This is going to be a short epilogue to my previous post about Charlottesville. . .
There's been a lot of discussion since Saturday about what to do with the Confederate monuments. One of the counterexamples people who want the monuments to stay is that George Washington and several other Founders owned slaves, so why should the Confederate statues be torn down and not the Washington Monument, etc? That seems like a good argument, but falls apart under closer scrutiny.
Almost all revered historical figures have something extremely shameful on their records. Washington owned slaves, and by some accounts he treated them pretty harshly. FDR ordered the military to intern Japanese-American citizens and threw Poland under the bus to placate Stalin. Gandhi admired Hitler and was a womanizer. Woodrow Wilson was a huge racist. Even above-average figures like LBJ and Mother Teresa had some pretty big skeletons in their closets.
Here's the important thing to remember, though. A lot of those revered figures are remembered for something they did on the positive side of the ledger. Something they did which benefited their country, their people, or all of mankind. The members of the Confederacy immortalized by statues aren't. Quick quiz. Name something noteworthy that Jefferson Davis and John Calhoun did - besides being important Confederate figures. Something else they did that makes them stand out. Same thing with General Lee. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Tick tock, tick tock. . .
Okay, time's up. Did you think of anything? I'm betting you didn't, unless you're well-informed on the history of the South. And that's the important difference. Lee, Calhoun, Davis, and many others are all remembered entirely for their association with the Confederacy. Their reputations, the only notable thing they did in their lives, was their association with a secessionist movement dedicated to maintaining slavery.
George Washington is remembered for more than owning slaves. George Washington did more than own slaves. The same is true for most other revered historical figures. They are more than their shameful deeds. And that is what makes them different from Lee, Davis, and Calhoun. The Confederates are not; whatever else they did in their lives, their notable contribution to history is fighting to preserve a slave state. Their legacy is not one worth honoring.
Showing posts with label Charlottesville. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charlottesville. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Charlottesville: Hate, Fear, and Ignorance in America
This is going to be a different blog post than the ones I've done so far. It doesn't fit into any of the major themes I had intended to write about when I started this blog, but I'm writing it to get a few things off of my chest. It will also have a different style to it - less like an academic research paper and more like an opinion piece. So here goes. . .
Everyone knows what happened in Charlottesville on Friday night and yesterday afternoon, so I won't spend much time on those events. I want to talk about some people's reactions to it and how those reactions pave the way for the Friday/Saturday race riot (I'm calling it a race riot because that's what it was; tough shit if you don't like it). The reaction in question is a shrug of the shoulders and a casual endorsement for the Nazis and the white supremacists. The way I remember it - I'm fuzzy on the details, but I recall the gist of it - was an implication that minorities brought this on themselves because of the various protests over the past several years. Movements like BLM, Gay Pride, Women's Rights, and so on were just "whining" and the minority protesters should just "suck it up and get over it". It's this attitude I want to talk about. The way I see it, it develops when someone possesses these three traits: a lack of knowledge, no sense of intellectual curiosity, and an inability to empathize.
Let's use a real-world example to explain my hypothesis. The Black Lives Matter movement is as good as any. Someone with the aforementioned attitude probably doesn't know about the racial disparities when it comes to sentencing and incarceration for comparable crimes, or about practices like "DWB", or how the GOP routinely makes it difficult for minorities to participate in the electoral process. Maybe this person has never heard of Philando Castile or Eric Garner. That doesn't make someone a bad person in and of itself - maybe this person doesn't watch much news. That's pretty implausible with the 24-hour news networks and the internet news saturation, but I suppose it's possible. It's the other two traits that really create this attitude, though.
First, the absence of intellectual curiosity. A lot of people go through life accepting what they're told without questioning it or applying any critical thought. That's just human nature. The vast majority of people don't have the time, the knowledge, the desire, or the mental bandwidth to critically evaluate every piece of knowledge that gets thrown at them. People are also psychologically predisposed to screen and reject information that doesn't fit with our core beliefs or opinions. So we're all guilty of intellectual laziness to some degree. But like any sampling distribution, some data points fall on the high end of the spectrum, meaning that a certain percentage of people are indifferent when it comes to critical thinking. Here's how this plays out in the real-world example. Suppose a person got most of their news from the Fox network, which is hardly a friend to minorities. How would that person view BLM, which has some very real and very serious grievances? They're going to downplay it, of course. Here's the curious part, though. This person is almost certainly aware of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Maybe they only read about in a history textbook, so they only see it as an abstract concept, devoid of the emotional resonance; but maybe they lived during that time, and saw the real-life images on TV and in the newspapers. The protesters getting sprayed with fire hoses. The balcony where MLK was standing when he was assassinated. The burning crosses and bombed-out churches. The Civil Rights struggle probably had more of an impression to people who were alive when it happened, but either way, how does someone reconcile that movement with everything that happened since then? With what's going on now? Aren't they able to make the connection?
That last one is the one that drives me bonkers. They don't have the intellectual capacity to conceive that racism hasn't ended. To them, the Civil Rights movement ended things, like it was a sporting event where time ran out, the ref blew the whistle, and that was that. They're surely aware that racists still exist, but the fact that those racists actively seek to undo the Civil Rights era reforms, and that those racists comprise an appallingly influential political bloc, evidently escapes them. That's the kind of shallow thinking that leads to some deeply contradictory behaviors and beliefs, such as flying an American flag and going to church every week while condoning a movement that represents the opposite of the ideals their religion and their nation embody. People like this don't realize that the Confederacy's secession was by definition a treasonous act, or that slavery has had a legacy that still resonates today. "What's the big deal?", they say when someone points these things out. "That was a long time ago, why does it still matter?" Unbelievable. This sort of lazy thinking manifests itself in many, many other ways, but those are outside the scope of this post.
Now, let's look at the third and final component: the lack of empathy. These people can't relate to minorities, because they've never experienced the myriad forms of discrimination. Nor do they know many people who have. They'll never have to worry about police assuming they're guilty by default or politicians disenfranchising them. Their resumes won't go straight into the trash because of their name. They won't be denied various legal protections and privileges simply because of who they are, so they take those things for granted. And because they don't have any frame of reference, they dismiss the complaints of people who do experience these problems. More than that, they make statements that imply minorities don't deserve these things, often without fully understanding what they're saying. Things like "Why do they have to push their agenda on us?" or "Aren't they happy with what they have now?" There's a sub-context that the victim's grievances are just whiny complaints or overblown exaggerations.
By now, you might have noticed that I'm a bit worked up and angry. Yep. This stuff is a "button pusher" topic, and here's why. I have a low tolerance for people who live in intellectual bubbles. It's hard to stay informed, I get that. And it's harder to see past your own mental blind spots. That's partly human nature, and I'm as guilty as anyone. When I'm faced with contradictory information, my natural reaction is to dig in my heels. But at some point, a person crosses over from a normal confirmation bias to burying their head in the sand. That infuriates me. The sky isn't neon green no matter how much you believe it is. On top of that, I have a default tendency to side with the underdog. Maybe it's because I disagreed with the aforementioned attitude so strongly that I moved pretty far to the opposite end of the spectrum - I dunno, that's a question for the psychoanalysts. However it came about, I'm kinda like Tyrion Lannister; we both have a soft spot for "cripples, bastards, and broken things." Automatically siding with the marginalized is one of my mental blind spots. So maybe I'm getting too dramatic about Charlottesville, but I don't think anyone can deny America has a racism problem now.
Typically, the actual racists are only a small portion of any population. It's the mentally shallow people are the ones who allow racism to flourish. They are the ones who turn a blind eye to the insidious spread of racist groups/movements or invent rationalizations to dismiss it. The ones I spent most of this blog post describing. They are indifferent to the reality of the situation, and indifferent people usually comprise the vast majority of a given population. They need to be pulled down off the fence and be made to understand the reality of the situation, because staying in their bubble allows the problem to grow.
Everyone knows what happened in Charlottesville on Friday night and yesterday afternoon, so I won't spend much time on those events. I want to talk about some people's reactions to it and how those reactions pave the way for the Friday/Saturday race riot (I'm calling it a race riot because that's what it was; tough shit if you don't like it). The reaction in question is a shrug of the shoulders and a casual endorsement for the Nazis and the white supremacists. The way I remember it - I'm fuzzy on the details, but I recall the gist of it - was an implication that minorities brought this on themselves because of the various protests over the past several years. Movements like BLM, Gay Pride, Women's Rights, and so on were just "whining" and the minority protesters should just "suck it up and get over it". It's this attitude I want to talk about. The way I see it, it develops when someone possesses these three traits: a lack of knowledge, no sense of intellectual curiosity, and an inability to empathize.
Let's use a real-world example to explain my hypothesis. The Black Lives Matter movement is as good as any. Someone with the aforementioned attitude probably doesn't know about the racial disparities when it comes to sentencing and incarceration for comparable crimes, or about practices like "DWB", or how the GOP routinely makes it difficult for minorities to participate in the electoral process. Maybe this person has never heard of Philando Castile or Eric Garner. That doesn't make someone a bad person in and of itself - maybe this person doesn't watch much news. That's pretty implausible with the 24-hour news networks and the internet news saturation, but I suppose it's possible. It's the other two traits that really create this attitude, though.
First, the absence of intellectual curiosity. A lot of people go through life accepting what they're told without questioning it or applying any critical thought. That's just human nature. The vast majority of people don't have the time, the knowledge, the desire, or the mental bandwidth to critically evaluate every piece of knowledge that gets thrown at them. People are also psychologically predisposed to screen and reject information that doesn't fit with our core beliefs or opinions. So we're all guilty of intellectual laziness to some degree. But like any sampling distribution, some data points fall on the high end of the spectrum, meaning that a certain percentage of people are indifferent when it comes to critical thinking. Here's how this plays out in the real-world example. Suppose a person got most of their news from the Fox network, which is hardly a friend to minorities. How would that person view BLM, which has some very real and very serious grievances? They're going to downplay it, of course. Here's the curious part, though. This person is almost certainly aware of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Maybe they only read about in a history textbook, so they only see it as an abstract concept, devoid of the emotional resonance; but maybe they lived during that time, and saw the real-life images on TV and in the newspapers. The protesters getting sprayed with fire hoses. The balcony where MLK was standing when he was assassinated. The burning crosses and bombed-out churches. The Civil Rights struggle probably had more of an impression to people who were alive when it happened, but either way, how does someone reconcile that movement with everything that happened since then? With what's going on now? Aren't they able to make the connection?
That last one is the one that drives me bonkers. They don't have the intellectual capacity to conceive that racism hasn't ended. To them, the Civil Rights movement ended things, like it was a sporting event where time ran out, the ref blew the whistle, and that was that. They're surely aware that racists still exist, but the fact that those racists actively seek to undo the Civil Rights era reforms, and that those racists comprise an appallingly influential political bloc, evidently escapes them. That's the kind of shallow thinking that leads to some deeply contradictory behaviors and beliefs, such as flying an American flag and going to church every week while condoning a movement that represents the opposite of the ideals their religion and their nation embody. People like this don't realize that the Confederacy's secession was by definition a treasonous act, or that slavery has had a legacy that still resonates today. "What's the big deal?", they say when someone points these things out. "That was a long time ago, why does it still matter?" Unbelievable. This sort of lazy thinking manifests itself in many, many other ways, but those are outside the scope of this post.
Now, let's look at the third and final component: the lack of empathy. These people can't relate to minorities, because they've never experienced the myriad forms of discrimination. Nor do they know many people who have. They'll never have to worry about police assuming they're guilty by default or politicians disenfranchising them. Their resumes won't go straight into the trash because of their name. They won't be denied various legal protections and privileges simply because of who they are, so they take those things for granted. And because they don't have any frame of reference, they dismiss the complaints of people who do experience these problems. More than that, they make statements that imply minorities don't deserve these things, often without fully understanding what they're saying. Things like "Why do they have to push their agenda on us?" or "Aren't they happy with what they have now?" There's a sub-context that the victim's grievances are just whiny complaints or overblown exaggerations.
By now, you might have noticed that I'm a bit worked up and angry. Yep. This stuff is a "button pusher" topic, and here's why. I have a low tolerance for people who live in intellectual bubbles. It's hard to stay informed, I get that. And it's harder to see past your own mental blind spots. That's partly human nature, and I'm as guilty as anyone. When I'm faced with contradictory information, my natural reaction is to dig in my heels. But at some point, a person crosses over from a normal confirmation bias to burying their head in the sand. That infuriates me. The sky isn't neon green no matter how much you believe it is. On top of that, I have a default tendency to side with the underdog. Maybe it's because I disagreed with the aforementioned attitude so strongly that I moved pretty far to the opposite end of the spectrum - I dunno, that's a question for the psychoanalysts. However it came about, I'm kinda like Tyrion Lannister; we both have a soft spot for "cripples, bastards, and broken things." Automatically siding with the marginalized is one of my mental blind spots. So maybe I'm getting too dramatic about Charlottesville, but I don't think anyone can deny America has a racism problem now.
Typically, the actual racists are only a small portion of any population. It's the mentally shallow people are the ones who allow racism to flourish. They are the ones who turn a blind eye to the insidious spread of racist groups/movements or invent rationalizations to dismiss it. The ones I spent most of this blog post describing. They are indifferent to the reality of the situation, and indifferent people usually comprise the vast majority of a given population. They need to be pulled down off the fence and be made to understand the reality of the situation, because staying in their bubble allows the problem to grow.
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