I have a similar job and I act the same way you do, I never expect or ask any student to speak for “their people”. That’s for the reasons you mention but also, and I think even moreso, because I think that it’s important to look at the white, cis, middle-class people there and say, hey, you have *at least* as much responsibility to think about this as the “minorities” do. I don’t want to encourage the idea that it’s up to “them” to tell “us” what’s going on and if they don’t, “we” can’t be blamed for not knowing.

I’d never given a thought to the privilage that being a white female gives me in the dating market.

I’m gonna go mull that over like whoa, now.

(And, also: Jesus H. Christ, those guys are a bunch of true winners. Ugh.)

Here’s the text online, in case anyone’s interested. The opening sentences run thus:

I READ THE OTHER DAY SOME VERSES written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. Always the soul hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost — and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgement.

What appealed to me was his urging his readers not to become “isms” — or as he phrased it in an earlier essay, The American Scholar:

It is one of those fables which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, – present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters – a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.

In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men`s thinking.

Of course, in 1830s New England, Emerson was still conventional enough to omit one-half of the human race from his considerations, yet, allowing for this, his points still stand.

“What I am” is a flagrant contradiction of “who I am”, according to society. I’m supposed to be “hey, girl, hey”-ing at the mall with my 6 kids instead of reading about the implications of Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer canonically existing in the same universe, which I think means I’m a societal unicorn.

ChloeMireille, I’ll see your societal unicorn and raise you a pegasus with rainbow afro: I’m all about Ugly Betty and old cartoons (I’m looking forward to a Filmation retrospective DVD box set. Yes, it’s that serious).

Ah, Spoonfork, but when you DO write what you know then you’re just creating Mary Sues. :)

I think people get hit with a lot of variations of this expectation. It’s pernicious regardless of the specifics and origin. Reducing people to a cardboard cutout is a Bad Thing, even if you then place the cutout on a pedestal strewn with flowers.

This may seem like I’m making a big deal out of something that you appreciated. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to ask a Muslim student’s opinion or a lesbian to speak about their own experience. Every time I’ve chosen to not do so. In the end, I’m the instructor and sometimes students just want to be students.

I feel there is some thematic connection between “The Fantasy of Being Thin” (or at least what I remember of Snarky’s Machine’s post on it, and the desire to be a writer/artist/singer/etc. first instead of being all about the Issue(s) first. When we spend so much of our energies dreaming of how great life will be when we… solve the fat, conquer the issue… yet forget to live in the moment, we lose something. Except that in the present case, the demand to put all else on the altar for the Issue or Ism is external. We can’t live the way we like, or so we imagine, because we aren’t thin yet, if we are still bound by TFOBT. We can’t write, or dance, or create, etc. the way we like because the professors, the critics, the blogosphere, expect so hard at us that we only meet their wishes.

And I’m from Appalachia. I’m extremely proud of where I come from but I’m sick of being the ‘exception’. For some reason people can’t fathom that not every person from Appalachia is dirt poor and living in shacks. Similarly, average Americans can’t even grasp the idea that a) Appalachia doesn’t need their fucking pity b) some people chose to live lives that aren’t mainstream America. And no, I don’t find your ‘compliments’ on my neutral accent complimentary. In fact its puts me in a really difficult place where I have to question if I have subconsciously resisted the accent out of shame. Not fun.

Last but not lease I have had a female partner for 8 years but I still love the doods. I wish that people would stop telling me that I’m ‘bisexual’. You don’t get to define me.

This isn’t exactly what Snarky’s had in mind with her post. However, it hit a nerve with me because sometimes its the assumption that a person with my identity doesn’t even exist or shouldn’t exist that pisses me off the most.

(bad fanfiction writers FTW!)