(11/09/17 12:22am)
The following piece is directed towards cishet (people who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth and are straight) men:
I want to be intentional about not speaking for anyone who experiences sexism, whether they are women, trans women or queer men. Though I sympathize and strive to be in solidarity, I do not share their experience with misogyny or femmephobia and it is not my place to speak on their behalf. However, I do believe I can speak to the way cishet men perpetuate misogyny, especially at Middlebury.
Recently, women have been sharing innumerable accounts of gender based violence and they are alarming. If you are not aware, google “Harvey Weinstein”, a film producer who was recently accused of sexually assaulting Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, and Rose McGowan among many other Hollywood actresses. Next google “#metoo”, a social media movement to spread awareness via women posting “#metoo” if they have experienced sexual harassment or assault. Search “Miss Peru” or “Michael Oreskes” or “Ben Affleck.” I could go on. All of these searches will yield results highlighting the problem of gender based violence. All of these stories are in context of a president-elect, who boasted about forcibly grabbing women by the p**** during his campaign.
Due to social media and Donald Trump and the bravery of victims, experiences of misogyny are being shared around the world more than ever right now. If you are not viscerally disgusted by these accounts, you should be. For those who are deeply troubled by these stories, you must not be surprised--this is not new.
As men we are ignorant to the violence women experience regularly, maybe paying attention when some great scandal is revealed. Sexual assault and harassment against women is something straight men often do not understand in the right way. We often respond with astonishment, which is naive, and then proudly condemn such behavior in an effort to secure our own reputation. We self-aggrandize before prioritizing the safety of women. Meanwhile at that party last weekend, when your friend was leaving with a super drunk woman, you did not stop him. That is a problematic situation that can easily become nonconsensual and you were complicit by not speaking up. Similar situations arise constantly. When your friend cat-called those women on your way to the bar, did you call him out? Or simply, if a woman said no, did you stop immediately?
Instead of acting surprised like occurrences of sexual harassment and assault could never happen at Middlebury and then openly stating “rape is f***** up” like you’re one of the good guys, think about how your daily actions fight or tacitly condone misogyny. Call out your boys who catcall--women are not objects to holler at. Don’t let your friends refer to women as “females”, a popular colloquialism amongst black men. Essentializing women to their sexual organs, which is what “female” denotes, is degrading. Misogyny is violence against women--colloquial usage of “female” is on this spectrum of violence. Referring to people as sexual objects does damage and that is verbal violence. Moreover, do not use the words “slut” or “b****.” Do not call women these words because they are sexist insults. A man who is sexually promiscuous is a “player” but a woman who thrives in the same evolutionary behaviors is a “slut,” a word meant to invoke shame. As a man it isn’t your place to say “b****”, do not sing it in a song and do not call a woman it. It’s a charged word that is inextricable from its usage as a means of demeaning women. Find another word to express your frustration with your science professor who writes hard exams. And when you call other men “b****” (or p****), you’re degrading them by implicitly calling them a woman or a woman’s sexual organs. That is insulting. That is misogyny.
I am not saying that we are all Harvey Weinstein or worse Bill Cosby, but I am saying that we, cishet collegiate men, tacitly permit misogyny in many ways. Call out your friends for problematic behavior and be cognizant of the words you use. Doing your part in addressing sexual harassment and assault goes beyond condemning rape. Speak up and let’s work to seriously acknowledge and combat gender based violence.
(10/11/17 10:16pm)
“Yo bro, that was an absolute savage move!”
Person sinks the final cup in a game of beer pong. Spectators comment, “Savage.”
“200 pages of reading?!? That professor is a savage.”
No one will deny that these and other similar phrases are prevalent on Middlebury’s campus. I either hear them directly or indirectly everyday, maybe multiple times a day. These colloquialisms are routine. From the varsity locker room to the pre-med class to the stage at theatre rehearsal, the word can be heard in all spheres of campus. Further, this outbreak of “savage”-based language is not unique to Middlebury. I can assure you that at most US colleges, you may be doted as a “savage” at any moment for doing something impressive. Beyond campuses, it is a hot trend everywhere. It’s a common twitter hashtag and it is pervasive in pop culture.
Demi Lovato says it in Sorry Not Sorry:
“Now payback is a bad b----
And baby, I’m the baddest
You f-----’ with a savage”
Kendrick Lamar drops it in LOYALTY:
“I’m a savage, I’m a a------,
I’m a king
Shimmy-yeah,
shimmy-yeah, shimmy-yeah,
rock (yeah)”
It seems that everyone wants to be a savage--after all it is quite the compliment. My understanding is: it means you are skilled, relentless, and powerful. You are a wild, untamed beast ready to fight with little regard for mercy. Whether your opposition is your opponent in pickup basketball, that last cup in beer pong, or your students whom you mercilessly assign 200 pages for one night, it is the highest honor to be deemed a “savage.” However, the word’s etymology reveals that it was/is not always an expression of praise.
As promised, this is the first installment of my column “For the Culture.” I hope to deliver you a “savage” analysis on the word “savage,” which has become embedded in our campus culture.
If you look up savage in Merriam Webster dictionary, among many definitions, it reads “lacking the restraints normal to civilized human beings; lacking complex or advanced culture; a person belonging to a primitive society.” It is irrefutably a pejorative word, but those definitions in isolation don’t seem so bad. Someone or a group of people who act in ways that are not typical to a set of established norms, who seem brutish and simplistic, are savages. But the word “savage” is actually rooted in very specific colonial history that we forget and erase from our daily consciousness too easily.
Historically, the normative, civilized, and complex culture that distinguished non-savages from savages was based on Western Europe. The primitive way of living was based on everyone else, specifically non-white people of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Savages. The word did not exist in isolation--it was used to divide and oppress. Africans, Asians, and the indigenous people of North and South America were labelled savages to make them distinct from European prestige. The traditions and customs of these indigenous communities were regarded as uncivilized by Britain, France, Belgium, and the like, using this cultural dichotomy to justify colonization. The colonial project was motivated by many factors such as economic gain, religious evangelism, and political expansion. To attain these ends the white westerners needed to take specious action: extract all natural resources, coerce the conquered into political colonial systems and Christianity, and enslave and massacre millions. This violence, abuse, and exploitation was reconciled with their ethics via the racist idea of the savage “other.” By labelling indigenous communities as invalid and the fundamental opposition (based on phenotypical, social, and cultural differences from white Europeans), it stripped non-whites of their humanness and homogenized them all as the primitive creatures who existed as the null to western white Europeans. They became sub-human savages in the eyes of the West and so it was okay to do heinous things to them.
The concept of “savages” was why blacks were slaves in the Americas for centuries. If people are relegated to a sub-human status then you can do whatever you want to them and feel unremorseful. “Savages” is why the United States has comfortably obliterated indigenous presence on the land that is not theirs. “Otherizing” people allows you to comfortably erase their history, and push them into marginalized communities. “Savages” is why Africa has been plagued by underdevelopment and weak nation states. Labelling the blacks as savages, allowed the West to nonchalantly deplete Africa of all its resources and construct artificial state boundaries that ignored the existing ethnic borders.
The sad reality is that for many people the “savage” relegation continues. Young blacks are systemically deemed “super predators” hence the government indiscriminately locks them up via a system of social control: mass incarceration. Tribes still live on reservations where their entire water security can be threatened by the government with no hesitation because they are seen as the “other.” The word “savage” has this baggage--it does not exist in an isolated vacuum merely for our colloquial pleasure. It has a dark, violent history, which still plays a role in systemic racism.
How does bro culture play into this? Bro-culture is the complicit element that perpetuates the use of the “savage” colloquialism. Everyone on campus says it, but it originates in bro-culture. Bro-culture in short is norms and behaviors based on financial wealth, whiteness, cis-masculinity, and demonstrations of power--it is not a coincidence that those were the same attributes behind colonization. It is the dominant culture in this community and it seeps into every realm of campus. It is often characterized by masturbatory, male majority friend groups and it is in these spaces that “savage” came to be a slang compliment used by everyone. However, it does have different implications depending on who is speaking. POCs, especially black and indigenous people can reclaim the word that was once used against them to justify stealing from, exploiting, and killing them. By the way, Demi is Latina. When a white person says it, it carries weight. It carries the historical suffering of colonization, which white privilege will never allow someone or their ancestors to endure.
People may continue to say “savage.” It is probably too culturally widespread for one op-ed to change its usage on Middlebury’s campus and beyond. Afterall, it is a trivial matter compared to the racial profiling of Addis Fouche-Channer ’17 or what is happening in Puerto Rico, Myanmar, and Las Vegas. I would be concerned if people stopped saying “savage” after this article but still hadn’t called their Congressperson about our healthcare system. My argument is part of a broader critique of how we use language. Etymology is often ignored and more commonly not known. Many colloquialisms are more than their superficial meanings--some are actually concepts that are rooted in oppressive history. Similar op-eds (perhaps with varying severity) could have been written about words like “ghetto” or “tranny” or “retarded” a couple of years ago. It is important to understand the history behind the language we use. Words were not created in a vacuum so why should we exist in one?
Anyways, those are just some thoughts for now. In two weeks, we’ll get into toxic masculinity and tacit misogyny perpetuated by bro culture.
(03/10/17 2:50am)
As soon as word got out that Middlebury College would host a lecture by Charles Murray (CM), students gathered and began organizing to ensure that he would not have a platform to share his ideas on our campus. Why did a large and diverse group of students put their lives on hold to plan and participate in organized dissent (knowingly breaking college policies and putting their education in jeopardy)?
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), one of the most reputable civil rights organizations in the U.S., takes a firm stance in defining Murray’s political position as one of white nationalism that promotes eugenics. According to SPLC, Charles Murray, “has become one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.” The SPLC goes on to say that “Murray, a statistically minded sociologist by training, has spent decades working to rehabilitate long-discredited theories of IQ and heredity, turning them into a foundation on which to build a conservative theory of society that rejects equality and egalitarianism.” Murray’s ideas and research were fundamental in driving a political agenda that we believe to be more mainstream on this campus than many admit. Opposed to addressing the lasting damages done by centuries of racist laws enacted by a culture that privileges whiteness, many people on this campus believe that people of color in the U.S. simply do not work hard enough.
On Thursday, demonstrators held signs that read “Resist White Supremacy,” “No Eugenics,” and “Expect Resistance Here” as they collectively read a statement that touched upon the deep history of eugenics programs in the state of Vermont throughout the 1930s, when Native Abenaki people were targeted for state-sanctioned forced sterilizations. In articles and open letters circulated before the event was scheduled to take place, students and alumni declared that under no circumstances should the College provide a platform for CM’s white supremacist ideologies.
Yes, freedom of speech is important and should be upheld in an academic setting; however, there are clearly fallacies within the administration’s interpretation of this constitutional provision. Not all opinions are worth amplifying or legitimizing. There are some theories that fabricate statistics and are rooted in hate.
And let us notice the context in which we choose to invoke free speech. There would be no cries in defense of the first amendment if student groups had brought a holocaust denier; no one would be yelling free speech if students were opposed to a climate change denier coming to campus. Neither the administration nor any department would have any issues denouncing these potential lecturers for their faulty science or hateful views. Yet as we saw on Thursday, our professors made an exception to offer a platform to racialized genetic inferiority, in the name of “rhetorical resilience” over academic honesty.
The Political Science Department endorsed Charles Murray as a fellow leader in academic thought. Why do we only care about free speech when it calls into question the genetic inferiority of our fellows students. What is the point of academia, if our political science professors can’t discern between conservatives and hate speech extremists?
We are deeply sorry that Professor Stanger was injured and hope that she gets well soon. Regrettable acts of violence aside, this protest was absolutely essential. If the rise of Donald Trump has taught us anything, it’s that the world beyond Middlebury College is not a classroom. If racist sh*t comes up, “rational” debate cannot dismantle it or effectively combat its growing power. The idea that bigotry will collapse under academia’s enlightened rationality is false. We must name it and deprive it of power. Robbing Charles Murray of one platform for his racialized pseudoscience is a small but important part of that resistance.
PS: Here are the two URLs that are hyperlinked in the piece
Eugenics in VT: http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/VT/VT.html
Southern Poverty Law Center: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/charles-murray
Anna Jacobsen ’16.5, Joshua Claxton ’18 and Austin Kahn ’17.5 consider the implications of last week’s protest.