Privilege, for Flint

N. sat, her examination gown open to the back, legs dangling over the edge of the table, while the nurse prepared her questionnaire.  She'd asked the questions a thousand times before.  We'd answered them eleven times before, and now we answered in unison, like participants in a responsive reading.

Does your child live in, or regularly visit, an older home or other place built before 1978 with peeling or damaged paint?
-no.

Does your child live in, or regularly visit, an older home or other place built before 1978 that is being or was renovated within the last 12 months?  A day care center, preschool, and the home of a babysitter or a relative?
-no.

And there, like ghosts in the room, were the children I'd seen on the news, recently, the children whose lives of bottled water were being chronicled in blogs and on my Facebook feed.

Has your family/child ever lived outside the United States or recently traveled to a foreign country?
-no.

Does your child have a brother/sister, housemate/playmate being followed or treated for lead poisoning?
-no.

A study done by the CDC shows that black children are more than twice as likely to be at risk than white children.

Has your child ever taken any traditional home remedies?
-no.

Does your child frequently come in contact with an adult whose job or hobby involves exposure to lead?
-no.

I looked at my beautiful, healthy, smart daughter perched up there on the table, and thought about the children who would never have a chance.  Who would face cognitive impairment. Fewer opportunities. A life of struggle.

"Does your child live in Flint, Michigan?" I asked, to no one in particular, interrupting the litany.

The silence was thick; I had called out the whiteness in the room, and it stood there now, an elephant of privilege.

Finally, the nurse shook her head.  "That's a sad situation," she replied, as if that were enough.

Here are a few ways you can do something right now.  But we can't just throw money at the problem of environmental racism, which happens not just in Flint, but all over the country.  It's time we did better by all of our kids.

People, on MLK Day

I used to believe I was colorblind.  What that meant, to me, was that I thought I could judge people, in the words of Dr. King, not on the basis of the "color of their skin but on the content of their character[s]."  And maybe I was (though I know better now, I have my own biases that I work to overcome); but maybe--more likely--I was just blind, not so much to injustice (easy to point fingers), but to my own role in perpetuating it by imagining that standards created by a dominant group could be race-neutral.

Now, I think we need to see the difference that we have been taught to (or become accustomed to) un-see, to acknowledge the difference that difference has made, and decide to throw away the glasses that cloud our vision, whitewashing everything.  We need to question what we think we know, about the world and about ourselves.  My eloquent friend Noah (who can riff in words as well as he can in music) wrote something along these lines last year, when he challenged us to be more self-reflective, to ask ourselves, every day, in the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, "are you sure?"

A few years ago, my son was gifted a hand-me-down book entitled, simply, People.  It's a beautifully written and illustrated book, originally published in the 1980s (in many ways a product of its time) that describes the astonishing diversity of humanity on all four continents, and touches on issues like poverty and racism and body image (even body modification) in a way that isn't moralizing, but that opens the door for questions and conversation.  Who are human beings? What are they like? Where do they live, how do they communicate, what games do they play? How are people different, and how are they the same? What can we learn from each other? Why should we respect -- and celebrate -- difference?

And while there are sections of the book that feel like a dated "salad"-style multicultural curriculum, or some pages that replicate cultural stereotypes, there are others that talk about the ways in which we create artificial power structures that don't, in the end, protect us from all experiencing the same fate: death.

My daughter chose this book as her bedtime story last night, and as I read, admiring the artwork and the book's matter-of-factness, I found myself wondering how her reading of People might be different with her own children.  Whether she would look at the pages about diversity of employment and think about the white man in the grocery store, complaining that black people get and keep jobs just because they're black (with whom she'd gently disagreed, pointing out the roots of urban poverty in slavery and industrialization, asking him why he thinks people in power shouldn't do something about the mistakes that we've made as a nation). Whether she would look at the pages about poverty and remind herself that all of the people in the poorly maintained apartment complexes at the other end of town are nonwhite.  Whether she would read the pages about diversity of religion and think about a world that turns away migrant women and children from war-torn countries.

Or whether she would be reading that book to a child in a country that continues to ask itself "are you sure?" ... that faces its unsavory past, has been brave enough to tell more complicated stories, recognized institutional biases, overcome fears of each other, and found a way to move forward, to promote peace and justice.

Respects

I was making small talk with a student as he got up to leave my office, as I usually do at the end of advising conversations: bookending the visit with questions whose answers make both of us human, or diffuse the tension or anxiety that comes with vulnerability.  When I asked him what he was doing for the fall break, he mentioned he was catching up on sleep, watching movies, and that he might go into the City, which in these parts means "New York."  It's not an uncommon answer, especially for international students during their first year here.

"Oh, that'll be fun," I agreed.  "What do you think you'll see?"

"The museums, maybe the Guggenheim ... probably not Ground Zero, even though I'd like to go."

It was an exclusion that begged the question: "Why not?" I asked.

"It's not a place for brown people," he said, shaking his head slowly.  "We've done enough damage.  I wouldn't want to offend anyone."

It took me off guard.  My student is from Pakistan, but as far as I'm concerned, he has as much right to Ground Zero as anyone else.  He's a gentle soul.  He's disappointed by the current political situation in his home country.  No one would be able to tell he's any different from the 3 or 4 million other people with U.S. passports who are brown (this only counting Asian "brown").  I wanted him to feel like he could pay his respects, too, and honor those lost when the towers fell.  Because that's what it would be for him: honoring them.

I told him as much: "you're not responsible.  We know that.  That site belongs to you, too."

He was skeptical.  And as he left, I wished him a good adventure, knowing that he wouldn't venture anywhere near the southern tip of Manhattan.

It made me think about other incarnations of guilt-by-association, and wonder how we can even begin to heal if we can't even return to the site of our pain, to pay our respects to the dead.

The Thin Line: Activism, Voyeurism, and Consuming Lives Online

(Cross-posted at BlogHer.com)

The other day, my news feed was full of that story.  You know which one.  The story about the black girl who was brutally dragged from desk in a high school classroom by a white uniformed police officer after refusing to get off her cell phone and leave the classroom.

I'd seen the story the previous afternoon, but I didn't want to play the clip; I knew what I'd see, and I didn't want to watch another black girl's body be treated like it wasn't even human. Part of me wondered if I had a responsibility to watch, to bear witness, to know that my privilege makes this inhumanity possible.  And then part of me thought about how I would feel if that had been my daughter, knowing that it would likely never have been my daughter (because she is white), and it made my stomach churn.

I finally ended up watching it, but not until I'd thought a lot about my role as a viewer.  I've written before about my mixed feelings towards hashtag activism: how it can become a throwaway, even with the best intentions.  And now, I realize there's something else that troubles me about the way in which we produce and consume activism on social media: it can be awfully voyeuristic.

Social media is a powerful tool for activism.  But if all we do is watch, and share, it can become a twisted form of entertainment, like rubbernecking at a car wreck.  Important images that bear witness to injustice can be diminished without deep thought, and context, and action.

An article in the New Yorker last week offered some interesting (though perhaps hardly surprising) data about bullying and bystanding online: that not only is bullying harder to escape in virtual spaces (because you can't physically walk away), but that bystanders act less often in defense of the bullied, for a variety of reasons, including: the victim is dehumanized by our computer screens, adults imagine that their comments as justified outrage instead of the kind of harassment they imagine perpetrated by children.  I wonder if similar principles are at work when we share images of people being bullied.  How does that complicate our role in the act?

Last week, I happened across an another article on social-media-as-virtual Colosseum, which argues that the vicious infighting among social activists online (which is partly designed to increase one's reach) replicates oppression:

When oppressed people watch or participate in destructive behavior toward one another in the name of social justice, in some way our values, and perhaps our pain, feel reaffirmed. We want to believe we are doing something powerful by adding our voices to already fraught conversations, and in fact we are; but at times it less the reestablishment of justice and more the reactivation of oppressive power dynamics.

Author Frank Castro explains that upvoting, doxxing, etc. -- the kinds of things we do as participant hashtag activists -- is, in the end, counterproductive to the cause.

I think something similar happens in the consumption of images and videos produced in support of social (in this case racial) justice.  And I don't think it's race-neutral.  Because aside from the fact that this never would have happened to a white girl, I don't think we would have filmed a white girl being treated this way, and I don't think it would have gone viral even if we had.  Black bodies are objects of consumption in a way that white bodies aren't.  Like siding with infighting activists, this becomes a spectator sport, reactivating the power dynamics that create the situation in the first place.  We have the privilege of viewing, knowing that many of us are safe behind computer screens.

I don't think that we should stop sharing disturbing stories.  We need those stories to be told.  But I do think that we should be more thoughtful about how we share media, understanding that what we're seeing isn't just a movie, that consuming media gives us power, and that we should wield that power carefully, in the service of justice.

#Microblog Monday: Passing, Privilege, and Working for (Real) Justice

My first encounter with the phenomenon of "passing" was a literary one, during a Harlem Renaissance class I took in college; we were reading Nella Larsen's novel Quicksand, which describes the friendship of two women who identify as Black, but can "pass" as White*, and Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun, in which the protagonist wrestles with the question of whether she can give up what she knows to be true about her identity just to gain social advantage.  Though I had some understanding of the complicated ways in which Blackness gets defined in the U.S., I remember thinking about how arbitrary our classifications are, and yet, how much they seemed to matter, even then, in the enlightened 1990s (!), how real they could be when we made them so.

In recent days, we've been reading a lot about Rachel Dolezal, whose story about "passing" as Black has gone viral since her reporting of false hate crimes.  It's raised a lot of questions for me again about why someone might do this (beyond "she's crazy," which would never be said about someone "passing" in the other direction), about how we claim identity and how it is imposed upon us, and about how we work for social justice.

I've been reading Claude Steele's Whistling Vivaldi recently, which is the assigned reading for our incoming freshmen this year.  The book tells the story of Steele's work on stereotype threat, which is (to do the injustice of summary) a condition of experience in which people worry about confirming negative stereotypes about their group; e.g. a Black person who is afraid of confirming that Black people aren't as intelligent, a woman who is afraid of confirming that women aren't good at math, a White person being afraid of confirming that white people are racist.  Stereotype threat, as Steele describes it, is complicated; the people most susceptible to it are the people who are actually least likely to confirm the stereotype applied to they group with which they identify under normal circumstances, but who care enough about subverting the stereotype and feel so anxious and distracted about their performance (in most cases, given some real cues from the environment) that they end up underperforming.

It's interesting to me that Dolezal chose to attend Howard University, a historically Black institution of higher education; at that time, she still identified openly as White, and apparently sued them for discrimination, which suggests to me that the experience was not entirely a comfortable one for her. When I started my first graduate program and began to pursue comparative American "minority" literatures (reading African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American writers), I thought a great deal about my role as an ostensibly "White" woman in a field dominated by "non-White" scholars.  Yes, I was raised in a family that drew traditions and culture from Latin America, and yes, I had experienced racism in a comparatively minor way when I was growing up, but by the time I got to grad school, I was classified by most people as "White." Would I have any authority? Would I be able to address my privilege sufficiently as part of my work? I didn't end up writing a dissertation in English, but I suspect that if I had, I would have--even if I had written with the most pure intention and greatest sensitivity and positionality I could muster--worried about doing the hard work of contextualizing my scholarship fully enough. Perhaps that worry would have been productive, keeping me constantly mindful as a scholar. Certainly, I think that I could do it better now than I could have as a twenty-five year old.

I don't believe that what Rachel Dolezal did was right, at all.**  She was a practiced liar who fabricated all kinds of things about her childhood experience; hers was no sin of omission. And it's not even clear to me that her motivations were pure (e.g. that she did it because she wanted to work for social justice). What she did feels almost like fetishizing.  Other people have called it appropriation.  In either case, I think about the students affected by her lie, students who may have seen her as a mentor or a role model, who had the rug pulled out from under them, and wonder: how did they feel when they learned that her story was all a lie? And more deeply, did it make them wonder who they were, too, and how tenuous identity is? What does it mean to be Black?

Moreover, I'm not sure that working for social justice as a White person posing as a Black person is progress; to me, doing so simply reifies privilege. (Edited to add, recognizing Mel's point below: this approach also tries to create change without building trust, and change without a foundation in trust is shaky at best.)  Brown or black bodies can't "choose" race as Dolezal did***; that act is highly problematic, especially given the fact that she was, presumably, trying to do "the right thing."  For someone working against racism, that choice is a betrayal.

So why not work for justice as the person you are, without claiming a category?  If you are aware that your voice and experience is the dominant one, why not make a point of ensuring that other voices and experiences are heard, no matter how you may identify?

Dolezal's decision to pass, regardless of her motivation, is one answer to that question.  Why not work for justice as the person you are?  Because it's easier not to.  Because, as Angela Goffman did, you may become alienated, and no longer feel like you belong anywhere.  Because it's easier not to say anything than to worry about saying the wrong thing. Or to say the wrong thing in disguise. And in the other direction, because it's also actually possible to gain even more privilege by working as a privileged person on behalf of a group seen as "less privileged"; maybe you want to reject that privilege, too, but don't know how to do so.

Blackness in this country, as Dolezal has so clearly demonstrated, is a fraught category: constructed, and yet vital to understanding our history and fighting for a more just future. But passing doesn't begin to do any of the really difficult work. Steele's book offers a few alternative suggestions: foreground/affirm people's competence and worth; make sure that there's critical mass of everyone in the conversation, to the degree possible; and create situations in which learning (through intergroup conversations)--even if you begin with the understanding that race and gender and a host of other identity categories are constructs--becomes acceptable.  None of these are easy fixes.  And the book isn't a panacea, by any means.  But we have a mountain to climb, and it's about time we got started somewhere.

*  I use the categories of White and Black here, knowing that those categories are as complicated as the words are reductive.
**I'm not even going to get into the issues of blackface and mimicry, which have a long and terrible history in the U.S.  
*** Dolezal could stop being Black any time it really became inconvenient for her to do so, because she didn't need to do so to survive, and she may even profit from her story: perhaps, as one Tweet suggested, "the ultimate White privilege."

Compassion and the Legacy of MLK

My son went to day care for Dr. Martin Luther King Day.  I had to work, my husband had to work, so there was no day of service for him, no Letter from Birmingham Jail, no "I Have a Dream" speech, which I've made him watch parts of for two years running now.  My daughter's school was also closed, but hosted a day of service, for which I was grateful.  So there's that.  But I also felt like our conversations yesterday fell short of what I really want to say.

I feel conflicted about the celebration of Martin Luther King, more so this year than ever.  For many people, it seems like Thanksgiving: struggle, martrydom, and at the end, the Native Americans and colonists sat down together to eat turkey.  Nice and neat.  I feel like there's some sense of satisfaction, some suggestion of completion implicit in the holiday. But as we all know, the arc of the moral universe is long, and if you remember anything the way curves and limits behave in mathematics, you know also we could could be a long time waiting for it to arrive at justice unless something happens to interrupt that equation.

And maybe something has.  Maybe what has happened is that finally we're hearing a different narrative that we're finding difficult to align with completion.  Making us uncomfortable.

When I was in college, I thought I was going to study comparative literatures of the U.S.  I was interested in what was then called "minority voices," interested in the writing that told a different story than the one I read everywhere else.  I took a different road after a few years, for many reasons, but I continued to seek out those voices.  The ones that made this look like a different country than the one I knew it to be.  The ones that revealed Dr. Martin Luther King's dream to be unfulfilled, the ones that showed the holes in what I was taught about equal opportunity.

I was listening to a short conversation between Maiken Scott and Dan Gottleib yesterday morning in the car (I can't find the audio version of it anywhere, so you'll have to go with my spotty memory of it) about MLK's thoughts on compassion, and I was struck by this thought: that compassion is the ability to listen to someone's story without judgment, without frustration, without getting caught up in our discomfort and helplessness.  And try to imagine living that person's life and having that story as yours.  Because if you know that race is constructed, then you need to understand that their story could just as easily BE yours.

I don't know.  There's a lot of "well, what do we do" going around.  There certainly are things to be done.  But maybe part of what we do is also just live with being uncomfortable.  We let it get under our skin.  Because maybe doing too quickly just tries to make the problem go away, when maybe what we need to do is live with it for a while, to think about how these systems and categories got constructed in the first place, and realize that they were created to do exactly what they did..

In South Africa, after apartheid, there was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  The Commission gave people an opportunity to voice their experience of human rights violations, offer support for victims and healing for survivors and their families, and express their regret at failing to prevent human rights violations and commitment to building a better society.  Part of me thinks that race relations and the history of race as a construct that has shaped our present has been silenced for so long that it's time for something like this.  Something more official than what we see on our Facebook and Twitter feeds. I realize that this opens up the Pandora's Box of reparations.  But we can't even go there until we can hear--really hear--other people's stories.

Maybe that's where my conversation with my children can--or must--begin.

On Activism, Giving (Enough) and the Effect of Hopelessness

Have you ever decided not to act, or to give, because you thought you couldn't make enough of a difference?

A few weeks ago, NPR featured a short piece on the effect of hopelessness on generosity.  Vedantam (whose micro-commentary I love) explained the basic premise of the research this way: in situations where we decide to give, or to help someone, emotional connection to the people in need is important (we get what he calls a "warm glow" from that shared humanity).  But also important is the feeling that we can make a real difference.  Statistics about the enormity of a problem actually reduce, instead of increasing, our emotional response; the "warm glow" is overshadowed by the negative feelings we experience (e.g. guilt) about people we're not helping.  So essentially, when they're given the opportunity to respond to a big problem, people don't do what they can do because they feel bad about what they can't do.

A friend of ours gave the sermon in church in December.  He's incredibly well-read and an excellent speaker, so we were looking forward to his talk; in general, whatever he has to say is interesting.

But this time, he made everyone squirm.

Because he called us all out for not giving enough.

Imagine standing up in front of a bunch of liberal tree-hugging do-gooders, and telling them that they don't give enough.  That they're too comfortable in their lives.  That their commitment to several key social justice projects is an embarrassment.  That they ought to be supporting their church better.  That they ought to be giving what they can, whatever that means.

It was a pretty ballsy move.

But he's right.  If you're going to stand up and call yourself a (insert your identity here: activist, Christian, UU, philanthopist, feminist, friend), you should pony up.

I live a comfortable life, all things considered.  I do give.  And I could choose to ignore (or simply be sad about) the news about domestic terrorism, racism and injustice, sexism, poverty, Muslim extremists, because there is so much I can't do.  I could feel like I'll never measure up to a former student who has moved to Sierra Leone and become know for her work with Ebola patients.  Or I could act, in whatever small way I can.

This week, I'll find a way to help the family down the street who just lost everything to a house fire.  I'll spread the word about the talk being given at my church on Saturday about the social construction of race, in a county where most people outside of my town are white.  I'll help to collect food for our local food banks, which are running lower than ever.  Maybe next week, there will be something else for me to do, something that's a little harder.

What do you avoid doing, because you feel hopeless about what you can't do, because it seems like an impossible issue to tackle?  What small things can you do to overcome that inertia?