#quotas

I actually reread my sequence of posts on the situation just now and couldn't find a single phrase in any of them that I think would justify your feeling that I "just fundamentally don't believe anything they say about their experiences", while at the same time, in certain particular ways only, that is in some much milder sense true, just not evident from my recent posts. So my response is going to be my typical brand of defensive yet simultaneously conceding a much milder version of what you say. (You or anyone else is welcome to point to where in the recent posts I betrayed a fundamental disbelief in what marginalized people say about their experiences.)

There is only one thing in my sequence of mid-June posts that I expressed skepticism about, and I expressed it over and over, and that was about the possibility of government officials looking through phones and targeting people -- particularly American citizens -- for writing generic anti-Trump things or posting anti-Trump memes on social media. (I tried very deliberately to conceal my skepticism about this in the lunch conversation, only expressing horror that such a thing could be happening, which was enough to get me "in trouble" and quite possibly my colleagues were perceptive enough to see that deep down I was skeptical.)

One crucial element of these kinds of conversations, and one that I frequently get frustrated by people not recognizing, is the distinction between some political action that may or may not be happening or going to happen, and marginalized people's personal experiences. The claim which I was so skeptical of, about people getting nabbed for putting generic anti-Trump things on social media, is not someone's experience, unless they themselves have experienced getting nabbed for their phone showing something anti-Trump, or I suppose, by proxy, someone they know from a similar marginalized background suffering this. My colleagues and whoever else who believe this horrible thing is happening at the borders aren't believing it as part of an experience; they're believing it based partly on whatever their media bubble and/or their social bubbles are saying (not based on the first-hand experience of anyone in the social bubble, almost surely), and based partly on their own intuitions of what is or isn't plausible. I can't fault anyone for basing things on social intuitions this way, since this is something I do a ton of -- this is extremely evident from like half of what I write on this blog! -- and intuitions certainly do in turn generally come from experiences. In this case, the closest thing to experiences that were brought up in the whole conversation were memories of "how brown people were treated following September 11th"; even those weren't direct experiences (they were events that happened in someone's local community), and to me it's a bit of a stretch to go from "there was lots of social prejudice against brown people almost a quarter century ago in the earlier Bush era as a result of a historic event" to "naturally the second Trump administration is likely to start persecuting ordinary citizens based on their social media postings, especially if they're of color; a person with enough awareness of the environment after 9-11 would of course know that".

(By the way, I brought up the likelihood of the Trump administration doing all this to a different friend and we discussed whether there's any real evidence beyond intuition combined with extrapolation, and he did a little research and found a few isolated incidents reported and discussed in forums such as Reddit, more than actual news stories. One of them, for instance, was a white American guy getting detained for four hours after they looked at his phone and found anti-America memes on it. Of course I should corroborate this myself and try to get a clearer picture. I would mention that there's a serious difference between anti-America rhetoric and anti-Trump rhetoric, although Trump himself may be unable to see that difference.)

Now for the concession bit: it is true that sometimes when it comes to people talking about certain kinds of things that actually are experiences, I do harbor some level of skepticism, not of their truthfulness, but of their interpretations of events. Since most -isms in recent decades, particularly racism as in directly and overtly being prejudiced/derogatory based on skin color alone, are taboo in most spaces, most experiences of perceived racism involve some element of interpretation of what's going on in someone else's head. (A similar thing is going on with sexism -- though much milder on the "taboo to be overt about it" front -- but I'll focus on racism here.) A lot of the perceptions of what's going on in the offender's head are probably accurate, and people from minority racial groups in the US are probably insightfully observant about a lot of covert racist behavior/speech in ways that someone like me likely wouldn't be, and I should listen to them about it. But there's also just about every psychological (and in certain progressive spaces like university settings, even social) incentive in the world to identify some behavior/speech as coming from racism rather than the dozens of other things obnoxious behavior/speech might arise from. And I don't know how to listen to claimed experiences of racism without applying that filter at least a little bit and (from time to time, depending on the story) feeling a little unvoiced skepticism, not of the objective facts of the story they told, but of the inferred mental state of the badly behaving person in the story.

This is probably not hard to guess from my demonstrated modes of thinking about culture war issues over many dozens of posts scattered throughout the history of this blog. It's probably harder to guess by friends and colleagues who know me in real life, where I'm much less overt about thinking this way. But it's possible my lunch mates at that lunch had some clue of it, because while I take most of my colleague's "how brown people were treated in her liberal college town community following 9-11" stories entirely at face value, one of the "experiences" brought up feels so out-there to me at face value the way she describes it that, even though it seems clear to me that Something Bad was probably happening and that racial prejudice was probably one element in it, I have like a dozen questions. (I put "experience" in quotes because it appears my colleague didn't experience it herself but heard about it, and it might be that even 24 years ago she didn't know enough details to answer any of my questions.) And of course I don't dare directly question my colleague's interpretation of it, and I didn't actually ask most of the questions, but I did my "that's horrifying in a novel and shocking way" thing that again got branded (even the "horrifying" part and sincere raw emotions that come with it!) as only what a straight white male would think.

So yeah, maybe sometimes I do betray a very indirect and covert not-taking-people's-interpretations-at-face-value thing that Does Not Help My Case, I don't know. It's not what I described in my original set of posts, though.

This got way, way too long, and I still haven't addressed the original question in your ask, which (for those who don't feel like scrolling all the way back up to the top) was

what do you think would be better for you if you weren't straight/white/male, and why you think benefits would accrue just for not being in one of those categories?

I'll try to keep this shorter, partly because this post is long already, and partly because I swore to myself long ago that as long as I stayed in academia, discussing issues of race/gender in academia was like the one spicy topic that I was actually going to keep off-limits even on this totally-secret-from-my-professional-life blog -- yes, I know I'm doing the paranoid "always seeing a scandal in the making" thing again here, and my long-term possibilities of remaining an academic are hanging by a thread at this point anyway, so whatever.

Anyway, it's probably pretty obvious from a perusal of my whinier posts made over the years in this space that there is a major cluster of things that I can't seem to make happen for me that is keeping me Dissatisfied With My Life, and this cluster is centered around my inability to Settle Down, which can be roughly broken into two major issues: failure to get a long-term job (in academia, as has been my entire aim for some 16-20 years), and failure to find a partner.

To summarize, being interested in men would probably help in very minor ways with the job thing and (under the right circumstances, like staying in regions with a high gay male population and low levels of ambient homophobia) in major ways with the partner thing; being black or brown would certainly help with the job thing; and being a (cis!) woman would surely go a long way in helping with both. (This is much trickier to defend where getting a partner is concerned, because in ways I'm not used to, being a woman is no walk in the park in the dating market either, and it doesn't appear that women as a group are really doing all that much better than men are sexually or relationship-wise. But at this point, after mostly being in denial about it during the 2010's, I feel like way too much evidence has stared me in the face about the advantages of being a woman on the math academic job market and adjacent things like getting invited to speak at conferences, etc. which in turn help with the job market. Guess I don't really want to elaborate any further here, except to add in boldface that none of this is to say that I'm against the policies that bring this about in principle -- in fact, I think I'm mostly for them on a "least of the evils" basis for solving an unfortunate problem about skewed representation in academia -- but on a personal, individual level, yeah, it sucks for me.)

Where the job thing and race is concerned, I want to make a major caveat that I don't mean to imply that I would actually choose to be black, especially African-American, in math academia (it seems to me that being brown, or being a woman, would overall be pretty nice though). A black person in math has to get used to most often being the only black person in the room in every type of academic setting, bears the greatest burden in doing work within academia for DEI-related issues, and has to deal with racially biased assumptions, conscious or subconscious, including probably even among super progressive academic types, that they have a less educated upbringing and have lower academic intelligence. I have a professional acquaintance who is an African-American man in math academia, who went straight from finishing his PhD program doing some pretty strong (collaborated) research but never teaching, to a tenure-track position at a good research university as a baby-faced twenty-something who had never taught a single course, if I remember right never even been a discussion session leader. (For those who don't know, it's normal in math academia to go through a couple of postdocs in-between and I had pretty much never heard, in modern times, of someone going straight from a PhD program to being an assistant professor at an R1 university, nor of someone getting an assistant professor job with zero teaching experience, unless they seriously look like Fields medalist potential.) He was actually reached out to by the hiring committee without having even applied to the job. He seems to be rising to the challenge, is surely doing a lot better than I would have ten years ago straight out of my PhD program, and I have faith in him. But he showed (especially towards the beginning) a good bit of understandable anxiety about having had this thing handed to him, and not feeling entirely ready, nerves over teaching for the first time, and generally needing to Not Screw This Up. Although the biggest problem of my professional life is never getting a tenure-track job offer over a decade past my PhD (and only getting the smallest glimmerings of interest almost exclusively from non-research-oriented institutions) and spending half my time over six months of each year applying to many dozens of positions because I don't know what else to try to do with myself, I don't actually envy this friend who has had the opposite extreme experience. At the same time, the fact is that he not only got offered something immediately that I've toiled year after year after year after year for over a decade failing to get, but had it HANDED to him on a SILVER PLATTER (all-caps in the spirit of early-2010's-era SJ blog posts), and we might extrapolate from that to get an idea of how things might go for someone in a less extremely marginalized category in math academia.

(Possible counterpoint: well, this kind of diversity hiring / quotas is over in the new age of Trump 2.0, so this should no longer be an issue for me, right? No. First of all, I'm not sure how much it affects what happens behind closed doors within hiring committees, and secondly and more importantly, Trump 2.0 has thrown academic funding into such chaos that it's widely believed there just won't be very many assistant professor openings to speak of for a while. So rather than giving me a boost, Trump 2.0 has very likely put the final nail in the coffin for my dreams of long-term academia.)

Where getting a partner is concerned, if I were either a woman at a similar level of conventional attractiveness or (say) a gay man looking identical to my actual self, there would be many ramifications, some negative, that I can't fully imagine without experiencing it, but one thing I'm confident in saying is that Things Would Actually Happen rather than my having to put strenuous amounts of mostly unpleasant work into getting one single date every many months which almost never turns into a second one. Also, as a gay man, my height and general lack of visible muscle would surely stop being a disadvantage. I spend way too much time on this blog on the topic of my dating life or often failure to have one (although lately I get the impression that some people follow me for primarily this reason and distinguish my Tumblr self in a mostly positive way for this?), so I won't go on slicing and dicing through this any further, but I'll just say that trading my current Things Don't Actually Happen problem for a Have To Learn How To Say No problem of being female in the heterosexual dating world, which I would genuinely find really daunting, at least frequent practice at learning how to overcome it would have been automatically provided to me from a very early part of adulthood. (Slightly similar for one of the other main issues, the Too Many Matches Most Of Which Are Crap problem.)

As a more minor point, I think, provided I weren't living in the wrong part of the country, it would be quite nice for my social life in general to be gay -- there's something about gay culture that's always appealed to me, although there is also something about me that I think is very incompatible with modern queer culture and I'm not sure how easy it would be to find the former without the elements of the latter that I have trouble with (ironic because queer groups tend to be very welcoming of me as I am, whereas older-school gay groups probably -- very understandably! -- wouldn't be).

(Of course, it's still recently enough that the tide has turned with attitudes towards gay people that there's still a lot of understandable fear about rights and safety and so on. My impression is that I'd feel compelled to become a little more aware of rumblings among some Republicans about reversing progress in gay rights, and greater anti-LGBT sentiments in a general sense within our country, and if I somehow got the earthly desire to visit a Middle America rural area would have to be more careful about showing my relationship with an SO in public, etc... but some people here fault me for underestimating the true level of hostility/danger, and that's an honest difference in model of what's going on, and I'm not going to go down that path.)

I'll finish by saying that questions like "Would you choose to be less straight or less white or a cis woman?" have an inherent ambiguity. They could be interpreted to mean pressing a button that means your body instantly changes to something everyone around you "expects" but you have identical experiences that led you to where you are now, or they could be interpreted as "Would you rather have been born with a different body but otherwise as similar to your actual self as possible, and lived through all the background experiences that would have come with that?" I've mostly been using the former interpretation, but it's true that if I'd actually had to grow up gay, or of color, or as a girl, I would probably be affected by certain negative experiences whose memories I'd still be living with. I'm going to give a way overdue bit of recognition to this excellent reblog by togglessymposium, which points out (among other things) that gay people past a certain age have experienced a certain kind of trauma that is probably hard to understand if you're in a certain category of person (SWM!) that has never experienced, including the way it feels to have laws passed specifically targeting and limiting you. If I were gay and above the age of, let's say 30, I'd be living with this, and none of it would be fun. (The student at the lunch table in my story, who is of an age that he might not have even known his sexual orientation until after Obergefell, not as much. Still, the guy did grow up in a really conservative state. I don't envy him.) Somewhat similarly, if I actually chose to be a woman living life AFAB from birth, I'd probably have had to go through particular kinds of social/psychological crap that I'm glad I haven't had to go through, would more likely have had truly traumatizing things happen to me, would be less likely to have wanted to go into math academia in the first place or just been less confident at math altogether even with the same amount of ability (even more so if I were black or Latino), etc.

At the same time, there's still this part of me, that I can't really endorse but I can't quite smother either, that would rather find myself with those bad memories, along with the knowledge that they come from unjust trauma inflicted on me, with the feeling of having overcome it to find success anyway and being stronger for it (assuming a reasonably positive outcome where I'm not constantly suffering riddled with mental health aftereffects), as opposed to being SWM and having been ragged on for the past decade and a half within the ambient discourse for my privileges while seeing myself as a failure at achieving my main life goals despite all those privileges (there's a name for that in my discursive environment too: Mediocre White Man!).