Freshman 15

This isn't a finished piece of writing; it's just the skeleton of what I'd do with the "Commonly held assumptions" assignment.

First, the assignment:

Select a commonly-held assumption and present an argument against it.

Notice what's contained (and implied) here:

• Everyone else (or at least a lot of people) thinks this one is true.
• Their argument isn't necessarily so.
• An argument implies that maybe there's some other material that I'm not even bringing out.

Now for my "commonly-held assumption" (against which I'm arguing):

The "Freshman 15" is a bad thing.

Definition work necessary: The "Freshman 15" is the fifteen pounds that a college freshman (not a high school freshman) is alleged to gain during the freshman year.

Where did we get this?

• Observations of friends, etc., showing that people actually are gaining weight (and some of it is fat).
• Magazine articles (particularly in magazines aimed at girls?) about avoiding the flab.
• The "bad thing" part comes from our culture's fascination with the body—whether it's the Abercrombie male with the incredible abs or the fashion magazine girl who weighs 98 pounds, we set up unrealistic goals for ourselves.

Parts of my opponent's argument that might be correct:

• Many freshmen do eat too much pizza, beer, and other junk food because they are away from parental supervision.
• Stress causes overeating.
• Without required gym classes and with a lot of homework, physical exercise is often forgotten.
• Gaining fat is often a poor idea—and fat gained by young people often stays put for the rest of their lives.

Soft spots in their argument:

• Freshmen are 18 years old or so, and are still growing. Compare a fit high school basketball player with a fit college player and you'll see more muscle, broader shoulders, and usually more height.
• The taller boys may put on another inch in height before their sophomore year.
• Some college students become more active in sports, etc., and gain pounds of muscle.
• "Normal" is a very tricky word when applied to height/weight.
• A normally-built woman of 25 or so has a different shape from a normally built woman of 17. Usually the difference is in general shape and (yes) a few moderate fat deposits that give the mature woman a more rounded, less bony appearance. This is not a bad thing (from a health point of view).
• Considering the amount of stress a college freshman has, perhaps a little comfort food (which is always high-calorie) is a better alternative to depression and/or other ways of dealing with stress.

Portrait of a Boss

Character Sketch

He scared me out of my wits, but I think he liked that. Dave Carroll wore a perpetual scowl; his head was shaved; his voice was loud. Though his belly hung over his belt, his thick arms made me feel like he could easily bend steel—or me—with his bare hands. It didn't help my attitude any that he was my boss, or that we worked together at a school bus company (not really the warm fuzzy place some people imagine). Underneath it all, though, Dave was surprisingly naïve and generous.

I found out about Dave's innocence on the first day of school one year. A kindergarten child had been missed because the route sheet was wrong, so the child's mother called the school bus company. Big, beefy, scowling Dave was just about to go for donuts anyhow, so he got Jerry the dispatcher (just as big, beefy, and scowling), and they got in Dave's dirty brown Oldsmobile to go take care of the situation. It never dawned on Dave that he was acting out every mother's nightmare: two large, mean-looking men telling a small child, "Come on, kid. We'll take you to school. It's all right!" while the mother watched helplessly from the porch, screaming and waving her arms.

It was another first day of school when I learned about Dave's generosity. I had driven my unusual old foreign car to Washington, D.C., to visit my parents. School started on Monday, but on Friday something under the old car went "clunk"! The dealer did have the parts and had plenty of time to fix the car on Tuesday. So there I was, 800 miles away, about to leave the school bus company in the lurch on the first day of school. Terrified, I called Dave at his home. The first day is always chaos anyhow, and I was about to make it much worse. I remembered Dave's fury at drivers who failed to show up, and I pictured his "I'm going to eat you" toothy grin. I pictured those forearms that were as thick as my legs. I knew I didn't have a chance of keeping that job, and in a way I was glad I'd never have to see him face-to-face again. I wasn't prepared for Dave's first comment: "Should I wire you some money?" As I look back over the years, I realize that Dave had kept me on the payroll doing a lot of little odd jobs around the garage, jobs that really didn't need to be done, mainly from generosity.

I will remember many things about Dave. He used to give good advice: "There comes a time in every man's life when he has to make a decision—under, over, or across" (meaning the route the belt takes when navigating the belly). I remember wondering how a man that big could have fit into a submarine when he was in the Navy. I will remember him best, though, for his childlike approach to the world and his bigheartedness.

---

I'd like you to notice several things about this short essay:

• It's very specific. You can find the color and brand of Dave's car, where I was when my car broke down, and the name of the dispatcher. Don't be afraid of specifics when they can feed into the point you're making.
• Don't be afraid of dialog either. Several times in this essay Dave says things.
• On the other hand, specifics that don't contribute were left out. You never find out, for example, that my car was a white 1968 Fiat 124 four-door sedan. My audience would probably know what an Oldsmobile was, but not a Fiat. The word "unusual" was enough for my purpose there. I didn't want to focus on my car, but on Dave's personality (and the dirty brown Oldsmobile contributes to that image).
• Though there is a lot of comment on Dave's appearance, it's all there to give a contrast with his character. I didn't expect a bullet-headed guy like him to act like that.
• Though I do tell two stories about Dave, they are stories that illustrate particular character traits I wanted to talk about. They are not connected in any time sequence—in fact, I really don't remember which happened first. The general idea here is to use short stories to prove a point, not simply to tell a tale. The essay as a whole isn't a story; it's a description. It has no plot.
• The structure is very tight. I write about his innocence, then about his generosity.
• This was originally written as a demonstration piece for a course that focused on very short essays. It's only 504 words. What would I do if I wanted to double the size?
  • Say more about stuff that's already there. How did my wife react when Dave offered to send money? What do I mean that a school bus company isn't warm and fuzzy? How did Dave dress most of the time? (His white dress shirt was ordinarily tight as a drumhead across his belly.)
  • Add incidents that contribute to points that are already there. He was generous enough to employ me to do odd jobs when he really didn't need them done.
  • At least consider another aspect of his personality. He asked me to lie to a nun.
  • Ask myself whether to add in the "next thing." Has he somehow influenced me since then?

Hidden Meaning

Yes, I know I'm getting tiring. But I wanted to write down something that I thought of today in class—very much on the "hidden meaning" wavelength.

The other day I watched a movie adaptation of Dorothy Sayers' Nine Tailors. In this drama, Lord Peter Wimsey, an amateur detective, sets out to find some missing jewels. (Warning: plot spoiler ahead) He finally does solve the mystery. To do so he must:

1. Figure out that a gibberish letter is really some form of code.
2. Figure out that the code is really a notation for bell patterns in British change ringing.
3. Figure out which of several possible methods might have been used for the change ringing notation
4. Figure out which bell to follow through the changes.
5. Figure out that the code really is writing out two quotations from the Bible.
6. Find the place in the church where those quotations are inscribed.
7. Learn that the church used to have a balcony.
8. Climb up to the place where the inscription indicated, and finally
9. Figure out what to open up once he got up there.

THAT'S a hidden meaning! To unlock it, one had to be a trained bell-ringer AND have lived in the parish when there was a balcony twenty years previously AND known that the bell to follow was named "Tailor Paul." (Not to mention having a certain familiarity with the Bible.)

Many of my students write as if poems and plays worked much the same way. No—it's not like Indiana Jones or National Treasure. It's more like a letter from your mother, mentioning things that make you both happy. Or maybe like someone visiting a zoo and seeing a lot of animals that remind him of frightening predators, then moving on to wonder whether a good God could create things that eat small animals.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could form thy fearful symmetry?

Well maybe that's more obscure than "I looked at the tiger and wondered if God could make something that scary." But Blake's poem isn't hidden. Just deep.

Richard Cory

1. Images of Royalty in Cory — not what you might expect in New York


1. Royal words — many words here do double duty, meaning one thing, connoting something completely different; Robinson often works against the common meaning of the word.
1. Gentleman (l. 3)
2. Crown
3. Favored (dual meaning: facial appearance {archaic} and blessed with advantages)
4. Imperially slim (are emperors normally slim?)
5. Arrayed (means decorative clothing, but this is quiet)
6. Richer than a king
7. Grace ("your grace")
8. In fine — another odd word: precision and superiority


2. Royal attributes
1. Quietly arrayed; human (why make a point of saying so?)
2. Flutters pulses (movie star? what is it like to meet royalty—as in Mrs. Dalloway?)
3. Glitters when he walks
4. Richer than a king
5. Schooled in every grace. Who is schooled that way?


3. His name
1. Richard may recall the kings of England
2. Richard Coeur d'Lion — perhaps, but not necessary
3. Not much made of names, but it is one of the simplest in Tilbury Town


2. Oppositions between Cory and population


1. He comes downtown; we're already there
2. We on the pavement; he's presumably not
3. We are still waiting for the light
4. We work; he's just rich
5. We have no meat
6. We wish we were in his place—we do not wish to be him, just to have his position and stuff


3. About his death


1. Irony of setting: calm summer night at home contrasted to violence of his manner of death. No preparation in the poem prior to the last half of the last line.
2. Irony of motivation: all our observations are of externals (clothing, possessions, behavior that he has been schooled in)
3. Why does Robinson work the nobility thing so hard before the death?


1. Death of aristocracy in the new world? Not likely.
2. Like so many others in Tilbury Town, the facade hides a darker story. Eben Flood, the merry drunk hides a lonely, rejected man. John Evereldown goes sneaking through the night woods to women he cannot resist. The tragedy of Miniver Cheevy and George Crabbe lie on the surface for all to see. Richard Cory's was hidden deep—only he knew.

Hidden meaning

This is one of those phrases that makes most literature teachers cringe: the "hidden meaning" of the piece. It's as if we were in an episode of Indiana Jones. The straightforward meaning of the story or poem might be about romantic love, but there's a "hidden meaning" (only available to the high priests who have gone through certain rituals) that has to do with something totally different.

The whole idea makes me a bit ill, but when I think of it, I've got to admit that the "hidden meaning" idea makes a bit of sense.

We look at Emily Dickinson's poem, "I like to see it lap the miles," and ask, "What is IT?" Students say "racing car" or "river." I point out that racing cars hadn't been invented when Dickinson was alive. I guess that's hidden meaning because I looked up her dates on Wikipedia. I ask whether rivers are "punctual" or "peer in shanties" and the students think I'm making something up.

There is a kind of student paper that says, "What the author was trying to say is ..."

Take it as a fact: most of these authors were actually pretty good at saying stuff. That's how they made it into the textbooks. And the stuff they were saying isn't something that's only for the high priests. It's for everyone. Everyone who will read carefully and look at a dictionary, that is.

Poetic line endings

When we read poetry, we're tempted to come to a sudden, complete stop at the end of every line. Sometimes that really destroys the meaning of the thing, though. Consider this traditional hymn:

Take my life, and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee.

If you sing or recite it with a total stop at the end of the first line, you get "Take me life and then leave me alone" (which is pretty far from the teaching of most churches). Then the second line is simply gibberish. If you simply consider it as a sentence, it's far different, and much better:

Take my life, and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee.

Apply the principle to all poetry. Yes, there's bound to be a slight pause at the end of a poetic line (especially if there's a rhyme), but the thing is bound to make more sense if you read the punctuation, not the line endings. Here's how Shelly's "Ozymandias" reads if we print it like prose:

I met a traveller from an antique land, who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed."

Makes much more sense, doesn't it?

Thesis in Literature Papers

Several kinds of papers are really tempting in a literature course, but you should avoid all of them:

• "I didn't really understand this piece." You're actually telling us that you haven't done your homework and that you were too proud to make an appointment to see the teacher. That's not much of a paper.
• "I didn't like this piece at all. It was dumb." To put this as gently as possible, nobody cares whether you liked it or not. Generations of scholars, critics, and teachers have loved the works of Shakespeare and Frost. Why is it interesting or important for you to write that your level of taste or understanding isn't quite mature enough to appreciate such things? (The reverse of this is also true: it's not scholarship to write about how much you loved a poem.)
  
• "I had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary, and here they are." Sometimes, an intense study of a word and its use in the poem or story is very fruitful, but don't spend the entire paper telling us how limited your vocabulary is. It's not really scholarship to announce that "luve" is the Scottish dialect spelling of "love" in "A Red, Red Rose," or that "melodie" is the 1799 spelling of "melody."
• "Here's a line-by-line translation of the work." Dictionary work and paraphrase are sometimes useful prewriting strategies, but, again, they aren't scholarship. One of my students analyzed these lines from Poe's "The Raven" "Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door; / Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking / Fancy unto fancy," and announced triumphantly that the writer had sat down on a couch and began thinking. Well yes, but that's not really worth saying, is it?
• "Here's a very raw set of observations." If you read "When I consider how my light is spent," and announce that it's fourteen lines (which means it's a sonnet), iambic pentameter, and a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, you haven't really done anything yet.

Thesis basics

The thesis in a literary paper is pretty much the same sort of thing as a thesis in a scientific or historical paper.

• A statement, not a question
• Goes in only one direction
• Makes a statement that you'll have to prove
• Ideally, has enough of an edge that a few readers will say "Really? I never though of that!"

Here are some thesis examples culled from my files of various student and on-line papers:

• Flannery O'Connor loves to pick unlikely, ordinary people and show how, by the sudden and unexpected operation of God's grace, they are transformed into saints.
• By paying close attention to the various fields in the mother’s monologue in "Girl," we discover that, instead of developing a plot, her dictums develop an ideology that prescribes and originates from labor (laundry, cooking, sewing, light farming, etc.).
• Four thematic devices which unify [William Cullen Bryant's poem "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood"] come together in lines five through seven: the spatial organization of the poet’s vision, light and shade, personification of the forces of Nature, and the breeze.
  

Research Paper Topics

For most students, the most difficult part of a research paper is simply finding the topic. In a fit of panic, almost everyone falls into one of the common mistakes.

• To explore strange new worlds. Certainly, it's interesting to read about topics that are new to you, but if you go too far from your field of expertise, you won't even know what questions to ask. You'll write a breathless paper that explores very ordinary basic definitions.


• To seek out new life and new civilizations. A research paper must be grounded. If you get into speculation ("Do space aliens exist? Did they leave crystal skulls to teach us technology and art?"), you aren't writing academic research. Leave that sort of thing for the supermarket tabloid papers.


• To boldly go where no man has gone before. If there's nothing written about your topic, no primary research, you'll have to fly to the Amazon yourself to come up with a decent paper. Maybe it's really intriguing to ask the enormous questions, but save that for your doctoral dissertation. Right now, you've got really limited time and no foundation grant.

Three more paradoxes

• Big topics make small papers. Students often figure that the more generalized and enormous topic will make a long paper more easily, but it's the tightly focused topics that suggest a LOT of further research. Consider which would make a longer paper (because it suggests more fertile research questions). "High gasoline prices" or "Effect of high gasoline prices on family-owned businesses in two ocean resorts: Ocean City, Maryland, compared with Rehoboth Beach, Delaware."


• Easy topics make difficult papers. (Difficult to find enough material, that is.) Students often go for no-brainers like "how to change a tire" or "reasons to quit smoking." The problem is that a three-page pamphlet has thoroughly covered the topic, so there's nothing to do except summarize it and get frustrated. There's nothing to prove, nothing to discuss.


• If you know it in your heart, you will have trouble proving it. When you approach a "research" project to teach the rest of us that you were right in the first place, you'll only look at sources that support your point of view. That's why nobody is in love with faith-based papers (except the writer and those who already agree). That's also why topics such as creationism, acupuncture, and macrobiotic diets usually don't fly in the academic world. You have to already believe the main point to accept the basic premise of the paper. There's no possibility for the "research" to change the writer's opinion, even the smallest amount.

It's All About the Grades

Well the grades have been posted for about a week, and (as you might guess) protests are rolling in. It seems worse this year, somehow. Here's a guide to my reactions to grade protests:

I might react favorably:

• Well, I've been a good student and shown up for all the classes. How close is my "A minus" to a full "A"?
• Did you receive this paper that I e-mailed you?
• Why does your gradebook show a different grade from what you wrote on my paper?

I'm less likely:

• Your records are wrong: I really did attend class all those times.
• I'm going to send my mother to talk to your boss.*
• I know I didn't show up much or turn in all my papers. Is there ANYTHING I can do to raise my poor grade?
• Even though I didn't attend class and just sort of guessed when I wrote that last assignment, I think it was pretty good and deserved a better grade.

Face it. Some students suffer from a form of burnout about three-quarters of the way through a term. They stop attending and their papers become shorter and shorter and show less and less real thinking. This is the point where the real students are separated from those who simply take up space: the real students carry through to the end.

*You should know that sending your mother to plead for a grade rarely works, and (assuming you are over 18 years old) it's not even really legal for a teacher to reveal your grade to your parents without a signed release.

Between Terms Advice

Because I write this blog mainly for my students, I feel like I can give you some teacher's advice. Here are three things that would have revolutionized the lives of many of my students (about a third of them).

Show Up! The previous blog entry said something about attendance. I'll say it again. Unless you're in college as a sort of expenses-paid vacation, you need to pass courses and learn information. You can't do that if you're not in class. My students with poor attendance records are always surprised when they turn in papers that I don't approve of. They thought they had guessed right on the assignment! Why not actually show up and make sure? The student with tapering attendance is always fascinating. Pretty good at the start, then less and less. What? Did you learn it all in the first month? Did you discover alcohol? Or are you just so arrogant that you figure nobody can teach you anything?

Read the Assignment! I mean this in two senses:
1. Read the stuff in the book. I don't know about you, but when I spend $90 for something, I want to get some good out of it. And no, the teachers don't get a cut of the profits. And no, we don't hear whether you did buy the book—so we don't grade on spending. We do grade on whether you absorbed the stuff inside the book. And surprisingly enough (this may be different from high school books) there's actually something inside most college textbooks that's worth reading!
2. Read the directions for the thing you're supposed to be writing. When I ask my students for a research paper that's five to seven pages long, I'm not going to give full credit for two pages of unsupported opinion.

Make a Gradebook! You need to know how many absences you have in a class, particularly if you have trouble showing up. You need to know what your grades are, so you know how much it will hurt you when you don't choose to turn in a major assignment. Many of my disappointed students this semester had no idea they were in trouble, even though they might have missed a quarter of our class meetings and not bothered to turn in a major paper. Here's a little hint: few college instructors will seek you out and try to talk you into doing the work. We feel we have better things to do.

Winding down thoughts

I'm sitting here at University of Akron on the last day of finals week. Department policy requires me to give back the final portfolios in a face-to-face conference this week, so this all feels very final and almost a little sad. I feel like we should do a little ceremony here.

We don't do office conferences that much. For one thing, students are generally terrified of their teachers (I think it's hilarious that anyone would be terrified of me), so it's really rare for anyone to come talk with me unless I've announced to them that I'm failing them for plagiarism. For another thing, someone brought a lawsuit at Akron a while back because classes were canceled for conferences. They claimed that a personal 20-minute meeting taught them less than three hours of group lecture. So we can't cancel classes for conferences. (NCSC is its own world. I can't do conferences there because students assume that anyone who has a one-on-one conversation gets an unfair advantage in the course.)

The result is that the last time I see these people is also the first time I talk with them personally. Odd. And sad, too, because these are some very interesting students, and we get to actually talk about their writing for once. But it's the worst time in the semester to do this, because their minds are on summer, and the next formal writing they will do is in September.

Most of these guys really will do well in their future. I look at the grade book and "B" is the most common grade I give out. About 22% of my students, though, won't be passing. For most of them, the issue is simple dishonesty or simple lack of attendance. It seems like every class I teach has at least two students who have "issues" with attending (often I suspect that the "issues" are related to alcohol). I used to assign a paper on "differences between high school and college." I hoped for people to write about maturity or about the new emphasis on thinking for oneself. Usually, though, they write, "The main difference is that you have to attend classes in high school and you don't have to attend in college." Alas. None of the people I'm failing this semester had a good attendance record. Some missed as many as 20 class sessions.

That's a dreary note to end on. A happier one: Several of my students reported that their thinking changed significantly for the better. They figured out important things about their careers. They learned how to think. They learned how to respect the opinions of others. This is the stuff that's supposed to happen to freshmen, and it did here.

My boyfriend the expert

I'm looking over the current crop of Ashland definitional argument papers, and I'm surprised at how many of them use interviews as research sources. I'm also surprised at the qualifications of some of the people interviewed. Sometimes it really worked. One student, answering the question "Are cheerleaders athletes?" interviewed the faculty member who is in charge of the cheerleading squad. This faculty member happens to be part of the Physical Education Department, and could speak (with some authority) about the number of injuries suffered nationwide by cheerleaders. Another, writing on the question "Are NASCAR drivers athletes?" interviewed her boyfriend. His qualification is that he watches a lot of car races on TV and even attended a couple of races in real life. Yet another, writing on the question "Are band members athletes?" (we seem to be on a roll here) interviewed several band members and learned that they really like being in the band and feel like they have to work hard.

Did these strategies work? Or, more specifically, would anyone call these real research? Or are they just fulfilling the requirement to find outside sources?

Let's review.

• Both the author and the audience must respect the source. The cheerleader source seems to work that way. She's got expertise (and academic qualifications) in the specific field the paper was discussing. Do I respect the boyfriend who put down his beer long enough to say, "Yeah, they look like they're working hard"? Nope. Would I respect the opinion of a Ph.D. in English who watches a lot of NASCAR? No more than I'd respect the opinion of a truck driver or anyone else—the degree only counts in the area it relates to.


• The source must have something to say. The band people only got to say that they enjoy band and work hard. They didn't get to talk about much of anything else. Nobody among the band interviewees was asked to compare the band experience to (for example) being on a swim team or being a football player.


• You have to ask the right question. The greatest interview source in the world won't help you much if you don't ask the right question and edit the response. The NASCAR boyfriend was allowed to ramble for about half the paper. The band members were asked if they liked being in band. The cheerleading advisor was asked how cheerleaders' injuries and workouts compare with those of other athletes.

What a research paper is about

This is the bottom line: it's about learning something new and reliable, not about simply filling space and accumulating things to put on a "Works Cited" page.

By the way #1: It's all in the question you're trying to answer. If the research paper question was "What do beer-drinking NASCAR fans think about the drivers?" the boyfriend would have been an expert. He just wasn't an expert on what sort of workout and exertion the drivers actually go through.
By the way #2: There's a way to actually cite these interviews. Look it up.

Scott Bidstrup

I recently picked up my Ashland essays, this group a set of responses to Andrew Sullivan's "Conservative Case for Gay Marriage," and I was surprised when the same Internet source kept appearing. Four of thirteen essays referred to to a web article by Scott Bidstrup, "Gay Marriage: The Arguments and the Motives." I've got some experience in the whole discussion, and I've got to admit that his name was new to me. I knew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, Tony Campolo, Mel White, and the Gay Christian Network, but this is a new name, so I decided to follow it up. One third of my students read Bidstrup? Is it some sort of assignment? Is there a sale on his stuff at the bookstore?

Turns out that the explanation is much simpler. Type "gay marriage" into Google, and Bidstrup is the first item to come up. Since he's a webmaster who owns a server hosting over 7000 websites, I'd assume he knows how to optimize a site to get it to the top of the Google heap. It's a matter of getting the right words into the hidden meta keword headers, putting the right stuff in boldface and italics, wisely using header labels, and getting lots more people to link to a site (from "good" websites) than you have links outbound. All easy material for someone who is fluent in HTML, but not necessarily the kind of thing that determines whether a site is a good source for academic discussion.

Turns out that Bidstrup is quite good on this topic, though my students didn't often delve very deeply. He's apparently:

• Gay and not too effeminate about it either
• Politically liberal and convinced that George W. Bush is one of the worst things to happen to America
• Not at all in sympathy with right-wing Christian religion, especially the form that tries to take control of the government to impose its standards on everyone else
• Living in self-imposed exile in Colombia because he's convinced that Bush's Patriot Act surveillance endangers everyone who has a contrary opinion to the official government line

He looks like a good project for Internet reliability and bias study!

Is Ethnocentrism Racism?

In "Making The Case For Teaching Our Boys To ... 'Bring Me Home A Black Girl,'" Audrey Edwards attempts to deflect the criticism that her attitude is racist. She claims that there is quite a difference between being "racist" and "ethnocentric." (Actually, she puts the distinction in the mouth of a source, Gwendolyn Goldsby Grant, on this matter—a good strategy to put some distance between oneself and a potentially damaging comment.) So there are two "what is it?" questions here: Is ethnocentrism racist? Is Edwards' attitude pure ethnocentrism?

Racism goes beyond simply recognizing racial differences. Informally, at least, it is not too difficult to make some harmless generalizations about race: Africans have dark skin; Asians are often less hairy than Europeans, and so forth. None of this means much, and nobody ever got too upset about the assertion that few Asians or Africans are naturally blond. There always seems to be something deeper in racism: a claim that in the categories that count—intelligence, dignity, and basic humanity—race determines who has "got it" and who hasn't. Much like the schoolyard bully, the racist makes claims to appear superior by denigrating those "lower beings." Adolph Hitler gives us the paradigm: "If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity for the shedding of precious German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin." He gives us both sides of racism, the "flower of the German nation" with its "precious German blood" and below these wonderful Germans, the "inferior race that breeds like vermin." Note the comparison: Germans are flowers and the others are rats, mice, and cockroaches. Friedrich Otto Hertz, a sociologist and historian who left Germany and settled in England in 1938, adds, "At the heart of racism is the religious assertion that God made a creative mistake when He brought some people into being."

There we have a basic definition of racism: We're good, and you're a mistake. We're flowers and you're cockroaches. Most of the racist manifestations you can think of probably derive from this frame of mind. Flowers and cockroaches shouldn't use the same water fountain. We don't belong in the same end of the bus. During the 1930's, railroads in the South had "Jim Crow cars"—minimal coaches with wooden benches for black riders. Why should they deserve the plush seats reserved for the whites if they are some lower form of life anyhow? The whole emphasis of the racist formula "separate but equal" was on the separate part. And the point of that was that lower forms were being separated from higher.

How does ethnocentrism fit into this definition? To begin with, the concept of ethnic group is very fuzzy, but usually refers to a shared culture, language, or religion ("Ethnic group"). The "centric" part is probably going to cause trouble. Galileo had to contend with thinkers who supported the geocentric model of the universe (everything revolves around the earth). Nearly everyone has had an egocentric roommate or coworker (everything revolves around me). Putting all this together, an ethnocentric point of view says everything tends to revolve around my culture, language, or religion.

To some extent, we all are ethnocentric. Jokes abound concerning tourists who go to foreign countries and yearn for "normal" food. It's not surprising when a down-home country type (such as my uncle) listens to Beethoven and wonders when we will get to hear some "good" music. No matter what I do about it, I'm probably going to always be white, male, Midwestern, and somewhat true to my religion and upbringing. There is a very thin line, though, between "I'm judging the whole world according to my culture," and "Your culture falls short because it isn't like mine." There's another thin line between "Your music and food aren't as good as mine" and "You aren't as good as I am." Stepping over that line is the move from "ethnocentric" to "racist."

In Edwards' article, Grant makes the point that "to want to be with people who share your values, religion and culture is very normal" (342). So far, so good. Even when nobody is forcing anybody, immigrants will tend to settle near folks like themselves. Most American cities have an Italian section, a Polish section, and so forth. When my brother-in-law, a good German Catholic, announced that he was marrying a good Catholic girl, there was a family uproar. The girl was Italian. Never mind that both families had been in the USA for at least two or three generations. Normal is "we want to be with people we understand."

Leaving aside the question of whether culture and skin color are equivalent, much of Edwards' article is focused on affirming the value of being black. This is the point of her comments about the beauty of black women. This is the point of reinforcing the self-image of black children. Substitute "Hispanic" or "Asian" for "Black" in these statements, and you get pretty much the same message: "we're good and we need to believe in ourselves." Nothing blameworthy about that.

Then there's Valerie Williams: "I want to have grandchildren who look like me [...] I don't want to be sitting around the dinner table at Thanksgiving feeling I have to bite my tongue" (Edwards 344). Why would she bite her tongue? She would be looking at the offspring of her good black son and a white woman who feels "superior to a former slave." Williams assumes (and Edwards quotes her with approval) that all white people are racists. Because racism is an attitude that puts one in the same villainous category as Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan, obviously there is something wrong with all those terrible white women. It is not an attitude of a few oddballs, either. "[T]here's not a White person in America who doesn't feel superior to a former slave," says Williams (Edwards 344). It's a racial characteristic of whites. Something really terrible is wrong with white people, all of them.

We get the feeling from Williams (and Edwards) that when wealth passes out of the hands of the black entrepreneur who originally earned it and gets laid at the feet of white women, something bigger than a sharing of community property has happened. Those white women do not deserve it. There is the intimation that a white woman would never think of marrying a wealthy black man for any reason except to get his money.

So where does this leave us? Is ethnocentricity a variety of racism? Probably not, in its pure form. Learning about the heroes of one's own cultural heritage, celebrating one's own cuisine, participating in one's own religious observances, and wanting to feel comfortable with a spouse who is generally from the same culture are all very normal. Wikipedia's root definition, though, strikes at the heart of the problem:

Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one's own culture. Ethnocentrism often entails the belief that one's own race or ethnic group is the most important and/or that some or all aspects of its culture are superior to those of other group. ("Ethnocentrism")

It's much too easy to slip from "we're pretty good" to "there's something wrong with you," which is the root of racism, and Audrey Edwards (with those disparaging comments about white women) steps over the line. Her form of ethnocentrism really is racism.

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Works Cited

Edwards, Audrey. "Making the Case for Teaching Our Boys to ... 'Bring Me Home a Black Girl.'" 75 Arguments: An Anthology. Alan Ainsworth, ed. Boston: McGraw, 2008. 340-44.

"Ethnic group." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 9 Mar 2008, 18:25 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 11 Mar 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ethnic_group&oldid=197044792>.

"Ethnocentrism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 10 Mar 2008, 05:13 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 11 Mar 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ethnocentrism&oldid=197168631>.

Hertz, Friedrich Otto. "Friedrich Otto Hertz quotes." Find the famous quotes you need, ThinkExist.com Quotations. ThinkExist. 10 Mar 2008 <http://thinkexist.com/quotes/friedrich_otto_hertz/>.

Hitler, Adolph. "Adoph Hitler quotes." Find the famous quotes you need, ThinkExist.com Quotations. ThinkExist. 10 Mar 2008 <http://thinkexist.com/quotation/if_i_can_send_the_flower_of_the_german_nation/198051.html>.

Reactions to Sullivan Reactions

I'm about to sit down to read the last stack of reactions to Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage." Now I know that it's quite difficult for a college freshman to disagree with a teacher and it's pretty obvious that I generally agree with Sullivan. Here are a couple of my own reactions to the student papers:

Several students have commented that Sullivan plays loose with statistics. He says, "the majority of people 30 and younger see gay marriage as inevitable and understandable," and my students ask, "How do you know? What surveys? Where were they taken? When?" The students have a point. Sullivan's argument would have been stronger if he'd given some indication of where his "majority" comes from.

I get disturbed, though, by simple misreading of the article.

1. The opening refers to action by the Canadian Federal Courts. Canada is a separate country from the USA, so actions they take (even if they also call their judiciary "Federal Courts") have no legal effect in our country. The United States Supreme Court hasn't made any ruling yet (five years after the writing of this article) on the legality of gay marriage.
2. In a similar vein, a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court doesn't directly affect the other states. If gay marriage becomes legal in Massachusetts (as it did after this article was written), that only affects Ohio and the other states indirectly.
3. The U.S. Supreme Court issue was much more limited: should a specific sexual practice be illegal for gay people but legal for straight people?
4. Sullivan isn't really saying he's leaving the Roman Catholic Church on this issue. The Catholics only come into the discussion because they have a stricter view of divorce than the civil courts (though those who know the Catholic stance on homosexuality should realize that Sullivan is pretty far from Catholic orthodoxy on this issue).
5. The "when I grew up and realized I was gay" paragraph doesn't say so directly, but the perspective seems to be a young man looking forward to his life and wondering how he will fit into the world. It's certainly not reflecting on a divorce that took place because he "decided to be gay."
6. Perhaps the most frustrating misreading refers to Sullivan's opening paragraph. He begins by saying that the winner for dull, unimaginative writing in the New Republic's humorous little contest was "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative." Sounds like something announcing a new rule for salmon fisheries. The irony is that that incredibly dull contest-winner would turn out to be an appropriate headline for something so earth-shaking as gay marriage in the Western Hemisphere. Sullivan wasn't saying he learned of Canada's decision by reading an article with that title. He's doing irony (a variety of humor).
   

Progress on Ethnocentrism

A prewriting

I've got this great quotation from George Bernard Shaw: "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."

The dictionaries aren't much help at this point, and quoting them will simply result in a very short paper. The online Merriam-Webster gives for "Ethnocentric:"

characterized by or based on the attitude that one's own group is superior

My Apple computer's Oxford New American Dictionary gives

evaluating other peoples and cultures according to the standards of one's own culture

I'm also thinking of that "-centric" suffix. Galileo had to deal with the geocentric theory of the solar system (the earth is the center of everything). Many of us have had egocentric coworkers or roommates (I am the center of everything). Following this, "ethnocentric" would be "my ethnos is the center of everything." (Which leaves aside the question whether a race is the same thing as an ethnos.) Is it just that my race is mine? Of course, I think as I do because I am me—I can't easily think as a woman or a child or an Eskimo. In that sense, I'm always going to be egocentric and ethnocentric, but that doesn't appear to be what Williams and Edwards are getting at. Should I take my ethnos to be the standard by which everyone else is judged?

The essential corner gets turned when I move from "we're pretty good" to "there's something wrong with you" (and perhaps around another corner: "you're so substandard that I don't want you around me").

There's a lot of ground to be covered here. Which option?

• My grandma's Cornish pasties were really good.
• My grandma's Cornish pasties were the best food in the world.
• Those Finnish pasties just don't measure up.
• Finns don't deserve to even MAKE pasties because theirs are so terrible!
• Don't you dare bring one of those disgusting Finns into my presence.

Pondering a Definitional Argument

Think of this as "getting ready." I wanted to actually write one of these definitional arguments to give you a pattern or model.

First Thoughts:

I began with the word "gourmet." It's interesting, because the dictionary meaning (yes, I know that it's really dull to begin with the dictionary) is either "a connoisseur of good food" or "food suitable for a gourmet." I thought that would be a fun word to work with because of such things as gourmet cat food and frozen gourmet meals. I remember working for a restaurant where "gourmet sauce" came in a can and was poured over things like pork chops to make them "gourmet." Odd little questions came up:

• Does "gourmet" have to be cooked fresh or to order? Is it possible to have a "gourmet" can of soup?
• Does "gourmet" have to be rare? Can a place like Olive Garden (or even McDonald's) be truly gourmet?
• Does it have to be weird? Snails and quail eggs and odd French fungus that grows underground? How about beans and franks? A hot dog and a Coke? Can those be gourmet?

This all ran aground, though. I really couldn't think of a good reason to write this paper. I just didn't give a hoot whether a Big Mac is gourmet or not.

Second Thoughts:

I can't quite let go of Audrey Edwards. Her sex-therapist source, Gwendolyn Goldsby Grant, makes a distinction between being ethnocentric and being racist (342). This, at least, sounds more important than pondering whether Wolfgang Puck soup is truly gourmet. Is it possible to be strongly in favor of one's own race without being racist? Where's the line? And is it racism to tell one's son that he must marry within the race? There's a song in the Broadway Musical Avenue Q called "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist." Seems to be true too. Maybe this is where I begin.

Response to Audrey Edwards

The Incredible Non-Vanishing Negro

Audrey Edwards' article, "Making the Case for Teaching Our Boys to ... 'Bring Me Home a Black Girl'" is useful for many things. She's provided a textbook case in misusing statistics (for example, when she conveniently forgets to mention that interracial marriage was illegal in much of the USA in 1960, but cries out in alarm at the increase in interracial marriages between 1960 and 2002). She's great at quoting experts who are speaking outside their field of expertise (for example, citing a sex therapist's opinions on economics and cultural change). The most interesting thing about Edwards' article, though, is that she doesn't know what she is talking about.

Edwards is worried that an increase in Black men marrying White women (she capitalizes the races as if they are political parties or religious denominations) will lead to a "weakening of the culture and economic resources of the Black community." The issue she raises is how to "ensure our cultural and economic survival as a people" (341).

I'd counter with the question, "Who is Black?" As far back as Frederick Douglass, interracial unions were producing "a very different-looking class of people" (Douglass 14). (Douglass' mother was Black and his father White.) Barack Obama is often cited as a model for the new generation: a black man who can run for president. Obama's DNA, however, is only about fifty percent African, and his Black father was an immigrant from Africa (so never had any experience of American Black culture). Edwards is terrified that Blackness will vanish, but most American Blacks have some White blood. Edwards seems to worry that when a black man and white woman (I'm dropping the capitalization because it's much too political) have a baby, the child will be lost to the black community, but her instructions to Ugo ("Dark, light, shades in between—it don't matter to me as long as she's Black") show that she buys the idea that a mixed-race child is black (340). Not white, not 50/50. She calls a "light" girl Black. We've made a lot of progress since the North Carolina legal definition of "Negro" (which I found in my trusty 1919 Funk & Wagnalls dictionary): "a person who has in his veins one-sixteenth or more of African blood." (that's one great-great-grandparent), but Americans seem to agree with Edwards—blackness sticks with a child more than whiteness.

My daughter-in-law is from Central America. She was adopted as an infant by a family in Ohio. Her maiden name is decidedly north-European. She doesn't speak a single word of Spanish. Is she a "person of color"? Is my son in a mixed marriage? Only if you do a DNA test; culturally, they are identical. This brings up an interesting point: does culture follow skin color? What is Black culture? Is it the conspicuous consumption of a rap star covered with gold jewelry? Is it the single mother in the ghetto struggling to raise her children in a neighborhood filled with gangs warring over drug territory? Is the gangs themselves? Is it John Lee Hooker, playing blues from the rural Mississippi delta? Is it Maxwell Manning, assistant professor of social work at Howard University? Is it the African Methodist Episcopal Church? Or perhaps the Black Muslims? Or maybe a more traditional Muslim group? Black culture isn't monolithic; about the only thing my examples have in common is that people with dark skin are part of them. I suspect that Manning, Hooker, and a hip-hop singer wouldn't find much to talk about over dinner—in fact, they'd have a difficult time understanding one another at all because of language and cultural differences.

Or perhaps there is another question: why is anyone worried about black culture vanishing? Listen to American popular music, not just rap and hip-hop, but almost anything written since 1900, and you are very likely to find African roots. George Gershwin, good Jewish boy that he was, couldn't have written "Rhapsody in Blue" without including its jazz roots—roots that go right back to Mama Africa. Or look at American teenagers. I'd wager you'll find more white boys in clownishly oversize clothing with a waistband near their crotch and a sideways baseball hat (styles that came directly from the black ghetto gangs) than you will find black boys in Dockers and polo shirts. The typical customer for hip-hop music is a young white male. He buys the CD after watching his hero, a black basketball player, sink a three-pointer. We may love it or hate it, but African culture is the engine that drives much of our music, clothing style, and speech patterns. (If you want to get all of the Africa out of your speech, just try to stop saying "OK"—a slang term directly from west Africa.) The white supremacists may have a point about white culture vanishing; the black supremacists don't.

White supremacists and bigots may abound in our culture (alas), but Edwards and her mouthpiece Valerie Williams don't seem to know much about them. Williams claims that "there's not a White person in America who doesn't feel superior to a former slave" (Edwards 344). Perhaps that's true—I haven't interviewed all the white people in America (as Williams appears to have done—but she missed me). I do have a pretty intimate experience of white bigots, however. I've been a blue-collar worker for most of my life and have a fair number of family members who are less than generous in their opinions of black people. I've heard a lot of talk about black people (much of it very insulting), but "former slave" isn't on the list. Lots of other insults are there, often focusing on intelligence or cleanliness, but slave status just never occurs to the bigots.

I realize that this essay wasn't aimed at me; its target audience is young black men—or perhaps their mothers (which may explain why it was first published in Essence, a magazine for black women). They may see the black community as a hermetically sealed enclave that tries to keep its money and marriages for its own, a place where culture and color are pretty much equivalent. I suspect, though, that most people who read this essay echo the concerns of Martin Luther King, and want Edwards (and her stepson Ugo) to learn to look at the heart, not at the skin. Edwards knows this too, and she really does agree. After all, with lots of historically black colleges to choose from (She must be aware of Howard University; she quotes an assistant professor), Ugo ended up at a predominantly white college. Why? Presumably because Ugo (and Audrey Edwards herself) wanted more from a college than a simple color match to his skin.

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Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Ed. William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1997.

Edwards, Audrey. "Making the Case for Teaching Our Boys to ... 'Bring Me Home a Black Girl.'" 75 Arguments. Ed. Alan Ainsworth. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008. 340-44.

"Negro." Funk & Wagnalls American Dictionary. 1919.

Equivocation on Gay Marriage

OK, so this isn't really a writing sample, per se. Think of it as a response to Andrew Sullivan's article (and to those who write against his position).

Equivocation is an argumentative fallacy that uses a word in two different senses to create the impression of proof where none exists. Here's an example:

• Nothing is better than cheesecake.
• Breadcrumbs are better than nothing.
• Therefore, breadcrumbs are better than cheesecake.

(No, I didn't come up with that example myself. It's pretty good, though.)

The confusion comes because "nothing" is being used in two different senses. In the first statement, it means ne plus ultra: cheesecake is the highest that can be obtained. Top of the heap. No foods above it on the list. In the second it means "lack of food." Having breadcrumbs is better than being totally devoid of food.

Now to apply the equivocation idea to gay marriage. We often hear that allowing gays to marry will "destroy marriage." Well yes, it will, but not in the sense that some people imagine.

Marriage has already been destroyed a lot—at least in the sense that our previous definition has been replaced by a newer one. Parents no longer arrange the marriage of their minor children in order to unite two political units. Fathers no longer sell their daughters to the highest bidder. We no longer assume that a man can have multiple wives at the same time. More recently (certainly within the 20th century in America), there was a time when a husband could hold a wife in an undesirable marriage by refusing to grant her a divorce. All of these definitions have been destroyed, and the new paradigm is a more democratic union between two equals, not a master/subordinate relationship.

But when people hear that allowing gays to marry will "destroy marriage," they often take it to mean that heterosexuals will stop marrying, that existing marriages will become more unstable, and that in general people will hold marriage in lower esteem.

Sorry—that's already happened, courtesy of easy divorce, acceptance of unmarried couples living together and producing children, and a general feeling that marriage ties one down too much. Gays didn't do it.

And that easy equivalence of "redefining who may get married" with "make the whole marriage institution less viable" just doesn't hold. It's equivocation.

Summary of Andrew Sullivan

"The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage," by Andrew Sullivan, discusses the possibility of same-sex marriage becoming legal in the United States. Now that Canada has followed several other countries by legalizing gay marriage and several United States courts are considering provisions to loosen legal restrictions, real marriage (not a pseudo-marriage) has become a real possibility. This is a very conservative move because it will tend to foster stability within the gay community while encouraging family ties, something older gay people really regretted losing. The world is changing: under-30 straight people seem to have less difficulty accepting gay marriage so younger gay people will feel less social stigma about coming out and finding partners. The move toward gay marriage isn't really a religious issue, though; it's matter of civil law. Many religions already have marriage or divorce restrictions that are stricter than the civil law, so there should be no problem with them following their own conscience. The central issue is learning to respect even those we disagree with.

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