2015 Anthropology Undergrad Research Journal Contexts 2015

spring 2015

Table of Contents Emma Joslyn • 4

Looking for the Realest Bitch: Brooke Candy, Genre, and Cultural Appropriation

Amelia G. Farber • 9

Environmental Education for Galapagueños: Accessibility through Collaboration

Meredith Pelrine • 13

Invisibility and Assailability: Living Asexual and Queer in an Aggressively Heterosexual Society

Taylor Nguyen • 19

Integration vs. Segregation: Why We Should Not Decide

Andrea Hale • 22

Wall Street Imperium: A Narrative of Progress

Nicholas Salazar • 24

No Justice, No Peace (op-ed)

Elon Hailu • 29

What About Black Women? (op-ed)

Kyra Vargas • 31

Living with Discomfort: Race in Contemporary America (op-ed)

Sarah Moore • 33

Perpetuating “Separate But Equal” Online: Anthropological Reflections on Social Media Responses to Ferguson (op-ed) Cover Photo by Jae-Young Son All papers published in CONTEXTS are published under an attribution, non-commercial, and share-alike Creative Commons License. All copyright is retained by the original author(s)

Special thanks to Anahid Sarkissian, Aisha Ghani, Sharika Thiranagama, Emily Bishop & the Department of Anthropology

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Letter From the Editors

Dear Reader,

The editorial team is proud to present the second edition of Contexts, Stanford University’s Undergraduate Anthropology Research Journal. Our edition this year focuses on events that have rocked the nation in recent months, bringing up issues of race, identity, inclusion and exclusion.

Beginning in the realm of popular culture, senior Emma Joslyn brings us an insightful commentary on the racial appropriation occurring in the musical stylings of Brooke Candy, a female white rapper with a unique dress code. Joslyn critiques Candy for her appropriation of black culture and shows the reader the ways in which Candy is attempting to create a new identity for herself.

Senior Amelia Farber brings us down to the Galapagos, with a penetrative analysis of environmental education in primary and secondary schools on the island. Ultimately, she recommends the use of both formal and informal learning to teach students about environmental education, given the island’s emphasis on informal education.

Meredith Pelrine explores themes of invisibility and assailability for asexual and queer people in an aggressively heterosexual (and sex-oriented) society. Her piece is based on independent field research conducted both in person in the Bay Area and in online communities.

Taylor Nguyen, in “Integration vs. Segregation: Why We Should Not Decide” takes us into the politics of the Special Olympics, reframing the debate surrounding whether or not recreational opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities should incorporate able-bodied athletes. Ultimately, Nguyen argues that families and individuals themselves affected by disabilities should be able to choose.

Nick Salazar’s photo essay portrays Stanford students protesting against police brutality during the past school year, particularly in support of communities affected by the shooting of Mike Brown, the death of Eric Garner, and those against all types of oppression and hurtful occupation. “Wall Street Imperium: A Narrative of Progress” by Andrea Hale examines Wall Street’s “narrative of progress” and identifies whom it addresses and whom it excludes.

In this issue, we also highlight the work of three senior anthropology majors who wrote op-eds bringing an anthropological perspective to contemporary debates on race. Our first, written by Elon Hailu, asks the question, “What About Black Women?” to draw attention to the absence of black women in conversations of police brutality in the United States. Our next op-ed, written by Kyra Vargas, explores the role of both white bystanders and white participants in racial debates. Finally, our journal concludes with Sarah Moore’s “Anthropological Reflections on Social Media Responses to Ferguson” which strives to challenge the way we engage with people online because of their race.

The articles in this journal are only a glimpse into the ways in which anthropology deals with conversations of race, identity, inclusion and exclusion. Nevertheless, we hope you get a better understanding of how anthropology interacts with these complicated issues and that you are one step closer to understanding what anthropology truly is. Above all, we hope you enjoy the journal and read future issues.

Sincerely, The Contexts Editorial Team

Josee

Julia

Nicole

Trent

Anthropology and Spanish Minor ‘15

Anthropology and Creative Writing Minor ‘15

Anthropology and Spanish Minor ‘15

Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity ‘16

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Looking for the Realest Bitch: Brooke Candy, Genre, and Cultural Appropriation

by Emma Joslyn Introduction Brooke Candy’s knee-length pink braids, metal body suit, and long press-on nails first appeared in electronic artist Grimes’ 2012 music video for “Genesis” in which the ethereal, feminine timbre of Grimes’ voice stands in stark contrast to Candy’s hard, hip hop dance moves.1 I, however, first came across Candy’s work after friend’s recommendation based on my interest in the White Girl Mob2, a now disbanded trio of self-identified white women from the California Bay Area who worked collaboratively on hip hop and rap projects.3 Already, these two connections highlight Candy’s ability to garner pop and hip hop connections, but this dual identity is more complex than these examples suggest. Candy’s identity as a white woman who raps and her public journey to enter into the mainstream not only make her difficult to categorize but also challenge existing categories all together. Somehow, Brooke Candy’s work is offensive and appropriative while also being popular and palatable.

Brooke Candy made her debut as a solo artist with her 2012 song “Das Me,” which she describes as part of her greater “mission statement” as an artist.4 Her appropriation of black linguistics is apparent immediately from the song’s title, which employs the consonant reduction (from “that’s” to “das”) that is characteristic of African American Vernacular English (AAVE)5. Similar speech elements run throughout the song (“with” to “wit”, “ain’t”, etc.). At the same time, however, Candy mixes AAVE with slang associated with white American culture, performing simultaneously her own race and the race of the musicians she imitates. As she sings, “All the dudes wiggle your dicks for Brooke Candy, and the hoes jiggle your tits 1 Grimes. “Genesis.” Directed by Claire Boucher. 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FH-q0I1fJY 2 Artists Kreayshawn, Lil Debbie, and V-Nasty.

3 Kreayshawn expresses in a radio interview that she is resistant to being labeled a “white rapper”. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=96ksY0Q-YyE Her album is in the iTunes store under “Pop, Music, Rock, Hip-Hop/Rap, Underground Rap, Alternative Rap, Rap,” while Candy’s appears under “Hip-Hop/Rap” exclusively (June 2014).

4 Meyers, Owen. “Video Premiere: Brooke Candy “Das Me”” Dazed. N.p., 2013. Web. 1 May 2014.

5 Rickford, John R., Guy Bailey, and John Baugh. African-American English: Structure, History, and Use. Ed. Salikoko S. Mufwene. London: Routledge, 1998. Print. Page 86.

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for Brooke Candy,” a discernable conflict in the racialization of her lyrics emerges. While referring to women as “hoes” has been a part of hip hop artists’ repertoires all along, calling men “dudes” is more a reference to southern California surfer culture than anything else. It is far more common for hip hop artists to refer to men as “niggas,” so perhaps in this lyric Candy reveals her whiteness through her inability to reclaim a highly contested racialized term. Regardless of the explanation for this lyrical decision, however, these contrasting linguistic elements indicate Candy’s whiteness. Her imitation of blackness through her appropriation of a black musical style is limited by her own identity and political position as a white person.

Her first hit, “Das Me” Lyrically, the focus of the song is on Candy’s identity as a woman, which implicates a long history of women in hip hop, both as subjects of the music and as its creators. In her analysis of female hip hop artists, lawyer and historian Imani Perry describes the tendency for these artists to occupy the traditionally male-coded “badman” role by presenting themselves as violent, angry, destructive, and unstable.6 Candy’s lyrics and out-of-control vocals play into Perry’s description of the “flip the script” tendency, as she raps, “I could kill a bitch/ man, I’m so fucking crazy/ got a gun to you dome/ foaming mouth rabies” and “A dude could fuck three bitches and they’d say that he’s the man/ but I get it in with twins/ she’s a whore/ that’s what they’re sayin.’”7 Perry describes four main results of black women’s “badman mimicry”8 that Brooke Candy appropriates. First, the female violence asserts black women’s roles in hip hop’s aim to employ black nationalism to protect the hood from “white capitalist interlopers, the sellouts, and the culture thieves,” like Brooke Candy, who just signed to a major record label and openly aspires to mainstream success.9 Secondly, it gives women the option of committing violence rather than playing victim to it, a subversion that Candy’s gender allows, despite her whiteness. Thirdly, badman mimicry 6 Perry, Imani. “The Venus Hip Hop and the Pink Ghetto: Negotiating Spaces for Women,” Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, Duke University Press, 2004: 155-190.

7 Candy, Brooke. “Das Me.” Directed by Matthew Bowman and Brooke Candy. 2012. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dHULK1M-P08 8 Perry, Page 164.

9 Later in this text, I will explicitly address Candy’s crossover to Pop.

“affords a space for rage and frustration in the black female She reduces the social history and racial aspect of rap into a experience, realities often imagined as male in the black comsellable piece of media. munity.” While I would argue that white women, too, have Musically, everything about “Das Me” is thin, from been historically denied their right to anger and outrage, the the high pitch of Candy’s vocals to the simplicity and repetease with which Candy appropriates this culture serves as a itiveness of the beat. Candy’s voice has a nasal quality that kind of meta example of the ways in which white women have is distinctly feminine, even distinctly white - a sound which historically denied black women’s experiences from within the combines with her employment of AAVE to create a relatively feminist movement. Fourthly, black women’s use of violent unfamiliar vocality. The musical accompaniment is a disjointimagery creates a space in which black women can appear ed combination of many notable elements of hip hop music. unstable and insane, qualities for which black women’s hisThere is a constant bass line, a faux-clapping percussion sound torical roles as caretakers did not allow.10 In this case, Candy’s to punctuate her rhymes, an air horn effect to accompany the employment of violence and insanity speaks to the historical chorus, and an ominous sounding repetitive minor melody labeling of white women as irrational and crazy by nature. that almost recalls Jay-Z’s 2011“Niggas in Paris.”14 The layers Perhaps the only poignant aspect of “Das Me” is are each simple, and they enter unsurprisingly on the downCandy’s gendered rebellion against the respectability politics beat of every four-bar phrase. Further, Candy’s rapping is far that Tricia Rose describes in from virtuosic. Her flow her book The Hip Hop Wars, is simplistic, her phrasing which seeks to describe in consistently falls on an undetail the debate around changing downbeat, and race and gender in hip hop. the speed of her delivery is Rose describes the ways in unimpressive. The video for which political leaders, black the song adds a new layer and white, have demonized to its relationship to the hip hip hop as a return to “a hop genre, highlighting the long-ago barbaric stage of ways in which it attempts to pre-civilization”11 through its embody hip hop but fails to degradation of women. As do so completely.

Candy raps, “’slut’ is now a The video for “Das compliment,”12 she explicitly Me” opens with Candy reclaims promiscuity and restanding in front of a Bulgari sists the patriarchal critics of advertisement on Rodeo hip hop who urge artists to Drive, camouflaged within a protect women and preserve Brooke Candy Tix, source: flickr.com, author: turistalibre (CC BY-NC-SA display of opulent gold and their respectability. Candy’s 2.0) Original image was modified to exclude concert information. jewels by her gold metallic place in this resistance is https://www.flickr.com/photos/turistalibre/8118296612/in/photolistbody suit15. As Candy emergf1Ecpd-f1Ecmf-f1pTpH-a9PHcP-dnooKf. more apt than her other enes from the ad, the visuals gagements with hip hop cultransition into a fast-paced ture because she is making a statement against her own white montage of several different scenes, one of the more lasting American culture and the role it has played in the vilification of of which is Candy and her “crew” in front of a pink Cadillac hip hop culture. Brooke Candy’s use of badman mimicry maps in a suburban neighborhood. In Black Noise: Rap Music and onto her identity as a female artist in some ways; however, it Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose explains, also exposes her as a member of the racially oppressive pop“Nothing is more central to rap’s music video narratives than ulation against which black female hip hop artists have fought situating the rapper in his or her milieu and among one’s crew for decades. She stands exposed as an arbiter of “the new or posse,”16 an element of the rap aesthetic that Candy overtly color-blind racism,” which, as Charles Gallagher explains, does employs in this scene. Rose describes this visual representanot ignore race, but rather “acknowledges race while ignoring tion of rappers’ identity as having “brought the ghetto back racial hierarchy by taking racially coded styles and products into the public consciousness”17 by allowing artists from comand reducing these symbols to commodities or experiences munities that otherwise go unheard to speak for themselves. which whites and racial minorities can purchase and share.”13 Clearly, when Candy chooses to employ this aesthetic element of hip hop, the results are different. As a white woman who grew up in LA, an image of her white friends in a suburban 10 Ibid. Pages 163-165.

11 Rose, Tricia. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About 14 Kanye West and Jay-Z. “Niggas in Paris.” Def Jam. 2011.

When We Talk About Hip Hop – And Why It Matters, Basic 15 “Das Me.” Books, 2008. Page 117.

16 Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture 12 “Das Me.” in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: U of New England, 13 Gallagher, Charles A. Color-Blind Privilege: The Social 1994. Print. Page 10. and Political Functions of Erasing the Color Line in Post-Race 17 Ibid. Page 11.

America. Page 578.

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neighborhood does little to awaken the public consciousness to systematic injustice. In her attempt to appropriate aspects of black hip hop culture, Candy reveals her power and privilege through her incongruence with the race politics of the genre.

In other moments in the video, Candy appears in an apparently low-income area surrounded by young people of color. A young black woman pushes Candy down the sidewalk in a gold wheelchair, passing barbed-wire-topped fences and graffitied walls, and a group of youth follows closely behind.

This image speaks volumes to the race implications of Candy’s work. First of all, the young black woman who pushes Candy’s wheelchair brings to mind immediately the history of black women as servants to and domestic workers for white women. Secondly, Candy’s white friends are nowhere to be found in this scene, and the young black youth that replace them appear aesthetically out of place in the video. They appear to be a group of young people that Candy encountered when she began filming in the neighborhood, and their voices are muted throughout the video. In an attempt to prove that she belongs in hip hop, Candy inserts herself in the type of neighborhood that hip hop serves to liberate. Despite the chorus’s repetitive claim that she is the “realest bitch,”18 Candy’s employment of black bodies as props to build her credibility backfires, revealing her cultural appropriation and insensitivity. As a result, this attempt at authenticity demonstrates Candy’s complicity in the very oppression that hip hop fights against.

Others of Candy’s songs since her debut have embodied a similar position within hip hop. “Don’t Touch My Hair Hoe” appropriates an aspect of black female culture explicitly. Using words like “hoe” and “weave,” Candy attempts to position herself within hip hop culture by imitating black femininity and language. The instrumental includes the same faux-clapping effect with a more upbeat bass line as well as a distinctly male chorus of “hey” and “ho” that recalls early hip hop groups like Naughty By Nature and N.W.A. “I Wanna Fuck Right Now” also features this male chorus and the word “dude,” and she even draws a comparison between herself and iconic black musician Rick James.19 In her article about Amy Winehouse’s “racial mimicry,” Daphne Brooks concludes that Winehouse’s work “mediates and transmits conflicting ideas about racialized and gendered subjectivities by at once both sounding racial formations and covering (over) their historical densities.”20 Candy’s rapping and appropriation of black culture have the same effect – they recall particular identities that suggest the role that Candy plays within a socio-historical context without her fully acknowledging them.

Difficulty of Categorizing Candy’s Work Critics and consumers interpret these contradictions in Candy’s work in a variety of ways, demonstrating the ways 18 “Das Me”.

19 All songs above can be found on the artist’s Sound Cloud page, https://soundcloud.com/brooke-candy 20 Brooks, Daphne. “‘This Voice Which Is Not One’: Amy Winehouse Sings the Ballad of Sonic Blue(s)face Culture,” Women & Performance 20/1 (2010): 37-60. Page 50.

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in which Candy’s ambiguity challenges the discrete categories on which the music industry and society as a whole operate.

Her reception paints her as both a rapper and a pop star, mirroring Candy’s own mixed messaging and convoluted genre. In July 2013, Clash Music published an article titled “Brooke Candy Goes Pop: The rapper’s frank pillow talk…”21 In one breath, Amelia Abraham names Brooke Candy’s ability to traverse pop and hip hop genres in journalists’ reflections on her work. In Christopher Glazek’s article “The Rise of the Rapping, Stripping, Snake-Charming Brooke Candy,” Candy is a rapper in the headline and a “pop star” in the body of the piece. A New York Magazine article about Candy’s rising popularity titled “Brooke Candy in V: ‘Infiltrating’ Pop ‘From the Inside’”22 places Candy in the pop world, while a Paper Magazine article from only two months earlier introduces her as “Rap’s new ‘Freaky Princess.’”23 While music journalists rarely offer explanations for their categorizations of Candy, a telling feature of these articles is the artists to whom they compare Candy. An article in music blog MuuMuse opens by comparing Brooke Candy’s scandalous performances to Miley Cyrus’s twerking and then goes on to describe her sound as “somewhere in between Lil Kim, Peaches, Ke$ha and Die Antwoord.”24 A piece in New York Magazine’s Vulture blog throws in some more names – Christina Aguilera, Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Azealia Banks, Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga.25 Some of these artists rap, some of them are known for their outlandish fashion tastes, but all of them are women. These seemingly incongruous comparisons and categorizations raise a number of questions about the factors that account for journalists’ contextualization of artists like Brooke Candy. Is she competing with other women musicians? Is she competing with other rappers?

Brooke Candy’s fans (and haters) cannot seem to offer any clarity on this issue of categorization. In one fan’s Tumblr post, Candy appears in a photo collage alongside Grimes, Lana Del Rey, Lady Gaga, and Crystal Castles.26 She appears on another fan’s Tumblr alongside images of the club-kid cul21 Abraham, Amelia. “Brooke Candy Goes Pop.” Clash Magazine. N.p., 24 July 2013. Web. 20 May 2014. <http://www. clashmusic.com/features/brooke-candy-goes-pop>.

22 Hyland, Véronique. “Brooke Candy in V: ‘Infiltrating’ Pop ‘From the Inside’” New York Magazine: The Cut. N.p., 23 May 2014. Web. 24 May 2014. <http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/05/brooke-candy-in-v-infiltrating-pop.html>.

23 Sia. “Sia Introduces You to Rap’s New ‘Freaky Princess,’ Brooke Candy.” Paper Magazine. N.p., 25 Mar. 2014. Web. 22 May 2014. <http://www.papermag.com/2014/03/brooke_ candy_sia_beautiful_people.php>.

24 Stern, Bradley. “Controversial Candy: Getting “Dumb” With Brooke Candy.” MuuMuse. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 May 2014. <http://www.muumuse.com/2013/07/controversial-candy-brooke-candy-gets-dumb.html/>.

25 Glazek, Christopher. “The Rise of the Rapping, Stripping, Snake-Charming Brooke Candy.” Vulture. New York Magazine, 17 Mar. 2013. Web. 24 May 2014. <http://www.vulture. com/2013/03/brooke-candys-new-business-model.html>.

26 29 April 2014. http://iwannabewithyoouu.tumblr.com/ post/84280005150

ture that emerged in New York City during the 1980s,27 and another user broadcasts a video of Candy as a friend of Prom Queen, two contemporary arbiters of the club-kid aesthetic.

Yet another fan starts a forum inquiring about Candy’s relationship with New York-based black woman rapper, Azealia Banks.28 From the posts on Tumblr – a site on which Candy has an active account containing an archive of her posts beginning in October 200829 - I perceive the vitality of Candy’s visual style and personal message as the main determinant of her genre. Grimes, Crystal Castles, and Lady Gaga are all white women who have or have had colorful hair and who dabble in experimental fashion. Club kid culture, which was born in New York but spread to other cities like Candy’s hometown of Los Angeles in the early 90s, is characterized by its embrace of queerness, extravagant and colorful costumes, and rejection of social norms through criminal behavior and rampant drug use – all characteristics of Brooke Candy’s persona. The conversation around Candy’s relationship with Azealia Banks demonstrates the role of Candy’s gender and genre in fans’ perceptions of her work. In these examples, Candy’s visual presentation and musical sound seem to become discrete and directly conflicting traits that a variety of fans enjoy. Further, her message of equality and freedom encourages young people’s extreme loyalty to the fag mob (how she describes her loyal fans), leading some to curate blogs dedicated to pictures of Candy as a child,30 others to make extreme statements like “I found out that someone I know listens to Brooke Candy. The world is finally changing for the better,”31 and still others to praise a 58 second long self-congratulatory free-style “powerful.”32 Candy’s visuals draw them in, but her message is what recruits card-carrying members of the fag mob. It is also what grants her access to the popular music industry.

Advocate of Equality?

fails to mention Candy’s identity as a rapper.33 “Das Me,” of course, embodies this platform.

Amelia Abraham, whose journalism tends to glorify the female artists she interviews, not only categorizes Candy as both pop and hip hop, but she refines Candy’s genre, calling it a “nasty-ass brand of feminist rap” and Candy “the most insurgent and important feminist voice in music of the moment, ” directly echoing Candy’s self-proclaimed message.34 Recalling Lady Gaga’s adamant support for the gay rights and anti-bullying movements, and perhaps explaining common comparisons of Candy to Gaga, Candy criticizes artists who do not use their visibility to advocate for social change. In New York Magazine, Véronique Hyland quotes V Magazine’s interview with Candy in which the artist argues, So many artists have the platform I’m working toward and they speak for nothing. If you have that power, you have a responsibility to stand for something. I stand for equality. I have been kicked out of my home for being gay. I felt that. I lived that. I want to speak out on things that I have had to deal with that have crushed me. I want to empower people and make a different. So I’m infiltrating from the inside. You make a proper pop song to infiltrate mass minds and then you push your agenda.35 Evidently, Candy not only sees herself as an artist activist but hopes to reach a broad audience with her message. She portrays her attempted “reclamation” of the words “slut” and “faggot” as a political move to empower young people36, giving her highly sexualized and controversial image the ability to break into the popular sphere due to its apparently well-intentioned message of tolerance.

Appropriation of Black Culture

Recently, Candy officially declared her deliberate and calculated entry into the mainstream. Iconic pop musician and writer Sia partnered with Candy in the writing and recording of her debut major-label record, and Candy explicitly describes their collaboration as an effort to break into pop. When one interviewer asked Candy why she is so openly trying to position herself within the mainstream, the artist explained, “I have a message that I’m trying to spread. You can be an independent or alternative artist, but really at the end of the day you’re just playing your guitar for yourself. To me, it’s not about money, it’s about the platform.” Shockingly, the journalist completely

Candy has not fully succeeded in marketing herself as an advocate of equality, however, which brings me to the element of Candy’s work that first caught my attention – her appropriation of black culture. A few blogs I came across served to further explain Candy’s cross-genre association with artists like Miley Cyrus and Ke$ha, who produce work that plays on popular music radio stations regularly. One post, entitled “White Girls That Ain’t Shit,” outlines the ways in which Cyrus, Candy, Ke$ha, Dita Von Teese, Lana Del Rey, and Gwen Stefani “are appropriating and profiting off of Black/ PoC cul-

27 http://clubkidandcollectives.tumblr.com/ 28 Josh. 13 March 2013. http://atrl.net/forums/showthread. php?p=14235404#14235404 29 http://bloodyguts.tumblr.com/ 30 http://kanankids.tumblr.com/ 31 http://abra-hamsandwich.tumblr.com/ post/86080019882/i-found-out-that-someone-i-know-listensto-brooke 32 http://littlekittenbitch.tumblr.com/post/83490642030/ this-is-so-powerful

33 Barna, Ben. “Introducing Brooke Candy, Pop’s Next Superstar.” T Magazine. The New York Times, 30 May 2014. Web. 7 June 2014. <http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes. com/2014/05/30/introducing-brooke-candy-pops-next-superstar/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0>.

34 Amelia Abraham. “Brooke Candy Goes Pop.” 35 Véronique Hyland. “Brooke Candy in V: ‘Infiltrating’ Pop ‘From the Inside’”.

36 “The People Vs Brooke Candy: Reclaiming The Word ‘Slut’ and Giving Zero Fucks”. Noisey. 8 March 2013. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPgzCbtEt6w CONTEXTS 2015

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ture”37. In a post from the blog CypherLeague, one blogger describes their transition from fan to critic, explaining, “Initially, I thought Brooke Candy’s identity to be edgy -- existing outside of mainstream consciousness -- so she appealed to my radical side. But then, as I began questioning what about her made her seem so crazy, some unsettling social and historical context dawned on me: the colored box braids, long nails, and her use of ebonics are symbols of ‘ratchetness’ ascribed to black women”38 If it is true that any press is good press, Candy’s ability to garner recognition from fans and journalists for her feminism and gay rights activism combined with criticism for her appropriation of black culture gets her on lists with some of the most popular artists of this moment while allowing her to maintain her identity as a rapper. There would likely be more of this kind of criticism of Candy if hip hop spoke more about her at all. Candy is largely unacknowledged by the hip hop industry, and whether this silence is a result of the apparent simplicity of her music, her whiteness, or her representation of the sell-out culture thief that Perry demonizes, her critics and supporters are mostly pop.

Brooke Candy is a walking contradiction, but she is a popular one. She refuses to speak to the apparent racial aspect of her performance, opting instead for a progressive message of gender equality and sexual freedom. In an April interview, journalist Ingrid Kesa asked Candy, “Being female and white puts you in the minority in rap. Do people in the industry have preconceived notions about you or not take you seriously because of this?” Candy responded by glorifying her position, explaining, “I have to work ten times harder than someone who immediately springs to mind when you hear the word ‘rapper’, but the reward is much greater... Fuck yo’ prejudice!”39 While this interview predates Candy’s debut “pop” album, it demonstrates the ways in which Candy embodies Jason Rodriguez’s claim that “the mass marketing of racially coded cultural symbols such as hip-hop allows whites to experience a felt similarity with communities of color.”40 Candy claims takes ownership of an identity as a minority in the industry, despite her access to some of its hardest hitters. Without her whiteness, Candy would not have had access to Sia, who has partnered with her to cultivate Candy’s mainstream recognition. Brooke Candy is racially privileged, making her position within a genre characterized by its resistance to racial oppression suspect. Woods asserts, “Many rap listeners are white, middle-class suburbanites, and many are also female,”41 and Brooke Candy demon37 “White Girls That Ain’t Shit.”18 August 2013. http:// irresistible-revolution.tumblr.com/post/58626602947/whitegirls-that-aint-shit 38 Fredburger, Fred. “Das Not You, Brooke Candy.” Cypher League. http://cypherleague.com/das-not-you-brooke-candy 39 Kesa, Ingrid. “Oyster Interview: Brooke Candy.” Oyster.

N.p., 6 Apr. 2013. Web. 7 June 2014. <http://www.oystermag. com/oyster-interview-brooke-candy>.

40 Rodriquez, Jason. “Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35.6 (2006): 645-68. Web. Page 649.

41 Woods, Alyssa S. Rap Vocality and the Construction of Identity. Diss. The U of Michigan, 2009. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

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strates what can happen when this generation of color-blind racists find hip hop and call it their own.

Works Cited 29 April 2014. <http://iwannabewithyoouu.tumblr.com/ post/84280005150abra-hamsandwich.tumblr.com/ post/86080019882/i-found-out-that-someone-iknow-listens-to-brooke Barna, Ben. “Introducing Brooke Candy, Pop’s Next Superstar.” T Magazine. The New York Times, 30 May 2014. Web. 7 June 2014. <http://tmagazine.blogs. nytimes.com/2014/05/30/introducing-brooke-candy-pops-next-superstar/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_ r=0>.bloodyguts.tumblr.com Candy, Brooke. “Das Me.” Directed by Matthew Bowman and Brooke Candy. 2012. <https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=dHULK1M-P08clubkidandcollectives. tumblr.com> Gallagher, Charles A. Color-Blind Privilege: The Social and Political Functions of Erasing the Color Line in Post-Race America.

Fredburger, Fred. “Das Not You, Brooke Candy.” Cypher League. http://cypherleague.com/das-not-you-brooke-candy Glazek, Christopher. “The Rise of the Rapping, Stripping, Snake-Charming Brooke Candy.” Vulture. New York Magazine, 17 Mar. 2013. Web. 24 May 2014. <http://www.vulture.com/2013/03/brooke-candys-new-business-model.html>.

Grimes. “Genesis.” Directed by Claire Boucher. 2012. <https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FH-q0I1fJY> Hyland, Véronique. “Brooke Candy in V: ‘Infiltrating’ Pop ‘From the Inside’” New York Magazine: The Cut. N.p., 23 May 2014. Web. 24 May 2014. <http://nymag.com/ thecut/2014/05/brooke-candy-in-v-infiltrating-pop. html>.

Josh. 13 March 2013. <http://atrl.net/forums/showthread. php?p=14235404#14235404> kanankids.tumblr.com Kanye West and Jay-Z. “Niggas in Paris.” Def Jam. 2011.

Kesa, Ingrid. “Oyster Interview: Brooke Candy.” Oyster. N.p., 6 Apr. 2013. Web. 7 June 2014. <http://www.oystermag.com/oyster-interview-brooke-candy>.

littlekittenbitch.tumblr.com/post/83490642030/thisis-so-powerful Meyers, Owen. “Video Premiere: Brooke Candy “Das Me”” Dazed. N.p., 2013. Web. 1 May 2014.

Rickford, John R., Guy Bailey, and John Baugh. African-American English: Structure, History, and Use. Ed. Salikoko S. Mufwene. London: Routledge, 1998. Print.

“The People Vs Brooke Candy: Reclaiming The Word ‘Slut’ and Giving Zero Fucks”. Noisey. 8 March 2013. <https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPgzCbtEt6w> Perry, Imani. “The Venus Hip Hop and the Pink Ghetto: Negotiating Spaces for Women,” Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, Duke University Press, 2004: 155-190.

Rodriquez, Jason. “Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Ap[Continued on page 36]

Environmental Education for Galapagueños: Accessibility through Collaboration

by Amelia G. Farber The Galápagos Islands are known as a natural laboratory, renowned for iconic flora and fauna that attract hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Fewer know that four of the main islands have fast-developing towns or cities.

The majority of research in Galápagos is produced in the scientific realm, which often does not include residents as part of the island socio-ecosystems (White, personal communication, 2014). As a result, there are few development initiatives aimed at local communities in Galápagos. One of the arguably most important current social issues in the islands is education for local students, due to many resources from the ministry of education not available to Galápagos schools, and restrictive administrative policies enacted from the federal level. In particular, there is a remarkable lack of environmental education (EE) in schools despite the fact that there are outside environmentally-based organizations offering informal EE, which could provide opportunities for local students.

Environmental education for students is both relevant and necessary in schools for promoting conservation, which is itself a social goal of the islands based on an eco-tourism economy (White, personal communication, 2014; Delgado, personal communication, 2014). Formal education (education which takes place within the confines of a classroom) does not have the resources or curriculum to teach environmental education (Martinez, personal communication, 2014). Examples of this include: books and curriculum guides not being successfully delivered to Galápagos schools from the Ministry of Education, and poor internet and electricity capabilities in school facilities. Contrastingly, informal education, defined as “the sum of activities that comprise the time individuals are not in the formal classroom in the presence of a teacher” (Eshach, 2006) presented through environmentally-based governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have resources to support schools to produce collaborative environmental education programs. Because informal EE offers activities like visiting nature sites, fieldtrips, and science projects, it would fill a void in formal EE in schools.

This paper proposes, then, that to improve environmental education for local students of Galápagos, students must be given both formal and informal EE. This stemmed originally from conversations with local naturalist guides on a first trip to Galápagos, where I first heard that students on the islands did not receive nearly as much environmental education as tourists visiting the islands.

Currently, students in Galápagos have poor access to environmental education both through federally funded school systems and lack of outreach by conservation organizations. This contributes significantly to slow change in

environmental awareness and policies (Delgado, personal communication, 2014). Science curriculum in schools on the islands does not contain emphasis on evolution (Ministerio de Educación, 2011), and as such, conservation awareness is superficial without sufficient knowledge of the importance of relationships between humans and flora and fauna (Trombulak, 2004). The areas in which science and EE curriculum could be augmented or established are the points at which informal education provides valuable resources.

Connecting the scientific knowledge produced by the organizational world on the Galápagos to the actual student knowledge on the ground is important for understanding how conservation awareness and policies can proceed consistently or exponentially in the future. There seems to be an apparent disconnect between the education of local students in the islands and larger academic research on the islands , which is often in league with the international conservation organizations who are the primary face of Galápagos to those outside of Ecuador. Investigating this disconnect and the level of environmental education and awareness of students will mitigate the possible conflict between both worlds and produce streamlined and effective approaches to conservation.

This article will examine the formal education system to analyze opportunities for informal education collaboration.

I will draw upon recently conducted research, as well as Ecuador’s federal science curriculum, and qualitative insights from journalists and researchers. Most of this research was produced outside of the Galápagos and Ecuador, due to a lack of research on the topic of environmental education conducted in Ecuador. Examples, then, from other science and EE curriculums and collaboration with outside groups will be given.

Sources from the islands or Ecuador are included when existent, especially in terms of new science curriculum, and reports by organizations on the islands. Interviews conducted by the researcher will also be used. These interviews 1 were part of a large-scale anthropological research project conducted by the author over the span of nine weeks in the islands of Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal, and Isabela.

Environmental Education Framework and Background For the purpose of this paper, the following definition and ideas of environmental education are presented. As the NAAEE (North American Association for Environmental Educators) states, “at no other time in Earth’s history have humans 1 Pseudonyms are used throughout CONTEXTS 2015

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had as great an impact on the planet’s systems,” (Hollweg, scientists and economists,” (De Roy, 2009). Now though, hu2011). This is apparent in Galápagos. Any researcher would mans have been included in the idea of Galápagos as a labobe hard pressed to find a resident on the islands who was not ratory, as “Galápagos has become an important prospective keenly aware of conservation efforts and the direct affect they source for lessons to be learned in conflict management, as residents have on the islands. But, as NAAEE also reminds, and could potentially acquire even greater importance in the “it is clear that only an environmentally literate public will be development of sustainable models for the world,” (De Roy, able to find workable, evidence-based solutions for these chal2009). Increase in human population in Galápagos over the lenges” (Hollweg et al., 2011). Environmental literacy is not past half-century, due to economic opportunities in harvesting currently a term used in the Galápagos, primarily due to lack marine resources and starting of knowledge of the term, but tourism industries, more attenalso due to the connotation of tion is now paid to the people literacy in Spanish. In Spanish, as on the islands. This has led to directors of schools in Galápagos interest in social institutions in insisted, literacy strictly means the islands; although, education ability to read and write, and a has not received attention. Eduphrase stating that students have cation of students on the islands low environmental literacy could is mentioned in many recent be construed as poor teaching of publications about Galápagos, language and writing instead of but judgments made by outside poor knowledge of the environvoices about the school systems ment (Almonte, personal commumay be detrimental to progress nication, 2014, Dohman, personal in schools (Bassett, 2009; De communication, 2014). While enRoy, 2009).

A highland school outdoor gymnasium vironmental literacy is not a term While it is pertinent used on the islands the definition, to recognize the dire situadescribed below, when presented by the author to schools tion of conservation in Galápagos, it is often presented in a and organizations was agreed upon as an important and inteway that demeans locals and demands unwarranted change gral part of environmental education. The definition is one put of residents of the islands. Conservationist, Stewart, author forth by the NAAEE and states that an environmentally literate of Galápagos: The Islands that Changed the World, and othperson possesses: er international contributors “the knowledge and unto the Galápagos conservation derstanding of a wide range of enquestion, often write about the vironmental concepts, problems, local reality as an after-thought, and issues; a set of cognitive and stating ultimatums that the affective dispositions; a set of communities must do to save cognitive skills and abilities; and the Enchanted Isles. These dethe appropriate behavioral stratefinitive presumptions by outgies to apply such knowledge and side sources are the causes for understanding in order to make halting progress in conservation sound and effective decisions in a within residential communities range of environmental concepts” in Galápagos, as they create re(Hollweg et al., 2011). sentment between both parties As Farmer, an education instead of creating constructive researcher, describes, “the definand respectful dialogue (White, Arriving on Baltra Island itive aim of environmental edupersonal communication, 2014). cators is to change individual beThe Galápagos National Park is havior toward the environment by producing environmentally keenly aware of these conflicts and their programs attempt literate and responsible citizens” (Farmer, 2010). to mitigate resentment between those groups (Torres, personal communication, 2014). International involvement in discourse about actions for conservation must therefore be Context of Environmental Education in Galápagos tactful and cognizant that residents are active participants in Galápagos societies are relatively new, as people did ongoing discussions and often are initiating grassroots efforts not begin living on the islands only until the last century. As and trying to engage on larger scales (White, Personal commusuch, have not been given much attention from the internanication, 2014). tional community in research. Because societies are recent With this in mind, it is necessary to present ideas developments on the islands, bodies of research on human and not ultimatums for progressive steps in conservation. Resubjects is sparse in Galápagos. Galápagos photographer, De search and suggestions for EE or conservation should be temRoy, notes that “until recently [the islands] attracted attention pered with a reasonable understanding of the constructs and from only a comparative smattering of anthropologists, social

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realities that exist when living as a resident of Galápagos, taking into account that ultimatums on residents to enact drastic changes are unrealistic and create undue pressures on residents balancing livelihood needs with conservation efforts.

of Ecuadorian society,” pointing at the Ministry of Education and its slow and disorganized progress in improving and making the system more rigorous/comprehensive (Bassett, 2009).

Jack Nelson, owner of a hotel on Santa Cruz Island, argues that the “very weak educational system in Ecuador” is reflected by the rampant belief in creationism on the islands, which is augCurrent State of Formal and Informal mented by the pairing of evolution and creationism as equals Environmental Education in Galápagos in natural science curriculum. Ecuadorian President, Correa, As will be covered further, environmental education supports the federal inclusion of core educational standards in Galápagos is not taught in a stand-alone EE course, and thus that include environmental education for all grades. With this is only taught in bullet points in science courses. Based on unique addition to the national education system, in reality interviews with school directors on three islands, EE curricuit shows very little in actual classroom curriculum and activlum and experiential EE through fieldtrips are needed more ities. While fundamentally, the national education system in schools or are non-existent. The lack of EE is a problem bedoes have flaws, it is unproductive to critique these failings cause it causes deep rifts between people and environment during the implementation of new education reforms atand perpetuates exploitation and degradation. Galápagos tempting to fix those very issues. Instead, with a proposal for naturalist guide Patricia collaboration between Stucki describes EE as resource-heavy or“a few drops on a hot ganizations and rerock; they just evaposource-lacking schools, rate. It helps to plant a environmental educacertain consciousness tion can gain a boost, in people’s minds, to rooted in local involvegive them reasons to be ment and connection proud to live here,” but between informal and then laments that “eduformal EE. cation is so basic that it’s Galápagos hard to open people to schools also have the the environment,” (Basopportunity to see sett, 2009). Points such unique and highly speas these are integral to cialized examples of flothe EE conversation, as ra and fauna that clearresearchers and orgaly present easy tools nizations must exercise for teaching evolution. caution when judging Based on research and Elementary school on Isabela Island schools on the islands publications of many that have to operate under problematic federal education polenvironmental education organizations, evolution is an inteicies. However, there is something to be gained from analyzgral concept to fully understand in order to effect change in ing the weaknesses in the schools and creating collaborative behavior and beliefs towards conservation. The “Society of efforts to augment curriculum and provide opportunities withConservation Biology (SCB) stated goals and objectives include in class that schools cannot offer. Felipe Cruz, former director “the education, at all levels, preparatory and continuing, of of the CDF and of Project Isabela, stated that “we should be the public, of biologists, and of managers in the principles of teaching about Darwin and establishing an educational system conservation biology,” (Trombulak, 2004). that is more according to the reality of Galápagos” (Bassett, These evolutionary concepts are stated as important 2009). for conveying the impact of humans on their environment, as As a consequence of these perceptions around the all “organisms can be grouped by degree of evolutionary renecessity of better EE, within the latest stage of education relatedness to one another” (Trombulak, 2004). Simply learnforms in Ecuador, a newer curriculum was designed specificaling about “ecological hierarchy: the components of nature ly for Galápagos with units in the natural sciences dedicated are grouped together in sets of nested and interacting levels to teaching Galápagos ecosystems. This development, once of organization, ranging from very small (genes) to very large implemented and put into effect, would answer the worries of (ecosystems and landscapes)” (Trombulak, 2004) can provide many science teachers in both primary and secondary schools contextual knowledge for students about their environment, on the islands. However, many directors pointed out that they especially one as tangible and accessible as an island in the still don’t have this curriculum or any terms for teaching enGalápagos. Scientifically, in classes of natural sciences, provvironmental education (Almonte, personal communication, ing that “all organisms are related to one another” (Trombulak, 2014; Martinez, personal communication, 2014).

2004) creates an impactful lesson for students and provides a Washington Tápia, of the Galápagos National Park arpersonal connection to the flora and fauna they see every day. gues that the failure of the educational system “is a reflection Organizations in Galápagos, such as WWF and the

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Charles Darwin Research Station, in Galápagos hail these prinimportant (Martinez, personal communication, 2014; García, ciples. An intersection of informal and formal environmental personal communication, 2014); however, directors explained education would fulfill these principles. This would create “an that resources and time restrictions, as well as administrative understanding of the important components of nature that blocks on outside organizations, culminated in a glaring abshould be conserved is based on an understanding of many key sence of experiential learning and fieldtrips in schools now. biological concepts, including those within taxonomy, ecology, One director stated that the education sector simply does not genetics, geography, and evolutionary biology” (Trombulak, have the resources for fieldtrips, transportation, research, or 2004). These topics are often not feasibly taught in schools on just materials that they would need on those fieldtrips (Althe islands due to lack of teacher professional development in monte, personal communication, 2014). When Brewer states those fields, as part of a transversal environmental education that we need to “overcome the institutional barriers that limcurriculum. As one director stated, the schools are missing it our participation in promoting ecological literacy” (Brewer, professional development for teachers to teach concepts of 2002) it doesn’t ring more true for the schools on Galápagos. environmental education in every subject, but also in natural Unfortunately, these administrative issues are not a quick fix sciences, and that it is necessary for such environmental edbased on requests from school directors due to the hierarucation to be transversal (Almonte, personal communication, chical structure of the education system with strict levels of 2014). administration that often Additionally, curpins teachers in and creates rent natural science curricutension between district lum presents evolution not or federal level education as a concrete science conadministrations, and local cept, but as a possible cause schools. With informal EE for the origin of life equally organizations, programs and alongside creationism. As community outreach is plenschools in Ecuador are closety, but work with students in ly linked with the Catholic schools is low to nonexischurch (Ministerio de Edutent. The National Park has cación, 2007), this presents year-round programs that many conflicts when teachreach out to students during ing the natural sciences in breaks or after school to particular.

Curriculum in teach about reducing plasEcuador is nationally-based, tic use, reforestation prothus every school in the grams, even inviting classes Marine Iguanas resting on a boat dock country receives the same to visit their interpretive materials. In 2010, a divergent curriculum handbook was center near Tortuga Bay in Santa Cruz (Torres, personal comcreated especially for Galápagos, and included lesson plan munication, 2014). Torres reminds that they cannot go into points such as “explain the relationship that exists between classes and give workshops, classes, or fieldtrips because of the volcanic origin of the Galápagos Islands, their topograstringent requirements of the school administrations (personal phy and the adaptations developed by the endemic flora and communication, 2014). Ecology Project International, housed fauna” and “explain the relevance of the conservation of the on Santa Cruz Island, focuses on providing vacation camps to particular biota of the Galápagos” (Ministerio de Educación, select local students that work with a direct contact with na2011). While this seems a great progress in terms of focusing ture while conducting scientific projects, a science-education environmental and science education on the Galápagos with directed environmental education (Sánchez, personal commua Galápagos-specific curriculum, directors of the primary and nication, 2014). Hacienda Tranquila, an NGO on San Cristóbal secondary schools explained that they have not received these Island, produces programs for international students, and materials yet, making the curriculum obsolete in practice (Alsome local students, to work on their land in the highlands in monte, personal communication, 2014) . Another issue in the an effort to promote learning outside of the classroom being curriculum for conveying the importance of an evolutionary outside (Reyes, personal communication, 2014). These, and context and understanding for environmental education, is many more organizations, have resources for student-focused that evolution is not taught as a scientific principle. The curprograms, but often are not able to enter classrooms or gain riculum states to “investigate the theories about the origin access to formal education platforms to help support EE for of life: creationism and evolution,” (Ministerio de Educación, local students (Torres, personal communication, 2014).

2011). This pulls away from evolution as a key scientific concept, directly opposite of what conservation biologists state is Environmental Education linked with important for students to understand for conservation knowlOrganizational Support edge.

The plethora of environmentally-founded organiThe majority of school directors interviewed on zations on the islands is a key resource for schools that lack three Galápagos Islands stated that connection with the natresources from the education system. As is significantly presural world through fieldtrips and experiential learning, was

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RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT

Invisibility and assailability: Living asexual and queer in an aggressively heterosexual society

by Meredith Pelrine Over the summer of 2014, I conducted research with a collection of people who identified both as asexual and queer, primarily from the San Francisco Bay Area but also from a few other areas in the United States who participated in the asexual community on a particular online interface. In this piece, I explore how queer-and-asexual experiences and identities are situated in a society and an ongoing historical moment that demands (heterosexual) sex, particularly through the frameworks of invisibility and assailability.

Background

Asexuality is most commonly defined as not experiencing sexual attraction1, and this definition is accepted by most asexual people (as well as used in the vast majority of recent literature about asexuality). A key component of this definition is that it draws a distinction between sexual attraction and sexual activity or libido. Sexual attraction is specific to a particular person or people. On the other hand, while sexual activity and libido often involve another person or people, they do not need to, nor does sexual attraction have to accompany sexual activity. Sexual attraction might be illustrated in the trope of seeing someone across a crowded room, finding them attractive, and feeling some kind of spark. Libido, or sex drive, on the other hand, might be illustrated in being horny— not necessarily wanting to have sex with any particular person or people, but simply wanting to have sex in general.

According to online surveys conducted by the Asexual Awareness Week team, the vast majority of asexuals, or aces for short, as asexuals often call themselves and other asexuals, are not sexually active and do not want to have sex2. Some asexuals (who have libidos—see glossary, 7) masturbate, and some do not. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of variation in 1 Asexuality Visibility and Education Network: Overview. http://www.asexuality.org/home/overview.html, accessed January 20, 2014.

2 Miller, Tristan. Analysis of the 2011Asexual Awareness Week community census. http://www.asexualawarenessweek.com/docs/SiggyAnalysis-AAWCensus.pdf, accessed August 3, 2014.

feelings toward sex as an activity amongst asexuals. In practice, asexual people can engage in any amount of sexual activity, from none to a considerable amount, with or without partners; have any amount of sex drive or libido; and have any range of feelings toward sex, from being sex-repulsed or sexaverse (see glossary, 9) to being willing or happy to have sex with particular partners in particular situations (see “Not everybody wants to do it”3 for further reading on sex-aversion).

Through all of these kinds and degrees of variation, the connecting thread among and between asexuals is not experiencing sexual attraction.

Unlike “asexual,” “queer” does not have a broadly accepted definition. It is a descriptive term, but also one with many political, aesthetic, and other social uses. For the purposes of this research study, I asked the people I spoke with to use (and explain) whatever definition of queer they regularly used. In other words, I included in my pool of interviewees anyone who considered themselves both asexual and queer, under whatever definition of queer they liked. In general, meanings for queer range from any non-normative sexual or romantic orientations to a particularly politicized kind of pansexuality (see glossary entries 8 and 12) to homosexuality. Both within the asexual community and outside of it, the definition of queer is contested territory, and a site where conventional power relations around gender, race, and class are continually reproduced, mobilized, and contested in efforts 3 Queenie of Aces. 30 July 2014. Not everybody wants to do it. In Asexual agenda. http://asexualagenda.wordpress. com/2014/07/30/not-everybody-wants-to-do-it/, accessed August 1, 2014.

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RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT to determine which groups are worthy of having their voices and experiences heard and legitimized—and which groups are “worthy” of being recognized as a distinct category or even community.

Because of the wide range of interpretations of queerness, a recurring element in my interviews was asking informants to describe how they saw, and, perhaps, experienced, the relationship between asexuality and queerness.

Some described asexuality as inherently queer, often arguing that any non-normative gender identity and sexual and romantic orientation is queer, and should be included in queer spaces. For example, discussing the relationship between asexuality and queerness, and that relationship in relation to her sexual and romantic orientations, one person wrote: The way I see it, queer is an umbrella for anything that isn’t heteronormative, as you’ve put it. So for someone like me who is on that never-ending path to discovering who I am (and in the meantime trying not to confuse the heck out of people), I tend to stick with the term “queer”.

Other people I spoke with characterized asexuality and queerness as entirely separate identity types, with no inherent relationship between the two. Responding to my question about what she thought about the relationship between asexuality and queerness, one person wrote: I really don’t think asexuality should be counted as queer, to be honest. If you are not trans*, and you’re attracted exclusively to the opposite gender, then you’re still just hetero. I don’t count my demisexuality as queer in any shape or form.

Though the people I conducted my research with spoke in a variety of ways about how asexuality relates to queerness, two recurring and related themes emerged over the course of all of my conversations: invisibility and assailability, and how social and environmental factors interact to position asexual-and-queer people as, to varying degrees, invisible and assailable. At least one of these themes was brought up by all of my interviewees, and in the majority of interviews both were significant and related topics of discussion. In this paper, I will define these terms in detail, and also provide ethnographic evidence that will illuminate what is at stake in the use of these terms, while exploring how queer-and-asexual experiences and identities are situated in a society and an ongoing historical moment that demands sex, and especially heterosexual sex between heterosexual partners.

Invisibility

Many interviewees discussed feelings of double invisibility, frequently as queer people in a heteronormative society and as asexual people in an often sex-oriented queer community. Every interviewee alluded to the general lack of awareness about asexuality in most of the United States, and many discussed in greater depth the damaging effects of prevalent ideas around sex as “natural” and even as “essential” to adult human experience, as a natural and necessary source of both

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health and happiness. Some described increasing awareness in dominant culture of asexuality as a sexual orientation—in other words, making asexuality less invisible—as the key necessary step in changing dominant U.S. culture so that it better supports asexuals. One interviewee even suggested that this was in fact the only necessary step for promoting asexual wellbeing, writing: I think there is a huge difference between the oppression of gay people and the “oppression” of asexuals.

The only oppression I’m aware of against asexuals is if they are perceived to be gay and therefore face many of the same difficulties that gay people do with respect to discrimination. On the other hand no one goes out asexual nashing [bashing]. no one has lost a job do to their being asexual, or kicked out of or denied housing. They don’t compare. I gotta tell you being asexual is MUCH easier than being gay. Who hates people for being asexual? No one. The biggest problem the ace community has is that they need to educate people about asexuality. I never heard of it until a few years ago.

This response was unique among all of my conversations; no one else suggested that education was the biggest problem for the asexual community, though many referred to it as an important concern, and almost all other people I spoke with did describe asexuals as experiencing a particular kind of oppression in the United States. Nonetheless, this comment illuminates quite clearly how lack of awareness of asexuality, and the accompanying invisibility, is a concern for asexual people and communities.

Invisibility within queer communities specifically was another component of the personal and general invisibility that many asexual-and-queer people I spoke with experienced. About a third of the people I interviewed categorized asexuality as inherently queer, about a third categorized it as absolutely not queer, and the remaining third said they were unsure how they felt on the subject due to the many conflicting views in circulation. The question of whether asexuality is queer or not is a topic of increasing discussion in online asexual spaces4, and one that remains unresolved. Those who considered asexuality inherently queer and those who expressed uncertainty all nonetheless pointed to personal and general examples of queer communities ignoring, marginalizing, or outright rejecting asexual people in their spaces.

More broadly, both queer communities and the dominant heteronormative society project a kind of deep-seated lack or deficiency onto any kind of sexlessness, especially asexuality. In dominant culture, queer asexuality in particular is imagined as a state of lacking something. This “lack” is, in certain ways a kind of invisibility. Because sex is represented 4 See, for example, blog posts in The Asexual Agenda (https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/, accessed July 15, 2014) such as: “What does it mean to say asexuals are queer?”, “Why the ‘are asexuals queer’ question is incoherent”, and “Why I no longer engage the ‘Are aces queer’ question”

RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT as so integral to adult human experience, sexlessness of any kind, including both asexuality and celibacy, is perceived as a fundamental “lack” of sex, and almost always as a “problem” or “deficiency.” One asexual blogger, discussing how the definition of asexuality should not be understood to mean that asexuals are deficient in any way, writes, “We have an orientation; it’s characterized by the lack of sexual attraction. We’re not missing anything”5. Nevertheless, in most dominant ideas about sexlessness and asexuality, “lack” and “deficiency” are synonymous, and asexuals are imagined as missing out on sex.

Furthermore, this focus on sex and the lack of it ignores the possibility for creative, novel forms of connection and experience made possible by not having sex or not experiencing sexual attraction, and so renders invisible the positive, productive possibilities of asexual experience. These possibilities encompass both emotional and physical realms. Asexual experience can open up sensitivity to multiple forms of attraction, including, for example, intellectual attraction and sensual (non-sexual) attraction. In discussing romantic relationships, one person I interviewed stated that, in their experience, allosexual (see glossary, 1) people push boundaries way too far in regards to sex, and went on to describe how in asexual romantic relationships they can be physically and emotionally intimate without sexually objectifying each other or pushing one-sided physical desires. This alludes to how not having sex might, in fact, help people to regard each other as whole subjects in the face of societal hypersexualization that threatens to turn everyone into potential sexual objects. Another interviewee described how not having sex opens up time for conversation and for care of other kinds, saying that, when with people he cares about, there are a multitude of things he could be doing with them, and ways he could be getting to know them better on emotional and intellectual levels, precisely by not having sex.

The lack projected onto asexuality is not unrelated to how queer desires and relationships, including both asexual and allosexual ones, are often represented as lacking in the appropriate heterosexual norms, as in when homosexual romantic couples are imagined as inferior copies of heterosexual configurations, with one partner fulfilling a conventionally feminine role and the other a conventionally masculine role. This projection of homosexual romantic relationships as lacking the proper sexual configuration to match the assumed roles renders invisible the possibility for entirely different roles (or the utter lack of stagnant roles) in homosexual relationships. The context of queer asexuality, then, can be represented as a double lack—by dominant, heterosexual standards, asexual-and-queer people are missing both appropriate gender configurations in their romantic relationships and the “natural” desires that are supposed to constitute the most interesting element of those relationships.

Furthermore, the lack associated with asexuality and with sexlessness on a broad scale translates into projections

5 Box Behind the Mirror. 2014. “What we are not missing.” http://silverblueroses.tumblr.com/post/100684258364/whatwe-are-not-missing, accessed October 30, 2014.

of asexuals as broken, incomplete subjects.6 Lacking sufficient sexual experience, asexuals are imagined to be not quite adults and, lacking sexual attraction, they are imagined to be psychologically and physiologically damaged. These assumptions surrounding sexual attraction, desire, and experience result in active and overt harm against asexuals, beyond the incidental harm of invisibility. In this way, the lack manifests itself in experiences of assailability, another recurring theme in the experiences of the people with whom I conducted my research.

Assailability

Many social justice-oriented groups and individuals, including ones oriented around gender, race, and class, mobilize critical examinations of unequal social relations of power around the discourse of “privilege.” Privilege refers to the extent to which an individual or social group benefits, socially, politically, and economically, from a given component of their identity, usually to the detriment of other groups. This is typically discussed in terms of singular identity categories, such as white privilege, male privilege, class privilege, heterosexual privilege, etc. “Assailability” refers to much the same idea, but from the opposite end of the spectrum. Where privilege refers to how holding particular identity components gives people more power of various kinds, assailability, in contrast, refers to how holding particular identity components makes people subject to and more vulnerable to violence in a variety of realms—discursively, structurally, and physically.

Much of the existing literature on asexuality that focuses on how asexuality is medicalized and pathologized alludes to the assailability of asexual people. There exists a common positioning of asexuals as broken subjects and as a kind of aporia—a lack, gap, or blind spot—in popular media as well as in medical and psychological literature.7 In popular culture and in everyday interactions, asexuals are regularly told that they simply have not met “the right person,” or that their asexuality is merely a “phase” that they are going through, and that their mode of being in the world does not warrant a label8. Asexuality is often (falsely) associated with histories of abuse in the popular imagination9, suggesting that asexuals are only asexual because of an experience of sexual 6 See, for example: Cerankowski, Karli 2012. Life without sex: imagining asexuality in popular culture. Gender News, The Clayman Institute for Gender Research. http://gender. stanford.edu/news/2012/life-without-sex-imagining-asexuality-popular-culture, accessed January 12, 2014.

7 Cerankowski, Karli 2012. Life without sex: imagining asexuality in popular culture. Gender News, The Clayman Institute for Gender Research. http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2012/ life-without-sex-imagining-asexuality-popular-culture, accessed January 12, 2014.

8 Decker, Julia Sondra. 2014. The invisible orientation: An introduction to asexuality. Carrel Books: 9 Brotto, Lori A., Gail Knudson, Jess Inskip, Katherine Rhodes, and Yvonne Erskine 2010. Asexuality: A Mixed-Methods Approach. Archives of Sexual Behavior 39(3):599-618.

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RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT trauma10. In addition, being part of an “invisible orientation” (as described by Decker, 2014) is itself a kind of assailability; the lack of awareness that asexuality even exists means that asexuals are regularly subjected to remarks in popular media and everyday interactions along the lines of “everybody likes sex” and “sex feels good”—in short, a robust conviction that sex is a necessary, vital component of human experience.

This in turn creates a process by which asexual people are then rendered incomplete and interminably broken for not experiencing sexual attraction and largely not wanting sex.

This is very similar to the kinds of assaults on identity that homo, bi, and pansexual people are subjected to.11 Furthermore, the notion of assailability alludes to the potential for physical violence that queer people of all kinds have historically faced, and that some asexual people face, particularly in the form of “corrective” rape.12 Here, I use the concept of assailability to encompass the social life of these beliefs, and the extent to which asexual-and-queer people feel their identities are subject to attack by heterosexual society at large.

A number of asexual bloggers have discussed assailability as a construct and through personal experiences. “The unassailable asexual” was the theme for the August 2014 Carnival of Aces, a blogging event where various people blog about a particular topic in relation to asexuality, and submit their posts to a single host who collects all of the links13. A number of bloggers focused on how unassailability is largely impossible for asexual people. Many of these authors discuss the intersection of disability and asexuality and the intersection of sexual violence and asexuality, demonstrating how these elements of identity converge to heighten their assailability in dominant culture and even in asexual communities.

In my research, the focus was on the intersection of queerness and asexuality, and in what specific ways these identities 10 It is important to note that some asexuals do, in fact, cite a history or particular experience of sexual violence as integral to their asexuality—see, for example, “The Fallacy of Causality: Asexuality & Trauma” (myhypomnemata.wordpress.com) and ”Here goes everything” (asexualagenda.wordpress.com).

The key point I want to make here is that asexuality is not by necessity born out of violence, while acknowledging that, for some asexual people, an experience of sexual violence and their asexuality can be deeply interrelated.

11 See, for example: Cerankowski, Karli June and Megan Milks. 2010. New Orientations: Asexuality and its Implications for Theory and Practice. Feminist Studies 36(3): 650-664.

12 See, for example: Mosbergen, Dominique. Battling asexual discrimination, sexual violence, and ‘corrective’ rape. In Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/ asexual-discrimination_n_3380551.html, accessed October 4, 2014.

13 See, for example: Beyond the Rainbow. 2014. The ‘Unassailable Asexual’ in Activism. https://beyondtherainbowblog.wordpress.com/2014/08/31/the-unassailable-asexual-in-activism/, accessed October 25, 2014. Yes, That Too. 2014. The Unassailable Asexual. http://yesthattoo.blogspot. com/2014/08/carnival-of-aces-unassailable-asexual.html, accessed October 25, 2014.

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converge to produce experiences of relative assailability and unassailability for different people.

Many interviewees discussed their personal feelings of assailability, both in particular moments and in their general social positionality. One interviewee in particular, David, explicitly framed his comprehensibility and social visibility to heterosexual people and society at large through the notion of his relative unassailability, as is discussed more extensively below. Other interviewees made less overt allusions to assailability; some framed their experiences with a heteronormative and hyper-sexualized society in terms of privilege or lack thereof and others in terms of direct instances of oppression.

One person highlighted her assailability, particularly as an asexual person, but also to a lesser extent as a biromantic person, in a repeated refrain, acting as the voice of dominant and sometimes queer culture: “What’s wrong with you? You don’t want to have sex? Ughh.” She said this very phrase, or some derivative of it, several times throughout our conversation, summing up her basic assertion that she is perceived as having something fundamentally wrong with her precisely because she does not want to have sex. This perception is the source of attacks on her identity and her personhood. Throughout interviews, the people I spoke with referred to discursive attacks against their identities and occasionally physical attacks against their persons, highlighting at times their asexuality, their queerness, or a particular combination of the two to illustrate how asexual-and-queer people are made assailable in various social spaces.

Case Studies

As noted above, every interviewee addressed the themes of invisibility and assailability, to various extents and in various terms and frameworks. However, two interviewees in particular, Morgan and David, discussed these themes extensively, and from very different perspectives. I will examine each of their experiences with and opinions about invisibility and assailability as more concrete and nuanced illustrations of how these elements of asexual-and-queer experience can be felt and framed.

Morgan

One of the people I talked to through an online social media site, Morgan, describes themself as an aromantic (see glossary, 2) asexual. They (see glossary, 5 for use of this pronoun) referred repeatedly in our extensive conversation to the invisibility they experience in queer communities and in asexual communities, and to their assailability both inside these communities and outside as a person with a number of intersecting “minority” identities. Morgan considers both asexuality and aromanticness inherently queer identities, despite, as they described, pressure from much of the broader queer community and particularly the LGBT community to exclude asexuals and aromantics from queer discourse and spaces. They discussed the discrimination against asexual people within the queer community through simultaneous frameworks of erasure and overt oppression. Discussing exclusiveness within mainstream LGBT movements and communities, Morgan wrote that “I’ve even heard of asexuals being

RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT kicked out of LGBT and even queer spaces for being asexual because we’re supposedly not queer,” going on to describe their take on the hierarchy within the queer community: The queer community has always placed homoromantic homosexuals on top, bisexuals (not sure how much their romantic orientation matters here) have managed to climb second from top, then under them are the pansexuals and transgender people, then finally on the bottom you have everyone else (including asexuals). So basically, asexuals are in the same place in the queer community’s “hierarchy” as bisexuals and transgender people were in decades ago. Considering that, it’s no wonder we’re not accepted. I expect this to change with time.

As an aromantic person, Morgan experiences another kind of erasure through the form of expectations that everyone should be, or at least should want to be, in a romantic relationship. Speaking of singleism, or discrimination against people who are single, Morgan wrote, “I do notice it a little bit in the asexual community and in the queer community as a whole.

It’s not that there’s outright discrimination or rude comments or anything towards single people, but there’s still the idea that we should be in a romantic relationship or else we’re losers.” In this way, Morgan experiences multiple intersecting layers of invisibility: invisibility within mainstream U.S. culture as a queer person, invisibility within queer communities as an asexual and an aromantic person, and invisibility within asexual communities as an aromantic person.

These layers of invisibility contribute significantly to Morgan’s experiences of assailability. Several elements of Morgan’s positionality cause them and their identities to be challenged on multiple fronts: both as an aromantic person in an asexual community that often tries to explain itself to a broader allosexual society by insisting on the persistence of romantic attraction even in asexual people, and as an asexual person in a queer community that often presents sex as a key vehicle of liberation. Gender identity and personal ideology are a few of the others realms where Morgan experiences fairly high assailability. Speaking of animosity toward cisgender and allosexual people in the asexual and genderqueer communities on Tumblr, they wrote: These people complain about how much they hate privileged people, but coming from someone who’s part of too many minority groups to count, the fact that they can rant against these people ironically shows what a privileged position there is. If I hated people right off the bat for being part of a majority group that I’m not part of I wouldn’t have ever been able to make any friends. I think it’s so hypocritical that these people bash those who are privileged.

As in this quote, for Morgan, this assailability is precisely the reason to avoid intra-group fighting and exclusive community boundaries. Morgan notes the presence of a great deal of nuance in how people are both privileged and assailable in dif-

ferent realms and in relation to different components of their identities. Morgan thus simultaneously acknowledges how people are assailable to different degrees—rather than simply being assailable or not—and, at the same time, stresses that the kind of “oppression Olympics” that often divide communities of all kind are futile. Perhaps for this reason, Morgan argues that queer communities ought to include and better support asexual people, aromantic people, and trans* people, and, further, that all oppressed groups ought to band together and support each other.

David David described himself as a biromantic (see glossary, 11) asexual. He defined “queer” as not fitting into a heterosexual framework, and so considered all asexuals queer because they do not “follow standard relationship tropes.” For him, isolation defines queerness; he told me that he describes queerness as having a particular feeling that “my sexuality is queer compared to ‘normal’ relationship tropes.” This framework of queerness as isolation can be understood as alienated social invisibility. Relationships, particularly in the realms of romance and friendship, that David experienced and wanted to experience were not represented in mainstream media; and the kinds of desires and expressions of intimacy that he experienced are not presented in mainstream media. Though David can, and did, construct communities outside of the dominant norm in which he can see novel kinds of relationships play out, he was not provided any examples that fit his desires in the standard discourse of dominant, heterosexual society in the U.S. In this way, he experienced a kind of invisibility within society at large in the United States that results in the feelings of isolation and alienation that he described.

Furthermore, he experienced this sense of invisibility within queer groups, though to a less alienating, less isolating extent. He described queer groups as “not primarily oriented toward [asexual] issues,” and said that his identity as an asexual person was much more fraught and contested than his identity as a biromantic person. However, after discussing the invisibility of asexuality in queer circles, both in personal and general terms, David was quick to point out that he experienced a much lesser degree of assailability than do many asexuals in queer groups and in the queer community at large.

David explicitly referred to himself as a relatively unassailable asexual-and-queer person. He is a white cismale (see glossary, 3), experiences romantic attraction, has an active libido (see glossary, 7), and has not experienced sexual abuse. All of these components of his identity and experience positioned him as relatively “normal” in certain ways. As he described it, all of these identity components coalesce to indicate that there must be “nothing wrong with [him],” by popular social definitions. This therefore put him in a position to be less regularly challenged than many other asexuals. David took advantage of this relative unassailability by being deliberately open about asexual issues with allosexual people, as he described: I am fairly unassailable, um, and that’s, that’s really helped me be open about a lot ace issues in a way that

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RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT a lot of my friends are not comfortable about. And I guess I feel like I can kind of take up the slack for them, right? I can, I can say, here, I am this way, but I also know these people who are not this way.

Particularly because he experienced romantic attraction and had a libido, David suggested that it was easier for him to explain his sexual and romantic orientations to (particularly heterosexual) allosexual people than it would be for, say, aromantic and sex-repulsed people with no libidos. The greater degree of commonality with dominant culture made it easier for David to describe his sexual orientation without being challenged, or at least challenged as much as many asexuals are.

This was particularly important for him because of the wide range of experiences and orientations within his own friend group that might position his friends as more assailable and so less able to educate others without experiencing challenges to their identities. He described the range of variation within his friend group alone, saying:

I have a very high libido. I’m still ace. I have a friend who has no libido; he’s still ace. I have friends who sometimes have libido and sometimes don’t; they’re still ace. […] I have friends who are, you know, homoromantic and ace. I have friends who are heteroromantic ace. I have friends who are sex-repulsed, not sex-repulsed. It’s like, there’s this whole spectrum of people I know.

David’s connection between his openness about asexual issues and the range of variation within asexuality suggests that part of why he chose to educate those around him was because in doing so he could both make things easier for his friends, who embody that variation, and be less threatening to heterosexual allosexual people and, thus, potentially more persuasive. For David, assailability was a crucial element for understanding how and why asexuality is erased and misunderstood in much of society in the U.S., and he took his comparative unassailability as an opportunity to casually educate others about asexuality on a regular basis.

Discussion: Joining and forming communities as an (un)assailable queer ace

Both Morgan and David connected their degrees of assailability—extreme for Morgan and relatively minor for David—to how they interact with asexual communities and with queer communities. For Morgan, their high degree of assailability, even within both asexual and queer communities, in addition to in dominant culture more broadly, motivated them to carve out spaces for themself online, by insisting on the validity of their presence in online queer community spaces, by voicing the existence and concerns of aromantic people in online asexual community spaces, and by creating an online forum and community space for aromantic people.

David, on the other hand, did not feel as regularly excluded from communities he might consider himself a part of, and instead directed his energy toward educating people around him about asexuality and working to diminish its in-

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visibility. These rather distinct experiences of and reactions to their assailability illustrate different ways of being in relation to asexual and queer communities. In my future thesis, I will look at how the asexual-and-queer people I conducted my field research with engaged with asexual and queer communities as well as paint a broader picture of how asexual communities are arranged across different social media sites online.

Glossary 1. Allosexual: someone who experiences sexual attraction; often used as opposition to “asexual”; sometimes referred to simply as “sexual” 2. Aromantic: someone who does not experience romantic attraction 3. Cisgender/cissexual: someone whose gender and/or sexual identity match those assigned at birth 4. Demisexual: someone who only experiences sexual attraction after first forming a strong emotional connection to a person 5. Genderqueer: a nonbinary gender identity; can be used by people who identify as neither a woman nor a man, somewhere between a woman and a man, or any other place outside of the gender binary; common pronouns are they/them/their and ze/zir/zirs 6. Gray-A: an umbrella term for people who experience sexual attraction rarely, experience sexual attraction sometimes but do not want to act on it, or otherwise experience sexual attraction and/or sex drive in limited and/or specific circumstances 7. Libido: desire for sexual activity; this can be entirely different from sexual attraction, e.g. someone can desire sexual gratification without being sexually attracted to anyone; desire can be fulfilled through masturbation or with (a) partner(s) 8. Pan-: comes from Ancient Greek term meaning “all” or “every”; in “pansexual” and “panromantic,” refers to experiencing sexual or romantic attraction to all genders and sexes 9. Sex-averse/sex-repulsed: someone who is uninterested in or disgusted by the idea and/or the act of having sex; sometimes distinguished where “averse” connotes a strong dislike and “repulsed” a physical reaction related to disgust 10. Trans*: an umbrella term referring to people whose gender and/or sexual identity does not match those assigned at birth; can include nonbinary gender identities 11. [X]-romantic: someone who experiences romantic attraction to [X] gender/people (e.g. a homoromantic person experiences romantic attraction to someone of their own gender, a biromantic person experiences romantic attraction to two—or sometimes more—genders, etc.)

12. [X]-sexual: someone who experiences sexual attraction to [X] gender/people (e.g. a homosexual person experiences attraction to someone of their own gender)

Integration vs. Segregation: Why We Should Not Decide

by Taylor Nguyen

An intellectual disability is not an individual’s shortcoming but rather society’s lack of acceptance of and accommodation for individuals with disabilities (Shapiro 1994). The disabilities rights movement argues that “there is no pity or tragedy in disability” (Shapiro 1994: 5). Consequently, the movement discards the question of what people with disabilities can do to better assimilate themselves, but rather asks how society can change itself to become more inclusive. Recreation is an important focal point for this change, since sport is a node between physical activity and empowerment, two important determinants to strengthen an individual. Stuart Schleien, University of Minnesota professor and recreational therapist, argues that sports offer the best opportunity for match-up against others (Shapiro 1994). Often, mental disabilities do not necessarily infringe upon physical capabilities, supporting the notion that sports are the most attractive starting place for social integration.

The Special Olympics is an international non-profit organization that offers recreational opportunities for individuals with intellectual disabilities. A person is eligible to participate in Special Olympics if they have been defined by a professional agency as having intellectual disabilities based on the following criteria: i) IQ is below 70-75, ii) significant limitations exist in two or more adaptive skill areas, and iii) the condition manifests itself before the age of 18. Upon its founding in 1968

by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, this organization has expanded to over one hundred seventy countries and caters to over 4.4 million athletes (Special Olympics). The Special Olympics was “designed in a time (1968) when segregated activities were the norm,” and building a division was the first natural step into introducing the idea of social equality for people with intellectual disabilities (Storey 2008: 135). However, the disabilities rights movement has changed its definition of “best practices” in the realm of recreational opportunities, raising concerns about the Special Olympics’ relative stagnation.

Scholars, such as Shelly Counsell, EdD, and Martin Agran, PhD, have recently acknowledged the practices of the Special Olympics as a crucial place for the debate between two polarized methodologies: segregated and integrated activities. Counsell and Agran believe that the organization’s current practices are outdated and run counter to the view of empowerment proposed by the disabilities rights movement (Counsell & Agran 2013). While proponents of segregation support conventional practices, where only athletes with disabilities participate, the integrationist arguments articulate the need to integrate both disabled and non-disabled athletes. The debate about the future direction of the Special Olympics reiterates the necessity for societal change to better

accommodate varying levels of ability. Thus, it is important to reevaluate whether the motives and outcomes of the Special Olympics programs are in compliance with the disabilities movement. Although the debate itself is necessary, it is crucial to consider the way in which it is being framed. To have a more workable dialogue between families, the disabilities right movement, and the Special Olympics, I suggest that we shift from arguing about one universal methodology to navigating the best avenues to promote self-advocacy among participants.

In July 1988, the Special Olympics launched its first integrated sports program, Unified Sports, to allow athletes both with and without disabilities to compete alongside and against each other in a shared environment. The new games gained prominence in July 2002 through spotlight attention by the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, one of the Special Olympics’ new partners. With the spreading influence of institutionalized integrated sports, observers voiced opinions in support of and against the program. Some proponents applauded the organization for making a step in the right direction. They claimed that the Special Olympics’ former lack of support for integrated activities allowed other organizations serving individuals with disabilities to feel less pressured to move towards integration (Shapiro 1994).

In contrast to those supporting integration, parent Barbara Gill argued that Unified Sports only allowed for superficial integration. She claimed that it is not enough for her son to play sports on the willingness of “some good people to be in the shadow world for a while” (Shapiro 1994: 180). Despite an increase in conversation about the benefits and shortcomings of integration, this discussion remained limited to informal exchanges of opinion between families and onlookers of the Special Olympics’ programs.

Even with new initiatives, such as Unified Sport, the organization still dominantly promotes segregated activities. In 2004, Keith Storey, associate professor of education at Chapman University, published a fiery article, The Case Against the Special Olympics, in the Journal of Disability Policy Studies to criticize the organization for becoming the major obstacle of external efforts to integrate people with disabilities into all recreational settings. He claims that any segregated recreation is detrimental to an individual’s perception of self-worth due to its age-inappropriateness. Because athletes are not grouped with others of similar age (as they typically would in integrated settings), older athletes tend to be grouped together with younger ones due to a shared attributed disability: “This infantilization leads to participants being denied adult status and dignity” (Storey 2004: 36). Storey views traditionCONTEXTS 2015

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al segregated activities as “overprotection” which can lead to infringement on human dignity. Storey contrasts the developments of the disability rights movement, where people with disabilities control the service system, to the Special Olympics, where decision-making powers are in the hands of those without disabilities (Storey 2004). In summary, he scolds the Special Olympics for blindly promoting negative stereotypes and for falling short of the expectations held by the disabilities right movement. He asserts that the only way to move forward is to first openly question the assumptions on which the organization is founded upon and to formalize a structure for integrated recreational activities (Storey 2004). In 2008, Storey reiterated his adherence to integration in The More Things Change, the More They Are the Same: Continuing Concerns With the Special Olympics (Storey 2008).

Naturally, the polarizing article attracted responses, many in support of segregation. Manning, Bear, and Minke, articulate a perspective in favor of segregation. Within such settings, they argue, individuals have a lesser chance of comparing themselves against peers without disabilities, avoiding the perception of deficiency and deflated self-worth. A structure of systematic encouragement and purposeful, maximal opportunities for success creates a nurturing environment to build self-esteem (Manning, Bear, & Minke 2006). Upon its founding, the Special Olympics has romanticized this setting to allow athletes of all types of feel like winners. By not competing with those of higher skill levels, athletes are encouraged to embrace their capabilities without the overbearing pressure to improve. In this sense, segregated sport support the goals “to demonstrate courage” and “experience joy” in the Special Olympics’ mission statement.

The current debate is consequently framed between a dichotomy between segregation and integration. How then might the Special Olympics move forward from the current debate?

In the literature, advocates of both integration and segregation are critical of a common phenomenon: paternalism. Hahn defines this term in “Disability and Rehabilitation Policy: Is Paternalistic Neglect Really Benign?” as “a relationship of superiority and inferiority between parental and childlike figures which is simultaneously benevolent and exploitive” (Hahn 1982: 388). Especially in the context of the Special Olympics, paternalism usually evolves from “profound and sincere sympathy,” but, as Hahn claims, acting paternalistically subordinates the minority group (Hahn 1982: 388). Those in support of both segregation and integration are concerned with the imbalanced relationship between decision-makers on the Special Olympics’ executive board and the participants.

Proponents for integration are disturbed that athletes do not have the option to refuse participation in segregated sport within the Special Olympics (Keith 2008). However, the same problem would persist if the platform were to change to integrated sport. With the major end goal of self-determination, it is alarming that there is not any assurance that individuals are “making an informed choice to participate or have alternate choices available with appropriate supports” (Keith 2008: 138). Without equal communicative representation, families and individuals are denied the opportunity to gauge the most

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effective and comfortable means for self-determination and self-advocacy (Counsell & Agran 2013). The significant act of deciding which methodology to participate in should not be exclusively in the hands of the Special Olympics board. The process of evaluation and decision allows individuals with intellectual disabilities to form opinions of their current abilities and goals for personal growth. Thus, this process is an important moment for self-advocacy.

There are two considerations at hand. First, as outlined above, is the problematic assumption that people with disabilities are not entitled to make decisions in their best interests. Secondly, there is an issue in assuming one methodology is applicable for all athletes encompassing a spectrum of disabilities and capabilities. Although integrationist perspectives appear to be more progressive and in compliance with the disabilities rights movement, it cannot be assumed that integrated recreational activity is the most viable method for every individual to experience growth and empowerment. The benefits of segregated activity cannot be ignored. Although many families find value and hope in allowing their children to interact within integrated environments, they recognize the appropriate counseling, pace, and accommodations made in segregated environments. In my interview with Katey Bielagus, parent of a daughter who is developmentally delayed, she praised sport as an avenue for social development and provided more insight into the considerations for choosing physical activities (Personal interview with Katey Bielagus, November 12, 2014). For sports that her daughter enjoys and excels in, Bielagus encourages her daughter to participate in shared team experiences to gain a sense of competition and challenge. However, for other sports that her daughter does not necessarily possess extraordinary skills in, Bielagus relies on the accommodations and understanding of Special Olympics’ coaches to still allow her daughter to participate comfortably (Personal interview with Katey Bielagus, November 12, 2014).

Certain accommodations that are more prevalent in segregated activity than in integrated activity include focus on equal participation, physical modifications to the game, and support that is framed more towards encouragement than constructive criticism. With an exclusive implementation of either methodology, her daughter, one athlete amongst millions, will lose the opportunity to grow in either setting. As both methodologies provide unique advantages, a choice of one over the other can deter from the end goals set forth by the disabilities rights movement.

Thus, the above analysis of the limitations of the Special Olympics’ universal decisions makes way for a new approach to future programs. The current logical approach is to offer a variety of opportunities for individual empowerment.

However, this sequence can only be rewarding if the offered activity creates the appropriate environment for the participant to thrive. In order to assure that participants are interacting in the best environment, segregated or integrated, the approach should shift to address how the Special Olympics can offer families more choices to allow them to decide what is best for their family member. The act of decision, the source of self-determination and self-advocacy, is thus directly and initially placed in the hands of families. In many cases, pragmatic

considerations allow for the families to decide, rather than the individuals themselves. This approach still aligns with efforts to promote self-determination because it deviates from the paternalism of the Special Olympics to establish a single methodology for all athletes. The decision-making regarding which activities each participant will interact in is then exchanged from the Special Olympics board to the families who are more informed and sensitive to the needs, wants, and preferences of the individuals affected by disabilities. Therefore, offering the choice of either segregated or integrated methodology serves as a means to promote self-advocacy.

Current literature demands that the Special Olympics act to stimulate individuals, but it does not suggest that the organization should take a more responsive stance to wishes of families. The solution to such a sensitive issue should sincerely consider families’ desire for choices while recognizing the perspectives of both the disabilities rights movement and the Special Olympics. By defining the future direction of the Special Olympics through the lens of these three major parties, the organization can move away from a paternalistic stance.

Designing a system for three parties to work in accordance may sound great in theory and harder in practice, but those doing this work can make substantial progress by actively engaging with the difficulties. The Special Olympics’ recreational opportunities can adopt the ideals of the disabilities rights movement by acting upon the wishes of families. The Special Olympic programs take place in many neighborhoods in countries around the world, but it cannot be assumed that the same template for programs can be applied identically and successfully in all areas. Low socioeconomic areas have been found to correlate with an increased incidence of individuals with intellectual disabilities. Families then face financial burdens by direct costs that include “additional costs of transport, child care arrangements and equipment” and other educational programs needed to stimulate cognitive and motor skills (Emerson, Graham, & Hatton 2014: 84). Furthermore, without substantial and regular educational and health services, social inequality deepens. In such areas, people with intellectual disabilities experience greater difficulty achieving equality in employment and education, signifying faltering levels of acceptance for disabilities in whole (Emerson, Graham, & Hatton 2014).

Because each location that hosts the Special Olympics games has varying levels of socioeconomic statuses, available resources, and general attitudes toward intellectual disabilities, the conditions of different locations should be factored in the discussion regarding new directions for Special Olympics programs. While the organization continues to expand to different cities and promote values set forth by the disabilities movement, programs should be tailored to comfortably accommodate for local families. While it may be argued that this new approach is more tedious and demanding on the Special Olympics’ part to create specific accommodations, it is a bigger step in the right direction. This step will allow deeper research and discussion of recognizing and applying effective methods to promote self-advocacy, especially in context of the Special Olympics. At the baseline, introducing a

new approach for people to engage in the discussion can help mobilize greater progress.

While it will be difficult to perfect the Special Olympics, it is important to move the discussion past the stalemate between segregation and integration. Both methodologies face limitations but provide unique advantages, and thus neither can be excluded from the platform to promote empowerment, strength, and self-advocacy. A specific look into the direction of the Special Olympics provides valuable insight in how we should address other opportunities beyond recreation for individuals with intellectual disabilities. Moving forward, we can engage in a more fruitful discussion of not only the recreational opportunities offered on behalf of the Special Olympics, but also the other avenues to achieve the ideals set forth by the disabilities rights movement. After all, the change must happen within societal accommodations, and the change can begin in how we approach this discussion differently.

Works Cited Counsell, Shelly, and Martin Agran. “Understanding The Special Olympics Debate From Lifeworld And System Perspectives: Moving Beyond The Liberal Egalitarian View Toward Empowered Recreational Living.” Journal Of Disability Policy Studies 23.4, 2013: 245-256 Emerson, Eric, Hilary Graham, and Chris Hatton. “The Measurement of Poverty and Socioeconomic Position in Research Involving People with Intellectual Disability.

“International Review of Research in Mental Retardation. Ed. Laraine M. Glidden. Vol. 32. San Diego: Elsevier, 2006. 77-92.

Hahn, Harlan, ed. “Disability and Rehabilitation Policy: Is Paternalistic Neglect Really Benign?” Public Administration Review 42. JSTOR. American Society for Public Administration, 1982: 385-389. <http://www.jstor.org/ stable/975983?seq=4>.

Manning, M., G. Bear, & K. Minke. “Self-Concept and Self-Esteem.” In G. Bear & K. Minke (Eds.), Children’s need III: Development, prevention, and intervention. Washington, DC: National Association of School Psychologists, 2006: 341-356. <http://www.nasponline.org/resources/ intonline/NAS-CBIII-05-1001-026-R03.pdf>.

Renick, Mari J., and Susan Harter. “Impact of Social Comparisons on the Developing Self-Perceptions of Learning Disabled Students.” Journal of Educational Psychology.

American Psychological Association. The American Psychological Association, Inc., 1989: 631-638. <http:// psycnet.apa.org/journals/edu/81/4/631.pdf>.

Shapiro, Joseph P. No Pity: People With Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement. 1st ed. New York: Three Rivers. 1994.

Special Olympics: Home Page. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation for the Benefit of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities, 2014.

Storey, Keith. “The More Things Change, The More They Are The Same: Continuing Concerns With The Special Olympics.” Research & Practice For Persons With Severe Disabilities 33.3 (2008): 134-142.

Storey, Keith. “The Case Against The Special Olympics.” Journal Of Disability Policy Studies 15.1 (2004): 35-42.

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Opinion-Editorial

Wall Street Imperium: A Narrative of Progress

by Andrea Hale In Liquidated, an ethnography of Wall Street, Karen Ho presents a synopsis of the development of the financial industry on Wall Street, as well as a picture of Wall Street culture today. Through the biographies, experiences, and practices of investment bankers, Ho argues that they “create social change and financial hegemony on a daily basis” (Ho 42). It is this narrative of ‘social change’ and ‘financial hegemony’ that this paper seeks to address. What is the narrative of progress that Wall Street creates, whom does the narrative benefit, and who does it ultimately exclude? I would like to address some of these concerns through the Anne McClintock’s work Imperial Leather. McClintock’s work addresses colonialism and the specificities of colonial history, its hierarchical structure, and the way it manifests itself in rationalized cultural frameworks that are self-reproducing. I propose that Karen Ho’s work presents how the cultural framework of Wall Street justifies the marginalization and exclusion of abstracted ‘communities’ and ‘employees’ who are ultimately most vulnerable and directly affected by Wall Street decisions to downsize in the name of efficiency.

In order to further delve into Ho’s argument that Wall Street has created a “‘virtual reality’ that is reductive, dislocating, and divorced from responsible and engaged social relationship,” I propose two categories of analysis using analytical frameworks presented by McClintock in Imperial Leather (Ho 35). First, I will address the structural base set forth in Liquidated and the way in which certain values are normalized through the very definition of a corporation on Wall Street.

McClintock offers very useful conceptual tools, such as “panoptical time” and “anachronistic space” in order to analyze the universalization of subjective values. Secondly, I will analyze the way in which the larger structural and institutional norms of Wall Street manifest themselves on the individual level through the culture of “smartness,” among other criteria, and the money meritocracy. These two categories of analysis, the structural and the individual relation to that structure, co-produce a particular narrative of progress based on subjective cultural and, by extension, subjective economic values.

Ultimately, the narrative of progress that Wall Street espouses creates a paradoxical economic system that claims inclusivity and democracy in theory, while producing exclusive privilege in practice.

To begin, the first category of analysis is the structure of Wall Street as an institution focused upon shareholder value and the redefinition of the corporation within the last 30 years. In order to understand the current state of Wall Street

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and the American economy, the analyst must look towards the very definition of the corporation, the unit upon which the economy is founded and the customer upon which Wall Street is built. Though the notion of corporation can mean many different things, the corporation of Wall Street is exceptional in that it has evolved to such an extent that by the 1980s, CEO salaries rose to over four hundred times that of the average worker (Ho 141). The 1980s was furthermore when M&A (mergers and acquisitions) becomes synonymous with massive layoffs (135).

To address the large sharp increase in economic inequality within corporate America, Ho summarizes the development of shareholder value and its emergence as the central tenant of corporate business in America and neoliberal economics in the third chapter of Liquidated. This is similar to the creation of planetary consciousness and the scientific revolution during the Enlightenment era in European history. Wall Street’s corporate development is in its own right a scientific revolution of the “science of economics. The organization of the entire world into a single “science of order” and “transforming the earth into a single economic currency, a single pedigree of history and universal standard of cultural value”—while once controlled by white European males can now be set and managed by Wall Street CEOs as well as large shareholders of the biggest corporations1 (McClintock 34).

The parallels between McClintock’s analysis of imperial control and Wall Street’s shareholder revolution extend further, particularly into the notions of panoptical time and anachronistic space. According to McClintock, panoptical time and anachronistic space are two ways of conceptualizing time and space within a specific value framework. Panoptical time creates the image of “global history…from a point of privileged invisibility” while anachronistic space is delegated to the abject or otherwise those “prehistoric, atavistic and irrational” peoples “out of place in historical time of modernity” otherwise known as “the fat that needs to be cut” on Wall Street (McClintock 37, 40). Given the definition that Ho proposes of 1 Although this paper does not directly address race discrimination on Wall Street, it is impossible to ignore the fact that as of 2011 America’s 25 highest-paid CEOs fit a similar profile to those in power during the Enlightenment: white European male, an indication of parallels in two instances of power hierarchies as well as the links between past and present histories (Helman).

shareholder value, the “mission-driven cause that overcomes the wrongful allocation of capital and embodies the sacred identity between profits and private property,” shareholder value is not only a quantifiable material entity, but an idiom for the value of private property over all else (Ho 152). Thus, panoptical time would be produced from the privileged invisibility of the shareholder and anachronistic space figured to those not directly engaged in the common goal of increasing shareholder value. Ho elaborates on the definition and implications of shareholder value: Any attempt to interpret the corporation as a longterm social institution whose profits and responsibilities are allocated to multiple ‘stakeholders,’ from employees to communities, constitute an attack on the inviolable rights of the shareholder. Shareholders are the company, and there is no space for employees to challenge downsizing or stock price primacy because all other constituents are written out of this narrow definition of the company. This definition presupposes that an exclusive focus on the stock price for the purpose of enriching the ‘owners’ is necessarily righteous regardless of who may be adversely affected (Ho 152).

In this model of the economy, the narrative of progress promotes any efforts to increase shareholder value as not only progressive but an ethical responsibility, whereas the employees are factored out of the equation and relegated to anachronistic space. The cultural justification for this becomes more evident within the second category of analysis, that of the individual cultural relationship to the larger institution of Wall Street.

A second category of analysis must look at the individuals that do in fact act as agents of social change or reinforcement of the structural system in place on Wall Street.

Through the narrative of progress espoused by Wall Street’s culture of smartness as well as the justification of economic inequality by money meritocracy, Wall Street creates a culture that is inherently exclusive and thus reinforces existing social norms and discriminatory practices within society. The Wall Street narrative of progress, like the colonial mission in Europe, does not exist solely on an abstract ideological level; however, it manifests itself in material spectacle—from recruiting events to workplace behavior. The material manifestation of Wall Street’s narrative of progress on an individual level contributes to the justification of a social inequality that can be directly linked to decisions made on Wall Street.

The culture of smartness creates social exclusivity because of the completely subjective nature of the term and its functionality within Wall Street culture. Wall Street is not about equal opportunity in which different kinds of people can contribute various global perspectives to create the most efficient and socially responsible world economics system. Ho suggests that smartness is much more than “individual intelligence” but it is to be “implicated in a web of situated practices and ideologies, coproduced through the interactions of multi-

ple institutions, processes, and American culture at large” (Ho 40). Smartness thus becomes a commodity in itself, not directly represented by material objects, but rather by symbolic indicators such as matriculation at Harvard or Princeton. The symbolism of cultural values can be represented materially and in turn consumed. McClintock uses the idea of the consumption of the progress narrative through mass spectacle in reference to the World Exhibition at the British Empire’s Crystal Palace in 1851. EXPLAIN WHT SHE SAYS--- Unlike the British Empire, Wall Street does not intend to target mass audiences with their progressive narrative, but rather to target particular groups of students who can ultimately contribute to the further development of Wall Street’s goals and values. Thus, the material spectacle of Wall Street exists at college recruiting events, where investment banks are actively seeking the ‘smartest’ students to consume and ultimately dedicate their labor power to the reproduction of Wall Street culture. For example, Wall Street is physically present on Princeton’s campus through recruiters: they “visit the university every week… their advertisements for information session…and free drinks and hors d’oeuvres dominate the campus newspaper daily; their company literature and application forms are easily accessible” (Ho 45). The recruitment strategy, in fact, appears to be extremely effective in terms of playing on the individual psychological tendencies of students at elite academic institutions where recruitment has little to do with being ‘the best’ or truly ‘global’ in any cultural sense, and having much more to do with a “solution to anxieties about post-graduation life” (Ho 53).

The beginning stages of recruitment and the legitimation of Wall Street as essentially the site of the highest developed and competitive economic system in the world are reinforced by employees of Wall Street, particularly those that do not earn a salary equivalent to upper management positions. Entry-level analysts are largely involved in a project of redefining success and ultimately creating the illusion of the money meritocracy. When most analysts were asked how they justified the social inequality and massive layoffs caused by decisions made on Wall Street, many such as Joseph Tsai answered that “I would like to think that everything…will work itself out so that if you do have the emphasis of shareholder value, that everybody is made better off and there will be more money to devoted to civic works or charity…this trickle-down theory” (159). On the other hand, Devon Peterson’s article in the Princeton Daily highlights the contradictions between the notion that a money meritocracy works to ‘benefit all’ at the bottom line: “These banking firms provide us with a way to maintain our elite status in society by providing avenues to wealth and power that other professions do not” creating the very same anachronistic space that Wall Street promotes through structural redefinition of the corporation as the shareholder (55).

Just as the culture of smartness creates exclusivity, the use of the money meritocracy as a mechanism for free market social justice is equally problematic. Explain what money meritocracy is. The money meritocracy not only does not address discriminatory practices directly, but rather ig[Continued on page 28] CONTEXTS 2015

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Opinion-Editorial

CONTEMPORARY DEBATES ON RACE Photo Essay

No Justice, No Peace

by Nicholas Salazar STANFORD #HANDSUPWALKOUT PROTEST

Courtesy of Nicholas Salazar

Organized by Palo Alto State of Emergency

Courtesy of Nicholas Salazar

A student demonstrator carries a sign protesting the non-indictment of the officer responsible for the death of Michael Brown.

Stanford students march in support of communities affected/represented by the shooting of Michael Brown and in response to the non-indictment of the officer responsible.

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Courtesy of Nicholas Salazar

STANFORD #ICANTBREATHE PROTEST

Courtesy of Nicholas Salazar

A mass of Stanford students gathered in Downtown Palo Alto the night that the officer responsible for the death of Eric Garner was not indicted.

The demonstrator’s sign reads “#TooManyNames”, emphasizing the connection between the death of Eric Garner and the deaths of many other black people at the hands of police.

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Courtesy of Nicholas Salazar Courtesy of Nicholas Salazar

Stanford student protestors walk onto Highway 101, stopping traffic in both directions in response to the non-indictment of the officer responsible for the death of Eric Garner and continued police-related deaths in communities of color.

Stanford student protesters are cleared from Highway 101 by police officers.

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Courtesy of Nicholas Salazar

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. DAY DEMONSTRATION ON THE SAN MATEO/HAYWARD BRIDGE

Courtesy of Nicholas Salazar

Stanford student demonstrators shut down the San Mateo/Hayward Bridge to highlight Martin Luther King Jr.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work against all forms of oppression.

Student demonstrators shut down the San Mateo/Hayward Bridge, stretching a Palestinian flag across all lanes to highlight the intersectionality between conflicts in Ferguson and in the occupied territories.

CONTEXTS 2015

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Courtesy of Nicholas Salazar

Police response to Stanford student demonstrators on the San Mateo/Hayward Bridge.

[Continued from page 23] Wall Street Imperium

nores them completely, delegating the free market not only to managing finance but also to managing societal relations as well.

Ho states that the “money meritocracy posits that the only color Wall Street sees is green, and because its lust for money is even greater than that of most institutions, it is inadvertently ‘less racist and sexist than society at large’” (107). The money meritocracy ignores the reality of the existence of different power hierarchies that are not accessible to all smart people, but only those that fit into the definition of smartness normalized within Wall Street culture. Thus, Wall Street culture and the people that buy into the real existence of a money meritocracy create a liminal condition for the marginalized peoples outside of Wall Street’s strategic focus as well as those within Wall Street’s scope of recruitment.

The idea of money meritocracy in turn fuels competition that can be observed even in the seemingly small material choices that individuals make at work from workplace dress code—women choosing not to wear sneakers over heels—to employees ordering takeout for lunch every day where “[w]hat’s for lunch…is a profound sign of class differentiation” (121). This class differentiation is part of the self-legitimizing culture of Wall Street, contributing to the Wall Street’s narrative of progress. which follows a similar discursive process as that of colonialism—“dangerous marginality, segregation, and reintegration” (McClintock 24). The “dangerous marginality” is experienced by analysts in their situation of job insecurity, followed by competitive segregation among individuals, and ultimately a reintegration into Wall Street culture with money and cultural prestige as the ultimate reward: “in a meritocratic feedback loop, their growing influence itself becomes further evidence that they are, in fact, ‘the smartest’” (Ho 57).

The discourse that justifies and creates Wall Street’s existence is exclusive and does act as an extension, if not a catalyst, of social discriminatory practices that exist within American society and throughout the world. The data collected by Karen Ho in Liquidated analyzed alongside the conceptual tools presented by McClintock in Imperial Leather show the similarities between imperial colonial strategy and the narrative of progress created during the Enlightenment on one hand and the narrative of progress [Continued on page 36]

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Opinion-Editorial

CONTEMPORARY DEBATES ON RACE

What About Black Women?

by Elon Hailu Model Beverly Johnson is the latest victim to come image of Brown people that almost anyone EVER. From Fat forth with rape accusations against Bill Cosby. On December Albert to the Huxtables.” She is one of many in the entertain11, 2014, Vanity Fair published an account by Beverly of a ment industry who have voiced their support for Bill Cosby for chilly incident where Bill Cosby had invited her to his house the same reason. in the 1980s for a “reading”, gave her coffee laced with a drug The negative representation of blacks in the media and threw her out of his house when she called him out on his and in the public has been criticized for leading to stereotypes scheme. Beverly is one of over two dozen women to come forof black men as violent, drug dealers, drug users and gun-totward with a similar story, most of whom were actually raped ing gangsters. Especially, the recent protests of police brutalby Bill Cosby. Yet, many people have voiced skepticism over ity against Mike Brown, Eric Garner and now Tamir Rice show these allegations. The question on people’s minds: why now? how these media representations are affecting the black comWhy are these women choosing to step munity in a real and violent way. It was out after over thirty to forty years from the characterization of “black men as the incident? violent” that has, in turn, led to the viFear of not being believed, olence enacted upon Mike Brown, Eric fear of speaking out against a powerful Garner and even a 12 year old child, man—black or not—and the fear they Tamir Rice, by fully armed police. felt in speaking out against their predI do not wish to belittle the ator; the loving, fatherly, African Ameriimportance of these protests and can family man of the 1980’s, Bill Cosby. the cause. In fact, I fully support and Why did Beverly decide to have taken part in these protests mycome out with her story now, after over self. However, what I saw lacking in two dozen women had already conthese protests and outrage was the fessed to being drugged and raped by representation of black women that Bill Cosby? In the account she wrote for were victims of police brutality. The Vanity Fair, she explained that she did shouts that #blacklivesmatter, #I Can’t not want to be seen as another “angry Breath, “We’re doing this for Mike black woman” who voiced her pain. In Brown,” hardly evoked the image of an interview with CNN, another of Cosbrutality against a black woman. What by’s black female victims, Jewel Allison about #AiyanaJones, #RekiaBoyd, and explained that she was devastated to #91YearOldPearlieSmith who were have been violated by “the one person a few of the black, female victims of that meant so much” to the African police brutality? Why do we not chant American community. their names when protesting the vioRosa Parks’ mugshot. Source: Flickr, author: For the black female victims of Richard rbanks (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) lence against black bodies?

Bill Cosby, their African American comDr. Treva B. Linsey, assistant munity played another role in their choosing to remain silent. professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Bill Cosby was a respected African American man in the black Ohio State University, speaks to this point “our narratives of community for representing the community in a positive light racial violence…have yet to evolve into ones that are gender to a larger public for the first time in history. In the popular inclusive. Black victim = black male.” This has been true both show of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, Cosby played a loving, sohistorically and contemporarily. phisticated, intelligent and witty family man who had it all toWhat about stereotypes of black women being crack gether. The public—black and white alike—loved him. Therewhores, “ghetto,” welfare queens, and—the stereotype that fore, when women in the African American community were prevented Beverly Johnson from speaking out about her inraped by the “father” of their community, they were afraid of cident with Bill Cosby—the “angry black woman”? These stetarnishing one of the very few positive representation of their reotypes have been as damaging to the image of black womcommunity. Worse than that, they were afraid of receiving riden, as images of the black man as a dealer, unintelligent, and icule for speaking out against him—which they did. Artist Jill a violent “gangster”. They have served to solidify negative Scott has been actively defending Bill Cosby on Twitter and understandings of black women that marginalize them in all tweeted “I’m respecting a man who has done more for the communities. People talk about how there are few black peoCONTEXTS 2015

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ple in positions of power. Taking a closer look, one sees that the damage appears to be greater given that there are even fewer black women than men, almost non-existent, in positions of power.

In fact, women in the entertainment industry speak of how there is space only for one prominent “black woman” in the industry. In statements to CNN, models Tyra Banks, Iman, and Naomi Campbell explain how black women were pitted against each other because there was “an unwritten rule that only one of them [models] could be black,” resulting in a competitive atmosphere between black women. In light of this, it is no wonder that black women cry out against injustice. These injustices are true barriers to economic and societal opportunities. In turn, these barriers deny dignity to black women in America.

The conflation of the black victim of social injustice with the black male obscures the fact that black women have been, and continue to be, victims of the same social injustices and more. Black women have been on the lowest rungs of America’s social structure. The social hierarchy in the United States is: white man, white woman, black man and black woman. Clearly, if anyone has rights to cry out against social injustice, it is the black women who have been the victims of racism and sexism for centuries.

Even amongst academics, studies of the African American community have focused on injustices against black men rather than black women. Michelle Alexander, a civil rights lawyer, makes an effective argument of how the prison system has become the New Jim Crow. She makes a compelling argument for how the prison system is the new institutionalized form of racism that replaced slavery. Anthropologists, in their defense of the “street culture” of inner city, black communities, have tried to show the complexities of “street culture” in order to complicate the public’s image of black men. Black women in America have been subject to the same structural violence as black men, yet they receive little attention in academia.

Academics who study marginalized African American communities pay little attention to all the black women that are the mothers, wives, girlfriends and daughters of these black men in prison who have to take care of their children and be breadwinners. They raise their children with absentee fathers. They face structural violence, social marginalization and ridicule when asking for welfare to feed their children, for being angry with their lot in life and for not having a man to take care of their children. American society rarely acknowledges the barriers facing African American women as they work their way up the socioeconomic ladder—barriers placed upon them just for being black women. The Presidency of Barack Obama is considered the greatest political achievement for African Americans in American history. How many of us know that the first African American to run for president in the history of America was a woman named Shirley Chisholm, who campaigned in 1972?

Historically, the efforts and struggles of black women for equality have been relegated to second class in comparison to the efforts of their male peers. There is a national holiday dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. in recognition of

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his civil rights efforts. I would argue that Rosa Parks did just as much for the civil rights movement by refusing to sit at the back of the bus as Martin Luther King Jr., but she does not have a national day dedicated to her resistance.

At a time when there are outcries against social injustices against black bodies in the United States, the call should not forget that black women are also black bodies. They face the same injustices of racism, structural violence, lack of opportunity and police brutality that men face. In addition to all of that, they also face injustices for being women; sexism in the work place, staying behind to keep life moving while their men are lost to prisons, police brutality and on the streets. In addition, they are called “hoes,” “ghetto,” and “crack momma’s.” The fact that successful women like Beverly Johnson cannot speak out against rape by another black man in fear of being seen as another “angry black woman” speaks to the hypocrisy of our society.

It is the obligation of those in academia, particularly those in the social sciences such as anthropology, to break down these structural and social inequalities and to dispel our mythical understanding of the black woman. When anthropologists study “street culture,” they should not forget the women running the family within the homes, who are directly tied to the “street culture.” They should ask how women fit into or do not fit into the street culture. In addition, they should also seek to valorize the achievement of black women and understand the barriers they face in a society dominated by white men.

Female black lives do matter. Their voices matter. Just because Bill Cosby once represented the “father” of the black community does not mean the injustices of black women should be muted to preserve a good image of the black community. The black community is both male and female. Our fight should be #blacklivesmatter, #Blackwomenslivesmatter.

Works Cited

Dionne, Evette. “Police Kill Black Women All The Time, Too – We Just Don’t Hear About It.” Bustle.http:// www. bustle.com/articles/52433-police-kill-black-womenall-the-time-too-we-just-dont-hear-about-it.

France, Lisa Respers. “Is There Room for Only One Celebrated Black TV Actrerss in Awards Season?” CNN, December 12, 2014.http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/11/ showbiz/tv/kerry-washington-viola-davis- nominations/ Johnson, Beverly. “Bill Cosby Drugged Me. This is My Story.”

Vanity Fair, December 11 2014. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/12/bill-cosby-beverly-johnsonstory.

Michelle, Alexander. 2012 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.

Rivera, Zayda. “Jill Scott Defends Bill Cosby on Twitter: ‘Society Is Attempting To Destroy A Magnificent Legacy’.”

Daily News, December 2, 2014. http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/jill-scott-defendsbill-cosby-twitter-proof-period-article-1.2030319.

Opinion-Editorial

CONTEMPORARY DEBATES ON RACE

Living with Discomfort: Race in Contemporary America

by Kyra Vargas On Monday December 1, 2014, I stood up and left my introductory Earth Systems lecture with other students in protest of recent events around police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri. I knew I was part of a national movement – from Harvard to Jackson State, students were doing the same across the country. In some places it was just a handful of passionate organizers, and in others there were hundreds gathering to march through the streets of New York City and ultimately getting arrested by the NYPD. I didn’t know what it meant to be a part of the movement at Stanford.

The unfamiliarity of taking such actions about black experiences surrounding police brutality led a couple of my white friends to text me seeing if I’d be there with them, supporting each other in our discomfort. And I was glad to get that text, to know I wouldn’t be alone in my relative ignorance. The thing that made me unsure was my lack of knowledge – I had tried to educate myself scrolling through article after article over Thanksgiving break, not knowing how to approach the tragedies around black deaths such as Michael Brown’s from my very insular, white northern California perspective. And sure, I knew the “facts,” but did I know how to participate?

Not really.

This discomfort with participation is at the heart of the issue of white bystanders across America today. It’s an ailment plaguing our nation, a side effect of white privilege. And this discomfort is integral for a national cultural shift, for making change in a country where black lives clearly don’t matter to so many.

The decision to remain ignorant, to remain outside of the conflict, is unacceptable and fueled by the comfort of complacency in America today. As one protestor’s sign read, “White Silence is Violence.” In the wake of tragedy after tragedy, of young black life lost after young black life lost, it is absolutely necessary to reconsider our place as young, white Americans. As a young white woman at an elite university, it is often hard to recognize when race becomes real in my daily life. In what registers is race applicable to my daily life? Before Ferguson, my inexperienced, ignorant, and yet reflective-ofthe-mass answer would be never.

The uproar over the Ferguson trial and police brutalities across our nation challenge white understanding of identity, precisely what makes these issues uncomfortable.

Mahmood Mamdani, Professor of Government, Middle Eastern South Asian and African Studies, International Affairs, and Anthropology at Columbia, writes about cultural and political identity formation through his delineation of the terms “race” and “ethnicity” in colonial contexts. These are common buzz-

words in modern American conversation. Mamdani argues that race was used colonially to distinguish between those who had power, and those who were subjected to power – the settler and the colonized. This means that ethnicity was left to describe culture within the powerless, it did not pertain to the powerful race at all, it lived in a separate sphere. In colonial Africa for instance, the “natives” and customary law, were said to belong to ethnic groups. This normalized the colonial state as the group without culture. White colonial law was the law.

Entrenched in a political history of how identity is made, the power rests on those without culture. In contemporary America similarly there are those who are seen to be racial and particular and those who are seen to be white and normative.

The tragic events of Ferguson let many white bloggers, journalists, Twitter users, and citizens speak out about their discomfort in their inability to react. Articles like “Ferguson: How White People Can Be Allies” and “12 Things White People Can Do Now Because of Ferguson” filled social media feeds, providing attempts at guidance. I saw no articles being shared that explained how black people should respond. No articles saying, “hey young black man, you may be mad about this so here are some steps to take”. Those messages weren’t necessary. Black people grow up in the United States needing to understand their relationship to power, racism, and discrimination and to them, the outrage felt after Ferguson was not at all confusing. I’d like to posit that a major driving force contributing to white response and the feeling of helplessness about what to do next was a cultural switch. The white privilege that is engrained in our society means that whiteness is the norm that white people are accustomed to understanding what their social response should be, to their fixed position of power. It is a privilege to be without culture in America, to be the default, when that means without a culture of police brutality, without a culture of fearing for your own life because of your identity.

When Michael Brown was shot at least six times by a white police officer, and just a week later Eric Garner experienced a similar fate, and America’s people were left with two cases of no indictment, black and brown response became the norm. Outrage, fear, confusion, and rallying cries were the reflexive strategies. Black, brown and white alike all took to the streets and took to social media to get their message across.

This is not to say that every black person responded the same way. Nor is it to say that white people were completely absent from the outrage. But the reason why my friends and I checked in with each other to see if we were going to the protest, if we had white friends accompanying us, could be CONTEXTS 2015

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thanks to Ferguson’s very important ability to make race feel real. To make the power dynamic that Mamdani studies feel real – to be the norm is to have significant reactionary power. My identity as a white woman was not political in the way that my black friend’s was. She seemed to slip so seamlessly into the movement, into the discussion. I, feeling similar outrage tried to join in, but was met with some concern of the unknown from my white friends. This general tone of apathy, not because you want to be apathetic but because that’s what you feel resigned to, was created by this uncomfortable role reversal in understanding who has culture in America and who is the norm.

Some of this has got to do with ignorance. As white people, we are privileged to be able to bypass all of the racial education about one’s social placement that is requisite in young black people’s lives. And some of it is a desire to block out something we’d rather not deal with. To borrow the words of Tim Wise from his article titled “White American’s Ignorant Bliss: Why so many ‘good’ white people are completely oblivious”: That so much of white America cannot see the shapes made out so clearly by most of black America cannot be a mere coincidence, nor is it likely an inherent defect in our vision. Rather, it is a socially constructed astigmatism that blinds so many to the way in which black folks often experience law enforcement.

The aftermath of Ferguson shed light on how easy it is to be inducted into a culture of ignorance as a young white person. In fact, it takes literally no effort. Many of us are fed bias after bias whether it’s through the news, or lack thereof, and we keep on living our lives. Even at an institution like Stanford University, where education is of the utmost importance, we can still possess this astigmatism. White people must recognize that when we claim a race or a culture, no matter how benign it may seem because in our society it is the norm, we must acknowledge the unintended consequences.

As we claim one identity, others understand us as so. As white people claim identity for others, then others understand it as so. The issue of identity is at once malleable and fixed in this country, and we must recognize our own power in that designation.

The #CrimingWhileWhite Twitter campaign is an excellent example of a step towards that recognition. Started

by Jason Ross, a writer for the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, that social media movement saw over 600 tweets per minute when it was at its peak, and featured tweets like this one:

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It was intended to show the inequality of treatment by police depending on the perpetrator’s skin color. And yes this campaign had its faults. In some ways it was just yet another opportunity for whites to take control of the American narrative yet again, to control the norm, to remain without culture or difference. An intended look at white privilege, manifested by white privilege itself, “look at this common experience the dominant group has”, is what it said to many.

However, we must acknowledge this attempt to step forward and to recognize the role reversal Ferguson provided. An attempt to publically accept a state of identity prescribed ignorance, which is wholly necessary to make any change at all.

A look at statistics shows why I implore attempts at this rhetoric. A Pew study found that “63% of white and 20% of black people think that Michael Brown’s death at the hands of Darren Wilson is not about race”. When in reality among young men, black men are 21 times more likely to be killed by a cop than a young white man. #CrimingWhileWhite is a start to clear away the fog of the normative ignorant, to give glasses to our national astigmatism. And clearly it’s necessary to open the eyes of some.

In controlling the narrative once again, it’s an attempt to step forward, and this role reversal is necessary for change.

The movement shows white privilege while also exhibiting white privilege in and of itself.

I’ll be the first to say that my own presence at the rally on December 1st wasn’t that monumental; I was one of 400. I was unable to continue my participation in the Silicon Shut Down movement and attend the second march after Eric Garner’s death. So maybe my action isn’t enough. Honestly, in my opinion, it certainly isn’t. But for me, it was important to take myself, and physically be placed in a situation in which I could feel this cultural power shift in the dynamic nature of culture in the US. Once I was able to feel that, once I was able to recognize my default place – to whatever degree I could – I felt able to engage in one more conversation. I could no longer pretend to be an outsider to national injustice; I cannot claim innocent bystander status.

I am still struggling to find an action plan, to find my role in getting this country to start moving forward. I would like to say that my participation at the Stanford protest was clarifying that it cured me of that cultural astigmatism. But it did not. It provided temporary relief through temporary experience. #BlackLivesMatter is proving to be a vital fulcrum in the national bystander perspective towards race in America. As a young, white, educated woman it is necessary that I continue to fight this astigmatism and to fight notions of power and the privilege of race-lessness in America. Just because I constitute the racial norm, does not mean that I can allow the narrative of race in America to continue being close-minded and scared of confrontation. Standing up and leaving that Stanford class on December 1st, reminded me to continue looking for moments of pause and reflection about my own political and cultural standing in society, and I hope in my own search I can nudge other white folks to do the same.

Opinion-Editorial

CONTEMPORARY DEBATES ON RACE

Perpetuating “Separate But Equal” Online: Anthropological Reflections on Social Media Responses to Ferguson

by Sarah Moore “We blame systems, but what ever happened to individual responsibility? Of course #BlackLivesMatter but #AllLivesMatter” Sipping your morning chai and scrolling through your Facebook news feed, you notice the above post and shake your head, thinking, “How can someone be so ignorant? In an age where it’s so easy to access information about historic and systemic injustice against black people how can someone so blatantly ignore the fact that racism is about more than individual choice?” With recent incidents of police brutality bringing the nation’s attention to the oft-ignored reality that people of color in the United States do not benefit from a wide array of privileges that their white countrypeople do, to you it seems appropriate to promote the message that black lives, and black lives specifically, are not inconsequential or second-class, and do indeed matter.

Letting out an exasperated sigh, you contemplate the background of the high school friend who probably typed this post from the comfort of their white, suburban living room.

As you check the name of the friend so you can confirm your suspicions about his lack of understanding that stems from never experiencing racism personally, you are somewhat taken aback by the realization that the friend is not quite who you expected. Instead of a sheltered Caucasian, the author of the post was a black classmate with whom you became Facebook friends after working on a group project together a couple quarters ago.

You pause and reconsider your earlier mental outlash. A new flood of thoughts inundates your mind: “Well, she probably just hasn’t had the opportunity to talk to anyone who has really studied these issues. Maybe I should offer myself as a resource… but I don’t want to come off as patronizing. Who am I to think that I can speak to issues of racism better than she can? I guess I won’t leave a comment.”

With all the recent activity on social media regarding publicized incidents of police brutality and subsequent public protests and demonstrations across the nation, there is no better time than the present to reflect on the ways we react to the posts we consume on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other Internet-based media. How does the race of our “friends” or who we “follow” influence, even subtly, how we initially respond to and subsequently interact with (or not) what they post online? Maybe too often the fear of being perceived as insensitive or inexperienced when it comes to struggles against racism keeps individuals, who otherwise at-

tempt to practice thoughtful social engagement, from deeply analyzing, considering, or critiquing commentaries we see online. Yet, if we do not thoughtfully engage with others’ online opinions, then we are perpetuating the hierarchical degrees of separation that already exist in American society and that can only be torn down by a widespread movement involving people of diverse backgrounds.

More so than during previous social movements surrounding race, social media has been a major force in circulating vast amounts of the information and analyses that Americans consume regarding the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the following non-indictment of his killer Officer Darren Wilson. Furthermore, individuals and groups across the country have used Internet outlets to organize thousands of people for demonstrations protesting the situation in Ferguson and the power structures at play. The hashtags #BlackLivesMatter, #HandsUpDontShoot and #ICantBreathe have become intimately connected with police brutality, Ferguson, and another widely publicized incident of the killing of an unarmed black man, Eric Garner, at the hands of white law enforcement officers. At the writing of this article, more than four months after Michael Brown’s shooting and almost three weeks after the decision to not indict Officer Darren Wilson, the hashtag #Ferguson is tweeted or retweeted nearly 1,500 times in a single hour (Hashtracking 2014). It is clear that race-infused events of police brutality are still on Americans’ minds and social media platforms, so how we engage or not with these posts is by no means trivial.

Because so many people use social media as a primary, or even their only, source of information regarding these events, some have turned a critical eye to the accuracy and quality of these sources. During his announcement of the grand jury decision to not indict Wilson, St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch drew attention to the Internet’s role in broadcasting the story, and how this coverage has fundamentally changed conversations regarding the incident. He proclaimed that social media is full of “non-stop rumors” circulating online about the case (Scola 2014).

Perhaps our initial response to this statement by McCulloch is one of aversion, of full-heartedly dismissing his characterization of social media discussions regarding the Ferguson events, because we recognize the power and good intentions of the movements that have been propagated through these online venues. But (why) do McCulloch’s literal words in themselves bother us? After all, Facebook and Twit-

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ter serve only as online forums where millions of participants can say whatever they want about whatever topic they want, and there is no guarantee that the ideas or information disseminated have been fact-checked. In this way, posts regarding Ferguson can very well be classified as “rumors,” which are defined as “circulating stories or reports of uncertain truth.”

Inherently, there is a degree of uncertainty surrounding the soundness of what we read online, and we generally approach that which we read on social media with even greater caution.

Even if we are adamant that social media posts regarding Ferguson and the “Black Lives Matter” movement are factually accurate or even simply valid because they bring to light greater truth about the state of systemic racism in America, we should not be afraid to reflect on how we allow McCulloch’s background to influence our interpretation of his statement. Does it reflect conceptions that we think someone of his background (as a white male in law enforcement) embodies, perpetuates, or believes? It is admittedly difficult to separate the one phrase “non-stop rumors” from McCulloch’s larger commentary and position in the Ferguson incident, but if he were black how would we respond differently? I do not mean to suggest that the race of McCulloch or anyone else involved should not be considered, rather that we should be conscious of how and why these considerations of race influence our engagement.

Similarly, what would we think of McCulloch’s same words if we read them as a tweet from a black youth not associated with law enforcement? It is just possible that in that case we might be more inclined to stomach or even support the notion that social media does host much hearsay and speculation. In fact, I dare to think that some of us might even call the critique insightful or thought-provoking. Yet, if we actually are so strongly defensive of the role of social media, it is unsettling to think that we would we be more inclined to let this critique pass by unaddressed merely because the speaker is black, and small choices like this hypothetical one speak volumes to why and how many of us (do not) engage with the opinions of people of color.

In the journal Critical Inquiry, German-born anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1990:764) declares that real knowledge is inherently intersubjective, stating, “Thought does not function only by imposing logic on data but also by addressing statements and questions, by listening and responding, in short by communicating with a real Other.” I would like to emphasize here the critical nature of the steps of “listening and responding” that Fabian highlights. It is not enough to merely acknowledge that someone else has different thoughts than you, but in order for this reality to be productive, we must actively and meaningfully communicate with one another, whether we are engaging with this second party as part of scholarly work or as part of everyday, real-world experience.

As anthropologists are well aware, there is the great risk that viewing someone as an “Other” can put the speaker in a superior position. Still, the truth is that persons are always, to an extent, separate from one another. For instance, even your romantic partner or best friend is inherently not you and thus an “Other” that you will never fully experience or understand in the same way they experience themselves, even though the two of you may share nearly identical life experiences, opinions, and values. Living a distinct life than someone

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else does not intrinsically create hierarchical viewpoints or interactions, but the refusal to exchange ideas, to foster a real dialogue between parties, does.

When we refuse to engage with Facebook statuses or tweets merely because we do not want to offend someone whose racial experience we do not share or do not understand as well as our own, we are opting out of these real dialogues and perpetuating an inherently unequal separation from Others with backgrounds that are different than ours.

To be sure, I do not claim that we should treat white and black responses to Ferguson and Ferguson-inspired protests in identical ways. Black voices speak from fundamentally different lived experiences than do those of their white countrypeople, but this is precisely why we must not be afraid to engage with each other and our differences, especially when they make us uneasy. In the midst of these discussions, it is just as important as ever to acknowledge that race matters and it influences our understanding of each other and each other’s statements and affects how we respond to these statements. This recognition is key for engaging in honest and open conversations about race and racial difference. If we continue not responding to posts on social media because we do not want to offend, then we are distancing ourselves from the valuable perspectives of a historically marginalized population and perpetuating the concept that black and white voices and black and white lives should be separate. The Jim Crow era’s institutionalized racial segregation showed us how separate is inherently unequal, so as we continue to keep black and white ideas and opinions separate from one another, we are passing the value judgment that they belong to distinct camps. And I’ll give you one guess as to which camp’s ideas are given preferential treatment.

Critically engaging with perspectives that are different than our own is one of the most effective ways to learn from others’ experiences and potentially be in solidarity with those who suffer differently than we do. In settings as common as Facebook and Twitter, people from all racial backgrounds have the chance to counter international and centuries-long racism by choosing to appreciate, but also critically make sense of, opinions that indicate different lived experiences. Of course it would be ridiculous and impractical to suggest that we must respond to every single post we see, or even solely all the ones that reference the killings of Brown or Garner, but it would be valuable and constructive to make a conscious effort to reflect and even respond to just some of the ideas that our peers offer online regarding these events. Collectively, small efforts like these on the ground level can help support grassroots campaigns for widespread, thoughtful change in an America that has thus far failed so many of its own people.

Works Cited

Fabian, Johannes. 1990 Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing. Critical Inquiry 16(4):753-772.

Hashtracking. N.d. www.hashtracking.com, accessed December 12, 2014.

Scola, Nancy. 2014 Ferguson prosecutor slams ‘non-stop’ social media while calling for increased attention to race. The Switch. The Washington Post. Accessed December 12, 2014.

portant to focus on education because “preserving these sacred islands cannot work without a rigorous education system where resident children and their parents learn to coexist with nature instead of exploiting it” (Bassett, 2009). Resources and ent in interviews with school directors, experiential learning programs already in place in many environmentally-based orplays a large role in administering effective environmental edganizations on the islands can provide needed supplements ucation. As Kolb explains, this provides “emphasis on hereto non-existent environmental education in schools. This link and-now concrete experience to validate and test abstract of informal and formal EE would create comprehensive and concepts” that may be taught in science education or other well-funded EE programs for students in Galápagos. Increased subjects (Kolb, 1984). Also, that this “immediate personal EE for students would ultimately contribute to conservation experience is the focal point for learning, giving life, texture, efforts, especially important for residents of the islands and and subjective personal meaning to abstract concepts and at for young students in local schools who will be leading conserthe same time providing a concrete, publicly shared reference vation efforts in years to come. Federally-mandated natural point for testing the implications and validity of ideas created sciences curriculum and administrative restrictions are now during the learning process” (Kolb, 1984). hindering EE in schools due to lack of EE in curriculum, conflaKolb adds, according to Dewey’s Model of Learning, tion of evolution and crethat the experience of ationism as equally viable learning, in general, must scientific concepts, and be a “dialectic process inlack of state-provided tegrating experience and class materials or fundconcepts, observations, ing for fieldtrips. With and action” and that inithese items missing from tially, the “impulse of formal classrooms school experience gives ideas directors state that stutheir moving force, and dents need experiential, ideas give direction to hands-on environmenimpulse” (Kolb, 1984). tal education and more When applied to environprofessional developmental education, these ment for teachers in the concepts of learning and subject area. Collaboraexperience gain reletion with environmental vance to the connection organizations would fill between informal and the absences that the formal EE as a bridge. schools are stating, to This connection, with effectively teach environthe resources and area Murals down town on Isabela Island mental education. expertise of the informal instructors, paired with formal concepts presented by school teachers, would provide Works Cited the vessel for effective EE with both experiential and concrete Ceaser, Mike (2006). Making Waves on Galápagos. Chronicle learning to produce environmental behavior change and deepof Higher Education, Vol. 52, Issue 41 en impact on students of the importance of conservation.

Ministerio de Educación, Ecuador (2007). Plan Decenal de EduStewart reminds that appreciation of flora and fauna cación del Ecuador 2006-2015: Año 2 de su ejecución. are heightened when one takes “the time to live at the same Quito: Ecuador. rate as all the fabulous species” (2006). This can point to a Heylings, Pippa, and Felipe Cruz (1998). Common Propercloser connection with local flora and fauna, a form of expety, Conflict and Participatory Management in the riential learning. Stewart also states clearly that “humankind Galápagos Islands. is a new and more deadly pressure, threatening permanent Ministerio de Educación, Ecuador (2011). Área de Ciencias alteration to unique and irreplaceable biological systems” Naturales: Actualización y Fortalecimiento Curricular (2006) acknowledging, as many sources and locals do, that de la Educación General Básica 2010, 8, 9, y 10 años. conservation is a pressing action that all residents must own.

Quito: Ecuador.

Through the bridge between informal and formal environMeyers, Ronald B (2002). A Heuristic for environmental valmental education, students can be more cognizant of the conues and ethics, and a psychometric instrument to servation of both social systems (primarily school education) measure adult environmental ethics and willingness and ecosystems. to protect the environment. Dissertation, Ohio State Ultimately, informal linked with formal education is the most important resource for presenting evolutionary and University. ecological concepts in comprehensive environmental eduFarmer et al. (2010). An elementary school environmental edcation as “everyone agrees that environmental education is ucation field trip: Long-term effects on ecological and conspicuously absent in the schools,” (Bassett, 2009). It is im[Continued from page 12]

Environmental Education for Galapagueños

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[Continued from page 8] Looking for the Realest Bitch propriation of Hip-Hop.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35.6 (2006): 645-68. Web. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: U of New England, 1994. Print.

Rose, Tricia. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop – And Why It Matters, Basic Books, 2008.

Sia. “Sia Introduces You to Rap’s New ‘Freaky Princess,’ Brooke Candy.” Paper Magazine. N.p., 25 Mar. 2014. Web. 22 May 2014. <http://www.papermag.com/2014/03/brooke_candy_sia_beautiful_people.php>.

Stern, Bradley. “Controversial Candy: Getting “Dumb” With Brooke Candy.” MuuMuse. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 May 2014. <http://www. muumuse.com/2013/07/controversial-candy-brooke-candy-gets-dumb.html/>.

“White Girls That Ain’t Shit.”18 August 2013. <http://irresistible-revolution.tumblr.com/post/58626602947/white-girls-that-aintshit> Woods, Alyssa S. Rap Vocality and the Construction of Identity. Diss. The U of Michigan, 2009. N.p.: n.p., n.d.

[Continued from page 28] Wall Street Imperium

created by Wall Street today on the other. The equation of the corporation to the shareholder has clearly negative implications for those employees who do the “grunt work” or are infamously included in the statistics that account for large layoffs during M&A processes and downsizing or restructuring. However, it is the symbiotic relationship between the institutional elements of Wall Street and the individuals that participate in its continued discourse of progress—increased shareholder value, smartness and money meritocracy—that ultimately result in the legitimation of the efficiency of financial industry at the cost of an overall sharp increase in economic inequality.

Works Cited Helman, Christopher. “America’s 25 Highest-Paid CEOs.” Forbes. 12 Oct. 2011.

Ho, Karen Zouwen. Liquidated : an Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2009.

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather : Race, Gender, and Sexuality In the Colonial Conquest. New York: Routledge, 1994.

[Continued from page 35] Environmental Education for Galapagueños

environmental knowledge and attitude development. The Journal of Environmental Education.

Trombulak et al. (2004). Principles of Conservation Biology: Recommended Guidelines for Conservation Literacy from the Education Committee of the Society for Conservation Biology. Conservation Biology, Vol 18 No 5, pp 1180-1190.

Brewer, Carol (2002). Conservation Education Partnerships in Schoolyard Laboratories: A Call Back to Action. Conservation Biology, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp 577-579 Boullion, Lisa M, and Louis M. Gomez (2001). Connecting School and Community with Science Learning: Real World Problems and School – Community Partnerships as Contextual Scaffolds. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Vol. 38, No. 8, pp 878-898.

Bassett, Carol Ann (2009). Galápagos at the Crossroads. Washington D.C.: National Geographic Society.

Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: experience as the source of learning and development. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

De Roi, Tui (2009). Galápagos: Preserving Darwin’s Legacy. United States: Firefly Books Ltd. Hollweg, Karen S. et al. (2011). Developing a Framework for Assessing Environmental Literacy: Executive Summary. Retrieved from: http://www.naaee.net/publications Stewart, Paul (2006). Galápagos: The Islands that Changed the World. United States: Yale University Press.

White, Deborah. Employee of the Charles Darwin Foundation. In-person interview, July, 2014.

Almonte, Valeria. Director of two schools on Santa Cruz Island. In-person interview, July, 2014.

Eshach, Haim (2006). Bridging In-School and Out-of-School Learning: Formal, Non-Formal, and Informal Education. Journal of Science Education and Technology.

Delgado, Maria. Director of a Primary School on San Cristóbal Island. In-person interview, August, 2014.

Martinez, Ricardo. Director of a Primary School on Santa Cruz Island. In-person interview, July, 2014.

García, Carlos. Director of a primary and secondary school on Santa Cruz Island. In-person interview, July, 2014.

Torres, Carmen. Coordinator in environmental programs, Galápagos National Park on Santa Cruz Island. In-person interview, July, 2014.

Sánchez, Miguel. Director of Ecology Project International in Galápagos. In-person interview, July 2014.

Dohman, Adam. Director of education programs for World Wildlife Fund in Galápagos. In-person interview, July 2014.

Reyes, José. Director of Hacienda Tranquila on San Cristóbal Island. In-person interview, August 2014.

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Author Bios Emma Joslyn

Emma Joslyn is majoring in American Studies with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality in America. She is an editor of STATIC (Stanford’s student activism publication), a player on the club tennis team, and a mentor for a local high school student with The Pheonix Scholars. She is also a research assistant for Professor Estelle Freedman and filmmaker Christie Herring, working with both on a documentary project about San Francisco community-builder Faith Petric, and working with Professor Freedman to design a course about music and social movements. Emma is currently writing an honors thesis that examines the identity politics of white women who rap, interrogating the identity politics of popular music genre. By examining several white women artists’ employment of hip hop culture, she will draw conclusions about race, gender, and socioeconomic status within hip hop culture and popular music at large.

Amelia Farber Amelia is a senior undergraduate double majoring in Anthropology, on the Ecology, Environment, and Evolution track, and Music, with a concentration in vocal performance. She is passionate about education and environmental awareness, which has led to her recent senior thesis research in the Galápagos Islands, investigating connections between informal and formal environmental education for students. She hopes to continue her research on environmental education in Latin America through her graduation this June. Anthropology and music intertwine as well in her interest in ethnomusicology of different national and era-specific musical trends.

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Meredith Pelrine Meredith Pelrine is a junior double-majoring in anthropology and linguistics, with a focus on culture and society in each. They’ve been part of various queer communities and involved in queer politics for many years, and have been previously involved in awareness training and advocacy for survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. They’re from Bloomington, Indiana.

Taylor Nguyen Taylor Nguyen is a sophomore majoring in bioeingineering. Growing up in Texas, she has focused much of her time into volunteering with children and, more specificially, indviduals with special needs. Her past work has inspired her to take further steps into opening greater avenues to offer support, including holding an executive position for Stanford Kids with Dreams that offers recreational programs for kids with special needs and other research positions. She is also committed to Stanford Camp Kesem, a summer camp for kids who have been affected by a parent’s diagnosis with cancer. She hopes to find and pursue the cross-section between philanthrophy and bioengineering in the future.

Elon Hailu Elon Hailu is a senior majoring in medical anthropology.

She is also pre-med and hoping to enter medical school within the next two years. She has done independent research in Ethiopia looking at how the plant, Moringa stenopetala, thought to have medicinal benefits, has become the epicenter of interaction between an indigenous community, urban scientists and business people hoping to gain benefits from its medicinal use.

It was an adventurous fieldwork traveling almost to the Southern border of Ethiopia, on public transportation, meeting a variety of different cultures.

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Kyra Vargas Kyra Vargas is a senior majoring in anthropology, taking classes in the culture and society track. She has especially enjoyed learning about the politics of land use, youth culture, and the anthropology of extreme environments. One of her favorite academic experiences was getting to travel abroad to Cape Town where she participated in a service learning program in environmental education. She is looking forward to pursuing a career in education, continuing her exploration of social justice and broadening her perspective.

Andrea Hale Andrea Hale is a senior majoring in Anthropology and Iberian and Latin American Cultures. Her current research interests include the politics of ‘cultural’ performance. She has found herself studying with a constant and active effort to understand broader contradictions set forth between discourses and lived experiences. She has observed these contradictions not solely through reading academic articles but from working in Latino communities in the Bay Area as a teacher and interpreter, from living with Ecuadorian immigrants in Barcelona, from interviewing artists and activists in the Afro-Ecuadorian and Chachi communities in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, and from working in workers’ rights groups on Stanford’s campus. She also loves to dance and has a dance training background mostly in flamenco and salsa.

Sarah Moore Sarah is a senior double majoring in anthropology and Spanish. Her research focuses on how the children of Mexican immigrants to California situate themselves in public school. Sarah is also an undergraduate peer advisor in anthropology and the president of a student group that offers math tutoring to elementary school students in nearby East Palo Alto.

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contexts

stanford undergraduate research journal in anthropology spring 2015

Contexts is a peer reviewed journal designed to allow Stanford undergraduates to share, discuss, and reflect on anthropology-informed thought and research.

For questions, comments, or to get involved please visit contexts.stanford.edu or email Stanford.contexts@gmail.com