Argh. Yesterday I step into the lab and a fellow grad student asks me if I think if someone would give her thousands of dollars for being a Gypsy.
Yes, a Gypsy.
The story
I am a grad student at Rutgers U. in Newark, NJ. It’s a heavily urbanized city that is predominately black (though immigrants from Portugal and the Caribbean make up a solid chunk too). The university is EXTREMELY diverse (we were voted most diverse university in the whole country by US News & Report). We have the whole United Nations thing going on. It’s so diverse that EVERY group–racial/ethnic/religious/sexual–is a minority on campus. For someone raised in the South, it was a culture shock seeing so many different people.
The faculty is different, though. White folks aplenty, with a couple of Asian folks and Indian folks. Very very few black people. I’m one of two black graduate students in my whole department (of about 30 Ph.D students). No black faculty in my department. This is–remember–in Newark, NJ, one of the “blackest” cities in the country, where one would expect to find more than one black “token” in the crowd.
Even though it saddens me, I’m used to it. My whole life I’ve been the “only one”. That’s what being a minority means. It means always being the only one and sticking out like a sore thumb every day at work, even though the streets are full of people who look like you. It means having to take the minor “slights” from your jovial colleagues, pretending that they were meant as jokes, not as anything “serious”. It means that when a lecturer starts spewings stats about black “crime”, “health”, “mortality”, etc., you have to pretend that he’s not objectifying you, just the people who look like you. If you can’t cope with these things, you’d be bent out of shape all the time. This, as december would tell you, is unproductive.
It means being lonely sometimes and being overly self conscious. But like I said, you get used to it. And I wouldn’t trade being who I am for all the money in the world (well, maybe I would have to think about it for awhile :)).
It’s not all bad. The National Institute of Health is committed to bridging certain historical disparties, and in doing so, they have developed a funding program specifically geared to underrepresented and historically oppressed groups. Like black folk and Latinos. Even though my work is more ecological than medical-related, I receive funding from this program and I’m very grateful for it. Without it, I would be forced to teach (whereas now I do it voluntarily) and not be fully engrossed in my research. It’s really been a blessing.
Now back to my rant…
My lab is composed of white women. My wonderful advisor is a white woman. All of the grad students–except for me–are white women. Including the chick who wants to suddenly claim “Gypsy heritage”, even though this is the first time I’ve ever heard of her having anything beyond Polish grandparents. She was raised in Brooklyn, as an American, and as a white girl. Just a few months ago she told me she feels like a minority on campus because she’s one of only a handful of white, American-born women in her classes :rolleyes:. Dumbass, I wanted to say. If she’s a minority, what am I? She’s got some nerve calling herself a minority when everyone in the lab is a white, American-born woman, including her boss! But when she said it, I was like “whatever” and just chalked it up to her usual cluelessness.
But now she wants to claim “heritage” that–IMHO–she doesn’t have any business claiming. This blond-haired, hazel-eyed, white girl told me that she discovered that she has “Gypsy roots” (she doesn’t use the word Roma or anything like that, nor does she explain what she means by “roots”). Not only does she want to claim it, she wants to benefit financially from it. She wants to find out if the program will consider “Gypsies” a minority. If she were truly a Gypsy, I wouldn’t be angry. There’s no doubt that Gypsies were and are very unpopular and have been discriminated against (even though they aren’t included as one of the groups being targetted by the NIH, at least not explicitly). But she’s not a Gypsy. She’s a white girl from Brooklyn, who’s never self-identified as anything other than a white girl from Brooklyn. The only language she speaks is Brookynized English (if you can call that English ;)). But now that her USGS funding is up, she’s scrambling for money. Obviously she’s desperate.
I’m angry because she seems to think there’s nothing wrong with her “on-and-off” concept of minority. Being a member of a stigmized, isolated group isn’t something you can turn on and off to suit your purposes. Whether I’m sitting in a crowded lecture hall or working in the laboratory, I’m a black person and everyone knows it. I would love to be able to turn off the blackness sometimes, like when I’m meeting someone for the first time or when I’m walking in a hoity-toity neighborhood by myself. I would love to be able to say I’m the “minority” when everyone who’s running things–from my advisor to all the people on my disseration committee–are “like” me. But it ain’t like that. I’m trying as hard as I can to get in one of those power positions. Fortunately I have government backing in my endeavors so that future generations won’t have to be the “only one” all the damn time.
To me, if you have to “discover” your kinship to a group, then you have no business claiming that you are a member of this group, which is basically what she’s trying to do. For instance, I would never say I’m Irish, even though I have Irish “roots”. Not only is it a political thing (no one would look at me and see “Irish”) but it’s a cultural thing. I don’t speak Gaelic. I don’t clog. I have no desire to go to Ireland. I’ve never done anything uniquely “Irish”. I don’t think both forms of identification are required to justifiably claim heritage, but I would think they are both important, especially when you’re representing yourself as a member of a particular group and you’re being financially benefited from such representation.
Because it takes me a while to come up with all my snappy comebacks, I told the girl she should call the administrator of the fellowship and I gave her the woman’s phone number. I kept waiting for her to laugh and say she was just kidding, but she was dead serious. I wanted to slap the bitch, yes I did. I wanted to take her on a walking tour around Newark and see all the people she’s claiming “minority” kinship to.
As much as I love not having to teach, if she gets the money, I’m going to pull out of this fellowship. I don’t want to be a part of something that participates in a mockery of its own noble goal. This decision will pain my advisor, no doubt, but it will hopefully pain her more to see what kind of sorry trash she brought into the laboratory. And believe me, this asswipe is trash. I hope one day she wakes up and finds herself in the body of a Gypsy, circa 1942, living in Germany (just like that Sheen guy in the Twilight Zone). Then we’ll see how fast she appreciates being the white American-born female that she is.
(I’m aware that the idea of having an “exclusive” fellowship might rub some of youse the wrong way, so there’s no burning need on my part to hear you say so. I look forward to your responses anyway.)
