Paul: You’ve Been Wronged. That Doesn’t Make You Right.

2024/04/26 Leave a comment

Increasing common thread in commentary these days on the “Oppression Olympics:”

We are living in a golden age of aggrievement. No matter who you are or what your politics, whatever your ethnic origin, economic circumstance, family history or mental health status, chances are you have ample reason to be ticked off.

If you’re on the left, you have been oppressed, denied, marginalized, silenced, erased, pained, underrepresented, underresourced, traumatized, harmed and hurt. If you’re on the right, you’ve been ignored, overlooked, demeaned, underestimated, shouted down, maligned, caricatured and despised; in Trumpspeak: wronged and betrayed.

Plenty of the dissatisfaction is justified. But not all. What was Jan. 6 at heart but a gigantic tantrum by those who felt they’d been cheated and would take back their due, by whatever means necessary?

People have always fought over unequal access to scarce resources. Yet never has our culture made the claiming of complaint such an animating force, a near compulsory zero-sum game in which every party feels as if it’s been uniquely abused. Nor has the urge to leverage powerlessness as a form of power felt quite so universal — more pervasive on the left, if considerably more threatening on the right.

Against this backdrop, reading Frank Bruni’s new book, “The Age of Grievance,” is one sad nod and head shake after another. Building on the concept of the oppression Olympics, “the idea that people occupying different rungs of privilege or victimization can’t possibly grasp life elsewhere on the ladder,” which he first described in a 2017 column, Bruni, now a contributing writer for Times Opinion, shows how that mind-set has been baked into everything from elementary school to government institutions. Tending to our respective fiefs, Bruni writes, is “to privilege the private over the public, to gaze inward rather than outward, and that’s not a great facilitator of common cause, common ground, compromise.”

Consider its reflection in just one phenomenon: “progressive stacking,” a method by which an assumed hierarchy of privilege is inverted so that the most marginalized voices are given precedence. Perhaps worthy in theory. But who is making these determinations and according to which set of assumptions? Think of the sticky moral quandaries: Who is more oppressed, an older, disabled white veteran or a young, gay Latino man? A transgender woman who lived for five decades as a man or a 16-year-old girl? What does it mean that vying for the top position involves proving how hard off and vulnerable you are?

Individuals as well as tribes, ethnic groups and nations are divvied up into simplistic binaries: colonizer vs. colonized, oppressor vs. oppressed, privileged and not. On college campuses and in nonprofit organizations, in workplaces and in public institutions, people can determine, perform and weaponize their grievance, knowing they can appeal to the administration, to human resources or to online court where they will be rewarded with attention, if not substantive improvement in actual circumstance.

The aggrieved take to social media where those looking to be offended are fed at the trough. Bruni refers to those who let you know that some representative of a wronged party is under threat the “indignity sentries of Twitter.” Ready to stir the pot, let the indignation begin and may the loudest complainer win!

But goading people into a constant sense of alarmism distracts from actual wrongdoing in the world. Turning complex tragedies into simple contests between who ticks more boxes rarely clarifies the situation. In San Francisco, when a Black Hispanic female district attorney chose not to file charges against the Black Walgreens security guard who shot Banko Brown, a Black, homeless transgender man who was accused of shoplifting, the entire episode was read not only as a crime and a referendum on arming security guards but also as a human rights crisis, simultaneously anti-trans, anti-homeless and racist.

In Brooklyn, when a man presumed to be homeless and mentally ill reportedly killed a golden retriever and the police did not immediately arrest him, the dog owner’s fears and efforts by some in the community to get the police to respond were read as racist vigilantism. The ensuing finger-pointing, name-calling and outrage did nothing to address the problems of homelessness, public safety or mental health.

The compulsion to find offense everywhere leaves us endlessly stewing. Whatever your politics, it assumes and feeds a narrative that stretches expansively from the acutely personal to the grandly political — from me and mine to you and the other, from us vs. them to good vs. evil. And as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff warned in their book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” the calculus is that if you’re hurt or upset, your feelings must be validated. You can see this reductive mind-set in action in protest after protest across America as a contest plays out between Jews and Palestinians over who has been historically more oppressed and should therefore have the upper hand now.

But as Ricky Gervais says, “Just because you’re offended, doesn’t mean you’re right.” Being oppressed doesn’t necessarily make you good, any more than “might is right.” Having been victimized doesn’t give you a pass.

If it felt like any of the persecution grandstanding led to progress, we might wanly allow grievance culture to march on. Instead, as one undergraduate noted in the Harvard Political Review, “In pitting subjugated groups against one another, the Oppression Olympics not only reduce the store of resources to which groups and movements have access, but also breed intersectional bitterness that facilitates further injustice.” Rewarding a victim-centric worldview, which we do from the classroom to the workplace to our political institutions, only sows more divisiveness and fatalism. It seems to satisfy no one, and people are more outraged than ever. Even those who hate Tucker Carlson become Tucker Carlson.

The acrimony has only intensified in the past few years. The battlefield keeps widening. What begins as a threat often descends into protests, riots and physical violence. It’s difficult for anyone to wade through all of this without feeling wronged in one way or another. But it wrongs us all. And if we continue to mistake grievance for righteousness, we only set ourselves up for more of the same.

Source: You’ve Been Wronged. That Doesn’t Make You Right.

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Bruni: The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus

2024/04/22 Leave a comment

Thoughtful approach, recognizing the complexity of issues and viewpoints and the need for humility:

I warn my students. At the start of every semester, on the first day of every course, I confess to certain passions and quirks and tell them to be ready: I’m a stickler for correct grammar, spelling and the like, so if they don’t have it in them to care about and patrol for such errors, they probably won’t end up with the grade they’re after. I want to hear everyone’s voice — I tell them that, too — but I don’t want to hear anybody’s voice so often and so loudly that the other voices don’t have a chance.

And I’m going to repeat one phrase more often than any other: “It’s complicated.” They’ll become familiar with that. They may even become bored with it. I’ll sometimes say it when we’re discussing the roots and branches of a social ill, the motivations of public (and private) actors and a whole lot else, and that’s because I’m standing before them not as an ambassador of certainty or a font of unassailable verities but as an emissary of doubt. I want to give them intelligent questions, not final answers. I want to teach them how much they have to learn — and how much they will always have to learn.

I’d been on the faculty of Duke University and delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that each component of it was about the same quality: humility. The grammar-and-spelling bit was about surrendering to an established and easily understood way of doing things that eschewed wild individualism in favor of a common mode of communication. It showed respect for tradition, which is a force that binds us, a folding of the self into a greater whole. The voices bit — well, that’s obvious. It’s a reminder that we share the stages of our communities, our countries, our worlds, with many other actors and should  conduct ourselves in a manner that recognizes this fact. And “it’s complicated” is a bulwark against arrogance, absolutism, purity, zeal.

I’d also been delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that humility is the antidote to grievance.

We live in an era defined and overwhelmed by grievance — by too many Americans’ obsession with how they’ve been wronged and their insistence on wallowing in ire. This anger reflects a pessimism that previous generations didn’t feel. The ascent of identity politics and the influence of social media, it turned out, were better at inflaming us than uniting us. They promote a self-obsession at odds with community, civility, comity and compromise. It’s a problem of humility.

The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were delusional, frenzied, savage. But above all, they were unhumble. They decided that they held the truth, no matter all the evidence to the contrary. They couldn’t accept that their preference for one presidential candidate over another could possibly put them in the minority — or perhaps a few of them just reasoned that if it did, then everybody else was too misguided to matter. They elevated how they viewed the world and what they wanted over tradition, institutional stability, law, order.

It’s no accident that they were acting in the service of Donald Trump, whose pitch to Americans from the very start was a strikingly — even shockingly — unhumble one. “I alone can fix it,” he proclaimed in his 2016 speech accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for president; and at his inauguration in January of the following year, the word “humbled,” which had been present in the first inaugural remarks of both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, was nowhere to be found. Nor were any of its variants. That whole sentiment and politesse were missing, as they had been during a campaign centered on his supposed omniscience.

There are now mini-Trumps aplenty in American politics, but anti-Trumps will be our salvation, and I say that not along partisan or ideological lines. I’m talking about character and how a society holds itself together. It does that with concern for the common good, with respect for the institutions and procedures that protect that and with political leaders who ideally embody those traits or at least promote them.

Those leaders exist. When Charlie Baker, a former Massachusetts governor, was enjoying enormous favor and lofty approval ratings as a Republican in a predominantly Democratic state, he was also stressing the importance of humility. He was fond of quoting Philippians 2:3, which he invoked as a lodestar for his administration. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit,” it says. “Rather, in humility value others above yourself.”

That’s great practical advice for anyone in government, where most meaningful success hinges on teamwork and significant progress requires consensus. Governing, as opposed to demagoguery, is about earning others’ trust and cooperation. Exhibiting a willingness to listen to and to hear them goes a long way toward that.

“Insight and knowledge come from curiosity and humility,” Mr. Baker wrote in a 2022 book, “Results,” coauthored with his chief of staff, Steve Kadish, a Democrat. “Snap judgments — about people or ideas — are fueled by arrogance and conceit. They create blind spots and missed opportunities. Good ideas and interesting ways to accomplish goals in public life exist all over the place if you have the will, the curiosity, and the humility to find them.”

Humble politicians don’t insist on one-size-fits-all answers when those aren’t necessary as a matter of basic rights and fundamental justice. Humble activists don’t either. The campaign for same-sex marriage — one of the most successful social movements of recent decades — showed that progress can be made not by shaming people, not by telling them how awful they are, but by suggesting how much better they could be. Marriage-equality advocates emphasized a brighter future that they wanted to create, not an ugly past that they wanted to litigate. They also wisely assured Americans that gay and lesbian people weren’t trying to explode a cherished institution and upend a system of values, but instead wanted in.

“I don’t want to disparage shouting and demands — everything has its place,” Evan Wolfson, the founder of the pivotal advocacy group Freedom to Marry, told me when we revisited the movement’s philosophy and tactics. At times, he acknowledged, champions of a cause “need to break the silence, we need to push, we need to force.”

“But I used to say, ‘Yes, there’s demanding, but there’s also asking,’” he recalled. “And one is not the enemy of the other. People don’t like being accused, people don’t like being condemned, people don’t like being alienated. It’s a matter of conversation and persuasion.”

That’s consistent with the message delivered by Loretta Ross, a longtime racial justice and human rights advocate, through her teaching, public speaking and writing. Troubled by the frequent targeting and pillorying of people on social media, she urged the practice of calling in rather than calling out those who’ve upset you. “Call-outs make people fearful of being targeted,” she wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion. “People avoid meaningful conversations when hypervigilant perfectionists point out apparent mistakes, feeding the cannibalistic maw of the cancel culture.” Instead, she advised, engage them. If you believe they need enlightenment, try that route, “without the self-indulgence of drama,” she wrote.

She was preaching humility.

She was also recognizing other people’s right to disagree — to live differently, to talk differently. Pluralism is as much about that as it is about a multiracial, multifaith, multigender splendor. That doesn’t mean a surrender or even a compromise of principles; a person can hold on to those while practicing tolerance, which has been supplanted by grievance. Tolerance shares DNA with respect. It recognizes that other people have rights and inherent value even when we disagree vehemently with them.

We all carry wounds, and some of us carry wounds much graver than others. We confront obstacles, including unjust and senseless ones. We must tend to those wounds. We must push hard at those obstacles. But we mustn’t treat every wound, every obstacle, as some cosmic outrage or mortal danger. We mustn’t lose sight of the struggle, imperfection and randomness of life. We mustn’t overstate our vulnerability and exaggerate our due.

While grievance blows our concerns out of proportion, humility puts them in perspective. While grievance reduces the people with whom we disagree to caricature, humility acknowledges that they’re every bit as complex as we are — with as much of a stake in creating a more perfect union.

Source: The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus

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I’m a White Man. Hear Me Out. – Bruni, The New York Times

2017/08/14 Leave a comment

Good thoughtful piece by Frank Bruni on the risks of a reductionist approach to identity to inclusion and integration:

Mark Lilla, a Columbia University professor, got a big, bitter taste of this late last year when he wrote, in The Times, about the presidential election and “identity politics,” which, he argued, had hurt the Democratic Party. He maintained that too intense a focus on each minority group’s discrete persecution comes at the expense of a larger, unifying vision.

Many people disagreed. Good. But what too many took issue with was, well, his identity. “White men: stop telling me about my experiences!” someone later scrawled on a poster that was put up to advertise a talk, “Identity Is Not Politics,” that he gave at Wellesley College.

“But I wasn’t talking about their experience or my experience,” Lilla pointed out when I spoke with him recently. “I was talking about an issue.”

In a new book coming out this week, “The Once and Future Liberal,” he asserts that “classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue. White men have one ‘epistemology,’ black women have another. So what remains to be said?”

And where are the bridges?

Race, gender, sexual orientation, class: All of this informs — and very often warps — how we see the world. And for much too long, this country’s narrative has been scripted by white men, who have also dominated its stage and made its rules. Our advantage, as a class, is real and unearned.

The “check your privilege” exhortation asks us, rightly, to recognize that. It’s about “being aware of systemic injustice and systemic inequality,” Phoebe Maltz Bovy, the author of the recently published book “The Perils of ‘Privilege,’ ” told me. And she applauds that.

But she worries that awareness disclaimers and privilege apologies have ferried us to a silly, self-involved realm of oppression Olympics. They promote the idea that people occupying different rungs of privilege or victimization can’t possibly grasp life elsewhere on the ladder.

In her book she mocks the inevitable juncture in a certain kind of essay “where the writer (probably a cis White Lady, probably straight or bisexual, probably living in Brooklyn, definitely well educated, but not necessarily well-off) interrupts the usually scheduled programming to duly note that the issues she’s describing may not apply to a trans woman in Papua New Guinea.”

Should we really have say and sway only over matters that neatly dovetail with the category that we’ve been assigned (or assigned ourselves)? Is that the limit of our insights and empathies? During the Democratic primary, a Hillary Clinton supporter I know was told that he could not credibly defend her against charges of racism for her past use of the word “superpredators” because he’s white.

That kind of thinking fosters estrangement instead of connection. Lilla noted that what people in a given victim group sometimes seem to be saying is: “You must understand my experience, and you can’t understand my experience.”

“They argue both, so people shrug their shoulders and walk away,” he said.

Across a range of American institutions, we need more diversity. We need it to expunge and guard against the injustice that Bovy mentioned, and we need it because it’s indeed a portal to broader knowledge and greater enlightenment. That means that white people — men in particular, even Google engineers — must make room in that narrative and space on that stage.

But I question the wisdom of turning categories into credentials when it comes to politics and public debate. I reject the assumptions — otherwise known as prejudices — that certain life circumstances prohibit sensitivity and sound judgment while other conditions guarantee them. That appraises the packaging more than it does the content. It ignores the complexity of people. It’s reductive.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, the author of the memoir “Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man’s Escape From the Crowd,” got at this in an essay about privilege that he published last year, writing: “My black father, born in 1937 in segregated Texas, is an exponentially more worldly man than my maternal white Protestant grandfather, whose racism always struck me more as a sad function of his provincialism or powerlessness than anything else. I don’t mean to excuse the corrosive effects of his view; I simply wish to note that when I compare these two men, I do not recognize my father as the victim.”

At the beginning of this column I shared the sorts of personal details that register most strongly with those Americans who tuck each of us into some hierarchy of blessedness and affliction. So you know some important things about me, but not the most important ones: how I responded to the random challenges on my path, who I met along the way, what I learned from them, the degree of curiosity I mustered and the values that I honed as a result.

Those construct my character, and shape my voice, to be embraced or dismissed on its own merits. My gayness no more redeems me than my whiteness disqualifies me. And neither, I hope, defines me.

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How and Why You Diversify Colleges – The New York Times

2016/05/16 Leave a comment

Frank Bruni on the efforts by USA elite colleges to broaden socioeconomic diversity of their student populations:

The socioeconomic diversity at elite colleges is hardly the most vital concern about higher education. These colleges serve a small fraction of the country’s students.

But that diversity is important nonetheless. It’s a mirror of our values — in particular, of how well we own up to stacked decks and how willing we are to make adjustments.

Amherst is an exemplar of such adjustments. It’s tweaking campus operations to recognize that some less affluent students stick around during breaks. It’s marshaling extra resources so students from low-income families can take on the sorts of unpaid internships and research opportunities that other students do.

I mentioned community colleges before: About 10 years ago, Amherst took just seven transfers from those schools. It has taken 34 in each of the last two years.

The college’s president told me that one of her current passions is to admit more military veterans, who bring to the campus abilities, experiences and outlooks that other students don’t possess.

She wasn’t talking about doing them a kindness. She wasn’t outlining a social experiment or anything gimmicky. She was embracing the reality that real learning and a real preparation for citizenship demand the intersection of different life stories and different sensibilities. Colleges should be making that happen.

Source: How and Why You Diversify Colleges – The New York Times

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