What if protests aren’t progress but regress?

There is a phenomenon in politics and in tech where scrappy underdogs grow big and strong but never stop thinking of themselves as the underdogs. They see still themselves as freedom fighters when they are actually becoming despots. I’m concerned that is occurring — that this battle isn’t between racism and anti-racism, it’s between the identitarians and the humanitarians.

The George Floyd protests that have swept the globe are seen as the biggest step forward in modern history. I’m worried that it’s the opposite. George Floyd was murdered. Police brutality needs to be ended and those institutions cleaned up.

What I’m concerned about is that while seeing each other by the content of our character used to be the gold standard of human relations that view is now seen as retrograde. That if we don’t see each other solely through the lens of skin color, genital assignment, job choice, class, etc. — if we dare to look for nuance in people and situations than we are seen as doing damage. Huh?

To illuminate: A major CNN commentator, Van Jones, went on the air, to say that white people inevitably had a virus in their brains that made them racist and white liberal women who voted for Hillary Clinton, who comfort themselves by giving to charities (gasp!) were worse than the KKK, the organization that was originated to massacre black people who tried to exercise their right to vote. Jones is seen as a freedom fighter. Meanwhile the New York Time pushed out Editorial Director, Daniel Bennett, as a fascist, for simply printing an op-ed by a conservative senator, in what is supposed to be one of the last remaining bastions of the free-thinking press. This is progress?!

My name “Karen” has become a slur for middle class white women and if you dare to say anything about it you are insinuated to be hypersensitive and not understanding the bigger struggle. Meanwhile, I would NEVER refer to anybody as a “Shaniqua” or an “Apu” because that’s shitty as fuck. However, if somebody publicly used those specific names now they would be fired so quickly it would look like cartoon character exit. “Karen” however is just fine.

This is not progress. This is just old fashioned “ism” in another form. Anybody who genuinely fights for true liberation knows you can’t liberate one while enslaving another.

What concerns me the most that is that we are glorifying dehumanization. When you relate to somebody as solely black or white, male or female, you’re relating to an abstraction, not a human being.

It’s true, unfairness abounds and it does discriminate. Black people are more likely to killed by police brutality. As far as I know women are about the only gender to be roofied and raped. In addition, almost all the recipients of venture funding are white or Asian males.

And yet, dehumanizing people as a way to work up the rage necessary to fight this unfairness is wrong. In fact, soldiers are trained to dehumanize the opposing army- to make them into caricatures, gooks and sand rats, not because the powers-that-be actually believe those stereotypes but because it makes it easier for the soldiers to overcome their natural aversion to taking the life of another person.

As we dehumanize each other into rigid identity groups what exactly are we preparing to people to do to each other?

Intersectionality isn’t progress. It’s primitive. People aren’t demographic statistics. Nothing but genocide, slavery or other kind of atrocities has ever come from collapsing people into a two-dimensional concept.

A white cop killed George Floyd. Officer Deon Joseph, on the other hand, is a well-known cop, who happens to be black, who walks one of the toughest beats in Los Angeles, on Skid Row. He feels identified with being a cop and appears hurt by the anti-police sentiment. He wrote a blog detailing all the good cops of every color that he’s met. Life is complex, people have multiple identities and loyalties. If you only have one identity, you need to grow up and do some more things.

As a person, who’s done some study of the Civil War, I’m personally not in favor of removal of confederate statues, for only one reason —the intentions of the people doing it. You can’t fight dehumanization with dehumanization. The Confederacy was one of the shittiest causes of all times. It should not be vaulted in any way.

However, the statue destroyers, only see these historical figures as an abstraction of some evil cause. While the people who value them see a more three-dimensional person, who fought for a terrible cause, some of them against their better judgement and then came home and built schools or worked on reconstruction or other better causes.

The crux of the matter is that these Confederates aren’t THEM, they are US. We are all flawed. This lack of historical understanding bothers me intensely. All Southerners weren’t evil. Indeed, there were many shameful policies and incidences of racism among Union states and Union soldiers. Some white Union soldiers were willing to take pay cuts if their black compatriots were being paid less (The 54th regiment) while other white Union soldiers massacred their own black compatriots in the horrific Battle of the Crater. People are complex.

The reason why this matters is the because of the terrifying underlying philosophy that I see with these statue destroyers is that you can wipe out human evil, by wiping out one group of people. I assure you, you can’t.

Maybe these statues should be in a museum. Maybe they should be boiled down into liquid metal. I don’t know. What I know for sure is that I can’t support a movement that sees people as two- dimensional saints and sinners. And when people are obsessed with dividing people into good and evil, it’s usually because they are obsessed with their own virtue, which makes them very dangerous indeed.

At this point in time, I’m so concerned about the issue of dehumanization that I’d rather have a statue of Hitler erected, with a plaque that says “Genocidal maniac, meth head, was nice to his dog, was a good boyfriend” then let this trend continue without substantial conversation. Anybody who tells you that human evil resides in any specific group of human beings is preparing you to be a murderer.

Case in point, the Germans slaughtered my people less than a century ago, in the worst genocide in human history. Today, I have a German friend named Bert. Were Bert’s ancestors Nazis? Potentially, we haven’t talked about it. However, Bert and I get along just fine because Bert is not a Nazi. He’s Bert. If he becomes a Nazi at some point we are going to have to renegotiate our relationship.

As a generalization, most Jews I know have not held a grudge against the Germans, because we’ve been persecuted by people of all stripes and colors. The evil wasn’t just located in the Germans. Moreover, as bad as the persecution was, a lot of Jewish people spend years in the therapy chair talking not about anti-Semitism but about mistreatment from their own parents, also Jews. Oppression can lie as close to home as it does with the distant outsider as anyone with friends or family knows. Any mature human being also knows the nature of humanity is as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart…even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil.”

What concerns me isn’t that this dehumanized thinking, that I’ve previously described, exists but that these are the people taking the lead. Case in point, when I was in my 20’s, I surrounded myself with a bunch of angry women who railed about “men” as a class of human beings. I was one of these women. This dehumanization came from a feeling of profound hurt and insecurity. But what’s most notable about it is that when women saw men in this way it’s usually because they had been pumped and dumped (dehumanized). I, and they, had so little relationship with actual men at that point (and I suspect the same of the men involved) that it was easy to dehumanize them.

This way of relating might be developmentally appropriate at some juncture, but it’s so immature that nobody at this level of maturity should be leading the country. And it’s concerning me that all sorts of mature political leaders seem to be abdicating their role and “letting the kids” do it. Yes, young people have raw energy and idealism that should be harnessed but that is different from mature wisdom. Where are the adults in the room?

Now I’m in my 40’s. I have lot of great male friends- deep friendships not shallow ones. I would never think of railing against “men” as a class again. I know they are all different, precisely because I now have genuine relationships with some, whereas before I had no real relationship.

The fact that that the preferred way of seeing each these days is through the lens of black, white, male, female, gay, straight, police, civilian, oppressed and oppressor, means that not only do we have no actual relationship with each other as human beings, but that WE DON’T WANT TO.

This makes me absolutely terrified. This isn’t progress.

It concerns me that our most respected political leaders are talking about the “white community” (and I suppose there is a “black community?”). What community? Is there some kind of Facebook page where millions of white people join to come to consensus on our position? I have a family of just 5 white people and we have very different opinions on topics of race and sex etc. In fact, we are in battle amongst ourselves half the time.

It makes me deeply frightened when our most respected politicians say things like “the white community” because it may mean they have never had any kind of deep relationship with a white person. Yikes!

Anyone who takes but a minute to search about will see there is no such firm racial or gender or sexual communities. There are plenty of black conservative thinkers and white progressive thinkers. These abstractions are not real. They are fictions designed so you don’t have to think or get to know someone.

I personally think you should find a cop, a person of color or a paleface, a liberal, a conservative, and make a friend. But if you don’t, then I can only put up my own boundary. If you aren’t actually seeking to get to know me or have a relationship with me as a three dimensional person, then you aren’t actually interesting in engaging in dialogue and the pretense of a two way conversation should be dropped.