Guest post: The necessity of broadening our experiences
Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Insult & injury=.
I think that what needs to be taught regarding First Nations and their history is that the “Noble Savage” concept is insulting and patronizing. What I have experienced as recently as 4 years ago in my 300 level course in diversity is not indoctrination about the poor natives or brown people but the necessity of broadening our experiences to better understand other cultures and how they have integrated into our own. Those students who have this fantasy about an idyllic pre-Columbian world are likely to have gotten it from anywhere but a UofT anthropology course, like perhaps social media. I think the same thing whenever I see someone claim that indigenous peoples worldwide didn’t have two separate sexes until Captain Cook (or whoever) forced them to.
Like Iknklast, I do not think that campuses are completely captured by postmodern fact-free thinking about gender and sex and world history; the bias of the news that we concentrate on receiving influences the perspective of what we read and see. There are student groups dominated by LGBTQ but I don’t think that you are forced to take an LGBTQIA+++ loyalty pledge to be a professor, student, or admin on campus. It may be necessary to be a closeted TERF in some situations, but Campuses are not the “woke hellholes” that some people paint them to be.
The events that are allowing trans ideology to dominate memorials of real women killed by violence from men are disgusting, and need to be turned back, but I do not know how we will get to that point with those who think that trans ideation of their oppression trumps all. We need to be able to convince those “allies” who claim it doesn’t harm anyone to let people believe that they are the other sex that this is a clear example of harm; and it’s enabled by using chosen pronouns, allowing males to enter wherever woman want to have their own spaces or groups.
And this definitely erases women’s experience of violence. Wasn’t there already a full month of remembrance of trans everything including violence?
There is a book recently out, which I haven’t yet read but which has been very favourably reviewed indeed, and has won a National Book Award:
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, by Ned Blackhawk (The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity, Yale University Press.)
No doubt this is the sort of book that will be dismissed as ‘woke’ by those who suppose that history, and the responsible recognition of what actually happened, doesn’t matter and see everything through a racial prism; but from the reviews in important places, it is clear that this book IS a responsible accounting for what happened.
Thanks, Tim!
I think it’s important to understand that we can face the past, but we are not obligated to feel defensive about it, nor feel attacked by it. We don’t really know who we are, if we hide the truth from ourselves.
There is rather good book out about one of my favourite poets (and prose-writers, particularly where actual Communism is concerned), the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. It is by Eva Hoffman, who was born in Poland not long after the Second World War into a Jewish family – her parents were among the few survivors of their own families. The title is, simply, ‘On Czeslaw Milosz’, and it is published by the Princeton University Press. In it she remarks, regarding the Shoah, that ‘recognition is perhaps the only form of reparation – the only redress possible – after enormous and irreversible wrongs have been committed’. The trouble is that a great many people do not want to offer even ‘recognition’. And they do not wish to recognise present and persisting wrongs, either – the recent vote in Australia in the Indigenous Voice Referendum is a case in point.
Hoffman also quotes the response of another great Polish writer, Aleksander Wat, to questions about his ‘identity’: ‘Polish-Polish & Jewish-Jewish.’