Call Me the Man II

because she's super-cool, sarah writes,

"and people sat there in class talking about how great it is that working class people know how to do things like live on minimum wage or something so they still get something ["life experience"] in return for the fact that owning-class folks have all the social power. no one particularly saw this as problematic."

i'm sorry no one in the class thought it was problematic. i do, that's for sure. and in some bizarre way that i anticipate sarah being rather concerned about, i think *that* discussion of class ties back to what i was writing earlier about race "versus" class, as well as to the ongoing cultural relativism discussion i seem to be having with several people lately.

let me try to explain with a circumstance i find myself in: there are things about the culture of norris square that i think are not so good for adolescent girls. (e.g. the influence of music--well, lyrics--that i consider misogynistic; and the ways that men often treat women--catcalls, heckles, and the like.) jenny, for one, is very concerned that as a middle-class white person, when i say that those are things i'd like to change, that i'm imposing a cultural standard that is really just a personal preference, and robbing the people in that culture of their...i dunno...self-determination, or something. (aaack! shades of ancient theory seminar!)

however, i think that we can point to lots of research that says that things like appearance bias and misogynistic messages affect people who live with them day-to-day in quantifiably negative ways. in that sense i *do* think there are better cultural alternatives--which is not to say that "my" culture, whatever that is, has the right ones. in fact, i think what i'm working for is a culture that kind of has to be conjured out of the air...it certainly doesn't exist in my background in any real way. but...ok, trying to find the thread again...i think the point here, and the reason sarah's post today was interesting to me, was that it messed with the cult of self-determination that is underground in both conservative-leaning sentiments (isn't it cool to 'choose' to live on minimum wage? what an experience!) and cultural relativism (i 'choose' to participate in a culture whose traditions tell me i'm less than equal).

ken sharpe said in seminar last week that no one here (where "here" = swat) believes there's a Right out there somewhere. laurel and i smiled knowingly at each other...silly man.