> hey phillip, and all,
>
> i have to admit that
> i am struck by the rage, and the violence, as phillip has discussed;
> however, i do see it as a race/sex/class issue.
>
> and that these kids were "marginalized", i admit, offends me.
> suddenly, now that white boys can claim to be marginalized,
>
> but, ya... it is an issue of race, whiteness matters. boys and guns.
> don't tell me it isn't a gender issue also. marc lepine, don't even start
> trying to list 'em 'cause there is something quite homogeneous about the
> perpetrators in these
> heinous crimes and it needs to be discussed, i think, it needs to be out
> there.
diane - it makes a lot of sense to me that white boys can claim
to be marginalized. it takes me back to an educational group i was
involved with fifteen years ago.
i was a member of the gay and lesbian teachers association here in
colorado. at one meeting a group of men - and the membership was 99.9%
male - were discussing abortion. rather, they were complaining about the
right of women to have an abortion. i was shook to my teeth - the
discussion seemed so incongruent with the assumed values of the group,
i.e., that the goverment had no right to control people's bodies... and
other assumptions about social oppression, etc.
the men in the group could see no connection to the issues of
being gay and its attendent fields of social oppression and
marginalization and how they viewed women's right to abortion.
it led me to think that often the rhetoric of male gay liberation
is actually the rhetoric of white boys who are furious that they've been
denied what they consider to be their just perogatives.
for at the same time as this, blacks and latinos were being
turned away from some gay bars on the basis of faulty ID's.
too, and i'm making a different leap here - Columbine HS is in
Jefferson Country, which is 98% white - the percent used to be higher.
the one african-american male shot would have been one of very few blacks
to graduate from a Jefferson Country high school. in today's paper there
were short stories about each student who had been murdered. a small
eulogy. nothing was written about the black student as to who he was,
rather the article dwelled on how angry the father was. it was also the
shortest of the pieces by half.
so, i guess that this is in its way a story of agreement for your
statements - yes.
and, it's been my impression that when men here in colorado has
taken up violence against women, it has been because the women have
resisted the men either by leaving them, or becoming involved with another
man.
now, this does suggest to me that the men feel discounted,
displaced, etc. ..... for me the question is, how have we gotten to such
a place that when men / boys do feel put-down, (may i use the term
marginalized?) that their dominant emotional resource is rage? why don't
men have greater emotional resources?
(i suppose that's one of those failed epistemological statements
that blurs materialism with abstraction, but i've not the conceptual
framework myself to construct a more theoretically felicitous statement.)
so, thanks, diane. yes, i think you're right in your
protestations.
phillip
phillip white pwhite who-is-at carbon.cudenver.edu
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A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated,
is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not
as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that
is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency.
Michel Foucault / Discipline & Punish
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