What's "old"?

A few years ago, I was offered "senior checking" by my bank. It was quite a shock, because it meant that in someone's eyes I was now old. Not too long after that, my dentist observed that everything in my mouth looked just fine, "not counting the bone loss that is normal for a man your age."

I should have been prepared. My son, after all, has been calling me "old man" for years. He even programmed my cell phone so the opening screen has that name. So I've been wondering. Just what is "old"?

The dictionary, as usual, isn't much help. Or maybe it is. One of the definitions is "no longer young." I can't imagine my father as a young man. He was always old, but then he always had arthritis, so I can't imagine him skipping or leaping. Or playing tennis or even walking really fast. He sort of lumbered.

I tried to put a number on "old." In The Full Monty, the committee auditioning dancers looks at one guy and someone says, "Look at him! He must be at least 50." That's how old I was when I got my senior checking. I haven't even bothered to check on McDonald's standard for "senior coffee" or the state's age for a Golden Buckeye Card. In an early episode of Will & Grace, Jack is horrified to discover that he's passed the magic number: 30. On the other hand, when I complain that I'm too old to find love, someone always mentions some nice old guy who got hitched in his 70s. I always assume that's an urban legend.

George Burns is sort of a hero. He was scheduled to play Carnegie Hall on his 100th birthday. He never made it. I think the cigars killed him. He was 99.

I used to be older. I used to have trouble with my back until I began weightlifting again. I used to worry a lot about my health. I used to have a gut hanging over my belt. I used to take pills. Now I eat fruits and vegetables. I used to worry about what people think of me. Now I vote for Obama (the young person's candidate), wear jeans, and listen to loud music.

Maybe "old" should fit into the phrase "too old to." I guess I'm too old to be mistaken for an undergraduate, but not too old to buy my jeans in the young men's section of Macy's. I'm too old now to wrestle teenagers, at least the ones over 16 or the ones on wrestling teams. I'm too old to drink Natural Light until I fall over, but then I always was too old for that.

Maybe that phrase "too old to" should be finished with "too old to have hope." An Argentinean friend of mine, Juan Acuña, told me that he couldn't wait to hit 65. That's when solid respectability comes. That's when one is what one was made to be. George Burns had hope (and a lot of jokes) waiting for Carnegie Hall. Another friend, Charlie Todd, got married at 86. (He did make one concession to his years though. He said he didn't believe in short engagements, but when one is 86, one can't wait TOO long.)

Maybe "old" isn't the right word. I should try to work on "elderly." In the sense of being an elder, it's a good thing, but in the sense of giving up on oneself, falling apart, restricting one's horizon to the next sitcom, and staying away from anything interesting, threatening, or fun, I don't want to go there. "Old" isn't something I can control: I approach it at exactly 60 seconds per minute. I can control "elderly" though. That's what I intend to do. I hope I follow in the footsteps of George Burns and Charlie Todd. Find true love at 86 and play Carnegie Hall at 100.

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.

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>.

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.

Informal Definitional Argument

This isn't a formal Definitional paper, just a few thoughts that might turn into one.

When I was a boy, I was, like many boys, fascinated with cars. I often spent my pocket money on car magazines, so I remember the discussion about whether certain cars were "true sports cars." Chevrolet had their first Corvettes out, and Ford was selling its first Thunderbird (which shows just how old I am, since I was obviously reading magazines in 1956), so the automotive purists were debating whether these new cars could be called "sports cars." This, of course, led to the question, "What is a true sports car?"

• Two seats? (No. Several very unsporty cars, such as the Plymouth Business Coupe were two-seaters.)
• Built low to the ground? (How low is "low"? There were some pretty low Studebakers.)
• Floor shift? (Many European economy sedans had floor shift at the time.)

The purists were really trying to somehow keep out the Corvettes and Thunderbirds, but let in the MGs and Triumphs. They finally hit on door handles! If you look at pictures of old MGs, Triumph TR2s and Morgans, none of them had door handles. They had canvas tops and flimsy side curtains, and the driver was supposed to simply push that side curtain open, reach inside, and open the car with the inside door handle. That's what made it a sports car! You couldn't lock it. The Corvettes and Thunderbirds offered genuine hard tops, roll-up windows, and lockable doors.

Then Triumph (whose credentials as a sports car were unquestioned) came out with the TR3. It had more power and DOOR HANDLES!

Looking back, it's interesting that the definition never focused on the car's abilities or purpose. Cars such as the early BMWs and Volvos (which routinely won road rallies) couldn't be called "true sports cars" because they had rear seats, heaters, and door locks. It was all focused on a tiny bit of trivia.