Why Owen Benjamin is Dangerous
Survivalism in the age of comedic apocalypse
When I was growing up, my sense of humor didn’t track so well with most of my friends. I was into “shaggy dog” stories, or just sick jokes that made people uncomfortable, or think I was dangerous.
So, I tried to fix it.
Like a lot of other kids, I searched to find the right formula for laughs and approval. I think at times I found it, but just couldn’t keep it going, because it wasn’t the truth. Despite failing to incorporate it as a part of my personality, I’m still glad I learned how to better understand my audience; It’s a valuable skill to be able to make people feel comfortable, even when you’re not completely being yourself.
Years later, an old high school pal of mine let me know he’d had a skateboard accident, and due to a closed head injury, had damaged the part of his brain linked to inhibition. He described it as losing his filter. After months of rehabilitation and getting back to day-to-day life, he realized he was now not as close with quite a few of his friends, and lost some of the life he’d built, because he wasn’t as good at faking it anymore. I thought about this story a lot years ago when my life hit a wall as I approached forty, leaving me with what felt like a filter that wasn’t working anymore.
It kicked off with watching my widowed father suffer and die of cancer. Minutes after I awoke the next morning, I was listening to my wife’s admission that she never really cared much for him over the years. Awakening from the first sleep after a loved one’s death is always the worst, but this was one of those times when I first felt the cutting absurdity of it all. The divorce came a few months later, and I lost contact with my stepson. In a few months a new love affair and a couple of years of reprieve, near the end of which I came to watch my dear uncle, the last of my family, die in a prolonged torture regimen I vowed never to participate in again. During and shortly after, some dead pets to top it off. Then of course, in perfect rhythm, the next breakup. It seems the breakup is a fitting bookend to death: an effective way to experience pain in all of its richness.
Boo hoo. My experience isn’t so different from the average human’s — we all experience death and loss — maybe the only part of this I could claim as unique is that I might have traveled this road too often at too early an age, much sooner than the people in my life. It left me in a different state of mind few of them could understand; they were always sympathetic, but unable to authentically relate. It seemed all at once I’d woken up to a different life, which included less-than rosy ways of looking at the world… but what had really happened was my filters had finally broken; it had been the same reality all along. I was no longer trying to believe in someone else’s vision of what the world “ought” to be, but instead accepting and openly describing the one I was experiencing every day.
I can remember the sour and condescending reactions when I started talking more about contemporary feminist ideas, and among other things how men have long been portrayed in media as villains, and disposable oafs. When I started to read and write more on the subject, my girlfriend let me know in an angry moment she thought I “must just hate women,” and that she couldn’t understand where it was coming from. It probably didn’t help her impression that I was also grieving and in a career transition, unable to make a decisive move. But like that morning after my father’s death, while I symapthized with her reaction, I knew her words meant we were over, because I knew what was happening to me wasn’t new or unusual; my feelings about being a man in the 21st century just weren’t a secret anymore.
I’d been “red-pilled,” as they call it, however shallow the term may be. An expression atrributed to Men’s Rights Activists, to the Alt-Right, to Deplorables around the globe, it’s a reference to a moment in The Matrix where the protagonist chooses to awaken in the real world of human fuel cells, instead of continuing their sleep in the world of computer simulation. Google it, and you’ll find everything from angst about dating to Nazis to a mountain of feminist derision and contempt, but what you’ll mostly find is a lack of civil discussion or genuine curiosity.
Red Pill didn’t really interest me as a club to join or label to wear, nor did the other colored pills which emerged in splintering succession. But in there I’d find a number of vaguely similar stories to my own, as men (and women!) were starting to wake up to something they hadn’t been able to articulate or share openly before, whatever it was. Without intending to sound too dramatic, it felt a bit like coming out of the closet, or finally meeting beings from the planet you’d been jettisoned from as a child.
Some of it felt too young, surely I was too old for this angry rhetoric and victim mentality. And I was, I was. But when I spoke to friends who could barely decipher what I was getting at, I was surprised. How could they still hold on to all this? So many still had the old lies firmly intact, entrenched in clumsy stereotypes about men as monsters and despots, and the eerily whitewashed views of women as helpless, victimized saints. And of course at the top of that hierarchy of Bad Men sat the most reviled symbol of privilege and exploitation, the cis white male. The one who, for all appearances, would be me: a 6'1" sorta Jewish Anglo slightly Native American straight guy with a broad stature, who isn’t very good at shutting up.
I’d been through the standard undergraduate liberal arts education. I got my colonialist history, that imperialism/capitalism was the disease. I learned the canon of literature needed to be purged of too many rapey old white men and replaced with women of color. I learned the cops were evil, jocks were dumb, and how to smoke pot out of a 4 ft. red plastic tube. I’d even been highly praised for writing a research paper titled The Origin of the White Devil, the earnestness of which I can’t recall. It would also be dishonest to say I didn’t learn a lot of useful and wonderful things which became essential parts of my worldview, and I’m thankful for much of it. But man, was it ever a heinous heap of programming.
Nonetheless I still hold a fair amount of that worldview today, with gray areas feathered in over the years. Cops still aren’t my favorite people in the world, as a matter of fact I just got my shoulder yanked out of whack last summer and was forced to endure screaming spit all over my face, mistaken for a drug dealer a few blocks from my house. The difference today might just be that I’ve now lived long enough to know how hard the job is, and the reasons why a lot of police officers aren’t the nicest folks in the world. Suffice it to say they endure copious amounts of bullshit on a daily basis. Over the years I’ve also met some really good ones, who deserve our respect and admiration.
And I still think capitalism is a disease, but now it’s a special disease, one we really can’t so much cure, but learn to live with, and maybe even be thankful for. (Some of this is just the truth that comes with age.)
“A boy of 15 who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at 20.”
— John Adams (1799)
However there were some teachings from my undergrad years which never compelled me, in particular certain aspects of American party politics, race, and gender. Nonetheless over the years, I found because my identity was wrapped up in being “left,” I was being careful not to share opinions which challenged “liberal” notions, even with close friends. But it was always confusing, because I didn’t fit the teams correctly.
So when life finally gave me a swift enough kick in the teeth to make me wonder if I wanted to continue living it, I realized there was much I hadn’t said over the years, and rather unceremoniously, I began to blurt it out. I wrote reams, posted incessantly, sought out the heated conversations. I was suddenly acutely aware of my own role in the culture, in a way I’d never felt before. I was also surprised to find there were many others like me, not so much in my social circles, but out there lurking on the Internet. And it felt good to learn this; it gave me hope.
I’d been trapped in what was basically your average middle-class liberal bubble. I’d always known I sympathized with my more conservative family, but the ones in Oklahoma, not so much the ones in Orange County. I started to become aware there were more than one or two kinds of conservatives, just as I had always known there were different kinds of liberals. Most importantly I began to sense that we’d all been suffering in a clash of identities that didn’t really exist, encouraged by media to polarize and demonize further at every turn. When you wake up to these new realities, the feeling can only be described as shame for how utterly stupid you’ve been for such a long time; for the lie you’ve bought into. It’s hard to imagine you were caught up in such shallow partisan propaganda from all sides, forming useless battle lines, spending precious time and energy in a fake fight.
And yet, as much as I wanted to embrace the obvious notion that we are all one, the practical aspects of day-to-day life seem to dictate different terms of the game. We still do live in a world where we can’t trust everyone to put aside such differences, so I lost some people. But I didn’t feel any animosity toward them, apart from my disappointment in their inability to tolerate my evolving point of view.
A few things that stand out as formative, a couple of years into my newfound filterless approach: Black Lives Matter, Transgender activism, and the 2016 presidential race. In terms of losing my former identity as “way farther left than you are,” it couldn’t have been better timing for making it all worse. BLM started out as something I’d long supported — a movement to expose the epidemic of police brutality — and quickly evolved to something I couldn’t support, as it made the decision to ignore obvious truths in favor of scarier logic: The ends justify the means. I don’t really believe absolute moral purity is possible in the pursuit of an impassioned goal, but the rhetoric reached levels I couldn’t handle. A couple of years later, BLM had become an identity army, borderline hate group, peddler of white guilt and “cultural marxism” (forbidden terminology in 2018.) On its heels was the movement which would oppose Trump, and later become the “resistance.”
I’d done some work for the Obama campaign the first time around, and voted again for him in the second. I admit I got pretty emotional at his first victory, thinking there was something genuinely good in the outcome, some new way of thinking about our future, even as the entire circus felt like a marketing ploy.
Over time, it became more ploy than genuine good. But still I forgave him for scripted smugness and feigned speech affectations, which both he and the First Lady seemed to perfect during their stay in the White House. There was nothing wrong with being idealistic about the man, but it ended. He was only human, after all. He didn’t ever seem evil, just supremely fake. Obama, after it all came out in the wash, wasn’t such a great leader, but sort of templated and sterile, the affable “America Show” host. Composed, reasonably witty, smart, a decent guy, but what I realized was that I didn’t like him anymore. I didn’t find him funny. Obama’s presidency was maybe most important because of his true legacy, not one we can really blame him for: American discourse in decline. It started with comments into a hot mic he wasn’t aware of, then a long cycle of skillful symbolic acts, drone strikes and speech-making, coming to its conclusion with an impassioned battle over which bathroom transgendered persons should be using, and what those persons should be called. And of course, the failed campaign of Hillary Clinton.
That campaign was a defining moment, the point at which I wondered if my ex was right; Maybe I did hate women. When the accusations of misogyny became a daily drumbeat, I thought “well, if you insist…” and I realized if I was honest, I supposed by their definition I hated today’s women. More accurately, I was in shock to find how many women seemed to be obsessed. It seemed they’d be happy with any female becoming president as a kind of symbolic gesture, and would accordingly overlook the flaws of a person I found to be so grating and unlikable I dreaded even the mental image of listening to her speak. In truth, at the time it wasn’t just women I felt this way about, but a great deal of men as well. I realized I was beginning to hate today’s people in what was becoming an identity circus. But I desperately didn’t want to; it’s ever so exhausting to hate people.
Maybe hate’s too strong a word; I was afraid of what they represented. I feared people who demonized men as the reason Clinton wasn’t trending as she should have been, people who then blamed men for her loss. I was afraid of those who blamed all white people for Trump. I was afraid of the BLM-turned-resistance crowd, Antifa kids swinging bats, maniacs screaming “Nazi” at anything with a pulse. I was afraid of a culture which finally seeemed to agree gender was nothing but a construct, with no significant biological differences between men and women. Not afraid of these people hurting me per se, but afraid of what they meant for this country, for our future.
I wasn’t ever in denial of what it means to be black in America. My dad was a Head Start teacher, and I knew that some kids needed extra help to get on the right track. This was never questioned in my family, nor do I question it now. But I also grew up believing that content of character was something we all agreed upon. I was one of the naive kids who bought that MLK line, even though I felt Malcolm had some good points. Nonetheless, I’d met so many people so different from me over the years who could have dismissed me for what I appeared to be, but instead saw who I really was, for better or for worse. Even if I was the one with some perceived advantage, for them to accept me seemed all the more admirable and right.
I never felt transphobic either. But what’s the point of blathering on about positive experiences with transgendered people, this kind of “best black friends” disclaimer has become a caricature of fake piety, besides it’s all useless anecdotal meandering anyway.
Despite my own continuing self-identification as “liberal,” things had changed in recent years; it seemed the world now desperately wanted (straight cis-gender) white men to feel judged, in contrast to every other group, as a long overdue come-uppance. After all, black people had been constrained by the assumptions of prejudiced society for all these years, maybe it was time whites felt the pressure of discrimination. And women, we were told had been nothing but oppressed for millennia, so #itstime for men to pay the price there too.
But the premise felt weak, even fallacious. It wasn’t that women had never been oppressed, or that black people hadn’t faced ongoing difficulties or experienced modern-day racism in the U.S., but the extent of the “patriarchy” and male privilege, once a listenable notion, had now become a ludicrous stretch. And the idea that black people in 2017 had no other destiny than to be oppressed by white supremacist, institutionally racist structures, and would therefore be somehow exempt from personal responsibility? Well, that seemed a stretch too. And what I noticed at the time was virtually no one speaking out about it.
The problem was not with rational observations of differences in how people are treated in society, but with the stretching and special pleading. As belittling and hateful remarks from the Democratic campaign and its supporters literally propelled Donald Trump to his unlikely victory in 2016, I was at a loss for words. I and many others felt they’d plugged their ears, refused to listen, made a terrible miscacluation, and instead of admitting their mistake, from the time of his election onward, they doubled down. They continued to stretch, and stretch some more. I wasn’t a fan of Trump, and was saddened to see this rich reality show dude become president. But I felt after the damage we’d done, we deserved him in a poetic sense. The more I listened and watched, the more I also saw how mismatched the caricature of Trump is to the reality of Trump. If you’re taking an honest look, it too is a stretch. Besides, what kind of person today really believes it’s really all about the President? The outrage was suddenly over-pumped, we were now in political loudness wars, the headroom and dynamic range were gone. It all felt like a terrrible halftime show.
But I understood what was happening. This wasn’t about who you believe in or who you feel is right, or how to find common ground, but about who you hate. And when you hate, you tend to stretch the truth. You do it because the ends justify the means. You leave out important details, you choose photos carefully, you make subtle edits to your “content” because you feel you have a moral obligation to make sure the right message reaches the public, and a duty to see the wrong ones silenced. You bury the stories that don’t fit the narrative. One by one, media outlets and activist groups seemed to fall in line in regimented opposition to the man they’d been told was the next Hitler, lumping the entirety of white men while they were at it. A growing women’s movement hitched their wagon to anti-Trump, and has been following that same partisan line ever since. Social media tribes coalesced, and the practice of blindly defending Trump was romanticized on the right as a chorus of “marginalized voices.” For the most part they were marginalized, and still are. It’s the silly identity badges that don’t help anything. (This is the part my left-leaning friends still don’t seem to understand.)
All of it felt as if we were nearly beyond hope, but somewhere from deep in the bowels of the internet, there bubbled other voices like mine, aghast at a public who were now taking it upon themselves to now mimic the roles of deluded politicians and yellow journalists. Not to mention the whole “Russia did it” line sounded eerily familiar, and wasn’t fooling anyone.
Somewhere around this time I learned from a friend about a stand-up named Owen Benjamin. If you’ve made it this far, you might feel duped by the title of this piece for having to wait so long to find out what the hell I’m on about, or how this is about him at all. Well, it’s a tough life, but I know you’ve got what it takes to get through.
I watched a few of his stand-ups, video podcasts and interviews, I followed him on Twitter. Some things felt instantly familiar to me: He’d grown up in a liberal academic home believing Republicans were body snatchers, an eclectic jock type with a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He didn’t watch too much TV, and played piano instead. I felt an instant affinity for this unlikely mix of traits, but he was really nothing like me — from what I could tell he was much more self-assured, a talented comic, and even one of the cool kids growing up. (It also escaped me for a while that he’s a towering 6' 7".) I was impressed by his unique brand of approachable, straight-faced brutality mixed with heartfelt musical jokes. I’d seen comedy sets before with the songwriting thrown in as a gimmick, but this tone was something new. Sharp but not buttoned-up, quick and incisive on all the touchy topics, with a disarming lack of pretense or fear. There was something brilliant about the way he handled audiences who weren’t laughing hysterically. He talked about things you’re not supposed to talk about, in a confident way. You’re not supposed to say these things in a confident, likable way. And because of the political climate, he came under attack.
While I’m sure it would be hard for some to understand the comparison, I couldn’t help but think of Lenny Bruce. Certainly not for political views, mannerism, character or even style of comedy — as Bruce (while a brilliant comedy mind in my opinion) was more of a long-form storyteller and social critic, the likes of which we’ve never seen since. But he came to mind as practitioner and defender of comedic law. A law that says comedy enjoys special protection from censors, by default, because comedy doesn’t really work if you’re feeling safe and comfortable. And due to that basic principle, literally everything is on the table, no matter how taboo, sick or obscene. And so that is not only the law, but the core purpose of comedy, to laugh at everything, even (and especially) the awful stuff. Without it, you’re left with lukewarm, unmemorable dreck, which is in effect transgression, a waste, a shame. It always seemed obvious to me that such laws are good.
There was a time when I thought an “irreverent” comedian like Sarah Silverman was marginally funny, but in the age of outrage and constant scandal with stand-up and nearly all comedy well past foundering, an entire generation of formerly-brave comedians were flung like rag dolls over the rails into the groupthink-drink.
I couldn’t help but feel understood when I saw this tweet, something I’d been struggling with for years, the absolute banality of the late night television personality. Given, a couple of these guys crack me up now and then, but for the most part, it’s all just bad, and we seem to have gotten used to it.
Conversely, someone like Bruce struggled a great deal in his career and personal life, was blacklisted, arrested multiple times for obscenity, among other things. He was called a “sick comic,” but more likely for the contrarian nature of his thinking. I drew the comparison because Benjamin, it seemed, was following a similar moral and professional code today, trying to navigate the 2017 equivalent of Bruce’s resistance to the prudish thought police of his time, and the unashamed call to examine media narrative.
Compared to America 40 years ago, it’s initially hard to imagine what would constitute “obscenity,” until taking a closer look at what has arisen in the age of social media. On paper it was words like “cocksucker” that got Bruce arrested in 1961, but everyone with half a brain knew it was really about the status quo and structure of blind adherence he’d been incessantly attacking. Today we haven’t begun arresting people just yet, but we’ve certainly seen plenty of blacklisting, doxxing, boycotting, and the like. What exactly is the modern day “obscenity?” Well, for the time being it appears the court of social media isn’t picky. Certainly anything about gender or race is an easy target, and for the most part, the current outrage-du-jour mostly concerns identity, in politics, entertainment, and all of American culture. This subject matter happens to be central to Owen Benjamin’s repetoire, and one of the main reasons I found him so refreshing — how was it that so few comedians had the guts to take a swipe at these increasingly absurd targets, ones which seemed so overly serious and self-absorbed, so well-insulated by media consensus, so sure they were right?
How could they not see it was ripe for comedy?
Over the course of a few months, I came to read more about him, and finally came across a documentary called The Comedy of Death, the story of Benjamin’s close friendship with Aaron Shoemaker, comprised of footage spanning the years 1998–2005. It’s a raw and honest story about two funny suburban white guys with a conjoined sense of humor, and love of life. It seemed the film was meant to explain how much of Benjamin is maybe even still tied up in Shoemaker, who died after an accident and the resulting cardiac arrest, at a snowboarding competition in 2004.
It’s an absolutely touching piece of film, despite the fact it contains a lot of white guys being young, mouthy and reckless, and a scene where the two friends intentionally piss themselves sitting at a kitchen table. The kind of thing we might even label as “bro stuff” these days. But something about this honest bit of video spoke to me, and all at once reminded me I did in fact have such a friend in my youth, one who understood my awful ideas and twisted sense of humor, as stupid as it might have been.
Benjamin describes his best friend fondly, with understandable feelings of loss and frustration, but nonetheless explains his need to carry on the tradition they’d started, joking about things you aren’t supposed to joke about. After seeing this film, the entirety of Benjamin’s work starts to feel like a study in modern masculinity, in terms which don’t condescend, apologize, or trivialize the importance of traditional male roles in society, but also holding men up as playful, powerful, considerate, intellectual, even renaissance types. As such we can be decent fathers, role models, sensitive artists, and unpredictable animals.
One thing you’ll notice if you follow him on Twitter is the fact he’s adopted the bear as a spirit animal, (which is supposedly mine as well, according to the kind old Ojibwa woman selling painted rocks in the north woods.)
I think if you were to ask most blogger types or journalists today, Benjamin is dangerous because of what he represents in the epoch of social media. The rationale is someone like Lenny Bruce didn’t have the immediacy and reach that today’s personalities do. He’d do his act, maybe get arrested, written up in the papers. It would take some time for this news to travel across the country. Today, much of our fearful rationale and attempts to control speech are linked to the immediacy of the technology we are immersed in. Owen Benjamin says something on the Internet, his followers might feel emboldened to the wrong ends. Can we have that? Even if his motives are pure in a stated effort to expose hypocrisy, isn’t it possible that his followers might be thinking something else? Isn’t there a latent message in his work which the more hateful types lurking out there could pick up and run with?
Well, defenders might say, this was always the way of the free world, where ideas themselves could be dangerous, and it’s up to each person to make the right choice and to teach our children accordingly. If we believe in personal responsibility, we must ultimately trust the people to do right, and bring them to justice when they do harm. But no, the fearful might say, this is different. Since the advent of these digital platforms, speech must be more carefully regulated, controlled, measured for potential hate content, the definition of which might have nothing to do with an author’s intent, but with how their words could potentially be twisted into something more sinister.
It’s this “wartime argument” about speech which gets under a certain type of person’s skin; it’s not a stretch to the Orwellian stuff from here. And I’d bet money it’s one of the stronger motivations for Benjamin’s audience: to hold key strategic ground on principle, for fear it might otherwise slip away.
Benjamin is dangerous bear to the status quo, because with his principled approach to performance, no one is safe. The forbidden stuff is the good stuff, his followers know it, and sometimes it’s ten times funnier expressly because of the parades of schoolmarms wagging fingers, insisting it isn’t. To them, he’s gentle protector bear.
I also know my story of unlearning the partisan rulebook is not an uncommon one, and I can only guess his “not a cult” following of “UnBEARables” (known by their bear emojis 🐻 on Twitter) is filled with all kinds who not only find him funny, but see him as loyal and truthful witness, staunch keeper of the flame for freedom of speech, and even the right to bear arms. For me, it’s been a real kick to find this guy‘s work at this point in my own journey. When you look around and feel as if the world has gone mad, and that even comedy is dead, this kind of bravery from an artist means a lot. That’s dangerous, because as a result, People like me are turning away. Increasingly allergic to any kind of politically correct agenda, which today seems to run through just about everything Hollywood or big media can crank out.
It’s something of a cliché today to say “I don’t agree with everything he says,” and it’s exactly this point which I believe he is shining a light on, whether he means to or not. We don’t need to believe in people as monoliths of ideology; in fact we shoudn’t, and realistically we can’t. In fact it’s the only way forward, if any common ground is possible. Benjamin comes across as the type of guy who might even be annoyed this piece was written at all, or at the very least would find it too long. Truth is I don’t give a shit if some of his jokes make me squeamish. I don’t agree with everything he says. But I hope he keeps it up; may he remain unpredictable and dangerous for as long as possible, at least until he he’s too successful to be honest anymore.
Let’s just hope he never runs for office.
As I was about to hit the “Publish” button here, I checked Twitter and found I’d been scooped in real time.
What else is new… it’s not as if I thought my ideas about Benjamin’s “study in offense” were all that original.
It’s very long, it’s obsessed, it’s direct, it says it all. It’s about the legendary legacy of Carlin and Bruce, and the need to challenge forbidden speech, to break new boundaries. As he narrates the history of Lenny Bruce, it’s fascinating to see the artist begin his difficult self-reflection in real time, acknowledging his worry about losing sight of comedy and entering the realm of obsessive politics. Bruce has always been someone who was admired with strong caveat, as it was well known he suffered as a result of his ideological mission. Many people opined that his practice drove him mad, and isolated him from the life or even success he could have had. Benjamin seems to hint at worries he’ll forget to be funny, if he stays on this path too long, becoming a tortured Bruce-like caricature. He holds Carlin up as a better example; the biting critic who still remembered to make people laugh.
Benjamin is unpolished in comparison to the giants who paved the way for attacking taboo, not just because his stage act has a more informal feel than theirs, but because there were no YouTube livestreams in their day. No one knows what any of these guys would have done with such technology in between their paid performances. But Benjamin isn’t exactly known for his economy of words, with livestreams, interviews and tweets at a volume to rival most media outlets. And he uses the new media to talk, a lot, in an ad-hoc stream of consciousness that’s almost hard to believe, with rawness and strong personal connection to his audience. The interaction with his UnBEARables feels much less like a performance than an intimate, messy conversation, always engaged, passionate, inclusive, and at times manic. It’s really no surprise people call it a cult. Unlike his standup, these monologues are at times uncomfortable to watch, and never appear rehearsed.
In this nearly two-hour video he also explains what’s been going on with the n-word. He’s been tearing up Twitter for a week now, saying the word more times than most non-blacks will in a lifetime. He calls it “World War N,” and assures us it’s now over. It’s at times hard to take, but upon reflection, one wonders what is behind the discomfort. Is his blatant disregard for this unspoken rule a rebuttal of black strife? Does he not recognize the pain embedded in the word? Or is he questioning the nature of the pain and what it’s about? Anyone who dares to use the word with such abandon is not only bound to get long explanations of white privilege and societal white supremacy, but is also opening themselves up to harsh criticism and retaliation. Be warned: Benjamin’s n-word saga is not for the faint of heart. He does however claim he‘s never used the word in anger, but only for purposes of exposing ideological cracks in the system.
He’s a better man than I.
I often come back to a tough memory of an incident years ago where I did use the word in anger after defending against a physical attack, (which in reality was probably partially my fault, for engaging.) It’s a shameful moment I often come back to and think about, a time in my life I like to think I left behind. But is it true? Can I leave it behind? What was really behind the use of that word? Who will decide, an academic, a politician, a Twitter user, or me?
Am I “a” racist? By many popular definitions today, I could be. But I prefer to call it prejudice. I believe we all carry more than a little bias based on life experience, and I like to think my own prejudices come from a real world I lived through, rather than some social programming. But, if we’re honest, for most people it’s most likely some combination of both. Does that mean the word I used in anger was a manifestation of my true, hidden, racist nature? That one I’m not so sure about. It was almost as if I was too dumb at the time to come up with something better, and just blurted out the worst thing I could think to hurt someone, anguish in the exasperation of battle. I sometimes wonder if he’d been overweight or really into Star Wars, maybe I’d have come up with a real zinger, and I could have avoided the mess entirely.
That said of course I get that’s exactly why the word is a problem. Of course I’m ashamed. Of course I’m aware of history, of course I know how the word affects a black person, casually, or when spoken in anger. Of course it was a low moment I still haven’t forgotten. But despite the feelings of shame, it’s hard for me to think of it as such an unforgivable transgression. Sometimes I even wonder if it happened expressly because I wasn’t allowed to say it. No matter how you look at it, in that moment, I learned something.
But I don’t know if it’s what the world wanted me to learn.
I learned in this world all I can really do is try to be conscious of my bias, and do my best to make sure I am evolving to grow beyond it when i can, to make sure it doesn’t enter into my engagement with the world. But do the black ladies at the DMV or City Hall sometimes make me want to tear my hair out? Yes. They are out of control. But they have a life to live which I can’t know, just as they can’t know mine. So I’ve learned some things as I’ve aged, just like most people hopefully do. That said, I’ll speak out when I have a complaint, or when I or someone I care about is being mistreated, and I hope everyone despite race or gender will continue to do the same. Call me “colonizer” because you saw Black Panther, and I’ll have a sense of humor for a while, but after some time has passed I’m not going to pretend it isn’t stupid. If I don’t do this, I’m treating grown adults like children, and I’ve learned that isn’t helpful to anyone.
He says World War N is over. I don’t know what kind of repair is necessary after this war, or if anyone will even remember after next week. But I’d guess the ideological rift was there before, and still remains. I’m not entirely comfortable with the rawness of Owen Benjamin talking into the camera, and drawing fire on Twitter. I don’t know if I really understand him, and I know I could never be him or do what he does. But in a world where the majority of mainstream voices in comedy have gradually become obsequious pandering bores, I’m glad he exists to make people uncomfortable, to stir things up, and make people wonder now and then if he’s lost the plot.
Sometimes I worry about how we are going to treat the dangerous people in this world, and at the moment I admit it doesn’t look good. But I hope in time, for our sake, we’ll learn to let them do their thing.
