Junot Díaz, “The Silence: The Legacy of Chidhood Trauma”

This is a remarkable piece.

…That violación. Not enough pages in the world to describe what it did to me. The whole planet could be my inkstand and it still wouldn’t be enough. That shit cracked the planet of me in half, threw me completely out of orbit, into the lightless regions of space where life is not possible. I can say, truly, que casi me destruyó. Not only the rapes but all the sequelae: the agony, the bitterness, the self-recrimination, the asco, the desperate need to keep it hidden and silent. It fucked up my childhood. It fucked up my adolescence. It fucked up my whole life. More than being Dominican, more than being an immigrant, more, even, than being of African descent, my rape defined me. I spent more energy running from it than I did living. I was confused about why I didn’t fight, why I had an erection while I was being raped, what I did to deserve it. And always I was afraid—afraid that the rape had “ruined” me; afraid that I would be “found out”; afraid afraid afraid. “Real” Dominican men, after all, aren’t raped. And if I wasn’t a “real” Dominican man I wasn’t anything. The rape excluded me from manhood, from love, from everything.

The kid before—hard to remember. Trauma is a time traveller, an ouroboros that reaches back and devours everything that came before. Only fragments remain. I remember loving codes and Encyclopedia Brown and pastelones and walking long distances in an effort to learn what lay beyond my N.J. neighborhood. At night I had the most vivid dreams, often about “Star Wars” and about my life back in the Dominican Republic, in Azua, my very own Tatooine. Was just getting to know this new English-speaking me, was just becoming his friend—and then he was gone.

No more spaceship dreams, no more Azua, no more me. Only an abiding sense of wrongness and the unbearable recollection of being violently penetrated.

…

…I had trouble at home. I had trouble at school. I had mood swings like you wouldn’t believe. Since I’d never told anyone what had happened my family assumed that was just who I was—un maldito loco. …

Quote of the day - Aodhán O'Riordáin

More here.

Terrible dissent – for the record, “ethics” and “morality” aren’t synonyms for “religion”

The dissent by Justice Alito, joined by Thomas and Roberts, in Stormans v. Wiesman is disturbing for a number of reasons. It’s poorly argued, and simply wrong. The line drawn between this case and Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah is based on truly weak reasoning. As Mark Joseph Stern suggests, the implications of the dissent are concerning: “If this unholy trinity ever managed to rewrite the First Amendment this way, they could effectively bar states from protecting women, gays, and other minorities from religious-based discrimination.”

Here’s the background:

Ralph’s Thriftway is a grocery store and pharmacy in Washington run by a religious family. It is not a church, or a church-affiliated nonprofit; it is a for-profit business, created and designed to make money for the Stormans. But the Stormans family are devout Christians who believe that Plan B is “tantamount to abortion” and thus refuse to stock it. For years, when customers came to the pharmacy seeking emergency contraception, the Stormans turned them away.

But in 2007, the Washington State Board of Pharmacy issued new regulations declaring that a pharmacy may not “refuse to deliver a drug or device to a patient because its owner objects to delivery on religious, moral, or other personal grounds.” Quite reasonably, the board felt Washington pharmacies should not be permitted to deny patients safe, legal drugs—which was a growing problem within the state: In addition to Plan B, religious pharmacists had refused to give patients diabetic syringes, insulin, HIV-related medications, and Valium. That, the board decided, was unacceptable. Pharmacists have every right to believe whatever they wish, but when those beliefs are manifested in the form of brazen discrimination against customers, they cannot be sanctioned by the law. In 2015, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the constitutionality of Washington’s regulation.

The most shocking aspect of the dissent, in my view, was its complete conflation of ethics and morality with religion. (To be perfectly clear, when I’m discussing ethics and morality here I mean the spheres or categories.) The dissent’s argument is based on the assumption that these categories are essentially synonymous. Alito argues that the regulations and the ruling effectively discriminate against religion (and intentionally so) because they allow for “secular” exceptions in which a pharmacy doesn’t have to stock or dispense certain drugs or devices but expressly disallow religious ones. He repeats and highlights the words “moral” and “moral beliefs” throughout the dissent as though they supported his contention that “the regulations…are improperly designed to stamp out religious objectors” (p. 9):

As Steven Saxe, the Board’s executive director, explained at the time: “‘[T]he public, legislators and governor are telling us loud and clear that they expect the rule to protect the public from unwanted intervention based on the moral beliefs . . . of a pharmacist.’” Ibid. “‘[T]he moral issue IS the basis of the concern.’” Ibid. Saxe, a primary drafter of the regulations, recognized that the task was “‘to draft language to allow facilitating a referral for only these non-moral or non-religious reasons.’” Ibid. He suggested that making an express “‘statement that does not allow a pharmacist/pharmacy the right to refuse for moral or religious judgment’” might be a “‘clearer’” way to “‘leave intact the ability to decline to dispense . . . for most legitimate examples raised; clinical, fraud, business, skill, etc.’” Ibid. And in the end, that is what the Board did. While the regulations themselves do not expressly single out religiously motivated referrals, the Board’s guidance accompanying the regulations does: “The rule,” it warns, “does not allow a pharmacy to refer a patient to another pharmacy to avoid filling the prescription due to moral or ethical objections.” SER 1248 (emphasis added). (p. 4)

Note especially this last quote. The regulations, he acknowledges, don’t single out religious judgments, but disallow refusals based on “moral or ethical objections.” Here Alito is either trying to convince the reader that “moral or ethical” are equivalent to “religious” or expressing this as his own belief. Indeed, Alito states that “While requiring pharmacies to dispense all prescription medications for which there is demand, the regulations contain broad secular exceptions but none relating to religious or moral objections.” He quotes the District Court’s findings that “the rules exempt pharmacies and pharmacists from stocking and delivering lawfully prescribed drugs for an almost unlimited variety of secular reasons [sic], but fail to provide exemptions for reasons of conscience.” Secular here is set in opposition – both by Alito and by the District Court - not only to religious but to moral and to reasons of conscience.

This distinction between religious/moral/ethical and secular is of course absurd, and I assume thousands of Philosophy departments would have something say about it. Alito provides a few of the accepted “secular” reasons for exceptions to the regulations – related to financial or equipment-related issues, suspicions of fraud, nonpayment, and so forth. I don’t think anywhere in the dissent does he offer a single example of a non-religious objection that would be considered a matter of ethics, morality, or personal beliefs. I can provide one easily: I don’t believe psychiatric drugs (or at least the vast majority) should be dispensed to children. The evidence shows that the biopsychiatric diagnosis of children is quackery, the drugs themselves are often highly harmful and dangerous, and children aren’t able to give informed consent or to refuse. I see the psychiatric drugging of children as a form of abuse, if often an unintentional one.

So if I were a pharmacist, I think it would be unethical for me to dispense them for children. This judgment is based on evidence, and is in no way religious, but it certainly falls under the category of a moral or ethical objection or one based on my personal beliefs. And it would not be a justified exception to the Washington regulations. I could protest pharmacies that dispensed these drugs for children; I can fight for a general ban on their use on children; and, were I a pharmacist or owner of a pharmacy, I could resign or close up shop rather than dispense these drugs to children, as a form of civil disobedience that I would expect to have serious personal consequences. But what I would not expect is that my personal objections would be protected by law.

Moral or ethical refusals, those based on personal beliefs, are not constitutionally defensible justifications to refuse to stock or dispense legal and legally prescribed drugs or devices. This is true regardless of whether that moral objection is purely religious, not at all religious, or any combination thereof. In one sense, the invocation of religion by Alito (it probably needed to be mentioned explicitly in the regulations since the vast majority of, if not all, refusals – including that at issue in this case – were made explicitly on the basis of religious faith, and because religious judgments are often disingenuously claimed as medically or sociologically grounded) is a red herring. A business can’t refuse to provide a legal service on these grounds whether that refusal is religiously inspired or not.

But the staggering aspect of this dissent is its attempt to seamlessly join religion to ethics and morality as the basis for the argument that the regulations discriminate against religion and thus run afoul of the First Amendment. The irony is that the dissent itself raises First Amendment issues. That Supreme Court justices could present arguments so unsound is more than disappointing; the assumptions underlying their argument speak to a religious bias among these men that is itself arguably anti-constitutional. The inability or refusal of Supreme Court judges even to recognize the existence of secular ethics and their readiness to equate morality and religion are astonishing, and could amount to a state recognition of religion.

Recommended: Wild Tales (2014)

I loved this film despite hating its underlying premise.



As the title suggests, and the opening credits make explicit, Wild Tales is based on the notion that we’re a heartbeat away from “regressing” to our animal nature. As expected, this nature is characterized by: violence, vengeance, irrationality, lust, the reflexive defense of kin and tribe, greed, and gluttony.

This sort of speciesism – which itself underlies a great deal of racism, sexism, and political repression - we can and should avoid, particularly in works that aspire to political satire or social criticism. Director Damián Szifrón has discussed the film’s theme:

Despite the clear common theme of violence and vengeance, what connects the accounts, according to the director, is ‘the fuzzy boundary that separates civilization from barbarism, the vertigo of losing your temper, and the undeniable pleasure of losing control’. This is explored through the concept that human beings have animalistic features. Szifron considers the main difference between human and animals is the capacity one has to restrain oneself as opposed to animals who are guided by their instincts. Humans ‘have a fight or flee mechanism, but it comes with a very high cost. Most of us live with the frustration of having to repress oneself, but some people explode. This is a movie about those who explode’. It deals with ‘daily life’ aspects and ‘is a movie about the desire for freedom, and how this lack of freedom, and the rage and anguish it produces, can cause us to run off the rails’. The main issue, according to Szifron, ‘is the pleasure of reacting, the pleasure of reacting toward injustice’. (my emphasis)

The Freudian distinction between a repressed “civilization” and a “barbarous” freedom, in addition to isolating the human characters with their alleged instincts and drives, presents an obstacle to working out a real approach to political freedom and social justice. As I said, I loved the film, but it could have been a much stronger work of art, a stinging and biting social satire, had it questioned and challenged received wisdom about “civilization” and “barbarism,” “human” and “animal,” rather than reproducing it.

More news of the dystopian kingdom

Speaking of Saudi Arabia, As’ad AbuKhalil posted a link to video of Saturday’s gigantic demonstration in Sana’a, Yemen, against the Saudi regime on the anniversary of the initiation of US-supported Saudi bombing. Wow.

Meanwhile,

The Saudi Arabia's Bureau of Investigation has announced it is pushing to impose the death penalty for homosexuals who ‘solicit homosexual acts on social media’.

Some social media users have used the Arabic-language hashtag #I’mGayYouWon’tTerroriseMe to express outrage at the proposed legislation and show solidarity with the Saudi LGBT community.

“Saudi Arabia Uncovered” this Tuesday, March 29, on Frontline

“All the people are angry, but the problem is that they can’t speak. Everyone is scared of being imprisoned…. If the truth comes out it will be the beginning of the end for [the regime].”

Frontline on PBS will be airing “Saudi Arabia Uncovered” this Tuesday, March 29, at 10 PM Eastern, 9 PM Central. People, at least in the US (I’m not sure about other countries), will also be able to watch it online beginning on Tuesday.

Quote of the day – no paradox, no irony

Carne Ross:

“The Kurds are alive to the paradox that this experiment in “government by the people” has become possible only amid the violent rupture of war. But there is a darker irony, too.

Democracy was supposed to be the point of Western intervention in the Middle East. But in Rojava, where it is cherished and has prospered despite the most vicious of opponents, this brave experiment is being quietly starved while the supposed champions of democracy stand by.”

There’s no paradox, no irony. Understanding the cultural, religious, and geopolitical reality of “Western intervention” allows us to dispense with these obfuscating terms.

Quote of the day – being aware of the social position from which you speak

« Il est important d’être conscient-e-s du ‘point de vue situé’ c’est-à-dire avoir conscience d’où on parle. Je suis une femme blanche, française, sans problème de papiers, sociologue, de classe plutôt aisée donc. J’ai vécu au Mexique, au Salvador juste après la guerre, en Colombie, au Brésil, en République dominicaine. Les féministes lesbiennes noires, indiennes et les femmes ayant vécu des situations de guerre m’ont appris énormément de choses. ».

- Jules Falquet, speaking at the “Feminist Economic Alternatives to the Dominant System” workshop, September 13, 2015

If you read French, I urge you to read the whole report. Carla Sandoval’s discussion of anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial feminism in Latin America is especially important.

Inconsistent

“Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official, and that’s inconsistent with our principles and our Constitution.”

Learning patriarchy at Bible camp

I sang and danced to this ridiculous bullshit:



Update: Hilarious that assorted limbs are black but no individuals.

Historical quote of the day – those who don’t seek to be masters

“I must lose in a world where only the winner is a Man, a human being. I was not a real Man. I was a queer, a half-Man, a pseudo-Man, like a woman…. Men fought and won, they fought other men for the ownership of the rest of creation, lesser peoples, the losers, women, the Third World, as well as the natural environment. I could never be a real Man.

We must not give up our humanity to become like the Man. We must not seek to conquer, to become the master. Our gayness, our ability to love one another, is our humanity, and it must not be sold for the Man’s mastery over others. And if the straight Man’s revolution is based on mastery and conquest we will have no part in it. But we are going to make a gay revolution, a revolution that will be an assertion of humanity. And remembering what you taught us of our humanity, we gay men, together with women, and all the other victims, those who don’t seek to be masters, can create it.”

- Mike Silverstein, “An Open Letter to Tennessee Williams,” Gay Sunshine, October 1971, quoted in Mark Grief, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 (2015)

Quote of the day – the hope that these humane values will triumph

“The Kurdish people of Kobane have shown tremendous courage and resilience in their resistance to the ISIS onslaught. The determination of the men and women to fight to defend the territory where they have established democratic self-rule has inspired people across the world.

The Kurds in Kobane are defending the values of democracy, inclusiveness, respect for difference and gender equality, against a ruthlessly intolerant force that offers only an orgy of bloodletting, carnage, public executions, vile abuse of women and even the repudiation of the right to education, learning and independent thought. The Kurdish resistance, and in particular the brave men and women fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG/YPJ), represent the hope that these humane values will triumph over a tyranny that would take humanity back to the dark ages. As such, the Kurds have received widespread respect.

In stark contrast, Turkey has been exposed for its duplicity and total unreliability as an ally in the coalition against the ISIS threat. Turkey’s leaders from President Erdogan downwards have preferred to bomb Kurdish camps, as they did on 14 October, rather than take swift and effective action against the murderous jihadists….”

- “The Resistance of Kobane Will Triumph Over Tyranny,” Peace in Kurdistan Campaign Statement, October 16, 2014, quoted in A Small Key Can Open a Large Door: The Rojava Revolution (2015)

(The ever-deceitful US State Department presents things differently.)

The existentialism of Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) is almost an existentialist manifesto. Here are a few quotes:

“Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe.”

“There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism.”

“I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.”

Coates’s Dream is Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s bad faith. It’s Baldwin’s innocence. And his vision of living and struggling authentically is an existentialist one. The book contributes to the long and great tradition of humanistic, atheistic political writing.

Quote of the day

“Committee chair Avi Himi noted that Amponsah hadn’t attempted to meet any women or ‘act on her alleged preference’ since arriving in Israel, and that this is ‘contrary to what might be expected of someone fleeing persecution for a sexual preference’, according to Haaretz.”

[Source] [see also]

Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law

“Trans resistance is emerging in a context of neoliberal politics where the choice to struggle for nothing more than incorporation into the neoliberal order is the most obvious option. We are invited to seek recognition in law that will deliver no actual redistribution of life chances. We are being offered a limited form of visibility, only to the extent that that visibility can prop up existing norms about whose lives matter and whose do not. We are encouraged to fight for inclusion in the systems that the most important movements of our times are trying to dismantle. The paths to ‘equality’ and ‘success’ being modeled by lesbian and gay rights will not reduce the premature death that pervades trans communities, and, in fact, those paths lead to legitimization and expansion of the very systems that most endanger trans lives.”

“[T]he picture of economic marginalization, vulnerability to imprisonment, and other forms of state violence that trans communities are describing suggests that the ‘successes’ of the lesbian and gay rights organizations do not have enough to offer in terms of redistribution of life chances – and that their strategies will in fact further endanger the most marginalized trans populations. If formal legal equality at best opens doors to dominant institutions for those who are already closest to inclusion (i.e., they would be included if it wasn’t for this one characteristic), very few stand to benefit.

…

A critical trans politics imagines and demands an end to prisons, homelessness, landlords, bosses, immigration enforcement, poverty, and wealth. It imagines a world in which people have what they need and govern themselves in ways that value collectivity, interdependence, and difference.” - Normal Life

Dean Spade’s Normal Life, with its criticism of the elitist priorities and hierarchical structures of mainstream LGBT organizations and celebration of grassroots trans groups mobilizing to dismantle oppressive systems in coalition with other social and economic justice movements, is of course welcome reading for me. His radical, essentially anarchist, vision of trans politics is naturally one I can support, even if in some cases I think he pushes his critique too far. (On a personal note, it was refreshing to read something on the subject that wasn’t a treatise on identity or a personalized argument about bigotry.)

The LGBT movement hasn’t been immune from the effects of neoliberalism, the reactionary backlash against the radical politics of the 1960s and ‘70s, growing inequality, the expansion of the police/prison/security state, and the “professionalization” and NGOization of leftwing organizations. Spade does a fine job of showing how many of the largest LGBT organizations have succumbed to these pressures and enticements in their priorities, practices, and structures. More generally, drawing on the insights of Critical Legal Studies, he argues that the top-down law-centered battles prioritized by these organizations do little to improve the lives of the vast majority of LGBT people, marginalize and exclude those not seen as “deserving” of liberal equality, and often serve to perpetuate the same systems that do the most harm to these groups. His description of an effective and inclusive trans movement is equally thorough, especially in that he addresses several of the obstacles radical activists face in the present context (though he could have said more about the organized opposition of powerful countermovements).

One of the most interesting sections of the book argues for a shifting legal focus. Spade suggests that an exclusive focus on reformist efforts to include trans people in marriage, the military, antidiscrimination and hate-crime laws should give way to campaigns that challenge the administrative systems that categorize and shape people’s life chances – healthcare institutions, welfare programs, employment, shelters, addiction “treatment” programs, immigration bureaucracies, prisons, and so on – and their practices of categorization and surveillance. These systems control “access to food, transportation, public safety, public health, and the like.” As such, they’re “the legal systems that distribute security and vulnerability at the population level and sort the population into those whose lives are cultivated and those who are abandoned, imprisoned, or extinguished.”

I was especially intrigued by the discussion of the “War on Terror” and the expansion of the security state and its surveillance apparatus. The security state, as it always has, attempts to shore up traditional categories and to exclude and police anyone whose identity or behavior is seen to threaten them. The ID programs of recent years also, as Spade points out, push in the direction of fixed and stable identities. “The augmentation of US security culture,” including the sharing and cross-referencing of information across agencies, “has raised the level of stability demanded of our identities and has sharpened the tools that heighten the vulnerability of those who are not ‘fully authorized’ in any particular administrative context.”

For trans people, this creates an impossible dilemma, given the widely varying requirements for altering identity documents (when they can be altered at all). More generally, in this sense, the state itself, in its most seemingly prosaic administrative acts, institutionalizes and enforces the practice of bad faith. While “people who find the commonly evoked societal norms used in classification familiar and comfortable tend to take these classification systems as neutral givens in their lives,” “the ubiquity of gender data collection in almost every imaginable government and commercial identity verification system” is necessarily “an area of great concern” for trans people and many others. “The consequences of misclassification or the inability to be fit into the existing classification system,” Spade shows, “are extremely high.”

Also significant was his discussion of the administrative denial of health care needed by trans people. I’ve been arguing that this care is comparable to reproductive care and should be socially and materially supported. But Spade introduces another aspect which also relates to bad faith and the essentializing of identity:

Much of the care provided to nontrans people but routinely denied to trans people by Medicaid programs has the sole purpose of confirming the social gender of nontrans patients. Reconstruction of breasts or testicles lost to cancer, hormone treatment to eliminate hair that is considered gender-inappropriate, chest surgery for gynecomastia, and other treatments are provided solely because of the social consequences and mental health impact faced by people who have physical attributes that do not comport with their self-identity and social gender.

Once again, systems prop up “given” identities while denying some people the possibility of living their identities authentically in practice. The costs to trans people, as Spade describes, are enormous: profound emotional suffering, lack of access to other needed services, vulnerability to illness through unsafe procedures, and vulnerability to harassment and violence. But there are costs to all of us.

I do have some criticisms. For one, this is probably the most repetitive book I’ve ever read. One sentence – about mainstream LGBT organizations’ equality and antidiscrimination campaigns pinkwashing, perpetuating, and even expanding the systems that are destroying the lives of LGBT people – appears in some form or another literally dozens of times. But several sentences and ideas reappear frequently throughout the text. I’m OK with this to a point, but here it’s excessive and leaves less space for other worthwhile information.

For example, I would have loved to have seen more, in the last chapters and the afterword, about grassroots trans organizing for social and economic justice in other countries and about cross-national efforts and solidarities. Spade mentions the role of Palestinian activists in bringing attention to Israeli pinkwashing efforts, but provides no sense of what Palestinian or other Middle Eastern LGBT activists are doing on the ground. Similarly, despite the solid discussion of grassroots movements against immigration enforcement in the US, there’s no mention of, for example, Honduran activists and their struggles against the US-supported coup.

While the section on the history of neoliberalism and the deradicalization of the LGBT movement is strong, I do think it leaves out the role of the AIDS epidemic, which has killed hundreds of thousands of gay men in the US since the 1980s, including many leading activists. You could of course argue that this could have led the movement to become more radical had people made different choices – especially given the continuing crisis - but any such history has to recognize the psychological, emotional, and social toll of that plague, and the impact of a deadly sexually transmitted disease on efforts to organize around sexual liberation. (The women’s and gay health movements, the struggle for reproductive freedom and care, and the psych rights movement are also the precursors of the trans health activism Spade recognizes as so important today. In those cases, too, some organizations and campaigns have been co-opted and “mainstreamed,” but others have remained radical. This history could have been emphasized more, especially given the wide potential for solidarity and coalitions in this area.)

The book is also missing a full discussion of what movements are doing, in practical terms, in the area of administrative systems. Spade makes a solid argument that legal efforts should be focused on these systems, but he doesn’t say enough about what these efforts entail on the ground. In some cases – concerning prison and immigration enforcement, for example – he argues that the ultimate goal is abolition, and the movements he discusses in depth are fighting for the abolition of the system as they support those most trapped in and endangered by it. But in terms of the more immediate struggles – eliminating the various impediments to changing identity documents, fighting for the public provision of trans health care, and so on - he provides less information. There’s one interesting discussion of a grassroots New York campaign, but I wanted more detail.

I recommend this book for anyone concerned with the struggles of trans people, the landscape of LGBT politics in the US, and larger questions about movement priorities and practices and the role of legal struggles in advancing radical goals.

Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!

I just learned of the film from listening to this interesting interview with its director Dean Spade. Here’s the trailer, but you can watch the whole thing – it’s a little under an hour – on Vimeo for free, or at the film site, or right here:

Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back! from Pinkwashing Exposed on Vimeo.

I think Spade did a great job with it. As he describes:

This film is useful, I hope, because it tells a story of what some local activists did to speak truth back to propaganda, and how we made our city confront uncomfortable truths. It doesn’t spare the details of the backlash - and it was ugly - because being prepared for backlash is part of doing work against well-organized opposition. But I think it demonstrates that despite the backlash, our work built a great deal of awareness and relationships and strengthened our resistance network.

For more about pinkwashing (origins), see here.

And because I still love it:



And a live version I just learned of:



“Because there is nothing hot about cruising in an apartheid state.”

Title IX covers trans and “gender nonconforming” people

Last April, the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education issued a guidance stating explicitly that: “Title IX’s sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity and OCR accepts such complaints for investigation.”

I’m somehow just learning about this now, and I have several thoughts:

First, it’s big, and it was a great development, certainly for the trans activists who no doubt led the push for this explicit guidance. The full significance will probably only gradually become apparent.

Second, however, it’s a remarkable development not only for trans people but for everyone. The inclusion of protection for “nonconformity” with stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity potentially affects everyone in an educational community. That’s why I’m a bit bothered by how the guidance was narrowly framed in many reports online as a victory for or recognition of trans people. The way protection against discrimination based on “gender nonconformity” was presented, moreover, for the most part tended to reify the very stereotypical categories from which the policy is meant to protect people. It was almost as though conformity-nonconformity was being portrayed as a spectrum, with trans people at the extreme end of nonconformity. In this way, it was suggested that “nonconforming” people were a subset of the trans spectrum, further reinforcing the idea that the guidance applied essentially to trans people.

Not only do I not believe this is an accurate view of identity and presentation – “conformity” with stereotypical gendered behavior has no necessary or inherent relation to being trans, and vice versa - but it’s inaccurate insofar as the text of the guidance makes clear that any discrimination related to stereotypes, including against characteristics or behavior which are seen as conforming, is prohibited:

It also prohibits gender‐based harassment, which may include acts of verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility based on sex or sex‐stereotyping. Thus, it can be sex discrimination if students are harassed either for exhibiting what is perceived as a stereotypical characteristic for their sex, or for failing to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity. (pp. 7-8)

Of note, the guidance has this to say about discrimination based on sexual orientation:

Although Title IX does not prohibit discrimination based solely on sexual orientation, Title IX does protect all students, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students, from sex discrimination. When students are subjected to harassment on the basis of their LGBT status, they may also…be subjected to forms of sex discrimination prohibited under Title IX. The fact that the harassment includes anti‐LGBT comments or is partly based on the target’s actual or perceived sexual orientation does not relieve a school of its obligation under Title IX to investigate and remedy overlapping sexual harassment or gender‐based harassment. (p. 8)

I’m surprised and disappointed that the coverage of the guidance by advocacy and civil rights organizations didn’t emphasize that the guidance is a victory for everyone and that it challenged the enforcement of stereotypes rather than reinforcing them. If nothing else, this could have been helpful in countering anti-trans propaganda, which often suggests that laws and policies protecting trans people work against, for example, feminist challenges to these stereotypes.

Third, I don’t care for the language of “conforming” and “nonconforming.” It suggests that the policy protects types of people rather than types of behavior or traits or interests, which minimizes the reality that people can’t be sorted in this way. While some characteristics are relatively stable, we’re all at different times behaving in ways that can be seen as either congruent or incompatible with gender stereotypes. Phyllis Schlafly’s actions, for example, have been in many ways gender “nonconforming” (and, like her gender “conforming” actions, would all be protected from discrimination following this guideline). It’s important to keep the focus on the characteristics and behaviors themselves.

It also tends to conceive of all characteristics or behaviors as inherently gendered. A kid plays video games, is a vegan, enjoys crafts, wears their hair long or short, wears a skirt, plays hockey, is sensitive and nurturing, joins the drama club or the debate team,… - none of this is by any means necessarily an element of gender presentation, conforming or nonconforming. It could be, subjectively, for some individuals, but it could also be kids just living their lives as who they are and doing what they enjoy. Just because others want to see it as gendered and use it as a basis for policing and discrimination, it doesn’t follow that the choices and behaviors have a gendered meaning for the person involved. The choices and behaviors themselves are generic. The DOE guidance generally seems good and neutral in its language – e.g., “exhibiting what is perceived as a stereotypical characteristic for their sex” – but this subtlety often tends to get lost in the larger conversation, especially given the suggestiveness of the idea of “nonconformity.”

The notion of “nonconforming” is also misleading in that it implies that dress or behavior which fits with existing stereotypes is “conforming.” In our culture, nonconformity is valued, which can lead to those behaviors, interests, or traits regarded as stereotypical, and the people exhibiting them, being viewed with disdain. (Since we live in a patriarchal culture with a feminist opposition, being seen as conforming to “feminine” stereotypes can be especially scorned.)

As noted above, people make choices for a number of reasons, and not all choices viewed as “nonconforming” are rebellious (in fact, some might be a means of conforming to a different reference group). Of those that are rebellious, the rebellion can have various meanings (for example, it can be a refusal to act in accordance with any rules, or with gender roles specifically, or a specific choice to live according to your own interests, needs, and desires, and so on). And, as I’ve argued, without knowing another person’s subjective reasons for acting in ways that appear to “conform” to stereotypes, we can’t know that they’re actually conforming rather than living freely as themselves. And the idea that simply acting in ways that have been stereotyped itself contributes to oppression serves to delegitimize especially traits and behaviors associated with “femininity”: caring, emotional sensitivity, etc. Instead of concerning ourselves with questions of “conformity,” we should be thinking about choices and actions in terms of our values.

Chicago will cover transitional care for city workers beginning this fall

Once the policy takes effect on October 1,” RH Reality Check reports, “Chicago will become the largest city to provide transition-related care to its employees. San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. have also started including transgender-specific health care in their insurance plans.”

The recognition that transitioning is of fundamental importance to some people – the difference between a life of suffering and a life well and freely lived – and thus that it should be socially and materially supported is growing. As I’ve been arguing over the past week especially, it’s analogous to the need for social and material support for reproductive technologies and services – birth control, abortion, sterilization, maternity care, fertility treatments,…

James Baldwin’s existentialist critique of gender, misogyny, and homophobia and its value today, Part 2

[I just learned from this nice piece in Salon that yesterday was Baldwin’s birthday. One featured quotation seems apt: “[O]ur humanity is our burden, our life. The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his [sic] beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”]

My previous post, drawing on a 2013 article by Molly Farneth, discussed existentialist themes in James Baldwin’s work, focusing on the influence of Simone de Beauvoir’s “maturational model” on his thought about bad faith (or, as he called it, innocence) and authenticity. To summarize, for Baldwin as for Sartre and Beauvoir, living authentically meant recognizing and accepting the contingency and ambiguity of identities – choosing existential freedom and its attendant responsibility rather than hiding behind essentialist claims. In that post, I challenged Beauvoir and Baldwin’s contention that a moment of choice between authenticity and bad faith occurs as we mature, particularly in adolescence, when a small portion of people bravely (but inexplicably) opt for authenticity while the rest retreat into what is no longer the natural innocence of childhood but has become a bad-faith innocence.

While I don’t think their coming-of-age model best captures how people grow into authenticity or bad faith, I’m impressed by the fact that they wrote about gender and sexuality in these terms in the middle of the last century. It’s difficult to overestimate the misogyny and homophobia that pervaded the political culture of the era, or how strongly these were linked. The work and thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, despite his perspicacious analysis of the bad faith of racial, nationalist, and other identities, were suffused by misogyny and homophobia.¹ In this, Sartre was simply representative of his time. The woman and the homosexual (or “invert”) were seen as fundamentally threatening to the survival of the “Free World,” linked in the political imagination to totalitarianism and decline. This was true not only among conservatives, but across the political spectrum.² Few were those who spoke out against the concrete treatment of these groups in political life, and even fewer who dared openly challenge the ideology at the core of their marginalization, exclusion, and policing.

In this context, Baldwin’s 1949 essay “Preservation of Innocence” was remarkable. He didn’t seek merely to defend the victims of homophobia and misogyny from false and harmful stereotypes, but turned the tables on their oppressors, going after the celebrated masculine identity and calling it out as a form of bad faith. Subverting cultural prejudices, he recognized that this identity made for a perfect case study of “innocence.”³

As Farneth describes, in “Preservation of Innocence,” Baldwin

turns his attention from racial categories to gender and sexual categories. In the first half…, Baldwin defends homosexuals against the claim that homosexuality is unnatural, by speculating on the concept of the ‘natural’. In the second half…, Baldwin turns to a discussion of hypermasculinity in contemporary American fiction. In connecting the two, he claims that homophobia results from people’s fear of the instability of gender categories; it is a violent effort to stabilize particular conceptions of manhood and womanhood.” (180; my emphasis)

…Baldwin discusses the nature of man and woman and their relationship to each other in the context of his discussion of homosexuality for two related reasons. First, Baldwin is trying to show that ‘natural’ gender categories are, in fact, human made. Like Beauvoir, who…argued that appeals to ‘nature’ attempt to oppress and silence those who threaten the status quo, Baldwin contends that such appeals attempt to eliminate uncertainty and ambiguity. …[I]n the second section of his essay, Baldwin argues that homophobia itself is the violent response of the ‘immature’ men and women who refuse to recognize the paradox of the sexes toward those who threaten gender categories. In this way, his argument about the contingency and complexity of gender identities is linked to an argument much like Beauvoir’s, about the tyranny of individuals who refuse to acknowledge the ethics of ambiguity and instead attempt to shore up the given world. (182; my emphasis)

Baldwin recognized that efforts to find essences of gender and sexuality are quixotic, Farneth writes:

Every attempt to establish the ‘natural’ qualities of men and of women fails. The evidence for the essence of gender or sexuality that one might try to amass from myth, legend, literature, and human experience is wholly contradictory and confounds the effort. (180)

…Baldwin notes the vast quantity of literature that has attempted to pinpoint the nature of the sexes and their relation to one another. Every such attempt, however, has simply added to the impossibility of the endeavor, for each assertion of what constitutes man or woman is confronted with an ever-growing number of counter-assertions, throwing these categories back into confusion. And yet it was this discomfiting ambiguity that produced the desire for clarification in the first place. (181)

As he wrote:

The nature of man and woman and their relationship to one another fills seas of conjecture and an immense proportion of the myth, legend, and literature of the world is devoted to this subject. It has caused, we gather, on the evidence presented by any library, no little discomfort. It is observable that the more we imagine we have discovered the less we know and that, moreover, the necessity to discover and the effort and self-consciousness involved in this necessity makes this relationship more and more complex. (quoted in Farneth, 181)

Given this, to live authentically (and thus ethically), “one must accept the ambiguity of these identities; thus, Baldwin notes, concluding the first section of the essay, ‘the recognition of this complexity is the signal of maturity; it marks the death of the child and the birth of the man [sic…and sigh]’ (598) (181; Farneth’s emphasis).

But Baldwin argued that US society was particularly incapable of living with this complexity and ambiguity, leading to identities and attitudes in grotesque bad faith: “Baldwin claims…the American male attempts to ‘preserve his innocence’, to remain like a child in the world of clear-cut and ready-made categories” (182) “One may say,” he suggests,

with an exaggeration vastly more apparent than real, that it is one of the major American ambitions to shun this metamorphosis. In the truly awesome attempt of the American to at once preserve his innocence and arrive at a man’s estate, that mindless monster, the tough guy, has been created and perfected; whose masculinity is found in the most infantile and elementary externals and whose attitude toward women is the wedding of the most abysmal romanticism and the most implacable distrust (597). (quoted in Farneth, 182)

“Violence against homosexuals” in the fiction of popular writers like James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, “that brutality which rages unchecked in our literature,” was, according to Baldwin, “part of the harvest of this unfulfillment, strident and dreadful testimony to our renowned and cherished innocence” (599) (quoted in Farneth, 182-3).

I believe that this existentialist framework - focusing on authenticity (the recognition of the complexity and ambiguity of identities, the acceptance of freedom and responsibility), bad faith (the retreat to the security of essential, “clear-cut and ready-made categories”; the denial not only of one’s own freedom and responsibility but of other people’s authentic projects; the policing - sometimes violent – of established categories and identities), and how “innocence” perpetuates oppression – is robust and extremely useful in talking about gender and sexuality. I’ve been wrestling with what this means in practice. What does it mean to live gender and sexuality authentically?

My ideas about this are still inchoate, but I’ve been working out a few principles:
first, approach gender using the existentialist definitions of “authenticity” and “is”; second, frame all questions about gender in a way that applies to everyone – we all share the same existential condition – rather than to one category or another (e.g., cis women or trans women), while remembering that people have different bodies and bodily experiences and therefore different problems and needs that we collectively need to address; and third, always keep in mind that our thinking about gender has developed in a patriarchal, male-supremacist society and that our actions will either perpetuate this system or challenge it.

The existentialist approach. In one sense it comes down to the difference between the existentialist meaning of authenticity and the traditional, essentialist meaning, which, I’m sorry to say, means that we need to be clear about what our meaning of “is” is. In the traditional framework, to say that someone is, for example, a man is to say that there exists a category “man” with an essence – biological, psychological, spiritual - which exists prior to and apart from any person’s self-identification or any group’s definition. A person is a man in the same sense that a table is a table. So authenticity is determined by congruence with this essence. Some who might self-identify as men are not authentically men because they lack the qualities deemed essential to this identification.

The existentialist approach is pretty much the complete opposite. People aren’t identities in anything like the sense that tables are tables. We’re free – and we’re all equally “condemned” to be free in this way – to create and recreate our own identities as long as we live. Authenticity, in stark contrast to the traditional view, means recognizing this freedom and the contingency and complexity of identity – that there are no “clear-cut and ready-made categories” existing apart from how we define and live our identities. Again, this is a moral question: refusing to accept the contingency of identity and retreating into pre-formed categories is dishonest, hinders our own development, and contributes to oppression.

The shared condition. This understanding of authenticity can move us in a fruitful direction. But only if we appreciate that we’re all authentic, or, conversely, in bad faith, in exactly the same way, and we’re all equally capable of being either. It’s not a question that only affects certain categories of people. As Christina Richards argues,

[G]iven that gender is not considered one of the existential givens, everyone is ‘condemned to be free’ with regards to their gender. We may further reasonably consider that anyone who is not trans (in that their gender is unconsidered) is in bad faith for refusing to recognise their choice (about what aspects of masculinity and femininity they take on), and for refusing to act upon it.⁴

I would put it slightly differently: Because living gender authentically means rejecting essentialism and recognizing that we’re necessarily free (in the existential sense) in our choices of how we identify and live gender, we can’t assume that trans people are living authentically from the fact of being trans, because we don’t know – until we ask people – that they’ve rejected essentialism and accepted their existential freedom. But we can’t make any such assumptions about non-trans people, either. If someone’s living as the gender they were assigned at birth or performing their gender in ways considered stereotypical, we don’t necessarily know whether or not they’re acting out essentialist beliefs or conforming to societal expectations or living their own free project. And this is all complicated by the fact that as social beings our understanding of gender comes shaped by society, so it can be difficult to tease out conformity from what’s freely chosen, even within ourselves. We can only resist essentialist thinking, abandoning the search for essences of any sort at the core of our identities and living with contingency and ambiguity.

The patriarchal context. Recognizing that gender categories aren’t, in contemporary society, neutral is of great importance. The essentialization of these categories, their association with differently evaluated qualities, and the policing of their borders are all driven by a hierarchical system of oppression. All of these have to be resisted – individually and collectively - in order both to fight oppression and to enable people to pursue their free projects. Existential freedom isn’t the same thing as social-political-economic freedom, and in living our free projects regarding gender we face different problems and have different needs (involving law, policy, reproductive and other health care,…); reducing the problems and fulfilling the needs are social obligations. It’s also important to keep gender in perspective. It’s not the only identity, and often it isn’t especially salient; it’s also not the only axis of oppression.

So these are my thoughts as they’re developing. I’m still struggling with some questions which aren’t at all specific to trans people, but also continuing to read those perspectives (Anne Enke’s Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies is in my queue). And I remain impressed by Beauvoir and Baldwin.

¹ One could point particularly to “What Is a Collaborator?” and “Holes and Slime,” but misogyny and homophobia aren’t incidental to a few works – they run through his philosophy as a whole. Even works addressing the bad faith of racism, fascism, and nationalism are frequently framed in homophobic/misogynistic terms.

² See especially K. A. Cuordileone’s great Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War; The Lavender Scare; and chapter 6, “Literary Fascism and the Problem of Gender,” in David Carroll’s French Literary Fascism.

³ In fact, I often wonder whether Sartre would recognize the similarity between the rightwing anti-Semites whose bad faith he describes and, for example, contemporary Russian gangs who target gay and trans people for harassment and violence.

⁴ 2011. “Transsexualism and existentialism.” Existential Analysis 22:2 (July).

James Baldwin’s existentialist critique of gender, misogyny, and homophobia and its value today, Part 1

[I’ve been scratching away at this two-part post for a few months. In light of recent events, I feel obliged to wrap it up and put it out there. In this first part, I describe and challenge Baldwin’s existentialist-influenced “maturational” model of authenticity. In the second part, I talk about (and admire) his existentialist analysis of gender categories, misogyny, and homophobia, especially in US culture.]

When I wrote at the beginning of the year about my 2014 favorites, I didn’t post about my favorite academic article. So I’m going to correct that. The best article I read last year – in the sense of intellectual fruitfulness – was Molly Farneth’s 2013 “James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, and the ‘New Vocabulary’ of Existentialist Ethics”,¹ which “explores the striking similarities between the new ethical vocabulary in Baldwin’s early Paris essays and that of Simone de Beauvoir’s emerging existentialist ethics, particularly in their use of a coming-of-age metaphor to talk in moral terms about innocence, guilt, and responsibility” (170). I found the piece significant not as much for its primary argument about the “striking similarities between the language of the expatriate Baldwin and that of the emerging ethics of French existentialism, especially as developed by Simone de Beauvoir” (172)² as for its discussion of how Baldwin, remarkably and courageously, not only examined the concept of bad faith in terms of gender, misogyny, and homophobia but called out American culture as being saturated with bad-faith masculinism.

There are several parts of the discussion that need to be kept separate. First, there’s Farneth’s argument about the influence of existentialist ideas – specifically Beauvoir’s “maturational” model of authenticity – on Baldwin’s thought:

Just after Beauvoir wrote The Ethics of Ambiguity, in which she stated that ‘adolescence is the moment of moral choice’, Baldwin arrived in Paris, became familiar with the existentialists and their philosophy, and began to write in moral terms about childhood, adulthood, innocence, and responsibility.” (172)

I’m convinced by this argument. While Baldwin didn’t acknowledge the influence and even wrote negatively of the existentialists, it seems unlikely that he arrived at such similar ideas by coincidence. Most likely, he absorbed ideas circulating in Paris and was either not fully aware of or forgot their source.

Then there’s the actual moral “coming-of-age” argument made by Beauvoir and Baldwin, by which I’m not convinced. In an earlier post, looking at Sartre’s analysis of anti-Semitism, I sketched out existentialist ideas about bad faith and authenticity. Briefly, the existentialists argued that the human condition is one of freedom and responsibility. Living authentically means recognizing and accepting this freedom and responsibility – accepting that our identities and choices and those of our society are contingent rather than predetermined. But, they contended, people are often overwhelmed by this freedom and responsibility and take refuge in bad faith, claiming identities and choices as preformed or scripted. Sartre saw anti-Semitism in these terms: anti-Semites fearfully fled the contingency of their existence by choosing to believe that their identity and nature – and those of Jewish people - are essential and immutable. This was an “extreme” case, but Sartre recognized this dynamic operating in a variety of everyday and political contexts.

The existentialists considered the choice of living authentically or living in bad faith to be a central moral question. To hide in bad faith was itself an immoral choice, and led people to other immoral choices and acts. But they only tangentially addressed the key question about why or how some people come to choose authenticity and others bad faith (or, better, what circumstances lead people in one direction or another), or why at some times masses of people can come to opt for bad faith. What they didn’t develop, in other words, was a sociology of authenticity. Sartre’s notion that bad faith was a sort of “original choice” that colored every aspect of a person’s life was, first, never quite convincing and, second, just pushed off the central sociological question. His general impression that bad faith resulted from moral weakness and cowardice left unexamined why some were morally weak while others - particularly, in his view, Resistance activists - had the strength and courage to live authentically.

Enter the maturational model, which suffers from the same problems. For Beauvoir, and then Baldwin, the choice of authenticity or bad faith is one made as a person emerges from childhood. “This is the core of the existentialist ethics,” Farneth explains:

In Beauvoir’s formulation, the transition from childhood to adulthood is a crucial moral transition, in which the individual recognizes that the world is made and remade by human beings, and that he or she has a responsibility to contribute to this project. (177-8)

Sartre saw children’s play as wholly innocent in the sense that children know that their play is entirely imaginary and has no impact on the real world. Beauvoir views childhood in similar Edenic terms:³

[A]s a child, each individual believes that the world simply is. Beauvoir continues, ‘He [sic] knows that nothing can ever happen through him; everything is already given; his acts engage nothing, not even himself’ (37). The child learns and explores, but he or she pursues and attains these goals within the limits of the given world. (175)

As people grow, however, they develop the capacity to recognize the contingency of human choices and human reality:

‘With astonishment, revolt and disrespect the child little by little asks himself, ‘Why must I act that way? What good is it? And what will happen if I act in another way?’ He discovers his subjectivity; he discovers that of others. And when he arrives at the age of adolescence he begins to vacillate because he notices the contradictions among adults as well as their hesitations and weakness. Men stop appearing as if they were gods, and at the same time the adolescent discovers the human character of the reality about him’ (39).

…In the age of adolescence, in other words, the child begins to question and challenge the rules, values, and authorities that constitute the given world. (175-6)

Adolescents’ awakening to the world’s contingency and their own freedom and responsibility, and the choices it demands, is an intense experience, and “[a]lthough the collapse of the ‘facticity’ of the world is a kind of liberation, most individuals face it with fear and trepidation” (176):

Adolescents experience this freedom as a crisis, in which they must decide how to respond to the non-givenness of the world that they had taken for granted. Adolescents may recognize their freedom and responsibility for shaping themselves and the world around them, or they may reject this freedom and responsibility and cling to ready-made identities and values. ‘Adolescence’, Beauvoir writes, ‘appears as the moment of moral choice’ (40). The adolescent must ask the question, If my identity and my world are not fixed or immutable, how shall I live? (176)

The choice of an authentic life is frightening, demanding, courageous, and rare, according to Beauvoir:

The ethical individual is the one who acknowledges his or her own freedom and responsibility for creating him- or herself and the social world, and who engages in concrete projects to extend this freedom to those who are oppressed. (174)

…Very few of us navigate the age of adolescence and emerge as liberated human beings. To do so, individuals must first recognize themselves and their world as the products of human decisions and actions. Second, they must recognize that they are also capable of deciding and acting. Finally, they must recognize their responsibility for deciding and acting in ways that create the conditions under which others will also recognize their own freedom. (177)

The retreat into bad faith, the “desire for ‘external guarantees’ and ‘accepted models’,” in the Beauvoirian framework, “stems from the uncertainty the individual faces in adolescence” (175):

Beauvoir argues that many people simply turn away from the questions that arise in the age of adolescence, taking refuge in the rules and values of the given world. These individuals evade the responsibilities of freedom by remaining childlike, living under the unquestioned authority of others (Beauvoir calls this type of person ‘the sub-man’) or actively propping up those authorities in order to guard the given world against assault (‘the serious man’). The latter, the serious man, becomes a fanatic, who sets as his goal the preservation of the given as such. In so doing, he ignores the subjectivity of other human individuals and is willing to sacrifice those who threaten to upset the social order. This, Beauvoir writes, ‘is the fanaticism of the Vigilantes of America who defend morality by means of lynchings’ (50).” (176)

This maturational model of authenticity and bad faith influenced Baldwin, who also considered that “moral maturity entails the abandonment - or, at least, the critical interrogation - of fixed or given identities, values, and authorities. One must assume responsibility for one’s role in crafting an identity and contributing to the social world” (183). He “shares Beauvoir’s rejection of essentialism and of the ‘natural’, as well as her insistence that this rejection is a mark of moral maturity” (178). Baldwin’s term for bad faith is “innocence” – “the willful refusal to accept responsibility for oneself and one’s social world” (183):

To be innocent is to refuse to engage in the risky process of choosing, acting, and taking responsibility for one’s complicity in the identities, values, and authorities of the world.

…This type of preserved innocence is morally corrupt; it is the state of being of individuals and societies who refuse to take responsibility for their role in making and remaking the world. For Baldwin, as for Beauvoir, this state of being is connected to tyranny and violence. In order to protect the fixed or given world, the ‘innocent’ will sacrifice those who appear to threaten its static categories. (183)

Arguing that “freedom is hard to bear,” Baldwin, like Beauvoir, believed that those willing to forgo what Farneth describes as the “comfort and security” offered by essentialist claims and the belief that “the world is stable and steady” were few, especially in the US, which he saw as a culture of preserved innocence (184-5).

There’s something to this developmental model (mischaracterized by Farneth as a metaphor), and the idea of a “moment of decision” we all face can be useful in helping people to appreciate what’s at stake in the choice between essentialist security and existential freedom. But in general I think the model is shaky and, like Sartre’s analysis, leaves the most important questions – concerning why some people choose to cling to a bad-faith innocence while others accept their freedom and responsibility - unanswered.

I don’t believe that childhood is innocent in the sense alleged by Sartre and Beauvoir. The argument that children’s play is grounded in a belief on their part that the world simply is and that their actions have no real effects isn’t especially convincing. I haven’t been a child for a long time or spent a great deal of time with children, but my memory and sense are that children see their play in a complicated way – both recognizing it as play on one register and believing in the reality of the play universe and their actions within it on another. Along with other animals, we have a need for effectance, and imaginative childhood play is one of the means by which we get a feel for our ability to affect the world around us and the limits of our effects. In a healthy childhood and culture, the process in which freedom and responsibility are increasingly accepted is a gradual growth process. This is very different from a model of childhood unfreedom and irresponsibility giving way to an age in which freedom and responsibility are thrust upon us and we have to make a stark choice whether to accept them despite having no previous experience of them or skills to manage them. The latter is the model for an unhealthy childhood.

This is important because I think that Sartre, Beauvoir, and Baldwin, perhaps because of the conditions of their own childhoods and the nature of their societies, internalized a sense of ontological insecurity and a lack of effectance and projected this onto childhood in general. This sense is pervasive, but it’s not universal. Sociologically, it may well stem from the conditions under which people develop as children, not just those of the family environment but the cultural and political context in which they’re raised. Generally speaking, it seems, certain conditions tend to foster a more natural growth into freedom and the responsibility it entails. To the extent that our environment is a healthy one which fosters ontological security, we’re less likely to experience freedom as frightening and to cling to the false security found in essentializing identities and naturalizing the social order.

¹ In Soundings 96(2): 170-88.

² Farneth notes that Baldwin didn’t claim any such influence, and in fact wrote negatively about the existentialists at times, but argues that, in light of the evidence, “[w]hile the nature of Baldwin’s conscious debt to the French existentialists is unclear, his own literary coming of age in Paris hinged on his adoption of several of the themes being developed and debated by them.” (172-3)

³ It’s unsurprising that this kind of Garden of Eden framework would be developed by people raised in Christian cultures.