Doing things: Times to speak up, and times to listen

Background: The MIT class ring is called the brass rat, and it is a Big Deal amongst MIT people. You get your ring at the end of your sophomore year, so wearing one around campus is a status symbol that you are at least halfway through your MIT education. You flip it around at graduation and forever after, so wearing a flipped brass rat is an even bigger status symbol - you have an MIT degree! There is a lot of pomp and circumstance surrounding the ring, starting with the "ring premier" partway through your sophomore year - each class has a "ring committee" that updates the design to reflect that specific graduating class's time at MIT, and that design is revealed at the premier. Starting with the class of 2002 there has been a push to include a woman in the MIT seal on the ring, but despite women making up nearly half of the undergraduate population it took until the class of 2017 to get another woman on the seal (happily the 2018s followed suit, so hopefully it will stick). Supporters of the two-men seal claim that they aren't supporting the exclusion of women, but the continuance of "tradition" - which is bullshit for many reasons, not the least of which is that the seal has been altered in a variety of ways over the years (like placing a remote control in the pocket of one of the seal people for the class of 2006) with no "tradition!" outcry. Also, any time you are defending something solely on the basis of "that's the way we've always done it," you need to dig deeper to figure out what you are really saying, since "tradition" can be, and often is, used to justify the continuation of all sorts of oppression long past the point when one can plausibly deny awareness of the issue (SAE, anyone?).

***

I was beyond excited for my class's ring premier. I look young for my age and was dying to soon have wearable, undeniable proof that I not only was an MIT student (and not a visiting high schooler, as I often got mistaken for), but I was (at least) halfway through my time at the Institute. Plus, like most 19-year-olds would be, I was dying for a status symbol that my particular community valued highly. I would finally have a tangible piece of evidence that I belonged with the cool kids.

My classmates and I dressed up for the premier, and applauded with delight as each successive component of the ring was revealed. I was waiting with bated breath for the revelation of the seal, because I was convinced that our class would finally include a woman - it was 2006, for chrissakes! But when the big moment finally came, they revealed a seal with two men - in fact, they specifically used the term "unadulterated" to describe it. Apparently the inclusion of someone like me would have been an adulteration - would have made it "weaker by adding something of poor quality."

For a split second I felt crushed, but then my disappointment turned to confusion as I noticed the rest of the audience reacting. Men, not all of them but a lot of them, all around me were on their feet cheering. Not just cheering - pumping their fists in the air, whooping, and hollering with excitement. It was like being in the stands at a sporting event when the home team scores, but the unbridled enthusiasm was because people like me were excluded. I felt a new feeling in the pit of my stomach, one that I had never felt before. A minute ago I had been comfortably surrounded by my peers, feeling very much a part of the MIT community. Now a large part of that community was triumphantly celebrating that I had been kept out of a cherished part of our shared culture, and I felt sick. I dimly noticed some students walking out - mostly women but some men as well - but I was too surprised and confused to join them. To this day I still very much regret that I didn't.

(Technically our ring has a woman on it, because it has Athena, goddess of wisdom, in the courtyard in another section. But if you believe that - despite the fact that she is separate, a quarter the size of the men (plural), and standing out in the yard instead of at the dais - she is still somehow equal, then we have a 1954 supreme court decision to talk about.)

MIT is a very male-dominated place, and I had been made to feel my otherness in many small ways over my first two years there - the two most common were people thinking I was there to visit my brother or boyfriend, and other students telling me it was easier for me to get in because I was a girl. It had been easy to brush off those incidents, and even laugh at them, because I thought they were anomalies - little leftover shards of a dying patriarchal culture whose heyday had long since passed. My ring premiere was the first time it was forcefully revealed to me that the belief that people like me didn't fully belong was much more pervasive and deeply held than I had realized, and it was the first time in my life I had been made to feel that way. After all, I'm a cis, straight, white, thin, able-bodied woman from an affluent neighborhood and with a great education - I very comfortably belong in the vast majority of places that I go. That brief glimpse of what it feels like to be marginalized, and to have your exclusion not just tolerated but celebrated by people you had liked and respected, was an eye-opening moment for me. As was the continuing delegitimization of my feelings by many of my male friends, who told me I was being too sensitive, reading too much into nothing, and - like most women who voice their feelings - crazy. In some ways, that denial of my experience hurt worse than the initial insult itself - I vividly recall the pain of a previously-trusted male hallmate telling me to stop complaining about nothing. We are still in the same social circles but I have never felt the same way about him since.

I tell this story today because my womanhood is often how I connect to and seek to more deeply understand other forms of oppression. I can never claim to understand what it feels like to be a person of color in this country, because my white privilege so far outweighs my oppression as a women given all the other forms of identity privilege I listed above. But moments like the ring premier and the conversations I had after it - and moments like when I was at the movies and the row of men behind me couldn't stop laughing at an anti-rape PSA (because apparently trying to prevent rape is hilarious), or when I was in the park and and a group of men near me kept catcalling a group of women marching against sexual assault - give me slivers of insight into what daily life is like for so many people in this country.

What stands out to me the most about all of those moments is not the small number of men committing the offense, but the large number of men watching what was happening and doing nothing. That is the real staying power of systemic oppression - not that some members of the dominant group occasionally make their power visible in ugly ways, but that the rest of the dominant group lets inertia prevent them from interfering. It is not the responsibility of the oppressed to intervene and educate the people who are oppressing them, and oftentimes doing so is not even a possibility for them. I felt physically unsafe in that movie theater and at that park; there was no way I was going to approach those men and ask them to stop. The ones with the power to dismantle oppression are the members of the dominant group, and - just like Spider-Man - having that power gives them the responsibility to do so.

The way I wanted men to disrupt other men during the moments I talked about here (and so many others) - that's the way I need to disrupt my fellow white people when I see them perpetuating racism, and my fellow cis people when I see them perpetuating transphobia, and my fellow straight people, and able-bodied people, and... And the way I wanted my male friends to actually listen to what I was trying to tell them about something that was painful and difficult for me - that's the way I need to listen when a person of color trusts me enough to tell me about a painful confrontation they had with racism, even if I was the one who caused the hurt. I don't need to explain away what happened by talking about good intentions, or alternate interpretations, or hyper-sensitivity. I need to listen, empathize, apologize when necessary, and above all else be grateful for their trust in me, knowing how hard it is for me to openly talk about my experiences with sexism with most men given how often it is met with denial.

For me at least, I often times don't speak up when I see something happening because I feel like I don't know how. But there are a lot of resources out there on how to effectively challenge oppressive moments and how to tell someone they sound racist, and letting my fear of making a fool of myself prevent me from fulfilling my responsibility to disrupt oppression is just another way of accepting the oppressive status quo. My silence legitimizes the power of systemic oppression, and makes me complicit in perpetuating it.

I still wear my brass rat every single day, no longer because I need the world to know that I went to MIT, but because when I look at it I remember that pit in my stomach nearly a decade ago. I remember how my silence forces other people to spend most of their lives with their stomachs in that pit. And while I don't always speak up when I should, and I don't always get it right when I do speak up, I wear the ring like Spider-Man would wear a locket of Uncle Ben. I have power to disrupt oppression, and that means I have the responsibility to do so.