Annals of American Ignorance: Or; The President Prays Every Day, And So Should We All

It's all over the news lately that, according to a new poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, nearly one in five Americans is dumber than a rock -- er, I mean, thinks that Barack is a Muslim (not that there's anything wrong with that!) The increase in those who believe that Obama sneaks off to the mosque behind our backs -- seven percent since last spring- is accompanied by a "sharp decline" of 14% in the number of Americans who think Obama is a Christian.

In May 2009, LiveScience reported that one out of five Americans admit that they pee in the swimming pool. The Centers for Disease Control reports that one out of six Americans has genital herpes, one out of five Americans infected with HIV do not know they have it, the American Dental Association reports (gag!!) that one out of five Americans surveyed do not brush their teeth twice a day, and the National Institute of Mental Health reports that more than one in four Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder.

So who cares what Americans think about the President's spiritual life? Tend to your own damn gardens, America, that's what I say, and don't forget to wear a rubber when you are playing any version of hide the salami. For a list of the other things characterizing one out of five Americans, go to this article in The Washington Post.

Interestingly, the number of African-American people who think the President is a Muslim has only risen from 6% to 7% in the same period in which whites in both parties, and those registered in neither party, have been successfully brainwashed by paid political operatives and radio talk show hosts. Given that the margin of error for each category was around 4% (and I suspect somewhat higher for African Americans, since their proportion of the survey group was probably the same as their percentage of the population), we can say with some confidence that it seems to be only white people who are obsessed with this question and there may be no black people who believe that Obama is a Muslim.

Odd that the media is not reporting this, isn't it? I guess this is what it means to be post-racial.

Stranger still, given how much talk there has been about the President's religion, in the part of the poll that links job approval to the Christian/Muslim question two out of five Americans, when asked about his religion, said they didn't know what religion the President was. This is truly amazing, since the right answer and the wrong answer are available on every media outlet nearly every day. And finally, when asked a series of questions about the proper role of religion in politics, and specifically on presidential decision-making, two out of five Americans were unaware that religious conservatives or liberals had created formal lobbying organizations to try to influence politicians and policy-making.

While the White House has reassured us that the President is not only Christian, he prays every day, there is very little concern being expressed about how unbelievably ignorant and ill-informed Americans are, and why Americans think being religious -- much less having the "right" religion -- has anything to do with policy-making. Not since the 1960 Presidential campaign, when John F. Kennedy had to repeatedly reassure Americans that he would not appoint the Pope to a cabinet post, has religion and the paranoia that Protestants in America harbor towards religions associated with non-white and immigrant people, been such an accepted part of the political landscape.

And not since the nineteenth century has rumor been such an acceptable substitute for being well-informed for so many people. But that may be because only one in five Americans reads above a twelfth grade level.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Sunday Radical Roundup: Surely The Obama Presidency Means We Are Now Beyond Race

To paraphrase Leslie Nielson in Airplane (1980), "No, not if we are firing black people in public service for talking about race -- and don't call me Shirley." Even out in Minnesota, where the Radical family was taking a vacation from all things political, everyone was aware that it wasn't a great week to be Shirley. Read good commentaries in today's New York Times from Frank Rich, a particularly lucid Maureen Dowd, and Van Jones on the Shirley Sherrod affair.

Sherrod's firing and rehiring by Tom Vilsack, a Midwestern progressive who should have known better (and a West Wing that either signed off or insisted on it) is a teachable moment. Ponder, if you will, what this event tells us about the cynical use of race in contemporary political culture. Why the Obama administration can't do better than it does, particularly given the historical lessons of the Clinton years in which accomplished black women routinely took it on the chin and were then hung out to dry by their allies, is something academics might want to think about too. Has anyone noticed that as women and people of color are breaking through to higher ed. administration in unprecedented numbers, yawning hiring, tenure and salary gaps persist, and are usually explained as the outcome of discrimination that only existed in the past -- discrimination that could not possibly be corrected in the present by women, people of color and self-proclaimed feminist men who now have the power to do exactly that?

But returning to the kamikaze political life that seems to be shaping the nation's destiny, I would like to add a few observations. As someone who is currently working on the history of radical feminism in the 1970s, it seems quite obvious to me that the political right learned to do this from the political left. Look at any New or Old Left social movement, and you will see a kind of winner-take-all viciousness in which a large scale ideological attack often took the form of taking a remark, or a political stance, as a thread that would then be used to unravel the opposition's whole sweater. Look at the dirty politics internal to mid-century American Communism; trashing in radical feminism; the decades-long success of the AFL-CIO in suppressing organizing among non-industrial labor; the internal struggles that ended with the expulsion of whites from SNCC (and the subsequent, less heralded, resignation of many black members of SNCC); and the number of queer organizations that have been founded, and then turned on, by Larry Kramer. In other words, there is some shared responsibility for the development of these practices and for the strategic deployment of dirty tricks, particularly statements that are spun out of context to "prove" a foregone conclusion.

This is not to say that the left is worse than the right in this regard: only that they shared in pioneering this behavior; that it has now been fatally merged with racist right-wing political tactics dating from Reconstruction; and that it is now being perfected in an age in which a media story can be transmitted in nanoseconds.

I would also observe that this is not just a political problem, it's a cultural problem. It is the kind of $hit that occurs daily on blogs: blogger writes a six or seven paragraph essay, and some a$$hat latches onto a sentence out of context, gives it a hateful spin, and writes a "comment" that is actually just a personal attack intended to discredit the blogger wholesale. The idea? Who cares about ideas? You would have to read the whole post to grasp the ideas!!!! How much easier just to move on to the next blog, knowing that the writer is exactly the putrid idiot you knew s/he was before you started reading.

Which is all to say: we have become Adderall Nation. Even our intellectuals and journalists often lack the attention span to read or watch anything all the way through. We tape everything on TV so we won't have to watch the commercials; we subscribe to Twitters from politicians so we won't have to read their position papers; and we read or view something just long enough to have -- not even an idea, but a reaction - and then we express our outrage as a character assassination of the person who provoked us.

Is it about the technology? In other words, if information could not be spread unchecked through blogs and other free social media, would a good woman like Shirley Sherrod have been assaulted in this way? Certainly the technology makes it possible -- but like any other phenomenon that has a history, it doesn't make it inevitable or necessary.

And as my mother used to say, it's the thought that counts.

Crossposted at Cliopatria.

On Political Violence: Vandalism And Mortal Threats In The Wake Of The Wake Of The Health Care Vote

If you actually go to Sarah Palin's Facebook page, rather than simply believe what you have heard in the media, you can evaluate for yourself whether the twenty Democratic congressional seats she is urging the Republicans to take back in November are, or are not, marked with rifle cross hairs. I'm voting for not, although I haven't looked through a rifle sight in decades, so I am no authority.

I think the notion that Palin is inviting political assassins to, as we now say in the political arena, "bring it on" (I guess if you are a Republican you say "let's roll") takes an act of imagination. In order to imagine that one was being summoned by Palin to harm a sitting Congressman as part of a rebellion against tyranny, one would have to disregard what the former Governor of Alaska (or the person who maintains the site for her) actually says in the note attached to the map. "We’re going to fire them and send them back to the private sector," she says; "which has been shrinking thanks to their destructive government-growing policies. Maybe when they join the millions of unemployed, they’ll understand why Americans wanted them to focus on job creation and an invigorated private sector." Appealing to millions of voters who are unemployed or underemployed, and asking them to blame Democratic rather than Republican policies for their immiseration, Palin is suggesting that Democratic politicians be fired -- not fired upon.

Hell, yeah. Why would you need health insurance if you are unemployed? I ask you. Fire the ignorant bastards!

And yet. And yet.

Let us consider acts of imagination that might turn those crosses into cross hairs. After all, history demonstrates that political violence becomes conceivable through acts of imagination. In the United States, those acts of imagination have often been given tacit (or not so tacit) approval by politicians themselves who imagine themselves leading "the people" in a rebellion against tyranny.

Palin's recent Twitter message to her followers -- "Don't Retreat, Instead -- RELOAD!" is an unambiguous use of a war metaphor in the political arena. This causes me to wonder why, if Palin truly wishes to distance herself from political violence, she hasn't retracted that Twitter or redrawn that map with little stars instead. That she should allow the misunderstanding that she is inciting her followers to dangerous attacks to stand strikes me as odd, particularly given the threats to and acts of violence against Democrats that followed the health care vote last week. In the most potentially lethal incident, Virginia Democratic Congressman Tom Periello's home address was listed on a Lynchburg VA Tea Party blog (except it was actually Periello's brother's address.) Subsequently, the gas line to that home was cut, which might have resulted in a lethal explosion and fire.

Although the Lynchburg Tea Party has said it does not condone the violence (while we're at it, we could change the name of that town), it hasn't taken down the address or sanctioned the blogger either. Bricks through windows, some with threatening notes attached, have been more the norm; as have threats delivered by mail. New York Congressman Anthony Weiner received an envelope containing "white powder," intended to mimic an anthrax attack, and pictures of nooses were sent to other Congresspeople who voted yes on the national health bill. As the New York Times reports, Tea Party leaders have "distanced themselves" from these acts, saying that they result from "frustration" but are "not acceptable."

Well, if violence is not acceptable, remove this garbage from your websites, public statements and protest posters. Any responsible political organization would do this if they were concerned about the possibility of violence.

Goading crowds of the disaffected to violent emotions while insisting that actual criminal acts are only perpetrated by fringe elements has a long history in this country: ask Pitchfork Ben Tillman ("It was the riots before the elections precipitated by [Negro voters'] own hot-headedness in attempting to hold the government, that brought on conflicts between the races and caused the shotgun to be used. That is what I meant by saying we used the shotgun.") Ask George Wallace ("Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done.... I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.")



Ask Strom Thurmond ("I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.") Or ask Jesse Helms: "You needed that job. You were the best qualified for this job. But they had to give it to a minority."



Better yet, ask any civil rights worker from the 1950s or 1960s about the ration of threats received to bricks or bombs through the window. As a former candidate for president, Sarah Palin knows exactly what her foolish fear mongering accomplishes among her followers, something that other Republican lawmakers also ought to be held accountable for as they pursue a rhetorical scorched earth policy that summons the Lost Cause, the Alamo, and every other intolerant moment in this country's history (the American Revolution had plenty of them too, as so-called patriots sacked Tories and Native Americans for fun and profit.) As The Telegraph in the UK reported in November 2008, the McCain-Palin campaign's pursuit of rhetoric that linked an Obama presidency to US vulnerability to terrorism not only provoked cries of "Terrorist!" and "K___ him!" against candidate Obama, but a dramatic uptick in threats made against the life of the candidate and his family.* That none of these threats have, to date, resulted in an assault on the President does not make them meaningless, and Palin must actively refrain from provoking them.

Huffington Post reports that House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) have "condemned" the threats against Democrats, but they haven't, not really. As one quote on HuffPo reads,"'I do not condone violence,' Cantor said on Capitol Hill on Thursday. 'There are no leaders in the building, no rank and file members that condone violence, period.'But Cantor admonished Democratic National Committee chairman Tim Kaine and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) for 'dangerously fanning the flames by suggesting that these incidents be used as a political weapon.'" The condemnation of Democratic fundraisers citing these incidents in fundraising requests (because why would Democrats be afraid of a Republican Party that harbors vandals and assassins?) begs the question of who lit the fire in the first place.

For a good example of who that might be, go to John Boehner's web page, where an article without authorship (it is posted by the "Press Office") trumpets a "states rebellion... in Ohio" in response to a "Washington Democrats’ massive job-killing government takeover of health care." Promising that "the fight is far from over," Boehner announces that "Across the country, nothing short of a rebellion is underway." Embedded in this sentence is a link that takes you to another announcement of politicians in three states -- Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina -- who are moving to oppose the plan.

Anyone recall how peaceful the last rebellion or three that started in those states was? My point exactly.

*My use of blanks for this word is in deference to the fact that it is a federal felony to imply a threat to the the President's life.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.

Don't Shoot! A Meditation on Civility

The sensationalism of the Amy Bishop tenure case, in which a University of Alabama biologist shot numerous colleagues in the head after her failed appeal, has us all unnerved and fascinated. Of course, the news reports that are piecing together a portrait of a sociopath, a ticking time bomb who happened to have become a university professor, have already helped us build distance between "us" and "her." The Bishop story, which is being reported over at University Diaries in press clippings and terse, incisive commentary (that makes you think Margaret Soltan really could produce the thriller or mystery we all long to write) is, however, countered by the more prosaic and recognizable case of Bill Reader, a journalism professor at Ohio University. Reader seemed to be on track for tenure and now -- isn't exactly. Why? There are allegations that, although he is not a sociopath, he may be a garden variety bastard (or not) who is being portrayed as a sociopath by colleagues who voted against his tenure.

Hence, the Reader case raises a set of more serious issues for all of us, in my view.

According to Inside Higher Ed, prior to his tenure case, Reader "had received nothing but glowing annual evaluations with no mention of untoward behavior in his file." But when the case was reported out of the Journalism School, with a positive but very split vote, three female faculty members who voted against the case filed harassment charges against him, citing threats allegedly made by Reader that were related to them by third parties. The rumour was that Reader "was 'out for revenge' against those who had opposed his bid for tenure." Subsequent to the filing of these charges, "recommendations by the journalism school's director, a college-level review committee and dean have all come out negatively."

It's always difficult to know what happened when reading public reports of these things. Apparently Reader was prone to nasty email exchanges, one of which, ignited over the failure of colleagues to sign a card for a departing colleague, was particularly unpleasant. I doubt that he was the only one who sent flaming e's, although he was in a position to know he could be harmed by such behavior and clearly failed to perceive it. But many people suffer failures of self-perception on email, as adrenaline and self-righteous wrath washes over their -- no, let's say our -- brains. Even those of us who don't have grievances filed against us have probably participated in terrible e-mail exchanges that we are embarrassed about in retrospect, whether we believe we were right or wrong at the time. Reader apparently isn't embarrassed about the greeting card incident, however, which tells you nothing about his suitability as a colleague, but a lot about what constitutes normal behavior at the Ohio State J-School. “I opted for vitriol," he states. "I have no regrets. Before my e-mail, there were few signatures; afterward, there were many.”

Really? Even now you are not ready to stand down about that stupid greeting card?

Inside Higher Ed sees this case as part of "a continuing national debate over the extent to which 'collegiality' ought to be considered in the awarding of tenure," and on the surface I suppose it is. But Reader's supporters, and presumably Reader himself (who was not informed or or able to respond to the harassment charges until several negative decisions on his case had already been made), say the tenure process has been tainted by these allegations. I tend to agree with this somewhat narrower interpretation. So does the Faculty Senate at Ohio, which has reversed the negative rulings, and sent the case forward to the next level. The attorneys standing outside their office sharpening their knives probably had nothing to do with it, although this is a situation where a little gentle advice from the AAUP can go a long way.

I don't know whether I would like Bill Reader or want to work with him, and it's difficult to tell from the few facts that can be gleaned from the IHE piece, of course. But take it from someone who has been bullied: what is wrong in that department goes beyond Bill Reader and points to a winner-take-all culture where there is more than one person with no commitment to civility. Although there are clearly people who believe they have been victimized, the search for authentic victims is likely to produce instead a vivid picture of professional relationships dominated by gossip, faction and spite, in which people who insist they are wedded to "procedure" manipulate it cruelly to get their way. It's not for nothing that novelists as different as Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, C.P. Snow and Ishmael Reed have spent anywhere from a semester to a career with us and consistently pointed out these very qualities.

Academia, one might say, is characterized by strong personalities out to win an argument, and sometimes the desire to win gets out of hand. The origins of the bad behavior at Ohio University, either Reader's abusive emails and threats over signatures on a greeting card, or individual faculty members trying to have more than one vote on a tenure case by launching an internal grievance process, might well be a departmental culture in which the need for authority and the disregard for appropriate behavior is pervasive at all ranks. I also find it useful to remember what every child psychologist knows: that people who bully have often themselves been bullied. I once saw an older historian who was famous for hir nastiness, public temper tantrums and contempt for colleagues, treated with such contempt and rudeness (in public and for no good reason whatsoever) by hir prestigious dissertation director of three decades ago that it literally took my breath away.

This observation didn't make me like this person any better, nor did it make me more willing to be subjected to verbal abuse by others. But it did create a little window of understanding that subsequently caused me to look around the world I live in differently; to understand the ways in which we replicate the behavior of others, often unconsciously; and to place my own actions under the lens that I used to evaluate other people's behavior towards me. The lesson, in my view? We need to model judicious and civil behavior at all costs, and speak to people honestly when they breach the bounds of civility, not wait until a high stakes moment to declare them unfit for our company. We all need to insist that our authority and reputations be taken seriously by others, but not demand it by damaging them, in turn, after the fact. It is quite possible to work productively with people one neither likes or respects, and it is possible to have one's judgement not be sustained by the judgement of the majority without going nuclear: people outside the academy do it all the time.

Valentine's Day Super Sunday Radical Roundup

Do As I Say Not As I Do Department: Yesterday, when I thought that a mysterious Web Presence was taking out my illustrations and leaving a ghastly grey hole in their place, I took a bunch of the affected pics down. This was precipitous. Further research on Websense (that I should have done at the time perhaps, but I was maxing out the archives hours) suggests that it is a network device that is location specific, not a bot at all, much less a tool of the capitalist patriarchy. Here I am sitting in a Starbucks on 93rd and Broadway (which I think is a tool of the capitalist patriarchy) and my blog hasn't been mangled by lost pictures and ominous messages at all. Still the mystery remains: why did Websense knock out a picture of that sexy Radical cowboy?

Feeling Helpless About Haiti? Have An Archives, Museum Or Public History Degree? Well, the last thing they need in Port-au-Prince are a bunch of historians coming down to help dig or rescue children (Baptists from Idaho are taking care of that, from what I hear.) But the Blue Shield is looking for archivists, restorers, curators, librarians, architects and other experts to volunteer to help assess the damage to Haiti's libraries, archives and cultural treasurers. You can volunteer on-line at the link in this post, and the Blue Shield will assess your credentials and see if you can be enrolled in this vital project.

Conference News: The Deadline for the AHA 2011 Annual Meeting in Boston is tomorrow. Unlike this year's event in San Diego, you won't have to bust through a line of angry queers with Ph.D.'s: in fact, they will be down the street getting married, since this is legal in Massachusetts. Also note a changed date in the sidebar for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians: we at Tenured Radical have been notified that the deadline for proposals has been extended to March 15. So date up your favorite chick historians now for the Best Little Conference in 2011! And feminist history menz? You haz cheesebuhgeh too. Don't be shy: apply.

Website Of The Week: Check out the Disability Social History Project. This rising field has a lot going for it, particularly in the ways that it opens up new ground in queer, critical race, and feminist history; not to mention political and cultural history more broadly. This interesting site is written by Stephen Dias, a long time disability activist who participated in the Section 504 demonstration in San Francisco in 1977, and is produced by Patricia Chadwick.

Can I Get A Witness? Are you starting out your career in religious studies? The Center For Young Scholars in American Religion is looking for you! To wit:

"Young Scholars in American Religion 2010-2012: Call for Applications. The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture announces a program for early career scholars in American Religion. Beginning in October 2010, a series of seminars devoted to the enhancement of teaching and research for younger scholars in American Religion will be offered in Indianapolis. The aims of all sessions of the program are to develop ideas and methods of instruction in a supportive workshop environment, stimulate scholarly research and writing, and create a community of scholars that will continue into the future."

Go to the website for details.

Department Of Things You Won't Learn About The Candidate In A Convention Interview: It appears that Amy Bishop, the University of Alabama prof who went postal when her tenure case was turned down, accidentally shot her brother as a college student and was subsequently a suspect in an attempted pipe-bomb murder at the Harvard Medical School in 1993. Now, I watch television and read police procedurals: suspicion in the pipe-bomb case may have followed from the fact that Bishop had already been implicated in a violent death. Nevertheless, as Margaret Soltan at University Diaries suggests, Bishop may have ended up in Alabama because Massachusetts was getting a little, um, warm.

And Finally.... In case you didn't already know that Duke History Dude Timothy Tyson is a rock star, the movie based on his book Blood Done Sign My Name goes into release this week. Here's a nice interview on NPR where this southern anti-racist progressive scholar discusses the personal roots of this civil rights story. I wonder what ever happened to the other book about justice in the Carolinas that was supposed to be a major motion picture?

Let's Run Away From The Girls! And Other Strategies To Make History Relevant To A Twenty-First Century Liberal Arts Education

Did Linda Kerber, Emily Rosenberg, Penny Von Eschen, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Nancy Cott, Joan Hoff, Marilyn Young, Ellen DuBois, Mary Dudziak and Mary Frances Berry die when I wasn't looking?*

I was a little concerned about this when I picked up my New York Times this morning and saw that none of them were quoted in Patricia Cohen's article, Great Caesars Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing? I guess they just weren't answering their phones yesterday when they weren't called.

Tradition, as you guessed even before reading the article, would be represented by diplomatic, military, economic, constitutional and intellectual history. These fields a, the article asserts, are being crowded out of university history curricula by (you've guessed already, haven't you?): the history of gender, and that other feminized field, cultural history. "Job openings on the nation’s college campuses are scarce," Cohen writes, "while bread-and-butter courses like the Origins of War and American Foreign Policy are dropping from history department postings. And now, in what seems an almost gratuitous insult, Diplomatic History, the sole journal devoted to the subject, has proposed changing its title."

Horrors. Change the title of a journal to reflect changes in the field? What else must the profession endure?

Aside from what you have already noticed -- that "tradition"="quality"="what you really need to know to live in the world" -- the association of "tradition" with "male" is sealed by the fact that not a single woman is quoted in the article, not even women working in the fields in question. Because, you know, once you add gender or race to your inquiry, you aren't really in those fields any more. Tu comprends, mon chou?

In case you are still in doubt as to the destructiveness of women's history to the profession at large, you have the helpful graphic pictured at left which demonstrates (without the appropriate gross numbers) that women's history is eating the profession alive. And then, to provide appropriate pathos about the extinction of men from the historical profession, there is a lonely little petunia in an onion patch, a first-year (male) grad student whose name is being withheld by me out of mercy, who whimpers that he feels "a bit like the last woolly mammoth at the end of the Ice Age. 'Being a young historian in this field is thus a rather lonely and sobering experience,' he wrote, adding that some historians treat his chosen specialty with 'genuine derision.'”

Do we have any doubt that these monsters are -- women? No, we do not. Because why else would you ask a first year graduate student in any field for his or her opinion before consulting any one of the distinguished women in the fields in question?

Naturally, it is the permissiveness of the 1960s that is to blame for this travesty, not to mention the pervasive cultural rot that allowed women into the profession in the first place:

The shift in focus began in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when a generation of academics began looking into the roles of people generally missing from history books — women, minorities, immigrants, workers. Social and cultural history, often referred to as bottom-up history, offered fresh subjects. Diplomatic historians, by contrast, generally work from the top down, diving into official archives and concentrating on people in power, an approach often tagged as elitist and old-fashioned.

Over the last three decades the number of history faculty members at four-year institutions has more than doubled to 20,000-plus, said Robert B. Townsend, assistant director for research at the American Historical Association. Yet the growth has been predominantly in the newer specializations, spurring those in diplomatic, military, legal and economic history to complain they are being squeezed out.

In 1975, for example, three-quarters of college history departments employed at least one diplomatic historian; in 2005 fewer than half did. The number of departments with an economic historian fell to 31.7 percent from 54.7 percent. By contrast the biggest gains were in women’s history, which now has a representative in four out of five history departments.

The closest we get to women who actually teach in any of the fields under question being asked for their opinion is a quote from Anthony Grafton, who is now officially dubbed an Honorary Woman for trying to make this point, even though it didn't affect the reporter's perspective a jot. His perspective that these fields are not gone but have "shifted focus" is immediately countered by two other scholars for whom only "tradition" will do:

....critics like David A. Bell, the dean of faculty at Johns Hopkins University, argue that traditional diplomatic and economic history are still the specialties that are best suited to deal with America’s problems today.

Simply giving everyone a place at the table is just not affordable in an era of shrinking resources. “I’d love to let a hundred flowers bloom,” said Alonzo L. Hamby, a history professor at Ohio University in Athens (n.b.: note reference to the famously destructive Cultural Revolution that gutted intellectual institutions in the People's Republic of China), but “it’s hard for all but the largest departments or the richest.” In his own department of about 30 faculty members, a military historian recently retired, triggering a vigorous debate over how to advertise for a replacement. (A handful of faculty members had the view that “military history is evil,” Mr. Hamby said.) The department finally agreed to post a listing for a specialist in “U.S. and the world,” he said, “the sort of mushy description that could allow for a lot of possibilities.”

You mean like gender?

**************************************

*And these are just the Americanists. Lord only knows how the female Europeanists are faring in these days of want and strife. Phone home girls!

Notes From The Archive: Some Of Those Nasty Rumors You Heard About Some Feminists Are True

Every once in a while, as I plug away at my ongoing research on second wave feminism and anti-pornography activism, I come upon a piece of evidence that the rifts in women's liberation were far uglier than the accounts of them that have survived in many secondary accounts of the movement.

Not infrequently, some of these startling moments cause me to re-think central themes from the 1970s: racism, homophobia and what would come to be known as transphobia, among them. As one example, I realized today, while taking notes from one of the feminist memoirs I am reading, that I have underestimated the anxiety triggered by masculine women among some old-guard second wave feminists who were critical to the early years of the movement, anxiety that seems to have survived intact into the twenty-first century. In her autobiography Not One Of The Boys: Living Life As A Feminist (2000), activist attorney Brenda Feigen chews over the significance of clothing to the gender identification of lesbians, and comes to the conclusion that normal lesbians present androgynously. Noting that because they seek comfort, not the approval of others, Feigen states that it is "a well-known fact that most lesbians prefer pants to skirts" (emphasis mine). Reflecting that she never really understood her friend and comrade-in-arms Gloria Steinem's preference for "tiny skirts and non-functional heels," (Gloria is not a lesbian) Feigen goes on to observe:

at the opposite extreme, there are male-identified butch lesbians, who mimic men in the often swaggering way they carry and comport themselves. They don't seem happy being women (emphasis Feigen), and being a woman is, as far as I'm concerned, more a state of mind than a particular look. For the most part, this kind of lesbian will raise money for AIDS but not breast cancer. They are often caught up in role-playing, so that their relationships with more "femme" women (often helpless victim types) mimic the worst of extreme heterosexual behavior. I have trouble understanding the desire to be with a woman who tries -- whatever her method of doing so may be -- to look and act like a man. If I wanted someone manly in my life, I would be with the real thing.

In any case, fortunately, role-playing lesbians seem increasingly to be in the minority....Most lesbians I know are feminists who dress and act like normal/androgynous-looking women. (132-133)

The use of the word "normal" is crucial, particularly in the construction of "normal" lesbians who are positioned as the opposite of queers (like me.) These butch and trans-identified women are, in Feigen's view, just perverts as well as enemies of true feminism, as are all transsexuals (I'm willing to bet this blog that FTMs do not count as "the real thing" from Feigan's perspective.) In case you missed her feelings on this matter, on the following page, Feigen shifts into full-bore transphobia. She slams MTF transsexuals who, in her view, "reinforce sex stereotypes about women," have a "thing about wearing women's underwear," and "are no friends of feminists, who have a serious mission on this planet -- not just play-acting and dress up." (134)

Well, alright then. Feigen, who worked with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the American Civil Liberties Union Women's Rights Project back in the 1970s, is currently an attorney in Los Angeles, specializing in entertainment and anti-discrimination law.

On, Wisconsin! The Sex Prosecution of the Month

Despite everything I had to do today, I could not help but read this article in today's New York Times. As a historian who is working on late twentieth century federal campaigns against pornography in the United States, I read anything with the phrase "Sex Predator" in the headline. When that headline also includes the word "Wisconsin," as in "Sex Predator Accusations Shake a Wisconsin Town" -- well, hold onto your hat, Harry.

Anthony R. Stancl, a good student who particularly loved political science, was expelled from Eisenhower High School last fall when he emailed a bomb threat to the school. Oh yeah. Can we spell "federal domestic terrorism laws?" Left with time on, and perhaps something else in, his hands, Anthony set up a Facebook page, using a female pseudonym and a fake profile (also actionable, as a recent verdict in a cyberbullying case establishes.) As a "woman," Anthony then solicited nude pictures and videos from male classmates: 39 folders full of these images were found on his computer, although there are only 31 counts against Anthony and 31 boys from Eisenhower currently being "counseled."

"But," as the Times write, "the authorities said Mr. Stancl did not stop there. In addition, they said, he threatened to release the photos to the victims’ friends or even all of Eisenhower’s 850 students if the youths who had sent them to him did not agree to perform sexual acts he demanded. The tactic was successful, officials said. Mr. Stancl is accused of using it to sexually assault seven boys."

Not surprisingly perhaps, as it is Wisconsin, folks at Eisenhower High, "opened in 1969 and known for its championship sports teams and above-average test scores" (not, I guess, for raging homosexuality) don't have much to say. What is quite peculiar is that none of this would have come out if Anthony were not a guy soliciting guys: in other words (and read the article for yourself, folks) teenage girls and boys emailing nude pictures of themselves to each other, as well as videos where they expose themselves, seems to be Standard Operating Procedure in boy-loves-girl land.

Not that this is a surprise.

I understand the focus on criminalizing Anthony: he has a very peculiar sense of humor. And he's not what you would call a nice boy, although I would argue that enough faggy men in United States history have suffered from the humiliations imposed by "normal," supposedly nice, boys that there is a kind of cosmic justice here. I would also say part of what I find peculiar about Anthony being charged as a sex predator is that the seven boys who are admitting to having had sex with Anthony had another choice. They could have gone to Mom and Dad and admitted what a humongously stupid thing they had done by mailing beefcake to a total stranger in the first place. But they didn't. They thought it was a better idea to have sex with Anthony instead. This means that these boys are either dumber than anyone wants to admit, or that they actually wanted to have sex with Anthony when given the opportunity. Anthony is not, after all, being charged with assault, kidnapping, false imprisonment, or felony rape.

Which leads me to my main point: it is a big, nasty, open secret in American high schools that there are more gay boys in any given student population than will reveal themselves until they are much older; and that there are lots of straight boys who think it's hot to have sex with gay boys.

And in looking for illustrations for this page, I discovered just how many boys and young men upload naked and semi-nude pictures of themselves to web pages, I guess because they think it is fun. Some pages let you vote on who is the "hottest guy." It seems to be a common practice, even beyond Wisconsin, that our Anthony tapped into: try Googling phrases like "Beefcake," "hot boys," and "hot men" and see what you get. My favorite was a calendar featuring Mormon boys back from their two years of evangelizing. There is a picture of each one in his normal black tie, white shirt and nameplate getup, accompanied by a bunch of photos of them bare chested! Yay! The calendar is called: "Men on a Mission." Buy it here. Isn't that hilarious? Well, the Elders don't think so: apparently the creator of the calendar, Chad Hardy, was excommunicated by the LDS church.

But back to Wisconsin. Unfortunately for Anthony, he is eighteen, and I suspect that several of the seven boys who had sex with Anthony are not. This means that Anthony is also not as smart as he thinks he is, and will be charged under a set of enhanced statutory rape, internet and child pornography laws that make this bit of trouble at least as serious as the bomb threat to the school (how did he beat the federal terrorism rap? Enquiring minds want to know.) Fortunately Anthony has an attorney who, presumably, is pleading down these charges in exchange for not publicly exposing (heh, heh) the defensive backfield and/or the senior class president and/or half the student council of Eisenhower High as a bunch of raving queens. But Anthony's lawyer will have to agree to something in order for the many law enforcement agencies now in pursuit to forget about this. My recommendation is that all charges be dropped in return for the following:

a) Anthony stops telling people he is from Wisconsin;
b Anthony goes into therapy;
c) Anthony leaves town immediately;
d) Anthony gets an agent and attends to his true calling, writing memoirs for Oprah's book club.

My Friends, Could We Vote Tomorrow? Or, Why The Radical Burned the Applesauce

One of the consequences of last night's presidential debate was that I overcooked the applesauce. You would think maybe I should follow the advice of both candidates and act responsibly with the apples, an untapped national resource which arrive in large bags every week from the farm share I belong to. Am I supposed to save them in the basement like a squirrel so that I can eat locally all winter? Turn them into ethanol? Or sell them on a street corner in downtown New York as a dramatic re-enactment of the Great Depression?

Oops -- I forgot. We don't need to re-enact the Great Depression! We are in the Great Depression! This must be something that McCain and Obama agreed not to discuss last night, leaving the rest of us wondering if they even read the newspapers anymore. It's not just "the economy, stupid" anymore, it's "what economy, stupid?" And yet, you could have listened to the whole debate last night and not known that a major consequence of the global meltdown is that Iceland -- a crucial NATO ally in the mid-Atlantic -- is being gobbled by the Russians, who Sarah Palin has seen from her house -- or was it flying over her house? Well, they may be flying over my house too soon, and maybe I'll run for Vice President next time 'round.

Instead of reading job applications, I used the time between The Lehrer NewsHour and the presidential debate to peel a pile of hardy New England fruits and turn them to apple sauce, so that I could transfer them from the kitchen counter to the freezer in compact little plastic boxes. They were supposed to cook, not overcook, during the debate. The overcooking had two consequences: one is that the whole pot caramelized, which will mean the outcome is either really good or really awful. Whenever the Mother of the Radical (MOTHeR) made such a mistake, she would look at her daughters brightly and say, "Well, we'll just eat it with ice cream!" I thought this was a normal, viable choice to make about failed food -- I now think it was a consequence of having grown up in the 1930's, when calories mattered, Goddamnit!

The other consequence of the overcooking is a nasty, deep-brown burned crust at the bottom of the pot. Will it come off eventually? It's too early to tell. But as they used to say in the first New Deal, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without!"

Why am I attributing this cooking blunder to the debate? My friends (a phrase John McCain repeated over and over and over): last night's debate was one of the most wooden and boring performance I have ever seen two candidates put on. Although I did not fall asleep, I fell into a kind of trance. I saw this mirrored in the faces of the audience, a group of Sixpack Joes and Josephines all gussied up in the clothes they still have left after the mortgage meltdown, people who looked like a bunch of captives who wanted to be anywhere but in the national spotlight. My boredom was only interrupted by moments in which I was briefly appalled: McCain referring to Obama as "that one" (did he forget Obama's name?); Obama "getting tough" and announcing that he would be happy to invade Pakistan (which the United States is already doing, but it made me think that Obama actually should talk to Bill Ayers, since it was a similar all-out bombing of Cambodia that caused Weatherman to split from the peace movement and go into violent opposition to the war.)

And it went on, and on, and on. Obama showed none of the spark, intelligence, zest, and humor that has catapulted him from the Illinois legislature to a national candidacy in five years; John McCain tottered around the stage like a mechanical doll with a key in his back. Watching Obama reminded me of old New Jersey Devils' playoff games, in which they would play defense relentlessly for three periods (analysis: Obama is ahead, and the plan was to not blow it.) Watching McCain made me think, no wonder they thought Sarah Palin was a viable candidate -- the guy is incoherent, can't finish a sentence, and can't answer a question with anything but catch phrases: "earmarks," "cronies," "higher taxes," "experience." At one point he mentioned -- for reasons that were never explained -- that Obama had purchased an overhead projector. I mean, come on. I once purchased an overhead projector, and I consider myself fiscally responsible. Who in America gives a crap about a bunch of unspecified earmarks when we are spending ten billion dollars a month in Iraq? (Analysis: McCain was told to get aggressive and stick to a few talking points that are supposed to mobilize the sans culottes wing of the Republican Party to get out there with their pikes and pitchforks on election day. "No new taxes! Harrr! Overhead projector! Harrr!")

Like the apples, both of these candidates have caramelized. Political consultants have ruined politics if we can be in a global economic meltdown, fewer than thirty days from choosing the new leader of the Free World, and the major parties can't do better than this. But most important, from my point of view, neither candidate wanted to answer a question, and they didn't, so absolutely nothing new came out of the debate. Any undecided voter who has been living on a desert island for the last two years may have gotten some good information; the rest of us, I think, have a right to be offended.

For a more charitable account of the debate in the Paper of Record, go here; for Maureen Dowd on Zoloft (thank goddess!) go here; and for the analysis of my Zenith colleague and fellow blogger, political scientist Elvin Lim, click here.

A Meditation on Change: the Radical Wears Her Administrator's Hat

Recently I have been involved in one of those academic negotiations that involves calling on powers of persuasive argument normally reserved for one's scholarship (sprucing up old ideas with new evidence, adding a dash of original thought culled from new reading) in an attempt to make a case for intellectual and institutional change. It is a case that I have made before, many times, sometimes to great applause from allies of various kinds. It is a case that others have made before me, and along side of me. But it is a case that, although partial results have been won over time, has never succeeded as it should. It is a change that makes sense, but it fails -- over and over -- to be approved. And what I want, although it seems to have puzzled some people at Zenith over close to two decades, doesn't puzzle me -- and in fact is not an unconventional feature of institutional life elsewhere. In other words, Other People Do It. Smart People. Prestigious People. Why Not Us?

As I am now fifty, and have approximately thirty years left to live (thirty-five if I am lucky and careful) a maximum of fifteen of which will be spent at Zenith, I am at the stage of life when it seems reasonable to question any expenditure of energy that seems not to be getting results. Or at least, if I am going to dedicate myself to something difficult, maybe it should be finishing final revisions on the book that got trashed during the Unfortunate Events: better yet, world peace, racial equality, universal health care, the global refugee issue, affordable higher education, world hunger, an end to illiteracy in my community, or a full-frontal attack on the standardized testing industry. All of these issues could use another set of hands, a quick wit and a big mouth.

And yet I continue to work on This Thing (not, of course to the exclusion of other things, as I write, teach my courses, and occasionally contribute my energies to stumping for a political candidate), in part because This Thing is so close to being successful. And yet it is not successful.

As the steamroller of administrative labor caught up with me this week, the scholarly work I am supposed to be doing in what is a remarkably short summer got sand kicked in its face by the institutional version of the Bully on the Beach. The Bully is not a person, but an unwelcome problem -- the kind of task they pay me to do as chair, that has to be done whether I like it or not and that can crop up unexpectedly. And part of how I got dragged into this set of negotiations is not just because it is work that Must Be Done, but because it involves changing This Thing -- my own personal Sisyphean task. As I considered buying myself a Charles Atlas course of some kind so that in the future my ninety-seven pound weakling of a writing self won't be chased away from my bathing beauty scholarship by a big, strapping administrative task, my mind wandered to how difficult it is to change the system.


To say that I wish to change the whole system by doing This Thing would be going too far. I don't have that fantasy. After all, I know the system well, I work it fairly effectively, it benefits me to some degree, and barring revolution, it is the system we have. But as I said, the rub is this: although the change being proposed has been presented in many long documents it is considered in many places not to be terribly radical. As a matter of fact, I know it isn't even radical at Zenith, because the mode of response has shifted from resistance to avoidance. In other words, it has been acknowledged that this change is something to which no one is opposed, intellectually or practically. And yet, Change fails to occur. Why?

Now partly I am being discreet about the issue under discussion because negotiations of various kinds require discretion, and also because History Shows that people dislike being written about without permission. Temporarily, at least, I would prefer to retain my status as well-liked. But partly I am being deliberately abstract, because if I told you what the issue was you, Dear Reader, would do what all academics do, which is offer solutions for that particular problem, your sympathy, or similar tales of woe (I actually have a friend who, every time s/he writes a request that addresses a similarly long-awaited change tells me "Yeah, I sent in the tale of woe again.") But I'm also after something grander here. Why is Change so difficult to achieve in the academy?

Oh go ahead, blame tenure. But I think we need to think more creatively than that.

One place I would start is a colleague of mine, now retired, who was a Very Famous Scholar. He was also a conservative in the grand old meaning of the term before it got highjacked by David Horowitz and Pat Buchanan. A Goldwater conservative crossed with a Buckley conservative, if you will. I would be in meetings with Dr. V.F. Scholar, and someone would propose some kind of change -- say, in the sequencing of courses, or in how one might simplify the form that admitted a student to honors work. And he would smile gamely, as if on the brink of tears, and say, "I don't think that is a good idea at all. You might be right -- it could be better to do it that way. But it might be worse." And with that, we would usually abandon whatever petty reform we had embarked on and leave things as they were.

As time moves on, however, I find that my former colleague was unique only in the sense that he was honest and open about his belief that change -- in and of itself -- was not necessarily a cause for optimistic anticipation. Instead, it was -- well, ominous. Because if things begin to change, where would it all stop? Would untenured scholars begin to say what they really thought, and write what they really wanted to write? Would it become possible to have an idea that was worth pursuing, publishing, building a program around, without it being vetted by eight anonymous referees, six university committees, a self-study, an outside review, sending it to a seventh committee and requiring a vote of the full faculty? Might students insist, as they did during that Terrible Time we call the 'sixties (even though a lot of it happened in the 'seventies) that they wanted some authority over what and how they learned?

Yes, these things might happen. Alhough probably not, particularly now that students have been so completely cowed by the college admissions process that they too regard change as something unobtainable and punishable by exclusion from the Elect; and untenured scholars are so bullied by the job hunt and tenure process that they would write on the sidewalk if we assured them it was the only way to acquire health insurance and secure their livelihood as intellectuals. More and more, I think my former colleague hit the nail right on the head. When you make a change it might be better. Or it might be worse. And there is no way to know.

Except to try.

Department of Odd Coincidences

So after yesterday's post condemning tenure (again) I get back to work on the talk I am supposed to give on pornography (again) and I drift off onto the internet (again), clicking around to the sites listed on my sitemeter from whence people arrived at Tenured Radical. Eventually, I come up with a story from the Chronicle of Higher Education about:

Pornography and Tenure.

Go ahead. Make my day!

To make a long story short, a married couple out at New Mexico State University was just denied tenure, and they are charging racial bias. What they also reveal, however, was that shortly before they were denied tenure, John -- the husband part of the married couple -- received an e-mail from an associate dean that contained a "graphic sexual image." He complained to the dean; and shortly afterwards, the chair of the couple's department decided that neither member of the couple should receive tenure (in what world does the chair make this decision all by himself?). The implication -- as both the dean and the chair have stepped aside pending an investigation -- is that the two men were in cahoots in the porn e-mail cover-up, and clumsily trying to get rid of the only other people who knew about it. Well almost the only people -- apparently someone else in the department is a witness to the harassing e-porn too. S/he will probably have to be killed, since denying people tenure clearly does not shut them up in New Mexico.

Confusing, isn't it? Almost as confusing as the most recent governor of New York, David A. Paterson, letting us know, minutes after the swearing in, that he and his wife have been having affairs (in an ungentlemanly moment, towards the end of the story, Paterson suggests that Michelle, his wife started it.) And in case you were concerned about it, he did not use campaign funds to rent hotel rooms, only the campaign credit card. And the affairs ended a year or so ago, and everything is alright now in their marriage, thank you very much.

But back to the couple who didn't get tenure in New Mexico. I have to say, I think it was clever of the dean to send the pornography to the husband, not the wife, because it means he can't be charged with sexual harassment. Unless it's gay porn, in which case the dean is way out of luck and should consider being nominated for lieutenant governor of New York, because his academic administrative career is over. And in case you think, because of my last post, that I have lost my sense of humor about tenure (I never lose my sense of humor about pornography), read the comments at the end of the CHE story. Comments, written by ordinary people like you and me who are supposed to be working on a talk or something, are often the best part of odd stories published on line. This is the one that cracked me up: a guy who calls himself Art Vandelay (perhaps because that is his name) writes,

"isn’t that the way it always goes in academe? you open your email and …there it is…porn from your dean. you know what that means: no tenure. that tragic scenario is, unfortunately, repeated hundreds of times each day."

Being "Diverse" in the Middle Ground: Thoughts on Racisms, Sexisms and the Many Phobias

Gayprof, who is a continual inspiration to my desire to write and think better, recently put up this post on being a "minority" in a humanities department. In "Enough Minorities? Minority Enough? (Part I)" he responds to Oso Raro's thoughts in his this recent post at Slaves of Academe (which, if you have never visited it, is also one of the most beautifully written blogs I know.) In addition, Gayprof is following on a previous post of his own about so-called diversity hiring, and presumably since "Enough Minorities? Minority Enough?" is labeled "Part I" there will be at least one more follow up. I'm looking forward to it. And for those who want to read a really great piece on similar questions, turn to my colleague Indira Karamcheti's classic article,"Caliban in the Classroom." Originally published in Radical Teacher, it is anthologized in Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation, Ed. Jane Gallop (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.)

Indeed, this was a good week for White Lesbian Semi-Tranny Me to read these provocative posts about the perils of embodying one's "culture" for others. Each post articulates the burdens of those who constitute the "difference" offered (marketed?) by a twenty-first century university as dilemmas that need to be at the center of the discussion. But also, to cut to the chase, I was, this week, for the umpteenth time in my career, accused of being a racist. Mostly deployed as an implicit rather than an explicit attack, it always raises questions for me about how those of us who embody "otherness" can also become entangled and implicated in the system that creates "others." I raise this because, while I don't think I never screw up, the real racists who walk my little part of the planet virtually never get told so to their faces, although they have plenty to say to me about my apparent inability to see the world with their scientifically objective eyes.

Familiar as being called a racist is (for reasons that will become clear below), it always leaves me speeechless, which is probably a good thing, because being caught in a shouting match with someone who is makig accusations of any kind is not something you come out of with your hands clean. It does not hurt as much as it used to -- or as much as it is intended to. And before I proceed, I would like to add that I am not claiming victim status from these difficult moments. Although it does not cancel out real errors I have made or have been perceived to have made, I have also been privileged with colleagues, students, friends and relatives of color who have gone out of their way to recognize my record as a comrade, and this matters too.

In my seventeen years of teaching, I have not only been accused of racism, explicitly and implicitly, I have been called names that identify me with historic figures in the history of white oppression. And racism isn't the half of it. In other heated encounters, I have also been accused of being a homophobe, a transphobe and anti-male (another version of this is "anti-whitemale.") I have been called what we might call a "heterophobe": in other words, students writing in anonymous teaching evaluations that I like queer students best; that I don't like them because they are straight (who knew? you looked so gay!); or, in a nasty dig at the fact that I am an out lesbian, some version of "although I did not feel listened to, Professor Radical loves the ladies in the room."

That's me, cruising my own office hours for innocent young things to use and throw away like Kleenex.

Two white students once accused me of sexually harassing a woman in our class by winking at her (the student took it as it was meant, as recognition of her achievement of having talked in class for the first time ever, but the Homo-Sexism Patrol had not been informed in advance.) A student once accused me of racism for bringing a plagiarism case in relation to a paper that was, in fact, copied from several books that s/he had helpfully returned to the library. Several male students have said up front prior to beginning classes with me that they don't expect to do well in a class where "white males aren't welcome." This is presumably because the class is taught by me, who does a good imitation of a white male but isn't one -- although many white males I have taught have not only succeeded in my class, but gone on to get Ph.D.'s, prestigious law degrees, and whatnot. A parent once accused me of racism because hir child was failing a tutorial, having not turned in any work all year, because, as s/he pointed out, I would "not have allowed that to happen to a white student." When I replied that a student not turning in work is not something you "allow," and that I had repeatedly asked the student to drop the honors project because s/he so clearly did not want to do it, the parent lectured me that no white student "would have ever been asked to drop an honors project."

Just to complicate things for you, like Gayprof, I get a lot of crap from faculty too, which I won't go into at length because students come and students go, but tenure is 4-Evah and there are any number of colleagues who could and would read themselves into stories that aren't even about them. OK, since you beg, just one. There was the individual, years back, who told me that there was concern about me having been appointed as chair of a search committee because I was widely perceived as being "prejudiced against white people." In the course of this conversation a racial epithet was used which I think was intended to give me an opportunity to disidentify with faculty of color and demonstrate that I was really on the (white) team. Instead I went home and cried and didn't tell anyone about it for several years. Here's a lesson for you: you tell people shit like this and they mostly don't believe you. But that is just a taste of what I have had to put up with over time because of my work on behalf of the scholarly projects on race that I have worked on at Zenith. How many searches have you participated in where all the finalists were white? Nearly all of them, did you say?

Now, this narrative compresses a very few incidents (but certainly not all) in a university life that has lasted almost twenty years: the two previous paragraphs read as though I am continually under attack, and that is not the case. Most of my life is lived as other people live their lives, and things get difficult when I have to deal with structures of power to which, regardless of my whiteness and class background, I will always be an outsider because of my politics. And I don't think the burden I labor under comes anywhere near that of my colleagues of color, who are too few, too beleaguered, and the object of too much projection and expectation from all sides. But I would like to say that I think I do catch more flak than most white people, and I do not actually think these things would happen if I were not so fully engaged with race, gender and sexuality in my teaching, scholarship and institutional work.

Here is where I am often left. I have my allies, it is true, and they are good ones, and we accomplish good things together despite having to do so on the margins of what constitutes power and influence in a university. But it is rare, as a white person, that one is fully trusted by a critical mass of faculty of color among one's own colleagues. That is simply a fact, although there are transient moments that give you an idea of what it would be like to have access to a more permanent sense of inclusion. Simultaneously, if, despite this problem, (which is a structural one, not a question of so-called "reverse discrimination" as the conservative critics would have it) should you manage to maintain fragile, but successful friendships and alliances over time with faculty of color, and should you invest seriously in race as an epistemelogical field, there is a surprisingly large group of white colleagues who make it clear, in word and deed, that you are not worthy of their trust.

Being labeled more or less a race traitor is simultaneously painful and liberating. It is painful because being misunderstood sucks, and because all of us who are women, queer, of color have -- consciously or not -- spent our entire careers trying to overcome the social barriers to our success by doing anything we can to be perceived as the intellectual equal of anyone in the room. This often means, by the way, being more or less a habitual overachiever, knowing all the conventional knowledge as well as your own undervalued field, which queer people, women and scholars of color who work on so-called "minority issues" have to do to get into the room in the first place. But it is also simply the case that you will not be acknowledged as an intellectual equal unless you conform, more or less, to dominant prejudices about what constitutes knowledge; or if you don't or can't conform, you must implicitly agree to leave those prejudices undisturbed and consign yourself to a status of permanently marginal critique.

Which is why becoming a race traitor, as opposed to being called a racist, can be liberating: it opens the door to saying and doing radical things. And at least if you are taking shit for it, you are taking it from the right people. But frankly, I think we are at a place in the history of the university life -- a place where, for example at Zenith, instead of affirmative action, we have a document that gives us helpful hints on how to "Avoid Discrimination" -- that this needs to be addressed far more openly by those of us who were there yesterday, and will be there tomorrow, to do the radical work of what has come to be called diversity.

Things You Don't Know About the Radical

I am from Philadelphia.

I received my first official Phillies hat for my sixth birthday.

I went to my first game, at Connie Mack Stadium, that summer. My mom taught me to keep a box score and yell "Pitcher's blowed!" at the opposing hurler. I watched every game on TV that I could, keeping the box score for the whole season. The games that weren't on TV, I listened to on the radio. That was 1964. Do I need to explain the significance of this date? There are people in Philadelphia who are more permanently damaged by 1964 than by their own birth trauma.

I once watched Dick Allen foul off twenty pitches in a row, deliberately and with precision, as Philadelphia fans booed him lustily. This was a little-known event in the struggle for African-American civil rights, but an event all the same.

I listened to Jim Bunning's no-hitter on Mother's Day.

There was a time in my life I thought Astro-Turf was the most beautiful thing in the world.

In 1980, when the Phillies won the World Series, I started to weep as Tug McGraw faced the final batter, and I didn't stop crying for an hour.

During one of my father's hospitalizations that led eventually to his death, my mother and I would occasionally leave in the evening, and go down to Veterans Stadium spontaneously, to have hot dogs and beer for dinner and watch the game. We didn't talk much: we just watched the game.

I now live in this god-awful part of the country where the only question people ask me is "Yankees or Red Sox?" And in fact, if I lived anywhere north of here, all the way to the Canadian border, or anywhere south of here, all the way to Staten island, they wouldn't even ask. The team to the North is just as hopeless as the Phillies; the team to the South is evil. As they say in South Philly, "Whaddayagonnado?"

I vowed not to follow the Phillies closely this year, as they grimly hung in within 8 or 10 games, losing franchise players to injury and having the same slightly-better-than-average pitching rotation they always have. This year they didn't even have a Jim Bunning, a Steve Carleton, a Curt Schilling -- brilliant guys who would gut out 1-0 victories, sometimes notching RBI's to make it happen, in years their teammates couldn't hit their shoe size.

And yet. A month ago, after a small losing streak, I couldn't help but notice that my Phillies were starting to pull themselves together, as they always do in August, lighting that beacon of hope that raises blood pressure from Wilmington to Trenton, from Allentown to Princeton, causing all of us to say casually, "Oh yeah, I think I'll watch the first couple of innings tonight."

Incredibly, the Mets have gone into a Phillies-like season end collapse. This morning I found myself in the car, on my way to rowing practice at 5:15, pumping my fist wildly and screaming "YEAH!" Why?



Because I heard on the radio that the Phillies tied the Mets for first last night.

I have two responses.

Dear God, no not again. And:

If I believe in them with all my heart, somehow they might just do it. There is no choice not to commit. One more time.