Part of my graduate program is training to be a therapist. When you’re training to be a therapist, you mainly practice on other people who are training to be therapists. The first thing we were told in therapist training class is that we are NOT required to disclose any experiences we didn’t feel comfortable exploring. In fact, we are discouraged from disclosing any experience that is particularly loaded because it changes the focus from teaching therapy to therapy itself. The American Psychological Association has specific training guidelines that cover what kinds of issues you can and cannot be forced to talk about in therapist training.
In therapist training class, we talk extensively about multiculturalism. Or at least the professor talks, and many people stare blankly at him. The first exercise we did was specifically an exercise on understanding the levels of identity people bring with them, a role-play where each ‘client’ was to talk for five minutes about various cultural (used in the broadest Isense) influences on them. Basically a “Who am I?”
And it’s kind of funny how awful, and uncomfortable, and unsafe I felt - there in that class of therapists-to-be talking about multiculturalism. The exercise was introduced specifically as a safe topic, one that wouldn’t touch on those tricky intense experiences that take away from therapist training.
But the thing is, for whom is “Who am I?” unconnected to tricky intense experiences? Not for me.
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A lot of settings that train clinicians, mental health clinicians or not, have been refocusing and recognizing diversity of clients as an important variable in treatment and care. We talk a lot about collectivism, or about spiritual beliefs, about experiences of discrimination, about who has power in a client-clinician dyad and how that plays out in therapy. Most of my classmates can articulate why certain populations may feel a reticence to share or a discomfort with the immediacy of self-disclosure in therapy. And yet, when we sit in a classroom full of therapist trainees, none of them can bring that articulation to why certain members of the class may feel a reticence to share or a discomfort with the immediacy of self-disclosure.
It’s like that stuff - race, gender, culture, class, and so on - it’s like it only exists if you’re in the client chair. Therapists are trained as though their group identities are nonexistent (i.e. majority culture). Every single time we talk about approaches toward minority clients, professors, supervisors, and trainees use the “we” to talk about how this interaction might be difficult because of how “they” are different from “us”. It’s never once been noted that minority clients are only different for majority therapists.
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Who am I? is a question you can answer a lot of ways, with your identities or your interests. People don’t answer to identities that don’t make them feel different. I’m wealthy, I’m fully able, I’m straight - these aren’t the answers I give to that question. The more marginalized identities you experience, the more likely one of those will be the first answer you want to give to that question. Because who I am doesn’t make sense to me when I don’t first say: I am a woman of color, a second-generation South Asian American. And maybe for someone else that is: I am a lesbian, or I am Deaf, or I suffer from depression.
There is no way to separate those identities from experiences, intense and maybe painful experiences. Identities are experiences. And the more of those identities you have, or the more deeply you hold them, the less you are able to answer “Who am I?” with any degree of safety. It’s a prompt that (when used to avoid self-disclosure) assumes neutral and mainstream answers, a prompt that privileges majority identities with comfort.
Sometimes I write on this topic trying to take a wider view, trying to say something that might have meaning outside of me. This is not one of those times. Everything I’m saying is completely about me. There are statements that I think have relevance outside me, yes, and there are also grammatical structures that I don’t know how to state entirely personally, but I’m only talking about me.
(I came back to add this.) I don’t think of myself as a writer, at all. But at the very least, I tend to be a good proofreader; I try to be a little polished. I didn’t at all here. It’s just me, thinking about stuff I’m not sure about yet.
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I don’t remember a time when my major life choices were not driven by the desire to be a mother. I think it sounds as if I overstate it, as if I’m extrapolating backwards from whenever my damn biological clock made itself known. But I don’t think so. I don’t think of it as passion or urgency, but as practical want - just an understanding of myself. The same way I look at getting the degree I’m getting - not because I want to be in grad school, but because I want to be out of grad school. Because the work that I want or need to do is made simpler with this degree and the doors it opens. And so, without desperation (and yet with considerable haste), I made my way toward that goal.
If you know me outside of the internet, you know that sometimes it slips out: “my kids”, “the kids”. I think people work not to make worlds, but to pass them on. I work to make worlds that I want to pass on. To me, for me, the most direct way to make the world I want is to mother.
I come to adoption as a first choice (this is a post I like a lot on this topic). I think there’s a lot to think about in that, but I’m still thinking and not writing yet. But I’ve been thinking a lot around it, thinking a lot about how I think about adoption.
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A hundred years ago, I thought pretty much all adoption was good. This is frightening for a lot of reasons, but mainly because I am a bright, well-educated, fairly aware, and somewhat critical young woman. And so I know this, because I was there, that mainstream coverage and popular thinking about adoption is (what I would now be able to term) anti-first-mother, pro-adoptive-parent, colorblind (i.e. inappropriately uses the rhetoric of colorblindness to mask racism), and imperialist. And I know this, that bright, well-educated, fairly aware, and somewhat critical young women, have to dig into that topic before waking up.
And then I thought international adoption was bad, but domestic adoption was pretty awesome - the whole “take care of your own problems first” mentality. And international adoption was bad not because there were serious ethical concerns, but because if you adopt, you “should” try to take care of the children in your own state or country first. And then I thought international adoption wasn’t so bad, because children have already been relinquished and would have to stay in orphanages if not for adoptive parents, but domestic adoption was terrible, because of the rampant corruption and coercion in the industry. And then I added international adoption to the bad list again, because, hey, it appears there’s enough corruption and coercion to go around.
It’s not that important, what I thought (mainly because most of it was wrong), but it’s important to remember how quickly it kept changing. You know, you try to think of yourself as principled, as ethical, and you have to confront that you - I - I have to confront that all I do is keep searching for loopholes. Little ways to convince myself it’s fine to choose this, that there’s a way that I can do it well in a system that is so screwed I probably can’t see the well from the unwell.
The foundation here - the heart - is this: I believe there are some children who need parents to raise them.
People are always talking about the wonderfuls of adoption, the first mothers who are happy they placed, grateful for the option, and reconciled with the result. Bullshit. Bullshit, I think. And yet, I do - I do believe there are some stories where it works out. I do believe that there are some first mothers who feel at peace about the decision; I believe it because they say so, and I, personally, think it’s poor form to question what someone else lived. I don’t think there’s a world in which adoption doesn’t exist, and so I think these stories are a goal - how can we make it so those who relinquish feel this way? No, that’s not it. How can we make a world where the only adoptions that have to happen end up this way?
But I don’t think it’s the norm. I don’t think that because it can happen, it happens every time it could. And when it does, there are hundreds of families waiting already. I don’t need to be there. It’s not a question of: if not me, then who? It’s more a question of: if them, then why not me? And that turns everything around, it shakes the heart. Because I’m not talking anymore about the children who need parents but the parents who need children.
I can say this, and I believe this - that parents who have to relinquish deserve as many, many choices as possible in families for their children. (And this is a little funny, because what they really deserve are many, many choices they didn’t have before coming to that “have to” in the first place.) And so, by becoming a candidate, I can tell myself that brings choices; that maybe someone will see in me the right mother that they didn’t see before, that maybe their heart will break into fewer pieces because I was there. You know what that sounds like to me? Loopholes. Bullshit.
And then there’s this, too. As much as there are things wrong in adoption, as much as adopting doesn’t fix anything, not adopting doesn’t either. (These are two posts that I’ve read many times, kind of around this.) Refusing to cross certain lines, or transforming from prospective adopter to advocate in those cases where there is certainly coercion, that can fix things. But there are many, many times that not adopting doesn’t change anything, except for which adoptive family adopts a kid. And sometimes I can kind of almost make myself believe this, that it’s better there are choices like me out there. I don’t know.
Most of my information about adoption comes from the internet. I read some books and some peer-reviewed articles but mainly I read blogs. I don’t know of any blogs from mothers who relinquished outside the US, so I read US first mom blogs. Sometimes I stop reading in the middle of a post because it hurts too much. It hurts me, poor old me who never had to and will never have to live it. This is what I know about domestic adoption, that it leaves this kind of trauma in its wake - that there are strong and amazing, ordinary (they are extraordinary, but they are also real, everyday, people) women whose hearts and lives have been broken in some way by adoption. And all of that is in my head when I think about domestic adoption, that this is what can happen, that this is what I can be a part of constructing.
And then sometimes I think about international adoption, and why I don’t feel that kind of trauma around it. Other than the obvious - racism, colonialism, imperalism, and the simple - I don’t have to. I think part of first-world privilege is being socialized in the sureness of your own wholeness, humanness, and the lack of others’ complete humanness. That it doesn’t hurt as bad for “them”, that “they” don’t feel as much as us, that “their” emotions lack that rawness. It’s a painful thing to recognize, to write, it’s something I’m ashamed about, but not unaware of. The rhetoric of relinquishment is particularly powerful in the eaves of this privilege. The children are relinquished (of course that process and the coercion that surrounds it hearkens back to the domestic adoption paragraph above) already. If they are not adopted, they will have to live in orphanages. Again, not adopting doesn’t fix anything.
These are two posts that have made me think a lot about international adoption. You know that parable (for lack of a better word here), that story that likens adoption to marriage, the one where you wake up one day and you have a new husband who keeps telling you it will be fine? I’ve read it a lot of times, and it struck me as dumb a lot of times. I had all these mental protests, you know? Well, that doesn’t make sense. That’s not exactly it. And so on. And then I read that second post, and I thought of that story again, and my heart hurt. I thought of being as young as I could remember, which is maybe four, and then tried to think of being younger than that, and being taken from somewhere by people I just met, taken to somewhere I didn’t know. And my skin crawled. And it’s weird, because I don’t know how to get around it, and there are certainly many families, in the blog world and otherwise, who have accomplished it consciously and continue to do so, but - just but.
I’m second generation, and I think it’s hard. Tie that in with being non-White, unable to pass as solidly American, and yeah, I think it’s hard. I get to go back all the time; I speak, and read, and write the language; I know both cultures; I am loved in both places. But being from two places, trying to be two things (you fail, you always fail). But at least I know I’m second generation. And my parents are first generation, and there’s a we there. But I’m scared, it scares me. To sever a child from country and culture, I think it needs a better rationale than the one I give. And yet, it’s the same thing right? How is it better for children to grow up in orphanages, unparented? I don’t know.
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And I think this is important, and for another time: race and culture, and how that ties into the parameters of how I have defined family for myself. It’s especially important for me to think about in adoption from foster care. In already straddling two worlds, in thinking about bringing in children who may already be straddling more than two. How do you do it? How do you not leave yourself behind, how do you make sure you don’t make your child leave himself or herself behind?
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I don’t feel guilt. Or rather, guilt isn’t what drives me - either to adopt or not adopt. I think guilt is pretty much stupid; guilt is an excuse to be paralyzed and a justification to continue to look inwards when what you’re guilty over is outwards. I think that needs to be said because there’s a lot of guilty undertones in this post. But that’s not why I’m thinking it.
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I define myself, (not, like, out loud), as a mother-to-be. So much of what I’ve wanted to do and become is tied up in that. I’ve been thinking about permanent foster care, and wondering if the cases that I tell myself I want to do this for, are the cases in which this is the best option. It’s hard, testing myself to see if I can let go of mother as a noun and embrace mother as a verb. To be not a mother, but a mother-er. I don’t know.
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Many apologies for the ramble. And for the probable spelling and grammar and other errors. And I think it’s worth the bracket here to say, this is only about me.
Kristen thoughtfully commented on the previous post:
…If you agree with them on the issues, great. Many people that I have met along they way are voting for Obama because he is black, Hillary because she is a woman (”it is time,”), Huckabee because he is a Christian, McCain because they have military ties, and my brother wants to vote for Thompson because he loves “Law and Order.”
What ever happened to issues and experience?
gradmommy wrote a beautiful and articulate response, below, that I say thanks for in two ways.
more seriously - i think reducing it to “i’m voting for obama just because he’s black” is not really giving power to how complex the issue is. the election of a black person (or a woman or a mormon) speaks volumes about what is possible in this country. there are thousands of black children who do not see themselves “represented” in national politics or many other areas of public life. to have a black man in the leading role for our nation will allow them to dare to dream of other things they could possibly be. lack of positive role models is a huge issue in black communities, especially since integration allowed the middle class to abandon working class neighborhoods. no longer do black doctors live next door to black laborers. having a black president provides a much needed role model that a state senator or even mayor just can’t give. there needs to be something radical happen for black kids to beleive in themselves again. electing barack won’t alone do it, but it will start the ball rolling.
In general, I don’t think many things - crime, the economy, etc - will change no matter who is elected president. but the type of person that holds that role changes a lot in how the nation is perceived in the world. george bush is perceived as a white supremacist cowboy - obama, on the other hand, is a person of color much like many of our “enemies.” like andrew sullivan said, that speaks volumes about what kind of country we truly are. the civil rights acts of the 60s were enacted in large part because we, as a country, could not continue to rail against oppression in other parts of the world and continue to oppress at home. by choosing a black leader, we are at least giving lip service to fighting against racism and the importance of diversity…
First, thanks because it’s a well-articulated expression of some important points. Second, thanks because I have a habit of looking for flaws in the counterargument instead of strengths in the argument, and gradmommy, along with a recent reading of George Lakoff reminded me of the power of speaking your truth.
And so, what ever happened to issues and experience?
When you vote for issues, you vote for the candidates you hope will make the statement you agree with on the topics you think are important. And when I vote for representation, I vote for my issues. An accusation against the institutional racism that permeates American political structures. A denouncement of the hypocrisy of a nation that occupies foreign lands and souls in the pursuit of freedom without freeing its own lands and souls. An indictment of a color blind lens. A reminder of the nature of privilege and the inheritance of privilege. A call for the return of values-based politics. These, and many more - they are my issues. And my vote, which is based on these and other issues, is not any less considered or serious than someone’s whose issues are defense and immigration and taxes and crime, because these are my issues.
And what about experience? I vote for the experiences important to me, which may or may not be time in the White House or the governor’s house. I think it is the funniest thing in the world when people say, “I would vote for Obama even if he wasn’t Black. It’s his experience that matters.” Blackness is not food coloring. There is no Obama who isn’t Black. And so I vote for the sum total of my life experience and of his; I vote for a change in the experiences we value.
In critical studies, representation is a concept used to understand how we/society/media construct reality around images and ideas. In politics, representation is a concept used to understand how we select candidates whose ideas and values mirror our own, so that they can then project those in a legislative or executive capacity.
The first, as I understand it, is often a lens for questioning how we come to certain conclusions and assumptions. What is the representation of young Black men in the mainstream media? In the alternative media? In the criminal justice system? In the school system? And so on. In one class I took, the students had an awfully hard time getting away from, “And then the Black guy picked up the X” and getting to, “The Black man was represented as picking up X.” And it’s not that it’s important to always frame the sentence this way, but that it’s important to understand how to frame the thought this way.
We’re about midway through an election season where people continue, overall, to sidestep the question of race (and gender), to take the liberal high ground and pretend it’s not important. Is America ready for a Black president? Is America ready for a woman president? These questions are almost always answered for others. “Well, I’m ready for a Black president, but I don’t know if America’s ready.” “Race has nothing to do with why I’m voting for Obama, but it might be the reason other people decide not to.”
Race has everything to do with why I’m voting for Obama.*
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I think about politics differently from a lot of people, in what I’m happy to accept is naive in a certain way (and anything but naive in ways that are important to me). When I think about politics, I look 10 (20? 30?) years ahead and try to describe to my (future) children how today’s politics created their world. And because this is the way I think about politics, I place a greater importance on representation v1 than representation v2.
At some point, issues and policies wash out a little, and I’m trying to describe why politics looks the way it does. I’m trying to describe why, in a nation that takes it upon itself to forcefully liberate other nations, two centuries of presidents and congresses and judiciaries all look the same. Why does it matter? It matters because the reality you will construct, the reality my children (of color) will construct is based on the representations we construct now. It’s based on representations of White male political power. And, I believe with all my heart, that that representation chains and limits those children.
It matters because we live in a country where people of color gained property rights and legal personhood and suffrage and electoral representation decades and decades and centuries after White people did. It matters because people of color gained entry to city councils and school boards and governors’ homes and senators’ planes and ambassadors’ cars, and the White House, decades and decades and centuries after White people did. It matters because every year that we say that four more years won’t make a difference is a year we agree to recenter power in the hands they’ve always been in.
And so to me it matters not just how our officials vote, but how they look.
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Andrew Sullivan wrote this in The Atlantic Monthly a while ago. It’s about representation.
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
If we can believe this about fundamentalist Islam (and I do, at least partly), we can believe this about our children. We can talk about freedom and America and opportunity forever, but the America we live in now, at the most simple level, does not look like that America we talk about. And that is the representation of America that we, and they, and the world carry. It’s a representation that’s dangerous because it implies (true) ideas about power. It’s a representation that’s dangerous because, like with every representation, you’re a part of it. And the part you are plays out based on the parts you already have represented.
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A few weeks ago, I was talking with a young White colleague of mine about our professional approaches. As a community-focused professional-to-be, I shouted a little about the importance of psychologists recognizing that talk therapy is often unlikely to be our most useful role, and the necessity of expanding psychology as a profession to preventative, institutional work. She’d asked me earlier where I could see myself doing this kind of work, and I’d said, probably in government. Which, some of you may know, is not really the answer you’re supposed to give in a program like mine. (I think government might actually be the level below private practice!) But it’s true. And I joked (a little) and said that what I really wanted to be was the President but I’d probably enjoy being Secretary of Health and Human Services.
So when we talked afterwards, she asked what I would do if someone came into my office looking for talk therapy. And I was pretty done with the conversation, so I said.
“By my office, do you mean the Oval Office?”
And she just laughed.
“Yeah, in your woman of color Oval Office!!”
It’s a little bit funny, because it’s not like I don’t joke about it sometimes. But it wasn’t the words, it was the laugh. It was the laugh from a liberal educated young White woman who could, if she wanted, reach for that office, telling me that I couldn’t. (Which of course is arguable, depending on who you are, but that’s not really the point.)
It’s the kind of statement that young White liberals “joshing around” with their young WoC friends feel comfortable making, a statement that would supposedly only be offensive from a non-liberal mouth. And it’s not the statement, really. It was the laugh - the let’s-laugh-together-all-embracing laugh, a laugh that expected me to join in, because without my complicity it would suddenly be offensive.
I don’t want my children to ever hear that laugh. I want to make a world where they will be confused when I tell them about that laugh, where they’ll shake their heads about that statement.
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A lot of young White (primarily male) peers have said to me something like this, “You know Black candidates often end up being the worst for Black issues.” Which, by the way, is about the stupidest thing you could ever say because it’s followed by an implied, “So why don’t you vote for a White candidate?” re-centering and re-norming Whiteness as default within the political system.
Interestingly, we don’t hear a whole lot of talk about White candidates and Black issues. We don’t hear a lot about White issues, because, oh yeah, White issues are everyday, everyman issues.
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There’s an awkwardness around a post like this, a certain rush to disclaim - I only speak for me. It’s not a popular viewpoint, the idea that there is value in belonging to a certain group identity in a position of power, despite what you do with that power. I am probably the last liberal on the planet to believe there is something redeeming about Clarence Thomas, and the last anti-racist to say that it is his race.
This is not the reason I’m voting for Obama, but it is a reason I’ll be overjoyed if he wins the Presidency. And it is a reason I’ll be damn pleased if Clinton wins. And a small, subversive part of me will even be a little bit less enraged/outraged if Romney, a Mormon, wins.
*A commenter asked, “Why Obama?” on a post below. I am loosely a single-issue voter. I usually narrow down candidates based on their position on abortion, because I have found that if a candidate feels the way I do about abortion they are likely to feel similarly about other issues I care about. And then I vote generally around the politics of family, which to me include abortion, marriage, women’s rights, and then healthcare, education, and immigration. And I don’t often get the chance, but when I do, I vote around representation.
Because the Presidency is not just about representation, but also about (re)presentation. And every wall that’s demolished is a wall that’s rebuilt a little bit lower.
OBAMA ‘08!!!
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See you all in 2008!
At the church I currently go to, they did a makeshift Nativity play today. They asked anyone with a baby to come up, to play the baby Jesus and family. We got one little girl with her mom and dad and one little boy with his moms. And someone said, “We’re missing Joseph!” and the pastor said, “Looks to me like Jesus has his whole family up there.” And there were Wise Women. There was a lot of bending going on. Everyone up there was White, but I dug deep down for some Christmas spirit and proclaimed it the most bendy part of all, considering there’s no way anyone in the original Jesus&Co was White.
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I just rewatched Love Actually for the first time in a year and was slightly miffed to note that the whole of Britain, along with some towns in France and Portugal, and a major metropolitan area in Wisconsin, contain only one non-White or non-Black person. How weird.
I met someone online a while ago, and mentioned a little too early for his comfort that I’m a feminist. He responded with a “Whoa, there” and it was really all downhill from there. The thing that was really confusing to me is that, even though our entire relationship, short as it was, was in print, he kept on referring to me as a faminist. I spell pretty well, and I try to proofread my emails when they are someone’s only window to me. So it wasn’t from me, and it kept on happening. And my twisted little mind figured out what this whole misunderstanding, and I mean the global one, about feminism must be.
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40 years ago, somewhere in middle America.
“Mom? Dad? What’s a feminist?”
“A faminist? Well, now, I don’t rightly know.”
“Oh, my, well it sounds to me like it could only be one thing.”
“You don’t think?”
“Oh, honey, you just don’t know with some people. Now, dear. A faminist is someone who believes in famine.”
“Whoa.”
“Yes, son. It’s terrible, isn’t it? Faminists just want good people to starve. They want to break up families and put people out of house and home.”
“Faminists want children to suffer and men to die.”
“Wow. I never thought anyone could be so awful.”
“Yes, son. Now listen carefully. You must never take up with a faminist. You must harden your heart against faminism and eschew all faminist principles.”
“Promise us, son. Promise you’ll be an anti-faminist all your life.”
“I promise.”
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Hehe.
I saw this movie ‘Election’ last night, which might be one of the most awful movies I’ve ever seen. I tend to spend my time during most media presentations counting the number of people of color and tallying what percentage of those are evil, incompetent, or end up dying (usually 0, 0 or 3, 67). Anyway, the good thing is I know that about myself and I can usually ‘turn it off’ long enough to enjoy a crappy movie.
So ‘Election’ is supposedly a satire on high school politics. Whatever. I don’t really care about the message.
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I was talking with a friend yesterday how parody (blackpeopleloveus dot com) is pretty much a medium that makes those of us who already get it pat ourselves on the back for getting it, and makes the people who were supposed to get it revel in media’s reinforcement of their prejudiced worldview.
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One of the ideas I struggle most with is the idea of responsibility on the part of the token (of whatever -ism we’re talking about). On the one hand, all -isms really do is sanction tokenhood and give disproportionate weight to the actions of one person on behalf of their group identity. So telling tokens to act as tokens is buying into that issue. On the other hand, the truth of tokenhood is that majority culture is looking for ways to justify their own actions and thoughts, and clings to the supposed approval by the token. Kind of the “But Dave Chappelle said that!” rationalization. (A not-so-related-but-then-it’s-all-related great post.)
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So one plotline of Election is that this over-achieving perfectionistic high schooler, Tracy, is seduced by her male high school teacher who is over twice her age. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say she’s over 16 at this point, but also, who the fuck cares? He sets up a situation to take advantage, brings her to his house, gives her alcohol, sleeps with her, and then vulgarly describes the sex to his friend, another high school teacher. The movie (in what is paced as a reluctant acknowledgment) duly finds out and fires him. Waah, waah, he’s in love. Waah, waah, he cries. He loses his wife. He loses his child. He loses his job. Waah, waah. He movies in with his parents.
The rest of the movie is somewhat structured around the idea that his friend feels the need to ‘get back’ at Tracy. He says repeatedly, “I didn’t blame her. How could I?…” And it’s the “…” that’s killing me here. In an interaction later in the movie, the two are discussing the history and he mentions that she managed to “slip away” from the scandal without the rest of the school finding out, and implies that she isn’t grateful enough for it. What the fuck is this movie? What the fuck is this message? She’s a CHILD. She’s a STUDENT. He was an ADULT. He was a TEACHER. You can go on for as long as you want about the age of consent but every single bit of power was on his side. And WHO’S the victim?
So this is what wikipedia says:
Earlier in the year, Tracy had an affair with McAllister’s best friend, another teacher. As a result, her lover was fired from his job, divorced by his wife, and ended up a ruined man; Tracy, however, walked away with no one knowing of her involvement.
1. Why does the sentence even start with “Tracy”?
2. “An affair”? “Her lover”?
3. “A ruined man”? Yeah, if you can further ruin a teacher who, I would argue, sexually assaulted a student.
4. “Walked away”? Seriously?
And entire movie based on the idea of a grownup’s revenge toward a teenager who was taken advantage of by a TEACHER. I saw it LAST NIGHT. She’s a perfectionist. She’s a little high strung. She’s not very nice to the person who helps her put up her posters. She rips down someone else’s posters and lies about it. Yeah, basically, she’s a pretty normal, stressed out high schooler lacking some emotional regulation. Which, really, considering what happened to her earlier in the year, her mother’s issues, and her involvement in about 3000 school committees, sounds not so unbelievable, AT ALL. She’s not (wikipedia again) “an overachieving senior with a secret vindictive and sexual side”. What the fuck is this secret sexual side? All the other kids in the movie having sex (which, hey, they’re SIXTEEN; it’s NORMAL) don’t have a “secret sexual side.”
Wikipedia is an interesting lens to look at the world. It’s a user-generated (majority culture led) source of “objectivity”. And it’s killing me that this movie is apparently a mega-hit, and a cult classic. Are we really so self-congratulatory and hard-headed about satire as a genre that we can brush this under the rug?
At a preschool I work with, they recently had a parent come in to read Christmas stories. Not Santa, elves, tree, presents stories, but Jesus, Mary, Bethlehem stories. Not a Christian preschool, by the way. She started with (and I give her some props for this), “I’m a Christian, so I think the special part of Christmas is that it’s Jesus’ birthday.” But that’s all she said.
“Evwybody’s a Chwistian!,” comes a shout from the audience.
Nothing.
Nothing.
This is a preschool where if a child so much as forgets an “Excuse me” when brushing past a friend or a “Bless you” to someone who sneezes, the staff has the child practice at least twice. This is a preschool where they talk honestly about divorce and pets dying and human anatomy.
Nobody said a damn thing.
We just moved right onto the book about how God gave Jesus to the world. If I had a child in that school, I would have been so pissed off I would not have known how to begin to react. And I am a practicing, fairly devout Christian.
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Last week at preschool was Chanukah week, which means that they make five Chanukah crafts. Mind you, Chanukah was all about dreidels and lights and latkes. You’d have to search far and wide for a statement from the teachers that included the words “Judaism”, “religion”, or “God”. Five days of Chanukah crafts, and on day four, one of the teachers said, “You know what? I’m tired of Chanukah! We’re going to make a Christmas craft today.” By the week, this is Christmas week, so there wasn’t exactly a need to worry about equal representation.
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Privilege isn’t just the lack of blatant oppression. Privilege is society, media, school, grown-ups telling you that YOU are normal. That what YOU believe in is normal and what YOU practice is normal.
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I had trouble tagging this post, because I already had a category called faith, that seems applicable enough. But in a sense, I’m not talking about faith at all, but religion, which is quite a different beast. Maybe the first step in recognizing and working against Christian privilege is sorting out faith from religion.
I have a common name with two not unusual spellings. Let’s say, Katie/Katy. I can certainly understand why people who have never seen it in print might spell it Katy when it’s Katie. But what is the deal with the six people in the last two weeks who, in response to my: Dear X, Blah blah. Thanks! Katie, wrote back: Dear Katy, No problem, X?? And my email is “Katie.KatieLast”, and in three cases, they had to TYPE in my email themselves.
I hate little ways of expressing, “You don’t matter enough for me to get this right.”
