by Roxane Gay
There is a complex matrix for when you can be racist and with whom. There are ways you behave in public and ways you behave in private. There are things you can say among friends, things you wouldn’t dare say anywhere else, that you must keep to yourself in public.
Writer Teju Cole succinctly identified why so many people are, seemingly, agog about these Deen revelations when he tweeted, “The real reason Paula Deen’s in the news is not because she’s racist, but because she broke the unwritten rules about how to be racist.” Most people are familiar with these rules. We suspect that everyone is, indeed, a little bit racist. It’s often not a question of if someone will reveal his or her racism to whatever degree but, rather, when. Or maybe it’s people of color who are familiar with these rules and willing to acknowledge they exist. Maybe it is people of color who wait, without bated breath, for that when.
My downstairs neighbors moved out. They were Korean, college students. I never met them but they seemed nice enough. They played loud music but it was never enough of a nuisance to complain. Who doesn’t like to party? When I went to pay my rent at the beginning of the month after they left, my landlord’s receptionist began detailing the extraordinary measures they were taking to air out the apartment because “you just wouldn’t believe the smell.” I nodded because I truly had no idea what to say, and then she leaned in to me and whispered, “You know how those people are.”
This was one of those rare moments in which I got to see the rules of racism in action in a multiracial context. A white person felt comfortable confiding in me. In that moment, we were an us conspiring against a them. I couldn’t think of anything snappy so I simply said, “I have no idea what you mean,” and walked away. I wasn’t interested in playing that game where we bond as we reveal our racist secret selves to each other. Later, I felt guilty I hadn’t used that moment to educate this stranger about race-based generalizations. I wondered why she thought she could reveal that casual racism in mixed company. I wondered, as I often do about people, what she truly thinks about me.
Tragedy. Call. Compassion. Response.
Every day, terrible things happen in the world. Every damn day too many people die or suffer for reasons that defy comprehension.
In Norway, in Oslo, in the city where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, on a Friday afternoon, a thirty-two-year-old man triggered a bomb at the government headquarters, killing eight people. On the small island of Utoya that same man killed sixty-nine people, most of them teenagers. Children hid behind rocks and fled into the water and pretended to be dead so they might have a chance to survive, to live a day beyond the unbearable day they were living. There is fear and there is fear. The scale of the tragedy is incomprehensible. The tragedy, like most tragedies, tests the limits of language. There is now a before and after. That’s what the news tells us. There are pictures of the building, decimated, the architecture’s broken skeleton revealed, the dust and debris, the wounded, the dead, the mourning, the mourned, candles melting, wilting flowers wrapped in clear plastic, handwritten signs trying to properly express the depths of a grief that, perhaps, cannot be expressed.
All too often, suffering exists in a realm beyond vocabulary so we navigate that realm awkwardly, fumbling for the right words, hoping we can somehow approximate an understanding of matters that should never have to be understood by anyone in any place in the world.
The man who committed these crimes has blond hair and blue eyes. These details are shared repeatedly in a litany of disbelief. Too many people expected the perpetrator of this crime to have brown skin and a Qur’an because we need to believe that there is only one brand of extremism. This is the world we now live in. We forget compassion. We pretend we are somehow different from those we otherwise condemn.
The man with blond hair and blue eyes has a Wikipedia page. A compendium of knowledge has been compiled about Anders Behring Breivik. We know his beliefs and his taste in music and what his parents do for a living. We know he has an exhaustive manifesto he worked on for nine years, some of which he took directly from the Unabomber. We have seen him posing with a big gun, wearing a wet suit. We have seen his face—his wide, open face, the youth in his features. We know he is extreme in his beliefs and that there must be hatred in his heart. We know he is crazy. He must hate. He must be crazy. We need to believe he is hateful and crazy because it is unfathomable to believe a man of sound mind and body could or would perpetrate such a crime.
“Crime” is a weak word, a weak, weak word. Those five letters cannot accurately convey what is, more accurately, an atrocity. Even that word does not suffice. The tragedy exceeds our vernacular in so many ways.
After this tragedy, the king of Norway said, “I remain convinced that the belief in freedom is stronger than fear. I remain convinced in the belief of an open Norwegian democracy and society. I remain convinced in the belief in our ability to live freely and safely in our own country.” Tragedy. Call. Compassion. Response. He chose grace. He found a better vocabulary with which to respond amidst a suffering that defies vocabulary.
We all have the capacity to do hurtful things, but we differ from one another in terms of scale—how much we can hurt others, how far we will go to make a statement about our beliefs, how remorseful we might feel in the aftermath of committing a terrible act. Most of us, if we are lucky, will only commit petty hurtful acts, the kinds of hurt that can be forgiven. The man who committed this atrocity in Norway has a capacity to hurt few of us will ever understand. He turned himself in. He confessed to his crimes. He wants to explain himself. I don’t know what that means, but it has to mean something. I wonder if he was scared before he took so many lives, before he created such unprecedented destruction. I wonder how he became the kind of man who could shoot children at point-blank range, who could be so careless with human lives. I wonder if he is sickened by what he did. I wonder how he feels, knowing he lives in a country where he will likely not be sentenced to life in prison; knowing that, even in the face of what he did, he will not be put to death. I wonder if he is grateful, if he is humbled, if he is staggered by the humanity of his people. Tragedy. Call. Humility. Response?
After the Norway tragedy, my on-again, off-again boyfriend called from many states away. He is politically conservative, though I’d like to think I’ve worn him down on certain matters. He asked, “Have you seen the news?” He asked, “Do you still believe the death penalty is wrong?” Tragedy. Call. Dial tone. Response.
We know much of what there is to know about Anders Behring Breivik. We know very little about his victims, who they were, what they wanted for their lives, how they loved and were loved, who they loved, how and by whom they will be mourned, what they felt in their last moments, if they suffered. We only know seventy-seven people were killed in one day by one man. Their killer is alive. There is a great deal of cruelty in this state of affairs.
I’m not a saint. I will not shed a tear for Anders Behring Breivik, but I do not wish him dead. I will try to think of him with the compassion he was unable to offer the seventy-seven people he murdered. I will likely fail in this. Still, I do not wish him dead. I do not believe his death is an appropriate punishment. I do not believe there is such a thing as an appropriate punishment for what that man did.
This is the modern age. When tragedies occur, we take to Twitter and Facebook and blogs to share our thoughts and feelings. We do this to know that maybe, just maybe, we are not alone in our confusion or grief or sorrow or to believe we have a voice in what happens in the world.
We take to these tools of the modern age, and there are those among us who, in the wake of tragedy, point fingers or proselytize or use humor as a means of distancing themselves from the emotional discomfort of knowing we are rarely as safe as we hope to be. We are rarely safe from knowing that every day terrible things happen everywhere. Tragedy. Call. Twitter. Response. Others use this time to take a political stance, to speculate as to why blond-haired, blue-eyed men aren’t now being profiled in airports arou
nd the world. There is almost a certain glee in these kinds of statements. At a time like this, tragedy is used for political posturing. Righteousness gets in the way of what is right. Righteousness gets in the way of valid observations that might be better shared more carefully, more thoughtfully, under different circumstances. The tools of the modern age afford us many privileges, but they also cost us the privilege of time and space and distance to properly think through tragedy, to take a deep breath, to feel, to care. Tragedy. Call. Heart. Response. Tragedy. Call. Mind. Response.
There is a girl who was a woman, but really, she was a girl. She was a girl because she was only twenty-seven, had only lived a third of a life. She had a voice like fine whiskey and cigarettes, or at least what I imagine fine whiskey and cigarettes might sound like. She had a voice that made me think of dark, secret nightclubs where you need to know a guy to gain admittance, where musicians gather closely on a small stage and play their instruments for hours in a haze of sweat and cologne, booze and smoke, while a singer, this girl-woman singer, stands at the microphone, giving those gathered the exceptional gift of her voice.
The year her second album came out was the year of the Halloween dedicated to this girl-woman. Everywhere I looked, women and some men wore their hair (or a wig) long and black with a bouffant on top, and they lined their eyes blackly with that distinctive angle at the corner of each eye, and they drew tattoos on their bare arms and sang the chorus of her most popular song. They tried to make me go to rehab. Call. I said, No, No, No. Response. That’s why we care. She was in our lives and our ears and our heads and our hair.
The girl-woman singer died in her flat, alone in bed. Too many people said, “It was to be expected,” because we knew this girl who was a woman was really a girl. We knew she had problems, and she did not have the luxury the rest of us do to handle our problems privately, with dignity. She was a mess. So what? We are all stinking messes, every last one of us, or we once were messes and found our way out, or we are trying to find our way out of a mess, scratching, reaching. We knew she had demons that were bigger than her, demons she tried to fight or she didn’t—we can’t possibly know. Her struggles were documented and parodied, celebrated and ridiculed. Celebrity. Call. Gossip. Response. We have seen the pictures of this girl-woman in the street, barefoot, her midriff bare and swollen, her makeup smeared, her unforgettable hair stringy, pasted to her pale face, her body being carried from her home in a red body bag. There was no privacy for her, not even in death. That is a tragedy too.
I love her music and listen to it regularly. I always hoped she might survive herself, hoped she would give her adoring fans more of her voice, hoped she would give herself the blessing of a long life. I heard she died from my best friend, who sent me a text message, and we commiserated about what a shame it was for a girl-woman to die at the age of twenty-seven. It is a different kind of devastating to think about the life she will never know, about those gifts that come with more years of living. I do not wonder about the cause of her death. The how of her demise isn’t my business. And yet. When I first heard of her death, I wondered if she died alone. I wondered if she was scared. There is fear and there is fear. Now, I wonder if she knew real happiness in her short life. I wonder if she felt loved or knew peace. She was someone’s daughter. She was someone’s sister. We know her father found out while he was on a plane. He did not have any kind of privacy to make sense of surviving his child. The death of a child is unbearable and suffocating. After Amy Winehouse’s death, her parents had to try to cope with something the human heart is ill equipped to withstand. Tragedy. Call. Broken heart. Response.
I followed many conversations about what happened in Norway and the death of Amy Winehouse because they happened one after the next. Too many of those conversations tried to conflate the two events, tried to create some kind of hierarchy of tragedy, grief, call, response. There was so much judgment, so much interrogation of grief—how dare we mourn a singer, an entertainer, a girl-woman who struggled with addiction, as if the life of an addict is somehow less worthy a life, as if we are not entitled to mourn unless the tragedy happens to the right kind of people. How dare we mourn a singer when across an ocean seventy-seven people are dead? We are asked these questions as if we only have the capacity to mourn one tragedy at a time, as if we must measure the depth and reach of a tragedy before deciding how to respond, as if compassion and kindness are finite resources we must use sparingly. We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line. We cannot understand these tragedies neatly.
Death is a tragedy whether it is the death of one girl-woman in London or seventy-seven men, women, and children in Norway. We know this, but perhaps it needs to be said over and over again so we do not forget.
I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live in a world where such was the case.
Tragedy. Call. Great. Small. Compassion. Response. Compassion. Response.
[BACK TO ME]
Bad Feminist: Take One
My favorite definition of “feminist” is one offered by Su, an Australian woman who, when interviewed for Kathy Bail’s 1996 anthology DIY Feminism, said feminists are “just women who don’t want to be treated like shit.” This definition is pointed and succinct, but I run into trouble when I try to expand that definition. I fall short as a feminist. I feel like I am not as committed as I need to be, that I am not living up to feminist ideals because of who and how I choose to be.
I feel this tension constantly. As Judith Butler writes in her 1988 essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” “Performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all.” This tension—the idea that there is a right way to be a woman, a right way to be the most essential woman—is ongoing and pervasive.
We see this tension in socially dictated beauty standards—the right way to be a woman is to be thin, to wear makeup, to wear the right kind of clothes (not too slutty, not too prudish—show a little leg, ladies), and so on. Good women are charming, polite, and unobtrusive. Good women work but are content to earn 77 percent of what men earn or, depending on whom you ask, good women bear children and stay home to raise those children without complaint. Good women are modest, chaste, pious, submissive. Women who don’t adhere to these standards are the fallen, the undesirable; they are bad women.
Butler’s thesis could also apply to feminism. There is an essential feminism or, as I perceive this essentialism, the notion that there are right and wrong ways to be a feminist and that there are consequences for doing feminism wrong.
Essential feminism suggests anger, humorlessness, militancy, unwavering principles, and a prescribed set of rules for how to be a proper feminist woman, or at least a proper white, heterosexual feminist woman—hate pornography, unilaterally decry the objectification of women, don’t cater to the male gaze, hate men, hate sex, focus on career, don’t shave. I kid, mostly, with that last one. This is nowhere near an accurate description of feminism, but the movement has been warped by misperception for so long that even people who should know better have bought into this essential image of feminism.
Consider Elizabeth Wurtzel, who, in a June 2012 Atlantic article, says, “Real feminists earn a living, have money and means of their own.” By Wurtzel’s thinking, women who don’t “earn a living, have money and means of their own,” are fake feminists, undeserving of the label, a disappointment to the sisterhood. She takes the idea of essential feminism even further in a September 2012 Harper’s Bazaar article, where she suggests that a good feminist works hard to be beautiful. She says, “Looking great is a matter of feminism. No liberated woman would misrepresent the cause by appearing less than hale and happy.” It’s too easy to dissect the error of such thinking. She is suggesting that a woman’s worth is, in part, determined by her beauty, which is one of the very things feminism works ag
ainst.
The most significant problem with essential feminism is how it doesn’t allow for the complexities of human experience or individuality. There seems to be little room for multiple or discordant points of view. Essential feminism has, for example, led to the rise of the phrase “sex-positive feminism,” which creates a clear distinction between feminists who are positive about sex and feminists who aren’t—which, in turn, creates a self-fulfilling essentialist prophecy.
I sometimes cringe when I am referred to as a feminist, as if I should be ashamed of my feminism or as if the word “feminist” is an insult. The label is rarely offered in kindness. I am generally called a feminist when I have the nerve to suggest that the misogyny so deeply embedded in our culture is a real problem requiring relentless vigilance. The essay in this collection about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes originally appeared in Salon. I tried not to read the comments because they get vicious, but I couldn’t help but note one commenter who told me I was an “angry blogger woman,” which is simply another way of saying “angry feminist.” All feminists are angry instead of, say, passionate.
A more direct reprimand came from a man I was dating during a heated discussion that wasn’t quite an argument. He said, “Don’t you raise your voice to me,” which was strange because I had not raised my voice. I was stunned because no one had ever said such a thing to me. He expounded, at length, about how women should talk to men. When I dismantled his pseudotheories, he said, “You’re some kind of feminist, aren’t you?” There was a tone to his accusation, making it clear that to be a feminist was undesirable. I was not being a good woman. I remained silent, stewing. I thought, Isn’t it obvious I am a feminist, albeit not a very good one? I also realized I was being chastised for having a certain set of beliefs. The experience was disconcerting, at best.
