Limited Voices
The Problem with Boxes
The problem with being a public intellectual and a person who isn’t white is being put into a box. The box that says “you now represent all people of your culture or race.” When a white person has a platform, he does not then speak for all white people, no one would even consider this. Just because Lin-Manuel Miranda is Puerto Rican does not mean he represents the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of all other Puerto Ricans, even though this is often how society views him.
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It is a discouraging cycle. It is not easy or comfortable to be representing an entire culture, and this is often the case with public intellectuals who are people of color.
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"I don't differentiate between black and Latino actors. We're in the same struggle to be represented in a way that's even close to honest. And I can tell you that the amount of Latino characters I can point at and say, 'That's what my life experience looks like' - I can't think of any off the top of my head besides Jimmy Smits in 'Mi Familia'" (Miranda).
Keeping a Balance
"I was an aspiring astrophysicist, and that's how I defined myself, not by my skin color. People didn't treat me as someone with science ambitions. They treated me as someone they thought was going to mug them, or who was a shoplifter." - Tyson
When deciding who we would feature in this project, we actually had a really hard time keeping a balance between men and women. There were plenty of men we could think of whose lives were “open” to the public, who had very active facebook/twitter/instagram feeds, and who often did interviews about their opinions on certain subjects. We could not think of as many women who were open like this.
Even J.K. Rowling rarely does public appearances, she communicates to the public mainly via tweets. Maybe this is just a problem we faced, but we don’t think so. We theorized that this is because it is not completely safe for women to be entirely open in the public sphere. We ran into again and again that female public intellectuals would only be open in one aspect of their life, not every aspect like many men are.
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