On 1/18/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)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