January 26th, 2007
"Creating Frustration Through Hypocrisy"
I was seriously ambivalent about attending this group, which was advertised as “Creating Peace through Dialogue.” I was hopeful, because after all I want peace as much as the next person–but skeptical, because so often things that are focused on “communication” are stubbornly apolitical. Unfortunately my misgivings were pretty well founded. There were 11 people in attendance, to my eye all white, 10 female plus the inevitable representative of the lefty-man police, and I don’t believe I’d be too far off base in saying I was the only person there under 50. Now, nothing against people over 50, some of my best friends, yada yada, but the truth is I have a lot of friends who are older than me. What I’m really seeking are real-life connections with people my age and younger. Where are all of you in your 30s? Are you too busy coupling up, buying condos, and having babies? Working two jobs to pay those social security taxes? What exactly is the deal?
(Course, the prevalence of retirees couldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that this meeting was held in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. Nah. But more on that later.)
Anyway, this group was as irritating as I thought it would be. Once again based on some man’s schema (David Bohm)–dagnabit, what is it with leftists anyway? If you listened to them, you’d think women never came up with anything worth emulating at all. From the handout ( if it’d been handed out before the end of the meeting, I wouldn’t have even bothered staying):
Dialogue is not intended to be a problem-solving process. Rather, dialogue is a means for creating shared meaning–for expanding the intelligence of the group by sharing thought. This differs from discussion in that it removes the need to convince anyone of anything, and when it is not necessary to convince nor defend, there is freedom to explore, learn, and adjust one’s thinking on one’s own terms. Therefore, while the process is not intentionally directed at problem solving, participants often experience an increased sense of ‘knowing what needs to be done’ from participating in it.
So, DialogueTM isn’t going to help us solve problems, but it will make us feel like we know what we ought to do. Because it’s much better to feel good about ourselves than to actually do anything.
And the participants in this particular group did not let David Bohm down. The gist of what I heard, as person after person introduced herself and talked about what she wanted from the group: “I’ve gotten jumped on by activists/friends/people in my family even though I didn’t think my opinion was that different from theirs. I felt bad. I didn’t know how to defend myself without being vicious, so I retreated. I want this group as a safe space where I can learn to talk about politics with people who are different than me.”
Positive Amy was positively sitting on Negative Amy throughout much of the monologuing (because of course there is no crosstalk in safe space), but after a little while of this, Mr. Snaggy White Guy turns his benevolent gaze upon me and intones, “You haven’t said anything, I’m wondering what you’re thinking.” (To his credit, he wasn’t anything like as big an attention-grabbing smarmy jerk as some leftist men can be, but the difference in the quality of attention paid to him by the women was mind-blowing. He’s the ONLY person that EVERY other person in the group (except me) focused on attentively the entire time he was speaking. The eye contact, the intent, interested looks, the sympathetic nods, the appreciative laughing at his little jokes–holy crap, internalized sexism is alive and well in amerika!)
So challenged, I made the following points: I’m really ambivalent about being here. I look around and I wonder if anyone else here is under 40, or even 50. I hear lots of talk about “tolerance” and “safe space” but I don’t know if I am willing to listen to certain opinions. I think racism is wrong. I think sexism is wrong. I don’t know if I want to hear from people who hold those opinions. If someone is in favor of starting another war in Iran (or anywhere else), I don’t want the same world as that person, and I don’t see how “understanding” their perspective–or them “understanding” mine–is going to change that. If we don’t have a shared vision, shared values, how is “dialogue” going to get us anywhere? I think part of creating peace is challenging power and privilege. Having our privilege challenged hurts, but creating justice requires that those of us who have privilege, power-over, money, what have you–we have to give that up. When a woman of color says to me that what I just said was racist and perpetuates ideas and attitudes that have contributed to the oppression of her people, that hurts. There’s no way for it not to hurt, but there’s also no way to create a just society without shaking up the status quo. All this talk about safe space ends up maintaining white middle-class norms of behavior and discourse, otherwise known as “being nice.” You don’t realize that what you think is just normal respectful behavior has class and ethnic implications. Oh, and by the way, if you want younger people to come, you can’t have a meeting at 3:30 in the afternoon.
There was absolutely no uptake on anything that I said. People looked at me and nodded while I spoke, and when I was done they went right back to talking about safe space and how they don’t know how to disagree as though I hadn’t even spoken.
Subsequently, the facilitator said at least twice how “alike” we all were, and how she hoped for “more diversity” in the group. I looked around the room and could discern that there was some class difference among the participants. She also said she was “glad there’s at least one man!” Right, because we never get to hear men’s perspectives on anything. I was sitting there, an obvious fat lesbian, saying things that were significantly different from what everyone else was saying, and getting absolutely no response. This tells me that “diversity,” in this group as well as so many others, doesn’t mean recognizing the sexism of patriarchy, such that a group of almost all women is, in and of itself, “diverse”–i.e., a gathering of the oppressed. It doesn’t mean, let’s ferret out the differences among us that might not be visually obvious, such as diversity of class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability, or religion. Let’s certainly not discuss diversity of opinion. Sighing for “more diversity,” therefore, is really a code for “we really wish some people of color would come talk to us so we could feel all good about ourselves.”
How many times do people of color have to tell white activists that we can’t just create groups and expect them to show up, be grateful, and put on a song-and-dance for us? How many times will white activists create groups, do no outreach to organizations for and by people of color (let alone work with people of color to create mixed groups that are relevant to POC interests), and then act all puzzled, like why is everyone here white? How long are white activists going to ignore the differences that inevitably exist in a room of people who all “look alike,” particularly diversity of opinion? How long are we going to dismiss people who say difficult things, things we don’t want to hear? How, in a group that’s supposed to be based on freakin’ dialogue and shared thought, can not one person ask me what the hell I am talking about?
This group then spent 30 minutes of their 1.5 hours discussing when to have the next meeting, with all the predictable agonizing permutations of “I have to leave before 5 or I can’t get across the bridge” and “I can’t come on Wednesdays.” When I reiterated my point about people “who aren’t professionals” not being able to leave work to come, a woman, dressed like a therapist, who had left work, said, without looking at me, “Well, but there are all kinds of work schedules, some people work 7 to 3.” How about suggesting the group split into two, and one group meet in the evening or on the weekend? How about someone volunteering to start a second group at a different time? How about finding some way of addressing the concern of the most obviously “diverse” person in the room, instead of dismissing it? Ultimately, they decided to meet on the same day, half an hour later–yet it took 30 minutes of wrangling to figure that out.
Oh yes, I foresee great strides in social justice as the result of this group meeting. Unfortunately, I won’t be there to witness it. I have better things to do than engage in anti-intellectual mental masturbation that pretends all “opinions” are equivalent and the problems that plague us are the result of a lack of understanding, instead of the deliberate attempts of groups with power to exercise that on the backs of the rest of us.
