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inkskinned · 11 months

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one of the things about being an educator is that you hear what parents want their kids to be able to do a lot. they want their kid to be an astronaut or a ballerina or a politician. they want them to get off that damn phone. be better about socializing. stop spending so much time indoors. learn to control their own temper. to just "fucking listen", which means to be obedient.

one of the things i learned in my pedagogy classes is that it's almost always easier to roleplay how you want someone to act. it's almost always easier to explain why a rule exists, rather than simply setting the rule and demanding adherence.

i want my kids to be kind. i want them to ask me what book they should read next, and i want to read that book with them so we can discuss it. i want my kid to be able to tell me hey that hurt my feelings without worrying i'll punish them. i want my kid to be proud of small things and come running up to me to tell me about them. i want them to say "nah, i get why this rule exists, but i get to hate it" and know that i don't need them to be grateful-for-the-roof-overhead while washing the dishes. i want them to teach me things. i want them to say - this isn't safe. i'm calling my mom and getting out of this. i want them to hear me apologize when i do fuck up; and i want them to want to come home.

the other day a parent was telling me she didn't understand why her kid "just got so angry." this woman had flown off the handle at me.

my dad - traditional catholic that he is - resents my sentiment of "gentle parenting". he says they'll grow up spoiled, horrible, pretentious. granola, he spits.

i am going to be kind to them. i am going to set the example, i think. and whatever they choose become in the meantime - i'm going to love them for it.

#writeblr #i was doing a lot with high school students. over and over again #other teachers kept asking me what i was doing differently - why the kids listened to me. i am not particularly foreboding #and i have a pretty firm personal policy of never reacting in anger #godhelpme.#i was always kind of taken aback #because in general the kids were pretty easy. i explained i needed to keep everything “PG-13” because this was my workplace #and it was kind of their workplace #too. besides #i love swearing #and since i couldn't swear #neither could they - so if they were going to say “fuck” or become violent #they needed to choose a really specific time #because we only get “the one”.. sure enough - nobody wanted to waste the one very specific “fuck” utterance. kids listened.#i think just because - that rule makes sense. the kids understand that i don't want to be unfair to them #that censorship is stupid #but that i'm under these rules too so like let's ride it out together #also i look young and tbh between me and u nobody wants to make the nice english teacher cry #the way these kids defended me to their friends was really genuinely so heartwarming bc the Grouchy Frat Boy #would be like MISS RAQUEL DOESN'T DESERVE THAT KIND OF AN ATTITUDE BRO DON'T TALK BACK TO HER

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buffster · 7 years

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Pangs (BTVS 4.08)

This is part of my ongoing Buffyverse Project, where I write notes/meta for every episode in an attempt to better understand the characters and themes of the shows. You can find the BTVS list here and the ATS list here. Gifs are not mine.

I ended up watching Pangs twice because there was a lot to digest. It was a good episode for many reasons--Angel lurking, Spike joining the gang for the first time, Thanksgiving--but also an uncomfortable one because of the racial issues. Let’s just say this straight off: if you don’t have any POC in your main cast, you probably shouldn’t make the villains POC or attempt to have conversations about race. As far as some of the more intricate issues within the episode, I don’t claim to be an expert. So if you have some thoughts on the issue feel free to reblog and add them.

Giles: It's not fair. You know that's what she'd say. You can see her and she can't see you.

Angel: Believe me, I'm not getting the good half of the deal. To be outside, looking in at what I can't... I'd forgotten how bad it feels.

Buffy has a couple of relationships throughout BTVS, but Angel and Spike are the only ones we see her be physically aware of and really have a connection to. There are multiple scenes in Pangs where she’s off her game because she feels something...and that something is Angel, lurking in the shadows watching her. I know the plot required he not reunite with Buffy in order to entice viewers to Angel, but it’s in character. This guy loves to lurk and avoid difficult emotional conversations. He does have a point about their interactions, though...both of them are an emotional mess in I Will Remember You.

Xander finally gets a dignified job as a construction worker and Anya is loving it. My policy is to live and let live when it comes to headcanons, but personally I think Anya is about as straight as they come. She’s all about the rippling man bod (and, as some have pointed out, she’d probably mostly date women if she was attracted to them at all).

Xander’s first project is a new cultural center for UC Sunnydale, which is where we get our plot. He falls into a pit and awakens the spirit of a Chumash warrior. The warrior then infects him with multiple diseases because that’s what happened to his people. One of the diseases is syphilis, which is where we get the “his penis got diseases from a Chumash tribe” line in OMWF.

Willow: Thanksgiving isn't about blending cultures, it's about one culture wiping out another. Then they make animated specials about the parts with the maize and the big big belt buckles. They don't show you the next scene where all the bison die and Squanto takes a musket ball in the stomach.

The most emotionally affected is Willow, who has inherited her concern for indigenous peoples from her mother. Ironic that Shiela refuses to participate in certain holidays for concern of others but can’t pay attention to her own daughter. She’s bad at personal relationships but very firm in her beliefs and ideas. Willow is fighting to make some kind of peace with Hus throughout the episode while Giles is firmly for taking him down (as the one with diseases, Xander is on Giles’ side). This is one of the first times we see Giles and Willow start to clash and her begin to question his authority and wisdom.

Buffy: The thing is, I like my evil like my men: evil. You know, straight up, black hat, tie you to the railroad tracks, soon my electro ray will destroy metropolis BAD. Not all mixed up with guilt and the destruction of an indigenous culture.

I can’t really explain why, but I love when characters/the narrative acknowledges something the audience has noticed (i.e. Buffy’s interest in evil guys). Although it is a little out of place here because she hasn’t had anything with Spike yet. I don’t think we can say she’s into the dark side until it becomes a pattern, and at this point it had not. Anyway, they all go back and forth throughout the episode about what to do with Hus. Giles thinks it’s too late to do anything. I like the “Vengeance is never sated, Buffy. Hatred is a cycle...all he will do is kill” line. I also believe, as the famous quote says, ‘Hate does not drive out hate. Only love can do that.’ No matter how many times Hus takes revenge he will probably remain angry. (( Since this is Tumblr, I’ll over explain so as not to be willfully misinterpreted: I’m not saying fighting back is never the answer. Just that getting revenge is never going to make your bad feelings go away. It might make other changes, but I think hatred and anger just grow. ))

We start to see some clash between Xander and Anya because he blurts out “you don’t talk to vengeance demons. You kill them.” He prefers to ignore Anya’s past misdeeds and I don’t think he ever really reconciles them. As long as Xander didn’t see you commit evil he’s content to ignore it.

Giles: Tell me again why we're not doing this at your house.

Buffy: Giles, if you want to get by in American society you have to learn our traditions. You're the patriarch. You have to host the festivities or it's all meaningless.

Giles: And this is in no way an elaborate scheme to stick me with the clean up.

Buffy is feeling lonely and particularly protective of Thanksgiving. She’s upset her mother won’t be doing it as usual and says “everything is changing”. But she “smells a turkey and (I’m) eight years old” so she’s hoping she can keep the spirit alive herself. Buffy really is about growing up and we see Buffy move farther and farther away from childhood comforts as time goes on. Her obsession with Thanksgiving this year is her attempt to cling to the past. While Giles and Willow worry about Hus, Buffy mixes ingredients and worries about all the little cooking details.

Buffy invites Riley but he has his own plans in Iowa.

Riley: My folks are there. We always do Thanksgiving at my grandparents farm. Little place just outside Huxley. Corn and pigs.

Buffy: That sounds wonderful.

Riley: It is. After dinner, we all go for a walk down by the river with the dogs. And there's... trees, and I know what you're thinking, it's like I grew up in a Grant Wood painting.

I know Riley doesn’t exactly fit with our band of outcasts, but that’s not necessarily a bad point for his and Buffy’s relationship. Since Buffy doesn’t have that he could have been an avenue for her to gain it.

Riley: What's the line --"Home's the place that, when you have to go there -"

Buffy: "-- they have to take you in." That's what they say.

Spike attempts to go home to Harmony, but she’s “in control of (my) own power now” and threatens to stake him. He finally turns to Buffy.

Spike: I'm saying Spike had a little trip to the vet and now he doesn't chase the other puppies anymore. I can't bite anything. I can't even hit people.

Sensibly, the gang is still planning to turn him away until he says he has the inside scoop on the soldier boys. He’s tied to a chair and sits through all the chaos.

Spike: You won! All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do! That's what Caesar did, he's not going around saying "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it"! The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, you massacred them, end of story!

Spike: You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better? It's kill or be killed here. Take your bloody pick.

Xander: Maybe it's the syphilis talking, but some of that made sense.

Giles: I made several of those points earlier, but that's fine, no one listens...

Spike’s pretty cold about what happened to the tribe, but he’s evil so it’s expected I suppose. The gang thinks he has a point about there not being anything they can do at this point and decide to fight. It was kind of a strange conclusion to the story. “Thanksgiving is a sham! So many atrocities! What can we do? Nothing. Ah well.” The message was just a little unclear and I think the story was more about plot than a political message.

The gang battle the spirits and finally triumph, but not before Buffy turns the main warrior into a bear. It was fun to watch Spike reacting to everything during the episode (and I love his smirk when Xander spills the beans Angel was there).

During the fight, Angel leaps up and breaks one of the warrior’s necks and he, according to the script, “drops like Jenny Calendar”. Anya then wonders what he’s like when he’s evil and we get one of our rare Angel-and-Angelus-are-in-fact-not-totally-seperate moments. Willow tears into the warriors as much as anyone else and feels guilty later.

Xander: I don't know. It kinda seemed right to me. A bunch of anticipation, a big fight and now we're all sleepy.

Character Notes:

Buffy Summers: Her mom is visiting Aunt Pauline for Thanksgiving this year. Buffy mentions she stole and lost Willow’s hairbrush, proving she’s still an annoying roommate--Willow is just more accommodating than Buffy/Kathy.

Willow Rosenberg: She mentions there are some great spells that work better with an ear. Giles and Willow talk about Angel losing his edge because everyone but Buffy saw him.

Riley Finn: Forrest calls him “mama’s boy” in reference to Maggie and we see he is already attached to her.

Xander Harris: He accidentally says Anya is a strange girlfriend and she lights up at the word. But he claims to be delirious.

Angel: He leads Buffy to Father Gabriel, apparently an old contact. When he first shows himself to everyone they all assume he's evil.

Spike: He explains that vampires that don’t feed become living skeletons.

#pangs #Jane Espenson #Buffy summers #willow rosenberg #xander harris #anya jenkins #spike #Rupert giles #angel #buffy/angel #xander/anya #Harmony Kendall #Spike/Harmony #Riley finn #Buffy/Riley

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bluewatsons · 7 years

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John Thomason, Hillbilly Ethnography, The New Inquiry (November 29, 2016)

A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of Trumpism

J.D. Vance has had a very good year. With the bewildering rise of Donald Trump–buoyed, supposedly, by a groundswell of support among the white working class–the author of the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy has become a de facto spokesperson for the president-elect’s constituency on the cable news circuit. “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the northeast,” Vance writes in the book’s opening pages. “Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree.” A Yale Law School graduate who now works for Peter Thiel’s investment firm in San Francisco, Vance has made a second career explaining his Appalachian Kentucky and Rust Belt Ohio roots to the liberal audiences of MSNBC and the New York Times. (The Times even included Hillbilly Elegy in its list of “Six Books to Help Understand Trump’s Win.”)

Some on the left have taken liberal readers to task for their earnest gullibility: Vance is a conservative–albeit of the #NeverTrump variety–and he prescribes conservative values to rectify the Rust Belt’s “culture in crisis.” He takes great pains to insist that the decline of industry is not responsible for “a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it,” that reacts “to bad circumstances in the worst way possible”: with hedonism, materialism, poor work ethic, lack of thrift, disregard for family obligations, and a victim mentality. Those sound like the pathologies conservatives have long attributed to black Americans, as Sarah Jones points out in the New Republic, because that’s exactly what they are. (“I have known many welfare queens,” Vance writes, “some were my neighbors, and all were white.”) Like all bootstraps narratives, Vance’s focus on self-improvement distracts from the structural causes of the suffering that plagues his hometown.

If this were the extent of Hillbilly Elegy’s ideological baggage, it would be harmless enough–Vance’s policy prescriptions are vague, and his bootstraps mantra is unlikely to convince any liberals. But embedded within Vance’s many first-person plural appeals to the white working class is a set of racial assumptions that readers would do well to interrogate. Hillbilly Elegy insists, almost simultaneously, that it is and is not about race. Vance writes that he hopes his readers will not see class through “a racial prism,” but quickly goes on to say: “There is undoubtedly an ethnic component lurking in the background of my story.” Hillbillies, Vance claims, are a race of their own.

After lamenting that all whites fall under a single racial banner in the American imagination, Vance works to distinguish “hillbillies” from WASPs and other whites. “Hillbillies” are an ethnically homogenous and geographically identifiable subgroup: whites of Scots-Irish descent who live in the Greater Appalachia region of the United States. As Bob Hutton notes in Jacobin, Vance’s ethnographic description echoes historians Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney’s “Celtic Thesis,” which argued that white southerners were ethnically and culturally distinct thanks to their common descent from pastoral Celtic tribes in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. McDonald and McWhiney were also founding members of the League of the South, a white nationalist organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center currently lists as a hate group.

Vance’s view of Appalachian culture feels more opportunistic than sincerely white nationalistic. It allows him to portray Appalachian and Rust Belt poverty as an exceptional phenomenon, rather than a symptom of broader trends that could not be so easily ascribed to culture. As such, it conveniently justifies the existence of his book. This opportunism makes the book’s racial determinism all the more insidious: it makes it more palatable to audiences that might normally be on guard against explicit white nationalism.

For one thing, Vance cites racist-thinking much more directly than even his critics have indicated. The very first endnote references Razib Khan, a writer who the New York Times dropped as a regular science contributor after Gawker revealed his “history with racist, far-right online publications.” Charles Murray–author of The Bell Curve, and perhaps the most famous racial determinist in contemporary American public life–is cited approvingly. These citations are not accidental, nor the product of lazy research. Last month, Vance sat down with Murray for an hour-long discussion at the American Enterprise Institute, a discussion in which the two emphasized the “strong ethnic distinctions” that characterize the white working class.

It’s clear that Murray not only relishes Vance’s emphasis on the ethnography of the Scots-Irish–Murray’s reference to his own “pretty clean Scots-Irish blood” is a bit chilling–but also has good use for the cultural crisis Vance diagnoses in his supposed ethnic group: when Murray asks him to comment on the decline of steady marriages and male breadwinning, Vance obliges in good faith. The accident of Vance’s success is that he published his memoir about “a culture in crisis” at precisely the moment that Trump’s election has forged a national consensus that such a crisis exists. And, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, the ideas that get picked up in a time of crisis are the ones that are lying around.

But Charles Murray’s ideas about racial determinism are not the only ones still lying around. Another racial ideology is “lurking” in the background of Hillbilly Elegy, one so central to contemporary conservative thought that it doesn’t register as ideology at all. Call it racial innocence: Even as Vance wags his finger at the vices of his fellow hillbillies, he cannot help but insist on the innocence of their whiteness.

For decades, the explicit invocation of white supremacy has been anathema to American public life. If this was a welcome development, it was foolish to assume it would be a permanent one. Racial determinism was the Trump campaign’s center of gravity, from the candidate’s rise to prominence as a champion of the “birther” movement to his insistence that a Mexican-American judge would necessarily be biased against him. People like Murray have been peddling racial determinism for a long time, but Trump’s victory has made it a central tenet of the American right, rather than a fringe view it entertains with the occasional National Review article or think tank fellowship.

With its “ethnic component lurking in the background,” and with well-meaning liberals tacitly accepting its dubious racial claims, Hillbilly Elegy helps to normalize this thinking across the political spectrum. But while reactionary racial determinism spent decades in exile before its recent, triumphant return, an insistence on racial innocence never left the conservative mainstream. This ideology, too, is implicit in the book’s opening pages. Hillbilly Elegy asks us to accept that the Scots-Irish are fiercely loyal, quick to anger, and suspicious of outsiders. It’s just their culture. If the white working class is reacting badly to deindustrialization, as Vance argues, it is because of these innate characteristics.

This strain of mythology was expressed in former Democratic Senator Jim Webb’s Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (2004), a book that Vance and Murray both cite approvingly. For Webb, these cultural traits are the very stuff of American greatness. In Vance’s update, those same traits are hastening decline. But, though Vance calls for introspection instead of anger, and though he explicitly insists that his people are responsible for their own lot in life, he is still (implicitly) endorsing a story much like Donald Trump’s: The Scots-Irish made America great until outside forces cast them aside. Something intrinsic to them–what they were–once held great social value, but no longer.

As the historian Matthew Lassiter has argued, racial innocence was a foundational ideology of the “silent majority” that elected Richard Nixon for two consecutive terms. The movement’s core of suburban whites accepted equality before the law (and many core civil rights); what they vehemently objected to was the idea that their whiteness had benefitted them and that antiracist policies might be required to counteract this. (Housing and school desegregation were the flashpoints for this constituency.)

For the Trump coalition, the dynamic is different: instead of the innocence of its privilege, it’s the innocence of its dispossession that supporters rally behind. The danger lies not only in their denial of the continued, empirically demonstrable benefits incurred by whiteness, but also in the implicit (and sometimes explicit) claim that their whiteness is being leveraged against them. This is how the racial innocence that has long characterized conservative thinking in the post-Civil Rights era evolves into a more dangerous phenomenon: racial vengeance.

Of course, vengeance couldn’t be further from the mind of J.D. Vance. He seems nothing but thankful for his own ascent to the coastal cosmopolitan class, and Hillbilly Elegy is peppered with positive statements about pluralism and multiculturalism. But with its casual, almost imperceptible acceptance of conservative racial premises, the memoir draws the battle lines in favor of the white supremacists now storming the halls of American power. The problem is that Vance tells the exact same story that they tell, just with a different ending: To make America great again, they should pick themselves up–not push others down. Needless to say, this sermonizing is not going to convince them. If we’re going to halt their advance, we need to tell a different story.

#literature #critique #appalachia #america #j. d. vance #conservatism #race #inequality #rural america #hillbillies #culture #subcultures #poverty #racialism

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