This week I’m publishing a series of posts about what I’m calling the Active Pedophile phantasy. Part I was published Monday.
I know, I know. I just wrote about the ills of conflating homosexuals and pedophiles. But then I read about Helmut Kentler, and I started to wonder where this conflation comes from, how it happens, and what it means.
A sexologist in post-WWII Germany, Kentler was haunted by the horrors of fascism, which urged parents to ‘suppress everything in the child.’ Such ideas, he wrote, only created ‘authoritarian personalities who have to identify with a “great man” around them to feel great themselves.’ Kentler, an open homosexual at a time when it was still illegal in Germany, pushed for greater acceptance toward sex and sexualities, which he thought would help the country heal from its collective trauma.
This is where the happy part of the story ends: In his respected position, Kentler formed an experiment which matched orphan boys and wards of the state with pedophilic foster fathers. The hypothesis seemed to be, as the author, Rachel Aviv, writes, ‘that some children are fundamentally second class, their outlook so compromised that any kind of love is a gift, a proposition that his colleagues apparently accepted, too.’
At the center of Aviv’s piece stands Marco, the man I mentioned above. Marco’s life had been a life of ruin for so long, his whole personality having just shut down to the world as a result of coping with his near nightly abuse, which abuse—and this is likely the part of the story that sends the hackles up on your neck, as it did mine—the government not only knew about but believed in the value of. When the German parliament called Kentler in to speak about decriminalizing homosexuality, he went off, unprompted, into a discussion of pedophilia and his foster father experiment. This was received less as an alarm than a digression.
Here’s the story’s twist: Kentler was himself part of the experiment, bringing in boys to house whom he soon starting molesting. At age 57, he wrote a colleague a letter explaining why he felt he was aging well (quoting Aviv’s story): ‘[H]e and his twenty-six-year-old son were “part of a very fulfilling love story” that had lasted thirteen years and still felt fresh.’ In other words, he’d been molesting his foster son since age 13 and convinced himself this was a love story.
Six years later, that foster son killed himself.
I bring Kentler up first to show how even us queers (it’s unclear from Aviv’s piece whether Kentler ever had relationships with other adult men, only that he ‘was attracted to men’) have historically been complicit in conflating homosexuality and pedophilia. But of course we learned this from heterosexuals, who’ve been doing this for far longer, the most famous example perhaps being Boys Beware, a 1961 educational film that warns boys about the dangers of ‘homosexuals’.
The film opens with Jimmy, a boy who innocently thumbs a ride from a man named Ralph, driving through town alone. Here’s what Ralph looks like:
(John Waters’s decision to co-opt this look as one of America’s more public homosexuals is one of my favorite acts of queer resistance.)
Boys Beware is a silent film with a voiceover soundtrack, which tells us that this friendly stranger returns to the playground where he first met Jimmy, and a friendship develops where they go fishing together:
Then during lunch, Ralph showed him some pornographic pictures. Jimmy knew he shouldn’t be interested but, well he was curious. What Jimmy didn’t know was that Ralph was sick, a sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious. A sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual, a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex.
Not one of the so-called homosexuals in Boys Beware is looking to meet another homosexual, meaning that all of them are pedophiles. What I’m trying to call out as apples and oranges many others see as rectangles and squares. This goes back at least to 1914, when the New York State Hospital Bulletin reported some recent findings on homosexuals: ‘According to the age of the attracting person homosexuals are divisible into ephebophiles (lovers of youths), androphiles (grown men up to the period of old age), gerontophiles (lovers of the aged) and pedophiles (lovers of small boys).’[1]
This feels in its classifications as more exacting science, but it’s junky science, in that this homosexual writing today is attracted to more than one of those above categories, and also: what are heteros divisible into? Or do their attracting persons not have ages?
Before Havelock Ellis popularized the word ‘pedophile’, the common term was pederast, which the OED helpfully (for my purposes here, but unhelpfully for all of our purposes forever) defines as ‘A man who has or desires sexual relations with a boy. Also in wider sense (chiefly derogatory): a man who practises anal intercourse; a homosexual man.’
My point: when our very language has for more than a century conflated and confused men who love men with men who love boys, it’s inevitable that many would look at the homosexual—any homosexual—and see some latent threat.[2] This is a sickness of the mind our culture needs help healing from—and that work has been going on for the 100+ years of this tangle. Men kissing on TV, adults-only sex clubs, queers rioting at bars, Bravo TV, assimilationist gays adopting babies with their unfortunately named life partners and giving up their candidacy for U.S. president at a critical moment in the primary races so’s to secure a cabinet position—all are part of that work.
The homosexual is the pedophile and the pedophile is the homosexual when both figures need to hide. Hiding, they become in our phantasy the other P-word we prefer to use: predators we need to go catch.[3] When, over time, the homosexual refused to hide, demanded to be known and understood, what happened to the predator, the pervert, the pedophile?
Incidentally, only one of these words is still, in a sense, a word, according to my browser’s built-in spell-checker:
One happy phantasy is a future where all those words get squiggles underneath.↵
Multiple studies have shown that heterosexuals tend to feel disgust toward gay men. In one study, they gave Ivy League college kids a survey about their feelings regarding different groups of people. The control group filled out the survey in a classroom. The experimental group filled out the same survey in a room the researchers had filled with a foul smell. The two groups had similar reported feelings on every racial, ethnic, religious, gender, political, etc. group except for one: the people who smelled something foul during the survey (shit, is my guess) ranked gay men less favorably. (Not homosexuals or queers broadly. Not gay women or bisexual men or even trans people: only gay men receive this disgust quotient.) I’ve always thought this was about anal sex, but now I think it might be about the Active Pedophile phantasy.↵
My hate of To Catch a Predator should probably become clear by the end of this series of posts, but if you need more on its hideousness, see Joseph Fischel’s Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent: ‘It may be more useful to think of [To Catch a Predator] less as a reflection and stimulant of moral panic and more as a hybrid genre of reality crime television and pornography. As reality crime, it breeds “law-and-order ideology” that evacuates any structural account of social violence and disorder by pinning the problem of crime onto the delinquent and defective criminal. As pornography, it insists on visibility, on relentless epistemological revelation through seeing and surfacing that becomes an erotic placeholder for what cannot be known through representation. TCAP, then, eroticizes criminal justice, eroticizes law, and aggrandizes its efficacy. That final moment, the arrest of the beaten down predator, grants its audience political efficacy, epistemological certainty, and pleasure.’↵
Many mornings, I wake to the LA Times’s ‘Essential California’ newsletter in my inbox, whose adjective often calls itself into question. One recent morning the headline was, ‘Would-be child predator caught by YouTube channel’, and I felt the opposite of what I assumed, once again, I was supposed to feel.
A 20-year-old student in San Diego has raised money and 137K subscribers on YouTube by posing as a teenager on social media and hunting out men who might want—as the subject, who goes by Ghost, is quoted saying—’to meet the kid for bad purposes.’ In the newsletter, they noted that Ghost was a fan of To Catch a Predator, and that’s when I started to feel better about my dislike of him.
You might be wondering what’s to dislike. What’s not to like about a young guy spending his time finding potential child abusers and stopping them before they harm children? That harm is real, and when we hear of it there’s a deep and heavy sickening feeling we get, reminded once again how hard and unfair the world can be to some people. Innocent people, too—like Marco, profiled in a New Yorker article I read recently, who in the 1980s was placed in foster care with a man with known pedophilic desires. Marco and his foster brother were molested most nights before bed, for years on end, because some people had rotten, ruinous ideas about the boundaries between sex and love.
We’re going to come back to Marco, but first let’s think again about Ghost and his project. Ghost was never a victim of child sexual abuse. (I was neither, it should be said up front.) ‘I do it for survivors, I do it for victims, I do it for kids out there,’ he said in the Times profile. ‘I serve the community.’
This last is what we should focus on. In this series of posts, I want to think about the figure of the ‘predator catcher’, the ‘pedo hunter’. I want to look at the service Ghost performs and his notions of service, and our notions of serving the community, and so I want also to look at community, and how Ghost and you and me understand it.
I’ll go first: For me to see that Ghost is serving, say, our community of California, I have to believe that community is a place where children are being abused, or under threat of abuse, by men they don’t know who are looking online to persuade these children into a sexual encounter. Though Ghost himself doesn’t use the P-word (at least not in the Times piece), let’s call this the Active Pedophile fantasy.
‘Fantasy’ is a tricky word, as it suggests so much positivity and romance. Fantasies are our troped and coded dreams of a better way we might live. And ‘fantasy’ cleaves troublingly to ‘sexual’ in a series of posts about child sexual abuse (CSA). Maybe ‘phantasy’ would be better; the word reeks of early psychoanalysis, but it also hides a phantom, another ghost we might think about how readily we’re haunted by.
But before we get into the argument I want to make this week—which is, in part, that we ‘go after’ ‘sexual predators’ because we can no longer persecute homosexuals—we should pause here, on what little stable ground I feel we have, before I ask you to take a leap of faith with me.
When an adult has abused a child, Victim and Perpetrator are clear in our minds. The power imbalance is clear in our minds. I’m not pointing to grey areas here (though I am insisting on greater nuance and understanding): a crime has happened, and the perpetrator should be punished. When an adult has not yet abused a child, how do we know he will? And when an adult finds he wants to abuse a child, what then? What should he do, and what do we in the community do with this knowledge?
Understanding justice need not strip us of our compassion, just as our desire to feel compassion does not blind us to justice.
This might sound like a lot of Jesus talk—hate the sin but love the sinner—and maybe that is whose ideas are informing my thinking about the Active Pedophile phantasy, but as someone who spent the first half of his life hating himself for the sex he wanted to have without being able to help it, I find that—when I indulge the Active Pedophile phantasy—the first thing I feel is sympathy, then worry, then a powerlessness I want to do something about.
If the Active Pedophile lives among us, in our community, please trust me that he needs our help.
The whole country knew California had an election this week to recall the governor, an election that failed. The pundit wisdom is that Trumpism gave Newsom his victory, and given that a number of Californians I follow online didn’t seem to get vocally involved in anti-recall activism until after a far-right talkshow host became the leading replacement candidate, I imagine they might be right.
Though only 42% of voters turned out on Tuesday, or mailed in their ballots on time.
For me the message has always been: Don’t vote No because you fear the new guy, vote No because you love democracy, and this isn’t it. The rich people who paid enough money to gather enough signatures never had to make an argument that Newsom was unfit for the office. He broke no crimes. He committed no ethics violations. He just governed differently than they liked, and all they needed for a chance to replace him was the 1.5 million signatures they paid for—and if that seems like a high number to you, that’s equal only to 12% of the last gubernatorial electorate,[1] which is the required threshhold by which California automatically had to begin the process of setting up a recall election. Kansas, by comparison, requires signatures totaling 40% of the electorate.
It’s an enormous and costly process. Tuesday’s recall election cost California at least $276 million to run. If you want to know why that number is so high, I served as an inspector at a polling place on Eureka Street, and I will tell you what we had to do. Bonus: you’ll get to see what it means to hold a fair, functional, and accessible election. And extra bonus: you’ll hopefully see why we need to Vote No Again on 2022’s recall of three San Francisco school board members, and on the likely recall of our district attorney.
The whole country knew California had an election this week to recall the governor, an election that failed. The pundit wisdom is that Trumpism gave Newsom his victory, and given that a number of Californians I follow online didn’t seem to get vocally involved in anti-recall activism until after a far-right talkshow host became the leading replacement candidate, I imagine they might be right.
Though only 42% of voters turned out on Tuesday, or mailed in their ballots on time.
For me the message has always been: Don’t vote No because you fear the new guy, vote No because you love democracy, and this isn’t it. The rich people who paid enough money to gather enough signatures never had to make an argument that Newsom was unfit for the office. He broke no crimes. He committed no ethics violations. He just governed differently than they liked, and all they needed for a chance to replace him was the 1.5 million signatures they paid for—and if that seems like a high number to you, that’s equal only to 12% of the last gubernatorial electorate,{{1}} which is the required threshhold by which California automatically had to begin the process of setting up a recall election. Kansas, by comparison, requires signatures totaling 40% of the electorate.
It’s an enormous and costly process. Tuesday’s recall election cost California at least $276 million to run. If you want to know why that number is so high, I served as an inspector at a polling place on Eureka Street, and I will tell you what we had to do. Bonus: you’ll get to see what it means to hold a fair, functional, and accessible election. And extra bonus: you’ll hopefully see why we need to Vote No Again on 2022’s recall of three San Francisco school board members, and on the likely recall of our district attorney.
Spoiler: you can’t. Everyone’s wrong on Twitter. Well: everyone posting a sincere tweet that’s usually based on anger and/or policies they’d like changed is wrong in and throughout their post(s).
Why? Well, I’m here to figure it out. This idea came to me three minutes ago.
*
Here’s what happened. I was on Twitter to tweet in anger about the effort to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. I hate recalls because I love democracy (I’ll return to this later), but mostly I hate that this recall effort, which from all I’ve seen based is in witlessness and failed imaginations, has garnered the signatures it needs and will be voted on in 2022.
I’ve had beefs with the Chronicle in the past, and for sure they’ve been part of the problem in aiding this recall effort, by devoting headlines to crimes that scare people and are easy to share on social media, broadcasting this idea that San Francisco is a crime-ridden wasteland. But also, I’m glad the Chronicle has also provided articles, columns, and op-eds, detailing all the ways that crime is down in the city.
To be clear: if you’ve believed that crime (i.e., robberies, burglaries, assaults, thefts, sexual assaults, larcenies, etc.)[1] is up in San Francisco, you’ve been sold a lie.
Which is what I logged in to Twitter this morning to tweet, with a link to the Chronicle‘s front page story today (I read the paper as a paper that arrives on my porch Sunday mornings): Chesa Boudin and San Francisco’s bitter debate over crime. “If you support the recall effort of Chesa Boudin, you have been sold a mess of lies” is what I typed. And then I added another tweet, with this screenshot of a passage from the article:
My tweet read: “Let me be the first to discount your feelings when they have no basis in reality.”
Twelve minutes later I deleted both tweets because I felt I was wrong.
*
I’m not wrong. You are not doing your part in co-creating a democratic society if you do not think critically about the issues at hand. This asks a lot from us. One of them is to follow cause and effect. What has been the cause of the increase in crime in the city, and how can we attribute it to Boudin? Well, in fact, there’s less crime in the city, and Boudin’s office has even been the first to not take any credit for that. Prosecutors understand that one office or one D.A.’s policies can’t have this kind of direct causal effect on crime rates. (Especially not when there’s a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic going on.)
Fine. If things just feel worse now than they have before, how is this a result of Chesa Boudin’s progressive policies, which have generally sought to release rehabilitated, nonviolent criminals out of long-term prison sentences, and to use fairer and judicious practices in charging and sentencing so as to help lessen California’s notoriously high prison population, which as everyone can tell you disproportionately hurts Black and Latinx communities because of racist policing and sentencing practices?
The recall argument focuses chiefly on this:
They cite any number of recent news stories, all of which are true, and one of the strong points of the Chronicle‘s reporting is to show how the circumstances behind such criminals’ release is usually more nuanced than “Boudin Lets Violent Criminals Roam Free.”
Here, I’m reminded of something N told me the other day, when we were talking about the Post‘s reporting that Facebook’s most popular post in Q1 was an article that cast doubt on the COVID-19 vaccine. “Facts and reporting are behind paywalls,” he said, “while misinformation is free.” He’s generally right. Yes, most newspapers have made their COVID reporting free to all, and I think I pay $0.99/week to read the Post online, so it’s not like it’s terribly expensive to get your facts straight. But for the most part we need to pay for news, and as of 2020, 80 percent of Americans don’t want to do it.
But back to the Boudin recall. What do the recall supporters imagine will happen to crime in San Francisco if they oust him—presumably with someone “tougher on crime”? What, in other words, will be the effect of their cause? We can’t predict the future, so we’ll have to do that thing where we know our history lest we repeat it. And, again as the Chronicle‘s reporting has shown, D.A.s whose policies sent more people to prisons did not produce less crime in the city.
In other words, the D.A. of their dreams is not going to make them actually safer. It may very well make them feel safer, but to what greater effects beyond their personal feelings? What will happen to families and communities when racist sentencing and imprisonment get worse?
Perhaps, to be fair to their argument, we can get the D.A. of all of our dreams: one who both charges more people for crimes and also helps to end racist practices. I could be on board, but while I admittedly know very little about the criminal justice system, what I’ve seen and read have shown me, again and again, that it has such a longstanding problem with its own systemic racism that any increased “toughness” on crime would only and always end up hurting communities of color disproportionately.
Which leads me to ask, when told we need a D.A. who can make us safer, who the “us” is meant to be.
*
Boudin singlehandedly won’t be able to end racism in the criminal justice system, but his office is doing what it can to think about longterm effects. And while they’ve been doing so, every measure we’ve always used to gauge the prevalence of crime in the city shows that crime is down. To me there’s no argument for recall. No critical thinking can get me there.
The closest critical thinking can get me to support the recall is to acknowledge my political biases. I am driven to want to give progressive policies like Boudin’s a chance, because I’ve long ago bought in to the fight to dismantle systemic racism, and the information I’ve consumed tells me this is one much-needed way to do that. So I may be dismissing the recall’s arguments because of cognitive bias.[2]
Even if I could be led to believe them, I still can’t support the recall, because I’ll always believe more strongly in democracy. As much as it hurt watching the last president get elected in 2016, I knew the election was fair and well run. We weren’t in a 2000 scenario here, and yes the Electoral College is anti-democratic and a nightmare but it’s the system we had. I had to wake up in 2016 and live with the fact that he won the election. We tried to impeach him when it seemed likely he had committed a crime, and we did it again when we all knew he encouraged sedition. They didn’t take, but the impeachment happened only after his personal actions were arguably criminal.
We’re not there with Chesa Boudin.
Any recall effort is expensive, and for it to have any lasting value as a democratic tool, it can’t be used when you disagree with the policies of a person elected into office. Just 51,000 verified signatures are needed to initiate a recall in a city of 492,000 registered voters. With the Newsom recall up in September, it’s possible that 49% of Californians vote against the recall and 51% vote for it, triggering not just his removal from office, but the immediate installment of a candidate who might receive as little a 20% of the votes cast, just because that’s the largest vote share on a ballot of nearly 4 dozen candidates.
That’s not democracy. And now we can understand what’s behind recall efforts: a refusal to accept the will of the people, one very sinisterly passed off as the people “finally having a voice”.
It pisses me the fuck off. Don’t let recall people steal our democracy from us. Hate Boudin’s policies all you want. This is your right, but wait until the next election to vote him out of office. That’s how democracy works.
*
And now back to Twitter, and how I was wrong there. Well, my two tweets had none of the above thinking in them. It had only my arguments, which were both only the beginning of true things. People who already believed them to be right might read them and feel their beliefs reflected, but how I might be right could very likely be different from how they might feel I’m right. Twitter has no room (and for sure no time) for getting into that, for filling in the messy middle of an argument.
So we’re all wrong there.
I scrolled down through my Twitter feed for a while after posting, because it’s Sunday morning and what else might I do, and because even though I’ve pretty much logged fully off of Twitter old habits die hard. And I found a retweet from a sex worker I follow, about a post from the head of some anti-sex-trafficking organization, which included a screenshot of what was called CSAM—child sexual abuse material. Basically, someone crusading for the closure of Pornhub on the basis of its allegedly being a hub for sex traffickers found and posted a screenshot of child sexual abuse as “proof” that this was happening there. The sex worker was rightly aghast at such a fucked up form of activism, and they got the post taken down in minutes, though it had been up on Twitter for hours.
I couldn’t resist checking out this crusader’s feed, and it’s basically 100% tweets about how Pornhub aids child sex traffickers. That’s shown to be true enough times I don’t need to cite sources, but what’s also true is that Facebook aids child sex trafficking, too, and here’s a source that shows how law enforcement agencies look at places like Backpage and Pornhub as low-hanging fruit—i.e., trafficking there is easy to find and catch, but agencies aren’t as good as navigating social media sites, which given their use statistics suggests that trafficking is far more prevalent there.[3]
It’s not hard to launch a crusade against Facebook (to me it’s harder to launch a defense of it), but it’s hard to get people enraged by your arguments when it’s become for some such an essential part of daily life. Plus, the optics can’t compete when porn is in the frame. Witness actor Ellen Barkin, who retweeted one of these crusader’s anti-Pornhub tweets, writing, “Lock them up! #TraffickingHub”.
More prevalent than trafficking on Pornhub are self-employed sex workers trying to make a living, but lest this already-long post run off to become another defending sex work, I want to end by asking where Barkin’s anger came from, in posting what she did, and why is it being directed where she’s directing it?
When, in the process of reading about policies on Twitter, was Ellen Barkin given the room and space we all need to think critically about the issue, look into cause and effect, check the findings of researchers uninfluenced by money or ideology,[4] and ask questions about what actions will best solve the problem with the least amount of pain and trouble for everyone involved?
Instead it’s: the sight of pornography makes me feel something very strong and uncomfortable, and one way to rid myself of this unwanted feeling is to post an agreement with someone who has tweeted only the beginning of an argument, assuming that everyone else can fill in the messy middle.
We all agree to do this on Twitter every time we tweet. Its central feature—the lack of room—is its central flaw.
*
By way of a tl;dr sum-up, here’s something that came up yesterday in a Zoom event I hosted for the MFA Program, with Paisley Rekdal, whose Appropriate: A Provocation is the smartest thing I’ve read about cultural appropriation in literature, what’s wrong about it, and why we need to work better. Rather than trying to imagine The Other, what their lives are like and how their trauma is relatable or something we should try to empathize with, Rekdal urges us to think about what our desire to imagine The Other is about. What does it tell us about power and access, and in asking ourselves these questions, how might our writing start to do the work to challenge and possibly dismantle the systems in place?[5]
This is one place where critical thinking begins: what is the nature of my feelings and desires, where are they coming from, and what can they tell me about the systems I’m a part of? When you tweet, in so many words, “THIS,” or when you’re quoted by a newspaper saying that people are feeling something that can’t be discounted, you haven’t even begun to do step one.
And as much as I believe in democracy, sometimes I don’t think you deserve as much a say in its workings as do the rest of us, doing the work.
Footnotes (↵ returns to text)
Homicides, however, are up in San Francisco, but this is true statewide and, the Chronicle reports, is in line with a nationwide trend.↵
I don’t think I am. I’ve read the facts, and it’s very hard to see how I’m wrong about them. But this is a devil’s advocate argument I’m doing as part of my method of critical thinking.↵
And if it’s not too self-defeating to cite a useful tweet thread with source links in a post about how we’re always wrong on Twitter, you can read more about this issue here.↵
Such people may not exist, but if they do, the closest equivalent would be tenured faculty in our universities, so think again if you support cutting public funding to those institutions.↵
UPDATE: It occurred to me just now that this is an idea Rekdal cites from Loffreda and Rankine’s On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary.↵
I worked for a few mornings on a post I was calling “How to Think From Yourself”, which I was doing my best to convince myself was not a pedantic piece of self-congratulation, but ultimately I couldn’t keep lying to myself. It was. I wanted, the morning after the election, to teach people the difference in thinking from yourself and thinking for yourself—the latter carrying to me an air of abandonment, like “fend for yourself” does. And I wanted to teach people how to figure out whether they’re really thinking from themselves when they say they’re trusting their gut.
It was a mess of a post. Here’s the only bit of it worth salvaging:
There’s a very American idea out there about trusting your gut. I’m not entirely sure what it means, but I imagine it has to do with feelings, which source themselves in your gut. Butterflies in your stomach, a knot of fear, etc. Maybe you feel your feelings elsewhere in your body, but mine are there.
When a person finds their brain at war with their gut (or their heart, where the warmer feelings seem to get sourced), this American idea says to side with the feelings. Feelings beat out the intellect. Don’t overthink it. Go with your gut.
An idea I like to bandy about, particularly on Twitter, is that most people think they’re thinking when in fact they’re feeling. Most tweets poke us in our gut, and we spit up what feels true to us. Most of us spend more time in gutspaces than headspaces, if only because headspaces take work to navigate and are, it’s true, exhausting. It’s not 8-hour-job-on-your-feet-no-breaks exhausting; it’s less a heavy body ache than it is draining and dizzying. A lot of time in your headspace can feel like too many rides on a tilt-a-whirl.
Why is that? My guess right now is that thinking requires linearity and the mind is anything but linear. Consider the sequence in which memories come to you—it’s never chronological—versus what you know your mind needs when you say, “Give me a second to think.” Thinking requires a steady laying-out of steps or ideas, and it asks us to form the mess of living into a chain of cause-effect relationships—all while the brain is continually spinning and processing the moving world around us, and trying not to get distracted by car alarms, campaign billboards, or sexy people crossing the street.
The gut never asks for linearity, and the gut doesn’t get distracted. But I don’t know why that makes it more trustworthy than the brain. I’m trying in this post to figure out how I think, and what kind of thinking I value, and why I value it. When I talk about thinking not just for yourself, but from yourself, I don’t mean this gut stuff. I don’t mean to trust this inmost part of your self’s body. I mean to stop feeling as thought your body is at war with itself. Stop believing that you have to pick a side of your insides.
One pet peeve of mine is when people online tell others Do Yourself A Favor And Learn This Thing I Learned To Do Long Ago, You’ll Be A Lot Happier, and then they don’t even bother to teach you how. Any moment I tried to get into the how, the post was a mess. So maybe I’ll come back to this, but all I can say for now is that the first step is knowing who you are and what your desires are, and to make sure you’ve arrived at those desires independent of your politics.
Which requires the didactic spelling out of another process, so you see how difficult good teaching is.
Where white men have to lead, so I’ve been told, is in conversations about racial injustice and gender inequality, when the audience for or members of that conversation includes other white men.
(Immediate clarification: white men do not have to lead women, trans people, or people of color in conversations about racial injustice and gender inequality.)
Used to be I’d’ve thought the opposite, that white men needed to sit back and shut up and, ideally, listen in such conversations. But as a colleague once explained to me, calls for justice and equality sound different to white people’s ears when spoken by other white people.
Her unspoken implication was that white people, by virtue of our history of being underchallenged on these topics, have developed a knack, consciously or otherwise, of being deaf to POC voices. Or of granting those voices low priority. Or, worse, of hearing marginalized people’s own arguments for equality as “black people once again making everything about race.”
In other words, when white guys make something about race, other white guys tend to finally listen to the conversation about race.
Oh, I remember thinking. My discomfort is an effect unbefitting my intention. (I was probably less articulate in the moment.) I wasn’t racist, and I may not in my lack of action have been a vehicle for racism, but nor was I in my lack of action putting an end to racism. When another colleague of color later spelled out the burdens I put on my already-burdened students of color by waiting for them to tell me of their discomfort with any racist goings-on in the classroom (goings-on I may have been ignorant of), whereas what they were looking for was for me to call it out, if anything as the person nominally “in charge” of the classroom, that sealed it.
I did not want to have to lead in topics and conversations where I felt ignorant or unskilled, and so because not leading in those conversations is a form of violence, I had to stop being ignorant and learn some skills.
