of politics and white privilege

This is a great oped piece which provides solid examples of the oft-overlooked and illunderstood phenomenon of White Privilege: This is Your Nation on White Privilege. You should read it.

Here's a highlight:

White privilege is being able to dump your first wife after she’s disfigured in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire beauty queen (who you go on to call the c-word in public) and still be thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you’re black and married for nearly twenty years to the same woman, your family is viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other are called “terrorist fist bumps”

And if you aren't familiar with White Privilege in the first place, you should read Peggy McIntosh's essay, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, in which she sets out to define the phenomenon:

As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege.

As a white girl who has attended an HBCU for several years, and lived in one of the most racist states in the nation for almost a decade, I've become all too aware of the privileges bestowed upon me by virtue of my pale skin, so for me this is interesting stuff.

gender: a primordial socio-cultural innovation

Gender constructs constitute one of the most fundamental organizational mechanisms of human society. This has been almost universally true throughout time and space. The practical implications and the real consequences of this fact have profoundly impacted the course of human history. For this reason the phenomenon of gender, as opposed to the existence of two biological sexes, demands extensive inquiry. I could dedicate my life to pursuing myriad avenues of research into the varying application of gender constructs in human society and the resulting influences on world events.

As a bit of an aside:
Likewise, technology - from the plow to the cellular telephone - has profoundly influenced the course of human history. Technological innovations that allow for changes to human society deserve investigation, particularly those which directly and indirectly engage socio-cultural innovations.

technological dependence

It seems to me that even a cursory perusal and/or casually inquiring glimpse of the history of humanity indicates an intimate relationship between the domination of humankind over the rest of the planet and our technological innovations. Just think of how obsessively humanity has created tools and made the very best possible use of them throughout time. This begs the question: does the evidence really support humanity's seeming dependence on technology as the sole mechanism of progress?

this I know: race still matters

A little over 45 years ago, on a humid June night in Jackson, Mississippi, Medgar Evers was gunned down by a White Power Asshole. Medgar was unpacking "Jim Crow Must Go" tshirts from his car at the time he was shot, while his wife and three children waited for him to return home from a long day's work as Field Secretary for the NAACP.

Last night I spent an hour in the house where Medgar was shot. I heard the story of his life's work for racial equality in Jim Crow Mississippi and the ways his family coped with the dangers associated with that work. I saw his blood on the concrete in the carport, and heard the tale of his unjust treatment the night of his death: how there were no ambulances nor police patrol cars available to transport him to the hospital, how his family and neighbors made a makeshift ambulance by placing one of his children's matresses down in the back of a station wagon, and how he was refused treatment at the hospital once he finally arrived.

A 1942 law segregated facilities at hospitals in Mississippi. In 1963 white doctors did not treat black patients to save their lives and the life-saving blood of white folks was withheld from those with black skin. Such pernicious racist practices culminated on the night of June 12, 1963 with the death of Medgar Evers.

It took 30 years to convict the racist son of a bitch whose bullet killed Medgar and left Myrlie Evers a widowed housewife with three small children.

At the Evers' home last night, my husband and I were the only white people present.

Some Many people think that in the year 2008 racism doesn't matter any more; that the problems of slavery and Jim Crow have been left behind as the years have passed, but I'm convinced that these people are wrong. They are either ignorant or blind to the fact of the matter: that racism still plays heavily in the day-to-day lives of many Americans.

So it goes that I'm convinced that racism in America is the second-most insidious socio-cultural innovation to be implemented by humankind for the exploitation of one group by a more powerful group. (The all-time winner of that esteemed honor is, of course, gender.)

thoughts on case studies to investigate

The most interesting cases of human technological advancements are those wherein socio-cultural and material technologies come together and create progress. Other areas of interest include those wherein socio-cultural and material technologies combine in ways that are more confrontational than harmonious.

{As a philosophical aside, one must wonder: what exactly is progress?}

Robert McElvaine noted the instance of gender roles and agriculture occurring close enough in time to influence and propel the furtherance of one another in a sort of symbiotic, mutually dependent relationship.

Indeed, other examples abound throughout the history of humanity, such as:

Religion as a socio-cultural technology that aided in the consolidation of power wielded by early city-state rulers;
Spoken language as a socio-cultural technology that led to the development of the material technology of a written language;
Racism as a socio-cultural innovation that made feasible the material technology of a slave-labor system in the United States;
the Rule of Law as a socio-cultural technology which led to the legitimization of socio-political power structures, state sovereignty, and the like;

and countless others...

There are any number of instances where socio-cultural and material technologies have interested and interacted to profoundly affect the course of human history, if only I train myself to consider the world in such a manner.

defining technology

It occurs to me that it will be necessary that I develop a working definition for 'technology' if I intend to write or think extensively about it, and especially if I intend to make the case that ethereal things like race and gender ought to be classified as technologies.

Back in 2006, in my very first semester as a university student, I took a class called The History of Science and Society. Somehow, although I was interested in the class, I didn't realize at the time how profoundly that very idea - science and society - would affect my future studies and the very course of my life's work.

One of my first assignments in that class was to submit a definition of technology. At that early stage, before I had done much thinking on the matter, I submitted the following:

Technology is the body of knowledge that members of a society apply to their physical environment to meet their survival needs.

-- from Renzetti, Claire M., and Daniel H. Curran. Living Sociology. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1998.

Truly this is was a fairly good starting point considering how little I knew two years ago. Nevertheless, here I find myself still struggling to come up with a good, solid definition that will allow me to apply the term 'technology' to both material and socio-cultural innovations.

So far, I think I can say this:
Technology is the implementation of a method to manipulate the natural world to the advantage of humanity or in such a way as to further 'progress.' (Defining progress, of course, would be the stuff of another discussion entirely.)

While this may be a good beginning in that it allows for the expansion of 'technology' to go beyond material technologies, it does not succinctly and specifically convey my meaning that the term ought not be so narrowly defined as to only refer to physical manipulation of the environment. Alas, it does not readily convey the idea that the manipulation of the social environment (which is, after all, a part of the natural world since humans evolved as social creatures) is a form of technological advancement as well.

I must work on this. A good place to start doing this would be to draw comparisions between material and socio-cultural examples of human ingenuity, and I've got an entire career ahead of me to figure all this out.