coldhearted scientist وداد

Since, very tragically, I cannot find my files I have decided I will fly blind into class, grounded in what I know from the last time I taught this subject and in what I have been thinking about it over the past few days. Instead of refining the beautiful handouts I cannot find, I will write a post.

This post, I have discovered, is listed elsewhere as an amusing anti-BDSM post. It is not really about BDSM but about the importance of seeing your oppressor. And seeing my oppressor is, of course, the topic of my chaotically proliferating anti-Reeducation posts.

Long ago a friend and I discussed our surely unfair envy of certain very skilled Black and Chicano colleagues we had. We did not envy their situations, but we did admire and envy their skill in handling these. How were they doing it? we asked each other. They seemed to understand what was happening as it was happening and react, or not, as was most appropriate and effective in each instance, on a dime. They appeared to know exactly what they were up against and to have it very well analyzed – compared to us, at least – and they would duck, dodge, feint, or hit back with precision. We could see that we also needed such skills, for different reasons, in our two institutions, and we wondered whether, if we studied them hard enough, we could acquire them in time.

The problem we had was that while we could see what the skills were, and we knew we could observe, imitate, practice, and finally acquire them, we could not define what we were up against. It was not racism, but it was something, something was happening and we did not know what it was, because we believed that to the extent that our universe was not egalitarian, we were the ones benefiting from that. We did not see that the elements with which we were struggling so blindly were sexism, anti-intellectualism, and wilful alienation from spirit – we could not see our oppressor.

This was before Reeducation, wherein these elements were well distilled, and it took deconstructing Reeducation to see what they were. And that, O Best Beloved, is what is so pernicious in the privileged insistence that “the playing field is level now.” People say this to justify themselves, but institutions and whole countries say it for a reason yet more powerful: so that those standing on the various down slopes will not realize they are on a down slope. If they do not realize this, it is of course much easier to keep them in place.

I know this, of course – I have been knowing it, I have been teaching classes about power and ideology since time immemorial – but it is always more difficult to see how such principles may apply to one’s bourgeois self. Becoming able to see it, however, allows one to jump up several hills directly.

Axé.