Monday, October 17, 2005
Another vignette from Next
"Mixed Like Me" written by a black-Jewish conservative. Wraps up on somewhat contradictory note explaining why he makes a living writing about racial issues, "Under our phony system of racial harmony, college-educated blacks are expected to do something that is, well, black. Black academics are concentrated in Afro-American studies, sociology, and other "soft" fields where they can expound at length about the plight of the American Negro...No one is forced to follow this course; there should be no whining about that. But in life, as in physics, currents flow along the path of least resistance. As long as it is easy to make a living as a professional race man, the best and brightest blacks will be siphoned off into this least-productive field in our service economy. The same is true of course of Hispanics, Asians, or whatever minority group is in vogue in a specific region or profession. Our educational system, our country's entire way of thinking about race is creating a class of professionals whose entire raison d'etre is to explore and explain--and thus perpetuate--the current regime."
Sometimes wonder about this--I've noticed the tendency for "minorities" to specialize on their backgrounds in academia at least, though admittedly my sample from BMC would be skewed. Even Richard Rodriguez, as much as he tries to escape it still gets stuck in with "Chicano literature" section. It could be seen as a "if I don't do this work noone else will"--seems like personal experience motivates passion and search for meanings. Though another article called it an academic ghetto.
In my own job search sometimes I wonder whether I should try to play my background up more--certainly I could gain more authority as a potential cultural expert, though the field as a whole doesn't seem particularly worried about diversity. When I watched a video on Latina women on Sunday, I felt somewhat detached as if it wasn't my history--the background scenes were of farm worker activism and of bustling New York and Los Angeles neighborhoods, far from my NC home. On the other hand, the Mexican movie "Sin Dejar Huellas' which I saw at Duke later on was also describing a world which I'm not altogether familiar with. It starts out with a woman from Juarez, probably younger than I working in a maquiladora with two kids worried about drug trafficking and all the femicides that are going on there. It was a little like "Thelma and Louise" only with a happy ending. So there are many stories that get told, though even Mom gets resentful sometimes that her experiences are not reflected in the picture of Mexicans.
"Mixed Like Me" written by a black-Jewish conservative. Wraps up on somewhat contradictory note explaining why he makes a living writing about racial issues, "Under our phony system of racial harmony, college-educated blacks are expected to do something that is, well, black. Black academics are concentrated in Afro-American studies, sociology, and other "soft" fields where they can expound at length about the plight of the American Negro...No one is forced to follow this course; there should be no whining about that. But in life, as in physics, currents flow along the path of least resistance. As long as it is easy to make a living as a professional race man, the best and brightest blacks will be siphoned off into this least-productive field in our service economy. The same is true of course of Hispanics, Asians, or whatever minority group is in vogue in a specific region or profession. Our educational system, our country's entire way of thinking about race is creating a class of professionals whose entire raison d'etre is to explore and explain--and thus perpetuate--the current regime."
Sometimes wonder about this--I've noticed the tendency for "minorities" to specialize on their backgrounds in academia at least, though admittedly my sample from BMC would be skewed. Even Richard Rodriguez, as much as he tries to escape it still gets stuck in with "Chicano literature" section. It could be seen as a "if I don't do this work noone else will"--seems like personal experience motivates passion and search for meanings. Though another article called it an academic ghetto.
In my own job search sometimes I wonder whether I should try to play my background up more--certainly I could gain more authority as a potential cultural expert, though the field as a whole doesn't seem particularly worried about diversity. When I watched a video on Latina women on Sunday, I felt somewhat detached as if it wasn't my history--the background scenes were of farm worker activism and of bustling New York and Los Angeles neighborhoods, far from my NC home. On the other hand, the Mexican movie "Sin Dejar Huellas' which I saw at Duke later on was also describing a world which I'm not altogether familiar with. It starts out with a woman from Juarez, probably younger than I working in a maquiladora with two kids worried about drug trafficking and all the femicides that are going on there. It was a little like "Thelma and Louise" only with a happy ending. So there are many stories that get told, though even Mom gets resentful sometimes that her experiences are not reflected in the picture of Mexicans.
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