The Blog and the Shower

Today we had a professional musician visit our summer program to give a presentation and demonstration of various Middle Eastern instruments and dances.  His drum playing was particularly dramatic, as he spun the disk around on his thumb and swung it high in the air with exaggerated movements.  When he had finished, he asked the audience: “Why do we move around so much when we play this drum?”

A small level-one student raised her hand and offered somewhat doubtfully, “Because God can see you better when you move around?”

I love these kinds of comments because they’re so unintentionally revealing of unexamined ideas about the physicality of God, who is apparently located far away, probably far up in the sky and perhaps sitting on a cloud in the stratosphere, and must really be an old man because he has bad eyesight, and needs humans to mix it up a little bit in order to pick out individuals who otherwise don’t attract much attention, massing like so many ants.  I don’t know much about this student’s religious background or upbringing, but I rather wonder if drawings for children of a God who sits up in the sky, aging and aloof, didn’t leave a much stronger impression than implicit threats that God, like Santa, some third-world dictators, and the CIA, is always watching us.  I’m definitely not religious, but if I can put in my own two cents anyway then I think I rather prefer the student’s theological vision to the traditional one.

Finally, and not too surprisingly, Judge Sonia Sotomayor was endorsed by the Senate Judiciary Committee today, but only after a series of hearings that dwelled on one of the worse kinds of identity politics–the kind that assumes that being white, (often) male, urban/suburban, and upper/middle class is “normal,” and the only ones who have an identity are those who deviate from this norm.

Two weeks ago, when I saw this New York Times headline last week–”Sotomayor Says Identity Won’t Distort Decisions.“–I remembered the time that a friend of mine in college suggested that it might be progressive to form a White Studies department at our university, so that we would be forced to acknowledge that white culture–or more precisely, middle class, Western culture– is not a sort of neutral slate against which all other cultures should be viewed, but one culture among many in which none take precedence over others or be considered the measure of their peers.

The New York Times article began:

Republican senators sparred with Judge Sonia Sotomayor
on Tuesday over racial bias, judicial activism and temperament as she
presented herself as a reliable follower of precedent rather than a
jurist shaped by gender and ethnicity, as some of her past speeches
suggested.

That’s what she said in the hearings; but as the New York Times and some of her dectractors quoted, she also said in previously in a speech: “I accept that there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

That, too me, seems like the more honest answer.  Of course Judge Sotomayor’s worldview has been influenced by her gender and ethnicity!  Just like all of the rest of us, and just like the worldview of the other Supreme Court Justices, and the Senators
questioning her–except in their case, it’s more likely to have been the fact of being male and white in a patriarchal and racist society that influenced them.  This perspective, however, goes unacknowledged and perhaps unnoticed, such that when it is demanded that she move away from any personal influences on her thinking by her status as a woman and a Latina, what is really being asked is that she adopt the position of the silent majority, which apparently is not actually a perspective influenced by personal experiences, but rather a sort of neutral standpoint from which to view the world.

The fact that one hails from a dominant culture that determines, among other things, what seems logical and what doesn’t, shouldn’t be confused with having an objective point of view, if such a thing is even possible.  Working from a powerful position within a given system carries its own unique perspective, and it’s one that should be acknowledged and examined as well.

I’m currently in Boston, living in an area that more closely resembles suburbia than anywhere I’ve resided in a long time.  There are no cul-de-sacs, which where the feature of suburban planning that most tortured me when I spent a summer walking door-to-door registering voters when I was eighteen–what’s apparently efficient for cars is quite the opposite for walkers–but here I’m still forced to traverse on foot distances that were scaled for motorized vehicles, walking twenty minutes to buy vegetables that I could have found by walking two minutes in any direction from my dwellings in Damascus and New York.  It’s a residential neighborhood, so also in contrast to Damascus and New York (two very different cities in other respects) the small houses are set a little ways apart from each other, and also from the street; there are trees in between the sidewalks and the asphalt, and everything is very neat and clean, probably because no one walks, very few people take the bus, and there is only a small pocket of time between leaving one’s house and climbing into one’s car in which everybody else could damage the area in any way.  The houses are pretty, though, in the rather New England way of pale-colored clapboards, and from mine I can walk to several small malls filled with the chain restaurants I associate mostly with airport layovers, one moderately fancy chain hotel, several liquor stores, many hair salons, a few humdrum “ethnic” restaurants, at least as many Dunkin’ Donuts as there are Starbucks in my own hometown, and the Mystic River of Hollywood infamy, though I haven’t discovered any bodies dumped into it.  I take two buses to get anywhere in Boston, and two buses home, and I come back to an apartment of white walls and polished hardwood floors in which the only furniture is the table, chair, and futon in my bedroom.  I have a roommate, but I haven’t met him, only seen traces of his presence in the apartment while I’ve been out: three days ago there was only my food in the fridge, and two days ago he left a bowl of peaches, and today they’re gone.

If near-suburbia is slightly depressing, however, at least it’s easy to escape it through my job at an “inner-city” school, in an area of Boston that was described as a “ghetto” by friends who grew up in the city (although all the word showed me was that they’d never visited this neighborhood, since that turned out to be a gross exaggeration).  I teach Arabic to high school students at a summer program led by a crusading public high school teacher with three Masters degrees who’s out to change who, exactly, can study this language.  It is, in fact, pretty difficult to get very far with Arabic if you’re not from a certain socio-economic class, as a list of my CASA classmates’ alma maters’ suggets: Harvard, Columbia, Harvard, NYU, University of Chicago, Georgetown, Georgetown, University of Pennsylvania… In short, it’s difficult to get into Arabic, much less continue with it, outside of only a handful of higher-education institutions–and the few high schools that are beginning to teach Arabic are overwhelmingly private and expensive prep schools.  The program I teach with, however, is free to all students, who recieve a $500 scholarship if they pass the course; in addition, students whose families make less than a certain amount each year are also paid $8.00 for each hour they spend in class, in order to enable them to study rather than work in the summer.  So a majority of the students are from racial or ethnic “minorities”; about half are from public high schools; and just under half don’t speak English as their first language.  The mixed relationships these students have with educational institutions can make teaching a challenge, mainly because it isn’t always clear whether we should prioritize teaching Arabic for those who will continue to study it in college, or making Arabic “fun”–which is one way, but perhaps the slowest way, to  teach it–in order to try to spark an interest in Middle Eastern issues for those who aren’t already, or simply giving kids who have very few opportunities to travel a wider perspective on the world.  Ideally, of course, we’d do all three, but the press of time usually means we have to pick and choose–something I’ll write a little more about later.