Kynthia mentioned in her comment on yesterday’s post that masculinism is not the only ism on Mt. Everest. Sexism is rampant in mountaineering. That reminded me of some sketchy language I was noticing the other day on Wikipedia. Look at these quotes from the article on Anatoli Boukreev, a russian climber:
“Scott Fischer and Sherpas began guiding the six remaining clients to the summit”
Sherpas are local mountain guides who are almost always stronger, often smarter, and sometimes better technical* climbers than the western folks they’re leading. Note that not only does the author fail to mention any Sherpa by name by name, they’re not even recognized with an article like “the” or “some”. Just “Sherpas”. As if they’re a bulk commodity. $4.39/lb at Whole Foods.
“Unnecessary delays at the South Summit, caused by fixed ropes not being setup by the climbing Sherpas by the time the team had reached that point, cost the team more than one hour of daylight”
Note also that the Sherpas are not considered part of the team, despite the fact that they are the part of the team doing most of the real work, and the whites are basically tourists. And note that they recieve the first blame for the tragedy. When thing goes wrong, it’s easy to blame the slaves by calling them lazy.
It’s Wikipedia so I should really just change the article, but I don’t know how to go about finding the names of the Sherpas who were on that expeditition. I think writing them into the history would be a wonderful project though. When I’m a high school teacher, my kids are totally going to be doing on that for at least one assignment: re-writing wikipedia articles to de-priviledge the oligarchy and empower the margins.
* climbing is considered more technical if it requires difficult maneuvers. Think rock climbing.
You’re going to be a high school teacher?? I think your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I just wanted to respond anyway. Many teachers in general these days are strongly urged to be apolitical. This comes from the crazy rumor that those leftist, liberal teachers are indoctrinating good right-wing kids from kindergarten onwards. Thus the policing at UMD to make sure we were all teaching rhetoric without ever stating our own political beliefs.
Hey Mel!
It’s something I’ve thought about, and I think it’d be a pretty fulfilling job for me. You’re probably right that a lot of schools want people to be apolitical. But I’d want to work for a school that felt that racism and sexism were intolerable and wanted to have a curriculum that taught kids to fight against them.
So I guess that means finding a school that shares my politics?
Still, I kind of feel like saying things like “all races deserve representation in history” shouldn’t be considered a political statement, but rather just good old fashioned decency.
I wonder if that became a political statement at the same time that acknowledging our fault in global warming became an admission of one’s own leftist politics.