I have probably mentioned this on the blog before, but a Chumash Elder with whom I was acquainted* back in Santa Barbara used to like asking "What's the biggest tribe in North America?" When you asked him the answer, he'd respond with "the Wannabe tribe!"
I was reminded of this yesterday, as I drove with the Native American monitor on my current project. As we moved from one site to another, we discussed all manner of things, one of which was the weird notions that many non-Native people have about how Native Americans live and how they are as people. She told me about how, as a teenager, a church located in her town arranged for people from her community to go live with people in San Francisco, as a sort of cultural exchange. Based on what she told me, it sounds as if she has generally good memories of the experience, but she told me about a weird set of conversations that she had with the host family, in which they were convinced that she lived in a ti-pi, hunted for food, etc., and had a hard time grasping that she lived in a normal house, had electricity, went to the grocery store, etc. The impression that these folks had, and keep in mind that this was the late 60s, a time when the vast majority of Native Americans lived in houses, had electricity, lived in towns, etc., was that the native peoples of the Americas were "wild" and "free", a romantic (and mistaken, and in some ways dehumanizing) belief, but a pervasive one.
Her story made me think of how some people react when they hear about my own ancestry. My grandmother on my mother's side was Cherokee/Choctaw, which means that my mother was half-native, and I am one-quarter, if we go by genetics. But, and here's the important thing, my mother and I were both raised in urban areas of Stanislaus County, California. We are both blond, we both have fair skin, and her eyes are blue while mine are green. We were never treated as being anything other than white, and neither Cherokee nor Choctaw culture were part of our upbringing - I only know about them because of my training in anthropology, which is essentially an outsider's perspective. While we might be considered Native American or partially so due to our ancestry, the fact of the matter is that we are for all practical purposes Caucasian. Whatever my ancestry, I am no more Cherokee or Choctaw than I am German, Irish, Scottish, or Swedish.
It has always struck me as curious, and more than a bit annoying, when people who are, like me, essentially just American white mutts discover that they have some Native American ancestry (or, as I suspect is often the case, invent Native American ancestry for themselves) and from there begin to claim some sort of bizarre "birthright" based on what are essentially racist notions of the wild, free, mystically-tied-to-nature "Native American." Now, don't misunderstand me, I see no problem with people becoming interested in the actual cultures of other people, regardless of whether this is out of simple curiosity or out of a discovery of their own genetic ancestry (certainly, I wouldn't be in my own line of work if I didn't support such things), but that is not typically what happens. More often, people find out that they have Native American ancestry, and from there decide that this means that they have some sort of magical tie to a non-existent people (the Native Americans of myth rather than reality) and that they are somehow more tied in to some sort of quasi-divine notion of nature. Most of these folks have little to no knowledge of the actual culture that they claim membership in, and often lump all Native Americans in to one monolithic whole - a tendency which demonstrates the depth of the ignorance of such individuals- and it is a monolithic whole that owes more to a combination of Westerns and New Age nonsense than to actual history. It's culture porn in it's purest form.
When I discuss this with people, they often say something along the lines of "hey, at least they're looking to the Native Americans with respect, which has got to be an improvement over the racism of the past!" Perhaps, but it is still not a good thing. Eve Darian-smith, in her book The New Capitalists, describes how the notion of the spiritual/natural mystic Indian held by many of the Wannabe tribe, and held by many people who aren't Wannabe members but are sympathetic to them, has been used by those who oppose entry of actual tribal organization into businesses - the basic idea being that people are comfortable with "natural" Indians, but don't think that they should be involved with such trappings of the modern world as business, science, etc.** This thinking can even impact individuals outside of tribal organizations, who often report that they have a hard time being taken seriously by colleagues who see them as an emblem of some sort of magical culture rather than as the individuals and professionals that they actually are.
Darian-Smith is Australian, and from what she has told me, similar problems face the Aborigines of Australia, and I suspect that this is not uncommon in other parts of the world.
So, yeah, it's probably an improvement that most non-natives now see these people as something other than a problem to be solved (as was the case for most of the 19th and even a chunk of the 20th centuries), but the conversion into divine nature-heroes probably isn't particularly helpful. And when it becomes difficult to determine who really is, and who isn't, a member of the groups because so many people claim a culture that they don't actually have any experience with, well, it becomes more of a problem.
*It's a funny thing, I come into contact with these people because of my job, and so when I say that I know a Chumash Elder, that's not bragging or an attempt to show off my multi-cultural ties to mysticism or any other such bullshit, it's pretty much the same as a construction worker saying that he knows a safety inspector. However, as described in this entry, we have so dehumanized the native peoples of tha Americas, first by demonizing them and now by making them into inhuman avatars for a nature-based mysticism, that to say that I know an elder sounds like I am claiming some sort of claims to being close to divine power.
**All of this despite the fact that there are many successful professionals from the myriad of Native American groups.
Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Monday, August 9, 2010
Old time religion...or not
When I was in high school, one of my friends announced that, having discovered that she was something in the neighborhood of 1/16th or 1/32nd Iroquois, she was going to start following "the Native American religion." She was rather proud of her new-found and allegedly deeper, nature-derived, mystical spirituality, which of course made her a bit obnoxious. Even more bizarre, she had turned to another friend, who was equally non-Native American, for information on this religious path*.
I found this whole turn of events baffling for three reasons.
The first reason is that I have never understood the common belief that having Native American ancestry somehow makes one more mystical, or provides them with a mystical birth-right. As I have described before, a full quarter of my ancestry comes from the Cherokee and Choctaw, and this in no way changes the fact that I was essentially raised as a white kid in a small town (which rapidly became the suburbs as I was growing up). The "mystical Indian" notion is at its heart a racist concept, and one that has been used (both historically and in the here and now) to damage attempts by Native American groups and individuals to advance their own causes in our modern world (see Eve Darian-Smith's book New Capitalists for a good discussion of the matter). It's basically culture porn that is used by (usually white) people who feel dissatisfied with their lives to try to make themselves feel connected to some other (non-existent but stereotypical) culture.
The second reason that I was baffled by this young woman's claim was the fact that the notion of the (as in a singular) Native American religion is absurd on its face. At the time of European contact there were hundreds of ethno-linguistic groups within North America and thousands of tribes and tribelets. Even looking at one ethno-linguistic group, let's say the Gabrielino of southern California, there is a figure who is considered a historic leaders at one village, a spirit at another village, a messiah at another, a culture hero at another, and a god at another village. And this is within an area that consists solely of modern-day Los Angeles and Orange Counties and amongst people who spoke dialects of the same language family and were part of the same social network. This doesn't even get into the differences between the Gabrielino and the Iroquois, Choctaw, Inuit, Tlingit, Hopi, Chumash, and so on. The notion that there is a single "Native American Religion" is based on the notion that all of the native people of the Americas are more or less the same - which is another rather racist notion*.
The third reason that this was baffling to me is something that I have actually come to accept, though not quite understand, since then. We, as a society, tend to talk about religion as being a deeply-held set of convictions and beliefs about the way the world works. For many people this is true. However, for some people religion has significantly more to do with adopting an identity than with belief. This is why it is not uncommon for some people to adopt religions when they admit that they don't know the religion's tenets, and why it's not uncommon for adherents to many social movements to adopt the same religious label as other members of the movement even though they may not actually hold the same beliefs or even know what the religion's beliefs are**. While I don't know if this woman was among them, as a teenager and as a college student, I knew many people who adopted new religions as a form of rebellion (they later admitted this was the case, which is how I can comment on it without worrying about overly-insulting them).
At any rate, I find the declaration just as odd now as I did back then.
*I remember, several years back, seeing the video-tape box for the film Island of the Blue Dolphins. The story is about a Nicoleno woman, but the video box bragged about having "genuine Salinans" in the cast. On the one hand, this seems rather uncomfortably reminiscent of the 17th-19th century European habit of putting non-Europeans on display for public gawking. On the other hand, it is as non-sensical as filming a movie about 1930s France and bragging that your film is especially authentic because the cast features "real, live Germans!"
**In retrospect, discovering this, and realizing that many people don't actually know, much less believe, the teachings of the religion that they claim to follow (such as the people I met who refused to believe that Jesus was Jewish) is probably one of the many factors that made me really start questioning religion in general.
I found this whole turn of events baffling for three reasons.
The first reason is that I have never understood the common belief that having Native American ancestry somehow makes one more mystical, or provides them with a mystical birth-right. As I have described before, a full quarter of my ancestry comes from the Cherokee and Choctaw, and this in no way changes the fact that I was essentially raised as a white kid in a small town (which rapidly became the suburbs as I was growing up). The "mystical Indian" notion is at its heart a racist concept, and one that has been used (both historically and in the here and now) to damage attempts by Native American groups and individuals to advance their own causes in our modern world (see Eve Darian-Smith's book New Capitalists for a good discussion of the matter). It's basically culture porn that is used by (usually white) people who feel dissatisfied with their lives to try to make themselves feel connected to some other (non-existent but stereotypical) culture.
The second reason that I was baffled by this young woman's claim was the fact that the notion of the (as in a singular) Native American religion is absurd on its face. At the time of European contact there were hundreds of ethno-linguistic groups within North America and thousands of tribes and tribelets. Even looking at one ethno-linguistic group, let's say the Gabrielino of southern California, there is a figure who is considered a historic leaders at one village, a spirit at another village, a messiah at another, a culture hero at another, and a god at another village. And this is within an area that consists solely of modern-day Los Angeles and Orange Counties and amongst people who spoke dialects of the same language family and were part of the same social network. This doesn't even get into the differences between the Gabrielino and the Iroquois, Choctaw, Inuit, Tlingit, Hopi, Chumash, and so on. The notion that there is a single "Native American Religion" is based on the notion that all of the native people of the Americas are more or less the same - which is another rather racist notion*.
The third reason that this was baffling to me is something that I have actually come to accept, though not quite understand, since then. We, as a society, tend to talk about religion as being a deeply-held set of convictions and beliefs about the way the world works. For many people this is true. However, for some people religion has significantly more to do with adopting an identity than with belief. This is why it is not uncommon for some people to adopt religions when they admit that they don't know the religion's tenets, and why it's not uncommon for adherents to many social movements to adopt the same religious label as other members of the movement even though they may not actually hold the same beliefs or even know what the religion's beliefs are**. While I don't know if this woman was among them, as a teenager and as a college student, I knew many people who adopted new religions as a form of rebellion (they later admitted this was the case, which is how I can comment on it without worrying about overly-insulting them).
At any rate, I find the declaration just as odd now as I did back then.
*I remember, several years back, seeing the video-tape box for the film Island of the Blue Dolphins. The story is about a Nicoleno woman, but the video box bragged about having "genuine Salinans" in the cast. On the one hand, this seems rather uncomfortably reminiscent of the 17th-19th century European habit of putting non-Europeans on display for public gawking. On the other hand, it is as non-sensical as filming a movie about 1930s France and bragging that your film is especially authentic because the cast features "real, live Germans!"
**In retrospect, discovering this, and realizing that many people don't actually know, much less believe, the teachings of the religion that they claim to follow (such as the people I met who refused to believe that Jesus was Jewish) is probably one of the many factors that made me really start questioning religion in general.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Just This White Guy
As Patrick McLean has pointed out, race is weird.
Conversations about race, and even private thoughts about race, are often disturbing or upsetting because it's so often the elephant in the room. It's the thing that everybody wants to talk about and think about, but nobody wants to mention or ponder too deeply. And race doesn't exist in a vacuum, as its own independent thing, but rather is a factor that influences every part of our lives, and so it creates a situation where nearly everything can be discussed racially, and yet most of us choose not to.
What brought this to my mind most recently is something that happened this afternoon. During my lunch break, I visited a friend in the hospital. As I was in the room, another friend of hers entered. This friend was an African-American woman, and she was not someone who I had met before.
As I left the room, I gave my usual goofy farewell, which was to give one of the many political slogans that I had heard shouted about when I was a college student, in this case "fight the power and damn the man!"
As I walked down to my car, I found myself wondering about the origins of this set of slogans. I had always heard them used by rather affluent children of affluent parents who would attend a rally to show their opposition to global capitalism before driving off in the BMW that their parents had given them to scarf down lattes at the local cafe. I had never heard these slogans from anyone who was actually well informed - they tended to engage in a wide variety of political activities and didn't just limit themselves to rallies - nor from anyone who had actually experienced any form of oppression. I had only ever heard them shouted by those who benefited from and engaged in the sort of activity that they claimed to be fighting against, and as such their context within my mind was a fairly silly one and I have found the slogans to be jokes as a result.
But, as I walked to my car, I began to think about the slogans, and I believe that they, or their immediate ancestors, were in use within the civil rights movement, where they had a definite and clear meaning and purpose before they were abducted and mutilated by the goateed coffee-house sorts during the 80s and 90s. And then I found myself wondering if my use of them would have been offensive to my friend's other friend. Had I inadvertently said something racist while trying to crack a joke to amuse my friend?
I then considered that, consistent with a running gag between this friend and I, I had cracked a "yo' mama" joke as I left. And then I considered that these jokes come from common perceptions of inner-city "black speak" and could be considered racist, even though the context in which I learned them was the "people sitting around cracking weird jokes" context.
And then I went into white-guy apoplexy. I didn't feel that I could ask if my comments were offensive or viewed as racist because to do so would be to draw attention to them and possibly point them out if they had been missed before. To ask would also reveal me for the racially insensitive Caucasian guy that I probably am (whether my jokes reveal it or not). At the same time, I couldn't ignore the possibility that they were, and couldn't stop worrying that I had inadvertently offended a stranger and, just as bad, found some racist core within myself.
So, of course, instead of asking, I wrote a blog post. Which, really, just reinforces some of the stereotypes about middle-class white people.
Did the other visitor even notice my comments, or give them any thought? I don't know. Is my worry about them a sign that I am making the ironically racist assumption that someone of African American ancestry would be concerned about me saying these types of things without acknowledging their historic context? Yeah, probably. Am I painting with a broad brush in thinking that every African-American is going to be sensitive to these sorts of jokes? Definitely. Would it be folly of me to not be aware that at least some African-Americans aren't going to think about such jokes? Yeah, probably.
As I got into my car and turned on the radio, a program on "conversations on race and a post-racial America" was on. The discussion panel and many of the callers were echoing my own thoughts - that it is currently impossible to determine what is and what is not truly racist because we don't have any clear idea of what racism actually is, and because race doesn't exist in a vacuum, but rather touches on so many other aspects of our lives.
When someone is denied a job because the hiring manager believes that someone of the applicant's ethnicity is clearly unqualified, that is clearly racism. When someone distrusts someone because of their ancestry rather than their actions, that is clearly racism. When someone cracks jokes that could strike a chord because of the history of racism, but to the mind of the joke teller are actually reflections on the silliness of other people regardless of ethnicity? Well, it's hard, if not impossible, to say if that is racism, because there is no clear definition of what racism is.
Clearly, there was no racist intent. In my mind, race never even entered the equation when I cracked the jokes. But, again, the vernacular of the jokes is rooted in the previous generation's struggle with issues of race, and in that sense there was a racial component whether it was intended or not. Is it going to cause offense? Well, that depends on who hears it and whether or not they care. And whether or not the hearer cares is not entirely dependent on their own ethnicity, but also takes into account many other factors from their upbringing and their current life.
Why can't we come to some sort of agreement on which "fringe" (for complete lack of a better word) behaviors are racist and which are not? Because race and racism are complicated matters.
We frequently hear about "what black/white/Latino/Jewish/Native American people think about race" as if any of these groups is a monolithic whole, which they are not. Martin Luther King and Malcom X both had different ideas of race, and while they had some similar experiences, they also had many that were different. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both southern whites, also had different ideas and experiences of race. No matter what racial group you are speaking of, it is guaranteed that you will find a diversity of opinions and experiences, even if certain types of experiences and opinions are more common than others. When we speak about the experience of any particular group, what we are really doing is speaking of statistical groupings - people in Group X are more likely to have had experiences A and B, and hold opinions C and D, but not everyone within the group is going to have those experiences or hold those opinions.
There's not even a real definition of what race is. When biologists and physical anthropologists talk about race, they are talking about common ancestries producing statistical clusters of genetic traits - but these traits are always in flux and no race is "set", they are simply the current clustering of traits, and genetic drift is always happening*.
When most people talk about race, what they are usually referring to is a mix of physical traits (largely, but not solely, due to genetics) and cultural traits that come from upbringing and general environment. The cultural and biological component are two different things, and the genetic component is again a statistical clustering - people in group X are statistically more likely to have genetic trait Y, but they are not the only group with any genetic trait, nor or members of this group guaranteed to have the genetic trait**. Also, no one group has lived in isolation, and genes have flowed from everywhere to everywhere throughout humanity's history, so the notion of set racial categories based on genetics is laughable.
The cultural traits that we think of when we talk about race are equally problematic. Modes of speech, family structure, musical preferences, etc. that we tend to use to mark race within western culture are all highly fluid and changing even faster than the fast-changing genetic clusters.
If you study anthropology, you'll often hear that race is a social construct. While there are biological aspects to our concept of race, the racial labels that we use were never good for labelling ever-changing phenomenon of either culture or race, and it is these very flawed labels that we tend to use. So, while elements of race may have ties in the physical world, the groupings that fall under our racial labels are basically arbitrary but loosely based both on geographic origin and history.
So, race is a difficult term to define, even loosely. Racism should at least be clear-cut...but of course, it isn't.
If one uses a term that has an origin in some racist aspect of our past, but which is not thought of by the person using the term as having any racial meaning, has that person said something racist? Many people would say that they have not, as the person wasn't thinking of race and had no racist intention when saying whatever they said. Other people would say that yes, it is racist - regardless of the intention of the speaker, the use of a racist term from the past perpetuates the feelings of that time even if only by causing upset to the hearer. Who is correct? Well, it probably depends on the people involved, the term used, and the nature of the conversation. But, at its core, you're looking at a question of whether the intention of the speaker or the experience of the listener should take precedence, and I don't know how that can be resolved.
Is it racist to point to objective facts that are the result of racism past? For example, is it racist to point to the higher levels of poverty in inner-city African-American communities? Well, it depends. If you are noting it as a result of historic racism, it'd be hard to label the observation racist. If you are citing it in an argument for the inferiority of an ethnic group, well, that's pretty definitely racist. If you are noting it as a reality and discussing it as a factor in politics? Well, then it's really going to depend on your exact point, and what assumptions are going into it.
But none of this helps me. Did I say something stupid and racist today? I don't know. Would it be appropriate for me to ask the person (who I don't know)? I haven't a clue. Should I let it bother me? I really have no idea.
I have no idea as to what the answer to most of these questions is. The simple fact of the matter is that, as a caller into the show I was listening to pointed out, we don't have a conversation on race. Some people try to talk about it, but they tend to be drowned out on all sides by people making proclamations based on their own experiences and assumptions without regard to the experience of others.
And in the end, I'm not just an oblivious white guy trying to figure these things out. I'm only this oblivious white guy trying to figure things out, and all I can do is get off of my ass and start trying to be more aware of what's going on around me.
* Consider that there are many racial groups noted in Roman and Greek histories that no longer exist because they have been absorbed into, or through physical isolation given rise to, other racial groups.
** When I was in graduate school, I routinely came across photos taken by ethnographers of people from Australia and sub-Saharan African who had traits such as blond hair and blues eyes. These traits were rare among those populations, but not non-existent. It was information such as this that caused most anthropologists to become suspicious of race as strong biological categories.
Conversations about race, and even private thoughts about race, are often disturbing or upsetting because it's so often the elephant in the room. It's the thing that everybody wants to talk about and think about, but nobody wants to mention or ponder too deeply. And race doesn't exist in a vacuum, as its own independent thing, but rather is a factor that influences every part of our lives, and so it creates a situation where nearly everything can be discussed racially, and yet most of us choose not to.
What brought this to my mind most recently is something that happened this afternoon. During my lunch break, I visited a friend in the hospital. As I was in the room, another friend of hers entered. This friend was an African-American woman, and she was not someone who I had met before.
As I left the room, I gave my usual goofy farewell, which was to give one of the many political slogans that I had heard shouted about when I was a college student, in this case "fight the power and damn the man!"
As I walked down to my car, I found myself wondering about the origins of this set of slogans. I had always heard them used by rather affluent children of affluent parents who would attend a rally to show their opposition to global capitalism before driving off in the BMW that their parents had given them to scarf down lattes at the local cafe. I had never heard these slogans from anyone who was actually well informed - they tended to engage in a wide variety of political activities and didn't just limit themselves to rallies - nor from anyone who had actually experienced any form of oppression. I had only ever heard them shouted by those who benefited from and engaged in the sort of activity that they claimed to be fighting against, and as such their context within my mind was a fairly silly one and I have found the slogans to be jokes as a result.
But, as I walked to my car, I began to think about the slogans, and I believe that they, or their immediate ancestors, were in use within the civil rights movement, where they had a definite and clear meaning and purpose before they were abducted and mutilated by the goateed coffee-house sorts during the 80s and 90s. And then I found myself wondering if my use of them would have been offensive to my friend's other friend. Had I inadvertently said something racist while trying to crack a joke to amuse my friend?
I then considered that, consistent with a running gag between this friend and I, I had cracked a "yo' mama" joke as I left. And then I considered that these jokes come from common perceptions of inner-city "black speak" and could be considered racist, even though the context in which I learned them was the "people sitting around cracking weird jokes" context.
And then I went into white-guy apoplexy. I didn't feel that I could ask if my comments were offensive or viewed as racist because to do so would be to draw attention to them and possibly point them out if they had been missed before. To ask would also reveal me for the racially insensitive Caucasian guy that I probably am (whether my jokes reveal it or not). At the same time, I couldn't ignore the possibility that they were, and couldn't stop worrying that I had inadvertently offended a stranger and, just as bad, found some racist core within myself.
So, of course, instead of asking, I wrote a blog post. Which, really, just reinforces some of the stereotypes about middle-class white people.
Did the other visitor even notice my comments, or give them any thought? I don't know. Is my worry about them a sign that I am making the ironically racist assumption that someone of African American ancestry would be concerned about me saying these types of things without acknowledging their historic context? Yeah, probably. Am I painting with a broad brush in thinking that every African-American is going to be sensitive to these sorts of jokes? Definitely. Would it be folly of me to not be aware that at least some African-Americans aren't going to think about such jokes? Yeah, probably.
As I got into my car and turned on the radio, a program on "conversations on race and a post-racial America" was on. The discussion panel and many of the callers were echoing my own thoughts - that it is currently impossible to determine what is and what is not truly racist because we don't have any clear idea of what racism actually is, and because race doesn't exist in a vacuum, but rather touches on so many other aspects of our lives.
When someone is denied a job because the hiring manager believes that someone of the applicant's ethnicity is clearly unqualified, that is clearly racism. When someone distrusts someone because of their ancestry rather than their actions, that is clearly racism. When someone cracks jokes that could strike a chord because of the history of racism, but to the mind of the joke teller are actually reflections on the silliness of other people regardless of ethnicity? Well, it's hard, if not impossible, to say if that is racism, because there is no clear definition of what racism is.
Clearly, there was no racist intent. In my mind, race never even entered the equation when I cracked the jokes. But, again, the vernacular of the jokes is rooted in the previous generation's struggle with issues of race, and in that sense there was a racial component whether it was intended or not. Is it going to cause offense? Well, that depends on who hears it and whether or not they care. And whether or not the hearer cares is not entirely dependent on their own ethnicity, but also takes into account many other factors from their upbringing and their current life.
Why can't we come to some sort of agreement on which "fringe" (for complete lack of a better word) behaviors are racist and which are not? Because race and racism are complicated matters.
We frequently hear about "what black/white/Latino/Jewish/Native American people think about race" as if any of these groups is a monolithic whole, which they are not. Martin Luther King and Malcom X both had different ideas of race, and while they had some similar experiences, they also had many that were different. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both southern whites, also had different ideas and experiences of race. No matter what racial group you are speaking of, it is guaranteed that you will find a diversity of opinions and experiences, even if certain types of experiences and opinions are more common than others. When we speak about the experience of any particular group, what we are really doing is speaking of statistical groupings - people in Group X are more likely to have had experiences A and B, and hold opinions C and D, but not everyone within the group is going to have those experiences or hold those opinions.
There's not even a real definition of what race is. When biologists and physical anthropologists talk about race, they are talking about common ancestries producing statistical clusters of genetic traits - but these traits are always in flux and no race is "set", they are simply the current clustering of traits, and genetic drift is always happening*.
When most people talk about race, what they are usually referring to is a mix of physical traits (largely, but not solely, due to genetics) and cultural traits that come from upbringing and general environment. The cultural and biological component are two different things, and the genetic component is again a statistical clustering - people in group X are statistically more likely to have genetic trait Y, but they are not the only group with any genetic trait, nor or members of this group guaranteed to have the genetic trait**. Also, no one group has lived in isolation, and genes have flowed from everywhere to everywhere throughout humanity's history, so the notion of set racial categories based on genetics is laughable.
The cultural traits that we think of when we talk about race are equally problematic. Modes of speech, family structure, musical preferences, etc. that we tend to use to mark race within western culture are all highly fluid and changing even faster than the fast-changing genetic clusters.
If you study anthropology, you'll often hear that race is a social construct. While there are biological aspects to our concept of race, the racial labels that we use were never good for labelling ever-changing phenomenon of either culture or race, and it is these very flawed labels that we tend to use. So, while elements of race may have ties in the physical world, the groupings that fall under our racial labels are basically arbitrary but loosely based both on geographic origin and history.
So, race is a difficult term to define, even loosely. Racism should at least be clear-cut...but of course, it isn't.
If one uses a term that has an origin in some racist aspect of our past, but which is not thought of by the person using the term as having any racial meaning, has that person said something racist? Many people would say that they have not, as the person wasn't thinking of race and had no racist intention when saying whatever they said. Other people would say that yes, it is racist - regardless of the intention of the speaker, the use of a racist term from the past perpetuates the feelings of that time even if only by causing upset to the hearer. Who is correct? Well, it probably depends on the people involved, the term used, and the nature of the conversation. But, at its core, you're looking at a question of whether the intention of the speaker or the experience of the listener should take precedence, and I don't know how that can be resolved.
Is it racist to point to objective facts that are the result of racism past? For example, is it racist to point to the higher levels of poverty in inner-city African-American communities? Well, it depends. If you are noting it as a result of historic racism, it'd be hard to label the observation racist. If you are citing it in an argument for the inferiority of an ethnic group, well, that's pretty definitely racist. If you are noting it as a reality and discussing it as a factor in politics? Well, then it's really going to depend on your exact point, and what assumptions are going into it.
But none of this helps me. Did I say something stupid and racist today? I don't know. Would it be appropriate for me to ask the person (who I don't know)? I haven't a clue. Should I let it bother me? I really have no idea.
I have no idea as to what the answer to most of these questions is. The simple fact of the matter is that, as a caller into the show I was listening to pointed out, we don't have a conversation on race. Some people try to talk about it, but they tend to be drowned out on all sides by people making proclamations based on their own experiences and assumptions without regard to the experience of others.
And in the end, I'm not just an oblivious white guy trying to figure these things out. I'm only this oblivious white guy trying to figure things out, and all I can do is get off of my ass and start trying to be more aware of what's going on around me.
* Consider that there are many racial groups noted in Roman and Greek histories that no longer exist because they have been absorbed into, or through physical isolation given rise to, other racial groups.
** When I was in graduate school, I routinely came across photos taken by ethnographers of people from Australia and sub-Saharan African who had traits such as blond hair and blues eyes. These traits were rare among those populations, but not non-existent. It was information such as this that caused most anthropologists to become suspicious of race as strong biological categories.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Corporate Culture Porn
I used to work for one of the big Silicon Valley tech companies, specifically I worked for a company that produced hard drives and other such storage devices. One day, while walking to my desk, I caught site of a flyer that had been posted on the wall. The flyer advertised an upcoming seminar (which we would all, inceidentally, be required to attend) on the conflict-resolution skills of the people of the island nation of Mauritius. The people of Mauritius, the flyer informed the casual reader, were comprised of five different religions, multiple ethncities, and had an economy that, like others of Africa, was often tumultuous - and yet they managed to all live together in complete happiness with no of ethnic or religious division or tension, no xenophobia, and no real conflict.
I was skeptical, but realized that, as we were all required to attend the seminar*, I would see soon enough what was up.
When the appointed day came, the human resources people all rounded us up and led us to the corral...err...meeting room. We sat down, and the presentation began. Over the course of the next hour, we watched a video produced by a company that sells products intended to increase workplace morale. In the course of watching this video, we were informed that the people of Mauritius are the ever-so-nicest people ever who completely accept each other despite religious, ethnic, and language differences, and gosh don't you know that in Mauritius there isn't ever any form of prejudice or bigotry because we are all ever-so-happy being one big family, and isn't it so great and makes you feel so warm and fuzzy seeing this so why don't you apply all of these ever-so-special and sugary sweet lessons to your job and have the ever-so-bestest work place ever!
Hmmmm....perhaps I should insert more "ever-so's" into the above paragraph...nahhh...
When the video was done, the human resources overlord who was running the show turned a whiteboard around to face the captive audience, and on it were printed three questions. I don't recall questions #2 or #3, but questions #1 was:
It was at this moment that I came up with the term Culture Porn. The producers of this video had clearly taken another culture, stripped it of its complexities and vitality, denied the real hardships and hence the acomplishments of the people of the culture, and packaged it as a consumer product to sell to corporate managers who were more interested in placating their employees than solving the real problems within their own corporate culture. I was thoroughly disgusted.
We had been shown a completely false image of Mauritius. In truth, there is much to admire about the people and the culture (or rather cultures) that they had developed. There was also much to be wary of. Like any nation, Mauritius has both admirable and damnable qualities. Within a year of sitting through this indoctrination session, I had re-entered the world of anthropology, and learned that, Mauritius did indeed have high rates of literacy and education, that it did function remarkably well as a civil society despite many economic and social problems, and all of this was certainly remarkable and well worth taking note of. At the same time, the claim that the island was free of prejudices and bigotries was an outright lie - ethnic and religious prejudices play a significant role in Mauritian politics, for example. Likewise, like many other physically constrained societies, the compact population leads to a society in which one is not exactly free to puruse ones own interests when they don't mesh with the often irrational prejudices of those around you.
In other words, Mauritus is, in many respects, a remarkable place, and it has a compelling story that is of value and interest to the outside world. However, to deny its problems is to deny the realities of life there, and also to deny the adversities that the people of the island have had to overcome, and is to cheapen the truth of their lives in favor of creating a consumer product.
To make matters worse, the entire presentation was rather disturbingly reminiscent of the racist "happy savage" stereotype that had been very much a part of 19th century colonial discourse.
Which brought us back to the question that had been scrawled on the white board.
I was at this point so disgusted that I decided to speak my mind about this. I commented to the room that the image that had been portrayed was obviously false, that it was quite offensive and borderline racist, and that it was impossible from such a false image to say if I admired the people, much less what I admired about them.
The HR people looked surprised, then annoyed that I had commented as I had. A few minutes later we were dismissed without further question. A few other employees thanked me for expressing sentiments that were, apparently, also on their minds.
*Like most large companies, the one for which I worked had developed a number of strategies to try to increase the morale of the work force, and as simple things like being honest with the employees regarding whether or not they would be laid off right before Christmas was apparently off the table, they did all manner of rather weird things instead. Amongst these were requiring us to read a book about finding happiness at work even if your job is a drag and makes you long for the sweet release of death (what I referred to as the "happy drone book"), and attending seminars on how people in harder situations have good lifes and so we really shouldn't be worrying about the dangling sword of unemployment, such as this Mauritius seminar.
I was skeptical, but realized that, as we were all required to attend the seminar*, I would see soon enough what was up.
When the appointed day came, the human resources people all rounded us up and led us to the corral...err...meeting room. We sat down, and the presentation began. Over the course of the next hour, we watched a video produced by a company that sells products intended to increase workplace morale. In the course of watching this video, we were informed that the people of Mauritius are the ever-so-nicest people ever who completely accept each other despite religious, ethnic, and language differences, and gosh don't you know that in Mauritius there isn't ever any form of prejudice or bigotry because we are all ever-so-happy being one big family, and isn't it so great and makes you feel so warm and fuzzy seeing this so why don't you apply all of these ever-so-special and sugary sweet lessons to your job and have the ever-so-bestest work place ever!
Hmmmm....perhaps I should insert more "ever-so's" into the above paragraph...nahhh...
When the video was done, the human resources overlord who was running the show turned a whiteboard around to face the captive audience, and on it were printed three questions. I don't recall questions #2 or #3, but questions #1 was:
What do you most admire about the people of Mauritius?
It was at this moment that I came up with the term Culture Porn. The producers of this video had clearly taken another culture, stripped it of its complexities and vitality, denied the real hardships and hence the acomplishments of the people of the culture, and packaged it as a consumer product to sell to corporate managers who were more interested in placating their employees than solving the real problems within their own corporate culture. I was thoroughly disgusted.
We had been shown a completely false image of Mauritius. In truth, there is much to admire about the people and the culture (or rather cultures) that they had developed. There was also much to be wary of. Like any nation, Mauritius has both admirable and damnable qualities. Within a year of sitting through this indoctrination session, I had re-entered the world of anthropology, and learned that, Mauritius did indeed have high rates of literacy and education, that it did function remarkably well as a civil society despite many economic and social problems, and all of this was certainly remarkable and well worth taking note of. At the same time, the claim that the island was free of prejudices and bigotries was an outright lie - ethnic and religious prejudices play a significant role in Mauritian politics, for example. Likewise, like many other physically constrained societies, the compact population leads to a society in which one is not exactly free to puruse ones own interests when they don't mesh with the often irrational prejudices of those around you.
In other words, Mauritus is, in many respects, a remarkable place, and it has a compelling story that is of value and interest to the outside world. However, to deny its problems is to deny the realities of life there, and also to deny the adversities that the people of the island have had to overcome, and is to cheapen the truth of their lives in favor of creating a consumer product.
To make matters worse, the entire presentation was rather disturbingly reminiscent of the racist "happy savage" stereotype that had been very much a part of 19th century colonial discourse.
Which brought us back to the question that had been scrawled on the white board.
What do you most admire about the people of Mauritius?
I was at this point so disgusted that I decided to speak my mind about this. I commented to the room that the image that had been portrayed was obviously false, that it was quite offensive and borderline racist, and that it was impossible from such a false image to say if I admired the people, much less what I admired about them.
The HR people looked surprised, then annoyed that I had commented as I had. A few minutes later we were dismissed without further question. A few other employees thanked me for expressing sentiments that were, apparently, also on their minds.
*Like most large companies, the one for which I worked had developed a number of strategies to try to increase the morale of the work force, and as simple things like being honest with the employees regarding whether or not they would be laid off right before Christmas was apparently off the table, they did all manner of rather weird things instead. Amongst these were requiring us to read a book about finding happiness at work even if your job is a drag and makes you long for the sweet release of death (what I referred to as the "happy drone book"), and attending seminars on how people in harder situations have good lifes and so we really shouldn't be worrying about the dangling sword of unemployment, such as this Mauritius seminar.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Race Relations and the Anthropology Department
I was listening last night to a radio call-in show, and the topic of discussion was why social and economic disparity exists between different ethnic groups, and who was responsible for fixing it. The callers, host, and guests were all over the board, and their comments ranged from insightful to ludicrous. However, none of them could reach any consensus at all, and all of them seemed to want to simplify matters beyond reality, while simultaneously creating straw-man arguments out of the positions of their opponents. This got me thinking about the value of the social sciences in addressing these issues, but then I recalled earlier events in my life and wondered whether this was truly the case.
When I was in graduate school, a few students noticed something that seemed both odd and disturbing – most of the non-white graduate students were leaving the program without finishing their degrees. This led to a number of us looking at what was happening. One particular group of students came to the conclusion that the non-white students were being pushed out of the program, while the white students weren’t. This seemed pretty simple and direct – another case of white privilege in a society where race is so often the elephant in the room – the overwhelming presence that nobody wants to talk about or acknowledge.
However, the problem wasn’t that simple.
Those of us who decided to look closer noticed something important – the non-white students who could be said to have been pushed out were all in the socio-cultural anthropology wing of the department. Looking closer still, MOST of the socio-cultural students were being pushed out of the department. The faculty tended to play politics with each other and use the students as pawns, resulting in students unable to form PhD committees, unable to get funding or workspace, and experiencing a remarkably hostile environment. Of course the students were being pushed out, but it was all of them, not just the non-white students.
So, why did it look like the non-white students were being pushed out? Well, the bio-social, physical, and archaeology wings of the departments had, between the three of them, only two non-white students. As these wings of the department tended to be more supportive of the students (including the non-white students, both of whom had secured generous funding and workspace arrangements), the students tended to complete their degrees. So, if you didn’t factor in the differences between the different wings of the departments, it looked like non-white students were being specifically mis-treated or alienated, when it was an entire wing and not just students of certain ethnicities.
If one wished to increase the ethnic mix of the department, which in an anthropology department is a very good idea, then the appropriate route to take was to tackle the issue at recruitment, trying to get a wider range of students into the other wings, while also improving retention of socio-cultural students. Specifically trying to keep non-white students in while ignoring the problems at both recruitment and retention of all socio-cultural students would be to tilt at windmills rather than to seriously address the issue of increasing ethnic diversity of the department.
The problem was that a few students had decided, without bothering to look more deeply into matters, that the problem was one purely of retention of non-white students, and anyone who tried to point to that pesky little thing called reality were immediately shot down and accused of, and no I am not making this up, “Racist colonialism”.
Hand me a pith helmet and a native phrase-book, Jeeves.
From this point on, everything that happened in the department was viewed through the lens of race and racism, leading to an increasingly weird and paranoid experience for all of us. For example, a position came open in the socio-cultural wing, and a number of candidates – both white and non-white - were interviewed. One applicant was a Hispanic man whose work had direct real-world applications in helping to figure out immigration-related matters, and, to top it off, was really fascinating. However, it wasn’t “cutting edge theory” (which, in our socio-cultural wing, often meant “mental masturbation”)*, and so the job was offered to a British guy whose work was “on the cutting edge of theory” and was also amazingly boring and irrelevant to the world around him.
Now, taken in context with other decisions that the faculty had made, it was clear that this was a matter of academic snobbery – the “pure research” fellow was favored over someone whose work was actually interesting and had real-world applications. However, as the interesting guy was Hispanic and the other was a pasty white guy from England, this immediately came to be seen as a case of racial preference rather than what it actually was - theoretical snobbery and shunning of the potential for research to actually impact the outside world.
Of course, the faculty also didn’t do themselves in favors in dealing with these issues. Whether it be some comments about Japanese internment that made a certain amount of sense from a historical perspective but sounded callous to people not overly-familiar with the events, or faculty members actively using the issue of race to further play politics with other faculty members, once everything began to be viewed as a “race issue” matters continued to spiral out.
And all the while, the real underlying issues, poor retention of socio-cultural students coupled with a lack of recruitment of non-white students into the other wings, went unaddressed. What’s more, other issues of diversity were completely ignored. A frequent feature of discussions involving this was the assumption that white people were a homogenous group, all affluent and all of the same background. I had the surreal experience of watching a white graduate student who had grown up in a run-down trailer park being told by a woman from a rather wealthy family that he didn’t understand what it was like to be economically disadvantaged. Likewise, I was regularly informed that I had always lived in all-white communities, thus proving that the people who made these claims had never seen the ethnic mix of the neighborhood where I grew up.
Last I heard, none of the attempts to “increase diversity” of the anthro. department had worked. This is no surprise, as the problems identified by the people with the passion to do something were not the problems that were actually present. Retention of specifically non-white students may yet be a problem that needs to be addressed, but until the other two problems (recruitment and overall retention in one wing) are addressed, there is no way to know.
The point that I am getting at is that anthropologists, the groups that, along with sociologists, one would expect to be the best at examining and addressing complex issues such as race relations, can be just as blinded by both early assumptions and easy answers. This can, in turn, lead to the “source of the problem” being mis-identified, and false solutions that do no good being implemented.
*I am not saying that all research, or even most research, is like this. However, in the department where I was a student, there was a tendency to favor things that sounded complex and were filled with buzz words over things that actually made sense. Other departments don’t necessarily have this problem.
When I was in graduate school, a few students noticed something that seemed both odd and disturbing – most of the non-white graduate students were leaving the program without finishing their degrees. This led to a number of us looking at what was happening. One particular group of students came to the conclusion that the non-white students were being pushed out of the program, while the white students weren’t. This seemed pretty simple and direct – another case of white privilege in a society where race is so often the elephant in the room – the overwhelming presence that nobody wants to talk about or acknowledge.
However, the problem wasn’t that simple.
Those of us who decided to look closer noticed something important – the non-white students who could be said to have been pushed out were all in the socio-cultural anthropology wing of the department. Looking closer still, MOST of the socio-cultural students were being pushed out of the department. The faculty tended to play politics with each other and use the students as pawns, resulting in students unable to form PhD committees, unable to get funding or workspace, and experiencing a remarkably hostile environment. Of course the students were being pushed out, but it was all of them, not just the non-white students.
So, why did it look like the non-white students were being pushed out? Well, the bio-social, physical, and archaeology wings of the departments had, between the three of them, only two non-white students. As these wings of the department tended to be more supportive of the students (including the non-white students, both of whom had secured generous funding and workspace arrangements), the students tended to complete their degrees. So, if you didn’t factor in the differences between the different wings of the departments, it looked like non-white students were being specifically mis-treated or alienated, when it was an entire wing and not just students of certain ethnicities.
If one wished to increase the ethnic mix of the department, which in an anthropology department is a very good idea, then the appropriate route to take was to tackle the issue at recruitment, trying to get a wider range of students into the other wings, while also improving retention of socio-cultural students. Specifically trying to keep non-white students in while ignoring the problems at both recruitment and retention of all socio-cultural students would be to tilt at windmills rather than to seriously address the issue of increasing ethnic diversity of the department.
The problem was that a few students had decided, without bothering to look more deeply into matters, that the problem was one purely of retention of non-white students, and anyone who tried to point to that pesky little thing called reality were immediately shot down and accused of, and no I am not making this up, “Racist colonialism”.
Hand me a pith helmet and a native phrase-book, Jeeves.
From this point on, everything that happened in the department was viewed through the lens of race and racism, leading to an increasingly weird and paranoid experience for all of us. For example, a position came open in the socio-cultural wing, and a number of candidates – both white and non-white - were interviewed. One applicant was a Hispanic man whose work had direct real-world applications in helping to figure out immigration-related matters, and, to top it off, was really fascinating. However, it wasn’t “cutting edge theory” (which, in our socio-cultural wing, often meant “mental masturbation”)*, and so the job was offered to a British guy whose work was “on the cutting edge of theory” and was also amazingly boring and irrelevant to the world around him.
Now, taken in context with other decisions that the faculty had made, it was clear that this was a matter of academic snobbery – the “pure research” fellow was favored over someone whose work was actually interesting and had real-world applications. However, as the interesting guy was Hispanic and the other was a pasty white guy from England, this immediately came to be seen as a case of racial preference rather than what it actually was - theoretical snobbery and shunning of the potential for research to actually impact the outside world.
Of course, the faculty also didn’t do themselves in favors in dealing with these issues. Whether it be some comments about Japanese internment that made a certain amount of sense from a historical perspective but sounded callous to people not overly-familiar with the events, or faculty members actively using the issue of race to further play politics with other faculty members, once everything began to be viewed as a “race issue” matters continued to spiral out.
And all the while, the real underlying issues, poor retention of socio-cultural students coupled with a lack of recruitment of non-white students into the other wings, went unaddressed. What’s more, other issues of diversity were completely ignored. A frequent feature of discussions involving this was the assumption that white people were a homogenous group, all affluent and all of the same background. I had the surreal experience of watching a white graduate student who had grown up in a run-down trailer park being told by a woman from a rather wealthy family that he didn’t understand what it was like to be economically disadvantaged. Likewise, I was regularly informed that I had always lived in all-white communities, thus proving that the people who made these claims had never seen the ethnic mix of the neighborhood where I grew up.
Last I heard, none of the attempts to “increase diversity” of the anthro. department had worked. This is no surprise, as the problems identified by the people with the passion to do something were not the problems that were actually present. Retention of specifically non-white students may yet be a problem that needs to be addressed, but until the other two problems (recruitment and overall retention in one wing) are addressed, there is no way to know.
The point that I am getting at is that anthropologists, the groups that, along with sociologists, one would expect to be the best at examining and addressing complex issues such as race relations, can be just as blinded by both early assumptions and easy answers. This can, in turn, lead to the “source of the problem” being mis-identified, and false solutions that do no good being implemented.
*I am not saying that all research, or even most research, is like this. However, in the department where I was a student, there was a tendency to favor things that sounded complex and were filled with buzz words over things that actually made sense. Other departments don’t necessarily have this problem.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Mind-Bullets Against the Dream Catcher
When I was in high school, my class read a short story (I don’t recall the name of said story) in which a young British boy is sent to live with his aunt in England. He detests her, and takes solace in spending time with his pet mongoose (that he eventually comes to revere as a god). At the end of the story, the aunt goes to remove the mongoose from her house, only to have the cage open and the mongoose kill her as the nephew listens on while calmly eating breakfast.
My senior-year literature teacher, Nancy Barr, suggested that the boy had willed his aunt’s death. She then proceeded to ask various members of the class if we believed it was possible to actually do this – to imagine a situation and believe in it so strongly that it becomes physical reality.
Ten years later, I got the chance to put this hypothesis to the test.
I spent a year and a half as an intern in the environmental conservation office at Vandenberg Air Force Base. During this time, a group that was dedicated to establishing a walking trail that covered the entirety of the Californian coastline decided to walk the proposed path, from the Oregon border all the way down to the border of Mexico. However, this meant walking through Vandenberg Air Force Base – and it probably goes without saying that the officers running the base were uneasy about allowing these “long-haired-hippie-type pedestrians” wander about the base, and so my boss and I were dispatched to act as guides and chaperones.
For the most part, it was enjoyable – we shepherded the trail-advocates across the base, and found most of them to be pleasant, if sometimes comically idealistic, folks (for example, the leader of the group spent a good deal of time talking about his rank in the Peace Corps, why he loved Birkenstocks, the number of Nalgene bottles he owned, and the joys he found in a tofu burger – I managed to not ask him how it felt to be a walking stereotype). The weather was nice, the scenery beautiful, and the work easy. All in all, a damn fine day.
Except for one conversation.
During the lunch break, one of the hikers, a woman of about 45 or so, approached me and asked what my function on the base was.
“I’m an archaeologist,” I responded, thinking nothing of the question at the time.
“Oh, that’s what I thought! Are you interested in Native American Culture?”
I knew where this was going, but could think of no gracious way to not answer. “Well, I kinda’ hafta’ be in order to do my job.”
“Do you have any of THAT blood in you?” She asked eagerly, clearly hoping that she had met some mystical creature of the sort that doesn’t exist outside of the mind of a modern white suburbanite.
“Pardon?” I asked, feigning ignorance.
“Do you have any of THEIR blood in you?”
“Well,” I looked up, thoughtfully, “I’ve managed to avoid needing a transfusion, so I don’t have anyone’s blood in me except for my own.”
She blinked, looked momentarily confused, and decided to phrase her question in a more plain and straight-forward way. “Do you have any Native American Ancestry?”
“Yeah. My grandmother, on my mother’s side, was half Cherokee and half Choctaw.”
“Oh!” She believed that she had found her prey – the elusive Injun Nature Mystic, so popular in the imaginings of wanna-be Sierra Club members who don’t get out much, “what was her name?”
“Buna” (pronounced “B-YOO-NA” for those of you who aren’t familiar with English butchering of words adopted from other languages) I stated.
She looked frustrated. “What was her REAL name?”
I looked at her blankly and said, again, “Buna.”
“Right, but what was her REAL name? You know, her REAL name?”
It was at this point that I decided to try testing Ms. Barr’s hypothesis, and I imagined, with as much force as I could muster, this woman getting a clue. It didn’t work.
“I told you her REAL name.”
She looked confused. Then she looked frustrated, as if I was somehow hiding a secret from her, and if only she knew how to ask correctly, or could complete some task, I would open the door and let her into the world of true Native American ecological enlightenment.
I decided to again test Ms. Barr’s hypothesis, this time imagining, with all of the will I had in my mind and body, that this woman’s tongue would shrivel and fall out. It didn’t work.
“Well,” she looked both confused and determined, “how do you know that THAT was her real name?”
“You mean aside from the fact that it was on her birth certificate, on her driver’s license, was what she called herself, and is what everyone else called her?”
“Oh.” She slunk away, and I tried to test Ms. Barr’s Hypothesis a third time, this time imagining that the woman’s head would explode. It still didn’t work.
The sad thing is that this woman probably doesn’t realize that her assumption that all Native Americans have names like “Deer Who Frolics in the Rain” or “Bear Who Hunts Walks in the Night” is based on a bigoted belief that all Native Americans are wilderness-dwelling mystics who are out of place in the modern world –with people making life frustrating for many Native Amaericans because so many folks believe that the “Indians aren’t capable of running businesses/being a lawyer/becoming a doctor/serving as a police officer/etc.”, because they are, apparently, only capable of being icons for a lost idyllic past in which humans had mystical connections to the trees and streams. This sort of cultural pornography, the titillating display of another culture to show only those aspects that appeal to the viewer without an acknowledgement of the reality of the individual or group of people being put on display, really gets under my skin - it's essentially a vestige of the racist 19th century notion that white Europeans were rational and responsible, and the rest of the world nothing but brown-skinned superstitious mystics and witch doctors. The fact that the white people are now revering the superstitious and the witch doctors doesn't change the fact that this is still a racist portrayal of the rest of the world.
I’d like to think that my responses helped slap this woman back to reality, and led her to ponder the fact that Native Americans are humans, just like the rest of us, and deserving of some basic respect, not pseudo-reverence where they are put up as bizarre inhuman idols of magic.
But the truth is that she probably walked away thinking of me as the ignorant one, and is still clinging to her racist stereotypes of my grandmother’s ethnicity.
And unfortunately, Ms. Barr’s hypothesis failed, but my high school physics teacher would be happy to know that his dismissal of such things as psychic powers was further confirmed.
So it goes.
.
My senior-year literature teacher, Nancy Barr, suggested that the boy had willed his aunt’s death. She then proceeded to ask various members of the class if we believed it was possible to actually do this – to imagine a situation and believe in it so strongly that it becomes physical reality.
Ten years later, I got the chance to put this hypothesis to the test.
I spent a year and a half as an intern in the environmental conservation office at Vandenberg Air Force Base. During this time, a group that was dedicated to establishing a walking trail that covered the entirety of the Californian coastline decided to walk the proposed path, from the Oregon border all the way down to the border of Mexico. However, this meant walking through Vandenberg Air Force Base – and it probably goes without saying that the officers running the base were uneasy about allowing these “long-haired-hippie-type pedestrians” wander about the base, and so my boss and I were dispatched to act as guides and chaperones.
For the most part, it was enjoyable – we shepherded the trail-advocates across the base, and found most of them to be pleasant, if sometimes comically idealistic, folks (for example, the leader of the group spent a good deal of time talking about his rank in the Peace Corps, why he loved Birkenstocks, the number of Nalgene bottles he owned, and the joys he found in a tofu burger – I managed to not ask him how it felt to be a walking stereotype). The weather was nice, the scenery beautiful, and the work easy. All in all, a damn fine day.
Except for one conversation.
During the lunch break, one of the hikers, a woman of about 45 or so, approached me and asked what my function on the base was.
“I’m an archaeologist,” I responded, thinking nothing of the question at the time.
“Oh, that’s what I thought! Are you interested in Native American Culture?”
I knew where this was going, but could think of no gracious way to not answer. “Well, I kinda’ hafta’ be in order to do my job.”
“Do you have any of THAT blood in you?” She asked eagerly, clearly hoping that she had met some mystical creature of the sort that doesn’t exist outside of the mind of a modern white suburbanite.
“Pardon?” I asked, feigning ignorance.
“Do you have any of THEIR blood in you?”
“Well,” I looked up, thoughtfully, “I’ve managed to avoid needing a transfusion, so I don’t have anyone’s blood in me except for my own.”
She blinked, looked momentarily confused, and decided to phrase her question in a more plain and straight-forward way. “Do you have any Native American Ancestry?”
“Yeah. My grandmother, on my mother’s side, was half Cherokee and half Choctaw.”
“Oh!” She believed that she had found her prey – the elusive Injun Nature Mystic, so popular in the imaginings of wanna-be Sierra Club members who don’t get out much, “what was her name?”
“Buna” (pronounced “B-YOO-NA” for those of you who aren’t familiar with English butchering of words adopted from other languages) I stated.
She looked frustrated. “What was her REAL name?”
I looked at her blankly and said, again, “Buna.”
“Right, but what was her REAL name? You know, her REAL name?”
It was at this point that I decided to try testing Ms. Barr’s hypothesis, and I imagined, with as much force as I could muster, this woman getting a clue. It didn’t work.
“I told you her REAL name.”
She looked confused. Then she looked frustrated, as if I was somehow hiding a secret from her, and if only she knew how to ask correctly, or could complete some task, I would open the door and let her into the world of true Native American ecological enlightenment.
I decided to again test Ms. Barr’s hypothesis, this time imagining, with all of the will I had in my mind and body, that this woman’s tongue would shrivel and fall out. It didn’t work.
“Well,” she looked both confused and determined, “how do you know that THAT was her real name?”
“You mean aside from the fact that it was on her birth certificate, on her driver’s license, was what she called herself, and is what everyone else called her?”
“Oh.” She slunk away, and I tried to test Ms. Barr’s Hypothesis a third time, this time imagining that the woman’s head would explode. It still didn’t work.
The sad thing is that this woman probably doesn’t realize that her assumption that all Native Americans have names like “Deer Who Frolics in the Rain” or “Bear Who Hunts Walks in the Night” is based on a bigoted belief that all Native Americans are wilderness-dwelling mystics who are out of place in the modern world –with people making life frustrating for many Native Amaericans because so many folks believe that the “Indians aren’t capable of running businesses/being a lawyer/becoming a doctor/serving as a police officer/etc.”, because they are, apparently, only capable of being icons for a lost idyllic past in which humans had mystical connections to the trees and streams. This sort of cultural pornography, the titillating display of another culture to show only those aspects that appeal to the viewer without an acknowledgement of the reality of the individual or group of people being put on display, really gets under my skin - it's essentially a vestige of the racist 19th century notion that white Europeans were rational and responsible, and the rest of the world nothing but brown-skinned superstitious mystics and witch doctors. The fact that the white people are now revering the superstitious and the witch doctors doesn't change the fact that this is still a racist portrayal of the rest of the world.
I’d like to think that my responses helped slap this woman back to reality, and led her to ponder the fact that Native Americans are humans, just like the rest of us, and deserving of some basic respect, not pseudo-reverence where they are put up as bizarre inhuman idols of magic.
But the truth is that she probably walked away thinking of me as the ignorant one, and is still clinging to her racist stereotypes of my grandmother’s ethnicity.
And unfortunately, Ms. Barr’s hypothesis failed, but my high school physics teacher would be happy to know that his dismissal of such things as psychic powers was further confirmed.
So it goes.
.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Built on an Indian Burial Ground
This entry is poorly constructed and probably barely legible to anyone other than myself. I'm not proud of those facts, I'm just lazy. You have been warned.
So, I was listening to the pilot episode of a new radio show called Curiosity Aroused, which was a pretty cool show (you can hear it here:http://curiosityaroused.wordpress.com/). In one segment, the host (Rebbecca Watson of http://www.skepchick.org/) discusses media coverage of an alleged ghost sighting at a gas station (what a lousy place to spend eternity). As usual, one of the various folks interviewed by the news crew comments that "this place used to be an Indian burial ground."
Yep. An Indian burial ground. How many times have you heard this one? It's as if the entire continent has seen Poltergeist one too many times. Feel uneasy at your house? Must be built on an Indian burial ground. See something weird at your office? Must be built on an Indian burial ground.
I wonder what kind of burial grounds the British blame their misfortune on.
Incidentally, I once worked in an office building that actually WAS built on an Indian burial ground. What's more, we frequently had human bones in the office. Want to know what happened there? Absolutely nothing - unless you count the soul-crushing boredom of Monday morning staff meetings.
Wait a minute...maybe the human remains in the office from our excavations put a curse on the building, and the burial ground put another curse on the building, and the two curses ate each other! Hmmm...I may yet make a name for myself in parapsychology!
I also once spent a week carting human remains (mostly bone, but also some preserved soft tissue) around in the trunk of my car - at the insistence of the Sheriff Coroner's office I might add - and other than some trouble with my starter and alternator, my car shows no signs of being haunted or cursed (and I'm inclined to chalk the electrical troubles up to the fact that my car is 13 years old and has never had any part of the electrical system replaced - though it is fun to yell obscenities at the spirits when my car won't start on a cold morning). Still, those were remains of white people, and therefore most of my fellow honkies will likely superstitiously not believe that they have the power of 'dem Indian bones.
But I digress. Back to the main point...
...anytime I talk to someone who feels uneasy in their home or thinks that they or someone they know has a haunted house, inevitably the old "built on an Indian Burial Ground" trope gets brought out. If all of the places that were allegedly built on burial grounds were, in fact, built on burial grounds, then I can say with confidence that there are more dead people in North America than there were ever alive people on the continent. For those who doubt the truth of that statement, I'll have you know that I arrived at that conclusion by using my archaeological training to compile and analyze data before pulling a conclusion completely out of my ass.
So there.
I used to work in the Central Coast Archaeological Information Center at UC Santa Barbara*. This facility houses all of the records for all recorded archaeological sites within Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties. In other words, this was the perfect place to examine the claim that any of the alleged haunted places in the county were built on Indian burial grounds.
So, I looked at the locations of several places that I had heard were haunted due to being built on burial grounds. One was built on a location that used to hold a flake scatter (where a couple of Chumash fellows had been manufacturing or modifying stone tools - but where there would have been no burials), all others were built on "archaeologically sterile" ground - no sites of any kind, including burials.
I did find a few buildings that were actually built on burial grounds. One was a building where I would eventually work, as described above (and where, when questioned, nobody who worked there had ever experienced anything odd at all). One was a museum that one would think was ripe for ghost stories for a number of reasons, and, yet, it had none at all. And one was a physics/engineering laboratory where several friends worked, and none of them had ever experienced anything that they would consider strange.
Oh, and one was a sewage treatment plant - unpleasant, but decidedly not haunted by anyone's estimation.
So, the places that really did hold burial grounds were all not haunted. The places that were supposedly haunted but definitely did not have burial grounds all had the rumor of a burial ground attached to them. That should tell you something.
And yet, stories of hauntings due to burial grounds continue to proliferate. When the folks behind the Amityville hoax decided to pull their prank, they even concocted an Indian burial ground/insane asylum story as part of the hoax.
My personal favorite rant about the horrors of Indian Burial grounds comes from this lunatic: http://www.demonbuster.com/burial.html**, who draws some rather odd conclusions about how people behave around these sites. For example, if people avoid burial grounds, how do we account for the vandalism often seen at these sites? Also, I got a good laugh from the claim that construction workers stop work at burial sites out of fear of the supernatural. If there's not an archaeologist like myself or a Native American monitor present to stop them, construction crews will blow right through burial sites without a second thought.
Don't believe me? Go to Google and type in "Playa Vista Gabrielino Burials". When the construction company has the legal right to plow through, or else the management thinks that they won't be caught, they do just that. The fear of the supernatural does nothing to stop them.
What's curious is that so many of these stories allege specifically Indian burial grounds. While you will occasionally here about a more run-of the mill white-bread cracker cemetery being the source of a haunting, it is usually the Native Americans who get the blame. Why is this?
Well, I don't know for certain, but I suspect that it has to do with three things: 1. Unlike most historic cemeteries, prehistoric Native American cemeteries don't have clear surviving grave markers that are obvious to the layman, and therefore it becomes an untestable hypothesis to most folks (it's essentially a "god of the gaps" argument - in the face of ignorance a questionable conclusion is drawn, and since you can't disprove it, it must be true! The illogic of the position should be pretty obvious). 2. Even prior to the current re-evaluation of North American colonialism, most folks at least agreed that the native peoples of the continent weren't happy with the European who were the ancestors of many of us, and therefore would have a motive for wanting to do all manor of horrible things to them - apparently including annoying them by moving their descendants car keys and knocking picture frames off of walls - hardly a fitting retort to genocidal policies, really. 3. There is a, frankly, racist notion that non-white people are somehow mystically powerful and therefore terrifying and not to be trusted (which has been a recurring theme throughout much of western colonial history - incidentally, the current obsession of young white people with India is typically little more than a current manifestation of this long-running racist belief) and this notion that even the dead non-white people are mystically powerful seems to be little other than a continuation of this tendency.
So, next time someone tells you that a place is haunted due to being built on an Indian burial ground, point at the person and laugh. You'll be glad you did.
* For some reason, the people of Santa Barbara consider themselves the "Central Coast" despite the fact that they are clearly in Southern California - but it gets even goofier when you consider that the Information Center in Fullerton is called the South Central Coast Information Center - there is nothing central about Fullerton! It's in fucking Orange County! San Luis Obispo County could arguably be described as the South Central Coast - but not Orange County.
** This guys has other entries with titles such as, and no I am not making this up, "Gall Bladder Disease and Demons", "Car shopping and Deliverance", "Dolls, toys, and stuffed animals - better burn them too", "Candles - Don't Burn Them; Get Them Out Of Your Home!", "Diabetes - Squid like demons attack ten parts of your body", and oh so many more.
Oh, and my favorite sentence on the site, from the page on doctors, is this "The dental symbol is a triangle in a circle. This same symbol is the highest satanic symbol." Yep. Your dentist is a Satan worshiper.
You can go to http://www.demonbuster.com/ yourself to see the true insanity of it all.
So, I was listening to the pilot episode of a new radio show called Curiosity Aroused, which was a pretty cool show (you can hear it here:http://curiosityaroused.wordpress.com/). In one segment, the host (Rebbecca Watson of http://www.skepchick.org/) discusses media coverage of an alleged ghost sighting at a gas station (what a lousy place to spend eternity). As usual, one of the various folks interviewed by the news crew comments that "this place used to be an Indian burial ground."
Yep. An Indian burial ground. How many times have you heard this one? It's as if the entire continent has seen Poltergeist one too many times. Feel uneasy at your house? Must be built on an Indian burial ground. See something weird at your office? Must be built on an Indian burial ground.
I wonder what kind of burial grounds the British blame their misfortune on.
Incidentally, I once worked in an office building that actually WAS built on an Indian burial ground. What's more, we frequently had human bones in the office. Want to know what happened there? Absolutely nothing - unless you count the soul-crushing boredom of Monday morning staff meetings.
Wait a minute...maybe the human remains in the office from our excavations put a curse on the building, and the burial ground put another curse on the building, and the two curses ate each other! Hmmm...I may yet make a name for myself in parapsychology!
I also once spent a week carting human remains (mostly bone, but also some preserved soft tissue) around in the trunk of my car - at the insistence of the Sheriff Coroner's office I might add - and other than some trouble with my starter and alternator, my car shows no signs of being haunted or cursed (and I'm inclined to chalk the electrical troubles up to the fact that my car is 13 years old and has never had any part of the electrical system replaced - though it is fun to yell obscenities at the spirits when my car won't start on a cold morning). Still, those were remains of white people, and therefore most of my fellow honkies will likely superstitiously not believe that they have the power of 'dem Indian bones.
But I digress. Back to the main point...
...anytime I talk to someone who feels uneasy in their home or thinks that they or someone they know has a haunted house, inevitably the old "built on an Indian Burial Ground" trope gets brought out. If all of the places that were allegedly built on burial grounds were, in fact, built on burial grounds, then I can say with confidence that there are more dead people in North America than there were ever alive people on the continent. For those who doubt the truth of that statement, I'll have you know that I arrived at that conclusion by using my archaeological training to compile and analyze data before pulling a conclusion completely out of my ass.
So there.
I used to work in the Central Coast Archaeological Information Center at UC Santa Barbara*. This facility houses all of the records for all recorded archaeological sites within Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties. In other words, this was the perfect place to examine the claim that any of the alleged haunted places in the county were built on Indian burial grounds.
So, I looked at the locations of several places that I had heard were haunted due to being built on burial grounds. One was built on a location that used to hold a flake scatter (where a couple of Chumash fellows had been manufacturing or modifying stone tools - but where there would have been no burials), all others were built on "archaeologically sterile" ground - no sites of any kind, including burials.
I did find a few buildings that were actually built on burial grounds. One was a building where I would eventually work, as described above (and where, when questioned, nobody who worked there had ever experienced anything odd at all). One was a museum that one would think was ripe for ghost stories for a number of reasons, and, yet, it had none at all. And one was a physics/engineering laboratory where several friends worked, and none of them had ever experienced anything that they would consider strange.
Oh, and one was a sewage treatment plant - unpleasant, but decidedly not haunted by anyone's estimation.
So, the places that really did hold burial grounds were all not haunted. The places that were supposedly haunted but definitely did not have burial grounds all had the rumor of a burial ground attached to them. That should tell you something.
And yet, stories of hauntings due to burial grounds continue to proliferate. When the folks behind the Amityville hoax decided to pull their prank, they even concocted an Indian burial ground/insane asylum story as part of the hoax.
My personal favorite rant about the horrors of Indian Burial grounds comes from this lunatic: http://www.demonbuster.com/burial.html**, who draws some rather odd conclusions about how people behave around these sites. For example, if people avoid burial grounds, how do we account for the vandalism often seen at these sites? Also, I got a good laugh from the claim that construction workers stop work at burial sites out of fear of the supernatural. If there's not an archaeologist like myself or a Native American monitor present to stop them, construction crews will blow right through burial sites without a second thought.
Don't believe me? Go to Google and type in "Playa Vista Gabrielino Burials". When the construction company has the legal right to plow through, or else the management thinks that they won't be caught, they do just that. The fear of the supernatural does nothing to stop them.
What's curious is that so many of these stories allege specifically Indian burial grounds. While you will occasionally here about a more run-of the mill white-bread cracker cemetery being the source of a haunting, it is usually the Native Americans who get the blame. Why is this?
Well, I don't know for certain, but I suspect that it has to do with three things: 1. Unlike most historic cemeteries, prehistoric Native American cemeteries don't have clear surviving grave markers that are obvious to the layman, and therefore it becomes an untestable hypothesis to most folks (it's essentially a "god of the gaps" argument - in the face of ignorance a questionable conclusion is drawn, and since you can't disprove it, it must be true! The illogic of the position should be pretty obvious). 2. Even prior to the current re-evaluation of North American colonialism, most folks at least agreed that the native peoples of the continent weren't happy with the European who were the ancestors of many of us, and therefore would have a motive for wanting to do all manor of horrible things to them - apparently including annoying them by moving their descendants car keys and knocking picture frames off of walls - hardly a fitting retort to genocidal policies, really. 3. There is a, frankly, racist notion that non-white people are somehow mystically powerful and therefore terrifying and not to be trusted (which has been a recurring theme throughout much of western colonial history - incidentally, the current obsession of young white people with India is typically little more than a current manifestation of this long-running racist belief) and this notion that even the dead non-white people are mystically powerful seems to be little other than a continuation of this tendency.
So, next time someone tells you that a place is haunted due to being built on an Indian burial ground, point at the person and laugh. You'll be glad you did.
* For some reason, the people of Santa Barbara consider themselves the "Central Coast" despite the fact that they are clearly in Southern California - but it gets even goofier when you consider that the Information Center in Fullerton is called the South Central Coast Information Center - there is nothing central about Fullerton! It's in fucking Orange County! San Luis Obispo County could arguably be described as the South Central Coast - but not Orange County.
** This guys has other entries with titles such as, and no I am not making this up, "Gall Bladder Disease and Demons", "Car shopping and Deliverance", "Dolls, toys, and stuffed animals - better burn them too", "Candles - Don't Burn Them; Get Them Out Of Your Home!", "Diabetes - Squid like demons attack ten parts of your body", and oh so many more.
Oh, and my favorite sentence on the site, from the page on doctors, is this "The dental symbol is a triangle in a circle. This same symbol is the highest satanic symbol." Yep. Your dentist is a Satan worshiper.
You can go to http://www.demonbuster.com/ yourself to see the true insanity of it all.
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