This is wonderful. Should be required reading.
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Thanks! I really feel kind of dumb for not thinking of this myself; I’m the chick who’s always telling folks, “HEY GUYS GET BREAST CANCER TOO!” when those chain messages go around telling us women to do something on FB (or wherever) to confuse men. You folks are confused enough as it is.
Starting at what age?
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Right before the start of middle school – age 10-12ish. That might seem early, but it’s when those boys who will eventually grow up to be assholes start getting meaner.
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Along with courses on what consent is and why it matters.
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And you’ll be able to tell who just had that class at the next recess when everyone is trying to kick each other and then mockingly say “I was just flirting,”
Citation - was once a 10-12 year old.
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Legit. I was also once a little shit.
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Then when, if that’s too late? And how?
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I think the problem is that’s too late to start talking about consent, but too early to start talking about kicking people in the balls as a serious analogy.
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I’m a little surprised that 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy don’t show up in that list.
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This simply deepens my hatred of Henry James.
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I once had quite the ‘discussion’ about Henry James with a college professor who pretty much thought he walked on water, most particularly because of “how well he understood women and wrote their characters”. I agreed to a lower grade rather than back down. I just wish I had known enough back then to give clear, cogent analysis so that I might have actually taught him something.
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Glad I wasn’t drinking anything when I read that – I would have choked for sure!
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“The only thing that’s new is the history that you don’t know.” - I think Harry S Truman said that, but I’m sure others did before and after him as well.
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On the same day that Strickland became a Nobel laureate and Wikipedia’s editors quickly threw together a page about her, President Donald Trump used a rally in Mississippi to ridicule Christine Blasey Ford, the psychologist who testified of her assault at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh, who has since been sworn in as a Supreme Court justice. Trump’s words were cruel. He elicited laughter at Ford’s expense, making her trauma—and that of all sexual assault survivors—into the stuff of jokes. The president’s ridicule turned on the idea of Ford’s ignorance: “How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know,” said Trump. “I don’t know, I don’t know. What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know.”
These two events—a woman dragged from obscurity in the morning, belatedly recognized for her achievements; and a woman scorned in the evening, her memory deemed fallible, faulty—are connected. Their stories are part of the same, long history of undermining women’s epistemological authority, of doubting and denying their very ability to know . Wikipedia, which is largely overseen by male editors, rejected Strickland because she was not noteworthy enough to be accepted into the ranks of scientists who have unique insight into how the universe works—until, of course, she became excessively noteworthy for just that. Republicans rejected Ford not because they thought she was lying per se, but because they decided she must be misremembering the assault—that Kavanaugh’s memory is accurate but Ford’s is faulty, that between the two it is the woman’s mind that failed, that she with her explication of the neuroscience of trauma and not he with his adolescent calendars fell short of their criteria for knowing. (And all of this despite the fact that he was the drinker.)
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Anyone who has read Henry James’s Bostonians , published in the 1880s, will remember that one main theme in the book is the silencing of Verena Tarrant, a young feminist campaigner and speaker. As she draws closer to her suitor Basil Ransom (a man endowed, as James stresses, with a rich deep voice), she finds herself increasingly unable to speak, as she once did, in public. Ransom effectively re-privatises her voice, insisting that she speak only to him: ‘Keep your soothing words for me,’ he says. In the novel James’s own standpoint is hard to pin down – certainly readers have not warmed to Ransom – but in his essays James makes it clear where he stood; for he wrote about the polluting, contagious and socially destructive effect of women’s voices…
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How structural racism works (in a nutshell):
ETA For those who need it pointed out:
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Ummmm… I agree not fixing this is structural racism, but this isn’t quite how it works.
Very old databases (<2000ish) would have either used EBCDIC or ASCII, neither of which support accented characters well. I’m not sure how, or even if it’s done in EBCDIC, but in ASCII it requires code page switching and is a headache if you’re dealing with more than one language’s worth of accents. A big enough headache that I remember FoxPro made a big deal about how it was a new feature in the 90s… and then it turned out it wasn’t that great after all. A lot of companies chose not to support it.
Eventually everyone switched to ANSI, and while things are far from perfect, and we are far from having all languages’ characters supported, things are better. We’re still less than 20 years from when that became true, though.
You can tell a search routine that N is allowed to match with n, ñ, ń, ň, and so on… if you can update the code. There are plenty of database running in government, in banking, in education, and other institutions which have basically been left in place to be used until the hardware gives out.
They are so old they cannot be updated. The documentation is long gone, the data format so old no-one knows what to do. The systems were built just before cost-cutting began in earnest, and now they just need to be replaced, 'cos they can’t be fixed.
I worked in a project where all we had to do was move two machines from one part of a room to another. Problem was, no-one knew if the machines would start again if they were shut down. They had been continously up, either on main power or backup generator, for over twenty years.
At this point, in order to fix the structural racism issue most quickly, it would be best to train the staff doing the searching. Fixing the software and the data will take a lot longer and cost a lot more.
It will be interesting to see what happens as more of these old machines break down for good.
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But punishing people for mismatches adds more racism (and more cissexism).
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