Blumenfeld Warren's Words

Smart Commentary on Social Justice
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9850986-7-4
Verlag: Purple Books Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 245 Seiten

Dr. Warren Blumenfeld, a professor at Iowa State University, had been writing social commentary for many years. This book is a compilation of his best essays. Much of his work addresses lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues, but he also writes about such topics as bullying, being Jewish, the intersectionality of identities, race, religion, and immigration. Dr. Blumenfeld writes about people including Pat Buchanan, Mathew Shepard, Fred Phelps, and Newt Gingrich, and places such as Texas and its school board, Tennessee, Arizona, Florida, and Michigan. He also addresses issues such as higher education, the girl scouts, same sex marriage, sexual abuse, and scapegoating populations. This is an outstanding work for such classes as history, political science, diversity, and LGBT studies. It is also an excellent work for discussion groups and book groups who want to delve deeper unto an understanding of what it means to be socially just and socially conscious in the 21st century.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Blumenfeld, Warren J.

Leseproben

II. “DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL, DON’T PURSUE”

17. What If “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Had Been Instituted in George Washington’s Army?

On September 26, 1777, Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a renowned tactical military specialist from Prussia, arrived on the shores of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His purpose was to join the Continental Army in its Revolutionary War of independence against the British.

By this time, the Continental Congress had fled Philadelphia in advance of British troops and had settled in York, Pennsylvania. General George Washington was commanding a rag tag band of volunteers, and Steuben donated his services for no salary to develop a military training program.

What Steuben accomplished was nothing short of phenomenal, for he turned a scrubby assemblage of farmers and merchants into a unified, efficient, and powerful force.

He instituted a method of “progressive training,” a sort of school for the soldiers. He raised the standards for maintenance of uniforms and military hygiene. He taught the effective use of the bayonet, which increased soldiers’ ability to attack and to defend themselves even when their rifles were unloaded. His technique is credited for the Continental army’s victory in a number of battles, including the battle of Stony Point. He also developed an efficient system of camp sanitation by developing standards and the more effective arrangement of tents and other living structures, latrines, and mess halls. These procedures remained in effect in the U.S. military for more than a century and a half.

General Washington gave Steuben command of one of the army’s divisions for the final battle at Yorktown. Following victory, Steuben assisted Washington in demobilizing the army in 1783 and he helped to craft a defense policy for the infant nation.

Steuben was awarded a military discharge with full honors on March 24, 1783. Through an act of the Pennsylvania legislature in March 1784, Steuben became a citizen of the United States and later settled on Manhattan Island.

Though Steuben contributed in profound ways to the Continental Army’s victory over the British, which resulted in what we know today at the United States of American, and while he deserves a prominent place in the pantheon of our country’s military leaders, how many of us have ever heard of him? Where is he mentioned in our schools textbooks, or in the discussions focusing on the founding of the United States? Why has this hero who contributed so greatly been virtually forgotten, while lesser figures are often referenced?

I would put forth that the primary reason for this erasure is the documented historical evidence that Steuben was, in modern terminology, “gay.” Throughout history, we have witnessed societal attempts to falsify historical accounts of our stories, through censorship, deletion, half truths, and the altering of pronouns signifying gender, thus making accurate reconstruction extremely difficult.

As our country currently debates whether to lift the military ban on gay and lesbian people serving openly in the military – the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy dating back to 1993 in which approximately 13,000 qualified military personnel have been drummed out of the service branches on the mere charge of being lesbian or gay – we need to remember people like Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, and ask ourselves the question: If the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy had been instituted and enforced during the Revolutionary War period, and Steuben had been tossed out of the military, would we today be an independent nation or a perennial colony of Britain?

18. Listening to Others’ Voices

Depending on our many social identities, we are simultaneously granted certain societal privileges and socially marginalized based solely on these identities. Based on Peggy McIntosh’s pioneering investigations of white and male privilege, we can understand dominant group privilege as constituting a seemingly invisible, unearned, and largely unacknowledged array of benefits accorded to members of dominant groups, with which they often unconsciously walk through life as if effortlessly carrying a knapsack tossed over their shoulders.

This system of benefits confers dominance on certain social identity groups, for example in a U.S. context, males, white people, heterosexuals, Christians, upper socioeconomic classes, temporarily able bodied people, people of a certain age range (young adults through the middle years), U.S. born, while subordinating and denying these privilege to other groups, for example, females, racially minoritized peoples, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender (LGBT) people, those who do not hold to Christian beliefs, working class and poor people, people with disabilities, young and old people, non-U.S. born. These systemic inequities are pervasive throughout the society. They are encoded into the individual’s consciousness and woven into the very fabric of our social institutions, resulting in a stratified social order privileging dominant groups while restricting and disempowering subordinated group members.

The relative invisibility of this privilege to members of dominant social identities helps to keep this system firmly in place. I often use the analogy of dominant group privilege as the water in an aquarium in that the fish do not see or even feel the water because it is so pervasive. In order for our society to move forward with greater equity, however, we need to be conscious of the water of dominance that saturates our environment.

I conduct an activity each semester in my classes, which I learned from my friend Jackson Katz, to expose the water of male privilege. I ask all my students the following question: “What do you do on a daily basis to prevent yourself from being sexually harassed or raped?” Within seconds, female students raise their hands and say things such as: “I never walk alone at night,” “I sometimes dress down as not to call attention to myself,” “I carry a set of keys between my fingers to use as a weapon if I’m attacked,” “I am taking a self-defense class.” The men in the class, on the other hand, usually remain silent except for the occasional, “Well, I never really think about it.” And that is the point! We as men have the privilege of not having to think about it.

The entrenched human mechanism of denial acts as an additional factor that maintains this system of dominance and privilege. Members of dominant social identities often resist, deny, and refuse to accept the fact of their privilege, while viewing it as, to borrow Al Gore’s term, an “inconvenient truth” to hear and even consider or acknowledge the ways in which their privileges marginalize and oppress others.

This point was confirmed for me as I read the comments on the Iowa State University Daily web site in response to my editorial last week, “Omitted from History” in which I exposed the water by reminding readers of the discriminatory and ultimately self-defeating “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DA/DT) military policy. One respondent, for example, flatly denied the real impact of this policy: “Gay people are not being drummed out of the military. I was in the Air Force. We knew there were gay people and nobody gave a damn. Commanders are certainly not rooting around in their subordinate’s sex lives to root out gays.” The respondent continued by asserting that those who have been discharged under the policy are primarily “some new enlistees [who] are calling themselves gay to get out of their service commitment.”

Another respondent not only denied the discriminatory and oppressive nature of the policy, but argued its supposed benefits for LGBT service members: “…Using the claim of 10% of the population, that would mean 320,000 gays have served honorably and without getting caught up in DA/DT. I submit that the DA part made their service more honorable for them and our nation….The 4% discharge rate under DA/DT pales in comparison to its success.”

While these respondents’ claims are in stark contrast to the actual lived experiences of LGBT service members, their reactions are, in fact, understandable. Denial in this sense serves the protective function of guarding individuals from the possible guilt associated with the realization that one’s privileges are based on others’ oppression.

I often recognize this in this myself because though I have studied and worked most of my life on issues of social justice, I am certainly not immune to the effects of denial and defensiveness in my privileged identities as a white person, as a man, as someone of my age group, as relatively able bodied, as middle class, as a first-language English speaker, and others. I have found that a crucial step in my process toward awareness has been to listen to and truly hear the voices of others -- those who discuss their experiences of marginalization and oppression – without reaction, challenge, debate, or argument. I realize that my relearning of past patterns takes work, often hard work that can last an entire lifetime, but the results of self and social awareness are extremely rewarding. Working through the denial and guilt also makes me a more effective change agent in challenging the inequities that drench our social environment.

19. Can We Forgive YOU over...