Ranthropologist

Category: Culture & Society

  • Finding Climate Hope in Alaska

    Finding Climate Hope in Alaska

    I have spent the last several years focusing on climate change as part of my job. I have worked with consultants, contractors, and colleagues on climate vulnerability assessments and adaptation plans, both for Pala and for other Tribes. I have presented, co-presented, and taught at conferences, workshops, and webinars. I have co-authored or edited articles and chapters in journals and reports. I have been interviewed for newspaper articles and podcasts. I have made work on climate change the centerpiece of the Pala Environmental Department’s mission and become very vocal as Pala’s Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) about the impacts of climate change on Tribal cultural resources, including sacred sites, traditional plants and animals, ceremonies, and cultural practices. But this week in Anchorage, Alaska brought it all crashing home in a way I have never felt before.

    I was asked to be a co-trainer for “Elevating Ancestral Practices: Tribal Wellness in Climate Adaptation Planning” for the Alaska Tribal Resilience Learning Network so I could present and share about how Pala has integrated health and wellness strategies into its climate adaptation plan. I was nervous because I was the only non-Indigenous trainer and because the situation in Alaska is very different from southern California. I expected to learn just as much from the other trainers and the attendees as they might learn from me, but I was wrong: I learned much more.

    Here is what I learned: it is one thing to read about how climate effects are greater in Alaska, and northern parts of the globe in general; it is another to hear directly from those who are experiencing those effects. We started the workshop with an activity in which participants drew pictures of changes they have seen in their communities and then shared their pictures and their stories. My “which one of these things is not like the other” picture was of a mountain in California before and after a wildfire. My eyes were stinging with tears as I drew the picture – much as they are now as I remember it. But then I heard the other stories and saw the pictures. I kept it together as, one by one, participants shared about rivers, lakes, and shorelines that freeze later and later in the year or don’t freeze at all, making it impossible to hunt on the ice or use the frozen expanses for traveling on their snow machines. I shook my head in wonderment as it dawned on me that all the talk about rain in October and November – which we would celebrate in drought-stricken California – was a bad thing, because it was supposed to be snow. I felt grief and dismay deep in my bones as I heard one participant speak with eloquence about the community effort to build fish fences that are meant to be anchored in the ice… and how the ice wasn’t thick enough to hold them. Her picture showed two people bundled against the cold with their empty hands held out, faces grief-stricken, next to an empty tub that should have been full of fish. There were stories of empty fish-drying racks, and racks where the fish had rotted because the weather turned warm when it should have been freezing, and berry patches where the fruit rotted in the heat, and patches that couldn’t be reached because erosion had destroyed the paths. There were stories of fish camps destroyed by storm surges and tidal ice scraping higher and farther over the shore than it ever had before, and stories about fish dying and rotting in the too-warm rivers before they could spawn. There were stories of villages preparing to relocate and cemeteries eroding into the sea. And we heard about federal agencies refusing to deviate from the cages of their rules, which meant they would build a dike around public buildings to protect them but not around people’s homes, or that they wouldn’t sign off to reimburse the cost of a community-built sea wall without a structural engineer’s inspection. We heard about the loss of Native languages, disappearing cultural practices, community conflict, social problems, and disaffected youth. And we heard from a USGS climate scientist that it is going to get worse – a lot worse – and faster than anywhere else in the world.

    I felt outmatched by everything I heard, but I did my best and talked about what we’ve done in Pala to plan for climate effects. One of the things we’ve done for community outreach is develop a robust website and social media presence – something that seems like pretty low-hanging fruit, until a show of hands revealed that most of the communities represented at the workshop have little to no reliable internet access in their villages. My role at the training was meant to show Pala’s work as an example of what could be done, and I did succeed at that, but none of the participants have completed a vulnerability assessment, much less an adaptation plan, so there is a long way to go.

    I was overwhelmed and feeling useless… and yet. And yet. These folks were there for a reason. They were there to do something. They were there for hope. And it’s not hopeless. The other trainers, all Indigenous Alaska women, presented on how to use traditional knowledge and practices for strength and healing and on how to identify and use strategies for maintaining community connection through ceremony, compassion, and curiosity. We talked about how the brain can “flip its lid” as a response to stress and how to manage those reactions. We talked about listening to the elders and remembering traditional stories about meeting change with bravery and strength. We participated in prayer, intentional breathing, and blessings. We talked about resilience, even when resilience means leaving one place so you can survive in another. And I heard that my stories about fire and drought in California, and the possibility that we, too, may have to relocate because there is no water, actually helped because it made people feel like they aren’t the only ones. In the end, we left with new friends, new ideas, and new hope.

    We are in deep, deep trouble. This is a topic for another time, but the idea that we can mitigate and manage climate change while maintaining our colonial capitalist way of life is not just wrong, it is deadly. It’s about so much more than reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s about what right we have to continue our “grow the economy at any cost” ideology at the expense of the life and dignity of not just people, but what I was taught this week to call the plant nations, the animal nations, the fish nations, the insect nations – all the life on earth. Still, where there is life there is hope, and I hope we are able to acknowledge the magnitude of the changes we must make before it is too late.

  • Nature, Nurture, and Sexual Assault

    When I was six years old, a neighborhood boy promised me that he would “show me his” if I “showed him mine.” That seemed like a fair deal to me. He told me to wait in his closet, which my six-year-old mind didn’t question, and when the door opened a few minutes later, several boys from the neighborhood had gathered in his room. I was scared, but I “showed them mine.” I didn’t get to see theirs. When I was in junior high, a fellow student threatened to rape me during a sleepover, and chased me into a bathroom where I locked myself in while he pounded on the door. When I was in college, a car full of men at a stoplight motioned to me to roll down my window, and when I did, they asked me if I gave good head. Also in college, I experienced two separate incidents with two different men where I engaged in a consensual kiss, and a few minutes later had a penis being forced into my mouth. In both incidents, I was alarmed, but followed through with the sexual activity because it seemed more dangerous to stop… and because I was embarrassed. As a woman in my late twenties, I had sex with a man I didn’t want to have sex with, again because it seemed more dangerous – and embarrassing – to tell him no. As a working adult, I endured a supervisor who peppered nearly every interaction with deeply sexual remarks and innuendoes. I told myself I was ok with it because he didn’t really mean it, he did it to a lot of women, not just me… and because I needed my job and had no confidence that anything would be done about his behavior if I reported it.

    The torrent of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault allegations that is currently sweeping through the nation is making me simultaneously angry (on behalf of the women), sad (same), and uneasy. Why uneasy? Because we seem to be experiencing a pendulum swing during which any behavior by a man that can possibly be interpreted as inappropriate is being called assault;* and more so because behavior that actually IS assault is being denied, brushed off, or treated as a deliberate lie or conspiracy. This is a dangerous dichotomy. The pendulum will eventually return to center, but when it does, I hope it is with a new calibration. To be perfectly clear: I believe the women (and men, in some cases) who have come forward. I also believe that any unwanted touching, words, innuendoes, actions, etc. is inappropriate at best, and truly constitutes assault at worst. Luckily, I don’t feel permanently scarred or damaged by any of the incidents I went through, but I understand why some victims carry lifelong feelings of fear and shame.

    This moment of reckoning had gotten me thinking again about something I have often wondered: why do human males engage in this sort of behavior? How much is nature, and how much is nurture? Broadly, it is easy to answer this question very quickly: it is both. But again, I need to make myself completely clear: the nature/biological component of this behavior does not excuse it. And, at the same time, the nurture/cultural component of this behavior shares much of the blame.

    Humans are primates – specifically, we are one of the great apes (along with orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos) . Our closest living relative is the chimpanzee. Chimps have active sex lives that are also linked to their social lives and to the status of individuals within the group. Now, our close genetic relationship with chimps does not destine us to behave in the same ways, but it gives us some insight into the biological underpinnings of some aspects of our behavior. Broadly, the point of sex is reproduction; and when you look at reproduction through a biological, evolutionary lens, it provides a set of explanatory principles for mating behaviors. Does this apply to humans too? Of course. Another caution about making myself perfectly clear: sexual behavior as an evolutionary strategy does not excuse sexual harassment, abuse, or assault. Nor does it provide a full explanatory mechanism for the ways in which humans engage in reproductive behavior. We are unique among animals in that we have learned how to have intercourse purely for pleasure – we invented birth control, and have found ways to have sex without reproducing. That means sex, for humans, is as much social as it is biological. But that doesn’t remove the biological underpinnings. The sex drive is still about the possibility of reproduction, but in humans, as in chimps, it is also linked to status; and in humans, status is the same thing as power. Here’s where we get the terrible overlap between sex as biology and sex as culture: men who engage in sexually abusive behavior are motivated by lust for power just as much as lust for physical gratification. 

    During episodes of war or conflict, men are often reported to rape captive enemy women. Again, very broadly, this is about power, status, and the dehumanization of the enemy. Nature or nurture? Powerful men are now being accused of treating women (or in the case of Kevin Spacey, men) as objects of sexual gratification, rather than as human beings – similar to the men who rape captive enemy women, even if their behavior does not (always) rise to the level of rape. Nature or nurture?

    I am not a sociobiologist, but I believe it is a mistake to dismiss or ignore the biological underpinnings of human behavior. BUT, and this is a hugely important but: unlike other animals, humans have culture. We have nurture. We have the ability to teach people right from wrong. So why are men still assaulting, abusing, and harassing women? Because they’ve learned they can get away with it. It’s nurture, not nature, that lets down the victims. It’s nurture, not nature, that says “Boys will be boys.” It’s nurture, not nature, that says “It’s just locker-room talk.” It’s nurture, not nature, that says “Who will believe the intern over the Congressman?” It’s nurture, not nature, that says “men can’t control themselves” and that women should “take it as a compliment.” And now it’s nurture, not nature, that is saying WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH. It’s nurture, not nature, that has to teach our boys and girls about respect, equality, and consent. It’s nurture, not nature, that has to battle the perpetuation of toxic masculinity. It’s nurture, not nature, that has to point to the past and say it was wrong then and it’s wrong now. Let the pendulum continue to swing, and when it comes to rest, maybe, finally, this time, nurture will have taught men that they’ve gotten away with it for the last time.

     

    *This is a topic to cover at another time, but briefly, I do think that we need to have a discussion about how to define and approach actions that are inappropriate but do not rise to the level of harassment, abuse, or assault. And that said, we need to work on reducing inappropriate behavior too, but in a way that is educational rather than accusatory. I believe that elevating the merely inappropriate to the realm of assault can serve to minimize actions that truly rise to that definition.

  • Thoughts on Charlottesville

    Here, in no particular order, are some of my thoughts as I follow the news on the white supremacist rally, protests, counter-protests, and violence that happened last night and today in Charlottesville, Virginia.

    • No matter what they may argue to the contrary, “white nationalists” are white supremacists. We need to call them what they are. No group that chants “Jew will not get rid of us” and carries Nazi flags can deny that they are a supremacist group.
    • Donald Trump (his election, and the man himself) has given these people the sense that it is safe for them to air their views publicly, but bear in mind that it is not just Trump that is to blame. These horrific racist and nationalist ideas have existed for centuries, as we all well know. What is the most horrifying about the current moment is that the white supremacists feel empowered to take their ideas public, and THAT can be placed squarely at the feet of Trump and his allies (Bannon, Miller, Fox News, Breitbart, et al).
    • That Trump, as of this writing (August 12, 2017, 6:00 PM PDT) has yet to specifically condemn white supremacy, and has only vaguely condemned violence “on all sides” tells you that he cares more about not alienating his base than he does about the rights, dignity, safety, and existence of millions of Americans. White supremacists, online and in the media, are interpreting his vague statements as tacit support for what they are doing. In response to one of Trump’s tweets (aside: I still can’t believe that THIS is how the US president is making public statements), white supremacist David Duke tweeted this: ““I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”
    • White supremacists are still a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the entire US population. They were outnumbered at least two to one by counter-protesters. This is a good thing – but not good enough. That these people feel comfortable showing their faces in public in support of their racist views is frightening. And being few in number does not mean that we should ignore the problem. Plane crashes are also infrequent, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything we can to prevent them.
    • Sadly, condemnations of white supremacists are interpreted by members of the group as shutting down their right to free speech and assembly, and a justification of why they need to fight for their views. These people literally believe that they are being oppressed, repressed, and discriminated against because they are white. As absurd and abhorrent as this view is, they truly believe it, and the more we condemn it, the more justified they feel. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to condemn – we definitely should! But it also means that this problem is much more difficult to solve than simple condemnation.
    • I’m not going to get into the reasons that white supremacists feel the way they do. My normal approach, as any reader of this blog knows, is to look at things anthropologically – which means using cultural relativity to try to see things from the insider’s point of view. Although I do think one of the keys to changing these hateful ideas is to try to understand them, the idea of doing that here makes my whole body ache. Still, I firmly believe, as in my point above, that simply telling people who think this way that they are wrong is not going to work, and may be actively harmful. I’ve never seen someone change their mind because someone else told them that they are an asshole.
    • White people need to actively acknowledge what is going on here. I know many people get defensive at the mention of white privilege, but we have to talk about it and acknowledge it. White privilege is what has made this protest and violence possible. As many elsewhere have already said, just try to imagine if this protest had been organized by any group of color.
    • Talking to our friends on social media is not going to help change this situation in the slightest. Studies have shown that most people live in silos with like-minded people. We can’t pat ourselves on the back for our horror and for posting something about it online. At the same time, sharing with like-minded friends helps us cope with our dismay, so I also don’t think we should feel bad about it. BUT: that shouldn’t be the stopping point. We need to find other ways to engage with this sort of thinking, even if it takes us out of our comfort zones. I already mentioned that just arguing with someone about it is more likely to reinforce what they already believe than it is to change their mind, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other actions we can take. At the moment, though, I’m not sure what they are. Minimally:
      • engage with your elected officials and urge them to support legislation that guarantees the rights of historically marginalized groups.
      • vote for people who do the same, especially if your elected officials are not already doing more than offering platitudes.
      • get to know people outside your silo, and practice engaging with them civilly if you find that you have disagreements. Some interesting preliminary research has shown that people are more likely to change their views when they talk to someone who is directly affected by a particular issue (e.g. someone who opposes gay marriage is more likely to change their mind after having a conversation with someone who is gay. Note that this must be CIVIL.).
      • show up for counter-protests if events like the one in Charlottesville are organized in your area.
      • work on acknowledging your privilege, if you have it – and then USE it in positive ways, since it will give you access that others don’t have (e.g. speak up if you witness abuse).

    I haven’t followed my usual rule of including links that support some of the things I’ve mentioned because I want to get this out there. I may update it later. There’s a lot more I could say, too – so there may be other posts to follow.

  • (R)anthropology Class: Revitalization Movements

    (R)anthropology Class: Revitalization Movements

    Around 1870, when colonization of the western United States by Europeans and their descendants was reaching its zenith, a movement that came to be known as the Ghost Dance began appearing in Native American communities. Taught by a Paiute spiritual leader named Wokova, the Ghost Dance was a ritual meant to cleanse the spirit, promote clean living, and reunite the living with the spirits of the dead. With the help of these spirits, the living would ultimately drive the white usurpers from the land; bring back the buffalo; usher in a time of peace, prosperity, happiness, and unity; and restore the ways of life that had been crushed by colonialism. As the Ghost Dance spread, it changed somewhat in form depending on the culture that adopted it; amongst the Lakota, it invoked the promise of a total transformation of society. Perceiving the Lakota’s wish for a new and better world as a threat, in 1890 the United States Army slaughtered at least 153 Lakota at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Over time, the Ghost Dance slowly petered out, and although it is still practiced by a few tribes today, it is no longer with the expectation that adherence to the dance and its teachings will usher in a new era.

    Phenomena like the Ghost Dance are a part of what anthropologists call revitalization movements. Similar to millenarianism, revitalization movements generally spring up in times of extreme social unrest, such as colonialism, war, or government oppression of citizens or social groups. The purpose of the movement is to usher in a new type of society; restore social values that have been repressed or denied; or return life to the way it “used to be.” They generally involve a ritual component and special rules that are adhered to by the followers, and can sometimes manifest as cults. A modern example is the Heaven’s Gate cult, in which the followers believed that a spaceship was concealed in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet and was coming to pick them up to take them to a better life away from Earth on a heaven-like planet. Unfortunately, validating your ticket to board this heavenly ship meant forsaking your life on Earth – via suicide. In 1997, 38 cult members dosed themselves with phenobarbitol, applesauce, and vodka, and left this earthly plane. I’m going to go ahead and assume that they did NOT make it to heaven’s gate.

    Sometimes revitalization movements are successful. There’s an excellent argument that Christianity began as a revitalization movement. Unhappy with Roman rule, many citizens throughout the Roman empire looked to prophets who promised a better life; Jesus of Nazareth was just one of those prophets, but he turned out to be one of the few with tremendous staying power. He promised that by following his teachings, a better life could be had – both in this life AND in the next one. In fact, that is the trick of Christianity’s longevity: unlike the Ghost Dance, which promised change in this life, Jesus promised the ultimate reward in the heavenly afterlife. Why is that important? Because unlike the Ghost Dance, where people eventually began to realize that the change they sought was not coming, no one has returned from heaven to either refute or verify Jesus’ teachings – therefore, people can keep believing because there’s no one around to say otherwise. (I realize this is a gross oversimplification of Christianity overall, but I believe it is key to why it is still around after 2,000+ years; and the same is true for all religions that promise rewards after this life or in the next one.) What of more recent religions like Mormonism and Scientology, or even New Age spiritualism? I think there are at least some aspects of revitalization movements in all of them.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about revitalization movements recently, because I think it provides a basis for analyzing not just recent religious movements and cults but the sometimes hysterical and irrational adherence of people to their particular political ideologies. We are living in a time, believe it or not, that is actually safer and more peaceful than any other time in history (an idea explained in great detail by many authors, but to great effect by both Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature and Michael Shermer’s bookThe Moral Arc). BUT (and it’s a big but): people feel less safe. We feel threatened by conflict and violence. We fear the loss of our most cherished values. We see economic inequality, a loss of stability, a lack of trust, an increase in terrorism, a deepening of racial and cultural divides, greater political differences, more apathy, more protesting, more rioting, more destruction, more fear… In short, we see the things that the Indians saw during colonialism and that the Jews saw under the Romans. So it comes as no surprise to me that, in this election season, some people’s adherence to their candidate’s values has taken on the quality of a revitalization movement. And I admit that I’m a partisan, but I feel that this is more evident amongst conservatives – and particularly among Donald Trump’s supporters. Without doubt, it also exists amongst the die-hard Bernie Sanders supporters, or the third-party supporters of Jill Stein (Green) and Gary Johnson (Libertarian), but it seems to have reached a fever pitch on the far right of the Republican party. And it makes sense: the very dictionary definition of conservative is “disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.” And is that not exactly what Trump is proposing with his slogan, “Make America Great Again“? The Ghost Dance movement sought the same thing: a return to previous conditions.

    I believe the revitalization movement concept also applies to terrorist groups such as ISIS (see here for other names for the group; some have started using the term Da’esh or Daesh specifically because ISIS doesn’t like it). Clearly, ISIS wants to see a different kind of world and intends to usher it in not through a dance or by committing suicide and boarding a spacecraft, but by terrorizing the world into accepting their extreme interpretation of Islam (one which, I am compelled to note, is not shared by the vast majority of Muslims). ISIS adherents tend to be disillusioned young men who feel ignored or unappreciated by their families, friends, and/or cultures, so they are easily drawn in to ISIS’ promise of a new and better life. I can’t think of a much better description of a revitalization movement.

    So why all these revitalization movements now? Some of these ideas deserve posts of their own, but in general, I think there are a few things at play. For one, human groups tend to operate at maximum efficiency with maximum communal cooperation at the hunter-gatherer level, when everybody knows everybody else, and the survival of the group and the individual are inextricably intertwined (I wrote more about this idea, and the overall concept of cultural collapse, here). With global population fast approaching 7.5 billion people, the hunter-gatherer model is all but extinct (there are still foraging groups, but they are heavily influenced by the modernized world in which they live). Plus, as noted above, people are living in fear, and it’s a fear that I think is massively exacerbated by the internet and social media and the ease of global information exchange we now have. We hear about everything that happens now, good and bad, which leads to the mistaken assumption that bad things happen more than they actually do. Finally (and trust me, this paragraph is not meant to be exhaustive of all the potential causes of revitalization-movement-like behavior), we are living at a time of economic and social inequality that has not been seen for generations. Many, if not most, historical revitalization movements have arisen in similar times. Put all this together, and we have no reason to be surprised that it’s happening again.

  • Race and Privilege: Embracing Discomfort

    Race and Privilege: Embracing Discomfort

    I’ve written before about race. I focused on how race, as biology, is not real. But the events of the past few days [minutes, hours, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia…] make it painfully clear that race has tremendous relevance as a cultural, social, political, and economic construct. In that sense, in the sense of how we use it to treat each other differently, whether we think we do so or not, it is real in a way that is much more powerful than biology.

    I could go into a long history lesson here, but others have done it before me, and done it better. There are discussions about how racism and inequality are a result of centuries of White colonial powers justifying the theft of indigenous lands, the pillaging and raping of Native cultures, and the brutal enslavement of Native peoples. These crimes required defining indigenous peoples as inferior, savage, and less than fully human. Skin color became the proxy marker for subhuman status, and thus a justification for dominance, subjugation, and ultimately, the inequalities that we still wrestle with, centuries removed from the origins of colonial capitalism. These are truths that I now accept without a second thought. Still, I was talking with a friend today, trying to ease the physical weight I was feeling in my head and chest, and I realized that I am one of the lucky ones. I have been exposed to ideas, critical theory, discussion, literature, and debate on structural inequality, systemic racism, political economy, identity, intersectionality, hegemony, ideology, and more. Even if I am not a specialist in all these areas, I know more than most; maybe that’s why I bear the weight of my privilege so heavily. I know all these things, and yet my privilege is still something I take for granted until something happens to make me take it out, gaze at it, grapple with it, and try to find ways to use it for good.

    “We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s race or sex.” – Peggy McIntosh

    I don’t want to make this post about me; my struggle with these ideas is nothing compared to the struggle of those who live without the privilege I so often take for granted. This post is about how, maybe, others can recognize their privilege. This is a very difficult thing for a lot of White people to do. We naturally become defensive. We want to believe that we aren’t complicit in the structures that allow us to move through life taking things for granted that others can’t. We don’t like the word privilege; it smacks of something unearned and undeserved, the indulgence given to a spoiled child. But in the context of White privilege, that’s not what the word means. It means something that we are lucky to have, and we are privileged because not everybody has it. If you want a full account of the idea of White privilege, read this classic paper by Peggy McIntosh. McIntosh discusses the concept, then lists several examples. If you are White, it’s illuminating to go through the list and feel recognition slowly dawning. If you are a person of color, I suspect you feel the same recognition, but from the other side of the coin. Not all of these examples will apply to everybody, but here are a few directly from McIntosh’s piece:

    1. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
    2. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
    3. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
    4. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
    5. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.
    6. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more less match my skin.

    And one of my own: I can get stopped for a traffic violation and not fear for my life.

    “[White people] move through a wholly racialized world with an unracialized identity (e.g. white people can represent all of humanity, people of color can only represent their racial selves). Challenges to this identity become highly stressful and even intolerable.” – Robin DiAngelo, Huffington Post

    Maybe you read these and think, yeah, ok; that’s true for me, but that doesn’t make me a racist. Maybe not; but racism doesn’t just mean individual discrimination and stereotyping. And that leads us to another subject just as tricky as privilege, if not more. White people don’t want to acknowledge the privilege of their race, and they definitely don’t want to acknowledge complicity in structural racism. And I agree! It’s incredibly uncomfortable to feel like you have to defend yourself just because you happen to belong to a particular race… but there, again, is another example of White privilege; generally, White people don’t have to defend themselves based on race. I’m talking about structural racism – the kind of racist ideology that is ingrained in us from birth. It’s the hegemony that we internalize as the natural order of things: some people are just better than others because they work harder, they try harder, they want it more. It’s the dismissal of the idea that maybe the system itself is structured so that we don’t all start from the same place, and as White people, we don’t want to have to acknowledge that. It takes away from the narrative that the hard worker is the one who wins; if people of other races really wanted to, they could work harder and get a better education and a better job and get off the welfare treadmill. We make it a defect of personality or upbringing or, yes, biology, because it allows us to keep on ignoring the reality that the playing field is not level. Again, these notions are deeply ingrained and not explicit in our thoughts, so we can go about our lives feeling secure that we aren’t perpetuating a racist system. But that is the very epitome of racist hegemony – it makes implicit co-conspirators of us all. You don’t have to be classically racist to be part of a racist system.

    In case you are having a defensive reaction reading this and thinking but I’m not a racist! (and I wouldn’t blame you), try to honestly answer these questions to see if just maybe you’ve internalized some structural racist hegemony (and bear in mind that your reaction might be deeply buried and not explicit, so think hard about your unconscious gut reactions and assumptions before assuming your answer to these questions is no):

    1. Have you ever crossed the street when a person of color is approaching from the other direction? If you didn’t cross the street, did you consider it? Were you nervous as you passed the person?
    2. Do you assume that Black mothers are raising their children alone and are on public assistance?
    3. Have you ever laughed over Black names, or said things like “It’s like they name their kids by grabbing a handful of Scrabble tiles!”?
    4. When you read about a random shooting or hear about it on the news, do you automatically picture a person of color?
    5. When someone talks about their doctor or their lawyer, do you automatically picture a White person?
    6. Have you ever seen a woman in a hijab or a man in a turban, and had the word “terrorist” pop into your head, even involuntarily?
    7. Do you get annoyed when a phone system asks you, “para Espanol, oprima numero dos”?
    8. Are you interested or concerned when you hear about the murder of a white person in  your community, but when you hear about the death of a person of color, you aren’t surprised? If you aren’t surprised, do you assume that the death involved gang violence or criminal activity by the dead person?
    9. Do you dismiss the ideas of Black people who use Black Vernacular English (what some people call Ebonics) and assume they speak that way because they aren’t educated?
    10. Do you feel relieved or justified when a Black person speaks out about trouble in their own community, because it makes you feel like you were right all along?

    Again, let me be clear: answering yes to any of the above does not make you a racist in the KKK fashion, or even in the fashion of your bigoted great uncle. And you may well have that initial reaction but then catch it and feel uneasy or bad about having it in the first place. And it’s not your fault. This is what hegemonic structural racism does to us – it implants these ideas and naturalizes them. Stopping those reactions is hard, and sometimes they come from a place so deep within that we barely register them. But recognizing and grappling with them is the only way to dismantle them.

    “…saying “all lives matter” as a direct response to “black lives matter” is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.” – Kevin Roose, Fusion

    I am writing this because I think it’s important for White people to do the difficult work of recognizing the system we are a part of, recognizing that we occupy a privileged position within it, and recognizing that we have implicit racial biases that make us complicit in the system. One more example of White privilege and structural racism: responding to #blacklivesmatter with #alllivesmatter. OF COURSE ALL LIVES MATTER. Black Lives Matter is not trying to say they don’t – they are saying Black lives matter ALSO. And until Black lives matter, it won’t be true that all lives matter. It’s the same as saying “But I’m not a racist!” Maybe so, but that doesn’t solve the problem of racism, does it? It’s a defensive reaction of privilege to push back at a community by saying “But what about MY life” when you don’t have to live in a world where your life seems to matter less.

    If you are White and this post makes you uncomfortable… I’m sorry for that, but I’m also glad. Since the horrific events of the past few days in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas, I’ve seen more pieces than I ever have before about how White people, if they really want to help, need to feel uncomfortable. As some of these articles point out, it is not the responsibility of people or communities of color to tell White people how to help or be allies. It’s up to us to do the hard work. I’m just as uncomfortable as anybody else, even with my years of exposure to ideas that are going to be new, foreign, and even frightening to others. That discomfort – it’s growing pains. It’s the necessary strain of working to be a better person who is helping to build a better world.

  • Us/Not Us

    Us/Not Us

    As I write this, over 100 people have been reported killed in Paris in multiple terrorist attacks. The news is jamming my social media feed and my RSS feed. It’s on every major television station. It’s being continuously updated on news websites. It’s a terrible tragedy. I’m not writing this to minimize it. I am upset and dismayed and disheartened and grieved by it – but I have a few observations to make.

    Who noticed the story from yesterday, November 12, about the suicide attacks that killed 41 and injured over 200 in Beirut, Lebanon? Did any of you change your profile picture on Facebook to a Lebanese flag, or post a photo of a Beirut landmark in tribute to the victims? Did you know that on October 27 in Syria, 115 people were killed? On October 25, it was 161 people. On September 18, it was 255. These are typical days for Syria. The death toll in the Syrian civil war so far is over 250,000. Anyone posting those status updates in their feed? And how about the rash of stabbings in Israel? On October 13, three people were killed and over 20 were wounded. Other attacks have occurred since then. So, where are the Israeli flags on social media?

    I’m not stupid. I know there’s a war in Syria and daily casualties are to be expected. I know that Lebanon experiences frequent unrest, and bombings and attacks there are sadly common. I know that the Palestinians and the Israelis are acting out generations’ worth of struggle and conflict, and attacks and violence are frequent there, too. I’m not trying to say that because bad things happen everywhere, every day, that we should just shrug our shoulders at what has happened today in France. Not at all. But I do want to observe that when it happens to people who we regard as being more like us – well, then we sit up and take notice. When political violence happens in places we don’t expect it to – places we think of as safe – then we react with shock. When terror happens in western or northern Europe (not so much in eastern Europe, though) we feel more connected to it. I’ve done it too – I made a drawing in tribute after the Charlie Hebdo attack last January. I posted it to Twitter and Facebook. I felt connected to France in their shock and grief because I felt an empathy that stretched back to September 11, 2001. So why don’t we react in the same way to the daily stream of violence in other places?

    I have some tentative answers. We become accustomed to violence happening to the Other. We don’t empathize, generally, with people whose countries and cultures – and, let’s face it, oftentimes colors – don’t match our own. It doesn’t mean we don’t sympathize, but we’ve become inured to violence and unrest in the non-Western world. We think of it as happening to “those people” – again, not in an unkind or dismissive way, but in a way that speaks to the differences we perceive between us. It’s a classic, unconscious us/not us mentality – an artifact of Western, and particularly US, hegemony.

    Is it any different when we shrug or tsk at reports of a drive-by shooting of a young person of color in a gang-heavy neighborhood, yet hold candlelight vigils for a white victim of violence? Is it any different when a sex worker or a homeless person is found dead in an alley and gets a few lines, if that, in the local paper, vs. when a person with a job and family is murdered and gets front page headlines? Is it any different when a working class mom reports her daughter missing and is told she’s probably a runaway, vs. an upper class family’s missing child who gets immediate media coverage and police attention?

    It is hard for us to feel empathy for the so-called Other, but the Others are human, too. We’d be exhausted by grief and shock if we reacted to every act of violence the way we react to what happens to people like us – the way we are reacting to the attacks in France now. But we have to remember to feel something. We have to remember that the suffering of the outcast, the minority, the underprivileged, the uneducated, the tossed away – is of equal import to the suffering of the powerful, the privileged, the lucky, the elite, and everyone in between. And the suffering and death and terror experienced by the Other – the people not like us – is no different than the suffering and the terror experienced by those like us. I grieve for France. I grieve for Lebanon. I grieve for Syria. I grieve for Israel and Palestine. I grieve for us all.