Women's studies attack ill-timed

Lots of times, prophetic active vision is slightly misguided and doesn't really end up as some might hope. Other times, active vision can be what Professor Phyllis Gorfain calls "irresponsible and cowardly." The recent Women's Studies flier lies not too snugly somewhere in the middle. The "cowardly" anonymity of the fliers isn't as important as Gorfain would like us to believe. In situations as these, names aren't nearly as important as the views espoused. The anonymous flier asked "guess what the Women's Studies Committee is doing today?" And the answer to number one was "interviewing a white feminist engaged in cultural appropriation." While it is quite possible that of the three candidates interviewed, 1 of the 2 white candidates or both of the white candidates were engaged in cultural appropriation, the creators of the flier simply could not know that - unless it is assumed that all white feminists engage in unwarranted cultural appropriation. This seems to be the assumption made. Embedded in this is a simple essentialized understanding of race, one which states vehemently that white folks cannot do nonwhite subjects justice. Is the same assumption made of people of color and white subject matter, or do people of color simply not have have the power to appropriate white forms?

Here we have the very worst of identity politics. Individuals interests are not critiqued, they are jaggedly boxed in by authenticized understandings of "should." White feminist "should" not study or mangle people of color, unless they do it slavishly, don't offend and make grand leaps to understand their white privilege. And people on the Women's Studies Committee "should" know that. Big period.

But "shouldn't" creators of such fliers have some knowledge or understanding of history? The Women's Studies department doesn't have a history of hiring white feminists engaged in cultural appropriation. The department doesn't even have a recent history of hiring white feminists. Since 1981, eight of the last eleven faculty appointments have been women of color. Hiring women of color hasn't been the problem; retaining them, however, has proven impossible as currently there are none on staff except visiting professor, Anna Agathangelou.

And this history is one that faculty and administration must own up to and immediately attempt to ameliorate. Hiring faces of color cannot be solely the goal if a healthy functioning department or institution will thrive. Systemically, administration and faculty should try their hardest to retain effective professors and expand the diversity of professorial thought and experience.

It seems that the creators of the flier would be content with an interview process that only includes women of color regardless of their politics, or perhaps it is assumed that all women of color share the same politics. Again, here we have the worst of identity politics. Social symbolic constructions of race and gender become more important than individual racial and gendered politics. Real, varying experienced folks are smashed together into one homogenous blob, each supposedly representing their race or gender definitively and successfully.

Problems of the flier lay not only in how the attack was carried out, but how it was planned. The day that the Women's Studies Committee was supposedly interviewing a white feminist engaged in cultural appropriation, they were really interviewing Toni-Michelle Travis, a woman of color engaged in hoping to appropriate a senior Women's Studies position. Following the poster's logic, we can assume that Travis' selection as a viable interviewed candidate was only racial tokenism, and most disturbing and unfounded, that Travis was not qualified for the position.

Did the creators of the flier want Travis to leave Oberlin, and disregard the interview? Why blatantly delegitimize a woman, a candidate, who you've yet to meet on the same day she comes? Surely this wasn't the flier's intent.The flier goes on to say that Wendy Kozol, "a college insider, is a shoo-in for the position."

Like Clayton Koppes, another college insider who was appointed as Dean of Arts and Sciences, the creators might be right about Kozol's chances, but look at the potential damage they might could have caused just to make that point. And most of the damage was not done to the institution, Phyllis Gorfain, or the selection process, but instead to those it possibly intended to help ... the Women Studies Department and the only woman of color interviewed, Toni-Michelle Travis. Silence and contentment are the best friends of establishment and status quo, so we applaud the anonymous students for making an effort to ripple too steady waters, but an understanding of history, a well-plotted attack of the process and a well-informed knowledge of the situation might have insured a better outcome. We hope the damage is not already done.