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9 Gender, Race, and Millennial Curiosity Ana M. Martínez Alemán In this chapter, the significance and importance of a raced deliberation of gender in higher education scholarship is considered. The failure of higher education research and scholarship to explore the many ways gender and race are interdependent and dynamic elements of identity and thus significant for the development of consciousness and conduct are examined. Given the continued and growing participation of all women in post-secondary education, continuing to disregard gender’s racial details and distinctions in higher education research and scholarship is a dangerous trend for this new millennium. When asked to contemplate for the pages of the New YorkTimes Magazine the prospects for the twenty-first century, noted author Stanley Crouch surmised that “race, as we currently obsess over it, will cease to mean as much 100 years from today” (Crouch, 1996, p. 271). Crouch speculated that the “international flow of images and information” would change the realities of lives on the planet, realities that will reflect a material reshaping and ideological reconstruction of race. Crouch rightly predicts (given the demographics of immigration , migration, diaspora, exile, interracial births, and the real and virtual collapse of cultural and national borders) that how Americans have come to know and understand race, how our behaviors have been shaped by this consciousness , will be a historic curiosity. What is absent from and implied by Crouch’s prognostication is itself a “curiosity” of gendered significance. Crouch’s view of “race,” not unlike those of other writers and scholars of this century, is an experiential schema free of the complications presented by gender. He submits us to an account of “race,” meaningfully constructed within present and future politics, that is apparently free of experiential interruptions and that is somehow independent of the effects of gender and gender relations. The realities that will be recast by Crouch’s ideological shift in the twenty-first century appear to have no sexual or gender differences, no positions within consciousness other than the specter of “race.” Implicit in this view, then, is the supposition that “race” is and will be similarly experienced by all, that such an experience is and will continue to be 179 normative, and that experiencing “race” can be independent of all the ways our bodies are conferred, including appropriate gendered meaning. Based on an explanation of “race” that obscures or ignores other markers of identity, it is a grossly simple and highly suspect prediction. “Race” consciousness without a consideration of such behavioral and experiential realities like gender is misrepresentative and illusory.1 Such deception, problematic in any examination of our varied associations, warrants careful scrutiny if post-secondary scholars are to honestly examine how race, or in Crouch’s words, “race consciousness,” will shape the future of higher education. I am confident that the material and ideological realities that Crouch correctly identifies will alter the place and position of race in the college and university of America’s twenty-first century. But as women of color2 outnumber men of color on college campuses, and as the enrollment of all women in higher education continues to exceed that of men (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1996), can we in American higher education validly speculate the future of “race consciousness” in higher education without accounting for gender? If women of color now account for a quarter of all professional degrees (Babco, 1997), can we accept a configuring of race on campus that does not weigh the significance of gender? But the growing number of women of color on college and university campuses should not be the sole reason for a deliberate inquiry into the intersection of race and gender. As systemic arrangements for relations between individuals and between individuals and institutions, race and gender can provide higher education scholars with an example of the varied and complex ways campus life is experienced. How, for instance, as challenges to affirmative action marked the end of the twentieth century, is African-American women’s access to higher education differently impacted from that of European-American women? If such antiaffirmative measures as California’s Proposition 209 are deemed attempts to decrease minority enrollments at selective colleges and universities (Bowen & Bok, 1998, p. 32; Burdman, 1997, p. 32), are Black women applicants subject to further discrimination because they are also women? Are such antiaffirmative action policies also inherently sexist? Are women of color “under the double jeopardy of gender and race discrimination” (Busenberg & Smith, 1997, p. 150)? Examining the links...

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