i and my friends work with young people from very different backgrounds and circumstances around the bay area. we often have an easier time working with "underprivileged" kids; whether despite or because of the very real challenges in their lives, they are often better able to take the circumstances, instructions, and experience at face value than their well-off counterparts. i also always notice in these conversations that we teachers tend to be white upper-middle-class young adults, discerning for ourselves where along the spectrum from "entrenched dominant" to "strong and hungry wanderer" we would most like to be in our new adult lives. so sometimes i have an easier time with "underprivileged" teens simply because i don't see myself in them quite as directly, so it's easier to get to know them as their own people, and be open and surprised and delighted at their uniqueness and unfolding.
it is difficult, when watching the little beasts, not to trace human parallels...the routine of changing domination is a case in point. one can think of the attached and dominant human who has captured the place, the property, and the security. he dominates his area. to protect it, he has police who know him and who are dependent on him for a living (do other traditional helping professions fall into this as well? how about parochial clergy?) he is protected by good clothing, good houses, and good food. he is protected even against illness. one would say that he is safe, that he would have many children, and that his seed would in a short time litter the world. But in his fight for dominance he has pushed out others of his species who were not so fit to dominate, and perhaps have become wanderers, improperly clothed, ill fed, having no security and no fixed base. these should really perish, but the reverse seems true.
the dominant human, in his security, grows soft and fearful. he spends a great part of his time in protecting himself. far from reproducing rapidly, he has fewer children, and the ones he does have are ill protected inside themselves because they are so thoroughly protected from without. (my emphasis. see madeline levine) the lean and hungry grow strong (and adaptive) and the strongest of them are selected out. having nothing to lose and all to gain, these selected hungry and rapacious ones develop attack rather than defense techniques, and become strong in them, so that one day the dominant man is eliminated and the strong and hungry wanderer takes his place. and then the routine is repeated. the new dominant entrenches himself and then softens.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
thoughts on privilege
i'm reading the log from the sea of cortez, by john steinbeck, which chronicles the 1940 journey in which steinbeck and biologist edward f. ricketts travel around the gulf of california (in between baja and the mexican mainland) collecting specimens of marine fauna. he says:
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Liz, the quality of your thinking continues to impress me. I still am unsure why you feel Steinbeck has increased authenticity as the typographical Siamese twin of ee cummings, but that's a nit we can agree to disagree about. I think you have put your finger on why you feel uncomfortable with the upper middle-class privilege and education which has been your birthright. You've described that feeling of "security yielding to softness and fearfulness" before, but I don't think I saw the evolutionary metaphor you so aptly apply from Steinbeck, a great social demographer and political scientist in his own right.
The point where I think we differ is your assumption that evolution, in the social as well as natural environment, demands that physical and financial security be a zero sum game--in other words, for "the dominant" to have it, others must not. Which says to me that all our social systems are akin to shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic: there is no net forward progress since societal advances must necessarily be based on the survival skills of the disadvantaged.
I can't prove this isn't true; certainly the current economic environment lends credibility to your argument. But, rose-colored glasses-wearer that I am, I believe that over the longer arc of history social systems have progressed. Your youth group participants in Redwood City may not have the social power that a shipping magnate in a 14th Century German city-state, or a captain of industry in early 20th century NY, or an early 1950's comfortable middle-class family in the Chicago suburbs, might have had, but they are considerably less likely to die of bubonic plague, influenza, or polio, respectively, than any of these. They have more financial security than families in Zimbabwe, who are facing a 100,000% inflation rate now, and unlike citizens of Zimbabwe, Kenya, Russia, and China, their parents, and they themselves when they're old enough, have a meaningful VOTE.
Dad and I saw Theatreworks' Radio Golf (August Wilson) earlier this week. You could argue that the protagonists in that play found themselves outliers in the Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh because they had sold out, because they, despite their African-American origins, had become "soft and fearful" and were living through the ethical fall-out of having sided with the system. Or you could celebrate the fact that they had the opportunity to choose. I think the play leaves one with the feeling that Harmond believes that one can be true to one's roots AND work within the system. You better believe that Dad and I were thinking, as we watched, about some of the amazing and prophetic individuals we have met through you.
Love, your Mom
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