Showing posts with label race studies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label race studies. Show all posts

Sunday, July 2, 2023

Letting Go of the World and Backyard Activism

Maybe this will rub people the wrong way, maybe it won’t, but I’ve been thinking about some of the current events in my newsfeed, as well as the larger movements happening in our culture, and can’t help but feel exhausted. 


This isn’t me, a white guy, being bummed out by “noisy minorities” or “angry women,” but just as a human being witnessing the endless outrage machines pumping out content, day after day, and seeming to not be able to escape it. Lately, I’ve been trying to reconcile the need to stay informed with the need to stay disconnected, and strike a healthy balance. Thus far, I’m coming up empty handed. My only, feeble, recourse has been to delete Facebook from my phone; which, even then, is kind of a pyrrhic victory. (How do you build a business/ following on social media without engaging in it? Trick question: you don't.) 


I’m trying to understand the best way forward but not getting anywhere. 


I started noticing this when I decided to stop listening to The Problem with John Stewart. Full disclosure, I love the show. It’s fantastic, informative, and generally entertaining. It’s also cathartic and moving, and getting to hear a dialogue being hashed out between people of varying opinions, something Stewart has always excelled at, is very gratifying. (We ought to recognize the diversity of opinion in this world and be OKAY with that.) But at a certain point hearing a continuous track of “the world sucks, everything is evil, everything is fucked,” becomes staggeringly oppressive. That is sort of the unforeseen gift of technology in general: we are given a mirror to hold up to our faces and observe the horror of who we are, without the veneer of best intentions and window dressing. And it’s awful. 


Stay with me. I’m getting to my point. 


So, I decided to find something different and landed on a podcast called Ask NT Wright Anything. The show itself follows a pretty loose format (at least as far as the first 30-something episodes are concerned), featuring Justin Brierley as host (known for his Unbelievable podcast), bouncing a handful of questions off of Wright every two weeks. (For those of you unfamiliar with Wright, he is a New Testament scholar that has contributed a wealth of information on the study of theology and history and philosophy over the last 40-50 years.) The questions vary week to week, some on difficult topics like abuse and church politics, but also touch on lighter things like general pastoral guidance, prayer, and intercession in general.


What got me thinking about the world, and my role in it, is the preface he mentions before answering these personal questions in the podcast. “I can’t be your 'online' pastor,” Brierley/Wright  say emphatically. “Please join a local church community and seek guidance and have someone work through these painful topics thoroughly, in person.” But then, of course, Wright proceeds to start answering the questions as best he can. (He even did so with me some years back when I worked up the courage to email him about some of my own struggles with faith. An absolute boss of a human!)


This gave me an epiphany that may be kind of “bleh, that’s obvious,” but I realized that my ability to affect change in the world is fundamentally finite. So, how much I can influence the treatment of Uyghurs in China, is fundamentally small. It’s not something that I can change or control, personally. I can vote in a general election for policies and politicians that may want to address something like that but, even then, unless I go over there to actively change something, I can’t actually do anything. We still live in a world where geography separates us from active conflicts. Technology can bring us up close but only as voyeurs. 


So, how did this revelation change my perspective? 


I'm not saying "don't care about things like BLM or MeToo." I'm saying, "care about what is happening in your own neighborhood, in your own town." You can affect change there in a meaningful and positive way because it comes from your own hands. I think the appeal of activism in general comes from the vicarious experiences it produces, but otherwise it’s just abuse tourism (or, as some have called it, "voluntourism"). Similar to how Christian youth groups go to Africa for a week to build a single house and then leave to go home and feel good about themselves, it’s easier to find inoffensive ways to help than to actually get down in the mud and trauma of people in tough places. 


(The irony of the former example is that Christians are called to actually do this, but we often (myself included) shirk those commitments in favor of a comfortable, drama-free existence. In fact, we are called to, and ought to, be involved in our local churches, be with others in solidarity with their struggles, and volunteer where necessary. While it seems trivial to pick up chairs after service, it is Kingdom work that serves an immediate need for everyone.)  


The good thing about local activism is that you, the individual, are the hands and feet of the movement. You see the change taking effect and you aren’t fucking off to somewhere else afterward to allow it to grow back (sometimes worse than before). But the constant availing of ourselves to this kind of brutality and carnage in the remote places that we will never set foot in, via social media and the 24-hour news cycle, is exhausting. If anything, media organizations of every flavor only profit off it when we tune in and pay attention to it (via advertising revenue). What I’m not saying is to be indifferent to earthquakes in Haiti, gun violence in Florida, or wars in Europe. What I’m saying is, if you do decide to engage, quit your job, change your life, actively do something about it. Otherwise, you'll just be angry, constantly, at how shitty the world is, and continue the endless cycle of outrage and grief at all the bad things we have no control over. But, the alternative is far better: do something about it in your own backyard. And over where the carnage is, make the choice to let others do the work, that is unless you are otherwise called to be there yourself. God is still in control. 


That said, I sat on the above for a day or two and felt compelled to add an additional thought... There are events that occur that do demand international assistance, like the ongoing war in Ukraine, or previous international incidents like the Bosnian War or the Rwandan genocide, but I think the response of private citizens willingly enlisting their skills and services to confront these events is the most realistic path forward. Also, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, making an active effort to be aware of systemic racism and confronting it where possible, has different applications specific to whichever region we live in. In California, for instance, Latino communities make up the largest percentage of residents, yet are routinely marginalized. So, wherever we are needed, we should go and support others and be prepared to serve and minister.



Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Gum Chewing Racism

Chewing gum, occasionally I bite my lip on accident, feel my teeth sink in just a little bit. It hurts a lot but after a while the saliva in my mouth coagulates the ruptured skin and I’m back in business. This has been happening a lot lately, chewing gum. It helps me forget and relax, kicking in my monkey-amygdala brain.

I keep getting the best ideas in the worst possible places. When I try to remember them I feel like I’m wandering in a fog and trying to make out shapeless blobs of cohesive thought. I had an Idea about racism, seeing that that is the flavor of the week. Since Trump took office I’ve only been able to conceive of myself as an oppressor even though I’ve never seen someone as being lesser than myself. (A note. I have plenty of racist thoughts in my head that make me consider Jesus’s sermon on the mount, wherein he suggests that the act of being angry is equivalent to murder. Does that mean that because I’ve had a racist thought that I’ve also considered someone to be sub-human?)

The quintessential quality of a “white person”—at least what I assume to be, in the context of a American everyman raised in the “good part” of town with minimal hardship—is a very human one. The preservation of property. It’s easy to look at material possessions as a right, when in fact the ownership of property is merely by chance. Unless I suddenly won the lottery, the acquisitions of life, liberty, and happiness is a slow going affair. So slow, in fact, that by the end of it all the hard work and chance luck just blurs together into one concerted effort. I find myself harboring bitterness toward my neighbors as if I’ve built up a life for myself in a one bedroom apartment. In reality I’m paying a slumlord a pound of flesh while being angry at my neighbors for littering. I don’t own the streets, or the hedges, or the sidewalks. But I’m under the pretense that I own the space that I occupy. Maybe this is spurred on by the concept of social contract?

Social Contract, as I conceive of it, distilled to its essence is about fairness. (This is the zeitgeist of the 21st century, correct? That meaning is fluid and taylor-fit?) And what we perceive as "unfair" is in violation of the social contract. My psychiatrist tells me that this isn't a realistic way to live, and I agree. Holding people accountable to a contract they never signed with me is tantamount to giving someone a roofie and sociologically fucking them.

In other, less-introspective, news, I got notes back from Desmond on my second book. Reading them has become a bit of a past-time for me, a one man roast on my labors which, I find extremely funny. It's soothing, also, to know that your work is taken less seriously by others than yourself. It's a safety net, placed under your ego, so that when it all falls apart you have a place to land. Like most first drafts, everything is raw and disconnected. Ideas are inconsistently spread across the canvass and need to be thinned out to an even grade. I've done this before with my first book and it's a very frustrating process, though worth wile. And whats interesting is that I've tried to write a second book in between drafts, a shorter novella that I'm really happy with, a tangential work that helps me vent creative frustration. I'm finishing it this weekend and giving it out for another round of notes.

I'm really bad at ending my blogs.

So that's it.

Go back to work. 

Thursday, May 18, 2017

RCT, Easy as 1,2,3

It’s been a long time – too long.

My book’s first draft is complete and I’ve sent it to my trusted advisors for their notes and insight. This is a common practice, one that I had only recently heard of and embraced by accident when I gave my first book to my good friend Desmond. He proceeded to shit all over my book. That sounds bad, but it wasn’t. It was eye opening. Everyone should be subjected to criticism, even if you’re fucking James Joyce.

I get these moments that come and go. Fleeting ideas that condense and then dissipate like morning mist in the desert. I like writing about these but I don’t, because they are rants. And no one wants to read that shit. Most of the time I think about them because I’m mad at something, or someone. Or, I am sitting alone and recounting the day’s events and considering the slights that I received and then avenge myself by articulating these brisk and colorful responses.

One, however, coalesced.

Something that has always bothered me is the concept of white guilt. Let me preface this by affirming that there is a deep need to reassess the social and economic damage that Americans have inflicted upon indigenous people. We owe the descendants of slaves, the victims of failed Reconstruction era politics, a fighting chance to compete and receive the education they deserve. I can go on, but it would detract from the point I want to make.

Like all things, the narrative of prejudice is hopelessly complex. Let me summarize: Realistic conflict theory, as demonstrated by the Robbers’ Cave Study. I find this study fascinating, mostly for the confirmation bias it offers me in my spiritual views on the nature of humans. The experimental model of the study is rudimentary, and lacking in the sophistication of modern psychological studies that attempt to account for extraneous variables, and deploy methodologies that curb all manners and sorts of bias. Still, I think it demonstrates a tendency for prejudice to occur as a byproduct of social, political, economic, and existential tension. And I suppose what bothers me so much about this concept of white guilt is that the narrative is embedded in western civilization, largely ignoring the social narratives of other cultures where there was a demonstrable presence of ingroup/outgroup prejudice. We only ignore it because we don’t wish to make the investment of investigating the “oriental,” the “other,” and bridge the gaps we make between western civilization and the myriad expressions of humanity.

In High School, I knew a “feminist.” We are decent friends today, Facebook friends (for what it’s worth), and our contact is cordial and mutually beneficial. But it’s interesting how our relationship evolved over prolonged periods of antagonism (mostly because, at the time, I had a crush on her). She would make these outrageous, though not misplaced, claims that because I had a dick, I had wronged her, which seemed a bit harsh, granted that I had never done anything to her. It was classic “guilt-by-association.” Nevertheless, it is wrong to pay a woman less than a man because of their sex. It is wrong to view a woman as not capable of arising to the occasional “manly” deed, mostly because men and women offer mutual benefits to working together in synchronicity. It seems disingenuous, if not hypocritical, to hoist one’s self onto a banner of moral superiority and commit the same crime: devaluing someone because of their genitalia. And the same is true of “race,” which is a bit overstated, as we are all homo sapiens.

To further my point, over the last few months I binge-watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was a science fiction television show flexing its intellectual muscles in the late 80s and early 90s. In all seven seasons were captured hypothetical arguments and debate over the preoccupation with Cold War paranoia and interracial conflict – magnificent and worthy pursuits all. I enjoyed the show for its rampant, albeit unintentional, embrace of Globalism, sundering conflict and quieting planetary squabbles under the pretense of dissident races joining the Federation of Planets. It teaches us about the worthiness of our ethnic values, while at the same time devaluing them because they innately encourage the very realistic conflict theory studied by Muzafer Sherif. All ethnicities are, in the end, are artificial divisions based on superficial expressions. To be “enlightened” is to, instead, join hands toward a common goal, and cease the perpetual blame game that has progressed into the 21st century. This is all the ad absurdum reductionism that I could glean from the show, whether they would like to acknowledge it or not.


The issue of white guilt that I have is the caveat of its proposition. I myself have never enslaved a human being or devalued one based on its sex, ethnicity, social tier, or religion. Yet I am devalued based on the assumption that my default predilections are innately sinister. Were I a Martian, living on mars with other Martians, with red skin, and there was an equally powerful group of green-skinned Martians, and we were at each other’s throats for our superficial differences, it would seem very silly to us, but it would make sense to Muzafer Sherif. He would watch us from afar taking field notes in a dust stained moleskin about our petty disputes over limited resources. And, suppose, that I am wrong, and there is no God, I have only just described the very basic principles of evolutionary biology, in which a dominant group supplants another because of their supremacy in means and resources. So I am at a precipice, a crossroads. I have the opportunity to believe that racism is as natural as Realistic Conflict Theory, but I won’t because that’s fucking stupid and we have a choice. We have always had a choice. I believe, wholeheartedly so, that this is who we are when we are blinded by our own egos. But I reject it as the definitive mode in how we operate.