Many people in the social sciences will be familiar with the injunction against value-driven work -- that it is generally less rigorous than more "objective" research and in some cases isn't even counted as social science. This kind of charge is probably getting harder and harder to maintain given the great inroads that feminist and other critical scholarship has made into the academy. The idea that anybody is an unbiased observer is one that, at least nominally, many would now reject as unrealistic. Still, once in a while you might -- as I have on occasion -- detect at least a note of hostility towards research done for/by marginalized groups. There is a particular strand of this discontent that I call, for lack of a better term, the "conspiracy of the oppressed".
Perhaps you are familiar with the conspiracy -- perhaps you have been implicated in it by someone in the past, or heard others charged with involvement in it. This is a conspiracy of obfuscation -- the goal is to carefully select one's observations and data so as to prove that a particular group really is oppressed. It is perhaps the ultimate form of bias: a blindness* to "inconvenient facts" of the positive variety that indicate that maybe some progress has been made on race or gender issues -- that things are not as bad as they seem. The term conspiracy implies a deliberate act, but whether the conspirators realize that they are doing this or not is really irrelevant -- either way, they are failing to do science properly.
I think this ties into another familiar trope: the idea the marginalized groups are never happy with any progress they happen to make. I recall one professor (years ago) smugly remarking about how he'd once shouted down a student for saying that feminism was still relevant. He explained to this student, he told us, that feminism had made a lot of gains in the last century or so, and maybe we were getting to the point where any remaining gaps just weren't going to go away. In other words: shut up and be happy, you've never had it so good.
More on this in the future, but I've been mulling this on and off for a while and wanted to finally get some of my thoughts down. This idea that "sociologists are allergic to good news" really bothers me, especially for its implicit assumptions about the realities of oppression only being accessible to those without a stake in the situation.
*I am aware of the ableist connotations of using the word in this way and would not do it myself -- but it has been put this way to me in the past (bias as unwillingness to see, "blindness" to the truth), so I reproduce the language here.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
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I stumbled upon this blog after reading your “Nerd Assertiveness and Blindness to Privilege” bit on Sociological Images. I am also a sociology major at the University of Washington (undergraduate) with an interest in the different discourses surrounding issues of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, which is why this particular post caught my eye. You make a lot of great points here, so I thought I'd offer some of my own thoughts:
ReplyDeleteI do understand why the conspiracy card is being played, if just slightly. If the sociology community really WAS carefully selecting data to prove that groups were being oppressed, then we'd be in a world of trouble. And tell me if I'm wrong - but even though science is supposed to be free of personal bias, I think it's safe to say that a person with little to no direct ties with marginalized groups is less likely to see the societal effects (positive or negative) on a group as thoroughly as someone who does. Still, if it's anything I've learned about science, it's that there is always something new to be found in the ideas that we think that we already understand. With that being said, we should never be completely satisfied with the answers given to us and assume it's the end of discussion. Unfortunately, that is exactly the kind of attitude I see for those playing the conspiracy card – the attitude of “things are good, so let's stop talking.”
The argument that “things are not as bad as they seem” concerning race and gender issues is a blatant disregard for the multidimensional nature of progress. First of all, progress is always in motion. It's difficult to gauge a clear finish line for progress because new issues are constantly arising all the time. Second, progress is not unilateral; it varies according to context and scale. Let's take heterosexism for example: One can probably argue that the approval of Referendum 71 in the state of Washington is a sign that the queer community is doing better now than they were before. The problem with this is that while it acknowledges the reduction of queer marginalization in the realm of formal law, it doesn't explain for the marginalization taking place at the the cultural-symbolic level: Why is the word “gay” still used as a pejorative among teens and young adults? Why do people still refer to fashionable heterosexual men as “metrosexuals” as if such a phenomenon is inherently abnormal? What about those whose sexual identities are more ambiguous than the heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy that we as a society have become accustomed to? And that's barely scratching the surface.
Hi Michelle,
ReplyDeleteThanks, I think you make a lot of good points. You touched on another issue which I forgot about here: how to define progress. Those who want to say that "we've come far enough", I'd argue, are more likely to define progress based on formal legal provisions, like you say. Of course, anti-discrimination laws are critical -- but they're not the whole story, as you point out.
Since people who are living on the privileged end of a particular spectrum of oppression are less likely to experience the cultural-symbolic marginalization you speak of, they might simply see that we have some kind of law protecting group X and use that as a metric for progress. Worst case scenario: this provides leverage for arguing that additional protections beyond things like hiring and wages are unnecessary and represent "reverse discrimination".
(Thinking about oppression as having to do only with particular, easily definable groups is another issue here, but I'll leave that one for now.)
Funny that you bring up reverse discrimination: I was having a conversation with a friend last night about whether or not universities “favor” ethnic minorities over whites when deciding on who to accept or reject during the admissions process. Her boyfriend (who is white) didn't get into the UW, while many of his non-white classmates who had lower GPAs and took easier classes DID get in. Her argument was that because many universities are seeking to increase the diversity of their student population, those who are white are experiencing greater discrimination due to the fact that their majority status goes against the schools' diversity objective.
ReplyDeleteI have a problem with this claim, though I'm not exactly sure why and on what level I take offense. What are your thoughts on this, Matt? Perhaps your input will help me better analyze the issue.
Well, I'm certainly not an expert on diversity programs or affirmative action, so I don't know how much I can say. I guess I can say that from my experience, (white) people against any measure of this kind seem to have this idea that we are living in a post-racial society. If everyone's on an equal playing field, then sure, it doesn't make sense to favour particular groups over others. Of course, we're not -- and to argue that people of colour and other historically marginalized groups pull themselves up by their bootstraps seems absurd to me.
ReplyDeleteAgain, not an expert -- my vague sense of most such programs is that they function as decision-making mechanisms when two candidates are of roughly equal qualifications. So I don't want to discount the experience of the boyfriend in the story, but I wonder whether his perception of the results might have been affected by unexamined racial privilege.
(Just to lay my cards out on the table: I don't believe that the concepts of racism and sexism can be usefully applied to whites and men, respectively, since to me they imply structures of power. So I tend to cringe when people use the terms "reverse racism" and "misandry" -- unless the latter is being used to describe the terrible image of men so often provided by defenders of the patriarchy. But I digress.)
I think what you pointed out may be the underlying issue – the debate of whether or not we live in a post-racial society. Or in this specific case, a person's willingness or lack of willingness to accept the idea of our society as one that is racialized. In a strange way, I think the friend who made this argument did mean well. Why should race have to be an issue? Why can't we just choose the person who is more qualified? And if the more qualified person is white, so what?
ReplyDeleteStill, we can rant all we want about how race shouldn't be an issue, but it won't change the fact that it is an issue. We're not dealing with whites and people of color as two groups who are equally struggling for power; we're dealing with one group holding significantly more power than the other in the greater societal context. If we accept this premise to be true, then the argument that whites are put in a disadvantaged position is quite a big stretch. Especially when you take scale and comparative discrimination frequency into consideration.
(For the record, I'm also not much for such application of racism and sexism to whites and men for the same reason that you gave. Then again, some believer in reverse racism could probably say that it's probably due to the fact that I'm both Asian and female. Har har.)
I wonder if this relates to the prejudice against "soft" science? As you say, social science tends to reject the idea of unbiased observers, and to accept that in some cases having strong ties to the groups(/categories) involved may be a good thing.
ReplyDeleteSeeing this from a "hard" science perspective (as society tends to) this looks problematic, and possibly even suspicious. At the least it damages the credibilty of social science research, and at worst it raises suspicions of the 'conspiracy' you describe?
(This topic interests me because I'm currently thinking about how different academic disciplines relate to each other and society more broadly)