Recognizing Your Privilege

Owning up to privilege is a difficult but absolutely necessary task for all of us. I know I'm currently struggling to identify all the ways in which my cis privilege manifests (among other forms of privilege). While I'm loath to hand out "cookies," I would like to give props to a few white guys that discuss their privilege in constructive ways.

First of all we have Brother Ali, who has some interesting things to say about race in general, but I would specifically like to draw attention to his interview with Jay Smooth over at Ill Doctrine:



Particularly good bits at 1:12 and 1:48.

Next we have Hugo Schwyzer, whose blog I've been reading more and more. His post on the gender imbalance in age-disparate relationships is particularly interesting. Although it's criticized by some feminists for neglecting the agency of young women, it is in my opinion a thoughtful analysis of the way that male privilege interacts with the power dynamics in May-November romances.

And let's round this out with a bit of humor. I may have mentioned this clip before, but it bears re-watching. Louis CK may sometimes be a raging gender essentialist, and this clip has a reference to rape that I dislike, but he sure seems to understand white male privilege.



All right, readers, it's your turn. Got any good examples of folk usefully discussing their straight, cis, thin, able-bodied, and/or class privilege?

White Dude Panels: Another Example of White Privilege

Good Media brings us today's topic: white dude panels at conferences.

This story is in the context of I Want Media's upcoming conference. The "Future of Media" panel will feature only white men. In a conference like that one, the panelists are specifically invited. As the author of the piece notes, it's not as though they necessarily knew that they were going to be on the panel with only other white dudes. It shows a lack of awareness on the part of the coordinator, certainly. Should these guys give up their chance to speak on this panel in the name of making it more diverse?

Yes. Yes, they should. As author Cord Jefferson notes:

After watching this happen again and again, something occurred to me: Why don’t the white men who are asked to engage in this nonsense simply stop doing it? The boycott is a protest with a long history of success. If white, male elites started saying, “I will not participate in your panel, event, or article if it is all about white men,” chances are these panels and articles would quickly dry up—or become more diverse.

Exactly. White men have to realize that they have had enormous privilege given to them based on their white maleness, and this is one way in which they can start to counteract their white privilege. The panels would become more diverse, it's true - and, other white men would have a role model for disinvesting from the privilege of being white men. I think this is enormously important as part of an anti-racism agenda.

In the kinds of conferences I go to, panels are not usually put together this way. There are a few, maybe, in which speakers are invited. At the last two AERA conferences I went to, the program chairs for my division were invited to put together presidential panels. In both cases, the panels were diverse (Disclosure: I know both of the program chairs well, and they are both committed to diversity beyond tokenization). In fact, at this year's presidential session, the only white person was a woman.

Most of the time, though, panels and papers are submitted anonymously and accepted or rejected based on the quality of the research. We have to attempt to make sure the topics reflect an array of subjects and ideas, so that not all of the research is on, say, middle class straight white people. It is entirely possible to have panels consisting only of straight white men. In that case, I'm not sure what the immediate solution is, as the papers are selected without the committee's knowledge of the authors' identities. The long-term solution, as I will return to in a minute, is to increase access within the field so that the field itself becomes more diverse.

It is certainly good for a person's career to be asked or selected to participate in a panel for one's professional organization. Letting that go because of the demographics of the panel might sound not only silly, but overly harsh. I don't think it is, though. If we are people committed to diversity, I argue that we should live that commitment. I also know this is easy for me to say - as a queer woman, I will up a panel's diversity points twice. I could be the token that lets the white dudes breathe easy. But I'm not letting myself off a hook I'm willing to put other people on. If I see the conferences and panels I'm involved in getting too "white," I'll speak up.

This goes beyond who presents at panels, though. This is about who is getting the props in the field, to be sure, and it also speaks to who has access to whatever it takes to succeed in the field. If you, as a conference organizer, are trying to track down women and people of color to be part of a panel, and you can't find any... well, that certainly raises questions about what your field looks like as a whole. Something is going on to prevent non-white non-men from getting involved. We need to figure out what that is, if it's a problem we can all identify in our lines of work.

I Have a Beef with Evolutionary Psychology

Comic by explosm.net

There's this perception of science as an unbiased, value-neutral discipline, and it's kind of bullshit. You could be a scrupulous gatherer of data and an excellent statistician, but the scientific method is all about testing hypotheses, and those hypotheses can arise in very biased ways.

Some fields will be better than others; astronomy, for instance, has at best a rather tenuous relationship to our day-to-day lives. An individual astronomer could be biased towards the core accretion model of planet formation over the gravitational instability model, but, if so, that's probably due to her own publication history and will not translate to the whole astronomical community.

On the extreme other end of the spectrum we have the field of evolutionary psychology, which seeks to explain current human behaviors as hard-wired phenomena and is enmeshed in bias, I would argue inextricably. For instance, imagine what it would be like to study human attraction. It would be easy to come up with a hundred hypothesis motivated by sexism, classism, and racism. And you're going to get about one "positive result" with a p-value of 0.01 out of a hundred bullshit hypotheses. That's just statistics.

Furthermore, someone who is generating and testing sexist hypotheses is not going to be terribly motivated to consider alternate explanations for a phenomenon. And so we end up with Psychology Today posting articles about how black women are fundamentally less attractive, rather than about how our culture is reluctant to see beauty in black women. (Here's the Crunk Feminist Collective's take.)

Just to be clear, I definitely think that sociology and psychology are worth studying. But I also know firsthand how difficult it can be to extract statistically significant results from only a few hundred data points, and I know how tentative results can be misrepresented by the media. The result is that I have a high level of skepticism for evo-psych research in general, and this skepticism is increased by [1.] a hypothesis which sexists and racists would love to have proven correct, [2.] non-public data, and [3.] no reproduction of the results by another group.

A further example is an evo-psych study pointed out to me by a friend, about the supposed anti-depressant properties of semen, the controversy over which is unappealingly referred to as "Semengate". Now, again, I don't have access to the data, so I can't comment on their statistical analysis. But the very premise is problematic for at least four reasons I can think of:

1. "Women be crazy." Seriously, that's how the study starts off: "Females are more prone to develop depressive disorders than males." Maybe because they live in a patriarchy? Maybe it's not semen-deficiency?
2. It then proposes that they need a man to fix them. Specifically, through the regular application of semen to their vaginal walls.
3. The whole thing is incredibly heteronormative.
4. Finally, it's commonly assumed that men want to have unprotected sex. This study justifies that supposed want.

Furthermore, the study was based on a survey of a few hundred college women; not humanity's most representative group. It was conducted nine years ago and has not, to my knowledge, been reproduced since. This is exactly the kind of study that needs to be taken with a shipping container of salt.

The salt-taking stands even if you think that a study applies to you. I would love to believe, for instance, that my thousands of moles make me some kind of Bruce-Willis-in-Unbreakable type person. But, you know, I'm going to wait for the follow-up studies before I start taking that seriously.

Impartiality: Another Privilege of Straight White Men

Because most people in the world are not straight white men, I have some bad news for the majority of you: you can't make an impartial decision. You'd probably best not go to law school or hope to become a judge, because you will certainly have opinions about things that do not have the permanence and gravity of the stone tablets the Ten Commandments were written on.

Where are those, by the way?

Apparently there are folks out there who think that Judge Walker, known now as the judge hearing the Proposition 8 cases in California, can't help but be influenced by his gayness in this decision process.

People always have opinions that are informed by their experiences, right? No matter what demographic groups you belong to. That's what the human experience is: learning from what we've gone through and using it to inform our thoughts. That's why Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment seemed perfectly innocuous to me, despite the bizarre outrage over it. Of COURSE her being Latina matters here - she has a different angle on oppression than the straight white dude over there. She comes from a different cultural background. If we lived in a society that was actually interested in ending oppression, and not preserving the spoils of wealth for the traditional elite, this would not be a problem. We would welcome such voices.

Beyond that, it appears that we're interested only in ratifying a certain type of citizenry, and all the others - the female, the queer, the brown - are considered deficits.

Should Walker have disclosed that he is gay and whether he intended to marry before hearings began? I don't think so. We wouldn't have asked a straight person the same questions, and the people looking to remove Walker wouldn't have wondered whether a straight person's homophobia was preventing his (of course, his) ability to think clearly about this case. There is no consideration that perhaps Walker doesn't want to get married, that perhaps he thinks marriage is not the battle we should be fighting here, that he thinks it's a screwed up institution. I know plenty of queer people who feel that way.

Of course Walker has an interest in the outcome of the case. We all do, even straight people. Because if this case gets decided properly - and I have no problem saying that a decision to overturn Prop 8 is correct and a decision to uphold it is incorrect - then we live in a less oppressive society.* And that's good for all of us. As the New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee puts it, "There cannot be democracy for the few. If one is oppressed, all are oppressed."

* I maintain my position that marriage rights are not the most important issue facing the queer community right now. This post is less about marriage than it is about who gets to be seen as a responsible authority figure in the US today.