Racism and Sexism at Citizendium

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29 November 2006

From: Kali Tal <kali[at]kalital.com>
Subject: <nettime> Racism and Sexism at Citizendium
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 11:44:57 -0700
To: Nettime-l system <nettime-l[at]bbs.thing.net>

A month or two ago I was invited to join in building a new repository
of knowledge on the Internet, a spin-off from Wikipedia called
Citizendium. The chief attraction of Citizendium (also called CZ) was
that articles would be authored by laypersons and experts alike, but
editorially approved by experts -- thus creating an environment of
authority and reliability that Wikipedia, with its lack of quality
control, could not match. I strongly support public intellectual
work and I am all for making reliable information and analysis widely
available to all who seek it. I joined CZ with high hopes, and with
the goal of recruiting others to participate in a project I felt
could be very useful and rewarding. My initial contributions
impressed Larry Sanger enough that he invited me to join the
Executive Board of Citizendium, and I accepted.

I wrote to colleagues and friends about CZ and invited them to
participate -- and especially appealed to African Americanist and
feminist scholars, since that is my own area of expertise. I asked,
in my announcements, what Wikipedia might have looked like if there
were significant participation from black or women scholars from its
inception. I assumed -- wrongly -- that Ethnic studies and Women's
studies scholars would be welcome at CZ. I was gravely
disappointed. We are not welcome, and our disciplines are not
welcome. We may participate only if we are willing to subsume our
work under the headings of other, "more traditional" disciplines. CZ
as conceived of and enforced by Sanger is a strongly conservative
endeavor, and adamantly opposed to progressive scholarship.

I am withdrawing from Citizendium because of the racist and sexist
policy put in place by Larry Sanger, who claims that the disciplines
of Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies do not belong in the list of top
level categories in Citizendium, or as individual categories at all.
Sanger has unilaterally decided that all race and gender topics
should be split up under traditional disciplinary headings, so that
there will be, for example, a sub-group of "African American
Literature," and "African American History," but no category -- at
any level -- in African American studies, and he embraces the same
tactic of fragmenting other Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies. The
fact that his broad strokes of exclusion primarily effect women and
minority scholars does not seem to matter to him.

Here is what Sanger has to say about gender and race studies:

"I take the view that most of these university departments are inherently
cross-disciplinary and--here I know I am treading on thin ice and saying
what few dare to say--highly politicized themselves. Well, I do not want to
make CZ "politically correct," i.e., appealing especially to one (largely
American/Western/Left) ideology. I really do want to make it neutral, and
that means **not** creating special groups for ideologically-motivated
groups." [posted November 16, 2006 10:29:59 AM MST to the Citizendium
Editors listserv]

The notion that traditional disciplines are race and gender "neutral"
is at the heart of Sanger's rationalization for exclusion. The
credibility of this argument has been (for anyone knowledgeable in
the those areas) thoroughly destroyed over the last thirty or forty
years, as accumulated quantitative and qualitative evidence has shown
that despite many white male scholars' protestations to the contrary,
power and authority have remained firmly gripped in their hands. The
claim that clearly biased disciplines are "neutral" is a plain and
simple power play, and an excuse to perpetuate the patterns of
exclusion that have been in place for hundreds of years. The tactic
of fragmenting ethnic and gender studies into small, minority sub-
categories under the control of larger white and male dominated
groups is also well understood, both by the white men who employ the
tactic to their advantage and by the minorities and women who are
disadvantaged by it. The idea that Gender and Ethnic Studies are
"political" and enforce "political correctness," while somehow
traditional disciplines are above politics and do not enforce an
inequitable Status Quo would be laughable if it were not so
pernicious and injurious to the people who are oppressed by sexism
and racism -- women and minorities.

Once again, this is a case of a white male scholar with no experience
in either race or gender studies legislating, with broad strokes, how
those disciplines will be represented in an academic endeavor he
hopes will be of major importance. He does it with no regard for the
current state of scholarship in those fields, or the expertise of
their practitioners -- an irony in an academic endeavor that claims
to rely on expertise for its authority. Expertise apparently only
counts if it agrees with the naive opinions of the untutored white
man in charge.

Sanger claims that his version of neutrality is rooted in
Enlightenment principles. But as anyone working race and gender
studies knows very well, white men have traditionally only applied
Enlightenment principles to each other. It is the work of women and
minorities that has extended those principles and challenged those
who espouse them to apply them more and more broadly... and it is
women and minorities who have risked their livelihoods and even their
lives as they have engaged in over 250 years of activist work
dedicated to building communities and nations that are free not only
in principle, but in fact. By refusing to acknowledge Ethnic Studies
and Gender studies as essential top-level disciplinary categories,
Sanger is attempting to roll back our progress towards freedom and
equality, as conservatives everywhere have been trying to roll back
all of our gains.

Frankly, I am embarrassed to have had anything to do with CZ and I
will be publicly critiquing Sanger's policy in various venues. I hope
that all supporters of race and gender studies will join with me in
boycotting CZ, and with protesting Sanger's decision.

You can find more information on Citizendium at http://
www.citizendium.org. Most of my discussions with Sanger took place
on the Editors listserv, but there are a few on the Citizendium Forum
pages:

http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,259.msg2165.html#msg2165
http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,251.msg2164.html#msg2164

Kali Tal
http://www.kalital.com

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Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 09:20:22 +0100
From: Florian Cramer <fc-nettime[at]plaintext.cc>
To: nettime-l[at]bbs.thing.net
Subject: Re: <nettime> Racism and Sexism at Citizendium

Am Dienstag, 28. November 2006 um 11:44:57 Uhr (-0700) schrieb Kali Tal:
> I am withdrawing from Citizendium because of the racist and sexist
> policy put in place by Larry Sanger, who claims that the disciplines
> of Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies do not belong in the list of top
> level categories in Citizendium, or as individual categories at all.
> Sanger has unilaterally decided that all race and gender topics
> should be split up under traditional disciplinary headings, so that
> there will be, for example, a sub-group of "African American
> Literature," and "African American History," but no category -- at
> any level -- in African American studies, and he embraces the same
> tactic of fragmenting other Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies. The
> fact that his broad strokes of exclusion primarily effect women and
> minority scholars does not seem to matter to him.

Two remarks:

- If one participates in a project that is structurally conservative (as
an elitist, anti net-cultural counter-project to Wikipedia), it's
hardly surprising if it's also structurally conservative in its
content. If there is a lesson to be learned for feminist, queer
studies, African American studies etc. intellectuals, then the one
that they should finally look beyond conservative academia and
traditional publishing. Wikipedia, in fact, is such an alternative,
and would overcome much of its quality problems if more academics and
intellectuals would bother to contribute to it. (That said, there also
are amazingly good Wikipedia articles on philosophical and humanities
topics.)

It always struck me as odd that, for example, you need to attend
expensive ivy league universities in order to study with the best
scholars in that field, and that minority students at inexpensive
state schools hardly have a chance of studying with reputed scholars
in those fields. (Back in the 1990s, as an exchange student in the
USA, I struck me - from my European point of view - as plainly obscene
that self-declared Marxists taught at Duke University.)

- To have a conservative understanding of displicines is one thing,
to be racist and sexist another. Many feminists, in fact, are opposed
to disciplines like Women Studies because they consider them ghettos
and find it more important to "hack", or rewrite, disciplines like
literature and history altogether. But even as a conservative, Sanger
shouldn't be called a racist unless he claimed that, for example,
African American history didn't belong into Citizendium at all.

Florian

--
http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc

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