inbag Perhaps you’ve been wondering how grad school is going for me. Well, I’m glad you asked!

I would shoot my own face off, if I believed in guns.

Oh, I’m not saying USC isn’t awesome—it’s basically four-star education, with concierge service. We are their little jewels, and they cherish us and hug us to their bosoms, though they haven’t catered any lunches lately, and honestly, really, they should.

Maybe I’m pitiful and considering the shooting off of my face because on Day Seven of a 90-hour week, I was accused of something that was thoroughly and entirely someone else’s fault, and I think you can imagine how I reacted to that! (For those of you who are not the king of Imagination Nation, it entailed calling my mother and weeping.) But that was like two weeks ago, so that couldn’t still be it?

No. It is because nobody likes me.

Rebecca Schoenkopf! you are yelling at me. Everyone loves you, crazypants!

How did you get through life being so, so wrong?

It turns out—ask my mother—I can be the teeniest abrasive, which on top of my congenital (and hereditary) know-it-allitude combines unbecomingly to resemble something like Barbara Boosh. This is most obvious in my seminar on race relations, where eyes are rolled until you fear for their bearers—and are averted by said bearers if encountered elsewhere on campus.

It all started innocently enough, with me being frankly surprised to learn that “assimilation” is a racist goal. I moved from innocent to insensitive, with an unnecessarily shouty remark from me regarding standard English. (I love ebonics, and I love immigrants who don’t speak English, but I believe people won’t be able to attain the middle class if they can’t speak like the majority, so whether or not it’s “unfair” or “postcolonial” to expect a minority to hew to a majority’s norms, I thought we should be pragmatic about it. But I totally see and am sorry for how it came off.)

Then I started getting deep on the shit list with a defense of the theory of the Culture of Poverty—which in today’s sociology departments is a bit like defending Krystallnacht. The theory of the Culture of Poverty does not say the poor bring it on themselves, or that all poor people exhibit its tendencies; it says that there are some reactions to poverty that are not conducive to escaping poverty. Anybody who doesn’t believe that has never been poor, or met anyone who was. Say it out loud, though, and you’re instantly accused of believing in bootstraps, and blaming the victim, and just being a general neoconservative, like it’s you and David Horowitz, together at last.

And then I started getting all raw and itchy about whiteness in general, which is held up as something frankly evil—and I also started to broken-record myself, bringing up generational white poverty every time poverty was mentioned. And it irked me that it was glossed over and brushed past, unacknowledged, EVERY SINGLE TIME. I really think everybody else thinks it’s all like that Eddie Murphy White Like Me skit, and we’re all drinking champagne on the bus. Poor white people? Unimportant, and besides, they have it just fine. And I still think that sucks.

“You need to understand: you’re an oppressor,” my mother told me kindly (as I cried). A moment later, she rethought her words. “You’re a member of the oppressor class.” (Yes, my mother went to college in the ’80s.)

But I reject that, just as I reject Kimberle Crenshaw’s assertion, cited approvingly by critical race theory godmother (and UCLA law prof goddess) Cheryl Harris, that “all whites have a stake in racism,” or Harris’s supposition that her own grandmother, who passed, must be given the benefit of the doubt as having claimed whiteness for sheer economic survival … but other white people did it just to be shitty.

The thing was, I completely agreed with Harris’s entire theme, in her seminal “Whiteness as Property” from which the above was taken, that the property interest in whiteness is ongoing as evidenced in the Rehnquist Court’s (and the Burger Court’s) eternal denials of the constitutionality of affirmative action, and that affirmative action is necessary, just and awesome. (I did take exception though to her conflating Wygant with Bakke and Croson, since in Wygant there was an actual taking—whether or not it was justified, and I believe it was—and in Bakke and Croson, the white people totally sued based on their perceived losses, just as Harris proffered. In Wygant? They messed with teachers’ tenure, and teachers take that shit for serious. So assuming said teachers were pissed on grounds of whiteness and its supremacy seemed if not wildly unfair, at least not-proven.) So why-for with the “all whites have a stake in racism”? How does that buttress your argument, besides just being a dick?

Anyway, I’m the asshole, the angry white girl, and I sound like a goddamn Orange County hausfrau every time I open my pinched little mouth. Unbecoming? Is it ever. Trust me, people who don’t like me in my seminar on race relations: I don’t like me either! But I really don’t like you.

When you speak sorrowfully of those in prison for robbery, or murder, as having been railroaded by the man, who do you think they victimized? They victimized other poor people and people of color, who are bearing the brunt of their “rebelling against the state and the system.” I think those people would tell you to shut the fuck up! Or they would if they weren’t so dead, from murder. A few weeks ago, I was on the bus, and a dude was shooting gang signs out the door at a dude from a different gang. And I slathered my hegemonic norms all over that guy, because I did not like it—and neither did any of the other black people on the bus. They weren’t happy about it at all either too! And we all said so! Just as soon as that one guy got off.

I’m feeling the need to add a caveat here: THERE IS RACISM ALL THE TIME, ALL OVER THE PLACE, OF THE OVERT, COVERT AND SYSTEMIC VARIETIES. Honest, I really do know that! I swear! And that is equally as true in the justice system as anywhere else in society, from the outlandish number of marijuana arrests for black kids to sentencing discrepancies to the efficacies of counsel.

But let’s take an example. Are all poor people or people of color drug addicts? Of course not, don’t be racist! But there is a small percentage who are, and even if we never have to read that DCFS dropped the ball on their case, in yet more screaming headlines in the L.A. Times, their kids have it the worst. And even if their parents didn’t have a lot of options, and it’s racism’s fault for making them drug addicts, I don’t care whose fault it was. I want them to stop it.

When someone (I) points out that being a drug addict isn’t good for drug addicts’ children or other living things—that they in fact are the victims, and you’re not “blaming the victim,” you’re trying to protect them and make possible for them an honest to god good life—and someone (I) is accused of being a “white liberal concern troll” who expects her norms to apply to everyone else, it sort of makes someone (me) not able to sleep any and every Tuesday night, after she’s gone and sat in class. When my dad was busy being a drug addict, I took his baby son away from him, and I’ve kept him so far for 15 years. When my uncle went to jail for armed robbery, none of us blamed society. We blamed my uncle, for being an armed robber. Stop that, my uncle! Stop being a dick!

There are terrible people in every segment of society, many of them in my house. Recognizing there are problems isn’t racist. It’s not racist of “white liberal concern trolls” when they want to fix social problems for all children, including children of color, so they have it better. It’s L.A. Times website commenters who are racist. Don’t you really see the difference? Really, even at all?

I want everyone’s children to do well in school. I want a big, fat, springy safety net for all of us, including a generous welfare system that would let single mothers breathe free from the terrible stresses of poverty, and what that does to their psyches and their kids. I want affirmative action programs both officially and un-; I would not bitch if I were passed over for a job in favor of a woman of color, even if she were less qualified, because diversity doesn’t just benefit society and it isn’t just a worthy goal. In reaching out to a widening customer base, it concretely benefits the company that’s hiring. Ergo, she is more qualified. QED!

And I’m both a liberal concern troll and David Horowitz? Fuck you and your neocolonial horse.

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