56 Comments
Mar 25Liked by Melissa Knox

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.

Expand full comment

“They need to step on you to gain a sense of purpose “. Great image!

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

The sad thing is, had you been male and written the play about two females you'd be tarred and feathered (at best) for some kind of appropriation or another. I don't honestly think empathy is a word many of these individuals understand or care about unless it benefits them in some way.

Expand full comment

Sadly, I fear you're totally right. The perception of appropriation seems to be one-directional. I suspect if a racialized or marginalized group of people adopted what is considered to be white or euro-centric culture, it would be considered colonization instead of appropriation. Funny how that works...

Expand full comment

Thank you, Friendly Debater, for this great contribution. (Is there any way i can read your piece about the two border guards? I lived in divided Berlin. And I spent a lot of time in the German democratic republic talking to people there. I am very interested in that whole phenomenon and id love to hear your take. ) Kathy Meeks

Expand full comment
author

Kathy, I'm in Berlin too. DM me on Facebook if you'd like to chat.

Expand full comment

You can DM me via Messenger (look up Stephanie Turple). I'll probably need your email address to send you a copy of the script.

Expand full comment
Mar 25·edited Mar 25Liked by Melissa Knox

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. ....."

Expand full comment
author

I love that Zadie Smith essay!

Expand full comment
Mar 26Liked by Melissa Knox

And Smith's "the Fraud" is her best one yet. It's Dickensian and her protagonist is a white Scottish Catholic bisexual woman. That'll show 'em!

Expand full comment
author

Imagine: a person who grew up as an only child should be forbidden to write about characters with siblings; a person who lives in NYC should never dare to set a work in Paris or Kentucky. A person who never owned a pet shouldn't imagine the mental state of a guinea pig or a tiger. But how about:

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night . . . .

What would the Woke say to William Blake?

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment
author

Exactly!

Expand full comment

Amen -- "too wrapped up in their cause" and living their entire existence in logic-tight woke echo chambers

Expand full comment

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?

Expand full comment

Weird how people who preach inclusivity and empathy tend to be the least inclusive and least empathetic group of people ever.

Expand full comment
Mar 25Liked by Melissa Knox

Bravo, Melissa! So well said. Thank you!!!

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment
author

That's why we all have to speak up!

Expand full comment

Social justice perverts and degrades every humane and valuable thing we create, including the arts. I think that's the point.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment
author

Oh, I think there are some real idealists out there--not of subnormal intelligence, just completely unrealistic.

Expand full comment

IMO, these folks are virtue signaling. They’re invested in seeing themselves as smarter, morally superior, kinder, and just plain better than conservatives, whom they rate on a curve from misguided and stupid at one end to incorrigibly evil and a threat to all life on earth at the other.

Expand full comment
author

And what gets forgotten on all sides is the importance and the dignity of the individual person

Expand full comment

"Identity" politics eradicates the individual person by design. That's why it's so insidious and painful.

Quite by chance, last night I heard Meghan Daum's interview with author Sherman Alexie on her Unspeakable Podcast. They discuss the corruption of literary journals.

I was familiar with Alexie's writing and his groundbreaking film, Smoke Signals, from the 1990s. But I didn't know that he, of all people, had been cancelled in the most reprehensible way. Definitely worth your time.

Expand full comment
author

Thanks, will check that out. Yes, there have been quite a few bizarre cancellations--Junot Diaz, too. Very unfair.

Expand full comment

Unfair, but consistent. As you pointed out, the individual, regardless of identity category or history of oppression, is apparently too dangerous to be allowed a unique voice. Individuals think for themselves, and this "movement" requires absolute fealty.

As others have noted, it's mind boggling how comfortable people are with group-think, despite the way it hamstrings their own creativity and self-expression.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment
author

Really not everyone. The problem was more pronounced during black history month, when a number of magazines made it clear only writers of color need apply. There are still magazines out there that refrain from setting requirements about the ethnicity of writers. But persistent notions about who is qualified to write about whom persist: a man can't write a novel from the perspective of a woman? A white person must "stay in her own lane" and never write about the feelings of a black person? Balderdash!

Expand full comment

Well then, everyone else must stay in their own lane and not write about anyone else. And since publishing is still dominated by white people, it'll be white stories about white people doing white things in white places and having lots and lots of white fun ;/

Expand full comment

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

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment
author

There's an old saying about academia: "the competition is so stiff because the pay is so low!"

Expand full comment

Good one!

Also, Higher Ed is becoming a Ponzi scheme. Graduate degrees in the vast majority of fields (especially non-STEM) are pretty much only useful for teaching positions. So they must create enough teaching positions for all of this generation's Ph.D.s (and Masters). They do that by selling the next generation on those (not very useful) fields.

Also, if our K-12 system were not near the bottom of industrialized nations, most Americans could get a decent job out of High School. A tin-hat wearer might suspect schools of education of sabotaging K-12 teaching to ensure Americans need a college degree. The focus on social-justice over instruction may be part of that plan - our children are not being taught how to read, write, think and do math. You can bet our economic competitors aren't doing this to their next generation...

Expand full comment
author

Also, I can't stand the indoctrination of children in books about gender and pronouns. Or the censorship of wonderful classics--among them Dr. Seuss and Astrid Lindgren. And see this recent book: https://queeringbook.com/

Expand full comment
Mar 25Liked by Melissa Knox

Thank you for promoting Lancing and Lindsay's book.

Expand full comment
author

Very much worth reading!

Expand full comment

I am a Queer, Disabled, white cisgender Female writer on a journey to try and write some autobiographical material. And one of the things that I am bumping up against inside of myself, is not wanting to tell a story that is just "one more narrative of how I became a hero for overcoming all that I have overcome"... and, in reality it has been a lot. I have overcome a hell-a-bucketful. Yet, if we really want to be honest in this conversation, "the hero (or heroine) story" is actually completely mainstream. Instead, I want all the nuances of my lived experience to be present. That is the challenge isn't it? HOW do we each tell the full story of our lives? And WHO gets to tell the full story of our lives?

What we are experiencing in the US now, and increasingly worldwide, is the attempt at balancing cultural narratives. By balancing, I mean finally hearing the primary stories of those that have been lost and silenced, including the hidden and repressed narratives of nation states. We are experiencing what happens when historically marginalized voices are finally centered. Perhaps or the first time in their lives, those who are living status-quo lives (as well as those who "pass" for status quo) begin to experience what it means to not have access to every space that is out there, or even to be silenced. OUCH. Yes... it hurts.

But instead of dropping into empathy, and saying "oh wow! this is what they are all talking about..." and then opting to open up to what is newly possible when all voices are heard -- we rail against it.

Our country desperately needs to find this balance. And in order for the pendulum to swing back to the middle, it's going to take some time. A pendulum has to swing all the way in one direction and back and forth for a while, until balance comes. So, what would it mean if we take all the time needed to continue to center voices from the margins until there were a collective out-breath? A big sigh…

To know that ALL the stories are being heard, will take some serious maturity -- both individual and collective. To listen long enough will take some serious discipline -- both individual and collective.

And, all we seem to have right now, is self-centered pandering.

Expand full comment
Error