If you can bear yet more blog discussion of the Pluralist Guide. . .
Linda Alcoff has posted some further comments about the Pluralist Guide (the Climate for Women section, in particular) over at the Gender, Race, and Philosophy.
There’s also an extensive reply from Liz Harman in the comments.
Women refugees – many of them destitute – record their lives in photographs. The Guardian.
A collection of the Guardian’s asylum articles is available here.
Wikipedia’s entry on DH starts
Darcus Howe (born 1943) is a British broadcaster, columnist, and civil liberties campaigner. Originally from Trinidad, he moved to America in the 1960s, then arrived in England intending to study law, where he joined the British Black Panthers, the first such branch of the organization outside the United States.[1] He came to public attention in 1970 as one of the Mangrove Nine, when he marched to the police station in Notting Hill, London, to protest against police raids of the Mangrove restaurant, and again in 1981 when he organized a 20,000-strong “Black People’s March” in protest at the handling of the investigation into the New Cross Fire, in which 13 black teenagers died.[2]
He is a former editor of Race Today, and former chair of the Notting Hill Carnival. He is best known in the UK for his “Black on Black” series on Channel 4; his current affairs programme, Devil’s Advocate; and his work with Tariq Ali on Bandung File. His television work also includes White Tribe (2000), a look at modern Britain and its loss of “Englishness”; Slave Nation (2001); and “Who You Callin’ a Nigger?” (2004).[3] He writes columns for New Statesman and The Voice.
The following interview is disturbing in several respects. Given Howe’ earned stature, it provides an insight into kinds of divisions that may have been operating in producing the riots, as Howe clearly thinks. In short, we are seeing a problem exemplified.
The BBC has apologized for the unfortuate question.
How fortunate we are, to no longer have adverts that boldly proclaim on ‘what wives are for‘, or that ‘men are better than women‘ (way to sell a sweater!).
And how advertising has changed in the last half century: recent controversy has focused on the GB women’s Olympic volleyball team, who feature in an advert which is premised upon taking photos of the pants (UK English sense) of the sportswomen (the barcodes take smartphone users to the website of a betting company). For more, see here.
It is not easy, as you can tell from this:
http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/completely-irrelevant-silliness/
From youtube:
Buster’s home is currently with Vernon and Tony Gibbs-Halls in Wilderness South Africa where they founded the Non-Profit organisation called The South African Wildlife Protection Society. She was hand-reared after being rescued from a flood event and only a few days old. She is now 6 years old and is doing very well. More of their work can be viewed on www.sawild.com She is currently being featured on both Facebook and www.honeybadgers.org in order to raise funds to build her a larger and more enriched enclosure. Buster has featured in David Attenborough’s Life in Cold Blood, The Deadly 60 with Steve Backshall and the film “Meerkats” along with a Japanese film on honey badgers.
Finally, Vernon and Tony’s marriage was the first gay marriage in South Africa.
For what it is worth, I associate Britain’s Telegraph with the right wing columns of a former Berkeley philosophy student whom I used to know. So I usually don’t read it. But in these perplexing times anything may be worth a look, and so I was led to some columns by Timothy Stanley, who is a historian of the US. Here are two interesting passages. One is very serious, and draws an impotant lesson from US history. The second is from the only thing I have read about the riots that is very funny, IMHO.
As we have come to expect, Britain’s political leadership has been singularly lacking throughout these riots. A few have offered jingoisms, while a former mayor has unwisely suggested that the hoodlums need love. There is a space – a wide vacuum in fact – for a reasonable statesperson to ask, “Can’t we all get along?” Most voters are conservative in that they want peace in the streets yet liberal in that they don’t want to use water cannons to get it. One solution is transformative leadership. Robert Kennedy offered something of that when he spoke in Indianapolis on the night of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. He said, “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.” He asked the crowd to go home and pray, and they did. Indianapolis was one of the few major US cities that didn’t experience riots that night. I pray that a similar recourse to reason is still possible in this crisis.
All of the above probably reads like a flippant satire of American sentimentality. But a lot of what has happened in Britain in the past few weeks isn’t an aberration in our history and culture: it’s the reassertion of a centuries old norm of bad behaviour. As Paul Lay points out, the British people have form when it comes to turning vague political disturbances into an excuse to riot and pillage. A lot of our problems probably stem from our emotional introversion. Americans vocalise their “issues” and their ideas about resolving them. Their society is far less stratified, far less neurotic than ours. The British live their lives through patterns of passive aggression (hating everyone, but never having the bad manners to say it) that inevitably erupt in occasional bouts of mysterious violence. And when they happen, we have no way of expressing why they happened. Our political leadership is inarticulate and out of touch. These last few days, the three main parties have displayed all the emotional sensitivity of a firm of particularly boring management consultants.
In many ways, America’s social problems (especially race) are bigger than ours. But they are articulated better too. In the last week, years of anger at never-ending queues, patronising social workers, government incompetence, casual police brutality, angry silences, hire-purchase agreement gone-awry, tax hikes and bad weather culminated in a giant British brain storm. We need to bury our pride and copy the American way of death: shout and scream and book ourselves into therapy.
[Expletives deleted]. Where to [expletives deleted] begin?
Go here to increase your blood pressure.
I keep mulling this piece over and wondering whether to post on it. It’s written by a woman with a black conservative father who is opposed to affirmative action. So is the woman, who looks white. But she eventually decided to let her agent (she was trying to get jobs as a television writer) offer her as a “diversity” candidate. So she got interviews for “diversity” posts, at which she was quizzed about her exact racial makeup while her interlocutors tried to decide if she was black enough.
I am in fact in favour of affirmative action. But I do find myself wondering if situations like this (which I find deeply problematic) are unavoidable. If you’re going to have special consideration for people who fit some category, you’re going to have to have strict rules about who fits that category, and that gets us into very serious difficulties indeed– as anyone who has delved at all into the literature on e.g. race and gender is well aware. (Or anyone who reflects even a little!)
And then I think: Surely there’s a literature on just this issue! So, is there?
…is very, very male.
Perhaps that’s why they include a screening of “Transcendent Man”.
(Thanks, M!)
Sophia Wong sent a link to this to the FEAST mailing list.
the vast majority of white people in the academy are absolutely clueless when it comes to race. Not race as some abstract category of analysis “out there,” but race as it is manifested daily in their/our own subject position and actions.
One archaeology colleague remarked to me at a cocktail party, in the midst of the Oscar Lewis debacle, “Too bad for you cultural anthropologists. You should be like us in archaeology. We don’t have any race problems. Because all of our students are white!” I gamely tried to explain to this colleague that the absence of students of color in her program was actually a more profound sign of a “race problem” than any visible conflict could be, but she was unmoveable.
Sometimes, might doesn’t make right. Sometimes might just makes you so punch-drunk that your peaceful, over-sexed cousins wind up doing better than you on intelligence tests.
The bonobos, chimp-like apes who live in matriarchal family groups and frequently use sex to resolve social conflicts, defied expectations by beating the group of chimpanzees in intelligence tests, because the chimps were too busy fighting among themselves for dominance.
Are there parallels here for philosophy? One can only hope.
(Thanks, S!)
That’s what Joseph Harker argues.
Over the last three decades we’ve allowed ourselves to be fooled that, with greater integration, plus a few black faces in sport and entertainment, things have improved. People gush about the growing mixed-race population, supposedly Britain’s “beautiful” future. Well, Mark Duggan had a white parent but it didn’t make much difference to his prospects.
Today, Cameron could stick to his comfort zone, talking of tough action against gangs and social media, of punishing offenders and welfare spongers. This is destined to fail: as in Iran or Syria, a crackdown won’t solve the problem. It will just bring more people into conflict with the law, seeing officers as the enemy. Once that happens, the impact on communities can be devastating.
So no, this is not 1981. In many ways it’s worse. Those riots were in their own way aspirational – people thought things could get better. This time all the indicators seem to be pointing downwards.
Eric Schliesser has a really nice post up, drawing out some *good* consequences of all the discussion of the Climate Guide. And also calling on the APA to enlist Carla Fehr to do a better survey.
Several members of the University of Oregon’s Philosophy Department have now issued a statement regarding recent events.
Dominic McIver Lopes has written to let us know that the Pacific APA has published not just the diversity review previously noted but also a draft Statement on Program Diversity.
First, Helen Mirren shared her opinions on rape. Now, Jeremy Irons has weighed in on sexual harassment. I’m beginning to think I only ever want to hear my favorite British actors speak when someone else is providing their lines.
Says Irons (in the context of complaining about the proliferation of sexual harassment laws):
Most people are robust. If a man puts his hand on a woman’s bottom, any woman worth her salt can deal with it. It’s communication. Can’t we be friendly?
Put aside, for the moment, the implication that a women traumatized by sexual harassment is not “worth her salt”, and the suggestion that the motive for most such harassment is a desire to be “friendly”. Irons seems to be suggesting that sexual harassment laws are superfluous (ridiculous, even) because women can simply “deal with it”.
Yes, if someone grabs my ass uninvited, I can deal with it. It’s happened before and I lived to tell the tale. Likewise, if someone walks up to me and punches me in the face, I can deal with that. (And if I had a choice between which situation to deal with, I’d choose the latter.) That doesn’t mean either action is acceptable, morally or legally.
Women shouldn’t have to live under threat – whether it’s threat of physical violence, intimidation, sexual pressure or domination, whatever. The fact that they can sometimes adapt to the presence of such threat – that they can be successful or function reasonably well even in the face of it – doesn’t mean it does them no harm, and it certainly doesn’t mean they should have to put up with it.
Jeremy Irons may not like having to refrain from ass-groping, of course. But I’m sure any Englishman worth his salt can – what was it? – deal with it.
Expenditure cuts carry a significant risk of increasing the frequency of riots, anti-government demonstrations, general strikes, political assassinations, and attempts at revolutionary overthrow of the established order. While these are low- probability events in normal years, they become much more common as austerity measures are implemented. … We demonstrate that the general pattern of association between unrest and budget cuts holds in Europe for the period 1919-2009.
From Crooked Timber.
I’m teaching a course on procreation and parenthood soon and need readings on whether and how parents should instill gender roles. I thought I might use the Canadian couple who are concealing their child’s gender as an entry point, but need one or two readings–by philosophers, preferably contemporary, and at least one with a feminist outlook. Any help much appreciated.
As we wade back into discussion of the Pluralist Guide, I’m sure the question on the forefront of everyone’s mind is “what does the noble honey badger think of all this?” Well, let me assure you: honey badger don’t care.
Possibly NSFW, depending on your workplace’s tolerance for profanity and/or honey badgers who just don’t give a shit.
Stay sane, everybody!
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