constant propagation
I'm watching Condi on CNN right now, and thinking about how to respond to Kathy's post on BlogHer.
I might as well, then, reflect on my reading of Condi's biography.
One of the lessons to learn from Condi's story is that you don't have to pass as white and male to succeed amongst the power elite, you just need to work two or three times as hard... and think like a white male.
To clarify, when I say that someone, let's say Condi, thinks like a "white male" it doesn't mean that that person is somehow less black, or less female (as some others would imply).
(It's also important to state that this perception is just that, a personal perception, and that our notions of stereotypical "maleness" cannot be easily extracted from our notions of "whiteness".)
That said, in order to ensure gender-variant diversity, in a way that samples our peopled universe with low-discrepancy, we need to ask for diversity not only in what we see, but in a greater diversity of spirit.
I admit that this, this talk of spirit, is hard to quantify, but I'll press on in spite of that.
Diversity in visible ethnicity and gender is a start, but it is not enough!
You can find like-spirited individuals in most all other genders, classes, and ethnicities, but if you focus /only/ on visible diversity, then you tend to only sample those subsets from other race/gender/class/ethnic/etc groups who match your spirit.
(Again, it's important not to discriminate against people just because you think their spirit does not match their visible appearance.)
For example, there have always been women in computing, and those of you in technology may have had a few women professors, coworkers, or students as your peers. And yet, how many of you see diversity in their spirit?
Again again, even if someone has a lot of (Western) (proto-)male(-typical) energy, such as Condi or SkySport Jackie, it does (or rather, at least should) not make them any less a woman. It's just who they are.
I know I'm treading on dangerous ground, but I feel that we do need to talk about such things...
Continuing on, for the purposes of discussion, let's quantize society into slightly more than just two buckets.
Let's consider those who generate, attract, and are energized by (Western proto-)male(-typical) energy as "Y-energy", and those who do the same for (Western proto-)female(-typical) energy as "X-energy".
(Most people can be bucketed as having mainly Y-energy xor X-energy, but it's worth noting that there are those who don't have much of either, who have a mix of the two, or who can resonate with both energies, even though they may be somewhat uncommon?)
The leading edge of tech is often dominated by "Y-energy" folks, /whether or not they are visibly male/. Y-energy folks who pass as male, and Y-energy folks who pass as female often don't seem to understand why there's a need to create "women-only space".
Yes-posters on Kathy's blog entry, to generalize, seem to fit (with some approximation error) into this loose category.
As for me, I both fit and don't fit into this category (more on this another day), but I do think that it is important to take time and energy in organizing space with the X-energy spirit in mind.
As I mentioned in a previous post, we have to step back and ask not only what happens in our non-random circle of RSS aggregation, but what happens more broadly in society. When we do this, I think we find that there is a systemic power differential between those that are visibly male and those that are visibly female, and that this affects the way that space is implicitly defined and propagated.
On a sociostatistical level, one reason we don't "need" to create male-only spaces is that Y-energy already dominates so many spaces implicitly, for hysterical raisins. This is hard to see for some people in the same way that some Americans don't realize what constitutes their own culture until they leave the country, as males rarely have to leave the "country of maleness" whatever that means.
People who grew up with a spirit consistent with the dominant spirit of their society often say that we should just be blind to these categories, and treat people as they are. Of course, this ignores the psychology of discrimination, which tends to be implicit rather than explicit, subconscious rather than conscious.
And even if it weren't this way, blindness simply propagates more blindness, and more-blindness propagates extant systems of oppression, perhaps no matter the intention. It may be, then, that however nice you intend to be by ignoring someone's gender or race or class, by lopping off what *you* think are just the smaller order terms of their humanity, you have to acknowledge that your actions do not contribute positively to ending oppression on an sociostatistical (instituitional) level.
Phew, enough responding for tonight...
I might as well, then, reflect on my reading of Condi's biography.
One of the lessons to learn from Condi's story is that you don't have to pass as white and male to succeed amongst the power elite, you just need to work two or three times as hard... and think like a white male.
To clarify, when I say that someone, let's say Condi, thinks like a "white male" it doesn't mean that that person is somehow less black, or less female (as some others would imply).
(It's also important to state that this perception is just that, a personal perception, and that our notions of stereotypical "maleness" cannot be easily extracted from our notions of "whiteness".)
That said, in order to ensure gender-variant diversity, in a way that samples our peopled universe with low-discrepancy, we need to ask for diversity not only in what we see, but in a greater diversity of spirit.
I admit that this, this talk of spirit, is hard to quantify, but I'll press on in spite of that.
Diversity in visible ethnicity and gender is a start, but it is not enough!
You can find like-spirited individuals in most all other genders, classes, and ethnicities, but if you focus /only/ on visible diversity, then you tend to only sample those subsets from other race/gender/class/ethnic/etc groups who match your spirit.
(Again, it's important not to discriminate against people just because you think their spirit does not match their visible appearance.)
For example, there have always been women in computing, and those of you in technology may have had a few women professors, coworkers, or students as your peers. And yet, how many of you see diversity in their spirit?
Again again, even if someone has a lot of (Western) (proto-)male(-typical) energy, such as Condi or SkySport Jackie, it does (or rather, at least should) not make them any less a woman. It's just who they are.
I know I'm treading on dangerous ground, but I feel that we do need to talk about such things...
Continuing on, for the purposes of discussion, let's quantize society into slightly more than just two buckets.
Let's consider those who generate, attract, and are energized by (Western proto-)male(-typical) energy as "Y-energy", and those who do the same for (Western proto-)female(-typical) energy as "X-energy".
(Most people can be bucketed as having mainly Y-energy xor X-energy, but it's worth noting that there are those who don't have much of either, who have a mix of the two, or who can resonate with both energies, even though they may be somewhat uncommon?)
The leading edge of tech is often dominated by "Y-energy" folks, /whether or not they are visibly male/. Y-energy folks who pass as male, and Y-energy folks who pass as female often don't seem to understand why there's a need to create "women-only space".
Yes-posters on Kathy's blog entry, to generalize, seem to fit (with some approximation error) into this loose category.
As for me, I both fit and don't fit into this category (more on this another day), but I do think that it is important to take time and energy in organizing space with the X-energy spirit in mind.
As I mentioned in a previous post, we have to step back and ask not only what happens in our non-random circle of RSS aggregation, but what happens more broadly in society. When we do this, I think we find that there is a systemic power differential between those that are visibly male and those that are visibly female, and that this affects the way that space is implicitly defined and propagated.
On a sociostatistical level, one reason we don't "need" to create male-only spaces is that Y-energy already dominates so many spaces implicitly, for hysterical raisins. This is hard to see for some people in the same way that some Americans don't realize what constitutes their own culture until they leave the country, as males rarely have to leave the "country of maleness" whatever that means.
People who grew up with a spirit consistent with the dominant spirit of their society often say that we should just be blind to these categories, and treat people as they are. Of course, this ignores the psychology of discrimination, which tends to be implicit rather than explicit, subconscious rather than conscious.
And even if it weren't this way, blindness simply propagates more blindness, and more-blindness propagates extant systems of oppression, perhaps no matter the intention. It may be, then, that however nice you intend to be by ignoring someone's gender or race or class, by lopping off what *you* think are just the smaller order terms of their humanity, you have to acknowledge that your actions do not contribute positively to ending oppression on an sociostatistical (instituitional) level.
Phew, enough responding for tonight...
posted by L. Wu @ 9:08 PM
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