(repost from 2018)

I feel profoundly alienated by discussions of individualism and collectivism that imply that individualism is the source of all bigotry and and that collectivism will resolve all social ills, or that collectivism is the cause of all social strife and the only means to ameliorate it is through adopting a strictly individualistic philosophy like libertarianism or Objectivism. I have seen other activists on the left decry all individualism in favour of a brand of collectivism that disregards individuality or de-prioritises it, which I find troubling for a number of reasons. First, this dichotomous view of individuality and collective identity seems primarily to be a Western construct and is not universal to human thought; individualism can indeed inform a philosophy that promotes respect and empathy for other human beings, as exemplified in the Southern African concept of ubuntu and similar worldviews from Western and Eastern African cultures. Secondly, my own personal experiences have made it intensely difficult to adopt a strictly collectivistic ideology.

Individualism and collective awareness and empathy can in fact co-exist with each other, even if prevailing Western ideologies claim they can’t. While I don’t necessarily subscribe to any pre-defined philosophy that describes the relationship between individuals and collectives, the ubuntu philosophy common in Southern African cultures is a reasonable approximation. Literally meaning humanity, ubuntu refers to a worldview that uplifts the individual and the community simultaneously. Individual identity is important, but individuals exist within a society that includes other individuals with different needs, backgrounds and priorities. Empathising with other people simply for existing and being fellow human beings leads to policies that uplift both individuals and the community at large. Existence is not, and should not be, a zero-sum game: both individuals’ and communities’ needs matter. Dismantling bigotry requires recognising others’ humanity and individuality; Michael Onyebuchi Eze (2008) describes ubuntu as a philosophy that indicates that ‘a person’s humanity is dependent on the appreciation, preservation and affirmation of other person’s humanity. To deny another’s humanity is to deprecate my own humanity’ ¹. The individual and the community they belong to are mutually supporting entities that define each other.

Clinging tenaciously to strictly collectivistic views presents the risk of authoritarianism; for example, fascism, Jim Crow segregation and Stalinism were partly predicated on the impetus to reduce societies composed of disparate individuals into groups of undifferentiated people whose co-existence was fundamentally impossible (bourgeoisie and proletariat, black people and white people, Aryans and non-Aryans, etc). These worldviews erase people’s essential humanity. Some Western thinkers have also rejected the conflation between anti-oppressive leftist politics and strict Western collectivism; for example, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a deeply individualistic work. He feared the encroachment of authoritarianism in British society and Western society generally because of his witnessing the spread of fascism and Leninism/Stalinism in Spain, Germany and the countries it annexed, Italy and the Soviet Union. As Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini pass out of living memory, the devastation these authoritarian leaders caused becomes less palpable, making it possible for politicians and unelected rabble-rousers like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon, Geert Wilders, Bashar al-Assad, Nigel Farage and Rodrigo Duterte to gain power and cause these ideologies to become resurgent. Political practices and ideologies that place all people’s humanity at the forefront, however, will necessarily be less authoritarian because authoritarianism requires that its practitioners reduce or deny the importance of others’ humanity.

My individualist and anti-authoritarian beliefs are rooted in a desire to recognise the humanity and autonomy of other people. I am pro-human rights precisely because I am an individualist. I am pro-feminist because I believe women are individual people and they can and should make their own choices. I am anti-racist because it is invidious to assume that people must share all the same traits because of the colour of their skin or their ancestral home. I am anti-disablist precisely because I believe disabled people are individuals who deserve to have their personhood recognised in its full, multilayered reality instead of being conflated entirely with their disability instead of other personal qualities. Black lives matter precisely because we are individual human beings and have rights that inhere within that humanity. People are complex and varied. You do not have to fight bigotry and uplift the needs of marginalised people by creating binary categories in which which some are sinners and others are saints. Some marginalised people express hateful or seemingly self-contradictory views: Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Carson and Caitlyn Jenner come to mind.

My tendency towards individualism is also deeply personal. I grew up in a relatively authoritarian environment in which loyalty to a collectivity, whether that be the United States, the fundamentalist Christian God, the family or the US armed forces, was valued over individual self-expression and identity. Moreover, family members and other adults around me would frequently reduce my personality, interests, creativity, intelligence, curiosity and independent spirit into traits of my autism diagnosis. They used these tactics to dehumanise me and to devalue my insights and beliefs. I found myself suppressing my intellectual curiosity for years because it was pathologised as Yet Another Autism Trait. I may be disabled, but my disability is not the totality of who I am. Being a disability activist should not necessitate viewing myself as a list of diagnostic traits. Nor are my race, gender, social class, upbringing, sexual orientation or political views. They certainly inform my perspective and it would be foolhardy for me to pretend that they do not, but I refuse to allow myself to become swallowed up by labels instead of viewing myself holistically. Yes, I speak as a queer, black, disabled person, but my voice is not representative of all autistic, queer, black or disabled people. It is ultimately my voice. This is different from shifting towards a ‘person with X’ construction; I think my marginalising experiences are influential, but that those experiences exist within a broader context and that people should not use them reductively to define me or my views. They are layers, influences, shades of nuance and meaning, but not the totality.

It is for these reasons that I reject the the forced choice between do-it-yourself individualism and collectivism that requires people’s subsumption into a group identity. It is a culturally bound illusion that is spatially and temporally limited. I may be an individualist, but that does not preclude my dedication to working alongside other marginalised people and those who support us in creating a more just and equitable world.

1. Eze, M O. (2008). What is African communitarianism? Against consensus as a regulative ideal. South African Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 27 Issue 4. ↩

(2018 repost)

Last year, Nathan J Robinson of Current Affairs published an article entitled ‘The Southern Poverty Law Center is Everything That’s Wrong with Liberalism’. While the first part of the article is excellent—it’s a well-sourced exposé that highlights the flaws of the SPLC under its former head, Morris Dees—the second part left me wanting, to say the least. Robinson’s reporting of the endemic racism, sexual harassment, venality and hypocrisy of the SPLC’s management are legitimate criticisms of a deeply flawed organisation that has often failed to fulfil its ostensible mission. I even agree that the use of the Hate Map as a fundraising tool is deeply cynical. That said, however, Robinson’s critique of the SPLC’s hate map exemplifies an insidious form of class-reductionist leftism and unexamined privilege that diminishes the threat some of these profiled groups present.

Robinson’s criticism of the SPLC’s hate-group designations omits a key part of the definition they list on the website. He says:

One problem here is that the definition of “hate” is very unclear. It supposedly means having “beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people,” but in that case I’m a member of a hate group myself, since I despise bourgeois liberals.

That’s not the full definition. From the 4 October 2017 SPLC FAQ about hate groups, archived on 21 February 2019:

The Southern Poverty Law Center defines a hate group as an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. We do not list individuals as hate groups, only organizations.

That’s a pretty glaring omission. He doesn’t even have the excuse that the FAQ was updated, because the line about immutable characteristics was there over a year before Robinson published this piece. He also failed to mention that the SPLC uses similar guidelines to the federal government’s definition of a hate crime:

Traditionally, FBI investigations of hate crimes were limited to crimes in which the perpetrators acted based on a bias against the victim’s race, color, religion, or national origin. In addition, investigations were restricted to those wherein the victim was engaged in a federally protected activity. With the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, the Bureau became authorized to also investigate crimes committed against those based on biases of actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or gender.

This is disingenuous. ‘Bourgeois liberal’ isn’t an immutable characteristic. Race is. Sexual orientation and gender identity often are. Robinson also claims that most of the groups listed on the SPLC’s well-known Hate Map don’t belong there, mostly because they’re skeleton crews of working-class racists with a small following and minimal influence. He writes,

If you trawl through the Hate Map for a little while like I did, you may also feel uncomfortable for another reason. Most of the people they’re listing as threats seem as if they are poor and unschooled. I bet if you compared the average annual salary of the SPLC staff to the average salary of the people in these hate groups, you’d find a massive class divide. Whether it’s poor Black people joining weird sects like the United Nuwaupians, or poor white people getting together and calling themselves things like the “Folkgard of Holda & Odin,” these are people on society’s margins. A lot of this seems to be educated liberals having contempt for and fear of angry rednecks.

While this does apply to many of the groups he highlighted in his article—a tiny cadre of neo-Nazis going on canoeing trips, an old Confederate-memorabilia seller—this doesn’t hold true universally. Robinson’s characterisation is ill-fitting for the very first group he mentions: the Family Research Council, which he describes as a ‘mainstream conservative’ organisation that has disputed its inclusion on the SPLC’s hate map. What he fails to acknowledge is that mainstream American conservatism would be considered far-right or outright fascist in other countries. The FRC is far from being a gaggle of harmless old yokels who haven’t updated their websites since 1995; they’re a well-funded Christian Right organisation that is hellbent on stripping LGBTQ people of our equal rights. They promote conversion therapy and conflate homosexuality with child molestation. The FRC’s head, Tony Perkins, has been an adviser to Donald Trump since his election, and was named chair of the US Council for International Religious Freedom in 2019. An organisation with White House access is not a bunch of ‘angry rednecks’. Robinson is also aware that American political views tend to skew to the right compared to those espoused in other countries, making his characterisation of the FRC as being ‘mainstream conservatives’ especially inappropriate. An organisation that dedicates itself to limiting others’ rights based on immutable characteristics based on outright falsehoods is the very definition of a hate group.

The Family Research Council isn’t the only group that gets off scot-free in Robinson’s article: he characterises Daryush ‘Roosh V’ Valizadeh’s Return of Kings, labelled a male supremacist group by the SPLC, as the work of a small-time pick-up artist and his friends, but that grossly minimises his reach. David Futrelle of We Hunted the Mammoth has catalogued Valizadeh’s abhorrent behaviour for years. The man peddled manuals on how to rape women for years before his conversion to conservative Orthodox Christianity. In 2015, Valizadeh sicced his followers on Aurelie Nix, a feminist activist who successfully campaigned to cancel a demonstration he was planning to hold in Montreal. Roosh is not harmless. Roosh has shed his old pick-up-artist ways, but he’s still a snake-oil-peddling misogynist, homophobe and antisemite. I don’t give a shit that Roosh is ‘just one guy’. He built a following selling books that glorified sexual abuse. He’s encouraged rape and death threats against women and their allies who stand against him. By describing Roosh as a ‘pick-up artist and his friends’, Robinson is in effect telling his victims, ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about a man who encourages rape and death threats.’

Robinson’s accusation that the SPLC is a group of ‘educated liberals’ targeting ‘angry rednecks’ exemplifies the class reductionism that is common among some progressives and leftists. There are plenty of working-class white people who abhor racism. Their class does not absolve them of their responsibility to their fellow human beings. This claim is the classic ‘Trump voters voted for him because of their economic anxiety’ canard. Robinson’s claim that uneducated white nationalists are on the margins of society, and the insinuation that they are sympathetic figures, makes him look as though he’s making excuses for racists. Some of these people may be poor, but it doesn’t matter how much money they have if they’re going to kill me.

(Also, Robinson can’t speak for the working class: he seems to have grown up upper-middle-class and attended elite private universities like Brandeis, Yale Law School and Harvard, all of which are in the US News and World Report Top 50. It would be one thing if he’d grown up working class, but that’s not his experience. This dude is a lifelong member of the fucking bourgeoisie himself! I myself have a lot of educational privilege, but I grew up working class—my father was an enlisted airman and my mother did random clerical and retail jobs. Neither has a college degree. My parents had lower-middle-class aspirations, but I think they were still working class. My grandparents were unambiguously working class.)

Robinson has posted excellent long-form takedowns of the odious conservative talking head Ben Shapiro and the now-disgraced Jordan Peterson. Shapiro is a bog-standard Republican who spouts the same nonsense as Ted Cruz or any other rank-and-file GOP functionary. He espouses similar views to those of the ‘mainstream conservative’ Family Research Council, though he’s Orthodox Jewish rather than evangelical Christian. Jordan Peterson isn’t a large organisation; he’s a Canadian psychology professor with an online cult following. Why are Shapiro and Peterson a threat, while Roosh is just an insignificant nutjob with a blog?

It’s clear that Robinson neither knew nor cared about the real-life harm that the FRC and Roosh V have caused. If he had, he would have found out that Roosh sold rape manuals, or that the FRC has worked assiduously to impose theocratic norms on a pluralistic society by abrogating the right of LGBTQ people to participate fully within the community. He would have known that Roosh used Gamergate-like tactics to silence those who opposed him.

Finally, Robinson claims he knows the biggest threat to people of colour:

This is not to say that neo-Nazis aren’t fucking terrifying, or that they don’t pose any threat. The Daily Stormer is a real thing, and there is a lot of dangerous white supremacist nonsense believed by a lot of people. But the “hate” focus is all wrong: The biggest threats to people of color do not come from those who “hate” them, but from those (like the contemporary Republican Party) who are totally indifferent to whether they live or die. This is the frightening thing about contemporary racism: It does not come waving the Confederate flag, it comes waving the American flag.

As far as I know, Robinson is white or white-passing. He cannot speak for those of us who encounter racism day in and day out. This is the kind of rank paternalism he’d happily attribute to ‘bourgeois liberals’. You are not our voice. His definitions of real threats to PoC reflect his cluelessness. He wrote this not long after the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally, the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, the Christchurch shooting and other incidents in which ‘lone-wolf’ far-right domestic terrorists gave vent to their hate by murdering people in broad daylight. Indifferent Republicans may pose a systemic threat through their promotion of deregulation, robber-baron tactics, healthcare rationing and other capitalistic evils, but domestic terror attacks are designed to make us afraid to go out of the house lest we be gunned down by hatemongers with far-too-accessible guns. Hate crimes are intimidation tactics that are designed to whip us into submission, as lynchings were in the post-Reconstruction, pre-Civil Rights era. Subprime lenders are a threat. So are neo-Nazis. It’s not an either/or proposition. (And in many cases, the plutocrats and hatemongers are one and the same: Steve Bannon was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs; the father-daughter duo of conservative billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer bankroll Breitbart; Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth; Richard Spencer comes from a rich family). Furthermore, he highlights the Republicans as a significant threat to PoC while pooh-poohing the threat of the ‘mainstream conservative’ Family Research Council. If the Republicans are a threat, so are their think tanks, especially when their operatives have the ear of the President of the United States. The Family Research Council is the very epitome of suit-and-tie bigotry. I do agree, however, that contemporary racism comes waving the American flag. It can also come waving Confederate flags or swastikas.

It’s one thing to criticise the SPLC for its objectively abhorrent actions; it’s another to cover for bad-faith actors like Roosh and the Family Research Council. While Robinson has performed a valuable public service through his enumeration of the Dees-era SPLC’s faults, his attempts to speak for people of colour, co-optation of working-class narratives, and minimisation of the threats posed by the Family Research Council, Roosh V and other far-right agitators, are ill-advised.

This is a public plea to the author: Please acknowledge that some of the organisations listed as hate groups by SPLC are real threats. Recognise your own position in this argument: an upper-middle-class white man does not have the direct experience to deliver a verdict on what is or is not harmful to PoC and working-class people. And finally, do your research to avoid making these kinds of errors in the future. We’re all fallible. But this is irresponsible journalism that downplays the threat of far-right groups and online ‘thought leaders’.

(repost from ca. 2019)

The view of trauma adopted in the DSM-V is a reflection of the Cartesian dualism that still permeates mainstream psychology. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, requires that a direct, physical threat to someone’s life occur; emotional abuse doesn’t seem to count, despite research studies indicating that emotional distress can exert the same effects as physical abuse. If emotional abuse results in the same biochemical responses as physical abuse or life-threatening accidents, then it should be included as a criterion for PTSD or other psychiatric disabilities that arise from stress or trauma. Limiting the aetiology to direct physical threats prevents survivors of emotional abuse or other forms of sustained maltreatment from receiving the help they need.

Drawing a bright line between the two seems entirely predicated on the idea that the mind and body are two separate entities. This kind of crude dualism reflected in the DSM is not in keeping with current neuroscientific findings. Rather, the states of the mind and the rest of the body work in concert with one another. For example, anxiety and depression lead to the increased production of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which can ultimately overload the body and lead to a variety of adverse health consequences like stroke and heart disease (McEwen, 2005). The idea of a mind wholly separate from the rest of the body is an epiphenomenon of our cognition, not a tangible reality; while we may feel a separation between our thoughts and the rest of our body, the brain is still inextricable from the rest of our flesh, blood and bones. Our selfhood is immanent within the corporeal; it neither transcends it nor is reducible to it.

Admittedly, this frustration is deeply personal; I myself have PTSD symptoms from surviving years of emotional abuse and neglect, but if diagnosticians adhered strictly to the DSM, I couldn’t even be diagnosed with it. There is no official name for what I’ve gone through, even though the effects of this maltreatment still linger. Some psychologists and psychiatrists have suggested adding complex PTSD, or C-PSTD, to the DSM, but it hasn’t been added as of 2013. Leaving the scars of emotional trauma unnamed creates the potential for gaslighting, denial, and manipulation. While I’m not an unalloyed supporter of the medical model to name and identify trauma, I do think that we need ways to discuss what we’ve gone through as survivors in a systematic way. I hope the DSM-6 actually catches up with the literature and recognises the effects of long-term emotional trauma.

References

McEwen, B (2005). Stressed or stressed out: What is the difference? Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience 2006, 30(5).

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V) (2013).

(repost from 2018)

Content warning: bullying, emotional abuse, food/weight talk

I am constantly beset by the worry that I take too much space. That my entire existence is a nuisance. Because of this, I often find myself consigned to the margins, either by my own reticence or through others’ behaviour. Ironically, I feel profoundly marginalised in communities that are supposed to address and dismantle the systemic marginalisation of those of us who have been pushed to the periphery of society. I am on the periphery of a periphery. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because I don’t sound right, or that I’m not ‘woke’ enough to fit in, even though I’m no Clarence Thomas. I often feel as though I’m in middle school again, being accused of acting white or failing to perform the correct kind of blackness for my peers’ benefit. I feel like an intruder in spaces in which people look like me, but don’t see me as one of them. I worry that I’m not pure enough. Not radical enough. Not loud enough. Not cool enough. I am terminally uncool. Square, nerdy, congenitally awkward. I feel constantly overlooked in discussions about disability and race, even though I have not shied away from discussing the relationships between them. I feel, despite my isolation, that I am somehow taking too much space simply by being there and having inconvenient opinions. I see ‘cooler’ voices amplified before mine. This is not limited to my work in advocacy; as a master’s student, I avoided applying for fellowships and other opportunities within my programme. After all, weren’t so many of the others younger than I was, and therefore more deserving of opportunities? Better for me to withdraw, to focus on my advocacy outside campus instead of intruding. It didn’t help that some people thought I talked too much in class during my first semester. I grew comparatively quieter. I didn’t shut up entirely – it’s not in my nature to do so – but I did feel some pressure to hold back. While I was able to build cordial relationships, there was always the knife-edge fear: I take up too much space. I’m not cool enough. I should just back off and let real people get involved.

I’m 32 years old. I finished junior high eighteen years ago, but I still feel I’m there sometimes, though the consequences are severer.

These feelings have deep roots that extend much further than my involvement in public activism or advocacy. As I previously intimated, it goes back to childhood, back when I grew up feeling as though I were an inconvenience for being neurodivergent. When I was bullied at school, my parents routinely took the side of the bullies unless they were actually inflicting physical pain on me. When I cried out in emotional distress, I was met with ridicule, stonewalling or punishment if they didn’t blame it on Satan. If I felt excluded, I was not to question it; for my parents, it seemed self-evident that I should be excluded, and that my protesting against my exclusion was tantamount to wanting to be the centre of attention for no good reason. Disputing this exclusion was clearly a sign of my being vain and self-centred. My being good necessitated my being a marginal figure. I was not to question, not to feel, not to exist in any substantive way that required that they address my humanity. I take up too much space.

I’m also fat. Very fat. I’ve been fat since I was ten years old, back when I literally Ate My Feelings, pace Mean Girls, because I didn’t know what else to do when I was depressed and dealing with my parents’ emotional abuse and neglect. Ironically, my being mistreated for taking up too much space led to habits that would cause people to believe I took up too much space in other ways. While I no longer binge-eat in the same way, I spent about twenty years dealing with disordered eating as a form of self-treatment when all the pills, prayer, therapy and meditation couldn’t banish the self-destructive demons dominating my thoughts. Doctors berate me about my weight, treating the effects of my self-medication as an individual moral failing. I take up too much space.

I have a hard time initiating conversations, even with friends I’ve known for over a decade. Even though they’ve managed to put up with me for that long and somehow don’t find me repulsive, I feel my initiating contact is an intrusive act. That I am intrinsically repellent and should wait to be approached first. I feel the same way about job applications. I take up too much space.

Even now, nearly twelve years after I have had any direct dealings with the people who inculcated this into me in the first place, I feel compelled to fold myself small and to be marginal for others’ benefit. If others approach me with opportunities, I’ll accept, but I am less forthcoming about seizing them for myself. For doing so requires that I place myself at the centre, rather than consigning myself to the margins and allowing others, who are always more important than I am, to take up space in my stead. For I take up too much space, and always will. The current political climate doesn’t help, either; far-right politicians and their acolytes actively say that those of us who do not fit the mould of an ideal citizen should be eliminated, whether by actively killing us or by persecuting us out of existence through the continual curtailment of our civil and human rights.

I’m trying to convince myself that I deserve to be here, too, but there’s a lot I have to work through before I get there.