Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Where they went wrong


Fortunately, before I read Grossman and Pinker I already had some experience in being disappointed by authors.

As part of my long reading list I read The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, and I really liked it. Then he let me down.


I read multiple articles on it. The Buzzfeed link is more about Ronson and the book, but the Shakesville link is really important for context, and for Ronson's duplicity in dealing with Adria Richards, which I find interesting in light of his sympathy for the quote manufacturer that is mentioned in the Buzzfeed article. I just have no trust for Ronson anymore.

Let me go back to On Killing. What I thought at the time was that Grossman was so entrenched in the military mindset that it limited his outer view. There were some things it helped him to understand better, but other things it made him miss.

It is completely normal for your lived experience to affect how you view the world. I know a lot of people get their hackles raised when you bring up "privilege", but it is true that there are things that you don't have to know. That doesn't apply to Grossman as much, but I totally believe it applies to Ronson and Pinker.

I don't have to think about what being black is like; I do have to know what being a woman is like. There are things I am aware of because of my economic status, and because of being educated, and because of being fat, but I don't have to know about being queer or not having good educational opportunities available, and I wouldn't if I didn't make a point of listening and reading.

if your circumstances place you at the top of the hierarchy (straight white male), then it is easy to only know that experience. These particular writers missing important things is not surprising.

Therefore it is easy for Ronson to compare job loss to rape. It is easy for him to sympathize more with the person who lost one job (where he already had a file) and still has a fair amount of privacy than the person who has had death threats and online harassment and had much worse employment problems. That is not changed by the fact that the man was violating the conference's policy, and the woman was following it.

It is easy for Pinker to decry rape culture as a thing when he is not the one devalued by it. Honestly, we might not have the right name for it. Right now I am finishing up Danielle McGuire's At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. Black women were raped and sexually molested by white men frequently, and there were rarely any repercussions. At the same time, accusations of the rape of white women got black men killed pretty regularly and the fear of it was used to keep white people afraid of integration.

That is about maintaining a social structure, so it is political. That doesn't mean there is nothing personal there, or that the sexual aspects are meaningless, but that's not all it is. It can be perfectly reasonable then to see in how we as a society respond to rape that there is something more there.

I don't want to prove rape culture or resolve online harassment in this post, but there are two things that I notice. One is that privilege comes through. Adria Richards, as a black woman, gets abuse that the person she reported got to skip. That's not a coincidence. You can find lots and lots of examples of that happening. So white guys missing things is one thing, but when the people at the top of the heap won't see the problems of those lower down, that's a structural problem and it needs addressing if we are going to pretend to care about fairness and justice and democracy.

The other thing I notice is that since you do have to actively seek out other viewpoints to get the full picture, it is fascinating and discouraging how strongly some people resist the inclusion of other voices. I read recently that diversity has become a word that people use to avoid talking about race, but that's unfortunate. Truly seeking out diversity means that you can get better information and better ideas.

That's why you need to hear from other writers, even though publishing is mostly white. You need to have racial diversity in film crews, and not just the cast. You need to be hearing from different people on the opinion pages. Unless we just don't care, but we should care.

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