Talking Privilege

Commenter Jo, in response to my post on participation grades, brought to my attention an article by Heejung Kim in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology called “We Talk Therefore We Think? A Cultural Analysis of the Effect of Talking on Thinking.”  The overall point of the article is so salient to the issue of how we use discussion and participation in class that I decided it needed its own post.

Kim set out to discover if differences in cultural attitudes about the relationship between talking and thinking had any effect on people’s preferred modes of cognitive problem solving.  She takes as her jumping off point an article from the San Jose Mercury News, which stated that:

[M]any colleges in the United States with a large population of Asian and Asian American students are concerned about the students’ silence in class. The silence of Asian students is a concern for universities who want their students to be “independent thinkers.” Motivating this concern is the notion that getting students to talk is a way to make them “better” thinkers. In discussing this issue, the news article details the concern of many educators who are trying to make silent students more vocal, and at the same time, reveals a number of educational assumptions about the relationship between talking and thinking.

As I’ve said before, educators socialized according to a Western model that privileges verbal assertiveness tend to treat (non-disruptive, on topic) vocal classroom participation as an objective good and as an essential educational tool.  As Kim’s summary of the newspaper article aptly indicates, Westerners tend to treat talking as a sign of independent thought, a sign that the student is processing and assimilating the information in an individualized manner rather than passively taking it in.  East Asian cultures, however, favor an internalized, reflective model of thinking, such that children socialized in this mode tend to be less verbally expressive and teachers tend to “see quietness as a means of control, rather than passivity, and appreciate silence more than American teachers.”  Obviously these are pretty big generalizations (I know plenty of American teachers who wish their students would shut up), but as broad descriptions of cultural attitudes toward verbal expressiveness, Kim’s study raises some important questions about whether or not talking really is a sign of “better” thinking.

In three separate studies (with an admittedly small sample of college students), Kim found that the performance of East Asian students (second generation immigrants who had spoken English since childhood) was adversely affected when they were asked to “think aloud” while solving a problem.  Similarly, European American students were distracted when they were asked to suppress articulation while trying to solve the same problem.  In one study, it was revealed that student’s attitudes toward the relationship between talking and thinking were significantly associated with this performance difference, and Kim found that parental approaches did have some impact on those attitudes.  In short, Kim points to the need for further research in this particular area but also suggests that we educators should examine the degree to which our expectations about what constitutes a healthy learning environment are a product of socialization and how we may be disregarding the learning preferences of certain members of a multi-cultural classroom.

Of course, one can’t essentialize about this.  There are plenty of outspoken persons of East Asian extraction just as there are numerous introverted European Americans.  While Kim chose to organize her study samples along ethnic lines, it’s clear that acculturation is the much bigger issue here.  Those of us teaching in the U.S. American system need to be aware of the extent to which both extroversion privilege and racial/cultural stereotyping mediates our classroom policies and interactions with students.

Recently, my partner wandered into my office while I was working and expressed bewilderment at how quiet I am when I write, expressing a clear preference for “thinking out loud.”  I do catch him nattering to himself while he creates lesson plans from time to time, but perhaps it’s ironic that he is, in fact, the child of a Japanese immigrant and my ancestors have been in North America since the 1700s.  I have been a pretty textbook introvert since my personality first began to emerge, preferring to work and play quietly by myself, to talk less than my peers, and to withdraw into solitude when I need my batteries recharged.  And I know from first hand experience that children who are quieter and more self-contained tend to raise eyebrows among parents and teachers.  I was held back a year in elementary school at the recommendation of teachers because I didn’t seem to have the social skills or “emotional maturity” to handle first grade (no, I did not fail kindergarten).  My introversion was frequently treated as a mental illness, and throughout middle and high school, I had to develop the skills for “passing” as an extrovert.  How much more frustrating this experience must be when one’s personality or learning style intersects with cultural and racial stereotypes about “quiet Asians,” who really may be quite gregarious and extroverted but trained to keep quiet in class. As Kim says,

In American education and work settings, talking is strongly emphasized and communicative assertiveness is generally regarded as a sign of a healthy personality (e.g., Cook & St. Lawrence, 1990; Henderson & Furnham, 1982), and anyone who keeps silent tends to be devalued as shy, passive, or lacking independent opinions (e.g., Jones et al., 1986; Zimbardo, 1977). The consequence of the collective silence of East Asians in America is that they are associated with some of these culturally negative traits of people who do not raise their voice.

This isn’t to say that classroom discussion isn’t a valuable educational tool and important classroom practice, but information like this does demand that we explore better ways to accommodate cultural and personality differences in the classroom.  At the very least, we should recognize that while many of us in higher education see lively discussion and debate as a good in and of itself (and I admit, even as an introvert, that I do), ours are culturally specific values that not everyone will share.  If encouraging discussion is still one of your pedagogical goals, then consider making the objectives of discussion transparent and teaching students how to actually hold the kinds of discussions you expect.

Participation grades are still a non-starter for me, though, and this study just helps confirm my position.

You Don’t Get to Talk About Immigration Without Talking About Race

On television, on the internet, from members of my family, I keep hearing things like:

“I’m just concerned about the rule of law.”

“I’m just concerned about the drain on our resources.”

“I’m just concerned about the impact on our school system.”

“I’m just concerned that their children won’t have the English skills to succeed.”

Statements like these are usually preceded or followed with some variant of, “It’s not about race.”

Bullshit.

We do not ever, EVER get to talk about the U.S.-Mexico border without talking about race. We do not ever get to talk about immigration without talking about race. We do not ever get to talk about second language issues, especially pertaining to Spanish/English, without also talking about race. Why? Because race is a part of the history of The Border, just as it is a part of the history of slavery, of the Holocaust, of the War on Terror, of apartheid, of North American Indian Reservations, and of Jim Crow. It is, in the broadest sense, part of the history of the Western Hemisphere. It is a history in which light-skinned European adventurers came to this hemisphere and displaced, enslaved, and exterminated millions of indigenous people because of greed, because of hubris, because of religion, and because of race, because they believed that the people they found here were less human than they were.

This is not a history in which you personally took part. Your family may not have been directly responsible for perpetuating those insidious crimes. This is not a history that you can go back and erase or ameliorate. It simply is. It simply is a history that resulted in Person A having a nice house in the suburbs and shopping at Whole Foods and Person B enduring a poverty so crushing that they would risk life and limb and personal liberty in order to mow the lawn and clean the house and diaper the children of Person A and harvest the produce that is sold at Whole Foods, making an hourly wage that is less than what Person A spent on coffee this morning. And it is a history in which Person A can say, without paying very many social penalties, that the problem with Person B is that she did not respect the law and hasn’t worked hard enough to perfect his English.

That’s called Privilege. If you are Person A, it is not something that you can relinquish, but it is something that you can be a total dick about if you aren’t careful. And given the history I just described, I have to say that when you say stuff like,

“It’s not about race, I just can’t understand what they’re saying.”

“It’s not racial profiling. I don’t even know what an immigrant looks like!”

You sound fucking ridiculous.

I know you probably weren’t thinking about race when you said it. I know you believe that deep down inside you really don’t harbor any ill will toward those who look and speak differently from you. I know that from your perspective, race probably doesn’t have a lot to do with anything. But that’s because in the Historical Lottery, you hit the genetic jackpot. Whether you are aware of your privilege or not, you have cashed in on it. You benefit from the historical inequities I described, and while that doesn’t mean that I think you should hand over your suburban home to an immigrant family, I do think that you should shut the fuck up until you’ve done a lot of reading and a bit of introspection on the issue.

I’m just saying.

*This post is not directed at any of the commentariat here. It is the product of an ongoing fight with a family member and the headache-inducing results of typing in “accent discrimination arizona” into Google in order to research this post.

Arizona Linguists Take on the “Fluency” Issue

Mark Lieberman at Language Log reported today on the Arizona law requiring educators to meet certain (rather vague) standards of English fluency in order to keep their jobs. This has widely been reported as an effort to crack down on “accented speech” in the classroom. The entire post is worth reading, as Lieberman attempts to suss out exactly what the law demands, but I thought the eight points submitted by the University of Arizona linguistics department to the Governor and Superintendant were worth citing here:

1. ‘Heavily accented’ speech is not the same as ‘unintelligible’ or ‘ungrammatical’ speech.
2. Speakers with strong foreign accents may nevertheless have mastered grammar and idioms of English as well as native speakers.
3. Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach English to Spanish‐speaking students better than teachers who don’t speak Spanish.
4. Exposure to many different speech styles, dialects and accents helps (and does not harm) the acquisition of a language.
5. It is helpful for all students (English language learners as well as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign‐accented speech as a part of their education.
6. There are many different ‘accents’ within English that can affect intelligibility, but the policy targets foreign accents and not dialects of English.
7. Communicating to students that foreign accented speech is ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ is counterproductive to learning, and affirms pre‐existing patterns of linguistic bias and harmful ‘linguistic profiling’.
8. There is no such thing as ‘unaccented’ speech, and so policies aimed at eliminating accented speech from the classroom are paradoxical.

The statement, which is linked to Lieberman’s post, rigorously backs each of these points up with sources representing the best work in the linguistics field.

I’ve pointed out before just how our “what about the children” concerns about non-standard and emergent forms of English–like textspeak–reflect a not-so-subtle form of xenophobia (not to mention classism and ableism), but the Arizona law stands as a pretty blatant example of it. While I do believe that educators who are teaching English should be proficient in the language to the extent that they can be understood and communicate English-language concepts effectively, it simply is not correct to conflate accent with non-standard grammar or lack of intelligibility. If Arizona wished to apply their laws fairly–as Lieberman demonstrates–then they would have to reprimand or reassign white native English speakers who misuse words or speak “ungrammatically” as well, but that’s probably not going to happen.  And as I have pointed out, enforcing draconian standards with regard to grammar are often a way of arbitrarily leveraging privilege as well.

Additionally, as Language Log commenters Jen Mc-Gahan and marie-lucie point out, most foreign language instructors in U.S. schools are not native speakers of that language. How are “fluency” standards established in those cases? Does their Spanish pronunciation/accent have to be able to pass muster in Mexico City? Every foreign language teacher at Evangelical High, where I went to school, was U.S.-American. They were masters of the grammar and, in some cases, idiom of the language they were teaching, but even my AP French teacher acknowledged that she does not speak perfect Parisian France and probably wouldn’t be understood in Canada or Senegal, both French speaking countries with different accents. Nevertheless, she was an excellent teacher, well versed in French literature and culture and effective at teaching us high school level French.

It is also worth pointing out that the teachers targeted by laws like this seem to be those teaching English to immigrant students. Perhaps that is an incorrect perception, but it seems to me that having a native Spanish speaker teaching English to native Spanish speakers presents the very same benefits and challenges as having a native English speaker teach French to native English speakers: the baseline level of mutual comfort in the common language can help the instructor to convey difficult grammatical concepts in the foreign language in an intelligible, helpful way.

Ultimately, before U.S.-Americans can address this problem objectively and effectively, we need to take a long, hard look at the intersections between racism and language bias in this country. Why is it, for example, that we insist that some English accents (British, Irish, New Englander, even Southern) are legitimate (and even charming!) and some are not? Why are we so very uncomfortable with non-native English speakers speaking amongst themselves in their own language? Why do we insist that immigrants assimilate linguistically effective immediately, when anyone who has taken a foreign language class knows that fluency take years to develop? And whose comfort/welfare are we really considering when we make those demands? The children for whom English-proficiency will not only impact their future career prospects but the degree to which they may experience marginalization? Or those of us who just don’t want to be reminded that Other People live here too and don’t want to work a little harder to understand the person sitting across the table or behind the lectern.

Update:  From The Washington Post–Students learn a second language better if the instructor has the same accent as themselves.

Update II:  From The Journal of Extension

Communication is a two-way process. Both the speaker and the listener have a responsibility for the act of communication. While different or foreign accents can sometimes interfere with the listener’s ability to understand the message, accents can conjure up negative evaluations of the speaker, reducing the listener’s willingness to accept their responsibility in the communication process. Sometimes, it becomes easy to say, “I simply can’t understand you,” placing full responsibility for the communication process on the speaker.

Mark Twain Thought Chivalry Sucked Too

A dude who thinks chivalry is terribad

Feminists don’t like the whole idea of chivalry much, no? I mean, ask this feminist, and I’ll probably tell you that yes, you should give up your seat to that pregnant lady, and yes, if you see me walking toward a door with a lot of heavy books in my hands, I would thank you for holding it open for me. But that’s because I would totally do the same thing for you! That’s called being polite! What feminists are really complaining about with the whole chivalry thing is that it’s something dudes sometimes use to prove how studly they are to other dudes by infantalizing women in the process. For example, dudes sometimes feel the need to beat up other dudes whenever the lady they are with is insulted. Now once again, if we are in company together and someone says something offensive about me, or another lady, or ladies in general, it is perfectly acceptable for you to speak up with a “wow, not cool” sort of comment, because again that’s just being polite. But if your immediate reaction to an insult directed at the woman you are with is something more like, “That’s MY woman you’re talking about!11!11  YOU HAVE IMPUGNED MY GENTLEMANLY HONOR, YOU KNAVE!!!1!!11 HULK RAGE!11!1!!1″ then I am not so cool with that. As Amanda Hess of the Sexist helpfully explains, when a woman is, say, harassed on a street while in the company of her gentleman associate, she may feel anger on her own behalf because someone thought she was a hooker, but she also feels:

A secondary source of shame, derived from the possibility that someone “may have thought [her fiance] was with a hooker.” Since the woman’s fiance is responsible for her shame as well, he may have a similarly conflicted reaction: (a) anger at the harassers who devalued her based on her gender, and (b) shame that he is associated with a woman who is considered by other men to be valueless. Chivalry encourages him to take personal offense to this, inciting one of two reactions: (a) engaging in a verbal or physical altercation with the harassers in order to compensate for the woman’s shame with a display of manhood; and/or (b) chastising the woman for bringing shame upon him, i.e. “Don’t embarrass me in front of other men”; “Don’t go out looking like that”; “See what you made me do.”

Chivalry has long performed the task of recasting violent oppression as benign paternalism, and you know who recognized this way back in the nineteenth century? Mark Twain. That’s not a name that gets invoked by feminists very often, and for good reason. True to his status as a nineteenth century male, Mark Twain’s gender politics were pretty appalling. I’m trying to think of one female character in one of his novels that isn’t a ridiculous stereotype, and yeah, no. But Mark Twain held many other radically progressive views. He was critical of the American imperial project at a time when the country was clamoring for the expansion of American influence abroad. He was a pacifist, and he hated most organized religion (though I think his own religious views were pretty complex). He also thought that the word chivalry pretty much encompassed everything that was wrong with the United States during his lifetime.  I’m not exaggerating.

See, U.S.-Americans learned about chivalry from Sir Walter Scott, the early nineteenth century author of such novels as Rob Roy and Ivanhoe. In these novels, knightly dudes did knightly things like fight duels (often over women). These knights were always part of a powerful noble class, whose rank was more or less granted to them by God Almighty and whose right to hold that rank was never, ever challenged. Everyone else–i.e. poorer people and women, i.e. a huge percentage of the population of the historical period these novels purported to depict–was pretty much the exclusive property of the male members of that noble class and fawningly served them and existed primarily to provide the picturesque backdrop for the nobles’ heroic pursuits.

The dude Twain blamed for that whole Civil War thing

According to Mark Twain, white Americans, particularly those residing in the South, read about this and said, “This is totes awesome. We totally need something like this right here in the U.S. of A.  And luckily it just so happens that we have a subjugated class of non-persons who can provide our picturesque backdrop built into our society.” In short, Twain argued that the Southern infatuation with Sir Walter Scott-style chivalry was responsible for the perpetuation of slavery and the Civil War. As he says in Life on the Mississippi:

There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works, mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner–or Southron, according to Sir Walter’s starchier way of phrasing it–would be wholly modern, in place of modern and mediaeval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.

The newer, sexier Old South

While Twain fully acknowledges that slavery predated the influence of Scott, he argues that Scott provided a heroic language with which to describe slavery and violent oppression, a language that continued to be prevalent even after the Civil War. After Reconstruction was disastrously abandoned, there was a market for fiction that presented the Old South in this highly romanticized fashion. Take, for example, Thomas Nelson Page’s short story “Marse Chan,” a piece of dialect fiction in which a former slave wistfully reminisces about the beautiful, long lost time before the war, in which his heroic master was crossed in love and fought duels. The reason this is told from the former slave’s perspective is to convey the not so subtle subtext that those nice white Southerners treated their slaves so well. See?  The slaves actually liked it!  Stories like this were essential in promoting white solidarity throughout the country after the war, by depicting the Southern lifestyle as quaint and picturesque rather than the human rights catastrophe that it actually was.

Twain’s 1890 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was basically a book length critique of chivalry. In that novel, Twain uses various forms of anachronism to remind us, first of all, that our entire understanding of chivalry is based on a set of myths surrounding King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, a mythology that is heavily mediated by novelists who were writing a millennium after King Arthur allegedly lived. Entire monologues delivered by the medieval characters are cribbed straight from Sir Thomas Malory’s La Morte D’Arthur, which was written in the fifteenth century, in order to mock those who had mistaken mythology for actual history.  The hero of the novel, Hank Morgan, is essentially the surrogate for the white Yankee audience(this dude is from Connecticut and is also totally smug about it). Transported from the late nineteenth century to the “sixth” (the sixth century in this book is essentially just a Sir Walter Scott novel), he spends most of the first act noticing how stupidly the people who inhabit this entirely fictional conception of the medieval period behave, with the implicit message being “HEY SOUTHERNERS, YOU LOOK EFFING RIDICULOUS WHEN YOU DO THAT.” He also observes that the entire system of chivalry seems to exist to perpetuate the completely unearned privilege of a few people, namely the King, his knights, and the Church, the result being that everyone else is essentially a slave.

The violence inherent in the system

Twain’s depiction of “sixth century” slavery in this novel could have been lifted directly from Harriet Beecher Stowe or Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs. While this is a comic novel, he is unsparing in his depiction of slavery as a moral outrage. We see couples torn apart, children taken from their mothers, people being savagely beaten. Even worse, Twain shows how violent oppression turns oppressed people on one another. Everyone who isn’t a nobleman or a priest is essentially treated like an animal, but some of them ultimately internalize their own oppression and act as enforcers of the system in order to attain slightly higher status or even just survive. When he witnesses a group of peasants hunting down some other peasants who burned down their lord’s castle in an act of rebellion against that lord’s arbitrary uses of violence, Morgan says:

It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when the “poor whites” of our South who were always despised and frequently insulted, by the slave-lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with slave-lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution which degraded them.

However, the novel implicitly critiques its narrator as well. Morgan’s smug sense of superiority to the sixth century noblemen is analogous to that of the privileged white people of the North, many of whom expressed disgust over slavery and the backward ways of the South but did absolutely nothing about it. In one scene, Morgan watches a young woman being beaten by a slave driver and utterly fails to intervene, because he fears offending the privileged people he is traveling with:

I wanted to stop the whole thing and set the slaves free, but that would not do. I must not interfere too much and get myself a name for riding over the country’s laws and the citizen’s rights roughshod. If I lived and prospered I would be the death of slavery, that I was resolved upon; but I would try to fix it so that when I became its executioner it should be by the command of the nation.

It is worth pointing out that by this point in the novel, Morgan has gone from regarding chivalry with rank disgust to regarding it with a kind of aesthetic appreciation. By virtue of having a nineteenth century knowledge of technology in the sixth century, he has risen to power and privilege and has even begun to see quaint beauty in the system he originally detested, a system that he is now benefiting from. In this passage, we see how that privilege has shaped the way Morgan determines who counts as a “citizen,” whose “rights” are worth respecting, whose “command” matters when it comes to abolishing slavery. I won’t spoil the end of the novel for you. It’s one that you really should go read for yourself, as it’s quick and funny and sneakily profound. Suffice it to say that for all it’s humor, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was sort of shockingly ahead of it’s time (if you read the contemporary reviews, you can see just how much of its subversiveness floated under the nose of Twain’s readers), simultaneously unveiling the role that language and literature play in supporting systems of power decades before Foucault and revealing the horrifying consequences of industrialized warfare decades before the World Wars.

Kids these days

But many of Twain’s other novels contain critiques of chivalry and “Sir Walter disease.” Remember when you read Huckleberry Finn in high school and got to that part at the end where Tom and Huck decide to free Jim but Tom makes everyone engage in this ludicrous role play of a typical captivity narrative (I think The Count of Monte Cristo is his inspiration) and your teacher didn’t really know what to do with that? (Ok, maybe she did and what I’m about to say is not news to you. What I’m about to say did not originate with me). Some people think that final episode makes the entire book a colossal literary failure, but there is a purpose behind it. See, from the beginning of that novel (and in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer is established as the type of kid who likes to act out the scenarios of his favorite books. Absurd shenanigans ensue.  Huckleberry Finn, as a coming of age story, is essentially all about what happens when we forget to put aside our childish ways and use those sorts of games to structure real, adult lives. (I suppose there is also an argument to be made that Huck Finn demonstrates how the systems of privilege and entitlement that structure adult lives begin with childhood play.)  Consider the Duke and the King, two con artists who adopt these sham titles because the Southerners around them will believe in that shit. Then you have the Sandersons and the Grangerfords slaughtering each other over a feud that absolutely no one remembers due to the fetishization of “Family Honor” as a grand, abstract concept.

What Twain is doing with Tom’s little captivity role play is showing how these childish fictions can become serious business. In the process of this little charade, Jim is recaptured, and Tom gets shot. But that episode isn’t just about the ridiculousness of patterning real life after a novel–though that’s pretty much what Twain’s critique of the South and Sir Walter came down to–it’s that enacting the narratives of chivalry requires taking away the autonomy of non-privileged people (Jim and to a certain degree Huck) in order to allow Privileged White Folks (Tom) to live out these self-aggrandizing narratives. Tom’s conception of himself as a Hero is entirely predicated on the fact that Jim has no choice but to play along because his very bodily survival depends on Tom’s benevolence and cooperation, just as the ability of White Southerners to perform chivalry as a class depended upon the existence of a permanent underclass that could be treated as personal property and kept wholly dependent on their masters.

In short, U.S. Americans have a long history of using the rhetoric of chivalry in order to deny autonomy and personhood to certain types of people, and that’s essentially what we’re talking about when feminists critique it. I wouldn’t even begin to argue that the situation of the harassed woman on the street who feels shame on behalf of her partner–because a slight against her is a slight against him, since she belongs to her in some way–is suffering from a form of oppression equivalent to that experienced by black slaves in the American South, or even African Americans in the U.S. today. But it is part of the same cultural logic that says that the performance of Dudely Heroism requires a woman to perform a circumscribed, subordinate role.  Furthermore, it justifies that necessity of that subordinate role by casting it as necessary for her own protection, because in the cultural logic of chivalry, women and other people who are treated as the personal property of white dudes are too ignorant and fragile to take care of themselves. Better they suffer indignities at the hands of one responsible, gentlemanly white man than find out what might happen if they had, you know, bodily autonomy, because dear God, what might happen then?

And this, dear readers, is what chivalry hath wrought.  So saith Mark Twain.

Language Games: Politically Correct English and Rand Paul’s Race Fail

I have a problem with politically correct language.  I blame David Foster Wallace.  In his Harper’s essay on the politics of usage and grammar (which is even longer, way longer, than mine), which is reprinted in Consider the Lobster, Wallace decries what he calls Politically Correct English (PCE) for its ability to allow us to pretend that using nicer words equals a more just, less discriminatory society:

Usage is always political, of course, but it’s complexly political. With respect, for instance, to political change, usage conventions can function in two ways: On the one hand they can be a reflection of political change, and on the other they can be an instrument of political change. These two functions are different and have to be kept straight. Confusing them — in particular, mistaking for political efficacy what is really just a language’s political symbolism … — enables the bizarre conviction that America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness. This is PCE’s central fallacy — that a society’s mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes — and of course it’s nothing but the obverse of the politically conservative SNOOT’S delusion that social change can be retarded by restricting change in standard usage.

Political correctness is a kind of language game that can be played by anyone, even people who do not share the values and goals of the feminists, anti-racists, and social justice advocates that promote it. As PCE has entered common usage, it has become a mode of self-presentation, of making oneself more acceptable to the public regardless of the ideology that usage may conceal. If one can play that particular language game and play it well, it can stand in place of true egalitarian bona fides. Even more distressingly, there are those who assume that the ability to play the language game is essentially all there is to being Not-Racist/Sexist/Homophobic/insert prejudice here, that one does not need to support actual social change or engage in the process of self-examination that social justice truly requires if one can simply adopt the right vocabulary.

Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown demonstrated this adeptly in her questioning of Sarah Palin’s outrage over Rahm Emmanuel’s incendiary usage of the word “retard” to describe progressive activists. As Doyle demonstrates, this was a classic example of the kind of language-policing that stands in place of actual efforts to change the systems of disadvantage and discrimination that plague the people whose marginalization is symbolized in those Not-Nice Words:

But, you know: Emanuel used the word. She pointed out that it was a fucked-up word. It is a fucked-up word. So, according to one specific version of the game – the game played by people who have no investment in the actual process, the actual structure, the sort of game where people get their politics through soundbites and focus exclusively and obsessively on their own comfort and just basically believe that they are Nice People so they should take whatever the Nice Person stance is today, especially if it doesn’t require too much thought aside from shaking their heads about the bad word the bad man said, or maybe (maybe at most) not using that word any more themselves – according to this version of the game, Sarah Palin wins.

It strikes me that Rand Paul was trying to do something pretty similar last night on Rachel Maddow. For those of you who may not know, Rand Paul is the son of Republican Congressman, former Presidential candidate, and ideological Libertarian Ron Paul. He just won the Republican Senatorial Primary in Kentucky. Like a lot of true Libertarians (as opposed to Libertarians of Convenience–I’m looking at you National Republicans), Rand Paul has some pretty radical, far from the mainstream views. For example, he believes in a division between the public and private spheres that is far, far more extreme than what most mainstream Republicans endorse (and further from how they actually govern). In the wake of Paul’s primary victory, it was brought to light that in an interview with the Courier Journal Paul indicated that he would have opposed the part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that forced privately owned businesses to desegregate. Then he went on Rachel Maddow to try to explain whatever it was he actually meant by that:

I couldn’t find a transcript and the video is too damn long for me to transcribe right now, but the gist of it is that Paul repeats, over and over and over again, that he thinks discrimination is terrible, awful, HORRIBLE even and that the desegregation of the public sphere was totes necessary, but he managed to avoid clarifying the statement actually in question until some point near the end. He ultimately confirms that he believes that requiring private businesses to desegregate represented an unwanted incursion of government into the private sphere. There is just so much fail here that I hardly know where to start, but let’s try to make a list:

1. Paul repeatedly accuses Maddow of taking the discussion into abstract, esoteric territory when what she is demanding is a straightforward answer on a specific, practical aspect of the Civil Rights Amendment. In fact, it is the language game of PCE that allows Paul to essentially keep this in esoteric territory, because for him, the issue of civil rights really is abstract, really does amount to little more than words, the ability and willingness to say the right stuff. When Maddow reminds him that desegregating private businesses like the Woolworth’s lunch counters was a very real event that affected real people, that real people were, in fact, beaten while staging sit-ins, he once again starts with the language games by saying “I don’t condone violence.” When Maddow presses him on the consequences of essentially allowing the entire private sector to re-segregate, he again retreats into the abstract. Because, again, this is an abstract concept for him. He has never had to, never will never have to, actually live the day to day consequences of what he is suggesting. Thus, the ability to use the language games of PCE to keep things abstract is ultimately a manifestation of a form privilege that never has to come in contact with the reality of what these abstract policy discussions might mean for in the lives of individual minorities.

2. Paul tries to reduce all of this to a simply division between the public and private spheres, when that division is, in fact, not simple. The public sector frequently intervenes in the private sector in order to protect the public interest. That’s how we get a police force and things like building safety and health regulations, fire codes, et freaking cetera. Now, I understand that as a Libertarian, Paul opposes some of these things as well, but it is illogical to act like we have not had a long tradition of public interventions for the public interest in this country. And preventing discrimination on the basis of race is pretty clearly a public interest concern.

3. Paul draws a false equivalence between forcing businesses to desegregate and forcing businesses to carry guns on their premises. Right. Because that’s totally the same: the government forcing me to allow you to bring your hobbies into my home or business versus me allowing you to bring your body onto my premises. I don’t know if I can point out the absurdity of this claim any better than The Daily Show, so I’ll just embed this clip:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Open Carrier Discrimination
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4. Paul declares this entire criticism a red herring (I already have a post on ad hominem drawn up for tomorrow’s Logical Fallacy Friday, but perhaps I should cover this one next) because the Civil Rights Act is ancient history and doesn’t have anything to do with any legislation that Paul may or may not support as a U.S. Senator. False. This is a country where you can still be fired for being gay or trans, where you can–thanks a bunch Democratic majority–still be discharged from the military for being gay, where the recognition of gay unions still is very much at issue for both the public and private sector. We are really only just now beginning to have that debate, so to pretend that Rand Paul’s position on the implications of the Civil Rights Act for the private sector is just sort of an abstract thought problem is a very real problem.

Let me be clear, I think that Paul is a little far from the pack even for a conservative Republican here. I like to think that there is a reason why Mitch “Good ‘Ol Boy” McConnell backed his opponent, but it will be a pretty distressing state of affairs if statements like these do not translate into very tangible political consequences for Rand Paul’s election. But then again, one of the big problems with Politically Correct English is that it allows a lot of people to look good while concealing from pretty disturbing views.

Edit–Melissa McEwan analyzes Paul’s spurious interpretation of the First Amendment here.

Another Edit–Everyone seems to be talking about this today and saying great things that I feel I need to share here. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has the following to say.

Political philosophy can never be free of history. And there is no denying that similar states rights or libertarian arguments have been the arguments of choice for those who want to defend racial discrimination since avowed defenses of racial prejudice and subordination became publicly unacceptable outside some parts of the South in the early second half of the last century. That’s simply a fact. In principle, it doesn’t delegitimize libertarian political philosophy. But we don’t live in classrooms or treatises. We live in an actual world where history and experience can’t be separated from philosophy.

Awesome.

The Politics of Book Selection

For the past two years, I have served on the selection committee for the book that all first years in our introductory writing program read.  The book is always on some sort of broad public controversy that informs the writing assignments and discussion that happens in class.  The graduate student committee puts together a short list from which the department powers that be select a winner.  I am not going to disclose the name of the book that got picked this year, because if people one day find this blog, I can only imagine the comments saying “WHY DON’T YOU LIKE THAT BOOK THAT BOOKS IS AWESOME YOU ARE TERRIBLE,” to which I can only respond: I know.  It is a good book and I have nothing against it or its talented author.  It’s just that given the history of books selected over the past 5-6 years, this particular selection turned what was possibly a coincidence into a trend.

The book that was picked is on environmentalism.  That’s great.  I love the environment.  I’m all for sustainable living and alternative energies and all that.  It was written by a straight white dude and focuses on his white dudely experiences with the aforementioned.  Fine.  That’s just fine.  I have no issues with white dudes.  Some of my best fathers and uncles and grandfathers are white dudes.  It’s just that, well, last year, the book—which was on sustainable agriculture and the locavore movement—was also by a white dude and centered on his white dudely perspective, as was the book before it.  In the past six years, all of the books picked for this program have been written by straight cis-gendered men, and only once–when the author was bi-racial white/Latino–was the author not whitey whitey white white.  That seems like a problem to me, especially in a program that seems to strive for inclusion, that put Zitkala-Sa (a Native American woman) and Gloria freaking Anzaldúa on our Ph.D. qualifying exam.

And it’s not that books by women and non-white and non-heterosexual cis-gendered people haven’t been nominated before.  They have.  I’ve even nominated them myself.  A select few have made the final short list, but for whatever reason, they don’t get picked.  I have a theory about why this keeps happening, and it is not that my department is run by smelly old white dudes (the chair is a dude, but his hygiene seems fine, also young, and the co-chair is a lady).  I think it’s just risk averseness.  These texts keep getting picked because they are “safe.”  We live in a world in which the voices and perspectives of non-white/straight/cis/male people just seem, well, inherently more “political” and therefore more likely to piss off the conservative state legislature, students, parents, and confirm that our school and department are, in fact, the stuff of David Horowitz’s fevered nightmares.

The thing is that the controversies that have come out of these books have tended to be, well, boring.  Like I said, I think sustainable living and ethical food production are very, very important topics, worthy of discussion, but from the perspective of instructors, it was difficult to sustain a semester-long discussion about them.  Students just did not stay engaged in the way we would have hoped, and I think that’s understandable.  It also doesn’t help that many of the recent controversies suggested by the selected books tend to be fairly typical lefty issues, issues that graduate students and professors in English may feel passionate about, but feel simultaneously alien and overplayed to eighteen year olds.  Furthermore, for students who aren’t already inclined to be sympathetic to their positions, these books (which were not without problems) must have felt easy to dismiss.

The first year I taught in this program, we used Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway (I feel comfortable mentioning it by name since I’m about to give a glowing review), and it was fantastic.  Most of my students had an opinion about immigration, and because this university is in a border state, many of our students had first-hand experiences that they were able to bring to the table.  It was awesome.  Minds were changed.  Simplistic, entrenched viewpoints were reshaped to become either more principled or radically different.  Fantastic discussions occurred.  Beautiful papers were written.  Urrea’s book, if you haven’t read it, doesn’t present a standard left or right viewpoint on the issue but praises the Border Patrol while lamenting the human rights issues that plague the border.  But from what I have heard from graduate students who were on the committee that sent up that book, the department powers that be got really sweaty about it.  The person who nominated it had to fight for it, and I’m sincerely glad that she did.  Urrea’s book isn’t perfect either.  There is a lot of gender fail in there for one thing, but in terms of introducing a compelling, relevant controversy and a well-written, engaging argument that did not center the experiences of white men who can afford to shop at Whole Foods, it was an unqualified success.

So, I’d really like to see more of that and less of what we’ve gotten the past three years and the years before Urrea, but as a member of the selection committee I’m sort of sitting in a big glass house here.  When it’s come time to vote on the short list both years I’ve been on this committee, I too have been persuaded by the idea that X book on sexual issues affecting teens and twenty-somethings (what could be more relevant than that?) will be too awkward in the classroom and potentially get us into trouble, or Y book by a Muslim woman will be too incendiary, even though it calls for mutual understanding between the cultures by speaking directly to young people and is more critical of Iran than of the U.S.  There is always a reason not to champion books like that, especially if you’re already sort of inclined to find one.  It’s always possible to imagine nightmare scenarios in the classroom, and in an age in which non-tenured instructors have become increasingly vulnerable to political backlash, there are reasons to want to protect ourselves.

But pandering is dumb, and it consistently feels like we are designing our curriculum around the most irrational, reactionary student we can possibly imagine, instead of considering that the vast majority of them really, really will be able to handle this and stand to benefit from the kind of lively debate a rhetoric and composition class is supposed to encourage.  In the end it’s insulting to young people and to people who might hold different views than those held by graduate students and professors in English to think won’t be able to cope, though I do get why we think this.  And we certainly shouldn’t be returning to the “safe” white straight cis-dude well as a default response to our fear of controversy.  It’s deploying casual racism and sexism as an antidote to potentially overt racism and sexism, and that’s messed up.

We (I) need to do a better job of fighting for the texts we want to teach.