On the Inside

So, according to a piece on NPR, an opinion piece in the China News referred to outgoing Ambassador Gary Locke, as a "yellow-skinned, white-hearted banana man." (Not being able to read Chinese, I'm taking their word for it.) This was a new one on me. I'm told that Asian Americans refer to people they consider "yellow on the outside, but white on the inside" as "Twinkies." I hear that for Hispanics, their version of the term is "coconut." And for African Americans, the term is "Oreo." But "banana," was novel.

All of this raises an interesting question for me: Do white people even have a term for this sort of thing? Do they call one another out for being white only on the outside? Supposedly, they use the term "inside out Oreo" for someone who's "black on the inside," but that sounds iffy to me, if only because it's so long. "Wigger" comes close, but it's not quite the same connotation.

I suspect, that as with many such things, that white Americans aren't really that invested in the idea that their "whiteness" must be more than "skin deep" in the way that other groups come across as being. Of course, I can only speak to African Americans as a matter of personal experience, and we seem to have a remarkably strong need to define ourselves as "not white." This tends to cause problems for us - especially when being well-educated is considered a mark of "whiteness."

Hardeman, 16, participates in a Los Angeles-based college-preparatory weekend program started by the 100 Black Men organization. Early on, his parents filled his head with thoughts of scholarly achievement. And that has led some to question his racial bona fides. On one occasion, "I was jumped after school for answering too many questions," recalled Hardeman. His dad gave him some hip-hop clothes to help him fit in. "That made it worse," he said. "People hated me." Even his music--the likes of Britney Spears, 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys--got him into trouble. Bullies shattered one of his CDs at a school function, and one told him, "Dude, you're whiter than they are."
Ellis Cose, "Does Cosby Help?"

Of course, this wasn't what the China News was complaining about, but there is a parallel. According to NPR, one of the things that riled up the China News writer was the fact that Ambassador Locke had been photographed "carrying his own backpack and buying his own coffee," which "was described as a ploy to embarrass less frugal Chinese officials."

The idea that it's somehow "un-Chinese" for a diplomat to act like a ordinary person (which, it should be noted, seemed to endear him to ordinary Chinese citizens) is just as strange, and insecure, as the idea that achieving in school should be understood as "un-Black." It's true that in many areas, the rules of virtue, as it were, were written by white people. And it's true that for some time, those rules were applied in such a way that benefited them as everyone else's expense. But a lot of the things that white people consider virtues are, well, virtues. And setting out to reject people who follow them as being "inauthentically" non-white (especially when the motivation seems to be avoiding shame or embarrassment over standards not reached) doesn't help anyone.

Unconditioning

I'm a student of human relationships and something of a people watcher, and so I've learned some things over the years. This particular thing struck me as one of the most interesting and useful. I suspect that a lot of you may already know this - it's something that you say to someone else mainly so that you can remind yourself of it.

The surest paths to love are learning to love yourself - and helping others to love themselves.

Of all of the relationships that I have seen disintegrate, several had a common thread running through them. The person who initiated the breakup found themselves having to choose between loving their partner and loving themselves. And they chose to love themselves. Their reasons for making that choice varied (some were good, and some were screamingly bad), but in the end, they could always be abstracted down to the same thing - the relationship, their partner or both came between them and their positive self-regard. "The worst loneliness," according to Mark Twain, "is not to be comfortable with yourself." And, as he noted, a person cannot be comfortable without their own approval. Relationships can be about children, religion or loyalty, but in the end, they're also about the people who are in them. A relationship that, in the end, forces a person to forgo all sources of their own approval results in loneliness and misery.

Unconditional love is often viewed as something that you give to another person. But I think that it's better viewed as something that we teach to other people. Successful couples, successful friendships, successful families - if it can be said that they are all alike it's in that the participants strive for their own approval and help everyone else strive for theirs. They may never make it to the point where said approval is completely unconditional - there may always be some price that self-regard demands, but every success lowers the cost just that much further, and lowers the chance that a choice will have to be made.

Ghosts

The story had started out simply enough. A friend of mine was telling me of having gone home to visit her parents, an intercontinental journey that required planes, trains and automobiles to complete. She was still a day's travel away, she told me, when the accident occurred. The way she explained it, it was sudden, and severe. The sort of accident where your first inkling that something is wrong is the sound of squealing rubber and rending metal, and by the time you understand just what is happening, it's all over. The sort of accident where the line between walking away unscathed and being borne away in a body bag is narrower than you care to realize.

When she arrived home, and told her friends about her trip, and the close call that she'd survived while making it, they told her that "he" must have been responsible for the accident. Even though "he" had died several years before. It's his ghost, they told her. He wants to be with you, they said, so he's trying to kill you, so that you can finally be together.

The last time they'd seen each other, they were in school together. They'd encountered one another in the morning, spoke, and then parted ways, promising to speak again that evening. By the time she'd found him at the end of the day, rushed to his side by friends who'd been frantically searching for her, he'd bled to death. They'd gone their separate ways to participate in anti-government protests, and sometime that afternoon, he'd been shot. When she said her last good-byes to him, she knew how he had died. What she hadn't known was that he had loved her. He'd never told her. And until then, their mutual friends had kept his secret. Her tale complete, we lapsed into silence for a time.

I remembered the protests she'd spoken of. I'd been a student myself at the time. We'd seen them on television. From our vantage point, they seemed like a lost cause. "Oh, those poor, poor fools," I'd said aloud, to murmured agreement. It was my one clear memory of how I had reacted to the news. It hadn't occurred to me that I would ever be relating it to one of the participants.

This story comes back to me with every new protest movement that slides into violence and chaos. And every time, I remember the hopelessness and the courage that leads people to fight, and die, for something they believe in. And I wonder, when the violence subsides and some normality is restored - how many more ghosts, lonely and bereft, will there be?

Five Words I Encountered Today

What frustrates me the most with [the Michael Dunn] case is that it further institutionalizes the exculpatory power of fear. I fear the person knocking at my door, so I can shoot them through it. I fear black male teens, so I can shoot them in their cars. I fear terrorism, so I can shoot these pixels I see on my screen via drone. Of course, the privilege of fear is not uniformly extended because of the political and legal power it grants.
"bear report" Comment on "Black Boy Interrupted"

"The exculpatory power of fear." It's a phrase that I had never seen before, yet it immediately resonated. We have granted fear a status akin to victimization, and thus, as we have with some other forms of victimization, we have also granted it certain privileges. And with good reason. I fear the person who has entered my home with a weapon, and so I may use deadly force against them. We privilege fear because we understand that otherwise, all we are left with is avenging wrongs that have already happened. But the possibility of privilege brings the potential for abuse.

When I was young, I was taught that fear was a weapon. That people would fear me, not because it was reasonable, or rational that they do so, but because it gave them the cover that they needed for abuse. That disobedience to their whims and dictates would be taken as a threat, because while being tyrannical, murderous or petty were indefensible, being fearful was accepted and thus the latter was always suspect as a cover for the former. Only those who were like me had any legitimate reason to fear me. But the privilege of fear was closely kept, and so, I was warned, I could never allow my fear to push me into defending myself from the ever-present threat, lest I provide them an excuse to be afraid, and thus to punish me.

But as I grew older, I came to understand. "The privilege of fear" is not uniformly extended, not because of a deliberate hoarding of the power attached to it, but because it is diminished by familiarity. The places I most encountered fear were those places were I was a completely unknown quality. Where the local environment provided no first hand frame of reference. As I stood on a sidewalk in northern Minnesota and watched a woman nearly trigger a serious collision through her inability to attend both to me, and to the road, it began to dawn. When asked to picture the average American, who do you see? Who do you think that your neighbors see? Who does your family see? Now - where can you go in the United States, and not see anyone who looks remotely like them? That ubiquity, that familiarity, makes them for the most part nonthreatening. Especially to one another. And fear is granted privilege mainly when it is shared. And that is why people pander to the fears of the mainstream. That is where the critical mass that can grant privilege resides. It's easy to see them as dishonest, because we do not fear what they do, and so the privilege that comes with fear seems unwarranted, if not completely inappropriate. And that leads us to denounce fear, rather than seek to eliminate it.

We may have nothing to fear, except fear itself, but sometimes, I think, that's more than enough.

Expedience

“‘Once the rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down? That's not my department,’ said Werner von Braun.”
Tom Lehrer, “Werner von Braun”

After World War II, the United States brought a number of German scientists to the United States to work on weapons and the space program. In return for this, they were effectively forgiven their involvement in Nazi atrocities during the war, and it was hushed up. Recently a new book on the subject was released, and the author was interviewed on NPR. It's made fairly clear that several of them, like the famed Werner von Braun, were both high-ranking members of the Nazi party, and knew of (and were sometimes involved in) the Holocaust. The actions of the United States government to to conceal these histories are portrayed as a “deal with the Devil.” The overall current of moral outrage, or at least criticism, that runs through the interview struck me as somewhere between naïve and willfully ignorant.

When someone is arrested for a crime, it's not uncommon for the prosecutors to offer a plea bargain. At its heart, a plea bargain is a trade - lessened accountability before the law for some consideration, normally saving prosecutors the effort of proving one’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And other trades are made as well, a very common one being a reduction of sentence (or at least the promise of a recommendation of same) or a lessening of charges in return for cooperation with an investigation or naming other people involved in crimes. Unsurprisingly, this has lead to a certain amount of deceit in the process.

Under federal law, the only way someone serving a mandatory minimum prison sentence can get out early is to provide information or testimony that is of “substantial assistance” to prosecutors. What constitutes “substantial assistance” is solely up to the judgment of prosecutors. Make the prosecutor happy, and you go home early. Tell him something that may well be true but doesn’t quite go far enough to win him an indictment or conviction, and you risk giving up a golden opportunity to cut your time. Critics say it’s a system that suborns outright lying.
Radley Balko, “Guilty Before Proven Innocent”

Like Operation Paperclip, the use of jailhouse informants to testify against people is driven by fear. While Operation Paperclip was put in place to help combat the fear of falling behind in the arms race or the quest to reach the Moon, the willingness to give unreliable “witnesses” breaks on jail time (sometimes, quite significant) in return for “substantial assistance” is driven by the public's fear of crime and drugs.

When I was first taking courses in Project Management, one of the classes I had signed up for was one on Ethics. After class one day, I asked the instructor: “Can you ever be considered really ethical if you’re not willing to risk your job, and maybe the rest of your working life?” What followed was an uncomfortable silence and an unspoken agreement. We both knew that the answer was, quite likely: “No.” But we also both knew that it was, quite likely, an untenable trade-off.

One of the lessons that we learn growing up that turns out not to be exactly true is that being held accountable only has costs to the suspected miscreant. When our parents told us that: “This is going to hurt me as much as it’s going to hurt you,” before dishing out a punishment, we rarely, if ever believed them. But the costs of holding someone accountable can, and sometimes do, go beyond the person themselves. And that creates an incentive to buy our way out of the consequences of accountability by releasing others from the same.

A commitment to Justice that begins and ends only with other people “Getting what they deserve” is always going to come up short, because there is no form of Justice that we can create today that lacks costs that the people seeking justice will be called upon to pay. It’s easy to look back on America of the mid-to-late 1940s, and decide that they’d overestimated the risks of sending Mr. von Braun to the gallows at Nuremberg, or to sneer at Louisiana’s law-enforcement community for being willing to send innocent people to prison to demonstrate their commitment to the War on Drugs. But it’s also dangerous. Bad ideas are not universally, or even commonly, the result of people being stupid, credulous or deliberately unethical. Often, they’re the result of being hard-eyed and coldly rational. The willingness to rationalize, like many other “failings,” preys on those who think they are above it.