The Reasons
I'm starting this because I want to write more, to more people. I have a lot of messy, hard-to-corral thoughts about how to live in our time. We have a lot of extremes as our options. I think the most truthful path forward is one made out of nuance. But nuance is hard to pin down, and hard to scale. At the very least I need to sort out these ideas for myself.
I was reading Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror which is quite good, if just for the fact that it sparked a realization.
(Often I feel a spark of insight into something immediately followed by the thought that it must be glaringly obvious to everyone already, and not worth saying out loud. Sometimes I'm right, occasionally I am quite, very much, dead wrong. Apologies for this spark and all future sparks if this provokes an "Okay, thanks Captain Obvious" response in you.)
Wait, before I tell you the realization, let me add that it also meshes with something from Ibram X Kendi's writing: the idea that if you have a system that produces inequitable outcomes, then either there is a problem with the system, or a problem with the peoples that these outcomes are distributed to. Since the latter is essentially racist (or some variation of "they deserve what they get"), it's probably the system that needs fixing.
So back to Trick Mirror, I realized while reading it... and it wasn't articulated exactly this way in Tolentino's text, but seemed to form the silhouette of this thought... we don't punish or hurt or abuse or discriminate against people because of rational reasons. Because we are human, and flawed, and creatures that inflict pain on people that are different, we do that first, and then come up with the rational reason why we did it after the fact.
This both makes me sad and also frees me from trying to figure out why I, or anyone else, might experience an unjust outcome. There's plenty of history of people, from sadists to scientists, coming up with intellectual reasons why their abuse is justified. And this always leaves the injured holding the bag: if they molded themselves to fit these prescriptions they wouldn't receive their punishment.
Unhooking that lie means shedding the responsibility of causing your own marginalization. And it carries with it a heavier implication: that you examine this dynamic in yourself.
This feels like a truer way to see the world.
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