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Week 1 blog(yes, an uncreative title)

In this first week’s class, the most memorable thing that came across for me was the notion of being able to shed things such as race, gender, or class on the internet. The internet is a place which gives us the ability to hide who we are, yet people still make assumptions based on the things we say, and make assumptions about who we are. Furthermore, these traits which we could supposedly shed are a part of our character, a fact which shapes who we are. Even if we have the ability to present ourselves as we see fit, our traits effect our behavior, and how we see others.

A question which came to me in class is ‘what can we do about privilege, on an individual scale’. The reading comparing straight white male to the lowest difficulty setting was made to speak to the privileged class, informing them of the issue, while attempting to avoid putting blame and being offensive. I do believe it is important to inform people of the issues that the less privileged face, but that still leaves the question: What’s the next step? The issue has complicated roots, and the solution would likely require a large amount of thought to find.

For the future, I would like to learn more about how our cultural operating systems affect our behaviors, and the behaviors of others. To understand our issues as a society, it could be helpful to understand a multitude of perspectives, and connect them together in order to identify the causes of the issues we face. By figuring out why things work the way they do, we would likely get closer to understanding how to remedy the disadvantages that some people face.

First Off

The most memorable thing that I took away from discussion yesterday was a metaphor. The metaphor that “Operating systems shape our interaction with technology in ways that seem natural and invisible.” This can be applied to cultural aspects like viewing sexuality as an operating system. There are many different types of sexualities and they all act as different hardwares within the operating system of sexuality. I feel that this is a very effective metaphor that gives a better understanding when considering any cultural aspect like sexuality, education, politics, gender, class, occupation, etc. Another thing that stood out in class was that I never really thought about there being discrimination towards females or even African American females concerning videogames. It is ridiculous that there is discrimination at all in the world, but concerning a hobby? Playing videogames can be a fun hobby to have, and to be discriminated against for doing something you enjoy is wrong.

A question that arose from discussion section on Wednesday is why people discriminate against hobbies based on gender and race. I am curious if the people who discriminate them do that because they were raised with that perception or that they personally believe that only certain people of certain race and gender should have certain hobbies. If so, how do they discriminate and what is the reasoning behind the discrimination? I believe that people should not be discriminated against for what hobby, let alone anything, they choose to partake in based on their gender, race, or sexuality.

I would like to go more in depth concerning white geek masculinity and feminist’s different reactions to it. I think it would be interesting to look further into this because I have never heard of “white geek masculinity” before. When it was first mentioned in Nakamura’s article I didn’t really understand what it was, and I still do not fully have an understanding of it.

 

A commentary as the “highest difficulty setting”

Being a Queer Female of Color has meant several specific things to me for the past few years, none of which having been directly compiled until this moment. Reading about Aisha Tyler’s struggle for acknowledgement and a voice in the gamer community, which is so exclusionary towards anyone who isn’t a Straight White Man, led me to epiphany (1).

I, the Queer Female of Color, stand at the gates of any community, physical or metaphorical. And I ask for permission to enter. Others, not only Straight White Men, come and go as they please without realizing, but I must stop and think. “Am I (blank) enough to go there? Is my belonging justified? Will I feel accepted and valued?” Who I am, where I go, and how I interact, is compartmentalized into the good, the bad, and the cautionary.

What does this all mean to me? It means that a third of the “minority trifecta” makes me an outcast in the eyes of my family’s god, a third is cause for carefulness in the wrong part of the very country I live in, and a third automatically decreases any contribution I make to my major and future line of work. It means that I feel the same amount of moderate worry that I’ll never see my nephew again when I tell my sister that I’m gay as travelling through the deep south in the summer, when my skin slips into a shade dark enough to be much less ambiguous. It also means that when applying for college I leapt for joy at the sight of a diversity essay. It means that I am a highly functioning victim of existential identity crisis.

But I know how to play the game. I recognize that I shamelessly take advantage of the system and I recognize that I am not, in fact, the highest difficulty setting. When we discussed affirmative action in class on Wednesday my thoughts immediately turned reflective. I graduated fourth in my class in high school. I was involved, and I had great recommendations, and I was fairly certain I could compete well with others for admission to UMD. But when I saw a diversity essay on the application, I’ll be honest. Maryland became my safety school. There is absolutely no doubt that universities want a diverse student body. I have heard President Loh, on multiple occasions, make remarks on how diverse the freshman class is. I watched one of my (white) best friends, who had credentials rather similar to my own, get rejected from the very school I was so confident I would be admitted to. Although we don’t know for sure why she was rejected, it presented both a conflict and a vote of confidence to me. My trifecta is my biggest secret weapon.

I’ve also realized that some of my other “stats” offer me great advantage in the world outside of college applications. I was fortunate to be raised in the upper middle class, something that my mother and father never had and worked their asses off for. Everything I ever needed was provided for me- education, medical attention, motivation, etc. Class distinction is as big of a factor as any when discussing Scalzi’s so called “difficulty settings” (2). Another big “boost” that I get is my half-white racial standing. There’s an excellent Button Poetry piece called “Da Rules” that profoundly states expectations of black young people in the society we live in. One part was even Just For Me! “Lightskins, be proud that you are ‘comfortable black.’ Your ambiguity is so interesting” (3). Biracial privilege is most definitely something that I believe exists. I have never had a problem with an authority figure. I do not fear police. I know that I don’t have to pay attention to how dark my clothing is, whether I’m wearing a hoodie, or if I have a smile on my face. I have often either felt too white for the black kids or too black for the white kids.

The more I write the more I understand criticism of Scalzi’s article. I still contend that it’s a fair “White Privilege, 101” for heteronormative white males who are painfully unaware of how many gates they can enter without any validation other than their appearance. However, when the analogy is extended it feels sinister and unsettling. To speak of things like wealth and being biracial as “stats” and “boosts” does not do justice to how consequential these things can be to quality of, and success in, life. I’m looking forward to delving into these concepts head-on during the semester so that I can better learn how to keep in mind the operating systems that govern our world, and yet also being to see myself as less of a Queer Female of Color and more of a human with worth and dignity, and incorporate that mindset with regards to all of my fellow humans.

Outside Looking In

Thoughts, ideas, perceptions. Everyone one has unique versions of these concepts, but we all see them through society’s lense of what may be seen as “normal.” In lecture this week, we discussed many metaphors dealing with how we are perceived in society. The first metaphor was the idea that society operates under an intangible operating system which connects us, the users, to the rest of the world. The metaphor of the operating system is of course flawed (no model is perfect, but they do get the message across), but it is one way to conceptualize that our cultural operating system affects how we view the world around us based on perceptions of the system. These are ideas like race, religion, class, occupations (basically all the things that lead to stereotypes). By learning about the operating systems, one has the chance to reflect on how they might view others from the cultural operating system of their society.

The second metaphor (well more of a model really) we discussed came from John Scalzi’s blog post “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.” The focus of Scalzi’s article is the comparison to people in society being like players in a quest oriented videogame. This comparison allows many readers, not just his target audience of straight white males, to understand the concept of privilege in life that places no blame on them individually. He basically removes the reader from the situation to become an observer looking in. He then compares being a straight white male to having the game’s difficulty settings at the lowest levels; so they have more “points” to begin with so they have an easier time in the game completing goals than say a “gay minority female” who would start at the bottom and have a harder time getting to the same goals. Scalzi’s point is that straight white males are not at fault for the privilege they have, but people should recognize that they are more privileged than other individuals. It is very interesting to learn that even though the article was written for the benefit of straight white males it was taken very hostility by many of such individuals.

Afterwards, we read the blog post “Queer Woman of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is?” by Lisa Nakamura, which is her response to Scalzi’s post. In her post she nit-picks at some of the issues of Scalzi’s model of all of us just being characters in a game (again models are not perfect), but the bigger concern she brings up is the idea of how an article like this would have been received had a queer minority woman have written it. She discusses Aisha Tyler, a gamer, who had to prove herself to other gamers, even though she had been openly playing games for longer than many of the people doubting her abilities. We see similar cases in other masculine dominated spheres such as sports; when girls say they like sports they must “prove it” with some bit of obscure knowledge, rather than they take her word for it. One thing that’s certain is that though Scalzi’s model is flawed it is a good step towards people learning more about how privilege invisibly affects the world we live in.