Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter,” says an African proverb. But what if the lionesses write eloquently but the editors prefer the hunters’ version?

We are, as a culture, moving to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.

Positive social change results mostly from connecting more deeply to the people around you than rising above them, from coordinated rather than solo action. Among the virtues that matter are those traditionally considered feminine rather than masculine, more nerd than jock: listening, respect, patience, negotiation, strategic planning, storytelling. But we like our lone and exceptional heroes, the drama of violence and virtue of muscle, or at least that's what we get, over and over, and from it we don't get much of a picture of how change actually happens and what our role in it might be, or how ordinary people matter. "Unhappy the land that needs heros" is a line of Bertolt Brecht's I've gone to dozens of times, but now I'm more inclined to think, pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn't know it has lots and what they look like.

Measured over too short a span, change becomes imperceptible; people mistake today's peculiarities for eternal verities.

The unexamined life is not worth living, as the aphorism goes, but perhaps an honorable and informed life requires examining others’ lives, not just one’s own. Perhaps we do not know ourselves unless we know others. And if we do, we know that nobody is nobody.

Comfort is often a code word for the right to be unaware.

Smile," a man orders you, and that's a concise way to say that he owns you; he's the boss; you do as you're told; your face is there to serve his life, not express your own. He's someone; you're no one.

But ignorance is one form of tolerance, whether it's pretending we live in a colorblind society or one in which misogyny is some quaint old thing we've gotten over.

One of the rights that the powerful often assume is the power to dictate reality.

As a girl, I would have liked to have my intelligence and intellectual labors regarded as an unmitigated good and as a source of pride, rather than something I had to handle delicately, lest I upset or offend. Success can contain implicit failure for straight women, who are supposed to succeed as women by making men feel godlike in their might. As Virginia Woolf reflected: "Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." Which can come to seem something you're obliged to be and they're entitled to see.

What are human murmurations, I wondered? They are, speaking of choruses, in Horton Hears a Who, the tiny Whos of Whoville, who find that if every last one of them raises their voice, they become loud enough to save their home. They are a million-and-a-half young people across the globe, on March 15, 2019, protesting climate change; coalitions led by First Nations people, holding back fossil fuel pipelines across Canada; the lawyers and others who converged on airports all over the US on January 29, 2017, to protest the Muslim ban.

If you regard women as people endowed with certain inalienable rights, then heterosexual sex -- as distinct from rape -- has to be something two people do together because both of them want to, but this notion of women as people is apparently baffling or objectionable to hordes of men, not just incels. Women-as-bodies are sex waiting to happen -- to men -- and women-as-people are annoying gatekeepers getting between men and female bodies, which is why there's a ton of advice about how to trick or overwhelm the gatekeeper. Not just on incel and pick-up artist online forums but as jokey stuff in movies and books, going back to Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Casanova's trophy-taking.

Perhaps it’s not that knowledge is power, but that some knowledge has power and some is stripped of the power it deserves. The powerful lack the knowledge; the knowledge lacks the power.

So #MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening, and even then—as we’ve seen in the case of Christine Blasey Ford, testifying against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—continuing to be silenced. Just as Gerard Baker did, for changing the story about the Battle of Little Bighorn, Blasey Ford received death threats. One measure of how much power these voices and stories have is how frantically others try to stop them.

I find now that most people forget the immense work done around race and gender and sexuality and prisons and power, and that it was, in fact, work—intellectual labor to reject the assumptions built into language, the forces that lift some of us up and push others down, to understand and describe the past and the present and propose new possibilities for the future.

Sometimes these white guys with outsized platforms say shit like James Comey did when he complained that his erstwhile classmate Amy Klobuchar was 'annoyingly smart,' perhaps because women are not supposed to be like that, in his worldview. Another man had the temerity to explain to me that, 'the really smart wonks don't end up being the media stars needed to win the presidency, i.e., Hillary Clinton--super smart, knows the facts, but comes off as smug and all-knowing. I get this from Kamala Harris too.' In other words, he assumes that they are women who know too much and the character defect is theirs, not his. The framework that intelligence is an asset in a man and a defect in a woman is nastily familiar.

Meanwhile, the radio host who groped Taylor Swift at a 2013 meet-and-greet and then unsuccessfully sued her for saying so--since her speaking up resulted in his being fired--complains he's afraid to talk to women (perhaps because talking to a woman and grabbing a woman's ass are apparently so hard for him to tell apart, a kind of confusion we're hearing about from many men who are now 'afraid to talk to' women).

The common denominator of so many of the strange and troubling cultural narratives coming our way is a set of assumptions about who matters, whose story it is, who deserves the pity and the treats and the presumptions of innocence, the kid gloves and the red carpet, and ultimately the kingdom, the power, and the glory. You already know who. It's white people in general and white men in particular, and especially straight white Protestant men, some of whom are apparently dismayed to find out that there is going to be, as your mom might have put it, sharing.

Comfort itself is often invoked as though it were a right of the powerful. I June 2018, CBS This Morning tweeted 'Border Patrol has reached out and said they are "very uncomfortable" with the use of the word cages. They say it's not accurate and added that they may be cages but people are not being treated like animals.' So a cage should not be called a cage, because the discomfort of people in cages is overshadowed by the discomfort of people who put them in cages having cages be called by their true names.

Las estatuas no son en sí mismo derechos humanos, igualdad de acceso, ni un sustituto de ambos, pero constituyen partes fundamentales del entorno construido: las que nos dicen quién importa y a quién se recordará. Amueblan nuestra imaginación y determinan el sentido del pasado que invocamos para decidir qué futuro elegimos y a quién valoramos y escuchamos en el presente. A quién nos referimos al decir "nosotros" es decisivo para cualquier lugar. Un sitio que sólo enaltece a los hombres define a las mujeres como seres insignificantes.

Quizá necesitemos un tropel de actos de amabilidad y relaciones personales en vez de un deus ex machina farmacológico para aplacar el dolor. Por supuesto que existen medicamentos útiles en las enfermedades mentales, pero a menudo se utilizan como alternativas a la resolución de las condiciones que originaron el sufrimiento mental, entre ellas los conceptos sociales asentados y las circunstancias personales. Esa es otra parte de nuestro individualismo acérrimo y de la cultura del héroe: la idea de que todos los problemas son "personales" y se solucionan mediante responsabilidad individual. Es un marco mental que excluye la posibilidad de realizar un cambio más profundo y general o de pedir responsabilidades a los poderosos que crean el statu quo y se benefician de él. El relato de la responsabilidad y el cambio individuales preserva la inmovilidad, ya sea adaptándose a la desigualdad, a la pobreza o a la contaminación.

Recuerdo a las estudiantes de arte que conocí en los ochenta: creaban obras minúsculas, furtivas, con las que expresaban algo acerca de su condición, como la falta de espacio que les parecía que pudieran ocupar con libertad. ¿Cómo va a pensar a lo grande alguien que se supone que no debe estorbar, abusar de la hospitalidad, eclipsar ni intimidar?

Al crecer comprendí que se supone que debo ser "el público", en lugar de una participante o el "centro de atención". Incluso una vez superada la edad en la que desconocidos me pedían que les sonriera, he visto cómo perfectos desconocidos se me acercaban para endilgarme durante largo rato sus teorías y anécdotas sin ofrecer espacio alguno para la reciprocidad en la conversación. Sabemos que esto es una realidad por estudios que indican que en las escuelas los maestros preguntan más a los niños que a las niñas, y que al crecer ellos hablan más en las reuniones e interrumpen a las mujeres más que a los varones.

Cualquiera pensaría que hay más material publicado sobre por qué los hombres están tan enfadados: los que buscan pelea en los bares, los que maltratan a su esposa, los que pegan a los gais, los que tirotean multitudes... A menudo la ira va ligada al privilegio: la idea, subyacente en buena parte de la violencia, de que la voluntad personal debería imponerse, de que los derechos propios valen más que los ajenos. La ira masculina es un asunto de seguridad pública, así como una fuerza de los movimientos sociales y políticos más desagradables de nuestra época: desde la epidemia de violencia machista, a los tiroteos masivos, de los neonazis a los niveles.

Los poderosos se envuelven en el olvido para evitar su relación con el dolor ajeno. Cuanto más eres, menos sabes. Conocer las estrategias que emplean las mujeres para estar a salvo entre los varones es opcional para ellos, si es que alguna vez han llegado a pensar en el asunto. En un ejercicio de clase realizado en universidades, se pregunta al alumnado qué hace para tratar de impedir las violaciones. Las mujeres recitan largas listas de precauciones y cosas a evitar. Los hombre se quedan perplejos

Recordar que las personas forjaron esas ideas, del mismo modo que los edificios en los que vivimos y las carreteras por las que nos desplazamos fueron construidas por personas; nos ayuda a recordar, en primer lugar, que el cambio es posible y, en segundo, que tenemos la buena suerte de vivir después de dicho cambio, en lugar de afirmar nuestra superioridad respecto a quienes llegaron antes de la creación de las nuevas estructuras, y quizá incluso de reconocer que no hemos alcanzado un estado de conocimiento perfecto, porque se producirán más cambios cuando queden al descubierto más cosas que aún no reconocemos. He aprendido mucho. Me queda mucho por aprender.