{"id":1017,"date":"2005-08-25T00:18:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-25T07:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dee-rob.com\/wordpress\/2005\/08\/on-a-geo-political-politically-correct-note\/"},"modified":"2005-08-25T00:18:00","modified_gmt":"2005-08-25T07:18:00","slug":"on-a-geo-political-politically-correct-note","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dee-rob.com\/wp\/on-a-geo-political-politically-correct-note\/","title":{"rendered":"On a geo-political, politically correct note"},"content":{"rendered":"

You know that hippie kind of sentiment that talks about “you have to be taught” to hate and junk. (OK, not really hippie, unless James Michener was a hippie back before they were invented during World War II. South Pacific<\/em>and all that.)<\/p>\n

Point being, racism isn’t born it’s made through lots of hard work.<\/p>\n

You kind of forget about pervasive ignorance when you step away and plop into a new world, until you catch yourself hesitating. Probably, someone who knows my roots might think I’m referring to some kind of old school Boston, Louisa Day Hicks action, and a culture clash between my upbringing and Cali style.<\/p>\n

But, no. Today I was thinking back on my former employ and some of the rhetoric tossed around the ivy walls and ivory towers amongst the best and the brightest.<\/p>\n

I worked with one Indian woman, who is I believe from a somewhat financially comfortable family, and who had multiple degrees and specialities of a medical nature. Perfectly OK to work with, as far as working for medical professionals go, but fairly demanding in a very polite, but sure that she was going to get her way kind of confident manner, with a dollop of not suffering fools gladly. I think we were fine, and she even wangled my involvement into a couple of things I wouldn’t normally touch. (There were a few doctors with that kind of confidence and sureness.)<\/p>\n

Another member of the elite, referred to her as “imperius” in a joking, ain’t she like royalty kind of way. The joke basically was extended to explain the Indian upper and middle classes and basically that ALL woman scholars who ended up here from there were of the same ilk. Well off, proud and unwilling to suffer, because they had silver spoons and servants before hitting the U.S.<\/p>\n

Perhaps there is, or more likely was, some truth in that in the days before outsourcing and India’s push for education. Afterall, isn’t the basic rationale for a lot of covert racism that grain of truth that makes the rest plausible? And, when I once cooked at my university’s international living center almost every foreign student had wealth well beyond my imaginings (which is, of course, why I was their cook.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, now I am working with Indian women of about the same age as the woman I was told was the same as all other women scholars from India here in the U.S. Only they are not just different from that model, they are different from each other, and neither is particularly convincing as an imperius diva.<\/p>\n

Prior to working and living in Silicon Valley, my contact with Indians was essentially the army of mostly male research assistants and postdocs who come over and keep many labs running all over the country, along with counterparts from the People’s Republic, and then go back home with their western training to run labs and pharmaceutical factories in Asia. Generally, I didn’t have any contact with the mainstream, US middle-class everyday folks here. (I finally admitted to my boss the other day that when I saw her name I was shocked to find out in my interview that she had a completely American accent. Apparently, her brother has a Southern drawl.)<\/p>\n

So, I’s all getting enlightened and shit and I’m thinking the ivory towers I left were more shit-stained than I thought.<\/p>\n