Sunday, April 19, 2009
Minority Issues
I was reminded recently how easily one can forget the peculiarities of minority life in the academy, even when one is a minority of sorts. Whether that minority status stems from sexual orientation or ethnic or racial identity, the academy is still built for white men. That is not to say that I don't have some lovely white male colleagues, but rather that the institution of post-graduate learning was structured for a particular exclusivity, one founded generations ago in the western expansion of Europe. Those walls are crumbling, but we fight different parts of them. I have my own battles, but I am more interested in yours. What is minority life in the academy like for you? What issues matter (when one gets through the idiocies of daily life)? What would truly improve your experience?
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Now that we have a black president and there's no need for feminism (we've "won" apparently), all my students are obsessed with gay rights being the most important and/or last frontier. The biggest struggle is to convince them that it's not "done" and that there are still immense disparities based on race and gender.
ReplyDeleteOf course it's not that I don't support universal equality and gay rights, but I fear that women will always be last in line since since they are not technically/numerically/visibly a minority (50%, right?). And yet for millenia their power has been universally and ubiquitously unequal.
But no one has enough energy to fight every battle; how do we press for our own category yet avoid competing with each other for "most oppressed"? Most day this seems to me an insurmountable obstacle.
Honest question: what are the institutional challenges that academia (as a whole) poses for minority groups?
ReplyDeleteWhile it is clearly the case that particular institutions present particular problems (e.g. lack of maternity support, partner benefits, bigoted administrators, etc.), I don't see any endemic/inherent disparities within the Academy (notwithstanding the credentialism, which, it seems to me, is a necessary evil).
And, yes, for the record, I'm a white male so I may just be part of the problem, but am trying not to be.
Deeply competitive, hierarchical power structures geared towards public performance doesn't appear gendered?
ReplyDeleteIn that vein, I am reminded of something I read about women on Wall Street. From the 2004 NYT article:
ReplyDelete"Still, the executives who run the biggest firms on Wall Street insist that they are meritocracies, where performance is all that counts...'They really don't believe they are discriminating,'' Ms. Sumner said of the brokerage managers she has encountered. ''If you come in and you look like they want you to look -- probably a white male profile -- they'll project success on you. They have a specific view of what a successful broker or manager will look like, and it is not usually a woman or a black or Hispanic.''
"Projecting success" on a certain category is an apt description of how the historical prejudice of any given field can institutionalize bias. I would say that there's the same cultural expectation of "(real) professor" meaning "white man." No matter how enlightened someone is, (s)he likely has these biases, as psych. association tests show us again and again.
Add in the fact that women performing authority (professorial or otherwise) are inevitably going to be judged too aggressive if they do it well; lesser recognition of achievements (because success is not projected); greater expectations for service; greater displeasure when she says no; less immediate respect from students; still scoring lower overall on evaluations; etc.
These are not things that a single policy can change. They require individuals to question their own actions on a regular basis, to frankly ask and admit if they are exercising such expectation/projection--and indeed, to be very wary of assuming the possibly of a purely meritocratic judgment. Or at the very, very least, to admit that these issues still exist.