May 11, 2008
La felicidad ja ja ja ja: On Walking While White
You cannot tell from this blog, but I am culturally undernourished and I lack exercise. This is a Wandering Post because this weekend, I have been strolling. As it is the weekend, I am also singing. I sing that T. and I are about to go eat rico menudo in the real barrio, and that I have found a new ceramics studio. In honor of that most notable discovery, I offer a really cheesy song by Tommy Rey:
Antes nunca estuve, así enamorado,
ni sentí jamás esa sensación
la gente en las calles parece más buena,
todo es diferente gracias al amor.
La felicidad ja, ja, ja, ja,
me la dio tu amor jo, jo, jo, jo,
hoy hace cantar ah, ah, ah, ah,
a mi corazón oh, oh, oh, oh,
La felicidad ja, ja, ja, ja,
me la dio tu amor oh, oh, oh, oh
hoy se cantar ah, ah, ah, ah,
gracias al amor,
y todo gracias al amor.
This is Tommy Rey himself, a Saturday night entertainer. The video is funny:
Watching Tommy Rey is far more lively than hiring, an activity wherein we are trying to find a candidate whose PhD is from an institution like ours, so that they will not be too shocked upon arrival. My insight is that it is not your PhD granting institution that indicates which tenure track job you will be happiest in, or at least understand. It is your undergraduate institution.
Meanwhile my friend the former German professor, who long ago took a job in business, reminds me he is opposed to tenure. The dead wood take up the tenured jobs, so the good new PhDs can only get adjunct positions. If there were no tenure, only good people would have jobs and it would also be easier to move around.
From this conversation I realized yet another reason why this plan would not work in practice: people would not really move that much. Their universities would get used to them, and they would get used to their universities, so they would stay, as the instructors do, albeit without tenure. Alternatively, everyone would always be on the job market and the tenure track.
Also while wandering through museums and galleries last night in clearheaded weekend fashion I realized what my mental fog is, that lack of focus and shutdown that I had decided to associate with PTSD. It is more specifically the confusion that means you have been assaulted somehow. I always had it around the edges of my mind, and if it came closer in I would say to it, get back! Later it took over much more, sometimes completely. I think it is a symptom of being in an abusive relationship. I think that what many people learn on the tenure track is how to enter into an abusive relationship with themselves.
My students, who also appeared at the museum, said that certain books I am teaching, classics on the supposedly universal theme of identity, are in fact about the midlife crises of straight, white middle class men in metropolitan countries. It is very funny and it explains why I did not really understand these books when I read them at their age, but understand them now.
Then I strolled home. One of the ways to walk to my house from downtown is through a poor neighborhood where most white people only go to buy drugs. It has wonderful architecture, though, and I would move there if anyone would sell a house to a gentrifier, which they will fiercely not. I like to go home that way because it reminds me of New Orleans, but police cruisers sometimes follow me - not because they think I am buying drugs, but because they imagine I am hooking. More than once I have had to show my university ID and they have called in to make sure I have not stolen or faked it. They have told me that white women do not walk for exercise while wearing regular clothes: I should signal that I am a mere exerciser by wearing exercise clothes, rather than the ladylike skirt and blouse I teach in. This means I have been an object of police inquiry for walking while white.
So do you think harassment of women by men is increasing? It has seemed so to me for about ten years, and it may only be a function of where I am. Or am I merely becoming more conscious of it? But if it is actually on the rise, is it a phenomenon on its own, or is it part of a general increase in harassment?
Far more interesting than all of that is Cuban salsa:
And Oscar de León on Suavecito, con mucho swing:
Eso sí que tiene asé, so watch that video if you watch any of these.
Axé.










