"if i do this people say it's racist, if i do the opposite, people say it's racist. so there's no point cause i can't win"
(every example we discuss, whether it's a thought experiment or a research study): "we don't know enough about this situation to say it's racist." we almost never broach the intellectual nuances behind the idea, everyone is too busy pointing out situations where you can't say it's racist, sexist, etc. one person today argued that an idea was invalid because you can't measure eye contact (...are you for real?).
listening to this has strengthened my idea of what it means to be an ally. my classmates are saying (and i understand their motivation) that if no one puts forward an "answer" to racism or sexism that they can't be expected to do anything. but i think the answer may be something they don't want to hear: if you're in a space where intersectionality and being an ally may be appropriate, as an ally your job is to sit down and shut up. that is it, before anything else, forever. they don't understand that if they want to help their job is to listen to minoritized people, rally behind minoritized people. if they find that too confusing and frustrating to handle, WELCOME TO THE CLUB and enjoy that you have the privilege to not have to care about it because it doesn't affect you.
there was also a (one sided) open class debate about whether gender is nature v. nurture. no surprise, i think it's 100% nurture, pure socialization. biology is often played as the trump card in this discussion, like, "men and women are OBVIOUSLY physically different, so you can't say there's no difference." but here are the two main reasons i think this is no trump card at all:
- neurological differences are almost always cited. i am kind of surprised anyone who knows anything about neuroscientific human development (which should be all of them since they all take ed psych) would say this. we are taught on the first day of ed psych that people's neuropathways are strengthened when they are repeated in engaging ways (therefore, change up your teaching!). how do people not calculate the neurological effects of being socialized to be female or male in a gender binary society? of course their brains are different BECAUSE we have a binary, deep rooted idea of gender. these differences are not present at birth.
- the other thing people always bring up is that men are "naturally" physically more strong than women. to me this makes no sense because of natural selection. try to think of a time (as far as we know) when it was fashionable and desirable for a man to be with a woman who was bigger than him. i don't know of any. if men want to be with women who are smaller than them, of course we have bred ourselves to be that way.
another frustrating and interesting thing i have encountered recently is stay at home dads. i have respect for and interest in any man who is a stay at home dad, just like i would want to engage with a woman who has become a successful businesswoman. there are three stay at home dads i come in contact with regularly these days: one is online (in law relative living in the state) and two are in my education classes. i respect all of them and they have brought up interesting points in a lot of my discussions with them. but all three inevitably sometimes express the same attitude, which is that since they are a stay at home dads they don't have to talk about feminism. or feminism is overreaching because how could feminism be relevant when there they are, a stay at home dad. it's an interesting expression of privilege that i haven't seen before: if a guy does something feminist and it's not a big deal for him as it would be for a woman to do something traditional female, is a natural consequence of that to think that feminism is off base? if a guy and his female partner decide she should be the breadwinner permanently or for a time not for reasons of gender equality but for purely economic reasons, does that become another source of privilege for the guy?