TSL: The Smut Life or The Sensitivity Training Life?

The oldest college newspaper in Southern California clings to a very old idea: that group identity is better than individual identity

Pomona's school-funded newspaper, The Student Life, is, as always, one step above school-funded pornography. Heck, there's even a review of pornographic movies on Page 5 of the Life & Style section! How stylish, indeed.

But what's more obscene than the pornography is the group-identity politics that so characterize its pages.

Sex columnist Zoe Yang had some explaining to do after she wrote a column she wrote last week that described how she used to do a little role playing with her former boyfriend. I'll save you the sexually explicit details and just say that Ms. Yang likes to pretend she's a Vietnamese prostitute and her boyfriend is an American G.I circa the War Against North Vietnamese Communist Aggression.

I was kind of stunned that Ms. Yang would put something so personal up in plain view. Who was she to expose the very intimate relationship she had with a former boyfriend? That she wrote so publicly only just to make a slight point about racial stereotypes is troubling, indeed, but I wager that's a matter for her and her former boyfriend to take up (if at all) and so I recuse myself from assessing it.

Naturally, that isn't why Ms. Yang's in trouble with Janelle Hing '08 and Simiao Amy Li '08 and the oh-so-many of women of color whom they claim to represent. Hing and Li fired off a letter to TSL. (By the way, they published that letter and gave me and Aditya a small paragraph after libeling us, but hey, we're not important enough to matter.)

Hing and Li criticize Yang for daring to speak for women of color generally in a letter where they purport to speak for women of color! Now if that isn't the pot calling the kettle black, I don't know what is.

Their letter includes such gems as this:

"Casting oneself in these exoticized roles to foster an understanding of the underlying systematic issues of white-male domination likely creates more problems than it solves. It cannot break down the structures of inequality and oppression, and sexist and racist legacies that continue to plague people of color."

Who ever said that was Ms. Yang's intent in writing the column about her own sexual behavior? And how dare Hing and Li presume that all authors must work to "break down structures of inequality and oppression"? Maybe Yang, in her own unique way, wants to write about things that matter to her, not the entire race she purported to represent.

It gets far worse. After arguing that Yang doesn't speak for anyone but herself -- as if writers and readers didn't already know that!--Li and Hing go on to excoriate her.

...having experienced hegemony many times as women as well as people of color, it is clear to us that we do not have the freedom to have our words interpreted as ours, and ours alone. To the majority, we will always be speaking, to some extent, for any and all minority groups attributed to us. For a woman of color to make statements regarding her own sexual preferences, she must understand that her views and preferences can easily be interpreted to represent all women and minorities. (bold is mine)

"She must understand"? To hell with that!

If whenever I picked up my pen, I was assumed to speak for all red-heads I would surely break it in two and never pick it up again.

How dare Ms. Li and Ms. Hing assume that all of us will automatically think Ms. Yang writes for anyone other than herself?!

Hing and Li criticize Yang for pigeon-holing Asians, but in fact, Hing and Li pigeon-hole Yang but suggesting that somehow her responsibility as a writer is much larger than it is and that somehow all of us racist white people assume that she speaks for all Asian people. If that isn't a racist assumption, I don't know what is.

I try never to resort to identity politics, but for the sake of full disclosure, I'll give you a bit of personal information. As many of you know, I'm in love with my high school sweet heart, Tina. We were very good friends in high school and lived only about a half a mile from one another and even though she turned me down fourteen times (yes, really) for a date before she finally said "yes." I could not imagine a day without hearing her voice.

She just so happens to be ethnically Vietnamese -- child of Vietnamese refugees, to be precise-- and she also happens to be a brilliant writer. Even though I give her grief for falling short of her potential or for resting on her laurels, I've been moved to tears by the pieces she's written. Not surprisingly, she won our prep school's highly coveted writing prize and essentially taught herself English when she was a kid.

So you can see where I'm coming from when I assess Ms. Yang's writing and the shake up.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't offended by Ms. Yang's column, but I've never once believed that I had the right to silence her or make her column more than what it is: a sexually-active woman trying to make sense of the world around her. In college, you should be offended all the time.

I would never think that Ms. Yang spoke for Tina because Yang shared an artificial racial designation with Tina. I guess I'm just a typical white person. (I should check with the Claremont Colleges for Barack Obama.)

Yang wrote an apology in this issue in which instead of defending her right to speak as an individual, used the typical racial play book of how she wants to take back a stereotype in a society that rejects her standard of beauty, and on and on and on. (The bit went on for three pages!)

Too bad. She had the opportunity to really make a statement about how she's not a member of someone else's arbitrary racial criteria.

Tina writes for herself and herself alone. She writes an individual. And she's damn good at it.

Guess which writer I think is better.