Wesleyan Jazz Band Visits Macdonough!

Today, students at Macdonough enjoyed the beauitful music from the Wesleyan Jazz Band! We even got to dance to a song from the 1940's and learned the names of each instrument they played.

 

Thanks for coming in!

 

 

Jonah Center River Paddle

Students and staff from Macdonough School have been invited to accompany volunteers from the Jonah Center on a River Paddle taking place on Saturday, June 22nd from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

The paddle will launch from Middletown's Harbor Park

Dress Down Days at Macdonough

Did you ever wonder why every few weeks the teachers at Macdonough School are dressed a bit more casually than normal? The reason is a staff initiative to raise money for local causes. Staff members donate money for each of the "dress down days" and the donations are allocated throughout the year to help Middletown area organizations.

Organizations supported by the Macdonough teachers include Oddfellows Playhouse, the North End Action Team, Amazing Grace Food Pantry, Relay for Life, and the Ruth Lawrence Fund.

Mobile Dental Program visits Macdonough School

 The back room in the library has been transformed into a dental clinic this week as Macdonough School is visited by the Community Health Center's Mobile Dental Clinic. Many of our students will have the opportunity to see the dental hygienist for check-ups and cleanings!

The Mobile Dental Clinic visits Macdonough School twice each year - once in the fall and again in the spring.

If you would like your child to have access to this program, please call the school and ask for information on the Community Health Center at Macdonough School

Sunday (Am I Really) Radical Roundup: The Resurrection And The Life Edition

Continuing Concerns About My Politics Department: Click here for more concerns about whether I am really radical or not, discovered when I was Googling the Marc Bousquet reference cited in the previous post. It bears repeating occasionally that the Tenured Radical thing is meant to be understood in an ironic, oxymoronic, culture-warsy kind of context. But why waste an opportunity to talk about myself at length? Particularly on the Day that Our Lord rose from the dead, proved that there is hope for all of us, and encouraged the creation of the first, rudimentary group blog (currently also available as an iPhone App)?



It is my view that being a radical academic is a tricky, and perhaps impossible, proposition. Academics are inevitably hewing to one kind of convention or another, even when we are in resistance to -- well, whatever. Hence, one is always stumbling over one's own hypocrisies as a "radical academic." Case in point: it is well-known that I abhor the effects of tenure, its filthy rules, and its tendency to make young intellectuals not more daring, but more conventional and in-groupy. I would like to see tenure abolished. Conversely, I participate in tenure cases, perform the due-est diligence I can, and have been known to run them. It is how we academics construct our workplace, I like to see people get a fair shake when I can, and it seems perverse (not in a nice way) to throw people I like to the dogs because of my own silly rules.

Not so radical is it? So many compromises, so little time.

A more serious example of the difficulties inherent to academic radicalism is attached to what we produce: written words, in combinations intended to be legible to others. Academics are all engaging in literary arts of various kinds. If you don't adhere to some kind of recognizable genre, no one understand what the frack you are talking about or who you are talking to, and you have no audience. Occasionally someone does something startlingly new that shifts genre and/or convention, but it is rarer than you might think.

Here I would cite as my example of the forms of "virtuous convention" that counteract radical intent the queer intellectuals at Bully Bloggers (where you can read an excellent post by Columbia Law Prof Katherine Franke raising questions about the efforts by pro-gay marriage funders to force funding disclosures on the opposition.) I make an example of them because these folks (with whom I am acquainted) are as radically queer as they come: smart, successful, fun and everything good. Furthermore, several have contributed an idea or two that is so startling new that it has leaked out of queer studies to alter other fields entirely.

This is what radical knowledge is supposed to do. That said, queer studies has developed its own conventions over time: it adheres to unwritten rules of style, language, subject matter and argument, even as it often improves on these conventions. It is, as we say, now a field.

You might argue that what then allows queer studies to still claim radical ground is its refusal of normative cultural and political paradigms, and you would be right. But to come back to convention: is refusal, in and of itself, not itself a convention? Is refusal enough to persuade us that the phrase "radical scholarship" is not an oxymoron when queer studies is simultaneously creating disciplinary paradigms of its own inside the academy? Refusal, as Dick Hebdige put it so well, always "ends in the construction of a style, in a gesture of defiance or contempt, in a smile or a sneer." These "signals [of] Refusal" are "worth making...even if, in the final analysis, they are...just the darker side of sets of regulations, just so much graffitti on a prison wall.(Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979; p. 3).

More About Me Department: The title is not mine, and I didn't do the drawing, but you can read an op-ed by yours truly on intimate partner violence in today's Hartford Courant. You can see me in person as a panelist, April 27, at a Key Issues Forum to be held at Zenith University, "The Person You Think You Know; Signs and Solutions of Campus Violence." I am there to provide historical context, as you may have suspected.

Historiann Would Have Rocked Sterling Cooper: I don't know whether it is more fun to watch Mad Men or to read Historiann's critique of Mad Men. We are not going to tell her that there are some big unexpected changes in the last disc -- but it doesn't change her right-on analysis of the lumbering plot and almost antiquarian take on gender, sexuality and race in the 1960s.

I confess, part of the pleasure I get from the show is utterly pornographic. I thrill to Salvatore Romano's closet, as I recall dashing in and out of my own in the 1970s; I want to be Roger Sterling -- and now empathize strongly with his error in judgement in ditching his wife for a much younger, more expensive ball and chain; and I stood up and cheered when Betty Draper, in the last episode, when she -- oops! Almost told.

Have fun Historiann, and for crying out loud, get a better cable package so we can do this in real time this summer!

Discriminating Tastes: What People Who Are Not Normal Might Know That You Don't Know

One of the things that prompting my last post about the restructuring of institutional benefits during a period of budget cutting was not, as some people assumed, that I think cutting faculty compensation is a viable way to save higher education. I don't. Rather, my concern was that the failure to address compensation inequities already in place means that in a period where we might potentially rethink and repair such inequities, many people, in the name of radical opposition to The Man, can only draw the wagons closer around what already exists. More progressive change, they argue, is unrealistic in a crisis, and must be put off to a distant future, when utopia will be possible. This is the pattern of debates over national health care, and it is a belief currently prevalent at private institutions that have done for the select few what the state refuses to do for everyone (hence supporting the following equation: salaried labor = health care = virtue.) Worse, in my view, is that periods of "reform" enshrine prejudices that, in turn, become the standard for what is "normal." This, as I discuss in that post, is one of the lessons of the New Deal.

That the current crisis might be related to structural inequities, and the skewed ethics that support such inequities, is hard for people to focus on (unless they are thinking about Wall Street) because they know best the world they already live in and take for granted. So imagine my delight when I discovered Richard Thompson Ford's excellent piece in Slate las Wednesday, A Primer on Racism: The Many Uses Of The Word And How Legit They Are. It is a must-read for anyone who enters the thorny waters of trying to talk openly about the question of bias, a conversation few people wish to have. (This is the vast majority of people, in my experience, progressive and conservative.) Ford usefully points out that the form of racism where someone will simply state, categorically, that white people are smarter, better, cleaner, more capable, or more law-abiding than people of color is rarely apparent nowadays, even though that is the stereotype invoked when the term "racist" is used. Being stereotyped, and stigmatized, is why people so resent and fear being labeled as racist, sexist or homophobic, and why, in turn they don't like to risk discussing discrimination at all.

So what, according to Ford, are we not talking about when we are not talking about racism? Most dominant, he argues, is institutional racism "when often the racial inequity is unintended" but the injustice is contained in "practices that contain built-in headwinds for minority candidates." Or we might be talking about environmental racism, in which the "headwinds" are toxic living conditions that are descended from segregationist practices and are perpetuated by the lack of political power that poor and working class people have. Ford also notes the importance of cultural bias and misunderstanding that is largely class-based and can function as an intra-group dynamic. He debunks the notion, loudly touted on the right, that “reverse racism" -- prejudice against white people - is an equally serious problem. Rather, he argues, bias against white people, as a group, is the property of the isolated cultural nationalist, and has only become imagined as a pervasive issue because of the political machinations of right-wingers seeking to mobilize white voters through fear.

While I would argue with or elaborate on some of these points, I thought this essay deserved attention for its clarity and thoughtfulness. It also caused me to think about encounters I have had in which people that I do and do not know well have felt the need to assert (for no apparent reason) that they are without prejudice and regard everyone as similar. However, the fact that I see race, gender and sexuality as live dynamics in our contemporary world demonstrates that I, myself, am bigoted or that any mention of these dynamics contains an implicit accusation of bigotry.

One underlying difficulty, from my point of view, is that people rarely speak honestly about the differences among us, actual and perceived. They like to discuss even less the power relations structured by differences, so they become hysterical very quickly, often lobbing defenses prematurely when no accusation of any kind has been made. For example, very few of the people I know are "homophobic" in the strictest sense of the term, even though they fear that I think they are. They do not fear what I am, they don't think that I am a sicko, they aren't worried about leaving the kiddies or wife alone with me, and many are actively educating their children to understand that queer people populate their world and need to be valued. I very rarely accuse someone of being homophobic, in part because people find it deeply shaming and it is a real conversation stopper, but mostly because what is going on is usually a great deal more complex in the way Ford points out.

And yet, when I come to a real difference of opinion with a person, s/he often finds it necessary to assert not only that s/he is not homophobic, but that s/he believes that I am just the "same" as s/he is.

This is where things start to break down. To my mind, one pernicious legacy of the social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s is the notion that the opposite of invidious hierarchy is the equality of similarity. Corollaries to this are the assumption of those in the dominant group that:

a) People in subordinate groups want to be similar to “normal” people in the dominant group;
b) That having technical access to certain privileges means that those privileges (and the institutions that grant those privileges) are consonant with broader notions of social, economic and cultural justice;
c) That equality exists when "we" all accept the notion, theoretically, that we are all the same and want the same things;
d) That a continuing suspicion of the dominant group by historically subordinate groups is unreasoning and without foundation.

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor's much-discussed pronouncement about the insights of "a wise Latina woman" coming from the "richness of her experiences" were not misguided. A racial perspective does matter, not because it is information other people don;t have, but because it is a way of knowing the world that other people can acquire if they try. Instead of being derided and suppressed, Sotomayor’s insight needed to be amplified to take into account a peculiar modern condition where inequalities in the law have been, in many cases, overturned and exposed, but the society and belief systems that these old laws created has not.

Hence, people fear being called racist or homophobic both because it stigmatizes and mischaracterizes them as someone who is actively bigoted (as opposed to still learning), and because it makes them feel misunderstood: they sincerely believe in justice and equality. But what they often fail to understand is how the institutions they hold dear are, in their own minds, synonymous with what also constitutes a natural and normal world. And this causes them to miss what some of us believe are structural inequalities.

Take marriage. One of the things that worries me about gay marriage is not that a lot of gay people long to be more similar to, or even appear to be exactly the same as, straight people. That has always been true in one way or another. It's that gay marriage reinforces the falsehood that everyone has access to the same privileges if they are willing to make the "same" commitments. That marriage delivers only a simulacrum of similarity, even to straight people, and that there is no logical reason to make it a gateway to privilege, is a conversation that gay marriage has made it more difficult to have. Consequently, that marriage represents the pinnacle of ethical commitment to another person is an assumption by which the unmarried are stigmatized.

One might also point to loving commitments between children and adults, in which legal custody of a child is firmly viewed by most Americans as the greatest ethical commitment possible. Commitments outside that legal and/or biological relation, however deeply felt, are viewed as a degraded version of this bond. Again, let us look to gay and lesbian people who now parent. In this case, technical inclusion of non-traditional parents has allowed the institution itself to remain a socially, legally and economically privileged site. It used to be that gay people were all perceived as potential child molesters (that was homophobia); now we seem to all be, in the eyes of our friends, potential parents. This is not homophobia, but it's not progressive either: it means that queer people who do not own children are now subject to similar stigma that child free heterosexuals are, and their relations to children they love are not taken seriously as an ethical commitment.

What is really peculiar is that neither institution -- marriage or parenting -- is as accessible or as stable as straight people seem to think, much as economic mobility for people of color is not as simple as white people think. The great publicity attendant to lesbian parenting, and the great visibility of gay men and lesbians parenting in a few places, has somehow delivered the misimpression that the only reason many older queers didn't have children was that we were barred from doing so. Now that we are not, the reasoning goes, we can freely exercise what is a natural and normal desire for all (wo)men. Now this is a problem, in part because it leaves intact the notion that all normal people like children, and that wanting to parent is the natural way that all human beings will want to establish an intimate bond with a child. But it also occludes two facts of life for queer people who do wish to parent. One is that that there are huge hurdles -- medical, fiscal and legal --that face lesbians and gays when it comes to obtaining children, either by gestation or by adoption. These hurdles are faced by some heterosexual couples, but not by the vast majority of them. Second, many parents still lose custody of and access to their children because they are gay, lesbian and/or transsexual; and legally, a child can only have two parents, so that if all parties to the conception are known to each other, at least one person in the deal must agree to terminate and/or not seek custody. Furthermore, as my attorney recently explained, no adoption agency will knowingly and officially deliver a child into the hands of a queer person, although many agencies, domestic and foreign, operate on a "don’t ask, don't tell" basis, and individual judges will perform these and second party adoptions in jurisdictions that permit them.

The privileging of parenting has another effect that few people are aware of: discrimination in health benefits. In health plans such as mine, operated by Cigna, there are substantial allowances made for the conception and bearing of children. One of these is for fertility treatments, which are time-consuming, painful and expensive, and I am sure entirely worth it for people who wish to have children and have had trouble conceiving on their own. But what is explicitly excluded from our health plan is gender reassignment. Nominally, this is because there is some dispute as to whether wanting to change your gender is a "medical" condition. But I would also ask, if being infertile is the normal condition of your body, and you are otherwise perfectly healthy, what makes that a medical condition?

This kind of dispute is not about money, and it is not about personal prejudice, although such claims are easily made and believed. But the reason that is so is because of how institutions recognize the grounds for legitimate personal happiness, reward what they perceive as good decisions and by doing so, enshrine them as normal. And yet, just as one might argue that no one needs gender reassignment, it could be argued that no one needs a child. Now that we no longer farm the soil to sustain ourselves, saying that one "needs" a child expresses a complex set of desires that are social and emotional. In fact, much as a person born a man might wish to fulfill her felt destiny by becoming a woman, people born as children seek to live out a particular narrative of fulfillment and happiness by transforming themselves into parents.

How much more progressive and rational it might be to frame all of these things as desires that offer happiness and fulfillment, not to mention the possibility that one might be truly loved. For some people, it might be produced by having a child; for others, it might be surgical gender reassignment, the first stages of which are actually less expensive than a round of in vitro treatments. And for others, it might be getting their teeth straightened in middle age, anti-psychotic medication, or having a poorly repaired cleft palate remodeled by a skilled plastic surgeon.

I compare these things not to be absurd, but to provide graphic examples of how institutions structure inequities by judging some desires legitimate, figuring them as "normal," and persuading all of us that if we adhere to these values, and not ask for anything else, we can all be normal and happy. As Ford argues in his piece, old inequities have not disappeared, but we are in an era in which discrimination often presents as the absence of inclusion rather than the active determination to exclude. Hence, racism and homophobia, as concepts, no longer do the work we want them to do, particularly in progressive communities that have gotten the message -- but not quite.

Thursday's Fun Facts To Know And Tell

Whoopsie-Daisy! This was so much fun I thought it was an April Fool's joke, but since I can source it in two places, I don't think so. Here goes.

Ben Smith at Politico reports that a piece of Republican National Committee direct mail designed to look like the Census went out as a fundraiser. Unlike the Census, however, it contained a telephone number that led callers to a phone sex line. "'The number in question was a typographical error by a vendor used on this particular mailer — using 1-800 instead of 202,' said RNC Communications Director Doug Heye," quoted in Smith's piece.

Been there, done that -- except in my case it was a link assigned by Tiny that took my Twitter followers to a German amateur porn site instead of my blog. I still use Tiny, but now I check the url before I tweet. I recommend that the RNC follow this practice (try calling the number, for example, to see who you get) to avoid misunderstandings in the future.

Go to the Daily Kos if you want to listen to what the GOP faithful were exposed to. My deepest sympathies, gentlemen. Now lay off the Health Care Bill before God ratchets things up.

Memories of Audre Lorde: At the Women's Review of Books Blog, Jewelle Gomez has posted memories of her friendship with Audre Lorde. Note to young writers -- take risks. As Gomez recalls, "Despite being shy in 1980, I took a leap and mailed her a copy of my self-published first collection of poems. Why not? She left me a message on my phone machine in her mellifluous Caribbean voice. I listened to it in shock about ten times before I actually heard her words of congratulations—along with editing comments."

Nice. This is the way it should be.

And Last But Not Least, April Fools: At How The University Works, Marc Bousquet pulls your -- and Arne Duncan's -- leg. For an oldie but a goodie, go here to see Bousquet picking on your favorite Radical and Historiann for suggesting that Ph.D.'s who believe they were deliberately led down the path to perdition might want to broaden their outlook and chill on the rage thing. All publicity is good publicity, in my view, except if there is an incorrect 800 number attached.