Wasn't Me

Mariya Karimjee: Even when I was in high school and I was reading this prompt, I remember being very aware of the fact that that question was not meant for me. Every time I read it, I had to think like, who on Earth am I going to write about? Who is different from me? I just can't get around the idea that the question is only for white people.

It says, "With your future growth in mind, describe a potential classmate that you believe you could learn from." When it's saying, "Your future growth in mind," who is the "your" in that context? In my opinion, it's white people. Who else needs to learn and grow from people different from them? It's like the prompt is saying that college is for white people and everyone else is here for the benefit of white people.
This American Life "Essay B"

Okay. This has become beyond stupid. Why would there be any reason for non-White students in the United States not to need to learn and grow from people different than themselves? There is a charitable reading of this, which is basically that non-White students have no choice but to learn and grow from people who are different than themselves, because White people are, basically, everywhere. But even this, it must be said, only really applies to non-White students in predominantly White schools. And that isn't everyone.

One of the nice things about having a blog with a small audience, as I do here, is that I can say things that would cause a scandal if put before a decently sized audience. And I'm going to take advantage of that to say the idea of "Whiteness" as some sort of malignancy has been taken to it's logical extreme and tends to fall off into the abyss. For the record, here is the full text of the prompt that Ms. Karimjee was referring to:

Many students expand their view of the world during their time in college. Such growth often results from encounters between students who have lived different cultural, economic, or academic experiences. With your future growth in mind, describe a potential classmate that you believe you could learn from, either within or outside a formal classroom environment.

Now, to be sure, I took a pass on this effect. Having grown up in the distant suburbs of Chicago, in an overwhelmingly White suburb, I was at pains to avoid any expansion of my view of the world during the one year I spent at a Historically Black University in Virginia. Most of the other students were uneducated Neanderthals, as far as I was concerned, and I had no problem with conveying this to them every time they sought to challenge me for not engaging in performative Blackness. And the last three years of college were spent hanging out with people, White, Black or otherwise, who shared my general circumstances and specific interests. At another school. My disinterest in dating made me the odd man out at times, but otherwise, I was simply one of the crowd.

But even though my first encounters in college with people who had "lived different cultural, economic, or academic experiences" were unmitigated disasters, it wasn't because, as a Black person, I couldn't understand how anyone could possibly be different from me, or had already done all of the learning and growing that carried any benefit. It was because I encountered circumstances that I perceived as mostly hostile and responded with open hostility of my own.

And that, I think, was a loss on my part. Too caught up in a need to punish the people around me for their apparent dislike of me, rather than attempting to understand it, I missed my earliest opportunity to understand a rather large group of people that I "looked like" superficially, but had almost nothing else in common with. As a result, I didn't really start learning about, and understanding, people whose lives differed significantly from my own until I moved to the Seattle area.

The point here isn't that White people can't be self-centered and self-important. That has been, after all, par for the course for most of American history, and despite what many White Americans might tell you, the habit hasn't died anywhere nearly as quickly as might have been hoped. But the idea that only White people have anything to learn from people different than themselves is to presume a uniqueness to White culture in one of the areas in which it is quite emphatically not unique. And therefore the logical leap that says that non-White people universally understand that everyone else in the world is there for their benefit is nonsensical.

To be sure, White people can suck. At times, out loud. But so can the rest of us. Yes, White America has yet to own up to the consequences that hundreds of years of history, both before and after the founding of the nation, have had on the various people that have been considered out-group., both inside and outside of the nation's borders. But that's because "White America" is nothing more than an arbitrary grouping of people based roughly on some combination of skin tone and perceived pre-American nationality. It's not any sort of organization or institution that can take responsibility for anything.

There was a part of the story of this that really stood out for me:

Mariya Karimjee: During the conversation, there was one moment where Jenna asked me something.
    Jenna: Did you literally think that this is how I saw you?
    Mariya Karimjee: After the essay, a little bit, yes. There was a brief, two-year period in which I did.
    Jenna: That's not very brief.
    Mariya Karimjee: But now I don't.

Of course, we don't have the whole of the conversation, but from the bit played in the episode, one piece is conspicuously absent; an acknowledgement from Ms. Karimjee that she'd misjudged her friend. Ira Glass, as host, doesn't bring it up, either. And this, I think, is what angers so many conservative Whites about this sort of thing. The idea that it's somehow self-evident that if there has been any error or wrongdoing, they are the ones at fault. Ms. Karimjee put thoughts in her friend Jenna's mind, and then held her accountable for those attributions for two years. And Ira Glass takes it as a given that this was the appropriate response. Because Ms. Karimjee is a Pakistani Moslem woman living in the United States. It clearly can't be her who made an error.

Is this how Ms. Karimjee actually sees the world, and the circumstances of that high-school essay? I have no idea. I wouldn't know Ms. Karimjee if I were to run into her on the street. But the This America Life story, which is all about how White people see others as means to their collective ends, presents her that way, and holds her up as righteous in being so. And there's an irony in that, in the sense that Ms. Karimjee becomes a prop in a story being told by someone else, in the service of an insignificant skirmish in the Culture Wars. Not, I think, because it was intended to be that way, but because that's how this cultural conflict works. Everyone is simply a means to an end of a conflict that, as an inanimate object, it's capable of caring about the lives of the people drafted to fight in it. It's not a good example to emulate.