Dialogue - Not Plato, But Timely

I have long been intrigued by the give-and-take on social media websites.  Some of it is witty, brilliant, even coruscating.  But some of it is - I hesitate to use this word, given its recent context - deplorable.

To use a clever remark whose originator I wish I knew, I am proud to be an American until I read the comments.

Last week I posted a short essay, the sort I think worth writing but too short for this blog.  The situation: a physician colleague had posted something about her angst, in the post-election period, as a professional woman of color in the toxic atmosphere created by the campaign of the candidate who won election and who made many statements during the campaign that were derogatory about women and about certain minority groups.  This was posted in a professional group, which one might think would be supportive.

Yet some of my colleagues responded in ways that bristled and brusquely rejected her views. And so I offered my thoughts in the closing weeks of the most bizarre year of American political history that I have witnessed in the half century I have been paying attention to American politics:

As I read the comments in this thread I sit here shaking my head. I am looking out through the vast expanse of my family room's picture window at a crystal clear, blue autumn sky and a pasture behind my house where horses frolic when their owner lets them out of the barn.

I live a life of remarkable privilege. Not wealthy, but upper middle class. It isn't the stratum of society in which I grew up, but it used to be relatively easy for a boy from the working class to pursue higher education and a professional degree. Now, sadly, the USA is among the worst in the First World in measures of upward social mobility.

Two of my closest friends in my high school years were African-American. We were brought together by our love for classical music. Throughout my adult life I have been drawn to people who were different: intrigued, fascinated, curious. If they were different in appearance, origin, language, or outlook on life, I wanted to know them.

But this is because I am an intellectual, and we live in a nation in which anti-intellectualism is very much in fashion.

We have just elected a president whose candidacy shone a bright light into the darkest corners of the American psyche, and the reflection that we all saw was shockingly hideous.  We learned that racism, xenophobia, nativism, jingoism, misogyny, and homophobia all had powerful resonance with a frighteningly large segment of our population.

If you believe that racism is exaggerated, or if you believe the same of any other "isms" or "phobias" (whereby phobia is used as a euphemism for hatred), then I urge you to seek out people who are other and ask them to tell you about their experiences being other.  There is a great deal of well-founded fear in their lives, founded in experiences that may not occur every day but occur far too often.

Frederick Douglass

White America's attitude toward black America used to be based on deeply held beliefs that people with black skin, originating on the African continent, were genetically inferior to people of white European ancestry. Now it is based on resentment that blacks refuse to "get over" their outrage about centuries of enslavement in North America followed by another century of oppression, and only in the last half century beginning to make some progress in the direction of justice and equality. Why can't they get over it? we ask. Why are they still an economic underclass living in wretched urban ghettoes? Why will they not pull themselves up by their bootstraps?

And we rail against their sense of entitlement, belittling them as multigenerational welfare families that will never make anything of themselves because they don't want to, because they are too lazy, because they'd rather work the system than work for a living.

We resent Mexican immigrants for "stealing" American jobs, when we know that they are doing things US citizens don't want to do. I do not want to cut my grass. I don't have much free time, and I don't enjoy it. I pay a local company to cut it on a schedule. The workers are Mexican immigrants. They are the people who want those jobs. They are not taking jobs away from anyone. And I live nowhere near the border.

We resent immigrants from India and Pakistan for coming to America and taking high-tech jobs, ignoring the many ways in which these immigrants have enriched our nation. How many doctors from that part of the world are colleagues you admire and whose friendship you enjoy? Ask them to tell you something about their experiences of being the "other" in America, especially outside of their professional setting.

A good friend is a black physician whose experiences of life in dark skin in these United States he has occasionally shared with me. And while I embrace him as a friend, and - thankfully - I long ago shed the hints of racism that inhabited the dark corners of my own psyche because I grew up in a city with near-total racial segregation and absorbed racism from that toxic environment - when I listen to his stories I am deeply ashamed of our society.

So, I implore you: seek out and listen to the stories of our colleagues who are "other" in a nation that calls itself a melting pot yet harbors shocking levels of intolerance. Listen to their stories. Simmer in them. Think long and deep. And learn, from doing so, that we must judge not the "other" among us until we judge ourselves and identify all the ways in which we must work to improve ourselves and our society.

I will begin to judge people of color living in America when I have done all I can to make American society one in which their lives are no more difficult than mine because of their "otherness." That will not be any time soon.

You've been waiting for the dialogue, because the title was a teaser.

So, take a gander at this comment:

"Pure, unadulterated, Leftist bullshit, which you believe sincerely, because all you know is the propaganda fed to you, and don't research the facts directly."

You can imagine what I thought about that.  And remember, you have to be a doctor in my specialty (emergency medicine) to belong to this group. This isn't some skinhead white supremacist writing this.

My reply, admittedly a little thin-skinned:

"You don't know the first thing about me, and what I now know about you is that you are willing to judge a person definitively, absent a shred of insight into that person. I daresay I've read more of this nation's history - political, military, economic, and social - than you and your ten best educated friends combined. So do not presume to call bullshit on me, Sir. That is a right you have not earned."

Our new friend was undeterred:

"It's bullshit on the face of it. Canned, leftist liberal psychobabble talking points. 

You're so brainwashed, and so out of touch with reality that it is a shockingly wondrous thing. 

What I do know is what you posted, which is a presumptious (sic), condescending piece of arrogant tripe.

Do not PRESUME to tell White Americans hat (sic) their attitude toward Black America is, you haughty, bigoted, racist fool. Why is it OK to judge one group based on color, and lump them all together by pigment percent, and assume they're monolithic? 

You, sir, are a blind fool. And an incredibly egotistical one at that. 

I believe my favorite line from your verbal diarrheal event was this :"But this is because I am an intellectual". 

Holy crap. Get on some medication. And get out more."

No, I didn't make this up.

And no, there was no steam coming from my ears as I read that.  Rather, I was amazed at the ideas he found in what I wrote that weren't there.  They weren't on the screen, they weren't in my head, they weren't even between the lines.  They were the product of our correspondent's imagination.  And yet he suggested to me that I should be medicated.  I believe psychologists call that projection.

The main problem seems to be that he is taking statements I made that were obviously generalizations based on observations and interpreting them as though I meant that they were true of all people in a given group.  Any sensible reader would, I think, understand that when I say white Americans want black Americans to "get over it," I am not talking about all white Americans; rather I am talking about a subset who are contributing to the problems I've described.

In case you were wondering what prompted my thoughts about white Americans' attitudes toward black Americans, in the context of the re-election, you might look at some of the exit polling and what Trump voters said when asked such interesting questions as whether Lincoln should have issued the Emancipation Proclamation (a third of South Carolina primary Trump voters said no) and whether the nation would be better off if the Confederacy had won the Civil War (a third of them said yes to that).

Oh, and I couldn't help being amused that he took my statement about being an intellectual out of context, in which it clearly meant that I have intellectual curiosity, and chose to interpret it to mean that I am egotistical about my intelligence.

At that point another member of the group interjected:

"Nasty. Is this how you respond when a patient disagrees with you? We should treat our colleagues with AT LEAST as much respect as we treat our patients."

Not about to accept such criticism, our prickly friend responded thus:

"Hmmm. Nasty. His post was far nastier, and far darker, but veiled in a veneer of inclusiveness and civility, while carrying menace. The typical hypocrisy, and projection of the Left. My post is a bit more straightforward.

In answer to your question: this is how I respond when I'm lectured by a pompous bigot, with deep psychological issues, who hates the country in which I live."

Impressive.  Someone read my original short essay and found it nasty and menacing, and further managed to deduce that beneath my "veneer of inclusiveness and civility" I am "a pompous bigot with deep psychological issues who hates the country in which I live."

Jeepers!  I'll give him credit for getting something right: I do not deny that I am pompous, at least occasionally.  But honestly, I didn't see any of that in what I wrote in my little snippet of social criticism.

Why, you might be wondering, have I chosen to share this "dialogue" with readers of my blog?  Well, I've been blogging for several years, although not much this year, because I have spent so much time trying - mostly on Facebook - to convince my friends, and anybody else who might pay any attention to what I write - that they should vote for Bernie.  Oh, and I did blast Trump rather mercilessly.  I did both of those things here in my blog, but endlessly on Facebook.  Many of my blog essays have been far more provocative than what I wrote that clearly provoked this fellow.  And I have never seen such vitriol posted in comments following any of my blog essays.

But I'm still proud to be an American, even after reading the comments, and even after about half the people who voted chose the Mangled Apricot Hellbeast.  (Oh, my, how I wish I could meet the Scot who tweeted that description and buy him a beer!)

And I hope you are still proud to be an American.  After feeling the way I felt on Election Night, I realized that shame and sadness are quite separate.  Am I ashamed that messages of racism, nativism, jingoism, xenophobia, misogyny, and homophobia resonated with a sizable segment of the electorate?  Of course I am.  But I will not let that make me ashamed to be an American, because Americans like the colleague (yes, that shocks me, I admit) who wrote such blindingly hateful things are, I am convinced, a very small minority.