The Tale of Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Interstitial I
While I put together the next post in this series, I’m going to post a couple of things that tie into the whole mess, thematically, but aren’t part of the narrative proper.
This exchange happened today on Twitter, and I think it says things that can’t be said enough:
Why are people who can look at critiques of race/gender/class problems in thier work without flipping out so perishingly rare?
— Contrapunctus I (@sinboy) March 14, 2015
@sinboy I think it comes from a place of fear? Fear of getting it wrong, being “that guy.” Which doesn’t excuse it at all. @asymbina
— Rebecca Croteau (@ReeCroteau) March 14, 2015
@sinboy I don’t think American society in particular offers us much in the way of examples for humble acceptance of critique. @asymbina
— Rebecca Croteau (@ReeCroteau) March 14, 2015
@ReeCroteau@asymbina And of course flipping out makes you “that guy” immediately.
— Contrapunctus I (@sinboy) March 14, 2015
@sinboy Yup. And then to take a step back and realize “i’m being an ass…” that’s hard stuff. Again, no excuse. @asymbina
— Rebecca Croteau (@ReeCroteau) March 14, 2015
(I was included in mentions because I retweeted the first tweet, and Rebecca responded to my retweet.)
The other link is from Cracked:
6 Ways to Keep Terrorists From Ruining the World
[We] have this invisible scoreboard in our minds that tracks how many times we’ve been screwed over versus how many times we’ve done the screwing. Get into a nasty argument with somebody, and the scoreboard sets the agenda — if Steve’s girlfriend brings up the time he got drunk and shit in the top part of the toilet, he now has to bring up the time she selfishly got a tumor and ran up a bunch of medical bills. BOOM! Your ball, bitch!
But here’s the ugly trick the world plays on you, and it’s going to jack up your life every day from now to the grave:
In reality, the scoreboard is your opponent.
If that sounds like some Zen bullshit, let me give you an easy example:
Whenever some notorious rapist is caught, exactly 100 percent of the conversations or Internet comment sections about the subject will say, “I hope he gets raped in prison!”
See, because that would “even the score.” But even five seconds’ consideration demonstrates how monstrous that idea is: “rape is awesome, as long as it’s targeted toward people who deserve it!” No, the cruel reality is that if that guy gets raped, the score isn’t: Rapist 1, Society 1.
It’s: Rape 2, Society 0.
There’s a great deal of truth in that article about how we have really destructive, counterproductive tendencies around when people hurt each other — we’re more about retribution than justice, for one. It’s very very easy to lose sight of this, if we even think about it at all: harassing and abusing someone in retaliation for their own abusive actions does nothing but add to the sum total of harassment, abuse, and pain in the world.
Why White People Freak Out When They’re Called Out About Race
Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
Last year, a white male Princeton undergraduate was asked by a classmate to “check his privilege.” Offended by this suggestion, he shot off a 1,300-word essay to the Tory, a right-wing campus newspaper.In it, he wrote about his grandfather who fled the Nazis to Siberia, his grandmother who survived a concentration camp in Germany, about the humble wicker basket business they started in America. He railed against his classmates for “diminishing everything [he’d] accomplished, all the hard work [he’d] done.”
His missive was reprinted by Time. He was interviewed by the New York Times and appeared on Fox News. He became a darling of white conservatives across the country.
What he did not do, at any point, was consider whether being white and male might have given him — if not his ancestors — some advantage in achieving incredible success in America. He did not, in other words, check his privilege.
To Robin DiAngelo, professor of multicutural education at Westfield State University and author of What Does it Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy, Tal Fortgang’s essay — indignant, defensive, beside-the-point, somehow both self-pitying and self-aggrandizing — followed a familiar script. As an anti-racist educator for more than two decades, DiAngelo has heard versions of it recited hundreds of times by white men and women in her workshops.
She’s heard it so many times, in fact, that she came up with a term for it: “white fragility,” which she defined in a 2011 journal article as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include outward display of emotions such as anger, fear and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation.”
Originally published at asymbina.tumblr.com.
