On 1/18/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
In all fairness didn't the problem lay in his refusal to segregate ethnic and gender studies from their larger supercategories. When you give special status to ethnic studies you bring attention to it. When there is systemic bias recognizing that bias is a first step toward solving the problem, but if you overemphazixe a specific bias there is a risk that you will generate new biases. Bias against African-Americans may be a significant problem in the United States, but other Wikipedians in other countries may see this as a particularly American problem. The ethnic priorities in other countries can be quite different. If America is indeed the great melting pot, what indeed is the point of classifying African-American literature as something separate from plain old American literature.
Well, nobody has really called America the great melting pot earnestly for some time now (see [[melting pot]]). Whether the proper response to different cultures is to assimilate them or to preserve them as equals has been a big question in the U.S. for a long time, to say nothing of other countries. It is an intensely politicized question, one you're going to run into these questions in more places than the U.S., and Americans are likely to wince at some of the distinctions made in other countries as well. This is, no doubt, one of the big problems with international, internet-driven problems, is that (as we've all known for a long, long time), categories don't match up across cultures, even within the relatively constrained environment of Western academic culture. Again, this is one reason that the "free for all" style of Wikipedia can probably cope with such things in a way that a more traditional approach would have difficulties with.
FF