong tomorrow?

If we as Christians are to be salt and light to the earth, we are to live with critical minds, minds that test and question what we see and hear, from both society at large and the church. We must refuse to say that anything is acceptable simply because everyone else is doing it. If we are to bring God’s kingdom of justice and love down onto earth, then we must be wary of this world.

race to the top [2]

race in the academy

Just some interesting excerpts from two articles I stumbled across last week…. I don’t really have any particular responses to them right now, other than I do agree that they pose interesting questions that can’t be answered easily:

Is race just a scapegoat for the problems of society when we should actually be looking at class? Is race an excuse for us to not talk about economic inequality? Would it ever be possible to extricate class from race, as history has inexorably intertwined the two? And how does the ‘framing of the question’, the vocabulary of interpretation, the lens of analysis, or whatever you want to call it, alter our conclusions? [And perhaps also, if you could really eradicate identity politics, or racial understandings of society and history, what would that solve? By erasing race from our discourse, and insisting on avoiding it altogether, do we deny something valuable about ourselves?]

This first article in the Chronicle addresses Princeton’s new African-American studies department and discusses race in higher education:

My point, then, is that the commitment to African-American studies, like the commitment to Asian-American studies, is a commitment to describing our social problems in a way that will make all of us — teachers as well as students, alumni as well as parents — feel comfortable. It does this by racializing injustice at a moment when race is less relevant to injustice — at least to the injustice done by elite universities — in America than it has ever been. Rooks quotes Orlando Patterson as saying, "The doors are wide open for ... black middle-class kids to enter elite colleges." The relevant term here is "middle-class." African-American- and Asian-American-studies programs tell us that, from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our identity, at the very moment when, again from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our wealth and what the upper middle class sees on that television show is not the image of its own virtue (that's what make us comfortable), but the reverse face of its own success.

Another reason is that these programs are the places where questions about the meaning of race (and its handmaiden, culture) get raised. No assertion is more common in American intellectual life today than the insistence that race and class (and gender) are inextricably intertwined, and, in a certain sense, this is obviously true. Everybody has a household income; everybody's descended from somebody; everybody's male or female or some combination of the two. But one of the things that thinking seriously about race makes possible is not just the imbrication of race with class, but the disarticulation of class from race. We live in a society where the struggle to achieve racial equality is not the most profound of the challenges that face us. A program in African-American studies that helps us to understand not just the importance of race but its limits (not just its relevance but its irrelevance) will be well worth the money Princeton plans to spend.

This article in The Nation reviews the books The Trouble with Diversity:

The Trouble With Diversity is a bracing jeremiad, an all-out assault on the way identity in general, and race in particular, is used to organize society. It is also a thought experiment in which Michaels invites us to remove our race-tinted glasses and view the world in the class-based terms that, he argues, actually define it. For Michaels, there is no middle ground, no room for compromise: Race shoved class out of American consciousness, and he wants to reverse the situation. "We love race--we love identity--because we don't love class," he writes. The alternative is not to "love" class, since Michaels knows that class, unlike race, is distinctly unlovable. Class inspires no "National Museum of Lower-Income Americans on the Mall" in Washington, and no special holidays celebrating the culture of the poor (indeed, the "culture of poverty" is a sociological epithet); while some poor people inherit their poverty, we would all agree with Michaels that it would be perverse to think of it as their "heritage." The only area in which we are sentimental about poverty is in studies of working-class culture and literature, in which class is considered a form of identity.

Furthermore, Michaels accused contemporary champions of postidentity theory--those who envisage identity as contingent, performative and fluid--of employing the very racial essentialism they oppose. The more we emphasize culture and diversity, he scolded, the more we become mired in race. We inevitably answer the question "What should we do?" in terms of "who we are"--an appeal to racial/ethnic identity. The quest for identity is a vicious circle in which one can never escape the nineteenth-century notion of race. "For racial identity to become a project, it must turn to culture; for cultural identity to become a project, it must turn to race," he wrote.

race to the top

So why do all the black people get all the rap for being criminals?*

Yes, it's true. Some do steal a few hundred dollars to help put dinner on their plate (or in some cases, a birthday present for a daughter).

Yet on the other hand, I'm reading through databases of hundreds of hundreds of cases of mainly rich white males in large corporations engaging in criminal and improper business and market practices to earn a few extra million to pad their already gold-lined yachts and country houses.

*Please read comments to this post.

I am Puerto Rican

Some snippets of conversations about race/appearances at the homeless shelter where I am volunteering

Conversation between Bryanna, a Puerto Rican-white mix and Skyye, a black-white mix after Bryanna sees Skyye's mum:
B: How come you're Puerto Rican when your mum is black?
S: I'm not Puerto Rican. I'm mixed.
B: No you're not! You're Puerto Rican!

Then Sally, a Puerto Rican mother of four kids-- two who look hispanic, one who looks white, and one who looks black but without the nappy hair replies:
"I'm Puerto Rican and so is she and she" (as she points to the girl that looks white and the girl that looks more black).

Then I ask the kids: So what do you think I am?
Kids: You're Puerto Rican. And if you're not Puerto Rican, you're white.
Me: No, I'm Chinese.
Kids: No you're not! You're Puerto Rican!
(This happens numerous numerous times)

Apparently my very white friend who taught kindergarden in the past encountered similar difficulties with explaining his race.
Kids: What are you?
White Guy: I'm white.
Kids: So are you African American or Jamaican American?

*In general, the kids are a bit confused too. Devin (white), Olivia (Filipino), and I (Chinese) are all volunteering and we're known as the "sisters". We told them we're sisters because we're all part of God's family, but I think they still believe that we're biologically related even though we told them that we don't have the same parents.

Sean says to Olivia: You and that other girl (aka me) look alike but you and Devin don't look alike.
Sean (after two minutes of staring): Actually, you two do kind of look alike.