StinkyLulu recently asked me to participate in a meme about which famous person, alive or dead, I would invite to dinner. StinkyLulu opted for Rita Moreno. It was a good choice. Of course, I was surprised he didn’t say “GayProf,” which would have made more sense. But, whatever. I think we all know who I would choose:
1. Pick a single person, past or present, in the film industry who you'd like to have dinner with, and tell us why you chose this person.
I believe that people demand a predictable GayProf. They don’t want a GayProf willy-nilly choosing unexpected people. So who else could I choose but Wonder Woman? Yes, I grant that she wasn't technically in the film industry. And, okay, she doesn’t really exist – allegedly.
Still, Wonder Woman (a.k.a Diana Prince, a.k.a. Princess Diana of the Amazons, a.k.a. the woman who is too often incorrectly identified as "Superwoman") is beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, swifter than Hermes, and stronger than Hercules. Plus, she really knows how to accessorize. Who wouldn’t want to have dinner with her?
2. Set the table for your dinner. What would you eat? Would it be in a home or at a restaurant? And what would you wear? Feel free to elaborate on the details.
Well, Amazon feasts tend to get a little peculiar. Apparently all the dinner guests are first expected to dress like deer:
Then they are hunted and “skinned”:
And, finally, baked into a pie:
Somehow, my kitchen just doesn’t seem big enough to accommodate an Amazon tart. Plus, I don't have a self-cleaning oven. I really hate to make things that I know will splatter.
So, I think my dinner would be much more simple. Given that Wonder Woman is a vegetarian (cannibal/deer references aside), the menu would be high on the soy protein, veggies and fruits. I’ll make darn sure, though, that all my fruit is remarkably fresh. Produce with blemishes seems to piss her off:
Maybe I can distract her with a good bottle of Rioja. Thank the gods that we know that Diana drinks wine. Just because you have to deflect bullets with your bracelets doesn’t mean that you should be concerned about drinking something that depresses neural activity and impairs motor skills.
3. List five thoughtful questions you would ask this person during dinner.
A. Diana, when you worked at NASA, who convinced you that hot-pants and a plunging blouse was the ideal outfit for work on spaceships?
B. While we are on the subject of work, you have had a hard time holding down a regular job. So far, you have been a nurse, a Navy yeomen, a secretary, the owner of a dress boutique, a guide at the U.N., an astronaut trainee, a U.N. special agent, an ambassador, a monarch, and now an agent for metahuman affairs. Have you ever thought about seeing a career counselor?
C. Has the spiking gas prices affected your use of the invisible jet? Also, don’t you think that it is environmentally dubious to just let it fly around the sky empty all day? I mean, it's bad enough that you don't carpool. Shouldn’t you at least be looking for an invisible hanger?
D. You once explained your unusual star-spangled short shorts:
After the Bush administration, do you ever feel dirty wearing your uniform? Maybe all the torture, war, death penalties, sexism, and disregard for social justice suggests that the U.S. is beyond hope of being reminded of its once lofty ideals.
I say that if you want to really send a message, opt for a wardrobe change. Maybe you should think about an outfit that is red and yellow with some columns?
E. Unlike Batman or Superman, you have constantly been shafted with bad writing and a total disregard to your origin material. First, they took away your superpowers and killed your boyfriend. Then they gave you back your powers and your boyfriend. Then they killed your boyfriend again and took away your secret identity. Now they have decided to split the difference so you lose your superpowers while you are under your secret identity. They call it a "reward from the gods" to experience mortality as Diana Prince. I call it a cheap plot device. Ugh.
Why don’t you get the same respect as Superman and Batman? Where is your movie and product tie ins?
You might be one of the “Big Three,” but clearly D.C. considers you the Chrysler of that metaphor. Superman and Batman are out driving Mustangs and Corvettes. You, on the other hand, have been saddled with a 1981 Plymouth Horizon. It’s not right, girl.
Bob Kane is one step away from canonization, but who mourns for William Moulton Marston? It’s because of the weird Amazon deer ritual thing that he created, isn’t it?
Okay, so maybe that wasn't so much of a question as a rant. Instead, let's ask another question.
E. Here you tell Hawkgirl that you will wait for her while she changes her clothes:
By "waiting," did you really mean "watching her undress?" Just what are your eyes so fixed upon? Her eyes are above her mouth, not her bellybutton. Come to think of it, you never did spend much time mourning Steve Trevor's many deaths. I am not sayin', I am just sayin'. . .
4. When all is said and done, select six bloggers to pass this Meme along to.
One of the things about being a minority faculty member that is not discussed a great deal is the amount of isolation that one experiences. Most scholars are usually at the whim of the job market when it comes to deciding where to live in the U.S. (or even earlier when they are at the whim of which university admits them to graduate school).
Because universities, particularly those in small towns, are often segregated from communities of color, becoming a professor frequently involves leaving the community where one grows up. Moreover, one’s audience in the academic world is most often composed of a white majority.
As I mentioned previously, humanities departments tend to use minority-research positions as the only means to build diversity. It is not at all unusual, therefore, that a Latino/a Studies scholar will also be the only Latino/a in the department (likewise for Afro-Am). In some small liberal arts colleges, that might even be the only one in the whole college division – or even the only person of color. An implicit (and sometimes explicit) expectation of these scholars is that they will work to make the few minority students on these campuses feel less isolated by becoming a universal mentor.
It is small wonder that so many minority scholars often report feeling exhausted and over-extended. I don’t think that it is an exaggeration to say that I did quadruple the number of campus talks that my colleagues did at my former Texas institution. It was almost always Latino or queer student groups that asked me to be part of their programming. Part of the reason that I got roped into this was because I have hard time saying “no” to anybody (Just ask my last few dates). Another major part, though, was that I felt a personal and political commitment to work with students who were trying to change the atmosphere on the campus. In a non-white majority state, it was shocking that minority students represented less than ten percent of that Texas institution’s student body.
Being the “only” (or at least the only willing to work with students (more on that in another post)) puts faculty in difficult spots. They are doing a solid amount of work by being engaged with students, but it is work that will not be valued for tenure and promotion at most research universities. It also makes fuzzy the line between an individual’s identity and their scholarly research.
Yet, faculty of color are frequently expected to become the central reference for every issue facing people of their same identity. Most people, who are secure in their own sense of identity and politics, try to take advantage of that powerful position to create change or support others pursuing change. If one isn’t careful, though, it can also really twist you psychologically.
I have seen some Latino/a colleagues become warped as they try meet other people’s expectations about Latinos. In their efforts to conform to the identity that is projected onto them, they contort themselves into a “Super Latino.” They lose sight of their research and simply become the "campus Latino," a ready-made spokesperson who exists only to give "the Latino point of view" to anybody who asks. One problem with this is that they often lose track of the fact that no individual could ever fulfill that role. There has never been a singular "Latino point of view." The Latino/a community is filled with contradictions and wide ranging experiences. These "Super Latinos," however, discount their own experiences that shows this to be true and become a self-proclaimed embodiment of the community.
In many ways, they are the academic version of the singing mariachis in the Taco Bell commercial (God, why? Why?? Please, no more.). They serve Anglos what they expect to see and are rewarded by being to asked to perform for them (Though they haven't yet mastered the talent of making the sound of a cracking whip with their wink). One can always find these individuals at conferences, roaming about in their size-six huaraches, with beans almost literally falling out of their pockets. They are rarely presenting their research, but are ready to critique everybody else's.
These same individuals attempt to enforce those standards of “Latinoness” onto their colleagues and (especially) their grad students. Because their career has devolved to merely being a projection of Latinoness, it is in their best interest to ensure that their version of Latinoness is validated. Some time ago, one Latino grad student shared a story with me about meeting a Latina professor at another university. When he demurred from claiming to be a modern “Aztec warrior” (Who knew people were still pushing that?), she questioned whether he was really committed to social justice or even Latino scholarship.
In my own case, I have certainly encountered a few Latino/a scholars who expected me to be apologetic or embarrassed for not having been raised in a bilingual household. Since my mother was Irish American, there was no Spanish language for her to pass on to us. My father’s parents succumbed to institutional pressures in New Mexico that demanded that they not pass on Spanish to their children. The U.S. then, as now, wrongly imagined being bilingual as a hindrance. Indeed, Latino/a children of my father’s generation were punished in New Mexico’s public schools for speaking Spanish (N.B. to America: being monolingual does not keep the U.S. unified as a nation. It’s just leaving us isolated and backward). My father, as a result, had only marginal Spanish skills to pass along to his own children.
When faced with this critique about childhood, I am not sure what people expecting me to do. Am I supposed to build a time machine, travel back to the time before World War II, and convince my grandparents to make another decision in my father’s upbringing? If I had that power, why not simply stop the United States’ 1846 invasion of New Mexico in the first place?
Obviously, knowledge of Spanish is critically important for my research on Latino/as in the U.S. I have had to learn it, though, in the same ways that non-Latinos have to learn it. It is also a struggle at times as I seem to have no natural aptitude for languages (We won’t even discuss my disastrous flirtation with Russian). I think of not being raised bilingual in much the same way as I think about having been circumcised. It wasn't really my choice or preference, but you've got work with what you got. No use in crying over things that are impossible to undo.
I am not apologetic about things that were beyond my control. Nor am I willing to concede that it somehow lessens my own sense of Latino/a identity. Indeed, the loss of Spanish fluency has been part of many Latino/as’ experiences in this nation. To paraphrase an old joke from Cheech Marin (who grew up speaking mostly English himself), Chicanos are Mexicans who get “B’s” in Spanish class.
My grandparents, like many Latino families, were promised that if they adopted English-only their children would not face discrimination in the U.S. It turns out that was a lie. My father faced numerous incidents of racism and, alas, he had only one language with which to curse about it. My grandfather frequently expressed his regret about and mourned his children's lack of Spanish skills. All of that was a "Latino" experience (but not the only Latino experience).
Latino/a and other scholars are frequently forced to conform to the expectations of their white colleagues about their identity. It is therefore disheartening when we see Latino/as imposing their own definitions of their identity onto one another. This only serves to contain and reduce Latino/a experiences and ignores the greater diversity of own community. It lessens our ability to understand the complexity of Latino/a responses and strategies for finding a place in the U.S.
Here are some random thoughts that I have had this week:
After a long and tedious day at work, nothing cheers a young queer man quite so much as watching a men’s diving competition on television.
Being queer places one in a peculiar position of both desiring certain bodies and being envious of those same bodies. Hetero men desire women’s bodies, but it doesn’t seem that the majority want their own bodies to develop the same breasts.
It’s a bummer that Oreo cookies are so toxic and fattening.
The profound and overly emotional investment that some people have in either Obama or Clinton makes me uncomfortable (and leery). I thought that we all understood that politicians were a necessary evil. They aren’t people that you want in your house.
Luckily, nobody seems to have similar enthusiasm for the scummy, two-faced McCain.
Some devoted CoG reader should really create a GayProf comic book that involves me wearing the outfit in my profile picture.
I can’t believe that my family used to construe Crisco as the healthy alternative to lard.
Beyond being incredibly annoying, Day Light Saving seems like a dubious proposition. I want some critical evidence (not speculation or theories) that it does anything for energy conservation.
Mary Ann’s recent arrest for possession of marijuana explains how she tolerated Gilligan’s annoying ass for all those years. If I was stuck on that island, I would be addicted to heroine by now.
Mentioning to your colleagues that you worked as a secretary before going to grad school can result in being “volunteered” to do lots of paperwork.
I miss the show Can’t Get a Date. It made my own dating strategies seem so reasonable.
A few days ago I didn’t buy gas because I figured that prices could only go down from $3.15/gallon. Today, gas is $3.26/gallon in MFT.
The cost of living in MFT, overall, is really outrageous given the size of the town.
Teaching grad students requires one to constantly give reassurance and hand holding – which is inconvenient, because I want reassurance and hand holding.
Xtube is not really that erotic, but it is filled with fascinating clips of people doing unexpected things.
Martha Jones is an infinitely more interesting character than Rose Tyler. So why spend a year plus mourning the loss of the latter?
Some academics deeply desire purely bureaucratic (and often thankless) jobs because they come with a title and give an illusion of power. One would expect people with Ph.D.’s to be smarter than that.
I am so relieved that the most recent political “sex scandal” involves the heteros for a change. No “wide stances in the toilet.” No “therapeutic massages” or crystal meth. At last, the heteros will be exposed to the same media scrutiny and speculation that we have endured.
This past week has been the mid-semester break at Big Midwestern University. Because classes started so early, our half-way point came well before the end of February. At least they have the good sense not to call it a “Spring Break.” We had two snow storms within that period.
Snow has certainly lost its charm since the last time that I lived in the Midwest (in grad school). Perhaps a significant part of that disenchantment comes from the fact that I now have to shovel all this crap out of the way if I want to get out of my garage. I am starting to run out of places to stick all that snow. It is piled up along my fence and I can’t imagine the mess it will make when it starts to melt.
The other day, while I was out huffing and puffing with my trusty shovel, I wondered what it would be like if we depended upon our nation’s politicians to do such a basic task. How would they grapple with being responsible for shoveling their own driveway clear in Midwestern Funky Town?
George W. Bush: Snow hates America’s freedom. That’s why I ordered the military to shovel snow, not in Midwestern Funky Town, but Arizona instead.
Condoleezza Rice: Despite having a memo delivered to me entitled “Five Inches of Snow Imminent,” there was no way real way that we could have predicted this snow fall. It’s all the previous administration’s fault.
Barack Obama: I have zero experience shoveling snow. In fact, I was raised in Hawai'i. Still, I am sure that if we all have hope, the snow will magically melt all on its own. Aren't I charming?
Dick Cheney: I will do nothing about the actual snow, but I have already asked Google maps to remove it from satellite images so the enemy won’t know that it exists.
Bob Gates, Secretary of Defense: A surge in personnel will surely contain our snow problem – We just need to be patient and not expect the snow to be removed until next August.
Lou Dobbs: It was probably Mexican immigrants who sneaked into this country illegally so that they could deposit that snow in front of middle-class Americans' doors.
Bill Clinton: I did not have sexual relations with that snow. Well, it depends on your definition of "snow."
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales: I don’t recall there being any snow.
Current Attorney General Michael Mukasey: It only qualifies as snow if it happens in front of my house. Otherwise, I can’t comment on whether it is shovelable or not.
Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve: The best way to combat that snow is to lower interests rates yet again. I mean, it's not like flooding the market with money is going to create inflation or anything.
John McCain: I applaud the Bush administration for all their hard work in shoveling snow in the past. The U.S. is more snow-free today than at any time in its history. You can expect the exact same type of snow removal service from me. By the way, have I ever mentioned that I was once a prisoner of war?
Hillary Clinton: Ignore the fact that I have done nothing to combat our nation's snow problem in the eight years that I have been in the Senate. If elected president, I would be ready on day-one to shovel that snow. In fact, I will be remembered as the snow-removing president.
Mitt Romney: When I ran for governor of Massachusetts, I said that I was in favor of shoveling snow. Now, though, my political views have evolved and I am fully opposed to the forcible removal of snow.
Exxon: Hey, if we keep up with all that gas guzzling and ignore global warming, nobody will have to worry about snow ever again. It's win-win.
Bill Richardson: I am the only one who has the resume and experience to shovel that snow. Why didn’t anybody ever notice me? What the hell is wrong with this country?
Mike Huckabee: I believe it's a lot easier to shovel the snow than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do -- to shovel the snow so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view. Praise Jesus.
Laura Bush: Look at the bozo that I chose to marry. Do you really think that I am smart enough to operate a shovel? Or even spell “shovel?”
Ralph Nader: It’s corporate interests that are keeping that snow from being shoveled. I will make sure that I am photographed in front of the unshoveled snow, condemn it loudly, and then leave you to deal with the mess.
Joe Solmonese, Director of HRC: If we get 1/8 of the snow cleared and nobody beats us to death with the shovel, I consider that a historic victory for the GLB community. Transgender people can shovel their own damn snow.
Oso Raro recently had a post on teaching, experience, and racial identities in the academic world. This, along with my own entry on diversity in hiring, had me thinking about the role(s) of minority faculty who teach on race in the U.S.
Since arriving at Big Midwestern University, several Latino/a graduate students have stopped by my office to talk about their futures in the academic world. While they still have a long way to go before they become professors, they expressed an ambivalence about their expected place at universities and colleges. Many of their peers and some professors don’t view their academic pursuits in the same way as other students studying [white] topics. Although they are working just as hard (if not harder) than their colleagues, many people assume that their knowledge and ideas about Latino/a Studies are “naturally” derived from their racial identity and experiences. They have felt a pressure to enact other people's assumptions about Latino/a identity even as their intellectual creativity has been ignored. They are called upon to be the living embodiment of Latino/a oppression so that others can know.
I wish that I had some solid advice for these students. Alas, though, their estimation about minorities in the academic world is fairly accurate. My experience at my former Texas institution demonstrated the disinterest (and even hostility) that still exists for minority scholars/scholarship within certain academic enclaves. During a department meeting, the classes that I and others (Others?) taught on race and gender were dismissed by one memorable colleague as “boutique classes” that distracted from the “real” [read: white, straight, male] history of the nation. For him and his friends, such classes were a frivolous waste of precious classroom space. Our presence in the university was a product of wrong-headed affirmative action programs and political correctness run amok. Another colleague made this explicit by saying to me that hiring in Latino studies was "just an excuse to add more brown faces to the department."
Such talk left me wondering how those Texas colleagues fantasized about me. Stereotypes about my perceived racial identity must have intermingled with equal stereotypes about my sexual orientation in their daydreams about my classroom. By the way they discussed my classes on sex and race, I figured that they imagined that most of my time at the lectern was spent in drag, wearing a long billowy skirt, whirling in a circle while I played the castanets. Then, after I finished with the ritual dance of my people (gay or Latino (take your pick)), we all ate tacos together and drank tequila. While I might actually enjoy that type of class, it’s not really how I choose to teach – most days.
African Americans, Latino/as, and Asian Americans in the humanities often have to walk a complicated tightrope between expectations about their racial identity and their academic scholarship. Many (Most? All?) departments depend upon positions focused on minority scholarship as the major (only?) method to increase the racial diversity of the faculty. Minority scholars are therefore viewed with suspicion if they are seen as not sufficiently “academic” enough and “distanced” from their subject matter. If minority faculty advocate for increasing the role of Latino/a Studies or African-American Studies, they are seen as “pushing an agenda” or simply wanting to hire their friends. The intellectual value that comes from a more diverse faculty is not seriously considered (much less the need to reinvent the way that we all teach U.S. history at the university level).
Yet, minority scholars are caught by equal pressure from the other side. At times, minority scholars have to prove that they have as “authentic” a racial identity as the people that they study. Certain white faculty position themselves as the arbiters of that authenticity. Since joining the academic world, I have been astounded at the number of white faculty (most of whom considered themselves “liberal”) who were willing to pass judgment on whether certain African American colleagues had “legitimate” claim to hip-hop styles based on their perceived economic class. With tremendous authority (but almost no knowledge), they felt certain that they could tell which of their colleagues had known “real” struggle and which had not. Likewise, I have heard other colleagues try to determine if certain Latino/as were sufficiently invested in a metaphorical salsa (either the dance or the food). Did the Latino/a faculty add enough zesty spices to the academic pot to warrant their continued employment?
From my own experience, I have numerous stories about my expected/ perceived/ desired racial identity being drawn into my professional position(s). The loveliest of my former Texas colleagues, for instance, accused me of being too identified with Latino/a students during my first year evaluation. They alleged that I catered to Latino/as and didn’t care enough about Anglo students.
For the record, not a single colleague ever came to observe my classes first-hand or ever spoke with any of my students in my entire time in Texas. In other words, they had no real evidence that Latino/as were getting better service in my classes. That didn’t matter. It sounded plausible enough that a Latino historian probably favored his Latino/a students that it made it into my official tenure file as something that I needed to work on (!).
Perhaps they felt threatened because they imagined that my classes were about “insider” knowledge to which they could never be apart. If I was teaching Latino/a History and receiving positive student evaluations for it, they reasoned, I must have been secretly conspiring with my race. It was surely a plot to take Anglo jobs and (possibly) replant their gardens (Also for the record, my classes on Latino/a History have never been filled with exclusively Latino/a students).
That wouldn’t be the only incident in my fledgling academic career. In other moments, some of my colleagues have questioned whether I am Latino enough given my mixed ancestry (Note to new readers: My father was Mex Amer and my mother was Irish Amer). My entire life in New Mexico, this was never raised as an issue by the Latinos who surrounded me (like, you know, half my family). Some white faculty, however, want to be sure that they got the “real deal.” Being “mixed” is suspect to them. It seems the power of whiteness grants them the unquestioned ability to decide the appropriate measure of everybody else’s racial performance. This is ironic given that Mexican identity has historically been imagined as mestizo.
These types of identity concerns would not be expressed to a scholar working on medieval Italian history. Nobody wonders if they are catering to students who are of Southern European extraction. Nor are they asked if they are “medieval enough.” It might be more interesting if we did hold them up to that type of criteria. Not wearing a hair shirt? Do you like to take baths? Have you never suffered from the plague? Clearly you aren’t a fully legitimate medieval scholar.
What is astounding about all of this is that it has nothing to do with our actual jobs. It is obvious (or should be) that identifying as Latino/a does not mean that one is ready to step into a classroom and instantly start teaching Latino/a history. It takes years of studying, reading, and thinking. True, being identified as Latino/a might predispose somebody to take up that challenge because of their experiences in our society. One’s experiences might also give one a political and intellectual perspective in writing that history. That, though, is hardly the end of the story.
Thanks to all of you who have either commented or e-mailed me directly wondering if this post was eerily prophetic. Your concern was very sweet. Where would I be without you?
Fortunately, my silence has not been the result of major calamity. I had been meaning to write a follow up entry to my last one. Somehow, though, time always ran out on me. Days slip by quickly when you're faced with a ridiculously full schedule.
On top of that, my body seems to be responding to the cold-winter conditions of Midwestern Funky Town by going into semi-hibernation. While I have always enjoyed my daily sleep, I find myself going to bed early so that I can have solid ten-hour blocks of snoozing. It feels like I submit to a little mini-coma each night.
Perhaps it also has to do with the fact that the six week period between December 31 and February 14 (more or less) is always the worst time of year for me. Usually these are the weeks when I am the most busy and the least happy. This year was certainly not any different.
I wish that I could say that my temporary absence resulted in my finding ultimate Truth and/or my inner light. Alas, I had only two mild conclusions recently. First, I really need more Walter Benjamin for the Never Ending Research Project of Doom. This either means more reading or breaking out the Ouija board and attempting to contact his un-dead spirit. Either way, it’s best that we don’t talk about that part.
My other conclusion is that I am easily manipulated by techno-babble and aggressive sales people. This comes as a bit of surprise given how critical that I am of the media, advertising, academics, and all other forms of discussion. Put me in a mall with somebody working for commission, however, and I am easily moved.
Over the past few years that I have spent at the gym, I have come to recognize the importance of a quality running shoe. Shoes, like tires, are not a purchase where one cuts corners. If you go for the "bargain" in either, expect a blowout.
Given that I refuse to use any other cardio equipment beyond the treadmill, I need to keep replacing my shoes regularly to ensure that I have ample cushioning. Over the past couple of weeks, the telltale signs started showing up that I needed to get myself to the mall. When my knee joints begin to sound like snapping mousetraps as I walk, we know that I need some new shoes.
Before going to the mall, I had already decided to simply replicate the purchase of my last pair of shoes. After all, they had served me well and I put tons of miles on them before they finally gave out. Such noble plans often fail.
The sales associate at the athletic store wasn’t prepared to let me walk out with last year’s model. “Ack, you are still using the ASICS 2110 model? How have you managed?” she asked in feigned horror, “I mean, I could sell that to you again, but there have been some significant changes in runner’s technology since last year.” I liked how she made “technology” to be a possessive of “runner.” Not only is it technology for jogging, but it belongs to runners uniquely.
At first, I held strong and asked her to see if they still had the 2110 model. With a little bit of time, though, I fell to her message. Clearly, what I really needed was the ASICS 2130. See? It’s a whole 20 higher than the 2110!
“The 2130,” she explained, “has a Space Trusstic System™ that creates a pocket between the Trusstic device and the midsole.” Without that system, I could face midsole deformation and loose my foot function. That’s not what I want, is it? To have deformed, functionless midsoles? If I bought the 2110 again, I might as well nail my foot to a piece of plywood and call that a shoe.
The only thing that seems to have really changed between the 2110 and the 2130 is the color, but I was convinced. Such capitulation, however, did not mean that my erstwhile sales associate felt that she had completed her task. No, no.
Had I thought seriously about the quality of my insoles? The 2130 was a good shoe, but those ASICS people cut corners on their insoles. Before my eyes, she disemboweled the 2130 to reveal the “flimsy and inadequate foam insole that they dared to put in such a great shoe.”
In the end, I walked out with shoes $30 more expensive than I planned on spending. Don’t say that GayProf isn’t doing his part for the nation’s economy.
P.S. This is entry 300 at CoG -- Please fawn appropriately.
Big Midwestern University is currently in the midst of hiring several historians. These positions are both at the junior and at the senior level, but it’s clear already that the majority of people offered those new jobs will be white. Indeed, not a single person of color is even in the running for the most senior of these positions.
One of the major problems facing history departments today is that they have failed in the mission to diversify. This may come as surprising news to some. Indeed, I have been in several meetings (both in Texas and BMU) where white faculty have lauded how diverse those departments had become and how seriously they took the issue of “diversity.” For them, the successful hiring of one or two people of color in the department was enough to break out the “Mission Accomplished” banner and give a speech on an aircraft carrier.
Keep in mind that these are not bad or racist people. On the contrary, they actually do support diversity and are allies (unlike many of my other Texas colleagues who were explicitly hostile to hiring minorities (that, though, is a different post)). Yet, many well-meaning white faculty members like these don’t realize that our departments aren’t even close to racial parity. History, as an academic discipline, is shockingly out of step with the nation (and even far behind other humanities programs). Why has this happened?
In October of last year, historian George Sánchez called attention to the problem in an article for the American Historical Association. Though it didn’t garner much attention or comment, Sánchez revealed the history profession to be woefully blind to the reality of the nation’s population and the diversity of college-aged students. Combined, African Americans and Latinos represent well over 25 percent of the nation’s total population (and over a third of the population age 40 and below). Yet, African Americans only represent 5 percent of the total number of historians in the entire nation. Latino/as only compose 3 percent of the total number of historians in the entire nation.
Obviously, there are larger issues that are keeping minorities out of higher education that are beyond the scope of the field. Minorities disproportionately attend public schools with inadequate resources, they are not often encouraged to enter college and/or lack the means to pursue higher education, etc.
Historians wring their hands and point to those elements to explain why they just can’t fight the system. Yet, even with all of that, business and law schools are still much more diverse than history Ph.D. programs or faculties. History also fares worse than other humanities or social sciences. Sociology, political science, psychology, and literature are all more diverse fields than history. We are on par with economics (the discipline generally considered the most “conservative” of the social sciences).
The lack of diversity in history faculties is seemingly impacting the number of undergraduates pursuing degrees in history. Of all the disciplines, history has the whitest undergraduate majors in this nation. It therefore becomes a vicious cycle. History is taught only from the perspective of whites, which only attracts white students, who then become professors who teach that same history.
What has happened to the field of history that we should end up so far behind our colleagues in other parts of the university? We should feel a certain shame that the MBA program has done better attracting African Americans and Latino/as than our field.
Part of the problem, it seems to me, is the way that hiring and searches are conducted in history departments. If a minority is hired into a history department, he or she is most often hired into a position that is specific to their personal race or ethnicity. Latinos/as, in other words, are hired to teach Latino/a history. African Americans are hired to teach Afro-Am, etc. This is not necessarily true for white candidates, who occupy positions across the discipline (including positions teaching Latino/a and Afro-Am history).
Obviously, these “ethnic studies” positions are critically important components of the department and I am not suggesting they should come to an end (as, you know, I hold one of those positions). Yet, these positions are currently the only mechanism that departments employ to increase the racial diversity of their faculty. This is a seriously flawed strategy. Most departments can only afford to fund a couple of these positions. If that is the only avenue for diversity, then Latino/as and African Americans will always be just one or two people in the department.
Minority applicants are simply not hired for job ads in other fields (including (especially?) general U.S. history positions). Indeed, even positions that should have minority candidates because there is an obvious overlap with ethnic studies are given to white candidates. So, a job advertised for the "History of the U.S. West" should potentially net somebody working in Chicano/a history. After all, the West is where the majority of Chicano/as live (and, in some places, were/are the majority of the population). Likewise, a job on the U.S. South should logically draw candidates working on Afro-Am. Despite good ol’ logic, those regional-specific jobs most often go to white applicants working on white history. In one memorable incident that I witnessed, a member of a search committee rejected a qualified minority candidate by claiming that his/her work would be better suited to ethnic studies rather than a broad U.S. position. Apparently ethnic history isn’t U.S. history.
The emergence of African-American and Latino/a histories came as a response to the demand for the field to take seriously the experiences of these populations. It took decades of rigorous activism for these classes to even appear on course catalogs. A friend of mine, however, has aptly characterized how those movements have now been undercut by most history departments. After the struggle to get faculty positions for African American and Latino/a history, history departments have decided that those are the only positions from which minorities can speak and contribute.
If you imagine that this is just a problem caused by retrograde white, straight men, think again. White women are seemingly as likely to maintain white-dominance in their sub-disciplines. Indeed, I have been shocked by the number of smart white women scholars who recently claimed that gender was more important than race. That is an easy position to take if one is in a position of racial privilege.
A job post for U.S. Women’s History should be competitive for scholars working in fields like African-American women’s history or Latina history. In practice, however, those scholars are often dismissed by many of their white women colleagues as “too narrow” for such an allegedly broad field. Some white women historians still operate under the hidden assumption that race and gender are totally separate categories rather than identities created from intertwined ideologies. Twenty-seven years ago, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga’s edited volume This Bridge Called My Back challenged white feminists to interrogate their own complicity in oppression. Moraga mourned that white feminists seemed to “feel no loss, no lack, no absence when women of color are not involved.” Since that time, This Bridge has gone out of print and few white feminist scholars have noticed. Whiteness, for many white feminists, is still the real story of women’s history, even if racial privilege is invisible to those safeguarding it.
If historians are serious about diversity beyond lip-service, then it is going to require a complete revaluation of business as usual. Affirmative Action programs are dead (and in some areas now illegal). To solve the problem therefore requires a new way of thinking. Instead of imaging diversity as a question for each individual department to solve, we need to think more broadly as a discipline.
This starts by rethinking how we approach undergraduate education. Our undergraduate classes can be made relevant for the population(s) that we serve. A single reading from Sojourner Truth does not make a course syllabus on U.S. history “diverse.” Rather, we can craft classes that position questions about the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality as the central theme.
We can also take more interest in encouraging promising minority candidates to pursue graduate education. It has been a fallacy to assume that minority candidates would only be interested in writing histories on people just like themselves. Our colleagues in non-U.S. fields would likely benefit a great deal from a wider-range of perspectives on their work.
Finally, we need to seriously scrutinize the ways job searches are conducted. From the initial drafting of the ad to the final campus interviews, we need to be more mindful about what is at play in our departments. I call it bullshit that a white woman writing about white women is writing "women's history." Call it like it is -- Make whiteness visible in historians' presumptions. We need to know about white women (obviously), but white women are not the sum-total of "women's" experiences in this country. Likewise, a white male scholar writing on white male settlers in the U.S. West is writing "white, male History," not a "general" history of the west that is supposedly open to all.
Moreover, having a single African-American historian writing African-American history doesn’t mean that he/she has the field “covered.” Nor does it mean that a supposedly “broad” U.S. history position is a “balance” to having African American or Latino/a History.
We must disrupt this “lite-brite” vision of U.S. history. The stories of minority groups in this nation are not simply festive, colored pegs that can be plugged into a core white background. The history of race in this nation is the history of this nation.
Tenured Radical tagged me to write about the reasons that I love teaching history (or something to that effect). Articulating our reasons for teaching, she reasons, will be a modest attempt to break apart the notion that universities provide a mere commodity for eager cogs in the capitalist machine (or something to that effect). I figured it would also be a good balance to my previous post. GayProf doesn't spend all of his time complaining about students.
Here are the reasons that I enjoy teaching history:
1. I can facilitate students discovering that they actually do enjoy learning about the past. Until college, most students’ education worked to crush their interest in learning about the past. Social Studies (which many people confuse with “history”) most often required them to memorize names and dates until they were ready to puke. How could anybody come to like history as an academic discipline if their only exposure required them to mindlessly spill out things like the exact date of the Treaty of Paris? Does knowing that it was signed on September 3, 1783 really do much for our understanding of the nation? What does that date even mean without any sense of context about what else was happening in the rest of the world in 1783? Most students, after dutiful memorizing such things, promptly forget them twenty-four hours after their high school exam. All-night cramming leaves a bad taste in their mouth. No wonder they are often filled with dread when they see that their university will require that they take six hours of history credit.
Yet, I have found that most people are quite curious about the past outside of academic environments. That curiosity might run the gambit. Some people might wonder how certain individuals became president or why we don’t remember other presidents (*cough* William Henry Harrison *cough*). Others might wonder how our modern assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality appeared. Still others might be more interested in questions about day-to-day life in the past. Some might ask, how and where did people take a shit in New York in 1833? I am thinking of you, Torn.
All of these questions have answers if we know where to look. If I can free students from the date/name phobia, they actually start to realize that learning about the past is – gasp – interesting.
2. Teaching history encourages students to develop skills in critical thinking. This is related to number one, but so important it deserves separate mention.
Memorizing all those names and dates? It does nothing for students to acquire actual abilities to think on their own. Now that we have entered into the “No Child Left Behind” era, things look even more grim. Apparently the marker of being educated is no longer being able to reason or form arguments. Nope, the marker of an education is the ability to play Trivia Pursuit: Scantron Edition.
Teaching history at the university level offers students the opportunity to think about the ways that others have created stories about the past. They learn that there is never one true history. Instead, there are always multiple and competing narratives about the past. This requires all of us to think critically about sources, perspectives, and context as we piece together the meaning of the past.
3. It beats shoveling coal. Teaching history also doesn’t require a lot of heavy lifting.
4. Teaching history can help students feel less lonely. The contemporary U.S. can be a grim place: unwinnable wars, a looming economic depression (don’t kid yourself – It’s nearly upon us. Cutting taxes again will only exacerbate the problem and continue to push the nation into debt), racism, sexism, and homophobia.
By studying the past, we learn that other people have dealt with similar (or worse) problems and survived. Individuals who identify as racial or sexual minorities, in particular, can find people in the past who weren’t afraid to challenge the status quo. Knowing such people existed can make one feel not so isolated. Because school boards mostly refuse to consider that history isn’t only about dead, white, straight men, the university classroom is often the first place that people even learn about the existence of different perspectives about the past.
5. I get to provide students with numerous anecdotes for their future cocktail parties. As I mentioned in number one, people are usually interested in the past (even if they are scarred off from the actual discipline). Interesting vignettes from history make excellent small talk for parties. Taking my class with undoubtedly improve students’ future social standing.
Did you know, for instance, that the nineteenth-century inventor of the Graham Cracker, Sylvester Graham, was obsessed with ending masturbation in young boys? Graham believed that one’s carnal desires were directly related to the food one consumed. Indeed, his cracker was imagined as part of a homeopathic system to “cure” all sorts of sexual vice. Think of that next time you make s’mores.
6. I learn a lot from students. Because history depends so much on discussion and trying out new interpretations, the classroom is not just a one-way venue where knowledge is imparted from behind the podium. I also take away new ideas.
Do I learn something from every student enrolled? Well, no. Still, there have been several students who arrived in my classroom with a different set of life experiences and/or a different intellectual trajectory that challenged and enhanced my own presumptions about the past.
7. Teaching history provides a means to buy sweet, sweet liquor. Hey, I might have noble sentiments about teaching, but it is also a paycheck. That paycheck permits me to eat, have shelter, and keep my bar quasi-stocked. Besides, with students like those mentioned in the previous entry, teaching history sometimes becomes a reason to buy sweet, sweet liquor.
8. Teaching is easier than trying to have a career in stand-up comedy. Both stand-up comedy and teaching require a lone individual to talk for an hour in front of an audience. Students, however, are usually so grateful that I make any attempt at humor in lecture that they will laugh at my corny jokes. In a night club, I would be booed off stage and possibly burned with cigarettes. Moreover, my students don't show up drunk -- most of the time.
9. By teaching history, I can provide an antidote to contemporary misuses of of the past. We would be in a sorry world if our only interpretation of the nation’s past came from politicians, CNN, Fox, or the National Treasure movies.
Teaching history gives students access to histories that were written based on, you know, evidence. Because it also provides students with critical thinking skills (see number 2), students are better prepared to identify when people are interpreting the past for their own political ends (whether it be the left or the right). Knowing that an argument is ahistorical is as important as knowing a reasonable historical argument.
Besides, any job where I can trash Nicolas Cage is well worth my time.
Teaching is generally a part of the academic job that I enjoy. More times than not I enjoy engaging with my students. Most of them are serious – or at least serious enough that they are willing to do some work. So, don’t take the rest of this post as a universal complaint about my students. Most of them are fantastic.
Still, I think that we are all dumbfounded by the astounding sense of entitlement that some students bring with them to the classroom. Given how twisted and out of shape parenting has become in this nation, it’s hardly those students’ fault. All of their lives they have been told that they are remarkably special and deserve only the best. The sad truth is, though, that you actually have to do something – anything – before that becomes true.
One of my colleagues also speculates that their parents have created a scenario where students imagine that as long as they are honest about their less honorable elements, then everything will be fine. It probably goes back to some childhood incident where they stole some cookies and then confessed. Their confession was greeted with such enthusiasm and a “thank you for being honest” moment that their theft was dismissed entirely. This, it seems to me, sets up an unreasonable expectation about how their life is going to go – particularly if you enter GayProf’s classroom. Steal my cookies and expect to go to jail. Issuing a confession just makes it easier for me to speed you through the trial.
Alas, some students imagine that their personal schedules and desires supersede their own responsibilities in the classroom. “My family is planning a trip to Paris this Spring,” one student recently informed me, “Is it going to be a problem if I miss two weeks of class in April?” This came on the heels of another student who asked, “This class conflicts with another one on my schedule. Would it be a problem if I show up to lecture half an hour late every day?”
One wonders how these students will make the rocky adjustment to the working world. How would IBM respond to an employee who approached their supervisor, “Gee, I have another job. Would it be okay if I didn’t show up to this one until noon? Also, since I will be arriving late, could you have somebody pick me up something for lunch?” Does Procter and Gamble have a flexible vacation program that allows its employees to blow off work for a vacation when ever the whim hits them?
Then again, those questions were better than, “How hard is your class? This is my last semester and I am not really interested in doing anything too serious.” Yes, a student really sent this to me in an e-mail. Granted, it is an honest statement. My only response could be that the class was a significant amount of work. I wonder, though, if s/he really expected that I would respond, “My class? No, it’s a total joke. We never doing anything important. Most of our class time is spent hanging out in the bar.”
After leaving Texas, I thought that I would also be free from students who stated, “Reading about gays and lesbians offends my religious/political sensibilities. Can I substitute another book instead?” Not so. The bizarre Right-wing exists everywhere. They also bring with them the notion that reading a perspective different than their own is “indoctrination.” To me, this always suggested that they knew their own positions were intellectually weak for they fear that they will not withstand scrutiny.
My response to this has become well rehearsed: The reading selected for this class explores a diversity of experiences and perspectives. It is not necessary for any student to agree with all the reading, but an important part of a college education is learning how to respectful grapple with view points different than one’s own. Questions and concerns about sexuality are currently at the heart of many people’s sense of the nation. If we can’t discuss these issues at universities, places designed for intellectual engagement, where can we?
What I really want to say is that this ain’t a buffet and I don’t assign reading a la carte. My goals are not to force students to agree with me. Grow up. If I avoided anything/anybody who had a different political perspective than myself, I would never read a newspaper, watch mainstream television, or see 99 percent of the movies out there.
Sometimes the questions aren’t all about trying to get out of work or being challenged. This semester I also had a student ask me, “What country are you from?” Unlike the other questions, I don’t think this is bad per se. Every few semesters, though, I am periodically asked this by a student. It’s a question that mostly confuses me. Why would they imagine that I wasn’t from the U.S.? Is this something other profs are asked often? It is even more mysterious given that on the first day I outline my life history and point out my birth and being raised in New Mexico.
Then there was the student who asked, “GayProf, you are clearly the smartest, most interesting, and best looking of the faculty at Big Midwestern U. Do your colleagues ever get jealous?”
Okay, nobody asked me that last one. They are probably thinking it, though.
Up until this point, I have largely avoided writing about the various presidential candidates. Acknowledging them only encourages them. Alas, tomorrow my state has its primary.
Your ol’friend GayProf feels quite frustrated by his options in the primary. You see, officials in my state moved up the date of their primary because they desired to be relevant. Silly Midwest – The rusting factories and crushing unemployment should have long ago indicated that the empire has abandoned you.
The Democratic Party responded by “punishing” my state for moving up its primary. My state's delegates will not be permitted to participate at the Democratic convention. Moreover, many of the top Democratic candidates refused to put themselves on my state's ballot.
So, I am left with the option of casting a vote, which has already been explicitly stated won’t count, for a candidate for whom I don’t want to vote. Way to empower the people, Democrats! You suck.
The Democratic Party has decided that I, as a voter, need not weigh in on the decision between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton . Nope – Obama isn’t even on the ballot (which won't be counted anyway). I can vote for Clinton, however (but it won't count).
Maybe I am just bitter because my choice for the Democratic Party was already out of the race (not that I could have voted for him anyway because, guess what?, not on the ballot in my state). Who was that? Bill Richardson. A Latino from New Mexico who, despite one or two major gaffs, has a basically good track record on gay issues? Yeah, it was a real mystery who I would have supported.
Think I might solve my voting problem by writing in my selected candidate? Nope. The rules for write-in candidates for the primary in my state are extremely narrow, meaning my vote would simply be discarded instantly (rather than later by the Democratic Party).
My state has offered that I could vote in the Republican Primary instead. Gee, thanks. I would rather eat a bowl of hot glass than vote for any of the candidates in the Republican Party – under any circumstances.
Those who think McCain is an “independent thinker” or a person of principles, let me just remind you of this:
Let's see what eight years of Republican mismanagement and greed have given us: the nation’s economy is in shambles, we are mired in an unwinnable war, the military is over extended, and our global reputation shot. As far as I am concerned, there shouldn’t even be a Republican Party. Running for President? The Republican Party doesn't deserve to field a candidate as city dog catcher.
Personally, I think that anybody who voted Republican in 2004 owes me cash money. Not only did they legitimate a coup, but they have really lowered each person's standard of living. Their greed or hatred (whichever pitiful motive they had for voting Republican) has cost this nation, and us as individuals, a great deal. Now it's time for them to pay up.
Before the Republicans took over, my U.S. dollar used to be worth €1.27. Today, one U.S. dollar is worth €0.67. By my calculations, therefore, the dumbasses who voted Republican owe me around $38,400. I would prefer, though, if they paid that to me in Euros. I am not sure those dollars are going to be around much longer.
If they aren’t willing to give me cash, they could always pay me in gasoline. In 2000, it was considered unusually high to pay $1.43/gallon. Now I am lucky if I find someplace to fill up for under $3.00. Bush’s oil cronies, on a completely unrelated matter, have been reporting record profits every year that he has been in office.
When I drive up to the local Shell station, there should be a Republican voter there in overalls waiting to fill my tank. And, just because of that whole Larry Craig nonsense, they should wash my windshield too.
We should start requiring anybody who wants to vote Republican to bring their Mastercharge card with them to the polls. You want to trash the nation because of your xenophobia? Okay – but it’s gonna cost you. You think that you have the right to prevent two men from getting married? Alright, but we are going to need a cashier’s check from your local bank. Voting for Huckabee? I hope you have a gold card.
Long time readers of CoG know that I have an unhealthy obsession a strong interest in 1970s television. Actually, even short-time readers of CoG probably know that as well. Hey, I never claimed that this blog would be topical.
So when hulu.com went on-line, you can well imagine that I was the first to sign up. While the site could use more work and content, it is a means to pass time when I should have really been working on the Never Ending Research Project of Doom.
Many revelations have emerged from hulu. Who knew there was a sequel series to Knight Rider called Team Knight Rider? Who knew that a show could be worse than Knight Rider?
Skipping over the utterly unwatchable, I went to Lou Grant. It’s a show that I have vaguely warm feelings about, but not enough that I would actually bother acquiring the DVD’s.
While it has mostly been forgotten today, Lou Grant had substantial ratings in the pre-cable days of the late seventies. The show’s titular character made a highly unusual transition from its origins on a 30 minute sit-com (Mary Tyler Moore) to a one-hour drama.
At the end of Mary Tyler Moore, the fictional Minneapolis television station fired all the main characters. Grant, in his spinoff, decided to move to Southern California where he found a new job as the city editor of the Los Angeles Tribune.
Part of the show’s popularity developed from its reputation to tackle serious social issues. Yes, Lou Grant wasn’t afraid to take bold and radical positions like “Spouse abuse is bad” or “falsifying school records is wrong.” Those were heady times.
Watching the old reruns reminds me (again) of how poorly the mainstream media grappled with the major social movements of the 1970s. Lou Grant’s setting in Los Angeles opened the opportunity for the show to engage the Chicano and Chicana activists who were challenging the nation’s status quo.
All through the U.S. Southwest, some mighty determined Chicano/a young people demanded more equitable access to education, an end to police harassment, protection of their civil rights, and greater investment in urban neighborhoods. In 1968, Chicano/a students walkout of their public schools in Los Angeles, Denver, and South Texas in protest of racist policies. Revolutionary movements appeared in New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, and California.
Among their other concerns, Chicano/a activists demanded that the mainstream media provide better representations of people of Mexican descent. Most images that circulated of Mexicans/Mexican Americans presented them as either ignorant buffoons for laughs or as dangerous villains. Frito Lay even engineered a means to merge the two stereotypes in order to sell their fat-laden snacks. Between 1967 and 1971, the “Frito Bandito” appeared on television speaking broken English while robbing innocent Anglos of their salty snacks.
While Chicano and Chicana activists were able to win some important victories in terms of education, voting, and the law, the media proved remarkably recalcitrant. Lou Grant’s location in Los Angeles did not mean that the show’s regular cast would include an actual Mexican American (that would just be crazy talk). Sure, the city has the largest urban Mexican population in the world after Mexico City.
Producers of Lou Grant might have even looked around at actual Southern California newspapers that had prominent Mexican-American writers. This included the Los Angeles Times columnist Rubén Salazar who wrote a number of articles documenting the LAPD’s abuse of Chicano/as during the late sixties. Salazar died when police launched a tear-gas canister into his head during an anti-war protest in 1970.
Instead of thinking about that type of story, Lou Grant served up a fairly ambivalent image of Mexican Americans in the city. Lou Grant mediated the demands of Chicano/a activists by either renaming their complaints as problems entirely internal to the Mexican-American community or the fault of just a few bad Euro Americans.
An early episode entitled “Barrio” delivered a classic “message” Lou Grant. The plot centered on the newly-arrived Grant learning about East L.A. after a story comes across the wire that a Mexican-American mother was shot by a gang. On one level, the episode did acknowledge that minority neighborhoods were often cut off from city services and disproportionately poor. Yet, it also upheld the notion that the “barrio” was riddled with violence because it was populated by irrational residents who refused to conform to middle-class standards.
Grant assigned his (apparently only) woman reporter, Billie Newman, to the shooting story. Newman discovers that the pre-teen son of the shooting victim plans revenge on the gang that shot his mother. This permitted the show to offer up a gratuitous scene of a drive-by shooting, which we are informed is basically a daily event for residents in the barrio. Indeed, it is such a non-event for the Chicano family that the three-year old girl spends her time comforting Billie (!).
To get the audience further invested, Newman takes Grant on a fantastical tour of the mysterious and inscrutable section of the city known as East L.A. While there, Grant learns two important lessons: first, tacos are good!; second, that Chicano L.A. is populated only by gang members, want-to-be-gang members, or people who were once gang members. Unless, of course, you count the victims of the gangs (who are, of course, the immediate relatives of gang members).
Grant never meets any Mexican American who wasn’t, at some point in their life, a gang member. Even the hero of the story, George/Jorge Santos, was a former gang member who now serves as a youth counselor in the barrio.
While the show pointed to some problems that existed in real life, it placed the onus of those problems on the Mexican American community. East L.A. wasn’t in trouble because of a lack of economic development, minimal city services, or the disenfranchisement of the population. Instead, the Mexican-American community was simply dysfunctional. The youthful character of Henry explained to Grant, “The gang is like your family, No, it’s more than your family. It’s everything. It’s always been like that. My father was in a gang and his father was in it too.”
In many ways, this episode of Lou Grant anticipated the gangxploitation films like Boulevard Nights or Colors that would be so popular in the 1980s. It gave mainstream viewers a notion of Chicanos as predisposed to being gang members because they were both hyperviolent and also senseless followers.
Obviously gangs do exist in inner-cities. Young people’s motives for joining gangs, however, are more complicated than the bizarre “family tradition” or sense of inevitability posited by Lou Grant. Gangs provide actual economic and social benefits to their members which are mostly closed off to them by the larger society. Jobs and income (from illicit sources) are one of the main reasons that gangs are appealing, especially in areas where unemployment or underemployment are high. Likewise, gangs offer entertainment and protection for those who participate.
Of course, gang membership also represents a remarkably small percentage of the Chicano community. Lou Grant’s decisions to make gangs appear all pervasive in the barrio only replicated stereotypes of Mexicans and Mexican Americans as “lawless” and in need of civilizing by benevolent white authorities (where gang violence apparently never happens).
Another episode entitled “Judge” presents a similarly compromised response to the period’s Chicano activism. The episode starts with an irate Chicana, Luisa Sánchez, visiting the Tribune to demand that Grant investigate the shoddy trial of her Chicano boyfriend, Esteban. This episode, like “Barrio,” acknowledges a certain level of unfairness in U.S. society. Indeed, it even starts fairly promising by exposing Grant’s own racist presumptions. When Sánchez challenges Grant, he offers to find a reporter who can speak Spanish. She observes that she does not need translation as she is clearly speaking to Grant in English.
The show kinda went off the tracks after that point. “Judge” got to play both sides when it came to Chicano/a complaints about the U.S. On one hand, the show exposed the injustice that many Mexicans and Mexican-Americans faced in the U.S. courts. The judge who presided over the case made racist remarks about the defendant, biased the jury, and clearly presumed the guilt of the defendant.
Yet, the show never suggested that the entire criminal system was biased against minority defendants. Instead, Lou Grant put forward the idea that it was only a few rogue judges who were causing problems for Chicano/as. If those rare individuals could be removed, then everything would be fine.
The episode further stipulated that Chicano/as would not do the figurative housecleaning of the U.S. judicial system. The two Chicano characters at the center of the plot are quickly sidelined as irrelevant. Esteban expressed extreme fear at bucking the system and passively resigned himself to his fate. While Luisa had started the episode with a zeal, she showed herself to be too emotional to handle the task. Both Luisa and Esteban need to depend on the Anglos to do the hard work of solving their problems.
Moreover, there was never any question that Esteban was truly guilty of the crime. By making his guilt unquestioned, the show suggested that Chicanos who faced the courts were there legitimately. They just deserved a fair trial before being sent to the slammer for the rest of their life. Rather than acknowledging the actual Chicano/a activists and lawyers who were demanding fair treatment from the judicial system, Lou Grant claimed that it was good-hearted and enlightened Anglos who would bring about social change.
Alas, Lou Grant wasn’t the only seventies television program to fumble with the social movements of the time. Even my beloved Wonder Woman had a troubling episode, "Knockout," that equated the Chicano/a movement with international terrorism. In an otherwise forgettable plot, Diana (played by real-life Chicana Lynda Carter) is dispatched to Los Angeles to investigate the disappearance of dreamy Steve Trevor.
Like Lou Grant, Diana must explore dangerous East L.A. to find answers. Also like Grant, she stops off for some tacos along the way (what is it with the tacos?). Unlike Grant, Diana has no sympathy for the Chicanos that she encounters.
After a quick costume change, Wonder Woman discovers that Chicano-criminal Angel Velasquez has all the answers. It turns out that a shadowy organization known as “the movement” engineered Trevor’s disappearance. In a unique twist, Wonder Woman presented Chicanos and African Americans working together within “the movement.” Caroline, an African-American police woman has teamed with Velasquez in a plot to kidnap high-ranking U.S. officials.Velasquez boldly proclaimed that the movement would "change the world by taking power away from those on the top and set free those on the bottom." Such proclamations were intended to make the movement seem crazy.
Wonder Woman’s vision of the Chicano movement was like Lou Grant’s in the sense that both presented the motives of Chicano violence as entirely irrational and without merit. Velasquez and Caroline are both misguided (the latter more than the former). Indeed, it turns out that a white man is the real leader of “the movement” who was simply using Caroline and Velasquez in a Soviet-driven plot (!). The message from this episode was that minorities shouldn’t rock the ship of state. If they tried, they were probably being mislead and duped by the supposedly smarter whites. Instead, Chicanos and African Americans should have faith in the system and, perhaps, Wonder Woman.
After watching such shows, one realizes how badly suited the mainstream media was to addressing the concerns raised by the Chicano(/a) movement(s). Keep in mind that these were considered positive visions of Chicano/as in the lat seventies. At least Mexicans weren’t being shown with a murderous desire for corn chips any longer.
All the same, these images only half-heartedly considered Mexican Americans' roles within the U.S. With friends like these, it is small wonder that the Chicano/a movement remained (and remains) mysterious to most Americans.
I am a queer associate professor of Chicano Studies. Currently, I am at a major research university in Midwestern Funky Town. As a single gay man, I am just trying to figure out my life. If I can't do that, then at least I will buy some cool shoes.
StinkyLulu recently asked me to participate in a meme about which famous person, alive or dead, I would invite to dinner. StinkyLulu opted for Rita Moreno. It was a good choice. Of course, I was surprised he didn’t say “GayProf,” which would have made more sense. But, whatever. I think we all know who I would choose:
