Common use of Yeah Clause in Contracts

Yeah. Great story. When I came home from Kenya in October (he’d left maybe in August), he was wearing pimp clothes: the wide hat, the brocade shoes, the fancy clothes. And women were going braless. This was ’72, ’73. He says, “Now you should wear hot pants and go braless.” And I went, whoa. I said, “I don’t think that’s me.” I went back to Kenya. I had a hot-pants suit made out of black cloth, and I got African beaded belts to wear with it. I come back and I’m going to go braless in my little tank-top thing and my little hot pants—and he’s a Muslim. ▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇: (laughs) “Cover up. Cover your head!” (laughs) Yeah. So much for that. Don’t pay attention to this man anymore. (laughs) I’m pretty sure that some of my language about the devil comes from that experience of trying to figure out a way to be in the world. At that point, I really did set myself in opposition to him. I wore long clothes all the time; I oftentimes covered my hair. I was not going to join the Nation of Islam. I was not going to abide by the kinds of culinary habits. For example, I didn’t feed him pork, and I did eat it. And, of course, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I was going, well, should I eat bacon, because it’s his kid? And he goes, “My mother ate bacon.” (laughs) And he smoked dope, too. So he was not the best Muslim. That was a big piece of it. He was active in a group, the Association of Black Psychologists, and they did a book called Even the Rat Was White. (laughs) Their world was so oriented toward race that I didn’t want it. And they were extremely sexist. I mean, not to mention that they had to be represented by the way these women look, right, and if these women don’t do these things, then they are damned. I realized that I was never going to buy into his kind of theology or his philosophy, but I could try to accommodate him as much as possible. I left him when our daughter was four years old. But we had been together for a number of years by then, because I got married when I was twenty-- and she was born when I was almost twenty-nine— I was thirty-three when I left him. So we’d been together for a long time. And the divorce didn’t happen until another four years after that. So it was a really long time, from the time that I was twenty years old, to be with him. A lot of that was really influencing me. In the short story I gave you, the civil rights movement doesn’t figure in very much, except to the extent that I felt that people wanted to be nice to black people at my university—and it was driving me crazy. I felt that nobody wanted to know who I was, or see me, except that there’s a black person here, and so you’ve got to be nice to black people. I thought, I’m nice enough, but why should everybody know me, and everybody want to have a piece of me? It just felt bad. In Virginia, we had undergone massive resistance to desegregation. Our school was not closed. Because our school was actually in a black neighborhood; it would be really hard to get any white people there. So it could go on. But all around me, and particularly in northern Virginia, schools were closing, and people were coming down on the buses. We were having freedom schools there. But we continued. So my family participated, but none of us were marching. We profited quite a bit from the civil rights movement. But at the same time, the civil rights movement, as you know, helped to break up these black communities, which is what I was most familiar with. My high school became a junior high school. My elementary school was closed. Because the high school never had what the white high schools had. They weren’t at the same level, when they were integrated. My high school, as a junior high school, was primarily black, and teachers were white. That was one of the effects. I had a black teacher who came into the dining hall and showed me how to use a knife and fork. We didn’t particularly use them at home, particularly if you’re eating something difficult like chicken or fish. Why are you going to be trying this when you’ve got all these little bones there? But you wouldn’t find that anymore. You wouldn’t find the teachers taking the time to groom these kids in ways that would make them feel like there are better things out there for them. I’m sure there are good white teachers there, but the identification with the community fell apart. So, the civil rights movement going on—a kind of a tug, from my sense, between ▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇ and ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇. At home: the ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇ scene. My husband became ▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇, and rather notorious at Stanford. I’ll just tell you briefly: he was denied tenure at Stanford, went to San Francisco State; he was denied tenure at San Francisco State. He went to Marist College in upstate New York, was denied tenure there. At that point I think he just actually stopped trying to get a tenure-track job, and he did some classes here and there after that. At one point, he taught a class at Princeton (when he was living in his hometown, near the campus.) He lives with our daughter up in Oakland. I think the civil rights movement influenced the way I think about things. I wrote another story back when I was a freshman in college. It’s about what is necessary to try to make a group stay together. To some extent, I was actually trying to figure out where I would be in terms of a kind of more militant and a more, I don’t know if you want to call it moderate, because certainly people were killed in the civil rights movement, and they were seriously injured—but a movement that was not so much about turning the other cheek, versus one that said, I will stand up and I will fight. I wasn’t sure if either one of those would work, but I knew that there was something that you had to create that would bring this group together. It never did have a real content. It’s not just about civil rights, and it’s not just about a kind of human rights, if you look at those two ways. There’s got to be something in the middle that talks about what it is that we, as a group, will find that will bind us together and will make us seem that we share something. Neither one of those was getting it for me. I think I was in a quandary, personally, about this. I’m sure that all these things were influencing the experiences that I was having then— To some extent, it’s sort of like the women in Kenya. It’s what I’d been experiencing all along—walking into this classroom, or having this young woman come to talk to me become more conscious for me, and I have to now start to deal with that. But let me tell you a little bit about the hiring. I told you about the job talk. And then I got the job offer, and it was $9,900 for the year—which I thought was great (laughs), and I said— but twenty years ago they were around $1500. But, I don’t know, they’re probably $4,000, to be able to rent there. I mention this thing about not negotiating just because it is common for women to not negotiate, to feel, “Oh, I’m lucky to have a job offer.” So here you are. You’re an academic; you’re doing something that you like and you’re getting paid for it. From that point on, I did try to tell my students to think about negotiation, at any rate—even if it doesn’t raise the salary, to think about what kinds of things that you might need, and what kinds of leave time that you might need, to be able to be there. ▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇: I think they were more likely to be negotiating, and I think they were more likely to want more money. And I think they were more likely to be offered more money. The fact that I had a husband working at Stanford probably did make it easier for me to say yes to the $9,900, as opposed to if I had a wife, working or not working. I have to tell you one more story, and then I’ll get back to ▇▇▇▇▇▇. When my husband finished his PhD, he had two offers. One was a job offer at the University of Wisconsin, and the other one was the post-doc at the University of Pennsylvania. The job offer at the University of Wisconsin came with an offer for me, as a lecturer, I think, to do something—maybe it was in anthropology. And I refused because—and it’s a problem for me nowadays as well—because [I felt]: they didn’t know me. They’re just giving me this job because they want to hire my husband. I know spousal hires are all in but it took me a long time, as a feminist, to say yes to spousal hires. Now, with spousal hires they are mostly hiring a woman and bringing her husband on. (laughs) It feels a little bit different than it did back in those days. But first of all, I couldn’t believe that they were offering me a position. I don’t know what they had of me; maybe they had a vita, or something. But I hadn’t finished my dissertation. I think that’s the same thing that happened when I came to ▇▇▇▇▇▇, came to UCSC. I get the interview with anthropology; they like me. And at that point, you had to have an interview with a college: you were hired half-time by a college and half-time by your board of studies. I interviewed at ▇▇▇▇▇ College. It seems to me that that interview at ▇▇▇▇▇ College was an interview with ▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇. I could be wrong in my memory, but I remember sitting in a room talking to him, and his saying, “We’d love to have you at ▇▇▇▇▇”—and then going to ▇▇▇▇▇▇, where I talked to three or four different groups of people, all actually knowing a little bit more about me, and having specific questions that they’d like to ask. And that meant, for me, that ▇▇▇▇▇▇ was interested in me, more so than ▇▇▇▇▇. ▇▇▇▇▇▇ had talked an awful lot about my husband—who was making a name for himself by then as ▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇ (his name is now ▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇), and had been standing in opposition to some things at Stanford and also doing some community service, I think, in the area. I think ▇▇▇▇▇▇ just thought I would be a good person to have, and he thought my husband was an interesting person. It just wasn’t enough for me. Whereas ▇▇▇▇▇▇ was organized according to “family groups.” At that point they called themselves family groups; later on they started calling themselves kin groups. A family group was the group of students in one section of the core course; faculty teaching the core course, some other faculty members associated with that group of students; and staff members associated with that group of students. ▇▇▇▇▇▇ was trying as much as possible to break down the hierarchies of administration, faculty, and students, and have people all together. They wanted to know from me a lot about how kinship and how families work. (I think maybe they wanted to know more about kinship, because psychologists think they know how families work, right?) That was my specialty. And even though I realized that they needed to understand that families and kinship don’t work the way that they think they do (laughs), I thought that these were people who were interested in me. There were two things that I let them know about family and about decision- making processes, because those were the two things that were really important to them. The first one was that kin groups usually come together for some reason, whereas in ▇▇▇▇▇▇, they wanted to bring together their kin-group members so that they could assert kin-group-ness. (laughs) I said, No, they come together for funerals and weddings; they come together to make decisions about members of the family; they come together for dispute settlement. Actually, if you’re trying to mimic real life, then your kin group probably needs something that it does, as opposed to just, we sit here be-▇▇▇▇▇▇▇.” (laughs)