Oklahoma Goddam, or the Whole Damn System

One thing I can't let go of from this latest macabre murder (Oklahoma Goddam, as Nina Simone would christen the incident): The officer who fired the fatal shots is a woman. Statistically, female officers are involved in very few such shootings. Given this fact, some experts have recommended increasing the number of women officers as one way to potentially eliminate these murders of civilians.
My read: the impunity granted to police officers, security guards, neighborhood patrolmen, and gas-station vigilantes who kill people from historically marginalized groups is corrosive and corrupting. An increasing number of combatants are being recruited to assist in the containment of those people--in the ghettos, in their social, economic, sexual, and psychological place. The reason is uncomplicated: there is not sufficient political will to hold them accountable.

It isn't the training. It isn't about cameras (they haven't produced any convictions, since the days of the Rodney King video). It isn't even about racism, as a matter of the individual heart. Or fear. It's about selective impunity. Police are professionals. They have a job to do and codes that can be used to evaluate the way in which they choose to do it. Every one of us who works knows that, if we know our job is on the line, we can suddenly summon up politeness and squeeze out a smile, even with people we don't like. Because the alternative is to be jobless and starving.

As far as I'm concerned, the goal is not to find out whether an officer "is racist." I'm not interested in "state of mind." I don't care what you're thinking; I care what you do. I care that your fellow officers file false reports to help you cover it up. I care that your superiors and internal affairs find no wrongdoing in their investigations. I care that prosecutors do not fulfill their sworn duty of advocating for the people and, instead, present exculpatory evidence to exonerate police officers (when they never do the same for other citizens). I care that judges (and appeals courts) allow bench trials, so that the few officers who are indicted do not have to face a jury of their peers. I care that grand juries and trial juries decide to "believe" that someone who is fleeing, at one moment, returns to kill his pursuer the next... or that a man can be held liable for attempted murder of one passenger in a car but not guilty of the murder of the unarmed driver of the same car.

The most memorable chant to me, from the BLM marches has been this: "Indict. Convict. Send those killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell." Until the state holds officers accountable, the number of additional people deputized to keep those people contained will expand and the means of containment will also expand. This is not an anomaly; it goes to the core of who our nation thinks has a right to be, to move, to be protected, and who must be a threat, even when they are surrendering, fleeing, being beaten by four officers with clubs; when they have already when hit by two bullets, when they actually called the police for assistance, when they are having a cigarette in their car or holding their child on their lap.

In order to maintain any credibility whatsoever, the government of this nation must apply the law to police officers as it does to any other citizen. Indict. Convict. Levy appropriate consequences. Upholding the illusion that black people, Latinos, Muslims, and Native Americas are demons, drug addicts with superhuman strength, whores, or ball-busting women--all of whom had it coming--is simply too damaging to both government credibility and the national psyche.

Soapy Odysseys

While I cranked up Season Three of Game of Thrones for a Thanksgiving Binge-Watch, a was visited by a thought: Mad Men is a soap opera. I think the chain of associations ran something like this: I am suddenly quite interested in Game of Thrones and definitely looking forward to more Justified and Archer in January. However, I could not be less interested in what happens next on Mad Men.

Clearly, my tastes are not squarely aligned with the Golden Age of Television favorites. But why did I become less interested in Mad Men? Why was I disappointed by the final season of Breaking Bad? Why does the US version of House of Cards leave me utterly cold?

I think part of my response has to do with the overwhelming air of seriousness and self-regard these shows muster. If you're going to tell me--with lighting, sound, pacing, and plot--that you are the most important television show of our times, then you had better live up to it. If, however, you admit that you're for tossing back popcorn as much as for any greater insights into humanity, then I have a lot more patience with you.

Let's be honest. Mad Men lost the plot long ago. The show is no longer about one man's secret: Don's identity has been revealed many times to many people. Nor is it any longer about the fortunes of an advertising agency: it has been unclear for much of the last two seasons just what kind of financial shape SCDP is in. At this point, characters seem to be introduced and plots launched simply to keep the show afloat and mobile--and not for any greater reason. The writers are simply giving the characters additional things to do--without, in many cases, addressing the conflicts that were at the heart of such characters from the show's debut. (The sidelining of Roger is a prime example; the unraveling of Pete Campbell an admirable exception).

So, what's left of the show's original draw? Well, the show remains an opportunity to immerse oneself in--and criticize--the intrigues of the rich. Similarly, it remains a visually captivating period drama, in costume.

What, then, makes it so difficult to see that Mad Men, despite all its pretenses, is still, in part, an heir of Dynasty or Dallas--not to mention kin to The Tudors and Game of Thrones?

I'm certainly not the first to say so: it's the show's focus on its male stars. We do not have a genre called "straight male soap opera." Therefore, the show automatically gets granted status alongside something like The Odyssey--with Don Draper as the lost, sojourning man. He is imbued, by the viewer, with great psychological depth and complexity. We read all of this from Jon Hamm's pressed lips and tight jaw. Yet, when (at the end of last season) he finally seeks to reveal to his daughter  his hidden roots, I find myself yawning. First, this offer of biographical truth is beside the point. Teenage Sally is angry with him because she caught him committing adultery with the mother of a boy she liked. He never apologizes for what she witnessed. The looming, ramshackle house where he was born is supposed to speak for him. Second, from a dramatic standpoint, the show has already revealed to viewers much of Don's early years. So, we aren't really hungry to know (hence, the credits begin to roll before he can begin to explain to Sally what we already know).

I think the continuing appeal of Don and company (and I'd extend this claim to BrBa's Walter White) lies in vanity. Viewers like Don because they ascribe to him an endless depth of personality: a depth they either fancy is akin to their own or, instead, want to understand and, perhaps, repair, like a therapist or a mother. My own sense, from dealing with people of the first ilk, is that they are absolutely detrimental to be in relationship with. It's impossible to achieve their regard, to have one's own complexity or concrete needs acknowledged. Unless acknowledging you suits the story they like to tell about themselves, forget it. Now, of course, we all have the capacity for extreme self-involvement. In fact, sometimes the acts we tell ourselves are good for others can be based on a confusion of their concrete needs with our psychological needs. It seems to me, though, that the strong, silent type also feels justified in demanding that you go hunting for his psychological complexity, his reasoning, his feelings of remorse. There's a great power in withholding--that is, until the other person decides they can live without whatever you're holding back. And that, dear friends, is where I am with Mad Men.

I was trying to imagine a narrative about adult women that featured such a character and drew such intense loyalty and vaulted praise. I can't think of any examples. Indeed, I find myself recalling the scholar Jennifer Rycenga's observation that Joni Mitchell's songs are so rare because they are told by a woman who is no man's wife or courtesan. Surely, even in Game of Thrones, wives and courtesans are the primary possibilities for women. And even novels written by women often speak more of frustrated odysseys than of women on the move. Toni Morrison has famously been trying to tell stories of women's adventures since Sula (1973), which famously omits the title character's journey away from her home in The Bottom. After several novels in which women journey from one domestic space to another (such as Beloved and Paradise), she may have finally succeeded in A Mercy (2008), whose protagonist strikes out in search of love but, failing to find it, must journey on. Of course, Morrison's Florens is strong but anything but the silent type. We are not asked continually to seek emotional dispensations from a withholder. Rather, she offers us that which she knows how to say. Even a younger novelist, Stephanie Grant, gives us a truncated journey in her award-winning Map of Ireland. While the young white lesbian at its center wants to leave racist 1970s Boston and journey with a shadowy black militant group, in the end she just can't. The female Huck Finn novel barely gets going "downriver" before the getaway car stalls and she returns home. What are the stories in which a woman embarks on a journey--perhaps one with an indefinite destination--on which she encounters an array of personalities and societies? A sort of female Odysseus--or Gulliver? And, more important, when such a woman presented herself in a fiction, who has heralded her?

Womb Privilege: The Last Frontier in Equal Rights

Aint Studying You received this letter in response to the proposal that we reconsider the use of the term White Privilege in 2013.

Dear Aint Studying You:

I am a single gay male in my mid-thirties. I want a child--well, a child that I don't have to be financially responsible for. So, I want a friend's child to be named after me.

One of my longtime friends, a lesbian, is having one--any day now. Said lesbian friend rejected me long ago as a sperm donor, despite the fact that I fit her IQ and demographic markers for the position. She said she just thought it would be too weird and "incestuous" because we're such good friends and also because she was afraid I might not renounce all paternal rights. Such a  litigious mind! (Quiet as it's kept, I think she didn't want the baby to have a gay father. Oh, but two mommies are ok?! The irony!) I swallowed the rejection and soldiered on.

As a consolation prize, I requested, in honor of our decades-long friendship, that she name the child after me--male or female. After all, I will certainly bear no children and I will likely not sire any, either. But in a display of what can only be understood as middle-class, cis-gender, lesbian feminist privilege run entirely amok, she has refused the naming request categorically. As I was thinking about being frozen out of this ceremony, I realized we are going to need a name for a phenomenon far more powerful than white privilege or male privilege, which are so clearly on the wane in the age of Obama. WOMB PRIVILEGE: the power that all women exercise over all men--but especially the socially vulnerable, nonreproductive population of gay men with college educations and jobs but no children. WOMB PRIVILEGE: it's mothers acting as monopoly capitalists, using their uteruses to enclose the commons of the child (whom the village, after all, is raising), to turn a human being into her private property, and then assert naming rights.

It's neoliberalism, homophobia, and reverse sexism unleashed and on the rampage. Therefore, I say, let womb privilege be the new target of our collective radical ire.

Because Matthewsula is a wonderful name.

P.S. She's light-skinneded, too.

That Man is Not Your Maker

It's a mistake to think Robin Thicke spoke the first word of patriarchy. I explain why below...


For some time I have been saying facetiously that not everyone should go to college. Or, put another way, college should not be the prerequisite for entering such a wide array of jobs.


I am not alone in having a moral objection to the ways that college serves as an economic gatekeeper, imposing debt as a precondition for entering the workforce. But I also have a more petty objection to college as a universal.


Because college also serves as a cultural gatekeeper, even when it does not guarantee employment, it tends to produce a certain smugness that comes from believing one holds the key to decoding all of the meanings in life. Witness the student who, after taking an introduction to women's studies or ethnic studies, becomes the resident expert on what is *really* sexist or racist. Note that this phenomenon can occur whether the student accepts or staunchly opposes the definition offered in the course.


This smug certainty is not unique to the humanities, as one might expect. Indeed, if I may be forgiven a gross generalization, those who believe that what they practice is a science (from physicists to Marxists) tend to be serious table-pounders. That is, while most of the rest of us must declare a position that might be assailed from the beginning as tainting, they get to pass as unbiased observers without much care for how their evidence is produced, gathered, framed, and interpreted.


However, rather than re-fighting the science wars, I would like to turn to the response to Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" as promoting rape culture. The primary culprit is its red-flag line "I know you want it." Reading any number of posts or comments will lead you to people flagging this line as "rapey." First, I would hope we can agree that rape is a term that doesn't need a cute diminutive. Rape would seem to be an absolute. But perhaps "rapey" conveys a certain discomfort with forcing Thicke into the role of Grand Marshal in the Sexism Parade.





Let me be clear. I have never liked Robin Thicke. Furthermore, I do believe the song has sexist elements. My problem is with suggesting that in removing the phrase "I know you want it" from our repertoire, we can quarantine rape culture. That solution conjures for me a game of whack-a-mole with an expanding list of newly banned phrases. However, proceeding in that way grants patriarchy more power than it could ever have. Patriarchy's arrogant gestures are not proof positive of men's absolute dominance.


What many seem to have forgotten, temporarily, is that cocky quips do not exist in a vacuum. They respond to and anticipate dismissive responses. That is, the pushy come-ons are a sign of weakness, of need. The issue, then, is not that Robin Thicke sings "I know you want it." The issue is not the speech, it's when one has the situational power to turn that speech (or unspoken thought) into the law of someone's workplace--or, in fact, the last words they hear before they are assaulted or killed.


I am not arguing here for "nuance." It's just that the lyrics are contradictory. For instance, "that man is not your maker" tends to empower the woman who has submitted to "that man's" attempts to "domesticate" her. If I were to take issue with a lyric in Thicke's infernal, ubiquitous song, it would actually be "just let me liberate you"--because the line suggests that the male singer--and not the woman herself--will be the agent of her liberation. In positioning himself as the person who can free her, he sets up a savior story, starring his power and not hers.


Of course, all of these lines include fairly clever rhyming. And sometimes the logic of the song is driven as much by a patriarchal agenda as by outrageous wordplay.


OK now he was close, tried to domesticate you
But you're an animal, baby, it's in your nature
Just let me liberate you
You don't need no papers

That man is not your maker


I never thought of domesticate-cha/your nature/liberate-cha/papers/maker as a potential quintet of rhymes. I must tip my hat to the ingenuity. And, it's hard for me not to think the lyrics are also making a clever reference to ex-slaves' freedom papers and even subverting (at least one) man's patriarchal rule. So, while I can see (and make) a withering, sex-negative critique of the song lyrics, I can also see that wordplay may have been a source that produced the problematic lyrics--and not just the inexhaustible well of misogyny.


But I'm even more skeptical of the harping on "I know you want it." Of course, tone matters a great deal, and Thicke has insisted that tongue was in cheek. But, be that as it may, it's important not to think of any statement in isolation. Statements are sequential; they always follow previous statements and anticipate or provoke new statements. Thus, "I know you want it" doesn't exist apart from, say, "I do want it, but you ain't got it" or any number of other retorts.


Let's not forget, Janet Jackson also had a song with a similar title: "I Know You Want This." The self-assured lover is a mainstay of song but, then again, so are the songs puncturing the balloon. Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" is the obvious example. But Tina Turner's lyrics to "Funkier Than a Mosquito's Tweeter" also come to mind: "You wanna be a graduated lover / but in reality you're just another brother.... You think you're slick but you could stand a little greasing / The things you do ain't never really pleasing."


It's only in taking male statements out of the context of an ongoing conversation that one can produce them as pure, unconquerable sexism. In reality, they are responses to a number of public questions ricocheting silently in the dude psyche: "Do you like me? Will my boys be impressed if I can talk to or bed you? How can I protect myself from the feeling of being shut down? Do I have enough money for someone that looks that high maintenance? What will I say if you shut me down? What will I do If you don't?"


A boast like "I know you want it" responds to or anticipates all of these statements. It is not a statement unto itself, the first word spoken over the vast deep, like the God of Genesis. He says "I know you want it" and then "you" are immediately a sex object in his patriarchal world? Not necessarily.


Keeping in mind this lack of God-like power, patriarchy emerges as a very real state of affairs, but one that has never been and could never be a place in which women have no power. While it is true that a rapist might say or think "I know you want it," he might just as easily not care at all what "you" want. He might enjoy the fact that he knows "you" don't want it.


Policing the language, then, seems less about effectively reducing rape than about promoting polite society. I suppose that eliminating phrases that might make a Barbara Bush clutch her pearls is a fine goal, but it's not the same as producing a society without rape. And if "polite society" relies upon a notion that women don't or can't respond effectively to boorish propositions, then no thank you. Frankly, it would seem that such a focus could even pose a problem as the better-heeled rapist--the one who has polished his language and his shoes--would seem not to pose a threat. And the true rape culture is the one that views the rapist as egregious, antisocial, aberrant--an outlier. If we make participating in rape culture about uttering forbidden phrases, we make rape the province of the dangerous stranger, poor and unschooled. If we cannot recognize sexual force in its middle- and upper-class versions--with or without indecorous language--we need to reconsider how we measure the presence of rape culture.


We should, I think, be less concerned with what men say than with addressing what they can do in particular situations--and with ensuring that women have the tools and the confidence to respond as they see fit without sex shame or fear of reprisal:


Yes, I want it.

No, I don't want what you've got.

Take it somewhere else, or I'll give you the beating you seem to want.*

--------------


* These last lines are not meant to place the responsibility on women for preventing rape. Surely, those who say that that responsibility belongs to rapists are correct. It is to say that the women should have every confidence in responding to the language of sexual proposition. Social responsibility pertains to the situations in which proposition overtakes request or consent.

The Visible Hand of the Market: Public Inequality and Private Violence

Dear Readers,

Pardon the hiatus, if you would be so kind. I can't say that I won't go away again, but instead I will promise to post some of the thoughts I've begun but not completed over the last six months. It seems that, now, this is how I blog.

The following are notes I took while trying to think of something to move the discussion about the Supreme Court hearings on DOMA from where it got stuck--namely, in simple assertions that gay marriage is the new interracial marriage, and denials thereof.

--------

Drawing these equations is fraught, I know. We know about the similar objections: opponents have variously asserted that gay marriage and interracial marriage are unnatural, antisocial, and confusing or outright damaging to children. Advocates for a liberalizing gesture argue that unrestricted choice in the marital arena is as much a hallmark of a free person as the ability to select any new model of cell phone.

I'd like to come at these from a different angle and talk about the shared status of both interracial and same-sex trysts as open secrets. In the spirit of the tried-and-true feminist dictum that "the personal is political," I'd like to sketch out some ways that the open secret of widely-known private affairs connects with the official world of law and economics.

I Didn't Know Lincoln Was Jesus, and Other Things I Learned at the Movies

I may not bring 400 hundred years of slavery and  oppression to Lincoln--I'm not that old. But I do bring two films worth of acid reflux to this latest attempt by le Spielberg to deal with the Negro question. So, in addition to *SPOILING THE PLOT* of Lincoln, I fear this post may also spoil the cheering over the national reunification the film wants to praise and call forth again.

My first disappointment with Spielberg's colored people was in The Color Purple. To keep this part brief, suffice it to say that I don't mind films differing from books. I do mind when they veer from the womanist politics of the novel by having the one female character who is independent of the story's violent men turn 180 degrees for no reason to cry out "Papa, I'se married!" That's not a difference; that's a violation of the whole spirit of the enterprise.

More recently, in the days of Amistad, Speilberg said (on Oprah, with Debbie Allen near him for backup) that he wanted to create a story so that his adopted black children could be proud of their country. I kept thinking that there is another option: help create a country your adopted black children can be proud of. In any case, this desire to exculpate the nation led him to the absolutely false courtroom climax in which John Quincy Adams wins the freedom of the Amistad mutineers through an impassioned Abolitionist speech when, in fact, JQA argued that, as they revolted at sea and were not yet the property of a slaveholder in the Americas, they should be free to return home. JQA was an unlikely hero for a story of the triumph of colorblindness anyway, he who withheld his sympathy from Desdemona in a review of Othello, because he believed that nature would always punish such outrages as sex across the color line.

So I come to Lincoln not primed to be pleased.

Phrases to Consider Retiring in 2013: 1. (White) Privilege

Nothing lasts forever. Gum loses its flavor. Welcomes are worn out. In the hopes of keeping critical edges honed, AintStudyingYou is sponsoring a discussion of which phrases, memes, habits, and tendencies to consider retiring for the 1-3. Please submit your suggestions (serious and humorous, personal and public) to the comments section and we'll see what kind of series we can come up with. 

My first nominee for forced retirement: (white) privilege...

This month, I have fallen down the rabbit-hole of privilege memes. Some (like this one on literacy) I found illuminating and forceful. Still, I find myself doubting that privilege is the most accurate or useful way of approaching social inequalities. In fact, I have lost faith in these exercises of cataloging privileged groups (whites, Christians, first-worlders, citizens, thin people, straights, cis-genders) and enumerating their ever-expanding privileges.

Therefore, be it hereby stated that I, AintStudyingYou, am perfectly willing to consider retiring  all variations on the term "privilege" (white, male, cis-gender, thin, etc), if certain stipulations are met.

White-on-White Crime: Domestic Terrorism Widens its Reach

Preface: I haven't had time to verify statistics on whether, in fact, white-on-white crime as a form of massacre is new in the US. In this case, I'm trying to think of what it would mean to add that to our repertoire of signs of social illness. 

In the days since Newtown, I have been looking for understanding about the apparent link between white males and mass violence in recent US history. Circa 1994, when Newt Gingrich helmed the Republican Revolution that gave the party control of Congress for the first time in decades, pundits described "angry white males" as the voting bloc responsible for the shift.  At the time, portraits of this constituency focused on their fire-breathing resentment.

At present, the mood seems elegiac. In the grips of this lament for the passing of what Fox News describes as "your father's America," a strange consensus is appearing across the political spectrum. (Follow this link to read David Brooks and Gail Collins of the New York Times in agreement that the "white working class" bears the brunt of economic inequality--an accord that emerges in spite of the fact that unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos are in many regions, including their own, as much as double that of whites).

If my previous post was about our practiced exercise of sympathy on behalf of white boys, this outpouring of feeling across lines of region, income, and region would seem to confirm my observations.

One comment in particular struck me while searching the internet. I find it a straightforward explanation of why gun sales spike when Democrats (not least President Obama) take the White House. I would prefer not to reduce a complex political and economic project to the emotion of "race hatred." After all, race hatred without voting power and firearms wouldn't concern me much. Besides, almost no one white admits to "hating" nonwhite Americans anymore. So, to get away from sanctimonious condemnations of hate-filled racists (always imagined in the South and the Midwest), let's call it the marriage of anti-federalism and white national masculinity. Said one commenter on Daily Kos (notable for his lack of inflammatory language):

"I think the extreme emotions worked up by the fear of gun restrictions plays into a sense of powerlessness felt by most working class guys I know. (I'm a blue collar gun owning hunter, and I even have a diesel pickup). Our wages have gone down our whole lives, a doctor's visit could mean losing our houses, ethnicities and languages we don't understand are mainstream." 

The writer's gesture toward "ethnicities and languages we don't understand" strongly suggests the "working class guys" he imagines are white Americans. If one really stretches, the group might include non-immigrant blacks and English-speaking Latinos. The way he makes "working class" identical to "white citizen" is something I've addressed elsewhere. In the process of this relatively mild and seemingly innocuous exercise in nativism, he makes two moves I find confounding. First, he insists that national and linguistic Others have become "mainstream." Outside of the most major cities, where can one use any language other than English to sell or obtain goods and services? For that matter, when was the last major film or weekly television program that featured a cast that wasn't predominantly white and that didn't speak in English? The writer's sense of loss is notably disproportionate to the actual loss.

Second, there are those amazing commas in the last sentence, linking economic issues of wages and health care to the aforementioned sense of lost dominance in the realm of culture and representation. It would seem as if, for this frustrated white male figure, the loss of cultural power is connected, in some inarticulable but deeply felt way, to depressed wages and soaring health care costs. From within this logic, two solutions present themselves: 1) oppose immigration, affirmative action, welfare and other expenditures allegedly earmarked for non-natives; 2) stock up on guns to prevent the federal government from extracting property for redistributive purposes.

It barely requires saying that the image of federal imposition in mind relates to those two great impositions on white property: emancipation and desegregation, both implemented with the conspicuous intervention of federal troops.

A New Age of Sympathy?

I had not intended to reintroduce Ain't Studying You with this post, but I've been doing so much writing and thinking on gun violence in the US that it seemed appropriate.

I nearly typed that I'd been doing thinking "in the wake of Newtown." I hesitate there because I am disturbed by the tendency to disconnect Newtown from Kansas City, Jacksonville, Sanford, not to mention the number of fatalities by guns or drones that remain untold and publicly unmourned.

It seems important to think about the injunction to feel worse about this loss of life than about others. (I'm drawing here on Fred Moten's crystalline explanation of the demand on the so-called Left for "more feeling" for the dead of 9/11 than those innocent dead of US strikes before or after it.) The distribution of sympathy--as much as that of wealth, rights, and guns--remains a life or death matter. What follows is, quite simply, a call to feel more often about more people.

I'll believe the Republicans want to return to a Christian nation...

when candidates tackle what I consider to be one of the most egregious lapses in faith, morals, and religious observance in contemporary America. If they are serious about re-establishing Christian parameters for conduct in this nation, they should insist that there be no professional sports -- or any other business, for that matter -- conducted on Sundays. It is the Sabbath, after all. The whole network of athletes and coaches, announcers and camera crew, stadium employees, bar owners, bookies, and more are, in fact, working on the day when we are not to toil but to give thanks to God.

When I was a child in the 1980s, many businesses were still closed on Sundays -- and not just Mom and Pop stores, either. As a Catholic schoolboy, I took the third commandment quite seriously: even when I did not attend Church, I knew that I was supposed to and felt appropriately guilty about it. The situation in 2011 could not be more different -- not just for me but across the nation. The NFL is its own Sunday ritual, one that requires almost no physical or moral effort but that does include continual solicitations. Call commercials the television version of passing the collection plate. The NFL-goer's duty, then, is not tithing to enable the work of the Church. Instead the imagined male viewer now has a moral duty to buy basic cable and the NFL channel--not to mention team paraphernalia and sponsors' products. What's most disturbing is that the collection plate is no mere analogy: Christianity has actually been hired to add its moral force to market culture.

Burying the Lead: Governor Christie's Plan to Use Diversity Against the Diverse

Today's New York Times gushes:

Gov. Chris Christie made a broad stroke for diversity on New Jersey’s Supreme Court on Monday, nominating one man who would be the first openly gay justice, and another who would be the first Asian and first immigrant to serve.

For the moment, I am going to skip over the fact that I'm pretty sure they meant a "bold strike for diversity." Perhaps the preposterousness of a statement linking Christie with progressivism (which will become clear soon enough) scrambled the language centers in their brains over at the NYT. Instead, I would like to focus on the odd structure of this article--an elaborated version of the story circulating at a variety of newspapers, blogs, and online magazines.

The official story (pre-packaged, it seems, by the identical language of the news outlets) is that Governor Christie is heroically leading the charge to diversify the New Jersey Supreme Court. The fact that he was, in fact, responsible for the whitening of the Court is buried and camouflaged in the currently unchallenged story of triumph. So, too, is the fact that his actions are a clever, subversive response to Democrats in the State Senate who implored (be careful what you ask for) that Christie "appoint a racially diverse court that looks like the state of New Jersey." The fact that this "diversity" will actually have terrible consequences for the diverse is drowned out by the imperative to celebrate.


While it is certainly possible Christie's "firsts" may pull their version of "Clarence Thomas's First Day" as envisioned by In Living Color, I don't intend to hold my breath.

Because the language of diversity and inclusion has taken over the language of justice, equality, and reparation in a weakened Democratic party, "liberals" have no response to Christie's move. It's diverse. It's inclusive. It's just that the gay/immigrant/multiracial symbolism covers a multitude of sins....

The Ghost of Thatcher Past?

In a campaign season when Newt Gingrich experienced at least a brief resurgence by claiming that he is "unconventional," in the mode of Thatcher or Reagan, the type of analysis offered below, from Germaine Greer, is especially urgent. I was especially struck by Rupert Murdoch's integral role in the rise of Thatcher (a prehistory rarely told in the US) and by her explanation of the downfall of trade unions in Britain. Might some of the same be said of failings of unions in the US that predisposed sectors of the public to believe conservative rhetoric aimed at obliterating them?

The alliance between the Maggie machine and the Murdoch media made possible the ultimate defeat of the print unions and the modernisation of the newspaper industry. And another brick was added to the rising edifice of Thatcherism.

Thatcher's strength derived directly from her limitations. If she had been better read, if she had been afflicted with imagination, if she had had a sense of humour, if she had had anywhere near as much insight into the lives of ordinary people as she claimed to have, she would have been unable to pursue her headlong career, riding roughshod over the consensus towards the property-owning debtor economy in which we now struggle. If socialism had been in better shape, she would not have been able to turn it into a dirty word or confuse it with totalitarianism and state monopoly capitalism. If the trade unions had not betrayed their own class, if they had understood the importance of organising all workers, including women, including those in the service sector, if they had not institutionalised inequality, the people might have defended the cause of labour. 

Thatcher thought that she and Reagan overthrew the Soviet Union, but the fact is that, like old Labour, it simply fell apart. The Thatcher phenomenon was only made possible by the weakness and indecisiveness of the opposition. It is justice of the most poetic kind that Thatcher's is now the evil empire and Thatcherism a dirty word.

Red Down Below: The Place of Indians in Black/White Dialogue

Preface: It appears that being swamped with work doesn't mean I blog less often, it means I blog more often in shorter bursts. Who knew?


In Wynton Marsalis's Pulitzer Prize Winning oratorio, Blood on the Fields, he condenses US history in this bit of poetry that forms the song's refrain and gives the work its title:

Blood on the fields

King Cotton grow

Brown soil yields

White up above

Red down below

A depiction of cotton-pickers in Texas. Source unknown. http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45173000/jpg/_45173825_187e10b7-bab0-4070-86b8-72dd5e42c3fa.jpg .

Marsalis produces a chilling portrait of the entangled violence and forced labor production that made the US a financially independent nation. In Marsalis's words, a shadowy, unknown force wields the whip and attacks black women's bodies: the blood is already on the fields. If we were to personify these metaphors, it would seem as if the brown soil of black female bodies is giving birth to cotton instead of children. In the lyrics that precede the refrain I quoted, we can see black hands (male and female) "picking, hoeing, feeding, and seeding." In this imagery, enslaved African America births a white supremacist nation ("white up above").

But what of this racial hierachy: white above, red at the absolute bottom with a layer of brown soil between? Black workers and mothers are dramatically present, while the presence of white masters and overseers can be inferred. Indians, however, are already disappeared. While Marsalis's oratorio begins with a wordless chant "To call the Indians out" -- the only place of the so-called "red" people in Blood on the Fields would seem to be in a past that runs quite literally underground: "Red down below." Any blood on the fields would have to be that of tortured African Americans; North America's indigenous peoples are not onstage in this racial conflict, their presence is subterranean, subtextual.

Marsalis's poetic history forms an interesting contrast with Dessalines, the revolutionary general and former slave who is said to have had this reflection on the achievement of Haitian independence from France in 1805:

We have avenged these true cannibals war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage; yes, I have saved my country. I have avenged America.

Bucking Columbus's insistence that flesh-eaters were around every corner when he landed at Hispaniola--Dessalines insists that Europeans who decimated and enslaved were cannibalistic in their use of other human beings. But, in reviving the first inhabitants' name for the island, calling the new "black Republic" by the Arawak name of Haiti, was he asserting kinship with an injured but still present people? Or was he promising that blacks would carry on in the name of a cruelly extinguished Amerindian population? In other words, was Dessalines trying to make political connections in the present, or was he lending luster to the first black postcolonial nation through association with the nobility of a vanquished people?

I ask these questions about black uses of the Indian past to open up another question related to a particular conversational habit I've encountered. You might say it's a move akin to that made by whites who would prefer to "talk about class" than about race. Where I posed some pretty stiff rebuttals to that false substitution, I have to say, this one leaves me genuinely perplexed.

If David Brooks Dislikes It...

then it is probably the path you should take.


In his most recent column, David Brooks suggests President Obama should reverse his recent more combative turn and make (more) conciliatory gestures toward Republicans. I think the only reason Mr. Brooks would advise that President Obama's attempts to uphold some Left values (such as increasing the real share--and not just the symbolic/patriotic one--that citizens share in the nation) is "suicide" is because such a strategy will work. Brooks pretends sweet reasonableness when he is actually a partisan unafraid of bending the truth to make his arguments (see his very intentional misquotation of Justice Sotomayor during her confirmation hearings. Attention, Mr. Brooks: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life," is absolutely not equivalent to "a wise Latina woman would make better decisions than a white male." The first is a wish; the latter is a statement of fact. And you knew that when you misquoted it).


I have no problem with Brooks's partisanship. I have a problem with his feigned moderation, his pretense toward a (pseudo)scientific objectivity (with all his nonpartisan articles on individual and social psychology). This is not to mention his insistence that his position is always coincident with that of the American people. Now, that's a game I'm sick of from both parties. I could stand for everyone to stop saying "the American people want" or "the American people don't want." How about some truth?: "I believe this is the best course of action because it will have these effects." Or: "I think this is the right thing to do for these reasons." Or, even: "I think this is the right thing to do because it fits these core national values -- or, even better, because it furthers the cause of human rights." 


I know these latter words are not perfect, but at least they offer the possibility for a persuasive argument. We are stuck in an argument about who the American people are. When, in fact, the argument should be over what actions and policies are just and humane. David Brooks contributes very little to that debate. And President Obama's insistence that Congress pass a jobs bill is, finally, a turn in the right direction because it is framed as a question regarding the right thing to do, the responsibility of government to its people. Conservatives can disagree, and I hope they do. But the ensuing debate could be about persuading Americans to go in one direction or another, instead of politicians and pundits claiming (ad nauseam) that the direction they advocate is already what all Americans want.


So... (as a follow-up to my last piece), I suppose we'll see if our black President can represent the working-class underdogs our nation typically imagines as white and move our government to do something to help their plight. (It's too much to hope he'll address the ways that race affects class, so I won't).

Great Expectations, Frustrated: or The White Face of "Class Diversity"

Dear Readers:


Posts will be fewer and farther between for another month or so as I venture into the job market incognegro. That's right: your friendly blackademic is applying primarily for jobs that are not marked "colored only." This is not an entirely conscious choice; this year, there are few positions in African-American Literature or History before 1865. And, though I have a chapter that deals with Cherokee audiences of Shakespeare, I am not a specialist in Native American history and culture.


However, there are Shakespeare, Early American Literature, and 18th Century British Literature positions galore. I have always wanted for the consideration of those forces that shape the distribution of property and pleasure (race, gender, and sexuality among them) to be central to academic study rather than peripheral and subordinate. We shall see if my applications--which speak to those areas but do not announce where I sit in them--are appealing.


Have we come a long way, baby? Would my being hired without announcing my blackness be a sign of postracial utopia? Or does the success of critical race approaches in the academy have unintended negative consequences? Often, minority scholars celebrate not having to study their own identity group as progress. But the more meaningful victory, I think, will be when such study is neither disallowed nor deemed mere partisan advocacy, a dead-end avenue that never opens onto the "big issues."


This thought brings me to the language of class, in its Marxist and populist incarnations--both of which have been reactivated by Occupy Wall Street and its galvanizing slogan, We are the 99%. Two caveats before I begin: first, I am tremendously supportive of the OWS protest. Their courage to be there and to stay give me hope that a new social contract might be negotiated. What I say below is an attempt to help provide a different way of looking at the old "identity politics is tearing our movement apart" conundrum. My second caveat relates to that: this is an early draft, a work in progress that I will continue to edit and revise.

Race and Masculinity, Sports and Swagger -- Second Thoughts after Justin Timberlake

One day I was watching C-Span's Book TV. Toni Morrison was speaking to a room of librarians. She read from the first pages of her then-new novel, Love. When she finished, she closed her portfolio and said: "This is from the new novel, Love, which--as you can tell--is perfect."

I hollered.

The combination of audacious pride and irony tickles me to this day. But if I like pride and audacity, why was I so repulsed by Punk'd and then, again, by Timberfake's and Fallon's History of Hip-Hop (the topic of last week's thoughts on the Timberlake phenomenon) ? Why do I find it ok for the senior black diva to show this arrogance and not the junior white boy?

Well, to start, I'd have to say I consider the artist's back story. I know that Morrison didn't just waltz into her position in national (not to mention global) arts and letters. Her success came relatively late in life -- she was nearly 40 when her first novel was published. The acclaim for her work was not immediate and universal. She paid dues. And, to this day, some cultural critics take it as a badge of honor to despise her writing.† So, I like her for the same reason I like the way Navratilova and Boris Becker played tennis. (Schiavone has the mantle now). I admire people for whom it doesn't come easily, but who persist and excel nonetheless. I admire people who take a risk and leave it all on the court (or on the stage). Conversely, I also admire those--like Morrison and Roger Federer--who can produce magic, seemingly at will, yet have a humility about it, even if slyly expressed.*

But the obligation to work hard and the freedom to express self-satisfaction often get distributed unevenly in a race-and-gender matrix--especially in an economy that sells us fantasies of race- and gender-specific properties (see: the Jersey Shore, or, actually, nearly any reality show where there is no task at hand). So, in the interest of taking a risk of my own, I am going to step down from my academic pedestal and try to explore the roots of my contradictory distaste for white braggadocio and admiration of the diva mode... but through autobiographical rather than sociological means. Of course, I don't think that social and historical forces can be taken out of the picture, but those can be delivered via pronouncement or implied in a narrative. I'm going to try the latter as an experiment.

Meet the New Dad, Same as the Old (Deadbeat) Dad: Justin Timberlake Pt. 1

In a previous post, I talked about the unexpected trouble caused by the success of African-American Studies (broadly) and black feminism specifically. It's a common story about subnational cultures or youth subcultures. When the underground comes above-ground, more often than not, the community that nurtured the art when no one else respected it suddenly finds that the fruit of their unassisted labor-- newly popular and profitable--is claimed as common property.

Some of you are old enough to recall (and others should avail themselves and look into) the bad old days in the history of hip-hop. Once, MTV wouldn't touch the stuff. Then they played it on a restricted hour on a Saturday night on a show called Yo! MTV Raps. From those marginal beginnings, hiphop has replaced rock as the sound of the US, exported to the world. Well, this is the way of things. And it is certainly a kind of success.

But then there's the moment when you turn on the TV, and Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon are performing a "history of rap." They aren't apologizing. They know the songs and they're doing it. Am I just jaded and paranoid for noticing the Roots, the all-black back-up band whose musical talent underwrites the white boys messing around up front? Does anyone listen to what The Roots actually play behind them, or is it just assumed that, since they are the black back-up band and they sound fine that they must also sound good (enough)?

What did I want from Fallon or JT? Certainly not a disclaimer: We apologize for being white and performing these songs. That would have been ridiculous. Yet, some other things stuck out to me--and this, with only one viewing. The one song they referenced by a white rapper was cut extremely short. They just gave us the Alright stop of "Ice, Ice Baby." What's the message there? That one of the first rap songs to hit #1 on the Billboard charts did not deserve to be performed? (Ice's single and album went to #1 on Billboard's pop charts, the first double-whammy in the genre's history. Well, I suppose if I can root irrationally for the Williams sisters and any black contestant on Jeopardy, white people can go nuts for white rappers in a black-invented and -dominated genre).

Timberlake's and Fallon's refusal to sing the lyric said to me that "Ice, Ice Baby" was simply too uncool to perform. But isn't part of its uncoolness that Vanilla Ice's roots in the vanilla suburbs were exposed? So isn't part of what is happening when Fallon and JT do not deign to perform it a refusal to inhabit the illegitimate white rapper position? It seems to me that this moment establishes distance from the old white person who couldn't hang. We are the new white party boys, it says. And we don't even need your permission to be in black cultural territory, because we've moved the hood to a sound studio at 30 Rock and hired you to bring the funk to us.

In the end, I just want good art. I love Michael McDonald's soulful singing; I agree with New Yorker film critic David Denby that the best black actors clamor to get in John Sayles' movies because he writes such amazing parts for them. I think John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation is among the very smartest, most beautiful narratives of race, class, and sex in our literature. So it's hard for me to put my finger on what makes me defensive when it comes to Timberfake (now that he's off Saturday Night Live, I quite like Jimmy Fallon). I suppose it is that with the artists I enjoy, I sense they are hard-working and humble, and this combination wins them amazing, uncommon insight. They don't think they already have black culture down (hell, I been black for thirty-three years and I still don't have it down).†

Milan Kundera once wrote that love is a continual interrogation of the other. I take this to mean that when you have no more questions, you have fallen out of love -- the opposite of love being indifference (or dis-interest, as it were). So the white artists that I enjoy are those who show a continued curiosity about the black thing, the way it may overlap with their experiences and, right at the moment of identicality, breaks off again... only to return, at the moment of extremest difference, to another point of convergence. This is our shared history in this country. Its inequalities are not simply dissolved through the arrival or acknowledgement of the multiracial. To reverse a point made by Mahmood Mamdani, even if cultural identities are cumulative, political identities tend to be singular. In other words, bilingualism, mixed-parentage, and cosmopolitanism do you little good when the person sitting in judgment of your job application or your court case has one of those switches flipped. You become citizen or illegal, man or freak, Israeli or Palestinian, family man or sexual predator, and your fate proceeds accordingly until the next reading.

But it is a bit strange, now, after channeling culture, geography, and money along racial lines for centuries to suddenly declare that your black blues ain't so black after all. I find myself hearing things like That's not black: it's Southern--as if something couldn't be both. As if black is exclusionary in the ways that white was. Hell, as a discard category, black has had far less capacity to reject what gets thrown into it. The real estate (and symbolic space) of blackness has not been typically been sealed by restrictive covenants. Speaking generally we have been obliged to take in all shades and all kinds--those who wanted to be with us, and those who were banished and had nowhere else to go.

But the fact that white American culture is hybrid is the result, it would seem, either of intentional appropriation or of minority influences that had to overcome white indifference or dismissal. Claiming, then, that black cultural production is hybrid is an entirely different enterprise--one that comes perilously close to staking a claim to the very baby you once dropped at the side of the road and left to fend for itself. To the extent that white America has been a deadbeat Dad to black America (to borrow from Hortense Spillers' "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe"), white scholars and cultural producers might tread lightly when returning to embrace the children, all grown up with no help from Dad. A rapprochement can happen, but it takes time and effort.  The claim of genetic similarity will not be enough, just as the knowledge that we've all been here together on this continent as one (un)happy family has not been enough.

 --- In one week, Part Two -- "Sports and Swagger"

† Guare, for example, builds an enormously moving story out of a simple dilemma for the white female protagonist. This gay black hustler comes into their lives, after having memorized the connections of Manhattan's social circles and learned an amazing amount of art and literary history. She decides, at his request, to take him in, to teach him the family business. Her children want nothing to do with her, but this kid wants in. After he is arrested by the police on nebulous charges, he disappears into the prison system. She tries to find him but realizes, sadly, "We weren't family. We didn't know Paul's name." This person who knew her, loved her, touched her life and invaded her dreams was gone to her forever, as if he'd never been there at all. It's this loss, and the desire to prevent it, that sparks a massive change in her life. Guare was smart enough not to pretend that we get a complete passport into someone else's community--or even into their individual psyche. But we get the possibility to work on it, to turn it  over and over like the film famous Kandinsky canvas in the film, painted on both sides.

Translocations

Recently, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Jennifer Boylan which contended that trans people always come last when it comes to LGBT rights. The article participates in a longer discussion that I can't recapitulate here. Suffice it to say, that conversation is about the use of gender normativity to grease the wheels of gay and lesbian assimilation into middle America -- only faintly tomboyish women marrying each other, while muscled, still-manly men do the same. Since trans people can't be gender normative, their struggles are necessarily marginalized when campaigns for gay equality emphasize gender normativity. Many indignant commenters insist that gays and lesbians cannot be opposed to trans people, that only the straight majority can do that. Unfortunately, that's just not the case, as people opposed on one topic can share ideas on another. I like to think of such partners as strange bedfellows, indeed.

This article and the resulting backlash prompted me to think about my own travels, relocations that often transformed my way of thinking about gender and sexuality. With that, here is "Translocations."

When Police Are the Anarchists

When in grad school, I taught an SAT prep class to keep afloat financially. I remember going over some of Greek and Latin roots of words to help my students (mostly Korean, nonnative speakers) get better access to meanings. Drifting away from the pure rote memorization the program demanded, I instigated a discussion about "anarchy" -- a word that literally means "without a chief or head" but has also come to mean tumultuous disorder. Why, I asked them, does the absence of a ruling authority immediately convert into a picture of violent chaos? And what constituency was behind the drive to fuse the literal meaning (no leader) and the figurative meaning (orgiastic riot)?

If I were willing to lose that job, I would have sermonized about contradictions on the political right. They have a libertarian streak that says with less government, citizens would actually be more virtuous. Hence, businesses and property owners should be free to engage in any contractual activity they like (besides, of course, same-sex marriage contracts). However, at the same time, they support "tough on crime" policies against people whom they pre-emptively define out of the category of citizens. Those people, apparently--those poor people, the ones that are immigrants, or don't speak English, or those criminals who don't wear business suits--are inherently immoral.Ω  The story goes that the police are the only protection from the anarchy that these people aim--every moment of their lives--to impose. Therefore, the absence of police automatically means that chaos and disorder are rampant.

I find myself thinking of these slides (from libertarian to authoritarian styles, from the absence of a leader to the absence of social cohesion) with the guilty verdict handed down in the case of New Orleans officers convicted of shooting six citizens (and killing two) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I remember being furious with the stories that were coming out--not only from the 24-hour speculation channels but also from "old media" like the august New York Times: babies being raped in the Superdome, a gang of 400 armed black people crossing a bridge to loot, deranged black people shooting at military helicopters.

Anyone who has reflected on being targeted by police knew immediately that all of this was sheer nonsense.  We didn't need the later articles retracting the reports. The reason? We never believed black people (the poor ones who haven't made it into the middle class) are so savage that the instant the police presence is suspended they'd do every manner of evil--hell, improvise new types of evil like it was a jazz solo or a freestyle rap. We were smarter than that. But, unfortunately, law and order/tough on crime talk has been so effective that even people in targeted groups repeat it. When the police cat is away, the negroes unleash anarchy.

•People displaced by the storm provided some of the sensationalized stories. Perhaps they thought heightening the amount of danger they were in would get them help. After all, the hurricane and flood were not enough to arouse many people's charity for those people.

• Police Superintendent Edwin Compass offered "babies getting raped" on Oprah. To be clear, he's black. But his skin color helps prove my point about the success of "law and order" talk. Being black doesn't make one immune from parroting that discourse. In fact, he might have felt he had to master it to rise in the ranks of the police department. By being so fully indoctrinated in police thinking, he is as fluent in "those people are animals" as anyone else and clearly believed that a "thin blue line" separated good law-abiding folks from near-animals waiting to be uncaged.

• Tiger Woods said (I'll never forget this and he's unlikely to ask for forgiveness for it):

"It's just unbelievable. Not only the devastation, but how people are behaving, with the shootings and now with the gang rapes and the gang violence and shooting at helicopters who are trying to help people out, trying to rescue people, I just don't understand that whole concept. You figure if anything, they would all come together and try to help one another out, but they are doing the exact opposite. From that standpoint, I just can't see how the community is doing that to themselves."

Doing that to themselves?!?!  Two words on the broken levee ("the devastation") and then sentence upon sentence of paranoid fantasies of Negroes Gone Wild: Hurricane Edition?!?! Better, I think, for Mr. Woods to have remained silent.

How much of those nightmares turned out to be true in the light of day? Well, no 7-year old was found raped and with her throat slit--much less a whole group of babies.† And considering that the National guard was sent to New Orleans with guns before water or medical supplies arrived, how would a citizen know whether a helicopter was being sent to help them or kill them? If you thought the latter, you had good reason and may well have shot at a plane.  Or maybe the shot was fired in an attempt to get attention to be rescued--or even arrested. The accommodations in prison beat dying of thirst on your roof, I'm sure.

The point is that the presumption that it must have been lawless, looting, gang-raping, gang-banging insanity is the least likely explanation. After all, these were people who had no food, no water, no medication. They were unsure of where their loved ones were and if they were alive, unsure of whether or not they would have homes to go back to. What person, in the midst of that, decides to rape a baby--much less participate in a gang-rape of a baby? Can you imagine the unfortunate victims of any of the tsunamis being described this way? Or the tornados that ripped through the Midwest this year? I can't. Those New Orleans blacks must be super-negroes, because even without food and water, they can still commit unimaginably, heinous crimes. So why send food and water?

And that conclusion, dear readers, is the reason for this whole law and order/tough on crime mantra. It's not meant for unique cases like Katrina. It is meant to paint a general portrait of a certain segment of the population in effect at all times. It doesn't need proof. It already predicts this behavior because it knows those people.

So, let's be clear: Katrina didn't unleash black anarchy, it unleashed the authoritarian imagination--the same imagination that confuses the absence of an uninhibited police force with an anti-social paradise for crime. (More on the "liberal media's" participation in paranoid racial fantasies below...)

Queer Auntie for the Straight Black Family: A quick follow-up on Tyler Perry

For AJC and DLM

It has often been said that Tyler Perry's films are homophobic. But what if that's not the case?



Could it be that Tyler Perry is trying to find the oddly gendered person a stable and necessary place in the "family" that is the black race? We know that some families beat, disown, or try to correct gender-inappropriate family members. Could Perry really be saying that his wild, transvestite character Madea--warts and all--is actually the most important aspect of her extended family, even if she does not have a hetero/nuclear family of her own? Could this actually be a blow in favor of new family formations, instead of the insipid, worn-out, impossible gender oppositions his films claim to sell?

Certainly this is the effect of the films. Whether Perry knows that this is what he has done, I'm not sure. And, even if he does, the cost is high: Madea gets to stay in the family, it seems, because of her perpetual offer of service to help them meet their hetero dreams. It's not clear what she gets out of it... any more than I could ever figure out what the guys on _Queer Eye_ got out of being straight guys' fairy godmothers... or what Lisa Turtle (yes, I went there!) got out of being everyone's matchmaking confidante on _Saved by the Bell_ .(For those of you who are too young to get the reference, take lonely Mercedes from _Glee_, subtract her singing voice and about 80 lbs, and you've got Lisa).

Apparently, it easier to imagine all these black feminine figures as lacking desire -- the more so that they can help you get what you want. Or, put another way, their only desire is that you get what you desire. It's a beautiful fantasy for the one getting. But it seems a bad trade for the person giving: you won't banish or annihilate me as long as I promise to spend all my time helping you get what you want. Umm, ok. I guess that's the assimilation two-step. Glad to know who's leading that dance.