What not to say

In the social justice scene, you're supposed to recognize patterns of oppression. You're supposed to know that women earn less than men, and that black men are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned.

But you're not supposed to apply that knowledge to individuals. It's not okay to openly assume that a woman earns less than her husband, or that the black man you just met is an ex-con, even though you know the statistics. This can land you in tricky situations.

This week I was at a Less Wrong meetup. A man turned to a young woman near him and asked, "Do you actually read the site, or did somebody drag you here?"

I asked him, "Did you say that because she's wearing heels and lipstick?"

He said, "No, no, it's not because of how she's dressed! It's because most of the woman who come here are dragged by somebody else."

I was furious.

The thing is, I understand where his assumption was coming from. It is more common for uninterested women to be towed to the meetup by their boyfriends than vice versa. I knew from talking with her that this woman is an avid reader of the site, but if I hadn't known that, I might have made the same assumption he did. We all judge new people based on people who seem to be like them. It's unrealistic to expect anyone not to do this.

But this is an inside thought. Unflattering generalizations fall into the same category as "Wow, your acne is really bad": it may be true, but you don't say it out loud.

Because Less Wrong is so heavily male, I know people who meet me will judge me as part of a population of women. I feel embarrassed every time a woman says something foolish, because people will judge me as being part of her group. I know that stereotypes have some basis in reality. I know all this, and I hate being reminded of it.

Even if you have a 90% prior that some unpleasant generalization is true of an individual, don't say it to their face. I'm not going to say you should just mind your own business and not ask them questions, because we make community by getting to know each other. But insulting someone is not a good way to get to know her.

If you're really curious to know if your guess is right, ask some more generic question - "So, what got you interested in coming here?" Nobody gets hurt, and you might actually learn something about her.

"Indio"

Who counts as Native American in the US is very different from who counts as indigenous in Ecuador. In the US, it's something kind of rare, kind of special. Americans love to tell you about how their grandmother was part Cherokee.

Here 7% of the population is straight-up indigenous, and 72% has mixed indigenous and European ancestry. People here with glossy black hair, sharp cheekbones, and russet skin mostly identify as mestizo. Whether you're read as indigenous or mestizo seems to depend mostly on your dress, hairstyle, and language rather than your physical appearance.

Here there is no Tribal ID number, no process of enrolling in a tribe, no affirmative action, no casino profits. If you marked “indigenous” on the census with only 1/32 Quichua ancestry, people here would laugh at you.


Family in Otavalo

In Massachusetts, 90% of the indigenous population died of smallpox in the first two years of contact with the English, and more were killed in clashes. (Ecuadorans are shocked when I tell them this. Here, the Spanish valued indigenous people as slave labor rather than trying to exterminate them.) The fact is that being Native American means something very different in a country where those people were almost wiped out than where they now constitute most of the gene pool.

At the daycare where I volunteer, another American brought in some coloring sheets for the kids. They had pictures of Disney characters, including an Indian from Peter Pan, half-naked and grimacing as he aims his bow. “Look,” she told the kid who received it. “Un indio.”

I didn't want to cause a scene in front of the kids or the teacher, but I wanted to ask her, “Did you think about the fact that every one of these children is descended from indigenous people? Did you think about the fact that “indio” is an insult tossed around on the street here? Did you notice that the teacher in the next room wears her hair in a long tress? Have you observed that growling and shooting stuff are not common pastimes here? Have you observed that four-year-olds absorb every scrap of information we give them? Do you realize you're teaching them more than fine motor skills?"

What's not working here

In college I spent a semester in Denmark partly because I wanted to see what a really well-run society looks like. And it was extremely civilized: people had good free health care, good free education, pleasant public spaces. Studies consistently rank Danes the happiest people in the world. There were few rich people and few poor people. Other than the xenophobia, it was almost an ideal nation.

And Ecaudor, too, has a lot going for it. People here are mostly polite, friendly, and involved with their families. The weather and natural environment are beautiful - it possibly has the most biodiversity per square mile of any nation. It has the potential to be a really delightful tourist destination.

And yet things aren't going so well here. 10% of the country lives on less than $2 a day (adjusted - that's what $2 would buy in the US, not what it would buy here). There are thousands of street children whose parents are dead, imprisoned, deported, or who abandoned their kids. Picketing, purse-cutting, and muggings are rampant in the cities, making them unattractive to tourists. Every house has a wall around it with barbed wire or broken glass cemented at the top to stop housebreakers. Even the grocery stores have security guards. People don't trust the police much anymore since they went on strike and held the president hostage in 2010. People were looting stores and the police did nothing. Freedom of speech is not a right here - people have gone to prison for criticizing the president. Bus accidents are more common here partly because mechanics will rent functioning parts to bus companies so they can pass inspection - then they take them back and reinstall the faulty parts. Firefighters don't always have functioning equipment, and recently there was a case when firefighters refused to show up to a fire. If you go to a lawyer, many will ask "how much help" you want - i.e. if you just want their legal services, or if you will also pay them enough to pay off the judge. Bribing the police is also common.

It makes me realize what difference a well-functioning government makes. It makes me think charter cities are a pretty good idea. Not that Ecuador is a failed state - it does have a decent level of functioning, just not as good as I was hoping for.

The other night we walked in a charming colonial street where families stroll, eating pastries and listening to traditional musicians. A girl with a dirty face, about seven years old, walked up and down begging for money to buy bread. (To be fair, at one point she was doing this with her mouth full of chicken kebab, which made it less convincing.) Eventually she tired of the routine and began playing with pieces of a broken bottle.

I left the street sobbing, furious with the adults and the systems that had abandoned her. The US foster care system is flawed, but at least we have an option other than the street. At 10 pm that girl should be in bed. She should be going to school in the morning. She should have parents who don't let her play with broken glass.

I kind of knew this is what I would see. I wanted to see a developing country to know how most of the world lives. And a lot of it is horrible. Which is why I want to change it.

Hunger hurts?

This is an ad for a food bank that appears on buses all over Boston.



Here we have a pretty young white woman hugging an older white woman. I guess the young woman is supposed to represent the food bank, since she looks happy, whereas the faceless older woman is presumably hungry and therefore in need of comfort.

Oh, wait. Except she doesn't need a hug. She needs groceries.

I have a rescue fantasy — what social worker doesn't? Somewhere inside, we love to believe that we could just hug our clients and make everything better. If we took them home and gave them a good meal and enough sympathy, we believe we could fix everything and earn their undying gratitude. But that is an inside thought. You do not tell your clients about that thought. The point is to help, not to feel helpful.

Please, people, fantasies don't belong on billboards. Everyone in the city who rides public buses — which is most of the food bank's clientèle — has seen this ad. If I needed groceries, would I really want to go someplace where I might get hugged by some misty-eyed young lady with a savior complex? No way.

There but for fortune

Today in the mental hospital where I work, I met a woman who said she had learned to be all brain and no heart. When she was five, the authorities found out her father was raping her, and she was sent to be raised by her aunt and uncle. They were hands-off academics who fed her mind but not her emotions, and in fifty years she has never had any close relationships. She came to the hospital because she was homeless and considering suicide.

This woman speaks with the richest vocabulary and most careful grammar of anyone I've talked to in a long time. Her intellect is completely sound, and she has clung to it because she has very little else in her life. She is who I might have been if I had been born into a different family.

Before I started work on a locked psych ward, I thought it would be scary to be around people who were totally unlike anyone I knew. Actually, the scary thing is that the severely mentally ill are a lot like people I know. They are people like any other people - professors, parents, dockworkers, students, cashiers - whose brains played them a trick. This, frankly, sucks.

All our brains go a bit askew at times, especially when we dream. You know that dream where your teeth are knocked out, or your finger is cut off, or you have a terrible haircut? That same fear, brought to waking life, is body dysmorphic disorder. You know how in dreams you know something is terribly wrong, even if you can't explain how you know it? That, when you still feel it the next morning, is paranoia. You know how scenes suddenly change into other scenes, and impossible things happen? That, if it goes on for months, is schizophrenia.

All our distancing from the homeless, from the insane - it's to help us pretend the distance is far, but it's not. We need to push them away to pretend it can't happen to us, or that it doesn't suck. But it does.

Remember this when services are being cut. Remember it when you hear someone shouting nonsense from a street corner. If this is not actually your neighbor, your sister, your self - it could be. It is people very much like you. Be kind.

Between a rock and a crunchy place

Despite my initial complaints, I've gotten really into Less Wrong. It's refreshing to talk to people who don't write me off as weird/cold/unfeeling for trying to think through things carefully. And yet it's mostly populated by male techy types, which has got me thinking about signalling.

In college when I started going to protests and hanging out with activist kids, I considered ways I could change myself to fit in better with them. I briefly believed that ripping my clothing and wearing a fair-trade head scarf might make me a better activist. One evening I remember going from an activist meeting to a Campus Girl Scouts meeting and realizing there was nothing I could wear that would make me look at home in both groups. The answer, obviously, was that I didn't need to look like either group to do good work.

But the pressure for outward conformity isn't as bad as the pressure for conformity of thought. I was at a women's college when the Larry Summers scandal happened. In class after class, my professors lambasted Summers for suggesting that biological differences between women and men could have anything to do with the maleness of the science and engineering faculty at top universities.

Except . . . there was nothing wrong with what he actually said. He cited a study that did indeed show men's intelligence varying more widely than women's, creating more idiots and more geniuses. In fields that demand extremely smart people, it makes sense that there's a larger pool of good male candidates. And he didn't even list this as the main reason for the disparity - the other factors he listed were discrimination, different socialization, and the fact that the jobs require something like 80 hours a week. Nothing that feminists haven't been saying for decades. But because he mentioned IQ, the feminist community went nuts without, in most cases, even reading what he said.

I'm a feminist. Given the absurd things that have been said about gender and intelligence in the past, I understand getting your hackles up when you hear anything about it. But when you start a ruckus for no good reason, you're embarrassing me. I believe in social justice work. Justice does not just happen by itself. But ignoring truth in the pursuit of justice is not okay.

I refuse to signal less as a feminist so I can signal more as a rationalist. That would be as silly as ripping my jeans to be a better activist. But I expect better of both communities.

Dear rationalists: please welcome people who aren't white male atheist computer programmers under the age of 40. The fact that the site was 96% male at last count is obviously not due only to a longer right tail on the IQ curve.

Dear social justice folks: please be sure your arguments make sense.

Whose life?

The news is telling us that a second person has died in Arizona after being denied an organ transplant. With a budget shortfall, the state cut $1.4 million from its transplant program. All I can think is - that much money and only two people died?

We all hate to put a dollar value on lives. But we do it all the time. If I had $1.4 million, I have some ideas about where we could save more lives.

If you want to keep the money in the United States, how about the Boston homeless shelter that had standing room only for 500 people seeking shelter from last week's snow? How about the people who sleep on the street because there is no room for them in existing shelters? Homeless people routinely die from exposure to the elements, violence, or illnesses they catch in overcrowded shelters with inadequate washing facilities.

Whose life do we value? Whose death do we read about in the news?

Did you know?

We've all heard the human interest story about Helen Keller: water pump, fingerspelling, etc. But there's more to her story.

Newspapers liked to pat her on the head for her work with the blind, but things changed when she voiced a political opinion. When she started advocating socialism, the Brooklyn Eagle editorialized that her "mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development."

Keller responded:
The Eagle and I are at war. I hate the system which it represents, apologizes for and upholds. When it fights back, let it fight fair. Let it attack my ideas and oppose the aims and arguments of Socialism. It is not fair fighting or good argument to remind me and others that I cannot see or hear. I can read. I can read all the socialist books I have time for in English, German and French. If the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle should read some of them, he might be a wiser man and make a better newspaper. If I ever contribute to the Socialist movement the book that I sometimes dream of, I know what I shall name it: Industrial Blindness and Social Deafness.

Dear Ms. Keller,
You're my hero.

Your soul like a message in a bottle to me

Dear Emma Goldman,

Even though I wish you hadn't spent quite so much time advocating assassination as a method of social change, I think you're super.

Julia

(Why are my best fan letters always to dead people?)

Slipping back

Today I stopped by the community center where I volunteered last summer. As soon as I walked into the room where the children's after-school program was going on, the supervisor embraced me and had me at the table helping the kids with their homework before I knew it. They were all writing essays on Martin Luther King, Jr. - at least in theory. The boy next to me was occupied in drawing pictures of a bear eating a mouse. "Come on," I asked him a dozen times, "Read the handout and write me something about him."

"I already know about him from school! I don't need to write about him again," he insisted. After some querying he put forth, "Martin Luther King made a law so the black kids and the white kids would go to the same school." I corrected him on the fact but looked around the room and wondered if he realized the irony of the statement. Every single child there was black, and I doubt the local schools are much different. Like other US schools, they're probably more segregated than they were twenty years ago. Slow progress would be easier to stomach than actual regression.

Look here, Karl

I'm really fed up with utopian theories that want to magic workers away by mechanizing all labor. I'm all about utopian societies, but this part is too ridiculous. I laughed at Valerie Solanas when she wrote that women's liberation depended on mechanizing and abolishing work. I laughed when a friend suggested the same thing (though his aim was to liberate everyone, not just women). Today in class I learned that this was Marx's solution to noncreative work from which people were alienated - simply automate it all - and it made me furious.

This is always people's objection to educating everyone well - "But someone needs to clean the bathrooms!" (Somehow this is never said by people who actually clean bathrooms for a living. It's always said by people who are glad they will never have to clean a bathroom and don't want to change that system.) Yes, someone does need to do the dirty work. To mechanize a lot of the drudgery people do - scrubbing toilets, busing tables, changing diapers, loading dishwashers - isn't very feasible. And when it is, it's not always pretty - imagine a world where all the telephone systems were fully automated and you could never get a real person who would actually answer your question.

I spent a good portion of last summer at Pendle Hill vacuuming floors and scrubbing toilets, and it wasn't pleasant work. But I didn't mind, because there was a culture that honored manual labor there. The director washed dishes next to you. At dinner the man who fixed the plumbing sat with the woman who taught religion, and both talked about their lives and thoughts. No one was degraded for the work they did, and everyone had the same access to music and art and books and discussion.

Don't erase the person who cleans the bathrooms. Honor her for the work she does, honor her as a human being, and let her talk with other people about what she does at work. Pay her well, at least as well as people who do pleasanter jobs. Let the nursing home worker and the taxi driver and the fieldhand be able to sit down at the table with the lawyer and professor and artist. Let them all have good educations - not so they will feel themselves too good to mop the floor, but so that their world extends beyond the mop. Liberal arts educations aren't job training - the point is to be well-rounded. Why shouldn't the janitor also be well-rounded? The accountant isn't a better accountant because he can read poetry. Why should a trash collector be worse at what he does because he can also read poetry on his lunch break?

If we can mechanize more labor and then distribute the resulting leisure, everyone could have more time to be human. Instead of working a second shift at the restaraunt, people could be reading to their kids or taking a walk or learning something new. That distribution of leisure (and thus of resources) is where things get really tricky, and I don't have good answers as to how to do that. But without redoing the economy we can at least redo our social interactions.

Esperanza

There are times when I'm embarassed about my idealism. My socialist politics, for example, never went over well with Sandy and Florina. They come from countries crushed by communism - they have every right to be jaded. And maybe my ideals are just silly untested things. I'm in such an ivory tower that I can afford to be concerned about whether the phrase "that sucks" is derogatory to women and queer men.

But I'd rather struggle to live small ideals than live none at all. Idealism is useless when it's not lived. When people go to protests but then go home and pay their taxes and drink their can of Coke and don't write their Congresspeople, they're doing nothing but feeling self-righteous. In middle school my closest friends put their hearts and souls into Star Wars and the cause of an imaginary rebellion against an evil Empire. We made up innumerable scenarios in which we, freedom fighters, died for our ideals. Where did that go? In a world where our tax dollars aid the massacre of real people, why aren't they willing to risk their lives for the lives of innocents here and now?

This weekend I met people who've had their idealism tested. I was at the School of the Americas vigil at Fort Benning, Georgia. The US military runs a training camp there for Latin American soldiers, a camp that's trained many of the worst human rights abusers in the area. I heard torture victims speak. I heard a man talking about having a machine gun put to his back for illegally filming government atrocities in Mexico. Last year a man who spoke at the vigil was killed upon returning to his home country.

But people still come, and they still speak out. People who have witnessed the worst side of humanity come every year to talk about peace and progress. Yesterday they led 20,000 people in singing "Hay esperanza!", and I believed it when they sang it. There is hope, and that hope is worth dedicating our lives to.

The worth of a beating heart

It's so strange how different deaths have different impacts. Recently Tom Fox, a Quaker peace activist from the US, was found shot dead in Iraq where he and several other peace activists had been kidnapped some time ago. The Quaker community has been constantly keeping each other informed of his situation and now his death. It seems strange that a population so aware of the deaths of Iraqis and US troops alike would pay so much more attention to the death of one of our own. The Quakers are the last people I would expect to be exalting one person's death when they are (more than most populations) so aware of the costs of violence in our world. Is Tom Fox's life worth more than anyone else's?

In Richmond when the Harvey family was murdered and the city went into shock, I wanted to ask people why they weren't shocked that other people are killed in Richmond all the time, why the death of a rich white family was worse than the death of black children or adults in poor neighborhoods. But it's not as if it's wrong to be shocked at a murder. Sometimes I feel it's a mark of ignorance to take individual deaths personally, to be moved by them, since it implies that you're not considering all the wrongful deaths and sufferings that happen every day around the world. No one can consider and mourn them all or we'd never be able to function. But on the other hand, what are we if we take all tragedies in stride, if we let nothing affect us? Is that diminishing the worth of all lives, the meaning of tragedy? We may function better, but don't we lose something?

Purpose

I have a new life goal. The professor for the class I'm taking on the sociology of oppression told us to ask our families what they had been doing during the movements for social justice during the 50s and 60s and 70s - were they involved? Sympathetic? Hostile? I knew the answer already - my family was probably all neutral or at best, sympathetic but disengaged.

Years ago when I was starting to illustrate a retelling of the Persephone story, I was trying to figure out how to write and paint Demeter. I finally figured that she should simply be everything one would want in a mother - gentle, wise, strong, steady, loving, sure of herself. I decided this was a pretty good set of qualities for me to try to live up to, as well.

Now I've added to that. I don't just want to be someone I would be proud to have as a friend or a mother or whatever. I want to do things my children and grandchildren will be proud of. If someone asks them decades from now what their family was doing in 2006, I want them to be able to say that their grandmother was out there doing something for the good of their world.

Coffeehouse pretention

There are few things sillier than white activist college students singing impassionedly about how they'd never cross a picket line. Well-intentioned, but Evan? Of course you won't ever cross a picket line. You went to Swarthmore. You're not ever going to have a job where you will be called upon to scab. Don't be ridiculous.

Left behind

My host family keeps bringing up Hurricane Katrina, which is in the headlines every day even here. I don't know how to react except to nod. What I really want to say is:

A few months ago the images of the homeless, helpless people stranded in New Orleans would have seemed foreign to me, the kind of people I only see in newspaper photos or through the window of a car while driving through the inner city. Now they look to me like the women in the shelter from this summer. Storms and domestic violence both strike people from all parts of society who are in the wrong place or the wrong relationship, but you can probably guess the kind of people who hit rock-bottom enough to have to live in an overcrowded shelter without even a bedroom to themselves. (To be honest, this is not even rock-bottom. Rock-bottom is the women who leave an abuser only to wind up living on the streets because they have nowhere else to go, and we have to turn them away because they're not technically in a crisis situation.) It's the same kind of people you see in the photos of the Superdome: poor, black products of poor education, poor nutrition, and bad jobs. And when the rest have some way out, they're the ones left behind. It infuriates me.

In which I wonder about priorities

I've been reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, about a doctor from the US working in Haiti to revamp healthcare for the poor there. The man is ridiculously inspiring - probably every highschooler who dreams of going into social justice work wants to found their own program and influence policymaking and win the adoration of whatever group they're serving. Later we realize that a lot of boring, unglamorous work is needed to keep any kind of program running and that this is what we'll probably do a lot of. But this man has actually done it - singlehandedly put so much in motion that has been really useful.

Of course, the natural response while reading about this kind of thing is to wonder what one is doing with one's life that's so great compared to fighting multidrug-resistant TB. I'm at least in the position of doing unglamorous work at an organization that does improve and sometimes save people's lives, so I don't feel as bad as I would if I were still at the posh suburban daycare. The book does make me question the rightness of doing useful work in the US that would undoubtedly be more useful somewhere else, though.

It irks me that Dr. Paul Farmer can have a wife and daughter stowed away in Paris while he trots from Haiti to Peru to Siberia, but that it's impossible to imagine some sort of Dr. Paula Farmer doing the same with a husband and child. The only reasons I want to live in the US when I grow up are so I can see my family regularly and so my kids won't grow up with dirty water and one-room schools and tapeworms. But if I do the whole leaving house and brothers and sisters and father and mother and fields thing, none of that will be a problem. (It doesn't say anything about spouses or kids, but presumably the the apostles weren't supposed to have those.) So maybe after I do Peace Corps I'll just stay in Venezuela or whereever and see where life takes me from there. I know you're supposed to be sure you don't burn out and become useless to everyone, but hopefully by then I'll be able to tell the difference between what I really need and what I only think I need. I'm pretty sure some sort of family is on the first list, but I could be wrong.

What's wrong with this picture?

I haven't even started working with domestic violence or sexual assault survivors, and already it's difficult. Tonight at the volunteer training we talked about legal issues surrounding domestic violence. One pamphlet we got dealt specifically with immigrant and refugee women and had a section on women who would lose their legal status if they left their husbands or if their husbands reported them to the INS. The consolation we're supposed to give them is "deportation may not follow, would not be immediate, and, in most cases, you would have the opportunity to present your cases to a judge." Great. Also, the mantra of all domestic violence workers seems to be "Leave!", but at the same time women are more likely to be murdered after leaving a domestic partner than at any other time in their lives. I'll be advising them to leave for the sake of their own safety, yet increasing their chance of being murdered.

At one point the woman leading the training asked how many of us had experienced stalking or domestic violence, and she and about a quarter of the room raised their hands. My first reaction was surprise that they seemed so comfortable admitting this, and then I had to give myself a mental whack for even thinking it was something they should be embarassed about. If we didn't think these things were something to be secretive about, to be ashamed of, maybe the problems wouldn't happen as often or be as horrible.

What to do? Who to be?

There seem to be two models of people I admire, the artist and the activist. The first are the kind who have weaving studios in their attics, play music, go to contra dances, write novels in their spare time. I’ve sort of been resisting this model because I felt it precludes the second model – the type who are active in politics or social movements or what have you. The problem is that while I’d love to live the first lifestyle, to live life for the sake of its own beauty, I can’t justify that in a world where so much is so bad and needs to be changed. Ideally one could do both, but I’ve almost never heard of people who take time and money for beautiful houses and clothes and music and art and still have time and money enough to make the world a better place (in some way more significant than making it prettier.) This month my compromise has been putting up a Pre-Raphaelite poster Ellen gave me on my wall and going to the contra dance in Shepherdstown last Saturday.

Lately I find myself looking for role models – for people who’ve done what I want to do, just to convince myself it’s possible. I can find people who have done each of the things I want to do with my life, but I haven’t found anyone who’s done it all. I hear an NPR story on a white woman who adopts a black baby – but it’s a baby, not a child from foster care, and the woman isn’t doing anything else noteworthy for the world. Or I read the book of interviews with second-wave feminists and their grown daughters that Eli gave me, but most of those women are living in posh suburban homes and sending their children to private schools. Or I read about women community organizers in low-income urban neighborhoods, but their children were stuck going to the worst schools in the country. Or I read about parents home-schooling their children but giving up their own lives and work to do so and ceasing to make much difference to anybody but their own family. (And by “parents” I mean “usually mothers.”)

Probably this means it’s impossible. Probably I can’t have a life’s work that makes a difference in the world and keep only a bare minimum of my income and not turn my kids over to the monster that is inner-city public schools and not go crazy from it all. But I’m sure going to try until I find out for sure.