Me and Membership

(Blah blah social justice wyt lady personal journey, blah blah.)

I wrote about the end of my library career waaay back in 2012, and I'll leave the details there, but the gist is that a seriously disturbed library volunteer waged an inexplicable, literally baseless, hate campaign against one of my employees.

A trustee told me to begin the firing process for this employee.  It was unethical, illegal, and unearned and I wouldn’t do it.   He then began a Machiavellian campaign to get rid of me.

And then another trustee — we had two who represented our area — took me to lunch. She diplomatically expressed her lack of support for Other Trustee and for Library Boss, and said she'd like to see me stay.

So, there in 1994, I'm sitting across the table, touched and grateful for the first show of support by anyone with power in this situation. But also wondering why it hadn't come soon enough.  I was worn out and I'd already burned my bridges. Figuring out whether I was handling it right, or I was a failure seemed irrelevant.

What this 1994 event has to do with 2021 is this:

This was the event that made me look at how caring about my reputation was making my life impossible.   I’d gotten a total witches' brew of messages all my life, from a bunch of different sources. Summer camp said I was crappy, my 4th grade teacher thought I was great, etc. etc.

Leaving the job didn’t resolve it, in the face of years of contradictory messages.  Was I a Good Witch or a Bad Witch?

 

Forming a sense of self starts with input — family first, but also society and culture. All these, though, are opinions of people with their own damage, needs, agendas both good and bad, their own wisdom or ignorance or love of wielding power, or their simple stupidity.  

So the next step was realizing that life required a sorting process, to at least try to know myself.  I’m still lousy at it, yet no one but me could do it accurately at all.

And yeah, you're maybe liking this, up to this point, but here's what a lot of people won't like.

I’ve never called myself an ally.

It’s not a term anybody should award herself anyway, it’s about standards determined by others, and I think claiming or seeking it is unhealthy.  I’ve tried, awarding myself a summer camp “G” because I thought I deserved it, and realizing that it was the acceptance, not the ornament, that I really both craved and needed to let go of. 

Even if my basic values are strong for equality, democracy, voting rights, ending racism and discrimination on religion, ethnicity, gender-anything, ending economic injustice, and line up 90% with everyone else, I can’t agree to follow an agenda set by others  ; and that’s pretty much the dictionary definition of being an ally. 

Liberal is a label I get to give myself without seeking approval. There’s debate about what earns people the Liberal label too, but there’s no authority making those decisions. Being an ally, though, does mean stepping back and letting those with whom we’re allying take the lead and determine what we should support and oppose. I can’t commit to that. 

I do know that belonging doesn’t require lockstep thinking, debate is ok.  But. There are things that are considered too essential to argue with, and that pretty much get my membership rescinded.  And they baffle me.

Sweeping statements like “politically correct just means being a decent person” are a Thing that I’m supposed to believe, only I think that statement is bullshit.

If I say that some campaign that I think is absurd is political correctness run amuck, I’m told that it means “I support treating people like crap.”  No.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that and I don’t support that. 

You may think Snow White reinforces rape culture.  I think that’s absurd.

No, some white kid wearing dreds is not doing a damn thing wrong. I’m very wary of the campaign against “cultural appropriation” at all, yeah, really, which makes me poor ally material.

No, Horton Hears a Who is not a story of White Saviorism.

Here’s an exact quote I am unapologetically not going to identify or attribute :

You might be wondering what [Game of Thrones] has to do with a radical qtpoc politics. Much of the GoT fandom probably cannot feel with and for people in the real world who face structural violence on a daily basis, the most vulnerable to everyday systems of exploitation.

Maybe some readers agree with me that that’s loony, but I guarantee that an unbroken stream of “So insightful!” and “Thank you for enlightening me!” was the response it got.

Yes, social media lets us cocoon with those who are like-minded, which explains some of the apparent unanimity that’s, in truth, not unanimous at all.  But the craving for acceptance that the sheer quantity of it represents is a real deal. 

I have trouble being polite about such lunacy but I’m ok with bypassing the GoT  type conversations altogether.  Other things, though, seem too important for that.

If you’re tempted to explain to me why I’m wrong on these issues, please know that it has been explained to me thoroughly, and you’re welcome to disagree but the reason for this post isn’t to engage about single issues.  I didn’t offer them to try to convince y’all to agree, and it’s fine if you don’t.  They’re here as illustrations of why “ally” isn’t a good fit for me.

I understand I’m disqualified to be an ally, not because of a particular opinion, but because I can’t agree with having standards set for me, not when they’re about about right and wrong.

Here we run into a good example:

This is the point at which I’m expected to add a line about how, of course, I’m asserting my right to agency and to choose my battles, while vulnerable people live their lives with this agency too often denied them.

It’s true.  But my neglecting to type it in doesn’t mean I really forgot my privilege, and typing it makes no difference in changing a thing on earth for these vulnerable people.

Typing it serves exactly one purpose : to flash my Hall Pass to maintain my membership in acceptable standing.  Seriously.   

There are a lot of us, people of privilege who heavily support justice and equality while enjoying safe and quiet housing, free exercise of their rights, well-stocked pantries, generally a nice personal comfort level.   

If we place the required acknowledgment where it’s called-for, we don’t get called out for trying to have both privilege and acceptance as an ally.  No one expects me to relinquish my safety and comfort, only to voice awareness of it.   My objection to trying for ally status is that it’s based on the properly placed disclaimers, not on the values I live.

It’s not based on having awareness, it’s based on demonstrating awareness.  

To whom?  Who stamps my hall pass, but more importantly, what does that do for any of the victims of violence and injustice?

Liberals berating — if done gently, it’s “reminding” — other liberals has not, in several years of social media politics, made the real problems of, and deadly dangers to, BIPOC and LGBTQ people get even slightly better.  Things are getting worse.  Violence and injustice come down on the vulnerable harder than ever, while Liberalism is being identified with rigid and sometimes irrational political correctness, hurting our winning elections or changing anything.

Did it matter if supporters were posting solid black squares as their Insta profile pictures for BLM, and one celeb had a thin white border around all her pix including that one?

The absurdity there is not that hers was the right way to do it.  That’s another one I’m not going to address, because it’s separate debate from the debate we need to have, which is:  

Let’s say it was the wrong way.  Did it do one single thing to weaken the fight for racial justice?   Lots ranted about it, but does that mean it wasn’t adequate support for BLM, or are we just desperately in need of something to blow off a shitload of steam about?  I call it the latter.

Maybe a bunch of us really believe that statements like “Due process is a basic right that still applies in sex crime cases” or “Friends wasn’t ‘problematic’ for being about a group of white people” cause actual harm.

The beratings and debates happen in liberal bubbles nowhere near the violence and injustice.  They happen between people who are on the same side against violence and injustice.  That we can solve anything by creating an Allowed position on And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street or whether Al Franken should have a hearing — not be exonerated, just have a bleeding hearing(!) —  is a delusion.

It’s a wasteful fight against at best, soft targets, at worst, unimportant ones.  We need to feel we’ve made some small difference somewhere.  People are being slaughtered.  We’re horribly helpless against atrocity, but we can go after Scrambled Eggs Super.  We’ll debate whether a Black actor cast to portray a real life historic Black person is dark enough. We’ll berate a social justice activist for not including the disclaimer line.

I haven’t totally lost faith in sanity prevailing.  The flap about the biographical movie faded pretty well.  The outrage about “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” did die down, corrected when it was established that it’s a female empowerment song, not a rape culture song. Good, but too many did not.

No, supporting what I believe is right, is not “centering myself,” it’s centering a position that I sincerely believe supports justice on an issue.

Yes, I’m “staying in my lane.”

Trying, however imperfectly, to uphold justice IS my lane.