Beating the Socialist with the Socialist's Shtick

Is anybody else old enough to remember when right-wingers were furiously circulating a meme that showed Barack Hussein Obama putting his dirty feet on the precious, sacred desk of the Oval Office?  The desk that was a gift from Queen Victoria of England, so it was like Barack "Not Their President" Obama was stomping on the Virgin Queen!  No?  Well, it was a long time ago, almost eight years, nobody can remember that far back.

 

Militant leftists from Medium to Snopes.com took delight in finding pictures of Obama's predecessors, from Nixon to Dubya, kicking back with their feet on the sacred desk, and soon the fuss died down.  It was recalled when Donald Trump's advisor Kellyanne Conway was photographed with her feet on an Oval Office couch.  

 

The two cases were obviously completely different, of course: Conway, unlike Obama, is white.  Besides, it wasn't clear from the photo whether Conway was wearing shoes, though her pose inadvertently revealed that she is actually a male homosexual.

I remembered this today when I learned that the San Francisco Chronicle had published an op-ed attacking Bernie Sanders for exhibiting white privilege when he appeared at the Biden inauguration wearing the now-notorious coat and mittens, instead of a custom Schiaparelli gown.

The author, Ingrid Seyer-Ochi, began with a salad of culture-of-therapy jargon that reads like an outtake from the Onion:

Three weeks ago I processed the Capitol insurrection with my high school students. Rallying our inquiry skills, we analyzed the images of that historic day, images of white men storming through the Capitol, fearless and with no forces to stop them. “This,” I said, “is white supremacy, this is white privilege. It can be hard to pinpoint, but when we see, it, we know it.”

Across our Zoom screen, they affirmed, with nods, thumbs-ups, and emojis of anger and frustration. Fast-forward two weeks as we analyzed images from the inauguration, asking again, “What do we see?” We saw diversity, creativity and humanity, and a nation embracing all of this and more. On the day of the inauguration, Bernie Sanders was barely on our radar. The next day, he was everywhere.

... wearing, as Ms. Seyer-Ochi put it, "a puffy jacket and huge mittens."  This indicates that she doesn't "see" very well:

That's not what I'd call "puffy."  I'll return to that presently.

Seyer-Ochi continues:

We talked about gender and the possible meanings of the attire chosen by Vice President Kamala Harris, Dr. Jill Biden, the Biden grandchildren, Michelle Obama, Amanda Gorman and others. We referenced the female warriors inspiring these women, the colors of their educational degrees and their monochromatic ensembles of pure power.

One of the markers of privilege is wearing outfits that give little or no protection against cold weather, especially for women.  It signifies that they will be whisked out of their heated carriages for a few minutes, then whisked back into shelter.  Such women aren't "warriors," they are clotheshorses, whose costumes bespeak the wealth of the men who pay for them.  Anyway, after listening for years to Barack and Michelle attacking poor and working-class black people for being unworthy of them, I'm not interested in this kind of discourse.  

And why should Bernie Sanders, who is definitely not part of Biden's inner circle, dress as though he were?  He was up in the cheap seats on a working day, dressed for warmth by Vermont standards.  But all Seyer-Ochi could see was a "a wealthy, incredibly well-educated and -privileged white man, showing up for perhaps the most important ritual of the decade, in a puffy jacket and huge mittens."  What (as the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote) do we see? What do we not see?

Seyer-Ochi is nothing if not fair and balanced: "I mean in no way to overstate the parallels. Sen. Sanders is no white supremacist insurrectionist. But he manifests privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege, in ways that my students could see and feel."  I mean in no way to suggest that Seyer-Ochi is an anti-Semite, but her bizarre attack on a Jewish politician manifests Gentile privilege.

I think Sanders knows quite well the privilege he has, given his working-class parents and childhood, the Brooklyn accent that infuriates so many people, and his left-wing politics.  He also knows that as a senior US Senator he has tremendous privilege.  (There is a large literature on the conflict, even guilt, many working-class people feel about the gulf an education and a profession opens between them and their parents; it's been a big help to me personally.  If Seyer-Ochi is unaware of it, she should check it out, for the sake of her students.)  Seyer-Ochi also has a lot of privilege, as "a former UC Berkeley and Mills College professor, ex-Oakland Unified School District principal and current San Francisco Unified School District high school teacher."  Perhaps she thinks she can atone for her privilege by writing an empty-headed screed like this.  As analysis of a politician's sartorial choices, it ranks down there with the Great Tan Suit Scandal of 2014.

She bears down on the "blindness I see, of so many (Bernie included), to the privileges Bernie represents. I don’t know many poor, or working class, or female, or struggling-to-be-taken-seriously folk who would show up at the inauguration of our 46th president dressed like Bernie. Unless those same folk had privilege. Which they don’t."  So is Seyer-Ochi saying that if poor, working-class, etc., people showed up for the inauguration in anything but their Sunday best, she'd shame them, or nod approvingly while others did? 

The best reply to Seyer-Ochi, I think, is the reply given to frothers who countered the pictures of Obama using his desk as a footstool with pictures of other Presidents doing the same.  In Sanders's case, there are two.  There's this one, of the context:

Of course all those other people are just showing white privilege too, maybe they'd been assigned to the White Privilege section.

And then there's this one, of the new Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, desecrating the holiest day of the past decade with her white privilege.

C'mon, would it kill her to smile a little?

I understand why Seyer-Ochi's students might be confused by the way Sanders dressed on that day, just as I understand the confusion of late 20th-century American Indian students who enter graduate school armed with 19th-century essentialist concepts of race and culture, only to discover that the discourse has changed.  I don't understand (well, okay, I do) why a teacher would let them stew in their assumptions instead of encouraging them to think about the meaning of the norms of dress and deportment that had shaped their lives and those of their parents and grandparents.  The class assumptions in African-American culture, the Talented-Tenth arrogance of those who managed to get an education and a profession against brutal odds, the Paper Bag Test which valued light skin over dark, are also understandable, and they're tragic, but they shouldn't be treated uncritically.  It doesn't mean that Seyer-Ochi's students should dress like Bernie Sanders if they go to an inauguration, but they do need to know what their choices mean, no less than Sanders'.  As Virginia Woolf may or may not have said, the real trouble with privilege is that everybody doesn't have it.

Stand By Your Man

I saw this last night:

So true! If Obama had embraced dictators ... no, wait, he did that. If he'd killed US citizens with predator drones... no, wait, he did that too.  If he'd joked about killing US citizens with predator drones... damn... If he'd supported coups against elected governments ... no, wait... If he'd cozied up to Wall Street... no ... If he'd, uh, packed his cabinet with corporatist neoliberals... if he'd deported record numbers of immigrants... if he'd given massive tax cuts to the rich when the economy was staggering after a major crash... if he'd sought to cut Social Security and other vital services in order to "lower the deficit" ... if he'd escalated and started wars of choice based on lies... if he'd suppressed whistleblowers... give me a minute...

Oh, I know, Rev. Dr. Barber isn't thinking of such trivia, nor are his followers on Twitter.  They're more interested in Trump's payoff to a porn star with whom he'd had an affair.  Which is not insignificant and I suppose it's true that if Barack Obama had done such things he'd have been attacked by the Right pretending to care about sexual morality even as they embraced Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and eventually Donald Trump.  But his fans would not have stumbled; they'd have stood by him, as Dem loyalists stood by Bill Clinton, and still idolize the serial adulterer John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  Let's not forget Martin Luther King Jr., a major cockhound, or Jesse Jackson Sr.  White privilege should always be borne in mind, but I think it's a distraction here.

I think party loyalty and the personality cult that surrounds successful politicians are much more relevant.  In Obama's case, it's so effective that even George W. Bush gets to bask in his glory, his crimes forgotten and forgiven by centrist Democrats.  If we're going to talk about "Teflon," Obama's crimes and right-wing policies just don't exist for his devotees. They were largely ignored by the same elite political culture and corporate media that made Donald Trump a star. There is a double standard here, but it cuts both ways according to party affiliation or other commitments. And despite it, Trump has encountered much more effective principled opposition, in the streets and in Congress, than Obama did, even though the media especially are doing their best to accentuate the positive.  (I almost posted a link to the article there, but the title may have been changed.)  If Obama were a white Republican, I doubt William Barber would be as amnesiac about his record.

Barber expresses some good opinions elsewhere in his feed, including strong support for Representative Ilhan Omar, currently under attack by Democrats and Republicans alike for her criticism of the Israel lobby.  Obama, by contrast, was wholly subservient to AIPAC and cozy with Israeli strongman Benjamin Netanyahu.  (Netanyahu spurned him, though. Oh, the humanity!) It would be interesting if Obama were to defend Representative Omar, but it'll never happen; he prefers to boast (inaccurately, as it turns out) about his service to producers of fossil fuel.

My Privilege

A friend linked to this article, which originally came from Good Black News.   According to the author, she "was tagged in a post by an old high school friend, asking me and a few others a very public, direct question about white privilege and racism."  She then answered this friend's question, at length, giving personal examples of encounters with white racism, and did a good job of it.  What I want to do here is to say what is wrong with the way the friend, Jason, expressed himself; one aspect of white privilege, it seems to me, is that I am allowed to question the motives and bona fides of other white people, where it might be considered rude for a person of color to do so.  Not only am I allowed to speak up, I think I'm obliged to.  So here's the friend's post, as quoted by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, the editor of Good Black News.

    “To all of my Black or mixed race FB friends, I must profess a blissful ignorance of this ‘White Privilege‘ of which I’m apparently guilty of possessing. By not being able to fully put myself in the shoes of someone from a background/race/religion/gender/nationality/body type that differs from my own makes me part of the problem, according to what I’m now hearing.

    “Despite my treating everyone with respect and humor my entire life (as far as I know), I’m somehow complicit in the misfortune of others. I’m not saying I’m colorblind, but whatever racism/sexism/other -ism my life experience has instilled in me stays within me, and is not manifested in the way I treat others (which is not the case with far too many, I know).

    “So that I may be enlightened, can you please share with me some examples of institutional racism that have made an indelible mark upon you? If I am to understand this, I need people I know personally to show me how I’m missing what’s going on. Personal examples only. I’m not trying to be insensitive, I only want to understand (but not from the media). I apologize if this comes off as crass or offends anyone.”

There are several red flags here, culminating in the faux apology at the end.  He's not "trying to be insensitive," but he achieves insensitivity effortlessly, without even trying.  He makes it look so easy!

I'm skeptical of his claim that he has treated "everyone with respect and humor my entire life (as far as I know)."  I've known numerous white people who made exactly that claim, and then proceeded to make some bluntly racist statements.  In general, announcing one's respect and humor is a direct prelude to saying something vile.  I'd never make such a claim myself, partly because I know that I have my own blind spots and have failed more than once in treating everyone with respect (a tricky word anyway), but even more because one aspect of structural / institutional bigotry is that the dominant group is shielded from feedback on its conduct.  Those on the bottom mostly know not to speak up, most of the time; they know they'd damn well better laugh at the little jokes of the Privileged.  One symptom of white or other privilege is wondering loudly why These People are suddenly making all this noise and trouble, the Privileged One thought things were mostly all right, this is America, and besides, the Privileged One has always treated people with respect and humor.

Humor, of course, is a minefield, and a Priviliged One who assumes that his or her jokes are as funny to the less privileged as they are to him or her is probably assuming far too much.  As Ellen Willis once wrote,  “Humorless is what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls. It carries no imputation of humorlessness if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth.”  I’ve noticed over the years that when I repeat this quotation, women usually laugh delightedly, but men usually look unhappy. (The more so if the men had previously been complaining about “humorless feminists.”) 

But what I noticed right away was the opening reference to "ignorance of this 'White Privilege' of which I’m apparently guilty of possessing."  There's been a lot of complaining -- almost all by white people, naturally -- about the term "White Privilege" lately; and also many attempts to educate the complainers.  I think I'd be cautious about using that term myself, not because it's inaccurate but because it is the kind of idea that gets people's backs up, and even if they're wrong, if you want to communicate with them you want to find ways to express what you want them to learn in ways and words they'll be able to hear.  It's going to be hard enough in any case.

Anyway, here's the thing.  White privilege is not something you're "guilty of possessing."  It is assigned to you, and you can't divest yourself of it.  No matter how respectful and humorous you are, no matter how much you oppose racism, you will be perceived and treated as a white person -- accorded white privilege, in other words.  You will not be followed around by store personnel who are convinced that you're a shoplifter, even if you are a shoplifter.  You will not be stopped for Driving While White, Walking While White, even for Carrying a Gun While White.  You're a lot less likely to be gunned down by police while you have your hands in the air.  You will not experience what John Howard Griffin called the hate stare, just for existing.  Barriers that black Americans learn to take for granted will not be there for you.  (It is possible, however, to have your white privilege taken from you, if you become a race traitor effectively enough.  White privilege didn't protect Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, or numerous others.  But I doubt Jason wants to go that far himself.)

This doesn't mean that white people always have it easy.  Privilege is never absolute.  I had privileges as the oldest child in my family, but that didn't mean I could do whatever I wanted.  My parents were explicit that as the oldest, I had obligations as well as privilege.  Which is why it's absurd when apologists for racism point to the existence of white poverty (or to the existence of black wealth) to refute claims about white privilege.  When someone invokes poor whites in West Virginia, I want to know how poor blacks are doing there.  One symptom of white privilege, indeed, is the conviction that no black person should get a job or be admitted to a historically white college or own a pair of shoes until every white person has been taken care of, first.  Such people see Oprah not just as a disproof of black advantage, but as an insult to poor white people, who presumably would be better off if Oprah hadn't gotten all those Special Rights.

Also closely involved here is "guilt."  I've never felt guilty for being white, or for being male, nor have I ever felt that black people or women were trying to make me feel guilty or wanted me to.  (Which is odd, because personally, I am very susceptible to guilt most of the time.)  Whenever a Privileged One complains about being made or expected to feel guilty, I feel pretty sure they're projecting.  I qualify that because I can't say for certain that guilt hasn't been used at times by some people in this way.  I'm sure that it has not been an important factor in the movements or the discourse.  Besides, feeling guilty, expressing one's guilt, confessing one's guilt to the congregation is often a way to avoid doing anything, either to make reparation for what one did or to change one's behavior in the future.  It turns one's offenses into something that is all about Me Me Me, and distracts attention from the people who've been hurt by those offenses.  This may not be deliberate, but it is damned convenient.

So I have severe doubts about Jason's good intentions in posing his question.  For one thing, how can someone who's been out of school for several years, and who claims to have "numerous Black or mixed-race FB friends," and who further claims to treat everybody with respect, be as ignorant as Jason claims to be about what people of color experience in this country?  Someone's living in a very effective and impermeable bubble.  I'm glad Lori Lakin Hutcherson answered Jason's question, and I'd be very interested in seeing how Jason responded to the answer he got.  In my experience, people who ask such questions rarely stick around to hear the answer, and tend to get all spitty if they do.  From the tone and spirit in which he wrote, I feel pretty sure Jason will find some way not to hear what Lori Lakin Hutcherson tried to tell him.

Some Adults Are More Adult than Others

I got bogged down in a post I was trying to write about the current fuss over Political Correctness, especially the Political Correctness of young African-Americans which supposedly threatens to bring down the Republic by attacking Freedom of Speech.  Then someone linked to an article that suggested another approach to me.  Rather than add it to what I'd already written -- the subject could and should be a book, rather than an article -- I decided to explore it separately.

First the writer, one Ryan Holiday, invokes and quotes Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451; it's a stupid book, and I've discussed it before, so I won't cover it here.

Then Holiday quotes a saying of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (ca. 55-135 CE): “If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.”  He concludes,

Control and discipline of one’s own reactions make for a successful person and a functioning society. I don’t think you want to live in a world where that isn’t the expectation of each of us. I don’t think you want to see the things that will need to happen when the burden of making sure everyone is happy and not offended is put on the government—or worse, a corrupt and bitter blogosphere.

But that seems to be the road we’re going down. Even though we’ve been warned. 

I was about to say that this is incredibly dishonest, but unfortunately it's all too credible.  Anyway, I decided to track the saying down, because it sounded like the sort of thing that is made up and attributed to some famous thinker; I'd already seen it by itself in a meme that was going around Facebook.  It turned out be genuine, it's Saying 20 from the Enchiridion or Handbook.  Then I noticed that Holiday had taken it out of context.  Here's the whole passage, in another translation.

Remember, that not he who gives ill language or a blow insults, but the principle which represents these things as insulting. When, therefore, anyone provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you. Try, therefore, in the first place, not to be hurried away with the appearance. For if you once gain time and respite, you will more easily command yourself.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to this, but as I noticed even before I tracked it down, in use it tends to exculpate and erase the person who gives "ill language or a blow" -- he or she is also complicit in the provocation, no less than the victim.  That generally is forgotten when someone is telling someone else that the insult is all in his or her head.  As Epictetus says, it's "the principle which represents these things as insulting."  He who gives ill language or a blow is also trapped by "the appearance."  Epictetus was born a slave, and before he became a freedman was owned by a secretary of the Emperor Nero, so he had plenty of occasion to experience insults and abuse, and to learn to master himself for merely prudential reasons.

Leaving out the reference to being struck also makes things too easy for Holiday and others who cite this version of the saying.  Very often it is the better part of valor for anyone who's hit by someone who has power over them to control their emotions.  The assailant in such cases is probably using the blows to assert his or her status and remind the slave who's boss.  That doesn't mean that the slave is mistaken about the message being sent, even if he or she decides not to collude with it; nor does it mean that anyone who objects to being struck has no valid complaint and just needs to man up.  There's also a world of difference between my telling myself to practice control when someone insults me, and the person who insulted me telling me that self-control is good for my soul.  When today's straight white males are whining about the misandry of feminists who joke about subsisting on male tears, shouldn't they also take Epictetus' wisdom to heart?

That being said, let's stick to speech.  If someone calls me "faggot," I don't react by bursting into tears or clubbing him down.  I'm not even insulted, since I am indeed a faggot.  But I also recognize what the epithet means.  That is also part of what Epictetus meant, I think: the "principle which represents these things as insulting" is the system of male supremacy, in which men have power over women and not-men.  The same principle is involved in a man randomly calling a woman a "slut," or a white person calling an adult black male "boy."  The word is used performatively, to assert and assign status.  I don't take the insult personally, but I do want to challenge the "principle."  To do that, I must think about how best to do it, which will probably include joining with other fags and sluts and boys to change our society.  Meanwhile, I may respond by calling the person who called me "faggot" a bigot; he or she should, of course, take the same advice he or she would give to me, by refusing to be complicit in the provocation.  But generally they don't: their feelings are delicate and must not be bruised; I must master myself, but they need not.  I consider this a test of their sincerity.

Many of the insults that people like Ryan Holiday want to minimize and protect aren't delivered face-to-face, one-on-one.  Athletic teams with names or mascots invoking American Indians are an example of this.  I can't help wondering how American white males would react if an historically black university were to name its team the Greyboys or Rednecks or Honkies; I don't think it would go over well, especially if the mascot wore a culturally-insensitive costume. (It's entertaining to imagine what one: a backwoodsman in whiteface and bib overalls?)  At any rate, that an individual isn't being targeted specifically doesn't mean that no insult or derogation is intended.  As Joseph Heller's Yossarian says in Catch-22, just because anti-aircraft fire was trying to kill all the Allied bomber crews didn't mean they weren't trying to kill him too.

Noam Chomsky's metaphor of stepping on ants is relevant here.  He says that Americans (that's just an example, since it applies to all imperial or ruling groups) don't necessarily harbor murderous hostility to the people our police and military kill or torture, we just don't think of them as having feelings we need to respect.  (Unlike our own -- nobody's more obsessed with cultural sensitivity than an American Christian throwing a tantrum because some Muslims on the other side of the world burned a US flag or called his country "Satan.")  Analogously, Chomsky doesn't worry about stepping on ants when he walks down the street.  So the little kids whom a friend once observed Trick-or-Treating, one of whom was dressed in KKK robes, and led the other, in blackface, with a rope around his neck didn't necessarily hate African-Americans; nor did their parents, who surely approved and probably helped make the outfits.  I'm being way too generous here, because southern Indiana is Klan country.  A better way to put it is that it doesn't matter what they felt, or thought they were doing; they were embodying the principle of white supremacy enforced by racist violence.  That this implementation didn't involve overt violence doesn't change the "principle" that gave it meaning.  The ants I step on thoughtlessly are no less dead because I didn't mean to harm them, and the dusky people killed by American bombs around the world are no less dead because it never occurred to most Americans that they were people.  (No one else is allowed to kill those dusky people -- they belong to us.)

There is an issue that needs to be explored here, which is the principle of non-retaliation.  That a person who feels himself insulted by words is justified in striking back is a widespread, longstanding principle of human social life, known as "honor."  (Women are not supposed to protect their honor with violence -- the men who own them are supposed to do it for them, because a slight to one's woman's honor is a slight to one's own honor.)  It's so widespread that it might well be part of "human nature." Yet the contrary -- that one should not retaliate -- is also ancient and found all over the world: not only Jesus but Plato's Socrates and the Buddha, among others, declared it.  Yet, though it has an equal claim to being natural, it's one of those principles that is generally honored only in the breach.  In practice, only the poor and relatively powerless are seriously exhorted to live by it.  When someone is excused from that duty, it's because someone more powerful is willing to grant them something like full human status.  An example would be the sympathy expressed by many about the Charlie Hebdo massacre.  I overheard a gay Christian male I know saying in connection with that attack that while he didn't condone violence, you'd better not insult his mother and expect him not to do anything about it!  I wouldn't blame him for being angry if someone insulted his mother, but I would blame him if he hauled out an automatic weapon and shredded the offender.

Holiday wrote:

Real empowerment and respect is to see our fellow citizens—victims and privileged, religious and agnostic, conservative and liberal—as adults. Human beings are not automatons—ruled by drives and triggers they cannot control. On the contrary, we have the ability to decide not to be offended. We have the ability to discern intent. We have the ability to separate someone else’s actions or provocation or ignorance from our own. This is the great evolution of consciousness—it’s what separates us from the animals.

Here's a perfect example of the patronizing attitude I'm talking about.  By telling black students at Yale not to make a fuss over racially insensitive Halloween costumes and the whole structure of white privilege and supremacy they invoke and support, Holiday tells them they're acting like children, even like animals.  The protesters did not claim that they were "ruled by drives and triggers they cannot control"; on the contrary, by organizing a protest they showed that they were in control of their reactions.

What also separates us is our capacity for empathy. But how empathetic the speech we decide to use is choice for each one of us to make. Some of us are crass, some of us are considerate. Some of us find humor in everything, some of us do not. It’s important too—but those of us that believe it and live our lives by a certain sensitivity cannot bully other people into doing so too. That sort of defeats the purpose.

Revealingly, he doesn't really believe that the black students' protest was a choice for them to make.  They should respect the right of white students to be "crass," but they have no correponding right to be crass themselves.  Even speaking out is "bullying."  It's a fascinating repudiation of freedom of speech by Holiday. White men, unlike minorities, are entitled to panic when their conduct comes under criticism.  Seeing them as adults who can be reasoned with is bullying and shows lack of empathy.  Notice his complacent certainty that he's one of those who "live our lives by a certain sensitivity."  Notice also that he speaks of the crass and the considerate as though these were acts of God -- the crassness that falleth like rain from the heavens -- instead of choices that people make, at least when they're white males.

Notice too that Holiday, like others of his viewpoint, equivocates -- or in plainer language, plays fast and loose with -- just what is happening in this controversy.  Are the insults real, or do they exist solely in the imagination of childlike minorities who lack empathy?  If they are real, are they unintended, or is that just a defensive excuse made by people who live their lives by a certain sensitivity when they're caught exploiting their status?  Now you see the insult, now you don't.  How I'll react to various expressions of antigay bigotry depends on my assessment of these and other factors. But I'm reminded of Dorothy Dinnerstein's remark in The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976) that for women to be

ready to collaborate with men ... is to have been given to understand, much more often than not, either [a] that they had no idea what you were talking about, but in any case it seemed irrelevant, or [b] that they could do the important part of it without you, but loved to have you around helping, minding the kids, cleaning up the shit, and looking pleasant.

This response in new left men was part, I think, of the ordinary human moral laziness that made them falter in the face of other challenges too.  But to face the narrow unintelligence of such a response, its complacent ungenerosity, is to give way to ordinary human rage, murderous rage, which one tries to handle, if one is not a murderer, by withdrawing from those who evoke it.

This doesn't solve the problem of offense and people's reaction to it; that is for the other post I'm still bogged down in.  Nor does it mean that every action by minorities is wise.  As I've said before, while overdogs are not entitled to lecture underdogs on what should offend them, those of us who are underdogs in some aspects of our lives can't take for granted that simply being underdogs gives us wisdom and discernment -- if only because we disagree with each other about which battles to take on. At some point we all need to address each other as adults.  But that's not made easier by people like Ryan Holiday.  The last thing he wants is for straight white males to be addressed as adults, because that would imply that the childlike minorities are not children but his equals -- not animals but human beings, with whom he can be expected to empathize.

No matter how empathetic and adult one succeeds in being, those who are used to privilege do not give it up easily, and will happily counsel their status-inferiors to be adult, empathetic, and above all, patient.  To take Epictetus' counsel is not to forget that abuses are happening, but it may give the abused breathing space to think how best to counter the abuses.  No effective action to do something about abuses will be acceptable to the abusers and their apologists.  But that shouldn't intimidate those who seek change.  If anything, it's one sign that the struggle is having an effect.  As the sociologist Philip Slater wrote, all real change produces a backlash; if it doesn't, it isn't real change.

Think of the Starving Children in Appalachia!

Roy Edroso gave some coverage to a rightblogger who was up in arms about the notion of "white privilege." Edroso remarked:

Actually, I find it useful to contemplate my white privileges, and any other privileges into which I was born, like being a citizen of the richest country on earth, and did not obtain for myself. In fact, when I was growing up, it was customary for adults to remind children of such luck as they had inherited, like the food we had and "people starving in other countries" didn't. This was meant as a spur to gratitude and humility, and to not being such a whining little shit. I guess things have changed. Everyone's a victim now, even (perhaps especially) the most privileged among us.

I agree that it's useful and edifying to contemplate one's own privilege, though I don't think I agree that the "people starving in other countries" line, used to cajole kids into eating food they didn't like (as though the adults in those homes didn't have their own personal food neuroses), was even meant to get kids to "remind children of such luck as they had inherited." It was meant to shut them up. I know I wasn't the only kid who thought (but would have gotten a clout in the mouth if I'd said it), "So why don't you send this stuff to those starving people in other countries?"

I don't recall my parents, decent folks who'd grown up poor in the Great Depression, ever acknowledging their white privilege; and the white people I know who are indignant at the very idea that their white skin gave them luck they hadn't merited, are still quite pious about the suffering poor in whatever country is on the news these days. But bring up white privilege, and it's "Nobody ever gave me anything because I was white! I had to work hard for everything I've got! Why shouldn't They?" Ah, but They do. But hard work alone won't open certain doors.

I must say, though, I liked this comment (no permalink, but Nov 11 at 8:15:17 a.m.) by Big Hank53:

Q: What's the best thing about an investment banker?

A: Even a small one will keep your dog fed for a month.

Hadn't heard that one before. But the same commenter also asked rhetorically in another thread: "Jesus, do you think there's enough smug superiority for everyone?" Why sure: there's an endless supply of smug superiority, and it's free to boot. This doesn't seem to detract from its popularity, however. Everyone seems to think they've got a corner on the market.