(no subject)
Years ago I did a terrible thing. I edited a copy of a young male student's paper, "Reflections on Black Women," so that all references to male and female were changed to "us" and "them." After several months elapsed, I read the paper during one of our after-class beer chats. And sure enough everyone reacted to phrases like "I don't believe in the double standard, but" or "They're trying to take over" and agreed it was the usual racist shit. As a matter of fact, the author of the original piece was even more vitriolic in his condemnation of the bigotry and hypocrisy than anyone else. Of course, he went into a tirade about my ethics when I announced that the paper, his paper, originally was not about Black and White but about Men and Women. But after the smoke cleared, we all sat and talked for hours, sharing such painfully private experiences, such poignant struggles with the rubber stamp of what a girl's supposed to be like and what a boy's supposed to be like, that attendance in the class dropped off drastically and we found it difficult to face each other for weeks. But at least the point had been made: racism and chauvinism are anti-people. And a man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist too.