racism | Rage Blogging is Therapy

So much crazy, so little time.

I don’t have the mental capacity to write individual articles about all of the crazy going on in the world, particularly in Texas right now, so I’m going to rant in response to tweets. Enjoy.

WTF

White professors: DO NOT DO THIS. This is called tokenism and it assumes that a person who shares superficial traits with a group (such as race or gender identity) must be expected to represent that group, explain all their actions, defend them, and generally expend untold amounts of energy for no reason or compensation. Your job as a professor is to first, I don’t know, GOOGLE IT? Wikipedia? TikTok is choc-full of creators talking about the Black experience (trans, nonbinary, disabled, indigenous, and the intersections of all these identities) for free. Read a book. That’s a thing we are supposed to be able to do. And don’t assume that you know someone’s race, culture, religion, history, or experiences based on how they look. Or their health (re: fatphobia), socioeconomic status, or nationality. Just. Freaking. Stop. Also read the comments for a whole slew of just bad, bad learning experiences experienced by minorities.

Disabled people are not less deserving of not dying from Covid.

Freaking THIS. Yes, Mary, I know that you’re tired of being scared and wearing masks and dealing with the Rona. But having the freedom to pretend it’s all over and risking the lives of immunocompromised and disabled people is a crock. It was true two years ago and it’s still freaking true. It turns out people get sick and die even when the numbers are lower than at the peak of a variant surge. We did, and my husband came within about 15 minutes of a very possibly fatal heart attack. Fucking wear your mask and maybe don’t kill a kid in chemo. You know, like a human.

Get a Hobby

Give @fatnutritionist a follow. Bullying fat people is like a national pastime, and yes, Helen, it’s intersectional. I’m all for body positivity/acceptance/neutrality, but pretending that just bucking up and being less sensitive to people telling you to kill yourselves or amputate your stomach will make everything better is nonsensical. We have to live in this world, and, as previously noted, looking at someone does not mean you know anything about them, including their health or lifestyle, and it’s none of your goddamn business. Find something better to do with your time.

Maybe rethink police budgets? Maybe?

I’m just going to leave this right here. Read the thread.

High-stakes testing has ruined US education. Don’t believe me? Look at our rankings.

Read the thread. This is why I haven’t considered working in k-12 education, despite the fact that it pays more than teaching full time at a top university (I shit you not). Even if my state hadn’t muzzled teachers who want to talk about, oh, I don’t know, OBJECTIVE REALITY, I would still have to teach to a test written by people less knowledgeable than me so somebody somewhere can cash in on taxpayer dollars. Not a vibe.

Hahahahah. Hah. Ha.

I love the anti-intellectual set who thinks academics are rolling in dough. A few are; most of us, not so much. Tenured profs at private colleges make about what I make as a non-tenured prof and it is very, very little. Adjunct professors make a fraction of that. So think about it this way: A tenured prof (if they make it through all the bullshit and debt that it takes to get a PhD and get tenured) might make 100k+ at a top research institution, but not many other places. Full-time lecturers will make maybe half that, and adjuncts, about half that again (But with no benefits! Whee!). Academia, bless her rotted soul, gaslights all of us into thinking that unending intellectual and emotional labor doesn’t need to be compensated fairly, and then encourages us to exploit our students. It’s a shell game, which really sucks for those of us who love learning and teaching.

Trauma makes it hard to think.

PTSD can be short-term from a bad year or a really catastrophic experience, or it can be long-term because you were subjected to abuse and/or extreme danger for years or decades (cPTSD). We’ve been in a hell spiral from Covid for 2+ years now and everyone has some trauma (and possibly triggered -retraumatization), and many people have a whole lot of trauma and it’s not ending. Please find a soul and some compassion, and if you have these symptoms, talk to a counselor if you can.

In “Why is Texas?” news…

Criminalizing the parents of trans kids and denying them treatments that prevent suicide to boost your cred during an election year is not classy. 1 in 5 trans and nonbinary kids attempt suicide. Trans inclusive healthcare is suicide prevention. I hope Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton get their asses handed to them by the DoJ and lose their elections. In other news, why isn’t Ken Paxton in jail like three years ago?

Academia is exploitation masquerading as public service.

I see you, grad students. You don’t deserve to be abused and exploited for five years. Most of your profs and advisors stuffed down their own grad school trauma and now take it out on you. Professors: get therapy. I promise you will be happier and less destructive.

What’s for dinner? Word salad!

Um. This GenX leftist totally remembers the cold war and because my dad was a science nerd I knew exactly what would happen after I stopped, dropped, and rolled. A slow painful death from various cancers. Asshole. Also, how drunk was he when he tweeted this? The comments are gold though.

The patriarchal bargain is not cute.

Did I mention you should follow @fatnutritionist? Because you totally should. Patriarchy doesn’t just create hierarchies of race or gender, it creates hierarchies of bodies. Credit to Sonya Rene Taylor for an amazing exploration of this in her book, The body is not an apology. So every time you performatively diet, especially in front of your kids, you’re telling them that they must align themselves with thinness (by either being thin at any cost or by attempting to be thin at any cost) in order to maintain superiority over fat people. Maybe try to not to?

Race is constructed to maintain a hierarchy of bodies. See above.

Fantastic thread on the western construction of “orientalism” and how it affects AAPI actors and Asian and Asian mixed people in general. Get amongst it.

That’s all for now, folks.

My husband and I caught the last segment on This American Life today, titled The Farce Awakens and I highly recommend it. It discusses how a Black children’s author found his books banned from school libraries in Katy, Texas. This horseshit is going on all over Texas and the south and it’s harmful and insane. But today I’m going to address specifically what the “concerned white moms” had to say in this segment because there is only so much I can yell at my radio.

Their argument was that exposing white children to the multitudes of microaggressions that black children face is harmful because it will make them feel guilty. (They also claim that there is no way that Black kids experience this much aggression. They do.) Let’s unpack this.

White guilt, of which I have had a good amount, is when you realize that you have been taking part in or advantage of oppressive social and institutional systems that make things easier for you and harder for Black people. I was raised believing that as a good Californian white liberal, I couldn’t be racist. It just wasn’t in my DNA. So when I said or did incredibly stupid things, I reacted with confusion and dismay. When I was forced to recognize the actual gulf between my experiences and my peers of color, I realized that I was full of shit and that I had no idea what they were going through. It was deeply uncomfortable and I did a lot of bullshit rationalizing of things to make me feel better about myself. Eventually, I realized that my sensitivity to terms like White Fragility WAS ACTUAL WHITE FRAGILITY. That was a start.

Why is this important? Because one of the most basic things you need to help your children learn while they develop is the difference between discomfort and danger. Guilt is uncomfortable, not dangerous. Shame is uncomfortable, not dangerous. Racist systems and racism are physically dangerous to short and long-term health and wellbeing.

So to the white moms in Katy who want to spare their children guilt for oppressions that they didn’t create (but are likely propagating because their parents can’t grow a pair of ovaries and woman up), I say GROW THE FUCK UP. It’s you who can’t deal with your guilt and discomfort. Your kids still have a chance to become more resilient, humble, and compassionate without a fuckton of therapy. You, my ladies, do not. You need to start learning to tolerate uncomfortable feelings and thoughts instead of trying to control everything your little angels come in contact with. Instead of banning books, get you a therapist and work on your shit.

In Transformative Learning Theory, we call this the Disorienting Dilemma. When a learner is faced with new knowledge that calls into question their sense of self or reality, it causes stress and discomfort. As educators, we can help them process it, but we can’t do it for them. Y’all need to take several seats and start thinking about whether or not you want your kids to be as easily disturbed as you are.

I want my kid to be more resilient than me. More ethical. More compassionate. More humble. I want them to outshine me in every way possible, not reflect back my own limited view of the world so I don’t have to have any uncomfortable feelings. I want the same for my students. If you can’t even imagine your child learning to empathize with a Black kid who gets picked on, harassed, and gaslit for being Black (or gay, or trans, or Asian, or Latinx, or Muslim, or disabled…), you are not living in reality and you are doing your children exactly zero favors. Learning to tolerate discomfort like guilt, anxiety, fear, and shame are the building blocks of adulthood and good-personhood. I really want the next generation to be less fucked up than mine, and y’all are not helping. Do better.