The Widening Gyre

A year or two ago I was eating dinner with a certain contingent of my extended family.  These are the (mostly conservative) southern relatives.  One cousin-once-removed opined, “Lemme tell you about Chileans: I got no use for ‘em.”  He went on to explain that while Argentinians think—or rather, know—they’re better than everyone else, Chileans think they’re better than everyone else, and they’re going to prove it to you.

I asked, “Where do Americans fit into this?”

Another relative, who’s done a lot of traveling, said “Americans don’t think anyone else exists.”

I am regularly reminded of how sadly, frighteningly true this is.  (Not the thing about Chileans.)

Democracy Now recently ran an interview with two Ugandan gay rights activists about the pending anti-homosexual bill there.  There’s something that’s been disturbing me a bit about US coverage of this bill, and the Democracy Now story was no exception.  Amy Goodman spent over half of the interview (as I remember it a couple of days later) asking her guests about the involvement of US christian right groups in promoting the atmosphere of homophobia out of which this bill has grown.  Other coverage that I’ve been exposed to has also drawn a lot of attention to connections between the US right and the legislators who have been pushing the bill.

These US groups certainly deserve to have their role exposed.  However, what disturbs me about the emphasis on their involvement is that it evokes a certain racist, colonial subtext.  There’s an implication that this horrific bill is the fault of the Americans who have promoted homophobia in Uganda.  It seems that responsibility is placed disproportionately upon the shoulders of these white “meddlers,” rather than on the Ugandans who actually drafted the bill and are promoting it using all kinds of hate speech and fear tactics.  These news stories echo an old colonialist narrative in which the natives don’t really think for themselves, but merely act on the influence of whites.  This idea was bandied about a lot when Africans were resisting European colonial rule: the blacks are like little children.  They need whites to take care of them.  They’re just confused because some socialist European meddlers gave been giving them crazy ideas.  The story I hear underneath the emphasis on US influences on the anti-gay bill is “Homophobic, fear-mongering rhetoric about the Homosexual Agenda to destroy the traditional family is all objectionable enough in the US where we’re civilized enough not to go around executing gays.  But these Americans should’ve known better than to bring it to the Dark Continent, where anything goes and the most unspeakable horrors happen on a daily basis.”

This narrative is not explicit, and I’m sure it’s not intentional.  But I’ve noticed it popping up in my mind whenever I hear one of these news stories.  And if it’s lurking in my mind, then it must have come from the culture somewhere, and it’s hard to think it doesn’t have some influence on the way the issue is being reported.

But even discounting this subtext, the way Amy Goodman and others in the US have chosen to report this bill is a deliberate effort to tell the story in terms of US politics.  Goodman is using this story as a way to attack the US right.  This attack may be well justified, but it is a transparent example of the difficulty that Americans have with seeing issues (and people) outside the US on their own terms—the tendency to make everything about the US and (United States of) Americans.  The thing that makes us talk about how many American lives were lost, rather than how many human lives were lost.

I’m glad that I know that US Christian groups have had a hand in what’s going on in Uganda.  But now I want to know what’s going on in Uganda.  Far more useful than spending 20 minutes discussing exactly how and how much these US groups have been involved would be discussing the economic, political, social, and religious realities of Uganda that allow a bill like this to be proposed and make it so likely to pass.  Or discussing what GLBTI Ugandans are planning on doing if it passes.  Or whether and how I can help keep it from passing.  Usually when I see this kind of hate-mongering, it’s being purveyed by people with power who want to cement and increase that power, to people who are in some kind of desperate situation such as poverty or, say, an AIDS pandemic.

If this bill passes it will have profoundly life changing, even life-threatening (though I believe the death sentence provisions have been removed), effects on countless LGBT Ugandans and their friends and loved ones (the bill includes punishments for people who know of and fail to report homosexuals and homosexual activity).  Can we stop thinking about how this bill is relevant to Americans and the US for a minute (I know, that’s what most of this post has been about, too) and start thinking about the people who are truly affected?

Enough about the US news media.  I have the internet:

Gay Uganda is a blog by a gay Ugandan, who (unsurprisingly) talks a lot about this bill.

A post about the bill on African Activist

An excerpt from a speech about the human rights impacts of the bill by Silvia Tamale on November 18, 2009 at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda on allAfrica.com. It has some really great analysis of what the bill means in African and Ugandan terms.

The text of the bill at Box Turtle Bulletin

There’s a lot more out there, but you have the internet too.

Pick a tarot card with a human figure or figures on it. Visualize the card with the race(s) of the figures changed. Or even get the uncolored BOTA Tarot deck, make copies, and color the people different colors. Try different combinations of skin colors. Meditate on the card with these changes, and observe how it changes your reaction.

For example, how does The Lovers strike you differently depending on whether the man is black and the woman is white or the woman is black and the man is white, or the man is Asian and the woman is black, etc.

It can be pretty disturbing, if you’re honest with yourself and haven’t done a lot of work on being mindful of your own prejudice.

You can also try switching the genders of the people in the cards to get a better sense of how gender is encoded in the imagery.

Perhaps I’ll post a personal example later.

I may not understand the term the same way others do, but I think white guilt is a good thing.

Guilt has gotten a bad rap for some reason.  Perhaps because it’s no fun.  Perhaps more because we don’t know what to do with it.  Guilt exists for a reason.  Like anger, it is there to tell us that something is wrong and needs to be changed.  In her essay “Killing Rage,” bell hooks talks about the rage that black Americans feel in response to racism.  She says that this rage is a healthy response which should be directed into militancy, self-determination, and action for change.  I think white guilt is a similar response to the same phenomenon from a different vantage point.  When you’ve been hurt, you get angry.  When you’ve hurt someone you feel guilty.  The healthy response to both emotions is to do something to change the situation—to redress the wrong and/or heal the hurt.

The problem with white guilt is not that it’s bad, but that it’s not enough.  Guilt is a largely selfish emotion by itself.  When I feel guilty I’m focused on the fact that I did something wrong and how bad I feel about it.  What I should then do is start to think about the person I’ve hurt, how they’ve been hurt, what they might be feeling and wanting.  Basically, guilt should lead to compassion.  Then I should think about what I can do to make things better for them.  And I should, of course, consult them in this process.

So white guilt sucks when we get stuck in it—when it becomes a way of beating ourselves up, of closing ourselves down, of isolating ourselves further from ourselves and others.  But it doesn’t have to be this.  It can be a doorway to opening ourselves up to deeper connection with ourselves, people around us, and our world.

A large part of the reason there has been so little activity here so far is that I have placed myself under the absurd onus of needing to have something deeply insightful and meticulously thought out that NO ONE HAS EVER THOUGHT OF BEFORE!!!! to say before I say anything at all.  I am now changing this policy, because contrary to what we might read in history groundbreaking ideas do not sprout fully formed from the minds of individual geniuses who carry humanity leaps and bounds beyond where it was before.  Groundbreaking ideas are the result of collaborative efforts of many people thinking about the same things, sharing their ideas, agreeing, disagreeing and elaborating.  Or rather, both narratives have some truth, but the first places the emphasis on how Important and Awesome are the (usually) guys who articulated a particular idea from a privileged enough position to be widely heard.  And yeah, I want to be Important and Awesome.  But what is more important is the actual beneficial effects that ideas have on the lives of people.  So for me to hoard my thoughts until I am convinced that they are perfect enough to reveal to awestruck adoration (which is, realistically, never) is to waste whatever contribution I might actually make to a discourse that might lead to real benefits to people.

Even from a purely selfish perspective, this policy change is a good thing.  My desire to be Important and Awesome leads directly to more suffering, whereas my desire to help liberate others from suffering leads in the opposite direction.  So this is now a place to expose my thoughts in whatever stage of development I find them.  It is a place to make myself vulnerable.  It is a place to air my process of figuring shit out.

So please, point out my blind spots.  Tell me if I’ve said something insensitive, or if there are holes in my logic, or if there’s something I’ve failed to consider.

I’ve been reading a lot about  oppression.  About sexism and racism, about feminism and anti-racism.  About rape.  And a (very) little about transgender issues.  And throw in some Noam Chomsky on US foreign policy.

It’s disturbing to read and think about this stuff.  It’s disturbing largely because I realize how easy it’s been for me to remain ignorant of so much pain and injustice.  It’s disturbing because I know I benefit every day from it.  It’s disturbing because virtually every course of behavior for which I have any kind of cultural script contributes to or benefits from this pain and injustice.  It’s becoming increasingly clear that in order to fight against the injustice endemic in the social fabric of my existence I have to truly step out of my comfort zone.  I have to participate in the process of forging new cultural scripts.  I have to put myself at risk in ways that I’m not used to being at risk.  In order to meaningfully confront racism, misogyny, transphobia/cissexism, ablism, homophobia/heterosexism, etc., even on a surface level, I have to risk losing friends, jobs, teachers, etc.  I have to be willing to confront the *ist sentiments in those around me (and of course, most importantly, myself) even and especially when it’s inconvenient or potentially painful.  Because these are precisely the situations where someone in an oppressed group would be unable to avoid pain and difficulty.  It is only because of my privilege that I have a choice.

When my taiji teacher makes a hateful comment about women of size, I can choose not to say anything and thereby maintain my non-threatening image in his mind.  He has certainly alienated me a bit, but I can choose to continue to get the same level of respectful treatment from him that I’m used to by leaving his comment unchallenged.  The only side effect is that I have tacitly given him the message that such sentiments and their expression are acceptable.  The situation would be very different if I were a woman of size.  Those hateful sentiments would have been directed towards me from the beginning of our acquaintance.  This would most certainly be significantly more painful and humiliating than the potential awkwardness of me, a thin young white male, objecting to his ideas.  One reason for this, besides the obvious, is that I have the luxury of being “polite” about it.  Such comments don’t have the kind of emotional impact on me that they would on someone who had been dealing with this kind of antipathy directed at them personally for their entire life.  Moreover, a given level of emotion is unlikely to be perceived in the same way when I express it as when a woman expresses it.  Anger from a woman is quite likely to be labeled shrill or hysterical, whereas anger from a man is much more likely to be seen as healthy or righteous, or at least normal if perhaps regrettable male aggression.

And of course, confronting such comments is only the tip of the iceberg of stepping out of my comfort zone to fight oppression.  The struggle against oppression is not the struggle against oppressive sentiments in the privileged.  Racism is not ended by making individual people less racist.  Oppression is ended by changing the structures that systematically strip certain groups of people of their humanity for the benefit of other groups of people.  What disturbs me is that the entire trajectory of my life so far, even raised in a very progressive community, has been at best of very little benefit in this direction, and in many ways actively harmful.  And there’s no obvious, well-marked path to follow to change this.  Of course there are others who have gone before me and are blazing trails.  I have been trying to seek them out and will continue doing so.  If you have any suggestions please let me know.

I read this at my union ceremony on September 7th:

We have not yet decided whether we will be legally married or refer to this union as a marriage, and we’d like to say a little bit about why.  The most pressing issue for us in this place and time in history is that one of the things that marriage has become is a set of legal and social privileges bestowed on people whose relationships conform to a particular image of what love can and should be.  The legal privileges are clear and distinct (as much as anything legal ever is). The social privileges are more subtle.  If I can refer to L as my wife rather than as my partner, that places me in a familiar category.  It smoothes my relations with people.  That subtle distinction could make the difference between getting a job (or house, or business deal) and losing it to someone else who makes a better—safer—impression; the difference between  acceptance, rejection, or that dubious concession, tolerance.  As two able-bodied, cis-gendered, white Americans in a heterosexual relationship, we are already afforded this privilege, this benefit of the doubt, in most cases anyway.  And as a heterosexual couple we have the privilege of the choice whether to marry or not.

But marriage is more than a set of legal and social privileges.  Marriage is older than history; it has been and continues to be many things.  It has certainly been a tool for the oppression of women—a contractual agreement in which men dispose of the lives, loves and bodies of women without acknowledgement of those women’s agency.  But it has also been a celebration of love and a sacrament of union.  A sacred joining of separate lives in the creation of something greater.  An acknowledgment and affirmation of the mystery of the way families converge and grow.  Marriage is not one thing.  It is not merely an established institution that we may choose either to submit to or to reject.  Like all human ideas and practices, it is a work of art to which we are invited to contribute.  Whether we ultimately decide to use the word marriage or not, this ceremony  both owes a debt to and is our contribution to this tradition.

It would be naïve to think that simply by refusing to use the word marriage or take advantage of its legal manifestation we could absolve ourselves of complicity in a society that uses marriage as one of many ways to separate people into categories and value some of these categories over others.  So as we stand here ready to affirm our love before and with our community, we wish to acknowledge all those around the world who are unable to enjoy this same affirmation, and we promise that we will always defend the right of everyone to love whom we will, how we will, and as much as we will.

I went shopping at Target today.  Faced with that monumental amount of crap, I was reminded of what exactly is collapsing, and feel a lot less bad about the whole thing.  

Perhaps next we can come up with an economy that supplies more people with basic needs and actually useful goods and services, rather than six different neon colors of plastic snakeskin purses that will break within a year of use.

Coming up, a more exhaustive and less flippant discussion of the shortcomings of capitalism.

I just read this post by Jess at Flip Flopping Joy, a long meandering reflection on, among other things, privilege and perfectionism.  It struck a chord.  Jess writes about suffering from at times debilitating depression based to some extent in a need to justify her existence through accomplishment—through some sort of contribution demonstrating exceptional intelligence or ability.  I may not be representing her story completely accurately, because I am also expressing mine.  And it became clear in the comment thread that this sort of depression is a very common experience.  People in the thread attributed this phenomenon to capitalism, white supremacist culture, the Midwest, being poor and trying to compete with/become the rich—and I would add modern education.  While all of these may be complicit, it is not my intention here to find the culprit and excoriate it.  

In fact, I’m not quite sure what my intention is.  Reading Jess’ post brought me out of myself a bit; made me realize that the experiences that I struggle with in solitude—the very experiences I use to isolate myself—are shared by many, many others.  Two of my dear friends seemed also to have recognized themselves.

I have been studying Buddhism and dabbling in the practice of tonglen, or sending and taking.  I’ll explain my understanding of it.  If this interests you, find some genuine Buddhist teachings on it.  Pema Chodron is a good source.  Tonglen is a practice in which one breathes in suffering and breathes out happiness.  One can begin with some suffering one is experiencing, such as (to take one personal example) anxiety about finding a job.  One breathes in this anxiety, then breathes out spaciousness, acceptance, or even the image of having a job.  Then one thinks of other people having the same (or a similar) experience—perhaps one or two people one knows—and breathes in their anxiety as well as one’s own, and exhales relief to them.  Then one inhales the anxiety of all the people in the world who are unemployed and worrying about it, and exhales happiness to all of them.

This and other Buddhist practices have been encouraging me to allow those private sufferings which normally cause me to draw away from others to instead bring me back into connection with my fellow human beings.  However, Jess’ post brought the point home in a way these practices have not.  It made me realize that yes, other people really do have debilitating doubts about whether they deserve to exist if they haven’t or won’t make some brilliant contribution to the human race.  And something as simple as expressing this can be tremendously helpful to others who share that pain.

The discussion was not, however, entirely about the depression that comes from this sort of paralyzing perfectionism.  It was also about how this myopic attention to whether I’m good enough or smart enough or doing enough gets in the way of helping other people who are suffering—whether that’s by engaging in mass activism, or simply being ready to really listen to the next person who talks to me, and really be present in my reply.  Again I’m blending her thoughts and my own.  Jess’ post, for me, was about realizing that it doesn’t matter how good what I write is, if it helps one person to soften as I did when I read her words.

I’ve been just a tad livid about the McCain campaign’s (primarily Sarah Palin’s) horrifically but infuriatingly deniably racist comments about “real Americans” and “the pro-America parts of the country.” Karnythia at The Angry Black Woman has an excellent post about how it is often precisely those who have sacrificed the most for America that are routinely excluded from “Americanness.” I would just add that the further you go back in history the more glaring this becomes *coughcoughslaverycough*… excuse me.

National Coming Out Day was October 11th, but along with traditional notions of gender and sexuality, I reject traditional notions of what day it is. Ha.

Actually, I was just reading Rebecca’s coming out post and all the comments, and was inspired to make a post of my own.

What I mean by “I am queer” is actually that I resist the social pressure to identify as anything in particular with respect to my sexuality or gender. I don’t feel the need to “be” heterosexual, bisexual, or even pansexual, especially on a consistent basis from one moment to the next. I would also rather not define myself in gendered terms much of the time. Other times I enjoy engaging in the game of masculinity and femininity.

By polyamorous I basically mean that I don’t want any rules for my relationships other than those determined by the participants in those relationships. Monogamy is just one of the rules that I don’t often find very useful or appealing.

The reason that I say I’m an ally is that I support the struggle(s) of marginalized groups—of all people who resist or are denied access to hegemonic identity structures and privileges. This means I do my best to challenge and to support those oppressed by sexism, racism, heterosexism, religious prejudice and other social inequalities. Despite the above, it is very easy and habitual for me to present as a heterosexual male, and I have the slightly dubious privilege of being white and middle class. Thus I don’t claim to truly understand what it means to be marginalized. There is a lot I still don’t know about the structures of oppression in my society, how I unknowingly perpetuate them, and how best to join the fight against them. But I’m trying to learn, and I’m immensely grateful for the guidance I’ve received from my queer and/or female friends, for what bloggers like brownfemipower and everyone at The Angry Black Woman have shared, and for the past and (especially) future comments and contributions of my readers here.

So, what about you?

Get together with a friend or a few and play Gods.

Each of you is equally omnipotent. For example, it is a trivial labor for one of you to utterly destroy the others beyond all possibility of return, or to cause them never to have existed at all. It is an equally effortless maneuver for them to return from such banishment.

Go.

March 31, 2009:  Comments on this post have been disabled due to spam.