Re: A very moving portrayal of the diversity element most difficult to include in cohousing | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Tiffany Lee Brown (magdalen23![]() |
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Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2016 12:17:59 -0800 (PST) |
oh!! you guys have to see the Saturday Night Live “bubble” skit if you haven’t already. it totally skewers people like me, and it is very relevant to co-housing, and it’s hilarious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKOb-kmOgpI <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKOb-kmOgpI> The Atlantic ran a good article on understanding America’s lower-class white culture, i think this is the right one: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/ <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/> to directly respond: my recent conversations with Trump voters close to me have led me to be even more alarmed than i already was. i believe these are good people, very good-hearted people whom i know to actively practice empathy, compassion, and generosity. the two primary ones are an older white, rural Christian woman who was raised in a lower-middle-class family that struggled a lot, but has been in a comfortable upper-middle-income marriage for many years. the other is a white, non-Christian, non-college-going, smart, hippie-looking guy in his forties in a liberal, small, West Coast city who has a demanding, underpaying restaurant job and comes from a big 2nd Amendment/Libertarian-leaning extended family. (he voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary.) what alarmed me, sobered me up, were these two factors: 1) they showed no interest whatsoever in protecting those already affected by Trump & followers, such as people of color. they complained of being *accused* of racism, but even when prompted or confronted about it, replied “Well I’m not racist, you know that!” or dodged the issue entirely with “but look what the protesters in Portland did, they’re bad!" when i said, “Well, maybe you can make this situation better. Trump isn’t going to listen to me, an outspoken liberal feminist married to a magazine-publishing Jew, a.k.a. evil Globalist Jewish Conspiracy guy. But he might listen to you, one of his supporters. What if the non-racist Trump voters got together and wrote to Trump, wrote letters to the editor, demanding fair treatment for all races?” and the answer was a big fat nothing. they just weren’t interested in anything beyond the complaining. also: to me, “racism” includes denial of systemic bias, racism includes failing to actively promote help or policies for people of color. to many white people (and some people of color), the term “racist” is reserved for those who consciously, externally confess to finding other races inferior, refusing to hire them for jobs, or turning them into Strange Fruit. so that’s a pretty big difference in approach. we may actually be talking about completely different things when we toss around the word “racist.” perhaps we need to break it down into other terms, and that would help us have better conversations about it. we might also need to abandon the language of Social Justice, which carries so much baggage at this point it’s really hard to talk about our real issues. for example, many white guys of my acquaintance hear or read the word “privilege” and instantly go on the defensive, misinterpreting it to suggest that they were raised in mansions, that their lives have been easy, that their struggles aren’t real. so maybe language and terminology would offer us a place to start. 2) as you mention, the bases of my Trump-voting friends’/family’s worldview is just plain different from mine (and from their own spouses’ incidentally). the older woman is very Christian and uses her faith as the foundation for cruelty against LGBTQ folks. she also frames the cruelty as “love” because she’s going to save humanity by, say, not allowing gay teachers’ jobs to be protected under the law. never mind that Jesus never said a thing about homosexuality, never mind that she doesn’t follow anything else in Leviticus—she believes it is wrong, she believes this wrongness comes from God’s will and Word. the “understanding” i have of this is simply, well, i understand that humans often need to project our fears and stuff out onto other people, and then fight ‘em (just as i do when i paint all Trump supporters with broad strokes). perhaps it is almost random, the group we choose to consciously or unconsciously project all our ugly internal stuff on, the group of people we then try to ban, deport, rape, convert, humiliate, or to whom we refuse to extend equal participation in society and equal participation under law. but what actually frightened me was hearing these folks mutter alt-right catchphrases under their breath and tell me about Fox-verbatim “news”. i looked at some links they sent me, hoping to find common ground, but walked away even more bewildered and horrified. they—these people i love, people i don’t want to imagine as today's equivalent to nice German families in the 1930s much less actual brownshirts—genuinely believe in a wide range of right-leaning conspiracy theories that i can mentally entertain but can’t quite get behind as reality. some of those theories may prove to be true. (in the 1980s, as a teenager, i was involved in anti-Reagan activism having to do with trading arms for hostages and funding Nicaraguan “rebels”, and we were scoffed at, told that our crazy conspiracy couldn’t possibly be true. guess what? it was true.) but once you believe that a secret cabal runs the international banking system *and* feeds all American media their headlines, it ain’t long before the same people who convinced you of that can convince you that Jews = Bad. i have been harping for a number of years on the subject of our country being in an Epistemological Crisis, and this generally makes people roll their eyes or glaze over, but the deep divergence in reality-models, in trust of media sources, etc., is evidence of this crisis. i personally don’t believe that pure journalistic objectivity is possible. having been in the media, in marketing, and in academia, i know how easy it is to “prove” anything you want to, spinning words, images, and statistics. we have seen blatant instances of utter corruption in science, medicine, industry, government, law, and media. we should therefore not be all that surprised that the Internet and social media have helped push us to a Balkanized state of worldview, of “knowledge”. if we genuinely suspend our usual everyday beliefs (say, our belief in what scientific research tells us, or what we read in the New York Times or what few other actual news sources remain solvent) we become very open-minded. that sounds great, but it’s terrifying on an internal, spiritual level. our minds are not generally comfortable with radical uncertainty. once we suspend an elemental belief, i think we have a tendency to replace it with some other belief, however far-out or random. we can also feel deeply betrayed by the world failing to consistently align with our beliefs and/or with what our society has told us is “true”. the bitterness you often run into among the ex-Christian apostasy, especially folks raised in a protected, home-schooled evangelical environment, provides a good example: you grew up being told a whole bunch of intense stuff, much of which never seemed to be true once you got out into the world, and you inevitably had to watch the grownups you admired turn out to be hypocrites. you moved to a big city and found all sorts of different people, many of whom seemed pretty great. how could they all be going to hell? you questioned your beliefs. you found a lot of holes in it. disillusioned, you felt betrayed by those who intentionally programmed you. instead of becoming a run-of-the-mill urban agnostic or the sort of quiet atheist who grew up in a non-believer household, you become a bitter and angry opponent of religion. and what are you supposed to believe is true, if everything you grew up with has proved not to be true?? perhaps like me you become a serious doubter of everything, and end up exploring Theory of Knowledge, epistemology, etc. as something to hold onto. “I cannot know The Full Truth about everything, and it is likely that one single Truth doesn’t even exist, especially if quantum theory is at all accurate, but I can try to understand how our brains manufacture ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ and ‘knowledge.’” or you become a hardline rationalist atheist, placing your belief in hard scientific research and rational-sounding, unemotional political discourse. (emotion played a big part in the Christians’ programming of you, so perhaps you retreat from that.) i meet people like this *all the time*. when things get REALLY weird? say you felt betrayed by your upbringing, whether Christian or liberal atheist, went in an opposite direction—and then the new belief system you embraced as an adult reveals itself to be full of holes. perhaps you stopped believing in Christ but picked up a firm belief in peer-reviewed scientific research. then solid information came out that some of that scientific research is bunk, that the funding of such research is dodgy and biased, that peer review is a joke in many cases. now you have NO BELIEF SYSTEM. this is hard on the heart, spirit, and intellect. the collapse of Big Media as our sole source of current events information has helped bring this about, because the Internet’s wide distribution network allows all ideas to get equal air. a story about false scientific research that might’ve blown over or been suppressed in 1965 is going to pop up in your Facebook feed in 2015 (see: Harvard scientists on fat and sugar in the 1960s). it takes great effort to avoid new information these days. so everything you believe is under some kind of attack, most of the time. you start to see that people just believe whatever random thing they want. they create communities based on belief, worldview, knowledge, and even communities initially based on hobbies and kinks can turn into entire worldviews. ethics are relative. truth is relative. reality is relative! there is no Truth! AUUGH! your brain explodes! you attach onto whatever’s in the room. maybe that’s a new religion. maybe it’s yoga. and maybe it’s Fox News, Breitbart News, truthers, birthers, Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer, and Donald Trump. it is natural to fear have our belief systems destroyed. it is natural to fear a world that has no definitive Truth. somewhere inside, we know this: if we open our minds far enough to be fully compassionate and empathetic with angry white racists, we may open up far enough to end up agreeing with them. that is a spooky idea. i believe this is part of why we liberals find it so hard to breach the Belief Gap with our conservative friends (those of us who even HAVE any conservative friends). once you decide it’s OK for our friend to vote for someone who accepts the Klan’s endorsement of his campaign, you’re on a slippery slope. if you allow yourself to consider that maybe the New York Times really is a mouthpiece for the international “globalist” conspiracy, you may well soon find yourself considering that everything the Times ever reports is wrong… and that it’s OK to stop calling it the international globalist conspiracy, and just call it by its other name, the Jewish cabal. some part of us, i believe, can feel the tug of this slippery slope. once we allow that Good People can be hate-filled racists, or even just casual racists who can’t be bothered to help or defend folks who are clearly affected by deliberate and systemic racism… then we allow the possibility that *we* can become blatant racists too. if our Trump voting friends are Good People who deserve a break, a sympathetic book-reading, who deserve our compassion… uh oh! we’re Good People, too, right? so does this mean *we* can be more selfish and implicitly racist in our thinking and voting? would that become ethical for us? this is frightening territory. so maybe “understanding” isn’t the right goal; i don’t know. yes, most of us, whoever we voted for, have lots in common. we want decent work, decent schools, a decent country to live in. we want freedom. as a writer and formerly an actor, i’ve spent my life allowing my heart and mind to expand, to imagine the unimaginable in order to portray characters who do, say, and believe things i could never do, say, or believe. i can easily and compassionately imagine just how easy it would be to go along with the crowd in 1930s Germany, to convince myself i was Doing the Right Thing. i love my Trump-voting 2nd Amendment friend who i know spends hours and hours every day watching random dudes on YouTube promote their various conspiracy theories about aliens, the Clintons, the Russians, on and on. does that mean i should spend a lot of time trying to “understand” and agree with today’s fake non-racists, much less the openly racist ones? i don’t know. perhaps about some things, one must simply stand up and say, “Hey, this is wrong.” and sometimes we may band together with others who feel strongly about the same thing. do we just nod and smile? “because you had a hardship in Appalachia, it’s cool you’re trying to snuff out my Black friends”? “aw, poor white 27-year-old guy in a white BMW, you didn’t feel like the entire world was supporting every moment of entitlement you felt in the last 8 years under a *gasp* African-American president, therefore when you walked up to my friend in a bar who was speaking ill of Trump, you felt justified in punching her in the head and running away… why don’t you come live with me in my co-housing community? we want to be inclusive.” perhaps so. but perhaps not. we could spend the rest of our lives learning to excuse ourselves and everyone else of our worst behavior… or perhaps we could use that same energy in some other way. i would be very interested to hear everyone else’s responses to this, especially based on living in intentional communities where conflicts frequently arise. i have spent too much time in the Portland-Eugene-Berkeley-Oakland reality bubble and have only recently returned to the way i was raised, living in rural/semi-rural communities that are deeply divided in terms of belief, politics, and lifestyle. all best, tiffany > On Nov 30, 2016, at 10:30 AM, David Heimann <heimann [at] theworld.com> wrote: > > > > Hello Everyone, > > Recently we've been having a thread about diversity in cohousing and > understanding people not in our own culture. A lot of the discussion has > centered around diversities such as people of color, LGBT, immigrants, > disabled people, etc. However, there is one diversity we in cohousing > haven't mentioned much and whom we ignore at our peril -- white > "working-class" without a college education, especially those in the Midwest, > Appalachia, and the South, and especially men. > > Nathaniel Rich has written a book reporting on an extensive study he > has conducted of this group of people. He has not only investigated them but > also has lived among them, gaining incredible understanding. I read the > following article about Rich's work in the New York Review of Books, > www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/11/10/american-right-inside-the-sacrifice-zone, > and am floored by the haunting picture he draws. Haunting not just for white > rural working-class people (especially men), but also for the rest of us, > considering the way the election and its atmosphere has gone and what that > portends. > > From what Rich describes, it is possible (at least by my mind) to > really understand and connect with them, but gosh is it difficult! It > requires a totally different mind set than I have and that I assume most on > this list have! Do you, dear readers and fellow cohousers, have thoughts on > how best to do so? And especially those on this list who are white > working-class rural folks or have such among your family and close friends, > can you share your perspective? Not only cohousing depends on bridging this > diversity, but the health of country does as well! > > Yours in *full* diversity, > David Heimann > Jamaica Plain Cohousing > > _________________________________________________________________ > Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at: > http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L/ > >
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A very moving portrayal of the diversity element most difficult to include in cohousing David Heimann, November 30 2016
- Re: A very moving portrayal of the diversity element most difficult to include in cohousing Tiffany Lee Brown, November 30 2016
- Re: A very moving portrayal of the diversity element most difficult to include in cohousing Mary Baker, Solid Communications, December 4 2016
- Re: A very moving portrayal of the diversity element most difficult to include in cohousing Crystal Farmer, December 1 2016
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