Briefly, Herring looks at two excerpts of conversations between men and women - one on IRC, and the other on Usenet. Both examples are pretty egregious - the men involved use pretty aggressive, pejorative language to attack the women involved. Herring analyzes the exchanges using Discourse Analysis literature by Labov, Lakoff, and Propp. She also analyzes the mediums referring to work Turkle, Nancy Baym, and some of her own articles. Overall, a fairly important article highlighting online behaviors that were less than democratically ideal.
We review the assigned articles by groups, and this week's group was pretty unanimous - they hated this article. They didn't disagree that gender harassment in online environments such as IRC or Usenet may be possible online - although one of the reviewers claims that he's never noticed it. Their problem was with the extreme nature of the case studies; with the conclusions drawn from the case studies; or with the fact that they didn't feel she had enough evidence to make her case.
So i got pissed.
see...most of my classmates are white. okay, maybe that's not much of an excuse, but it's the best one i can come up with.
I said to the class,
"The way you destroyed this article reminded me SO much of the way that white people deny the existence of racism in this country. if the example is too extreme (say, someone gets lynched) then the problem is the behavior of the individuals involved - it's not a societal problem. if the example is too nuanced (say, coded language devaluing the intellectual merit of minorities), then the problem is the perception of the victim - it's not a societal problem. No matter how many incidents are recounted, there are never enough examples given of racism/sexism/(you pick the)-ism to convince you that a transgression has occurred."
i added,
"i am disappointed because y'all are going to be my colleagues one day. your devaluation of the validity or even reliability of this article devalues the conclusions that the author is making and even the experiences of the women involved in each incident - and you guys don't have any problem with that."
when i re-read what i said (and yeah, i actually said it like that), i realize that i tiptoed. i should have told them that their behavior was straight up racist; that their dismissal of the article was a reinforcement of white male privilege. i was trying to be polite...and as a result, they wiggled right the f*ck away from what i said.
they said that they were just being objective, that the article was too biased because Herring was LOOKING for gender harassment rather than letting her data give her enough information to draw her conclusions.
*sigh*
it's frustrating enough that i'm the rare Black male in a field dominated by middle-aged white women. it's even more frustrating to be confronted over and over again how hidebound, conservative, and subliminally racist academia is - much less my field.
for those of you who care...any suggestions on how to deal with this?
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