Intellectual privilege, money and harmful exclusivity at elite institutions

Signifying Nothing: Holding on to gender, resisting whiteness and 'bougieness'

For as long as I can remember, a shelf in my living room at home has proudly displayed a book called “Are Italians White?” I’ll admit, I’ve never read the book, but I always predicted the answer to be something like, “Well, you may assume they are, but it’s actually much more complicated than that!”
The complexity of Italian identity isn’t just the terrain of erudite, problematizing intellectuals. My grandmother—rest her soul—once told me how she hated to fill out forms about her race. “I’m not white!” she said. “They want to make me say that I’m white, but I’m Italian, not white!”
I’ve often encountered a similar problem. With all the paperwork necessary for higher education, I’ve needed to fit my race into a checkbox. It doesn’t help that my father is Latino, so I’ve had to choose between categories such as “white,” “Hispanic,” “Hispanic (non-white),” “white (non-Hispanic),” “Puerto Rican,” “Hispanic (non-Puerto Rican)” etc.
The options change depending on the form, and (as you can see) often border on the ridiculous. Recently, institutions have tried to accommodate for mixed ethnicities, but sometimes I have to choose just one option. And I usually avoid being “white.”
What’s wrong with being white? White is the default race. The white race is not an identity in itself as much as it is an absence of identity. How many times have you seen someone, shoulders shrugging, say “I’m just white,” and nothing more?
To admit that you’re white is to sacrifice ethnicity and culture. Can whiteness exist in its own right, as more than an instrument of oppression?
Whiteness is also association with power, and the derogatory language we use often classifies social and economic power as “uncool.”
A few months ago, my friend John and I were walking to a concert in downtown Manhattan. We passed by a building with a large vertical sign: “Sohotel.” I turned to John. “Wow,” I said, “that is so…hotel.”
Reveling in my wittiness, we decided that “hotel” would be a cool new slang word. But what did it mean?
We arrived early to the concert with nothing to do but walk around the theater and observe the crowd. That dude’s pinstripe suit? Hotel. That woman’s Google tote bag? Hotel. Showing up an hour early to a rock concert? Hotel.
Feeling out a meaning to this word, we decided that “hotel” meant “tackily bourgeois.” To act “hotel” is to ignorantly exude self-importance. Of course, there was already a word that meant more or less the same thing: “bougie.”
To be bougie is not just to be a part of the bourgeoisie, to own the means of production. Bougieness is aesthetic, and bougieness is not cool.
What about “basic?” In one popular sense of the word, “basic” activities include drinking Starbucks, wearing North Face and using Instagram. Truly basic people are unaware—they don’t realize that their interests are unsophisticated and vapidly materialistic.
The basic and the bougie aren’t far apart. In a way, bougieness is basic. To value wealth and power is to conform to a dominant capitalist ideology. Being bougie is the default: we see it across television and in advertisements. The media tells us to value the aesthetic of elitism, and that conforming is not hip.
When I was a child, there was another book I often noticed. It wasn’t in my living room, but on my mother’s personal shelf. This book was Maureen Dowd’s “Are Men Necessary?” (I didn’t read this either.) Even as a 10-year-old boy, the title felt like a personal attack. If men weren’t necessary, what did that mean about me? In my childhood understanding of gender, it seemed insane to suggest that we eliminate half the population. And yet, when it came to race, I had no qualms about sacrificing my whiteness for a cooler Italian ethnicity.
When deconstructing identity, we sometimes conflate race and gender as analogous structures of power. And yet despite resisting “bougieness” and whiteness, I’ve held on to the masculine, dominant, gender. Being a man isn’t lame like being white or shallowly wealthy.
Gender feels more substantial than wealth or whiteness. We can measure and change our wealth; whiteness is simply the absence of color. Gender, on the other hand, is something that most of us hold on to.

Signifying Nothing: Think before you watch: considering racist depictions in porn

If you think Americans are no longer racist, you must have never watched porn. Even the most mainstream, “vanilla” porn sites are full of racist representations. A search on Pornhub.com (in the name of investigative journalism, of course) yields the following video titles: “Interracial cuckold slave is humiliated and dominated,” “Dirty Latina whore swallows cum after hot anal sex,” “Asian housewife serves her two guests,” “Mocha.”
Feminists often discuss how pornography implicates gender. This is important, but prejudice in porn goes beyond gender. Porn produces pleasure by capitalizing on all kinds of power relationships: gender, age, class, occupation and race. Despite priding itself on filling every niche of desire, most porn reenacts racist tropes that build and represent a racist mentality. Black men threaten white men by having sex with white women. Asian women are docile and subservient. Latina women are fierce and exotic. Black women are “ebony.”
Porn is obscene—a word derived from the Latin “obscaena,” meaning offstage. Literally, it is a network of media that exists underground, outside of more publicly-acknowledged media outlets. And yet the Internet has made it easier than ever for us to access pornography. If you want, you can watch porn in a car, in a bathroom stall or during class. Such ubiquity deserves serious attention.
When some adolescents spend hours every day consuming porn, what are they learning about the world? As backstage media, porn masquerades as a glimpse into adult reality. Of course, the bodies are exaggerated, the plots contrived, and the acting often banal. But the irony is that, by fulfilling consumer desires, porn plays out racial tensions that exist in our collective mind. And racist images shape how media consumers see the world. I’m sure you’ve heard young men claim “I’m just not into black girls,” or “I have an Asian fetish.” Porn trains an entire generation of people to associate sex with race, to objectify and compartmentalize their sexual partners.
A few semesters ago, Professor Peter Coviello (who is unfortunately no longer at Bowdoin) gave a talk where he argued that feminists shouldn’t see porn as a problem to be solved, but as a positive space where people can acknowledge their desires. But should porn recognize and satisfy all desires equally? Porn is regulated enough to keep images of children out of the pornographic mainstream. Children cannot consent to depicting their own naked bodies. But what about race? Do we not care if black men consent to be depicted as savages, Asian women as slaves and Latina women as whores?
The racist depictions in porn suggest a world where the white man is a viewer whose desires must be fulfilled at just about any cost. For pornography, people aren’t people as much as they are symbols. In “The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography,” Angela Carter says that, “Pornography involves an abstraction of human intercourse in which the self is reduced to its formal elements.” Porn is form. Carter suggests that a “moral pornographer” could combat the injustices of porn by using pornographic forms to empower degraded people. But would the process of empowerment and humanization be truly pornographic? Should morality ever be obscene?
I’m not telling you to stop watching porn. Puritanical censorship and regulation is exactly what allows pornography to get away with rampant prejudice. By labeling sexual content as “obscene,” mainstream media can claim their moral superiority, while engendering a space that permits the reenactment of all kinds of injustice. Sex is not bad, and pictures of sex are not bad. But a mindless pursuit of pleasure will only perpetuate longstanding relationships of power.

Signifying Nothing

Intellectual privilege, money and harmful exclusivity at elite institutions

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Jesse Ortiz

Columnist

September 11, 2015

I always sneeze twice. My sneezing pattern is a goofy quirk of my body, a trait that I have lived with but never understood. But, for all of its mystery, double sneezing is completely harmless. At worst, I have to deal with tepid “bless you’s” after the second sneeze.

For many people, facts of their bodies are more than silly. My older sister has Down Syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by an additional chromosome. Her genes have shaped her subjective experiences in ways I can barely imagine. However, I do know how a developmental disability prevents her from enjoying the same opportunities that I have. In the liberal arts, we like to talk about socially constructed differences such as race, gender and sexuality. Although genetic conditions are deeply physical, these conditions are medicalized and classified, and the people who experience difference are essentially deemed as others.

People with serious intellectual disabilities are so othered that they are nearly unrepresented on elite college campuses. Bowdoin is getting better about studying privilege around race, gender and class. However, it’s easy to lose sight of the intellectual privilege that brought us here and allows us to thrive in an intense academic setting.

Intellectual privilege intersects with class and wealth to perpetuate inequality. I don’t come from a family that could ever afford to pay full price for Bowdoin, but my academic merit got me into this wealthy institution that could supplement most of my tuition. Being at Bowdoin, I have access to resources that can further my intellectual and social development, which in turn increases my opportunities to earn money. Conversely, some people may experience mental and physical differences, but they can achieve mainstream success with extra support that they deserve for their unique conditions. When you’re smarter, you get more money, and when you have more money, you can become smarter.

So really, what is the relationship between intelligence and wealth? It can’t be a coincidence that the institutions with the best reputations, the “smartest” students, tend to have the greatest endowment. In politics, we hear demands to increase funding in schools, which will ostensibly increase the quality of education and the intelligence of the students. If you can buy smarter people, is intelligence any more than a function of power? In America, there exists an illusion of meritocracy where we expect that individuals who’ve earned massive wealth are especially intelligent. In addition, large corporations can control the distribution of valuable information while creating standardized tests that measure narrow ideas of intelligence.

Despite the correlation between wealth and intellect, masses of people can’t get their foot in the door of an institution with nearly as much capital as Bowdoin. My elementary school had a program that incorporated students with manageable intellectual disabilities into “regular” classes. While this model worked well with nine-year-olds, I doubt that the educational model of Bowdoin or many other institutions of higher education could sustain such radical integration. Bowdoin can institute affirmative action for gender, race and class, but perhaps there are some embodiments of difference that will never fit this kind of environment. Is this a problem for Bowdoin? Maybe a college isn’t responsible for educating more than its select group of students. But, wealth is never innocent, and with Bowdoin’s immense endowment, we should be aware of how we’re hoarding money to further our own intellectual pursuits.

Maybe Bowdoin needs to devote its resources to ensuring that its own students are comfortable, healthy and smart. Perhaps Bowdoin’s education is turning us into valuable citizens who can use our resources to fight for underrepresented minorities. Our academic expertise can allow us to work with organizations that “serve the needs of others.” However, despite the value and importance of charity, service work is intrinsically othering. We serve others because they are not in our situation. Can we work towards and invest in initiatives that liberate all people to pursue their social and intellectual goals? Could my sister with Down Syndrome ever access the opportunities that I encounter every day? Maybe this is impossible while selective institutions accumulate massive amounts of wealth. And maybe, with enough effort and resources at Bowdoin, I’ll hit upon an answer.

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