One of the things I really like about teaching at a community college, and specifically at the community college where I am employed, is that it’s a place where people who might otherwise not have the chance to get a college education can get one at a reasonable price and can also reasonably expect that their teachers will be committed to helping them succeed, despite the obstacles–financial and otherwise–they might be facing. Usually, in terms of the student’s classwork, that help involves relatively simple things like spending extra time outside of class, and in addition to your scheduled office hours, to offer the student additional instructional support, extensions on assignments and other such things. Sometimes, though, you also end up doing a kind of counseling triage, trying to help the student see her or his situation in perspective, referring them to counseling and other services they might need, convincing them that sometimes, when life gets in the way of their education, they need to take care of their lives first, that to do so is not the same thing as failing at school and that the opportunity to continue their education will–all else being equal–still be there in the future. Sometimes, you can find yourself getting involved at a level where someone’s life might truly be on the line.
I value this aspect of my job as deeply as the purely educational aspect of the work that I do because the students who come to me with the kinds of problems I am talking about really do care about why they are in school–and I am not talking here about the grades they earn; grades are an entirely different issue–are struggling as honestly and as fully as they can to figure out how to use the education they’ve come to college to get to understand themselves, both in the grand liberal arts sense of self-awareness and in the more practical sense of how am I going to use what I have learned to get a job, have a career and build a life for myself? These students in crisis are often the ones for whom these two ways of understanding education are often the most inseparable, because they desperately need both of them, and the trust they place in me when they share their crises is at least as precious as the commitment to good grades, intellectualism, scholarship and so on that the honors students I will be teaching next semester in my Myth and Folklore class bring into the classroom. (Not that honors students don’t also have crises, of course.)
Still, for some reason, this semester the amount of drama students have brought with them into my classes–by which I mean into their relationship with me as the person who holds them accountable for the work that they do and the grade that they earn–is really getting to me. I don’t want to give too many details, for obvious reasons, but here is a partial list. Each of these people is paying for school out of his or her own pocket:
- A man whose wife kicked him out of the house and did not allow him back in for at least some weeks. He did not, therefore, have access to his laptop, his textbook or anything else connected to my class. I have no idea who is in the right, and on one level I really don’t care, but when he tells me in the middle of class that he has to leave because there is no babysitter and he needs to be home to take care of his daughter, what am I supposed to say? (I don’t know, and I am not going to ask, if “being home” means that his wife let him back in, or if his daughter is now living with him.)
- A 20-something woman whose parents are desperate to marry her off and the pressure they are putting on her is getting so intense that she really cannot concentrate on school; and she is scared to go live on her own–which she can afford to do–because she worries that they will either disown her completely or scheme to get her to return to her country–<i>Grandma is dying</i> or some such ruse–where they will be able take her passport, trapping here there; and she’ll end up with no choice but to marry the man they choose for her. I don’t want to say more, but I know she is not being melodramatic about this.
- Another 20-something woman whose boyfriend has kicked her out of the apartment where they were living together; so I guess he’s really an ex-boyfriend. She has, though, no place else to live that will also allow her to continue to go to school. (She has some family, but they live too far away.) So she ended up, I guess, convincing the boyfriend to let her stay in the apartment until she can get her own place. (She has a full time job, so she can pay rent; she just needs the time.) Except the ex-boyfriend yells at her all the time and has told her that she is not allowed to be in the apartment when he is there.
- A man who, by his own admission, got involved with the wrong crowd and ended up getting arrested. His sentencing was this semester and he was very concerned that he would have to drop out of school in order to serve his time.
- A woman who is failing, with whom I spoke and who said she really wanted to try to do better. She got into a car accident, did not go to the hospital, which she really needed to do, and yesterday–the day after the accident–showed up in my class, in tears, barely holding it together, because she felt it was more important to prove to me that she meant what she said when she told me she was going to start taking her work seriously than it was to get medical attention.
The interaction that moved me to write this post, however, was drama of a different sort. In my technical writing class is a man–I am guessing he is in his forties at least–who has decided that he really doesn’t need to take seriously any of the instructions I have given the class. He is a good writer; he got an A on his first assignment; and he has taken the class before, at another college, but for some reason he needs to take it again. Anyway, he came last class and handed me an assignment that was completely wrong; I don’t mean badly done. I mean completely wrong; he had written the wrong assignment. I will spare you the details of the conversation we had in which he didn’t believe me, but when he finally had no choice but to accept that he had done the wrong assignment, he asked me if one of the members of his group has turned in the proper assignment. (The groups do research and planning together, but each member writes his or her own paper and gets an individual grade; I don’t give group grades; and this is all spelled out in detail on the assignment sheet.) When I said yes, that the other person had done the assignment properly, this guy asked me if I would just count that paper twice, once for him and once for the guy who wrote it.
I was, as you can imagine, furious. The details of what I said to him are unimportant, though I felt really awkward talking to a grown man that way, but I just left that class thinking about the difference between the students I told you about above, who are struggling against some pretty serious obstacles to get their work done, and not always successfully, and this guy, who is very clearly just trying to get over. The result was this post.
I knew first-hand a young woman from a third world country whose parents lured her back to her country of origin and then absconded with her passport to get her to marry someone she didn’t want to marry, yadda yadda. So this stuff, which seems bizarre to us, really does happen.
No, your student is not being melodramatic, she probably has a very good grasp on the situation. By our standards her parents are nuts, but apparently this kind of behavior makes sense to someone somewhere else in the world if not here. Your student should indeed watch her step.
My best friend is part-timing in a start-up. They recently came close to going belly up, because the following happened:
Their main hardware expert was 25 year old woman. She took a week off to go back to Kashmir because her brother was getting married. One week later, her boyfriend came around to ask whether they knew anything – her car was sitting at LAX, her rent was going unpaid, and he had not heard a thing.
My friend, probably to show off, said that he was going to find out what happened. He called someone in Tajikistan, and asked him to find out. Turns out that she got married without anyone caring that she had a life in the US, and that she was a prisoner in her husband home.
I don’t know what happened afterwards, but she was back at work the next month… No one would talk about it. Then at the beginning of this year, there was a fight at their offices, and the police report said that two foreign nationals were involved in an attempted kidnapping. They both were sent (under custody) to the hospital, supposedly because Durga beat them up.
I can’t help but wonder what would have happened to her if her coworkers were not a bunch of semi-civilized Slavs (disclaimer: most of my friends are Slavs, pepper of the earth, and all that) But back to being serious, it’s a different world, past the Urals. Your student should be very careful, if she wants to live as an American.
Progress is being made in some places, but slowly. If this is progress.
I fell in love with an exchange student from India when I was 18, in 1963. Of course it was Casa Blanca, dramatically doomed love, my heart was broken (and I enjoyed every minute of it) and he went back to India. No internet, no affordable phone, we lost touch.
Last year up he pops on Facebook. He’s now 66, just like me, married (arranged marriage) with three grown children and three grandchildren. He and his wife were in this country to visit a child working for Intel, and I had them down here for a few days, which was a hoot as you can well imagine. (We’re still in love, of course, high school being what it is; his wife and my husband tolerated this, smiling, I suspect, behind our backs.)
Anyway, back to arranged marriages. Vijay my friend had his marriage arranged to the excellent Indrayani (a catch, imho) and they arranged marriages for their three children, two boys and a girl.
The boys went along with it, and are perfectly happy so far as I can see. The girl, however, the eldest, had her own ideas, and ran off to the south of India to fall in love with a very dark-skinned (yes, other people besides Americans are racists) guy and she insisted on marrying him, not the guy her parents had in mind for her. (This fireball is also CEO of a small bank in India, the girl I mean.)
My friend said repressively, “We talked to him and he seemed like a nice boy,” which is Vijay for, “I totally did not approve but there was nothing I could do about it.”
I question whether all this is “progress” largely because Americans and westerners generally have some trouble keeping families together (unless you think a 50% divorce rate is success), while there are many very happy marriages which are arranged by parents under the old system, Vijay’s and Indrayani’s being one of them.
That said, however, it is what it is, and this rather archaic system only works with the cooperation of all concerned. It does NOT usually work when people are fighting it or even indifferent, and I have a hard time justifying kidnapping, no matter what the rationalization.
So tell your student to watch her step (she knows this, far better than you do) and hope she succeeds in evading her family. Perhaps her parents, like my friend Vijay, will come around, however reluctantly.
I had a student in a CC, a woman in her late 20s, single with two children. She often told me that she had meant to be like me, get an education and only then have children, but pregnancy got in the way. She was on welfare, trying to get a certificate for a trade our CC specialized in, which would have led to a good job and getting off welfare — which she wanted to do before her children were old enough to understand her situation. She was not the best student I had, but dedicated and conscientious, and I imagine would have been quite good at the job she was aiming for. (Which could have led to further education and a better job, etc.)
One day in the middle of the semester she came to see me in tears: “workfare” had just been instituted, and her assigned work conflicted with the class. She was going to have to withdraw from all her classes. I told her not to worry — that she could go sit in on another section of the class I was teaching, and that professor and I would get together to figure out her final grade, and that I was sure the people teaching her other classes would also cooperate and make sure she could finish the semester properly. She explained that the workfare assignments were at different times each day, and far away both from her home and from the campus. (On public transportation this added a couple of hours to the work to be done each day.) So she wouldn’t be able to make it to any class regularly.
She also said that she’d been to the first couple of days of “work,” which involved raking leaves and putting them into plastic bags; when all the leaves were raked, the supervisor dumped the leaves out and told the workers to rake them up again. I read in the paper that this experience was common; a little later it came out that the staggered schedule and distance from home was general and deliberate, because the people in charge of the program had decided that people on welfare didn’t deserve to be in school.
So here was someone trying to get off welfare, being punished for being on welfare, and being prevented from getting the skills that would have helped make welfare unnecessary. Community colleges will break your heart.
Oy.
I know you’re not joking. So I have to ask: Did he say why he thought that made sense?
Because he wanted to get a good grade. I don’t think he really cared whether it made sense.
Richard, you may have already referred your student to these, but there are often support/activist organizations that provide assistance to women in these situations – as a random example this group in Berkeley assists South Asian women. Such a group may be able to assist her in protecting herself from her family.
Richard, when my first billion comes in and I endow the Hayes University of Awesomeness, you can come teach freshman English, and you will be empowered to shoot any student like this guy. Our legal counsel will get you off and cover any lawsuit, but there won’t be a lawsuit, because our legal counsel will double as the Dean of Mafia Studies.
You have to shoot him in the foot, of course. We aren’t barbarians.
Robert: Thanks for making me laugh.
Mythago: Thanks. I gave the student a list of places to try, but it’s always good to have one more.
G&W: He looked at me incredulously. “But it’s group work,” he said. At which point, I counted to three so I didn’t start yelling and, as if he were a kid in fifth grade, put my index finger under the line on my assignment sheet where it says that even though the prep work would be done in groups, each group member would write their own paper and get their own grade, and I read it to him very, very slowly. He then stopped trying to manipulate me and tried to manipulate the guy who was in his group–which, I am glad to say, did not work.
Susan:
Proponents of arranged marriage will point to this fact all the time in order to explain why “their” was is better than “our” way. What they don’t talk about, though–even aside from all the instances of women (and, depending on the country, sometimes girls) being forced to marry men who then do in fact make them prisoners in their own homes–is that, in most places where arranged marriages ostensibly work so much better than love marriages, women’s economic opportunities are so slim, so marginal, that there is little choice for the women but to make them work. I don’t mean the spouses never love each other; I don’t mean that all women in such marriages are miserable; or anything like that. But to the degree that it is hard, or impossible, to separate the nature of marriage as a social institution from the gendered economic and other power politics of the country in which that institution exists, comparing the success rate of arranged marriages to the 50% divorce rate for first marriages in this country is a more like comparing apples and oranges than it is not. I think it was in about South Korea that I read an article which talked about how, once women’s economic opportunities/conditions began to improve overall, the divorce rate for first marriages started to climb quite steeply.
It is important not to demonize arranged marriages, and so I appreciate your comment about your friends, but it is also important not to romanticize them. (And I am not saying you were romanticizing them; I’m just kind of riffing off of what you wrote.)
NM: Ouch! That’s all I can say. That is one, big heartbreaking Ouch!
People who make these kinds of decisions shouldn’t be in administration. Cleaning up animal poo in a zoo would be too good for them.
I mean in all seriousness, this is what I really want, my tax dollars to go towards holding people back so that they can eat up even more of my tax dollars as they are forced to stay be on welfare for an even longer time frame. Yes!
-Jeremy
Richard, I’ve known several happily arranged married people and I’ve also known some miserable ones. But either way, there are longstanding cultural and social factors at work in those countries and trying to transplant that custom in the United States would not work.
Sebastian, you contacted someone in Tajikistan to look for someone in India?
How did they find her?
Susan, “The girl, however, the eldest, had her own ideas, and ran off to the south of India to fall in love with a very dark-skinned (yes, other people besides Americans are racists) guy”
Its not racism because Indians are the same race. What it is is a preference for lighter skin. Here White people use bronzing creams and tanning booths to get brown. In other countries Brown people use creams to get lighter skinned, like a beige or caramel latte, if you will. Call it “skin tonism” or “colorism” if anything.
CCC: re: racism.
Let’s say it’s class-ism with a racist twist. Just because you come from the same country doesn’t mean the people in it THINK or BEHAVE as if you all come from the same country.
Richard,
Thank you for your posts about your experiences at school this semester. I’m glad you’re sharing them and in doing so, we, a set of your internet community, get to support you.
CCC
I’m not sure what you mean by “transplanted.” Arranged marriages are taking place in this country, they have been for a long time, among orthodox Jews and other religious groups, and among various immigrant groups as well–though I imagine it is much less common once you get to third generation immigrants. In saying that, I am neither attacking nor defending the practice, just acknowledging that it is already part of United States culture, if you take a bird’s eye view of things.
In the US we call it “matchmaking” when it’s voluntary and “shotgun wedding” when it’s not.
mythago, aren’t shotgun weddings where the couple gets married really quickly so the baby won’t be born out of wedlock?
eva, “Let’s say it’s class-ism with a racist twist”
Uh? Where does class and race come into it?
Of course the borders of India include a number of populations that did not share a common ethnic identity prior to colonialism and there remain strong divisions along those lines.
Both Angry Black Woman and I are Americans; the fact that we are from the same country does not signify in whether or not we can practice racism against each other. (ETA: Or more accurately, whether I can practice racism against her.)
Then again, the assertion that colorism is not (in many/most locations, at least in part*) itself a form of racism, stemming from structural racism in a post-colonial context, is not reflected, at least last I knew, in the way that social scientists talk about colonially influenced in-group discrimination by skin tone.
*Some colorism favoring lighter colored people does seem to have a pre-colonial basis and so can’t be analyzed with the same tools
White people spend tons of money on tanning creams. Brown people spend tons of money on lightening creams.
The preference for lighter skin in India has nothing to do with race or class. All sub-ethnicities and classes in India are BROWN, some lighter, some darker, but their lightness or darkness is not class related.
That term only applies when it’s involuntary.
f Bob got Mary pregnant, then the “right” thing to do would be for Bob and Mary to immediately marry each other. That’s a normal wedding.
But what if Bob and mary don’t WANT to marry? Well, then: Mary’s dad might “encourage” Bob to “do the right thing,” and “make an honest woman out of her,” which might literally mean marching Bob out of the house at gunpoint and standing in the church with a shotgun ’till the wedding was done. Therefore, “shotgun wedding.”
(The shotgun never was aimed at Mary. I guess we can figure that in that particular social setting and with Mary’s father being willing to threaten Bob with a gun, Mary probably doesn’t get any say in the matter either way.)
“Shotgun wedding” is sometimes used to refer to a wedding in a rush, when the bride-to-be is pregnant. But technically that’s not right.
CCC:
I am wondering how you know this with such certainty. Why wouldn’t the preference for lighter skin (and all the assumptions/perceptions about class that it contains) be left over, so to speak, from British colonial rule in the same way, say, that my Haitan students tell me a similar preference in Haiti is left over from the French colonizers. In other words, while you may be technically correct in that the preference has nothing to do with the race of the people involved–since they are of the same race–why wouldn’t it be true that the preference is still rooted in racism, and so also in race, even if that connection is a little more attenuated than we are used to thinking? (And I am, for the moment, assuming the people involved are of the same race; in certain countries, they might not be; and I am leaving aside entirely the question of whether someone’s background might be mixed-race and how that might play into the mix here.)
“you may be technically correct in that the preference has nothing to do with the race of the people involved–since they are of the same race”
I’m not sure what’s founding the assumption that all Indian people are the same race. Seriously. There’s a complex history of invasion by several different peoples (who we would not contemporarily classify as all the same race) which created historical differences in beauty ideals–but more importantly in class: http://occawlonline.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/stearns_awl/chapter3/objectives/deluxe-content.html
Light-skinned invaders set themselves up in inheritable high class positions, with darker-skinned earlier peoples taking lower places, hierarchically.
Then of course that gets reinforced by colonialism later.
Jeremy: “People who make these kinds of decisions” = Rudy Giuliani, in this case.
Mandolin,
I meant assumption for the sake of argument. And thanks for the link.
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“Light-skinned invaders set themselves up in inheritable high class positions, with darker-skinned earlier peoples taking lower places, hierarchically.”
The AIT, Aryan Invasion Theory, was pre-scientific British mythological construct that has long since been debunked.
“Why wouldn’t the preference for lighter skin … be left over, so to speak, from British colonial rule”
Might be, might not be, we simply cannot say, but one thing is for sure, many (not all by any means) Indians find light brown skin (not white or pink) to be attractive, just as many White Americans find it attractive, and hence both spend alot of dough on trying to make their skin that color. White Americans lay out in the sun to get it, Indians will avoid the sun. Both use creams.
Try not to read anything more into it than personal preference and aesthetic taste.
White people do not just “magically” find tanned skin attractive. Beauty Ideals are not something that just happens, removed from society. The preference for tanned skin can be directly traced to societal changes. Really pale skin used to be the idea- it was the skin colour of rich people who didn’t need to spend their days working outside in the sun. But then society changed, most people ended up working inside. And then rich people started going on beach vacations. And tanned skin became a sign of having money- people who were tanned had the money to afford time of, and maybe to travel. (You can see the classist elemt really clearly when you look at the term “red-neck”- the type of skin you get from working in the field is not valued, the type you get from tanning is.)
Also, white people tanning or using bronzer are not trying to look like (light) brown skinned poeple. They are trying to look like tanned white people.
I am not qualified to comment on colorism in India in depth, but the assumption that people there just magically happen to prefer lighter skin is questionable when we know how much beauty ideals are informed by cultural factors like history, classism and racism. Also, if it were just a case of some people personally prefering lighter skin, it wouldn’d be a systemic issue. The fact that there is so moch colorism, which can influence people’s chances of employment and other important parts of society speaks to the fact that it is.
“Also, white people tanning or using bronzer are not trying to look like (light) brown skinned poeple. They are trying to look like tanned white people.”
And brown people using Fair and Lovely or Fair and Handsome are not trying to look like white skinned people, they are trying to look like light brown people.
In my travel experiences I have found that there seems to be a happy medium between really dark and pale. I call it the Beyonce factor. The ideals seems to be her skin tone – a light golden brown. That’s what pale people who lay in the sun, booths and use creams/sprays try to achieve and that’s the general shade brown people who avoid the sun and use creams try to achieve.
They are free to do whatever they want to achieve the look they want.
No biggie.
CCC:
True enough.
I am not inclined to argue this any further, because I don’t really see the point. It does seem to me, though, that this statement is awfully and casually dismissive of colonialism as a force in shaping a post-colonial society.
Richard – just want to say that I hear you. Yesterday’s “…” moment for me as a teacher involved a student apologizing that her work had been poor in my class because she is terribly distracted by the fact that her son made an outcry of sexual abuse just as the quarter started, and they go before a grand jury in a few weeks.
When it comes to the issue of colourism in India, I’m inclined to agree with Cross Cultural Comparisons. For one thing, skin colour in India tends to correlate more strongly with region than it does with either caste or class. For example, a Punjabi Jat (Jats are not a “high” caste; they’re a group of peasant farmers, though they do tend to have a rather high opinion of themselves) is more likely to have fair skin than a Brahmin from Tamil Nadu. Colourism in India, while deplorable, isn’t the same as racism or even colourism among African-Americans.
I dare say that British colonialism did influence India’s aesthetic standards, but I don’t think that influence was major, it just entrenched a tendency that was already there. In fact, Indians weren’t particularly impressed with European looks when they first encountered Europeans (I’ve read accounts of British missionaries visiting Indian women and being told that their skin was the colour of uncooked meat, for example).
Anyway, when it comes to blaming colonialism for India’s aesthetic standards, why blame just British colonialism? What about Mughal colonialism? In fact, there’s solid evidence that Mughal influence has more to do with Indian colourism than anything from India’s pre-Mughal past or British colonialism. There are a few derogatory references to dark-skinned people in the Vedas, but there are also plenty of references to beautiful dark-skinned people in India’s epic texts. By contrast, India’s Turko-Iranian rulers often spoke disparagingly of the dark skin of the people they ruled (in fact, the Mughals devised a system of skin colour classification that ascribed criminal tendencies to darker-skinned people; this classification scheme was later adopted by the British).
When discussions like this come up, there are a couple of problematic assumptions that seem to underly them. The first is that racism/colourism are the same everywhere; the second is that the only sort of colonialism that counts is European colonialism.
Priya:
Thanks for this. I was actually wondering about the Mughals, but I didn’t want to say anything until I’d had a chance to do a little bit of research. For reasons that have nothing to do with this discussion, can you point me in the direction of any articles, etc. where I could read up on this? Thanks.
Also, if colorism is an -ism–meaning that it is systemic, structural, institutional, etc.–then that seems to me not in line with what CCC was arguing, which was, as I read it, that it had more to do with simple personal preference. But maybe I missed something.
Hi Richard,
You can gain information about Mughal attitudes towards skin colour from travelers’ accounts, like Francois Bernier’s Travels in the Mughal Empire. Of course, when it comes to travelers’ accounts, you have to keep the author’s biases in mind.
I first read about the Mughal skin-colour taxonomy in Susan Bayly’s book Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Another book you might find interesting, in light of your academic interests, is Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800, by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.
I agree with CCC that skin colour in India doesn’t align neatly with social status. I don’t agree with her than skin colour preference is just a harmless aesthetic quirk. Colourism in India really can blight people’s lives, but it isn’t the same phenomenon as colourism in African diaspora communities. In the latter case, light skin was a definite prerequisite for entry into the economic and cultural elite. That isn’t the case in India; there are plenty of dark-skinned people among India’s elite, and plenty of fair-skinned people among India’s dispossessed. In India, dark-skinned people lose out in a big way on the marriage market. The darkest-skinned girl in a family will constantly be told, both explicitly and implicitly, that she isn’t as pretty as her sisters, but that doesn’t mean she can’t become a doctor (in fact, her parents might invest more in her education, since it will be assumed that she isn’t as marriageable as her siblings).
Priya, I was going to bring up Islamic Colonialism but seeing as to how most liberal blogs tip-toe around that, decided not to.
Thankyou for bringing that up. I have PLENTY of opinions on Islamic Imperialism in Africa and South Asia.
Sebastian, you contacted someone in Tajikistan to look for someone in India?
How did they find her?
I was not the one who ‘knew people’ or did the contacting, and furthermore you’re making it sound as if it was a case of seeking a needle in a hay stack. She was a project lead for the company, she went on a relatively long leave and I am sure left as much contact information as humanly possible. The trick was to get a boot on the ground, i.e. to find someone who can physically go to her town, and who knows the language of her neighbors.
And once again, they will not talk about it. After all, can you expect her to discuss her kidnapping, rape, and imprisonment? Because that’s what her ‘arranged marriage’ was.
The fact is, she is in the US now, and she is concealing her address from her family. Her cousins found her only because the start-up’s offices have not moved. I brought the story up this Saturday, and my friends were laughing about the kidnappers trying to get the cops to look at the ‘marriage’ certificate and notarized statements from her ‘husband’… probably expecting assistance in dealing with the crazy ‘wife’. Which makes me think that in Kashmir, they would have gotten it.