Kali Tal

Ehm. Can you tell me how "refusing to acknowledge Ethnic Studies and Gender studies as essential top-level disciplinary categories, Sanger is attempting to roll back our progress towards freedom and equality" ?

I can't see the relationship (probably because I come from an European country where there is no thing like Ethnic or Gender studies). I can't see why can't you write an unbiased (and totally unracist) history of African American Literature, for example, without having to resort to the cathegory of Ethnic Studies, and why this should automagically be a white-male partial point of view.

Yes, I could tell you, but frankly I have better things to do. My guess is you wouldn't jump into a conversation about biology, taking place among biologists, and ask them to fill you in on everything you'd missed because you forgot to take biology in high school. You might try paying the same amount of respect to Ethnic and Gender studies and do at least a modicum of reading in those areas before you ask a scholar to go over the lower-division undergraduate basics with you. Come back and talk to me when you can articulate the foundation arguments in those disciplines and we can have a conversation. It's not my job to convince you that my discipline has a right to exist in the first place. It's your responsibility to seek an education in that area if you want to talk about it, and to start with basic texts. And there are dozens (if not hundreds) of syllabi online that list those texts for your edification and enjoyment. Have fun and come back and enter the conversation when you've done the reading.

This gives the impression that you don't want to defend your position, but you do want people to agree with you. It seems to me that the fundamental ideas and jargon of an academic discipline are comparable to the grammar and vocabulary of a language. Consider, please, that someone could study a widely spoken language, such as Chinese or English, and that person would, in that case, find a large number of people in the world willing to converse with you in that language. Or, someone could study a much more obscure language, such as Northern Saami or Cree, with the opposite result: that, outside of a few specific circles, there will be almost no one who wants to talk to you in that language. Cree might be a very beautiful language, but if you won't discuss that fact in a language other than Cree, you've selected a quite limited audience for yourself.

You write, "It's not my job to convince you that my discipline has a right to exist in the first place. It's your responsibility to seek an education in that area if you want to talk about it, and to start with basic texts." That's an if. Personally (I can't speak for dev/urandom, of course) I'm not very interested in talking about ethnic or gender studies, but I am interested in talking about the problems you've had dealing with Citizendium. I'm not sure whether that's a conversation you're interested in.

Otto, I don't really care whether "people" agree with me or not. If most people agreed with me, there'd be a lot less racism and sexism in the world. I expect certain people (mostly white men) will disagree with me, and that certain people (mostly people who are relatively sophisticated about race and gender issues; hence, mostly non-white men and women) will tend to agree with me. To me, the gendered and raced way that agreement or disagreement breaks down is an illustration of the very problem I'm pointing out.

Your language example is a poor one. If you compare feminism and race studies to the study of Northern Saaami and Cree, you ignore the fact that just about every university in the country has departments, scholars and students in Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies, that a huge body of generally accessible scholarship has been produced, and that large professional organizations in these areas have sprung up everywhere in the world. This has been the case for at least thirty years now. The fact that the basic tenets and non-jargon vocabulary of feminism and ethnic studies are as obscure to you as those tiny language groups is not a measure of the insignificance of the fields, but of your comfort level in ignoring and brushing aside certain kinds of large, popular and significant disciplines. There's a reason we're not having this conversation about, say, Sociology.

I do not use complex or advanced terminology when I discuss feminism and race as a public intellectual. But the most elementary and simple concepts in the fields are alien to the white men who simply have not bothered to concern themselves with what the women and the minorities were doing. We're not important enough for you -- you work in the "real" disciplines and don't even, for the most part, notice we're not there.

You and I can't talk about the problems with Citizendium unless you're willing to take some responsibility for equipping yourself with the basic tools to do the analysis. How on earth can we discuss whether or not CZ is racist or sexist (and those are my problems with CZ) if you have only a popular or naive model of racism or sexism. Really... it only takes picking up one book on each to get a decent sense of what the stakes are. Try Farai Chideya's Don't Believe the Hype and the Sadker's Failing at Fairness as basic, readable books that will introduce you to the issues with which race and gender scholars deal in their work.

The bottom line is that I don't have the time to rewrite the elementary, accessible texts that are out there. And you need those basics in order to understand my critiques... or any critiques of gender and race politics. You need those basics if you're going to be able to discuss racism and sexism in a responsible fashion. You need those basics even if you're going to disagree with them.

White men are a numerical minority in the world, but just like the whites in apartheid South Africa, they pretty much think they own the place, get to define it and to control it. Sanger's decisions about what disciplines are "in" and what disciplines are "out" in CZ is an exercise in exactly that sort of control. The insidious thing about racism and sexism is that they're invisible to the people who are being racist and sexist, and visible only to the people who are being oppressed, or who identify with the oppressed and consider those largely silenced and ignored voices to be important.

You have a choice at this juncture: remain unthinkingly and unconsciously embedded in the institutional structures that support you in a web of unearned privilege based on your whiteness and your maleness, or start to break out of the web by taking the responsibility for educating yourself about the way life is for the majority of the "other" people in your culture.

If you take that responsiblity we can have long, interesting and fruitful conversations about CZ. If you don't, then there's really not much we can say to each other beyond stating our basic positions.

I commend Kali for her brave, principled stand against bureaucratic obstinacy and arbitrariness. I tired of the CZ pilot after about a week of edits on the African American literature page, after a lot of bureaucratic crowing and interference with routine edits.

For example, I was informed that an edit of mine identifying African American lit as one branch of the literature of the African diaspora was going to have to be discussed and debated. Ridiculous. Anybody who thinks such a claim is in the least controversial is unqualified to be editing a page on African American in the first place.

Anyway, good for you, Kali.