Author Archives: quinn

Tab dump

I was considering writing a whole post about this, but I’ll sum up: if, impossibly, she were to get her way I’d want to be a corrupt gov’t official or amoral story thief. I could get out of front of any scoop newspapers ever had, just by spreading around my story under something like a CC license while theirs was in its new copyright prison. An information spreading source that thinks it will benefit by keeping its information locked up is very funny.

I might be able to give some insight into this question, but I choose not to.

Watching Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell argue makes me dizzy in a way only reading something rigorously peer reviewed can help.

I’ve thought about it, and decided I can live with that. I’m a brave girl.

More anti-news about how our lack of single payer or state run healthcare is making us poor as well as sick. Given the global financial crisis, it’s making everyone else poor too.

I’ve always had a deep and abiding hate for my home state’s system of direct democracy. It’s ruined the schools, taken away civil rights, and is at this point bankrupting the state.

Yes, me too. Ok?

Regarding the senses, and a Northpaw update

There is no more powerful teacher about the nature of human senses than the migraine. Within the headache’s state senses are heightened to the point of vicious permeating pain. Light stabs you, smells choke you, sounds can hit you with the force of a shovel. It is an argument whether you are sensing more or filtering less- I am with the latter camp.

Once, about 30 minutes post Imitrex during the worst of my migraine seasons the pain passed enough for me to process the sensory data incoming. I was walking along a one-way street in Cambridge with Aaron. I started telling him what each type of car was as it came up behind us, based on the sound of its engine and suspension. I could have guessed that some people can distinguish cars by sound, people *really* into cars, but I had no idea I was one of them. I found my new ability unsettling, as much for wondering what other canons of knowledge my brain wasn’t telling me about as for the oppression of unexpected information. At dinner I heard all the adjacent conversations simultaneously. I repeated snippets back to Aaron. I wanted to convey how entirely strange this experience was, but that was hopeless- describing senses themselves, rather than their integrated gestalt, is nearly impossible.

I found this to be true as well with the magnet. To this day I have still never found a way of explaining what it was like: electrical, oscillatory, a pure sensation, ‘like putting your hand in an ultrasonic cleaner’, sharp but not painful, tangy, metallic, synthetic, fluctuating, warm, tugging. I feel that I’m a good writer, in particular I’ve been told more than once that I have a gift for explanation. Explaining a sense, just the sense, stumps me.

I have the least useful, most common, barely present, probably most boring form of synesthesia there is. Every so often I taste colors. I don’t taste something and see the color, I don’t taste and associate the color, I just taste the color. It’s useless to ask me what, say, red tastes like. It’s not hot or sweet or anything like that, it tastes like red. It’s an awareness of an element of red in my food, on parr with sweet or hot rather than suggestive of them. That’s what tasting a color means. It happens to me once a year at most. It used to happen more, but it’s declined as I’ve gotten older. It was so natural, so clearly part of the food, that for most of my life I didn’t believe it was synesthesia. Everyone had to taste those occasional colors, they were just there. Come on. It was finally a pharmacist friend in Las Vegas that pinned it down. I had a drink that was pink, and tasted pink. That was unusual, tasted colors rarely matched visual colors, and it amused me a great deal. I handed it to my friend and said “Taste this! It tastes pink!” He said “Ok…” dragging out the k long enough to make it a 15 cent word at least. He tasted it, and told me I was a synesthete.

I suspect all new senses are somewhat synesthetic. You are leveraging an existing sensory infrastructure, running something new on old roads into associative areas of the brain. I ‘felt’ electricity, right now I ‘feel’ north on the left of my left ankle. Feel is touch, but touch is not a state of awareness. When it’s working as a sense my awareness is not the buzzing, it’s the awareness of north from the buzzing Northpaw. I make it dance around by spinning my office chair. Sometimes it doesn’t keep up. I believe I get nauseous and dizzy much quicker wearing the Northpaw than I do spinning my office chair without it. Right now I can feel it buzzing, and I can feel north. The Northpaw gives you a recombinant sense.

Here is the thing about a new sense: calibration in a bitch, because experiencing it subjectively is kind of the point. That a new sense is unreliable goes with the territory – all your senses are unreliable. Senses not about accuracy, but they kind of require that you think they are about accuracy. Senses are integrative. They create the world that you inhabit- but it’s important to understand that they create a world you can inhabit rather than the whole of, or even a slice of, the objective truth of your environment. This is one of the many reasons people make terrible eye witnesses.

What lets you process a new sense isn’t that it’s right, wrong, precise, superpowerful, or pathological, it’s that integration. What you need from a new sense is consistency, or it becomes part of the noise you are filtering all the time. You need to train and force yourself to rely on it just enough that it gets plugged into the continual associative process of creating the useful fiction you spend your days wrapped in. Integration and consistency means far more to us than accuracy.

The Northpaw is not always, in fact not usually, integrated into my perception. That was never really a problem with the magnet, so this is a bit of uncharted territory for me. Admittedly it’s only been three weeks since I first put one on, so it might actually be coming along nicely thankyouverymuch. I can say it’s begun to uproot and reassemble DC in my mind, which I’m thankful for. The two spacial maps were distressing, and at one point got me lost more than I was without the Northpaw. That is past, though I can’t say I never get lost. It hasn’t done that for me. The experience is similar to the magnet in that it’s been more realigning of reality than useful. It tells me more about how the world works rather than giving me immediately practical information. Grids aren’t quite so griddy anymore. As a native of LA, that’s actually quite an insight into the nature of the city.

My Northpaw article is due soon, but I hope to keep on with my study and reporting on it. I think there is more to learn from this little thing. (No idea what I’m talking about? See all entries on the Northpaw.)

Northpaw, end of first week.

No problem getting it through TSA. I even had my story ready, and it turned out to be entirely unneeded.

The Northpaw doesn’t work well when tilted. It’s unstable while driving, or a few other similar conditions. This seems reasonable for a compass, but it can be disorienting. I have now worn it in two cities, DC and SF, and I hope to add NY to the mix. As soon as I figure out where I’m living. My DC house flooded while I was in SF, and my life is pretty disrupted at the moment.

Since returning to DC I have found out that my mental spacial map of DC swapped north for west. I have found out that my idea of north isn’t quite what I thought it was. My mental north seems to be less a cardinal direction as the dominant direction, the top, the most important thing. I wonder if north is simply, from any direction, where Ada or the Pacific Ocean are. The map I have of DC is pretty hard, and turns out to be difficult and disorienting to dislodge. Much of my experience of the Northpaw is more about disrupting a mythical sense than augmenting life with a new one. I am trying to let the Northpaw win, but it’s slow going.

The one part that is broadening my horizons is how the Northpaw corrects the extreme smoothing we do to get along. Straight things aren’t as straight as we perceive them. Skory told me that in the time he was wearing this Northpaw he found that hiking trails are much more twisted that he thought they were. I find roads, paths, and bit of buildings drift in ways usually too subtle to notice. Not always, but just enough to be unsettling. I am beginning to wonder how much maps are myths we tell ourselves about man’s mastery of nature.

The fact that it goes wrong quite a bit is making it hard to integrate as a sensory experience. Whatever is happening with plane of inclination or possible software or hardware glitches, there’s also those times when something is just mucking with the magnetic field. Riding on the subway, both the BART and the Metro, is very magnetically unstable. And it’s not the Northpaw- if I put my hand compass on the floor, it goes crazy as well. I plan to try re-calibrating it by circling the compass with a rare earth magnet and seeing if that helps me find the proper locations for the buzzers- a non trivial task.

In LeDroit Park a man on a moped stopped me while I was on my bike and asked me about the anklet. He was clearly interested. I explained the concept behind the Northpaw and my project, and his eyes and smile grew. I pointed to north. He was nearly giddy. People love this thing, though I occasionally get comments that it looks like I’m under house arrest. Still, this idea of widening perception consistently fascinates people.

Food, Inc. (So very full of spoilers.)

My problem with Food, Inc. (and Inconvenient Truth, with which it shares some pedigree) isn’t with its negatives. It’s with its positives. The portrayal of agri-business is possibly even too charitable at points, overlooking some issues, admittedly my pet peeves, about land use, soil erosion, the nitrogen cycle, and water and air safety. But for the most part it is honest and I think not overly gruesome look at factory farming. The the cow with a window into its stomach served no real purpose and was a bit of a gross out, but you can kind of see the producers saying “We have to put that bit in! Have to have to have to!” It has a kind of Baron Harkonnen’s pet cow feel to it, but it doesn’t really tell you anything.

My problem is the lack of examination into the heros of the story. Many of its suggestions are likely to be ineffective, and in same cases so easy to game they are likely to make the situation worse. Most of their answers require a middle class or better income, which also attracts corruption. We are told to buy organic. We are never told why organic is better, or what the organic standard is. In fact, it’s not always better, and you can slide in under the wire with the standard while violating the spirit utterly. Free range chickens and eggs can basically mean there’s a catdoor-like thing the chickens never use. Organic farming can be more destructive in some cases than conventional farming, but it varies by crop, location, climate conditions… etc. It’s nuanced and complex and doesn’t fit into a sound bite or slogan.

We are told to buy local. This is a tremendously dubious claim. Economies of scale can be better for the environment and our health, when food is produced where it wants to grow and then shipped. I once found a grown in California banana – whatever you have to do to grow a banana in California cannot be good for anyone. Buying local is something that should go with buying in season- you have to know the foods, and do it when it makes sense to do it. Again, nuanced, and not a general prescription for saving anything.

While Food, Inc. didn’t come out and say GMO = bad it certainly implied it. GMO, once again, equals complex. Not all genetic modifications are equal, and Round Up Ready soy beans is a far cry from Golden Rice- a strain engineered with enhanced vitamin A and iron for poor populations where deficiencies are a blight. GMO crops are something that should be examined rather than accepted wholesale or rejected outright. They may have the greatest potential to save the environment in the end. Is that the way current genetic engineering in food is going? Hell no. It’s largely being misused in ways that abuse human rights as well as potentially make food more poisonous. But it’s a technology, and technologies are inherently neutral. We figure out what to make of them.

We are shown meat washed with ammonia, but not told why that is bad. We are shown terrible labor conditions for undocumented workers in meat packing, but not the terrible conditions for fruit pickers, whether the farms are organic or not. We are introduced to Stonyfield Farms as an organic business that proves better methods can make money, but we’re never told what those better methods are, or what makes them better. We are simply left to trust CEO Gary Hirshberg while he goes on at length about how great their product is, and how responsible you are for buying it, even at Walmart.

It gets to be a bit of an ad for a while, but like most ads, it’s largely free of substance. But it’s great exposure, so much that Stonyfield is marketing the movie heavily on their own.

Food, Inc. lacks journalistic investigations of its own answers- it doesn’t ask those questions. Perhaps this is because when you do, the simple actions you can take listed at the end of the movie stop being so simple. None of them are wholly wrong, but none of them are wholly right either, with the possible exception of telling your congress person to pay more attention to food safety legislation. I can’t really see a problem with that. As for Kevin’s law, I hate laws named for dead children. They make me suspicious that someone is trying to short circuit my ability to reason. And that doesn’t entirely fail to work on me only makes me more suspicious.

Nevertheless, I do want to show this movie to a lot of people. Despite its flaws and omissions it at least opens a conversation about food people aren’t having. We do need to understand our foods better and make more informed choices- and this is a first step. At the very least I could use this to explain part of why I am vegetarian. I dislike its easy answers, but I love to hear people talking about the subject. While possibly sinfully incomplete, it doesn’t seem to be actually wrong very much.

One more pet peeve: the film claimed it was carbon neutral because of carbon offsets. Carbon offsets are generally an indulgence sold to people to let them feel better about doing things they are going to do anyway. It’s a system totally without certification based on things like planting monocultures of trees- not exactly helpful. We don’t know how much the trees will sequester, we don’t know how much they will put back into the environment when they die. Alternate energy production as a carbon offset is also plagued with problems. It needs to hit a market and take the place of carbon based fuel, which is not as straight forward as you might think.

Mostly I am just being the bearer of the bad news that the world is complex. Food, Inc. is a movie with very discrete good guys and bad guys and a list of simple things you can do to save [insert cause here]. Most of the easy things in this world have been done, and good guys and bad guys almost never turn out to stay safely in their black and white boxes when you look closer. Go see Food, Inc. But caveat spectator.

The Northpaw, Day 1: A new sense I didn’t know I didn’t have.

The magnetic implant had a magical quality to it. A long journey ending in a moment of bloodletting in a ritualistic setting, surrounded by cryptically ornamented people, and suddenly I had the full force of an entirely new sensation. I could see a new thing in the world. I practiced, but there was still something of the etherial to the situation, enhanced by the ritual with which it all began. The loss was just as otherworldly. One day without an apparent precipitating event my finger grew swollen and angry. It turned black and painful and I developed a fever, and as quickly as it had come, the new sense was gone. All I had left was the apparent the anger of the gods at my hubristic magic, to be satisfied only by a weeklong course of Cipro.

I was very sad. A dear friend gave me a hug and said “There, there. We’ll get you another new sense.”

The Northpaw feels a lot more like technology than magic. It’s based on the Feelspace, a project by the Cognitive Psychology department of Universität Osnabrück in Germany. It works by a series of mild buzzers hooked to an electronic compass and arrayed along a belt. the buzzers signal north to the wearer. The wearer gets used to it. They just begin to always know where they are, and have perfect direction sense. The Northpaw, a kit under development by some friends at Noisebridge, does this in an anklet.

I am an extremely alpha tester of the Northpaw. We’ve run into some hardware problems, software problems, and problems caused by the size of my ankle and the direction of the zipper on my strap. We’ve fiddled, by which I mean Adam Skory has fiddled, while I watched and offered to make tea. I have served my universal purpose though- exposing flaws by suddenly having everything fall apart the second I touch it. (This is no criticism of Skory’s work. This happens with major corporations and large governmental computer systems as well. I’m just amazing at breaking things.)

After some trial I figured it was almost working right, good enough to take home and try to calibrate later. Calibration in this case is moving the motors slightly on the strip to make sure that they are actually in the right place for north on the small circumference offered by my ankle. I’ve always had a good native sense of direction, so I felt I could tell when the Northpaw was off.

I got out my compass and wandered around. Yes, I have a great sense of direction. It’s just wrong most of the time. I get around by what I have realized is extreme smoothing. It wanders well off the cardinal directions, and then gets yanked back by points of reference. I also hold an independent compass in my head for buildings I know that defines north as whatever I think of as the top of the building and has not much relationship to the cardinal directions.

The Northpaw isn’t perfect, but so far it’s better than I turn out to be. I am still in the alarming newness phase of awareness, figuring out how much I was wrong about things I didn’t know I thought about.

I will blog the experience as I go, and will be writing an article for h+ magazine summing up my time of augmentation.

A remarkable speech and political progress

I was quite moved and impressed with Obama’s Cairo speech. Quoting the Qur’an four times, and the Talmud alongside the Bible, invoking Cordoba, and confessing publicly our role in the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s peacefully democratically elected and legitimate government- it was all such a departure from the ideology of the last administration, and so much more courageous than even many before that. I think the significance of acknowledging the past may be lost on many of the listeners, both here and in the Middle East, where the past is so well known, but it represents a willingness to speak with candor that I believe will make a huge amount of difference. Before reconciliation comes truth. Now is the moment where the world reacts to the speech. That reactions seem to be largely positive- and even when it’s not in some of the Middle Eastern blogs I’ve perused it seems like there is as much avoidance of hope for fear of being disappointed as actual criticism. But the brilliance of the speech was how it enfranchised so many subtle points of view without taking away from others.

What struck me most in the post-speech commentary was this comment in an Al Jazeera story:

Ahmad Yousuf, a senior Hamas official, told Al Jazeera that Obama’s speech reminded him of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech”.

About Obama stressing on the legitimacy of Israel, he said the Palestinians must have a state of their own before being asked to recognise another.

I don’t believe one gets rid of a Hamas by driving them into the sea, by bombing them or starving them, or by threats, or even education or propaganda. One gets rid of a Hamas by giving it political legitimacy, putting it in charge of some roads, and saddling it with a bureaucracy. Yousuf is here framing that end to Hamas as it is- admitting the possibility of political compromise where none should be ideologically possible. ‘Let us have our nation,’ he seems to be saying, ‘and we’ll let you have yours.’ That the possibility of the promise being broken exists doesn’t matter- then it’s just politicians lying. They are one good asphalt trade negotiation away from doing it anyhow.

More Perfect Union still stands to me as the greatest political speech of my lifetime, but this could have been one of the more brilliant moves in psychohistory I’ve seen in a while.

Malcolm Gladwell being sloppy and school shootings

I’m just now getting through The Tipping Point. A lot of it felt poorly researched- Kitty Genovese and Broken Windows and the fashion industry’s Just So stories represented too uncritically for me. Not that I think these stories have no merit, but before you draw conclusions I want to see them questioned. Then, in an afterword to the book, he talked about the Columbine shooting starting an epidemic. That was where I got annoyed.

In 1998 I was teaching part time at a Jr. High/Highschool in Oregon City, Oregon. On May 20th we got the news of a school shooting in nearby Springfield. It was the fifth school shooting since I’d starting teaching, but the only that close to me. It all hit much harder than I expected. The kids were fine, it was as random and distant to them as all the other school shootings. The fact that it was so normal to them was what made me finally unable to handle the situation. My principle saw my condition and told me to take the day off. Columbine, almost a year away, would be the next shooting.

If it was already so normal the year before Columbine, how did Columbine start the trend? In fact, it seems to have kicked off a period with fewer actual school shooting. It wasn’t until the 2006/2007 school year that we would see as many shooting as the 1997/1998 year that I taught.

Then comes the interesting aberration. 2008 (the year, not the school year) saw nine shootings. That’s a notable and horrible spike. Is that how long it’s taken the media’s over coverage of Columbine to hit? Is it related to the recession? Foreclosures? Neither the 97/98 nor the 06/07 spikes were times of financial stress. It drops off to a normal level come 2009, though I suppose we could have a sudden burst in September.

So if Gladwell is pulling the Columbine connection out of thin air, what is really going on? And what started in the 60s and 70s to set the whole phenomena going, both here and around the world? There wasn’t a precipitous rise in gun access, that’s for sure. What makes school shootings jump or settle down?

I have no idea. But I can promise the answer is complex. I find these questions far more interesting, and too hard for the quick answers Gladwell seemed to settle for in this book. I guess the problem with something like The Tipping Point is that how these things happen is actually an ecological question, but ecological contexts are highly complex- there are no simple answers, no generalizable useful truths one can fit into a short book. Anything you can say needs a caveat about probably being wrong.

I killed a crow today

Today was my first day biking across the city, from NW to NE to SE, passing back and forth from poverties to glories, from projects to lobbying offices, minutes apart. But it was in SE near the capitol I saw the crow.

It was in the shaded and lovely streets surrounded by restaurants and pillared government buildings. It was by a small park. I was listening to The Sun Also Rises, and barely paying more attention than I needed to stay alive. I was preoccupied. The crow caught my attention because it was screaming in the middle of the road. I looked at it confused for a moment, and stopped. it was shaped wrong, and it wasn’t running from traffic. It just stayed where it didn’t belong. I parked my bike and walked out into the middle of the road. I thought “If I try to help it I need to be careful, it will try to attack.” I wanted to block the cars, I wanted to get it off the road. Other crows were coming up to it, replying with screaming of their own. They flew and land and flew again violently and without reason. I got up close. I didn’t kneel, I wanted to be visible to the traffic. The tip of its beak was covered in blood. It held it wings strangely and breathed hard and painfully. It didn’t try to step away or turn as I came up to it. It didn’t cock its head to look at me. I didn’t believe then I could save it, and I did believe it would attack me as best it could. I stood there for a moment not sure what to do, my mind was blank. A man in a grey suit behind me stopped and began walking in tight little circles with his phone out.

The birds were angry at me and one in particular moved from screaming to diving. It occurred to me there is no language in nature to say “But I want to help.” It’s not something that happens in nature. It dived again and hit my head hard, and I was grateful that I’d kept my helmet on. The screaming drowned out the city noise.

I stepped back as the cars came on, mostly big black SUVs. All of them saw the bird and slowly drove over it, trying to keep it between their wheels. I longed for someone to finish it. None killed it, only caught it here and there on the bottom of their cars, injuring it more and more. It screamed with every car that drove over it. I considered whether I could kill it. I felt sick and shaky, but I knew I had to. I thought my light bike would only hurt it more. I considered whether I could stamp on its head, but I was scared, even more because I wasn’t sure I would kill it. I imagined it staring up at me in pain I couldn’t end. The other crows were getting truly violent now, and they scared me. They had picked me as the focus of their anger. I didn’t know what they would do if I killed it.

I stayed close by. The man in the suit behind me was on his phone now, explaining. “It’s just in the middle of the street. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He was stuck in his spot. Another man, browned and tan and fit in shorts and a tank top walked up beside a jeep and stood there looking at it, scared. His gripped his phone, offered it forward like a talisman. “What do we do?” he asked me, “Do we call 911?” I shook my head, thinking, this is ridiculous, but I understood. “No,” I said, “It’s too far gone, it just needs to be put out of its misery.”

He paced back and forth. I had hoped it was his jeep, and that I could ask him to finish it, but he made no move for it. Finally I said, “Get back, be careful of the birds, they’re diving. I have a helmet on.” He paced back a little bit, not willing to go and not able to stay. The bird had stopped screaming now. A volvo came up and slowed, and I jumped out in front of it and went to the open window. “Please,” I said to the man driving, “If you can, it’s too far gone to be helped, it needs to be put out of its misery.” He looked stricken, but backed up the car. He aimed and took his hands off the wheel and flattened them against his head over his ears. He let the car roll forward.

There was a pop. I grimaced; he’d missed the head, but I was sure he’d crushed the heart. It was good enough. I ran up to the car as he pulled away and shouted “Thank you!” He didn’t look back. I turned to the bird. It was still, and I could see its viscera spilling into the street. I wished that I’d taken it to the side of the road, but it didn’t care, and there were the other birds, still wheeling violently over me.

There was more traffic coming. I got back on my bike and put my headphones back on. I continued on my way.

I have had enough of death today.

White Privilege: Updating the invisible Knapsack

“White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.”

In Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (pdf) she took on trying to understand the unearned advantages her skin color granted her. First there was establishing that these advantages existed, then enumerating them- and then, taking what measure she could to lessen them. In some cases that meant trying to extend them to all people, but many are based on a racial exclusivity and simply needed to go. I was first introduced to this essay in a session at BIL looking at how the election of Barack Obama had changed race relations and the lives of white people.

The essay was inspiring to me. But it was about the privileges enjoyed by a white professor more than 20 years ago. If I was going to take the message to heart I felt I needed to update and personalize it- try to examine my own white privilege in my own context. Thus was the idea born for what I suspect will be the world’s least popular internet meme: unpacking my knapsack. Based on Mcintosh’s original essay I will examine my own privileges, which ones have diminished, which remain, and which don’t really apply to me. Then I’m tagging five friends (Ethan, Aaron, Danny, danah, Tim) to unpack their knapsacks as well.

I think there’s an extra challenge in asking poor whites to lay down white privilege. Being poor is terribly hard in this country and it feels as though you’re a fool for letting go of any scrap of advantage you can get. And that has been used as a wedge to drive people apart and even keep them poor and underprivileged since Nixon visited the South, and probably before. It is to everyone’s long term advantage to let go of white privilege.

I discovered in this process that my queer sexual identity undoes some point of white privilege, and doesn’t affect others at all. I think this is one of the real values of this exercise- seeing how this applies to your own life and context.

I won’t pretend this will be a perfect list, merely an effort along the way.

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

I can, though this seems more universal than it might have once been. I don’t choose to, in part because I don’t feel a particular affection for my race.

1.1 (new privilege) I can not feel an affection for my race without facing criticism. I don’t have to race identify, or deal with issues around my race if I don’t want to, and no one will really question that. I don’t have to worry if I am white enough or too white.

2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.

Unchanged: as it ever was.

3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

Yeah, basically, except no, because I don’t have much money.

4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

This is an important departure- unless they find out I’m queer. So I have to continually wonder if I’m giving it away, and maintain my alienation for my sense of safety and dignity.

5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

True.

6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

This is no longer a position of white or male privilege. This is an area of true progress since 1988, which is wonderful. On the other hand, queers still hide and when politicians reveal themselves to be not straight it goes with a resignation. I can see queers everywhere, but with a nudge and a wink, with only the rarest of exception. And those exceptions are always lead with “Openly gay…” As for openly poly, transgender, or modded people, I see them not at all.

7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

Yes, this is largely unchanged.

8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

Indeed.

9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

Publishing is leaving the privilege sphere. Not gone yet- but my option for this is my blog- and blogging is (relatively) free and pervasive. Publishing is now open to the poorest of nations, if still restricted to the more privileged and educated people within those nations. In the US, online publishing has given voice to even the homeless, prisoners, the poor, the mentally ill, and people of color from any SES. Definite progress.

10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.

Yes. Not true of being a woman, and if I’m the only queer in a group, I am most likely going to stay quiet to stay safe. I would say this is largely unchanged.

11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person’s voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race.

Yes.

12. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair.

I think this is safely out of the sphere of whites. I think this is an area of true progress.

13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

Yeah, and this is still bad.

14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

Nope.

15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.

Not yet, but it might become an issue later.

16. I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others’ attitudes toward their race.

True. I have some worry about my child getting flack for her family structure; I certainly did.

17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.

True.

18. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.

Yes. As a matter of fact, my race protects me from them realizing that I come from a background of poverty and attributing misbehavior to that.

19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

Yes.

20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

True.

21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

Actually, I have been, and for women and queers. I think this is a strange reversal of fortunes.

22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

That’s changing hard and fast. This is an area of real progress.

23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

No I can’t, in fact my treatment on this point is severe, but related to queer culture rather than race.

24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge”, I will be facing a person of my race.

Most yes, but much less so, but I can rest assured that if I face a person of color my race will not work against me.

25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.

Yes, or because of my gender, or my sexuality. This is still a race thing, and still bad.

26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.

Yes, but this is much better- still not perfect.

27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.

This is not true for me. Also, I am more likely than most people of color to face violence for my sexual identity.

28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another race is more likely to jeopardize her/his chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.

True.

29. I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues disagree with me.

True.

30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn’t a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.

Absolutely true, in fact, possibly more so than in 1988.

31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.

This seems more common to me, as in the writing and activism has become rich enough that more people of color can ignore things outside of their field as much as whites do. Is that progress? I don’t know.

32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.

That certainly changed recently.

33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race.

Well, no, I look white and feel like I have white body shape. Perhaps this is privilege eroding. Perhaps this is also just strange to me.

34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.

In a weird way this isn’t true. I can be accused of political correctness as a self seeking strategy. I think that’s a change, but not a good one.

35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.

Yes.

36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.

Yes, but this seems like perhaps it’s also diminished from 1988.

37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.

Less so because of gender. I am very shy about this- in part because of my sense of alienation, which is largely class, gender, and sexuality based.

38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.

True, but much more limited on the basis of my sexuality and gender.

39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.

True.

40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

Yes, but often I have needed to cover the nature of my relationships.

41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.

Yes, though my sexuality will, and has.

42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.

I think that many people can now, but through dangerous insularity. Nevertheless I think this is eroding.

43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.

True

44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.

Not true at all anymore! Progress!

45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.

Definitely eroded- I see the experiences of many races now. It would take effort not to.

46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin.

Yes. Clear has been a great innovation though, and even more so fun bandages.

47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.

This has lessened all around, even for queers.

48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household.

I can never feel assured of finding neighborhoods where people approve of my household, even in the Bay Area.

49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.

Absolutely false for me.

50. I will feel welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.

No.

I also identified what I think of as new white privileges:

* I can assume that my problematic sexual identity doesn’t conflict with or disrupt my racial identity. I can come out of the closet and keep my racial identity.

* I can, if I choose, ascribe problems and failures to individuals and claim that there is ‘a level playing field,’ and not be perceived as callous or racist.

* I don’t have to wonder if my missed opportunities are due to my race.

I strongly recommend reading the original essay, and will end my list with the quote that ends hers:

I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.

I think the prognosis is mixed. Some things are better, but others are worse, and my racial privilege is still insulating me and subtly repressing people of color. Even places where My queerness trumps my white privilege my race often still disadvantages others- worst of both worlds.

It’s incumbent on me now to notice and speak against my own privilege where I can. This isn’t easy, but unpacking my knapsack is a first step.

Ok, I tag Ethan, Aaron, Danny, danah, and Tim to unpack their knapsacks based on McIntosh’s original 50 points, add their own, and note the changes they’ve seen in their lives and communities. Then tag five more unpackers.