Ideas Make Me Happy

I realized as I was reading these I was excited to be encountering the ideas in them, made happy by the way they were stimulating my thinking.

The Anti-Racist Revelations of Ibram X. Kendi

“How to Be an Antiracist” takes the form of a memoir, with Kendi interspersing his experiences with analyses of types of racism that he has found in himself: ethnic racism, bodily racism, behavioral racism, cultural racism, color racism, class racism, gender racism and queer racism. It’s hard to believe one person — let alone a scholar of racism — could have encompassed so much bigotry, but that’s Kendi’s point: Anyone can. . . .

Have you noticed that almost everyone self-identifies as “not racist”? Consider: In June, responding to backlash over his fond recollections of working with segregationists in the Senate in the 1970s, Joe Biden insisted, “There’s not a racist bone in my body.” The following month, in response to backlash over his attacks on four women of color in Congress, President Trump tweeted, “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!”

Kendi has little use for such protestations, for two reasons. First, he thinks “racist” should be treated as a plain, descriptive term for policies and ideas that create or justify racial inequities, not a personal attack. Someone is being racist when he or she endorses a racist idea or policy. Second, he doesn’t acknowledge “not racist” as a category. At all times, people are being either racist or anti-racist; in Kendi’s view, “there is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist.’ ” Through his scholarship, Kendi has traced nearly six centuries of racist and anti-racist ideas. He could not do the same for “not racist.” It’s an identity without content.

All policies, even the most trivial, are either racist or anti-racist, he argues — they support equity or they don’t. A do-nothing approach to climate change is racist because climate change overwhelmingly affects people of color on the planet. Forgiving student debt and offering universal health care would be anti-racist policies because people of color are more likely to have student debt or lack health care, so those policies would lessen if not erase those inequities.

In Kendi’s analysis, everyone, every day, through action or inaction, speech or silence, is choosing in the moment to be racist or anti-racist. It follows, then, that those identities are fluid, and racism is not a fixed character flaw. “What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what — not who — we are,” he writes. In studying the history of racist ideas, Kendi has found the same person saying racist and anti-racist things in the same speech. “We change, and we’re deeply complex, and our definitions of ‘racist’ and ‘anti-racist’ must reflect that,” he told me. Those who aspire to anti-racism will, when accused of racism, seriously consider the charge and take corrective action. They will not claim to lack any racist bones. “The heartbeat of racism is denial,” he writes in his new book. “The heartbeat of antiracism is confession. ... Only racists shy away from the R-word.” . . .

Power, he argues, devises racist policies for economic self-interest and then justifies the racist policies with racist ideas of hierarchy, inferiority, necessity, greater good and otherness. These racist ideas are consumed and reproduced at large, giving rise to ignorance and hate. Stop focusing on people, Kendi advises: The smart anti-racist identifies racist policy and attacks the racist ideas justifying it.

The heartbeat of racism is denial.

Who Wins, Who Dies: Game of Thrones (2011 - 2019)

This is a show about power, and all the different ways people use or abuse it, and when I watch it, I subconsciously align myself with the person whose approach to power most closely matches my own. It’s what people do with stories. And at one point, Game of Thrones’ female characters were rich and multi-dimensional enough that you could perform this kind of detailed power analysis with every single woman on the show.

Cersei internalized the misogynist and abusive norms of power that had been inflicted on her by her father and her husband and her society; she became good at that kind of power, proving her worth by the only standard she knew, until Cersei ultimately became a more abusive misogynist than most of the men in her life. Daenerys experienced the same abuse; in the TV series, she’s the first major character to be raped, and in the books, we’re introduced to her in a scene where her older brother fondles her breasts and tells her she’s worthless. But Daenerys projected her pain outward, onto the world; instead of trying to become so strong no-one could hurt her, she decided to make the world a place where people don’t get hurt. Sansa was relegated to a position of powerlessness by her father’s death, and found a way to use the skills we call “feminine” — alliance-making, gossip, the emotional labor of convincing a man you don’t hate him while you long for his gory demise — to clamber her way out. Arya was a tomboy; those feminine forms of power were never interesting to her, and she was never good at them. So when she lost her father, she embraced what she was good at — knife crimes — and wandered the earth in search of mentors who could help her become the strongest and most effective version of herself.

These questions — do you climb to the top of the social structure, or do you work to change that structure? Do you try to find power in the feminine, or reject traditional gender roles? Is Dany driven by empathy or a Messiah complex, is she helping other people or trying to heal herself by interfering in cultures and lives she doesn’t understand? — are part of many women’s lives. They have been bitterly fought out in the feminist movement for years. It was genuinely helpful to many women to see them dramatized, to play an elaborate game wherein the characters embodied different feminist (or anti-feminist) ways of coping with a misogynist world. . . .

From being a show about all the different ways women approach power — good, bad, or “ancient witch-priestess of a vengeful fire god” — Game of Thrones has become a show which suggests all women have the same relationship to power: It’s bad for them, and they shouldn’t want it. Running the world is a nasty business, sweeties, wouldn’t you be happier staying home? . . .

Predictably, some of us are still finding reasons to hail that message as a fresh, sophisticated insight. But dressing the argument in contemporary references does not make it smarter. For one thing — and this is a big, big thing — when women are getting raped all the fucking time, on screen and off, it takes some brass balls to tell them they should aspire to be helpless. Some of us have already been helpless, thank you very much. We’ve lived the dream. We’re trying to wake up. . . .

Because in that moment, when Daenerys goes nuts, and becomes a wicked genocidal dictator who must be deposed, I am remembering her rape scene. Basic story logic: That was the beginning of her arc, this is the end, and we are being asked to see what has changed. It was a journey from powerlessness to power, but now we know this makes it a journey from good to evil, too. What you are telling me, when you make Daenerys a power-mad despot, is that it was better for her to be powerless. It was better for her to be on her knees, with a stranger’s dick forced inside her, than it was for her to be a queen. Power turns Dany bad, and her badness hurts everyone, so it was better for the whole world for that little girl to get raped, over and over and over, than it was for her to find her power. . . .

But here is what I know about women and power: Men fear powerful women, because they know that women have always had cause to fear powerful men. Men fear that women’s power will be violent, because they use their power to rape, assault, and beat us. Men fear that women’s power will be temperamental and despotic — that they will be forced to fear our every mood swing and obey our every irrational whim — because men have been raised to believe that their women should tend to them, cater to their whims, hang on the thread of their good graces. Men don’t fear “female power,” in the abstract. They fear being treated like women; they’re afraid that, when we win, they die. That when get the power, we’ll do the shoving, and it will hurt.

Men don’t fear “female power,” in the abstract. They fear being treated like women.

Travel Is No Cure for the Mind

This is The Box of Daily Experience, and it is the space we occupy on any given day of the week/month/year in which we live our lives. It is what we consider “normal” in the context of an everyday experience, and is the operating system we run ourselves on when we require a sequence of events to default to.

The boundaries of our box define our present-day situation, so when we dreamingly gaze toward the prospects of an exciting future, we look outside of it to experience emotions like wonderment, amazement, and inspiration. Our current box is okay and livable, but the world outside of its boundaries is where our hope really resides. . . .

But here’s the thing. Regardless of what you do to break out of the box, it won’t work. You can change your external environment all you want, but you will continue to travel with the one box that will always accompany you.

The box known as your mind. . . .

We tend to grossly overestimate the pleasure brought forth by new experiences and underestimate the power of finding meaning in current ones. . . .

Gratitude is what allows you to feel that same sense of wonderment about your day-to-day life as you would if you were walking the streets of a faraway city. . . .

Being grateful about our existence and its relation to others allows for a blossoming of meaning and purpose in our exploration of this life. It is the starting point for an endless list of awesome things we have going for us, and we don’t need to change our physical location one bit to witness this list grow.

While clarity of experience is a direct path to the calming of the mind, there is another beautiful quality to our consciousness that is often overlooked.

The ability to find fascination in the minds of others. . . .

This sharing of stories is one of the great joys I’ve experienced over and over again with people. There is always an interesting story behind every mind — and hearing it widens the health of our own.

While travel does expand and stretch the horizons of what we know about the world, it is not the answer we’re looking for in times of unrest. To strengthen the health of the mind, the venue to do that in is the one we are in now.

It is location-independent, and always will be.

The key is not to discard The Box of Daily Experience and find a new one — it’s to warmly embrace the one that we have now — with its joys, its flaws, and everything in between.

We tend to grossly overestimate the pleasure brought forth by new experiences and underestimate the power of finding meaning in current ones.