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Focus on the Power

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I am frankly baffled by the fact that, for anyone who claims to be a progressive, their first reaction to the Olen column would be “she had it coming for telling her employer about the blog,” with in some cases a further recitiation of the obvious point that Olen was within her legal rights to fire her. Well, yes, of course Olen can use her discretion to fire somebody because she makes her feel stodgy, just as “Ivan Trimble” has the right not to hire someone beccause she has a hobby more youthful and time-intensive than collecting Jim Nabors records. But let’s not lose sight of the real issue here: the use of irrational norms to enforce social hierachies, to keep employees cowering and uncritical, something even worse when presented in the passive-agressive language of Olen or “Trimble”. Since it has been said well elsewhere, allow me to outsource to Et al. (via Perfesser B.):

Taking recourse in “appropriateness” allows the person passing judgment to preserve the veneer of postmodern sophistication in these kinds of rants; “See, look at me, I know that monitoring my nanny’s sexual fantasies/my job candidate’s penchant for Star Trek reruns is actually beneath me, and that it should probably have no bearing on my position as an employer.” At the same time, of course, the judgment is clearly being passed, and the blogger is found to be beyond the pale.

“Appropriate” has such a nice, commonsensical ring to it. Of course you wouldn’t want a drug-crazed nymphomaniac taking care of your children, right? Or a Star Trek conventioneer at your department meetings? But the tyranny of appropriateness seems to go more and more unnoticed in society, so that it works as a kind of de facto Truth, a kind of everyman’s litmus test for behavior. In practice, of course, it’s anything but benign, and anything but “common” in the universal sense. Instead, it elevates various socially and economically and politically specific beliefs to the status of inarguable fact, while appearing instead to reduce them to “choices” that are clearly within the individual’s control. All the nanny would have had to do to keep her job, we argue, is to avoid the stupid mistake of giving her weblog URL to her insecure and bitchy boss. And why, for heaven’s sake, we cry, would any job candidate in this horrific market send prospective employers to the website where she wrestles with her secret problems with self-mutilation and affection for the paintings of Thomas Kincaide?

No one is savvier about this truth than my students. They know that conformity is ALWAYS the right choice, and few of them can imagine feeling strongly enough about any issue of personal expression–sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion–to risk being “inappropriate.” They know that all of our talk about the death of Truth is total b.s., and that in place of a hierarchy based on white patriarchal and economic power, we have instead a hierarchy based on “appropriateness” [as determined within white patriarchal and economic power]. They are scornful of students whose desire for personal adornment leads them to body art that the Fortune 500 would disapprove. They know better than to stand up to injustice, if doing so would require raising their voices.

Read the whole etc. See Patrick and Lindsay too.

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