On Pointing

Thomas Wells
Aug 9, 2017 · 8 min read

I am a highly educated white man who lives in Portland, Oregon. I am intimately familiar with the works of Kierkegaard, Camus, Morrison, and Du Bois, but I do not know the works, lives, and interests of the people living next door to me. I am an avid reader of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxanne Gay, Lindy West, and Sam Kriss, yet before I decided to write this, I had no idea who the mayor of Portland is (Ted Wheeler), nor did I know the name of a single city council member (though a quick internet jaunt solved this). Only recently did I learn the names of my state representatives (Wyden, Merkley, Walden, DeFazio, Blumenauer, Bonamici, and Schrader). I don’t know the names of my neighbors.

I know the names of some of their dogs.

I lead with this because in order to talk about what I want to talk about, I need to identify my complicity with what I see as a current and toxic state of affairs.

Now, my intuition is this: I am not unique in my disconnect from my own community. I, like many others, am very educated, yet lacking in both virtue and wisdom.


I recently had an interesting conversation with a much smarter friend about this new show Confederate, and I will leave him to one day post his much smarter thoughts, but we were talking about the aforementioned Ta-Nehisi Coates, and his very good article on the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Coates is a powerful writer whom I admire, and everything that he has to say about the show is good. About the show: the white majority in the United States has never come to terms with slavery and the idea that a show re-imagining the Confederacy as having won when elements of it are still currently winning as somehow “helpful” or “interesting” is a complete crock of shit. Fuck the Confederacy, and fuck the Lost Cause, and fuck white supremacy.

But, the idea that popular culture is somehow a political force dictating the winds of opinion and policy is disingenuous. Art has power, yes, but art is not monolithic, nor is it all-powerful. Art does not stop the police from shooting innocent black people. Lawmakers, citizens, and police are responsible for stopping the violence. The blood of innocents is on our hands. We should not stop telling stories that feature abuse and cruelty. We should be telling people to stop doing those behaviors and constructing institutions to enforce that stoppage.

My problem is not with Coates. He should keep writing for large audiences as that is what he is successful and good at, and his arguments are often very good. My criticism is not of his work or the work of others like him. My criticism is directed at both myself and people like me — the well-meaning left. For many on the left, our immediate approach to solving social issues has essentially become a room full of people pointing at things, yelling “SEE? SEE?”

Fuck that. That is foolish.

Fuck the bourgeois privilege of selecting a new thing to point at and mewling “situation x is indicative of a systemic injustice” and then calmly returning to our regular screenings of HBO programming, micro brews, internet outrage, and boutique restaurants.

The left is eating itself. We’re so consumed with our own rightness, our own sensitivity to the plight of others that we’ve lost fight after fight after fight to unchecked capitalist exploitation, corporations, and shameful behavior. We’re losing this fight because of some vague idea of “hurt.”

Here are some statistics:

Does some of this hurt to read? It fucking should. The middle and working class are being poisoned and systematically crushed under an impersonal heel, and we’re taking it while we argue over the right and wrong ways to write a YA novel.

I’m not going to give my theories on why many of these things are happening or not happening, because there are oodles of people smarter and more informed than I who have already done so, and returning to my central thesis, we’ve got too many people saying why already. But, I will say this:

I believe that the disenfranchised are easily exploited and ignored by those with power, and we ought to have institutions to protect them. People should be able to find or train for meaningful work for a reasonable amount of time. People should also be compensated fairly for their work. Education should be a right available to all, and it is in the public interest to ensure everyone is being educated. Healthcare is a right, and should not be determined by something as slippery as economics. Legislators should work together to represent both the interests of their people.

Now, once again, these I believe these to be good principles, but there’s a lot of people saying this shit, so I’m instead going to talk about what I’ve wanted to for like 600 rambling words. Our circles of influence.


Heirocles’s model of cosmopolitanism.

I think this is an idea of our spheres of influence that should be attributed to Hierocles. It’s pretty basic. At the smallest circle, we have ourselves, situated within the larger circles of family/friends, fellow citizens, the state, and humanity as a whole.

What I think this model allows us to understand is crucial if we think in terms of responsibility. Our top priority, obviously if we’re interested in living lives that are courageous, honest, and kind, is to free ourselves from ignorance. Ignorance is the moral failure that generates atrocities and enables oppression. We have a responsibility to seek the truth, no matter where it leads us. This is something we have a higher degree of control of. Obviously, someone born into ignorance cannot totally be blamed for their ignorance, but neither are they absolved of it.

Next, we have a responsibility to the people that we care about. Because these people (hopefully) care about us as well, we have a shot at changing their minds.

It’s also important to be a force in our communities, though our power there is far more limited. That doesn’t mean we’re absolved of any responsibility. America is great in that we have public officials that we decide upon collectively, and on this scale, what we think about them, and do about them matters. A racist firefighter in your community is absolutely the responsibility of the individuals in that community to deal with.

After that, we have the state. Here, at least in America, we have a responsibility to vote for these officials (or not vote for them) and remind them whom they work for. As for the mass or humanity, very few of us have much we can do for them.

Hopefully, I’m being clear and you’re paying attention. Essentially, there is shit we can be responsible for, and shit we cannot be held responsible for (individually, at least).

As a straight white dude, I am not responsible for slavery, nor am I responsible for systemic injustice or police violence en masse. I am responsible for racist and sexist biases I may hold, and I am responsible for what those biases create in my community. In the long chain of causation, my biases help scaffold the structure of injustice, but I am not the sole builder. It is a contradiction, and a difficult one. It is wrong for me to believe that I am faultless, but it is also wrong for me to take full responsibility, or to point and blame another as being responsible. Things are too damn big for that sort of thinking.

I am responsible for what I can control. I cannot control that Donald Trump is president of my country, nor can I control the fact that my country has coordinated some of the most horrific events of the 20th century. But I can address and control my own ignorance, and the ignorance of others around me, to a degree.


I’m going to stop for a minute and qualify something that might have raised a flag a moment ago: Ignorance as the ultimate moral failure.

Take from this what you will, but I do not believe that there are freestanding concepts like “good” or “evil.” These are concepts we have reified to a point of meaninglessness. There is no object out in the world that is evil, nor is there an object that is good. What we do have is suffering, pain, powerlessness, and consciousness. Inflicting suffering and pain is wrong because it creates harm that would otherwise not have to be there. Making animals suffer so we can eat them is wrong because we don’t need to eat them. Effectively, we value our taste buds over their pain.

We know that harm is real. It is a thing that exists. We know, or at least have the capacity to learn, that our fellow human beings lead rich interior lives, have the capacity to suffer, experience pain, and are conscious of the world. Ignoring or refusing to acknowledge these facts, or not caring about them, is wrong. Supporting policies that deny these facts is wrong. They are byproducts of ignorance, both willful and unaware.


One of my intellectual watershed moments was encountering W.E.B Du Bois’ coining of the term double consciousness. In The Souls of Black Folk, he describes it as:

“… a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one-self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

To further clarify, having double consciousness is the experience of experiencing both yourself and what you mean to the world immediately around you. As a silly example, I grew up a non-Mormon surrounded by only Mormons. I developed an acute sense of myself as apart from this group, while also being forced to navigate it. Many of us have this experience to a greater or lesser degree.

To a black person, I imagine it must be more than slightly ridiculous to see white people in their communities losing their shit on Facebook about issues of IMPORTANCE TO THE LEFT. Those black people must still navigate a world where one wrong word to the local cop might lead to them dead in the street. Many of their white neighbors don’t even know their names.


My point is this: the desire to point at things much larger than ourselves and proclaim how shitty they are is easy. I’ve done it. I did it at the beginning, and throughout the piece. Just like Louis CK in that SNL skit, it feels good. It also takes zero courage.

You know what takes real courage? Standing up to your neighbor. Your local public official. Starting a union. Risking being shot in the face by members of your community so you can go to school.

It requires great reserves of courage and wisdom to engage with the people we live with. Facebook tirades and strongly worded polemics are wonderful, and useful in some small way. But not at the expense of the communicative networks that matter — our friends and families, and the communities that we live in. Go point at them.

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