Category Archives: critical thinking

Social inequalities hide in funny places

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“I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one.”
― Marilyn Monroe

A family member sent this internet joke to me. The subject of the email read: “Just thought you could use a laugh. This is so true.” As I teach about social inequalities, I asked students last week if a personal happiness or in this case a a joke can function like a personal trouble. This is the basic premise of the sociological imagination forwarded by C. Wright Mills. The meme below says it all:

From a tweet by @DJAcademe

 The letter contained in the email must be linked to larger public or political issues. It’s doing some of the cultural work of online capital — tracked as funny memes or viral videos, likes or dislikes, numbers of hearts, followers, or subscribers, or just the comments below and update or a video in social media. Email started this stuff with internet jokes, legends, and myths that circulate unregulated and tap into our cognitive biases and social norms. This one is no different.
Take a moment to read it before I comment:


Purdue University: Natural Born Citizens

Those of you who worry about Democrats versus Republicans — relax, here is our real problem.

In a Purdue University classroom, they were discussing the qualifications to be President of the United States. It was pretty simple. The candidate must be a natural born citizen of at least 35 years of age.

However, one girl in the class immediately started in on how unfair it was of the requirement to be a natural born citizen. In short, her opinion was that this requirement prevented many capable individuals from becoming president. The class was taking it in and letting her rant, and not many jaws hit the floor when she wrapped up her argument by stating, “What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified to lead this country than one born by C-section?” Yep, these are the same kinds of 18-year-olds that are now voting in our elections! They breed, and they walk among US.

Lord, we need more help than we thought we did!

How my relative got an email from a midwestern, predominately-white, university, from a land grant university in Lafayette, Indiana known for its STEM programs, from a social institution that is surely male dominated except among its secretarial staff is facsinating to me. The context or social forces behind it are not even questioned. This makes internet jokes pernicious, this one because it is circulating in the framing of our current American presidential election process.

A land-grant university is a particular social structure in education that has it’s own patriarchal bias that may be overlooked. This from the Wikipedia on “land grant univerity”:

The Morrill Acts funded educational institutions by granting federally controlled land to the states for them to sell to raise funds to establish and endow “land-grant” colleges. The mission of these institutions as set forth in the 1862 Act is to focus on the teaching of practical agriculture, science, military science and engineering (though “without excluding … classical studies”), as a response to the industrial revolution and changing social class.[1][2] This mission was in contrast to the historic practice of higher education to focus on an abstract liberal arts curriculum.

The final line evoking — a religious exclamation and invocation “Lord…” — can evoke both intergenerational disdain for the joke’s readers making it dismissive of Millennials and for religious minded and purist folks it may be dismissive of the lack of or loss of values these groups see within their own in-group. Us vs. Them is subtly instituted in our minds. Our calling attention to other people’s ignorance is always a sign of our own cognitive distortions and biases. It’s easy to call someone else stupid. Hard to accept you are the arbiter of the slippery slope of hating others.

What initially lured me in was the way the email/internet joke started. It seemed non-partisan appealing to an escape from the usual polemics of social engagement on the web these days. (How do you unfriend an email?). Bi- or multiple-partisanship (i.e., intersectionality) is missing in our social discourse around politics, racial inequalities, gender disparities, and discussions of the root causes of extreme wealth inequalities in the U.S.

Critical thinking begins with a consideration of the many possible readings of an internet meme or joke that all too easily circulates our diverse society and global internet. Critical thinking should not be partisan and should not preclude considering opposing and feminist readings of texts considered “just a joke”. What makes something funny actually turns on the symbolic meanings we cannot see on the surface with our personal, biased thinking. Jokes are sociological and turn on personal readings without short cut thoughts.

I wrote back to my relative: “If the joke turned on a male rather than a female this would be really funny.” I was dodging a bit here..afraid to just come out and say I did not find it funny at all. I continued: “The sociological under belly, here, is the incompetence of girls [or I should say “women”] in the classroom and in [our national] politics at a time when a woman happens to be running for president. [This is] the political [and sociological] work of anonymous internet jokes! But, hey, I am only a professor of sociology so my view is not the norm.” {{sigh}}. Betwixt family norms and critical thinking.

As I prepare to teach a bit about labeling theory and strain theory (cf. Robert Merton and others) today, I can see how my familial reaction and behavior was “deviant” relative to expressing my dislike of the joke. It was palpable–my amygdala was like “danger, danger, Will Robinson!!” tentacles failing and lights flashing on alert. I hesitated in writing back to my relative. Family ain’t relative it’s constant, rarely malleable, it seems.

The micro norm of talking back to an elder is some serious pressure. “Don’t do it” my cognitive bias told me without thinking. “Don’t be a trouble maker. Ignore it. Play nice. Pretend.” But that would mean not being fully conscious of my whole self, of who I am, right? Maybe.  Some things, wisdom is teaching me, may be better left unsaid but I am a teacher at heart. Testing out what happened here in this blog can be useful not only to me but perhaps my students who get to see it never stops–negotiating social identities and social structures.

You must pick and choose your battles as long as you live. Meanwhile you do not pick and choose your family. You can learn to be selective and remain open to multiple readings of texts and people. THAT act may actually may impact the larger inequalities that bias access to opportunities as well as how girls and boys see themselves and how elders and teachers react in the future.

Are you training yourself and others to accept being talked about as the dumb blonde in the STEM classroom? How will you learn to STEM the tide of inequalities, inequalities that stem from internet memes we share on email or on social media without considering who might be impacted or stigmatized by it? All jokes turn on some kind of bias and all can be unpacked to consider whether we wish to keep telling such biased jokes.

If I simply flip the script to reflect the patriarchal bargains men and women make by passing such jokes if still won’t work, no matter whether you are liberal or conservative. It will simply breed animosity from the hegemonic majority, the conservatives, or other.

However, one guy in the class immediately started in on how unfair it was of the requirement to be a natural born citizen. In short, his opinion was that this requirement prevented many capable individuals from becoming president. The class was taking it in and letting him mansplain it all, and not many of his male classmates or professors jaws hit the floor but the women’s did when he wrapped up his argument by stating, “What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified to lead this country than one born by C-section?” Yep, these are the same kinds of men that we’ve voted for in our elections for centuries! They take up the seats in the House, and blame us for what sets men and women apart among US.

Lord, we need more help than we thought we did!

We do need help but all is not lost to despair and there is hope.

Sojourner Truth’s speech “Arn’t I a woman?” for some reason popped into my mind here as an nice close. It registers the power of the vulnerable groups we sociologists and anthrologists and ethnomusicologists seek to protect and bring awareness to. Not to speak for the oppressed but to show how they are quite apt at speaking for themselves–no joke!

I can’t read, but I can hear. I have heard the Bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept—and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part? [Man ain’t have nothing to do with it.]

But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.

Sources:

Elizabeth C. Stanton, S. B. Anthony, and Matilda J. Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1 (Rochester, N. Y.: Charles Mann, 1887), p. 116; Anti-Slavery Bugle (Salem, OH) June 21, 1851.

– See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/1851-sojourner-truth-arnt-i-woman#sthash.YSCQT7W0.dpuf

#StayWoke #keepitintersectional

Non-Racist or Anti-Racist? Hidden Truths

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Learn more about implicit bias using the 2015 annual review by the Kirwin Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.  The institute offers insights into implicit bias for those who wish to understand how we socially reproduce racism or sexism as individuals and groups without thinking.

A Few Key Characteristics of Implicit Biases:

  • Implicit biases are pervasive.  Everyone possesses them, even people with avowed commitments to impartiality such as judges.
  • Implicit and explicit biases are related but distinct mental constructs.  They are not mutually exclusive and may even reinforce each other.
  • The implicit associations we hold do not necessarily align with our declared beliefs or even reflect stances we would explicitly endorse.
  • We generally tend to hold implicit biases that favor our own ingroup, though research has shown that we can still hold implicit biases against our ingroup.
  • Implicit biases are malleable.  Our brains are incredibly complex, and the implicit associations that we have formed can be gradually unlearned through a variety of debiasing techniques.

http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/researchandstrategicinitiatives/implicit-bias-review/

The Kirwin Institute has collaborated with MTV to offer young folk an implicit bias test and a 10-day fast. Check their website here: http://www.lookdifferent.org/what-can-i-do/implicit-association-test.

Low culture’s antidote to despair…

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….music, language and art

Niederdeutschen. Lowlands Germany. Normaal musik. The Netherlands.

Here we call it hip-hop. Conscious rap. Dirty South rap. Soul music. Funk. The Blues.
Bessie Smith. William Grant Still. Big Mama Thorton. Betty Davis. Nona Hendryx.
We gon’ be alright, RIGHT??!??

Making strange historical connections to the culture of despair after Nazi Germany and after Apartheid and the study of marginalized youth on YouTube and teaching students to grapple with the despair of learning that our American culture is NOT what it claims itself to be when it comes to poverty, the working class, the middle class, business, education and much more. It can be depressing to study and think critically. The mind wants to lighten the weight of the burden by oversimplifying even the notion of “despair”. It’s merely a distraction not a “shit hittin the fan” confrontation with what’s really happening to the people in the nation.

Skimming though a Columbia Emeritus professor’s first book, The Culture of Despair (1963) by Frtiz Stern, I am starting to discover a rich definition of “despair” that is appropriate for my social inequality class discussion today. I captured this notion in my notebook:

“Despair, historian Fritz Stern writes, leads to a maze of self-afflicted hatred and frustrations [I would add resentments quite apparent among people of color, women, and college students]. He adds, “Despair [must] ultimately to yield to the promise of redemption. Hence the insistence on several steps to regeneration. The healing powers of Rembrandt, on the still slumbering powers of the Niederdeutschen–all these were verbal constructions designed to combat the deeply rooted sense of despair” (Stern 1963, 152).

This got me thinking about the power of the arts and media to regenerate and heal the illogics and psychosis that politics imposes on citizens. Stern writes that culture, psychology and psychic manipulation are harnessed in cultures of despair. Something to draw upon as we invent the format of our final presentations.

I decided to write a letter of acknowledgement to emeritus professor Stern. I always embrace intergenerational communication and I think in this age of technological information overload where our mobile devices control us with dings and buzzes, that we actually slow down and take time to compose handwritten letters or even an email to a retired professor whose research still resonates. I shared more of my notes with Stern:

Stern concludes the preface of the book with a wistful thought. Perhaps it is the very culture of despair that demands a historical return [from the living]. [I] “would prefer to live in a world in which the politics of cultural despair had nothing to do with historical resonance”.

[KG:] In other words, wouldn’t it be great to live in a world where the past was just that–behind us–not shaping us; easy and undemanding of our critical reflection and study.  This is brilliant stuff!!

I added to Prof. Stern, “Sorry for using such lowbrow language. My 10th grade honor’s English teacher would staunchly protest the use of ‘stuff. But it seems fitting from the bit of information I examined about the cultural history of Niederdeutchen in 1970s subculture. Here’s a video of one of its proponents who reclaimed the use of Low German, which is the translation of the German term.

For more on Niederdeutschen See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German#Contemporary Normaal and low German language reclaimed through subcultural music.

I don’t know enough but to quote Wikipedia just yet. Here is a bit of biography about Normaal.

Normaal is a rock band from the Netherlands, more specifically from the Achterhoek region, who sing in Achterhooks, a local variety of the Low Saxon language group. Bennie Jolink, who was an Arts education[disambiguation needed] student stationed in Amsterdam in the 1970s, started the band in 1975 as a reaction to disco and glamrock, in addition to the overall “Dutch snobbery” towards people from the Low Saxon-speaking regions, and use of the English language by many other Dutch artists. “Normaal” meaning “normal”, suggesting the same: “act normally”. The band has since gained national fame, and have had more top 40 hits in the Dutch chart than any other Dutch band. Despite this fact, the band never reached number one.[1] The music could be typified as “heavy country rock”, and possibly as a rowdier version of ZZ Top.