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The Problem In The Pronouns
As a theologically liberal clergy person, I receive a lot of drivel masked as thoughtful, contemporary writing addressing the most urgent issue of our day: How can we make life better for nice, middle-class white people? These things come with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, and are often written by black people, but they are really about white folk (and people “passing for white,” which I think includes people like Condi and Ben?)
Two big clues to who these missives are for, and what they’re really about: Pronouns. Also: verbs.
As a representative example, I offer the following, penned by Amira Sakallah and presented courtesy of the Theology of Ferguson project. “Ferguson,” you will recall, is the small city in Missouri where an 18-year-old black man, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by a white police officer. This is important, because a) Michael Brown is dead; and b) it sparked huge demonstrations and riots that went on all year, and resulted in massive property damage and further loss of life. So: serious business! Something for the clerical-collar-clad social warrior to really sink her straight, white teeth into! The essay is called Being a Do-Gooder, Becoming a Freedom Fighter: BlackLivesMatter:
In fact, in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, acknowledging the truth of how you have benefited from white or white-passing privilege at the expense of Americans of color, whether you know them from your nonprofit work or personally, can be very painful.
If you really want world peace, challenge your intentions. When you really start working for the powerless, the powerful will not be as excited about you anymore. You will not be praised for your selflessness. You will not be complimented. Your return on investment for taking this next step of service in the world will not be of benefit to you. In fact, in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, acknowledging the truth of how you have benefited from white or white-passing privilege at the expense of Americans of color, whether you know them from your nonprofit work or personally, can be very painful.
But this truth sets you free. It removes the paralysis you have often sensed within yourself but have been unable to identify. It makes you useful. It makes your work full, as a servant to your sisters and brothers in humanity. All of the benefit, then, goes to the betterment of black lives in America. The uplifting of black value in society. Where it belongs.
As a citizen of a country that has white supremacy sewn into its very fabric, your job now is to check your privilege, or in more religious terms, humble yourselves. In pursuit of well being for all, your job now is to sacrifice your comfort, and hear the stories of the Black Lives Matter movement. Your job now, is to show up and listen.
Pronoun problem: “your privilege,” “humble yourself,” “sacrifice your comfort,” “acknowledge the benefits of white (or white-passing ?!?!?) privilege,” and, of course, “this truth sets you free.”
Even assuming all this acknowledging, checking, and humbling does indeed set me free, so what? I thought this was about a young black man who — do we need to be reminded of this? — is dead.
I am a privileged person and a lucky, lucky girl. My sons do not stand a one-in-three chance of being incarcerated in their lifetimes, nor are they at high risk of murdering or being murdered, nor of being shot by a police officer, for that matter. My daughters do not have a better-than-even likelihood of bearing their children out of wedlock and rearing them alone.
The pronoun problem (and the limp verb problem) is endemic to liberal discourse; anti-racism is about the souls of the white and middle-class, not the well-being of the black and poor. Even calls for “action” are about white being (acknowledging, checking, humbling), not white doing. This is about whether the rich get through the eye of the needle, not whether the poor live and eventually prosper.
Where is the passage that begins, “This is what poor and African-American people need in order to not be poor anymore, and to lead lives that are as happy, healthy, and interesting as the lives of the lucky and privileged?”
Published in Culture, General
Kate,
I think your focus on the pronouns is extremely perceptive.
The magical, superstitious implications of the phrase, “If you really want world peace, challenge your intentions” are mind-boggling. What else might we achieve by “challenging our intentions?” I’d like a cure for cancer: Will it help to “challenge my intentions?” Lack of access to clean drinking water is a massive problem for much of the world. Think I can discover a low-cost solution to the problem by means of a vigorous challenging of my intentions? I truly want to see an end to the enslavement and rape of Yezidi women. I’ll challenge my intentions and see if that helps.
It does seem like the intent is to humiliate and humble one group without helping the other. My son is that rarity, a conservative social worker in Indy, who last year worked as a therapist in an inner city high school and now works with child protective services. The stories he tells break my heart. It seems to me that the biggest problem, and not just for any one race, for the poor in general, is the lack of modeling in many of these neighborhoods. While they are growing up kids don’t see what good parenting looks like, what a family is (many live in extended conglomerates of coming and going people) what a disciplined life looks like and so on. What they do see is drug use, teens having babies, welfare dependency and the like. How can a social worker do much about this in the hour or two he spends per week with troubled families or teenagers? How does he give them purpose and hope? He desperately wants to, but how to do this? Any ideas greatly appreciated.
All I comprehend from the essay excerpt you quoted – and it’s not easy to dissect such a stream of consciousness ramble – is that the movement does not want us to perform any positive action to help anyone; they just want us to lower ourselves. They don’t want anyone to get a hand up from us; they just want us to cut off our hands.
What a small, contemptible ambition.
Kate, do you respond to these people in any way?
It never helps to use “you” to much. The problem might be other people but the solution is usually how we react to others.
This is also garbage. There is also “yellow privilege”. It helps no one to be stuck in the past. I think Islam does Arabs no favors by always bringing up the Crusades or Israel. Blaming others doesn’t make you any less accountable.
Virtues and hard work have no color. Any group that have been stable and sacrificed for the next generation will be privileged but they were also in the slums and the tenements not that long ago.
I really first thought this post would be about the he/she or unisex issue. Let’s call men mothers and women fathers because there is no difference. Except for the parts, personality, and brain chemistry. ;-)
We saw an interesting group on our DePaul tour yesterday: a middle-aged white woman, a large black woman, and what appeared to be (by accent and looks) very tall twin African brothers.
The black woman had on a t-shirt which read:
I think those brothers might have a shot at earning their own privilege.
Here’s where I get confused.
America was an obviously more racist country 60 years ago.
It is also true that by many objective standards [crime, incarceration, family structure, literacy, employment], the everyday status of many [I won’t go so far as to say most] black people was far better 60 years ago than today.
I’m not sure what conclusion to draw from those two observations.
Isn’t this straight out of Neitzsche? People only help other people to feel better about themselves and this turns the person helped into something other.
Seems that black activists are finally realizing that most of their so called allies just use them as props in a smug contest between gentry liberals.
Personally, a healthier development there could not be.
Not all racism is propagated by bad people for bad reasons. Blacks are far more racist than whites in this country. And their racism (which links all long-term thinking and action to being “white”) directly leads to bad social and economic results.
I watched the whole Boondocks series—it’s actually an interesting show—the main character, Huey, is a fierce little radical, but he’s driven nuts by his grandfather and brother who contradict the pieties, and earnest, well-meaning liberals who spout them.
I agree. The show is pretty complex and enjoyable.
In Anchor & Flares I tell a story about a little boy who was beaten by his stepfather. On one occasion, he required medical attention, and a state trooper who had been called to the house drove him to the hospital. The kid remembers lying in the backseat, looking at the back of the State Trooper’s head and pondering his options:
1.) I can be like my stepfather.
2.) I can be a victim.
3.) or I can be that guy…
Lo and behold, that kid grew up and became a State Trooper.
Children want to survive. They’re scanning the world for evidence that life can be better than it is. At least one of the children your son encounters in his work (and probably many, many more than one) has already carefully filed away the clues your son provides just by showing up and loving them.
I recommend Gregory Boyle’s Tattoos on the Heart.
Touche!
It isn’t really racism I originally wanted to discuss, though it’s an easy bunny trail to get me scampering down. It’s the apparently unconscious solipsism of the discourse.
Are they? I’ve never experienced a black person being racist to me. How much could America have changed since I grew up?
Blacks in my city are extremely sensitive to being “dissed” by white people, and they blow up with any opportunity. They also tend to see everything through the prism of race, even (or especially) when others do not.
But the racism that concerns me the most is the way blacks treat each other. Acting white involves working hard, striving to achieve in school, pulling up one’s trousers…. this is the racism that Bill Cosby combated.
Challenging your intentions means asking yourself how much you care about the plight of the disadvantaged and oppressed and what you’re willing to do about it. You can talk all day about the poor Yezidi women and not support doing a damn thing about helping them. That’s what a lot of whites is the US do, they express frustration and sadness about the state of the black community, but they don’t do much beyond that. Are our intentions to really help people in need or just stroke our egos that we’re so engaged in the world and mindful of the hardships of others by talking about them up to each other?
You grew up in Washington State, right? I grew up near Portland. It is easy to be enlightened when there is so little experiential data.
I don’t know that we have made progress in thirty years. and the yardstick I use is my family. My (white) brother’s wife is dark skinned. When they married in 1975 it was a little unusual but not that big a deal; surely not expected to be an issue for their children, since we as a society were past that kind of discrimination.
Wrong. They don’t talk about it much but I sense it has been a significant factor in their life and in the lives of their two beautiful daughters. I don’t know for sure why we haven’t made progress, but I believe affirmative action and professional race agitation has counterproductively led to mutual resentment. It has heightened the awareness and importance of skin color, a truly superficial quality. You do not know anything about my sister-in-law or my nieces, or my brother for that matter, from their skin color.
As an example, my niece went to a small liberal arts college where they gave her lots of special attention because she was black, and had special programs just for minorities (?) like her, where she learned how oppressed she had been. It was confusing, unhelpful, and uncomfortable to her to be singled out as different.
When people are really in trouble, there’s no substitute for showing up. I have some wonderful (liberal) friends, including clergy, who teamed with a local sheriff’s department on a restorative justice project that turned into a statewide phenomenon.
Whether or not my friends began with the romantic idea that criminals are victims who just need love, they showed up for the concrete experience of interacting with damaged human beings who have damaged other people.
They shared these interactions with police officers, and began to understand and respect their work and point of view. When their efforts failed, they got a taste of compassion fatigue. When the project began to yield good results, the do-gooders in and out of uniform got to share what is known as “compassion satisfaction.”
Like anyone whose job is essentially human service, they found that the work changed them (“challenged their intentions!”). Those who persevered became wiser, deeper, more realistic and thus finer lovers-of-neighbors. This is the guilty little secret of service—it really does humble, challenge and change you, and it can be painful and even set you free. But that’s an effect, not a cause—it’s certainly not a prerequisite.
Whether Officer Darren Wilson was or was not a racist, he showed up, day after day, in a neighborhood my earnest liberal clergy colleagues had never set foot in or given a thought to until it was time to protest. Where had they been? Where were they when a poor black mother’s little baby was having trouble breathing and she needed help and a ride to the hospital? (This was the call Darren Wilson had responded to just before his encounter with Michael Brown on the street).
I’m willing to listen to Father Gregory Boyle about what poor people need, because he’s with them. Not just “with them” in some imaginary solidarity, tweeting”support” from a Starbucks on Beacon Hill, but actually physically present. I’ll listen to Revs Jeffrey Brown and Ray Hammond for the same reason—they showed up.
What helps means removing the things that have destroyed the black family, and communities. Restore reliance on one’s neighbors – but that means enormous cutbacks in welfare programs of every kind. It means wholesale adoption of conservative platforms: less regulation and lower taxes means more employment opportunities; school choice means better educational opportunities, etc.
This is seen, of course, as cold-hearted hatred of poor black people. But, like good parenting, that which is perceived as cruelty in the short term (“why can’t I do whatever I want?!”) is precisely what is needed in the long term.
Poverty is an issue all right but not really a racial one. In central New York as in Maine, poverty and dysfunction bear an entirely white face. They are not the effect of white privilege or some sort of imaginary racial inferiority.
There probably is something like white privilege. And male privilege, and good-lookin’ privilege. It’s ridiculous and useless for those holding the privilege to feel bad about it. It’s even more useless, in fact very counterproductive, for those not holding the privilege to focus on and resent it, or for the government to try to put a leveling thumb on the scales.
From another essay that arrived in my in-box after Charleston ” I clench my teeth, ball my fists, and cry in frustration and sadness. Please, God, we must do so much more than jack [redacted].” What follows is more “white people need to recognize…white people need to acknowledge…” Basically, we need to dry our tears, gird our loins and…visualize…
One thing I noticed more in Virginia than here in MD is racism of blacks toward each other regarding skin tone. Darker skinned blacks were prejudiced against lighter skinned blacks. This might be part of the legacy of slavery in that lighter skinned blacks were often the house slaves (often more educated, but also more likely to be products of a slave master’s will) and darker skinned ones worked in the cotton fields. “High yellow” is a term considered offensive to describe the higher place in the black social class system that lighter skinned blacks once held (still hold?). Interestingly, some of the most vocal advocates of the black community are light skinned blacks. Tom Joyner comes to mind. Being a light-skinned black isn’t black enough, so some feel the need to compensate.
I know that black Americans often resent Africans or West Indians coming into the US and getting Affirmative Action acceptances at Ivy League schools. Not the right kind of African-Americans, it seems.
The ironies are delicious.
Again—it’s not that racism has not played a huge part in making the material and cultural poverty JoJo and I see among whites in upstate NY and rural Maine something too many African Americans are mired in. It’s not that injustice didn’t and doesn’t exist. It did and does.
It’s not even that the majority culture doesn’t bear responsibility for helping to repair the damage—Rick Perry did a beautiful job laying this out in his speech to the National Press Club.
Heck, not only do I believe that racism/slavery was our nation’s original sin, it is a major burden on the human soul, it’s conquest the number one moral project of the modern age. (Incidentally, I think we’re winning, too—good news!)
But if we had looked at the horrors of Nazi Germany and concluded that the most important thing was for gentile Americans to cleanse themselves of anti-Semitism, Hitler would have won the war. As it was, not only was Europe a different place in 1945 (well, it was a ruin, substantially), America was too.
At a reading the other night, I met a man who joined the Marines in 1945, and later served in Korea. He was thus one of the first African Americans to serve in Truman’s desegregated Armed Forces. My father, who had attended an all-white, all-male Yale University served alongside black men. We didn’t get into all of this, of course. Just that they had both been in Korea, and both received Purple Hearts for wounds received in combat. But before he took his leave, this veteran very sweetly said of my father: “I’m sure we ran across each other.” Hope so.
Well, the ironies are human. Any human phenomenon is complicated, because we are a complicated, screwed-up, terrible and wonderful species. The truth we hold to be self-evident is that we are all created equal, and endowed with inalienable rights: heaven help any of us if we actually had to earn those rights with our own (or our group’s) consistency and virtue. Delve into the sorry history of my people (whether the Danish or the WASP side) and you inevitably come up with some unattractive stuff.
Perhaps it is because I spend a lot of time studying, reading and speaking about the effects of trauma, but given the situation African Americans were dragged into, and the repeated traumas inflicted on generations, I am more often moved, impressed and/or astounded at how much was and is accomplished. Among the many reasons for seeking ways to more effectively address the issues of the black underclass is that by leaving those genes locked up (too often literally) America is depriving itself of some serious talent, energy and strength.
Exactly. Neither of those other groups will actually throw Molotov cocktails into the windows of white businesses. But you can bet your bottom dollar Huey will.
This is the challenge I want my liberal colleagues to face up to—not just “what do you want me to actually do?” (which would be a start) but “this is what we’ve been doing… why isn’t it working?” And “if it’s not working; if things aren’t substantially better, don’t you think we should try something else?”
And New York, and San Francisco, and Washington D.C, and I’ve spent time in the South. I mean — I grew up around a lot of black people, and just don’t ever remember a single racist comment directed my way. I may be insensitive to microagressions, but frankly, I have no patience for people who are sensitive to them.
One of the premises that affirmative action is based upon is to make up for past wrongs committed in America.
What past wrongs have been committed against immigrant blacks who came here after the 1960s?
I’m seeing more and more references in the popular media about the need for reparations to blacks for slavery. Given the immigration rate into the United States, what percentage of blacks in America can trace their ancestry to slaves anymore?