At the end of last year, I published an article in the journal Transcontinental Human Trajectories, my first “official” publication. It is mostly a personal narrative — and I do mean personal — but it also lays out much of my educational philosophy, and sketches my initial trajectory from a school teacher to more of an activist. Although I didn’t use the term “school abolitionist” at the time, you can see the first inklings of that identity starting to crystallize. The abstract is below, and you can click here to read the full article.
In this personal essay, I discuss how shifts in my positionality as an educator changed the dynamics of power between me and my students, how the threshold between informal education and the School marked a clear delineation of power that placed us on opposite sides. My journey as an educator paralleled my personal journey as a Black man in the United States, during which I had to navigate the troubled intersection between race and disability. Along the way I became aware of a “potential-realization gap” — internalized as a hovering sense of inadequacy, and externalized as a deep disillusionment with people and the world.
Where once race had operated on my consciousness from the margins, certain experiences forced me to contend with my identity in ways I had been able to avoid before, in part due to a stark divide between mind and body. With racial consciousness came indignation, manifest in my orientation as a teacher activist, and which I imposed upon my students as the imperative for their — but not my own — liberation. Wading through toxic environments, spaces of collective trauma and bureaucratic rot, any attempts to make change were usually met with fierce resistance.
This disconnect, between mind and body, theory and praxis, school and community, reality and my ideals — exacerbated by racial trauma and ADHD — tore a jagged fissure through my career. Lost in all of this were the young people I was ostensibly fighting for, yet for so long failed to recognize as agents in their own liberation. I had sought in vain the pedagogical method, the repositioning, the creative freedom — something — that would allow me to reconcile the disparities.
But it wasn’t until I approached the decision to leave schools in favor of community education, that I discovered participatory action research (PAR), and with it the need to ground my own work, and that of my charges, in identity, history, shared struggle, and building community. In PAR, I discovered the possibility for collective liberation — a means for bridging the gap within myself, and between myself and the communities I serve.
As a person who prides himself on being critical — perhaps even to an excessive degree — I definitely support dissent and debate. But I also recognize that positions don’t emerge from the ether, without the weight of history and political power behind them. Opposing positions do not enter into some neutral “marketplace of ideas” uninformed by context. Rather, the context, as shaped by history and hegemony, dictates that any two positions will not “compete” on equal terms. For example, in the national “debate” over gay marriage, the weight of public opinion was for many years levied against it.
That a national debate wasn’t even possible for centuries before that, clearly indicates that the two positions — in favor and opposed — did not enter the debate on equal terms. Eventually, as public opinion shifted, and the basic civil rights of queer folx were recognized as worthy of defense, this lead to the legalization of gay marriage nationally. Even then, this didn’t really stop the “debate”, and there continue to be court cases over the rights of queer families, as private businesses deny them service on religious grounds, or states deny them the right to adopt children.
What is vital to understand in this example is that queer folx are and always have been an oppressed class in the United States. This means that any “debate” concerning their rights does not take place in some culturally and politically neutral space. Where the power of the state, reinforced by the cultural norms of the dominant classes are weighted against any group of people, it is often their voices, their perspectives, their rights, which are silenced and suppressed. We do not need any continued “debate” on people’s dignity or sovereignty or safety. Hegemony and counter-hegemony do not exist on equal terms.
Free Speech vs. Cancel Culture
In reading about this debate between “free speech” and “cancel culture”, as mediated by the Harper’s open letter, and the many different responses to it, I feel that there are a few critical points being left out of the discussion. First, it is important to distinguish “call out culture” from “cancel culture”. The former is about raising the issue of accountability, while the latter is about what the consequences should be once a person is held accountable. It seems to me that the two “sides” of this debate are confusing and/or conflating these two concepts.
Where the internet has allowed for a more equitable exchange of ideas (in theory), giving marginalized or oppressed people a platform they lacked before, people in positions of power and privilege can be “called out” for their abuse, and where this calling out is amplified by many voices, there may be in turn a public reckoning — from which “cancellation” is one possible outcome. The signatories and defenders of the Harper’s letter are clearly arguing against “cancel culture” — that is, what they see as the disproportionate punishment of people for expressing certain views, which also has a chilling effect on people expressing those views at all. While I think this can be reasonably seen as a suppression of free speech, punching down should not be granted the same liberty as punching up. The force of justice must back those who are subordinate to Power, just as Power is backed by the force of hegemony and the State.
Those arguing against the Harper’s open letter, most notably the response published by The Objective, are defending the right of people, particularly the marginalized and oppressed, to call out others, which is in itself a defense of their free speech. But there is some nuance to discuss here, with respect to opposing positions not emerging into a neutral space, free of context, or divorced from relationships of power.
As Anthony DiMaggio discusses in CounterPunch, the argument of the Harper’s letter is being made either in bad faith, or with a complete ignorance of or disregard for history and politics in the United States.
We live in a period when the rise of neoliberal capitalism and untrammeled corporate power have cheapened “public” political discourse to serve the interests of plutocratic wealth and power, while assaulting notions of the common good and the public health.
DiMaggio goes on to argue how this power dynamic has historically been heavily weighted against those on the “left” of the political spectrum, particularly in the Academy, where discourses around “professionalism” dictate that all legitimate scholarship remain within a certain ideological “center”, silencing voices on the margins.
This constraining of ideas to the “median” seems to be rooted in white USAmerican norms of white upper/middle class “decorum”, specifically the pressure to avoid conflict, or rather, to avoid any public appearance of conflict. Settle the lawsuits out of court, sign a non-disclosure agreement, don’t talk religion or politics at the dinner table, leave race out of it, and for goodness sakes, put those rainbow flags away, and keep any discussion of sexuality behind closed doors. This is far more complicated than I have time or space to discuss here, but put simply, those who benefit from the status quo (and those who aspire to) — by virtue of social, economic, or political power and privilege — would really quite like it, if the rest of you wouldn’t much mind, if we could just keep things “civil”. A premium is placed on preserving the appearance, not just of civility, but of the fundamental “goodness” of those in power.
Muddying the Waters
The debate becomes confusing and downright bizarre, as the defenders of the status quo scramble, stumble, and fall all over each other in an attempt to keep up appearances, to maintain their claims to a moral superiority. In our current political moment, the Black Lives Matter movement approaches mainstream legitimacy — this only after the murder of George Floyd, a particularly egregious visualization of the Black oppression, suffering, and death which the “mainstream” could no longer ignore or wish away.
The dam finally broke, and countless white people scrambled to make it known that they were nothing like the murderous police officer, that they condemned and disavowed him, and that they had always valued Black lives. To prove it, they would post statements of support on social media, donate to Black causes, march in the streets, and most importantly, put on a performance of punishing those who did not do the same. These include the unapologetic racists, but also those who merely did not express their support publicly, who held the same positions as many of these new defenders of black lives, just minutes before they saw the video of George Floyd being murdered.
These white “woke” people — liberals invested in the performance of superior morality — have co-opted critical discourse and perverted it into some profane purity test of who can be the most symbolically “good” while doing much of nothing to change the reality of the situation. Where they trip and fall all over themselves in their performance of “wokeness”, cherry picking the language away from the substance, they obscure and invalidate the underlying logic of criticality, as advanced by people of color and other marginalized groups (see: critical race theory, queer theory, etc), undermining the very causes for which they claim to stand.
(As a brief aside, I find it extremely frustrating that the term “woke” — Black American vernacular meaning sociopolitical awareness — has been so co-opted and abused as to become a pejorative against white liberals.)
In the name of this fake purity, they’ll risk actual damage to vulnerable communities. I spoke about this in my critique of the Ralph Northam blackface scandal. Democrats (white liberals), in order to stake some imaginary moral high ground, were on the verge of losing the whole governorship of Virginia, which might have lead to policies that actually harmed black people. These are the same people, you’ll remember, who wore Kente cloth stoles in a misguided show of solidarity. Without irony — or self-awareness it would seem — they knelt for nine minutes, basically embodying the white police officer who killed George Floyd, rather than Floyd himself. Their obliviousness and ham-handed pandering might be funny if only these weren’t the same people who hold black lives in their hands as they make decisions for the rest of the country.
This whole conflict, supposedly between “free speech” and “cancel culture” has become so circular and recursive as to completely pollute the waters of reasoned debate. Take this article by Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic, which, at its core seems to be arguing against a narrow view or set of norms, outside of which people meet with disproportionate retribution (i.e. some damage to their reputation or livelihood). Friedersdorf’s argument doesn’t seem to be so much against cancel culture, as it is against its perceived excesses. Navigating this threshold between what makes the personal and professional consequences proportionate to the harm is extremely difficult, mediated as it is by the complex interplay of culture and the dynamics of power, each of which themselves are informed by long histories. Hardly anyone is evaluating a single act — or even a series of actions — within all of this context.
As part of his argument, Friedersdorf cites an New York Times opinion piece by Chad Sanders, in which Sanders makes demands of his friends to hold their own friends and loved ones accountable for various offenses. To be clear, Friedersdorf is critiquing Sanders, who is critiquing his associates, on the grounds that they should be critiquing their friends and family. Friedersdorf characterizes Sanders as using “cult tactics”, seeing him as trying to force other people to behave within very specific parameters. Ironically, what Friedersdorf does in order to make his point, is to take one small part Sanders’ article and divorce it from the larger context, confining it within his own narrow parameters.
Chad Sanders is black. This matters because his article is actually about his frustrations with white friends and colleagues, who in their outpouring of “support”, their expressions of “love”, were not providing him with what he needed or even wanted from them. He is arguing, like I am here, that much of this “support” is performative, a clarion call to the Arbiters of Virtue — the “black friends” of the world — to remind him/them/us that they are the “good” white people. The same dynamic plays out with all kinds of privileged “allies” of marginalized/oppressed people, and how they perform their allegiances.
Friedersdorf couldn’t be concerned with this context, perhaps because it would require too much work for him to navigate the dynamics of power at play, to parse issues of free speech and autonomy from how those things are leveraged by those with power against those without. Sanders’ white friends and colleagues are under no obligation, will not be under any particular pressure,to take his advice. Actual cults are entirely about power: who has it (the cult leader), and who doesn’t (the members). Sanders, as a Black man in America, even at this moment of national reckoning, has absolutely zero power over his white friends and colleagues. Friedersdorf conveniently ignores this dynamic because it better suits his argument to do so. In the process, he uses his power and platform to essentially invalidate Sanders’ entire argument. Is that the “free speech” he is defending then? The freedom to decontextualize and disregard the speech of others?
Friedersdorf also discusses the case of a bookstore called Tattered Cover, which released a statement explaining why they hadn’t come out publicly in support of Black Lives Matter, attributing it to a longstanding policy of political neutrality. This resulted in a backlash, summed up in the statement of author Carmen Maria Machado, who canceled a scheduled engagement at the bookstore, saying that “choosing neutrality in matters of oppression only reinforces structural violence”. The bookstore would later release a second statement, definitively in support of Black Lives Matter, and apologize for “violating the trust” of the community.
For Friedersdorf, this is madness, the bookstore committing “self-flagellation” for no useful purpose, other than “unanimity” — that is, the absolutism of a particular point of view, which he perceives as a threat to solidarity in itself. This is one of the rare times where I find myself in the “middle” of two opposing points of view. While I agree that being neutral within an oppressive dynamic is the same as being complicit, I don’t think this means everyone always has to speak up on behalf of the oppressed in every conceivable situation. Especially not where it isn’t solicited and where one’s action or inaction doesn’t really make a difference.
Does every business need to issue a statement in support of black lives? I don’t think so, especially where it is only symbolic and performative, not backed by any meaningful effort to change the material or social reality for black people. Tattered Cover’s mistake was in making any statement at all. They could’ve quietly donated to black causes, hired some new black employees, featured black books, without any additional performance. If someone wanted to call them out for not making a statement, they could’ve simply pointed to their actual support for black people, in contrast to so many other businesses’ symbolic gesturing. This is the essence of Chad Sanders’s argument.
Prior to the release of the Harper’s letter, Yascha Mounk, one of the signatories, also wrote an opinion piece for the Atlantic, in which he criticized the apparent trend of “innocent” workers and businesses being punished for offenses that violate what he calls a “zero tolerance policy on racism”. The examples he cites are indeed extreme, and speak to the sort of confusing recursion I mentioned earlier. In one case, a group of white executives fire a Mexican employee after another white person, outside of work, allegedly tricks him into flashing a hand sign that other white people (white supremacists) have repurposed to represent “white power”. In this instance, white people caused harm to a person of color (took away his livelihood) in order to, as Mounk says, “signal their good intentions”. This signaling isn’t done toward, or on behalf of people of color, but to other similarly performative white people, as if there’s a competition for who can be the most “woke”, and through that, the most “good”.
Mounk also brings up the case of David Shor, a data analyst who was allegedly fired, not for violating the “zero tolerance policy”, but for merely highlighting the work of someone else who was perceived as having done so. That person — Princeton professor Omar Wasow — came under fire for publishing a paper which argued that non-violent protest yielded better electoral returns than violent protest. Wasow was criticized perhaps for the timing of the release of his study, from which it was inferred that he was not in support of the Black Lives Matter protests. This is a bit of a leap in itself, and for Shor to be fired merely for tweeting a summary of Wasow’s posts — thereby similarly positioning him in perceived opposition to BLM — is indeed absurd. One problem with Mounk’s argument, however, is that in the two cases mentioned above, the employers in question either denied or did not comment on whether these were the reasons for the terminations. The larger problem with Mounk’s argument, which also finds expression in the Harper’s letter, is that these extreme cases are anomalous, and there isn’t any observable trend of “innocent” people being terminated for minor offenses in accordance with a “zero tolerance policy on racism”.
The Harper’s letter cites six nonspecific examples to justify their argument. It’s possible to guess what incidents the signatories might be referring to, and it’s likely that if they listed specific examples, most wouldn’t hold water. But the instances they reference are not part of a new trend at all…
The Non-Power of Cancellation
Earlier, I made the claim that people on both sides of this “debate” are conflating two different concepts: calling out and canceling. To explain that further, I need to return to Friedersdorf’s article. In it he mentions another case, of a principal who is fired for making a statement against Black Lives Matter. Not an obviously racist statement, but criticizing what she saw as “coercion” in the Movement’s methods. She also made the fatal error of saying, in effect, that “Blue Lives Matter, too”.
What the principal did speaks to the critical error in the Harper’s piece, which is using false equivalence. As mentioned previously, in a conflict where two opposing sides do not enter on equal terms, the actions taken by both sides do not have the same social impact. In the conflict between black people and police, there is an enormous power differential to be considered — that is, the police have the power and often wield it against black people. Actions taken by black people against police, nearly the entirety of which are non-violent, cannot be compared, let alone equated to police violence. “Blue lives” aren’t even at stake in this conflict.
At the same time, while I vehemently disagree with the principal’s stance, I also do not think she should have been fired for that statement alone. She absolutely should have been called out and corrected. I also think she should’ve been subjected to some sort of professional “audit”, because if she holds these problematic views of Black Lives Matter, she is likely engaging in poor judgment in other situations of greater importance, given her position of power in the lives of black students. Firing her outright wasn’t about holding her accountable so much as it was about the district signaling that they are on the “right” side of the issue, that they have the moral high ground.
Alternatively, where an “audit” revealed that this principal’s statement was not representative of her views of black people in general, or were not reflected in how she treats black students under her care, this could’ve been an important “teachable moment”. This could’ve been an opportunity for the whole school to receive training on racial justice, or the pretext for bringing about other meaningful changes. Instead, the district chose to maintain the appearance of goodness, and in the process likely drove others with problematic views into hiding, where they may continue to do harm, under the cover of performative wokeness.
This example also reveals the difference between “call out culture” and “cancel culture”. Again, the former exposes the need for accountability, while the latter is about the actual consequences. But it is more nuanced than even this, once we again factor in the dynamics of power. Unlike the examples Friedersdorf and Mounk provide — “extreme” for the very fact that they are so rare — most instances of cancel culture are ultimately ineffective attempts by those without power to bring retribution for abuses committed by those in power. And it is because of the power differential that these attempts are ineffective.
J.K. Rowling, one of the signatories to the Harper’s letter, has been “called out” on numerous occasions for transphobic statements, or defenses of aggressively transmisogynist people. Despite the many calls for her to be “cancelled”, however, she has remained a best-selling author, and a billionaire, with no lasting stain on her reputation, or impact to her livelihood. This says nothing about whether or not she deserves such retribution, but everything about the power of those in a subordinate social position to hold those in power to account. In spite of the pearl-clutching concerns of the Harper’s letter signatories, “cancel culture” — and even this name oversells its reach and its impact — rarely has any lasting effect on the free speech of the powerful and/or prominent voices like the signatories themselves.
Journalist Zaid Jilani (another signatory to the Harper’s letter), speaking on the YouTube Program Rising, pointed to fact that some of the signatories to the Objective counter-letter had to do so anonymously. For Jilani, that they could not take their position publicly without fear of retaliation, is exactly the sort of thing that the Harper’s letter was speaking against. However, this is yet another failure to understand the nuances of power. That the Harper’s letter signatories felt free to sign their letter openly, has everything to do with the fact that the letter upholds the liberal centrist hegemony, evidenced most strongly in its vague, milquetoast language, uncommitted to any serious position, and therefore not a threat to the existing order.
On the other hand, the signatories to the Objective letter, are speaking from the same subordinate position as people of color, queer folx, and other marginalized populations, who regularly have to suppress our speech. This for the fact that our very existence — nevermind any demands for change or accountability — is not only a direct challenge to the existing order, but to Power’s sense of moral superiority. Every day, every instance of where we point to the ways that the status quo is immoral, seems to be perceived by these types as a direct attack on their very identities as “good people”.
Chatterton Williams and the End Run Around Race
Given that I have written about him in the past, there was no way I could address this issue without discussing the author of the Harper’s Letter: Thomas Chatterton Williams. Rather than rehashing the argument against him I made a two years ago, I’ll just say that this is a man who has yet to truly cope with his trauma, even as the entire thrust of his career seems to be in response to it. That he finds himself in a position opposite the majority of critical black voices is directly related to the fact that he has now written two books lambasting some aspect of majority black culture.
It is directly related to his view of a uniquely black cultural product — hip hop — as incompatible with other cultural products, such as (mostly white) literature, which he regards as entirely separate, and superior. It may have been “books” which sustained him in his battle against hip-hop — a battle he won to hear him tell it — but books and hip hop were mere surrogates in theinternal conflict between his conception of own blackness versus that of many others. This conflict was no doubt founded upon Williams’ experience of being rejected by black people in some way, indeed the definitive crisis for tragic mulattoes everywhere.
A conflict thus slices the tender soul of our young hero: Live the unexamined life of thuggish hedonism and machismo, or cultivate self-discipline and become an intellectual like [his father]? Some version of this tension drives every scene in the book, as the battle between brains and “hip-hop” is restaged with plangent, tiring zeal.
For Williams, those other people’s conception of blackness is founded upon trauma and suffering, which he fervently rejects, as someone who claims to have experienced very little of it, and as the son of a man who “overcame” it. With the same sort of individualist thinking that characterizes white Americans at large, Williams disregards black people’s collective trauma and suffering, dismissing it as the discrete experiences of many individuals, who with just a small change in fortune, or by virtue of hard work, could’ve avoided it, or overcome it, as he and his father managed to do.
It seems as if Williams’s entire identity, his tenuous hold on his own blackness, depends on this premise. Because if blackness is defined by trauma and suffering, and he has not experienced these things, then it follows by his logic that he is not black, thereby validating his alienation. He does not seem to grasp that he has, in fact, experienced trauma and suffering, and that it is not these things that define black people’s collective identity, but our resilience. Williams saw the “battle” as being between himself (as represented by “15,000 books”) and other black people (represented by hip-hop), for the right to claim blackness. Really it should have been a collective struggle with other black people against white supremacy. In that he never even recognized the terms of the conflict, his defeat was so absolute, that he also failed to notice when he was converted into an agent in the continuing war against black people.
Because he has managed to cling to his own narrowly defined blackness, he is ironically even able to cite racism to defend himself from criticism, even where that criticism comes on behalf of other black people. At some point, another Twitter user — a white woman — critiqued Williams from a critical race perspective, arguing against his respectability politics, and in the process mentioned his “mixed-race”. Her critique was valid on the merits, but this was one of those times where a white person inserted themselves into an internal conflict between black people. His “mixed race” is actually important, in how it undoubtedly shaped his experiences with blackness and other black people. But that’s really not for a white person to point out, as this Twitter user later acknowledged. This brings up another murky dimension in the whole free speech debate: who should have a voice, and what they can rightfully say, within any given social or political context.
Williams responded by saying, “I believe in another era she would have simply called me ‘uppity.’”. What he evoked there was the historical dynamics of power between black and white people in the U.S., wherein any instance of black resistance, real or imagined, was regarded as black people not knowing their “place”. To be “uppity”, for white people, means a black person attempting to rise above their station, immutable though it may be due to racial inferiority. For Williams to take an argument based in critical race theory, and reject it not on the merits, but because of the race of the messenger, is stunningly hypocritical. This is yet another example of how the free speech vs. cancel-culture debate has become circular and recursive to the point of absurdity, transforming the discourse into an unnavigable slog through muddy waters.
Williams — who we must remember is the sole author of the Harper’s letter — has positioned himself more or less against most black people, in believing, against all evidence, that black oppression is individually experienced, rather than collective and systemic. This allows him to hold firm to the myth of a post-racial society, wherein his experience of blackness is as valid as any other. In fact, his experience is as valid as any other, but for Williams, it requires an invalidation of others’ experience: a rejection of those who rejected him.
His positioning has allowed him to accumulate some measure of prestige and validation — a salve, I imagine, for persisting wounds. But I think even he recognizes this validation as temporary and circumstantial, that he must “renew the contract” every so often by excoriating other black people — even if only implicitly — for reminding white society of our oppression, for challenging their deep sense of moral superiority. Williams, in redefining blackness as entirely divorced from trauma and suffering — in abject denial of history and our collective experience to the present day — serves as proof for his white friends and colleagues of their “goodness”.
The Rise of Cousin Miles
It would be so easy to label Williams an “Uncle Tom”, for his close proximity to and tireless defense of whiteness. But I think this overlooks the subtle complexities of what he’s been able to accomplish, and the historical evolution of Uncle Tom, as he moved on up from the House to the Board Room. Tom lived in constant fear of direct physical violence, bowing his head both to avoid the blows and to lower himself to a posture sufficiently subordinate to his white masters. As the machinery of white supremacy grew infinitely more complex, Tom did his best to understand it, to navigate it, to survive it long enough to pass on his knowledge on to the next generation.
Enter “Cousin Miles“, the mixed-race son of Uncle Tom, who for his integration into youth culture and the liberal pluralism of the modern era isn’t as blatantly self-hating as his father. But in the tension between his deep desire to fit in with the other black kids — tempered by the sting of their rejection — and the pressure to “succeed” from his father, within the narrow parameters of white supremacy, he is inevitably pulled toward the latter. With one foot in the white world, and with at least a whole toe in the black world, Cousin Miles is able to capitalize on his tragic mulatto identity to acquire limited status, wealth, or power.
Taking out a line of credit on on his RaceCard, he holds himself up as a paragon of New Blackness™, “clean” and “articulate”, the diametric opposite of the Angry Black Man® who continues to shout unintelligibly from the other side of the glass. Sustained by all the white liberal smiles and glad-hands he can stand, Miles ignores the itch of inauthenticity as they make another toast, not to him, but in tribute to their own tolerance.
Meanwhile, the rest of us continue to struggle, to find purpose and meaning and solidarity in that struggle, defining ourselves by what we can accomplish collectively, rather than by individual concessions earned through appeals to white moral superiority.
(This was originally an email which I sent to Civic Ventures, a political advocacy group (think tank?) based in Seattle, which also produces the Pitchfork Economics podcast. Because it got so long, and because it reflects my general thinking on education, I decided to post it here.)
Hello,
My name is Kermit O, and I’m an educator in Philadelphia, as well as an avid listener of the podcast. The recent episode with Diane Ravitch was extremely important, as was Nick’s article in the Atlantic. I immediately thought: everyone needs to hear/read this – and you can bet it will come up in my next staff PD.
Pitchfork Economics: Educationism (with Diane Ravitch) August 6th, 2019
But then I thought, who’s really gonna hear or read these things? Certainly the fact that it was tweeted by Barack Obama will expand its reach, but generally it will still be people, like me, who are already attuned to the impact of income inequality on everything, people already primed to have these conversations.
I know Civic Ventures does work on the policy side of things, but what I kept hearing, implicitly, was that it was up to “woke” wealthy people like Nick, and their wealthy or politically connected circles to fix the problem. What, I wondered, is even my role as a teacher, if schools aren’t really the issue? What do you see as the role of my students, their families, other teachers, and community advocates? To hold some line while other people work toward solutions?
Well, of course not. It seemed to me that if ultimately we’re advocating for a fair and just democracy, then the best thing I could do would be to civically engage and activate my students to advocate on their own behalf. But before that, because my students come from poverty and trauma, to be a reliable, safe adult in whom they can confide, who provides some stability which may be in short supply, who encourages them that they are more than their circumstances. Not in a “bootstraps” way – but by helping them to understand the systems that obstruct every path toward their liberation.
I am lucky, because this Fall I will be at a school where I have the freedom to steer my curriculum toward that end. The neoliberal “data driven” model in most public schools doesn’t allow that. Having worked in those kinds of schools most of my career, I have learned firsthand what happens to teachers who push back against that system. I’ve been both with and without Union protection and seen ferocious backlash.
Soon after I listened to the Ravitch episode, I started reading this book:
This passage, from early in the book, connected me back to the point Nick and Ravitch were making:
Schools reflect our political economy. The fact that schools are funded by local property taxes ensures that students who live in poor communities receive an education that will maintain, and, in fact, widen the gap between the über-rich, the rich, the rapidly shrinking middle class, the working poor, and the poor. This system renders schools ineffective in providing poor students any type of real social mobility. (Love, p. 17)
This in turn made me think about how it was Diane Ravitch on the podcast and not Dr. Love, and what that meant. Kudos to Ravitch – and Nick – for recognizing their decades of misguided thinking. I mean that sincerely.
But that whole time, there were other voices, on the margins of academia and the political sphere – pushed there by the relentless power of the status quo and those who uphold it – who were already making the case Nick and Diane only just came to understand. There were teachers who understood it, even if they didn’t have the vocabulary or the platform to make the case, or if they did, were quickly buried by the neoliberal demands of the system and punished for noncompliance.
Why do we keep hearing from the same people? Why do we have to wait for the wealthy or elite or well-connected to have a change of heart, and then promote them, they who did so much of the damage, rather than finally giving a platform to those who had been sounding the alarm for years? Those who had been working *against* the abuses of the neoliberal establishment?
When 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates are writing their education platforms, who are they consulting? People like Ravitch, no doubt. While that’s better than an Arne Duncan or Michelle Rhee, it keeps on the margins those important voices, who have spent the past decades advancing the position the “Reformed Reformers” have only recently embraced, adding to it much nuance, practical experience, research, and vital intersectional perspectives. The “right people” just aren’t in the room when these platforms are being designed, which is why progress is slow to nonexistent.
So I come back to the question in my subject line, for you all at Civic Ventures. Who is your audience? And who do you hope to impact? If the latter is much larger than the former, what does that mean? To me, it reflects the thinking that only the well-connected or well informed few will have a seat at the table where the decisions are made. Which I feel is antithetical to any serious push for democracy.
Where does this thinking leave me, as a solitary educator? Now, to be clear, I am not idle or isolated. I am active within the “radical wing” of the teacher’s union, where we advance positions that look at the bigger picture, and argue from a baseline of racial/social/economic justice. But this often means battling against our own, the deeply entrenched status quo upholding “mainstream”, who prioritize our pay and benefits – important, yes – but at the expense of everything else we know is important.
It leaves me trying to equip my students with the knowledge and skills to fight a morally bankrupt system. But I feel like these different efforts play out in well-insulated silos. What would happen if policy makers and influencers were aligned and in close communication with those of us “on the ground”?
What would happen if Pitchfork Economics had Dr. Bettina Love as a guest rather than Diane Ravitch? What would happen if Civic Ventures had even one black face on the team – someone like Jesse Hagopian right there in Seattle – who works from a racial justice perspective?
What would happen if Nick interviewed with The Breakfast Club, where his message would be heard by more of the people you all seek to impact? There he would also be relentlessly scrutinized by people like Charlamagne, Envy, or Yee, who are going to ask the sorts of questions regular people might have, if only to clarify some of the more opaque aspects of economics discourse. They might critique Nick’s position from an angle he may not have considered, because he literally does not have access to it as a wealthy white man. If this seems far-fetched, or unworthy of Nick’s time, ask why people like Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Andrew Yang have seen fit to appear on the program.
Again, who is the podcast for? And is that audience truly the best positioned to bring about the change we need?
I have been working on my novel, UNTIL THE MONSTERS COME, on and off for 13 — thirteen! — years. Sometimes I mourn the fact that after all this time, I am still quite a ways from finishing it. I mourn that I can’t even commit to writing a little every day, that I often use up my creative energy in the planning, in the taking of “notes” about the book more than actually writing it.
But then I realize that had I finished this book two, three, or even five years after I started, it would not be the book it will eventually become. Although I have struggled with the writing of it, I have not been idle, and what started as a weird thought experiment juxtaposing childish fantasy with real life violence is becoming a sprawling epic that incorporates Gnostic and Jungian themes, takes on issues of race and gender, and presents a number of complex philosophical arguments. The book that I would’ve completed back in 2008 or 2011 would not have been this book, and frankly, it would not have been as interesting (at least not to me), and probably not as good.
Maddie (Original Concept)
Maddie (Current Concept)
Then I got to thinking that whatever version of UTMC I end up completing — hopefully in the next few years — might be in some ways less than the book it could become if it stewed for another seventeen years. Writing this book has involved a constant process of incorporating new ideas as my life experience grows, as my priorities shift, as I start to see even more obscure connections between real life and the fantasy world I am creating. UTMC has become my “everything book”, but I often have to check the impulse to try and stuff into it every “cool idea” I think up. I have to resist the urge to make this book the one that touches on all the philosophical or theological questions that interest me, the social issues I consider important, the aesthetics with which I fall in love on any given day.
“Poguri’s Awakening” — A scene that no longer exists in the current novel
This impulse, I think, comes from the feeling of stagnation that has plagued me throughout my writing process, the fear that this book — whenever I finish it — will be the only book I am able to complete. So I’d better put it all on the table, all the things I care about, all of me into this one book. But of course, no book can ever be everything.
So I find myself thinking about all the “Never Books”, the books I will never write, not because of stagnation, but because for any given project I have to draw the line somewhere and finish it. There are infinite variations of any book I might write, given enough time to ruminate and to appropriate any and everything that captures my attention, stirs my devotion, or inspires my revolt. Truly, what would UTMC become if I gave it another twenty years? Assuming, of course, that it needn’t actually take me that long!
The difference between UNTIL THE MONSTERS COME today and “POGURI: THE LOST GRANIMAL” (the original title) from 2006 is one of such dramatic scale and scope that I can’t even think of a proper metaphor. They are just completely different books, and I have no interest at all in writing the old one. It would’ve been awful. But perhaps twenty years from now, as I look back upon the successes and failures of UTMC, I will have had so many ideas, learned and experienced so much more, that I will mourn the book it could’ve been.
The current iterations of the main characters in UNTIL THE MONSTERS COME
Hopefully I won’t have the time or space to mourn, because all those ideas and experiences will find their way into the second and third books of a trilogy, inform my work as a teacher, inspire me to some form of activism, or make their way into some other creation that I cannot even foresee today.
To all the Never Books, I choose to imagine that somewhere in the multiverse you will come into being. But here and now, you continue to inspire me toward infinite possibility.
By now you’ve probably heard the story about Virginia governor Ralph Northam, and how a photo in his medical school yearbook — from 35 years ago— showed two people in costume: one in blackface, the other in a Klan robes. Northam made a public apology about it, then oddly walked back his apology, saying that he was neither of the people in the photo. At the same time, though, he admitted that he had that same year dressed up in blackface as Michael Jackson for some sort of contest. It was an odd admission to an offense that hadn’t even been discovered yet, but probably to get ahead of it, just in case someone dug up a picture of that event, too.
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam
Within moments came the chorus of condemning voices from Democrats, pundits, and activists from the “left” (whatever that really means these days) calling for Northam to resign. Resign. Listen, I am the the last person to defend anyone’s racism, be it obvious or subtle, as any of the 2-4 whole people who ever read my blog will attest. However, it does strike me as a bit extreme to demand that a person resign from a very powerful position because of something idiotic they did more than three decades ago. Why does the power of the position matter, you may ask. Because it has become an issue of political priorities.
Shortly after the Northam scandal broke, allegations of sexual assault surfaced about Lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax — who would succeed Northam if he resigned. These allegations, to me and I would imagine anyone, are far more serious than someone appearing in blackface. Not too long after that, Virginia attorney general Mark Herring — second in the line of succession to the governorship after Fairfax — admitted to also dressing up in blackface back in 1980. I guess blackface was all the rage in Virginia back in the 80s?
This rapid-fire sequence of breaking scandals created a crisis for Virginia, as calls rang out for all three men to resign. But herein lies an additional complication. If they were to do so, the man third in the line of succession is Virginia is the Speaker of the House of Delegates, Kirkland Cox. This is significant because Northam, Fairfax, and Herring are all Democrats, while Cox is a Republican. It brings into question the priorities of the Democratic party, because is it truly more important that these three men resign as penance for offenses committed or alleged, even if it means a complete shift in the balance of power in Virginia? Even if it means that the governorship will be taken over by a man with truly troubling political positions that have translated directly into his votes on policy?
Let’s for a minute say that, in the worst case, Northam is actually lying, and that he is the person in blackface. Or the person in the Klan robes. I’m actually not sure which would be worse. Both of these images evoke an American history — and present — that has been very harmful, and very painful for black people. A history that devalued, dehumanized, and diminished us. And in Virginia, of all places, pretty much the epicenter of American slavery. The symbolic power of the image is not lost on me, I assure you, but it is still only symbolic. I don’t say that to imply that symbols don’t matter, because they hold great power. I say that because as powerful as symbols are, they do not have the same impact as policy on the everyday lives of black people. The symbols of blackface and the KKK represent an American history during which national policy remanded us to the status of livestock, and after that, third-class citizens. At no time would anyone be able to argue that blackface minstrelsy was more damaging than Jim Crow. Or that dressing up as a Klansman was as harmful as government complicity in the murderous and destructive actions of actual Klansmen.
I am not saying any of this to defend Ralph Northam’s actions, even if his only offense was allowing such a hideous photo to be posted on his yearbook page. But this is bigger than Northam, and Fairfax, and Herring, because if all three men were to step down, Virginia would have a new governor, in Kirk Cox, who almost certainly would harm black people on a far more than symbolic level. A quick look at how he has voted on various issues reveals a man who is staunchly anti-choice, which is especially dangerous at a time when Roe vs. Wade is under regular attack, with perhaps the only thing holding it in place being Chief Justice John Roberts, suddenly the “moderate” voice on the court. I could write another whole blog post — and many articles have already been written — about the disproportionate impacts of anti-choice legislation on women of color, and massive disparities in reproductive health in general.
Kirk Cox, Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates
Cox’s record also reveals a man who has supported voter suppression efforts — via voter ID laws — which are nakedly aimed at further disenfranchising black voters. You wanna talk about history? How about the fact that for most of American history black people were regarded as three-fifths of a person, our bodies counted toward representation in the House, and bolstering the power of slaveholders, while our actual voices remained silenced? How about the fact that for another hundred years after slavery, we were still not allowed to vote, and for years after that, we were terrorized and killed for daring to exercise that right once we had it? The current voter suppression efforts in states like Virginia are an extension of that same system of oppression and disenfranchisement. Are Democrats and other voices on the left really willing to cede power to a man who would undoubtedly continue that legacy?
This whole saga was started when the far-right publication Big League Politics dug up the old yearbook picture. Do you figure their motive was to call out Northam’s racism, or to cause the exact sort of chaos that Virginia is dealing with now? They probably couldn’t have anticipated that their effort might lead to a complete toppling of Democratic power in the VA executive branch, and allow a Republican to assume the governorship. Why should Democrats and left-wing commentators play right into their hands?
This whole Virginia drama is revealing something important about the current Democratic establishment, which has implications for both past and future, including the election of Donald Trump. Democrats are symbolic politicians, concerned more with the image of doing the right thing, than actually doing it. Where they effect policies that actually make a positive difference in people’s lives, it is usually reactive, a case of them “holding the line” against the worst abuses of the Republicans. They have rarely advanced bold legislation that challenges the status quo, and even when they have, they rarely maintain enough power, or enough solidarity among themselves to see it through. They are beholden to the same corporate interests as the GOP, support the same neoliberal hyper-capitalist policies at home, and imperialist policies abroad.
They have been so indistinguishable in substance from the GOP, insofar as their actual impact on regular people’s lives, that it didn’t seem much of a leap for those who supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Presidential primary to vote for Trump in the general election. Much like the poor whites in so-called “Trump Country”, many on the left knew they just didn’t want more of the “same”, the maintainers of a status quo that sees so many people struggling, jaded, and hopeless. Democrats’ inability to understand this, or perhaps refusal to act on it, is why Hillary Clinton lost, and why any middle-of-the-road Democrat is likely to lose if they are put up against Trump in 2020
Democrats are riding so stiff and proud on their high horses as they sneer down at Ralph Northam, but what has been more damaging to the black people they symbolically defend? A photo in a yearbook from 35 years ago, or 35 years of benign neglect at best, and at worse, complicity if not command over the institutions and systems which have caused great harm to our communities? Like the War on Drugs and mass incarceration. The Democrats’ near-unanimous insistence that Northam resign is nothing but a platitude to convince everyone that they are the “not racist” party, quite different from the anti-racist party, — which they most certainly are not.
Let’s take a look at some of the more prominent names calling for Northam’s resignation. Senator and 2020 Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has quite a troubling record with respect to criminal justice, during her tenure as California attorney general, upholding and reinforcing the sort of policies that have disproportionately impacted communities of color. Senator and 2020 candidate Cory Booker has in the past been a little too cozy with Big Pharma, and evenly recently appears to be an advocate for the expansion of charter schools, which has proven disastrous for public schools, mostly attended by students of color.
Hawaii house representative and 2020 candidate Tulsi Gabbard has a troublesome anti-LGBT history, and seems to be oddly chummy with right-wing leaders like Syria’sBashar Assad, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and India’s Narendra Modi. Senator and 2020 candidate Kirsten Gillibrand made it a point to own up to her conservative past, which wasn’t all that long ago. And don’t even get me started on Hillary Clinton, the white queen of neoliberalism, whose moral duplicity, and overall weakness as a candidate helped usher in the Age of Trump.
With the new crop of Democratic lawmakers, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar, we see the potential for a party actually bringing about substantive change. With the unveiling of the Green New Deal resolution by Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, we see the first whispers of massive, systemic change, in response to the some of the greatest problems we face as a country, and in the world: climate change, systemic racism, neoliberal destruction of the economy. These need to be the priorities of the Democratic party, and while the 2020 Presidential hopefuls have put their seal on approval on the Green New Deal resolution, it seems a gesture of convenience, of sensing the direction of the wind, of symbolism.
Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has belittled or dismissed the Green New Deal resolution, while also reassuring her corporate friends in the health insurance industry that she has no intention of challenging their dominion. Still, she made sure to hop on the bandwagon calling for Northam’s resignation.
U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
These mainstream, centrist, milquetoast Democrats, regardless of their newly minted progressive stances, have made careers out of “compromising” with the Right, capitulating to corporate interests, merely “holding the line”, when the lives of Americans hung in the balance. On a policy level, they have either caused or allowed real, quantifiable, harm to black people in particular. These same Democrats hem and haw and hedge and hesitate over whether or not to impeach Donald Trump, a man with a long history of racism, and who is not only openly racist at present, but fuels the resurgence of white supremacy through his words and deeds. Yet they come out in force against Ralph Northam over a picture in a yearbook from 35 years ago.
It needs to be stated that Northam himself is one of the same middle-of-the-road Democrats I am criticizing here. He is no progressive hero. But he has, at least, like many of those calling for his resignation, held the line. He voted against the anti-choice and voter suppressing legislation supported by Kirk Cox. If we are going to talk about compromise, maybe the Democratic establishment needs to compromise in its hard-line sanctimony, its hypocritical moralism, especially if their current course will lead to a reversal of the progress they claim to stand for. The weight of such regression will, as it always has, be carried disproportionately by black people. The same black people Democrats continue to court for votes through empty rhetoric and symbolic gestures, rather than a serious commitment to systemic change on a policy level.
Recently I stumbled upon an op-ed in the LA Times, written by Thomas Chatteron Williams, and called My black privilege. Whenever someone puts the words “black” and “privilege” together I can anticipate what comes next: a rebuttal against the concept of white privilege, and with it some false equivalency around Affirmative Action. Chatterton’s post is a bit different in that he isn’t another John McWhorter or Thomas Sowell, black men who have made a name for themselves in denying the impact of racism, and being openly hostile towards other black people.
While Williams’s article is no less misguided, it seems to come from a place I can understand, even relate to, with respect to my relationship to blackness and black people. The article starts with a reference to an exchange where he felt his particular experiences as a black person were invalidated. This invalidation, I think, is at the heart of a certain isolation which leads Williams to his hyper-individualistic thinking which plagues the article, and probably informs much of his memoir, Losing My Cool. That much is conjecture, because I have not, and nor will I ever read the book. Chatterton’s worldview is so predictable as to make it unnecessary.
Before I get into my argument, let me be clear that it is not my intention or goal to shame Williams for his point of view, but to point out the inherent fallacy in his thinking, which itself stems from what I like to call the scourge of individualism. My tendency towards the polemic should not be taken as animosity towards Williams, but as a passion for the subject.
In the precipitating exchange, Williams was apparently told that:
People who care about people of color ought to focus their energies on continued systemic racism and forget about anything so nebulous and untrustworthy as observation. Like it or not, I was the victim of greater social forces. It did not matter that I had come to see my life as something of my own making — the evidence of my senses was useless.
There are two very important things happening in this paragraph. The first, and most important, is that this sociology professor — who wasn’t black — made the mistake of trying to tell a black person — Williams — what his experience should be. Regardless of their expertise, this was simply not their place. While we can’t be certain this is how it happened, it was at least how Williams felt after the exchange, and that is just as important. The second thing is that, aside from the professor’s apparent misstep, the underlying point was valid, though I think Williams’ feelings muddled his interpretation.
As someone who has had many in-depth conversations with sociologists about issues of race and power, I can be relatively certain that the professor’s point was not that “the evidence of [Williams’s] senses was useless” or that how he saw his own life was irrelevant. As any scholar of race in the U.S. will tell you, as any black person can tell you, our experiences are not a monolith. Williams’s experience was his own, and shaped his particular worldview. It wasn’t, however, representative of any shared black experience in the U.S.
And here lies the fundamental flaw with Williams’s whole argument: individualistic vs. systems thinking, which is the point the professor was probably trying to make. There has undoubtedly been one person, or ten, or even one thousand black people who have gone through their lives with little to no observable experience with racism, don’t consciously feel its impact, and for that manage to gain some degree of success or wealth or high quality of life. Their experiences do not invalidate the very real existence of systems that make such outcomes more unlikely for the rest of us. Systems that privilege white people at the expense of people of color.
This sort of individualistic thinking, which is at the heart of the myth of a U.S. meritocracy, is a product of the American Enlightenment. It was only by virtue of those philosophers’ privilege as white men in the 17th and 18th centuries that they could even reflect on such lofty ideals as individual sovereignty. I shouldn’t have to explain to anyone why black people at the time were not afforded the physical or mental space to entertain such thoughts. That this way of thinking persists into the present does not suggest that it is correct, so much as it indicates the outsized influence of the white perspective in shaping the narrative of the United States.
The enormous amount of data demonstrating the racial disparities that exist across every social, political, and economic domain — wealth, housing, criminal justice, education, physical and mental health, infant mortality, life expectancy, and the list goes on — greatly outweighs the experiences of a handful of individuals. If I have a huge sack full of berries, 99% of which are poisonous, and you happen to eat one of the few that isn’t, it would not be realistic — or safe — for you to conclude that the whole sack is edible. That’s a weird analogy, I know, but what’s important here is safety, because the kind of thinking what Williams is propagating here is actually dangerous.
Williams goes on to write:
My black father, born in 1937 in segregated Texas, is an exponentially more worldly man than my maternal white Protestant grandfather, whose racism always struck me more as a sad function of his provincialism or powerlessness than anything else.
The point here seems to be that his black father, in spite of the circumstances of his birth, managed to achieve more than his white grandfather. For Williams, both men’s outcomes had nothing to do with their race. This is a common argument. Bootstraps. Meritocracy. What you get out of life is what you put into it. So on and so on. Don’t complain about race. Don’t like your circumstances? This is America. You can do something about it if you work hard enough.
This is not entirely false. There is much a person can achieve through the strength of their will, in spite of their circumstances. But that does not negate the circumstances, nor does it mean that overcoming those circumstances is possible, to the same degree, for everyone. Whatever success the elder Williams was able to achieve cannot, in turn, be used as evidence that race is a non-factor in most black people’s life outcomes. Again, the data shows us different.
Another spin on this same argument is where white people talk about how difficult life was for their parent or grandparent or ancestor, that their race didn’t help them, that they too “made it” in spite of their circumstances. Yes, class oppression is a thing. But the structural obstacles placed before black people in the US are simply greater than those placed before white people, regardless but not independent of class. There is an intersection of race and class, and for black people these two things are inexorably linked, as they have been for our entire history in this country. What many people fail to understand about white privilege, is that it is the absence, or at least reduction, of certain structural obstacles to health, wealth, and a higher standard of living that people of color face.
Later, Williams says:
Like a piece of paper that is both red all over and green all over, for far too many Americans of all backgrounds, the idea of a simultaneously black and advantaged person is impossible to imagine. This mental inflexibility points to a seldom discussed but nonetheless very frustrating aspect of being African American: well-intentioned people will insist you are a victim whether you interpret your life in such a way or not.
No one who lives in the real world thinks this way. There are countless examples of black people who are black and advantaged. One would have to be delusional or contrarian to deny it. But again, these folks are the exceptions. And even with all of their advantage — mostly financial — these black people still face some of the same structural obstacles.
Serena Williams, perhaps the most prolific athlete in any sport since Michael Jordan, almost died because of how structural racism manifests in the healthcare system. NBA star Sterling Brown and NFL star Michael Bennett, were perhaps one impulsive decision away from being casualties of police brutality. Their individual advantages did not protect them from the systemic issues that plague the black experience in the U.S. There are countless examples.
Williams’s sense that his life was “something of his own making” does not mean the struggles faced by so many others were products of their own failures. The problem with his article starts at its very title: “My black privilege”. With the first word.My. Williams’s own. He seems to think that his personal, exceptional, individual experience says something about the plight black people in general. Privilege, within the context of race, is not some individual currency that each of us carry around, choosing how and when we spend it.
Privilege — white privilege — at its most basic, is the widespread, systemic, advantage white people have of not being discriminated against on the basis of their race, of not having a well-established history of such discrimination that continuously echoes into the present to impact their life outcomes. Whether or not they have felt it, or believe they have benefited from it, does not mean it is not there. Black privilege, within this same context, simply does not exist.
That is to say there are no social or economic or political advantages awarded to all black people on the basis of our blackness.
What Williams also fails to consider is how his own trajectory was informed maybe not by white privilege, but its encapsulating framework: white supremacy. One need only take a look at Williams to understand how this could be the case. He is a very light-skinned black man, one who could even pass for white.
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Given this, and his experiences, it is to Williams’s credit that he even so strongly identifies as black at all. And perhaps it is because of this identification that he may not grasp how he could’ve been the beneficiary of white privilege, or put another way: light-skinned privilege.
Unlike Thomas Chatterton Williams, no one would ever mistake Sterling Brown, Michael Bennett, Serena Williams, or any of countless other black people who have sharply felt the impact of racism on their lives as anything other than black. Williams, the writer, doesn’t seem to understand that his particular experience — no “less black” or less valid — does not represent the experiences of most black people. Again, look at the data. Just search JSTOR or any other scholarly archive for “racial disparities” and be crushed by the sheer enormity of the evidence.
It is…unsurprising to me that it would be another light-skinned man making this kind of argument, oblivious to, or in contrarian denial of how race impacts black people’s lives. John McWhorter, mentioned earlier, is perhaps the most egregious example, though I think his entire public persona is a fiction he has crafted for social and economic advantage.
I must mention here that I, too, am lighter skinned, though no one in this country would mistake me for white. And I, too, have gone through growing pains around identity and my particular connection, or lack thereof, to black culture and black people. At one point in my life, I disavowed my blackness, by which I mean that I rejected the racial classification as a “social construct”, not that I positioned myself apart from or in opposition to other black people. At least not intellectually. I did feel, however, a distance between myself, black people and black culture. This, I came to understand later, was due to the absence of opportunities for immersion, and a lack of education about black history and culture, these things in themselves a consequence of white supremacy.
When I first learned this idea about race as a social construct, I seemed to think that it could just as easily be deconstructed. I say “seemed”, because I have a hard time these days placing myself within the mind of my younger self. I was in college, awash in a sea of new ideas, and perhaps grappling with each of them in isolation, rather than understanding how they interlocked within various systems. I didn’t understand that the institution of race in the U.S. continued to exist in spite of my firm declaration that I would not, and therefore other black people should not, subscribe to this inferior status imposed upon us. I seemed to think that I actually had a say in it, which to my mind today — overwhelmed by the data — is patently absurd.
Williams was a philosophy major in college. While that doesn’t have to mean anything, I often find that people within that discipline, disproportionately informed by Western (white) sensibilities, are uniquely able to detach themselves from social and historical context, to explore what they might call the purity of ideas. While I am sure this is an interesting pursuit, it is so divorced from how reality is structured as to be delusional. There is a sort of oblivious playfulness to these philosophy types that would be enviable if it wasn’t so dangerous, especially as it applies to the persisting impact of race and racism on those of us who live in the real world.
For one to place themselves in some ideological bubble wherein their own individualistic experience somehow negates the experiences of many others is highly problematic. This is further compounded by the fact that those who support the status quo are always looking for the next black token to validate their assertions that systemic racism isn’t really a problem. And Williams, for his lighter skin, and likely ability to pass in certain situations, only elevates his position, and makes him more “credible” to a white establishment.
It seems clear to me, from his op-ed, and from the premise of his memoir, that Williams has had a difficult time locating himself within the black experience. I get it. He had a difficult time reconciling his own successes and quality of life with the narrative that life for black people is necessarily more fraught with danger and hardship. Sure, makes sense.
But it also seems that his entire trajectory is informed by his distance from black people and culture. He views his education, his love for literature, as existing in opposition to his experience with black culture. Indeed, it was by virtue of his hard work that he was able to “beat” hip-hop, which he views as inherently toxic. Anyone with any remotely authentic relationship with hip-hop knows that it, like any other culture, is not defined by its more problematic features.
I would bet that most of the literature in question was not written by black authors, and that none of it spoke to his particular experience as a light-skinned black man. Instead, it showed him that blackness was something he could embrace intellectually, while remaining unaffected by its ramifications for his quality of life. Great for him, I guess.
But the “privileges” he was afforded within his particular, individual life trajectory say very little about the greater collective black experience in the United States of America. The only black privilege, if we must consider one, is the honor of being a part of one of the richest, most artistic, brilliant, resilient, cultures the world has ever known. Truly, this is an advantage. But this advantage is not equivalent, nor exchangeable for the kind of social, economic, and political power inherent to whiteness.
It was sometime in 2012 that I began to deeply distrust Google. Because of what I saw as the trajectory of their business model, with respect to Big Data:
LEARN. PREDICT. STEER.
PHASE 1: LEARN — Google would collect as much data as it could on every person who used their services, and conceivably, every person on the planet. Contacts, locations, travel patterns, email, text messages, phone calls, consumer habits, interests, concerns, political ideologies, religious affiliations, family relationships, occupations, and so much more.
PHASE 2: PREDICT — With so much data collected, and through the use of complex algorithms and artificial intelligence, Google would anticipate the thoughts and actions of its users (and everyone else), and make convenient suggestions based on what it extrapolated their wants or needs to be in the moment.
PHASE 3: STEER — Deferring to the almighty power of the algorithm, Google would start to influence people’s actions, conceivably in directions that represented their own interests, motivations, ideologies, and so on.
This idea sprung fully formed from my mind after an experience with what was then called “Google Now”, and then evolved into the Google Assistant. One day, I walked to the corner store, and my phone prompted me with transit directions to my partner’s house. That corner was indeed where I would catch a trolley, but this “suggestion” unnerved me. I didn’t like the idea of this machine, or the company behind it, knowing enough about me as to predict what I would do next. Thus began a long process, with many relapses, to remove Google from my life.
It was an ambitious goal. Because Google was ubiquitous, pervasive, and in so many cases, offered the best tech solutions for various everyday “problems”. Problems, mind you, which really didn’t exist before Google made itself so indispensably convenient.
Then in May of 2018, a strange internal video leaked from Google. It was called The Selfish Ledger, made by members of the company’s experimental wing, “Google X” — afterward just X, a subsidiary of parent company, Alphabet.
There were many voices clamoring to comment on this provocative “thought experiment”, but I had a different take. As I watched the video, my anti-Google impulses went into overdrive.
“See! I knew it!”
It seemed to validate my theories about Google’s trajectory, in spite of the company’s official statement that the Selfish Ledger was a mere “thought experiment”. However, I felt something else, too. Maybe because of the music or images, or because it was talking about memetics — a major interest of mine — I was also highly engaged, even mesmerized.
As the narrator laid out his dystopian vision with a pleasant British accent, I felt vaguely placated and a sense of awe. I thought ahead to the world the video envisioned, and some part of me felt at peace in the thought of relinquishing control, of allowing some gentle overseer to guide me. Much of this had to do with the vulnerability that arises out of life being so difficult at times, but I think it also invoked something deeper and endemic to the human condition. The same impulse that pushes people toward religion, or toward the stars. Toward all things mysterious and greater than ourselves.
If I, as non-religious person, who was hyper-skeptical of Google and its designs, felt such a thing, I could only imagine how easy it would be for most people to slide into the sort of complacency envisioned by the video. Because Google, without question, made life easier. At some point, it even made phone calls on our behalf. There was a slippery slope between convenience and dependency.
The video had a disingenuous — and rather pretentious way — of talking about a process that has already been taking place for the whole of human history. The process that sets humans apart from all other animals. The “Lamarckian data” which might be mapped and understood to predict and steer human behavior is exactly what Richard Dawkins called memes. These “selfish replicators”, analogous to genes, exist independently of Google’s ability to track them, and are already passed on from one generation to the next. What the video called the Selfish Ledger, we already knew under a different name.
CULTURE.
Google was proposing they act as the custodians, the mediators, the purveyors of human culture — stored, analyzed, and transmitted as “data” — and conceivably modifying it along the way. Not just on the broad, collective level, but on a deep, hyper-personal, individual level. Where humans have long sought a total understanding and thereby a mastery over nature, Google would be the stewards of our nurture. Analogous to GMOs, perhaps we would become “CMOs” (culturally modified organisms), or maybe MMOs (memetically modified).
I thought about the implications of this corporate AI Overseer guiding thoughts, emotions, opinions, consumer habits, politics, public policy, among many other things, including the very modes of human interaction and our reasons for doing anything at all.
And to me, it sounded like:
PHASE 4: CONTROL — manipulate the thoughts and emotions, dictate the actions, drive the behaviors of users under the pretext of what’s best for them, and the world.
It sounded like a “benevolent” dictator, but one with far more insight into people’s thoughts and emotions on an individual and collective level than any human or their administration could ever manage.
It sounded like a god.
Not merely the kind Neil Gaiman postulated in his novel, American Gods, competing for our attention and brain space, but an actual force that actively and constantly intervened in our lives to determine their outcomes. A god that was functionally omnipotent, with respect to its power over human lives, and one that already was omnipresent.
It seemed particularly salient given the explanation of how our data would live independently of us as people, as the substrate with which this god molded the world and society. How it imagined future generations being born into a world already shaped and guided by data and algorithms and the artificial intelligence that made meaning of it all.
I briefly wandered down a philosophical rabbit hole, considering that this god had long existed in some other form, perhaps laying dormant in the collective unconscious, until humans and their technology gave it the means to manifest with agency in the physical world.
At some point, we had a choice as to how much of our personal information we offered up to the new god. Though it was neither as much choice as we would have liked, nor as much as Google led us to believe. Future generations would not have much choice at all, because the Infernal Machine had already started unwinding. Their input had little influence over the new direction of the world, driven as it was by the momentum of millions of data points from billions of people over many years.
The ideas presented in the video were both awe-inspiring, and terrifying, as one imagined a god must be.
The God That Google Made. Past tense. Because I am imagining a future where the Selfish Ledger has already become a reality. A future that looks back on all the omens that signaled the rise of this digital god, and our failure to do anything about it.
Or perhaps our inability to do anything, once a certain line was crossed. But where was the line? When we, as a society, shrugged at any revelation that our every thought and action was being tracked by private companies and used to manipulate us? Or was it when artificial intelligence algorithms started to function in ways their programmers did not predict or anticipate? There was a chilling irony in that. Or maybe with the advent of quantum computing, which allowed these digital minds to function at speeds and levels of efficiency that humans could barely comprehend, let alone control.
That future was not as far away as we thought, with respect to time or the ethical distance Google placed between “thought experiment” and company policy. The slide into complacency and dependency had already begun, and was accelerating at an exponential rate.
There were scattered and muted critiques from some technologists, and from anyone who ever regarded science fiction about artificial intelligence as cautionary tales. But by and large, the new god’s arrival was met with fanfare and devotion. While venom and bile was reserved for any who dared a more heretical interpretation of what the future held. A future that would inevitably see the proliferation of creepy robots*.
As I considered the many ways humans could and probably would be complicit in our own destruction, the quest to “Un-Google” my life continued…
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* Boston Dynamics, the robotics company behind “Atlas”, was owned by Google X until 2017.
Quantic Dream founder David Cage got in some trouble recently, with accusations of racism, misogyny, and homophobia being lofted at him by employees who accuse him of creating a toxic workplace. Cage, of course, denied these charges, and where there is documented proof of racist or sexist incidents involving his staff, he claims not to know about it. This is a bit difficult to believe, given that Cage actually has a pretty well-established history of racism, particularly anti-black racism, in his games.
Quantic Dream Founder David Cage
Terrence Wiggins over at Paste Magazine, already called Cage out on on some of these issues, and others I forgot or blocked out, well over a year ago. That this recent controversy has emerged as a “new” problem suggests that neither Cage, nor the gaming media at large, has been paying attention.
Fahrenheit
With Fahrenheit (also known as Indigo Prophecy), released in 2005, Cage started off light, though about as subtle as a brick through a window. All of the controllable (read: important) characters in the game were white, except for Sergeant Tyler Miles, a black police officer who the player controls for a brief period. While all of the other characters have reasonable character development, Tyler is more or less a black caricature, and an accessory to main character Carla Valenti. In scenes where you are not controlling him, it seems to be the player’s objective to prove Tyler’s incompetence, like when Lucas hides from him, under a table in plain sight. Or when Carla beats his ass at the gym. From Tyler’s dialogue to the way he walks, everything hints at the possibility that Cage had never actually met a black American, and had only ever seen them in racist Hollywood movies or blaxploitation films.
Unique to Tyler, too, is the fact that on two distinct occasions when the player gets to control Tyler, he is in the midst of, or just finished having sex with his girlfriend. At first glance, you might wonder how this constitutes racism, but it has to be considered within the long historical context of how black people are represented in film: in this case, black men as insatiable nymphomaniacs. There is a reason “BBC” is a common search term on pornography websites; it taps into a deeply ingrained stereotype — and well-documented white hysteria — about black men as sexual predators.
Heavy Rain
Quantic Dream’s next release, in 2010, was Heavy Rain, another quick-time-event police procedural game with a decidedly somber atmosphere. Cage seems to be a fan of melodrama. This time around there are no playable black characters, or really any black characters of note at all. This in itself is not racist, or uncommon, as there is no shortage of posts about the absence or misrepresentation of black characters in video games. On this very site, no less. What’s interesting about Heavy Rain is that its setting was inspired by Philadelphia — my beloved hometown — a city which demographically is about 50% Black.
Heavy Rain’s faithful portrayal of Philadelphia’s iconic row homes and murals
And yet, there is scarcely a brown face to be found anywhere in the city Cage created for Heavy Rain. He copied much of Philly aesthetic with fidelity, but at some point must’ve decided to reimagine the demographics such that black people barely exist, replaced with a majority white population with vaguely French accents.
Heavy Rain’s portrayal of a shopping area in Philly. Where are all the black people?
If you think this was merely some oversight, or just a limitation of graphics engine, or some other weak excuse, consider the lens through which Cage even visited Philadelphia in the first place.
So we took a plane to Philadelphia, hired this movie scout that worked on the movie Philadelphia. We asked him, “Could you take us to some poor houses and meet poor people?” The movie scout was surprised by the request.
What kind of weird, condescending, voyeuristic pretext is this? Who even says things like this in real life? I imagine Cage thinks that this request was “surprising” because who would “want” to see poor people, right? Zey are, how do you say in America? Gross? Oui!
And later, he describes his experience in detail. I have trimmed the excerpt for length, but it really is worthwhile to read the whole thing:
We saw despair. We saw violence. We saw fear. We saw poverty, in a way that no one in Europe could imagine takes place in the U.S. […] I remember one specific time where we went to this family, and the movie scout had arranged it a month before. But when we arrived, their ten-year-old daughter had died the day before in an accident. The family was there crying in the kitchen and we immediately said, “We’re going to go. Sorry.” And they said, “No. You came from France to take pictures of the house, please come in.” We didn’t want to say no, we couldn’t say no. And we were taking pictures of their house while they were crying about their daughter. This is something that stayed in my mind for all the years I spent writing, this moment of intense sadness, and depression, and death. I hope a little of this is in the final story.
There are several interesting things about Cage’s commentary here. He talks about “violence”, “fear”, and “poverty” as these novel things that he has barely heard of, and certainly never seen or experienced before. Indeed, “no one in Europe could imagine” the horrible state of things he witnessed in Philadelphia. I suppose Cage has never been to, read an article, or even seen a news report about the some of the banlieues in Paris (he’s from France), or economically depressed and socially marginalized communities anywhere else in the whole continent of Europe.
As is the case across the United States, Philadelphia’s low-income population is disproportionately black. There is no doubt in my mind that the people Cage met and photographed were also black. The “sadness, depression, and death” Cage claims to have seen — all the while missing the vibrancy, resilience, flourishing culture, art scene, and night life — certainly touches black Philadelphia in unequal proportions, too. The story of the family that lost a daughter “stayed in Cage’s mind” for years, and he hoped a little of it transferred into Heavy Rain. And yet, not even their likeness, or that of people like them, made the final cut.
Beyond: Two Souls
In 2013, Quantic Dream released Beyond: Two Souls, featuring the likeness of actors Willem Dafoe and Elliot Page. Worth mentioning is the fact that Cage used Page’s activist reputation to defend himself against accusations of homophobia, because surely Page wouldn’t agree to work with him if they were true? While Page did work on B:TS, he was also furious to discover that Cage and the development team had decided to leave a nude model of him within the assets of the game, in spite of the fact that his character doesn’t actually appear nude at any point. Even in his interactive shower scene. Why even was there an interactive shower scene?
Seriously, the player has to move the controller back and forth to make Jodie towel dry. It’s weird. I mention this here not to further damage Cage’s credibility, but because it relates to his overall deflection of his former employees’ accusations. I will come back to this point later.
In Beyond: Two Souls, main character Jodie Holmes (voiced by and designed in the likeness of Page) possesses a variety of psychic powers which enable her to perform any number of superhuman feats. Although she has her own personal conflict to deal with, she continuously finds herself inserted into other people’s and other nation’s affairs, mostly through her work as a US government agent. In a demonstration of the white savior complex rivaled by James Cameron’s Avatar or the KONY 2012 campaign, Jodie goes to Somalia to save the country from a ruthless warlord, only to be manipulated by her handlers into killing the country’s democratically elected president. This was actually a rare case in which a game pointed a finger US imperialism, and the CIA’s very real history of assassination and regime change. For that much, the developers deserve some credit. Still, it surely wouldn’t be a proper depiction of Africa without a child soldier for the white hero to rescue along the way.
Jodie comforts child soldier Salim in Beyond: Two Souls
In another segment, oddly titled “Navajo”, Jodie comes upon — you guessed it — a Navajo family living on a remote ranch. A common trope in entertainment media not written or overseen by indigenous people, is to relegate them to some frozen past, playing up the “mystical” aspects of their culture, while rarely taking on the long-term systemic issues that Native folks have had to deal with into the present. They are treated as human relics, only relevant to the present insofar as they can provide some peculiar insight or ancient wisdom.
The Navajo family members are the silliest sort of “noble savages” dressed up in a thin veneer of modernity. The Navajo culture is almost entirely ignored. At one point, Cage gives us a flashback of tepees burning, despite the fact that the Navajo never lived in tepees.
[…]
There’s even a moment where the boys take Jodie to a place “no white man’s ever been before” which, honestly, is just the worst sort of nonsense. As if the American government hasn’t been all over indigenous lands. No, in Cage’s bizarre vision of the American Indian, it’s all mysticism and horses and Jodie the white savior.
Jodie stays with a Navajo family in Beyond: Two Souls
Invited to stay for a few days and help out around the farm in exchange for room and board, it isn’t long before she dons the mantle of the white savior once more. The family has apparently been under siege by an evil entity known as Yé’iitsoh, a character lifted arbitrarily from Navajo creation mythology and then bastardized.
This entity has attacked the Navajo family every night, for generations. Five spirits protect the family from “Yé’iitsoh”, but none of the flesh and blood Navajo can figure out a way to stop it. Once again, all of indigenous America’s power and agency must be an artifact of another time, with B:TS consigning modern Native folk to incompetence, ignorance of their own history and culture, and ultimately, irrelevance. Because it is Jodie who figures out how to use some ancient talismans in some ancient ritual to save the family from Yé’iitsoh once and for all — though not without sacrificing the grandmother in the process. It is patently absurd, and indicative of the kind of “subtle racism” that runs throughout all of Cage’s games.
Detroit: Become Human
This brings us to the present, with Quantic Dream’s latest release, Detroit: Become Human. I need to disclaim from the start that I have not played — and likely will not — simply because I refuse to give any more money to this developer. If I borrow a copy from someone, perhaps I’ll have more to add here in an update.
Detroit: Become Human is, of course, set in Detroit. The reason Cage gives for choosing the setting is that given its history as a manufacturing city, its current decline might be reversed by the establishment of a new industry such as artificially intelligent androids. It’s a solid premise.
But can you guess the substance of my critique?
Detroit is — wait for it — over 80% black. Yet in the future the game imagines, black people are once again relegated to minor roles and are relatively absent with respect to the city’s actual demographics. What’s interesting, too, is that the proportion of black people in Detroit has only increased over the years.
Since 1910, the black population of Detroit has increased
Much like he did with Philadelphia in Heavy Rain, Cage seems to have made it a point to “unblacken” Detroit as much as possible. At least he has a more reasonable explanation in this case, because it is almost certain that any burgeoning industry in future-Detroit would displace the mostly black population, those who have remained in spite of the city’s decline, either out of necessity, or love for their city. But even if this was the case, why not make that gentrification and displacement part of the narrative? Because Androids? That’s a lazy excuse, and suggests an inability to write with complexity or nuance.
In an interview with Gamespot at E3 2016, Cage says that Detroit is “great, for its cultural background”, and then goes on to mention music and Motown, a decidedly black institution. Later he rambles on about the people he met, apparently having honed his lens to notice some of the positive things about Detroit, though he doesn’t say much of any substance.
“We met the people, and we were very surprised by the energy there, and the fact that there are people there who want to build something new here.”
What did they expect, then? More fear, violence, and despair, like they found in Philadelphia? It’s a strange interview, made all the more difficult to watch due to the interviewers’ boot-licking and complete failure to ask any deep questions.
Watch the entire interview, if you are so inclined. The quoted segment takes place at about 4:40.
Earlier, I mentioned Elliot Page’s ordeal with Quantic Dream. If you recall, in Cage’s mind, the mere fact that Page agreed to work on Beyond: Two Souls somehow vindicates him of any wrongdoing with respect to creating a toxic workplace, or charges of misogyny or homophobia. He called the accusations — not the alleged behavior, mind you — “ridiculous, absurd, and grotesque”.
He also said:
“You want to talk about homophobia?” he said. “I work with [Elliot] Page, who fights for LGBT rights. You want to talk about racism? I work with Jesse Williams, who fights for civil rights in the USA… Judge me by my work.”
Well, that’s exactly the purpose of this essay, Mr. Cage. Your work speaks volumes, and not in your defense.
Like with Page, he seems to think that merely working with Jesse Williams — who, yes, isn’t just any black man, but one who uses his platform to speak out against racism — means that Cage, by association, cannot be racist.
This is, of course, utter nonsense, because one’s mere proximity to a member of a marginalized group does not magically clear their mind of prejudice toward that group. Especially that of the implicit variety, as I think is mostly at work in Cage’s games. Proximity certainly helps, and working relationships more so, and if Cage actually recruited more people of color for his development team, he would grow as a developer, and be a lot less likely to commit these kinds of offenses.
I’m not sure what kind of compartmentalization took place in the development process, that is, how much of the world design Williams was privy to, but I wonder what he thought, or would’ve thought, of a visibly not-black Detroit. According to an interview with Waypoint, Williams lent his voice to the project “very early on”, before he even emerged as an activist.
Jesse Williams lends his voice and likeness to Detroit: Become Human as Markus
It is also worth noting that of all the black people that could’ve — and should’ve — been featured in Detroit: Become Human, Cage chose Williams, who is very light-skinned with blue eyes. I want to tread carefully here, because I am in no way suggesting that Williams is any “less black” for these reasons, and he certainly solidifies how and with whom he identifies through his activism. But there is a clear trend in Hollywood, the gaming industry, advertising, and other media to give preference to lighter skinned, more ethnically ambiguous black people, where we’re included at all.
It was an interesting decision to center Williams’s character, who in the context of the game does not have the actual man’s background, identity, politics, or platform. To a player unfamiliar with Williams, as I imagine many will be, the character’s blackness can be plausibly denied. Either implicitly — giving his race conscious consideration, or explicitly in arguing against his blackness as so many gamers do when it comes to ethnically ambiguous characters.
The recent accusations against Cage do not exist in a vacuum, or without precedent. Cage wants to be judged by his work, and indeed if one looks critically at his games, a theme emerges. People of color are reduced to caricatures, invoke harmful stereotypes, and should remain at the margins, if they appear at all. Even if that means literally erasing them from settings where they predominate. This is not the cross-burning of the past or the anger-marching racism so en vogue these days, but the more deeply entrenched racism underlying all of our media institutions.
Cage might be forgiven for simply being ignorant, if only I were able to believe that no one, ever, has brought these issues to his attention. But as he seems to be the kind of man who reads every review and critique of his work, tied as it must be to his self-worth, I think he has simply chosen to ignore them. Worse yet, when the issues drag him out into the spotlight, forcing him to come to terms, he deflects all accountability and uses what amounts to the “black friend” defense, or the…”I’ve worked with an actual woman” defense. Is that even a thing?
What’s sad is that David Cage is a talented developer, and I have, in spite of everything, enjoyed Quantic Dream’s games. But for someone so ambitious as to attempt social commentary, examine the human condition, and speculate on humanity’s future in video games, his massive blind spot about race and racism — or his willful ignorance — is a persisting blight that keeps him well-short of accomplishing any of these objectives.
“Diversity” and “Inclusion“. Buzzwords for the 21st Century, especially in “post-racial” America. But for all the mumbling and fumbling, the empty rhetoric and symbolic gestures, white media creators (and others from non-black majority countries) seem catastrophically inept at understanding what these words mean, or how to put them into meaningful action, especially as they apply to Black people.
What I am about to say is nothing new, nothing original, nothing that hasn’t been said — probably better by countless others — but I felt inspired to join the chorus of voices holding media creators accountable for how they represent me and mine: on paper, on screen, and in every other medium.
So here are my ten tips for white media creators seeking to be “include” Black people. It is by no means an exhaustive list.
1. Blackness is not metaphorical.
The X-Men have long been a stand-in for black people and black struggle.
The Black experience involves real people and real struggles, not to be “sanitized” or reduced to symbolic representation, as in the “Civil Rights” struggle of the X-Men or slavery in Dragon Age. If you’re going to “borrow” (read: appropriate) our struggle, then at least include our likenesses from time to time.
2. Blackness is not skin deep.
Commander Shepard from Mass Effect can be customized to look black, but nothing about the Black experience informs her character.
Merely palette-swapping racially or culturally “neutral” (read: vacuous) characters from #F6DACD to #7E3617 does not count as “inclusion”. Blackness involves a vast, diverse, historically grounded, continuously lived experience all but inexorable from skin tone. Do some research, or better yet, hire some black creators.
3. Blackness is not monolithic.
Dear White People is the rare example of a show that demonstrates that Black people have a wide variety of perspectives, ideologies, conflicts, experiences.
This may seem obvious, but…ALL BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT THE SAME. See the above point about “vast and diverse”. We come in many skin tones, have thousands of different ethnicities, and countless different experiences along multiple axes of gender, class, sexuality, ability, religion, and…just being different people because that’s how people work. Even an egregious stereotype might be excusable if it doesn’t exist in isolation. Still probably better to avoid those.
TLDR: Feature different kinds of black people.
4. Blackness is not expendable.
Darwin from X-Men: First Class fell victim to the “Black Dude Dies First” trope
It is inconceivable to me, outside the context of pure malice, that I even need to bring up such an established trope. If you’re going to include black characters, maybe don’t kill them off first, or even second, unless you’ve heeded Point #3, and have plenty more to spare. Even then, maybe just don’t, at least not until they’ve had time to develop? Or, you know, unless your the majority of your cast is black. Including your hero.
5. Blackness is not a punchline.
Jules from Pulp Fiction was a “bad mother fucker”, and a bottomless well of meme-ification and white laughter
The “Sassy Black Woman”. The “Mammy”. The “Smooth Pimp”. The “Bad Mother Fucker”. These and others have all been deployed at different times for the amusement of white audiences. There is nothing inherently wrong with these archetypes, provided that they are given some breadth, depth, and nuance. See Point #3 about blackness not being monolithic. Just as all black people aren’t the same, no black person is only one thing. Can we be funny? Absolutely. Humor for black people has been essential to our survival. Exploring why that is and has been might help with your character development.
Black people have struggled. Continue to struggle. We also endure. Our endurance is one of the foundations of our pride. But we also laugh (see Point #5), learn, love, contemplate, question, explore, create, eat, sleep, shit, and fuck just like everyone else. Which is to say, we contain multitudes. Also, our struggle and our endurance don’t exist in a vacuum. Rather they are informed and shaped by the prevailing context of white supremacy. I know those are two words you probably hate seeing adjacent to one another, but the shit is real. Choose to address it head on, because at least you have that choice.
7. Blackness is not violence.
Though black people’s lives and experiences have historically and continue to be beset with violence, it is not inherent to our condition. See Points #2, #3, and #5. And despite the narrative of “black on black” violence, the simple truth is that violence most often occurs between members of the same group — any group — if only because there is a larger set of interactions of any kind between members of the same group. We do not present some unique and ever-present danger. We are no more prone to perpetrating violence than any other group. Which, frankly, is kind of amazing, given that we have been and remain the disproportionate victims of violence, by the state and its proxies.
8. Blackness is not scarce.
Black Joy!
There are over a billion black people in the world — one-sixth of the world’s population. And that’s just by “official” counts, which may exclude any number of people who do or don’t identify as such. Which in itself speaks to Point #3, about how blackness is not monolithic, even in how it is defined. Black people make up anywhere from 11-13 percent of the United States, and yet you’ll hardly ever see either of these proportions (11-13 percent or one-sixth) reflected in the populations of most media properties.
In spite of the huge set of everyday dangers that pretty much ensure these percentages seldom increase, black people are not in short supply. There is, nor has there ever been, any paucity of black resources to draw upon when building that imaginary world which looks suspiciously a lot like this world. For the record (and yes, there are records), we’ve always been around. In spite of white/European historians’ relentless attempts to erase us, or decouple us from our own history. Dwayne McDuffie’s Rule of Threecan actually be broken with a shift in consciousness.
9. Blackness is not a commodity.
It’s only “dreadlocks” when white people do it.
Black music. Black art of any and every kind. Black language. Black aesthetic. Black culture more broadly. The Black Experience (See Point #1). Each and all of these things have been and continue to be stolen, appropriated, decontextualized, remixed, and whitewashed for mainstream consumption. Which is to say they are stripped of their most fundamental element — black people ourselves — for the sake of white palatability. Or perceived white palatability. To be clear, brown skin fixed to a black aesthetic — clothing, voice, music, etc. — does not a black person make. See Points #2 and #3.
More importantly, if the blackness in your properties, however it may manifest, does not promote, uplift, or enhance the lives of black people in some way – and positive representation has a greater impact than you might realize — then your property is not inclusive. It is appropriative for the sake of drawing in black dollars (or maybe white liberal dollars) or creating some sort of “feel good” image for the company — currency that can also be traded for…yes, dollars. This is the very definition of commodification.
Taken literally, this is obvious. But perhaps what isn’t so obvious is that all the shades and nuances of the Black Experience are not accessible to you. No matter how many books you read, albums you listen to, films you watch, plays you attend, black friends you make (though by all means, yes, tap that resource if you have it, without demand or expectation), there are things about being black that you simply cannot comprehend—physically, intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually.
This leaves you with one—also obvious—recourse. Recruit black people to work beside you. By which I mean hire them, because that work-for-free shit is over. Or, if you’re feeling particularly “magnanimous”, hand black people the reins and see where they lead you. I hear some guy named Ta-nehisi Coates is killing it on that Black Panther comic. And every other thing he touches, for that matter. Incidentally, he is not the only smart black person in the world. See Point #8.
Conclusion: Black People are Human Beings
In closing, it needs to be said that including diverse representations of black people in media has nothing to do with “political correctness”. It has little to do with fairness, either. This is not a zero-sum game by which black gain equals white loss.
What it concerns, most significantly, is the acceptance of this proposal that Black Lives Matter. That Black People Matter. Black representations are a matter of survival. Of casting us as fully-realized human beings with thoughts, feelings, dreams, aspirations, complexity, agency — against a backdrop that explicitly shows and tells us (everyone) that the opposite is true.
If we don’t matter, if we are seldom seen or heard, reduced to caricatures, or otherwise rendered less than fully human, it creates a void. Not just of our bodies or our voices, but of empathy and compassion toward us.
The cost of this void, engraved in history and playing out in real time, is our very lives.
*UPDATE* Sushee Games responded to my letter within a few hours, and I have already replied again as well. I will continue to update the post below with any future correspondence.
Fear Effect is coming back. Have you heard? After the heartbreak of Inferno’s cancellation, and a 15 year wait with no new game in sight, French indie studio Sushee Games is creating Fear Effect: Sedna. To say that I “literally screamed”, might actually be literal. I mean, look. There has been a 15 year vacuum that no other game has been able to fill. For fans of Fear Effect, this is huge news, so I can only hope that Sushee is successful, and that they are able to be true to the spirit of the franchise.
As I followed the campaign, being who I am, I couldn’t help but notice some things. 15 years ago, when Retro Helix was released, I had no awareness of cultural appropriation, and probably even a knee-jerk resistance to any discussion of the matter. Now, with the game industry’s slow realization that representation matters, reflecting an even longer-time-in-coming realization by mass media in general, creators are being held accountable for how they “borrow” — let’s go ahead and say appropriate — cultures not their own.
What I noticed with Fear Effect: Sedna, was their proposed use of Inuit culture and a native character. Alarm bells went off in my head, first about my impression that the character, Iluak, pretty much looks like a white man as currently designed.
Concept Art for Iluak from Fear Effect: Sedna
So I tweeted to Sushee Games about it.
Iluak has very European features. In jeans/t-shirt he’d be white. Please tell me he’s not the “more relatable” “half-Native”. @FearEffect
I was delighted that Sushee bothered to respond, as this is something they could’ve easily shrugged off, with me being a nobody on Twitter, and representing a small and easily recoverable amount towards their Kickstarter goal.
@KermitO He has changed yet from the concept till the artwork, especially for this reason. We keep an eye on this, and for others too!
As I continued thinking about cultural appropriation, I decided to contact Sushee Games again, with more in-depth concerns about how they would handle the use of Inuit aesthetic, cultural stories and history. I sent them a message through Kickstarter, which I’m publishing here as an open letter, so that as the game’s production moves forward, it can be known that at least one person brought this issue to their attention.
This is part of the reason I love Kickstarter, as a platform, and as a new standard for interactions between creators and consumers. Will my message make a difference? Maybe. Which is more than I could say for my impact on the production of a mainstream title produced by a major company. I will continue to update the post if and as Sushee Games responds to my letter.
Hello,
I recently tweeted my concern about Iluak’s “European” look and was pleased that your team responded. I just wanted to follow up a little and share some thoughts on the troubled waters Sushee is wandering into. I hope you’ll take the time to consider it.
The big issue at stake here, featuring the likenesses, history, and or lore of Inuit people is cultural appropriation. By the way, you do know that “Inuit” is a broad term encompassing several culturally distinct groups? The appropriation issue is especially contentious when dealing with culture of indigenous or other historically oppressed people.
This is not a matter of “political correctness” but has very serious implications (possibly legal) and consequences for indigenous people. When cultures are in danger of disappearing, appropriated representations can accelerate that erasure by displacing native sources. Outsiders should never be the primary source for any culture.
I think it is really worth your team’s time to read these articles (and the works cited in them) as you proceed:
With respect to Nisi Shawl’s article, you should look at the game “Never Alone” (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa) as an example of how creators can be “Guests”. They work with an indigenous population that I believe fit under the Inuit umbrella.
Be aware that this issue rightfully keeps emerging as creators recklessly use others’ culture, a recent backlash involving JK Rowling and Native Americans. Read about that here, and please Google “JK Rowling Cultural Appropriation” for more:
Also please be aware that different cultures have different rules about when and where and by whom their culture can be used. It is vital that you consult with an authority of the culture you’re borrowing.
This has come up for me personally in writing an Indigenous Australian character for my novel, and in doing my research I came across these resources. Although they deal with Indigenous Australians, I think similar considerations apply to borrowing culture in general:
FE: Sedna is not a film, but again, it’s a place to start.
I write all this to you not to tell you how to make your game, but because I love the Fear Effect franchise and at the same time care deeply about this issue. I don’t want to see the campaign mired in controversy, and I also really want to see indigenous culture and people represented in a way that honors them and preserves their dignity and culture.
One more note, and I’ll leave you alone. It also occurs to me that Iluak is a secondary (non-playable) character. Fear Effect as a franchise already over-represents white/European people, as all of the main characters are white (yes, I know Hana is “half-Asian, but aesthetically, culturally, and even given her voice actor, she might as well be white).
It’s been 15 years since the last Fear Effect game, and a lot has changed in the gaming and media climate in general. It seems to me a lost opportunity not to upgrade the franchise in a way that reflect’s the game industry’s (and consumer base’s) dawning recognition that the vast majority of the world’s people are not white.
Is there any reason why Iluak can’t be a playable character? And also, France has a multitude of different ethnicities (in spite of the government’s ridiculous official policy that race doesn’t exist), so is there anything about Axel that necessitates that he be a white Frenchman?
These are the thoughts of one measly backer, but I feel like Kickstarter as a platform allows for a new level of communication and collaboration between creators and their audience. So I hope you’ll consider my words here as you move forward.
Thank you,
Kermit O
Hi Kermit O
We actually saw your open letter before this message ^^
It’s quite a long (and interesting) question/post, so we’ll take some time to answer it the best as we can. One thing you should know before we start: we are at a very early stage of the development, and the script isn’t finished at all. It’s actually time to think about these questions.
First of all, we are well aware of cultural appropriation. It is a complicated matter, and our first intention was to bring some spotlight to a less known culture that we discovered late ourselves, and which is incredibly rich; and not to use it for dramatic purpose. What is done today with egyptian mythology in some Hollywood movies for example, where all the protagonists have been westernized and the myths just used for the sake of exotic mystery, doesn’t please us at all – we really want to avoid that kind of cheap usage of the Inuit myths and legends. But we don’t want to avoid speaking about a particular country in the world just because no one in the team originates from it (or everything would have happened in Brittany – which is a very nice place, but not really the kind you come across in a dark cyberpunk horror story).
Iluak, in our story (without saying too much) is part of Glas’ past. He originates from Nuuk, but lived in the USA for more than 20 years. As we said earlier on Twitter, his design evolved from the early concepts to the current 3D model. We are happy with his design for now: his aura, his noble and proud stature serve the story perfectly, and he does look like some of the Greenland inhabitants we came across during our research. In a cel-shaded way, of course.
Also, we never said he would not be playable. In fact, he is really central to the story, and not at all a secondary character.
One last thing about Inuits: for now we are doing a lot of research on their story, to begin with; their lifestyle, their art, their music, their ceremonies and celebrations, and the way they live their spirituality. This is all very good, but we all know that academic knowledge alone won’t do justice to their culture. So we are now searching for consultants and advisors who could guide us on the right way. Obviously, we’re now focused on the Kickstarter campaign, so we didn’t dig too much here, but yes for sure, this is our plan.
As for Axel, he is exactly the cute-looking over-confident young white man we wanted him to be – and that will serve the story as well!
There are no good nor villains in Fear Effect (I mean, look at Deke!). So in case you were afraid of that: Iluak won’t be a bad guy. He will do bad things for good reasons, as well as good things for bad reasons, because this is all what Fear Effect is about. To quote John Zuur Platten (writer of Fear Effect 1): “morally ambiguous people ending up doing heroic things”.
We hope this will answer your concerns, and we will keep working hard to create the best experience and story we can provide.
Please don’t hesitate to share you thoughts & ask any question you want, we will be happy to discuss with you!
Friendly yours, Sushee.
Thank you for responding, and promptly at that.
I am glad that you are familiar with the cultural appropriation and have already considered steps to handle the matter carefully. That does a lot to ease my mind.
Still, as there is always more we can learn about any issue, I encourage you still check out the resources I mentioned in my earlier message. You may find they address the issue in ways that you haven’t considered.
Also, please note that I was very intentional about not using the words “myths” or “legends”. The reason for that is that some cultures, especially indigenous cultures, can be reduced simply to their “myths and legends”, when in fact these cultures regard these particular elements of their culture as neither. See the issue of Rowling and her use of “skin walkers” as an example.
Native cultures are often mysticized, treated as something ancient or obscure, in some space “other” than the reality the rest of us inhabit, rather than living and breathing and existing in a continuity with the present. This, too, is a kind of erasure. So another question I would ask would be whether or not the game deals with the realities, including the struggles, of *Inuit people (again, recognizing that term as too broad) TODAY, in the time and place in which it is set? Or do ancient “myths and legends” extend from some dark and mystical past to impact the present? This would be the sort of “dramatic purpose” you mentioned in your response as one to avoid.
As I am not in any way culturally connected to Inuit people, nor have I been nominated by anyone to speak on their behalf, I don’t feel I am the one to continue this discussion. I am glad your team has given it some thought, and I hope you’ll share your thinking and how it factors into your production process publicly and transparently as you move forward (like in your project updates). I think this could encourage those who are impacted by your use of their culture to share their own concerns and help shape the final product.
Thank you again for your response, and I look forward to hearing more as development continues.
Kermit
First of all, let’s be clear : Fear Effect being what it is, mythical creatures and old traditional magic is part of what makes the game unique, along with the fact that it often collides with a futuristic/technologic reality. So we will of course be inspired by Inuit myths to build our world.
From what we read about J.K Rowling’s debate over Skin Crawlers (we hadn’t heard about it before), the fact that she didn’t link the myths to actual people is the problematic part. Also, it seems that she pictured them the wrong way. This will not happen in our game.
When you write a story, you have to fictionalize a lot of things (otherwise you would be creating a documentary). This is where we will have to be careful – but depicting legends in a dramatic way is part of the process, especially with a game like Fear Effect. Building a whole legendary/mystical realm coming out of nowhere is not our intention though. Even if we are not from Greenland ourselves, the myths we talk about will be brought and told by local inhabitants. The mix between a realistic (though futuristic) setting and the legends is one of Fear Effect’s core ingredients.
There are examples of games that made very clever choices while choosing to talk about foreign cultures. In The Secret World, for example, the depiction of Transylvania could have been what we all imagine in the first place: huge pine forests and gothic castles with bats under the moonlight. But they remembered that Transylvania is actually part of Romania, and they chose to show the rural part of that country, in a way that makes you feel they have actually been there to see how they lived and how they would tell their own stories. Same goes for Egypt and the native americans, in the same game.
Of course it’s not perfect, you can still come across the eternal “old fortune teller in her colorful caravan” cliché, but at least it shows a lot of respect for the people. This is what we’re aiming at (minus the cliché, that is).
I know it’s all but words, but we too think these matters are important.
Thanks again for your interest in the game we’re making!
