racists getting fired (& getting racists fired)

Over the last few days I've noticed a lot of folks on the Twitter and the Face-book linking to the new Tumblr sensation. It's called racists getting fired (& getting racists fired), and its purpose is to find people saying nasty racist shit on social media, finding out where they work, directing their superiors to aforesaid racist shit, and getting them fired.

I kind of really hate it.

I'm not apologizing for racists. It's unnecessary to explain why not: their beliefs are ignorant and atavistic and should have no place in the twenty-first century (or any century, for that matter). But it makes me uncomfortable that many of the same people who were so livid at at the Gamergaters' doxxing tactics are the ones linking to and applauding Racists Getting Fired.

When you disconnect the politics from either scenario, what you essentially have are a group of motivated zealots targeting a total stranger who has offended them and proactively working to ruin their life. We would certainly be upset if, say, some mean-spirited trog outed somebody—someone they've never actually met face to face or spoken to—as gay or transgendered, or got them fired from their job at a Catholic relief services nonprofit by pointing to a blog post where they refer to undergoing in-vitro fertilization. But then we Like and Favorite and Retweet when someone performs the same sort of attack on a person whose views we don't like.

"Bullshit," you say. "People need to be held accountable for believing and saying things beyond the pale." Sure. Remember that when you arrive at a moment in your life when your personal compass doesn't align with the crowd's.

I think it speaks to how personhood has been revised by the internet. The people (assholes) on Racists Getting Fired aren't really people to us. They're just the part of them that says racist shit. It's really easy to advocate for a stranger's public humiliation, to go behind their back and divest them of their income, to hand out their phone numbers to thousands of acrimonious anonymouses when what you're dealing with isn't someone you see as an actual and complete person, but as a remote abstraction of a person. (Funny: don't we often think of racism as the reduction of a human being to a single characteristic?)

What bothers me most (as someone who would like to consider himself a progressive) is that tactics like these aren't going to be very effective in the long run. They're great for rallying the believers, but not necessarily for winning converts, which is what we want to do. The successes of the queer community towards achieving social acceptance over the last thirty years weren't achieved by an intimidation campaign, but by what was essentially good PR: by demonstrating to an ignorant and hitherto biased public that, gosh, these are people with feelings, aspirations, and contributions to make, just like anyone else. Winning hearts and minds. You don't persuade holdouts to change their beliefs by subjecting offenders to a digital auto-da-fé. More likely than not, it will leave their noxious beliefs unchanged or reaffirmed (how often is a forced repentance honest?), and help "SJW" further along its way to becoming a slur. We don't want social progressivism to become associated with vengeful thought-policing, with people who only care for free expression when what's being said is what they agree with. Not only will its proponents risk being discredited, but so will the cause itself.

People like Daryl Davis have the right idea. (I wish I had occasion to link to that piece more frequently.) We can't all do what he can, but the key is to make our ideological opponents into our allies. We can't very well round up and gas all the racists in the world; we have to give them cause to sincerely become non-racists.

But yeah, it's much easier and more immediately and viscerally satisfying to terrorize them via the internet, and it'll win you more followers on Tumblr. So carry on.

The Descent of Winter: 11/28

     I make very little money.
     What of it?
     I prefer the grass with the rain on it
     the short grass before my headlights
     when I am turning the car——
     a degenerate trait, no doubt.
     It would ruin England.


(W.C.W.)


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Fires and Ferguson

I wish I could watch the violence in Ferguson with some satisfaction. This whole thing has just sucked, dismally sucked, from beginning to end, August to November.

"Everything in moderation, including moderation," I saw someone saying on Twitter on Monday night, when downtown Ferguson started to burn. This has been a salient theme in the Twitterati's response to the fallout from the Michael Brown verdict: the rioting is unfortunate, but if it isn't justified, then it exists in a kind of moral vacuum, isolated from and unassailable by the judgements and admonitions of anyone watching from the outside. Let it happen; it had to happen, the crowd had no other recourse.

It's interesting how this strain of social exegesis accurately, albeit indirectly, acknowledges that the actors in the Ferguson danse infernale were not behaving as totally autonomous agents (whose actions were determined by some obscure factor called "free will"), but as organisms doing precisely what organisms do: answering their present environment precisely how that environment has developed them to answer it.

A tautology: riots are caused by environments apt to cause riots. We can refine this by inserting the appropriate sociological diagnoses, but it is enough here. The social environment is much more at fault than the human beings or human behavior it produces, whether considered individually or as an aggregate.

Fires must be put out. Letting a blaze run its course is one way of seeing it extinguished; it demands the least effort of intervention, but is certainly the most costly in the long term. And that is why I can't condone the rioters, why I still have to be one of those sententious assholes who sits far away and yawps about nonviolent civil disobedience.

Where fires are concerned, it is most sensible to subtract from the environment the necessities for ignition: if no fires start, there is no need to put them out.

We are doing a very poor job of this. The Micheal Brown case has been like trying to extinguish a spark by smothering it with kindling.

Ferguson: Dispatch from an Alternate Dimension

A few hours ago the grand jury announced its verdict in the Michael Brown case, and I haven't been able to turn away from the videos of cheering and dancing in the streets. The system might be imperfect, but as we've seen tonight, it works. The people who enforce the law aren't above the law, and justice is colorblind. And that is truly cause for celebration.

Though it came at a grave and irreparable cost, the Michael Brown saga, from start to finish, has been a reaffirmation of the rule of law America. The eyes of the world were on us as the first outraged demonstrators took to the streets in August, and we can all take pride in the professionalism and calibrated response of the Ferguson Police Department as they sternly but quietly observed the protestors' right to peaceful assembly, even as they themselves were the subject of the protest.

It really is astonishing that the protests never grew violent. The discipline of the protestors has been almost unbelievable, as have the responses of government officials at nearly ever level. Remember how Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson's public address on August 11 went viral? ("The police exist to serve the community...and today the community is wounded.") And there was President Obama's impassioned speech in Saint Louis on August 15 when he promised, in essence, to investigate and scale back the militarization of local police forces, and House Speaker John Boehner's formation of an ad hoc committee to investigate police training and procedure. (It really is a shame that it takes a disaster like this to get congressional Republicans to agree with Obama on something.) Everyone rose to the occasion, but special accolades are due to St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch for gracefully stepping down from the occasion, acknowledging that any perceived conflict of interest or partiality would discredit the entire proceeding.

My friend James has been in Ferguson for the last few days, waiting on the announcement of the grand jury's decision. I asked him over the phone what he thought might happen if Darren Wilson escaped an indictment—were we looking at a Midwestern sequel to the 1992 riots in Los Angeles?

He just laughed. "Absolutely not. No way. That would solve nothing. Everyone here knows better than to shit where they eat."

I actually got another call from James a few minutes ago. Even though the celebrations are winding down, it was still hard to hear him over all the cheering and music in the streets. I reminded him that this isn't the end of it; Wilson still has to stand trial, and there's a chance—we can't guess how much of one—that he'll be acquitted in the end.

"Maybe. Just maybe we've been wrong about him. But we'll have to wait and see. Let the system do its work."

Judging from what I'm seeing on Twitter, most observers are sharing James' sentiment. People aren't out for blood or revenge here: from the beginning this has been a murky case with wildly inconsistent testimony, and what most us want is to get to the truth of what happened on August 9, 2014. Taking the matter to trial will ensure that it is given a fair, rigorous, and transparent examination.

I don't know about the rest of you, but tonight I'm proud to be an American. Despite its foibles, America has once again proven the efficacy of its justice system and the gentle rectitude of its people. Imperfect as we may yet be, we are drawing ever closer to the vision of "a city upon a hill" espoused by John Winthrop, the Massachusetts Bay Colony founder and governor renowned for his religious tolerance and commitment to an equitable coexistence with the Wampanoag tribes.

The Descent of Winter: 11/24

Paul Klee, Comedy

  If genius is profuse, never ending——stuck in the middle of a work is——the wrong track. Genius is the track, seen. Once seen it is impossible to keep from it. The superficial definitions, such as "genius is industry, genius is hard work, etc." are nonsense. It is to see the track, to smell it out, to know it inevitable—sense sticking out all round feeling, feeling, seeing——hearing touching. The rest is pure gravity (the earth pull).

  Creations:——they are situations of the soul (Lear, Harpagon, Œdipus Rex, Electra) but so closely (subjectively) identified with life that they become people. They are offshoots of an intensely simple mind. It is no matter what we think, no matter what we are.

  The drama is the identification of the character with the man himself (Shakespeare——and his sphere of knowledge, close to him). As it flares in himself, the drama is completed and the back kick of it is the other characters, created as the reflex of the first, so the dramatist "lives," himself in his world. A poem is a soliloquy without the "living" in the world. So the dramatist "lives" in the character. But to labor over the "construction" over the "technique" is to defeat, to tie up the drama itself. One cannot live after a prearranged pattern, it is all simply dead.

  This is the thing (obvious and simple) that except through genius makes the theater a corpse. To intensely realize identity makes it live (borrowing stealing the form by feeling it——as an uninformed man must). A play is this primary realization coming up to intensity and then fading (futilely) in self. This is the technique, the unlearnable, it is the natural drama, which can't imagine situations in any other way than in association with the flesh——till it becomes living, it is so personal to a nothing, a nobody.

  The painfully scrupulous verisimilitude which honesty affects——drill, discipline defeats its own ends in——

  To be nothing and unaffected by the results, to unlock, and to flow (They believe that when they have the mold of technique made perfect without a leak in it that the mind will be drilled to flow there whereas the mind is locked the more tightly the more perfect the technique is forged) (or it may flow, disencumbered by what it has learned, become unconscious, provided the technique becomes mechanical, goes out of the mind and so the mind (now it has been cut for life in this pattern)) can devote itself to that just as if it had learned it intuitively or not at all.

  To be nothing and unaffected by the results, to unlock and flow, uncolored, smooth, carelessly——not cling to the unsolvable lamps of personality (yourself and your concessions, poems) concretions——


(W.C.W.)


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The Descent of Winter: 11/22

and hunters still return
even through the city
with their guns slung
openly from the shoulder
emptyhanded howbeit
for the most part
                 but aloof

as if from and truly from
another world




(W.C.W.)


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The Descent of Winter: 11/20

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, The Idiot

       Even idiots grow old
         in a cap with the peak
       over his right ear
         cross-eyed
       shamble-footed
          minding the three goats
       behind the firehouse
         his face is deeper lined
       than last year
         and then the rain comes down
       in gusts suddenly


(W.C.W.)


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