The incident with Henry Louis Gates Jr. has made it clear that while many Americans take pride in electing a “black” president, President Obama is not supposed to discuss race. Obama quickly got the message as well, transforming a much needed dialogue about racial profiling in the wake of Gates’s arrest into an appropriately mocked beer summit. Since a frank and informational discussion about race cannot be had in the political realm, it must take place within “radical academia,” right? Maybe not. Drawing upon her experience as a multiracial scholar, Heather Tirado Gilligan disputes this idea, exploring how the racial boundaries permeating U.S. culture stand just as thick within the walls of academic institutions. Finding it difficult to transgress such boundaries, Gilligan calls for effective affirmative actions that can finally begin the process of transforming them.
The Opposite of Obama
By Heather Tirado Gilligan
AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2009 CONDUCIVE
As a bi-racial child of a single mother, as a daughter of the projects who went on to earn a Ph.D., my life might seem perfectly suited to the hazy-happy tone of uplift that characterized discussions of race at the beginning of the Obama era. My mother came to New York from Puerto Rico when she was sixteen. At eighteen, she married, then had a child, my sister, at nineteen, and another at twenty (me). When she was twenty-five she divorced my father. My mother, sister and I lived in public housing in the Bronx until I was nine, when we moved to the exurbs of Washington D.C. My mother worked two jobs until I was twenty, though she had eventually earned her bachelor’s degree at night school at the University of Maryland. In contrast, I earned a doctorate in English from a well-regarded graduate program by the time I was thirty. I worked until fairly recently as a visiting assistant professor for the University of California. I am a published scholar, journalist and essayist. Like many Americans, across lines of race, I could not help but see myself in Obama, son of a single mother; that he was clearly an intellectual person held a particular meaning for me too. As a student of the late nineteenth century, and the writers of color who published in that period, most of whom were visibly of mixed race and felt acutely the pain of their in between position, I paused too to admire how Obama made his own mixed race work in winning the presidency.
Many battles over equality and affirmative action are fought over access to higher education, making academia seem like the front line in social justice struggles.
Still, the thrill of racial reconciliation that ran through the country on inauguration day shocked me, and I doubted its depth and sincerity. The shallowness of this thrill is now evident in the race-baiting currently characterizing criticism of President Obama, which perhaps seems like a predictable fallout of electing the first black president; it is difficult to remember the celebration of a post-racial America that occurred just a few months ago. From the early days of his candidacy, we should have understood Obama’s success (as did some scholars of race in the United States) as the result of an unlikely set of contingencies, a consequence of his very particular racial circumstances. His mother was white, and the white members of his family raised him. His father is African, rather than African American, and his black family distant enough in place and cultural difference to make an insignificant impact on how he was perceived, aided by the revelation of his black grandmother only at his inauguration, while his white grandmother played a central role in his life story throughout the election. Obama’s speech patterns, habits of dress and mannerisms are not racially specific, yet he clearly is not white. He married into deep Black Chicago connections and established a life informed by that context as an adult. Thus Obama’s racial identity covered the appropriate bases in a way that was sufficient to win the presidential election, both racially authentic and racially inoffensive in his public persona. We could feel one with him, or pat ourselves beneficently on the back for accepting him as our leader though he is black, and both with little discomfort. This is how we like our racial interactions in the contemporary United States, with as little challenging disquiet as possible.
Such a clear victory as Obama’s election, a visible movement away from our racist past, set self-congratulatory tongues wagging on the right and the left in the months following the election and inauguration. The right crowed for us to understand Obama’s presidency as symbolizing the end of our need for affirmative action. “The whole argument in favor of race preferences is that there is ‘institutional racism’ and ‘institutional sexism’ in American life, and you need affirmative action to level the playing field,” former University of California Regent Ward Connerly told the Boston Globe in March 2008, before Obama won even the Democratic nomination. “How can you say there is institutional racism when people in Nebraska vote for a guy who is a self-identified black man?” Meanwhile, progressives wept over Obama’s election as a symbol of change finally realized. “Whether by design or by default, the past now loses power: for the moment, it feels as if we’ve left behind the baby-boomer battles of the past 40 years; the culture wars that took us prisoner and cut us off from what we have in common,” wrote Nancy Gibbs in Time magazine the day after the election. Both reactions suggested the lack of distance between the racial politics of left and right. Conservative or progressive, we like our symbols, despite—or more accurately, because—of the fact that symbols frequently keep systems intact.
We like our symbols so much, indeed, that when Barack Obama moved outside of his role of racial reconciler ever so briefly, he found himself immediately rebuked, open to race-based attacks unthinkable in the days just before and after his election. After stepping messily into the controversy surrounding the July 20 arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., by suggesting that the (white) arresting officer involved “acted stupidly,” Obama was denounced as racist by Fox commentator Glenn Beck, a characterization swiftly publicized by other right-wing loud mouths such as Rush Limbaugh. President Obama moved quickly back into reconciliation mode by inviting Gates and the offending officer to share a beer with him at the White House on July 30, an event that Rachel Maddow, in conversation with Tricia Rose on her show that night, described as “surreal.” Still, Maddow asked Rose, professor of Africana Studies at Brown: “Was it a teachable moment?” Rose replied: “For a real teachable moment to happen, you have to have…data, facts.” An exchange of actual information was essential, Rose said, rather than swapping personal perspectives suggested by the beer summit. Expertise, she continued, is essential to understanding the complexity of race in the United States—the kind of expertise typically found in academe, not in the White House, thus discounting the president as a substantive leader in a discussion about race. Obama, she noted correctly, has quite enough to contend with in his current position without personally educating Americans about race, even if he was equipped to do so. “We have experts for that. We need to gather them,” Rose explained, conjuring an army of academics ready to fight a progressive battle for social justice.
Suggest a fundamental shift in our way of thinking about race, create one small pinprick indicating the painfulness of actual change, make a crack in the structure of knowledge, and you will be shown directly to the door, expelled like a lost mutt who’s sneaked into an expensive house and piddled on the floor.
I have little doubt that every academic I ever came into contact with voted for Obama, and believes, at least abstractly, in progressive social justice causes such as racial equality. I think academics also know, newfound national pride aside, that an election does not heal the racial inequalities that have structured this nation since its inception, inequities that are replicated daily, even in the most allegedly radical bastions of American society. The latter fact is perhaps more difficult for the intelligentsia to admit, as it strikes directly at how academia operates. Race (and class) continues to define fields of study and hiring practices in higher education, in a regressive rather than progressive fashion. I found this fact so crushing that I eventually left academia—not that I’d have faced good prospects had I decided to stay. After writing a dissertation that produced an alternate, multiracial version of nineteenth century American literature focused on authors who published in literary magazines, including writers prominent in ethnic and regional traditions, such as the Native American writer Zitkala-Sa, Charles Chesnutt, an African American writer who looked white and wrote about the absurdity of racial categories, and the southern white Thomas Nelson Page, whose oeuvre mourned the loss of the Old South, I found myself virtually unemployable. My work did not focus on major white writers, so I could not be considered for positions in American literature. Unlike Obama, visibly darker-than-white though raised by his white grandmother, I was raised by a brown-skinned parent, yet I look white. Nothing in my bearing or manner of speech immediately suggests to people looking for stereotypical racial codes that I am anything but white. Thus I was not considered for jobs in ethnic or African American literature, which are still viewed as affirmative action hires, despite my ethnic background and the class constraints I faced in obtaining higher education. There were serious economic consequences attached to these racialized limitations imposed on my employability, but I left the profession because academe came to seem the most stratified, stagnant organization I could possibly work within, so stunningly racist that there is no room for the smallest challenge to racial uniformity.
***
In the United States, the specter of the tenured radical is, like Obama’s election, a symbol standing in for actual, structural change. We imagine that academe is an institution where the work of equality is taking place: after all, it shelters “terrorists” like William Ayres and firebrands like Angela Davis, and is a home of many former activist-radicals. Mild-mannered professors like Gates, an English Ph.D. like me, unlike me, he hails from a family long part of an established black community. Of late, Gates is best known for his documentaries on PBS, his association with the most famous African Americans in the nation, and his appearances on Oprah, yet he is associated with radicalism simply because he works in academe. In addition, many battles over equality and affirmative action are fought over access to higher education, making academia seem like the front line in social justice struggles. Prop 209 in California, for example, ended racial preferences in the state in 1996 and diminished minority admissions to the University of California system with alarming swiftness thereafter. More recently, the 2003 Supreme Court case Grutter v. Bollinger, a fight over law school admission at the University of Michigan, narrowly upheld affirmative action in higher education.
Yet a cursory examination of the supposed hotbed of leftist radicalism and the allegedly most progressive departments, like English, reveal the same cultural divides, defined by race and class, that shape American society as a whole. Affirmative action exists in academe to shuttle people of color down specific career tracks; it is racist in the old-fashioned sense of the term, dictating that your place in the system matches your looks. Participation by people of color in the system leaves it sadly unchanged. My suggestion here is that despite Rose’s invocation of an enlightened army of experts ready to educate the populace about race and inequality, fewer people than we think are actually working on these pressing problems. Higher education, that place we have seen as a progressive force in the United States, is as invested as any other social institution in keeping culture divides in place, especially in the institution’s upper echelons, the research universities that fund their graduate students and create the professorial class.
My experience in academe suggests that higher education is more a modern iteration of the country club than a hotbed of radicalism. When I arrived at graduate school in 1996 to pursue a Ph.D. in English, I thought I’d finally set a firm foot on the path of upward mobility. Access is often seen as the raison d’être of affirmative action, and I was undoubtedly assisted by racial preferences. My opportunities as an undergraduate also prepared me for graduate school, and I did well in my first semester courses, but did not yet realize that excelling on my papers was only one small segment of success in this milieu. All I knew about accomplishment I learned from the upward mobility narrative, the nose to the grindstone, work-and-ye-shall-receive-uplift ethos of popular culture. In hindsight, it is difficult to imagine a more grossly inappropriate set of skills to take to academe.
Socially, I was ill-equipped to succeed, in part because I didn’t understand the concept of connections, the basis of advancement benignly referred to as “networking.” “Who are your people?” one faculty member questioned two years into my graduate study when I asked her to serve on my qualifying exam committee, sounding slightly vexed after I outlined my plan of study in our meeting, and more so as I didn’t understand her question. She rephrased: “Who did you work with as an undergraduate?” I had few people, much to my acute embarrassment in that moment, as I never understood the logic in collecting them. My mother didn’t attend conferences or belong to professional organizations; my father was a blue-collar worker all of his life—and not in a union. Neither met influential people or picked up business cards for their non-existent Rolodexes. My mother didn’t have dinner parties or attend cocktail hours; she mixed pina coladas and listened to salsa music on the weekends, and these are the activities I understood as social, as distinct from work. For middle-class people of any race, these leisure and work distinctions don’t really exist; the barbecue with colleagues or the chat at the health club with the boss are part of the way they organize their lives. They know that these blurred interactions make or break careers with regularity.
So I didn’t get the clamor to fetch the tea of an influential professor on class break, nor the unending series of social events I was expected to attend as a graduate student; these were entirely foreign rituals to me. After attending a few—post-lecture wine and cheeses, beginning-of-the-year mixers—I stopped going. The cheese was always horrible and cubed, the wine headache-inducing, and my self-esteem dropped precipitously after mere minutes of social interaction.
Or lack of interaction, I should say, as I was often pointedly ignored, at wine and cheese events, on class breaks, and in the hallways of our department. I found myself at an unfortunate nexus of race and class in academe, and lacking in both skills and protection. I should have curried every favor available, stood my ground nibbling and sipping until the fact of my presence was accepted as inevitable. Because I entered academe on a minority fellowship, and nothing I could do after that was right. I paid for my undergraduate education with student loans, Pell grants and 20-hour-a-week blue-collar jobs; my GPA when I finished was good rather than excellent. Though I did manage to write a thesis and graduate with honors, I would never have gone to graduate school if not for affirmative action, and I could never have met my tuition and living expenses without a minority fellowship.
Once my difference had actually earned me a bit of money and a slot in a prestigious program that may otherwise have been earmarked for white students, I suddenly was reclassified as a middle-class white person, my actual background and life experiences no longer relevant. Mentioning that I was from the Bronx, or affirming that, yes, I did know what plantains were because I grew up eating them, was seen as the worst kind of racial inauthenticity, an elaborate masquerade intended to take money from the deserving, the children of the better classes who’d genuinely earned their place or the darker-skinned poor who clearly needed a hand up. Such ignorance disturbed me on my own behalf, and I did come to feel comfortable feeling outraged for myself—no one else was going to feel outraged for me, after all. I found these moments devastating because I came to academe thinking I would find a community of like-minded people. I entered graduate school expecting to find visionaries, a group ready to crush social norms into something new and better. I found instead the same the simple-headed notions of race, where skin color coincided with social expectations in lockstep with stereotype, a place where acting white, black or Latino translated into a specific place in the social system. A system, in other words, where I (or anyone else challenging the racial structure) had no place.
I was offended, too, on behalf of justice generally. How academe reproduces the structural inequality of the larger culture with impunity is illustrated beautifully in the way that the department handed out funding to students according to race. I used the phrase “a bit” advisedly in relation to the amount of money my difference earned, because the graduate school meted out minority funding begrudgingly: My fellowship was half of what was routinely granted to white students. The other half of the money I was promised as a stipend was to come in the form of a Stafford Loan, which I learned only after my arrival on campus. Once I discovered this disparity, I turned to my fellow graduate students, asking them if they got the funding packages they were promised.
Let’s make academe the radical force for change it should be: let affirmative action define diversity outside of race, and base such policies on class.
And thus began my social death, after revealing that I, poor girl who looked white, had minority funding. The ritualized exclusion of the racial misfit defined my academic career thereafter, and it began with a series of snide comments: “Say something in Spanish,” one of my fellow classmates once commanded. I thought maybe she needed to practice for the language exam too, so I asked her in Spanish if she’d like to come to the library with me. “At least you can talk like one,” she replied. Such comments were public censures, and the bigger the audience, the better: once, I mentioned I attended Montessori school for four years as a child, in the context of a larger conversation going on the in graduate lounge. I left the room, only to a return to a heated group discussion about people belatedly claiming their ethnic heritage to get minority fellowships, as if this were a pressing social problem, the misappropriation of graduate student funding by “so-called Hispanics,” as one in my cohort termed me. I thought, and still think, that the pressing problem is that affirmative action had netted exactly one poor person for our program the year that I was admitted, from the inner city or otherwise: me.
Eventually, I did meet with the graduate director, and she did bequeath me more loan money. But she also clearly signaled her lack of sympathy along with with her acquiescence, meeting my request with a skeptical: “is your rent very high?,” suggesting that I was asking for more than my fair share of resources. I understood then that I was supposed to be grateful for the second-class access I’d been granted, and that my funding package was different because I was different, and less worthy, not because of an administrative error.
I got my loan and I learned my place: interloper and fraud.
***
I determined thereafter to prove that my access was deserved, and stayed in graduate school, with no change in my social status, for eight years. My dissertation was an archival research project on race and late nineteenth century American intellectual culture, in which I asked people to reconsider the absoluteness of racial categories, by using a frame other than race to understand the place of writers of color in the United States. This may sound like a densely academic project of limited relevance, but to me, at the time, it seemed like a clear strike at the racism that structures the academic world, in analytical approaches as well as in graduate student funding distribution.
Literary studies is very interested in the idea of separate traditions of literature based on the race of the author at hand. There is African American literature and American literature, and rarely do the two traditions meet minus an elaborate theoretical framework. Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark used a close reading of classic American texts to show the black presence at the heart of American literature. Morrison traces what she calls an “Africanist” presence in classic American texts by writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville, in books traditionally read as having nothing to do with race. Eric Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations used the idea of dialectics to read shared themes in the works of American and African American literature, and argue for the significant, if indirect, impact of African American culture on American culture.
Brilliant books both, but, in their emphasis on hidden, underlying racial exchange, both authors elide the historical fact that black and white writers have actually talked to each other about race, directly, publicly, and incessantly, throughout American history. Americans have, in fact, never shut up about race; the subject has always been openly at the heart of our cultural discussion. From the advent of the slave narrative in the 1800s to plantation literature of the late nineteenth century, from Gone With the Wind to Dreams of my Father, Americans—white Americans—have always found stories of difference endlessly fascinating. And from my perspective in academe, this talking seemed to accomplish little in changing the way we think about race.
Looking for a more historically accurate way to understand race in American culture, I turned to a method that had long fallen out of favor: genre studies. I used genre to look at how Charles Chesnutt, an African American writer in the late nineteenth century, was talking to his contemporaries, like the white writer Thomas Nelson Page. Both men wrote plantation fiction, a very popular short story form in the post-Civil War period, and they both published in august magazines (Atlantic Monthly and Scribner’s, respectively). Though I would never describe Chesnutt’s work as parody, the writers’ deviations in their use of form made their stories as sharply different as Gone With the Wind and The Wind Done Gone. Page used the form to eulogize the Old South; Chesnutt used it to push for continued recognition of the radical damage inflicted on the country by slavery. Both were using literature to make an argument about politics in the post-Reconstruction United States, with Page urging magazine readers to consider the Old South benign and dead, and Chesnutt asking readers to recall their sympathy for slaves, which once galvanized the abolitionist movement, as Jim Crow took hold in earnest in the South. I dug through five decades of late nineteenth and early twentieth century magazines to extract a number of these literary conversations, weaving writers long plucked out of context–from lions like W.E.B. DuBois to lesser-knowns like the half Chinese, half British writer Sui Sin Far–back into an integrated story of American culture.
In doing so, I escaped entirely a problem that plagues discussions of writers from this period, some of whom were very light-skinned: Are they ethnic enough to be part of an ethnic tradition? So much ink has been spilled by literary critics, for example, justifying Chesnutt’s blackness though he looked white and wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, and the ethnic authenticity of other writers of color who like him could easily pass for white, and were similarly inclined intellectually and professionally. So much so that criticism of writers of color suggests that what’s at stake in evaluations of authors is their racial essence, and their adherence to what we could today consider an authentic ethnic identity, rather than the significance of the books that they wrote. In effect, critics spent their time trying to shoehorn these writers to fit into the same neatly dovetailed categories, recreating the clear lines of identity that made me such an oddity. And, in so doing, these critics sorely undermined the life’s work of the authors they “recovered,” to use literary criticism’s term for writing about texts once deemed insignificant and now dusted off for reevaluation. Chesnutt’s essay “What is a White Man?” presents a far more sophisticated analysis of race in its title alone than most critics bring to his oeuvre.
Make affirmative action apply to jobs that don’t necessarily conform to our expectations of appropriate work for African Americans or people of color generally.
My own work, when finished, was rough, still a dissertation rather than a book, but when I finally wrote the conclusion, I considered myself very clever. I thought, too, that I had finally proven myself when the department’s director of job placement called my dissertation one of the best in recent years. Typically, simply completing a dissertation is considered sufficient evidence of the ability to conduct original scholarship, but my dissertation, it was said, had “actual ideas.” This single moment of praise helped me to justify the difficulties that had come before, including the moment when another graduate director left me a voice mail while I was in the middle of my project, informing me that my work “lacked a certain quality,” and that my funding was being cut off. I wouldn’t call myself confident after I completed my dissertation, with self-esteem tattered by so many moments like this, but I worked up enough gumption, bolstered by supportive members of my dissertation committee, to apply for jobs as an English professor. I gathered my application materials, including my writing sample, and applied for jobs in American and African American literature.
My campaign for a job was less successful than Obama’s, though I realized early in the process that I would never get a job in academe, and therefore did not find myself too disappointed. Applying for a professorship is complicated, and involved sending applications, getting dossier requests, then invitations to interview at an annual conference, then a two-day job interview at the campus in question. Though I got many dossier requests for jobs in American literature, after I sent in my writing sample on a black writer as part of my dossier, I received no calls to interview for positions in American literature. I had, however, been invited to interview for the best jobs in African American literature, a fact that one of my committee members met with amazement. “But you’re not an African Americanist,” he said, and indeed it is difficult to imagine a project more removed from the usual approaches to the African American literary tradition than mine. For all of its focus on African American writers, I’d deliberately written a multi-racial history of American literature. Though I was perfectly well-equipped to teach African American literature, and I did teach the subject for some time after I competed my dissertation, acceptance as a full-fledged member of the field was an impossibility. I’d spent eight years clevering myself out of gainful employment, and the small salary and health insurance I earned by teaching while I finished my dissertation were about to end.
And I wasn’t the only idealistic student, or young promising scholar, ultimately compromised or drummed out of academe altogether by these racial divisions. There are the other pale students, the racial imposters I’ve already mentioned; people, smarter than me, who simply quit early. Then there are the scholars who visibly conform to racial expectations, but don’t want to study the subject they physically match. One woman who began the program shortly after me, for example, wanted to study race in kung-fu films, and instead was urged to write a dissertation on twentieth century black women writers under pressure from her dissertation director. Traditional subjects like Toni Morrison’s novels placed the woman in contention for a job in African American literature. Otherwise, she would have to compete against a significantly larger pool of scholars for jobs outside of an ethnic tradition. There, roaming freely in the racially stratified life of academe, the fact of her darker skin would be a disadvantage. As it turns out, her dissertation on black women writers, which as far as I know remains unfinished, disadvantaged her too. I don’t mean to suggest that a dissertation on race and kung-fu movies is necessarily desirable, but rather that creative ideas, new ideas, often begin in such small odd germs. Instead of being allowed to mature, hers was immediately crushed into something different, to reflect the realities of a racialized job market. The potential for a new and challenging way of seeing the world was dead on arrival.
Imagine this control exerted 100-fold, as new ideas are trampled and minds reshaped to fit a racialized job market, while people who don’t fit into the role of visible minority or white are systematically culled from academic life. The result is a startlingly homogeneous culture and a stultifying life of preformed ideas. This culture is the precise reason why scholars debate, justify or challenge writer’s ethnic authenticity as if such absurd conversations are a legitimate form of literary criticism. It’s why they ask questions that will never result in answers challenging us to rethink our perceptions of race in the United States. Scholars who want work are forced to conform to conservative ways of thinking that are, inexplicably, labeled progressive. The academic system creates a closed circle of ideology under the cover of affirmative action policies and the putative production of new knowledge. This is the true face of the institution we look to for progressive change.
The academic gatekeepers dress themselves in kinder clothes these days and masquerade as forward-thinking people, but challenge them in any way and you find the same white waspy class, perhaps with different stakes than they claimed in the days before diversity, but still holding bitterly to what’s theirs: Goethe and Shakespeare, Hawthorne and Melville, James and Wharton, Pynchon and Barth. Such lists signal that knowledge is completed to the advantage of a particular group of people who control knowledge. Adding a single class requirement in minority literature, adding a single author to a reading list, are shifts that symbolize change, but do not challenge the production of droning sameness in academe. Suggest a fundamental shift in our way of thinking about race, create one small pinprick indicating the painfulness of actual change, make a crack in the structure of knowledge, and you will be shown directly to the door, expelled like a lost mutt who’s sneaked into an expensive house and piddled on the floor.
***
Affirmative actions battles flare around academic admissions for a reason. Access to higher education determines life course in the United States. And academe, like it or not, produces both our knowledge and our cultural sense of self as a nation. The elite echelons of higher education also produce our political leaders, and shape their world-view, evidenced perhaps in the plodding moderation of the Obama administration.
Real change will be recognizable by the pain it inflicts, as old systems die hard, not sweetly in a sea of waving flags, or after a beer on the White House lawn.
Let’s make academe the radical force for change it should be: let affirmative action define diversity outside of race, and base such policies on class. Make affirmative action apply to jobs that don’t necessarily confirm to our expectations of appropriate work for African Americans or people of color generally. Place people from different backgrounds in positions of power across fields and banish bourgeois gatekeeping with these appointments. Such logical, pragmatic changes would shake the foundations of knowledge in this country, and in the process dislodge some of the class that have been holding fast to the production of knowledge for a century. Such changes will ensure that someone, somewhere, will be doing something about the chasms that have historically structured life in the United States.
These changes will hurt some. Fewer children of the white middle class will get into graduate school. Jobs that were once the exclusive property of white scholars will be given to scholars of color. A white officer who arrests a black man livid at having been accused of breaking into his own home will be pointed to as an officer who made an unfortunate decision without apology. And our cultural sense of self will shift profoundly. Real change will be recognizable by the pain it inflicts, as old systems die hard, not sweetly in a sea of waving flags, or after a beer on the White House lawn. Feelings of ebullience and conciliation are a sure sign that change has not come.
Author Bio:
Heather Tirado Gilligan is a writer based in San Francisco. She has taught literature in English, Women’s Studies, and Black Studies departments. For more information on her work, visit her website: heathertgilligan.wordpress.com.
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