The Beneficial Skill of Complaining
I defend the form of complaining that’s not seen as productive. I suspect that our reports of our pains can be more socially beneficial, even more morally generous, than naysayers think. Of course, not all complaints are equal and not all contexts are great. Complaining well is a complex skill, to be exercised more than never and less than excessively. . . .Complaining can be thoughtless, and it can be unwelcome. But complaining can also be thoughtful. At times it’s so useful to a situation that I describe it as an affective duty. That means that there are times when we ought to be sensitive and attuned to the emotional environment and offer a complaint as a way of offering an opportunity for solidarity. You ought not to act as if no one has anything in common with you and, instead, you ought to extend your vulnerability and say: ‘Let us share it.’To observe the duty to complain, we need skills of complaining well. And to do any skill excellently, we need to practise, so that we know what occasions call for complaining. Such occasions include times when you think you could help someone else and invite them to complain because you think they need to. My journal article ‘Can’t Complain’ (2018) includes the example of two coworkers plodding from opposite directions in a cold rain. They step inside, shivering, and one says: ‘Awful weather we’re having!’ The point is to open that interpersonal door so that the other person feels free to complain. It is friendly but, more importantly, it’s a recognition that someone might need to disclose that they’re uncomfortable or vulnerable, if only to the weather. Some might refrain from complaining merely because they’re polite, but they might also refrain because they don’t think you’ll agree. Offering the opening complaint is a way of indicating that you’ll agree. It’s prosocial.This affective duty can also be towards oneself – a duty to complain so that we’re not misrepresenting ourselves. We don’t associate quotidian gripes with authenticity, but letting people know that you’re not perfect, that you, too, suffer from some things that others might be suffering from, can indicate a healthy self-awareness. In complaining well, we’re both honest about who we are and helpful to other people who might need to know that they’re not alone. It might take personal courage to admit that one is in pain or vulnerable, but it’s important to our own wellbeing to find that we’re not alone. . . .The good life requires complaining to the right people, in the right amounts, for the right reasons. . . .Instead of being a virtue, complaining is more like the skill of people who are really successful at sociality, who know when to share themselves, when to help others, and when to contribute to a relationship. . . .Complaining helps ameliorate isolation and helps people bond. It reduces our loneliness and reveals us to each other in a way that can build relationships. . . .I want to encourage people to recognise that no one’s life is free of suffering. No one is untouched by trouble, and therefore everybody gets to complain a little. We should help each other be vulnerable together. We’re stronger together, even when we feel like we’re not strong.
We typically think about ‘wellbeing’ in terms of physical and mental health. To improve your physical wellbeing, it might be best to exercise; to increase your mental wellbeing, consider putting your phone down once in a while. There is another, less noted way in which we should think about our wellbeing: in terms of knowledge. Knowledge is good for us not only because we generally want to know the truth, but because knowledge dramatically affects our ability to navigate the world and accomplish our goals. Ignorance, on the other hand, is bad for us in that it prevents us from having an accurate representation of the world and stands in the way of our achieving those goals. Just as there are factors that affect our physical and mental wellbeing, there are factors that affect our epistemic wellbeing. It’s not exactly a new notion, but it can help us make better sense of what has been called our current ‘epistemic crisis’. . . .There are three components of epistemic wellbeing: access to truths; access to trustworthy sources of information; and opportunities to participate in productive dialogue. . . .Access to truth, the first component, is the basis of epistemic wellbeing. Access might be thwarted in many ways: you might be unable to go online, books might be banned, important information could be redacted. Or, in less extreme cases, you might be presented with different media outlets presenting conflicting information about an event. In this case, you might feel that you’re being prevented from accessing truths insofar as you’re unable to determine which information being presented is correct. . . .While we’re all interested in obtaining truths, we’re unable to acquire all of these truths on our own, and so we’re reliant on others. This is a good thing. . . . Feeling as though we can find these trustworthy sources is crucial in being able to know what we need to know, and is thus an important component of our epistemic wellbeing. . . .The third component of epistemic wellbeing: the feeling that you can participate in productive dialogue.Lack of opportunity to participate in productive dialogue can be detrimental to your wellbeing. There are many ways in which you can be excluded explicitly or implicitly on the basis of facts about your identity, a phenomenon philosophers call epistemic injustice. If you’ve ever been denied the chance to have your input heard when you could have made an important contribution, or were assumed to be incapable when you weren’t, or otherwise dismissed in conversation because of your race, gender, sex, etc, then you’ve experienced epistemic injustice. These are all examples, then, of one way in which your epistemic wellbeing might be adversely affected. The notion I’m working with here, however, doesn’t necessarily depend on exclusions on these kinds of bases, and instead concerns any kind of sense of lacking opportunities to engage in productive dialogue (it remains the case, of course, that members of marginalised and minority groups will tend to experience these kinds of detriments most often). . . .If people are, as I have suggested, driven by a pursuit of truth, trust and dialogue, then, when they feel they’re thwarted in these efforts, they’re going to pursue them by other means. One of the most lamentable aspects of our current epistemic situation is the rise of conspiratorial thinking: people are willing both to believe a whole host of outlandish theories, and to share them widely on social media. This might come about partly as a response to a decreased sense of epistemic wellbeing, with the result that we look to potentially surprising places to try to find truths, trustworthy sources and opportunities for dialogue. While it’s in an important sense irrational to believe in many conspiracy theories, the motivation behind doing so is not necessarily irrational. . . .A decreased sense of epistemic wellbeing might be both a cause and a consequence of an epistemic crisis: if you feel unable to engage in dialogue, you’ll find alternative opportunities to do so, resulting in more extreme views, which in turn make it more difficult to engage in dialogue – a vicious cycle, harmful to epistemic wellbeing.
We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the ‘information age’, we are moving towards the ‘reputation age’, in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. Seen in this light, reputation has become a central pillar of collective intelligence today. It is the gatekeeper to knowledge, and the keys to the gate are held by others. The way in which the authority of knowledge is now constructed makes us reliant on what are the inevitably biased judgments of other people, most of whom we do not know. . . .The paradigm shift from the age of information to the age of reputation must be taken into account when we try to defend ourselves from ‘fake news’ and other misinformation and disinformation techniques that are proliferating through contemporary societies. What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility.Whenever we are at the point of accepting or rejecting new information, we should ask ourselves: Where does it come from? Does the source have a good reputation? Who are the authorities who believe it? What are my reasons for deferring to these authorities? Such questions will help us to get a better grip on reality than trying to check directly the reliability of the information at issue.
Minimum wages have a way of screwing with economic intuition, and complicating the simple logic of supply and demand. The benefits of a $15 minimum would greatly outweigh the costs. More than that, new economic evidence suggests that those costs might be small ones anyway: Even in low-wage, low-density, low-cost-of-living parts of the country, a $15 minimum might not be a death knell for small businesses or a job killer for low-wage workers. . . .A large body of research has upended the old consensus that higher minimum wages necessarily reduce employment. One recent survey, for instance, examined 138 minimum-wage hikes at the state level and found essentially no effect on payrolls. . . .Examinations of wage hikes in other countries also suggest that a high minimum wage would not cause major job losses.“Can we say with full assurance what the employment impact will be? No,” Dube said. “But our evidence base has been fast growing in the past five years, and ambitious minimum-wage policies—they haven’t been having a clear impact on low-wage employment so far.” . . .A second set of concerns has to do with high minimum wages forcing companies out of business or giving them cause not to open in the first place—not so much the big national chains that hire lots of minimum-wage workers, such as dollar stores, but mom-and-pops with thin operating margins and less access to credit. . . .The minimum wage seems to be Darwinian, driving weak competitors out: One study, for instance, showed that a company with a 3.5-star average on Yelp is more likely to fail after a minimum-wage hike, but a five-star company is not.Is it worth keeping the minimum wage low to save those firms, or to keep profits high at others? Stepping back even further: Does it make sense to allow businesses offering poverty wages to flourish? Do we want, as a society, to have an economy made up of businesses that rely on poverty wages? The answer, I believe, is clearly no. . . .Finally, there is the concern that higher minimum wages will lead to inflation: Hello, $15 minimum wage; hello, $15 takeout sandwich. Again, these concerns are overblown. Businesses do pass the higher labor costs associated with minimum wages onto consumers. But the price increases tend to be quite small—a buck more for a sandwich, 50 cents more for a taco, a few dollars more for yard work. One study, for instance, found that for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, prices for food consumed outside of the home rise just 0.36 percent.The impact would not be big enough to have more than a marginal effect on prices or on the country’s overall rate of inflation. . . .The question is what kind of economy we want to have, what kind of jobs we want to promote, and how much poverty we want families in relatively low-wage—and often brutally difficult, emotionally draining, physically tiring, and societally essential—jobs to experience. Right now, our policies do not just allow, but promote, destitution. We choose to have a large precariat, with tens of millions of families both working and poor. The $15 minimum would make it possible for such families to get by, if not thrive.Indeed, all the focus on the drawbacks has overshadowed the good that higher wages would do. A $15 minimum wage would lift 1.3 million people out of poverty, half of them children. It would push an additional $8 billion a year in earnings to families below today’s poverty line, and another $14 billion a year to households just above it. Millions of people would find it easier to put food on the table and gas in the car.At no cost to the government either—there’s no better deal for the taxpayer in economic policy.
As Washington debates sending checks to Americans and increasing the minimum wage, a new study offers evidence for how such policies could help eliminate poverty. Obviously, giving more money to people without much money helps them with money problems. But the study adds to a growing body of research that says that money really does help workers earn more money. . . .The authors conclude that giving workers cash upfront helped alleviate the mental burden of their financial problems and freed them to be more productive. It echoes findings from other studies on the psychological consequences of poverty, but it is novel because it looked at the effects of it at a real job rather than in a laboratory setting.Given the emerging body of evidence that suggests the cognitive load of poverty hurts low-income folks' ability to escape their circumstances, the authors argue that policymakers should consider reshaping welfare programs with these psychological issues in mind. Giving poor people cash without conditions, for example, could do a lot to help them earn more cash on their own.
I begin to sweat. White fragility has burned me hotter than the heat flooding me now. Then again, aren’t we all fragile? Maybe my own fragility is a lens through which I eye their intent with suspicion and scrutinize their language.But damn, even the phrase—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It reinforces, once again, that this is about white people because it centers whiteness. It gives whiteness the power to include, to determine equity, and above all, to determine what and who is diverse from it.Imagine an all-black organization with a DEI policy scouting white people, without understanding, maybe even unaware that they are ignorant of the historical and lived experiences of those they want to recruit. Yeah, that makes me feel fragile. My right eye twitches and my poker face begins to disintegrate.I have to speak.I acknowledge my pounding heart and clammy palms, my vulnerability in frequently being the only brown woman in these conversations. I want them to understand that inviting people to the table makes them the owner of the table; it doesn’t equalize power. And if they invite people to the table, they have to learn to cook and serve what those people want rather than assume what they dish out is appetizing or even palatable to others. If the meal you serve doesn’t nourish in deep and broad ways, they won’t come back. It may even make more sense to try to get invited to other tables. Further, just because us diverse folks aren’t talking to them, doesn’t mean we’re not talking. To paraphrase David Bowie:and these people you’re ignorant ofas they try to change their worldsare immune to your consultationsthey’re quite aware of what they’re going throughSince I allowed my heart to speak, it returns to its natural rhythm. I wait. Maybe for pushback, maybe for judgment, I don’t know. Will my comments impact the conversation’s trajectory? Fragility—no, vulnerability—draws my shoulders to my ears. I breathe deeply and shimmy them down with the assurance that I spoke with calm clarity and truth in an effort to help us evolve into an equitable and pluralistic, not diverse, community.I am thanked for sharing. A woman ponders how awkward it would be to go to other tables to offer her services. I respond. You’re not going there to offer your services. Not just yet, anyway. You’re going there to learn. To learn what it is to be the minority, to be disoriented as one would in another culture. You’re going there to experience what you are asking for from BIPOC who are historically accustomed to expect hostility from people who look like you. Who expect to be used, once again, by you for your agenda. You’re going there to learn humility and vulnerability. You’re going there to listen. Deeply. To hear what may transform you and your organization, if you allow it. After all, ecological collapse disproportionately impacts us.
Black Americans are still receiving Covid-19 vaccinations at dramatically lower rates than white Americans even as the chaotic rollout reaches more people, according to a new KHN analysis. . . .Seven more states published the demographics of residents who have been vaccinated after KHN released an analysis of 16 states two weeks ago, bringing the total to 23 states with available data.In all 23 states, data shows white residents are being vaccinated at higher rates than Black residents, often at double the rate — or even higher. The disparities haven’t significantly changed with an additional two weeks of vaccinations. . . .Across the U.S., non-Hispanic Black Americans are 1.4 times more likely to contract Covid-19, and 2.8 times more likely to die of it than white Americans, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis.
The stereotype of Black fathers as “absent” and Black children as “fatherless”—first introduced over 50 years ago—has, like many racial stereotypes, refused to die. . . .The idea that racial disparities in education, employment, income, incarceration, and more can be blamed not on structural racism, but on this “absence” of black fathers has been parroted by pundits and politicians alike. . . .This stereotype ignores clear evidence that Black fathers are in fact more involved in their children’s care, and their lives, than fathers of other races. . . .According to a 2013 report by the CDC, Black dads—whether they live with their children, or not—are more actively involved in their children’s lives than their counterparts of other races.For example, the CDC reports that Black fathers who live with their children are more likely than fathers of other races to provide physical care (bathe, diaper, feed) for their young children, read to their children, and help their children with their homework—all on a daily basis—than fathers of other races who also cohabitate with their kids.The report also reveals that, among dads who don’t live with their children, Black dads are more likely to be involved in care, including reading to their children, helping them with homework, talking to them about their days, and taking them to activities, than Hispanic or white dads who live apart from their kids. Non-residential Black fathers are also the least likely to report that they’re not at all involved in the care of their children, including bathing, dressing, changing diapers, and playing with their children.Lest we believe that these statistics are skewed by the fathers’ own self-reporting, other studies based on maternal reports echo these findings.
Privilege Spotlight
Instructions
to participants: Turn your cameras off and mute your microphones. I will read a
series of prompts. If a prompt applies to you, turn your camera on. Pause and
observe for 5-10 seconds. Then turn your camera off and wait for the next
prompt.
Prompts:
1.
If you
have never tried to change your appearance, mannerisms, or behavior to fit in
at your school, please turn your camera on.
2.
If you
have never been called a racial slur, please turn your camera on.
3.
If you
have never been asked to explain a food, music, custom, or culture, please turn
your camera on.
4.
If the
authority figures in your life generally look like you, please turn your camera
on.
5.
If your
parents have never had a conversation with your about how your race will impact
your life, please turn your camera on.
6.
If your
household has employed help as tutors, nannies, gardeners, or housekeepers,
please turn your camera on.
7.
If you
can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to your
race, please turn your camera on.
8.
If you can
find Band-Aids at mainstream stores designed to blend in with or match your
skin tone, please turn your camera on.
9.
If you
have never worried someone might call the police because of something you—or a
group you were a part of—were doing, please turn your camera on.
10.
If
English is your first language, please turn your camera on.
11.
If you
have never seen your heritage turned into a Halloween costume, please turn your
camera on.
12.
If you
have never seen your heritage turned into a sports mascot, please turn your
camera on.
13.
If you
have never used public transportation, please turn your camera on.
14.
If, when
faced with the disapproval of others, you don’t worry that your race will be
part of their disapproval, please turn your camera on.
15.
If
characters in books are assumed to look like you unless otherwise noted, please
turn your camera on.
16.
If no
one has ever been curious about or asked about your hair, please turn your
camera on.
17.
If you
have never worried what new neighbors might think of you, please turn your
camera on.
18.
If you
have never been asked, “Where are you from?” please turn your camera a on.
19.
If you
have more than fifty books in your household, please turn your camera on.
20.
If you
have never, while shopping alone, felt watched, suspected, followed, or
harassed, please turn your camera on.
21.
If you
see people who look like you widely represented as the norm on TV, news, and
other media, please turn your camera on.
22.
If your
family has lived in the US for at least 20 years, please turn your camera on.
23.
If you
never think about whether your actions or appearance will reflect badly on your
race, please turn your camera on.
24.
If you
studied the history and culture of your ancestors in elementary or middle
school, please turn your camera on.
25.
If your
family owns their house, please turn your camera on.
26.
If you
can display anger and aggression without others associating it with your race,
please turn your camera on.
27.
If you
would not think twice about calling the police when trouble occurs, please turn
your camera on.
28.
If your
entire family has health insurance (including Medicaid), please turn your
camera on.
29.
If
school and government holidays coincide with religious holidays that you
celebrate, please turn your camera on.
30.
If you
or your family ever inherited money or property, please turn your camera on.
31.
If your
primary ethnic identity is "American," please turn your camera on.
32.
If you
can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or use text or chat speak, without
having people attribute those choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the
illiteracy of your race, please turn your camera on.
33.
If you
feel no loss or liability knowing no language or culture besides your own,
please turn your camera on.
34.
If you
have never had to worry that you will be perceived as an authentic member of
your ethnic group based on a sufficient amount of “blood,” as verified by a
government-issued document, please turn your camera on.
35.
If a college
education has been the norm in your family for at least three generations,
please turn your camera on.
36.
If you
have never been called a thug or a terrorist, please turn your camera on.
37.
If no
one has ever been surprised at how articulate your are, please turn your camera
on.
38.
If you
have never skipped a meal because there was no food in the house, please turn
your camera on.
39.
If you
have been taken to art galleries, museums, and fine arts performances by your
parents, please turn your camera on.
40.
If you
can be late to a class, event, or gathering without having the lateness reflect
on your race, please turn your camera on.
41.
If your
online community is similar to your real life community, please turn your
camera on.
42.
If you
never really think about your race (except in situations where race is the
topic), please turn your camera on.
43.
If
others identify you as white, please turn your camera on.
44.
If you
have not yet turned your camera on in response to a prompt, please turn your
camera on.
Discussion questions:
1.
How are
you feeling?
2.
What did
you see during this activity?
3.
What
went through your mind as you turned your camera on and off?
4.
Which of
the statements did you find most meaningful or eye opening? Why?
5.
Which of
the statements, if any, hurt? Why?
6.
In what
ways do the people on screen right now reflect or not reflect your community?
7.
What
does this activity say about societal messages about your worth and the worth
of people like you?
8.
How has
privilege affected you, your family, and your community, in terms of
opportunity and access?
9.
How are
race and privilege related?
posted by Degolar @ 1:42 PM
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