[Xmca-l] Re: Fwd: [New post] Why generations?

[Stetsenko, Anna]

Phillip,

you said exactly what needed to be said (and not the first time, I remember an episode from some 15 years ago, when  the same pattern was present - including excuses for language such as "a good girl" as just stemming from "misunderstanding" etc...don't know if you remember). That was exactly when Mary Bryson and others left but not without first sending a powerful message.


Not much to add - other than that I deeply appreciate Arturo's and Maxine's position and intervention. I can imagine it comes at a personal cost, in feelings and emotions, of having to explain, again and again, what should have been clear to anyone with open eyes by now. There was enough context to see things through for what they are, long before the current episode.


I too left xmca some 15 years ago...am writing now only because I was alerted to the latest episode. I will keep from saying more lest I "destroy xmca" (that's what I always tend to do, apparently :-).


Anna



Anna Stetsenko, PhD
Professor
Ph.D. Programs in Psychology/Human Development and in Urban Education
The Graduate Center of The City University of New York
365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016
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________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of White, Phillip <Phillip.White@ucdenver.edu>
Sent: Friday, November 27, 2020 12:39 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Fwd: [New post] Why generations?

dear Everyone:

thinking over all of the posts as an aggregate, rather that individually referencing them, regarding marginalization of xmca members, i'm reminded that this has been a topic over the last twenty-five years, that i've noticed.  only this time, the response is different in both quality and quantity, as well as introducing shared tools of analysis - which in my mind i believe is in part due to BLM activism, and certainly a newer and younger generation of colleagues here on xmca with a mindful use of our shared professional ethnographic tools. which i appreciate, greatly.

as any native english speaker knows, the term - to put someone on the spot - elicits the synonyms:
embarass - humiliate - shame - inhibit - tease - degrade - crush - wither - show up.

if the intention was to praise the student, why then weren't words of praise - for example: "Thank you for that question.  I myself have wondered about that evolution."

i'm reminded of Foucault: People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does."

in Brandon Taylor's novel Real Life, the narrator notes that in social gatherings when a white person makes a casually racist comment to a person of color, the whites remain silent, preferring not to move out of their own comfort level.  really, nothing was lost in translation.

from my perspective, there is too much protection here on xmca of both white fragilities, as well as white hetero-normative male fragility.  and one way to work around this is practice - i humbly suggest - is that those who self-identify as CIS white male could begin to point out points of view that support white hetero-normative supremacy.  the burden for this should not be placed on those already socially marginalized.

i'm reminded that in a class i taught for those working to get their master's degree in education, that when i would assign Bryant Keith Alexander's "(Re)Visioning the Ethnographic Site: Interpretive Ethnography as a Method of Pedagogical Reflexivity and Scholarly Production" - in which Alexander used the metaphor of pedagogy as drag - i would get blow-back from some students complaining that since they had no personal contacts with gay men, much-less gay men in drag, that they should not have to read the ethnography.  my response was that since they had no experience, this was a good way to start since they had no knowledge of who their students were, or their parents.  Yet within their classroom, or school community they worked in, there very well could be these life experiences.

i'm feeling that i've written enough - this is such a richly complex topic.

and so i'm grateful for Arturo's inadvertently public response - it was illuminating.

 phillip
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