The Widening Gyre

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’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.

The title of this entry is an exercise in crude attention-grabbery, but it’s also essentially what I’m asking. Violet recently responded to a post by Lisa Kansas in which the latter got fed up with feminists excusing women, including sex workers, who have sex with married men. The discussion continued here, here, and here. Feel free to read it if you’ve got some time, but I’ll give you the quick and dirty and then veer somewhat off topic, so the details won’t be essential. Basically Lisa was pissed that the sister of the woman with whom John Edwards had an affair dared to try to defend her honor. The reason this was relevant was because Lisa believes that the sister’s response was typical of feminism:

Frankly, I’m completely sick of so-called feminists maintaining a tomblike silence on the females who engage in this behavior and the damage it does all those female spouses.

Unsurprisingly, the response was on the whole less than sympathetic (to Lisa). People accused her of slut shaming, and violet even said,

I don’t think in the context of feminist blogging and critique that shaming these individuals is either valuable or appropriate.

which is dangerously close to trying to revoke her feminist card, at least on this issue.

What’s most interesting to me about this hullabaloo is that it gets to the heart of a major difference between liberal and conservative rhetoric and analysis. (more…)