I heard you interviewed with Hamish Mackenzie on The Active Voice. I was so intrigued, and a little intimidated. I've just started my own Substack which is much lighter than yours ... I'm not a member of an academic elite think tank nor can I be considered an expert on anything. I am, however, a white woman, a writer a teacher, a wife and a mom. That's the extent of my credentials.
When my son was in 7th grade playing travel baseball, he had a teammate named Jarcques. Jarcques was 13 at the time. We quickly pieced together that there were days - weeks over the summer - that he was at home alone with only his younger brother. They fed themselves, looked out for each other, survived together. Their mom was gone for days on end. Dad in prison. Sister already a victim of the streets. By the summer's end, I collected him from a street corner with a bag of things and brought him home to live with us. My son and husband were in Canada at that time and I had no way to reach them. When they crossed the border, they had a text from me that simply said, "Jarcques is now living with us. Safe travels home."
The sacrifices we asked of our children were immense and always silently born as they were/are the "lucky" ones in this scenario. The white children with beds and a kitchen full of food.
The school system that turned a blind eye and allowed him into school, onto teams, into academic programs was instrumental in helping us, help him. Jarcques lived with us from 8th grade through high school and then a couple of years beyond. He was a two sport varsity athlete. We took him to as many places as we could without a passport. He was loved. He was well cared for. He was a part of our family. Upon graduation he was offered a football scholarship to a small NAIA school. He lasted one semester. He decided to trade in his cleats and focus on his studies and girlfriend - at a different university. But he was still moving forward. He came home to us in the summer and for holidays.
And then. Bit by bit. He drifted away. He began to spiral. Covid came. His dad was released from prison and down down down he fell. An "uncle" was murdered in a gang related activity. Jarcques was called to action. And we never saw him again. Any of us. He, at times, will reach out to my daughter with whom he has always held a protective bond, but he separated entirely from my son, his best friend, and me and my husband.
He had a baby girl. And she prompted him to finally free himself of his family's pull. He did for a bit. But then got a DUI. House Arrest. And then, this fall, he was arrested on weapons charges and intent to sell drugs alongside the gang members he had once tried to break away from.
We lived in Tennessee at the time (he still does). Our children accepted him into our home without question. They shared their friends, their bathroom, their parents, their Playstation - everything with him. But there were people in our town who would not allow their daughter to spend the night because Jarcques was down the hall.
At graduation, his mom looked at me and said, "thanks." Thanks. As if I'd driven a carpool rather than raise her child.
All told, he was in our lives for 7.5 years. I feel like he is my son. In my heart I feel that way. But, of course, I'm not. I know - and always knew - that I couldn't replace his own mother. I didn't intend to - but I also didn't think it would be so easy for him to turn his back on all that he knew of life in our family and return to the shattered family that bore him. As I write this, Jarcques is out on bail awaiting trial. His dad is awaiting trial for 2 murders - gang related. His baby girl is living with her mom in Kentucky.
I would love to talk about this with you. I try to write about it. But it is incredibly difficult to articulate everything that I feel and know. Primarily, because there is so much I cannot possibly understand. What is the pull of his dad? A person who is a murderer and active gang member.
What is the pull of his mom? A person who handed him to me for 7.5 years.
Why is the cycle of poverty so pervasive? How can it be broken?
(I don't assume that you fully know just because you're black, any more than I understand the Jan. 6 mob, just because I'm white. I'd just simply like to talk.)
How do I, as a white person, begin to understand it? Because I want to. I need to. I lay my head down at night and pray that he is safe. Just like I do for my own.
While there are brilliant minds debating race and equity and power and social justice or the lack thereof...there are people like me, regular every day people, just Big Ten educated people who are trying to come to terms with race today. It's so incredibly layered and complex and real.
What we did, I'd do again. But it was really fucking hard.
I'd like to say I'm not hurt but I'm human. I'm very hurt. And I'm a little mad. I have so many questions...but at the end of the day, when I'm being most honest, I just want to know why he turned his back on us and returned to the streets. And I just want to understand it better.
I firmly believe that humans are humans first and foremost and that as humans we have innumerably more things in common than those we do not. But.
It's always about the but.
But.
I'd love to talk about the But.
Did I face antirascist fervor because of what we did? Yes. But as good southerners, they didn't say it to my face. However, there's no way to bring a black boy from the ghetto into a white middle class neighborhood without shit. From everyone. White, black, and everyone else.
My God, I contemplate US society with absolute horror. Gangs are unknown here. We have drug dealers and some them are race based but race is not synonymous with armed murderers. Nor do we have parading racists in regalia brandishing guns and burning crosses. Australia is dull and suburban and the suburbs are full of racists and their racist stereotypes, but people like to live and let live. But I am sure the US bullshit of individual success at all costs will change al that if we let it penetrate our society even further. As it is if you give black people a hard time they’ll give you one back which is as it should be.
A few years ago, I would have been mildly disappointed by a tirade like this, shrugged my shoulders and moved on. However, after reading the reports on Australia's fascist response to COVID, I actually find this post mildly amusing.
These are stereotypes peddled by left-wing Americans. US is the only Western country in the world which twice elected a black man with a (partly) Muslim background as President. Such a thing could not have happened in any other Western country, including of course, Australia. I am a brown skinned man who lived in the US for 8 plus years, Australia for 6 years and UK for a little more than one year. I faced more racism in Australia and UK than the US. So did many of. my friends. My personal experience on this issue is also supported by published research (not citing papers here to avoid clutter) and the high rates of dating and marriage among different racial groups in America.
Your comment hasn't dated very well, has it. The UK has a brown Prime Minister and a dozen of the major UK cities have brown mayors. https://twitter.com/LozzaFox/status/1786809682574586151. Maybe you should have stayed longer than a year and had a proper look around you.
From my experience with Australians, they tend to see the average American as some kind of combined New York investment banker, gun-toting Texan, and Hollywood celebrity. I have to explain to them that no American is likely to be all of those things at once, and most of us aren't any of them.
Australia is a sparsely populated country, and there is not nearly as much regional variation in culture as there is in the U.S. (i.e. it's difficult to tell whether someone is from Townsville or Perth based on their accent or appearance, where as it's usually pretty obvious if you have someone from San Fransisco and someone from Miami which one is which). I try to tell them to imagine the U.S. as being more like Europe than like a country in the way that they understand it.
There are a few people who meet any stereotype you can come up with, but several hundred million that don't.
My grandmother's father kidnapped her mother off the street when her mother was 14 or 15 years old. He kept her prisoner for several years, periodically raping her and during which time my grandmother & great aunt were conceived and born. After my grandmother’s grandmother located them and took the kids, my great-grandmother managed to escape, fleeing first to another city where she didn’t think he’d be able to track her down. She eventually reunited with her mother, but became an alcoholic and died at 30. My grandmother was aware that her father was a bad (understatement!) man, and yet when she came of age, she tried reaching out to him to establish some sort of relationship. Surprise, surprise, she received no response. I can only imagine what stories she told herself about her father, a vicious human being who deserved nothing less than to to hung.
The desire for connection with one’s [even undeserving] kin (sometimes expressed in horribly disordered ways) is one of the things that makes us human. And even though the pull isn’t there for everyone, it’s strong for many of us, and maybe most.
Mrs. Benning, my heart is with you. You and I represent 2 ends of the same spectrum...I am AA woman private HBCU educated, with doctorate. I have spent my professional career to make sure students like Jarcques make better choices. I can only say that for many It is far more complicated than you imagine. Please be encouraged that you played a positive role in his life and as long as he breathes he has a chance. God bless you and your family.
It is the compassion of moms like you that can rescue the world, not any wisdom born in elite academic thinktanks. Not in every case, but often enough. Thank you for trying. Everyone who read your comment admires you.
"What is the pull of his dad? A person who is a murderer and active gang member.
What is the pull of his mom? A person who handed him to me for 7.5 years.
Why is the cycle of poverty so pervasive? How can it be broken?"
why does being a white woman preclude you from exploring these questions? does the bond children have/feel towards their parents vary between races? does poverty so disparately affect races that one needs to be in conversation to comprehend?
It doesn't of course. And I don't think the parental bond varies between races. I am simply trying to find answers and those answers may be hidden behind doors that I am not privy to. I think it's important to recognize how different people see things so as to understand a little more fully. Communication and listening...I guess that is what it comes down to. I'd like to not think that we approach things as races but as humans but of course, we are also of a race. Sometimes I find that people with different backgrounds - race, religions, ethnicity - help me see things from a different perspective.
I can understand the hysterical anger of people of colour. It must be like being locked up with people out of their minds on some officially prescribed drug.
I am watching Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner on the TV. The lack of any socio -political context, then in the context of the Freedom Democrats and the BPP, now in the context of televised police murders and the horrifying scenes of deindustrialisation, servile impoverishment, tent cities, unobtainable medical treatment, endless war and war shortages and NO ( unlike then) conscious resistance in either the black or white communities, so illustrates the American genius for the writing of the rhetoric of parallel universes that I am staggered endlessly as in a recurring nightmare. America is a nightmare, it sits on a dung heap/opium dream scratching itself with notions of “race”.
We have the opposite problem. Our leaders are literally dictated to over the phone by the US state department. We had our day in the sun, our social democracy, under Whitlam; there was very little resistance to the widespread social reforms, including the reforms to immigration and indigenous affairs, precisely because the reforms were so wide ranging. Racism is a narrow, resentful thing, a squabbling over crumbs. The answer to the oppression of a minority is the freedom of everyone. We understand that even fifty years later, which is why we resent you, the US elites...for your bizarre imperial reaction.
The white and black sections of the US working class grasp the historical realities of the ideological category race. What they need to grasp is the material basis of social justice, which has nothing whatsoever to do with anyone’s “desserts” and a lot to do with the terrorisation of any genuine labor activists trying to bring together white and black workers. With the smashing up of the US labor movement this hasn’t changed-it merely takes on this ridiculous middle class form that we see debated here. Genuine black activists get this. Idiots will never get it.
“White fragility” is just a variation on that well known Right Wing trope “resilience”. Its intention is the same whether you are white or black, to shut down dialogue and to shut you up.
Perhaps the question is: How can you tell someone they’re not a victim? (Credit to Ashe Short, nee Schow for being the first to phrase person I read asking this explicitly, in the context of Title IX issues). It is now socially normative that any sort of claim of victimhood ends the conversation. That is unworkable. So what new norm can there be? How can a culture that is respectful and does acknowledge genuine hardship establish some norms around how to shut down the disingenuous whiners??
Convincing people that they aren't victims is a major focus of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, where negative thoughts are reframed or otherwise debunked. Greg Lukianoff correctly points out that woke culture, by encouraging a victim mentality, is effectively doing the opposite of therapy.
But I was talking about this more as a social phenomenon. Not as convincing the person complaining, but as forming a shared agreement with everyone else that some people's claims should be dismissed.
As in some of the cases they talk about in this interview, it may not be that the person complaining is doing so in good faith, but it seems very difficult as a matter of social norms for the rest of us to deal with that.
I have observed many Australians whose opinion of the U.S. is informed by entertainment media, American news outlets, and perhaps a brief tourist trip to New York. I would advise against making generalizations.
If a society cannot satisfy the legitimate claims of the people because it is held that only individuals can make claims upon other individuals then the society begins to collapse preceded by the kind of catawauling we are seeing in this series of posts.
If society devolves into cultish behavior of the sort this episode discusses, the people at the top are very happy they don't have to address any legitimate concerns.
Yes, that’s perfectly true. But all demands are legitimate demands until constituencies are arbitrarily pitted against each other. Americans have a right to free university education, free healthcare, job and career opportunities and generous support in sickness and during periods of unemployment. It is pathetic to see them gouging each other for preferment on the basis of ethnicity and suchlike. Individualism is merely narcissism politicised.
This is incoherent. Deprivation of social goods, such as education, housing security, employment and professional development is real and a real deprivation of means of satisfying vital human needs. Once you start rationing them you end up with this racist and racialist bullshit and nasty ideological tropes like CBT to persuade people to put up with it.
I'm not claiming that no one is actually a recipient of any sort of misfortune. I am saying that when people lie or exaggerate about their victimhood, we seem to lack a socially acceptable countermeasure.
You’re missing the point completely. You also miss the point about individualism. To the extent it informs social policy it is destroying democracy across the globe emanating more or less by force of arms from the US. This is why you are facing what could almost be described as civil conflict throughout all your institutions. I am not surprised you left Australia. You would not be comfortable here.
I was very comfortable, but I did notice the rising influence of the Chinese Communist Party, which is destroying democracy and is definitely not individualistic. American corporations are much the same.
When the subjective becomes the objective and my truth becomes the truth, when reality is fully unhinged from language, words and sentences we struggle with to touch what is really real, our world becomes a fantasy where cruelty is kindness and kindness cruelty. DiAngelo's truth is not true; it is cruelty in the finest silk of the naked Emperor. DiAngelo's work is naked and ugly and we must never stop saying so, never. Make lying wrong again.
The thing is, the young actors breaking down and sobbing over how traumatizing it was to be in a room with white people surely knew at one level that they were perfectly safe. People who may actually be in danger can't afford that kind of meltdown; they have to maintain their dignity, their privacy and their vigilance. White people who mean well doubtless have their own irritating habits and unexpected volatilities, but they're not out to cheat and humiliate and endanger black people as a matter of cultural policy (think the Jim Crow South, where that kind of thing was practically a sport).
No doubt social media exacerbates the tendency toward hypersensitivity and emotional manipulation (for young persons regardless of race), but the phenomenon predates social media - the little girls in 17th-century Salem knew all about it. It's the same kind of contagious and escalating hysteria, and the same kind of . . . not being quite at the point of knowing other people are real. (Some activists, even as adults, never quite get to that point with people they think of as the enemy.) As I remember from my own excursions into radical feminist activism, you don't quite even know your own side is real - not one by one in the fully individuated sense - you're just trying to appear adequately enlightened in the eyes of the group, and you do things you wouldn't do if you were alone.
Maybe what everybody in the situation needed to do was to admit they were nervous about each other, and go on working together until they weren't.
When radical feminism and various other kinds of radical crap led to my radical disadvantage, the fact I was not about to be literally lynched didn’t matter very much, the fact I could not find a home did. When you can’t find work, a home, basic amenities, you don’t give a damn where you are on some scale of victimisation.
The essence of oppression, a fact, middle class wankers do not seem to grasp, is the deprivation of the material necessities of life. Christ, why the fuck would we want to go to your bourgeois theatres to watch your bourgeois bollocks ? But we would like relief from the anxiety of making the rent or sleeping under bridges.
In the US you pay with your fucking soul for warm, dry sheets and a bowl of soup. The abysmal US concept of human dignity has led to millions imprisoned and the rule of armed criminal gangs...not least in blue uniforms. It is about time you idiots grasped the material basis of human and civil rights and respected them across the board. Living in a world dominated by you is like living next to an immense plague pit.
Genuine empathy is painful. Genuine art as a consequence does not censor. Well, of course other people aren’t real to you, this entire debate from beginning to end assumes they’re not. Where are we up to after, at the determination of criteria for authentic suffering? Oh, please.
Anti racism is nothing more than a temper tantrum among leftists who feel guilty about their success and want to make everyone feel as miserable and worthless as they are. The left is a cultural cancer that needs to be extirpated from the body politic.
The desire for connection with one’s [even undeserving] kin (sometimes expressed in horribly disordered ways) is one of the things that makes us human. And even though the pull isn’t there for everyone, it’s strong for many of us, and maybe most.… I love this!!! And I get it. Truly. I’m so sorry for what you experienced. Thank you. I appreciate you.
Thank you very much for bringing Jim on. I feel like my suspicions about wokeness in the theater have been confirmed by the overwhelming high number of "woke" theater and movies here in Chicago (which has the 2nd largest production of theater next to NY). 80% of the Goodman theater productions are about wokeness and/or white oppression. Steppenwolf about 50%. The smaller venues have either gone under or have gone super-woke as well. I enjoy going to the theater because it used to be an escape from reality not an enhancement of it.
On a positive note, I did see Good Night, Oscar with Sean Hayes. It was amazing and will do well in New York!
Age Harassment and Discrimination in the Workplace
Tackling banter at work: micro-course
Awkward at the Office - California Law (AB 1825) - Employee Edition & MORE!
We also have a new Civil + Human Rights and Equity Department with discrimination enforcement services to investigate claims of discrimination within the private sector.
"Any person who willfully resists, obstructs, or interferes with the enforcement authority of this Department, or the Hearing Officer in the performance of any duty under this article shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and be punishable by a fine of not more than $1,000 and by imprisonment in the County Jail for a period of not more than six months."
Seamus Heaney's THE CURE AT TROY: A VERSION OF SOPHOCLES' PHILOCTETES (1990) is a play for our times too. Written to address one of the legacies of the Irish Troubles, 'a sense that the pride in the wound is greater than the desire for the cure', it contains these devastating bits:
1) CHORUS:
People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they're fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones.
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
Licking their wounds
And flashing them around like decorations.
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself.
2) CHORUS:
Your wound is what you feed on, Philoctetes.
3) NEOPTOLEMUS:
Stop just licking your wounds. Start seeing things.
What one sees is the deeper wound that the mythology of the wound conceals. Ireland bled for the English speaking world but was convinced it bled for ourselves alone.
The coils of race prejudice that destroy lives wholesale are fundamental to a brutal and unjust imperial system. Racial oppression is part of an essential wound at the heart of US society which also takes in the industrial oppression and exploitation of white workers and all workers. The democratic civility US liberals believe in never existed. US capitalism is founded on a series of brutal wounds, from the Indian wars to the Civil War and US foreign military adventures. The Irish romanticised a narrow self-sufficient nationalism but their literature and political rhetoric spoke for the world. Americans romanticise the small scale town hall democracy but their suffering speaks for the struggles of an entire civilisation.
No society escapes empire and if you are honest with yourself you will surely admit that the citizens of this latest incarnation of empire escape it least of all.
I heard you interviewed with Hamish Mackenzie on The Active Voice. I was so intrigued, and a little intimidated. I've just started my own Substack which is much lighter than yours ... I'm not a member of an academic elite think tank nor can I be considered an expert on anything. I am, however, a white woman, a writer a teacher, a wife and a mom. That's the extent of my credentials.
When my son was in 7th grade playing travel baseball, he had a teammate named Jarcques. Jarcques was 13 at the time. We quickly pieced together that there were days - weeks over the summer - that he was at home alone with only his younger brother. They fed themselves, looked out for each other, survived together. Their mom was gone for days on end. Dad in prison. Sister already a victim of the streets. By the summer's end, I collected him from a street corner with a bag of things and brought him home to live with us. My son and husband were in Canada at that time and I had no way to reach them. When they crossed the border, they had a text from me that simply said, "Jarcques is now living with us. Safe travels home."
The sacrifices we asked of our children were immense and always silently born as they were/are the "lucky" ones in this scenario. The white children with beds and a kitchen full of food.
The school system that turned a blind eye and allowed him into school, onto teams, into academic programs was instrumental in helping us, help him. Jarcques lived with us from 8th grade through high school and then a couple of years beyond. He was a two sport varsity athlete. We took him to as many places as we could without a passport. He was loved. He was well cared for. He was a part of our family. Upon graduation he was offered a football scholarship to a small NAIA school. He lasted one semester. He decided to trade in his cleats and focus on his studies and girlfriend - at a different university. But he was still moving forward. He came home to us in the summer and for holidays.
And then. Bit by bit. He drifted away. He began to spiral. Covid came. His dad was released from prison and down down down he fell. An "uncle" was murdered in a gang related activity. Jarcques was called to action. And we never saw him again. Any of us. He, at times, will reach out to my daughter with whom he has always held a protective bond, but he separated entirely from my son, his best friend, and me and my husband.
He had a baby girl. And she prompted him to finally free himself of his family's pull. He did for a bit. But then got a DUI. House Arrest. And then, this fall, he was arrested on weapons charges and intent to sell drugs alongside the gang members he had once tried to break away from.
We lived in Tennessee at the time (he still does). Our children accepted him into our home without question. They shared their friends, their bathroom, their parents, their Playstation - everything with him. But there were people in our town who would not allow their daughter to spend the night because Jarcques was down the hall.
At graduation, his mom looked at me and said, "thanks." Thanks. As if I'd driven a carpool rather than raise her child.
All told, he was in our lives for 7.5 years. I feel like he is my son. In my heart I feel that way. But, of course, I'm not. I know - and always knew - that I couldn't replace his own mother. I didn't intend to - but I also didn't think it would be so easy for him to turn his back on all that he knew of life in our family and return to the shattered family that bore him. As I write this, Jarcques is out on bail awaiting trial. His dad is awaiting trial for 2 murders - gang related. His baby girl is living with her mom in Kentucky.
I would love to talk about this with you. I try to write about it. But it is incredibly difficult to articulate everything that I feel and know. Primarily, because there is so much I cannot possibly understand. What is the pull of his dad? A person who is a murderer and active gang member.
What is the pull of his mom? A person who handed him to me for 7.5 years.
Why is the cycle of poverty so pervasive? How can it be broken?
(I don't assume that you fully know just because you're black, any more than I understand the Jan. 6 mob, just because I'm white. I'd just simply like to talk.)
How do I, as a white person, begin to understand it? Because I want to. I need to. I lay my head down at night and pray that he is safe. Just like I do for my own.
While there are brilliant minds debating race and equity and power and social justice or the lack thereof...there are people like me, regular every day people, just Big Ten educated people who are trying to come to terms with race today. It's so incredibly layered and complex and real.
What we did, I'd do again. But it was really fucking hard.
I'd like to say I'm not hurt but I'm human. I'm very hurt. And I'm a little mad. I have so many questions...but at the end of the day, when I'm being most honest, I just want to know why he turned his back on us and returned to the streets. And I just want to understand it better.
I firmly believe that humans are humans first and foremost and that as humans we have innumerably more things in common than those we do not. But.
It's always about the but.
But.
I'd love to talk about the But.
Did I face antirascist fervor because of what we did? Yes. But as good southerners, they didn't say it to my face. However, there's no way to bring a black boy from the ghetto into a white middle class neighborhood without shit. From everyone. White, black, and everyone else.
My God, I contemplate US society with absolute horror. Gangs are unknown here. We have drug dealers and some them are race based but race is not synonymous with armed murderers. Nor do we have parading racists in regalia brandishing guns and burning crosses. Australia is dull and suburban and the suburbs are full of racists and their racist stereotypes, but people like to live and let live. But I am sure the US bullshit of individual success at all costs will change al that if we let it penetrate our society even further. As it is if you give black people a hard time they’ll give you one back which is as it should be.
A few years ago, I would have been mildly disappointed by a tirade like this, shrugged my shoulders and moved on. However, after reading the reports on Australia's fascist response to COVID, I actually find this post mildly amusing.
These are stereotypes peddled by left-wing Americans. US is the only Western country in the world which twice elected a black man with a (partly) Muslim background as President. Such a thing could not have happened in any other Western country, including of course, Australia. I am a brown skinned man who lived in the US for 8 plus years, Australia for 6 years and UK for a little more than one year. I faced more racism in Australia and UK than the US. So did many of. my friends. My personal experience on this issue is also supported by published research (not citing papers here to avoid clutter) and the high rates of dating and marriage among different racial groups in America.
Your comment hasn't dated very well, has it. The UK has a brown Prime Minister and a dozen of the major UK cities have brown mayors. https://twitter.com/LozzaFox/status/1786809682574586151. Maybe you should have stayed longer than a year and had a proper look around you.
From my experience with Australians, they tend to see the average American as some kind of combined New York investment banker, gun-toting Texan, and Hollywood celebrity. I have to explain to them that no American is likely to be all of those things at once, and most of us aren't any of them.
Australia is a sparsely populated country, and there is not nearly as much regional variation in culture as there is in the U.S. (i.e. it's difficult to tell whether someone is from Townsville or Perth based on their accent or appearance, where as it's usually pretty obvious if you have someone from San Fransisco and someone from Miami which one is which). I try to tell them to imagine the U.S. as being more like Europe than like a country in the way that they understand it.
There are a few people who meet any stereotype you can come up with, but several hundred million that don't.
Speaking as a former Australia resident, I'm glad I'm here and not there. We aren't nearly individualistic enough.
What is the pull of his father and mother?
My grandmother's father kidnapped her mother off the street when her mother was 14 or 15 years old. He kept her prisoner for several years, periodically raping her and during which time my grandmother & great aunt were conceived and born. After my grandmother’s grandmother located them and took the kids, my great-grandmother managed to escape, fleeing first to another city where she didn’t think he’d be able to track her down. She eventually reunited with her mother, but became an alcoholic and died at 30. My grandmother was aware that her father was a bad (understatement!) man, and yet when she came of age, she tried reaching out to him to establish some sort of relationship. Surprise, surprise, she received no response. I can only imagine what stories she told herself about her father, a vicious human being who deserved nothing less than to to hung.
The desire for connection with one’s [even undeserving] kin (sometimes expressed in horribly disordered ways) is one of the things that makes us human. And even though the pull isn’t there for everyone, it’s strong for many of us, and maybe most.
Mrs. Benning, my heart is with you. You and I represent 2 ends of the same spectrum...I am AA woman private HBCU educated, with doctorate. I have spent my professional career to make sure students like Jarcques make better choices. I can only say that for many It is far more complicated than you imagine. Please be encouraged that you played a positive role in his life and as long as he breathes he has a chance. God bless you and your family.
It is the compassion of moms like you that can rescue the world, not any wisdom born in elite academic thinktanks. Not in every case, but often enough. Thank you for trying. Everyone who read your comment admires you.
"What is the pull of his dad? A person who is a murderer and active gang member.
What is the pull of his mom? A person who handed him to me for 7.5 years.
Why is the cycle of poverty so pervasive? How can it be broken?"
why does being a white woman preclude you from exploring these questions? does the bond children have/feel towards their parents vary between races? does poverty so disparately affect races that one needs to be in conversation to comprehend?
"From everyone. White, black and everyone else."
this to me is the take-home observation.
It doesn't of course. And I don't think the parental bond varies between races. I am simply trying to find answers and those answers may be hidden behind doors that I am not privy to. I think it's important to recognize how different people see things so as to understand a little more fully. Communication and listening...I guess that is what it comes down to. I'd like to not think that we approach things as races but as humans but of course, we are also of a race. Sometimes I find that people with different backgrounds - race, religions, ethnicity - help me see things from a different perspective.
Thanks for your comments.
“Shit” , I imagine them saying, “where are the jolly rules now?”
I can understand the hysterical anger of people of colour. It must be like being locked up with people out of their minds on some officially prescribed drug.
I am watching Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner on the TV. The lack of any socio -political context, then in the context of the Freedom Democrats and the BPP, now in the context of televised police murders and the horrifying scenes of deindustrialisation, servile impoverishment, tent cities, unobtainable medical treatment, endless war and war shortages and NO ( unlike then) conscious resistance in either the black or white communities, so illustrates the American genius for the writing of the rhetoric of parallel universes that I am staggered endlessly as in a recurring nightmare. America is a nightmare, it sits on a dung heap/opium dream scratching itself with notions of “race”.
We have the opposite problem. Our leaders are literally dictated to over the phone by the US state department. We had our day in the sun, our social democracy, under Whitlam; there was very little resistance to the widespread social reforms, including the reforms to immigration and indigenous affairs, precisely because the reforms were so wide ranging. Racism is a narrow, resentful thing, a squabbling over crumbs. The answer to the oppression of a minority is the freedom of everyone. We understand that even fifty years later, which is why we resent you, the US elites...for your bizarre imperial reaction.
The white and black sections of the US working class grasp the historical realities of the ideological category race. What they need to grasp is the material basis of social justice, which has nothing whatsoever to do with anyone’s “desserts” and a lot to do with the terrorisation of any genuine labor activists trying to bring together white and black workers. With the smashing up of the US labor movement this hasn’t changed-it merely takes on this ridiculous middle class form that we see debated here. Genuine black activists get this. Idiots will never get it.
The one kind of segregation that the US establishment will honour to the end of days is the political segregation of US workers. Stop falling for it.
“White fragility” is just a variation on that well known Right Wing trope “resilience”. Its intention is the same whether you are white or black, to shut down dialogue and to shut you up.
Perhaps the question is: How can you tell someone they’re not a victim? (Credit to Ashe Short, nee Schow for being the first to phrase person I read asking this explicitly, in the context of Title IX issues). It is now socially normative that any sort of claim of victimhood ends the conversation. That is unworkable. So what new norm can there be? How can a culture that is respectful and does acknowledge genuine hardship establish some norms around how to shut down the disingenuous whiners??
I wonder how you convince someone they’re not a victim? There wouldn’t seem to be a premium ( at least not in the US ) on being one.
Convincing people that they aren't victims is a major focus of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, where negative thoughts are reframed or otherwise debunked. Greg Lukianoff correctly points out that woke culture, by encouraging a victim mentality, is effectively doing the opposite of therapy.
But I was talking about this more as a social phenomenon. Not as convincing the person complaining, but as forming a shared agreement with everyone else that some people's claims should be dismissed.
As in some of the cases they talk about in this interview, it may not be that the person complaining is doing so in good faith, but it seems very difficult as a matter of social norms for the rest of us to deal with that.
But of course they won’t. ...they are Americans.
I have observed many Australians whose opinion of the U.S. is informed by entertainment media, American news outlets, and perhaps a brief tourist trip to New York. I would advise against making generalizations.
It is frightening to see them proselytising for their ugly ideology in our country.
“Restoring rugged individuals to their rightful place” would not revolutionise the US . On the contrary it would probably plunge it
into civil war. Americans need to make collective demands.
If a society cannot satisfy the legitimate claims of the people because it is held that only individuals can make claims upon other individuals then the society begins to collapse preceded by the kind of catawauling we are seeing in this series of posts.
If society devolves into cultish behavior of the sort this episode discusses, the people at the top are very happy they don't have to address any legitimate concerns.
Yes, that’s perfectly true. But all demands are legitimate demands until constituencies are arbitrarily pitted against each other. Americans have a right to free university education, free healthcare, job and career opportunities and generous support in sickness and during periods of unemployment. It is pathetic to see them gouging each other for preferment on the basis of ethnicity and suchlike. Individualism is merely narcissism politicised.
This is incoherent. Deprivation of social goods, such as education, housing security, employment and professional development is real and a real deprivation of means of satisfying vital human needs. Once you start rationing them you end up with this racist and racialist bullshit and nasty ideological tropes like CBT to persuade people to put up with it.
I'm not claiming that no one is actually a recipient of any sort of misfortune. I am saying that when people lie or exaggerate about their victimhood, we seem to lack a socially acceptable countermeasure.
You’re missing the point completely. You also miss the point about individualism. To the extent it informs social policy it is destroying democracy across the globe emanating more or less by force of arms from the US. This is why you are facing what could almost be described as civil conflict throughout all your institutions. I am not surprised you left Australia. You would not be comfortable here.
I was very comfortable, but I did notice the rising influence of the Chinese Communist Party, which is destroying democracy and is definitely not individualistic. American corporations are much the same.
When the subjective becomes the objective and my truth becomes the truth, when reality is fully unhinged from language, words and sentences we struggle with to touch what is really real, our world becomes a fantasy where cruelty is kindness and kindness cruelty. DiAngelo's truth is not true; it is cruelty in the finest silk of the naked Emperor. DiAngelo's work is naked and ugly and we must never stop saying so, never. Make lying wrong again.
The thing is, the young actors breaking down and sobbing over how traumatizing it was to be in a room with white people surely knew at one level that they were perfectly safe. People who may actually be in danger can't afford that kind of meltdown; they have to maintain their dignity, their privacy and their vigilance. White people who mean well doubtless have their own irritating habits and unexpected volatilities, but they're not out to cheat and humiliate and endanger black people as a matter of cultural policy (think the Jim Crow South, where that kind of thing was practically a sport).
No doubt social media exacerbates the tendency toward hypersensitivity and emotional manipulation (for young persons regardless of race), but the phenomenon predates social media - the little girls in 17th-century Salem knew all about it. It's the same kind of contagious and escalating hysteria, and the same kind of . . . not being quite at the point of knowing other people are real. (Some activists, even as adults, never quite get to that point with people they think of as the enemy.) As I remember from my own excursions into radical feminist activism, you don't quite even know your own side is real - not one by one in the fully individuated sense - you're just trying to appear adequately enlightened in the eyes of the group, and you do things you wouldn't do if you were alone.
Maybe what everybody in the situation needed to do was to admit they were nervous about each other, and go on working together until they weren't.
When radical feminism and various other kinds of radical crap led to my radical disadvantage, the fact I was not about to be literally lynched didn’t matter very much, the fact I could not find a home did. When you can’t find work, a home, basic amenities, you don’t give a damn where you are on some scale of victimisation.
The essence of oppression, a fact, middle class wankers do not seem to grasp, is the deprivation of the material necessities of life. Christ, why the fuck would we want to go to your bourgeois theatres to watch your bourgeois bollocks ? But we would like relief from the anxiety of making the rent or sleeping under bridges.
In the US you pay with your fucking soul for warm, dry sheets and a bowl of soup. The abysmal US concept of human dignity has led to millions imprisoned and the rule of armed criminal gangs...not least in blue uniforms. It is about time you idiots grasped the material basis of human and civil rights and respected them across the board. Living in a world dominated by you is like living next to an immense plague pit.
Genuine empathy is painful. Genuine art as a consequence does not censor. Well, of course other people aren’t real to you, this entire debate from beginning to end assumes they’re not. Where are we up to after, at the determination of criteria for authentic suffering? Oh, please.
Anti racism is nothing more than a temper tantrum among leftists who feel guilty about their success and want to make everyone feel as miserable and worthless as they are. The left is a cultural cancer that needs to be extirpated from the body politic.
The desire for connection with one’s [even undeserving] kin (sometimes expressed in horribly disordered ways) is one of the things that makes us human. And even though the pull isn’t there for everyone, it’s strong for many of us, and maybe most.… I love this!!! And I get it. Truly. I’m so sorry for what you experienced. Thank you. I appreciate you.
Thank you very much for bringing Jim on. I feel like my suspicions about wokeness in the theater have been confirmed by the overwhelming high number of "woke" theater and movies here in Chicago (which has the 2nd largest production of theater next to NY). 80% of the Goodman theater productions are about wokeness and/or white oppression. Steppenwolf about 50%. The smaller venues have either gone under or have gone super-woke as well. I enjoy going to the theater because it used to be an escape from reality not an enhancement of it.
On a positive note, I did see Good Night, Oscar with Sean Hayes. It was amazing and will do well in New York!
Here are the courses available for employees of the City of Los Angeles:
Diversity Made Simple - Government Version
Diversity Made Simple for Managers
Understanding and Tackling Gender Bias at Work
Tackling Race Bias at Work: Managers' Guide
Respect Gender & Sexual Differences & Assert Yourself
Additional Options:
Equality & Diversity
Diversity Made Simple for Managers
Understanding gender bias: micro-course
Understanding Race Bias: Micro-course
Diversity in the Workplace... for Employees
Diversity in the Workplace... for Managers and Supervisors
Diversity Made Simple
Bystander Intervention
Navigate & Respect Age, Ethnic & Racial Differences
Navigate Diversity
Blind Spots in Business: Diversity and Ethics
Introduction to Equality Impact Assessments
EEO Made Simple
Working with the Equality Act: micro-course
Getting Real About Workplace Violence
Age Harassment and Discrimination in the Workplace
Tackling banter at work: micro-course
Awkward at the Office - California Law (AB 1825) - Employee Edition & MORE!
We also have a new Civil + Human Rights and Equity Department with discrimination enforcement services to investigate claims of discrimination within the private sector.
"Any person who willfully resists, obstructs, or interferes with the enforcement authority of this Department, or the Hearing Officer in the performance of any duty under this article shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and be punishable by a fine of not more than $1,000 and by imprisonment in the County Jail for a period of not more than six months."
I just don't know where this is all headed.
A very dark place-1984.
Seamus Heaney's THE CURE AT TROY: A VERSION OF SOPHOCLES' PHILOCTETES (1990) is a play for our times too. Written to address one of the legacies of the Irish Troubles, 'a sense that the pride in the wound is greater than the desire for the cure', it contains these devastating bits:
1) CHORUS:
People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they're fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones.
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
Licking their wounds
And flashing them around like decorations.
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself.
2) CHORUS:
Your wound is what you feed on, Philoctetes.
3) NEOPTOLEMUS:
Stop just licking your wounds. Start seeing things.
What one sees is the deeper wound that the mythology of the wound conceals. Ireland bled for the English speaking world but was convinced it bled for ourselves alone.
Could you please elaborate on this? Thanks.
The coils of race prejudice that destroy lives wholesale are fundamental to a brutal and unjust imperial system. Racial oppression is part of an essential wound at the heart of US society which also takes in the industrial oppression and exploitation of white workers and all workers. The democratic civility US liberals believe in never existed. US capitalism is founded on a series of brutal wounds, from the Indian wars to the Civil War and US foreign military adventures. The Irish romanticised a narrow self-sufficient nationalism but their literature and political rhetoric spoke for the world. Americans romanticise the small scale town hall democracy but their suffering speaks for the struggles of an entire civilisation.
Thank you. The truth is hard. History is violent and full of brutality. Is there any society that escapes this?
No society escapes empire and if you are honest with yourself you will surely admit that the citizens of this latest incarnation of empire escape it least of all.
US racism and racialism bleeds for all the victims of that empire but is convinced it bleeds for some integral civility that never was.
But only a prick beats some kid over the head for asking questions in class.
Excellent. Thank you.