Nasty Law in a Nasty State

GayProf goes away for just a bit of time and look what happens to man’s world! Like most Americans, I watched with revulsion as Arizona passed a draconian measure that basically compels police to harass anyone they “reasonably suspect” to be an undocumented migrant worker. Apparently Arizona is tired of waiting in the shadow of Texas to be named the most evil state in the nation. They want that trophy for themselves!

What constitutes “reasonable suspicion?” To claim that it won’t involve forms of racial profiling is disingenuous at best. Do they seriously think that we believe that police will be instructed to be on the look out for anybody sporting a beret? Are they going to scrutinize people whose clothes suspiciously display a red maple leaf?

Arizona shouldn’t insult our intelligence. This is a mean spirited law that will target people of Mexican descent, particularly if their first language is not English. The law also requires that migrants carry papers with them at all times and produce them on demand. Yet, the law's drafters are shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that many people are making comparisons between Arizona and fascist governments. All Americans who believe in fairness should boycott Arizona.

Those in the historical know see this as a continuation of Arizona’s long history of racism and harassment of Latinos. You might not be aware, but pro-slavery Confederates founded Arizona way back in the 1860s. And weren’t those the type of people you would want as neighbors? It turns out, they didn’t arrive in Arizona with a cherry pie and a smile. They had every intention of instituting a brutal racial hierarchy against the already existing Mexican community in the region (which predated the U.S.-Mexican War). In 1877, the editor of Tucson’s Spanish-language newspaper Las dos repúblicas lamented the “the attack of the [Anglo] hordes from the north . . .” Before the arrival of these white supremacists, Arizona had been part of the territory of New Mexico. For the rebel whites, though, the idea of living in a territory with a Mexican majority was anathema. They therefore separated themselves from New Mexico and created a whole new territory where they could institute a tyrannical government.

One of the first things that whites did when Arizona became a state in 1912 was to enact measures to restrict the civil rights of Mexican Americans. Arizona passed laws that denied the vote to any person unable to “read the Constitution of the U.S. in the English language.” Don’t be deceived, though. Euro Americans never truly wanted to rid Arizona of Mexicans entirely. Through the nineteenth century, corporate mining interests came to control the region. These mines were more than happy to exploit Mexican laborers in inhumane working conditions, harshly segregated living arrangements, and depressed wages. They simply created institutional mechanisms that deprived those workers of their basic voting rights.

So, while I am greatly depressed by it, the new law does not surprise me. Many things strike me about it. Mostly it seems a product of conservative white fantasies about the nation. It distracts from the role Republicans had in crippling the United States economy. Scapegoating Mexican migrants has been a cherished Republican tradition at least since 1929. Republicans hope that it will stop Arizonans from asking tougher questions about the gluttony of the small majority motivated by uncontrolled corporate greed.

Enacting this measure also taps into xenophobic fantasies. It presumes that the nation’s demographics have not already shifted tremendously. Though Republicans might wish it were not true, Latino/as are now the nation’s largest minority (accounting for 15 percent of the total population). No amount of walls or borders will alter that fact.

They seem to be under the delusion that migrating to the United States is just a matter of daintily crossing an imaginary line in the sand. The U.S. Border Patrol, however, has made crossing the border a remarkably brutal endeavor. Their patrols and posts have intentionally funneled undocumented workers into the Sonoran desert. They imagine that making entry into the U.S. so difficult (even deadly) it will deter migrants.

Yet, it does not. We should well ask why not? Migrants brave conditions unimaginable to most Americans. Crossing into the United States is expensive and dangerous. Coyotes routinely abandon entire groups in the desert. Others kidnap those who paid them and extort money from their families in Mexico. Violence, including sexual violence, is well documented in these crossings. Yet, the United States remains blind to the circumstances it is creating on the border.

White supporters of this law also fantasize that the United States exists in some supposed isolation from the neighboring republic in everything except migration. What they don’t seem to appreciate is that migration from Mexico occurs because the U.S. is so deeply intertwined with the history and present of Mexico.

We live in a nation with just 4 percent of the global population, but consume over a quarter of the world’s resources. The overwhelming majority of those who cross into the United States are seeking basic employment opportunities and an escape from the crippling economic conditions in Mexico. Most Americans are probably vaguely aware of the rapid pace that U.S. corporation built factories ( maquiladoras) after the passage of NAFTA in the 1990s. They might not be aware, though, that when the U.S. economy started to decline in 2000, almost 300,000 of those jobs were eliminated in northern Mexico. More than 340 maquiladoras closed between 2000 and 2003. The United States’s unending quest for avoiding a fare wage brought many of those factories to China. WTO membership (and the accompanying changes in tariff restrictions) allowed China to compete with the same labor advantages as Mexico. Between 1997 and 2006, the number of jobs in China’s versions of maquiladoras increased from 18 million to 40 million. Unemployment and underemployment in Mexico leaped by bounds.

I cannot deny that the United States desperately needs to rethink its immigration laws. What I would suggest, though, is that we need to consider the motivations for migration and our commitment to a basic standard of living for the world. It is a nation that depends on the degrading labor of workers that most Americans scarcely know exist to maintain their standard of living.

Historiann and GayProf Teach It All, Part III: REVOLUTION!

Today Historiann and I finish up our discussion about the U.S. survey class. Together we have already outlined devious ways to undermine the entire nation through our teaching. Won't somebody think of the children?

If you are just joining the discussion, remember to read up on Part I and Part II. All of your friends already read Part I and II. You want to be cool like them, don't you?

***

Historiann: It would still be a Great Leap Forward if Anglophone historians would reorient their teaching, if not their research. Perhaps the best way to alter the center of gravity

GayProf (GP): *coughGravitas*cough*

Historiann: (ignoring GayProf) Perhaps the best way to alter the center of gravity in American history is to change the date of that split between the first and second "halves" of American history. (I put "half" in quotation marks, as someone who teaches a "half" that goes from 1492-1877 and is therefore 385 years in 15 weeks, by comparison to my modern U.S. colleagues who teach a "half" that goes from 1877-2010, or only 133 years in 15 weeks. What can I say? Some Democrat, who thinks that 60 is "half" of 100, must have done the math.)

GP: Our colleagues teaching the History of Asia won’t give us much sympathy in the divide. Remember that they often have to cover several centuries every class session! Sometimes my two-part lecture on the U.S.-Mexican War (which was, you know, less than two years) seems really indulgent in comparison.

Historiann: Let's end the first "half" in 1848, instead of 1877, putting the Mexican War rather than the Civil War and Reconstruction at the center of American history.

GP: Ending in 1848 would be a good start. If the goal was to end the class with the incorporation of tens of thousands Mexicans into the U.S., maybe it would encourage professors to provide a modicum of background on Mexico (and if, as a side effect, that increases the marketability of the Never Ending Research Project of Doom, how could I disagree?). But I worry even then we would just end up with a ra-ra version of the Texas Rebellion.




Maybe we could even end the first section in 1821 with Mexican Independence? Tell me that wouldn’t blow the minds of many historians to think that a “foreign” event could define the cycle of U.S. history! And, yet, it did. Once the wars for independence in Latin America took hold, the U.S. was in a very different place in the global economy. Independence in Latin America meant the U.S. could suddenly exercise its emerging power in ways that were unthinkable in 1780.

Starting the class earlier than the seventeenth century would also be a nice thing to do. It seems like (and the WMQ articles alluded to it as well) that most of the non-Anglo history is given scant attention. A typical first-day lecture usually goes, “There were Native Americans in the hemisphere for tens of thousands of years; but not much happened until Jamestown was founded in 1607!” Or, if you are in a slightly more informed class, “There were Native Americans in the hemisphere for tens of thousands of years; then Columbus sailed in 1492. Then not much happened until Jamestown was founded in 1607!”

Lately I have been toying with the idea of offering a colonial borderlands class. I’m not looking to move over to CEUS, but I feel like Spain’s northern frontier is entirely absent from BMU It’s either teach that or an entire semester devoted to the golden-age of Queen Hippolyta. Really a toss up to me.

Historiann: As Donna Merwick said back in 1994 in her response to Hijiya's article, "to tamper seriously with America's received story of its past is dangerous because it is tampering with a myth. It disturbs the fixed version of the sanctified past that makes the present bearable," (WMQ 51:4, October 1994, 736). Suggesting that the independence movement in another nation or a trumped-up war of imperial aggression, rather than a noble war to end slavery, is at the center of American history certainly would challenge "the sanctified past!"

GP: I also think it has to do with the fact that we (as a profession) never really talk about what purpose the U.S. Survey is supposed to serve. Are we there to provide a backdrop political history? If so, which one(s)? Or are we there to teach basic historical methodologies? Or is our goal to shake up that “sanctified past?” All of these are potentially worthy goals for a survey class.

I personally struggle with the balance between “coverage” and “skills” in all my classes. While I prefer to talk about more “fun” things (like how we understand changing ideas about sexuality through time), I also can’t help feeling that they should know some really basic events and people before they move out of college.

For instance, if my class is going to contemplate the Mexican Revolution as one of the most important events in North American History, I feel like I need to give students at least a basic frame of reference. Like, you know, who Emiliano Zapata was.


Historiann: (Who???)

GP: But, of course, the problem with those types of narratives is that they privilege a pretty darn exclusive group: Men more than women; Whites more than people of color; Heteros more than the queer folk. Spending time on simply establishing who the hell Zapata was means that the soldaderas get cheated. It is much the same issue as how we all fall into the "Parade of Presidents" that you mentioned in the comments of Part I. We know better, yet somehow can't help ourselves. I am conflicted.


Historiann: I agree with you that we never discuss the purpose of the U.S. survey. At least, I can’t recall taking part in a formal conversation about the purpose of survey courses in the fifteen years I’ve been on various History faculties. This may have something to do again with the bruising “culture wars” of previous decades—a lot got said and written that I think embarrassed people in retrospect. (I’ve heard one confession from a culture warrior—with whom I utterly disagree—who told me personally that he regrets some of the things he wrote and said in those days. If I told you who it was, I’d have to kill you, so I’ll take his secret to my grave.) Immediately after 9/11, we had a brief discussion in which the importance of history to the creation of a patriotic citizenry was affirmed. But even then, none of us wanted to be terribly specific about what we’re up to because we all have different ideas and priorities.

GP: See, I don’t really see it as my job to affirm or discredit one’s patriotism. Instead, I think it is my job to provide historical context to our modern concerns as a nation. What students want to do with that once they leave my class (Wave flags, move to Canada, join the Army, start a sensible bistro) is entirely up to them.

What if instead of mandating “U.S. History,” we made the requirement “History of North America” or even “History of the Western Hemisphere (Including the Africa bits everybody always forgets is technically part of this hemisphere)?” We could forgo the nation as an organizing principle entirely.

Of course, there are downsides to that as well. Right now the rush to teach “Global History,” for instance, feels flat to me. It seems those classes are just “Western Civ, Now With China!” rather than really rethinking old structures. But that is another post entirely…

Historiann: What we certainly don’t want to talk about is the ridiculousness of expecting a compulsory history class of two quarters or one semester to cure historical ignorance in all of its many forms.



GP: True, but it would be nice if we could market our classes like they were a snakeoil cure. “Take Dr. GayProf’s Patented Chicano/a History Class – Cures All: Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, Scurvy, Billousness, and Dropsy. Satisfied Customers Feel Less Ignorant After Just One Dose! Goes Down Easy – Great for Young or Old!”

Historiann: If various states of the union, or universities, or liberal arts colleges actually thought American history was important, they’d require more than a one-semester dose. What we’re left with in the popular discourse is the insistence that U.S. history is vitally important for everyone to know, and the injunction that we (the History professors) are doing it all wrong. (A former mentor of mine used to call this the “history is too important to be left to the historians” point of view.

GP: That’s so true. We don’t have a hard time convincing either the political Left or Right that people should know history. They are just at odds in deciding what history they really want people to know.

Historiann: Maybe it’s my Midwestern low-church WASP heritage of conflict-avoidance, but this state of affairs (call it détante) is better than the projectile insults and name-calling of the kulturkampf. Let’s just all teach what we want to teach, and let others teach what they want to teach. Let a thousand flowers bloom, in other words. (Or as we say here on the plains: “it’s your affair, and none of my own.”)



GP: Yes, I want to echo that. I am not interested in establishing a formal curriculum or dictating what must be taught. Still, I’d like to think that most people want to be more inclusive in their classes (I’m in a “People are Basically Good” sort of mood -- Or at least, “Historians are Basically Good” sort of mood). The problem is that they either have never thought about it (because they, themselves, were never taught in an inclusive way) or because they don’t know how to go about it.

Historiann: That doesn’t mean busybodies like you and me can’t point out who’s being left out of the dominant U.S. history narratives, of course, and why it’s problematic.

GP: And we still get to judge them, right?

Historiann: By all means. Over cocktails, of course!

Historiann and GayProf Teach It All, Part II

Yesterday Historiann and I chatted about teaching the U.S. history survey. Today, we continue with that conversation over at her ranch in Part II. We cover a range of topics like how the West is always lost; graduate language acquisition; and editing for content. I also finally reveal to Historiann that I am gay. Join us!

Historiann and GayProf Teach It All, Part I

My blogging buddy Historiann recently invited me to join her in a discussion about teaching the U.S. history survey. In particular, she wanted to tackle new ways of framing this familiar freshman class that were more inclusive. Talking about this class seemed like an ideal way to squeeze out some content on this blog to tackle this very serious issue facing our profession.

Join us here, at CoG, and at her place over the next three days to read our ideas. It's sorta a blog slumber party. You'll laugh. You'll cry. They are the feel good posts of the year!

Historiann (Text in Blue): A few months ago, GayProf published a thought-provoking post on the exclusion of "the nation’s largest minority" from graduate education in his department, and the implications this has for the teaching of history into the near future. Because I thought that post raised some important questions about history curricula and how our imagination of the past shapes our present politics, GayProf and I thought we'd continue the conversation and invite the rest of you to join in!



Back in December, GayProf wrote:

"Latino/as’ long presence in this nation means they should appear in both halves of the traditional U.S. history survey. For most U.S. historians, though, Latinos (much less Latinas) remain an “and also” topic rather than being construed as fundamental to the history of the nation. If they make it onto a syllabus at all, Latinos are most likely to be found in the “Suggested Reading” section rather than in the “required” list.

"Part of this is a problem much larger than academia. For the past 160 years, the United States has been in collective denial about Latino populations north of Mexico. The mass media periodically expresses “shock (SHOCK!)” that Latino/as account for a large slice of the nation every twenty years or so. Even in those moments, you can depend on the fact that Latino/as will be figured as “foreign” or “recent arrivals” rather than as communities with a century-and-a-half of history that informs their experiences in this nation.

"But where would the media learn such things? Given my recent conversations with grad students, it turns out that even the best history departments can't be relied upon to teach that history."




GayProf, your point about the erasure of Latino/as from American history and the political implications of portraying Latino/a people always as "recent arrivals" to the U.S. really struck me, both as an early Americanist and as a transplant to Colorado, where the Latino/a population has grown dramatically in the past few decades (along with the population of white immigrants from California and Texas).

GayProf (GP): I think that the entire country just doesn’t want to acknowledge how much the nation’s demographics have changed. Latino/as are the nation’s largest minority and the fastest growing population. Those changes are harder to ignore in a place like Colorado. Still, politicians and the media are pretending that they can simply wish away Latinos.



From my perspective the demographic changes should be prompting everybody to ask questions about the historic role of Latino/as in the U.S. That doesn’t seem to be happening, though.

The other evening I was at a dinner party with non-academics. One of the guests asked what type of history that I teach. When I told hir, “Latinos in the U.S.,” Ze responded, “Oh, I thought that you were a history professor. Didn’t Latinos arrive, like, just a few days ago?”



That isn’t just the case with the general public, either. I have been in several meetings where colleagues have bemoaned that the department doesn’t have enough people in nineteenth-century U.S. history. Somehow my work, despite being dead center in the nineteenth century, only registers as “modern U.S.”

Historiann: Wow. As if Latino/a = post-1945, or post-1980!

GP: Or post 2000! Shouldn’t I really just be a sociologist? But maybe my wardrobe is too good for sociology. . .

Historiann: In 2004, our former U.S. Senator Ken Salazar's campaign capitalized on his identity as a Latino, but also couched it carefully by repeatedly claiming that "his family has lived on land it has farmed for nearly 400 years," so as to reassure the white majority that "he's not from a family of illegals! He's a native Coloradoan with deep roots!"

GP: I was sad to learn that there has been a significant amount of conflict between “recent” Mexican migrants and established Latino communities in my home state of Paradise Island. Or, er, I mean New Mexico. Salazar’s campaign wasn’t just strategic; it is also part of a larger (and often unexplored) disavowal that many Mexican Americans make of more recent Mexican migrants.

Historiann: It seems like my field could very easily incorporate Latino/a history in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries because the important issues and topics are the same: Conquistadors, La Malinche, The Virgin of Guadalupe, and The Pueblo Revolt are just other ways of talking about power, slavery, religious syncretism, and Native resistance. And yet it seems like my field is the most resistant to said incorporation because (perhaps) of the reluctance you noted in recognizing that Latino/a history is one of the longue durée.



GP: I don’t know if Colonial/Early U.S.(CEUS) is more resistant than the other fields. Recently I attended two public talks at Big Midwestern University that focused on race in “modern” U.S. history. In both cases, it was clear that the speaker had never once thought that Latino/as might be important to hir research on race. Quite shockingly, most scholars still can’t wrap their mind around a vision of history that is not the white/black binary.

It does seem (from the outside), though, that CEUS has gone through a period of retrenchment. When I was in graduate school (which wasn’t even that long ago (GayProf is so very, very young, after all)), the colonial historians often talked about the importance of knowing the overlapping histories of contact (France, England, Netherlands, Spain, plus the multiple indigenous groups). They even seemed to take it is a point of pride that CEUS required a more “global” approach than slouchy, lazy modern U.S. scholars. This isn’t to say that they all actually did that, but there was at least talk of it as an ideal.

Today, though, CEUS has really fallen back to its old bad habits. If it didn’t involve people with buckles on their hats, they aren’t interested.

Historiann: This may have to do with the digitization of some published primary and archival sources (for example, Early American Imprints, otherwise known as the Evans Series), and the lack of availability of travel funds and other support for graduate students and junior scholars. (I have spoken and written about this before—at the OAH and the Omohundro Institute conferences in 2009, for example.) When people rely on published sources for their research, they’re relying for the most part on the thoughts and opinions of a tiny slice of elite, Euro-American men. The really interesting sources about and by the majority of colonial Americans are in the archives.



GP: Right – It is a self-fulfilling archive. The archives that are digitized and/or printed are the ones that are imagined to be “most important,” which, of course, people assume are the ones written by Euro American men.

Grad students use of this material is probably also tied to the rush to finish their degrees. Not only don’t they have funding to travel, but they don’t have the time if they are supposed to be out the door in five years.

Teach It!

Big Midwestern University has one of the shortest breaks between semesters in the entire nation. My loyal readers might imagine that the past six weeks have been spent lounging about without a care in the world. Not so! I have been trying to navigate the pressing demands of multiple academic departments while also feigning that I have a personal life.

My last nerve being worked over, though, isn’t the topic of this post. Rather, it is the alleged crisis facing humanities on our nation’s campuses.

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Making College ‘Relevant’.” It turns out that the model of liberal education in place in this nation for the past 160 years has been totally disconnected to the lives of those who obtained degrees. Thankfully, a new group of extremely savvy students and their parents are finally asking the right question: Which majors pay the big bucks?

I know it’s easy to be flippant about those desires (fun, too). Let me be clear: It’s not that I begrudge the reasonable expectation that time and expense invested into a university should result in a graduate’s ability to earn a basic income that meets hir basic needs. Those of us who are in Race and Ethnic Studies units have long known parents' desires to steer their children away from our classes to something “useful.” After all, if one’s child is the first generation to attend college, parents don’t want to see it “wasted” on an “impractical” degree. I get it.

I am under no illusion that humanities fields are a sure path to financial wealth and fame. What I do begrudge is that universities are being driven by some rather base impulses. Few faculty, and even fewer administrators, are on the front lines defending the larger role of universities as sites of intellectual inquiry (especially for the humanities). The push to treat students as consumers has resulted in the tail wagging the curriculum dog. And that’s resulting in one nasty, mangy mutt of academia.



Should we really celebrate the Literature Department at the University of Texas bending its curriculum by having classes focused on résumé writing, networking, and interviewing? If those aren’t the topics covered by the Business School already, just what are they learning over there?

Other departments shouldn’t be upstaged by those enterprising literature professors! Why not have the philosophy professors build their classes on existentialism around the modern U.S. tax code? Or have lessons on table etiquette in your history class? “Remember students, the peasants were starving in the years leading to the French Revolution,” a typical lecture might go, “but if you want to rock it like Marie Antoinette, just remember that the salad fork goes on the far outside of the table setting! She might have lost her head, but she never lost track of her water glass because it was always positioned on her upper right!” Finally, some sensible real-world advice from a history professor!



For me, being engaged with the humanities is not some optional luxury like heated seats in a gas-guzzling SUV. Learning from the humanities is necessary to be a thoughtful citizen of the world. Humanities scholarship reminds us, as individuals and as a society, that we are more than our jobs or the amount of money in our bank accounts. It also prompts us to consider that our own perspectives and experiences are not universals that account for all other humans.

The benefits and unique role for humanities courses at universities has slowly been eroding over the past decade (or longer). Humanities professors' unwillingness to defend their disciplines has allowed the the consumer-driven model of higher education to take root. We have more-or-less capitulated to the notion that we aren’t doing anything really important unless the students tell us we are.




Time was that professors’ abilities were imagined to be measured by the skills that their students received upon exiting their classes. Well, stop the bus, Betty, because those days are over. Legislatures are slashing funds left and right from universities. American taxpayer greed is reaching a new high. Universities and colleges have little choice but to increasingly depend upon tuition dollars to keep the lights glowing.

This means that students are no longer seen as individuals who will be educated, but as consumers who must be placated. Side effects of this trend have included a new tyranny of student evaluations; a push to make classes as “cost efficient” (read: ginormous) as possible; and occasional dry mouth. Humanities professors’ success does not depend upon the amount of knowledge or content covered during the semester. Instead, our main goal has moved more and more to entertaining those consumers. Professors who keep their students rolling in the aisles with laughter are seen as “good teachers.” Why are university professors being held to a higher standard than NBC holds for its late-night talk show hosts?



We are all now subject to tedious programs from (what HistoriAnn has dubbed) Centers for Teaching Illusions. These centers are often created by university officials to prove to parents how totally seriously their institution takes teaching; but they are regularly staffed by people with a ph.d. in almost anything except the theories and practices of learning. As far as I can tell, most of these centers also take the student evaluation as the ultimate benchmark for a professor’s “success” in the classroom.

It’s not that I don’t think that professors should reflect on teaching strategies, goals, and methods. Nor do I discount that student feedback is an important element in that reflection. For instance, I have had students note that there was a gap in the material covered that they wanted to learn. I have changed my courses when such comments emerge.

I do reject, though, that students are always the best assessors of what they need in the classroom. If that were so, they wouldn’t be, you know, students.

Perhaps my sensitivity to these trends has to do with my own intellectual autobiography. My model for teaching stems from courses that were incredibly influential in shaping my academic thinking and training. Travel with me now as we go back to the time when I was not GayProf, but rather GayUndergrad.



Like everybody in their late teens and twenties, GayUndergrad was quite certain that he knew how the world worked and how his life would turn out. I was a serious student, but often exhausted because I was also working nearly full time (That’s another story for another time). I do remember that there were “fun” professors. And I also remember two professors that I really didn’t like very much while I was in their classes. One taught Theories of Anthropology and the other Feminist and Queer Studies (FQS).

Looking back, it’s clear that they both cared that their students learn how to think in new ways. Let me tell you, though, they never gave a fuck about funny.

They expected us to write research papers using methodologies that we learned in class. This was not something that I appreciated at the moment that I took either class. Why? My time was precious and they were some pretty demanding taskmasters for three credit hours. AnthroProf shockingly expected us to read actual academic journals and to contemplate the underlying premise that informed the articles that we encountered. She seemed nuts.



When I signed up for the feminist-and-queer-studies prof, I remember thinking it would be a breeze. How hard could it be to complain about sexism, racism, and homophobia? These were topics I thought that I knew quite well. Turns out, it’s a lot harder than I make it seem on this blog.

The FQSProf for that class took to task our facile identity politics. Sure, GayUndergrad identified as “lefty” as did most of the students in the class (and, thus, we were predisposed to take such a course in the first place). She pushed us beyond simplistic notions of “good” and “bad” stereotyping; to think about the ways race, gender, and class intersect in daily lives; and to consider how racial, gender, and sexual ideologies inform relationships of power. For the early 1990s, it was heady stuff. It was also stuff that required lots of reading and time, which made me a little bitter (Or, er, bitterer).



As a student in each of these classes, I knew that I was working hard and that hard work made me not like my professors very much. What I did not appreciate was that the hard work in those classes would turn out to be so foundational later on in my academic career. Indeed, I was often way ahead of students in subsequent undergraduate classes who had not yet been exposed to the dense theories covered in those classes. It is also no exaggeration to say that I probably would have failed horribly in graduate school had I not taken those two classes as an undergraduate. Indeed, most of the “fun” or “easy” undergraduate classes that had seemed so great turned out to be almost totally useless later in my life. Sometimes I even look at my transcript and find it hard to remember anything from some of the "fun" classes listed there.



But what would happen to my anthro and FQS classes under the emerging standards for humanities? Efforts to keep at bay poor student evaluations would also likely mean reducing the work load, avoiding complicated challenges, and gearing the material to specific careers in the business world. I find it hard to believe that these classes would have generated as much impact if part of our time went into discussing what type of paper stock makes the best résumé.

All Aboard?

There seems to be some type of law that requires bloggers to comment on the recent bombing attempt on the Northwest/Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Who am I to buck the trend? Hey, I don’t want to end up in bloggy jail.

My first reactions to the bomb attempt were threefold. First, given the abysmal level of service since Northwest and Delta merged, I wondered if maybe it had been a simple misunderstanding. After all, this is an airline that has the audacity to consider a single cookie a “snack” and to charge $3 for a handful of Pringles. You can also forget about that drink cart making a second trip down the aisle. Perhaps, I thought, the passenger in question was just so hungry that he desperately tried to heat a HotPocket at his seat.

As it turned out, it was another lunatic who is willing to sacrifice the lives of innocent people. This time around, the would-be-terrorist apparently stitched the explosives into his underwear. I was relieved that the plot had been thwarted with nobody suffering unjustly. I was also glad to hear that the terrorist burned the shit out of his legs and genitals.



Then I wondered, “Why target poor Detroit? Haven’t those people suffered enough?”

Terrorists clearly aren’t very good at information gathering. If they did a better job, they would realize that the rest of the United States stopped caring about the people of Detroit in 1967. Indeed, it is the only major city in the nation with a 30 percent unemployment rate; the highest levels of poverty; absurd levels of political corruption; and failing schools. Oh, and did I mention the severe racial segregation and resource-sucking suburbs? Detroit already looks like a war zone due to most Americans’ indifference to its future.



My last thought was, “Oh, man, now we will never be able to get rid of those ridiculous liquid and shoe rules! Ugh.” We are set for the inevitable round of finger pointing, paranoia, and jingoism that such events always inspire. Thank the goddess that the Republicans are no longer in control of our government. We would have likely invaded the Netherlands or, at the least, declared Queen Beatrix part of the axis of evil.

Still, like many other people in the nation, I see the recent event as evidence that airport security is ineffective. Take that color coded “Homeland” security silliness. Did you know that we have been at “Code Orange” since 2006? Yes, that’s right – For the past three years, our government has apparently seen no variation in our security risk levels at all. Maybe they forgot that this system has four other dazzling colors to choose from? Geez, even Captain Kirk occasionally went to “Yellow Alert.” And he was dealing with Klingons and Romulans and all.

We don’t ever move in the other direction, either. Apparently not even the recent bomb attempt was enough to nudge us on up to “Code Red.” It begs the question, what does it take to make it to Red? A nuclear attack? Total Armageddon? A multi city Celine Dion tour?



Can we admit that the Sesame-Street approach to informing the pubic is a total failure? What is the purpose of an alert system permanently frozen in time? If we are going to be stuck at Orange, at least break out the 64-color box and give us some variety of Orange colors. How about a day of “Burnt Sienna?” Or maybe “Neon Carrot?”

Another revelation to come out of this incident is that airlines and airports are uncertain about how to respond to terrorist threats. They are sure, though, that they want to look like they are doing something. Lufthansa snatched away passengers’ blankets during the last hour of flight out of concern that a terrorist could be igniting something out of view. This action lead Delta passengers to ask the question, “Lufthansa still provides blankets?”



Toronto airports decided to do full patdowns of all travelers. Though that might have just been an excuse by the Mounties to keep their hands warm in these bitter winter months.

JetBlue (an airline I normally like) decided to cancel all of its on-board entertainment the weekend after the attack. It’s really open to debate whether eliminating screenings of Aliens in the Attic is a victory or a loss for the terrorists.

Now they are telling us that we must install the full-body scan equipment to be really safe. It will help reveal tailors gone bad.

Privacy advocates, though, are concerned that lecherous TSA officers are going to be drooling at the site of all those naked passengers. Eh – Have they ever seen Xtube? It turns out most people really aren’t that interesting without their clothes. We’ll be lucky if the TSA agents don’t all join a celibate religious order after a couple of years of grueling service.



Personally, I have no problem with the full-body scan per se. I am not particularly shy about my body. After all, I am naked in my gym locker room almost daily.

Still, the expense of these machines seems a wee bit suspicious. Before committing to buying all of that equipment, I would like to make sure that their advocates are not in some way tied to the corporations producing them.

The makers of the machine already admit that these scans don’t reveal everything. Full-body scans, for instance, can’t detect items that might be hidden under rolls of fat. Well, isn’t that horrible news? If obesity becomes the key to thwarting airport security, will the terrorists start to recruit in Houston, Texas?



It seems to me that in the 1990s, there were all sorts of swabs that the airport used to do on bags and people for bomb residue. Now I never see them take those swabs anymore. Did that equipment not work? Did they lend it all to that CSI show?

The awful truth is that most security measures are really just dog and pony shows to make the public feel safer. That’s why I drink heavily when I fly.

Give a Little, Take a Little

Alright, kiddies, I am off to my equivalent of Paradise Island. That’s assuming that the invisible jet can navigate through these snowstorms. Transparent wings don’t really take to chemical de-icer. I am not sayin', I am just sayin'.

Before departing, though, I thought that I would once again help you all decipher the hidden messages behind gifting this year. Okay, a couple are recycled – But they are as true now as ever!

And that truth can be as disillusioning as my discovery that egg nog is now manufactured with that nasty high fructose corn syrup. Oh, agribusiness, is there nothing you won't ruin?

Here is a list of gifts, what the giver meant by giving them, and what the receiver thinks upon getting each:

The Gift: A copy of Going Rogue.

What the Giver Meant: I have a perverted sense of humor.

What the Receiver Thinks: Oh, I can use this. My coffee table is a little wobbly because of that short leg.





***

The Gift: A complete set of the Twilight saga.

What the Giver Meant: Sex will only bring heartache, despair, and pain – So don’t do it!

What the Receiver Thinks: I will develop a kinky S&M obsession involving fangs.

***

The Gift: A complete set of True Blood on DVD.

What the Giver Meant: Buying porn seemed too obvious.

What the Receiver Thinks: Was the store out of porn?

***

The Gift: Antique Dishes

What the Giver Meant: My dishmania has reached the level that I can only justify things to myself if I buy them for other people.

What the Receiver Thinks: These better be dishwasher safe.



***

The Gift: Diamonds!

What the Giver Meant: I am trying to buy your love.

What the Receiver Thinks: I wonder how many children suffered digging these out of the ground. . .



***

The Gift: A Bible.

What The Giver Meant: You should remember the real reason for the season.

What The Receiver Thinks: When will this sanctimonious asshole get out of my house?

***

The Gift: A blank, white coffee mug.

What the Giver Meant: I panicked at the local CVS.

What the Receiver Thinks: Was the CVS out of Bourbon this year?

***

The Gift: A basic textbook on macroeconomics.

What the Giver Meant: You are the most crooked, creepy, incompetent Treasury Secretary this nation has ever had.

What the Receiver Thinks: Macro-what now?


***

The Gift: An all expense paid vacation to a beach resort.

What the Giver Meant: I am trying to buy your love.

What the Receiver Thinks: Maybe once I get there I can ditch you at the beach.

***

The Gift: An electric quesadilla maker.

What the Giver Meant: Quesadillas are delicious.

What the Receiver Thinks: Oh, something that I will use once and then abandon in my cupboard forever.

***

The Gift: Egg nog with high fructose corn syrup.

What the Giver Meant: I give the gift of diabetes.

What the Receiver Thinks: Why do you hate me?



***

The Gift: Stock in GM.

What the Giver Meant: It’s bound to come back!

What the Receiver Thinks: Did this gift come free with a full tank of gas?

***

The Gift: An Apple Computer.

What the Giver Meant: Now you can be as smug as I am!

What the Receiver Thinks: This person has confused capitalist brand identification with actual liberation.

***

The Gift: A Windows-based PC.

What the Giver Meant: This new operating system is bound to be better than Vista!

What the Receiver Thinks: Oh, I can use this. My coffee table is a little wobbly because of that short leg.


***


The Gift: Guitar Hero - Van Halen.

What the Giver Meant: You never let go of the eighties.

What the Receiver Thinks: Sigh – I wish that I still had enough hair to be part of a hair band.

***

The Gift: A new car!

What the Giver Meant: I am trying to buy your love.

What the Receiver Thinks: I love you.


***

The Gift: Wonder Woman comics, books, or dolls.

What the Giver Meant: Wonder Woman is the alpha and the omega.

What the Receiver Thinks: Your personal obsessions make me uncomfortable.


***

The Gift: Baked goods.

What the Giver Meant: I learned in childhood to show my love through food.

What the Receiver Thinks: If this person loves me much more, I won’t be able to fit into any of my clothes by the new year.

***

The Gift: A healthcare plan that mandates coverage to 30 million new people.

What the Giver Meant: I sorta wanted reform, but didn’t want to bother with all that work of dismantling private insurance companies.

What the Receiver Thinks: Insurance companies will be even richer now!

***

The Gift: Liquor

What the Giver Meant: I think that you are an alcoholic.

What the Receiver Thinks: Give me, give me, give me.



***

The Gift: A Promise to Have a “Special” Christmas Together – on December 26.

What the Giver Meant: I am really married to somebody else – with kids. If queer, however, it could also mean that I still haven’t told my parents that I am gay.

What the Receiver Thinks: Man, I have made poor life choices and am in denial about the viability of this relationship.

Have a happy and safe nonsectarian, nondenominational winter holiday!

The Past is a Footnote

Over the past few weeks I have been hearing from a variety of graduate students in my academic programs about their frustrations with the current curriculum. Normally I don’t pay much heed to the whining. A complaining graduate student is about as rare as a Popeye Pez dispenser. Disappointingly, they don’t jettison delicious candy from their throat, either. Trust me.

In these cases, though, the graduate-student concerns reflect a much more serious problem with History and American Studies as fields beyond Big Midwestern University. Many of these students arrived at BMU with the explicit intent of studying Chicano/Latino/a Studies. Yet, in their required courses on the U.S., they have read zero (0) books on Latino/as in the U.S.

I am concerned about these revelations less for the students already interested in Latino/a Studies. After all, they will do what similar scholars have always had to do. They will fulfill the expectations for their classes while simultaneously building reading lists on Latino/a Studies that they will complete on their own time. Despite their intellectual isolation, they will nonetheless persevere because they are committed to Latino/a communities.



Rather, I am worried about the students who are not explicitly interested in Latina/o Studies in those classes. These are students who will (if they have some luck) obtain jobs teaching U.S. history at other universities across the nation. They will do so having received the implicit message that it is acceptable to ignore the nation’s largest minority entirely. It will, in other words, replicate a disciplinary ignorance that has been in place since the nineteenth century.

Curriculum, of course, is a touchy subject. It is hard to bring up these issues without sounding like I am wagging my finger and clucking in disapproval. That’s probably because I bring these issues up while I am wagging my finger and clucking in disapproval.

Still, these classes are taught by colleagues whom I deeply respect. They are some mighty smart people whose own research is impeccable. We aren’t talking about secret members of the Klan in other words. I can guarantee they aren’t pushing a covert white supremacist agenda. Hey, that might not sound like such a ringing endorsement, but it’s not a guarantee that I could have made about some of my former colleagues in Texas. At Big Midwestern University, though, these are faculty who are fiercely interested in social justice issues.



So if these colleagues aren’t disciples of Lou “Immigrants are Hiding Under My Bed” Dobbs, just what is going on? Why is there a disconnect between their politics and their course content?

Latino/as’ long presence in this nation means they should appear in both halves of the traditional U.S. history survey. For most U.S. historians, though, Latinos (much less Latinas) remain an “and also” topic rather than being construed as fundamental to the history of the nation. If they make it onto a syllabus at all, Latinos are most likely to be found in the “Suggested Reading” section rather than in the “required” list.




Part of this is a problem much larger than academia. For the past 160 years, the United States has been in collective denial about Latino populations north of Mexico. The mass media periodically expresses “shock (SHOCK!)” that Latino/as account for a large slice of the nation every twenty years or so. Even in those moments, you can depend on the fact that Latino/as will be figured as “foreign” or “recent arrivals” rather than as communities with a century-and-a-half of history that informs their experiences in this nation.

But where would the media learn such things? Given my recent conversations with grad students, it turns out that even the best history departments can't be relied upon to teach that history.

This year, 2009, marks the fortieth anniversary of El Plan de Santa Barbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education. Back in 1969, Chicano/a college students were mighty pissed. Universities failed to acknowledge the contributions, struggles, and perspectives of Chicanos and Chicanas (and Latino/as more broadly) within the United States. These students turned their frustration into direct action. Most universities responded by creating subunits focused on Latino/a Studies. After four decades of activism, scholarship, and teaching within those units, it seems that Latino Studies has failed to convince other historians of their importance. And guess what? Latino/a students are still pissed.

It is to historians’ peril that they continue to bury their head in the sand around Latino/a issues. Today, twenty percent of the nation’s schoolchildren currently identify as Latina/o. The Census Bureau further predicts that Latino/as will constitute 28 percent of the nation’s population by 2050. Latino/as will profoundly change the face (literally) of higher education in the next decade.

What will the poorly trained historians we are producing tell those future students? That the nation’s history isn’t relevant for Latino/as? That a quarter of the nation's population isn't relevant for its history? That they would have learned more about Latinos in grad school, but it just didn’t seem that important? That salsa is delicious?

This is not to say that I think every U.S. historian must devote themselves to studying the experiences of Latino/as exclusively. I am saying, however, that it is inexcusable that we have graduate students earning Ph.D.’s who have little or no knowledge of this history. Savvy departments who are currently searching in any field in U.S. history would be wise to ask a new assistant professor how they will address the surging Latino/a Student body in their course content.



The knowledge and research that we conduct about the past means that historians have an unusual ability to speak about political and social issues in the present. By refusing to understand how much the nation’s population has actually changed, however, historians forfeit their intellectual authority.

Thanks a Lot

Let me tell you, kiddies, this semester is kicking GayProf’s ass. I have been deeply involved in “service.” For those outside the university, that is the amorphous category that is neither teaching nor research. Think of “service” as being the university equivalent of rotating your tires. Sure, everybody knows that it is necessary, but they rarely do it themselves.

While there is a general claim that service is “important,” the horrible truth is that it counts not at all for raises or promotion. This seems especially true for service to ethnic studies units, which “traditional” (read “white”) departments either don’t see or simply dismiss as “unnecessary.”

Let me tell you, for a junior professor, I have been giving a lot of service. Stupid GayProf and his stupid ideas about “caring” and all.

What this means for you, my faithful and loyal followers, is that the bloggy hasn’t been updated since Halloween. Maybe I should turn this into a holiday blog. Like Queen Elizabeth II, I will only address my loyal subjects when the shops are closed for the day.

Speaking of holidays, we are on the eve of U.S. Thanksgiving. It’s not a holiday that ever particularly spoke to me. Certainly, though, I could use the break. This year I felt fatigued over the usual rituals of cooking and gorging. Therefore I and a friend are driving to Multicultural Canadian City instead. Since Canada gave up their thanks over a month ago, and Americans rarely travel outside the states during this holiday, we got a pretty good deal for a hotel. Quite shockingly, I have never been to MCC, despite its relative proximity. Now I need to see where I stashed that wad of Canadian dollars that I used to have . . .

Skipping Thanksgiving suits my contrarian mood. Consider GayProf “going rogue.” To keep up with that theme, here are the things in the world that I am not at all inclined to be thankful for this year:

* Holidays that hide the brutality of imperialism by pretending that the colonized welcomed their own oppressors.



* A road close to my home that is so riddled with potholes that it threatens to literally shake my car apart when I drive down it.

* Midwestern Funky Town, instead of fixing the huge, gaping holes on said road, decided to spend tax money installing speed-bumps on it. And people wonder why this state is floundering?

* Creepy, crooked, and incompetent Treasury Secretaries who are in the back pocket of Wall Street.



* The weakness of the U.S. dollar, resulting in part from creepy, crooked, and incompetent Treasury Secretaries who are in the back pocket of Wall Street.

* Graduate students who do not recognize the difference between professional and personal relationships.

* Professors who do not recognize the difference between professional and personal relationships.

* Potlucks – A form of “entertaining” that I despise. Don’t invite me to dinner and then ask me to bring my own meal. If I wanted to cook, I’d have stayed home. Why not just ask me to bring my own silverware and dishes, too? Potlucks send the message that "I want to spend time with you, but I don't want it to cost me that much money or effort." This is especially true if it is for an event where I am also expected to bring a gift, like a wedding shower. Then you are just lazy and greedy. I have an anti-potluck agenda.

* Commercials with cavemen, talking ovens, or that creepy disembodied blonde woman who has an unhealthy relationship with her phone.



* Americans who are so greedy that they will dismiss their obligations to their fellow citizens and refuse to acknowledge that access to health care is a basic human right.

* Organized sports.

* The most recent Windows update that seems to have somehow disabled my scanner.

* Star Trek’s release on DVD reminding me of its failures in terms of race and gender.



* Colleagues who don’t actually provide service themselves, but are quite willing to criticize those who do.

* The remake of V that turned out to be so boring and slow. I can still taste the suck.

* Pharmaceutical companies that try to convince us that "inadequate eyelashes" is a serious condition that is afflicting a huge section of our population.

* The dumbass liquid rule for airport screening.

* Project Runway's move to Los Angeles. It seems to have left Tim Gunn depressed.



* Big Midwestern University obstinately refuses to acknowledge the colossal failure of on-line course evaluations.

* Logo has never approached me to star in a sitcom based on this blog.

* Guys who ruin a perfectly nice time dating by prematurely demanding to ask those “relationship” questions. I don’t understand why there is always a rush to define a relationship. Nothing makes me feel pressured like, “Where is this going?” or “Are we on the same page for the future?” or “What’s your name?”

* The karmic wheel inevitably grinds me down because of the attitude above.

* Incompetent bartenders.

* Being greeted with laughter when I propose that, instead of me always having to board a plane, my family might actually travel to Midwestern Funky Town instead.

* Chrissie Hynde never gets her recognition as an influential songwriter and recording artist.



* The Delta and Northwest merger has already demonstrated an even greater lack of service (Hello, antitrust laws???).

* Having to go around the table and name something for which we are thankful before we are allowed to eat.

* The words “very,” “opinion,” or “lifestyle” in student essays.

* Bloggers who take themselves too seriously.