Remembering Discrimination

I have this theory about how people remember pain, and how those memories are recalled and used in daily life. I've written about it at length here, but basically the idea is this: pain is a traumatic experience that would harm the mind if it were remembered clearly, so the human brain regularly blurs the memory of pain so that it is more remote. Its easy to remember the fact that pain is unpleasant and distressing, but its not at all easy to remember the actual sensation. My evidence for this theory is both my own experience with chronic pain- which is difficult to remember even when I experience it every day- and also signs in the relatively healthy population that indicate that people don't remember the pains they've encountered in the past, things like drug laws that severely punish chronic pain sufferers, doctors who consider a set amount of daily pain to be perfectly acceptable and not worth treating, people who are otherwise compassionate who just assume that chronic pain sufferers choose not to engage in certain activities simply because they are lazy, and so on. People act like they have no idea what pain is, because they really don't remember it when they aren't experiencing it.

I have a more tentative corollary to this theory: discrimination is like pain in that it is a traumatic experience that is difficult to understand unless you are currently on the receiving end of it. I used to be pretty sure that this was true, but now I'm not as sure.

My evidence in favor of this theory was my experience with disability rights activism. As I've said before, my acceptance of my disability has transformed the way I see the world, my place in it, and the place of other people. I have a stronger sense of the goods of society, which includes a much better understanding of all the ways those in power discriminate against out groups on the basis of race, gender, religion, etc. I understand sexism and racism better because I understand disablism. Obviously there are differences between various outgroups, and there are a lot of ways in which being female, or being gay, or being Latino, or whatever, is not at all like being disabled. But I think that, for example, understanding the ways in which being seen as a "good" crip (that is, inspiring but not socially challenging, asexual and passive and dependent) is just as marginalizing as a negative stereotype, helps me understand how being seen as a "good" woman (that is, motherly and submissive, pretty and a good cook) can be just as marginalizing as negative stereotypes of women. And I think that knowing the cost of trying to "pass" for perfectly healthy helps me better understand what it must be like for a homosexual person to "pass" for straight: not only is there the cost in physical pain, but I have to avoid talking about most of what my life is like, hiding the things that are important to me for the sake of the social comfort of the person I'm talking to. Obviously it's not the same. But I think its similar, and while my understanding of discrimination in all it's forms certainly isn't perfect, its better than it used to be.

The thing is, though, that political events of the last few months have clearly proven to me that experiencing discrimination yourself doesn't necessarily bring understanding of the discrimination that anyone else experiences, even if you understand what is going on in your own situation. When the Democratic primary races started, I assumed that in general people who voted Democratic would think more or less along the same lines I do: people who experience discrimination on whatever basis have more in common with each other than with people who don't experience discrimination regularly. So white women are more likely to have philosophies and voting patterns in common with minorities than with white men. And as far as I know this has traditionally been the case (although its not like I'm an expert on election history). The Democratic party is the party of women and minorities and the poor and those marginalized on the basis of religion or gender or any damn thing, right?

But it seems like I was wrong. It seems like there are a lot of people out there who think that the best way to achieve power for their particular marginalized group is to crowd out anyone else. There is a particularly nasty video making the rounds of a Hillary supporter making racially based arguments against Obama, and the Hillary Sexism Watch at Shakesville is up to installment #104. All this infighting makes me think that I am entirely wrong about the instructive value of discrimination. Maybe its just that you have to chose to learn, and then you have to chose to generalize from your own experience to others' experiences. Maybe we're just not brave enough to empathize with others who are in pain.

I also don't think that this is likely to work, as a political tactic. I mean, as a chronic pain sufferer, if I want to accomplish a political goal like, say, increasing funding into research on pain and brain function, my best bet is to include everyone who suffers into the same coalition. When it comes to policy and social movements that benefit those with chronic pain, there is no difference between people with arthritis, people with migraines, people with phantom limb pain, people with fibromyalgia, or people with diabetic neuropathy. I believe it is the same for those who are trying to fight discrimination. We all have the same goals, and forcing divisions does no one any good.

If heaven is on the way

So I was talking with my mother-in-law the other day, and the conversation went like our conversations usually do, where she talks about 95% of the time, and I say "mmhmm" and "oh really?" and "yeah" a lot. She was telling stories about how she got into trouble in high school, but then got diverted onto the subject of how inconvenient it was for everyone she knew when the school district policy started to require forced integration of the school districts, which meant that the bus rides for some people took longer. She honestly couldn't see any need at all for integration of schools, because after all, the people she knew would never harass black students, and if the black students all sat at one table at lunch it was just because they wanted to. All integration was to her was a pointless hassle, and at that point I really didn't have anything to say.

My in-laws and the people I've met here in St Louis since moving here last summer are not bad people. They are intelligent, educated, middle class white folks who insist that St Louis is not, in fact, in the South, but is in the Midwest and so must be untainted with horrible horrible racism. It puzzles me, that they don't see it. St Louis is about half white and half black, I think, although I don't know the current statistics; we are currently living in my grandmother-in-law's house, which is in a neighborhood with exactly zero people who aren't lily white. I go to the grocery store around the corner and it's no more diverse than the stores in rural Washington state where I grew up. On the other hand, if you go up to the northern part of St Louis county, communities there are almost 100% nonwhite. My in-laws' social circle does not include a single person who isn't white.

The way money is spent by the local governments here reflects this segregation to a degree that makes my skin itch. The neighborhood here, which is white and upper middle class, is perfectly safe. You can leave your doors unlocked when you run to the store and you can walk alone at night. I get the impression that the nonwhite neighborhoods are rather dangerous; the principle advice I got when I moved here about how to get around the city was to not go north of downtown or across the river, because doing so means you're going to get shot. It's not just dangerous crime, either. The VA hospital downtown is in a part of town that is right on the edge between a university campus and, to the north of it, a patch of urban poverty recognizable by ancient, poorly maintained, or abandoned buildings: it's a 'black' part of town.

Some of the history of the area is outlined in these posts by The Infamous Brad, which I found via Orcinus. The shooting he talks about occurred in Kirkwood, which is a suburb of St Louis that is only about ten minutes from where I'm living now. Orcinus also gives a link to a previous discussion of sundown towns that mentions Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, which I thought was very interesting. It's easy for a white kid from a white town like me to grow up almost completely ignorant of the complexities of race in our society, but it seems to me like it ought to be more difficult to stay ignorant when your white town is right next to a black town and the difference is so stark. My in-laws do manage to be ignorant, though.

It makes me wonder if the difference between us really is just that I read so much science fiction at such an impressionable age, or if there actually is less racism in the Pacific Northwest like I used to assume. Or maybe the type of racism in Washington- the kind people don't talk about- just doesn't pass along to the next generation as reliably.

Raven Steals the Sun

I don't remember what I was doing but somehow earlier today I stumbled upon this picture of a tattoo, which shows Raven, which in the folklore of many of the Native tribes on the northern west coast of America is a creator god figure. There is a story that many tribes tell in different ways, but which comes down to this: once upon a time there was no light in the world. The light was kept away by an old man (or Eagle or Seagull in some variations) who kept it locked up tight so that only he could possess it. Raven tricked his way into a place in the household via the old man's daughter (some variations say he courted her, some say he turned himself into a tiny pine needle in her tea so she swallowed him down and became pregnant) and stole away the light, scattering it across the world to form the moon, sun and stars. The old man was angry but in the end he could see how beautiful his daughter was so Raven got away with it.

I really like this story, for a lot of reasons. I think monotheistic religions are poorer for their lack of trickster role models. Ravens have always symbolized the battlefield in my mind, and I like that this story puts a harbinger of death in the position of one who brings light to the world. This is probably not the spin a Native storyteller would put on it, but it was the first thing that occurred to me when I heard this story. I like that the hero of this story is a frail bird who obtains his goals through subtle trickery instead of violent confrontation. I think it tells a true story, in the sense that it says things about the way the world works that are true.

Anyway, so this tattoo is something that I wouldn't mind getting. I won't, because I don't want to lay claim to a culture that, when it comes down to it, my ancestors purged from the land in a violent genocide; I don't really have any right to it. Its a beautiful tattoo though.

Science Fiction and the Other

I've been reading Pam's House Blend off and on the past week or so, and it's been making me think. Her section on hair styles, specifically the implications of straightening or not straightening your hair if you have African hair, is particularly fascinating. Apparently there are people in the world who make a moral distinction between straight and curly hair. This shocks me a little bit. The idea that respectable, thinking people still care about race, still categorize people based on skin tone is almost unbelievable.

Believe it or not, it wasn't clear to me until recently just how prevalent racism still is. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, about an hour out of Seattle, and although my parents in many ways are religious nuts, the only categorizing I ever heard either of them engage in was Christian v. non-Christian, and even then non-Christians weren't worth less as people, they were the focus of Christ's love. I used to think that this attitude was pretty much normal for educated, intelligent people. I was aware that in parts of the country there were still people who thought African-Americans were stupid and lazy, but I assumed that no one took these people seriously, because they were obviously cracked.

Some of this, I think, was the area I grew up in. There wasn't the residue of hate from ages of slavery to deal with, and the racial divisions were based on less vitriolic things. Instead of there being this line drawn between white and black, there were many lines, most of which were really blurry, between white, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Thai, Native of infinite varieties, etc. So the biggest historical racial inequity was the genocide of the Natives, and even that was mostly accidental, through the introduction of diseases white settlers didn't realize they were carrying and so on. I remember being taught in school the story of the Whitmans, missionaries who began a mission in western Washington and ended up slaughtered after the tribe they were supposed to be saving ended up mostly dead from measles, as a parable of European arrogance and stupidity. I don't know why it was easier to demonize white missionaries than white slave owners, but it was.

The other major influence on my thinking about race, however, was my love of science fiction. By the age of 16, I read almost every science fiction book in my local library, and often read an author's entire canon by ordering books from the county library system. I was fortunate that the county I lived in included Seattle, which meant a ton of money for artsy things like libraries. A lot of it is a blur by now, but I remember at one point, I must have been 12 or so, reading a short story in this huge grey book full of great short stories from the whole history of science fiction. This particular story was written in the 70s sometime, I think, as a reflection on the civil rights movement. It was very simple: aliens had made contact with Earth and wanted to see how regular people lived, so they went out to restaurants and things. I believe these aliens were tall and blue and quiet. The story was told from the point of view of a waitress at a restaurant one of these aliens visited, basically speculating on what he felt and how he reacted to the people he met treating him with disgust. The message was, what's so special about us that we feel we have some right to treat them as though they're dangerous and untrustworthy and evil?

It's difficult to read science fiction for years and still hold onto us v. them thinking. The whole genre explores the idea of the Other and the Different and the Strange, seeking to know what these things are like. And after all, to know is to love, is to hate, is to be, is to eat... just ask Mr. Heinlein.

Which is why it's so striking to me to live now in St Louis, which claims to be the Midwest but really looks like the South to me in many ways. People here who are educated and smart and liberal still believe that black people are fundamentally different than white people. It's not correct to claim that black people are stupid or lazy or can't swim or are prone to violence, not really, but they are still an Other group. Its ridiculous. It really bothers me that not only can I not say that I wish I had a classical North African bone structure so that I could shave my head and still look beautiful, people who actually have North African bone structure still feel pressured to imitate 'white' hairstyles so that they're socially acceptable. I wish I could do something to change things.