It is with hopes of answering my own questions on-the-fly that I write. It is from the heavily-patched seat of my pants that I write. It is in the wake of certain suggestive points that I spill certain beans.
To be polite, my concessions are that I am an able middle-class ethnic majority with living parents. That said, I have my moral jitters about the situation.
For instance, my recent introductory Anthropology class has introduced me, among many other things, to the concept of aversive racism. One might ignore the first word, which I too did not know, and say, “Racism? I’m a citizen of the 21st century! My parents were smart enough to teach me that all human beings are equally worthy of empathy and rights and necessities, et cetera.” Having scratched further, however, this English language of ours catches us in its talons. Nevermind the fact that “race” as a concept is an archaic means of gradating people according to pseudoscientific genetic differences, aversive racism drags it out again when defined eerily as “a subconscious tendency, by virtue of humans’ inclination to categorize their environments, to disproportionately value ethnic interactions based upon one’s own ethnic affiliation.” This at least gave me pause. The answer I posited above in quotes to the possibility of racist sentiment used to be a satisfaction to me. Now it’s a liability. It’s like having no say in the fact that you start to smell bad in public. It’s like being told that you talk loudly in your sleep about napkins for an hour every night. The very virtue of my belonging to an American ethnic majority makes me terminologically and associatively inclined to subtly disregard the information and inputs of another ethnicity. How do I get around this? How can I use the Gwich’yaa Gwich’inn eighth of my ethnicity to plead the case of what I assume is my genuinely empathetic nature? Am I allowed to constructively criticize a member of an ethnic minority without moral or social damage? My only answer to these questions is that someday, humans, as one of the most genetically similar species on the planet, will have become so ethnically intertwined that we will be essentially “grey” and freed from stifling ethical questions like these.
These perturbations don’t begin to cover what this might imply about aversiveness to attraction, gender, ability, class, et cetera.
Next, and perhaps less cerebral in importance, is the suspicion/fact that the language mediating this exchange of ideas is in desperate need of a gender/sexuality-referents upgrade. I imagine you have encountered the awkwardness of this situation before: for instance, an ornery old cuss cuts you off in the parking lot. You make an on-the-spot estimation of their gender and knock the spots out of their reputation in the confines of your car. After having waited for them to hurry the hell up, you pull up next to them at an intersection shortly thereafter and realize that the woman you’ve been raging on is, in fact, that unpleasant white guy with the ponytail. This example doesn’t quite cut the butter, however, when considering how to inoffensively reference a hermaphrodite, for instance. As with the awkwardness mentioned in the “Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions” book about bisexuality, a waiter cannot, according to tradition, say,
“This way to your table, individual.”
To come up with alternative terminology for this situation takes sand, it seems.
This begs the question, however, of whether we reference an individual by their sexual firmware, their sociocultural role, or not at all, and what the associated referent terms would be. Certainly, a referencing system based upon sexual firmware has been the culprit of much damage in our world, since it leaves no room for the creative portrayal of all the colors of gender. With the possibility of gender-based referents, we run into the fact that the world’s cultural roles associated with genders often don’t exist, or are so various that to try to memorize them for everyday discourse would involve another separate language. To emphasize the point, consider the fact that the English word “woman” can’t be applied to a culture whose language and gender schemes involve none of things associated with the English word for someone who doesn’t often have a beard. Our language is leaking. Or perhaps it’s taking on water.
And just for fun, here’s a little bit of media from one of my favorite musical groups along the lines of gender equality.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=emFCNJBOBFI
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