Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

I’m sitting at my desk, my body finally having adjusted enough to the time zone for me to have woken up at a reasonable hour. I’ve got a French press full of coffee and a slightly burned bagel with black currant jam. If the weather holds up (mostly cloudy, no rain), I may go on a university-sponsored bus tour later, and I need to buy a new notebook, but other than that, after running from office to office to office all day yesterday, I have today free before tomorrow’s research student induction workshop.

My darling Martyn helped me settle in over the weekend. He met me with coffee-in-hand at the Belfast Harbor Airport. It had been raining as my flight came in, with clouds stretched to such effect that I could hardly tell where the sky ended and the sea began. Fortunately, the rain eased off in time for the walk from housing check-in to the house where I am now. (We probably should’ve gotten a taxi.)

On Sunday, we ended up in a pub where I had gone the first time I visited Belfast. Even though I had met Martyn earlier during that same trip, I had no idea then that I would end up returning, let alone as a student (planning to be here for three years, which is an eternity for someone who has lived their 20s the way I have) and with a wonderful partner living a short hop across the water. You never do know how one trip, one day, on choice can open up a whole new world of possibilities; I never want to live a life that’s closed to that. To me, that is precisely the source of life’s wonder.

Wonder, surprise, and sometimes discomfort are all part of the adventure (though when I speak of discomfort, I do not mean to bring the real horrors that lurk out there, mostly in the minds and at the hands of humanity, into it: those will never be positive). Culture shock is part of the experience whether you’ve moved to a new country for the first time or, as in my case, the third. Little things like how to queue and which sorts of stores sell which sorts of items always take some getting use to. Pharmacies here are much more limited in what they carry than drugstores back in the US, for instance. Then there are the ways people are classified. The woman helping me at the bank to open my student account assumed that I would want to use Miss as my title rather than Ms. What surprised me more was when I went to register at the University Health Center and, upon reaching the racial background question, discovered that Eastern European was listed separately from White.

On the one hand, it was easy for me to classify this as simply more evidence of how unstable racial constructions are (and how they serve the dominant group: in Northern Ireland, Whiteness doesn’t need Eastern European folks in order to rule). On the other, I had never experienced that sort of uncertainty of about which box to tick. After all, I am not only Eastern European but also Irish in heritage. There was a box for Mixed, but that didn’t feel right either. In the end, I checked both Eastern European and White.

The sense of partial belonging this suggests is probably going to be one of my main issues in adjusting to life here. This is the first time I’ve lived somewhere other than my birth nation without being visibly foreign. Even my speech doesn’t strike people as immediately non-Irish, as I’ve several times been asked by other incoming students if I’m from Belfast. I’m not sure why that is, though I suspect it’s something to do with singing and having a fairly melodious way of speaking because of it.

A recent New York Times article surveys campus studies that have discovered a number of different effects of having interracial roommates. The effect that makes the headline, however, is to my mind the most obvious: that living with someone of another race can reduce prejudice. According to the article:

Several studies have shown that living with a roommate of a different race changes students’ attitudes. One, from the University of California at Los Angeles, generally found decreased prejudice among students with different-race roommates — but those who roomed with Asian-Americans, the group that scored the highest on measures of prejudice, became more prejudiced themselves.

That last part did strike me as unexpected, in part because during my second year at Evergreen, I roomed with a young woman of mixed Japanese and Irish heritage (Hi, Christine!) who certainly wasn’t any more prejudiced than anyone else I knew at the time (yes, I know anecdote =/= data).

While it is difficult to evaluate one’s own level of prejudice, I do know that living with her, and seeing how different incidents and statements affected her, woke me up to a lot of my white privilege. I won’t go into specifics here because it is more her story than mine, but I learned not from demanding that she explain things to me (though I probably was guilty of this on occasion) but by living through things with her.

It is living separately that allows prejudice to continue. Because of this, educational institutions that want to develop whole citizens and not just cog-in-the-machine workers do have a real interest in making sure that their student populations are diverse. At the same time, it must be remembered that it is not the responsibility of people of color to open up their lives to white people just because we want to understand.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I have nothing but harsh words for the vaccines-cause-autism crew. When I started seeing people who have never spoken out against Autism Speaks or CNN shows that have given Jenny McCarthy a platform criticizing Oprah for hosting her, however, I started to get a knot in my stomach*. Indeed, the absolute virulence displayed in this comments thread at Bad Astronomer shows that my discomfort was there for a reason.

Oprah makes an easier target than, say, Larry King (who has also had guests like Jenny McCarthy on), even though one would think that his show being on a news network would mean that he would be held to a higher standard. As a woman of color, Oprah has achieved power, popularity, and wealth that the intersecting oppressions of racism and sexism say she does not deserve. Because of this, people who believe (even unconsciously) that their race and/or sex entitles them to more than she has already resent her. That she would give a platform to someone promoting medical quackery gives such individuals an excuse to let their resentment show. Another reason she makes an easy target is who we perceive her audience to be: if you look again at that comment thread, you will see a lot of references to uneducated, non-wealthy women who follow Oprah without engaging in critical thought. These are women that we, as a society, already hold in contempt because of their socioeconomic position.

To be clear, I am not saying that Oprah should be exempt from criticism. What I am saying is that 

1. Criticism should stay on topic and not take a nasty, personal tone. 
2. If Oprah is the only media figure you criticize for giving anti-vaccination campaigners a voice, you’re doing something wrong.

*No, not everyone speaking out against Oprah has otherwise been silent; if I’m not talking about you then I’m not talking about you.

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In Chicago, a 16-year old autistic boy was beaten by police, despite his family’s attempts to communicate to the officers that they were dealing with someone with special needs. While the story clearly shows why it is so important for people (especially those with power) to understand that some people respond to stimuli in unusual ways and that that doesn’t make them dangerous, it seems that there are overlapping oppressions in play in this case.

Why did the police confront Oscar Guzman in the first place? Why was someone watching cars on his break from work regarded as a suspect? I doubt they would have approached a young white man in quite the same way. Going through any sort of special training on working with autistic people (which the Chicago PD has, though we don’t know if the particular officers in question attended) isn’t going to help people like Guzman unless officers can get past viewing them as suspect-by-default.

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