Wednesday, November 5, 2014

20141105.0625

Yesterday, after I came home from voting, I read Michael Mark Cohen's 12 October 2014 Medium.com article "Douchebag: The White Racial Slur We've All Been Waiting For." In it, Cohen argues that the term "douchebag" serves many of the same functions as racial epithets--only applied to the typically unmarked position of privilege occupied by white, heterosexual men of the upper and middle classes in the United States. To do so, he provides and explicates examples of usage, including historical attestations, and links the lot to the more commonly understood epithets that still get bandied about. While the argument is not likely to gain cultural traction, it is composed well and convincing as a loose description of the deployment of the word "douchebag" as a slur.

Something that might tighten the fit of the description to the term would be a larger study. It is true that Cohen does not pretend to be comprehensive or even expansive in the work that informs his article; he situates it in discussions from classes he has taught and some reading in earlier popular culture, and it is published in an easily accessible format, so it is not to be expected that the piece will display the same level of rigor that should attend on more formal academic treatments. But such a treatment would be welcome; having the more thoroughly researched historical context and the more representative surveys of usage that such a treatment would entail would do much to illuminate the phenomenon.

That illumination would serve to highlight more of the intertwined class and race stratification and tension that continues to pervade the US (and likely will increasingly do so in the wake of the 2014 elections). It would offer some answer to those few who are unconvinced that academic study can be relevant but are not solidly set in the notion that it cannot be relevant; in showing what people do and how what people do works, it would necessarily open the way for some kind of corrective to the problems it would necessarily identify. (Admittedly, this would only be for those who are willing to accept the results as valid and who see their own complicity in the problem, which is far too small a set of people.) And that has value.

Also of value in the piece is what it shows about the worth of the physical classroom. The underlying impetus of the article comes from a classroom event the author describes. Such an event cannot occur through the mediation of a computer screen, whether in the pseudo-synchronous environment of ongoing chat or the asynchronous (and far more common online classroom) environment of message boards; it can only come through the direct, face-to-face interaction of teacher and student. Although the specific event in question may be small, it is representative, and it is of small advances that growth in knowledge is made. More such explorations need to happen, far more now than in the past, and it is in the physical classroom that they occur. That Cohen's article points to such a thing is perhaps the best point, among many good ones, it makes.

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