Protests (vicarious)
(Pandemic Diary - day 94)
From my journal: 31 May 2020 (Sunday)
The pandemic is no longer the headline right now. It’s still a backdrop, a setting, but for right now it’s been displaced by the reaction to yet another on-tape killing of a Black man by a White police officer. This one was particularly blatant and clear, and even the apologists and fascists are having a hard time spinning it as anything but murder.
I sympathize, and I want to empathize. I feel a deep sense of outrage and injustice that things like this are happening anywhere, let alone in America. And I want to take helpful action of some sort, but as far as doing something to change our current situation, I’m at a loss.
I’m skeptical of protests, not that they never create change, but that the great majority of them are nothing more than an impotent combination of self-justification and shouting (or pissing) into the wind.
There is widespread outrage, and there are (mainly peaceful) protests from large numbers of people, but then at some point the justifiable rage that’s simmering just slightly below the surface emerges and there’s this transition from non-violence into violence.
The looting and pillaging and burning begins, and the underlying story is lost to the chaos.
The sad truth is that, no matter how disturbed I feel about racism, this is a notional situation for me, beyond the realm and reach of my daily life — it doesn’t touch me personally.
I had the privilege of being born male, middle-class, white, and straight in late 20th-century America. I did nothing to deserve that, or to somehow earn the easy path (relative to that of others who didn’t have that same good fortune) I’ve had because of it. The combination of that privilege and the functional homogeneity of the communities I’m part of means I only experience these issues vicariously, through what I read and watch.
In the course of my usual daily life, the closest thing to “others” I encounter are the over-fed, under-educated, intentionally ignorant (and proud of that fact) right-wingers who roam our streets and walk amongst us. Most of them are white.
I could practice my empathy by taking the way I feel about them — that complicated mix of disappointment, pity, anger, and fear, — and turning it around. I could try to understand that this might be the same way they feel about the objects of their racism (or their more generic other-ism).
But it doesn’t work.
There are just too many parts of it that break down, that aren’t similar at all. I know I shouldn’t be judging them, and I still do it, reflexively. But when I do, I’m judging the choices they make and opinions they state and actions they take, not physical characteristics beyond their control.
Yes, it’s an oversimplification. The classism I display when I talk about them this way is similar to parts of their racism (just talking about “them” at all might be part of the disease). The great majority of them, like me, have had very little interaction and almost no daily contact with anyone who doesn’t look like them. If you have no personal experiences to refute the stereotypes you’ve been taught, it’s hard to get past them.
I’ve lost my track on this topic.
I guess what I was working my way towards was some justification for my own lack of action, and that justification was going to be that I’m already doing the things that have a chance of being effective. The most powerful of those things... well, I’m not going to try to rank them, as there’s no point to that. Instead I’ll just say that I vote for leaders who will address racial inequity through laws, and I try to be sure that my own actions in the few pertinent personal interactions I have are honorable.
Beyond that, maybe the best thing I can do is to write about it, to share my thoughts on these issues.