Tokenism

1. I am absolutely dreading this one.

2. I'm tempted to whisper it.

3. But I won't; and what's more, I'm going to stop using a numbered bullet list now, too.

*ahem*

I think, when people start asking things like, how do I increase the diversity of my blogrolls? And, isn't that kind of a funny thing to do? And, do I announce it or not? What it really comes back to is tokenism. The Big T Word. No one wants to be a token, and no one wants to create a token. For good reason. Because it's horrible and wrong.

And, because I really have no idea what I'm talking about and am petrified that I'm going to make an ass of myself--putting my foot in my mouth while my head is up my ass, which would be uncomfortable, don't you think?--I'm going to use an analogy again, because analogies are my best friends. We stay up all night eating pizza and talking about boys all. the. time.

Imagine Company A. Company A does an internal census and realizes, hey! Ninety per cent of our employees are male, 95% are white! WTH? They panic. We are not diverse! There is a competition, and one of the applicants and interviewees is Chinese. WE HAVE TO HIRE THE CHINESE ONE, they say, SO WE WILL LOOK MORE DIVERSE. They do. But for some reason, the new hire doesn't really feel like they fit in. It's not a good fit. There are problems. The new hire quits. Sheesh, they think. Maybe this diversity thing was a mistake. Let's just hire a white guy next time.

Now let's look at Company B, which also did a census. Hey! 90% male, 95% white! (BTW, not pulling these numbers out of a hat, either; these handy stats came from Geurilla Girls campaigns about the diversity in various Hollywood and artistic industries. And look at this poster of theirs from '95 about internet participation.)

Company B takes the opportunity to look within. They ask themselves, how did this happen? Is there something about our hiring process that privileges certain groups? Do we have poor working policies for certain groups? Do we need to change? They use the results of this introspection to change their hiring and retention practices, and then take another census after a while. Good change, but maybe not enough. Then they ask themselves: is it the wording of our job ads? Or does it go back further? Are certain groups finding it more difficult to get the right training? How is that? Are certain groups being discouraged from pursuing this training, eg., girls in science or math? Maybe they begin to look at ways they can influence those structures, even though it's outside of their control.

There are companies that do this both ways. I was a casualty of the first sort of "diversity promotion"--hired because they didn't have enough women, and there I was, only once they hired me they had no idea what to do with me, so had me running around faxing things and ordering sandwiches. Because isn't that an integral part of the job description of every environmental planner? Where I'm working now is trying, at least, to focus on the latter strategy.

Let's pretend we all agree that Company B has a much better idea of what it takes to build real diversity. What's the difference?

1. Company B isn't into it as an optics exercise. It's not about "Looking Diverse." They realize it is a problem, an actual problem, and not just a problem of perception. They are not asking members of certain demographnic groups to give them legitimacy by working there.

2. Company B is looking within. They are not blaming the applicants, they are not blaming the relevant communities, they are not just flailing about looking to hire people from certain groups to "fix" the numbers. In other words, Company B recognizes that the corporation's attitudes and practices are likely a significant part of the problem.

3. Company B recognizes there are larger structural factors at play--education, training, prejudice--that will need to be addressed. They then attempt to become involved in addressing them. Maybe female workers or visible minorities or disabled workers are sent into public schools to do talks on working in that field, to increase interest; maybe they fund a scholarship for a particular group to increase training. They recognize that prejudice and discrimination are not random acts of obvious bigotry, but largely result from systemic forces. It's not that five bad apples are spoiling the lot. It's that every apple is more or less rotten, but at the core where you can't see it.*

I'm going to suggest that it should be similar for fighting blogroll homogeneity:

1. It's not an optics exercise. It's not about looking diverse. It's about fixing a real problem; a problem that has real consequences, in terms of stifling important contributions to the cultural discourse, dismissing certain viewpoints as irrelevant or uninteresting, and the human toll that takes. If you read this woman's work you don't need me to tell you this, but there are studies that show the damaging effects internalized racism has on little children--they are learning to hate themselves and view themselves badly because of their skin colour from living in a racist society. It isn't just that we all distrust what's different from ourselves and then magically get over it when we learn it's bad; it's that we are systematically trained from our infancy to hate, fear or pity certain groups, and when we get older, we learn that we're not supposed to, so we hide it (even from ourselves).*

2. It is not about looking around to find people to fill certain preconceived demographic slots. It is about recognizing that there is quality out there that is being overlooked for irrelevant and prejudiced reasons. It is about looking within to find our own blind spots, the places we become uncomfortable, and working on those spots; recognizing that the problem lies in part within us. It is about asking ourselves, why is it that I don't find these voices interesting? **

3. It is also about recognizing that there are larger forces at work that a single individual can't fix by themselves, realizing that racism and sexism and ableism and heterosexism are real, and that those structures have been imported into the blog world by a whole host of mechanisms. Ultimately, the blogosphere will reflect the real world, warts and all; to make the blogosphere a better place, we'll need to work to make the world a better place, too.

Of course, if you have a blog on Topic X--let's say, homeschooling--it would indeed be very odd to go out and add a whole bunch of video game bloggers to your roll to increase the diversity quotient. Just as it would be very, very odd for Company A, a software company, to suddenly hire a large number of, I don't know, sociolinguists. Very odd. And if they were hiring the sociolinguists solely because of their demographic characteristics, to "fix the nubmers," not good. I don't feel bad about the fact that 99% of my blog-reading and blogroll are mommy blogs, because this is a mommy blog, that's the genre. There's nothing wrong with genre. But I would feel badly if the only mommy blogs I read or linked to were, say, straight. Or married. Or well-off. Very, very badly. Because not-straight, not-married, not-well-off moms have just as many valid and interesting things to say about motherhood as I do, and I SHOULD find them interesting. If they weren't there, I'd think there was something wrong with me. NOT THEM. ME.

I know that blogrolls seem like an odd thing to get worked up over when, you know, Darfur. Iraq. AIDS. But that's exactly why I am getting upset about this: we can't even get the internet to be democratic, when all we have are words on a screen; we find a way to figure out who someone is "in the real world" and use that to dismiss them online, dismiss their voices and contributions, and then hide it from ourselves. I think it's all of a piece. Our blogrolls are screwy because the world is screwy. We are dismissing the same people and the same voices who are being regularly dismissed and screwed over already.

That's not even all. The momosphere regularly works itself up into a rage over being dismissed by the rest of the blogosphere. There are ongoing debates over whether "mommyblogger" is a slur--are you being dismissed because you are "just a mother"? Is it insulting to have your voice dismissed because the world finds mothers boring? Don't we write about more than diapers and temper tantrums?

And then what do we do?

Turn around and do it to other mothers, for other, equally irrelevant reasons. While patting ourselves on the back about being inclusive and tolerant and open-minded and such a fabulous, well-knit community.

~~~~~

The research is starting to come together. Not only are communities segregated, but mothers of children with disabilities are twice as likely to write unpopular blogs as mothers of healthy children. The specifics will be shared closer to the time, but I admit I feel much better about my posts now, having an actual leg to stand on and all.

If you'd like to assist in this research, or if you would like to personally prove me wrong, and you have four or five hours to kill, leave a comment or email me and I'll let you know what I did.

But if you decide to dismiss what I'm saying without any evidence and without bothering to follow the links or consider the evidence provided, it will not go well with you. My kid gloves are wearing a little thin.

~~~~~

* For more on this, see bell hooks. I don't have the time or interest to explain it to anyone. Seriously. So don't ask, go out and do some reading.

** I think it's also important to note that one is not trying to incorporate these voices into one's own community, necessarily, which is the mistake the feminist movement seems to make over and over again. You're not asking WOC or disabled women to join The Movement in order to give it legitimacy and tweak the perspective a little. If it helps to think of it this way, you are joining their movement, as a novice, so it behooves one to sit down, shut up, and listen for a long time before trying to contribute. So, in this exercise, you are not putting other voices on your blogroll so that they can see you are a magnanimous, open-minded person and then join your conversation about diapers or the household division of labour or the gender wage gap. You are simply letting them know that you are listening to their conversation because you think they have something interesting and important to say.

I absolutely hate the extended us of "us" and "our" and "they" and "their" that such posts seem to require, seeing as who is "us" and what is "ours" and who are "they"? Anyone have a better vocabulary to use?

Posted by Andrea at September 11, 2006 3:36 PM under Web

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