Morning Pages: 08.25.17
I’ve been thinking about attention. In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn talks about how historians state facts such as Columbus’s actions led to genocide, but then these facts are couched in within another narrative, and as a result, its emphasis are crowded out when the surrounding text, or context, emphasizes something else like a romanticized account of Columbus’s seafaring abilities and feats. He says the choice is ideological, maybe even unwittingly so. Attention is the primest real estate of all, or so I’m beginning to believe. It is what’s in our field of vision that has the most power. Confederate statues are in our field of vision, and while their removal will not solve all our problems, it is a step in the right direction. It’s true that these protests take up energy and maybe that there are more important endeavors that deserve our attention. But I don’t think it’s necessarily an either/or situation. I don’t think energy focused on these statues’ removal is necessarily being done at the cost of implementing progressive policy.
Another thing Howard Zinn wrote struck me: we have never been the united states, nations have never been communities, and we have never had common interests. If white people truly believe in their heart of hearts that as a race they are superior, then it is not in their best interest to oppose someone like Trump. Trump is hierarchy embodied and all the power that gets concentrated at the apex of this hierarchy. But I do not think this necessarily means that we should accept factionalism and its byproduct nationalism. But when does de-escalation turn into repression? And is repression necessarily a bad thing? What would happen if these white supremacists were denied permits, and the media did not report on their activities at all? What if they receded into oblivion? Violence may be the only language they understand, but they thrive on attention. What if Hitler had not had the megaphone of press to keep the global community abreast of his activities? Maybe we should rethink what is meant by the saying that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. The doctrine of white supremacy is one that can hurt.
