Given that all peoples have enslaved and been enslaved at some point in history, we are all descendants of slavers and slaves. The Left effectively undermine their own position because they are selectively indignant. Their positions are built on feelings and maintained through fashion.
The Left have created an economy based on hatred in which victim hood is the transactional currency. They need to position an oppressor in order to maintain the value of that currency.
So it is not that they exclude you to make room for their preferred “voices”. They need to step on you to gain a sense of purpose.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, Melissa. I'm also a writer, and once wrote a play about two white, male East German border guards on the night the Berlin Wall fell. I'm a white, Canadian woman who never lived under Communism but with some research and imagination, I created two male characters and put myself in their shoes. Our capacity for empathy is not rooted in identity and lived experience only but in our shared humanity and capacity for imagination. As an artist, it's absolutely essential to embrace this, otherwise it would be utterly stifling as a writer to be limited to my lived experience alone. It would also strangle the life out of the arts in general (which it already has to some extent), as everything becomes a political statement or victim porn instead of insightful, engaging, nuanced, and sometimes amusing and entertaining storytelling.
The irony is by promoting ‘social’ justice for the marginalized, these journals are marginalizing themselves, creating ghettos of identity, dividing and excluding,not actually including. Not that they care or even notice. They are too wrapped up in their cause to realize it.
In 2019 the great writer Zadie Smith wrote about this in the New York Review of Books knowing she was on shifting sands - but moved by your reflections I have to quote her on your (and my behalf): " .... At some point during this inconsistent childhood, I was struck by an old cartoon I came across somewhere. It depicted Charles Dickens, the image of contentment, surrounded by all his characters come to life. I found that image comforting. Dickens didn’t look worried or ashamed. Didn’t appear to suspect he might be schizophrenic or in some other way pathological. He had a name for his condition: novelist. Early in my life, this became my cover story, too. And for years now, in the pages of novels, “I” have been both adult and child, male and female, black, brown, and white, gay and straight, funny and tragic, liberal and conservative, religious and godless, not to mention alive and dead. All the voices within me have had an airing, and though I never achieved the sense of contentment I saw in that cartoon—itself perhaps a fiction—over time I have striven to feel less shame about my compulsive interest in the lives of others and the multiple voices in my head. Still, whenever I am struck by the old self-loathing, I try to bring to mind that cartoon, alongside some well-worn lines of Walt Whitman’s:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I’m sure I’m not the first novelist to dig up that old Whitman chestnut in defense of our indefensible art. And it would be easy enough at this point to march onward and write a triumphalist defense of fiction, ridiculing those who hold the very practice in suspicion—the type of reader who wonders how a man wrote Anna Karenina, or why Zora Neale Hurston once wrote a book with no black people in it, or why a gay woman like Patricia Highsmith spent so much time imagining herself into the life of an (ostensibly) straight white man called Ripley. ....."
Yes to every word of that. We've got to move towards meritocracy, grace, and just treating people like people. Everything about intersectional/woke is counterproductive. Not least: I still find sweeping generalizations blaming whole groups of people jarring even as they become more common. As we have this arbitrary and flawed grievance hierarchy, one use has become to sneak in actual bigotry (not the modern use as a Tourette Syndrome-like epithet but in the literal meaning of cruel hatred of a group for immutable characteristics) behind devaluing people on a lower victim hierarchy characteristic so that you get to attack them. EG stereotyping "white women" lets real misogynists parade their hatred of women using a racial password. Ditto stereotyping "black men" for anti-black racists or "ci gay men/women" for anti-gay bigots as long as they add the degrading "lower" characteristic. It is all a nasty business that I hope collapses under the weight of its contradictions and absurdities. Sure it is evil but it is also... just dumb. It is a low quality way to understand the human condition. There is nothing in this whole DEI apparatus worth salvaging. We should simply start over and rebuild with a curious and generous effort to connect with each other as people with more in common than at odds with one another. We're just trying to think and write clearly, raise our families, improve our crafts, and build our businesses -- that is far more important and interesting than the immutable characteristics that nominally separate us. And for a particularly childlike closing observation: isn't it better that we don't all look the same way or are attracted to the same thing? Wouldn't that be worse?
It's so exhausting and diminishing of the actual writers. Do you write well? "As an AFAB 2 spirit mix native and black identifying person - I'm one of the best in that group with specialized submissions writing exclusively about my sexual and ethnic identities". What an impoverished life to lead. Constantly navel gazing with no insight, and no capacity to take in the universe of human possibility either. Just walking through life wearing mirrored goggles that reflect your own image at you while writing about the profundity of that endless solipsism. So misguided.
As a Hispanic writer, I must say that I am disgusted by the gleeful embrace of racism by progressives, especially in academia.
To publish and win awards nowadays you have to fill all the boxes and be an ethnic, sexual, or religious minority; even better if you have a disability, or many at once! (since for them deep down not being a "cis white male" is tantamount to being disabled). But what they're really most interested in is that you regurgitate their poisonous ideology (maybe that's why they were asking for "neurodivergent" writers?). So even if you were born with the misfortune of being white in today's American art and literary landscape, you can still make a career out of instigating racial hatred and playing the victim.
I've been tempted to participate in this circus a few times, and take advantage of my racial "edge," but for some time now I've decided not to submit work to media or literary contests where this fundamentally illiberal and absurdist thinking predominates.
I can only imagine the subterranean-level quality of what those journals are publishing. However my disdain for this nonsense is beside the point. This is an extremely troubling trend. That so many people are foolish or vulnerable enough to embrace this notion is disturbing. That so many are willing to pander to it, even more.
The Arts have clearly been captured by the woke mob, and until we get a hold of the false narrative and turn it back around, the "equity" myth will continue to erode the arts.
Such policies must be called out, letters written to state boycotting of events that are clearly excluding many artists, and we will have to gather our own groups and produce outside the ring of wokeness. Their version of art is SO dull anyway, so preachy and uninspired, most people don't like that grey porridge anyway. We need a revival! Form groups with anti-wokeness policies.
Thank you for illustrating what I've long considered to be a never-spoken truth: to be well and truly woke, one must be of subnormal intelligence or under rather severe duress. The hypocrisy and deeply flawed logic of that orthodoxy are simply too obvious for a normal person to swallow unless they're being seriously intimidated.
This is one of the reasons why I don't even bother submitting to magazines websites. Everything is so tiresomely woke. Hollywood is suffering a decline in movie attendance, probably for a number of reasons but maybe, bigly, everythign they produce sucks??? Everything's so damn woke and preachy. It's like Christian entertainment hell, except it's the woke preaching at us and not the Bible-thumpers. You can't even make a joke without some tight-assed WokePuritan shitting a diamond in response. Maybe there are enough people reading their magazines or subscribing to their websites to support it for now, but wokeness seems to be in slow decline so maybe eventually they'll have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for the now-least-heard-from voices of all: White, fe/male, cis-het.
My dept is in the process of hiring a new faculty member. One very strong candidate wrote in their application that they were of Native American descent and transgender (MTF).
When we interviewed them we met a crew-cut person wearing dress slacks and a men's dress shirt - the only sign that they may be female was maroon finger nail polish. Due to color contrast of the nail polish I noticed that their fingernails were shorter than mine! (I am cis-male).
This candidate was the strongest of the bunch by far - I wondered why they hadn't already been hired by some College or University. Then the penny dropped!
I told our dept chair that if they are hired, I bet they will 'detransition' as soon as they get tenure.
I just hope they wear a flowery blouse to the second interview ... it is so hard to find talented educators who will work for low pay.
Given that all peoples have enslaved and been enslaved at some point in history, we are all descendants of slavers and slaves. The Left effectively undermine their own position because they are selectively indignant. Their positions are built on feelings and maintained through fashion.
The Left have created an economy based on hatred in which victim hood is the transactional currency. They need to position an oppressor in order to maintain the value of that currency.
So it is not that they exclude you to make room for their preferred “voices”. They need to step on you to gain a sense of purpose.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, Melissa. I'm also a writer, and once wrote a play about two white, male East German border guards on the night the Berlin Wall fell. I'm a white, Canadian woman who never lived under Communism but with some research and imagination, I created two male characters and put myself in their shoes. Our capacity for empathy is not rooted in identity and lived experience only but in our shared humanity and capacity for imagination. As an artist, it's absolutely essential to embrace this, otherwise it would be utterly stifling as a writer to be limited to my lived experience alone. It would also strangle the life out of the arts in general (which it already has to some extent), as everything becomes a political statement or victim porn instead of insightful, engaging, nuanced, and sometimes amusing and entertaining storytelling.
The irony is by promoting ‘social’ justice for the marginalized, these journals are marginalizing themselves, creating ghettos of identity, dividing and excluding,not actually including. Not that they care or even notice. They are too wrapped up in their cause to realize it.
In 2019 the great writer Zadie Smith wrote about this in the New York Review of Books knowing she was on shifting sands - but moved by your reflections I have to quote her on your (and my behalf): " .... At some point during this inconsistent childhood, I was struck by an old cartoon I came across somewhere. It depicted Charles Dickens, the image of contentment, surrounded by all his characters come to life. I found that image comforting. Dickens didn’t look worried or ashamed. Didn’t appear to suspect he might be schizophrenic or in some other way pathological. He had a name for his condition: novelist. Early in my life, this became my cover story, too. And for years now, in the pages of novels, “I” have been both adult and child, male and female, black, brown, and white, gay and straight, funny and tragic, liberal and conservative, religious and godless, not to mention alive and dead. All the voices within me have had an airing, and though I never achieved the sense of contentment I saw in that cartoon—itself perhaps a fiction—over time I have striven to feel less shame about my compulsive interest in the lives of others and the multiple voices in my head. Still, whenever I am struck by the old self-loathing, I try to bring to mind that cartoon, alongside some well-worn lines of Walt Whitman’s:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I’m sure I’m not the first novelist to dig up that old Whitman chestnut in defense of our indefensible art. And it would be easy enough at this point to march onward and write a triumphalist defense of fiction, ridiculing those who hold the very practice in suspicion—the type of reader who wonders how a man wrote Anna Karenina, or why Zora Neale Hurston once wrote a book with no black people in it, or why a gay woman like Patricia Highsmith spent so much time imagining herself into the life of an (ostensibly) straight white man called Ripley. ....."
Yes to every word of that. We've got to move towards meritocracy, grace, and just treating people like people. Everything about intersectional/woke is counterproductive. Not least: I still find sweeping generalizations blaming whole groups of people jarring even as they become more common. As we have this arbitrary and flawed grievance hierarchy, one use has become to sneak in actual bigotry (not the modern use as a Tourette Syndrome-like epithet but in the literal meaning of cruel hatred of a group for immutable characteristics) behind devaluing people on a lower victim hierarchy characteristic so that you get to attack them. EG stereotyping "white women" lets real misogynists parade their hatred of women using a racial password. Ditto stereotyping "black men" for anti-black racists or "ci gay men/women" for anti-gay bigots as long as they add the degrading "lower" characteristic. It is all a nasty business that I hope collapses under the weight of its contradictions and absurdities. Sure it is evil but it is also... just dumb. It is a low quality way to understand the human condition. There is nothing in this whole DEI apparatus worth salvaging. We should simply start over and rebuild with a curious and generous effort to connect with each other as people with more in common than at odds with one another. We're just trying to think and write clearly, raise our families, improve our crafts, and build our businesses -- that is far more important and interesting than the immutable characteristics that nominally separate us. And for a particularly childlike closing observation: isn't it better that we don't all look the same way or are attracted to the same thing? Wouldn't that be worse?
Weird how people who preach inclusivity and empathy tend to be the least inclusive and least empathetic group of people ever.
Bravo, Melissa! So well said. Thank you!!!
It's so exhausting and diminishing of the actual writers. Do you write well? "As an AFAB 2 spirit mix native and black identifying person - I'm one of the best in that group with specialized submissions writing exclusively about my sexual and ethnic identities". What an impoverished life to lead. Constantly navel gazing with no insight, and no capacity to take in the universe of human possibility either. Just walking through life wearing mirrored goggles that reflect your own image at you while writing about the profundity of that endless solipsism. So misguided.
As a Hispanic writer, I must say that I am disgusted by the gleeful embrace of racism by progressives, especially in academia.
To publish and win awards nowadays you have to fill all the boxes and be an ethnic, sexual, or religious minority; even better if you have a disability, or many at once! (since for them deep down not being a "cis white male" is tantamount to being disabled). But what they're really most interested in is that you regurgitate their poisonous ideology (maybe that's why they were asking for "neurodivergent" writers?). So even if you were born with the misfortune of being white in today's American art and literary landscape, you can still make a career out of instigating racial hatred and playing the victim.
I've been tempted to participate in this circus a few times, and take advantage of my racial "edge," but for some time now I've decided not to submit work to media or literary contests where this fundamentally illiberal and absurdist thinking predominates.
I can only imagine the subterranean-level quality of what those journals are publishing. However my disdain for this nonsense is beside the point. This is an extremely troubling trend. That so many people are foolish or vulnerable enough to embrace this notion is disturbing. That so many are willing to pander to it, even more.
Social justice perverts and degrades every humane and valuable thing we create, including the arts. I think that's the point.
The Arts have clearly been captured by the woke mob, and until we get a hold of the false narrative and turn it back around, the "equity" myth will continue to erode the arts.
Such policies must be called out, letters written to state boycotting of events that are clearly excluding many artists, and we will have to gather our own groups and produce outside the ring of wokeness. Their version of art is SO dull anyway, so preachy and uninspired, most people don't like that grey porridge anyway. We need a revival! Form groups with anti-wokeness policies.
Thank you for illustrating what I've long considered to be a never-spoken truth: to be well and truly woke, one must be of subnormal intelligence or under rather severe duress. The hypocrisy and deeply flawed logic of that orthodoxy are simply too obvious for a normal person to swallow unless they're being seriously intimidated.
This is one of the reasons why I don't even bother submitting to magazines websites. Everything is so tiresomely woke. Hollywood is suffering a decline in movie attendance, probably for a number of reasons but maybe, bigly, everythign they produce sucks??? Everything's so damn woke and preachy. It's like Christian entertainment hell, except it's the woke preaching at us and not the Bible-thumpers. You can't even make a joke without some tight-assed WokePuritan shitting a diamond in response. Maybe there are enough people reading their magazines or subscribing to their websites to support it for now, but wokeness seems to be in slow decline so maybe eventually they'll have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for the now-least-heard-from voices of all: White, fe/male, cis-het.
Sadly, it’s not just literary publishing that’s succumbing to this rot. Identitarianism is coming for scientific journals, too: https://open.substack.com/pub/hxstem/p/positionality-statements?r=9qtb6&utm_medium=ios
My dept is in the process of hiring a new faculty member. One very strong candidate wrote in their application that they were of Native American descent and transgender (MTF).
When we interviewed them we met a crew-cut person wearing dress slacks and a men's dress shirt - the only sign that they may be female was maroon finger nail polish. Due to color contrast of the nail polish I noticed that their fingernails were shorter than mine! (I am cis-male).
This candidate was the strongest of the bunch by far - I wondered why they hadn't already been hired by some College or University. Then the penny dropped!
I told our dept chair that if they are hired, I bet they will 'detransition' as soon as they get tenure.
I just hope they wear a flowery blouse to the second interview ... it is so hard to find talented educators who will work for low pay.