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tanadrin · 5 years

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Olly Thorn, the guy who does Philosophy Tube, argues in his video on liberalism that, as an ideology, it’s characterized primarily by its tendency to carve out exceptions: politicians of classical liberal bent like moderate Republicans in the US and Tories in the UK promulgate a general political perspective of to-each-their-own, but place those principles in abeyance for pragmatic or situational reasons--and, of course, classically liberal documents like the U.S. Constitution talk a big game of being about freedom and self-determination generally, while having implicit and explicit glaring exceptions, like women and black slaves.

I disagree. Not because I’m a diehard classical liberal; I think liberalism is a useful starting point through which many much more incisive and useful political and social analyses have passed. It is at best the Newtonian physics of human rights, though sometimes it reeks of epicycles. But: I think liberalism is best understood as the practical application of philosophical principles discovered during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but only fully explored and coherently grappled with much later. Nonetheless, as a tendency, it does have its own internal logic, and the apparent suspension of liberal principles by self-professed liberals is less an inherent property of a liberal worldview than an inherent property of humans being shitty and clinging to, or adopting, prejudice when it’s expedient or provides some measure of personal comfort.

This is important because I think that ultimately the contradiction between the liberal perspective and the mental jiu-jitsu required to maintain those prejudices from a liberal perspective can open the floodgates to progress. Let us take the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s in the US as an example. Many different factors contributed to the successes of the CRM in the 20th century. Previous attempts to win something like civil equality for black people in the US had failed: Reconstruction was abandoned, struggles against segregation in the early 20th century came to little, and the appetite for racial discrimination on the part of the white majority, especially in the South, was not at all diminished after the end of World War 2.

What changed? Mostly, I think, the right leaders and the right strategies at the right time. But a strong contributing factor was the fact that the U.S. saw itself as an essentially liberal construct, based on rights and freedoms and equality, and no matter what racist justifications were trotted out to narrow the scope of those rights, it was increasingly apparent both in internal and external terms that something was hilariously out of kilter. Women’s suffrage, the labor movement, and the relentless drive of black Americans to increase their own economic prosperity made it clear that there were brutal archaisms within the systems of American life that could no longer be sustained. On the world stage, two massive wars were fought in which the U.S. positioned itself as a defender of freedom and democracy, alongside allies that emphatically did *not* have explicit regimes of racial segregation enshrined in their laws, or the same thoroughgoing ideology of white supremacy, and one of which indeed argued (at least on paper) for a kind of radical social equality that would have had the so-called freedom-loving founders of the U.S. begging and screaming for a king to come back and rule over them again.

Like all great attempts at reform, the CRM achieved less than it set out to do. But, in a way that the labor movement and women’s suffrage had not, it did leave a powerful lasting model within American culture and within the American civil religion for What Rights-Seeking Is Supposed To Look Like. I don’t know why the CRM was unique in this respect. (I suspect that it’s because the CRM occurred when the contradictions it sought to undo were at their height, relatively-speaking: even in the 50s and 60s, the philosophical justification for racism and segregation was basically incoherent screeching, which meant that extremely uncontroversial tactics could prove highly persuasive.) It also established that *this was a process that was supposed to occur.* By giving such a process a formal presence within civil society, it directly laid the groundwork for other movements rebelling against much older, and much more deeply ingrained prejudices, against which liberalism had, heretofore, been mostly powerless. This was extremely important.

Gay and lesbian culture, and the idea that gay and lesbian people might not be demon-possessed desecrators of all that was good and decent in life, did not appear suddenly in the second half of the 20th century. But the CRM provided a new framework in which to cast the concept of gay rights, and, indirectly, language for a gay identity that wasn’t one entirely of rebellion. Let us cast ourselves back to a much earlier era, the long 18th century. In this era, before even the milquetoast concession to the humanity of homosexuals that was the reclassifying homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder instead of an immolation-worthy offense, the dominant language to talk about good and bad, ethical and unethical, right and wrong, was monopolized by religion and the religion-adjacent concept of natural law. Lacking the natural empiricism that was the legacy of scientists like Darwin, natural law was conceived of in narrow terms that were not, in fact, based on any close or careful observations of nature, but human biases projected on to the natural sphere. Therefore, for many people who found themselves inherently opposed to the dominant ethical framework, like those who fell in love with and were attracted to people of the same sex, the choice they had must have felt from the inside a lot like Huck Finn’s: to be “good,” even though it was personally and spiritually intolerable to you, or to say, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.”

If society refuses to make a distinction between real evils and real suffering we visit upon each other and the moralizing “evils” we conceive of only to police the behavior and opinions of our neighbors, it must not pretend to be astonished when those who, out of no actual malicious inclination, must be themselves or perish reject that general framework entirely. And you know what? I sympathize. If somebody told me that who I was, inherently, was evil, even though I desire no harm and no suffering to anyone around me, and that expressing that identity even in private was equivalent to--or worse than!--inflicting grievous harm on another human being out of pure hatred, I would be extremely suspicious of their overarching moral framework.

Out of, I suspect, an inclination to rebelliousness and an imperfect analysis of the insufficiencies those antiquated frameworks, people like Marquis de Sade embraced or appeared to embrace monstrous ethics, because these were the only other ethics available to them. Christian, and especially Catholic teachings on sexual ethics require not only a denial of truths of human nature available to casual, empirical inspection (if one is willing to conduct such an inspection dispassionately, attendant to discovery of novel goods as well as novel ills), but a monstrous indifference to the suffering such teaching inflict on those who are simply unable to conform. Then, Pikachu-like, the Catholic church looks at gays and lesbians and gender-nonconforming people and says to itself, “Why on earth did these people reject the simple truth of the teachings of Christ??”

Thankfully, the gay rights movement has a superpower that the African-American civil rights movement, and the feminist movement, and many other such movements throughout history, did not. That superpower was the closet, or, more specifically, in the act of coming out. Women, the working class, and racial minorities are not randomly distributed throughout the population. Working class children are not born at random to middle-class and wealthy families; you do not need to come out as black to your shocked segregationist parents at sixteen. There is not a pre-scripted social role for gays and lesbians to slot into, a set of norms that are foisted on one as totally and completely as gender roles with a provenance that stretches back into the misty depths of Mesopotamian time. (There could have been. In some societies there is something quite like that--just not in ours.)

Because literally anyone could be gay, and because creating social bubbles of like racial or political or socioeconomic attributes does not insulate one from knowing someone who has the experience of being gay, even though gay people are not a large proportion of the population (2-5%, maybe), it becomes much harder to maintain “gay” as a firmly isolated category of other. When just enough gay people have come out in a society that is just liberal enough to tolerate their existence, it rapidly incentivizes more gay people to come out, both to be able to live as themselves, and to say to their acquaintances and family, even if in the most nominal way, “yes, you too know a gay person. You must integrate your knowledge of me as a person into your understanding of the category ‘homosexual.’” And, of course, also incentivizes closer analysis of sexual identities; of the coming out of bisexual people, who otherwise might live tolerably-but-unhappily in the closet, or who simply might not understand that bisexuality is a thing and they share it; and, as we have now, the beginning of a glorious blossoming of a diverse and nuanced understanding of sexuality and sexual identity. To the reactionary mind, this looks like the gays are recruiting, and lobbying, and overturning the order of society. In fact, what is happening is that even those conservative by inclination (among them, famously, Dick Cheney) cannot maintain both their avowed liberalism and their opposition to gay rights when confronted with members of their own family who are gay. It may not lead them to a comprehensive application of the ruthless logic of liberal democracy, but it does destroy one specific contradiction. This is why, even though the U.S. as a whole is not much more socially liberal, the popular opposition to gay marriage absolutely fucking *cratered* between the end of the 90s, when the idea was first conceived of in an extremely-distant extremely-theoretical way, and Obergefell. For institutional reasons peculiar to American conservatism, there’s still a nominal opposition, but let’s be clear: the war is over. Gay marriage (which I’m using here as a proxy for ‘basic acceptability of homosexuality as a personal attribute’) won.

This not to say that all discourse over gay rights is finished, any more than racism in the US ended with the VRA in 1964, or the need for feminism ended when women got the vote. Political rights aren’t the equivalent of social equality. But how we organize ourselves politically is integral to the mythology of our society--there’s a reason that, say, in the US electing your high school student council uses first past the post voting, while in Ireland it uses IRV. Political rights are a baseline and a pivot point. If your right to marry someone of the same sex is protected by law, it is a powerful social signal that being gay is OK--just as the VRA is a powerful social signal that racism is not, and women’s suffrage that women’s role as political beings is not to be ignored.

So there’s an ongoing social struggle to dismantle illiberal-undemocratic incoherencies within smaller bubbles of society, using the overarching consensus, and to dismantle biases and prejudices which are predicated on the illegitimacy of homosexuality, because the actual implications of the legitimacy of a gay identity haven’t been fully worked out generally. Same as with race. Same as with gender equality. And because the L, the G, the B, and the T (and all the other letters in the increasingly-expanding initialism) are related, because gender and sex and sexuality are part of a huge and messy complex of human identity, transness and trans identities specifically, while constituting a distinct concept on their own, are bound up in other ongoing struggles, while also having issues all their own. If, as Dan Savage says, misogyny is homophobia’s snot-nosed sibling (and it absolutely is), so is transphobia. You cannot be a transphobe and not, at some level, be supporting the same set of memes that has for thousands of years legitimized sexism, sexual exploitation, the brutalization of gay people, etc., etc.

What are some of those unique issues? Well, for one, transness is more bound up with medicalization and looks more to medicine to legitimize itself as an identity than any other GSM. There are historical and practical reasons for that. Historical, in that sex researchers and psychiatrists newly interested in the empirical exploration of human identities were among the first people to take the experiences of trans people seriously. While we had preexisting and strong social stigmas around the idea of homosexuality, we had a society so transphobic by default that it didn’t even really understand trans people could exist, much less come up with invective against them. This didn’t mean early trans pioneers like Lili Elbe were accepted by society, really; but the cruel incomprehension of society was more like the attitude to circus freaks than to serial killers. With gay people, on the other hand, “sympathetic” psychiatrists reclassified homosexuality as a disease, then started work on various kinds of fucked-up conversion therapy. Psychiatry may be a science, but let it never be said that science is immune to human prejudice.

But the practical reason for that association is that modern medical technology offers a powerful tool for relieving the suffering of trans people. To be sure, there are specific concerns of medical care among gay, lesbian, and bi people, too, especially since the beginning of the AIDS pandemic. But such is a) the complex and interlocking aspects of gender and presentation and embodiment of both in our society and b) the nature in which dysphoria is felt by trans people, that medical intervention is, purely on a pragmatic level, a powerful tool to both relieve suffering specific to the experience of being trans. That’s not really the case with gay or bi identities.

Where we run into trouble is where we rely on the interface between trans identities and medical institutions to legitimate trans identities. What this huge long screed has all been a preface to is this assertion: that it is, above all, entirely unnecessary. You do not need a comprehensive medical theory of blackness to recognize black people deserve rights. You do not need a medical theory of gayness to recognize gay people deserve rights. Ditto womanhood. Indeed, in *every one* of those cases, medical theorizing on paradigms of homosexuality, womanhood, and race have been used to prop up, rather than to dismantle prejudices, and it is only the relentless logic of liberal values, either on their own terms, or in the more sophisticated form under which they’re incorporated into other critiques of society (as leftists sometimes manage), that have ultimately pushed through the “eww, I don’t like these people” reaction to a consistently tolerant treatment of these categories as fully realized human beings--or, at least, the beginnings of that treatment.

(Irrelevant aside: I actually entirely expect that the close relationship between medical and experiential aspects of transess will be the vehicle to greater acceptability of a transhuman ethos around how we interact with our bodies. Because the morphological self-determination aspect of transhumanism is fundamentally liberal, i.e., it’s about personal autonomy and personal flourishing, and because the technologies available to facilitate that are medical, they’re bound up with the cultural aspects of medicine. Right now, that’s a disease model, based both on the inheritance of medicine as “thing which exists to make people healthy again,” and the practical limits of scarcity and wanting people to pay out of pocket for anything that is classified as purely cosmetic. But in my heart of Utopian hearts, even purely cosmetic procedures belong to the same category, mutatis mutandis 1) whether they can be shorn from the (IMO mostly unfair) presumption they’re about conforming to oppressive social norms, and 2) the fact they’re usually used to enact a preference much less acute and involving much less personal difficulty than GID. But big, big emphasis on “usually.” To put it another way, unbinding medicalization from transness wouldn’t be an argument against providing specialized medical care for trans people. It would be an argument for providing a similar set of services to everyone.)

I’m actually deeply uninterested in theorizing about what transness is or how it’s constituted. For one, I think a lot of the questions around it are simplistic and ill-defined, such as the utterly moronic search for “a gay gene.” Human identity and sexuality and sex, and cultural complexes built around those things which have their roots in, but really aren’t tied to biology in any kind of philosophically consistent way, are too multifactorial, and too fuzzy to be clearly or cleanly captured by psychiatry and neuroscience and biology as they currently stand. Maybe one day, when we have Culture-level AI able to image us down to the subatomic level and run sophisticated simulations of every metabolic pathway and every cognitive tic simultaneously we can create a sufficiently detailed model of the human being to speak on these things with some certainty. But that’s actually irrelevant to the messy business of lived experience, and to the practical business of “how do we get people to stop deliberately inflicting massive amounts of suffering on each other.”

The answer to the latter question is essentially the same as has been for homosexuality. Like gay people, trans people have the superpower of being able to come out. Unlike gay people, trans people make up an even smaller proportion of the population. And the conversation around the diversity of gender identity is even more in its infancy than the conversation around sexual identities. But as we have seen time and time again, the exact constitution of the identity is irrelevant to the identity’s legitimacy. Those hostile to that identity will always find a basis on which to rest their hostility: using medical legitimacy, or failure to conform to the gender binary, or failure to meet some arbitrary definition of dysphoria, will make it no easier to gain acceptance. Minorities under siege have been willing to throw less-mainstream members of the group under the bus to defend themselves since time immemorial: it never works. You will be accepted for precisely as long as you are useful to attack other members of the group, and then they will turn on you. Racists will use black people who look down on AAVE to say, “see! I’m not racist!” and then still refuse to hire the well-dressed black person who speaks perfectly standard GenAm, over a less qualified white person. There is no “balancing act” between a “reasonable” set of trans identities and an “unreasonable” set, because what the philosophical battle is over is not where, exactly, the line will be drawn for a minority identity, but the validity of that fundamental identity in the first place.

So I tire of people who want to endlessly split and compare forms of transness that they feel are well beyond the set of central examples of trans identity. I tire of people who want to treat some forms of gender self-identity as invalid, or of too little value to the person making them to be worth caring about. This is not just dumb, and it’s not just bad strategy (solidarity! it works, bitches). It’s actually completely missing the point. If you can convince society that “trans” is a legitimate identity, the supposed edge cases don’t matter. If you can’t, abandoning people “without” “real” “dysphoria” or w/e won’t make a difference. It’s not as if they’re the one thing standing in the way of every transphobe going “welp, guess we were wrong!” The thing standing in the way is that they refuse to accept trans identities at all. They will point to whatever they can to buttress that lack of acceptance, and if it isn’t that it will be something else. The thing that works against that, the thing that dismantles that, is the same thing that always dismantles prejudice: you be who you are. You don’t let anyone take that away from you. And if someone asks you to philosophically justify your experiences, your life, your existence, you tell them to get fucked, and you keep right on living.

#ramblings and doggerel #please excuse the long ass maddowesque meandering #i swear there's a point at the bottom of all this

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webart-studio · 5 years

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How to make sure your small business is on the correct aspect of historical past in 20 years

Historical past has a behavior of trying unfavourably in the direction of people and companies who don’t maintain as much as the scrutiny of recent morality.

David Solomon, co-founder of Blueprints explains that that is evidenced by the demonisation of all slave merchants, colonisers and sexual exploiters of historical past, who typically had been merely doing what was ‘completely authorized’ of their interval of historical past.

It’s tough to inform how historical past will look again at us now, however the indicators are there. Our descendants shall be astounded by our technology’s wasteful nature. They are going to be horrified that we’re so damaging to our personal planet, that we didn’t act on local weather change, that we had been so overtly misogynistic and racist. And with historical past transferring sooner than ever earlier than, I consider we are going to look again with disbelief in as little as a decade.

So what can we do to ensure we’re on the correct aspect of historical past, particularly when moral moorings will change as quickly as 2030? What steps can we take to make sure our legacy as a enterprise chief is seen favourably?

Will your determination nonetheless be seen as honest and simply in 10 years?

I consider the subsequent #MeToo motion is more likely to come from the world of worldwide enterprise, the place firm administrators have allowed so many staff to be exploited in creating nations by low pay and admittedly life-threatening working situations. Moreover, they’ve made choices which have prompted untold injury to the environments of creating nations.

I can envision a time within the close to future the place whistleblowers name out their bosses after they make morally abject choices that have an effect on the lives of staff abroad. They are going to leak emails of those who willfully prompted rainforests to be minimize down or rivers polluted.

We’re seeing the shoots of this now, however in the intervening time it’s the faceless companies who’re being singled out, and they’re able to counteract this by rising their public relations funds. In an age the place it’s straightforward to pay money for emails and name recordings, it’s not onerous to think about the subsequent step being an lively marketing campaign by the general public to carry the choice makers to account.

Now think about it’s 2030 and environmentalism, financial justice, and true social/gender/racial equality aren’t simply fringe concepts, however are the mainstream. Will your choices maintain as much as scrutiny, or will you be held to account by your colleagues, and finally most people? Will you be protected from #DecisionsHaveConsequences?

Negotiate to do what’s proper

The concept the whole lot is negotiable is a hangover from the ‘80s enterprise ethos of dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest. Nonetheless, the economic system just isn’t a zero-sum recreation, and getting one over in your companions/shoppers/prospects merely creates a internet loss for society. That is additionally a breeding floor for unsustainable progress, which has led to us pillaging our planet.

I strongly really feel that we will resolve most of the issues on the planet if we merely reframed how we approached a negotiation, eager about the human and societal implications of the agreements we attain, reasonably than simply the underside line.

When you should, consider your negotiations by way of a branding train with longevity. As a result of customers of the longer term will keep away from the manufacturers who operated sweatshops and drove their SME suppliers out of enterprise of their relentless pursuit of income.

Think about your choices on the entrance cowl of a newspaper

Within the fashionable age, ailing intent has few locations to cover. In only a few years, we’ve come from miniscule recording gear being the stuff of governments and spies to nearly each human on earth having a tiny private recording system that may immediately share content material throughout all the planet. Who is aware of what expertise shall be developed sooner or later? What we do know is that it’ll doubtless make it even tougher for the morally abject to cover.

The one answer to survival on this always-recording milieu is to behave with empathy to your stakeholders in each determination you make. How would they react in case your opinions or actions had been plastered throughout the homepage of the Huffington Publish?

Measure your organization by greater than profitability

We dwell in a capitalist society, so we declare forgiveness for specializing in the underside line with each determination we make. Nonetheless, I predict that historical past received’t look too kindly on the businesses that passively performed the sport of creating infinite income with out actively searching for to enhance the lives of their staff and prospects.

Some argue that we’re transferring right into a interval of post-capitalism, the place markets nonetheless drive the economic system, however clever machines are in a position to overlay human wellbeing as a major issue to make sure the damaging nature of unfettered free markets is reigned in. On this situation, it’s attainable to think about that we programme these machines to be optimised not only for revenue but in addition for the standard of lifetime of all stakeholders inside an organization – i.e. administrators, staff, companions, suppliers, shareholders and prospects, multi functional go.

The attention-grabbing factor about this concept is that you just don’t want to speculate closely into synthetic intelligence to future-proof your organisation for post-capitalism, you simply want to start out eager about how one can enhance the lives of each particular person your organization touches.

But it surely’s not all optimistic. A few of the largest firms on the planet are at present making huge fortunes by exploiting their staff. I predict that until they alter their methods, historical past received’t look kindly at Walmart, Sports activities Direct and Amazon, however conversely it can at Riverford, John Lewis and Google.

Be guided by your ethical compass

While we’re on the topic, one other factor historical past received’t look favourably on is the billionaires who hoarded wealth reasonably than reinvesting it, who facilitated the best hole in wealth distribution the planet has ever skilled.

I left the world of banking as a result of the system was damaged, it was designed to assist drive wealth to the highest and hold the remainder of us blinded to how inequitable it truly is. My instinct screamed to me that this was morally bankrupt, although tradition at present nonetheless praises those that hoard wealth in a hole pursuit of non permanent reward.

I realised I may apply my information of economics and finance to assist areas which were exploited, reasonably than proceed to be a part of that exploitation. I additionally realised that taking a long run, sustainable method to the financial improvement of those resource-rich areas would assist facilitate better wealth technology for all, in a manner that works in concord with nature as an alternative of in opposition to it.

I co-founded Blueprints as a result of in my intestine I knew it was the correct factor to do, and that I didn’t must compromise on being rewarded financially for my efforts – certainly the extra profitable I’m, the extra profitable others turn into with me.

Equally, I’m very conscious that I couldn’t dwell with myself if I had been one of many eight individuals who held better wealth than greater than half the planet.

What’s your instinct telling you? Are you serving to to generate wealth symbiotically for your self and for these much less lucky, in a manner that’s harmonious with nature? Or are you purposely holding again others in a hole pursuit of wealth or standing, with little regard for what state you may depart the planet in for future generations?

I predict that historical past will choose those that are dishonest with themselves by a lot larger requirements than we at present really feel are acceptable.

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how2to18 · 6 years

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“There must be more money! Oh-h-h; there must be more money. Oh, now, now-w! Now-w-w — there must be more money! — more than ever! More than ever!”

— “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” D. H. Lawrence

IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, Lily Bart, Edith Wharton’s heroine in that well-known novel of an earlier Gilded Age, contemplates with envy and appreciation the beauty of a porcelain tea service. Wielding her fine-honed sense of materialism, she persuades us that things can embody aesthetic spirituality. In Lauren Greenfield’s new documentary Generation Wealth, we find no such consolation. Here materialism presents itself in the most un-transcendent form. Greenfield has spent the last 25 years studying, photographing, and filming the American drive for wealth and its overflow into the global economy, extending from Los Angeles to Moscow, Dubai to China. And it is not a pretty picture. Greenfield shows us the investment banker who cannot recall the number of homes he owns as he eyes his next yacht; the Orlando time-share mogul who builds a 90,000-square-foot mansion on credit, hoping to outrival the Palace of Versailles; the etiquette coach in Beijing who charges $16,000 to teach proper pronunciation of Western designer labels; the wife of a Russian oligarch who proudly labels herself “a luxury.”

In addition to the mega-rich, Greenfield also shows us the poor — primarily white American women, as she’s chosen to represent them — who are equally caught up in this frantic, often narcissistic, struggle for excess: the school bus driver who puts herself in debt and loses her child and home after traveling to Brazil for plastic surgery (“It was time to focus on me”); the small-town 15-year-old girl who wants to become a porn star because she is determined to “make something of [her]self”; the six-year-old beauty queen who chants through pouty, painted lips, “money, money, money!” while dressed like a Vegas showgirl.

Woven into these blunt portraits of seemingly delusional individuals whose desires for money, beauty, and fame lead them to downfalls of various kinds, Greenfield’s camera also captures more subtle, ironic juxtapositions, many of which underscore the uneven racial and gendered axis of power: the black rapper who boasts of his ability to buy women, “I was throwing money at a person, and she likes it!”; the anorexic socialite who anxiously weighs herself while surrounded by a mountain of luxury goods; the hedge-fund manager who tells us that having a child finally taught her what is important in life, while the camera shows an infant sporting bejeweled sunglasses and a “Future CEO” sign by her crib.

If we ever wondered why, in the age of Trump, the working class should come to identity with a self-styled billionaire, it is because, Greenfield suggests, “wealth” is all about aspiration. As one subject in this documentary puts it, “Fake it ’til you make it.”

Longing suffuses this film: a collective murmuring of want seeps from within and without the narrative. The film’s principal insights — that materialism feeds and hides intangible hunger (the craving for power, fame, privilege, and beauty); that for some there would never be enough; that sex and beauty are sources of abjection and currency for women; that race and gender inflect power differently; that neoliberalism has made commodities out of all of us (artists and scholars included) — are not new. But what does infuse these insights with a novel, if melancholic, power is Greenfield’s own sustained and complicated preoccupation with the world that she documents.

Whispering a “more more more” song of its own, Generation Wealth is itself an expression of voracious appetite and acquisition. It is more than a film; it is an archive, a brand, a franchise, an iteration of articles, photography shows, museum exhibitions, books, catalogs, and sister documentaries (Fast Forward [1997], Thin [2006], The Queen of Versailles [2012], and more). The sheer quantity of images (hundreds of thousands) that Greenfield has captured with her camera for the better part of a quarter century reminds us that there is often a very fine line between curatorial practice (an art that the film underscores when Greenfield shows herself working with her collaborator to shift through thick stacks of photographs for her story board) and hoarding. What compels this documentation — this collecting, this hoarding — is Greenfield’s own accounting of loss.

As a documentarian, Greenfield is not shy about treading close to voyeurism or offering overt judgment, but she tries to soften the harshness of her criticism by placing her own professional and artistic aspirations alongside the other forms of addictive ambitions being documented. Interspersed throughout the film are snippets of Greenfield’s own home videos and interviews with her family members, including her mother, a feminist academic who was abandoned by her mother and who went on to make her own hard decisions about the priorities of work when she moved away from her children while Greenfield was still a minor.

What is unsettling in Generation Wealth is not the morality tale and its attendant values (the difference between, say, surface and depth or superficiality and authenticity), but the unavoidable cyclical nature of compulsion and intergenerational haunting, particularly concentrated around the figure of the mother. The anxiety of motherhood, though never explicitly thematized, gnaws at the edges of this documentary, erupting in multiple incarnations of mothers in the film, including Greenfield’s own mother and Greenfield herself as a mother, and what these maternal figures bequeath or fail to bequeath.

In several, almost random home movie clips — some taken by Greenfield, some by her husband in her absence — we witness scenes of quieter but intense unfurling in Greenfield’s own home: in one scene, we see her son Noah as a cute toddler first standing alone and rather lost in a room and then running out calling “Mommy … Mommy …” to an apparently empty hall; later, we see the same boy, older, scowling into the camera, engaged in what was clearly a well-known game in the house, called “No Camera Allowed.”

There is an especially painful moment when Greenfield interviews her now teen-aged son. In response to her question about what it was like for him that she traveled so much for work, Noah says rather calmly, “Well, the damage is already done.” The camera remains on the son’s face for a few seconds, until he looks uncertain and asks, “You … alright?” Greenfield stays behind the camera, but the camera-focus wavers ever so slightly. It is in these moments that we see the shadow archive haunting this archeology of plenty.

It is by now a commonplace to identify material craving as a substitute for deeper, emotional hunger. But such a diagnosis tends to also assume or imply that some forms of more real or more worthy fulfillment can or ought to be had, overlooking what remains irresolvable in modern everyday life: the often still-incompatible demands, for instance, between work and family, especially for women, what social psychologist Arlie Hochschild famously called the burden of “the second shift.”

If the glimpses that gesture to Greenfield’s biography in the documentary suggest that Greenfield does finally come to terms with her mother from whom the estrangement was both persistent and unspoken, that reunion is delicately balanced against Greenfield’s own ongoing, never-complete outreach to her own sons, especially the eldest who grew up during and alongside this project. Early in the documentary, Greenfield recounts how painful it was for her in 2000 to leave her then-two-week-old firstborn in order to take on a prestigious, 10-day photo assignment in China commissioned by Time magazine. She then goes on to tell us that she made 11 more trips to China and Russia in the next 14 years.

In 2017, in the catalog for the photography exhibit that was an earlier iteration of Generation Wealth, Greenfield ends her introduction with a note of aspiration that already carries its own denial: “And as I run faster and faster toward the finish line of this project, I promised myself I will spend more time with my children when it is done.”

The flip side of this anticipated future is a latent nostalgia — both ideological and personal — that drives Greenfield’s film. But the prelapsarian America of Protestant work ethic and frugality for which the film mourns and to which it aspires never existed. American pastoralism achieved at the expense of genocide and other forms of violence has always been more of a myth and a desire, an imaginary point of ever-receding origin. Consumerism has always been part of the American Dream, ever since the early colonials acted as the middlemen in, and then became avid consumers of, the so-called China Trade (George Washington banked his social standings on the number of china plates and tea cups he owned). What Max Weber called the “worldly asceticism” of American Puritans existed in concert with John Wesley’s exhorting Christians to gain all they could to grow rich. Artists and thinkers from the 19th century to the 20th have repeatedly warned us of the dehumanizing effects of modern capitalism: think of Thomas Cole’s five-part series The Course of Empire depicting the American progress from pastoralism to civilizational success to the gluttony of inevitable decay; or consider writers as diverse as Veblen, Dreiser, Wharton, and Lawrence who have explored in various forms the social and psychological effects of modern consumer culture.

It is thus worth reminding ourselves that Greenfield’s extensive and often arresting visual archive about greed gives us both over-saturation and partial vision. When she moves us from the macro-picture of global capitalism to the micro-interpersonal scale of mothers and children, we get the full affective force of her critique, especially her gender critique. At the same time, the telescopic transition also makes us wonder whether the socio-political has been eclipsed for the familial, displacing the cruel optimism of neoliberalism onto (white) maternal lack.

The question of American wealth and its attendant twin, poverty, is related to but not reducible to personal or familial pathologies. It is not even an issue of pure economics; after all, the wealthiest nations are usually the ones most haunted by the principle of scarcity. All we have to do is read Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016) to begin to grasp the profound and expansive pathologies of a nation so intently focused on property while ignoring one of the most basic human needs of many of its denizens, a roof overhead. The American Dream, for a great number of people not in Greenfield’s documentary, involves much more modest yet also more inaccessible aspirations: a home, food, education. This tale of plenty is a rehearsal of incompletion on many levels.

The poet Susan Stewart tells us that the object, in the form of the souvenir, gains the source of its power from its very partiality. The souvenir object that we collect can never recuperate the original experience, not because the object is limited, but because the object-as-fragment can generate a supplementary narrative that is more expansive than the original experience. In the end, the haunting fetish logic invoked by Generation Wealth is not the specter of commodity fetishism (though there is plenty of that) but the legacy of partiality — that fraught toggle between possession and dispossession — that plagues and animates our senses of who we are as a privileged nation.

If Lily Bart dreams of aesthetic fulfillment as a stay against the demeaning and constricting realities of materialism, for Greenfield the image revives and erases loss by way of its endless rearticulation. Robert Hass would put it more elegantly: “Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.”

Anne Anlin Cheng is professor of English and director of American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief and Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface.

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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“There must be more money! Oh-h-h; there must be more money. Oh, now, now-w! Now-w-w — there must be more money! — more than ever! More than ever!”

— “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” D. H. Lawrence

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jakeschuler66-blog · 6 years

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Synthetic Reflection Essay

Jake Schuler

Work of Art

Professor Straton

Synthetic Reflection Essay

Before enrolling in “work of art,” the freshman inquiry course I was in for my first couple terms here did not focus on critical thinking. The only way I feel like I improved my critical thinking is in an educational sort of sense. In high school, although I was fortunate enough to have a lot of intelligent, inspiring, and captivating educators, I also had a handful of lazy and teachers who obviously viewed their job as just that, a job and not an opportunity to educate the future cogs in the machine of the future in the hopes that result in a healthier society. Despite how frustrating watching someone waste that position is, it’s somewhat expected of high school teachers at a public institution due to the fact that Portland Public schools, the district I went to high school in, is known for not holding it’s employees at high standards, holding them accountable and paying too well. The students are also often times less eager to learn as well because they are not paying for their education.

“Health, happiness, and human rights” gave me the experience of acknowledging that university educators can also be apathetic and lazy when it comes to their students even though they are being paid far more, an average college professor in the U.S. makes around $98,000 a year as opposed to a public high school teacher who makes around $58,000. Ineffective teachers and members of the workforce are to be expected everywhere you go, but I’ve been curious about university professors who show little interest in their subjects because of the fact that at least some part of them is a very capable educator. I say this because getting a college-teaching degree takes several years at the least and has large amount of assessments, requirements, ect. that are needed to pass that would, prove they are capable in some sort of fashion, even if it’s not quite traditional, educating students who are new to the subject.

Despite my obvious frustration with lack luster teachers, especially higher level ones, having this experience gave me a situation that made me consider that there may be more going on behind closed doors, I never heard my old professor mention a spouse or partner, but I did know he had kids and I also know that being a parent, especially a single one, can be a fulltime job. There’s also just the fact that you never truly know the type of emotional turmoil or trauma someone is dealing with. Because of this, I was able to think critically on an emotional level and attempt to be more sympathetic.

In my previous freshman inquiry class, I learned very, very little. The course was called, “Health, happiness, and human rights” and although we did touch upon a few topics that discussed the abuse of human rights based on their class, race or gender, or more of just read books about them, I can truly say that I picked up very little new or provocative information about race relations and theories about them in that class. This is one of the reasons I wanted to transfer out of that course and into, “Work of art.” What I would like to see is more information on how to address racial prejudice and the impacts of it in our community. I feel like there is more that I can do on a day-to-day basis to observe, discuss and help combat racism in Portland, a city that is obviously segregated and dominated by white culture. This should be an important topic in a class that is supposed to revolve around mental health and human rights, but I can’t really recall learning anything that would help with the epidemic of racism in Portland. This is an issue because despite Portland residences often claim to be super progressive, we are still a primarily white community and you will notice that people of different races tend to gravitate towards people of the same color around here, which only furthers racial tensions in society. What I would like to see in this class, is the most effective way to create a bond between people of different races consistently, creating a stronger and less oppressive society often starts with changing your daily life, routine, or ideologies.

This course definitely supplied me better for the synthetic goals. The skill I feel I improved the most in was communication. I felt like I could openly express my feelings in this class and that people would hear me out. That does largely have to do with that this group of classmates was more accepting and friendly than the previous freshman inquiry I was in, but as someone who can be very overbearing and struggles to hold my tongue at times, I grew in an equally important way, listening. This is an equally as important part of communication as speaking your mind because by listening you can learn how to show better respect for your peers and give them more wholesome responses when you do speak. This is also helps contribute to my critical thinking skills in the sense that I can draw more from listening to other people’s experiences and be able to develop more sympathy on a daily basis.

If there is one thing that I could have changed in this course, it would be that we did more to do with ethics and social responsibility during class. Despite viewing a lot of content about social injustice, overcoming it, the causes of it, ect., I feel like we lacked discussion about these things or how we could potentially model after successful civil rights movements when it comes to similar issues that our community maybe involved in. I also would have liked to go on more field trips where we could actually work and contribute in a community. However, I was recently informed that this class was tight on it’s budget so I do understand why this was an issue.

Overall, this class was satisfying. I was able develop skills such as communication and critical thinking because i was in a setting where I could comfortably speak my opinion and feel like I was being heard and respected. As far as I could tell, everyone else in the class was in the same boat and I actually got to know a couple people in my mentor session pretty well. This course, unlike my last freshman inquiry, was less revolved around busy work and more invested with expressing yourself, which I prefer as an educational method.

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ouraidengray4 · 6 years

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Why I Think Porn Is (Extra) Important for Women of Color

It's 2018, and most progressive-thinking people recognize that porn can be great. But it might be even better than we thought—especially for women of color hoping to figure out some stuff.

New research published in the Journal of Sexuality and Culture found that porn is useful in helping women explore their sexual interests. According to the study, women who watched porn were more likely to embrace sex, and in addition to being more in touch with their sexuality (no pun intended—OK, maybe some pun intended), women who watched porn were more likely to use the internet to find community with other women who did the same.

EDITOR'S PICK

"I think porn can open a new world," Wallace says. "It can make imagination possible, especially for people who have had limited sexual experience. It's a means to consider other ways of being sexual and intimate without having to practice, or feeling vulnerable with someone else."

However, many WOC are unsure about the best way to ease into porn. If you're thinking about it, consider starting small. "I started out watching GIFs on Tumblr and slowly graduated to videos. I keep a bookmark file of my favorites called 'petit mort,'" Thomas jokes.

Finding porn that doesn't suck for women—especially women of color—can be difficult.

Once we overcome the pre-conditioned guilt associated with watching porn, women may find another barrier: A lot of pornographic content is aimed pretty exclusively at a male audience. "There are so many different types of porn, and many interpretations and understandings of the material. Much of it seems to subjugate women, even when we seem to be in power—the performance aspect of porn feeds masculinity, from the positions to the sounds," Wallace says.

Thankfully, there are subcategories and communities to provide women with more direct access to better-tailored content. Terms like the quickly-multiplying "Porn for Women" tag lead the way to videos that tend to be less male-centered. "When the only videos I could find were anal or incest/rape, I spent a lot of time googling 'free ethical porn' and found a subreddit of links that women vet and share with descriptions and reviews," Thomas says.

Of course, there are downsides to porn when it comes to the sexual identity development for women of color. The phrasing of porn categories can be reflective of stereotypes that are harmful: Just like in the real world, the pornography industry limits the range of acceptable scenes of individuals of color.

"In mainstream porn, fetishization is still how many people of color are allowed space," Glover says. "You see a similar overlay with how trans bodies are hyper-consumed when they are allowed to exist in porn, and representation for gender nonconforming individuals is still largely nonexistent.

But I think this is definitely improving as more independent porn options, like CrashPadSeries, are becoming more available," says Glover, referring to a porn site that offers porn for queer individuals of all genders and orientation. They prioritize ethical consumption and dissemination of material along with advocating safe sex, ethnic diversity, equal pay, and comfort for their contributors. While these kinds of sites are few and far between, they can provide a framework for prioritizing sexual identity development for individuals overlooked in traditional porn.

But it's worth it—for developing your own sexual identity (and sex with your partner too).

For many WOC, porn has been the only tool available to explore what we do and don't like sexually in a safe way. Black women have often been portrayed as insatiable, hypersexual beings. In an attempt to help us, our families often restricted sexual expression through messages about good Black girls not being "fast." Those messages about the strict boxes Black women must fit into remove our ability to connect with those around us without shame, but when seen in private, porn offers a bit of refuge from the stigma of sexuality for Black women.

There are many obstacles on the path to healthy sexual identities for women of color. Some of them are common to all women and taught through cultural influencers like religion; others are personalized through oppressive histories and exclusion. Unfortunately, the world isn't going to change so we can accept ourselves—but many Black women have decided that we aren't going to be limited by the metaphorical chains others apply to our sexuality.

The good news is, women are watching more porn than ever. According to PornHub's 2017 end of the year review, the term "Porn for Women," saw a 359 percent increase over the last year. And when porn is helping, it can help show us what we might be open to—and what we would absolutely not consider in real life. Porn is also a great place to explore possibilities that we may want to attempt in real life with our partners, such as kinks, fetishes, positions, accessories, and additional people, Thomas says.

In order to ensure sexual education considers the struggles and cultural concerns we face, Black women are founding their own sexual curriculums and networks, and becoming sex educators, which is helping create more conversation around sex—and porn—in our community. Despite being a nonconventional tool, porn shows a lot of promise as we choose how we will portray our sexual identities. It provides an unrivaled opportunity for women of color to test the boundaries of sex and interest with risks. And once we have established those boundaries and found empowerment, no one will ever remove our freedom again.

A. Rochaun Meadows-Fernandez is a diversity content specialist who produces materials relating to mental and physical health, sociology, and parenting. Her work can be seen on several national platforms. Check her out on Facebook and Twitter.

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foursprout-blog · 6 years

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Why I Think Porn Is (Extra) Important for Women of Color

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/health/why-i-think-porn-is-extra-important-for-women-of-color/

Why I Think Porn Is (Extra) Important for Women of Color

It’s 2018, and most progressive-thinking people recognize that porn can be great. But it might be even better than we thought—especially for women of color hoping to figure out some stuff.

EDITOR’S PICK

displayTitle

The benefits of these actions can’t be overstated: We live in a society that predominantly discourages sexual expression unless it’s for the benefit of male partners. But finding community with other women who embrace their sexuality can allow women to develop sexual relationships in which they can present their authentic selves, instead of bending to fit into narrow categories of acceptable expression. This can be especially true for women of color.

But why is this issue connected to race? Limitations on women’s sexuality aren’t limited exclusively to Black women: For generations, women have been bound to others’ sexual expectations. This struggle affects all women—but as usual, our statuses affect how these expectations are expressed, and women of color, especially Black women, still face disproportionately greater restrictions on their sexuality.

Alicia Wallace, a gender rights activist and public educator, explains that the history of misogynoir—or misogyny directed toward Black women—has negatively impacted Black women’s sexual expression. Wallace notes that our sexual identities are further complicated by the fact that we are aware of how our past has led to the struggles we continue to contend with today.

“We’re fully aware of the ways our bodies have been used for the gratification of others—for example, as sex slaves and wet nurses,” Wallace says. “It often feels as though we have only two options: The first is to actively fight against sexual objectification by hiding our bodies, refusing to talk about sex, and putting other parts of our humanity and personalities in the center of our beings and presentations of ourselves, often to the exclusion—and possible detriment—of our sexuality.”

Alternatively, she says, the other option is to take control of our own sexual image and define it for ourselves before anyone else has the chance to.

“We’re in a complicated situation, fighting for the right and the comfort to do what we want today while acknowledging the distance we’ve covered and the oppression we still face,” Wallace says. “This is true in online dating—where racism masquerades as a fetish—as well as in the artists we love putting people like us on display specifically for the male gaze.”

So what can porn and sexual exploration mean for women of color?

“Porn can be a great way to safely explore and normalize sexual behaviors that you’re interested in,” says Cameron Glover, sex columnist and sex educator. “A lot of people can be turned on by visuals, and porn is one of the most accessible means of being stimulated in that way. I think for WOC and non-binary folks, porn is another tool that you can add to your sexuality arsenal.”

Porn can help women of color explore their own desires.

Patrice Thomas, 28, started using porn to explore her sexuality at the age of 18 when her aunt suggested she use it to learn more about sex. “I didn’t have sex education in school or at home, but I was curious about sex. I wanted to know what it looked like and how it worked.”

Watching porn helped her discover that she didn’t fit into the fundamentalist religious household she was brought up in. “I grew up under the assumption that I’m heterosexual and was startled to find myself aroused by the female form and get off on watching female pleasure. I don’t claim a bisexual identity, but I don’t consider myself entirely straight, either,” she says.

Porn can be a form of self-care.

For Monica Smith, 26, porn has been an outlet to explore her sexuality and promote self-acceptance. “I think giving myself space, time, and love to do this on my own terms—without judgment—has been emotionally, physically, and mentally freeing,” she says. “It’s helped me accept myself, my identity, and my sexuality, and I’ve grown to accept and love myself so much more. I never realized how important it is, but it’s vital—especially if you want to be intimate with others.”

EDITOR’S PICK

displayTitle

“I think porn can open a new world,” Wallace says. “It can make imagination possible, especially for people who have had limited sexual experience. It’s a means to consider other ways of being sexual and intimate without having to practice, or feeling vulnerable with someone else.”

However, many WOC are unsure about the best way to ease into porn. If you’re thinking about it, consider starting small. “I started out watching GIFs on Tumblr and slowly graduated to videos. I keep a bookmark file of my favorites called ‘petit mort,'” Thomas jokes.

Finding porn that doesn’t suck for women—especially women of color—can be difficult.

Once we overcome the pre-conditioned guilt associated with watching porn, women may find another barrier: A lot of pornographic content is aimed pretty exclusively at a male audience. “There are so many different types of porn, and many interpretations and understandings of the material. Much of it seems to subjugate women, even when we seem to be in power—the performance aspect of porn feeds masculinity, from the positions to the sounds,” Wallace says.

Thankfully, there are subcategories and communities to provide women with more direct access to better-tailored content. Terms like the quickly-multiplying “Porn for Women” tag lead the way to videos that tend to be less male-centered. “When the only videos I could find were anal or incest/rape, I spent a lot of time googling ‘free ethical porn’ and found a subreddit of links that women vet and share with descriptions and reviews,” Thomas says.

“In mainstream porn, fetishization is still how many people of color are allowed space,” Glover says. “You see a similar overlay with how trans bodies are hyper-consumed when they are allowed to exist in porn, and representation for gender nonconforming individuals is still largely nonexistent.

But I think this is definitely improving as more independent porn options, like CrashPadSeries, are becoming more available,” says Glover, referring to a porn site that offers porn for queer individuals of all genders and orientation. They prioritize ethical consumption and dissemination of material along with advocating safe sex, ethnic diversity, equal pay, and comfort for their contributors. While these kinds of sites are few and far between, they can provide a framework for prioritizing sexual identity development for individuals overlooked in traditional porn.

But it’s worth it—for developing your own sexual identity (and sex with your partner too).

For many WOC, porn has been the only tool available to explore what we do and don’t like sexually in a safe way. Black women have often been portrayed as insatiable, hypersexual beings. In an attempt to help us, our families often restricted sexual expression through messages about good Black girls not being “fast.” Those messages about the strict boxes Black women must fit into remove our ability to connect with those around us without shame, but when seen in private, porn offers a bit of refuge from the stigma of sexuality for Black women.

There are many obstacles on the path to healthy sexual identities for women of color. Some of them are common to all women and taught through cultural influencers like religion; others are personalized through oppressive histories and exclusion. Unfortunately, the world isn’t going to change so we can accept ourselves—but many Black women have decided that we aren’t going to be limited by the metaphorical chains others apply to our sexuality.

The good news is, women are watching more porn than ever. According to PornHub’s 2017 end of the year review, the term “Porn for Women,” saw a 359 percent increase over the last year. And when porn is helping, it can help show us what we might be open to—and what we would absolutely not consider in real life. Porn is also a great place to explore possibilities that we may want to attempt in real life with our partners, such as kinks, fetishes, positions, accessories, and additional people, Thomas says.

#Health

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mandavt · 7 years

Text

LGBT Injustice in America

My name is Amanda Theriot and I am from New Orleans, Louisiana. I am currently a graduate student at Walden University. I am working towards my PhD in Applied Psychology. The purpose of this blog is to discuss the impact of psychology on social change and to elaborate on the social injustice of LGBT injustice/discrimination.

Psychology and Social Change

According to Hargrove & Williams (2014), psychology contributed to the progression of the Civil Rights Movement of 1964 and Martin L. King was the person who led awareness to the field of psychology. With this being said, social change and psychology go hand in hand with each other. Social change impacts psychology and psychology impacts social change. According to Marcella (1998), “Scale, complexity, and impact” of events and social forces such as the media, human right’s violations, war, and poverty create many challenges for psychology as a field and a vocation; therefore, social change positively affects the field of psychology. “Nations, societies, and people are competing for survival as contemporary life pits secular, humanist, scientific, technological, religious, and spiritual cultural traditions against each other” due to fundamental differences (Marsella, 1988, p1283). Psychologists are working towards finding unbiased knowledge that can be used to calm the rigid “competition” due to the array of “fundamental differences” (Marcella, 1988). Psychologists are social change agents; Psychologists are trained to be unbiased while they work towards personal and worldly progression.

Awareness and application of ethics in professional practice is considered a core competency for psychologists (Domenech Rodríguez, Erickson Cornish, Thomas, Forrest, Anderson, & Bow, 2014). According to Domenech Rodríguez, Erickson Cornish, Thomas, Forrest, Anderson, & Bow (2014), Graduate school must provide a solid foundation for ethics competency before practice. Students who are ready to start practicum should be exhibiting ethical competency and are expected to “independently” incorporate ethical and legal competency once he or she is ready to go into practice (Domenech Rodríguez, Erickson Cornish, Thomas, Forrest, Anderson, & Bow, 2014).

LGBT Discrimination

The LGBT community has been fighting for equal rights for decades. Finally, in June 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage should be legal in all states based on the constitution (Kite, 2011). This ruling was a huge victory in the LGBT community as well as in the United States as a whole. The LGBT rights movement has been fighting for the statewide legalization of same-sex marriage for decades and now, same-sex couples can finally acquire a marriage license anywhere in the United States.

Although the marriage legalization was a huge victory, America still has a long way to go. Why do we, as a country, have a long way to go? The United States Justice System is indirectly giving the American people permission to hate each other LGBT and Social Change

Although the LGBT community has finally been granted the right to marry in the United States, many LGBT injustices still exist. For example, transgender people experience the highest levels of prejudice, discrimination, and violence in the LGBT community (Reisner, White, Gamarel, Keuroghlian, Mizock, & Pachankis, 2016). According to a national study, more than 6,500 US transgender people reported an “emotionally-life impairing experience of discrimination” (Reisner, White, Gamarel, Keuroghlian, Mizock, & Pachankis, 2016). Unfortunately, the transgender community is still struggling for social and political equality; however, the LGBT rights movement is continuously fighting for social equality for all LGBT individuals.

Another example is that there is no national legislation protecting the LGBT community from employment discrimination and health care discrimination (Landers, 2015). In 29 states, it is 100% legal to fire an individual based on their sexual orientation/gender identity (Landers, 2015). According to Landers (2015), a 2011 study found that transgender respondents who were currently unemployed had twice the rate of homelessness and twice the rate of HIV infection than those who were employed. As for health care discrimination, The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) allows private “entities” in the health care field such as doctors, pharmacists, and insurers to implement their own religious freedom rights (Ladner, 2015). According to Ladner (2015), “the ‘religious liberty’ they protect has been exercised to exclude coverage of contraception services from employer-sponsored insurance, to deny lesbians or single heterosexual women access to alternative insemination procedures, and to refuse provision of health care services to LGBT people altogether” (p1093). According to Ladners (2015), a 2011 study found that transgender respondents who were currently unemployed had twice the rate of homelessness and twice the rate of HIV infection than those who were employed. Just like other forms of discrimination, the transgender community gets hit the hardest. With this being said, prejudice will always exist; however, no one deserves to be discriminated against, especially within health care and employment.

The social change that needs to be made is not only a “social” change but also a “justice” change. With that being said, the change needs to start within the justice system before it can spread into society. First and foremost, Legislation needs to be passed to protect the LGBT community from employment discrimination and health care discrimination. LGBT discrimination needs to be tackled at the core of America before it can spread throughout the rest of society.

Psychology plays a major role in the existence of prejudice as well as the understanding of prejudice within the human race. For this class, I chose LGBT inequality as my social injustice topic. The LGBT community has been fighting for equal rights for years. People whom identify with the LGBT community are continuously fighting to receive the same respect and treatment as heterosexual individuals. Unfortunately, not all heterosexual individuals feel that LGBT people deserve the same rights and respect as heterosexuals due to strong beliefs of traditional marriage between a man and a woman.

“Whiteness” in the LGBT Community

The injustices that LGBT people face each day are a direct result of prejudice. According to Crandall, Eshleman, & O’Brien (2002), prejudice is a psychological phenomenon that is based on attitude systems and personality, social norms, and cognitive dynamics. Research on the cognitive dynamics has provided ample information of the basic cognitive processes of prejudice while attitude systems and personality has been the highest area of interest in prejudice research (Crandall, Eshleman, & O’Brien, 2002). Researchers tend to mostly focus on the social psychology aspect of individual prejudice. When research is aimed at a specific prejudice, social history, power relations, legal history, and economic and political repression are the high areas of interest (Crandall, Eshleman, & O’Brien, 2002).

Psychology also plays a major role in addressing the LGBT community/movement/injustice in terms of cultural diversity. Our world is that, culturally diverse, and the LGBT community is one of the many diverse groups that exist in our world. With that being said, cultural diversity is a necessity in psychological practice as well as psychological research. A psychologist must be culturally diverse and aware of his or her own biases in order to appropriately practice and/or research in an ethical manner. “ The American Psychological Association’s ‘Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct’ (APA, 2002) declares that psychologists must address issues of cultural, individual, and role differences related to age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and national origin in order to provide appropriate services to a culturally diverse population (Sue, 2004). The American Psychological Association made a “historical” move when the Council of Representatives validated the “Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists” (APA, 2003; Sue, 2004). The guidelines were endorsed due to the profession of psychology not being culturally diverse and being biased (Sue, 2004). According to Sue (2004), white practicioners/colleagues felt that the field of psychology was becoming more multicultural; however, African Americans continued to see “cultural malpractice and the growing obsolescence of psychology” (762). According to Sue (2004), the “whiteness” phenomenon is a result of cultural conditioning. Many “white” individuals within the profession of psychology have reported that they believe in equal opportunity for all; however, they have difficulty getting away from their cultural conditioning which results from being “trapped in a Euro American worldview that only allows them to see the world from one perspective” (Sue, 2004, 762). With this being said, cultural knowledge and understanding are the antidotes to cultural conditioning.

Ethnic Inequality within the LGBT Community

Both African American civil rights’ movements and LGBT civil rights’ movements stand for the same exact thing; equality. Although both communities fight for equality, racism in LGBT communities exists and anti-gay attitudes in African American communities exist (Hans, 2007). Gay black men experience racial exclusion within the LGBT community. Some LGBT organizations will exclude black men from leadership positions within the organization (Hans, 2007). Another example of racial discrimination displayed within the LGBT community is the events involving the gay bar, Badland’s. Many complaints were filed against the bar due to the owner denying black gay men employment and promotional opportunities and entrance into the establishment (Hans, 2007). It was also reported that black men were required to show two types of identification at the door while white men were only required to provide one (Hans, 2007). Hans (2007) suggests that the “whiteness” of the LGBT community is even expressed through the media. Many “LGBT” movies and TV shows that have been produced in the last 10 years display LGBT “whiteness”.

Not only do Black gay men experience prejudice and discrimination within the LGBT community but also within their own ethnic group. The African American culture has a high rate of anti-gay attitudes. Homophobia within the African American community may have to do with class, self-identification of gay men and women, and other situational factors associated with being a minority group in a prejudice society (Hans, 2007). Racism within the LGBT community and African American anti-gay attitudes lead to the inadequate development of coping skills and poor self-conceptualization involving sex roles and racial stereotypes in black gay men (Icard, 2008).

Psychology’s Responsibility and Promotion of a Greater Society

In terms of LGBT injustices within the United States, the field of psychology has not always played the same role as it does now. Homosexuality was considered a mental disorder in the 1960’s and the 1970’s (Meyer, 2003). It was believed that homosexuality could be cured. During that time, individuals who “suffered” from homosexuality underwent conversion therapy in order to “cure” their homosexuality. In 1973, homosexuality was removed from the DSM; however, the stigma of homosexuality was not removed from society. It has been almost fifty years since homosexuality was considered a mental illness and LGBT individuals are still fighting against the “stigma”.

In present time, the field of psychology holds many roles and responsibilities in terms of this issue. As I have stated in previous postings, cultural diversity is the most important responsibility of psychologists. Whether it’s in research or in clinical practice, psychologists must be aware of their personal biases and have understanding of the LGBT injustices that exist in society. Psychologists have to recognize that individuals within the LGBT community face many forms of discrimination that affect every part of their life that heterosexuals do not face. According to Burke (2007), cultural competence is an ethical and professional responsibility of psychologists. Cultural competence is considered essential not only in clinical practice, but also in research, training, and education (Burke, 2007). With this being said, psychology is promoting for the greater society by promoting cultural competence within practice, research, and education. It is evident that the field of psychology is promoting cultural competence simply because it is REQUIRED by the American Psychological Association. It has been recognized that cultural diversity is needed in order to eliminate all prejudice within our society.

Conflict Theory and LGBT Injustice

The LGBT community is continuously fighting for social, legal, and economical equality. The social conflict theory suggests that society is in constant conflict over power, status, and money and in constant contradiction of personal views and belief systems. According to the social conflict theory, the dominant groups in society work to promote their worldview and well as their economic interest (Rice University, 2013).

In terms of an ideological dimension of the social conflict theory, the “dominant group” would include heterosexuals who promote their worldview of “traditional marriage” between a man and a woman while the “less powerful group” would include members and supporters of the LGBT community who promote marriage equality (Rice University, 2013). The “dominant group” attempts to exploit the “less dominant group” while the “less dominant group” is simply trying to gain access to the same resources as the “dominant group”. In terms of an economic dimension of the social conflict theory, same-sex marriage promotes economic equality to both groups in terms of being entitled to the same financial benefits, social security benefits, and insurance as a result of legal matrimony (Rice University, 2013).

With the conflict theory in mind, people have their own opinions, beliefs, and morals that they will swear by and fully believe that other people should do the same. For example, many individuals do not support homosexuality because their religion does not support it. Individuals whom are against homosexuality due to their religion believe that EVERYONE should be against homosexuality. With that being said, individuals against homosexuality fight AGAINST LGBT equality due due to the idea that their “worldview of traditional marriage” should be the only view.

References

Burke, M. C. (2007). The Ultimate Guide to Diversity in Psychology. Psyccritiques, 52(33), doi:10.1037/a0007366

Domenech Rodríguez, M. M., Erickson Cornish, J. A., Thomas, J. T., Forrest, L., Anderson, A., & Bow, J. N. (2014). Ethics education in professional psychology: A survey of American Psychological Association accredited programs. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 8(4), 241–247.

Goldberg, A. E., & Kuvalanka, K. A. (2012). Marriage (in)equality: The perspectives of adolescents and emerging adults with lesbian, gay, and bisexual parents. Journal of Marriage and Family, 74(1), 34–52.Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.

Hargrove, S., & Williams, D. (2014). Psychology’s contribution to the development of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/communique/2014/08-09/civil-rightsact.aspx

Kite, Mary E. (Some) Things Are Different Now: An Optimistic Look at Sexual PrejudicePsychology of Women Quarterly September 2011 35: 517-522, doi:10.1177/0361684311414831.

Landers, S. (2015). Civil rights and health -- beyond same-sex marriage. The New England Journal of Medicine, 373(12), 1092-1093. Retrievedfromhttp://search.proquest.com.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/docview/1713645739?accountid=1487

Marsella, A. J. (1998). Toward a ‘global community psychology’: Meeting the needs of a changing world. The American Psychologist, 53(12), 1282–1291.

Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697.Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.

Reisner, S. L., White Hughto, J. M., Gamarel, K. E., Keuroghlian, A. S., Mizock, L., & Pachankis, J. E. (2016). Discriminatory experiences associated with posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms among transgender adults. Journal Of Counseling Psychology, 63(5), 509-519. doi:10.1037/cou0000143.

Rice University. (2013). Introduction to Sociology (7.23th ed.). N.p.: OpenStax CNX. Retrieved from http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:_97x1rAv@2/Introduction-to-Sociology.

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