I very much enjoyed the read. There is always a lot to mine and to think about in your essays. Thank you so much.
The passage that most caught my eye is this:
"What does it do to people, I asked the students, to have every aspect of your life controlled as a constant message that you aren’t to be trusted? Which related to the student’s secondary question about neighborhoods—if you live in a neighborhood that doesn’t have sidewalks or parks, or shade or access to green spaces, or is cut through by a 4- or 5- or 6-lane road and there’s no way for kids to walk to school safely—much less if you live in a region under constant oppression and surveillance, ripped from freedom by razor wire and armed patrols—that’s a pretty strong message about whose neighborhoods and lives are valued, whether by your own city officials or a colonizing imperial power.
Extend that to the criminalization of anyone who can’t afford a home at all, and the message about who matters couldn’t be clearer."
One could write thousands of words on these thoughts alone, but for the sake of brevity (brevity, after all, being "the soul of wit"), here are some of the brief thoughts your words inspired:
They reminded me of the highly structured and regulated apartheid state imposed upon the Palestinians of the West Bank by Israel, all made possible by the support--moral, financial, and military--of the United States of America.
Your words reminded me of how the United States forced Native Americans to live on, what was at the time, the most desolate and valueless parcels of land imaginable, upon which they were left to eek out miserable and penurious lives--all because they had the audacity of not being born Christians of European descent. The message of their relative value could not have been clearer.
Your words sparked in me the memory of an essay I read many years ago about Jeremy Bentham's concept of the Panopticon. Here is a short definition from Wikipedia:
"The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single corrections officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.
Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation."
This strikes me as being very similar to how religion operates. An all-knowing God allegedly sees everything we do, and everything we think or feel (Oops!), and we are doomed for all eternity to sizzle like Jimmy Dean pork sausages in the fiery bowels of hell if we dare succumb to the weaknesses and errors built into our being that we never chose or asked for in the first place.
Also, it seems to me that we are living in an age of the digital panopticon--imposed incrementally and surreptitiously for commercial exploitation, to groom us all to be good and docile little consumers, and to keep us blind and numb to any possibilities of being that might threaten the dominant structure.
One last item: It seems to me that the spirit of the Vagrancy (or Vagabonds) Acts is not only very much alive today, but is an essential component of modern capitalism and so-called property rights.
I always look forward to your comments, Kenneth, and the less brief the better! You always have a wealth of insights and ideas.
Palestine was--perhaps obviously--top of my mind when I said this, linked of course to the reservation system (I don't know how many non-Native American people know that Native Americans's land was not just stolen, but that for decades they were not allowed to physically leave the reservations without permission). Both of which always bring me back to 2000 years of oppression of Jewish people throughout Europe, especially the ghettoes in western Europe and the shtetls in eastern Europe. It's impossible for me to see what the Israeli government and army have been doing to Palestine and Palestinians for something like a century without wondering how they could have looked at the 2000-year oppression and massacres and wholesale evictions of Jewish people and taken the worst possible lessons from it.
And definitely the Panopticon! I think Big Brother in 1984 was partly based on that idea? That you were always being watched, even if not actively in that very moment. You just had to assume they saw everything.
The Pennsylvania penitentiary described in Jane Brox's book Silence was partly inspired by that, but somewhat different because it was also based on Christian ideas of silent isolation and penance--clean living and contemplation of your sins. It was disastrous for people's mental health. Not very many actively choose a monastic life, for good reason. Most people do not do well in that kind of social isolation, and it's awful to subject anyone to it when it's not their choice. We are obligatorially social! (Also I cannot spell obligatorially. Obligatorial?)
I think the spirit of the Vagrancy Act is indeed alive. It depresses me that it's very much alive in peoples' imaginations -- "these people living in tents who have nowhere to go to the bathroom are a threat to my property values and comfortable life!" -- and in how it manifests legally. As Willa Cather wrote in one of her novels (Shadows on the Rock), the law is there to protect property, and thinks too much on property.
It makes me very sad that so many people walk through this life believing in a god, yet insisting that said all-knowing deity is punitive, judgmental, and mercurial. Why not believe in the kindness of a god? Why believe you're going to burn for eternity if you stumble over rules you might not even understand?
I'd rather believes in god/dess(s/es) of chokecherries and clear mountain streams ...
Is it fair to say that research is world-building? And as with world-building, you wanna follow the iceberg rule? The 90% you never show is as essential to telling a good story as the 10% you do. Are you close to that ratio, or are you gonna end up showing even less than 10%?
I like that! Research is indeed a kind of world building. And you can never go wrong sending me N.K. Jemisin! Excited to listen to that.
And that's a good question. I'd say less. Maybe 5%. But I do overdo it a little. I just want to get to know ALL the angles, and there's always another footnote to follow ...
An excess of research is never wasted. The spillovers you mention are the unintentional sparks that lead to massive insights. Ultimately, we are all laying down bricks for future generations, building bridges of hope and designing better systems than we currently have. Your extensive research is necessary because you never know how that information will combine in your brain to create new ideas. Much of our work is a semi-conscious amalgamation of information, memories, and imagination. For this reason, writing is a deliberate yet beautiful process of manifesting how we want to serve the world.
I am so grateful for your laborious service to this community Nia. 💜
Your research is aspirational for me, Swarna! I often save your newsletters because of the sheer amount I learn from them, along with the incredible writing. I can't imagine how much time you spend on each one.
And that is so true! We never know how it will all mix together to bring forth new ideas and connections. The semi-consciousness of it all shouldn't be downplayed.
I do that too with your essays Nia! I learn so much from your research and your insights have helped me a many times get clarity on seemingly unrelated topics. It’s like a culture of various ideas sitting there fermenting into something else. I love that!
Also I feel like the gaps between excess research and complete silence is what leads to the pure magic of writing. I sit in those spaces for weeks sometimes for something to arise which is worth sharing.
A culture of fermenting ideas! Perfect! It's amazing how versatile fermentation is for a metaphor, and so true. And how beautiful, the space between research and silence and what we find in there. Writing is so, so weird and so, so beautiful.
Ha! Love that. (I have to credit Jael Prezeau for my knowing those lines. So much of my thinking patterns and early lessons came from her English classes.)
And yay! I am in Portland all week, but will be back next week. Fingers crossed they're still at their prime. You might be happy to know that I gave a bag of your dried transparents to Mr. Irritable Métis himself a few months ago and told him where the apples came from, and he thoroughly enjoyed them.
Thank you for this. I hadn't thought in this way of the many rabbits I chase as part of my research and I'm happy knowing it's not just me but others also pursue "too much" research.
Glad to know I'm not alone! And I suppose we get to define what "excess" is -- what harm is there in being well-informed on our subjects and their implications?!
"policy wonk" yeah, okay, sorry for reading the rules to the game, shitass. Somebody's got to know how our lives are casually chopped and screwed six ways to Sunday. What an ignorant, obtuse, and insulting way to insult another person.
"Changing a paradigm is hard, involving as it does a massive upheaval of perception and possibility, and especially hard if you can’t see it for what it is. The ancient Greek maxim to “know thyself”—inscribed on the Temple of Apollo—applies equally to knowing the structures that shape our world and our expectations of it. If we want life to count more than skin in the game, more than profit, we have to know what we’re fighting."
Helluva paragraph there, Antonia. Glad you wrote it.
Our manufactured reality is a mindfuck. It's daunting and haunting to get one's awareness around—just like the fact that an octopus exists...so alien and defying of definition. How can this be? How did it become? But when you begin, it's a rabbit hole of interrelated/interconnected events and trends and outcomes. Then the question is: what am I to do with what has been revealed?
Like you, I'm not a "policy wonk" and yet my writing is always entwined in the brutality of the dominant lifestyle, no matter how the words come. I try not to preach, but it often comes out that way, and I know this is the least receivable method of communicating unwelcome truths.
I dunno. I'm deeply troubled but I keep trying. I'm a feeler, an expresser, an uncomfortable sharer, not a convincer.
But it's a balm to read your words, because I constantly feel isolated and misunderstood at best, judged and dismissed at worst. I feel like this is the most important of human endeavors given the stakes and what we've already experienced and endured, but it falls on deaf and defensive ears.
I am the convinced, the aware. But what about the others?
"I'm a feeler, an expresser, an uncomfortable sharer, not a convincer." You know, I truly do believe that stories are the most reliable way to build empathy, for more than straightforward convincing. Stories matter. They last, and they stick with people, whatever the voice or tone.
Our manufactured reality really is a mindfuck, and so much of it is hidden, portrayed as "just the way things are." (Love the comparison to an octopus! What a miraculous creature.)
There's the undeniable insanity of change taking *so long* while more and more is destroyed, along with the fact that there is a limit to what people are willing to change. Anything that threatens their comfort--including their property in various forms--ends up being a hard barrier. That is a big part of why I do this work. If we want things to change, those in comfort who profess agreement with progressive change are going to have to start sacrificing, and there is a LOT they are unwilling to give up. Comfort and economic security most of all, no matter how tenuous those things actually are in a system that continually wants to strip both from those who have less and give all to those who already have the most.
It's interesting you mention defensive ears -- Noha commented on defensiveness, too. I think it's a huge barrier. It covers up an unwillingness to face the reality that what makes many of us comfortable comes at the expense of everyone else, and most people can't seem to handle that. The more ways we can find to show that a different way of living together is possible, one in which everyone's needs are met and life is respected, the weaker that defensiveness might become. Maybe.
Glad you dropped this piece, Antonia. I teared up a little when I read about the vagrancy act. On the road, I meet many with little choice but to live in the way they’re living, without brick-and-mortar walls and far less mobility than I enjoy. I don’t suspect the new regulations cropping up about sleeping in cities and such are necessarily targeted at those like me who live on the road with more choice (though they’ll certainly be applied). It’s the fact of the true target—poverty—that breaks my heart.
As ever, Antonia, I love your recordings. I love the depth of your research, wonky or no! Thank you.
Very kind words, Holly, thank you! And absolutely: with the popularity of Van Life (which I see a LOT of where I live) contrasted with the reality of people who are living on the outskirts of, say, Bozeman, Montana, in campers through no choice of their own, it's something I think about all the time.
I'm in Portland, Oregon, for the week, and was thinking about it yesterday. My son is roaming around on his own (gah! so grown-up!), so I was walking along the river by myself and was very tempted to take a nap on the grass. And was pretty sure that if I looked and/or was dressed differently, it might not be allowed, whereas being who and how I am I could probably get away with it for a few minutes. We all know who's being targeted.
Yes, I’ve had that experience so many times—knowing I’m being allowed liberties (and I do mean that ironically as well) that the way I look and read to others afford me that would not be afforded to others. It’s not OK.
I also wanted to say that I had the experience of visiting a couple of newly built prisons at Guantanamo Bay -- Camp V and Camp VI -- which were supposedly based on facilities from the Midwest somewhere.
That's very interesting. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising. I don't want to get distracted by pursuing research into prison architecture, but the bits I have read say a lot -- as I'm sure you know better than most of us -- about how people living within them are perceived by the systems that put them there. I found the part of Jane Brox's book "Silence" on Eastern State Penitentiary riveting and very disturbing.
Thank you, Noha! That means a lot. And yes -- it's the barriers I think about almost nonstop. It's in the interests of those in power to keep them invisible, which means more work for the rest of us in making them clear. 🕵🏻
I've just a had deep and difficult conversation with a dear friend about the invisibility of so many of those barriers - difficult because I think many of us carry so much hurt around the default, which skews to keeping them invisible, as you so well described.
Do you find that the response to highlighting the barriers is often defensiveness on those who are not affected by them? It's a pattern I've noticed, that I'm constantly doing a dance around what to point out and what will make me too much of a squeaky wheel, an angry racialized woman... And I'm curious if you have a similar experience with this...
Oh, absolutely. I'm glad you brought that up, though not glad you ran into it. The defensiveness is *constant.* It's what I've come to expect most.
I haven't written about this in quite a while, but I think that identity--how people see themselves and who they are--is one of the trickiest and most intractable issues we run into when advocating for progress or change in almost anything. In identity, I'm specifically talking about the stickiest kinds where I live, like being a cattle rancher or wheat farmer and what that means ("we feed the world," "we're the best stewards of the land," "we won 'the war'" [when there was no war, just theft and genocide, but they don't want to hear it]). But I first started thinking about it when reading a sociology study years ago about a steel plant that had shut down in the midwest. It was people's loss of identity that hit worst, even more so than the economic hit.
Anyway, that's a bit tangential from what you're talking about. But it seems to be rife in white people. The defensiveness is HUGE. And I am often at a loss for how to work my way through its tangles. I keep trying because I think change will remain a steeper battle than it needs to be until white people start dismantling their own internal defenses. I think you're right about how many people carry hurt around the default; there's also the weird knee-jerk reaction people get where they want to disavow any personal responsibility for ongoing damages and hurts in a system from which they themselves have benefited.
D.L. Mayfield had an interview a while back with Tori Williams, who runs an Instagram page called White Homework. It's a super long interview and mostly about shame and the evangelical churches they both grew up in, but there are some things Williams talked about that really stuck with me, like "shame is why the US, like people in the US, are having this allergic reaction to any kind of accountability around race and racism, and have, again, no resilience around these conversations, because we don't have the tools, we don't have the skill set, we haven't seen it demonstrated, we have no safe place to practice it. And so this is what I'm trying to change about the world." She works to help white people build emotional resilience and recognize their own shame responses that lead to defensiveness, which ... whew, I am in awe of anyone who is able to do that work.
Anyway, yes! Defensiveness is the most common response that I've run into, sometimes hidden behind anger. And it's absolutely unfair because it means everyone else has to do that dance around the feelings of the people who have benefited most from this crushing, oppressive system.
OMG please do not apologize! Novella length comments are my JAM lol... I appreciate this so much and I was nodding along to everything you wrote. Identity is so key to it. And the "we won the war" vs. recognition that there was no war is this constant refrain. I am often shaking my head at when it's a war and when it's injustice, and the pattern I've seen is that it's perceived as injustice and tragedy when white people are the ones suffering, and it's perceived as a war/ just the way things are / toughen up buttercup etc etc when anyone else is suffering.
I've grown so used to it and yet it's very hard to be on the receiving end up. Like, viscerally painful.
Haha, Mike Sowden and I always say the same thing to each other: Wall of Words is my JAM!
"It's perceived as injustice and tragedy when white people are the ones suffering, and it's perceived as a war/ just the way things are / toughen up buttercup etc etc when anyone else is suffering." YES.
I get into this conversation off and on when people say we have to let people come to these realizations in their own time. I know from personal and ancestral experience that this is true--it's hard to persuade anyone of anything they're not ready for--BUT sitting on that claim, that perspective, just accepts that everyone else has to continue suffering while those with means, comfort, and power take their time to come around. It's not okay. There have to be other approaches because it's absurd to expect most of the world to bear up under oppression while those either enacting or at least benefiting from the oppression avoid their discomfort in facing it.
Love that word "estivate" - thanks for introducing us. It'll probably become a household term as climate change ramps up.
Interestingly, I recently heard an interview with the actress Michelle Williams who is from Kalispell, and describes growing up with lots of strangers around because her great-grandparents who lived nearby were always taking in families who had nowhere to stay or were traveling. She says it shaped her sense of community in terms of having deep family feelings with people who weren't really your family.
"The research I do is frequently boring, written as it is for academic expectations and requirements, but it is rarely without some kind of gift, some spillover of story or insight or simple information that makes me feel like I’ve been rewarded." One of the nice things about Substack is that as readers we reap the rewards of all these spillovers, which then spill over and feed back into our conversations with others. If only there were a way to distill academic writing down to its spills and spoils.
I love it, too. 😊 Definitely describes the state of my mind and general being in summer.
That is very interesting. I'd love to hear that interview if you have a link to it. There are a number of people to share it with locally who would appreciate it. It's always been a small bit of pride for Kalispell to be able to claim her.
I suppose that's what nonfiction writers partly do, at least those of us who engage with academic writing. I think about that a lot with regards to science writing and science communication. It would be great if all scientists were great communicators, but not all of them are, and it would be unfair to require that of them in addition to good science. You need people who can take research and conclusions and find ways to bring them to the wider public in ways that make sense. It's full of pitfalls (on the rare but welcome occasions I get to do talks or workshops on science writing, I always share the Chocolate Hoax study story, which shows how sloppy science journalism can be), but also very important.
Oh, I should have included the link to the Michelle Williams interview, sorry. This is the Talk Easy podcast hosted by Sam Fragoso: https://talkeasypod.com/michelle-williams/
It's a pretty slick-looking podcast (just check out that A-list of celebrities on there), but I think he's a very talented interviewer. I cannot believe he's only 29!! There's also one with Lily Gladstone which may be of interest to some of your readers: https://talkeasypod.com/lily-gladstone/
I very much enjoyed the read. There is always a lot to mine and to think about in your essays. Thank you so much.
The passage that most caught my eye is this:
"What does it do to people, I asked the students, to have every aspect of your life controlled as a constant message that you aren’t to be trusted? Which related to the student’s secondary question about neighborhoods—if you live in a neighborhood that doesn’t have sidewalks or parks, or shade or access to green spaces, or is cut through by a 4- or 5- or 6-lane road and there’s no way for kids to walk to school safely—much less if you live in a region under constant oppression and surveillance, ripped from freedom by razor wire and armed patrols—that’s a pretty strong message about whose neighborhoods and lives are valued, whether by your own city officials or a colonizing imperial power.
Extend that to the criminalization of anyone who can’t afford a home at all, and the message about who matters couldn’t be clearer."
One could write thousands of words on these thoughts alone, but for the sake of brevity (brevity, after all, being "the soul of wit"), here are some of the brief thoughts your words inspired:
They reminded me of the highly structured and regulated apartheid state imposed upon the Palestinians of the West Bank by Israel, all made possible by the support--moral, financial, and military--of the United States of America.
Your words reminded me of how the United States forced Native Americans to live on, what was at the time, the most desolate and valueless parcels of land imaginable, upon which they were left to eek out miserable and penurious lives--all because they had the audacity of not being born Christians of European descent. The message of their relative value could not have been clearer.
Your words sparked in me the memory of an essay I read many years ago about Jeremy Bentham's concept of the Panopticon. Here is a short definition from Wikipedia:
"The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single corrections officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.
Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation."
This strikes me as being very similar to how religion operates. An all-knowing God allegedly sees everything we do, and everything we think or feel (Oops!), and we are doomed for all eternity to sizzle like Jimmy Dean pork sausages in the fiery bowels of hell if we dare succumb to the weaknesses and errors built into our being that we never chose or asked for in the first place.
Also, it seems to me that we are living in an age of the digital panopticon--imposed incrementally and surreptitiously for commercial exploitation, to groom us all to be good and docile little consumers, and to keep us blind and numb to any possibilities of being that might threaten the dominant structure.
One last item: It seems to me that the spirit of the Vagrancy (or Vagabonds) Acts is not only very much alive today, but is an essential component of modern capitalism and so-called property rights.
I promised to keep this brief. I lied.
KJ
I always look forward to your comments, Kenneth, and the less brief the better! You always have a wealth of insights and ideas.
Palestine was--perhaps obviously--top of my mind when I said this, linked of course to the reservation system (I don't know how many non-Native American people know that Native Americans's land was not just stolen, but that for decades they were not allowed to physically leave the reservations without permission). Both of which always bring me back to 2000 years of oppression of Jewish people throughout Europe, especially the ghettoes in western Europe and the shtetls in eastern Europe. It's impossible for me to see what the Israeli government and army have been doing to Palestine and Palestinians for something like a century without wondering how they could have looked at the 2000-year oppression and massacres and wholesale evictions of Jewish people and taken the worst possible lessons from it.
And definitely the Panopticon! I think Big Brother in 1984 was partly based on that idea? That you were always being watched, even if not actively in that very moment. You just had to assume they saw everything.
The Pennsylvania penitentiary described in Jane Brox's book Silence was partly inspired by that, but somewhat different because it was also based on Christian ideas of silent isolation and penance--clean living and contemplation of your sins. It was disastrous for people's mental health. Not very many actively choose a monastic life, for good reason. Most people do not do well in that kind of social isolation, and it's awful to subject anyone to it when it's not their choice. We are obligatorially social! (Also I cannot spell obligatorially. Obligatorial?)
I think the spirit of the Vagrancy Act is indeed alive. It depresses me that it's very much alive in peoples' imaginations -- "these people living in tents who have nowhere to go to the bathroom are a threat to my property values and comfortable life!" -- and in how it manifests legally. As Willa Cather wrote in one of her novels (Shadows on the Rock), the law is there to protect property, and thinks too much on property.
It makes me very sad that so many people walk through this life believing in a god, yet insisting that said all-knowing deity is punitive, judgmental, and mercurial. Why not believe in the kindness of a god? Why believe you're going to burn for eternity if you stumble over rules you might not even understand?
I'd rather believes in god/dess(s/es) of chokecherries and clear mountain streams ...
Keep writing. :)
Is it fair to say that research is world-building? And as with world-building, you wanna follow the iceberg rule? The 90% you never show is as essential to telling a good story as the 10% you do. Are you close to that ratio, or are you gonna end up showing even less than 10%?
World-building with N. K. Jemisin: https://pca.st/episode/355f8f3a-4419-4c01-8b8d-386e6e454939
I like that! Research is indeed a kind of world building. And you can never go wrong sending me N.K. Jemisin! Excited to listen to that.
And that's a good question. I'd say less. Maybe 5%. But I do overdo it a little. I just want to get to know ALL the angles, and there's always another footnote to follow ...
Maybe you could make the book twice as long!
I would not inflict that on people, LOL!
Great piece. Really looking forward to the next book. I enjoyed the first one.
That means a great deal to me, thank you!
An excess of research is never wasted. The spillovers you mention are the unintentional sparks that lead to massive insights. Ultimately, we are all laying down bricks for future generations, building bridges of hope and designing better systems than we currently have. Your extensive research is necessary because you never know how that information will combine in your brain to create new ideas. Much of our work is a semi-conscious amalgamation of information, memories, and imagination. For this reason, writing is a deliberate yet beautiful process of manifesting how we want to serve the world.
I am so grateful for your laborious service to this community Nia. 💜
Your research is aspirational for me, Swarna! I often save your newsletters because of the sheer amount I learn from them, along with the incredible writing. I can't imagine how much time you spend on each one.
And that is so true! We never know how it will all mix together to bring forth new ideas and connections. The semi-consciousness of it all shouldn't be downplayed.
Always, always grateful for you, Swarna. 💖
I do that too with your essays Nia! I learn so much from your research and your insights have helped me a many times get clarity on seemingly unrelated topics. It’s like a culture of various ideas sitting there fermenting into something else. I love that!
Also I feel like the gaps between excess research and complete silence is what leads to the pure magic of writing. I sit in those spaces for weeks sometimes for something to arise which is worth sharing.
So grateful for you Nia. 💜
A culture of fermenting ideas! Perfect! It's amazing how versatile fermentation is for a metaphor, and so true. And how beautiful, the space between research and silence and what we find in there. Writing is so, so weird and so, so beautiful.
Back atcha, Swarna. 💜
In the 80s(definitely a time of excess) I used to say---"Moderation in Excess"
P.s the transparent apples are ready if you want any.
Ha! Love that. (I have to credit Jael Prezeau for my knowing those lines. So much of my thinking patterns and early lessons came from her English classes.)
And yay! I am in Portland all week, but will be back next week. Fingers crossed they're still at their prime. You might be happy to know that I gave a bag of your dried transparents to Mr. Irritable Métis himself a few months ago and told him where the apples came from, and he thoroughly enjoyed them.
Oh i forgot about her. Iwas before her time. I knew her from the Buffalo
Glad the apples are still sharing their medicine
Thank you for this. I hadn't thought in this way of the many rabbits I chase as part of my research and I'm happy knowing it's not just me but others also pursue "too much" research.
Glad to know I'm not alone! And I suppose we get to define what "excess" is -- what harm is there in being well-informed on our subjects and their implications?!
"policy wonk" yeah, okay, sorry for reading the rules to the game, shitass. Somebody's got to know how our lives are casually chopped and screwed six ways to Sunday. What an ignorant, obtuse, and insulting way to insult another person.
Haha, thank you for saying what I could not! I was actually offended. He was quite rude about it. Like, sorry for knowing my subject? Good grief.
"Changing a paradigm is hard, involving as it does a massive upheaval of perception and possibility, and especially hard if you can’t see it for what it is. The ancient Greek maxim to “know thyself”—inscribed on the Temple of Apollo—applies equally to knowing the structures that shape our world and our expectations of it. If we want life to count more than skin in the game, more than profit, we have to know what we’re fighting."
Helluva paragraph there, Antonia. Glad you wrote it.
Our manufactured reality is a mindfuck. It's daunting and haunting to get one's awareness around—just like the fact that an octopus exists...so alien and defying of definition. How can this be? How did it become? But when you begin, it's a rabbit hole of interrelated/interconnected events and trends and outcomes. Then the question is: what am I to do with what has been revealed?
Like you, I'm not a "policy wonk" and yet my writing is always entwined in the brutality of the dominant lifestyle, no matter how the words come. I try not to preach, but it often comes out that way, and I know this is the least receivable method of communicating unwelcome truths.
I dunno. I'm deeply troubled but I keep trying. I'm a feeler, an expresser, an uncomfortable sharer, not a convincer.
But it's a balm to read your words, because I constantly feel isolated and misunderstood at best, judged and dismissed at worst. I feel like this is the most important of human endeavors given the stakes and what we've already experienced and endured, but it falls on deaf and defensive ears.
I am the convinced, the aware. But what about the others?
"I'm a feeler, an expresser, an uncomfortable sharer, not a convincer." You know, I truly do believe that stories are the most reliable way to build empathy, for more than straightforward convincing. Stories matter. They last, and they stick with people, whatever the voice or tone.
Our manufactured reality really is a mindfuck, and so much of it is hidden, portrayed as "just the way things are." (Love the comparison to an octopus! What a miraculous creature.)
There's the undeniable insanity of change taking *so long* while more and more is destroyed, along with the fact that there is a limit to what people are willing to change. Anything that threatens their comfort--including their property in various forms--ends up being a hard barrier. That is a big part of why I do this work. If we want things to change, those in comfort who profess agreement with progressive change are going to have to start sacrificing, and there is a LOT they are unwilling to give up. Comfort and economic security most of all, no matter how tenuous those things actually are in a system that continually wants to strip both from those who have less and give all to those who already have the most.
It's interesting you mention defensive ears -- Noha commented on defensiveness, too. I think it's a huge barrier. It covers up an unwillingness to face the reality that what makes many of us comfortable comes at the expense of everyone else, and most people can't seem to handle that. The more ways we can find to show that a different way of living together is possible, one in which everyone's needs are met and life is respected, the weaker that defensiveness might become. Maybe.
Glad you dropped this piece, Antonia. I teared up a little when I read about the vagrancy act. On the road, I meet many with little choice but to live in the way they’re living, without brick-and-mortar walls and far less mobility than I enjoy. I don’t suspect the new regulations cropping up about sleeping in cities and such are necessarily targeted at those like me who live on the road with more choice (though they’ll certainly be applied). It’s the fact of the true target—poverty—that breaks my heart.
As ever, Antonia, I love your recordings. I love the depth of your research, wonky or no! Thank you.
Very kind words, Holly, thank you! And absolutely: with the popularity of Van Life (which I see a LOT of where I live) contrasted with the reality of people who are living on the outskirts of, say, Bozeman, Montana, in campers through no choice of their own, it's something I think about all the time.
I'm in Portland, Oregon, for the week, and was thinking about it yesterday. My son is roaming around on his own (gah! so grown-up!), so I was walking along the river by myself and was very tempted to take a nap on the grass. And was pretty sure that if I looked and/or was dressed differently, it might not be allowed, whereas being who and how I am I could probably get away with it for a few minutes. We all know who's being targeted.
Son in the wild! Ahh!! And also fun.
Yes, I’ve had that experience so many times—knowing I’m being allowed liberties (and I do mean that ironically as well) that the way I look and read to others afford me that would not be afforded to others. It’s not OK.
I also wanted to say that I had the experience of visiting a couple of newly built prisons at Guantanamo Bay -- Camp V and Camp VI -- which were supposedly based on facilities from the Midwest somewhere.
That's very interesting. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising. I don't want to get distracted by pursuing research into prison architecture, but the bits I have read say a lot -- as I'm sure you know better than most of us -- about how people living within them are perceived by the systems that put them there. I found the part of Jane Brox's book "Silence" on Eastern State Penitentiary riveting and very disturbing.
I am excitedly thinking about creating a reader on enclosure for my next college composition course inside San Quentin.
Wonderful piece.
Oh my goodness. I would love to know how that goes. And happy to help with finding any resources if you need them. It's a great idea. 👏👏👏
Thank you!
Thank you for wonking so that we don't have to. I can't wait to read your next book!
I'll gladly take the hit for as many people as possible, though you do plenty of your own work!
Thank you as always, Nia! 🙏🏻📚❤️
Much gratitude to you, always, Greg. 💖
I really enjoyed this and I loved the HCN article. Thank you for the work you do.
Thank you, Jeffrey!
Incredible essay. I appreciate the link of the last to the future, as well as needing to know where the barriers are if we want to dismantle them.
Thank you, Noha! That means a lot. And yes -- it's the barriers I think about almost nonstop. It's in the interests of those in power to keep them invisible, which means more work for the rest of us in making them clear. 🕵🏻
I've just a had deep and difficult conversation with a dear friend about the invisibility of so many of those barriers - difficult because I think many of us carry so much hurt around the default, which skews to keeping them invisible, as you so well described.
Do you find that the response to highlighting the barriers is often defensiveness on those who are not affected by them? It's a pattern I've noticed, that I'm constantly doing a dance around what to point out and what will make me too much of a squeaky wheel, an angry racialized woman... And I'm curious if you have a similar experience with this...
Oh, absolutely. I'm glad you brought that up, though not glad you ran into it. The defensiveness is *constant.* It's what I've come to expect most.
I haven't written about this in quite a while, but I think that identity--how people see themselves and who they are--is one of the trickiest and most intractable issues we run into when advocating for progress or change in almost anything. In identity, I'm specifically talking about the stickiest kinds where I live, like being a cattle rancher or wheat farmer and what that means ("we feed the world," "we're the best stewards of the land," "we won 'the war'" [when there was no war, just theft and genocide, but they don't want to hear it]). But I first started thinking about it when reading a sociology study years ago about a steel plant that had shut down in the midwest. It was people's loss of identity that hit worst, even more so than the economic hit.
Anyway, that's a bit tangential from what you're talking about. But it seems to be rife in white people. The defensiveness is HUGE. And I am often at a loss for how to work my way through its tangles. I keep trying because I think change will remain a steeper battle than it needs to be until white people start dismantling their own internal defenses. I think you're right about how many people carry hurt around the default; there's also the weird knee-jerk reaction people get where they want to disavow any personal responsibility for ongoing damages and hurts in a system from which they themselves have benefited.
D.L. Mayfield had an interview a while back with Tori Williams, who runs an Instagram page called White Homework. It's a super long interview and mostly about shame and the evangelical churches they both grew up in, but there are some things Williams talked about that really stuck with me, like "shame is why the US, like people in the US, are having this allergic reaction to any kind of accountability around race and racism, and have, again, no resilience around these conversations, because we don't have the tools, we don't have the skill set, we haven't seen it demonstrated, we have no safe place to practice it. And so this is what I'm trying to change about the world." She works to help white people build emotional resilience and recognize their own shame responses that lead to defensiveness, which ... whew, I am in awe of anyone who is able to do that work.
This is the interview, with transcript: https://dlmayfield.substack.com/p/interview-with-tori-williams-douglass
Anyway, yes! Defensiveness is the most common response that I've run into, sometimes hidden behind anger. And it's absolutely unfair because it means everyone else has to do that dance around the feelings of the people who have benefited most from this crushing, oppressive system.
(Uh, apologies for the novella-length comment!)
OMG please do not apologize! Novella length comments are my JAM lol... I appreciate this so much and I was nodding along to everything you wrote. Identity is so key to it. And the "we won the war" vs. recognition that there was no war is this constant refrain. I am often shaking my head at when it's a war and when it's injustice, and the pattern I've seen is that it's perceived as injustice and tragedy when white people are the ones suffering, and it's perceived as a war/ just the way things are / toughen up buttercup etc etc when anyone else is suffering.
I've grown so used to it and yet it's very hard to be on the receiving end up. Like, viscerally painful.
Haha, Mike Sowden and I always say the same thing to each other: Wall of Words is my JAM!
"It's perceived as injustice and tragedy when white people are the ones suffering, and it's perceived as a war/ just the way things are / toughen up buttercup etc etc when anyone else is suffering." YES.
I get into this conversation off and on when people say we have to let people come to these realizations in their own time. I know from personal and ancestral experience that this is true--it's hard to persuade anyone of anything they're not ready for--BUT sitting on that claim, that perspective, just accepts that everyone else has to continue suffering while those with means, comfort, and power take their time to come around. It's not okay. There have to be other approaches because it's absurd to expect most of the world to bear up under oppression while those either enacting or at least benefiting from the oppression avoid their discomfort in facing it.
Love that word "estivate" - thanks for introducing us. It'll probably become a household term as climate change ramps up.
Interestingly, I recently heard an interview with the actress Michelle Williams who is from Kalispell, and describes growing up with lots of strangers around because her great-grandparents who lived nearby were always taking in families who had nowhere to stay or were traveling. She says it shaped her sense of community in terms of having deep family feelings with people who weren't really your family.
"The research I do is frequently boring, written as it is for academic expectations and requirements, but it is rarely without some kind of gift, some spillover of story or insight or simple information that makes me feel like I’ve been rewarded." One of the nice things about Substack is that as readers we reap the rewards of all these spillovers, which then spill over and feed back into our conversations with others. If only there were a way to distill academic writing down to its spills and spoils.
I love it, too. 😊 Definitely describes the state of my mind and general being in summer.
That is very interesting. I'd love to hear that interview if you have a link to it. There are a number of people to share it with locally who would appreciate it. It's always been a small bit of pride for Kalispell to be able to claim her.
I suppose that's what nonfiction writers partly do, at least those of us who engage with academic writing. I think about that a lot with regards to science writing and science communication. It would be great if all scientists were great communicators, but not all of them are, and it would be unfair to require that of them in addition to good science. You need people who can take research and conclusions and find ways to bring them to the wider public in ways that make sense. It's full of pitfalls (on the rare but welcome occasions I get to do talks or workshops on science writing, I always share the Chocolate Hoax study story, which shows how sloppy science journalism can be), but also very important.
Oh, I should have included the link to the Michelle Williams interview, sorry. This is the Talk Easy podcast hosted by Sam Fragoso: https://talkeasypod.com/michelle-williams/
It's a pretty slick-looking podcast (just check out that A-list of celebrities on there), but I think he's a very talented interviewer. I cannot believe he's only 29!! There's also one with Lily Gladstone which may be of interest to some of your readers: https://talkeasypod.com/lily-gladstone/
Sounds right up my alley (as your suggestions almost always are) -- thanks!