Psst…fellow Men and White People…your identity politics are showing…
Kavanaugh Apologists get no credit for walking a mile in their own shoes
Should I live another 30–40 years, I will physically look like the eleven Republican men on the Senate Judiciary Committee judging Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh.
I hope the resemblance ends there.
So, seeing that I am a straight white man, I am going to write here largely to fellow straight white men.
Why?
Because everyone hates “being talked at” by people outside their communities (and, yes, fellow white people, this includes US!) The rhetorical political gold the right wing has been mining since the 1960’s via the fallacy that “identity politics” are only deployed by non-white or non-Christian or non-straight groups is pyrite, it’s fools’ gold.
If you don’t think that “Make America Great Again” is a clarion call to a specific group engaging in identity politics, then I don’t know how you can square that with the sheer overwhelming math of who does and doesn’t respond to it.
People with skin like mine, predominantly male and almost entirely straight, put Donald Trump a mere 3 million votes away from winning the 2016 election. That’s pretty impressive when you consider the dumpster fire of a “political organization” he had behind him and his Dewey Decimal Card Catalog-sized trove of heretofore disqualifying gaffes, lies, incapabilities, lawsuits, bankruptcies, slanders against P.O.W.’s, on-the-record-braggings-about-the-sexiness-of-his-teenage-daughter, remorseless affairs, boasts about being too smart to pay taxes, fake medical disclosures, etc. etc.
For a recent historical reminder, Howard Dean’s presidential candidacy went down in flames because of a positive and exuberant (yet funny sounding) “he-yaaah!” cheer he yelled in front of supporters, excited to move on to the next Primary showing…and this was post-Y2K. My dog is older than “The Dean Scream.”
Okay…crap, you’ve got me…I’ve let it out. I don’t respect or support the current President. I am a lefty. I live in a multi-cultural, mixed-class neighborhood. I’m a card-carrying supporter of the ACLU. I have a political bias.
So do you. So do all people paying attention.
Add to us the majority and minority caucuses in the Senate, represented by the members of the Judiciary Committee we’ve seen do (and not do) their jobs these last few weeks as they stage the world’s most cringe-inducing, tone-deaf and traumatic televised job interview.
By the way, I’m not being flippant — these hearings are the ONLY structured occasions for the American public to weigh the merits of the would-be members of the unelected, term-limit-less nine-person panel comprising one-third of the co-equal branches of our federal government. And to everyone who thinks Alex Jones getting banned on Twitter or Rush Limbaugh not winning a Peabody award is further proof of their first amendment rights being trampled, this hearing process REALLY IS just a glorified job interview — albeit one with horrible collateral damage. Brett Kavanaugh is not under any threat of prosecution, incarceration or even firing…If he fails to get awarded the final spot on the Supreme Court, he’ll have to settle for staying in his current job on merely the 2nd highest court in the land…next to Merrick Garland.
Back to the rest of us: In a hyper-partisan time, when identity has never matched up more with party affiliation, there are so few truly politically agnostic people left (no matter how many New York Times reporters scour the country looking for them), so let us all cop to the fact that if we are paying attention to the Kavanaugh Hearing, we have a vested interest in its resolution.
Never has the American political rainbow been more bi-chromatic. What you stand for — WHO you stand for — has never been less subtle or more easily broadcast to the world…nor has it ever been more of a badge of honor or scarlet letter, depending on your audience.
So we’re all in the same boat…every American ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, age cohort, geographical tribe. We are more easily categorized, more politically vocal, and more ANGRY (on the whole) than ever (this despite not having any Redcoats to fight, Civil Wars to wage, Reconstruction to sabotage, Kaisers to depose, Pandemics to survive, Depressions to weather, Nazis to defeat, prolonged land wars in Asia to be drafted into, etc. etc.). Even though existential threats are at an all-time low, tribalism across the board is at an all-time high.
Simply, everyone is part of an identity group, if not multiple. Everyone sees something of themselves in their groups and in a majority of outcomes affecting their groups. You may be very proud of your group(s).
You may not be. (Anyone else raising their hands? Fellas? Bueller?)
I am not a sexual assault survivor. I’m very, very lucky. I don’t deserve to be spared while so many others aren’t.
So if I and all the (mostly) men who haven’t had such horrors perpetrated on us can’t — AT THE VERY DAMN LEAST — show some empathy and intellectual honesty in the sight of those who have, then we really do deserve every bit of abuse heaped on us: the overwhelmingly most empowered and dominant cohort in this nation’s history (as well it’s present).
Put another way: believe someone who is actually, clearly victimized. Don’t set up a thousand straw man arguments.
Why didn’t the other handful of people present that horrible night of the assault in question remember the party? (Maybe because it was a normal night for them since they WEREN’T violated and, therefore, haunted by it three-and-a-half decades later).
Why isn’t there more documented evidence of it as there would likely be today? (Maybe because the advent of camera phones was 20 years in the future, MS-DOS was 1 year old at the time, and Mark Zuckerberg was an ovum).
Why didn’t Dr. Ford didn’t contact the FBI (an oft-repeated question!) or local police right after the assault? (Maybe because she was 15, scared out of her mind and well aware that she would be irrevocably harmed by the aftermath of reporting what happened in the less female-friendly year of 1982 — far more so than she is being harmed, even now).
And — to hammer it home — this was 1982. CSI was a long way off, as was The Social Network, to say nothing of 1992’s “Year of the Woman,” or any woman on a major presidential ticket (shout out to Shirley Chisholm!), or the mere possibility of a female Speaker of the House. (Tangentially, if you think we’re so far removed, in 2018, from 1950’s mass-marketed female subservience and the blatant sexism undergirding the foundations of American power, consider that the few US Senators that happened to be women were not allowed to wear pants at work until 1993…oh, and that my grandpa — who is still alive — was born in a time when American women couldn’t “be trusted with the vote.”)
So let’s try to be honest about what we really know about how men and women have acted and reacted toward each other forever. I’m NOT SAYING every individual man or white person dehumanizes or exploits people, but there’s quite a track record, as a collective. My fellow white men, especially, please try to not take anger at Kavanagh and his coterie as a direct impugning of you….however, IF YOU ARE feeling targeted or demonized or humiliated or reduced or guilty by association from The Left, imagine how it might feel to be, say, the one demographically-different representative on a cable news panel show and have to defend your entire identity group every time a black celebrity makes a provocative video, or a flamboyant performer is photographed in a LGBT Pride Parade, or a frustrated woman writes an aggressively pro-feminist tweet…to say nothing of how you need to “represent and explain to the rest of us” what your community is like when an act of violence occurs.
To those who don’t want Dr. Ford’s allegations to be true for reasons of identity and/or partisanship, please stop acting like amateur Sherlock Holmeses, searching for a smoking gun in Dr. Ford’s purse to invalidate the sad, eternal truth that men receive the overwhelming benefit of the doubt in he-said/she-said disputes, (especially in those of a sexual nature).
If you’re clinging to a conspiracy theory about a mysterious doppelgänger of Brett Kavanaugh’s or a four-decade-old Machiavellian plan hatched by a high school sophomore to ultimately harm the political viability of a New York tabloid punchline heir to a real-estate fortune that she alone somehow knew would one day be President, please try to look at this from a 30,000-ft. level. Instead of, coincidentally, this being “just another one-off,” like all the women who have come out in the #MeToo era, consider that Dr. Ford and others might be brave and vulnerable and exposed but also resolute because they hope and need to believe that juuuuuuust maybe society has evolved enough to where they won’t be treated in 2018 like another Anita Hill (let alone another Hester Prynne).
We won’t know, definitively, what happened that night between Ford and Kavanaugh…either way. But how many women have to be hurt? How much disparity do we have to turn a blind eye to when we look at who is represented in boardrooms, legislatures, and all the local, state and federal halls of power and academia and law enforcement? Good grief, there was date rape in Sixteen Candles and Revenge of the Nerds and SNL sketches, to say nothing of the rape and domestic violence jokes that were run of the mill in The Honeymooners, Vaudeville, and innumerable pieces of 21st and 20th century pop culture, putting a mirror to society while garnering laughs aplenty.
Let us all attempt to look at the two testimonies through the eyes of normal people with nothing socially to be gained or lost. Can you say Dr. Ford wasn’t credible? Are you telling me Judge Kavanaugh seemed judicious? And, no, I don’t see how one can accept that he was just “defensive and righteously indignant” without acknowledging that — between the two of them — she (AS A SEXUAL ASSAULT SURVIVOR) has a much larger burden to carry than he (in the dual role of accused young abusive drunk in the eyes of one half the country and good-guy carpooling social-justice martyr in the eyes of the other half).
Put another way: She has been plagued by this for 36 years. He either a) doesn’t remember this because he was so unremarkably drunk or b) is lying because he’s choosing expediency over virtue or c) is completely innocent. (Only 1 of those 3 outcomes speaks well of him). Far more anecdotal evidence from classmates, yearbooks, books penned by his best friend and paid Republican political operative Mark Judge, etc. point toward one of the first two outcomes than point toward Dr. Ford being a craven fabulist or towards this whole thing being a wild, wacky sitcom-style misunderstanding.
Side note — as someone who grew up in a house plagued by alcoholism and fear — I can tell you that a blackout drunk can be easily hidden to the public, as well as that most alcoholics know what they’re capable of, even if they don’t remember specifics…they, when they’re honest, can acknowledge the pain they may not remember inflicting
To those who reflexively defend Kavanaugh to the hilt (whether out of cynicism, loyalty to your tribe, or an ardent love of extravagant tax cuts or other policy goals that make Paul Ryan sing giddily in the shower), do you not see the toxic and dangerous machismo in Kavanaugh, in how how he belittles female senators and how he and his blood brothers bragged in their high school yearbooks about all the kegs they drained/ the girls they “shared” (and how “certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs”?) Have you ever been around really rich people? Many of them act with impunity because they really DO get to live (and be judged) by a different set of rules.
Oh, no…am I judging one person, in part, by his background? In this case, yes, I am adding his stereotypical and peer-reported backstory as corroborating evidence, just as he and his defenders used his daughter’s basketball team and the interns he hired and friendly newspaper columnists and the fact that he drove carpool as character references in the run-up to this televised mess. It is warranted because this guy was born on 3rd base, thinking he hit a triple, and has lived a life of power and privilege and — oh, yeah — he is one Jeff-Flake-reverts-back-to-the-mean “yes vote” away from being the key vote deciding the most important jurisprudential issues affecting 350 million people for, possibly, the next 40 years, where he will be unfireable for bad job performance, unlike 99.9999999% of the people he will “serve.”
One last point putting this in the context of the early 80’s, when your chance of seeing popular representation of female equality with men was almost non-existent (hence, giving us a pretty damn accurate account of what people in the marketplace would and wouldn’t accept and/or relate to): Isn’t this the epitome of the bad guy behavior in the Snobs vs. Slobs movies so prevalent at the time?
Wasn’t this guy and his crew harassing the working-class joes in “Caddyshack” and “Back To School”? Didn’t Daniel LaRusso give Brett Kavanaugh a swift crane kick to the face at the end of “The Karate Kid?
We are what we accept. We do what we see. We model what is before us. I literally saw a little girl at my kids’ school today approached by one, then two, then four larger boys, arms around each other’s shoulders, trying to intimidate her into giving them the ball she had in her hands. Are these boys monsters? No. They’re 7. Is this girl going to be in the right in every conflict for the rest of her life? No. But, for a brief moment on the playground, they were pressuring her and she was outnumbered, on the outskirts of where everyone else was playing and paying attention. It was a tiny episode that maybe none of them remember tonight. But the boys slipped into that behavior pretty easily, pretty subtly, probably because they’ve seen it before and because (even today) boys predominantly are still both tacitly and explicitly reared to be more aggressive than girls. I consider myself not very macho at all, but even I have to admit the parts of myself that I maybe didn’t ask to be formed and those I willingly allowed to germinate for my own advantage.
Men, white straight men, those who are demographically in the empowered majority (and, hence, accepted by those who look more like you and hold more money and power than those who do not, as a bloc), loyal Republicans (whose party holds the Executive, both houses of Congress, and are thiiiiiis close to also holding the majority of the Supreme Court) who can afford to release a scintilla of your outsized power this time in exchange for being on the moral side of this ugly would-you-rather scenario, you can afford to #Believe_Women this time, if not many times in the future…but please don’t wait for the lame excuse of having to be personally touched by assault.
In 20 years you don’t want to be the person who only took the side of a victim over a powerful member of your in-group because something horrible happened to a female loved one whom — of course — you believed and supported.
Don’t be like the old lady who changed her racial biases only once she had a black grandchild…or the guy who came around on enshrining basic civil rights for LGBT people only once he found out his brother was gay and that he and his partner couldn’t enjoy any of the legal, economic, tax or death benefits a heterosexual couple could…or, more to the point, the somewhat latent and non-introspectively misogynistic dad who didn’t support his wife’s career ambitions or the hiring of female bosses overseeing him, or the election of unashamed woman political candidates or the Equal Rights Amendment or nullifying the gender wage gap, only to later become a champion of his daughter when she became a young woman entering a hostile workforce, facing an uphill battle for advancement….please, don’t be that guy.
Please try to step outside of your demographic bubble. Sampling, from a far away menu, merely the most two-dimensional fare a differing group has to offer will only make you double-down on believing and supporting those who look like you even more…If the majority of Black points of view you encounter are on Twitter, if the only LGBT people you know are on TV, if the organizations or clubs you belong to don’t have women making decisions, then you’ll be so much more susceptible to slip-sliding down the road to expediently defending even the least heroic of your in-group over anyone from the dreaded “they,” the others, the different.
If your extracurriculars, your friend group, your influencers, your heroes, almost entirely reflect your own identity and circumstances back at you, how can you expect to be “open-minded,” or “just calling it as it is,” let alone “fair and balanced”?
It is natural for all of us to fall back, a little or a lot, on what is familiar, what is endemic to us, and to (sometimes unconsciously) glorify that which is familiar to the detriment of that which is not…as well as those who are not. It might take a bit of effort to check yourself…
I’ve been involved with three non-profits and one social service provider since moving to our beloved neighborhood almost 7 years ago…I’m usually the only straight white guy at the table, and often men are very much in the minority….and stuff gets DONE! Plus, I have learned and continue to learn a whole lot more than I ever could have about the wider world and people who look and sound and experience things differently than I, and I am thankful and humbled and grateful for it. Does that mean that I and every other white person and/or man have nothing to offer or don’t deserve to lead sometimes? Of course not. But so many people of privilege (of which I am manifestly one) have no idea what they don’t know…and it really shouldn’t be surprising. If you’ve never been followed or tailed or glared at or arbitrarily denied service in a retail or dining establishment because of the color of your skin, why would you think that’s a thing that rational people would subject you to in 2018? If you’ve never been groped, leered at, or slyly (let alone blatantly) propositioned, why would you think that that could be something a normal person would do to you, today? People don’t really do those things, right? They do. I’m arbitrarily lucky that I haven’t gone though those things…but I know people who have gone and do go through them…I believe them. I don’t subtly disregard their claims because it makes me feel bad or complicit because the person often doing the objectifying has my basic skin tone or number of X and Y chromosomes or political affiliation or hometown or professed faith.
