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tommyomalley · 5 years

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Overstated Harm

I have been thinking lately about harm—when it’s real, and when it’s exaggerated for political reasons. And as harm escalates, at what point does it require us to intervene on behalf of ourselves or others?

Yesterday, I recorded a conversation for my podcast Theater Fag with playwright Isaac Gomez. We met in the offices of Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, where his new play “La Ruta” is currently finishing a sold-out run. “La Ruta” is about the women of Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican border city that suffers one of the highest crime rates in North America, if not the world. Disproportionately impacted by the violence in Juárez are women, who regularly go missing without any hope of being found.

Obviously the situation in Juárez is an example of real harm. Like gay men with AIDS in the 1980s—like trans women of color in the United States today—the women of Juárez are dying preventable deaths at an insane rate, and nobody in the dominant culture gives enough of a shit to make it stop. Isaac’s play, “La Ruta,” is a tortured cry for mercy, one belonging to a theatrical tradition that includes plays like Larry Kramer’s seminal AIDS polemic “The Normal Heart” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” Anna Deveare Smith’s verbatim account of the Los Angeles riots (in which Congresswoman Maxine Waters is a character, by the way).

In our conversation, Isaac and I discussed the roots of violence in Juárez, which Isaac attributed to toxic masculinity and failed US policy. Of the former, Isaac elaborated that he can draw a straight line from small acts of gendered insensitivity—microaggressions such as a man interrupting a woman to explain a point she was in the middle of making—to more grandiose expressions of violence, such as rape or murder. My impulse in the moment was to disagree and question the equivalence I thought Isaac was making. But after a night’s sleep on the matter, I think agree with Isaac’s general point—unchecked privilege corrupts, and if we don’t intervene when violence presents itself, it will escalate.

The women of Juárez are in a daily fight for their lives. The stakes for them could not be higher. That’s why, when people start to talk about feeling “safe” and the stakes fall somewhere short of life or death, it’s important to pause before offering our support and validation. Unfortunately, not all claims of victimhood are intellectually honest, and sometimes, folks who identify as victims are actually perpetrators. These situations require a different kind of intervention.

This week, the boys from Covington Catholic high school in a Kentucky have been all over the news, after a viral video clip in which one boy wearing a MAGA hat—Nick Sandmann—stared down an indigenous veteran named Nathan Phillips, who was seemingly just banging his drum. Since the release of that initial video, dozens more clips have surfaced, some of which show that Mr. Phillips intentionally walked into the Covington Catholic group, and others of which show an unrelated group of Black Israelites screaming nasty shit at every person who passed them, including the Covington Catholic boys and Nathan Phillips.

Some people claim these videos exonerate the Covington Catholic boys. Others say they implicate Nathan Phillips as a provocateur. What’s compelling to me is the immediacy with which reactions split along party lines. Lefties are Team Phillips, righties are Team CovCath. I have way too much trauma surrounding Catholic schoolboys of my youth to be impartial, but what I will argue is that the Covington Catholic boys are not victims here. I don’t want them destroyed, but I want to see some accountability. And when I see a lot of white adults minimizing their actions, I feel compelled to intervene.

The fact remains that Nick Sandmann stood aggressively close to Nathan Phillips, his posture and smirk fixed with a rigidity familiar to anyone who, like me, has been physically threatened or assaulted by a Catholic school meathead. Regardless of the aftermath, this was not a boy who was standing by innocently. He was full of the all the bravado an underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex allows, and that—to my eye—is undeniable in any of the videos I’ve seen so far. It’s an expression of the toxic masculinity Isaac mentioned in our discussion of “La Ruta.”

Part of the PR campaign the Covington Catholic community is waging involves blaming the Black Hebrew Israelites, a group of absolutely wild bigots that stand in public spaces and say naaaaaaaasty stuff about gays, women, etc. The reason for this PR move, I believe, is that Covington Catholic knows on some level that truth seekers will look at Nick Sandmann in those videos and see a young man eager for conflict, not peace. To avoid this murky discussion, they instead point to the Black Israelites as the instigators. “Look, these folks said faggot, that’s way worse.” Unfortunately, these two unrelated wrongs don’t change the interaction between Sandmann and Phillips on that video.

I was once a teenage boy, and I remember what a brutal period of self-discovery those years were for me. I made so many mistakes and treated folks around me with tremendous disrespect. To say the least, I’ve spent a lot of my adulthood making right the wrongs of my youth, and I am so lucky that every single fucking person wasn’t armed with a recording device when I was 16. I share this because I truly wish the best for the Covington Catholic boys—that they may overcome this moment, emerging on the other end with renewed faith and commitment to peace. I don’t see that happening, however, because as Nick Sandmann told the Today Show’s Savannah Guthrie, his only regret is that he didn’t walk away from Nathan Phillips (a subtle suggestion that Phillips was the aggressor), and he does not feel that he has anything for which to be sorry. If the only offense the Covington Catholic boys committed that day was Nick Sandmann glaring disrespectfully at an elder, then that would be enough to warrant an apology. Unfortunately, Nick Sandmann and whatever crisis PR firm is handling his case do not agree. (If you do not think Nick Sandmann’s glare was disrespectful, then let me ask you this: how would you feel if you saw him standing that way before your mother, father, grandparent?)

The problem is not so much the Covington Catholic boys as it is the adults who thrust victimhood on them. (And unrelatedly, I can’t help but imagine, if society cared this much about gay boys as it does about these Catholics then Bryan Singer would’ve been dealt with decades ago. But that’s another story.) The community that has built around Covington Catholic is absolute—the boys were not wrong, and any assertion otherwise is an attempt to ruin children's lives. Their supporters are misrepresenting the stakes in order to argue that MAGA folks are under attack. An attack on these boys gives MAGA supporters a chance to transfer their own feelings of victimhood, and so the amplification of their stories has created a deafening “poor me” echo chamber.

Speaking of poor me, in December I got into a Twitter fight with a playwright named Jeremy O. Harris, whose “Slave Play” was a controversial hit for the New York Theatre Workshop. The controversy wasn’t so much about the play as the playwright himself. I haven’t read or seen Slave Play, so I can’t speak to the piece’s merits, but I can speak to the way Jeremy behaves on social media, which seems to be carefully cultivated.

The initial buzz around “Slave Play” was huuuuge. As Jeremy himself said, the play went viral. The reviews from white NYC theater critics were overwhelmingly positive, with a few notable exceptions. On Twitter, however, criticism began to mount from a surprising corner: other black theater makers took serious issue with the way black women in particular are treated in the play. Some folks went as far as to say that Jeremy’s play was its own sort of violent act against black women, and they used things he’s said and tweeted publicly to support this. I won’t quote any of them, but it’s all there for you to find, if you want to.

All I can honestly say about Jeremy Harris is that I do not believe his social media persona is authentic. While “Slave Play” was enjoying an often sold-out run, he began tweeting about all the death threats he and his cast were receiving. For sure, horrific shit got hurled at Jeremy and his collaborators. At the same time this was happening, producers were looking seriously to bring the show to Broadway. Jeremy took to Twitter and called attention to the tweets and emails, claiming the threats he and others received numbered in the hundreds. I called bullshit on that number, and I wondered whether every mean tweet he received was actually a “death threat.” I suggested Jeremy was performing victimhood to engender sympathy that would distract from his critics and/or help facilitate a transfer, and perhaps that’s a leap too far. But I tweeted what I tweeted: I do not believe Jeremy Harris received “hundreds” of credible death threats over a play at an off-Broadway house. (For the record I never @ mentioned Jeremy on Twitter, he found my tweets on his own.)

In my back-and-forth with Jeremy, I made the mistake of roping critic Elizabeth Vincentelli into the discussion. Wasn’t really fair of me, because I don’t know her. But she was one of the only mainstream dissenting voices in her assessment of “Slave Play,” which she said ripped off better plays like “An Octaroon” and “Underground Railroad Game.” Elizabeth responded on Twitter to tell me that her problem was with the play, not the playwright, and she sort of scolded me for making inferences about Jeremy’s personality based on his tweets. Jeremy, who loves to herd critics on social media, jumped back in after EV’s capitulation, letting her (and me) know that “we stan critics.” The “we” referred only to him. Lol.

The funnier thing is that, two weeks later, on her podcast “Three on the Aisle,” Elizabeth did exactly what she admonished me for doing on Twitter—drawing conclusions about Jeremy the person—and she used much harsher language than anything I tweeted. She doubled down on the derivative nature of “Slave Play,” describing it as “a play that is embarrassing in its self-satisfaction and the way it revels in this empty provocation that is not really provoking, because people are just expecting it.” She elaborated:

“It’s is also written in an incoherent, smug manner that I found really, really annoying. Just the ineptitude of the writing was confounding, I felt. This play should’ve stayed in the oven, it was not ready to be pulled out… Reading the script afterwards, it annoyed me even more. The script is a window into the way this playwright’s mind works that is not really all that interesting.”

She later described anyone who was shocked by an event that happens in Jeremy’s play as “a target sitting still.” Harsh words for an artist and his audience. I wondered why she would be so brazen on a podcast yet conciliatory on Twitter. It made me wonder if she was afraid to bring the full weight of her position to Twitter, in writing, before Jeremy. And if that’s the case, then what positional power does she perceive that he has over her? Could be generational. Jeremy and his social media followers are presumably savvier to the medium than EV, which I imagine she would understand, so perhaps that’s part of the reason. Regardless, my question now, in light of everything, is: do we still stan critics like Elizabeth? (FWIW, I do. EV is one of the greats among NY’s theater critics.)

My beef with Jeremy truly isn’t so personal, although his personality seems challenging based on our Twitter interactions. That’s not real life, though, I know that. Jeremy and I have never met, only battled from our phones. Theater is the art I care most about, and I’m interested in who holds the power to create it.

Jeremy is a power-holder, despite repeatedly trying to position himself as an outsider. As far as I can smell, Jeremy is disingenuous in these claims, as he was when he overstated the number of actual threats he and others received. I believe that doing so helped bring attention to his play. Of course I have absolutely no concept of what it’s like to be a queer black person in America, but I do know that Yale Drama School—where Jeremy is finishing up his MFA—is the nerve center of NYC’s theater establishment. You cannot graduate from Yale Drama School and call yourself a theater outsider. Sorry. It’s just not honest. And when we allow dishonesty, for whatever reason, we allow injustice to escalate. And we stan only what’s just.

#la ruta #steppenwolf #theatre #theater #juarez #el paso #covington catholic #sandmann #phillips #catholic school #kentucky #march for live #harm #harm reduction #jeremy o harris #slave play #nytw #new york theatre workshop

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performingwomen-blog · 7 years

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Working Women - Response

Because the invisible labor article was written by and for practicing Mormons in America, the households that were described seemed to follow the mid-20th century American imagining of the nuclear family to the letter: one God-fearing cisgender man married to one God-fearing cisgender woman, and I’m sure if you listened carefully and squinted just a bit, you would hear the wails of their 2.5 children and spot the glint off their crystal blue eyes/shining blonde hair. But this is not the world we’re introduced to in Udita, in part because the thing most invisible in the movie is the men of this world.

Of course, this was a film that had as its focus the consequences of garment work on Bangladeshi women, and we’re told on several occasions of husbands disappearing after wives give birth, so it makes sense that we don’t get to know many men as well as we do so many women. But it still says something important; if we’re to trust exclusively the filmmakers’ presentation of the world (and I don’t have a meaningful understanding of Bangladesh outside of the film, so I have no choice but to trust), then we have reason to believe that proletariat Bangladesh is a world wherein most of the adult men are either dead or in some other way permanently absent from their immediate families. Those that remain are either taking care of their grandchildren with their wives (as seen in the 2010 segment, in the family with three daughters, all of whom had children and worked in the factories), or working alongside them in the factories while female grandparents or other community matriarchs take care of the children (2010 segment, married couple).

A consequence of these absent fathers is that the labor that would be invisible and in need of attention from community members and onlookers in the American Mormon world is actually very visible in form and function to members and onlookers of the Bangladeshi proletariat world; it’s very clear to us and to the people featured in the movie that mothers (and, if present, fathers) work, while grandmothers (and, if present, grandfathers) take care of children, and that the mothers (and, if present, fathers) retake caretaking duties on their return. Though, as in the American Mormon world, household labor (including emotional and mental labor) in the Bangladeshi proletariat world continues to be unpaid and as-difficult-if-not-more-difficult than wage labor, there is at least a common conception that it is incredibly hard, and that it is essential work.

If this is all true, then what I’m left to believe is

(1) that the lives of female garment workers are made exponentially more difficult by the absence of partners to take up an equal share of the household labor and bring in more money,

(2) that this is a culture that openly and heavily depends on grandparents/the elderly to perform caretaking duties and household labor when parents are otherwise incapacitated, even in spite of recognizing/perhaps because they recognize its importance,

(3) that this burden also falls disproportionately on grandmothers/matriarchs because of absent grandfathers/patriarchs,

(3) that a really effective way to organize long-term to improve the lives of the above-mentioned people would be to cultivate a culture of male responsibility/culpability to their families that retained the understanding of the importance of household labor and didn’t perpetuate sexist gender stereotypes/toxic masculinity, or at least work out some kinda method to stop all the men from dying prematurely, and

(4) that even while recreating even partnerships in the households, these people will still need much better wages, much better working conditions, much better benefits, much better bosses, much better education, and much better job opportunities to keep them alive in a meaningful way before cultural issues can be sorted out through education over the subsequent generations.

This kind of awareness is what the Walmart response lacks; their timbre does not indicate an understanding of the actual mechanisms of the world at the other end of their supply chain. Like, of-fucking-course there were significant jumps in worker feelings of safety and understanding of protocol after they established mandatory safety training sessions -- the workers likely weren’t offered the opportunity to learn about these things before, even when they asked. They were likely intimidated or abused if they sought out that information. Why else would the unions be so focused on teaching workers their rights, for five years running? How hard are you not trying if you don’t realize that, even after all your focus groups and audits, when we can tell as much from watching one hour long documentary that was apparently filmed with a potato?

Even though Jacqueline Novogratz’s talk felt kind of white-West-savior-y, she seems to have a more wholistic understanding about the hows and whats of the other world in which she’s found herself than Walmart seems to. Novogratz has clearly made the effort to understand the social and cultural fundaments in a meaningful way, and made her pitch/performs her work out of that. That’s something that we should hold Walmart and “multiple stakeholders, including governments,” accountable to do, even as we insist gravely on their responsibility to provide for the needs they discover, in the ways that the people themselves see fit.

Apologies for the saltier-than-usual post, -sali.

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unillustratedadventures · 7 years

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On Paranoia and Projection

Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Or so the platitude goes. Of course, there’s a reason that this platitude is recited almost exclusively by the paranoid. It betrays the sort of uncritical, dichotomous thinking that so often goes along with paranoia. Specifically, it presupposes that a thought is only bad if it’s false—and, conversely, that all it takes for a paranoid thought to be good is for it to be true.

But thoughts can also be good or bad for another reason. They can be good or bad with respect to the thinker’s justification for them, or with respect to her evidence for their truth, regardless of whether they are in fact true.

It just so happens that paranoid thoughts are usually bad in the former way—i.e., bad insofar as they are false. For this reason, crticisms of paranoia correlate with the falsity of paranoid thoughts, and so they can look very much as though they are criticisms of this falsity. But the fact that paranoid thoughts tend to be false is only a byproduct of what makes them paranoid; it is secondary to the definitive problem with paranoia. By definition, paranoid thoughts are bad with respect to justification. A thought is paranoid only if it is unjustified. Moreover, so long as a thought is unjustified, it can be a paranoid thought—and bad for this reason—even if it happens to be true. In other words, just because they’re out to get you, it doesn’t mean that you have a good reason to think they are. And if you think they’re out to get you without a good reason, then you have a true thought that’s bad in spite of its truth. Paranoia is precisely this badness of thought.

Paranoia often comes from a place that is extremely counter-intuitive. It’s always worth keeping in mind that paranoia might come from this counter-intuitive place. To this end, it’s worth emphasising that paranoid thoughts are quite often psychotic. When a paranoid thought is not just unsupported by one’s evidence for reality but also contrary to this evidence, and when it rigidly persists despite continuing evidence to the contrary, such a thought qualifies as an instance of psychosis. It is a paranoid delusion.

Delusions, or psychotic thoughts, are variously caused. However, one cause that is relatively common—but often counter-intuitive—is psychological projection. When the psychological defences of repression, splitting, and projection are sufficiently inflexible and extreme—as is observed with certain personality disorders—this can give rise to paranoid thoughts and associated behaviours. This doesn’t always look like outright paranoid delusion. In a friend, family member, or romantic partner, it usually manifests as the unpleasant tendency to adopt an accusatory attitude. It can just look as though the person is treating you unfairly, or accusing you without any clear justification, or blaming you for genuine reasons of which you aren’t aware. However, in reality, such a person is projecting her own malice, aggression, self-loathing, bad intentions, or bad deeds onto you, without being fully aware of what she is doing. Projections of this sort are instances of paranoia. After all, the person is believing that someone (you) is out to get her without sufficient evidence, and (usually) in stark contrast to the evidence.

If you don’t know about psychological projection, and you don’t know about the character disturbances that can make it an everyday occurrence for some people, then it’s natural to always give your accuser the benefit of the doubt. It’s natural to try to reassure your accuser, and to defend yourself; to emphasise the contrary evidence that is already available; to point out that you’ve only ever expressed good intentions and never bad; to try to indicate your innocence. However, when projection is responsible for the paranoid thoughts or behaviours, such pro-social and well-intended reactions are bound to fail—at least in the long run. Moreover, when projection is responsible, it is often the case that you are trying to square things with someone who has in fact wronged you twice—once by wronging you somehow in the first place, and once more by keeping this from you and unfairly accusing you of the very same bad deed.

Since you tend to assume that the person has a healthy relationship with the truth, and that the person is not interpersonally exploitative or manipulative, it is natural for you to believe that her accusations are authentic, even though they seem to be extreme or unsupported. But to keep taking this attitude to another person’s projections is rapidly crazy-making. Indeed, whenever gaslighting is not a fully conscious and deliberate attempt to control and pervert a person (as it is with many psychopaths and malignant narcissists), it results from paranoid projections of the sort that I’ve been describing, combined with the target’s good will and willingness to please.

So, if you ever find yourself being accused of something out of the blue, and you’re totally confused about how you gave the wrong impression, or what reason you might have given the person for thinking ill of you—just stop for a second, and take a look at the accuser. Carefully consider the possibility that this person is psychologically projecting, and that this is why her accusations and attributions of blame seem disproportionate, unfair, or unprovoked. Consider that this material might be spewing out, uncontrollably, from something toxic inside the accuser herself.

If the paranoid person is indeed projecting, then, on some level, she is likely to be having exactly the same bad thoughts or intentions about you that she is accusing you of having about her. And she is likely to be wronging you—hurting you, cheating on you, exploiting you, or otherwise thwarting your preferences—in exactly the ways that she is accusing you of wronging her.

E.g., if you’re accused of cheating or playing games out of nowhere, for no sensible reason, then the actual reason might be that the accuser herself is cheating, and is projecting this onto you. Alternatively, perhaps your normal emotional reactions (such as being hurt, feeling jealous, expressing confusion or shock) are mischaracterised as excessive or inappropriate despite their normality. This is a form of gaslighting. The gaslighting veers into paranoia if you are accused of intending to harm or guilt-trip or control the person, simply for reporting such normal emotional responses. All gaslighting of this sort is dangerous and abusive. It is likely due to the fact that the accuser is repressing the relevant feelings in herself, and then projecting her self-loathing for having these feelings onto you. Or it might be that your reactions make her feel guilty or ashamed, and she is projecting her self-loathing about this onto you, in the form of punishment. Another possibility is that you’re accused of being controlling or belittling, simply because you’re asking questions that the accuser doesn’t want to answer (or even reasonably decline to answer), or simply for saying or doing something that the accuser doesn’t like. Here, the accuser is certainly projecting, for this is itself a form of coercive control. To respond in this way is to avoid having a frank and compassionate discussion, and to avoid respecting you as an agent, by the use of coercion and manipulation. I.e., it is to coerce rather than to cooperate and converse. Lastly, if you are baselessly accused of being crazy or of being a narcissist or anything like that, then—especially if the accusation is oddly specific—it could well be informative as to the things that the accuser knows about her own nature, and is projecting onto you.

In ways of this sort, being able to recognise that someone is projecting onto you can provide you with a valuable key to the truth. Such a key isn’t valuable in the way that keys typically are. It’s not going to open a door to some vast warehouse of truths, equally well-stocked, well-lit, and meticulous. Unfortunately, whatever door this key opens, it’s likely that you’re still going to be confused and uncertain. You’re probably going to find yourself searching through piles of junk, in the dark. And because of the way in which the key is forged—because you must fashion it by reverse-engineering the projections of your tormentor—the truths that you find in those junk heaps are going to hurt.

Such a key is still valuable, because it is likely to provide you with your only access to the truth, or at least your only access to certain kinds of truths, however incomplete or ambiguous or hurtful this access might be. It will open up a foggy window, overlooking some concealed information about your tormentor; about the things that she is keeping from you; or the bad things that she thinks about herself; or the bad things that she is doing to you. For a chronic projector, the act of projecting could well be the closest she ever comes to telling the truth for its own sake, without any ulterior motive. It could well be the closest she ever comes to being authentic, or sincere, or telling deep or uncomfortable truths about herself. It’s just that she’s twisted these truths inside out, and is hurling them at you as weapons. She means to penetrate you with them. She wants to open you up. She wants to make you carry their weight instead. All the while, the projector intends to remain closed, unyielding, and invulnerable.

Fuck that. Find the key.

More concretely, when a person seems to be paranoid, or seems to be unjustly accusing you or blaming you for something out of nowhere, it’s always worth considering whether the person is projecting, and thereby inadvertently revealing important truths. This is always worth considering, but don’t over do it. Just because they might be projecting, it doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid.

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