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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
I don’t think it’s an accident that Huey is a child. In other words, the series’ author was placing the hazardous unambiguous innocent moralist in a complicated and complicating context. I’ll have to watch it again, and see what I think, but I remember thinking it was both funny and revealing. “Useful,” even (my highest praise!).
Incidentally—would that these young people were sufficiently imaginative to throw the Molotov cocktails at white businesses. The reality is that the safe distance my liberal colleagues can wring their hands from isn’t much of a distance at all–less than a mile, as the crow flies, between Beacon Hill and the ‘hood. The metaphorical wall around the “ghetto” is maintained by its inmates. The crimes poor black people commit overwhelmingly victimize other poor black people. Young black men murder other young black men, not white conservatives, and when it’s time for “Burn, baby, burn,” it’s the Rite Aid poor people need for their medicines, not my Rite Aid.
Sigh.
I’m seeing this too — the idea comes from Ta-Nahisi Coates — and wondering why no one’s pointed out the obvious: Do you wish to submit your DNA to the government to find out whether you’re officially “black?” If not, how would we know to whom these reparations are to be paid? How much “black” blood would you need to have to be eligible for reparations? Would we use a sort of Nuremberg law standard or something?
Having said all of this, I still think things are getting better— it’s just a whole lot slower than I want it to be. This may be because when I travel around the country to do law-enforcement stuff, I am often teaching Death Notification, say, to a multi-colored roomful of serious, engaged, intelligent men (mostly men). When I “presented” to the New York State Chaplains Association, I think I was one of only four or five white clergy-persons there. There are a lot of good people working on this project—really working on it, in the trenches. Doesn’t mean they’re doing everything right, but they are, like Merina’s son, showing up in love.
To put it another way – if an ethnic minority voluntarily immigrated into the racist hell-hole that is White Supremacist Modern Amerika, should we really give them benefits intended to make up for past mistreatment of those brought here involuntarily?
I’d like to see a post on the Member Feed about how to do this.
And who pays for these reparations? My Great-Grandfather fought for the North in the Civil War (fought in the battle of Shiloh, among other things). Given the common knowledge that the Civil War was only about slavery, shouldn’t the fact that my ancestors fought against slavery absolve me from having to pay the descendents of those slaves?
Again- sixty years ago there was not the black cultural poverty there is now, when there was widespread racism. So though it’s hard to believe racism played no part in current misery, it may not be a very big part now or one that requires any attention any more. Look elsewhere for the main cause and useful solutions.
One thing we need is economic growth, which brings opportunity, and with which we seem to have a structural problem made worse by government action. People need jobs.
I’ve known a lot of black folk in my life from various circumstances. In the Merchant Marine they were shipmates from New Orleans, when I was abusing various drugs they partook and sold. When I cleaned up they were there at the meetings. When I worked on a Youth at Risk project in the 80’s I met kids from Bedford-Stuyvesant and the Bronx. I was married to a black woman for ten years and had many outings with her extended family based in South Carolina. My daughter, if pressed will identify as black even though genetically she has more caucasian ancestry (myself being 100% white and her mother’s grandfather’s being American Indian and another grandfather white ) and even though my current wife (German) and we got custody of her when she was ten and grew up in a suburban white neighborhood – also before that, her mother remarried a white man and they lived in a white suburban neighborhood.
I’ve read several of Thomas Sowell’s books, notably Race and Culture, which logically and scientificlly obliterates a all of the racial hooey out there.
Now, to my point. The great secret is that blacks are racists. I’m not talking about the subset who hate whitey. I’m talking about them being racist toward other black folk. It goes beyond the old light-skinned, dark-skinned split. They are (generally) profoundly embarrassed and have a psychological need to find something that accounts for this.
I’m doing a Ted talk on it, believe it or not! A Member Feed post might help me prepare for it…
Double posted instead of edit, oops.
There is no logical principle for reparations for people who are no longer alive.
Anyone who wants to achieve can do so. Everyone has certain advantages and disadvantages from birth and upbringing. We are not how we are made: we are what we choose.
Then there’s this from today’s paper:
Lawmaker on Sheriff David Clarke: ‘I don’t even accept him as black’
http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/319687971.html
I understand the idea—that the economic contributions of enslaved African-Americans should have been compensated and never were. Being a tax-and-spend squish-conservative and possible DINO (still working on self-definition, here) I naturally don’t have a problem with spending the money. By all means, tax and spend!
Let’s say we (“we” being the American taxpayer, some of whom are themselves African American, others are the children of recent immigrants whose ancestors had nothing to do with slavery…never mind, let’s make this simple) write a check to every African American (that is, every American citizen with any DNA traceable to Africa) for twenty thousand dollars. Or thirty thousand. Or a hundred thousand. Whatever.
Are we done then? Debts paid, justice done, everybody happy?
Or are we exactly where we were before, except for having created new (and justifiable) resentments and debts?
I will.
“the left institutes these policies on purpose in order to sustain a permanent victim class,” which they can then exploit to remain powerful.
It is too obvious a truth to be ignored.
#68 continued
This is why they want to focus on white folks attitudes. That’s desperation. The most embarrassing thing for them to do is to blame the modern black culture. This is why Clarence Thomas Condi Rice Walter Williams Thomas Sowell are pariahs. They cringe because they know it’s true and they desperately want it to be something else. These are the people who can’t separate the concept of race from the concept of culture – two completely different things.
It does stem from the past. Whatever culture they had in their African village was stripped and then the existing slave culture was oppressed and distorted. Then huge mistakes were made trying to empower these poor people by destroying their families starting in the late 60’s.
Continuing to focus on race for decades in the media made everyone have wildly distorted ideas – especially African Americans – because of the over-identification with race causing embarrassment, while minority status encouraged solidarity.
Now it would seem that the worst thing someone can be is a ‘racist’ – child molester might edge out .
Whites, in our zeal to rid ourselves of the vestiges of racism, have allowed this campaign to uncover and vanquish racism and racists.
But most of us know it’s getting ridiculous.
That’s why I care not a whit about so-called “white privilege”. Some people have it better than others and it has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with culture.
a completely meaningless aside – the title of this post sounds like an episode title from the TV series “Bones”.
I’ll bet on “exactly where we were before, except for having created new (and justifiable) resentments and debts”.
Actually, Franco, your family represents another great (and it really is great) secret: the mixing pot has been mixing away even as intellectuals fret over the definitions of who is this and who is that. Ten percent of American marriages are interracial, and I’m willing to bet if we did a poll here on Ricochet, the majority will have relatives of another race. This can be said of three of the last four presidents (and given that the exception is Clinton, whose wild oats are doubtless flung far, probably four out of four), of John McCain, Angus King, the mayor of New York and the (tea party) governor of lily-white Maine.
It’s no longer a race, it’s a political party! Noting that white chick who identifies as “black” with 0% genetics.
It’s leftism appropriating race to it’s collectivist revolution.
I no longer care about ‘racism’ as something we must eliminate. There’s a point of diminishing returns and a point where people will become more racist, not less if we try to do too much.
Are race relations getting worse? I believe they are, and am afraid it’s only begun. Here’s why.
First, from the black side of the divide. Not being black, I’m speaking out of school here, but have an observation to make. I was initially taken aback by the various race riots last year. “What is it, 1968? Where did this come from?” After reflection, I suspect the rage manifesting in those riots is at least in part due to disillusionment that electing Obama didn’t magically make everything better. But whatever the cause, the race hustlers (like Obama) will continue to stoke this anger for their own benefit, and so the problem will continue to fester.
From the white side of things, for generations it has been socially unacceptable in polite society to express racist attitudes. This is a good thing. But this stigma has now gone completely around the bend, and lots of whites are saying, “To hell with it.” When everything that you say is twisted to make you out as a racist, or is a “microagression”, or an expression of “white privilege”, or whatever the thoughtcrime of tomorrow will be, the social stigma looses its sting. I predict more overt white racism in the future, especially in the poorer communities. A poor white man that can’t find a blue collar job but is constantly heckled for his “white privilege” is likely to push back. Hard.
I know what I would bet. How about you?
I think this has something to do with it too, Terry. That all the obvious, visible evidence that things aren’t the way they were in 1968 makes for a kind of despair, since the alternatives aren’t obvious. It’s not just that they aren’t easy, or don’t satisfy a thirst for revenge, it’s that they really aren’t clear, the way “desegregate the bus system” or “remove the obvious obstacles to voting” were clear.
Yup. Even if we overcame all the obvious practical problems, it just wouldn’t work. Coates suggested (as I recall) that it would, nonetheless, be a profitable thought-experiment: I’m not so sure of that, either. I’ve never heard a good, interesting, fruitful conversation that began with a proposal for reparations. This might not matter if there weren’t urgent existential issues at stake, but since I believe there are, it seems foolish to waste time debating the merits of something that isn’t going to happen and wouldn’t help if it did.
Sometimes I see parallels between a dysfunctional, damaged culture and a person with PTSD.
A person with PTSD—me! for instance—can point with considerable accuracy to the Bad Thing, the source of the problem; I was sexually abused when I was a kid. The self-protective behaviors one develops and practices in response to the threat are not adaptive to a normal environment, and there’s nothing like constant, nauseating, hyper vigilant dread to permanently warp the neurochemistry and damage the stress-response structures of the brain.
The physiological effects of trauma persist long beyond the point at which the negative, stressful stimulus ends (think about the WW2 vet who still reacts to loud sounds) and these even get passed down –biologically, not just behaviorally—to the next generation.
The first priority is to stop whatever it is that is causing the trauma—remove the child from the abusive environment, arrest the rapist, expel the bully, free the captive, end the war.
This is what the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement were all about: make the bad thing stop. At tremendous cost, they succeeded, if not completely then substantially.
It is also important—truly—to name injustice for what it is, to study it, talk about it, learn about it in school and extract as much information and blessing as we possibly can from all that real and terrible pain. We should indeed do this with slavery, as with the Holocaust, as with the Gulag, as with all the abundant evidence history provides about what human beings are capable of doing to one another.
At the end of the day, though, the people (and perhaps the culture?) that has been injured by trauma simply has to heal. Justice, while important, is not a cure. Focusing on the victimization can even retard the healing process (I think Cynthia Ozick made this point about the work of Primo Levi—by writing about his experiences, he heroically denied himself the relief that others found in simply refusing to think about it anymore). The uninjured can help (and should) and provide support, but the healing itself demands that the victim has to do the work—all the usual, cliche’d stuff; let go let God, stop with the self-medicating and self-injury, do your yoga, meditation and prayer, drink lots of water, exercise, and go faithfully to therapy so you can recognize and un-learn those maladaptive behaviors, practice healthier ways of thinking and reacting to the world… it’s time-consuming and boring. It’s not fair that you have to do it, but no one else can.
Am I pushing the analogy too far?
But why would the effects of the trauma appear to get worse (as measured by several objective criteria I previously listed) the farther we get from the trauma?
From what I’ve read about Coates’ new book, it is an extended exercize in the type of writing you’ve quoted in the OP. Imagine a WHOLE BOOK of this. And yet lefties are obliged to swoon over it and not point out that it doesn’t actually say much, if anything.
That would explain seeing severe social pathologies by the actual sufferers of Jim Crow and pre 1960s Racism.
It doesn’t explain why people born decades after the civil rights acts of the 1950s and 1960s are exhibiting more severe social pathologies than people who actually lived it.
Kate,
This is interesting. I accept your synopsis of PTSD. However, I have a question for you. Given the likelihood of all that you say, what effect on the vet would being told “it was all for nothing”, “the policy was a mistake”, or “we are guilty of war crimes” have?
Remember the vet risked his life every moment in combat on the assumption that it was his duty to his country to do so. He watched many comrades slaughtered performing the same duty.
Regards,
Jim
Pardon me for sidetracking, but FYI, you might tell your liberal friends that naming anything “<adjective> justice” is counterproductive, to say the least. The term has been corrupted beyond all redemption. After years of abuse at the hands of the left, I assume anything named Adjective Justice is just another shakedown attempt.
A few years ago, the pastor at the church we were attending invited an older black pastor from across town to give a sermon. He gave a wonderful, moving talk, but ruined it for me with a single reference to “social justice”. My openness to his message, and respect for him, plummeted with that single phrase.
I know it’s not logical, but there it is.