Day89: Potential, Part II

Once I understood that, not only did my aversion to sitting meditation decrease significantly, but I began, slowly slowly, to recognize all the ways in which I had been, at hugely important times in my life, attending with care and attention to the present moment, on purpose, without (and this has always been my struggle) judgment.  And with, as I came to understand later, compassion for myself in my struggle.

When I realized this in my mid-thirties, I immediately recognized that I’d been using mindfulness to manage a difficult relationship with a colleague.  Little by little, instead of reacting to hostility engendered by something I’d said by apologizing and trying desperately to make her like me, I had learned to recognize the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that drove me to fix it at all costs.  That didn’t stop me at first from trying to fix it, but little by little, the practice of awareness had begun to give me space.  And in that space, I could give myself the gift of time to decide – did I really do something wrong?  And if I didn’t, what would I like to do to respond to this difficult moment, instead of trying to survive it?

Mindfulness.

And once I saw that, I saw that my practice dated back even further.  To the way that I learned to watch the nerve pain in my leg, rising and falling and changing, without attachment to how it felt ten minutes ago, or how it might feel ten years from now.  Noticing that allowed me to see all the fears and stories I’d attached to that pain, and to see them for what they were – fears and stories that also rose and fell away.

Or the way I’d finally learned to manage lifelong insomnia.  From my early teenage years on, going to bed involved hours of lying awake while ruminating and fretting, worrying over what I should have done differently, or what I was going to do when the next crisis hit me.  In my thirties, mindfulness (not that I called it that at the time) allowed me to notice when I’d headed down those rabbit holes, and to kindly and gently call my attention back to my breathing.  (Note: for anyone who wants to have a sitting practice, I don’t recommend using this exact trick to fall asleep – to this day, I have to fight drowsiness when I sit in meditation, I think largely because of the neurological connections I built at this time.  I’m laughing again – the mind is a funny, funny thing!)

Dating back even further.  To when my first daughter was an infant, and I was driving back and forth across the Bay Bridge to visit my husband’s grandmother.  Thanks to his engineering class, I learned that, in the event of an earthquake, a portion of the eastern span of the bridge was meant to fall into the bay, to prevent the entire thing from pulling itself apart (this is good engineering, by the way).  And I obsessed over what I would do if that happened while I was on the bridge.  I calculated how fast we’d be going when we hit the water, and that, unfortunately, we were likely to survive the fall.  Which meant drowning, unless I could get a window cracked before we hit the water and the electronics shorted out, so the car could fill and equalize the pressure so I could open a door and get us out.  I imagined the whole thing in my head again and again and again. And again.  And again.  It was awful.  And then I read about neuroplasticity, and about the ability of the brain to rewire itself, and I decided I was going to get off that superhighway of bridge-collapse-drowning despair and rewrite the neural connections.  But to do that, I had to notice when I started down the story so that I could step away from it.  Which I did.

Mindfulness. 

I could go on and on.  But what this all means is that, as I have begun to come to realize, I have long had a robust mindfulness practice.  One that has given me deep insight into my mind and its inner workings, as well as into the fundamental interconnectedness of all beings (the realization of which is, in itself, yet another essay).  A practice that did not, in spite of my flirtation with meditation in my twenties, rely in any way on sitting meditation.

And yet, to this day, when people talk about their years of mindfulness practice, I have trouble claiming the depth of my own, precisely because it was not a silent sitting practice.

And isn’t that interesting.

My reading and talking to other people suggests that I am not alone in this.  That being able to complete long sits, and, especially, long silent retreats, are considered some kind of gold standard against which all other practices are held.  This strikes me as a limiting and limited way of assessing and judging practice.  Totally aside from the problematics of assessing others’ practice, when assessing our own, is it really productive to judge it on the basis of: I sat for X hours, or Y many days in a row, or Z number of retreats this year?  As a friend recently asked me when I spoke with her about going on retreat (and I should say here that I am not against retreats in general, and that my retreat experiences have been intensely valuable in my overall practice, and that I’m looking forward to finding the time and money to go on another one):  in aid of what?

Day 88: Potential, Part I

I've been thinking a lot about that realization I had the other day that I'm not writing about (some of) the things that are on my mind the most, because I really want to get them right.  So, in the spirit of letting go of that a little, here's a short series on something that really has been occupying a lot of mental real estate lately.  Imperfect, but out there.

“Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.”  - Jon Kabat-Zinn

I don’t think it would be an understatement to say that mindfulness has saved my life.  At the same time, it is also true that I have often felt, and still feel, alienated from and resistant to mindfulness. 

I know.  It’s complicated.

I’m not even sure where to start.

I think that, because I am a linguistic anthropologist, it’s perhaps best to start with the ways that words like meditation and mindfulness are used, and the prototypes that build up around those uses.  Of most interest to me is how those prototypes exclude certain practices and people, in ways that are actually antithetical to the practice of mindfulness.  In ways that rob mindfulness practice of its potential to radically transform social structures and relationships. 

In my twenties and thirties, living in Berkeley and even after moving down to Southern California, I knew lots of people who engaged in what we might think of as present-oriented activities, especially yoga and meditation.  In that context, my exposure to meditation often came from people who talked about how hard it was.  Especially when talking about sitting for long periods, or going on meditation retreats, from which they would come back talking about excruciating physical pain, mental and emotional storms, and, at the end, a fantastic feeling of peace and oneness with everything that, inevitably, they would describe as “wearing off”.  From my perspective, I could go for a hard workout, work on my dissertation, and drink a glass of wine with the same effects, and with a lot less expenditure of time and money.

More seriously, I felt (and still do feel) a very deep resistance to the idea of putting myself into a situation that causes extreme physical pain, just for the opportunity to watch that pain mindfully.  As someone who has lived with chronic nerve pain, and who had survived several bouts of deep depression, I just could not, for the life of me, discern the need to create more pain for myself.  It felt unkind.  And also limiting, in the sense that it seemed like a practice that couldn’t be open to everyone.  I knew people, myself included, who just physically could not sit for ten hours a day.  To do so would be to ignore the very real limitations of my body.

Unfortunately, in some settings and with some people, to say that is to show, not discernment, but resistance.  And the prescription is to get on that cushion and suck it up.

I tell this story in conjunction with the definition of mindfulness above, to point to the ways in which mindfulness practice, in the West, has come to be identified almost solely with sitting meditation, and with the project of self-knowledge and self-improvement.  And I want to suggest that, while the self-knowledge gained through individual practice has been one of the greatest gifts of my life, I feel strongly that by limiting our understanding and practice of mindfulness to that, we also limit its radical and transformative potential to the transformation of the individual. (The assumption being that that is sufficient.)

My resistance to what I perceived to be a potentially damaging practice caused me to avoid sitting meditation entirely (even though I had had a sitting practice in my twenties).  I have come to see that as a form of wise discernment.  Even as I was avoiding sitting meditation, however, that same wise part of myself knew that mindfulness, and the Buddhist tenets upon which secular Western mindfulness is largely based, had something important to offer.  In seeking out information about the practice of mindfulness, I also continued to carefully watch and attend to my aversion, exploring its causes and conditions, noting how it felt in my body, and what stories attached themselves to it.

And I’m laughing at myself right now.  Because even though the next part of this story is about how I came to realize that I’d been practicing mindfulness for more than two decades before I allowed myself to call my practice “mindfulness”, I had not, until the moment of this writing, realized that, in all of the careful ways that I recognized and attended to my aversion to sitting meditation as it was being offered to me, I was practicing mindfulness. 

That is funny!

Two books changed everything for me, slowly slowly, but surely.  The first was the wise little book Buddhism Without Belief, which not only gave me permission to practice secular Buddhism, but also brought me to an understanding of non-attachment which let me – a parent who could not imagine feeling non-attachment to my children – begin to recognize the Four Noble Truths, and to explore the practices offered by each one.  That is the subject of another essay.  The second book was called The Mindfulness Revolution; it is a collection of essays about the practice of mindfulness, gathered together in one place.  In one essay, the author said something along the lines of: we don’t sit in meditation to get better at sitting or breathing, or even to get better at meditating; we sit in meditation to strengthen our ability to be present in our day-to-day lives. 

What?

Nothing I’d heard from anyone I knew who sat in meditation had led me to believe that the practice that took place on the cushion was meant to be a practice that continued off the cushion.  I literally thought that the goal of meditation was to create a peaceful feeling that lasted for a while after the practice ended, and then wore off and had to be renewed.  And I couldn’t make that make sense to me.  But this – this made sense.  I understood it in my mind to be like going to the gym.  At the time, I hated exercise.  So when I exercised, god knew it wasn’t to get better at exercising – it was to be strong for picking up my daughters and swinging them around, for grabbing all the bags of groceries in one trip in from the car, for going camping with my dog and my family.  In other words, I exercised so that all the muscles I built up in the gym were available to me in my real life.

You mean meditation works that way?

Turns out, the answer is yes.

Day 49: The mission of education

I'm in the throes of getting ready to lead a faculty learning community (FLC) about contemplative pedagogy.  I've been using contemplative pedagogical methods for years now, and have been part of an FLC on this subject, but I've never led one by myself, so I'm a bit nervous.  That's not what this is about though (I'm sure I'll feel compelled to write about that at some point).  Nor is it about contemplative pedagogy per se (although I know I need to say what I mean by that at some point).  Instead, as I was re-reading the first assignment for the FLC, I found this quote, and I just needed to share it, because it says something that I believe in completely, but that I think is usually not at all on the minds of those making decisions about education today:

"When I think about the reforms needed if higher education* is to serve our students and our world faithfully and well, I think there should be a litmus test for every project that claims to strengthen the mission of our colleges and universities.  Does this proposal deepen our capacity to educate students in a way that supports the inseparable causes of truth, love, and justice?  If the answer is no, we should take a pass and redouble our efforts to find a proposal that does."  (emphasis mine)
     - Foreword, Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning (Daniel Barbezat and Mirabai Bush)

Can you imagine a world where that was the litmus test for education?  The mind boggles.

*For my money, this applies to all levels of education - and perhaps should be even more important at the K-12 level.

Day 44: (Mis)representation, Part 3

At the end of Part 1, in which I shared the true confession that I really believed that roadrunners were emu-sized, Ellen commented, simply: Misrepresentation matters. 

Yes!  Exactly!  That is exactly it.  This is the other half of my Day 29 post, representation.  Representation matters, because it reminds us that our way of being and seeing the world isn't the only way.  It offers us another standard for normal.

And misrepresentation matters, because we form our ideas of how the world works based not only on our own experience, but also on the stories and images that we hear and see.  We experience those, too.  In many cases, these pervasive images and stories about people become more powerful than our own experiences.  And then, in turn, we interpret our experiences through the expectations that come from those images and stories. 

Let me give you an example.  One day many years ago, when I was a student in the Bay Area, I was driving somewhere in Oakland, and I got lost.  This was well before cell phones, so I pulled over to get out my handy dandy Thomas Guide, and two guys came up to the car to see if I was lost.  They gave me directions, and I thanked them, and I got where I was going. 

If you know the demographics of Oakland, you know that the chances were good that these two young men were African-American (in fact, they happened to be).  At the time, Oakland had a very high crime rate.  And representations of African-Americans were (and still are) often of urban youth, portrayed as gang-involved, dangerous, etc etc.  When I told someone about my experience - feeling grateful that these guys had been able to help me - her first response was, I can't believe you talked to them, they were probably planning to carjack you.

Now, here's the thing.  If it had been her, and she'd pulled over and been approached in the same way, she would have double-checked to be sure her doors were locked, pulled away, and told people (and believed) that she'd narrowly avoided a carjacking.  Her experience was interpreted through a lens that she already held, and then reinforced that lens and made it real. 

We often suggest that if people could only meet one another, they'd understand that their stories about The Other aren't true.  But I think what I'm saying is that it isn't quite that simple.  If we interpret our interactions with other people through powerful preexisting lenses that are informed by pervasive misrepresentations, the chances are high that we will interpret what we see in light of our beliefs, and we'll end up reinforcing those beliefs, rather than disrupting them.  I'm not saying that it's not important to create many many opportunities for people of different backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, and so on, to interact.  But I am saying that it isn't sufficient.  And I am saying that we need to think carefully about how people are represented.  We often mock or roll our eyes at folks when they call out problematic representations - but they all matter.  It's not about being politically correct - it's about realizing that all those "little jokes" and "mistakes" add up to something really big and intractable.

Because it's not just about thinking that roadrunners are emu-sized, or that rabbits hatch from eggs.  It's about thinking that a young woman who gets raped after having several drinks or while wearing something revealing was asking for it.  Or that she actually wanted it, but then was too embarrassed to admit it, and so made a false accusation.  Right?

Misrepresentation matters.  Amen.

Day 35: What does it mean to be free to speak?

So, this is a post about something I mull over quite a bit.  It's not going to be the last post on this (and it probably isn't the first, but I'm too lazy to go back and look at other places where I might have mulled/ranted/opined/otherwise engaged in discourse about this).  It has to do with freedom of speech, hate speech, freedom to speak, the First and Second Amendments, and so many other things.  In this moment, the context for thinking about these issues is the hideous hate crimes that took place recently in California, Texas, and Ohio.   Also, the way that language preceding the El Paso violence, in particular, chimes with hateful language which is always already there, but which seems to be on the rise.

Further context for this has to do with free speech on my particular college campus, and the way that speech is protected and exercised, and by whom.  There's a lot to unpack there, but for the moment, recent precipitating events for me in thinking about this are these:
- An African-American student was referred to our health services (the details aren't available, due to FERPA), and was removed from a classroom by police pursuant to that referral;
- A white student, after being reported multiple times for posting hateful misogynistic, white-supremacist and anti-Semitic speech on classroom online discussion boards (nothing was done on the basis of those referrals), engaged in a terrorist attack at a local synagogue, killing a woman and injuring others;
- Female students have been followed down the quad by older white men holding placards with religious quotes, screaming at those women that they are whores and Jezebels, and telling male students that these women will drag them (the male students) down to hell with them.  This is protected, says our campus administration and police, by the fact that our entire campus is a "free speech zone".

The terrorist at El Paso, like our student who committed the hateful and tragic crime at the synagogue in Poway, preceded his attack with a post of a screed that is the definition of hate speech.

I am an ardent supporter of free speech.  I am a trained ACLU legal observer.  I am also a linguist who understands that speech is, inherently, action.  It does something in the world.  Speech is also intertextually linked to other speech, and to specific acts, in many cases.  Intertextuality refers to the process by which we understand a given text (which can be speech, written representations of speech, symbols, etc) through reference to other, similar, texts, or to texts which have been linked to it in many circumstances over the past.  For example, the text of a burning cross is intertextually linked to violence and death, perpetrated by white bodies upon black bodies.  They're inextricable.  The same is true of the swastika - a religious symbol in many many cultures over millenia, now (I would argue) impossible to extricate from Nazism and anti-Semitic violence and hatred. 

The standard pro-free-speech response to the question of what to do about hate speech is to support the rights of the hateful to speak, and to advocate for more speech in return - for those who disagree to speak out in response to the hateful speech.  I have advocated that course of action many times.  Furthermore, the definition of hate speech that actually should be policed in other ways is very interesting: it is usually understood (in court cases) to be speech which can reasonably be expected to lead to physical response of some kind in retaliation, or speech which creates a dangerous situation.  Direct (credible) threats and harrassment are usually also not protected speech.

But I have come to realize that that is not an unproblematic prescription, and these definitions are also not unproblematic.  In fact, both the prescription of "more speech", and the definitions of hate speech, assume (as we so often do) a "standard reasonable person", read: a white man. 

Think about it: if an African-American man engages in physical violence in response to hate speech, he is not going to be judged to be a reasonable person, responding reasonably to provocation - he is going to be read through a very different lens, one which is informed by centuries of texts arguing that Black bodies are dangerous.  If a woman responds with violence, it won't go much better for her (doubly if she is a woman of color).  But, in fact, women are much less likely to defend themselves physically than men, because angry and hateful words directed at women, intertextually, link to physical violence and sexual assault.  It is not safe for a woman to yell back at someone who calls her Jezebel.  So the definition of hate speech becomes hard to apply to cases where the target isn't a white man.  This is also true of the prescription to just speak more: women and people of color speaking out do not get the same reception that white men do, and they are also at much higher risk of a violent response to their speech.

A colleague of mine has a student who told her about going to a crowded music festival with female friends.  A man grabbed one of the women's rear end; when another woman in the group called him out on it, he hit her so hard he broke her cheekbone.  When women speak out, they risk being hurt.  Or, they risk being threatened with hideous physical violence (usually sexual in nature; I've never yet seen a man, posting something disagreeable online, being threatened with rape, but it happens to women so often that we mostly don't even talk about it).

In other words, by exercising freedom of speech in specific ways (ways in which the speech itself is an act which intertextually links to violence and, by so doing, creates an environment of violence), those who engage in hate speech shut the doors on the right to the freedom of speech of others.  It is problematic and simplistic to say that the targets of that hate speech just need to speak out more - saying that denies a reality in which speaking out in response is dangerous, or is policed and silenced.

I am by no means saying we get rid of freedom of speech; I'm not even necessarily saying that we need to narrow our definition of free speech.  I am saying that we need to think carefully about simplistic understandings of how free speech is enacted, who gets to enact free speech with relative impunity, and whose freedom of speech is regularly abrogated by credible threats of violence, whether overt or implied.  When I think about whatever back-door conversations went on after the Poway shooter's hateful screeds were reported on campus, whatever "free speech" arguments were made that kept him from being policed in the same way that the African-American student was policed, I also think about who wasn't getting to exercise their right to free speech in those same forums.  Which students were afraid to speak, lest it result in violence?  Because let's be clear, this man's speech arose out of a tradition of violence, and resulted in violence.

I don't know what to suggest, but I think we'd better be having conversations about this for sure.  I'd love to hear your thoughts - this isn't something to consider in a vacuum, I don't think...

Day 9: Intent and impact

A lot of ink has been spilled in recent days over whether or not Trump is a racist.  I want to contend, perhaps controversially, that it doesn't matter.  And, in fact, that arguing over whether or not he (or anyone else) is racist doesn't serve those of us who are deeply concerned about this kind of discourse.  It doesn't serve us, not because what he's saying isn't racist, but precisely because it is.  And this is where the distinction between intent and impact really matters.

I'm a linguist (I may have mentioned this before).  And, in fact, I'm a linguistic anthropologist.  So you might say that my stock in trade is based in the understanding that speech* is action.  To say something is to do something in the world.  (Maybe reread that, because it's the foundation of the whole rest of this post.)

What this means is that we are not responsible only for what we mean by our words, but also for what they do.  I understand that this is the point where all of us, including me, to one degree or another, feel resistance.  But surely I can't be responsible for all of the possible impacts of my words - what about people who are hypersensitive?  What about stuff I didn't know could be hurtful?  Why can't people give me the benefit of the doubt?  And I get it.  I truly do.

That doesn't change the fact that our words have an impact. And the more that those words ring with broader discourses and social structures that create and reinforce inequalities, the more we are responsible for their impacts.  A useful term here is "intertextuality", the idea that every text (spoken texts count) is understood in no small part through its links to other texts, past and present.  No speech event stands in isolation. 

I think it also helps to unpack what it means to say that a particular speech event is racist (or sexist, or misogynist, and so on).  (I should say before I go on that there's really no way to cover this well in a space this short - this is a massive national conversation we need to be having - and I was tempted to say nothing at all, but I think that way lies complicity, so here I go.)  A racist speech event is one that upholds and justifies the structures which legitimate one group of people's ways of being and doing as right and natural for our society as a whole.**   

As a relevant aside, I have been struck by the many people who are upset by those who criticize what they call "our" way of life.  Who is the "we" there?  It is white, Christian, and patriarchal.  The use of "our" is another racist speech event that upholds those identities as normative, right, legitimate.  And it simultaneously denigrates anyone who would hold alternative perspectives.***

A racist speech event is about power.  It upholds the power, in this country, of white folks to say what they want; it upholds and justifies the structures that allow that to happen.  It upholds and legitimizes the violences that keep people of color from speaking (physical, emotional, psychological, political, and so on).  A single speech event, through the process of intertextuality, draws upon and feeds the many other speech events that create a system of racism in this country.  In other words, speech doesn't just reflect what is, it creates it in an ongoing way.  It reifies structures - makes them real.  As fiber artists (which I know many of you are), we know that a single strand of yarn may be weak, but a knitted or woven structure is strong.  In the same way, a single speech event, all by itself, may not seem strong - but we must acknowledge and understand that each speech event is interwoven with many many others.  And that interweaving makes them strong.  It creates impact.

I started this off by saying that it doesn't really matter if Trump is a racist (and boy, am I having trouble not also writing this about misogyny).  And here's why.  When someone says that he (or anyone else who says something that justifies and reinforces structures of racism) is a racist, it's all too easy to duck that charge, as we are seeing here.  And then we get into arguments about whether a person really is racist.  (Check out this video, which I show my students each semester - Jay Smooth gets at this point in a fun and useful way.)  But it doesn't really matter whether someone is racist in their heart of hearts.  Instead, it's critical to focus on what their words are actually doing out there in the world.  As many have argued in their analyses of the implications of telling four women of color, all US citizens (and three of whom were born here in the US), to go home if they are going to criticize anything about the US, these words do a number of things out there in the world, all of them racist.  They say that some people are allowed to criticize the US, and others aren't. I'd like to point out that no-one has told Bernie Sanders to go home.  Or Elizabeth Warren.  That is a text (silence is also a text) which links to this one, and tells us that white folks (and especially white men) can engage in criticism of the US, but that women of color cannot.  These words tell us which folks can become US citizens, and whose membership in our national community, no matter how long they've been here, is contingent.  Barring Native Americans, we all came here from somewhere - some of us willingly, others as enslaved human beings.  No-one ever, not ever, tells white men to go home.  Their immigrant status is gone in a generation.  People of color do not get that consideration.  (This chimes with the birther lies about President Obama, which only make sense if the citizenship of people of color is always contingent.)

Even Lindsay Graham's statement reinforces this message: "I don't think [Trump's statement] is racist to say.  I don't think a Somali refugee embracing Trump would be asked to go back.  If you're racist, you want everybody to go back because they are black or Muslim."  It is not true to say that if you're racist, you'd want everybody to back.  Racism is about maintaining systems of inequality.  Insisting that people of color are OK as long as they agree with you is, you guessed it, part of a system of inequality.  It relies on and replicates racism. 

I know from teaching about this in my classes that it's really hard to step into the idea that our words are implicated in immense and intractable structures of racism and misogyny.  It feels too big.  I think we end up feeling frightened by the weight of responsibility that this implies, and when we're frightened, we often get angry (so much easier to feel righteous indignation than fear and shame).  As I try to help my students see (and as I try to remember myself), the fact that our words have so much power should give us not only pause and an incentive to be careful, but also hope.  If my words can reinforce structures of power inequity, institutionalized forms of violence, surely they can also help to undo them?  At the very least, I have the power to choose not to make real the things that I don't want to see in the world.

When someone calls us out on the impact of our words, and we respond by saying things like, "but I didn't mean it that way", or "why are you so sensitive?", we are speaking from and defending our smaller selves.  When we say, "but I didn't know" that it would have that impact, or that it does that thing out there in the world, that is true sometimes.  It seems, though, that once we know better, we can do better.  Not out of a sense of self-flagellation or martyrdom, but rather because there's something important about being actively engaged in creating the world we want to live in.  Something that speaks to our larger Selves, the selves that understand that we live in community, that interconnection makes us better.  Bringing about Martin Luther King Jr's Beloved Community, a world where we can look at one another and see ourselves in all other beings - it doesn't happen in isolation.  It doesn't happen if we indulge in guilt or shame, or if we hide from the consequences of our actions.  And it certainly doesn't happen without care for our words, precisely because they are action. 



*"Speech" is (not unproblematic) shorthand for language in both its primary - oral and manual (signed) - and secondary (written) forms.
**Please note: this is why reverse racism really isn't a thing.  Even if individual people are biased against white folks, they don't have the structures of power behind them, and their bias doesn't create structures of power which disadvantage white folks. I know that it's tempting to think that they do, but the data show otherwise.
*** Please also note: to believe that this was, at any point in its past, a white nation is to disregard the facts of history.  Our history books have been written to give that impression. Which, of course, implicates those books in this project of upholding racial inequities.  This is also why it's problematic to say that people of color (and women, and LGBTQ folks, etc) are playing "identity politics".   We're all playing identity politics - it's just that white, Christian, male identities are allowed to remain unspoken, so when policies are put in place that benefit that particular group, we call that business as usual.

Day 7: Who needs to "go back"?

This has been coming to mind over the last few days, so I thought I'd post, as it makes me laugh in a dark and sassy kind of way...

A slightly different perspective on belonging and respect, in response to this week's deeply problematic twit storm:

Mulling over harrassment - long and anguished

OK, you know this had to happen, right?  I mean me, sharing some thoughts about #metoo and sexual harrassment and Franken and Moore and the whole thing.  Please feel free to skip this if it isn't your cup of tea, and return next time for our regular programming.

I have, as I'm sure many of you have, been watching and contemplating and contextualizing and trying to understand and processing how I feel about each of these revelations and their consequences or lack thereof, and wanting to write something about it, but haven't quite been sure where to start.  It seems to me that there are so many threads that must be followed to come to even some sort of understanding of the whole fabric that, as it were, clothes this moment in history - which one to pick at first?

Having just spent a weekend at my annual conference (and there's a post in the queue about that), the American Anthropological Association's Annual Meetings, I've been thinking a lot about positionality.  The idea there is that the various elements of my position - elements which are commonly thought of as identity, but which I would think of as being much more fluid and less stable than the noun "identity" suggests - have a significant relationship to my perspective on the world.  They should, therefore, not be taken for granted; there is no objective or right or unmarked position from which anyone can stand and opine.  So, it's perhaps worth coming right out and stating that I am: a European-American, cisgendered, straight, married, upper-middle-class, non-theist/animist, feminist, progressive woman who has two daughters and a PhD in the social sciences.  And so much more, as you know (a knitter, a horse owner, a hiker, a reader, a friend - the list, as it does for all of us, goes on).

For the purposes of understanding my thoughts about sexual harrassment, the label "progressive" up there is perhaps the most relevant.  To me, being a progressive is different from (although with some overlap) being a liberal, and means that I believe that we, as a society, can do better than we have in the past.  Not by rejecting everything from the past part and parcel, but rather by learning from it, and reaching toward something better in the future.  For me (and I wouldn't presume to think that this is how all progressives think), that means doing my best to create a world that resembles the Beloved Community discussed as early as the early 20th century (the philosopher Josiah Royce), although it is perhaps most associated with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  The way I tend to think of the beloved community is this: that when we look at other human beings, we see ourselves.  As an animist, I actually would extend that to the planet as a whole, but that's a discussion for another day.  By seeing ourselves, I do not mean, being like ourselves; I mean seeing them as full and complete human beings, with the same desires for respect and peace and safety and well-being that we have.  Seeing here means holding all the complexity of another person with affection and acceptance.  If we look at another person and see ourselves, surely we would not want them to suffer, to be lacking in the resources that they need to live a full life, to feel fundamentally that they are not cared for and respected?  Love informs the beloved community, not power.

Power informs sexual harrassment, not love.  Not only power, but a lens that views women as not-people, not-self - instead as available for the whims of men either because those men are in power or because they want to feel powerful.  (I realize that men are also sexually harrassed by other men; however, for the moment, I am going to center the perspective of women for two reasons: one, that perspective so rarely takes center stage, and two, the vast majority of those who endure sexual harrassment and assault are women.)

There are a number of threads that feed into a culture that accepts harrassment as part of the normal workings of everyday life.  One of the most insidious is the one that frames men as a) highly sexual, b) inherently violent, and c) out of control of both their sexuality and violence.  The onus for controlling men's sexuality and violence therefore falls on women.  It is of critical importance to note that this is a social construct: men are not inherently more sexual or violent than women, and they are certainly not more out of control of their impulses than women.  A culture of toxic masculinity both gives men permission to understand themselves this way, and traps them into that understanding, denying them access to their whole selves, selves that need and want love and affection and a full range of emotion, selves that often pay serious physical and emotional prices for locking away those sides of themselves.  The NYT had a great article today on exactly this, the power of touch and how critical it is for all human health, and how men's touch is so frequently given only two avenues for expression: violence, and sex (and how often those two then become conflated).

Another thread is one which treats women as somehow not belonging to the more general class of "people".  Women are framed as weak and in need of protection; they are also framed as the purview of men.  I can't tell you how many times I have heard people say, either "I was raised" (if the person is a man), or "I raised my boys" (a parent speaking of sons) "to respect women/to never hit a girl"; these often come in one breath.  To which I invariably respond (or bite my tongue to stop myself from responding), why just women and girls?  Why don't we raise our boys to not hit people?  And to include women and girls in the class of "people"?  This framing reinforces an understanding of women as weak, and in need of protection (usually by a man, which in turn reinforces our understanding of women as belonging to men).  Imagine how different things might be if we raised people to respect people, where respect means many things, including allowing all people the integrity of their bodies.

Related to this thread is that of our treatment of women when it comes to reproduction.  Women's bodies become the belongings of society.  We regulate their access to birth control, and to reproductive health services, including abortion.  Powerful men who enact the laws that regulate these things publicly sometimes encourage "their" women to make use of these services, up to and including the abortions that these men attempt to make illegal, when it suits the interests of those powerful men.  Our nation's handling of women's bodies is, to my mind, one of the places where we are farthest from the beloved community that I spoke of earlier.  If we truly value humans and human lives, why would we not do two things: ensure that women have access to safe, legal abortions, and, at the same time, work our hardest to create a world where that service is needed rarely?  By that I mean valuing all life: the lives of mothers before, during, and after conception and birth, and the lives of children after they are born.  This means easy and affordable access to: birth control; prenatal and postnatal health services; health care for infants and children; real food; high-quality public education from kindergarten through college; safe places to live and play; either support for mothers who decide to stay home, or high-quality affordable child care for those who need or want to work outside the home; a living wage.  Also, a world in which they do not have to fear sexual assault.  Do you see?  Women are vulnerable.  Laws which deny women full and free rights to their bodies and to choices about reproduction treat women as lesser humans and as society's possessions.  Our current system, which limits women's access to birth control and health services, and which doesn't support them in raising healthy children, a social system which simultaneously supports men in (and even encourages them) harrassing and assaulting women with few, if any consequences (and certainly even fewer when it comes to then raising and supporting children who might result from such assaults), is a nightmare.  It is also the natural result, and perhaps even definition, of patriarchy.

It is in the context of this nightmare that the assaults that we are hearing about occur, and have occurred for lifetimes.  It is in this context that women live with these assaults as the tax that they pay for being born in a woman's body.  If women were people, in the way that men are people, can you imagine how the world might be instead?  I am reminded here of Muriel Rukeyser: "What would happen if one woman spoke the truth about her life?  The world would split open."

And to some degree, that is what has happened.  I think it's time and past time that we split this particular aspect of the world open.  This is what I mean by being a progressive: I don't think that our past practices serve us here in creating the beloved community in which mutual respect and love govern our relationships to one another; the patriarchy that our current social relationships are founded upon doesn't allow for that - because it is, rather, a social order grounded in power relationships.

And here's where things get complicated.  It seems to me, in watching what's happening, that progressives such as myself are embracing this moment as a chance to split the world open, to try to realign our priorities to include all humans in our vision for a just, fair, and equal society.  The ousting of politicians like Franken, a man whose public face supported women's equality even while his private life included actions that were not in alignment with that, is a reflection of the desire to ensure that accountability happens, even for men whom we like.  What scares me is that it appears that conservatives are not interested in creating the same culture of accountability and change within their ranks.  (I want to note here that I'm speaking of general trends, not individuals.)  The fact that our current sitting President was elected after being heard on tape bragging about assaulting women, coupled with what looks like the immanent election of Roy Moore, is what points me towards this conclusion.  That worries me on a couple of levels.  If one of the two groups who struggle for political power in this country is trying in this moment to stand on principle and oust men who actually support policies that support women, while the other of those two groups is willing to abandon principle to elect men who are harassers, in order to maintain power - well, we have a problem.  It means that we disagree fundamentally on whether it is important to value women in this society that we are in the process (always and forever) of creating.  It also, I think, means that we have fundamentally different ideas about what it means to respect women.  The perspective that I have articulated here holds that respecting women means treating women like people; the more conservative perspective, as I see it represented in a broad range of public discourse, holds that respecting women means protecting them, preferably in the safety of their homes and roles as child-bearers and -rearers; it also separates the worlds of men and women, and holds that separation as natural and proper, instead of understanding it to be an aspect of a very particular historical moment.

At the same time, that isn't the only thing that concerns me about this particular historical moment.  I worry about due process.  To some degree, Franken and Trump are easy cases - there is documentation, visual or audio, of their harrassment of women.  That, however, isn't true in all cases.  And while I happen to believe the women who have accused Moore and, say, Weinstein, at the same time, I am not an advocate of vigilante justice, and there is something worrisome about, say, firing people (e.g., Matt Lauer among many others) without some kind of due process.  And yet, we all know that due process is deeply (and I do mean deeply) flawed.  There are cases upon cases of men being let off with few to no consequences for atrocities committed upon female bodies (Brock Turner, I'm looking at you).  So I understand the urge to grab this moment and make. someone. pay.

I don't even know what to suggest here.  I only know that I am troubled.  That I believe with all my heart that women are people and should be allowed a full range of expression and self-determination.  That I believe with all my heart that men are people and should be allowed a full range of expression and self-determination.  That I believe that we can create a world in which those things are possible. But that we are far away from that world, and, I fear, getting further.  I reread this and feel that it's too long, and yet there is so much I didn't get to say.  I welcome your thoughts and insights.

ETA: As a reward for getting through all that, two humorously serious takes on consent and harrassment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRYlfjlFLk (Tracee Ellis Ross rocks)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZwvrxVavnQ. (tea and consent)

A funny thing happened on the way to the barn...

A post with musings about partisanship and conversations.

So, a funny thing did, indeed, happen at the barn a bit ago, and I've been mulling it over off and on ever since.  First, full disclosure:  I have bumper stickers on my car.  This is actually a fairly recent phenomenon (I was always a bumper stickerless sort of person until recently; I still wear my bumper stickered status kind of uncomfortably - it may change).  The bumper stickers on my car are: Coexist; A woman's place is everywhere; the Obama sticker that says "Hope over fear"; I'm with her; and 13.1.  My basic policy about bumper stickers is this: they must say what I stand for, not what I stand against.

So, I recently pulled into the ranch where Disco boards and drove (slowly! speed limit 5 mph!) over to the bathrooms to change.  As I did, I noticed a man walking in the same direction from the covered arena - I pegged him as a dad waiting for his daughter to finish her lesson, and smiled.  I tend to feel friendly towards people at the barn, assuming that, whatever else may be true, we share some interest in horses one way or another.  He seemed very occupied with examining my car (which I should also note, in the interests of full disclosure, is an old and very dirty Prius - I do a lot of driving, some of it on dirt, and it shows).  I headed into the bathroom to change, and when I came out, he was past my car and turning to look at it, again, over his shoulder. 

I got in, started up, and was pulling out when I saw he'd circled back.  I unrolled my window.  Looking back, I was still in the mode of assuming that our common element was horses, and I think my expectation was that he was going to ask whether I had a horse at the barn, or whether I worked with one of the trainers, or something along those lines. 

He said, "I couldn't help but notice your bumper stickers."

At which point, I wondered whether we were on the same page, in a social justicey kind of way.  Once in a while, people will comment on liking one of the bumper stickers.

He said, "We don't see eye to eye at all, politically."  Oh.

"Oh?"  (Because I wasn't quite sure where to go with that.)

"I voted for Trump, and I have to tell you, I am very happy right now."  (This was a few days after the first immigration ban.)

I made another semi-interested, noncommittal noise.  Mostly because I was taking it in, and trying to figure out exactly what was going on.  In the moment, my sincere feeling was that he'd never actually met anyone who thought the things I had on my bumper stickers, and he was checking out the liberal in the wild.  Friends later suggested that he was trying to pick a fight.  Maybe I was picking up on that, too.  But my strongest feeling was this: he was not seeing me as a person.  I don't know what he was seeing, but it really wasn't me.  He said,
"We really do not see eye to eye!"

And I, not knowing what else to do with that uncomfortable feeling that he wasn't seeing me, and I really would feel much better if he did, stuck my hand out the car window and said,
"Hi.  My name is Jocelyn.  It's really nice to meet you!"

He stopped short.  His hand was halfway out before, I think, he realized what he was doing (those social norms are strong, aren't they?), and he responded by introducing himself.  I told him it was nice to meet him, and he said again: "Well, we really don't see eye to eye."  I said, "That's one of the nice things about a democracy!", and he excused himself and wandered off.

It was weird.  It was weird because I still don't really quite know what he was hoping for in that conversation.  I do think that, whatever it was, he didn't get it.  I think I went seriously off-script.  I'm just curious what the script was supposed to be. 

In a larger way, I also found it interesting that he approached me to tell me that he disagreed with me.  It's not something I would do.  I noticed the same thing yesterday, as I was standing outside my Representative's office with signs - some people would make a point of flipping us off or giving us a thumb's down.  It caught my attention because I regularly drive past a protest outside a health clinic - I don't agree at all with what the protesters stand for, but it wouldn't occur to me to flip them off; it doesn't seem like a conversation starter, you know?  On the other hand, maybe I'm just assuming that such a dialogue can't happen and avoiding engagement?  In other words, should it seem hopeful to me that someone would approach me about my bumper stickers - incipient conversation - or was it the verbal equivalent of the flip-off - no conversation, just an opportunity to say I don't agree with you?  Conversations seem so important, and yet so impossible, right now; I'm not sure what to do about that.  (Although a friend just sent me a link to a roundup of interesting articles about conversations and how to have them: here it is.)  What do you think?  How do you handle seeing visible signs of some stranger's non-alignment with your views in the world?

Meanwhile, the wisteria are blooming, and the leaves on the sycamores are coming out, and the branches on the oaks trees on my morning walk are tipped with new red leaves, almost like flowers.  I think it's spring.

She was warned

Well, I didn't think I'd be posting again quite so soon.  And I'd intended my next post to be a round-up of recent knitting projects that I've completed, and a foretaste of things to come.  (True story: a package just came and I was so sure it was yarn for my next project - I bounded out the door, all excited...  And the nice man handed over a package of wine from a club we belong to.  My face fell.  I don't think that's the reaction he was expecting at all.)

But, time and tide - and crazy doings in the world of politics - wait for no woman.  So, I told you fair warning and here it is: linguistic analysis and feminism incoming...

Today's NYT coverage of the silencing of Elizabeth Warren on the floor of the Senate included, in the front page article blurb online, the following quote from Mitch McConnell*:

"She was warned.  Nevertheless, she persisted."

I have to be honest.  Reading that gave me cold chills.

The more complete quote was:
"She was warned.  She was given an explanation.  Nevertheless, she persisted."

This appears to me (and judging by the articles, tweets, email messages, and Facebook posts going around, I'm by no means alone here) to encompass the history of women in a nutshell, with only the consequences left unstated:  So we silenced her.

I've been mulling this over ever since (while simultaneously plotting with friends to make a t-shirt out of it; if that's your gig, stay tuned), and three things in particular strike me.  They are all linked to one another, and difficult to disentangle, but here goes.

First, and perhaps most simply, what I think resonates for so many women (and the reason why the trending hashtag here is #shepersisted) is that concept of persistence.  Persistence is what we do.  Think of the persistence it takes to do all the "women's work" that, changing times notwithstanding, is called that because it still typically does fall on women: diapers, dishes, laundry, changing sheets/towels/toilet paper, cleaning, child care, parent care - the list goes on and on.  Each of these tasks is one which must be done, but which doesn't stay done; if there's one thing we know, it's that clean dishes don't stay clean, and neither do diapers (alas). It takes a certain degree of dogged determination to hang on to the bigger picture and keep slogging through the daily round, sometimes. 

As knitters, we know this one particularly well.  Nothing but persistence lies between us and an FO we can use or gift, and be proud of.  It's persistence that makes us rip out that miscrossed cable (12 rows back) and fix it.  Persistence is what got countless pink pussyhats knitted in time for the Women's March in January (more discussion of this is bound to be forthcoming; I was fascinated). 

But that persistence can also encode something darker.  What is it that we are persistent in the face of?  Sometimes, as above, it's drudgery or repetitiveness.  But women deploy their persistence in other circumstances.  In the face of demeaning comments, or of being ignored; harrassment, assault, rape; a culture which attempts to deny women the right to determine what happens to their bodies in so many ways - and which calls it locker room talk, even when the talk becomes action.  Women persist as they earn less than men for doing the same work, and they persist in the face of men telling them that wage inequality just isn't a thing.  We persist patiently in the face of (sometimes endless) mansplaining.  (And, as a linguist, can I just tell you how much I love that word - talk about encoding a fabulous and real linguistic construct!)  When we are afraid, whether for our bodies or our sanity, we persist.  We persist in the face of warnings that our presence and behavior are unacceptable, and will have potentially very frightening consequences for us.

There is something even more insidious in those three little sentences, though, something that strikes me in particular as a linguist.  They are encoded in the same kind of language one might use to describe imposing a punishment or consequences for a naughty child.  "I warned her.  I explained why.  She didn't listen, so now she has to face the consequences."  In my gender and language class, I have my students read an article (West and Zimmerman 1983, for those who might be interested) that looks at interruptions - defined (simplifying here a little) as a turn in the conversation that is inserted into someone else's turn, and (this is important) which is disruptive to the conversation (by, for example, changing the subject, or taking the floor over before the first speaker is finished).  The authors first look at adult interruptions of children (contrary to popular belief, adults interrupt children far more often than children interrupt adults).  These interruptions most frequently take place at points in the conversation when children's behavior is deemed problematic by adults, and are used to try to redirect that behavior in order to bring it into line with expectations. 

And here's where things get interesting.  Looking at adult same-sex and cross-sex dyadic (two-person) conversations, it is clear (and this, by the way, shows up in study after study after study) that men interrupt women far more than women interrupt men, or than men interrupt men, or than women interrupt women.  And, moreover, their patterns of interruptions are remarkably congruent with adult interruptions of children.  In other words, men interrupt women at points in the conversation when they deem women's actions or words or thoughts to be problematic, in order to redirect them to fit expectations more closely.  "She was given an explanation" fits right into this; it suggests a speaker with superior knowledge and understanding of how one should behave, someone with the authority and power to require conformity.  (It's also very patronizing.)  This is just one of the many ways in which women are (and have historically been) treated as less than full adults. 

To my mind, this is what those three sentences encode.  We gave her a chance to behave like an adult (as defined by us) and then we interrupted her to force her into line.  The "she was warned" is deeply troubling.  Women who have been "warned", historically, have paid serious and often lethal prices for continuing to persist after that warning.  (I also find the distancing created by the use of the passive voice disturbing - who's the agent here?)  Linguists talk about the concept of "intertextuality" - the idea that a given text is understood at least in part through its link to similar texts produced elsewhere and elsewhen.  This text ("we warned her") is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as located in the context of all those past threats and their consequences.  It means that even though no-one will be burning Warren at the stake (but all those chants, directed at Clinton, of "jail her" and their intertextual links to "burn her" last fall were unmistakable and also resonate here), the chilling warmth of those historical flames is present.

"She was warned.  She was given an explanation.  Nevertheless, she persisted."

Taken all together, the degree of misogyny encoded here is quite remarkable.

ETA:  Male Democratic Senators were allowed to read all or part (depending on the Senator) of Coretta Scott King's letter, including the part that Senator Warren was rebuked for (http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/318515-sanders-dems-read-coretta-scott-kings-letter-after-warren-silenced).  As I said, it's not about party - it's about gender.

*I am focusing here, as a feminist and a linguist, on this text as spoken by a man to a woman in this context.  I could, but won't, also go into why I think the rule that McConnell cited is inappropriately applied here: while the rule states that Senators should avoid accusing other Senators of behavior unbecoming to a Senator (an attempt, I assume, to help stop Senators from engaging in ad hominem attacks on one another instead of debating the merits of legislation; not a bad idea in that context), it seems to me that in this context, Mr. Sessions is being evaluated as a candidate for Attorney General, rather than as the proposer of a bill.  Regardless of political leaning, the misogyny in this message seems like something that should trouble women...