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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
On second thought, don’t tell them. They’ll just go find some other term to corrupt, like they did “liberal”.
Oh, definitely—the question of meaning is huge. On the other hand, WW2 and Korean War veterans did suffer from PTSD at the same rates (by some measures higher rates) than Vietnam veterans.
I could have done the same thing—made the analogy, that is— with a survivor of sexual abuse; traumatic stress provokes a stereotyped human response (neurology is neurology).
Interestingly—and to your point—the infants of mothers who had endured a defined period of traumatic stress (Dutch women in occupied Holland were studied, for example) showed higher rates of stress-related illnesses than control groups. This makes sense—if cortisol, for instance, can cross the placenta, the child is actually exposed as if he or she were being faced with a threat.
If you have an entire community subjected over generations to traumatic stress, and separated by a rigid and continuously-maintained color-bar (definitely true of African American communities in, for example, Los Angeles) and if the behaviors engaged in by those affected by traumatic stress go on to inflict traumatic stress to others (in the example of the veteran, his wife and kids, his opponents in the bar-fights) one could expect to find cumulative effects, particularly once the more resilient and higher-functioning members move away?
Incidentally, lest this sound like some kind of Darwinian self-selection, let me just point out that resilience to stress is not necessarily correlated with other desirable attributes, like intelligence or creativity. It was gently explained to me that I probably had an underlying inherited vulnerability to mental illness, and while I probably wouldn’t have developed PTSD had I not been sexually abused, the abuse was necessary but not sufficient to explain the severity of my symptoms. I’d like to think that I am not, otherwise, a Darwinian dud.
Criminal justice?
But I take your point—and Restorative Justice advocates often find themselves explaining that, far from being warm-and-squishy, R.J. demands a lot more of perpetrators than traditional justice does.
Did the children show worse stress effects than the mothers?
Would we expect the behavior to be worse after the stress is removed?
Kate,
Kate I must at this point respond. Your argument is just one more tenuous social scientific “just so story” based on a bare thread of Darwinian logic.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act provided a standard of behavior. The first affirmative action ruling in 1969 streamlined the process of bringing a civil rights suit. I would say at that point the greatest chance for progress on race this country has ever had was in effect. A proper standard and a means to bring it about.
Unfortunately, thereafter your kind of social scientific arrogance took over. The quota-based affirmative action ruling happened in 1973. Now no evidence of actual racism need be proved. Only the tenuous thread of supposed historical macro injustices were enough. Imaginary standards of racial perfect percentages were manufactured by courts. These were not related to any actual prejudicial behavior or even the desires of the “oppressed” but simply assumed. Social Science uber alles.
From 1973 onward one could watch the black community slipping backwards as the rest of society attempted to make up the difference by destroying standards of excellence not to mention standards of justice.
Social Science just doesn’t know that much. Only an omniscient deity could know that much. To paraphrase Chevy Chase, Gd is Gd and you’re not.
Regards,
Jim
This #BLM BS demonstrates a central premise of the core belief of the Left: the pie is only one size, if you got more, someone else got less. They have the defeatist negative mindset of the Zero Sum Gain. The racist, tribalism balkanization they argue is bad. But it operates from a primitive world view that would prefer to pull everyone down into the mire, rather than let anyone do better.
I’m not being God, Jim, nor am I making excuses for anybody, or suggesting that this explains everything. I’m exploring an idea, a possible, partial explanation for the predicament too many black Americans are in.
The proximate causes of African American oppression—the real thing; slavery and Jim Crow, discrimination, segregation, etc.— have been removed. So why didn’t black Americans immediately become just as successful as white people? Why didn’t they at least achieve the successes that immigrants tend to manage within a generation or two? Why, sixty years later, are we still having this conversation?
We both, I am sure, reject explanations that involve the inherent inferiority of African Americans.
We are both unpersuaded by the explanation that white America continues to discriminate and oppress black people just as they always have done, and black Americans will not really achieve equality until white people get their moral act together.
Another explanation: The combination of misguided welfare programs and the way “the rest of society attempted to make up the difference by destroying standards of excellence not to mention standards of justice.”
Very broadly speaking, you and I probably agree about this too.
What I am suggesting, I suppose, is that the effects of trauma may provide an additional explanation.
“May,” I say—it may not. Still, one of the reasons we object to people committing crimes or inflicting injustice is that the effects do not cease when the immediate cause is removed. However disdainful you may be of social science, you would probably agree that the harm done to the victim of a sexual predator goes well beyond whatever happens in the minutes or hours in which the specific abuse occurs. In fact, to an outside observer, the behavior of the victim immediately during and after the abusive act may appear less bizarre and a lot less dysfunctional and self-destructive than her behavior a week or a decade later.
The long-term effects of sexual abuse are part of the reason we take even relatively low-violence assaults very seriously. The effects of war on warriors is known to extend far beyond the end of a tour of duty. Why would the effects of chronic, continuous and violent discrimination and oppression magically terminate with the passage of the Civil Rights Act?
Kate,
Yes, I agree but that’s why the law calls it a crime and puts such a high penalty on it. Misusing the words of criminality to describe just an unpleasant experience not only will encourage the victim to wallow in self-pity but can result in the crime of false accusation. Trump who isn’t my favorite candidate just had some cheap hack look up an old piece of testimony where Ivana said she felt “emotionally raped”. If the hack had just repeated it verbatim then this would have been a knock on Trump’s image as a sensitive family man (not so much anyway). However, the hack dropped the “emotionally” and used the word rape, one of the severest of felonies, in the headline. The headline was run around the internet for a few news cycles before the reality came out. I don’t think false accusation of a felony is anything that can be justified. As it is Ivana is much more of a mensch than the rest of this victim happy society and immediately defended the Donald against this absurdity.
Again, I would suggest that you realize just how difficult it is to know the truth. We have an adversarial legal system that has been created over a few thousand years. This system seems extreme at first. Until you realize just how easy it is to assume the wrong story as the truth. Michael Brown is the prime example. The Soros paid protesters spun their psychotic propaganda from the first moment. Three different agencies, local, state and Holder’s FBI checked the autopsy results. There were multiple black eyewitnesses who corroborated the autopsy and Officer Wilson’s account.
No apologies and still “Hands up don’t shoot” was spun for months. Wilson who had done nothing but roll his window down and ask Brown to stop walking down the middle of the street blocking traffic was up for murder. The din and cry kept up long after the acquittal and everyone should have known. Freddy Grey took a little longer but when the facts finally came out this too was lunacy. I’m sure sooner or later they’ll find a crime where a white cop will have murdered a black man. Meanwhile. while we are waiting, 50 cops black and white will have got shot or knifed. Probably 25 whites will have died at the hands of false arrests. Meanwhile, massive amounts of property damage resulting in the loss of businesses that were most likely to employ those unemployed black youth will continue. The phony narrative goes on and on.
The quota-based mentality thinks it knows what happened before it happens. They don’t and the chaos it causes is a disaster.
Regards,
Jim
You’re preaching to the choir on this one, Jim.
Ferguson is an excellent example of the toxic uselessness of the liberal “narrative” e.g. “Michael Brown was yet another martyr to white police brutality.” (or, as Amira would say, “white-passing” brutality, just to cover the Af-Am officers involved in Freddie Gray’s arrest and death, not to mention Baltimore… ) It’s not only that it is inaccurate—it takes us in the wrong direction. That is, it takes us away from any solution that might actually prevent the next Michael Brown from ending up dead.
,
Well, and the real fear among LEOs is that police officers will hesitate too long before shooting…or will simply refuse to go (or at least go quickly) toward anything that might end up turning into a use of force. Leaving the vulnerable population (which in Ferguson is black) undefended.
Just to depress us all even more…
the son of one of the NY officers murdered in Brooklyn is a college freshman here in Maine. So when I met a professor who works at his school, I asked how he was doing. She said he had a lot of good friends and counseling and whatnot, and was doing okay.
“Had there been protests at the school during the fall?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “They held some Hands-Up Don’t Shoot die-ins in the quad, and some of our students went to the protests in Boston and New York.”
“Huh,” I said. “So, basically, this kid got to spend his first semester at college listening to people accuse his father and his father’s comrades of being racists and murderers. He got to hear his own classmates shouting “what do we want? Dead cops.” And then his dad was murdered.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well…”
Redacted for [CoC]
Touche on Criminal Justice.
But the problem with “Social Justice” isn’t that it’s warm-and-squishy. It’s that it’s dishonest, angry, hateful, grasping, greedy, insatiable and dishonest. Did I mention dishonest?
Oh, and by the way: This kid is also a member of a minority group. He doesn’t represent much of a minority when it comes to the NYPD, but he was definitely in the minority at this nice, liberal college.
Tell me more?
Kate, you keep missing my question. I’m not asking why they didn’t “immediately become as successful as white people”. I’m asking why for so many things have gotten measurably WORSE!
Kate,
All lives matter. Whoops.. well I guess O’Malley found out that all lives don’t matter. Just the lives that fit our psychotic narrative matter. It’s been one heck of year.
Regards,
Jim
It sure has. (It was the law enforcement stuff (Ferguson/NY/Baltimore) that brought me to Ricochet, as it happens.)
Sorry MWM! I had a good long reply going, and then I got interrupted and lost it. It was a beautiful, long involved theory, and now I have to see if I can reconstruct it…
But not if you’re going to think I’m trying to excuse bad behavior, or claim that more social programs are what’s needed—not what I’m saying at all.
It’s funny—by coincidence, my husband invited a new friend over for supper. So we just had a seriously delicious meal (cooked by my husband on his Big Green Egg) with a guy who is not only Af-Am, but grew up in Washington, DC. He, too, cut class in high school and went to the Smithsonian… just like me! And he, too, grew up going to Maine in the summer … and just like my husband, he is an artist/craftsman. He’s even done Search and Rescue stuff (after 9/11) so we got to talk about Death Notification and on-scene bereavement support.
A lovely, coincidental little reality check, somehow.
Okay. So.
It would not surprise a psychiatrist that a combat veteran or sexual abuse survivor’s untreated PTSD not only did not abate, but worsened, even long after the termination of the original trauma.
PTSD represents an injury to the stress-processing system of the brain; further stress strains the damaged system, which subsequently sustains more damage, and so on. The effects of stress are cumulative.
In addition, PTSD is expressed behaviorally, not just experientially; the behaviors of the patient with PTSD can create or exacerbate situations that are also stressful, perhaps even traumatic (e.g. imprisonment).
I’m asking whether the above might be true, at least metaphorically but perhaps even literally, of a traumatized population, given that populations are made up of persons.
If an individual exposed to the traumatic stress of heavy combat develops behaviors that are adaptive to combat, but are maladaptive when that individual returns to peacetime life… mightn’t a population exposed to systematic, dehumanizing cruelty develop behaviors that are adaptive under these conditions, but maladaptive once the cruelty has stopped?
And what is “culture” if not the sum total of behaviors —adaptive or otherwise—that are exhibited by a whole population?
If you consider all the stuff that happened to everyone in America—the sexual revolution, Vietnam, the anti-establishment movements that spawned not just the Black Panthers but the Weather Underground and the SLA, the oil shock and recession (and Carter’s “Malaise,”) the popularity of cocaine and then crack cocaine, the AIDS epidemic, no-fault divorce, Murphy Brown, etc. etc….
Any SoCon here on Ricochet will tell you that all these were all disastrous for any and all Americans, right? Well, when the plagues arrive, don’t those with pre-existing conditions tend to get sicker, quicker?
Jim, I exchanged e-mails with an acquaintance of mine a few days ago — an Iraq war vet — whose writing I discussed in this post. His book “The Return” was directed at fellow veterans, and is well-worth reading; he makes a lot of good points about the importance, for veterans, of reframing PTSD as “PTSA” — Post-Traumatic Stress Asset, which sounds idiotic when I simplify it like that, but his book is anything but idiotic. It’s a very persuasive argument that pathologizing the psychological transformations that take place after you’ve experienced combat is not necessarily helpful. (He would say “not helpful at all,” but I also know vets for whom PTS is clearly not an asset: As in all things, some of us are more resilient, for reasons physiological or spiritual; I surely don’t think people who have a difficult time rebounding from trauma are weak.)
I know I suffer from some aspects of it, and still haven’t figured out if it’s “disorder” or “an asset,” I do know that I walked past that scene at Charlie Hebdo and said to myself, “major terrorist attack, probably 10-15 dead, national news level, won’t make international news, so no money in it” and kept walking — it took a week of my phone ringing off the hook for me to fully grasp that for once, the world had the same reaction to seeing something like that as I did, upon which I was deranged with anger that no one had ever cared before.
That’s a digression, though: Point is, I asked him how the other Iraq vets he talks to were handling the news from Iraq, and unsurprisingly, he said that he, and they, were devastated. Now, he is very resilient, emotionally, and I suspect he was born that way. He was able to say, “But there’s nothing I can do about it, so I can’t dwell on it.”
I’m not as resilient. What’s going on now in Turkey has left me unable to think of anything else; it’s interfering with my relationships — I can barely stand talking to friends and family who don’t grasp what this means, and want to slap people for going on with their lives as normal — and probably I could show up in a psychiatrist’s office and say, “I’m suffering from PTSD,” explain what I saw there, and walk away with a formal diagnosis of it.
In short, I think these categories are elastic; that some people are more vulnerable to lasting devastation after traumatic experiences; that yes, PTSD describes something real, as does “PTSA,” and yes, surely, it makes a difference if you can assign meaning to those experiences: If the war you fought was for nothing, if people died for nothing, if you killed for nothing, you have to be damned resilient not to be very harmed by it.
My grandfather did not suffer from PTSD. He was one of only 250 survivors of a 1,250-man regiment. He remembered those days as happy, happy times. I never heard him say a word to suggest anything but nostalgia at the memory of killing Nazis.
My grandmother, on the other hand — who lost her father in Auschwitz — was deeply depressed her entire life, and suffered from a wide range of what would now be diagnosed as psychiatric illnesses. My grandfather once said to me — in slightly more delicate language — that the reason she wasn’t able to make her peace with it was that she never got to kill them. He did.
So yes, I think the questions of “whether the war was just” and “whether we won” are hugely important to how people cope afterward.
Fascinating discussion here at this point (I haven’t read all the comments). I just want to chime in and agree with Claire’s(?) earlier comment that this is a very insightful post, Kate (which resisted even my earlier silliness).
As we’ve been touring colleges and listening to information sessions (ten so far), I’ve become more aware that whenever the discussion of “service to the community” comes up, it invariably ends up with how service improves the server. And I think of this post and say to myself, “Huh.” I know what they’re saying to be true, but is that really the point of charity and service? Self-improvement?
I’ve decided (engineer’s brain) there really should be a way to measure the outcomes — the improvement in the lives of those on the receiving end. Imagine what we might do to roll back the welfare state if we could point to actual data!
But don’t you think it’s the fact they were poor, not the fact their ancestors were slaves, that made black people vulnerable to social disintegration and thug culture? My understanding is that ex-slaves and children of slaves had a remarkably functional culture until the sexual revolution, widespread drug use, and “war on poverty” hit. And I think they hit poor whites hard too, it just plays out differently in rural areas. I understand England has a white urban thug culture problem. It’s a poverty-and-how- we address-it problem.
Suppose I am wrong, though, and thug culture in America is the manifestation of psychological weakness in an entire population, induced by inhuman mistreatment of their ancestors. The solution would seem to be something like: acknowledge that slavery was wrong, correct any lingering systemic discrimination, provide some extra help for a while. At what point does the extra help begin to cause more damage ?
This is what I think of as the slightly shameful little secret of service. (I’ve even been known to “prescribe” it?!) Not surprising, since service = love, so of course it makes us better, more whole.
On the other hand, service/love is also risky. You can risk wasting your time and energy on a bad cause. You can risk boredom, compassion fatigue, and all the things you’ll miss out on because you’re not doing something more profitable or fun. (Opportunity costs, right?)
The more crucial the service the more risk is taken by the server. Physical risk (you can get hurt or killed, or exposed to awful things) and moral risk; my wardens (like DocJay, or Vicryl Contessa) live and work with the knowledge that they could get it wrong and someone could be injured or die as a result.
When my daughter and I talk about the risks of exposing herself to more awful images (child pornography) and more knowledge of how rotten people can be to the innocent than most people, including most police officers, want to carry around with them, my advice was to take the risks seriously. Take care of yourself, do all the boring self-care stuff that everyone, including your mother, pesters you about. And ask yourself this: is stopping sexual predators from harming more children and rescuing victims from their unearned hells worth a portion of your resiliency and mental health? Her answer was: well, what else am I going to spend it on?
The problem is, and always has been, in the mind. People believe that they are incapable, and they get addicted to the excuses.
Any cure for the problem is not going to be money or things. Those just feed addiction and do nothing about the underlying problem.
Enhanced opportunities are a very good step – so School Choice is hugely important. And so are all policies that reduce the reliance on addictive government “aid”, undermine marriage and traditional families, and sap self-reliance.
Hard word and a willingness to take risk are scary things. Self-reliance is terrifying. But this is what America’s underclass needs more than anything else. How do you get an entire culture to change the way its thinks?
Most immigrants to the US arrived with little more than the shirts on their backs. Poverty is not the cause of disintegration. On the contrary: it can be a powerful binder and incentive.
YES—agree with all of this, JoJo! In fact, I’m probably making the problem a lot more complicated than it has to be. If nothing else, the fact that there are such broad overlaps between the persistent problems of poor white people (here and in the U.K.) and poor black people means that all we/I really should be doing is concentrating on poverty.
I’ve read that when poor families, single parents, etc., are able to live among people who have jobs, intact families, etc., they tend to do much better. In other words, they see sensible patterns modeled and tend to follow them. I’ve seen this at church. We have quite a lot of poor members and single parents, but the kids do very well. They see intact families and that’s what they want for themselves. They get a lot of support and encouragement in school every other part of their lives. They are taught what they need to know to succeed and they see it modeled. It works.
Well, there’s poor and hopeful, and poor and hopeless. You’re right it’s not the poor that’s the problem. Most people who see opportunity and think there is a good chance if they work hard they will be economically better off, will be willing to work hard.
There’s the trickle-down property of social dysfunction—if more children are born out of wedlock generally, many, many more children will get born out of wedlock in already weak subcultures, e.g. rural Maine.
If it is uncomfortable of painful to be where you are (e.g. standing on the docks of New York harbor with only the shirt on your back) you are likely to begin moving toward something that promises to be better.
This requires also that you have a reasonable sense that there is something better, and that you are capable of moving toward it.
Any immigrant that arrives in the U.S. has already moved away from something uncomfortable (Latvian pogroms, Cuban communism, Mexican poverty) toward something better (the US, safety, freedom, jobs).
In the Great Migration, African Americans did the same thing, moving away from the oppression and discomfort of southern sharecropping to the new industrial jobs in the North. And they built impressive communities in Northern cities in spite of ferocious discrimination.
So, obviously, it’s possible. For anyone.
The trickle-down theory of social eufunction!