Naming the Real Enemies in this War; Remarks from an Event on the Syrian Refugee Crisis

^{** This is a copy of a speech I gave at a forum about the Syrian refugee crisis yesterday. It is a hybrid of a slam poem I wrote and a speech I gave at a rally a few months ago and put on this blog already, but I'm reposting it here again anyhow.}

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This year, as far away people reap what our foreign policy has sown, Islamophobia is breaching the walls of my town’s rich-white-liberal snowglobe. I start to hear things in the hallways. A girl I know says we have to keep the refugees out because they're probably terrorists. She says it's in their religion.

But if there’s a religion whose doctrines mandate war and terror, it is less Islam than US foreign policy. But for now we here—in my town, in Massachusetts, in the US—are still at enough of a remove that we don’t yet have to reckon with the “refugee crisis.” We can think of it in terms of numbers, but in terms of people? Lives? I’m not sure. People live there. People live there, but do we realize that? We take the people fleeing the violence we visited on them, and brand them the potential enemy. We look at our Muslim neighbors and brand them dangerous. We look at the politicians forcing their perpetual doctrine down the throats of countries whose names we can't pronounce while spoon-feeding us national insecurity. Shouldn’t it be those politicians who warrant the branding of enemy or dangerous?

Haven’t you heard those phrases, “People who forget history are condemned to repeat it?” How about “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity?” There’s some truth in those. Wars that never worked are not going to start now.  Spreading terror and calling it democracy does not make it democracy, but does undermine what democracy we might have here in the US. Bombing terror will only seed more because you can't bomb terror, you can only bomb people, and we have.

In Massachusetts, in cities like mine, we like to style ourselves progressive. But there’s actively progressive and then there’s passively progressive--doing something or just kind of thinking something. We have the luxury to choose to keep sitting back, hoping the military solution will work this time (remember, definition of insanity), hoping that we never have to face up to the role of both our aggression and our indifference. Never mind that the refugees are fleeing the same people we’re thirsting for war with; that they are not the aggressors. Never mind that we’re grudgingly admitting what, a couple thousand people? into the US, despite our disproportionate responsibility. Even Europe is facing the tip of an iceberg compared to the numbers that countries like Lebanon and Jordan are shouldering. Never mind that it was our military misadventures that caused the crucible of instability and brutality and devastation that spawned this crisis in the first place.

But no, never mind all that. (Or actually, please do mind.) Because the official line is the same as it always is: be afraid, be very afraid. Even in places like here, we’re hardly immune to fearmongering.

Fear is useful to the architects of war. The fear that makes us malleable is a tool that will be used against us, to drum up support for policies that don’t make anyone safer. This is the fear that makes us accede to legislation that strips away our rights and laws, and wars that drain money and human lives. This is the fear that spirals into apathy when our reaction is to batten down the hatches and seal ourselves off from what we may call terrorism.

One of the best antidotes to mindless, racist fear is knowledge. Awareness of the facts on the ground and the possible courses of action. The knowledge that this atmosphere of fear and instability and warmongering is a strategy, advancing the interests of the corporate and military elite. It has been done before and it will be done again. But it’s not a foregone conclusion. The outcomes still depend on how people choose to think, and how we choose to act. So let’s call the refugees our future neighbors, colleagues, teachers, doctors, friends. And redefine enemy—as war, Islamophobia, empire, racism, hatred, fear.

Here’s one last appeal to the youth here: we have a certain power to remake the world. We have an especial vulnerability to feeling that there’s nothing we can do, but I see hopeful things alongside the flashes of bigotry. I was at a slam poetry competition recently and several of the poems people performed focused on Islamophobia and rejecting fear and hatred. There is a broader, more humane consciousness growing here, I want to believe. That’s what peace organizations and political clubs like mine are trying to tap into. We know how to think. We can stand up to the narratives we’re taught. We can make the difference.

Ableism in Gattaca

I don’t quite know how to start this.

I pride myself on being eloquent, in my own (subjective) opinion. I shake every time I speak up in class or in a situation that doesn’t feel fully comfortable, but I have learned to trust that my voice will be there for me, that I can start speaking and will come off as articulate.

Not today.

I don’t like watching movies in school--not all movies, not all the time, but in general--and yesterday and today one of my classes was watching Gattaca. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether I’m shaky and rattled because of the suspense of an action movie, because of general anxiety, because of a low blood sugar, etcetera. But after the first half of Gattaca yesterday, I left the class knowing I did not like this movie and I did not want to see the rest. I couldn’t even tell why for a while, but it struck me last night: besides flunking the Bechdel test, it’s ableist, despite seeming like it might have the potential to be the opposite.

The premise of the movie is that in a not-too-distant future society, everything is explicitly determined by your genetics, which can be engineered to make you perfect, or you can be naturally-born, with all the unknowns of that. The main character of Gattaca was born with some physical limitations and high risks for heart disease and such, but he is so determined to succeed in the cutthroat, elite, and “geno-ist” world of science/space travel that he takes the identity of a formerly  perfect man, Jerome, who has now fallen from his social standing after becoming cr*ppled.  The movie tells the story of the main character struggling to keep his identity from being discovered as he tries to become an astronaut in a society that considers people like him worthless.

Interesting idea, right? It could be a powerful commentary on the dangers and horror of a society in which supposedly the only remaining form of oppression is a drastic and explicit ableism, called “geno-ism.” It could be a story that affirms disabled people living their lives how they want to against all odds, or fighting for their rights to determine their own lives and potential. It could be a story that hammers home the message that judging people on the basis of disability is extremely damaging and that you can’t possibly know everything a person is or could be by knowing their genetics and abilities.

It could be--or could have been, rather, since instead of challenging ableism or giving us a story in which the In-Valid people launch a rebellion or even protest for their rights, we get a story that ignores that ableism is no distant horror, but already alive and well in the present world. We get a story in which fake-Jerome, the protagonist, achieves his dreams by faking being a Valid. He proves to us that there’s nothing wrong with being an In-Valid and that In-Valids, too, can be successful--but only as long as no one knows they’re In-Valid.

Today, at the end of the class I decided I should say something. I got a couple of sentences in about ableism and disability and such, and then I couldn’t talk. I could not make myself speak. My entire body was shaking and I was fighting tears, listening to my heartbeat againsts the silence of the classroom. I bit down on my lip to keep from crying, but I still couldn’t speak. I shrugged and lifted my hands as though making an offering. The teacher picked up the thread of conversation and kept going, but what I wanted to say I was never able to articulate. After class I stood in a bathroom stall choking on the effort not to cry.

I would never have anticipated this response, and I was as shocked as the class probably was when I was rendered unable to say my piece. I knew Gattaca was making me uncomfortable, but I could not have predicted that it would hurt like that. Apparently the movie used up more spoons than I would have thought, and I ran out.  In an effort to parse my reaction, I have tried to pinpoint what dynamics in Gattaca hit so hard and so painfully and why.

The first thing that struck me was that it’s both disingenuous and redundant to set up geno-ism as some new bogey monster that reared its head as an unfortunate consequence after everyone’s DNA was sequenced and made public,  and  manipulating genes to make “perfect” children became the norm.

Yes, being able to know what anyone’s DNA contains and ordains would bring ableism to a new level. But that’s all it is--a new level. Geno-ism isn’t some new social ill. It’s just a heightened and more explicit form of ableism, and geno-ism victimizes people with invisible disabilities to an extent that is not seen today.

To place discrimination on the basis of arbitrarily determined ability--according to risk factors or medical conditions or other disabilities--in the future as if it inhabits a society that we could move towards rather than one we live in now is extremely damaging to people who already are familiar with such discrimination. Because think about it: in Gattaca, ableism is essentially codified policy in many workplaces; people with disabilities are denied social services; they are forced to work menial jobs as cheap labor; and many parents deliberately avoid having their children born with any condition that would render them In-Valid.

Now think about today’s world: disabled people face massive workplace discrimination, and yes, even for nearly invisible disabilities--I know someone who had to leave her job because of harassment for being diabetic. People with disabilities are systematically shut out from many healthcare options--before Obamacare, if I had not already had insurance when I was diagnosed with my various medical problems, I would not have been able to get it or would have had an extremely hard time doing so because insurance companies discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. People with disabilities are very often relegated to menial jobs, such as janitors or fast food workers, and given no other options. And although I support abortion rights, one of the reasons given in support of reproductive rights is frequently that abortions allow parents to avoid having children born with disabilities. And here, too, sometimes it is necessary to hide your disabilities in order to be accepted. Gattaca  threw all these things into blatant view in its “futuristic” society, but they are no imminent nightmare--they’re already here, and we didn’t even need public knowledge of everyone’s genome to accomplish that.  Gattaca made disability the sole dividing line between elites and the underclass, but ableism doesn’t need to be that stark in order to be deeply entrenched and do deep damage.

Now, after I tried and failed to say my piece in class, my teacher began talking about the movie as a positive portrayal of why geno-ism would be so dangerous, why it’s wrong to judge on the basis of In-Validity, and how disabled people can overcome their obstacles and achieve great things. Besides being a bit of trite  inspirationalism (if that’s not a word, it should be--making disabled people’s successes out to be inspirational  and extra-impressive just because they happened , which is apparently shocking and unlikely), considering Gattaca a triumphant repudiation of geno-ism--although I acknowledge that it raises some important bioethical questions and may help non-disabled people sympathize with someone facing ableist discrimination--does not stand up to scrutiny.

At the end of the movie, fake-Jerome has headed out to space, and as he leaves Earth behind, he feels he is in fact coming home. Escaping Earth just to feel at home--what does this say? If this is supposed to be a movie about why it’s bad to judge people on their DNA,what message is this sending? Isn’t the message here that the protagonist has to go into space, to a different planet, in order to not live in fear of people’s judgment and condemnation? If the movie was trying to point out how terrible this possible society would be, there ought to have been attacks on that society and an attempt to overthrow it. Fight-the-bad-government-and-win might be a bit hackneyed as a plotline, but please, give me a little revolution. Give me a little vindication. Let us see this terrible paradigm toppled as the movie grapples more directly with real questions about the harm in gauging people’s worth according to their ability. Let us see resistance to this system. Let us see the In-Valids forming solidarity alliances and refusing to submit, refusing to be written off as lesser, refusing to try only to blend in and be acceptable according to the norm.

Because that’s all Jerome does. Determined to become an astronaut, he becomes an impostor in the world of Valid people. We all know he isn’t really Valid, that he’s carrying out a dangerous balancing act--and sure, we root for him, because we don’t want him to fall victim to discrimination on the basis of his In-Validity. Yes, the unfairness of his assigned position in society is clear. But the only solution we see for changing this situation is to fake it, to go to extreme lengths to “pass” as Valid. This is a toxic message about disability that’s all too prevalent in our society today: blend in, be normal, don’t be weird, don’t let them know, don’t be how you really are, be how you’re supposed to be. This message racks up real casualties, real people who keep  struggling to meet the criteria for “normal” that are not possible and should not be demanded of them.  

Also, our one disabled main character (not played by a disabled actor) serves the sole purpose, it seems, of supplying bodily materials and samples so that fake-Jerome, the In-Valid, can pass as real-Jerome, the former Valid turned cr*pple. His personality, when he gets one, seems to be built around his bitterness that even as a Valid he was never good enough, and now he doesn’t have an identity or a life outside of helping someone impersonate him. To make matters worse (spoiler warning), at the end of the movie, while fake-Jerome soars off into space aboard a rocket ship, real-Jerome self-immolates. Thus we see our In-Valid character succumb to the impossibility of his life. His suicide could be taken as a commentary on the tragic fallout of “geno-ism,” but when set against the success of the In-Valid who “beat the system” by passing as Valid, fake-Jerome’s story seems to say that real-Jerome was a failure. Not to mention, it reinforces the idea that the disabled character who “overcame” their disabilities--by hiding them and conforming to the rigid standard of perfection--can get a happy ending, can succeed, while the other commits suicide.

Gattaca’s  message, therefore, ends up coming across as saying that to avoid that inexorable shame of being In-Valid, passing as normal should be the ultimate goal for disabled people, and that as long as they don’t, there is no opportunity for them. The goal does not seem to be to dismantle this system, to fight, to demand rights, to demand respect, to push back against geno-ism. What we learn instead is that the way to avoid being a target of geno-ism is to avoid being seen or known as disabled. There is no activism or protest. There is a mention that there are laws meant to forbid geno-ism that are completely disregarded, and while that’s a realistic touch, it merely reinforces the prevailing idea that the only way to beat the system is to become the system, without letting the system know that you’re an impostor.

That is no way to dismantle oppression. That is no way to build a better world. That is no way to affirm disabled people as real, complex humans who don’t need to change in order to fit a straitjacket of “normal.” Maybe Gattaca’s creators intended that it provoke reflection on our current ableist world, but if so, it failed for me utterly. And whatever the intention, to halfheartedly tackle ableism without really fighting it is no way to make us feel like our struggles are comprehended and respected, and like our lives are full and worth living exactly as we are.

Some Radical Thoughts For Earth Day

In honor of Earth Day, I’m going to set forth here a version of a little talk I gave at my school’s Environmental Awareness Day a week ago. Loath am I to see any discussion of environmentalism go by without making an effort to string together the larger picture, the intersections between climate change and other systems of oppression, so that making of connections is what I've tried to do here. To de-silo the climate issue, so to speak. Earth Day can be a pretty tame occasion, it seems, but we can't afford a tame conversation about the climate crisis anymore. 

My comments are informed by Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything and by the notes I took at a workshop on environmental justice at a recent local conference. 

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I say often that apathy is a deathwish, but, as with so many other things, all apathy is not created equal. Some people’s indifference is more deadly than others’. As a wealthy and privileged community, it is my town’s option and responsibility to take the most active role our privilege allows us in combating climate change. Central to the idea of fighting the climate crisis is a movement around environmental justice, which is sometimes different from the standard environmental movement--though it shouldn’t be. 

The key tenet of environmental justice is that it acknowledges that the environment is nature but is also our living conditions, health, and the groups that we belong to. It acknowledges the intersections between climate issues and other social justice issues, particularly race, and also class. Environmental justice involves tackling unfair policies, facing the reality that regulatory structures are only meant to keep some of us safe. 

One of the many ironic injustices of climate change is that although it sounds like a democratic force--untamed forces of nature and such like that--it’s not in fact democratic at all: it will reinforce and worsen existing disparities and inequality. Certainly, it’s inevitable for everyone, but massive climate disruption is already happening for some people. The ones who did the least to cause climate change--those who burned the least fossil fuels to get where they are and who continue to consume the least--are living in communities on the frontlines of climate change, a la Kiribati, Bangladesh, sub-Saharan Africa. This crisis is one they barely contribute to, but they will be paying for it long before we in towns like mine do, and paying with their lives. 

Here in Massachusetts, there is environmental racism and injustice right at home too. A lot of environmental issues can seem distant and removed to us, because we aren’t faced with them every day--we aren’t, for instance, a low-lying island being slowly inundated by rising sea levels, nor are we California or São Paolo, weathering historic and devastating droughts. My town isn’t next to a toxic mine or a hazardous waste site--that sort of pollution has been shifted to disadvantaged communities, displacing the crisis without dispelling it. 

Unequal distribution of environmentally harmful living situations is a manifestation of environmental racism. Massachusetts is very un-progressive with this: our levels of wealth inequality are as bad as Mississippi, and the communities of low income and people of color are the ones likelier to experience environmental contamination, danger, and toxicity. This is part of what’s been happening in Flint, Michigan, incidentally. Is it a coincidence that it was Flint, a community of largely poor people of color, that saw its water contaminated with lead and saw that contamination ignored by the government? No. It’s environmental racism. 

Michigan isn’t a rare or isolated offender, however: Massachusetts has severely unequal distribution of environmental hazards. In fact, we rank last overall in the country for disparity in who lives near hazardous sites. The air pollution racial disparity is worst in New England than the rest of the country too, and the Merrimack valley in Massachusetts has the highest mercury levels in New England. 

We don’t, of course, want everyone polluted equally--that’s not the solution. We want no one polluted. This is why the climate movement needs to be broader than just “recycle more and change your lightbulbs.” We have to think about the other systems of oppression that environmental problems feed into. 

To change these paradigms requires a mindset shift. In the current framework of environmental, industrial, and waste-management policy, some people are deemed disposable, and some places are deemed “sacrifice zones,” in order to maintain a system that exploits and harms some people and privileges others. My town, of course, will never be a sacrifice zone--here, our lives are deemed valuable. But that advantage comes with the obligation that we use it mindfully. We have a lot of power, if we want it--to stop pipelines through people’s backyards, to stop mines near their houses, to fight the fossil fuel exploitation of land of indigenous people.

One cynical reason that we have power to change the game is that carbon emissions and negative impacts on the environment increase along with wealth--those of us with the disposable income are liable to drive more, travel more, consume more luxuries, etc. So the actions we take to mitigate our contributions to climate change--because those contributions can be pretty big--could have significant impact. We can start with simple things--be aware of what we’re consuming, what we’re buying, the choices we’re making about food and water and transportation and electricity and throwing stuff away. 

Then there’s other kinds of involvement: joining environmental organizations--there are plenty in the Boston area--and signing petitions, joining efforts to divest from fossil fuels and put a price on carbon, lobbying your legislators, and going to events. Just show up. Just be there. This is critical: be there for the people who are fighting, even if you don’t feel like it’s affecting you much yet. 

On the small, current, and concrete level, showing up is important for expressing genuine solidarity with people fighting a fight that hasn’t yet reached our doorsteps, lending the power of numbers to their struggle. But on a broader and further-reaching level, we must realize that if we don’t work in solidarity with people on the frontlines now, we will eventually become the front lines. That’s our future, as well as their present . That’s our reckoning that will come, someday. 

This is what climate change promises us. And we have a short window of time to make a lot of change--which we can do--but we’re going to need all hands on deck. No one left out or left in a sacrifice zone. As they say at climate rallies and such: To change everything, we need everyone. 

How Not to Deal with a Culture of Bigotry

Recently, my town’s continued efforts towards tackling the bigotry that’s been welling up recently met with stark and ominous--if predictable--pushback. A few days ago, the city held a public meeting to discuss how to respond to the anti-Semitic and racist events of late--they acknowledged racism more prominently this time, which seemed promising. Unfortunately, that attempt to be inclusive of more people facing intolerance ended up sparking some “issues hierarchy,” as I might call it. Our issues are more important than your issues. Our pain is more severe than yours. Our voices need to be heard more than yours. You know the drill.

This wasn’t the only narrative that emerged, but it was a strain that rang out more clearly this time, as I watched the recording of the meeting, than I had noticed in the past.

Since the recent surge of anti-Semitic graffiti and insults, the atmosphere felt to me a bit like treading on eggshells. Issues around anti-Semitism evoke strong emotional reactions, as any incident of bigotry does, but also touches a nerve of defensiveness. Too frequently, anti-Semitism is equated automatically with criticizing Israel, and Jewish voices and others are all obscured by that static.

It is probably not invalid to say that the city and school administrations’ response to longtime anti-Semitism (even here, with a one-third Jewish population) has been weak and ineffectual. Certainly, accountability and transparency are questionable. If our record on bullying is any indication, then I can say from personal observation that our bureaucracy is deeply pockmarked with indifference and systemic problems. However, the issues at hand here are not merely that anti-Semitism was tolerated quietly until recently, and that the effectiveness of the city’s response can be doubted. The deeper problem that this represents is that all the forms of bigotry that people in my community have experienced were pushed under the rug and left to fester untreated. Trying to bring those other problems to light is not to minimize anti-Semitism. And to contract the scope of the problem to focus only on anti-Semitism and the victimization of one group of people is to minimize, ignore, and perpetuate other forms of prejudice.

It was disturbing and shocking to see residents of my town stand to denounce the attention given to racism, or assert that the main issue and only deserving point of focus here and now was anti-Semitism. The anger and self-righteousness that was stirred up is telling: the outbreak of anti-Semitism here is not special or isolated. It was bad and painful, to be sure, but a toxic atmosphere is not anathema to the status quo here, no matter our shiny and progressive surface. The tipping point and the trigger for these dialogues about how to tackle our problems happened to be anti-Semitic hate crimes--but that does not mean that the only issue we need to resolve is anti-Semitic prejudice. The hierarchy of importance of oppressions ensured that other glaring and appalling incidents of racism and Islamophobia, not to mention the general undercurrents of sexism and homophobia, were not granted enough weight to be our tipping point. That in itself speaks to how serious it is that we deal with all forms of bigotry we face.

As one Black parent who spoke up at the town meeting said, there were no emails out to parents after racist incidents took place. There was no outcry and call for soul-searching. Schoolwide discussions and town meetings were not convened. For these conversations to happen now, people with enough power and privilege needed to be affected by bigotry. This town has a far more Jewish character than it does one that is reliably welcoming and respectful towards people of color. The acts of anti-Semitism that we have experienced recently--hateful graffiti and slurs--are reprehensible, but they do not render their victims more oppressed or more worthy of justice than other people suffering from intolerance and systems of oppression.

However, because anti-Semitism is a trigger word for pro-Israel forces--who demonstrated their strength, vitriol, and fearmongering at the town meeting--incidents that target Jews become conflated with attacks on Israel. This is disingenuous in that it bulls forward a blatantly pro-Israel agenda when Israel is irrelevant in this local issue, and in that this argument implies that Israel stands for all Jews, and that all Jews stand for Israel, and an attack on one is an attack on the other.

That the pro-Israel lobby was frustrated specifically that anti-racism had been given a voice at the table as well is also a significant observation. First, the our-issues-trump-your-issues sentiment in itself is often racist and also unhelpful. As a few people at the meeting pointed out, trying to build this hierarchy of oppressions construct walls when what we need is to strive for cooperation and understanding.

Second, addressing racism can set off particular defensiveness with Zionist folks, because the state of Israel is in many ways predicated on racism. Both its portrayal as a Jewish state--in which anyone not Jewish then becomes Other--and its self-promotion as the only free and genuine democracy in the Middle East--setting Israel apart from those backward Arabs, so to speak--are racist positions. Racism is an uncomfortable subject better left alone when trying to defend a racist state. The US also shies away from real conversations about race and racial policy, because again, it is a subject that could raise questions some would rather not hear.

Third, tunnel-vision outrage at anti-Semitism that channels itself into defensiveness of Israel does not lend itself well to intersectionality and addressing all oppressions. Particularly since, as stated, Israel relies on racist policies itself, and in addition regards with hostility interracial coalitions in solidarity with Palestinian rights, such as the Black-Palestinian solidarity movement that is burgeoning (and released a powerful statement and video last year). Indeed, the similarities between the struggles for Black and Palestinian liberation are striking: both communities, for instance, may experience the deprivation of water rights, due process, and safe homes, and both struggle against the violence of an occupying military or paramilitary force (I’m thinking militarized police in communities of color in the US). Perhaps there is a fear is that too much attention on or too close an analysis of racism here might provide an environment more likely to be critical of the systemic racism in Israeli society as well. Or the backlash against intersectionality could simply come from a desire to prioritize anti-Semitism, which is so often co-opted as a platform to promote and defend Israel.

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My town’s relationship with blatant and hostile Zionism is neither short nor benign, but to paint anti-Semitism as the core issue we face--and especially to conflate it, as I have said, with anti-Zionism--would conceal this. While one man at the meeting was railing against supposed pro-Palestinian propaganda in our schoolbooks and an alleged “leftist alliance with radical Islamists,” if I recall correctly, I could not help remembering that teachers at one of our high schools have received death threats for teaching history through a lens deemed too sympathetic to Palestine. Our schools also have ties to pro-Zionist organizations (particularly Americans for Peace and Tolerance, a rabidly Zionist and anti-Islam organization, which some of the disruptors at the town meeting belong to), which encourage reports of anti-Israel going-ons in the schools, and inflame Islamophobia. Glaringly absent, as far as I could tell, from the meeting was any mention at all of Islamophobia, despite the high visibility (in my observation, anyhow) of that type of bigotry and hate speech. This is a significant omission, and perhaps quite a strategic one, in order to focus on anti-Semitism at the expense of addressing other religious prejudice.  

Why all this fervor and agitation is being stirred up now is not, I think, because Massachusetts in particular is caught is some kind of unprecedented whiplash of prejudice and hate crimes. The roots and the timing reach beyond our state. Some of it--the hair-trigger defensiveness of the Zionist side--may stem from continued friction and strife over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Boycott-Divest-Sanctions (BDS) movement, which, in unintentional testament to its power and potential, is facing crackdowns from multiple levels of government and academia, including at many schools right here in Boston. .

But a great deal of the tension, of the hate crimes, of the fear, is spawned by the fear- and hatemongering happening at the national level of politics, most remarkably with Donald Trump’s brand of reckless incitement. The hate speech and tension in the US has been amplified to an unusually shameless and publicized degree. The sweep of anti-LGBTQ laws across the country, further crackdowns on reproductive rights, violence and racism on full display at Trump rallies--are these kinds of trends related to the uptick in anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry on display at my school? Is the national culture of anger and prejudice trickling down to the educational system? At times, this country looks a bit like a powder keg and a bit like a surreal nightmarescape, and the actions of my peers may be reflecting that.

The response to the incidents of bigotry or hate reflects the volatility of this moment as well, it must be noted. Hillary Clinton, for example, displayed her remarkably bald Zionism and fearmongering at a recent speech to AIPAC, and the amplification of her rhetoric may well be stoking the kind of flames that erupted in my town a couple days ago.

I’ve heard that hardline Zionist positions hold less sway among youth, and the same goes for Clinton’s campaign and ideology. These trends may also have been visible at the town meeting as a marked generational divide. The students who spoke at the meeting--even those who I know to lean towards the Zionist narrative--were far more rational, eloquent, respectful, intersectional, and thoughtful than many of the adults who took the microphone.

One of the sadder things about this devolvement of the bigotry situation here, of course, is how much of the potential conversation will be lost if the Zionists succeed in commandeering it away from an (already flawed) intersectional narrative. Cynical I may be about whether my town would ever seriously address or fundamentally change the culture that keeps racism, sexism, and other oppressions simmering, but any opportunity for change that might have arisen from the recent attention to our fault lines could be lost if the conversation is hijacked to focus solely on anti-Semitism--and on Israel. Since attitudes here tend towards the pro-Israel line anyway, this would be only a perpetuation or intensification of the unhealthy status quo.

The Bigotry Threshold

Not too long ago, my school made national news as part of an altercation at a basketball game which culminated in anti-Semitic chants. The other team began chanting “You killed Jesus” in response to my school’s yelling “Sausage fest” and “Where are your girls?” (That school is Catholic and all-boys; mine is largely Jewish.) Since then, there has been an outbreak of graffiti, mainly swastikas, in our school bathrooms, that has the administration up in arms. Although I’ve heard that fans and players at the game did not take this particularly seriously, the news media has seized upon it and the students here (and at the other high school) are receiving daily lectures and entreaties to crack down on this behavior. Some people judge it not as big a deal as it has been made out to be, while others insist that the Catholic school “crossed a line” when its fans threw an anti-Semitic insult.

The interesting thing about lines and who crosses them and how dastardly that is is that it’s entirely subjective, of course--but not only do lines mean different things for different people, the lines drawn by different people garner different amounts of credibility and respect. People insist that “sausage fest” was not meant to have homophobic connotations, but even if that’s so, my school has a troubling record of shouting highly problematic chants at sports games, usually racist. At matches against schools with mostly students of color, my school reportedly began chanting “Build a wall” at one game and “Go back to Africa” at another. How many lines do those chants cross? We can’t suppose that the schools victimized by our bigotry were not drawing lines that we crossed blithely. But our racist transgressions warranted no PSA announcements, no special meetings or  class discussions. Sports games aside, there were viciously sexist and violent graffiti and online responses to projects run by the feminism club at my school, and racist comments appeared online in relation both to yet another sports game and also to the Black Culture Day my school hosts. There is also a seething undercurrent of Islamophobia, and earlier this year some students made enormously offensive posts online about a girl who wears full Islamic face and head coverings.

None of this made national media. It didn’t even result in soul-searching or lectures on our behavior and the strength and tolerance levels of our school community. But when anti-Semitism joins the fray, it’s a five-alarm fire. It’s unacceptable bigotry all of a sudden. Perhaps it’s good that we are (purportedly) tackling our prejudice issues openly, but that it took this long raises uncomfortable questions about whose right to feel safe and valued is most prized, and about whether this upsurge of discussion about our Problems will yield any permanent or institutional change. My experience with the public school system here is that cosmetic reforms are usually considered adequate, if that. By state law we are mandated to talk about and supposedly address bullying, but certainly I have not noticed that either the students or school administration actually respond particularly well to incidents of bullying. And racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, etc.--are these not just bullying on a massive, systemic scale, both internalized and externalized?

There's also the possibility that steps are being taken now (if they truly are) to address this mostly because our reputation suddenly seems marred, as we at once rise to prominence as the victims and perpetrators of anti-Semitism. When the spotlight turns towards us and finds we might look bad--and, clearly,  when white people fall under fire--then and only then does the school open up a conversation about bigotry.

A student in my Italian class--the only class where we had a comprehensive (and very interesting) conversation about these recent going-ons--suggested that the anti-Semitism raises such an uproar because for many students here, it is literally the only identity they possess that could fall under attack, and they are unused to feeling in the minority. As one classmate said, “They aren’t exactly going to yell ‘your school cost $200 million’ or ‘you all drive Mercedes.’” Our wealth and privilege insulate many of us from ever experiencing discrimination or hatred, and also provide a buffer between us and the consequences of our actions when it is we who are shouting obscenities and giving offense.

The lines we draw, because we have the privilege and the power to sound alarms when they are crossed, stand out starkly while the lines other schools must draw when my school shouts “build a wall” are not granted any visibility or respect. The power to judge wrongdoing--though rarely our own--is yet another privilege restricted to certain social strata. We reserve the right both to cross lines with impunity and to scream when ours are crossed.

Of course, one final component that ought not to  be left out of this conversation is the uncomfortable reality that anti-Semitism, above all other forms of bigotry, has the potential to strike up far more fervor and outrage in my community because defensiveness runs so very high around any issues that pertain to criticisms of Judaism. Pro-Israel Zionists have largely hijacked the concept of anti-Semitism to mean any possible slight towards not just Jews but Israel as well, rendering the word so highly charged that any accusations of it strike a different and much more responsive nerve than accusations of racism or sexism or homophobia or Islamophobia. This has less to do with the gravity of the hatred that people experience due to any of these “ism”--since I am not making the argument that one form of oppression or prejudice hurts worse than another--than with the conditioned responses that are embedded in my community when it comes to issues that could possibly invoke the specter of Israel. It is an alarming phenomenon that the entrenched bigotry in our schools is brought to light only when the seethe of prejudice coincides both with white privilege and one of our political hair-trigger issues. If we have to wait for wealthy and white people to feel threatened or hurt before they acknowledge that the bigotry thresholds have long been crossed, before we can hope to see any institutional soul-searching or change, then we won’t likely be seeing a great deal of either.

A Responsibility of Privilege

There is a component to combating subtle or well-intentioned manifestations of prejudice--microaggressions--which doesn’t seem to come up in dialogue so often. Most of the conversations I’ve had about microaggressions--especially with my family, most of whom will never experience any kind of “ism” or microaggression stemming from it--end on a more sour note than I would appreciate, but it is these interactions that are crucial, in their way. Since microaggressions, as my brother points out, are micro, they are easier to dismiss as a sort of unfortunate but insignificant side effect of the bigger problems we should be spending our time on. Implicit in this analysis is the idea that dealing with microaggressions is the sole domain of the people at whom microaggressions are directed, and not really anyone else’s problem. But I would argue that it is the responsibility as well of allies and people whose identity is not questioned or misrepresented or misunderstood to stand up to even the small comments, the ones we think we can let slide.

Simply speaking, many microaggressions are not even addressed to the people whom they hurt and about whom they make assumptions. Many are spoken between members of privileged social groups, and if these people do not make an effort to call out prejudiced language when they hear it, they are quietly condoning the way of thinking for which microaggressions represent the tip of the iceberg. That in itself spawns more aggression, because if microaggressions aren’t challenged by anyone but the people they directly hurt, then the aggressor--even an unintentional and usually not bigoted one--may not be convinced that there is sufficient pushback to really examine their words and actions.

Privileged voices may be among the most powerful factors in swaying the behavior of other privileged people. And such activism, within circles of privilege, is critical for being more than a passive ally--being an accomplice instead, as Nakisha Lewis of New York City Black Lives Matter said at an assembly at my school recently (accomplices being more active and deeply invested than allies, who never put themselves on the line and have less of a stake in the struggle). To weed out bigotry, you must make the effort to extirpate wherever you can the attitudes that make life more difficult, restricted, and dangerous for people less privileged than you. Since privileged groups are the ones who commit microaggressions, by and large, it is up to the members of those groups to regulate their language and actions and be aware of others’, not only in direct interactions with people in a minority group but also in conversations in privileged spaces.

It can be hard to know what to say. It’s hard to criticize or call out or even gently nudge someone who has said something that you know is predicated on false assumptions, stereotypes, fear, or ignorance. There are times when I didn’t step in during situations when I could have--when I’ve overheard casual homophobia, for example, or when a girl I know described someone she knew as “ghetto.” Sometimes it’s just our own inertia or apathy standing in the way of speaking up; sometimes it’s other obstacles. It’s hard especially if you are not the person with the most authority or who stands to lose from pointing out their prejudice. For example, it’s harder to explain why my parents or my doctor or an adult has said something problematic than it is to do so with someone of my own age, in general.

But there are always conversations to have, always points to make, always awareness you can bring. When my mother mentioned to my doctor that I had been walking around Roxbury and Dorchester--largely working-class areas of greater Boston  inhabited by people of color--I cringed as she and the doctor expressed their incredulity and shock, laughed uncomfortably, and seemed to imply that I was either stupid or brave to have dared to walk in neighborhoods outside my privileged one. I didn’t know what to say to them, and I was deeply uncomfortable with the implications of their reactions. I could have said, “Wait, slow down. What are you implying? I think you’re operating on stereotypes and it’s not fair to the people who live in Roxbury and Dorchester to believe that I would be automatically be unsafe there…” or something to that effect. To not accuse, but to try to first understand what they really are saying and then guide the conversation towards less offensive territory.

Other times, I have tried to stand up. At a political event in Boston, one of my adult activist friends watched a woman walk by wearing both a hijab and niqab--only her eyes uncovered--and then said she was fine with the headscarf, but disapproved of Muslim women wearing the burqa or niqab. I took a breath and said that I supported any woman’s choice to wear what she wanted. I wasn’t sure my friend believed that wearing religious coverings was a choice--the all-Muslim-women-must-be-oppressed narrative--but she humphed and said, “Well, fine, but you wouldn’t catch me wearing one.” I said, “Well, no one’s asking you to.” It’s not her experience to ever live, so it’s not her place to criticize how others choose to live it.

The strange concept that other people’s choices with which we don’t agree somehow threaten us can be, often, the impetus behind prejudiced behavior. The corollary to that, of course, is that those of us whom society validates as correct and moral and superior may express that privilege--the privilege of being the default--as refusing to accept other backgrounds and ways of life, and feel that different lifestyles represent an attack on ours. It seems absurd, that my queerness could threaten your straightness, that women’s rights could subjugate men, or that someone’s religion could make you react defensively as if you were in danger of oppression. The irony, of course, is that people who are othered by the Western world and corporatist society are not the ones with the power to oppress those people who benefit from the status quo, yet some still fear its demise.

It’s hard to know if people with privilege calling out other people with privilege makes serious inroads into dismantling oppressive institutions. But we do know that if we aren’t willing to take up the mantle of activism everywhere we go, whether we are interacting with people of similar or different experiences, in places where we need to sit down and listen or places where we need to stand up and speak out--then it is akin to only cutting down a plant without trying to dig up the roots, which will keep producing new shoots of bigotry. Fighting racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, ableism, classism, etc. does not stop when you return to your privilege bubble. Indeed, it festers there deeply, perhaps with the veneer of progressive respectability, and it is there that it warrants a more concentrated attack than it usually receives. And that attack has to come from the privileged people. Because the microaggressions that look so small don’t affect them, they don’t feel they have to engage. But it’s not up to people who are victimized by prejudices to be the ones to call them out every single time. It must be part of the work of activists with privilege to identify and tackle bigotry--macroaggressive and microaggressive--in their own communities, relationships, and lives.

The School System's War on Thinking

For the last several weeks of my English class, the subject of our learning and analysis has been school itself: how we are educated and how we are not, how schooling is destructive--from the very ideological foundations on which it rests to the privilege echo chamber of elite colleges.

All of the suspicions or beliefs I have long held were reconfirmed, though in all honesty the institutional conspiracy of the US educational system is wider than I’d even realized. I wrote back in September on this blog that “the institutions that should be guiding and preparing us for what is really out there are instead programming us to react like trained seals, to balance on our noses the balls of standardized testing and whitewashed, watered-down US history, and the everyday inanity of attendance and dress codes. Our public schools are not safe places, and they are not teaching us all we need to learn.” What I’ve always chafed against in the school system is more expansive than I knew. What I was writing about is neither new nor unique, and, though I did not know it, already the target of shrewd reformers.

Paolo Freire, a Brazilian reformer whose essay, “The Banking Concept of Education,” was one of the texts read in my English class, touches upon a phenomenon I noticed: as I put it, “We are taught to sit still and swallow information, keep it down just long enough to regurgitate it for standardized tests. We are fill-in-the-bubble children, prefabricated for a world far less predictable than we are being readied for.” Freire contends that this style of teaching is predicated on a theory, a concept of education that takes students and “turns them into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.” This method of education as “an act of depositing” makes reality “motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable”--thus rendering it impossible to teach history with nuance or context. Perhaps, when my teachers teach history as if it were suspended in formaldehyde, with no connection to the present or future, they are suffering less from personal ignorance than unchallenged deep allegiance to a dehumanizing and dysfunctional method of so-called education.

One of the questions I posed in September is particularly telling: “Why do we delay the time when we will have to really think?” I tended to place the blame on students who chose not to think, who chose to obey. I would like to amend that. What is more important to realize is that thinking is not the point of school. We delay the time when--if ever--we will have to really think because the entire educational system is designed to keep us from thinking.  

John Taylor Gatto, in another of the essays we read, “Against School,” traces the genesis of the hyper-controlled, dehumanized educational system to the model taken from militaristic Prussia in the early 20th century. The goals of educating children within a militaristic machine are many, and alarming: mainly, to subvert the potential democracy and unity of the poorer classes of US society (part of the many efforts to keep that mass of people from enlightenment and uprising, to stunt their social consciousness and activism so as to protect the power of the elite--job quite well done). Gatto also references Alexander Inglis’s concept of school as a six-pronged machine with various “functions,” among which are developing habits of submission to authority, cultivating conformity, and funneling different kids to different career paths or lack of them. It’s all in the interest of creating a mass labor force for the corporatocracy, and keeping education to a minimum. As Gatto puts it, our schools are “laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.”

No wonder teenagers are faced constantly with disparagement. I have had teachers who call the students boneheads or who remark flippantly that “there is nothing any of you could say that would interest me,” but beyond obvious disregard for our intelligence, there is what YA fiction author A.S. King calls “systemic psychological hazing” which teenagers undergo in our “laboratories of experimentation,” our schools. We are trained through humiliation and disrespect that we are immature and pathetic, and as soon as we scurry up to the next level of almost-adulthood, we had better start looking down at the kids below us and ridiculing them. King says, “It’s in the mindset now—in our DNA. I see college students rolling their eyes at high school students, and graduates of both rolling their eyes at all beneath them. It’s a cycle of condescension and alienation. It didn’t always used to be like this. We’re eating ourselves.”

Why this internalized ageism? One reason, I believe, is the bizarre hierarchical importance age has been given in the educational system. Instead of teaching children as a group and allowing them to learn from each other regardless of age, as many non-Western cultures might or even the US did in the days of one-room schoolhouses, kids are cordoned into grades based on age, and largely seem to not cross those borders. Kids even one year older seem like towering giants, and the younger ones are just so little and pathetic and immature. It gives legitimacy to the work of the machine and its functions, dividing us and molding us, because if we believe that where and how we are now is wrong, we will gladly scurry along and look down at whoever we are told to look down on. It helps enforce a hierarchy instead of a mindset in which seeking help or even company from someone of a different assigned rank than you is discouraged. It helps entrench in us a dog-eat-dog mindset in which lateral cooperation is repudiated in favor of climbing social and power ladders. It’s a side effect of the production-line mentality, assembling children as fodder for the corporatocracy. Given the tolls this takes and the ways we are breaking, the surreality of our bomb-threatened and doublespeak-laden schools, but do we even comprehend what this system is really producing?

I wrote earlier that mine is “a school system from and for a specific social stratosphere, and it is excellent at churning out shiny graduates ready for a shiny career path.” But that same system operates on all socioeconomic levels, just with varying levels of gilding and militarism. The functions of school to produce phalanxes of identical products ready for use become clearer and more brutal the greater the distance from the softly glowing privilege bubble.

Farther down the privilege ladder, the idea of social mobility becomes more and more a bitter farce. One of Inglis’s functions states that schools serve to sift through their students and determine just how far they will be allowed to progress. The majority of kids, above all inner-city minorities, are groomed for menial labor in the same social stratum they came from. As Jonathan Kozol’s essay, “Still Separate, Still Unequal,” examines, segregated schools have entrenched themselves ever deeper while white liberal society wants to consider itself postracial, and the kids in these still-segregated, still-neglected schools are being trained with appallingly militaristic methods of discipline to never exceed their social station or threaten the corporate status quo. These crumbling schools are not places for education, but are rather assembly lines, which break apart and rebuild children as effective robots, where somewhere far above, their wealthier counterparts are trained in a vastly different style, for a different purpose.

Since both history and the present are narrated by those with the power and the airwaves, the work of deliberate inequality remains out of sight and out of mind. The amount of freedom allotted to kids in schools increases in proportion to their wealth. This isn’t to say that privileged schools truly foster an environment in which thinking is encouraged or real knowledge gained, but the function of education according to Inglis for people like me, in higher socioeconomic strata, skews more towards grooming us to assume the reins of this massive corporate matrix.

This takes its toll. We may be high-value banks entrusted with larger denominations of bills, but we are still fundamentally not people in the eyes of the educational system. Perhaps the goal is to train us to act enough like people that by the time we graduate we will be very good candidates for jobs in which humanity is questionable but power is a necessity--politics, corporate officialdom, etc. I have the requisite academic intelligence, excellent memory, and more or less neurotypical ways of processing information and regurgitating it, so I have learned to play this system perfectly. The farther I get and the more honors classes I prove myself capable of taking, though, the more I lose motivation and any remnants of the belief that any of this is worthwhile.

The other day my friends and I were asking a deck of tarot cards questions about our lives and souls and such, and when the deck was asked to describe my past, present, and future, I received the card “stagnation” for my present state. I quipped, “Well, I am stuck in the educational system right now,” which does feel like stagnation. Sometimes I do think it’s all a mind trick that I can’t handle anymore--trying to convince myself that what I’m “learning” will be applicable and helpful in the rest of my schooling and beyond, and that there really is a point to shelling out all that college money. Bitter, jaded, and exhausted, I end up believing that my educational experience has largely been a series of inanities, indignations, absurdities, anxieties, and yes, stagnation. Why? I like to learn. I love facts and unusual words and logic and reading and writing and analyzing history. But school isn’t teaching me how to think, except by accident, when I became frustrated enough to understand that none of this inanity and slogging through testing and ennui was actually making me better-rounded, happier, or even smarter.

We’re living in an absurd matrix, whose dysfunctions seem to be in the same mold as those of the war on drugs: it’s not that the system isn’t working, it’s that it’s working all too well with terrible fallout. We are the fallout, my generation. Those who came before us are also victims of the industrial school system, but we stand at a point more crucial than ever, when we need to be educated more than ever, when we need to be thinking--and we’re not. Sometimes we are, but we’re not supposed to be. We know we’re suffering; we know we’re ridiculously stressed and that there’s ridiculous privilege and wealth disparity in our society. But the big picture, the insidious whole, is hard to see from inside, and even harder to dismantle.  

It goes far beyond individuals, either students or teachers. Creating individuals is not the goal of schooling any more than is teaching us to think. Even in my September blog post, I acknowledged, “The teachers, on the whole, are not the problem, or at least, not the enemy. The enemy is the system that locks them into delivering the sort of worthless, classist, irrelevant education that will leave us unfit to handle the future for which we are the last chance.” Who knew that a class within a school within this system would actually come to teach about this enemy, to help us identify how and why we are being controlled and screwed over? (How many of my classmates will believe or realize the gravity of what they’re reading?)

I’m grateful to have taken this class, but the ironies are plenty, as well as the epiphanies. In order to take a class in which I feel that the students are actually thinking, actually analyzing and applying arguments and theories to our own lives and the world around us, I had to be a top-level, masochistic student willing to take on the pressure and course load of an AP English class. That it’s at the AP level only that this curriculum is offered ensures that the students taking it will be mostly white or Asian, on the wealthier side of things, extremely driven, and equipped with the support (emotional or academic) to take such a demanding class. Even in this best of classes I’ve taken, it is serving the function of divide and conquer: as I wrote in September, “Honors and AP classes do not winnow out the students who are brightest. They winnow out the ones who can best fit in the hamster-wheel framework we have been strapped to.” There are kids in my class who admit that they took it only because of those two little letters, AP, and there are friends of mine who declare their lower-level classes insults to their intelligence, but are daunted by the course load of an AP English class. This is a very tricky and very clever strategy: reserving the few classes where thinking might actually take place as the domain of students who have proved themselves so successful within the system that thinking might be a habit so unfamiliar that they are at little risk of developing it.