We were all being forced to compete for a gold medal in BEING A VICTIM.
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“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”—Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream Speech” (August 28, 1963)
Choosing the terrain on which you meet your enemy is of paramount importance. The three truly great treatises on the art of war—Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Art of War (1521), Carl von Clausewitz’s On War (1832), and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War—are in agreement on this: battles are won and lost before the fighting even starts by wise leaders who know which terrain plays to their strengths and which terrain plays to their weaknesses. I witnessed this often on the battlefield of the graduate school seminar.
Though we all paid lip-service to the Hydra-Headed God of Intersectionality, when it really came down to it, the working-class white guys who grew up poor (like me) would invariably (and, in retrospect, rather predictably) try to steer the seminar discussion towards a CLASS analysis of whatever we were talking about (even when it really didn’t fit); the middle-class white women tried to steer the seminar discussion towards a GENDER analysis of whatever we were talking about; and the visible minority students tried (often, alas, in vain) to get us to remember RACE.
Sometimes it felt like we were trapped in a perverse academic version of The Olympic Games, wherein we were all being forced to compete for a gold medal in BEING A VICTIM. At other times it felt like we were trapped in a dystopian intellectual version of The Hunger Games, wherein we were all being forced to tear each other apart to survive.
Alas, it’s easy to see all of this as horribly cynical. But, truth be told, I doubt any of us were consciously trying to be manipulative. Privilege is, after all, for the most part invisible to those who possess it. So we shouldn’t be surprised to find a wealthy white woman who only seems to see sexism. Nor should we be surprised to find a middle-class African-American man who only seems to see racism. Be that as it may, a military man like Machiavelli might suggest that me and my fellow graduate students were all—albeit unwittingly—fighting for the higher ground.
On an actual battlefield, the high ground is usually the most desirable position. Sun Tzu stresses this, time and again: the fighting force that fails to identify and seize control of the high ground is almost always forced into a reactive, defensive position. Opportunities for offensive action are highly circumscribed. By contrast, the fighting force that occupies the high ground gets to set the terms of the engagement.
On the battlefield of the graduate school seminar, the moral high ground is the most desirable position. A graduate student who fails to identify and seize control of the moral high ground is forced into a reactive, defensive position (e.g., trying to prove that she’s really not a racist, that he’s really not a sexist pig, etc.). By contrast, the students who successfully come to occupy the moral high ground in the graduate seminar get to set the terms of the engagement. It’s a powerful position. No doubt about that. But I wonder if it’s really worth fighting for.
Should we be defined, first and foremost, by what we’ve done in the world OR by what the world has done to us?
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2015)
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Photo: Flickr/Brendon
Photo 2 provided by the Author.
The Michael Moores of this world would have you believe that only a rich, racist, reactionary rube could refuse to drink the Kool-Aid of their progressive prognosis. But most of us know that there are perfectly decent people—poor, penniless “privileged” people—who bristle when they hear preachy puritans and pushy prophets prating on and on piously about Power and Privilege, Patriarchy and Persecution, the Proletariat and the Past. They wonder, sometimes aloud: Where’s my prosperity? Where’s my prestige? Where’s my white male privilege? I sympathize with them, really I do, but they’re asking the wrong questions. After all, being privileged is,… Read more »
I like this a lot, John Faithful Hamer, but it doesn’t reflect my experience of the adjacent seminar rooms I had the privilege to occupy. Let me rephrase that. It doesn’t accurately reflect what I observed in those seminars. I think I can also fairly say it doesn’t reflect the general tenor of my own contributions to them, but enough about me. Here are a couple of things I’ve adduced, from the trenches: 1. Identity politics – specifically, the politics of race and the politics of gender – ought not inform literary study, or the broader analysis of political culture,… Read more »
Both, my brilliant and sensitive friend. Both. What has happened TO us (should) inform our empathy. What we do informs the future and what we can be to each other.
Alas, Kwame, dear friend, you are, as always, able to say eloquently in 30 words that which takes me 628 words to say.