Adam

Another book I've read (and another memoir) where the audiobook–read by Bourdain himself–is absolutely, positively essential.

Definitely, definitely listen to this as an audiobook read by H. Jon Benjamin himself. I feel like this would've been a much more run of the mill set of semi-humorous essays otherwise, and some of the stories that would've been downright boring on paper were completely enlivened by his delivery.

This was a Common Read book I had to slog through, and boy, do I hate it with a fiery passion.

This Boston Review take down by Charisse Burden-Stelly is way better than anything I can write. Nonetheless, a few assorted thoughts and observations:

1. Wilkerson seems to be taking the Ibram X. Kendi route of generating buzz through what amounts to semantics, in her case trying to disentangle caste from racism. As Stelly writes, she fails, and frequently undermines her own argument. In the Epilogue, she writes “Even the most privileged of humans in the Western world will join a tragically disfavored caste if they live long enough. They will belong to the last caste of the human cycle, that of old age...”. Besides the inaccuracy (take one look at the current US president, Congress, or economic fortunes by generation), this understanding of caste is entirely at odds with her own definition and everything that comes before it. She does this a lot.

2. There's an entire chapter dedicated to comparing human caste to the pack structure of dogs told through stories about her purebred terriers.

3. Having taken a number of incredible classes on race as an undergrad, on top of my time as an organizer/activist, I know there are many, many, MANY brilliant, modern theorists of race Wilkerson could draw from. Instead, she has a strange predilection for mostly white mid-century social scientists, referencing and quoting guys like Gunnar Myrdal, Erich Fromm, and Andrew Hacker instead.

4. She takes some extremely obvious and notable liberties here, stuff that would never pass muster if she was writing history. She talks about purity as a central pillar of caste, and does through references to Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America by Jeff Wiltse. Yet a quick Google shows that Wiltse himself writes that Northern pools were segregated by class and not race for a significant chunk of history.

5. This a pattern. Sunil Khilnani's review in The New Yorker isn't as ruthless as the other review I shared, but is similarly dubious of how Wilkerson collapses the history American slavery, Indian caste, and the Nazi extermination of the Jews into neat packages in order to make what turns out to be a point of rather dubious usefulness. (Knowing that she has decided that all three should be called caste systems helps our understanding of any of them how, exactly? Especially when their respective histories and societal functions are not nearly as clear cut and similar as Wilkerson tries to prove?)

6. And, of course, Wilkerson is really writing all of this because she is itching to vent about the election of Trump, extol the virtues of Obama and “advocates for justice” like Eric Holder and Colin Powell, and to tell us that the solution to caste is....for everyone to have empathy. That's what the Civil Rights Movement did, right? Just ask everyone to be nicer to everyone?

There's no better way to get people to read a book than to ban it, right? Though I imagine the Christian neofascists gunning for Gender Queer aren't as worried about keeping it out of my hands as they are those who would be most helped by it: teenagers and young adults who are questioning their gender and/or sexuality and searching for proof that they aren't the only “weird” ones. Assuming reaching that audience is Kobabe's goal, I think e succeeds reasonably well. E shares the evolution of eir thought processes around eir own gender and (to a lesser and somewhat more confusing extent) eir sexuality. As someone who is assigned male at birth but also is stridently non-gender conforming in a number of ways, there were a number of parts I could relate to, especially the emphasis on the reflection and the trial and error that goes into shaping one's performance of gender to match one's internal sense of gender. Feeling pops of recognition as e's past self has thoughts that exactly match my own is as validating as intended. And I don't always love the usually very simple art, but I adore the color palette provided by eir sister, and I think one of Kobabe's strengths is using metaphor and visual language to describe eir feelings about/experiences with gender clearly and succinctly.Memoir can be tough, because it can be hard as a reader to separate feelings about the individual from an assessment of the work. I'm not too much older than Kobabe and know eir type (obsessed with fan fiction/slashfic and fandom, theater, art, and Oscar Wilde) a bit too well and so my own experiences with that crowd made em grate on me somewhat. E describes writing hundreds of thousands of words of gay fanfiction about One Direction, which, uh, no thanks. Kobabe also can't change the facts of eir life, but it's also notable that e grew up in an environment that is not only privileged in traditional ways, but which was also extremely queer-friendly; eir parents are hippie-types who moved the family off the grid and homeschooled e, eir high school had an active Queer/Straight Alliance, e mentions several high profile queer friends, eir sister's partner is transmasculine, etc. Effectively all the struggle here is internal, which is not bad, but also probably well outside the norm. Lastly, I have one big bone to pick: Kobabe's embrace of biological determinism. Kobabe glowingly cites Patricia Churchland, an analytical philosopher who supports brain organization theory, which argues that brains are “gendered” through their exposure to different hormones in utero. The book has an annoying tendency to hop into and out of little vignettes and then move along, and this is no exception; it quotes a bunch of Churchland, and then shows Kobabe emself thinking “So Lady Gaga was right–I was born this way. WHAT A RELIEF.” And then it moves right along without another comment on it. I'm sorry but....no. Anyone claiming that a hormone has a gender (as Churchland seems to think) should be ignored. Estrogen and testosterone are present in everyone's bodies. They have functions, not genders. I recommend reading (or at least consulting) [b:Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences 11363891 Brain Storm The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences Rebecca M. Jordan-Young https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348012692l/11363891.SY75.jpg 13242443] which is dry and academic but dismantles the “science” behind brain organization theory. From a social perspective, this biological determinism implicitly cedes that queerness is an aberration, a crossing of wires, something that can be changed or fixed. It fails to stand up for the inherent dignity (and joy) of being queer and it denies the fluidity and complexity of gender and sexuality. Kobabe isn't a scientist or a queer theorist, sure, but in that case, leave it out, or at least complicate it a bit more. Thinking there's a purely biological basis for gender identity or sexuality is only temporary relief. Gender Queer can be a bit scattershot, and it ends abruptly, but I have no regrets about reading it and wouldn't hesitate to share it with anyone for whom questions about their gender weigh heavily on their mind.

The most engaging element of this book are the interviews with students. Dr. Jack seems to have successfully created strong bonds with them and I get the sense that the ability to vent about their experiences at “Renowned” to someone who shared their experience was welcome.

But this book fell short for me personally for the following reasons...

1. The differences between the Doubly Disadvantaged (low-income students entering elite colleges from public schools and with limited exposure to wealth) and the Privileged Poor (low-income students entering elite colleges from prep schools) are relevant. But Dr. Jack does not persuade me that universities aren't aware of the heterogeneity among their minority/low-income students, and the bulk of his policy proposals at the end of the book are aimed at government, public high schools, and foundations, not the universities themselves. The elite university I worked at previously had a comprehensive program working with this student population that was founded back in 2004.

2. The most compelling part of the book for me was the last third, in which he talks about flaws in programs meant to aid low-income students that in actuality demean them, along with the issue of food insecurity. These issues are important, but it was strange to me he devoted 1/3 of the book to a subject irrelevant to his central thesis, as these issues affect the Doubly Disadvantaged and Privileged Poor equally and he doesn't distinguish between them when describing their impact.

3. I have some questions about the methodology that I won't bother getting into (sorry).

4. And lastly, my biggest issue: the problem this book articulates is extremely narrow. Yes, low-income/first-gen/minority students struggle compared to their peers at these elite institutions. Their suffering is not worth disregarding, and universities like “Renowned” should do everything in their considerable power to work with these students to improve the experience of them and future cohorts.

But there's bitter irony in the fact that Dr. Jack writes this as he contemplates whether expanded admissions to private high schools is worth considering as a solution: “The use of federal dollars to place students in private schools, instead of improving public education, further disenfranchises public schools, removes funds from districts and schools that are already financially strapped, and sidesteps the problems plaguing the education system.” How does he address this issue, yet not spend a single moment talking about this same structural dynamic within higher education?

Harvard, for example (ahem), has a freshman retention rate of 99% and a 6-year graduation rate of 96%. Students from the bottom 20% of the income distribution have a 58% of rising to the top 20%. Money is not everything. Going to these schools can come with significant social and emotional costs, and I do not want to be dismissive of that.

But this book takes our system of higher education as a given and casts making the most elite institutions more welcoming to low-income students as something urgent to address. Yet both the history and the present of these colleges and universities suggest that they exist to reproduce inequality, in particular class and wealth inequality, and that the students who attend them can already expect significantly better outcomes than their peers.

The book succeeds in being an interesting window into the experiences of students who are experiencing the culture shock of elite education. It has some good ideas to take away if you are an administrator at one of these top schools, which is probably why I was exposed to it in the first place (and why the school where I worked paid him an extremely hefty speaker's fee to come for a day). But it takes certain ideas about the structure of higher education and the desirability or possibility of making these institutions welcoming to low-income students as a given.