My eyebrow-raising encounter with a media studies professor at Occupy Wall Street.
- Why does the fact that the event was called at ‘short notice’ matter? (Are there any speaking events that aren’t?) Were you asking women and people of colour along at the end, as an afterthought? Why aren’t you asking them first, as a natural part of the process of inviting speakers?
- If you can’t think of women, people of colour and young people to talk about your chosen subject, that says more about what you’re reading and who you’re associating with than it does about the participation of people who are not old white professional blokes in any particular sphere. In this particular case, I could easily name you half a dozen women and people of colour living in New York City who know more about ‘The Future of Occupy Wall Street’ than at least three out of four of the people on that panel, and I’ve been here a fortnight.
- If you’re just selecting speakers from your friends and colleagues, don’t you find it problematic that your friends and colleagues are overwhelmingly middle-aged white blokes?
- No, having one woman/minority/young person in your lineup and five doesn’t make it all better. Speaking as someone who is regularly invited to be the one woman and/or the one young person on a panel of older white blokes, it makes something twist and ache inside to know that you are valued not primarily for what you say but because of your particular demographic: they could put any of over a billion women under thirty on the planet in your place and feel that they had achieved the same effect.
- No, inviting that one woman to chair your debate rather than participate in it doesn’t make it all better. This is such a common get-out tactic, and it’s a special sort of offensive, because it shows that organisers understand the importance of having a female person present in the debate, they just can’t quite bring themselves to allow her to voice her own opinions – her job is merely to manage and make things pleasant for the men as they talk. Seriously. I’m sick of watching panels where the one woman’s only role is to facilitate discussion between men, to handle rude or unruly questioners, to lay out the dialectical doilies and retreat into the background when she is not needed.
- For fuck’s sake, why exactly is it so hard to make space in political discussions – even on the nominal left – for people who are not middle-aged, middle class white men?
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