Shit we say?

A friend just posted on FB a clip called "Shit Korean Girls Say," which made me laugh b/c I responded to it as more or less good natured fun. So much of it is familiar and recognizable, but more particularly, it is performed by a phenotypically white male with facial hair who pronounces his Korean so convincingly well!

Yet, I also had an uncomfortable moment wondering about what the point of the "fun" might be. B/c apparently, this is just one of the many iterations of the YouTube phenom that is "Shit Girls Say." I did not click on the other versions that popped up. I am afraid of what happens when you arm groups of young men with video production capabilities and then they produce something that they call "parody" concerning women.

However, what alerted me to the phenom in the first place was a video called "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls". I have been thinking about this video, which illustrates what we can think about as the everyday-racism-not-recognized-as-racism - in other words, privilege.

Privilege is what allows white girls to say shit like that depicted in the video without themselves intending or meaning harm to black girls with whom they actually might be trying to make a connection. Case in point: The comment about being dark enough to be black ("Twinsies!")

More particularly, I have been thinking about the comment in the video about the best friend who used to be black. ("She is black... but we're not really friends anymore.")

For me, this is a reminder of how segregated our supposedly post-racial society remains - and why white and black (and Korean) girls remain such mysteries to each other. (The same might be said about women and men in this so-called post-feminist - I would say anti-feminist - society.) So that we mistake our superficial observations about the shit we say as some kind of insight.

State of The Nation

Just catching up on issues of The Nation that went neglected at the end of the semester, and this caught my eye - from a November 21, 2011 review of Melissa Benn's School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education, which seems instructive for us on this side of the pond:

Benn quotes a commentator who observed that, for all the vehemence of disagreements on the matter, "everyone wants the same thing: a good, free, local school for all." But it may be, alas, that not everyone wants that; what many people want is for their children to have more educational advantages than others, and they are prepared to do anything legal to get that. One of the most striking features of middle-class norms of ethical propriety is that a degree of self-interest that would be condemned as unacceptably selfish if attached to one's own wants becomes irreproachably "normal," even altruistic, when attached to the education of one's children.

This leads to people reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers as a parenting manual.

Beanie's New Year

Last week, I checked Beanie's backpack and found this in her purple take-home folder.

At first, I marveled over it as evidence of her reflexivity and determination. I know math is not her favorite subject. So, I was impressed that she had expressed a wish to "get better" at math.

Yet, I also felt it was necessary to remind Beanie that in fact, she is already good at math. At school, she has been moving through her addition worksheets at a fine clip. At home, she and StraightMan have been exploring multiplication and division based on her own discovery of what it means to say "times two." Having suffered my own hang ups about math, I have tried hard to encourage Beanie to think about herself as good at math and to think about math as interesting, even enjoyable. I got her an electronic Minute Math game b/c she likes to have StraightMan set a timer when she does a math worksheet or flash cards (which again were her idea to get in the first place).

Then, walking home from school, she told me in her matter of fact manner that she was so happy that she had finished the W page / would start the X page of math even though she had been "shaking so badly" and her hands had "sweated so much that the paper stuck" during her math exercise at school.

I have been thinking about this b/c I saw on Facebook a link to this post on "The Trouble with Bright Girls" from last spring.

In particular, this observation made me think not only about why and how it is important for me to rethink how I might help Beanie, which psychologists Heidi Grant Halvorson and Carol Dweck would emphasize would be not through praise, but encouragement of her efforts:

[Dweck] found that Bright Girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up; the higher the girls' IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts rather than give up.

Why does this happen? What makes smart girls more vulnerable and less confident when they should be the most confident kids in the room? At the 5th grade level, girls routinely outperform boys in every subject, including math and science. So there were no differences between these boys and girls in ability, nor in past history of success. The only difference was how bright boys and girls interpreted difficulty -- what it meant to them when material seemed hard to learn. Bright Girls were much quicker to doubt their ability, to lose confidence and to become less effective learners as a result.

The difference, the author suggests, is based on what Bright Girls internalize:

More often than not, Bright Girls believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable, while bright boys believe that they can develop ability through effort and practice.

How do girls and boys develop these different views? Most likely, it has to do with the kinds of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children. Girls, who develop self-control earlier and are better able to follow instructions, are often praised for their "goodness." When we do well in school, we are told that we are "so smart," "so clever, " or "such a good student." This kind of praise implies that traits like smartness, cleverness and goodness are qualities you either have or you don't.

This recalled to me a profile of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg that was published in The New Yorker last year:

At her Phi Beta Kappa induction, there were separate ceremonies for men and women. At hers, a woman gave a speech called “Feeling Like a Fraud.” During the talk, Sandberg looked around the room and saw people nodding. “I thought it was the best speech I’d ever heard,” she recalls. “I felt like that my whole life.” At every stage of her time in school, Sandberg thought, I really fooled them. There was “zero chance,” she concluded, that the men in the other room felt the same.

Sandberg says she eventually realized that women, unlike men, encountered tradeoffs between success and likability. The women had internalized self-doubt as a form of self-defense: people don’t like women who boast about their achievements. The solution, she began to think, lay with the women. She blamed them more for their insecurities than she blamed men for their insensitivity or their sexism.

I remember feeling more than a bit irritated when I read this, and I am not the only reader who took umbrage with the emphasis on psychologies as opposed to the institutions and structures that keep women "in place." Then again, I think it is important and necessary to recognize that what the institutions and structures do is they create psychologies.

So, it matters a lot how parents talk to their daughters about math.

Driving home from piano lesson, I said as casually as I could: "Beanie, things like piano and math take a lot of practice, and I can tell from hearing you play and from your math worksheets that you practice a lot." To which Beanie replied: "I also practice a lot at reading."

To which I might respond that it takes a lot of practice to be a parent.

Threads

No year's end reflections or new year's resolutions here. Working on my tenure file, which I will be submitting in a few weeks. 'Nuff said.

***

Being an anthropologist who has published on fetal ultrasound imaging and having just uploaded about 20 photographs from Christmas, it seems fitting to ponder this, from Jana Prikryl's review of Errol Morris' new book, Believing Is Seeing: Observations in the Mysteries of Photography, published in the December 12th issue of The Nation:

On Facebook, intimate, life-altering information is often delivered in the form of a pictogram rather than a written "status update" - the ur-example being the dim, grainy sonogram news flash, which gestate as the mother's profile picture and then bursts forth into religious iconography with the posting of the Madonna-and-child snapshot. Births, bar mitzvahs, vacations, graduations, weddings and car accidents tend to be announced by way of their visual documentation. Compared with whatever we choose to write about ourselves, these snapshots seem to offer incontrovertible proof that how we wish to be seen is, in fact, precisely how we look.

***

StraightMan posted a tribute to archaeologist Elizabeth Brumfiel, who died on New Year's Day. I wanted to make mention of this here because without her willingness to take a chance on hiring an inexperienced instructor, it is likely that StraightMan would have quit academia. So, he and I both owe her something for both being working anthropologists today.

As a parenthropologist, who I particularly appreciate is that Professor Brumfiel's research as a specialist in Aztec archaeology turned attention to women and ordinary people. When she visited StraightMan's college to give an invited lecture in 2008, I became convinced that there could be almost nothing more fascinating to study than spindle whorls! I think that this is because she was interested in gaining insight into what life and work and family must have been like.

***

In college, a friend, observing the aggressive scribbles in the margins of my books, remarked that I needed to be a more "relaxed" reader.

I do not like to relax with books. I like books to make me change my mind.

YA author Walter Dean Myers speaks against a romanticized notion of reading in favor of a radical one:

“People still try to sell books that way — as ‘books can take you to foreign lands,’ ” Myers tells The New York Times in an interview published on January 3, 2012. “We’ve given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.”

“I think that what we need to do is say reading is going to really affect your life."

Word.

Visions of sugar plums and Marcel Mauss

How I spent the last week: Giving finals. Grading finals. Drawing long eyelashes on Beanie and her seven comrades-in-arms for five performances of "The Nutcracker."

Watching Beanie march on stage before a packed house - it was something to see. It makes me wish every child had opportunities like this. To perform and to transform and to learn - and to teach her mother what it means rise to the occasion and act with grace. I am so proud and so hopeful for her :)

***

I like to think of Christmas as the Mauss wonderful time of the year.

Yuk, yuk, yuk.

A friend posted on FB the following link to comedian Jimmy Kimmel's shtick urging parents to punk their kids with prank Christmas presents.

She posted the link, commenting that while she found it side-splitting, she also wondered whether or not it was abusive. Others then mused about the potential for children to draw lessons about gratitude from the stunt.

I hope not. As a parent, I hope that my children never learn to be grateful for a gift deliberately selected to be just plain bad.

As an anthropologist, I also hope that they learn a bit about the meanings of gifts.

Marcel Mauss observed that a reason why it might be better to give than to receive is because gifts create obligation to the giver from the recipient. Or as anthropologist Lee Cronk wrote in an article that is widely taught in introductory anthropology classes, gifts always come with strings attached.

It is at this point when I am teaching on gift economies in ANTH 100 that I need to remind students that it is not necessarily "bad" to be under obligation. When you think about it, feeling obligation, as individuals and as groups, enables us to live together. We call it a sense of responsibility and of belonging. I think when my students start to feel the weight of obligation as "bad," they are responding to their understanding that giving gifts can be assertions of status and power - and receiving gifts (or feeling obliged to receive them) can be experienced as a loss of status and power. (For more on this, see the classic ethnographic film, "Ongka's Big Moka," with the memorable line from Ongka, "In giving so much, I have knocked you down."

As much as we tend to want to forget that status and power exist between adults and children and within families, they do. This is perhaps what prompted my friend to think aloud about whether or not the prank Christmas presents were abusive.

I will open myself to accusations of being utterly humorless and say that I think punking your kids with prank Christmas presents is mean.

Of course, having no sense of humor is my specialty as a woman, in particular a feminist, and a member of an ethnic minority in the U.S. The former also makes me fiercely sarcastic.

However, I say with complete sincerity: Enjoy your winter holidays :)

Tips for battling your Inner Grouch

Disclaimer: No provocative anthropological content in this post. Go to Anthropology Report or Living Anthropologically for something intelligent. This post is for the weary, like me. A few reminders for the comadres and compadres who are giving and grading final exams this week:

1. "Put your own mask on first..."

Today I awoke and realized how ill I had been for the last two weeks or so b/c I experienced health again! I had forgotten what wellness felt like.

Last Friday, I finally took myself to urgent care, not for the hacking cough that has been lingering for about a month now, but b/c I thought my eye had gone septic: Redness, swelling, pain. Turns out it was an allergic reaction to erythromycin, which I had been using to treat the pink eye that I had caught from Beanie! A shock to me b/c my parents, both doctors, dispensed erythromycin with liberality. It is not an exaggeration to say that my mother always had a few in her purse. Just in case we had a bit of soreness in our throats that needed to be quelled.

BTW, the cough? Bronchitis. The dull ache in my ears? A touch of an infection in both ears. I was prescribed a horse pill of an antibiotic and an inhaler (which cost $40!)

StraightMan, I am sorry. I should have listened to you a full 10 days earlier.


2. I am a feminist, but I have to admit that at age 41, a little lipstick and eye liner can go a long way to brightening my own impression of myself.

Fellas, you can achieve the same effects with a trim of nose and ear hair! (Oh, come on, just admit it: At age 41, that is where it is growing now.)


3. Enjoyment needs to be practiced. Preferably among a dozen or more lovely individuals who have been gathered together to drink pomegranate punch and swap Christmas cookies! (I baked Mexican wedding cakes.)


4. Speaking of the bakerly arts and sciences, these atom cookies from the baker / blogger / biological anthropologist at Not So Humble Pie look good for the winter holidays! Cookies will not cure what ails you, but they offer little bits of comfort, which are good to take.

Back to grading :)

Keeping up with the Times

Just a quick comment on this piece on "The Dwindling Power of a College Degree," which appeared in the NYT Sunday Magazine for November 27:

Computers have hurt workers outside factories too. Picture the advertising agency in “Mad Men,” and think about the abundance of people who were hired to do jobs that are now handled electronically by small machines. Countless secretaries were replaced by word processing, voice mail, e-mail and scheduling software; accounting staff by Excel; people in the art department by desktop design programs. This is also true of trades like plumbing and carpentry, in which new technologies replaced a bunch of people who most likely stood around helping measure things and making sure everything worked correctly.

As a result, the people whose jobs remained valuable in that “Mad Men” office were then freed up to do more valuable things. A talented art director could produce more work more quickly with InDesign. A bright accountant could spend more time thinking of new ways to make and save money, rather than spending endless hours punching numbers into an adding machine. Global trade works much the same way. It’s horrible news for a textile factory worker in North Carolina, but it may be great for a fashion designer in New York.

Has it, in fact, been great for that art director and accountant and fashion designer? Or, in addition to producing more work quickly, thinking of new ways to make and save money, and so on, are these workers not also having to take on paperwork, maintain correspondences by voice and e-mail, and schedule meetings and what not via Outlook? The technologies do not do the work on their own - they still require people to run them. Except that those people are no longer dedicated staff that (in my opinion, more efficiently) manages the operations of a workplace.

In the workplace of higher ed, I recently heard from a colleague that how a few of her now-approaching-emeritus faculty member typically handled attendance (until quite recently) was that they circulated a sheet of paper asking students to sign in - then passed along the sheets to their full-time department secretary to keep track of student absences! So that the older faculty members could not understand how and why younger faculty members complained that they could not "count" attendance in their grading. Hint: Because it takes a lot of time to keep track of student attendance. Time that younger faculty members do not necessarily have b/c we have absorbed a lot of workplace operational work ourselves... (Not to mention whether or not it is even appropriate to ask department secretaries to do work like this...)

Here is what I found a bit frightening:

A general guideline these days is that people are rewarded when they can do things that take trained judgment and skill — things, in other words, that can’t be done by computers or lower-wage workers in other countries. Money now flows around the world so quickly, and technology changes so fast, that people who thought they were in high demand find themselves uprooted.

I think we tenure-track faculty members cannot take for granted that professors will always be needed. (We know that they are not always wanted...)

It is happening already, believe it or not, in K12 schooling. Read this piece, "How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools," from The Nation's November 16 issue.

The new normal sucks.