In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Asked and Answered

piny

First of all: calling all card-catalogue junkies. I would like to open this comments thread up to any and all resources and good reads on normativity, prejudice, privilege, unexamined assumptions, and anything else anyone can name.

Second: Over on the feministing thread where a PhD candidate was just told to go take an English 101 class (not that the former circumstance precludes one from being a lousy writer, but I think she’s seen a few argumentative essays in her time, am I wrong?) and also to modulate her tone by someone who’s not racist at all, this hoary old chestnut just rose from its shallow grave again:

(Quoted by justine)

Audre Lourde in, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”

Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppresssed to teach the oppressors their mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my children’s culture in school. Black and Third-World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions.

And the response, coming this time from a David Thompson:

we read a piece by a woman who said essentially, it’s not the job of the oppressed to teach the oppressor–go out and learn that shit yourself.

Um, who are the “oppressors” supposed to learn that stuff from?

It’s hard to put into words exactly why this diffident little question makes me so mad. Maybe it’s that so much of it is implied rather than explicit.

I hear it a lot, usually after I express frustration with the burden of education. While it is annoying to be treated like a human filmstrip, the problems with this question go beyond the immediate disparity it sets up.

Look:

Q. [reference to Audre Lorde, one of the most brilliant women who ever breathed, who spent her whole life providing some of the most incisive answers yet articulated.]

Q (cont.): [profound yet accessible chapter-and-verse from Audre Lorde, one of the most brilliant women who ever breathed, who spent her whole life providing some of the most incisive answers yet articulated.]

A: [“But how am I ever gonna learn any of this stuff if you all complain when I ask my ignorant questions?! I gotta start somewhere!”]

So start with her. Is she invisible?

Obviously, yes. To David Thompson, Audre Lorde is a nonentity and her writing is so much gibberish. That paragraph probably didn’t even register; the key it provided wasn’t even picked up, let alone plugged into a search engine. Audre Lorde does not exist.

That’s what I find so infuriating about this question. People like Audre Lorde have been struggling, usually against Promethean odds, to bring their answers into the light since centuries before David Thompson and I were even thought of. There are answers to questions we are not capable of asking. There is more material out there to read and learn from than one person could tackle, and–most shamefully of all–most of it is accessible through the teensiest amount of effort. The only thing standing in the way is the one question no one really needs to ask.

28 thoughts on Asked and Answered

  2. For what it’s worth, “David Thompson” trolls a number of blogs I read. That’s his usual line.

  3. It’s hard to put into words exactly why this diffident little question makes me so mad.

    Well Piny, you rose to the occassion and did a damn fine job nonetheless. I don’t much time now (exam tomorrow, just taking a break), but if I remember someone left a link or two about white privilege over at Feministing. I can dig up some other references, but I won’t be able to do so until at least midnight tomorrow night.

  4. I can see having that sort of reaction from a person who is actually interested in understanding privilege – but they’re not likely to stay in that frame of mind for more than about five minutes. Even if the Audre Lorde quote weren’t there, there’s this thing called Google. And before that there was this thing called a library.

    But that’s only if you’re actually interested in learning. Otherwise, it’s much easier to sit back and whine that no one is explaining everything for you – or, preferably, downloading all that information straight into your head, so you don’t have to do any of that pesky “listening.”

  5. Just something to add:

    I think a lot of progressive people get further confused by the idea that it’s entirely appropriate to ask other people about their personal experience and to listen to their voices without expecting them to educate you or speak on behalf of entire communities. Few things bother me more than people in a priviliged class asking me to “explain feminism” to them; one of those things that does bother me more, though, is when said people attempt to speak on my behalf.

    So I think that’s an important distinction to draw: Listen to personal narratives, recognize that people within oppressed/disenfranchised communities are indeed speaking for themselves, but realize that the point of their speech is not to answer all your questions. It’s valid in and of itself, and while it certainly can be an education tool, it’s one that you need to seek out and not demand.

    Anyway, slightly off-topic and painfully obvious. But.

  6. God, the trolls always use that question. Always. Always. Like we’re supposed to babysit them and hold their hands and educate them. Meanwhile, they’re not interested in listening. Women aren’t human to them; they have varioius excuses, but what it boils down to is women are things they amuse themselves with.

  7. For what it’s worth, “David Thompson” trolls a number of blogs I read. That’s his usual line.

    evil_fizz beat me to it, although the question (especially coming on the heels of that Lourde quote) would be obnoxious no matter who asked it, for all the reasons given above. Great post, piny.

    Still, I find Thompson’s feigned ignorance especially grating, because the dude has spent months trolling this and other feminist blogs. You’d think with such an investment of time on his part, he’d have picked up a crumb or two of knowledge just by accident.

    But that would suppose he were interested in learning anything in the first place, and I’m with Tamakazura in doubting that possibility oh, a whole hell of a lot.

  8. I’m stealing this from a thread at Alas because it seems like it’d be worth a read on this topic.

    “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (from The Black Feminist Reader, eds. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Blackwell Publishers, 2000).

  9. Here’s the link from Feministing via Tom H. and writen by Peggy McIntosh.
    http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2006/04/27/asked-and-answered/:

    Of note:

    I have met very few men who truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance, and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

    Difficulties and angers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantages associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage that rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity that on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the members of the Combahee River Collective pointed out in their “Black Feminist Statement” of 1977.

    One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant groups one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.

    Disapproving of the system won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But a “white” skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.

    To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subject taboo. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

    It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

    Read the whole thing. It’s good.

  11. “Like we’re supposed to babysit them and hold their hands and educate them.”

    I don’t understand this attitude. Doesn’t sound like a good way to attract somone to your cause. If I ask an environmentalist “What have you got against my SUV, anyway?” should he tell me to look it up on google or should he explain his position?

    It seems you assume that anyone who asks such questions doesn’t really want to hear the answers. Why is that?

  12. In a perfect world, no one would ever have to speak for their entire community. In the read world, *we have to do it all the damn time*. I feel like this is a perfect situation where there is no hard and fast rules, where people are going to each make personal decisions based on the intent of what they say, where they say it, and who they say it to. When a person who holds a minority theory/sexual orientation/religion/race/ethic group/belief/job/whatever, people in the numerical majority are going to ask stupid questions, like it or not. I wish that there was an easy solution or theory for when and how to answer those questions, but so far I haven’t found one :-/ If someone else has, I would love to see it. All the theories I have read on the issue seem to boil down to critiqing the system of privledge that goes on behind the asker without giving any real ways to solve it, and I don’t think that is good enough.

    I think that as a result of it being so highly personal and so highly situational, it becomes highly controversial. We each draw our own lines, and we each critique where others lines are drawn. Because there is no good answer, we get easily reduced to squabbling. Its one of those things where one persons gray area is anothers black and white. Its a bloody powder keg.

  13. I wish that there was an easy solution or theory for when and how to answer those questions, but so far I haven’t found one :-/ If someone else has, I would love to see it.

    I don’t know if this is easy and I certainly don’t desire to see it made official, but just personally, I normally follow this algorithm:

    1. Initially assume all questions are asked in good faith.
    2. Observe reaction of questioner upon answering questions.
    3. Use data obtained in (2) to determine whether questioner is genuinely curious, or just being a douche, or whatever.
    4. Loop (2) and (3), until or unless repeated evaluations of (2) point to questioner just being a douche.
    5. if (douche) ignore = 1;

    Presently, I am thinking of this as my “Why I Am Not Responding To Comment 11” algorithm.

  14. Jill, thanks for clarifying on the difference between asking a person about their experiences and asking them about what “The Whatever” point of view is on something.

    I was feeling awkward at first, because I do like to know what individual experiences people have had with gender/sex/class/race/religious/age discrimination. Individuals stories have done a lot to make me aware, and able to explain to others, how to show respect for everyone’s human dignity.

    On the other hand, I do hate-hate-hate it when a man asks me “What do women think about–?”, as if I could speak for every woman on the planet. I’m sure they would understand that not all men are alike, so why is it that even when I explain I can’t speak for anyone but myself, they will phrase another question the same way 5 minutes later.*

    *rhetorical question. I know no one here can speak for the doofii in my acquaintance.

  15. I’ve yet to have anybody ask that question, RM, who was doing it in good faith. “But don’t feminists REALLY hate men? Don’t feminists want to take over?” They get all their information about feminism from Faux News and they believe it, but they want a private education from you when they won’t listen to you in the first place.

  16. On the other hand, I do hate-hate-hate it when a man asks me “What do women think about–?”, as if I could speak for every woman on the planet. I’m sure they would understand that not all men are alike, so why is it that even when I explain I can’t speak for anyone but myself, they will phrase another question the same way 5 minutes later.*

    Samantha, a link just for you

    And…what Ilyka said, basically. I have yet to meet a member of any given minority group who doesn’t in practice spend a lot of time answering those questions.

  17. Perhaps it’s not my place to say–I think the record will show that I am not exactly gifted with tact–But I agree. It’s so easy to learn new things these days, that any real ignorance on the part of the individual HAS to be maintained by force. Perhaps I’m not the one to be saying this though, as on this subject I’ve often stepped on a few mines myself.

    But oh well. One lives, and one learns. If I ever step in it as bad as this guy, please gently let me know. I assure you, I bear no intentional ill will, and with a little coaching I may learn.

  18. I don’t see what was so bad about his question As someone in a tech field, I get annoyed by the “RTFM” types, even if the person asking the question really should have, well, RTFM. When I’m teaching a class, I realize that that kind of attitude can put someone off math and science forever.

    And telling a PhD candidate that she’s a bad writer? That kind of thing happens on the Internet. Not everyone is going to like your writing. I get comments like that all the time on my blog, sometimes because someone doesn’t like what I have to say, sometimes because of a string of weak or forgettable posts. Usually both.

  19. If you mean Raging Moderate’s question, it’s because he asks once every day and twice on Sunday. We’ve been through it, over and over.

    As someone in a tech field, I get annoyed by the “RTFM” types, even if the person asking the question really should have, well, RTFM. When I’m teaching a class, I realize that that kind of attitude can put someone off math and science forever.

    Well, I suppose it depends on whether you think that feminist blogs are your personal classroom or not. Frankly, I think it’s arrogant to assume that a blog must have you in mind as its audience all the time. There are plenty of blogs that I read which discuss issues I’m largely unfamiliar with, particularly blogs that talk about race and class and the intersection of both. So I read, see what other people are talking about, and ask an occasional question if I’m confused about the point, rather than whine about how I’m not the target audience. There are discussions which can on that do not revolve around me an my personal experiences.

  20. Ugh, that last sentence should read:

    There are discussions which can go on that do not revolve around me and my personal experiences.

  22. And telling a PhD candidate that she’s a bad writer? That kind of thing happens on the Internet. Not everyone is going to like your writing. I get comments like that all the time on my blog, sometimes because someone doesn’t like what I have to say, sometimes because of a string of weak or forgettable posts. Usually both.

    She said that nubian needed to take a couple of elementary writing classes, which is a little bit different.

  23. Well, if you meant David’s, two things. First, he can RTFM. There are tons of resources out there which will answer his basic questions. Google is a marvelous thing. Secondly, I think that people who ask that question are rarely sincere. What they really want to know is why a particular forum isn’t pandering to them. Not every blog is going to be X Issue 101. I don’t head into graduate courses in computer science and say “So, what’s an operating system?”

    I’m less worried about turning people off from a particular issue than I am in making sure they’re in the right level class. If you’re only qualified for 100 level courses, putting you in with the grad students is going to frustrate the hell out of everyone. You’re going to be confused, the grad students are going to be mad that you keep having to go over the basics again and again and again.

  24. I don’t understand this attitude. Doesn’t sound like a good way to attract somone to your cause. If I ask an environmentalist “What have you got against my SUV, anyway?” should he tell me to look it up on google or should he explain his position?

    It seems you assume that anyone who asks such questions doesn’t really want to hear the answers. Why is that?

    Following up on what evil_fizz just posted, the problem arises when you’re having a discussion among informed participants, and someone wanders in, claiming ignorance, and demands that every thing comes to a screeching halt until he’s been brought up to speed. In the example of the guy asking about the SUV, the more knowledgeable person challenged the ignorant person, and so asking for an explanation is reasonable. Thrusting oneself into an existing discussion just to derail it with newbie questions is a very different dynamic. It’s also a very arrogant thing to do, potentially.

    It’s the combination of assuming that educating a clueless newbie is the primary goal of the discussion — which it may very well not be — and refusing to take any responsibility for educating oneself. Would-be students who come into a class mid-term, having done none of the reading, and who then demand that the class stop in order to answer questions that were addressed on the very first day of class are not honest participants or learners — they are selfish and arrogant and want to derail the discussion. If they then get huffy or defensive when this is pointed out to them… well, that’s just confirmation of their lack of respect for the topic and those who take it seriously.

    Yes, it’s nice to educate someone who’s genuinely clueless and honestly doesn’t know where to begin, especially if you’ve called them out on their ignorance first — but such naive individuals are pretty rare on the ground, and most newbies have at least the sense to lurk and poke around to educate themselves first — not least so they don’t look like idiots when they burst into on-going conversations.

    Pretending that these basic rules of human interaction don’t apply to one is not a great way to encourage others to help you, in any case.

  25. Great post.

    As an aside, the woman telling Nubian to take a writing class needs to look at the three fingers pointing back at her.

    Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

    I hate answering any and all questions about trans related stuff when asked by any person who hasn’t had similar experiences, or provided care for someone who has. I include in this group those folks claiming a some form of trans identity who do not desire medical modalities.

    I no longer participate in panel discussions where I tell my personal story. While I get Jill’s point, the value of the personal story, in my opinion as a transsexual, functions to make the listener feel really okay about themselves. I remain a freak.

    Politically all gains in this country have been made by collective action, not personal story telling. I get that tone and manner are important. But in all my personal relationships my stories came about over time, not as a consequence of some Jerry Springer drive-by, but as a natural evolution of the relationship.

    Lastly, in addition to the many great resources available to read, the work of education can be assumed by allies. That’s why we want them. That’s why we need to be good ones.

    I get frustrated with white folks who don’t get it, but their comments do not cut me to the quick. Questions about my transsexual body, however, can and do, enrage me.

    Card catalogue references:
    Eli Clare, Exile and Pride
    On Being White (can’t remember the author)
    No Pity (about disability rights and ableism, can’t remember the author’s name)
    Queerly Classed (title speaks for itself. Can’t remember the author’s name)
    All Our Relations (written by the woman who ran for VP with Nader in 2000)
    The State of Native America
    Finite and Infinite Games

    Best,
    Jay

  26. I wish that there was an easy solution or theory for when and how to answer those questions, but so far I haven’t found one :-/ If someone else has, I would love to see it.

    I think what Glenn Greenwald did in compiling his insights about the Bush warrantless wiretapping scandal into an easily-accessed “Compendium of NSA Arguments” URL-click reference on his main page provides an excellent model to follow. And of course there are tons of blogs out there with FAQ clicks to help newcomers get oriented.

    If one of the goals of this blog is to educate/persuade people who don’t currently understand/subscribe to its viewpoint(s), then something similar — addressing “Feminism Basics” and (in particular) “Trans Issues” — would go a long way.

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