I am Working on the Topic of Racism

            I work as a university researcher while studying as a PhD student.  The last couple months my research has focused on Racism in K-12 education.  The idea being to see how various factors of racism are discussed in the field of education and how it might be applied to Public Policy or Administration.

            Shockingly, researching this topic for numerous weeks left my brain feeling like it had been beaten with a cudgel.

            It was a strange arc to the whole process too.  The first half dozen sources I worked thru I could immediately see a larger narrative (one that held steady thru the remaining research) and enjoyed the act of learning for its own sake.

            Then as I read the next half dozen I started to think, “Oh good, a lot of these literature reviews see policies in action, and it seems like they know how to fix many of the underlying problems.”  During this time is where a normal undergraduate would be able to write a paper spelling out numerous issues and numerous solutions.  Then I kept going…

            The refrain of racism became an earworm.  20-25 sources reviewed and all I could see is the long pattern stretching back thru American and world history and it leading to the current state of things.  The attempts to fix it, the constant push back, and the half-hearted attempts to dig out the infection of systemic racism and cultural bias, it was the arc of history and while things are better, they still suck, and it is too easy for them to get worse.

            Conversations with people at the dog park were a treat for them I am sure.  As puppies played and older dogs sat on benches and got head pats from the various lounging dog owners, I turned conversations with those who would listen to me into town halls.  There a bunch of people listened to me explain how subtle racism permeates every aspect of the primary education system.  And then went on to explain how that racism is part of the legacy of segregation and white supremacy that is as baked into the apple pie of America alongside patriarchy and heteronormativity.

            I was being a bit of a downer.

            By the time I had finished summarizing and organizing more than 30 of these papers (each in turn a literature review or meta-analysis of numerous other studies) I had been thinking about racism constantly for a month… and I stupidly didn’t stop there.

            I am an avid user of audiobooks and I had been listening to some of the free titles offered via my audible subscription on history.  What were two titles I had picked?  “A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution” and “Reconstruction and the Rise of Jim Crow” as my stupid ass had decided without really thinking it out, “Hey, I have been wanting to learn a little more about these topics” and ended up reading about a whole other dimension to racism.  (Both of those titles are quite informative; I am not slighting them in the least, do pick them up if you are a fan of history.)

            Racism was the hobgoblin of my thoughts.  You might be saying, “what about your classes?  Didn’t studying for those take your mind off of it?”  Well, one of them deals with philosophy and certainly did, the other… It deals with Welfare Programs in the US and HOLY SHIT is it just racism all the way down.  I kind of lost my mind at some point when we were having class discussion where people were trying to give the benefit of the doubt to… let’s politely call it, “the other side” by spelling out their fiscal conservatism and romanticizing of the Protestant Work Ethic.

            Yeah, I decided not to give the same benefit of the doubt.  Ending up on a mini rant about how we all need to stop giving them credit or listening to them lie.  Spelling out how persistent racism has been the guiding star of so many “reforms” and so many abuses within the American welfare system (and America in general) that we have to stop treating the other side as acting in good faith.  At a certain point you have to come to the realization that you and the public you serve are in danger, that the other side is not acting in good faith, that the other side does not tell the truth, and that if you don’t start acknowledging all that you are going to allow great harm to come to the most vulnerable.

            Regardless of all these attempts to kill my own soul by burning away what little remained of my own ignorance (keep in mind, I am not learning too many new things about racism, it is the wallowing in the subject matter that is getting to me) I did come out the other end and will continue to work on the material.

            I talked to my supervising Professor about how draining it has been to bathe in this topic (it is interesting at least to see which authors look at things with a cold detachment, those that feel a sense of sad pity, and those that have some real fire to their writing) and the professor suggested to distance myself from the material a bit, focus on putting out a useful policy message and maybe making a positive change.

            The professor also made the suggestion to go back over the reading list he had given his students earlier in the semester which included the titles, “White Rage”, “White Trash”, and “White Fragility” and not read those titles for a little while.  The university and our department in particular had been trying to position themselves as “Anti-Racist” (something I support) and that had led to many such reading lists to help the student body understand the context of the university’s work on the subject.  I previously discussed the book “Blindspot” for this very reason.  The Professor saw that I was already knee deep and needed a bit of a mental break.

            Good news is that I might be able to publish some of my work from this and that might do some good in the future.

            Maybe.

            Maybe it will just be the latest in a long line of papers saying, “Here is the problem, we all see it, here is a possible solution, please don’t ignore it” and then it getting filed away to only be referenced by other academics and ignored by policymakers… Cause racism.

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Audio Book Discussion, "Blindspot"

I am returning to higher education in the coming weeks.  I have been futzing about with a longer and more navel gazing blog on the topic, mostly having to do with how I decided to try, the hoops I jumped thru, and what I hope to accomplish… That is for another day.

                Today I am going to briefly talk about a book I am reading for my return to Graduate School that I have been listening to on Audible.  This is part of the University’s summer reading and… kind of a mission statement for the University.

The School

                I am going to be attending George Washington University in the Foggy Bottom area of Washington DC.  I will be seeking my Doctorate and I hope to study voting systems, my ultimate goal would be to get a popular referendum passed… Somewhere… that would allow for ranked choice voting, a system I was surprised to learn is gaining traction in the United States and I think is the key to saving the Republic.  Or at least hitting the snooze button on our inevitable collapse for another couple decades.

The Book

                George Washington has decided to emphasize learning about hidden biases.  To do this they have put out for summer reading, “Blindspot” by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald.  Not the TV show, “Blindspot” starring the intensely hot, Jaimie Alexander… I like athletic women with tattoos.

                The book is about biases and mental categorization with the key analogy being the literal blind spot all human eyes have but we are not aware off without doing some deliberate effort to “show” it to ourselves.

                What has surprised me most so far reading the book is how much of it I already knew or anticipated.  Studying politics you begin to understand how people have a mental image of certain jobs, certain ethnicities, and misconceptions about every other possible way to categorize people.

Stereotypes

                In “Blindspot” one of the chapters deals with stereotyping, and it begins with this old… Riddle I guess would be the best term.  The riddle helps frame the rest of the chapter.  Here it is,

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A young boy and his father are on their way home from soccer practice when a distracted driver crosses the center line and hits them head-on. The father dies at the scene of this horrible car accident, but the boy is still alive when the emergency medical technicians arrive. The injured boy is transported in an ambulance to the hospital, where's he taken immediately into surgery.

However, the awaiting surgeon steps out of the operating room and says, "Call Dr. Baker stat to the operating room. I can't operate on this boy. He's my son!"

The question: Who is the surgeon?

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                If you are unfamiliar with the riddle take your time to think about it.

 

This is from an article about Daylight Savings time.
I hate Daylights Savings as a concept.  It is cosmically stupid.

                The answer is that the Surgeon, a role that is typically MALE, is actually the boy’s MOTHER.  Gasp!  Twist!

                Not really.  I had heard it before all the way back in middle school along with other problem solvers… I figured out the answer then too.  Something in retrospect I now attribute to having watched a lot of diverse media growing up (you can read a little about that here).  I mean, Doctor Crusher was a woman and a doctor on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”.  The idea of a woman doctor is not all that world flipping.

                But I also get the point.  People do often default to certain mental images that shape what they expect and how they react to the world around them.  The book goes on to talk about one of the first studies on the topic of stereotypes that has been replicated in recent history to show the evolving nature of stereotypes.  FYI: Germans, for the last hundred years, have been consistently thought of as industrious and scientifically minded.

                The topic then moves into what would more often be called intersectional identities, or intersectionality.  That by layering different categories you can picture in your minds eye a distinct individual.  Their example was to first picture a professor, which they said, “white male, tweed jacket, pipe, etc…” they then started talking about how you could build a person by stacking certain ideas.  For instance, “Professor, French, Black, Muslim, Lesbian”.  To show how your mind can construct an image.

                Their idea is that stereotypes help humans to construct individuals based on these categories layering on top of one another until a unique person is constructed.  This allows you to see people as individuals, but also as the sum of their “parts” for lack of a better word.

Again, this chapter was nearly an hour long on the audiobook, I am not giving you all the material.  I do have a reason for explaining all of this.  To set up for an insight I WAS EXPECTING, but NEVER SHOWED UP.

The Un-Twist

                See, the chapter starts with the Surgeon riddle, and at several points during the chapter sexual orientation is mentioned.  The Muslim, French, Lesbian being the one I relayed to you.  So I was EXPECTING, that the chapter would end with a subversion of the Surgeon Riddle.

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A young boy and his father are on their way home from soccer practice when a distracted driver crosses the center line and hits them head-on. The father dies at the scene of this horrible car accident, but the boy is still alive when the emergency medical technicians arrive. The injured boy is transported in an ambulance to the hospital, where's he taken immediately into surgery.

However, the awaiting surgeon steps out of the operating room and says, "Call Dr. Baker stat to the operating room. I can't operate on this boy. He's my son!"

The question: Who is the surgeon?

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                I was expecting the new answer to be, “The surgeon is also the boy’s father.  His parents are a gay couple.”  Apparently, I am either ahead of the curve on subverting expectations in the world by acknowledging that gay surgeons exist in the context of a riddle… Or maybe I should just get around to writing a novel because I am apparently pretty good at writing twists that book end a quasi-narrative.

This is not a well composed photo.  There is so much dead space to the left.

Other Book Elements

                The final thing I want to mention is that the narrator, Eric Jason Martin, has a cadence almost exactly like the opening narration of “The Outer Limits”.  It is not distracting, I kind of like it.

To School

                I am very close to the last day of my current job, less than two weeks.  It is in many ways somewhat scary-exciting.  A life roller coaster for which I am in an interminably long line waiting to take off down the track.

                I am so eager; it is kind of exhausting.  If for no other reason that I will get to read books and have people ask me my thoughts on them.  I had no idea I would miss that so much.

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