Community

"It’s getting easier to talk about “white culture,” maybe even white politics, without knee-jerk sarcasm or, for that matter, knee-jerk sympathy. And it’s getting easier to imagine an American whiteness that is less exceptional, less dominant, less imperial, and more conspicuous, an ethnicity more like the others. In the Obama era—the Tea Party era—whiteness is easier to see than ever before, which means it’s less readily taken for granted. If invisibility is power, then whiteness is a little less powerful than it used to be."

—

I think Kelefa Sanneh nails it here. Zadie Smith and – new to me – the fabulous Valarie Kaur both have spoken beautifully about how a flourishing of mixed/mulatta experience disrupts traditional constructions of race and racial privilege. In the latter half of the twentieth century (inaugurated, perhaps, by Loving v. Virginia), children began to be born who felt entirely at home in what had previously been distinct spheres of experience and self-understanding. I’ve been moved by the picture Kaur and Smith paint of what that coming of age offers our culture, but have been skeptical that it can really start to tear at the edges of white institutional supremacy in a real way.

I think Sanneh’s is a first answer. Whiteness is indeed defined by the unnamed-nature that allows it to take whatever form necessary. As the multivocal (Zadie’s term) and the shadow children (Valarie’s term) grow in number, they give the lie to the invisibility of whiteness. I love the Tea Party example because it’s so immediate. The more we are able to name – to make conspicuous – White America, the more difficult it becomes for whiteness to shapeshift as it did a century ago in an effort to maintain power. I don’t think this is the answer, if there were one, and I certainly don’t think white privilege is going anywhere anytime soon, but this passage from Sanneh’s solid piece really turned a light on for me.

# ‘Beyond the Pale’ in the New Yorker

Community, capitalism, and the human story

It occurs to me that this blog’s new title is Community, and I found that word echoing in my head last night as I asked a question at Union Theological Seminary’s “mega-class.” Following are my question and Dr. Serene Jones’ response – I addressed the question to her because, after hearing the fabulous Gary Dorrien answer a half dozen questions on the AIG bailout, I wanted some theology. Also, I’m transcribing - and not linking to the video podcast of the course - because this way I get to edit my incoherence.

Q: Professor Dorrien said that neoclassical capitalism pays no heed to community, and that economic democracy is a brake on human greed. It seems that those two work together: community may curb greed, and greed harms community, right?

But on the human level, it wasn’t [Reagan-era] globalization that destroyed that community, it was industrialization and the ability to simply buy something from two towns away.

As Christians, we feel this anachronistic call to a community that began to decline with modernity itself. What do we say to a world which lacks the sort of robust community that can curb our sinfulness, curb our greed?

Serene Jones: Community is an interesting term because, like many of the things we’ve been discussing, community isn’t inherently a progressive or positive space. You can have really corrupt forms of community and when you get corruption going in deep, communal ways, it’s bad. So we can’t just sort of invoke community as if it’s a nostalgic, utopic space somewhere that if we just got reconnected to one another, we’d be alright.

But what I do think your question points to is that this is all transpiring in the context of a world populated by people who still have very fundamental desires for intimacy, for connection, for being seen and being known, for being held and being loved and being fed. Again and again, if those sort of basic truths that the Christian story lifts up in profound ways stay at the center of our reflection on this, then we stop thinking that we’re dealing with human beings who are creatures other than these kinds of creatures, and we stop thinking as if these systems have a life of their own and [realize] they’re systems that these kinds of people with these kinds of needs have generated. Then we keep coming back to the earth of our existence as the place in which we are most likely to find – not always the most immediately practical answer – but we will get the impulses and the desires that point us in the right direction when it comes to articulating those policies.

In one regard, Dr. Jones fixated on my use of the word “community,” when I was really trying to recall the broader litany of grievances Prof. Dorrien raised against “neoclassical capitalism.” However, inasmuch as I was trying to say, “we Christians want this deeper thing than a post/modern world has ever offered,” she rightly took me down several notches in reminding me that community is anything but a “nostalgic, utopic space somewhere.”

I think my choice of that particular word is unwittingly rather revealing; any who know me can attest to my deep reverence for relationships and the often sabotaging ways in which I can elevate the role of community.

The body of her answer, though, gets to the heart of why I feel called to seminary of all things. I’ve been fiddling around, trying to find what felt like a rationally sound way to simply say, “Christianity tells a story of truth.” A story, where analytic philosophy simply strikes out at the thing. Embodied as we are in time and place, aren’t humans always entangled in the story of our lives more than any Platonic forms?

Dr. Jones’ answer exemplifies that growing conviction of mine, that the Christian story pushes back against our willful belief that, “we’re dealing with human beings who are creatures other than these kinds of creatures [who have orchestrated the current economic catastrophe], and we stop thinking as if these systems have a life of their own.” Scripture is so troublesome, but humanity is still more so. I find a truth in the way the Christian story contains so much, and wraps all of it in God’s love and justification.

I explain myself these days by saying that I head to Union to give myself to God. Said less biblically, I go to recognize that my life is not my own. It may be God’s (I’m beginning to believe so), or it may just belong to fate, nature, the soil. That giving up makes increasingly little practical sense as job prospects dwindle in this economy, but I find the end of Dr. Jones’ answer deeply affirming. Places such as Union, study such as this, may “not always [be] the most immediately practical answer – but we will get the impulses and the desires that point us in the right direction when it comes to articulating [just] policies.”

I am eager to spend a few years seeking to form those impulses.

Madam Senator,

Though the political slate - particularly for California - is already overcrowded, I would like to register my vigorous endorsement of the dispassionate but unshrinking reasoning in a piece in yesterday’s New York Times, ‘To Investigate or Not: Four Ways to Look Back at Bush.’

As a steadfast civil libertarian, I believe that our new president cannot fully accomplish his goal of restoring this nation’s standing in the world without a full accounting of the misdeeds of the last eight years. I seek no vengeance for the pitiable men and women of the Bush administration, but the above-linked author makes a compelling case for the need to take account before memories fade and critical actors pass away. We must learn from this.

I believe you share some of my embarrassment with our recent fall from grace; I hope you will champion a thoughtful and bipartisan commission as soon as the occasion arises.

Respectfully,
Steve McFarland

The Bush Era, a coda.

George Packer, reflecting on Bush’s final press conference w/r/t his presidency, on the New Yorker’s Transition podcast:

They are tactical, they are almost communications errors he is admitting: I should have gone to New Orleans sooner, Abu Ghraib didn’t look good, it’s as if he’s saying “Our Strategic Communications office wasn’t on its game that day,” and that gets to part of the fundamental problem with his administration, which is that they thought that message control was everything, and that the actual results in New Orleans and Iraq were secondary.

This strikes me as an accurate read of the man and the administration he assembled, but I think Packer underemphasizes the extent to which sheer righteous conviction led to the narrowing of vision. Bush sees them as communications errors, yes, but I think because “If only we had better shown the American people,” or “If only they knew of the threats we knew of,” we, too, would accept something like Abu Ghraib as tenable collateral damage.

I can’t remember who said/wrote it, but the idea of “inadequate moral restraint,” seems to me the pithiest rendering of the Bush/Cheney reign. It synthesizes two things I’ve come to feel: the horror of a staunch civil libertarian in the face of international and domestic disgrace, but also an empathy for what must have been the crazy-making experience of the President’s daily intelligence brief in the aftermath of 9/11.

Conviction over and above reason led them down this path, and inadequate moral restraint – a sort of pathologically ordered understanding of America’s priorities – leads Mr. Bush to see Abu Ghraib, as Packer picks up on, as something like a distraction. Indeed, Bush finds it regrettable, but mostly lost in the wash of a greater struggle.

And that is the sorrowful legacy of this administration, from which President Bush will find no absolution. His lack of concern for individual dignity and freedom was made plain in that prison, in the Ninth Ward, the Patriot Act, Defense of Marriage act, and on countless other occasions. What they all missed is that justice and dignity to the level of the individual (enemy combatant or no) is not something to be dispensed with in lean times, it was the very stuff of 1776.

Bush fought for our stature in the world, without ever grasping the ideals, the “self-evident” truths, which won us that stature. After eight dark years, I pray that this new President, burdened as he is with the smoldering mess left by his predecessor, will begin the work of rebuilding that stature, and returning to those values which begin, “When in the course of human events…”

Can’t just cross my fingers: Prop 8

I sent this email to as many California voters as I could think of. I encourage you to do likewise.

Hello Friends,

Many of you have not heard from/seen me in years, and I hope this letter finds all safe and sound. As I try to keep up with California news from my Harlem apartment, I have followed the prospects of Proposition 8 - the ballot initiative to revoke equal marriage rights for gay couples - with some interest. I wasn’t much worried, though, counting on a fundamental sense of justice in the California people. But as polls continue to narrow, I can no longer conscience silence. I’m doing something I have never done: writing a bulk email.

This not a political matter, and this is not a choice which has any bearing on the love, sanctity, and meaning embodied in so many heterosexual marriages. Marriage is a civil right. If you have married, I’d imagine you believe it to be a fundamental one. Anything less than marriage - including a “separate but equal” pact under another name - is a profound injustice.

I urge you to vote NO on Prop 8 to preserve basic civil rights for all California citizens. If you identify as heterosexual, the need to stand up for our brothers and sisters even without our own stake in this fight is of particular ethical import. If you already plan on voting NO, I encourage you to read up on the state of the race and see if you, too, feel compelled to write as many people as you can.

In 1948, California was the first state to rule racist anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. That decision sparked a fire culminating in the landmark Loving v. Virgina almost two decades later. Our parents or grandparents never had the privilege to vote in support of civil rights on that issue, but on this occasion we do. While we pray that this struggle for a basic equality moves more speedily, we must not forsake the opportunity to make our voices heard on November 4th. Vote NO on Prop 8.

Much warmth,
Steve McFarland

Goodbye to what? Hillary, Sex, and White Power

And when I say Hillary, I really mean to include what seems to be an increasing number of Second Wave feminists advocating on her behalf: first Gloria Steinem got me worked up with her Op-Ed in the Times a month ago, detailing the case for how Women Have it Harder Than Blacks.

I really started shouting at the radio yesterday, however, when Women’s Media Center founder Robin Morgan made the similar but exponentially more outrageous implication on Day to Day that while Barack, as a man, moves through this patriarchal political system with ease, Hillary is pathologically harassed. To wit,

When a sexist idiot screamed at Hillary, “Iron my shirt!” it was considered amusing, there was a lot of chuckling on all the airwaves. If a racist idiot had shouted, “Shine my shoes!” at Barack Obama, it would have inspired pages of newsprint and hours of airtime, analyzing what would in fact have been our national dishonor. [The nutcracker made to look like Clinton] is being sold in airports. If it were a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged, and yet people think this is amusing.

The essay discussed in this piece, ‘Goodbye to All That (#2),’ is here. A few things: I agree that much of this is pathological “woman-hating,” in Morgan’s word. Duly noted that Hillary’s womanhood conflicts with cultural norms around female power to her great disadvantage.

Yet Morgan’s sycophantic outrage at Hillary’s treatment completely silences racist elements of national discourse around Barack. In fact, Morgan does something worse: she acknowledges and dismisses the contemporary perniciousness of racism altogether.

By caricaturing the actual operation of racism with references to “extreme far ultra-right racists” and blackface figurines at airports, Morgan reinforces her own great white fantasy of racism’s being restricted to a small fringe of (racialized) poor whites in trailer parks. In what strikes me as her callow, threatened finger-pointing of “if this were about the Jews!” and “if this were Racists!” she does great disservice to her movement (well, it’s my movement, too, if I’m allowed that) but causes much greater harm to people of color - not only Blacks, but all communities for whom lived experience tells them that racism is not a distant memory restricted to “far ultra-right racists,” but a daily, hourly act performed on their bodies by whites and others in power. Morgan denies all that to her ends.

Of course, that’s exactly what white male patriarchy likes to see. After all, if we can keep them all fighting amongst themselves (see: Blacks and Latinos), dividing the opposition, whites maintain and even increase their supremacy as others knock each other down. It has been happening in this country for centuries (see: The Wages of Whiteness) and continues to be a powerful mechanism for the maintenance of white power. Enter Steinem and Morgan.

Finally, there is a whole other element to this discourse which I have hardly touched on in my focus on Morgan’s article but is pushed to the fore in Steinem’s ludicrous false premise of a thought experiment: “What if Barack were a black woman?”

The answer, you might guess, is “By gum, he’d have it harder! See?” In this first clip (of 4) below from an episode of Democracy Now, the crazy-impressive Melissa Harris Lacewell similarly calls out Steinem on the invisibilization of racism’s death grip on all black bodies. Where Morgan wishes to ignore race altogether, here Lacewell systematically picks apart Steinem’s more nuanced assertion that sexism is worse than racism. Things get going around 2:00 if you’re in a hurry (but I don’t think you’d be here if you were):

Lacewell makes several points I really like in that clip and the following ones, but I think I’ve said my piece - you can click through for more interesting conversation (well, Steinem basically evades engaging with Lacewell, so I’m not sure it could exactly be called a conversation).

Do I have a pithy conclusion? I don’t know, this shit tires me out. To see white woman feminists I respect divide the fight for equity and - I feel - actively, perniciously, and knowingly step upon the fight of others for their own gain and self-satisfaction makes me sick and, as Harris Lacewell says, represents the very worst of the women’s movement.

More directly: when white people use their location of power not just to grab more, but to single out historically oppressed communities as a point of leverage to that power, it is racism - plain and simple. Even when those white racists are women carrying the mantle of ‘feminism.’

No feminism I accept sees it necessary to harm others’ fight for equity for self-gain.

Nuditygate 2007: Innocent Students in the Crossfire

Every year a bunch of kids at Tufts get drunk and run around naked on the last day of classes; we call it NQR. This year, a reporter (obviously without any exciting Monday night plans) from a local paper¹ got the bright idea to head up to campus with a video camera and a dream to shoot everyone running by, then to put together a hard-hitting piece on life at a prestigious school attended mostly by affluent suburban white kids².

The story is here and the video is here.

This is where it gets good: basically everyone is outraged about this. My fellow Tufts students are appalled that their naked bums are online for all to see (“it’s creepy!”), parents are embarrassed that $41,000+ per year pays for, among other things, euphemistic funding for the event, and local residents are just plain pissed off after 152 years of living next to college students. Go figure.

Like all outrageous things ³ these days, there’s a Facebook protest group, called NQR 2007: a Tufts Tradition, NOT a Media Sensation (Facebook account needed to view the link) and featuring a charming photo of naked people with the colors (dramatically) inverted and lots of capital letters superimposed.

Something immediately got under my skin about this whole blow-up, and I took it out by getting saucy with the Facebook group. Here’s what I wrote to the members on the group’s “Wall,”

HI, I CAN CANCEL PLEASE TEH VIDEO?!1!?! I NAKED BUT NOT EXPECT PPL TO SEE ME. PLZ, YOU VIOLATE MY RITES. NO VIDEO. KTHX.

And,

Good thing I didn’t waste any outrage on Darfur, because THIS IS UNCONSCIONABLE. It is COMPLETELY UNEXPECTED that someone used an electronic device to capture hundreds of naked college students and put it on the internet. DO WE HAVE A RALLY COMMITTEE YET?????

Saucy indeed. It was late and I get hyperbolic. I’ve had more conversations recently than I’d ever hoped to about those thousand naked kids, and my thoughts have cohered. Since I know you won’t be able to sleep until you get my take on the matter, here it is:

There’s two elements to this for me: one frustratingly normal, the other universal but insidious for that fact.

The first is everyday classism. You people (working class “Townies”) don’t have a right to come do this to Us people (bitter Ivy also-rans). It’s like a bunch of eighteen year olds are just finding out that Mom and Dad aren’t going to be able to make everything okay anymore, and that’s a hard pill to swallow.

A comment by “Just Thinking…” does a pretty good job of coming right out with some of the latent aspects of student sentiment on the article’s massive comment thread:

I was just thinking about how many students have one, if not more than one, lawyer in the family who wouldn’t do anything to protect their relative. I myself have two, my mother and father. So, I guess, be on the look-out for those “phone calls” and “e-mails”

Students really cant complain about residents coming and watching. its a spectacle. But the pictures and videos are ruining a tradition. Tufts students aren’t taking pictures of the unkempt yards and houses in somerville, showing your bosses how you cant maintain your personal property, demonstrating lack of responsibility and commitment….OUCH, not a great attribute for any working person.

Respect Tufts University. They do a lot for your community. If you dont think so, please visit www.nspnet.org and look up the somerville office. They have some really interesting stats that I think all residents should appreciate.

There needs to be respect between the community and the school. If the community doesnt respect the school, then it makes 5000 enemies really quickly.

Yowza! “Don’t you appreciate what we do for you people?! My Mother and Father taught me that poor people should stop wallowing on welfare and get off their asses, mow their lawns, and find a job! So pick up those beer cans I left in your yard on Friday and don’t mess with us!” That kid would make even Daniel Patrick Moynihan blush, and he’s hardly alone on the thread.

We’re winning hearts and minds here.

What’s really compelling to me about this discussion, however, is the myopic effect of passion. The thing is, it’s highly plausible that this reporter really did have the legal right to film the event. She’s standing on Tufts property to do it (which might make it illegal) but claims to received an okay from the Police (which would make it legal). For the sake of argument, I’m going to say that even if she were ten feet over and in the street (public property and 100% legal to film whatever you want), the tone of the discussion would be exactly the same.

Rather than actually Google anything about the relevant laws (or - gasp - just swallow their pride and move on), a majority of the commenters who are “victims” of this gross invasion of privacy just make shit up, padding it with legal-sounding terms and a sense of imperative, as does “Participant #2:”

You obviously did not get the permission of the two girls in the pictures above. I can recognize the two girls from these pictures. You have to either censor it using photoshop or just take it down ASAP. If you are going to film anyone naked without their written permission, and then distribute it for your profit or that of the Somerville Journal (since you are putting it on a website that does contain advertisement), I can guarantee you that it’s not legal.

Of course, s/he can’t guarantee that at all (because it’s completely false), but on the internet - and the internet is a big part of where this story has gone - no one can see you lie. So people make claims they can’t substantiate, threats of legal action, and more.

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine Harry Reid appearing in the bedrooms of each of these commenters to say,

Look, it turns out that it was legal for her to be there and film you - crazy, I know, son, but it’s true. Thing is, I’ve got the votes to pass an amendment to the Constitution that would make it illegal for something like this to happen, and even if she’s on public property, she can’t film your event. Do you want me to go ahead with this and reign in that pesky 1st Amendment so that this kind of thing can’t happen to ya’ again?”

What do they do? To my mind, almost all of them take the offer, make it illegal, have the video taken down, and the reporter run out of town.

Because when people are riled up about something - especially what they take to be a moral wrong - they’ll do anything to see it righted, and put on blinders as to the means to their ends. In this instance, it’s the freedom of the press that is causing great indignity to a largely liberal group of students.

It’s the same technique, however, that the far right uses to attempt banning gay marriage, and that the White House has succeeded in using to do great violence to the Bill of Rights. Interestingly, it’s also how any number of totalitarian regimes have come to power and how great numbers of people have been made to do unthinkable things: you arouse the passions and critical thinking is left to the dogs. The ends trump the means. Take the video down!

I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but I think it’s something essential about man’s fallibility that is shared by “Just Thinking…,” Jerry Falwell, and all sorts of infamous men. If it’s in any of them, it’s in us, too.

Footnotes

1. Which is owned, like so many others, by a national conglomerate. Although, you’ve got to give them props for licensing all of their content under Creative Commons. Way to go.
2. Disclosure: I am an affluent suburban white kid. I did not run naked (this year).
3. Exhibits A & B.

Eight albums that mattered to me in 2006

Stars - Heart
‘What the Snowman Learned About Love’ was my NYU roommate’s favorite track, a fact he surprised me with after I’d had this record on repeat for a couple weeks in the financial district. ‘Life Effect’ was my goddamn anthem through one of the more epic phases of a troubled relationship, and then I went and saw these kids play Webster Hall. My definitive New York record, for better or for worse.

Magnetic Fields - 69 Loves Songs Vol. 1
One memorable night alone in the apartment as winter turned into spring. ‘Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side’ cranked up extra loud and the front door cracked open, praying that some roving band of affable hipsters would hear the siren song and befriend me. Instead I think I folded pants and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to a pizza and cold hands and a brilliant view. I connected with this album in the city and will probably never lose that; it’s been with me all year.

Belle and Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
Spring. First listen was one of those 94 minute spin workouts I used to have for training at Palladium. For my cycling season that never materialized (at least on the road). Back when I was a vegetarian. It was catchy then and it caught me all through the spring. Dance, dance, dance. Saw these Scotsmen, too, and froze my toes so bad that I couldn’t hardly walk to the Times Square Starbucks to warm up.

Regina Spektor - Soviet Kitsch
Burned for me by Ally Milligan. What more needs to be said? It took me a month to put this record on my computer and another several weeks to really give it a listen, but there is a flashbulb moment, crossing La Guardia Place towards Bobst, stepping my foot into traffic and hearing ‘Poor Little Rich Boy’ in a more visceral way than anything I’d known. This record was basically a constant on my commutes to Palo Alto through the summer. “WALKA-WALKA-WALKA…”

Magnetic Fields - i
‘It’s Only Time’ is actually the song that comes up with the house lights at the end of a 2004 bootleg of Jenny Lewis playing a solo show in L.A. I fell in love with the song, but put this entire record into increasing rotation as 2006 wore on. I always seem to listen to it straight through - something about the coherent beauty of it all. ‘I Don’t Really Love You Anymore’ has meant so many things to me about so many different women in my life in the last six months, I don’t know where I’d be without it.

Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope
Big fat Regina Spektor kick carried into the fall semester and then Lauren and Chelsea (‘my girls’ at 124) discovered this through me and it became a house staple. We all love her. I saw her play the Avalon. I gave Soviet Kitsch to half of Trunk. So much Regina under the molded tin ceiling of our kitchen.

The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
I’m not ashamed to admit that I am completely enthralled by everything the Decemberists release. Do I love big archaic words and fanciful stories? Absolutely. Do they make me work to appreciate their pop? Absolutely not. But it’s so much fun and I just loved this record. Refused to let Cam or Carlo play it for me this summer, then I missed the boat when it was legitimately released. ‘Sons & Daughters’ sounded so spetacular over the Diesel speakers and it’s still one of my most played tracks on the album.

Camera Obscura - Let’s Get Out of this Country
This was the girls’ summer anthem and felt for so much of the semester like something I’d just missed out on. Had to pick something for the hostess of honor at Lauren’s 21st birthday party, though, and the choice was obvious. This was study music piped down from upstairs, this was party music from Chelsea’s stately desk. This was our Alpha and Omega, what they shared and what I came to feel a part of when we three settled into the most beautiful rhythym at the end of the semester. Then the record came from my own computer and kept on playing in the December chill of California to warm me up and remind me of what I had to look forward to back east.

Honorable Mentions
Peter, Bjorn, & John - Writer’s Block
I realized this was my anthem for fall somewhere around the twelfth play. ‘I happily have to disagree’ was my line in November, for some reason. Playing this and ‘Crane Wife 1 & 2’ on Tuesday evening rides back and forth from The Guidance Center what seems like every week. To and from work, to and from campus, this is biking music and one of those defining albums.

Kate Bush - The Whole Story
Shit, this is a compilation, but it went into the disc changer of the Passat after I’d had a rather protracted love affair with Kate for several months. She became my go-to record when driving, and things just took off from there. Old favorite ‘Wuthering Heights’ took a back seat to ‘Hounds of Love,’ ‘Breathing,’ and who knows what else. I love you, Kate!

Found it!

I’m sure it makes my family and friends back home flush with pride to see my esteemed University in the news.

Oh, my. The Primary Source is at it again.

And I hate to say it, but I seem to have misplaced my outrage; can’t seem to find it. I’ve read enough horrific things in that “Journal of Conservative Thought” to not be surprised by this one.

The Source deals in thoughtless political diatribes and misogyny on a monthly basis - not because their staff is incapable of more complex thought (they certainly are) - but because they see themselves as martyrs at the stakes of infuriating liberal college elite. They seem to ask not, “How can we thoughtfully convey our contrasting political views?” but instead, “How can we piss them off this week?”

And this week the gang had a bit too much eggnog and ran straight into (not so) covert racism. The lesson here is not, as the wide dissemination of the AP’s report of the brouhaha would suggest, “Look over here! We found racism! You’ll never guess where!! An esteemed New England university!” The lesson, instead, is: look what perfectly intelligent people can write when they get themselves going.

Here is where we meet up with last month’s fascination, Michael Richards. Because you got carried away, it’s not an exemption from responsibility, it’s a window into something we all share. Prejudice. Formations of privelige and identity that underlie the same society that necessitates affirmative action policies.

Merry Christmas, Source. You got everyone talking, now we need to start thinking.