Yes, Bobby Jindal, the left are obsessed with race – someone’s got to be
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Version 0 of 1. We’re all familiar with the old standby culture wars: violent video games, profane rap albums, gay people doing stuff, Jesus riding a dinosaur, the terribly deviant medical needs of uteruses, and so on. But there’s a new culture war brewing, the battlefield is primarily online, and I believe it’s going to go down in history as a major ideological divide. I’m talking about “political correctness”. The “age of outrage”. “Professional victims”. “Social justice warriors”. The perpetual struggle between people who have to talk about race and gender and disability and size and sexual orientation to carve out a place for themselves in the world, and the people who find just hearing about those struggles too tedious to bear; between the people who insist that “not everything is about [xyz]”, and the people who have never had the luxury of that illusion. But this rift is interesting, because it doesn’t break down along the typical swingin’ liberals v moral majority lines. For instance, this week, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal – whose parents moved to the US from Punjab, India – reacted to leftwing criticisms of “whitewashing” in what was briefly thought to be his official portrait (it was later clarified that the portrait was merely Bobby Jindal fan art) by accusing liberals of being “obsessed with race”. “I think that this whole thing is silly,” Jindal said at a breakfast event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “I think that the reality is: one of the dumbest ways we divide people is by skin colour ... I think that the left is devoid of ideas and this is unfortunately what they have resorted to – name-calling, attacking, dividing people by the colour of their skin. “One of the great aspects of our country is that we’ve been a melting pot, and it shouldn’t matter whether you came here five minutes ago or 100 years ago, we’re all Americans,” he added. Eighteenth-century terminology aside, the notion that the left is “obsessed with race” wouldn’t have been out of place in another recent controversial statement, this one from the other side of the aisle: Jonathan Chait’s 40,000-word screed, published in New York Magazine, about how hard it is to be a well-meaning white guy who is criticised sometimes. Chait is dismayed with the current state of online discourse, in which, he claims, censorious, overzealous young progressives are working to silence, en masse, leftwing stalwarts such as himself for thought crimes such as “mansplaining” and “being white”. You can tell the silencing campaign is working because the bullies Chait points to are in secret Facebook groups and on Twitter, and he’s telling his side of the story ... in New York Magazine. The headline in the print edition reads: “Can a white male liberal critique the country’s current political-correctness craze (which, by the way, hurts liberals most)?” Clearly, yes. Both Chait and Jindal’s sentiments have the same subtext: Calm down. Hush. You are overreacting. You have not thought this through as well as I have. Your lived experience is frivolous. Your commitment to social justice is actually an impediment to social justice. And anyway, can’t we all just get along? No. In fact, we can’t. Because “getting along”, in its present incarnation, means tolerating an oppressive status quo. It means ceasing dissent, because dissent makes some people upset – whether, like Chait, they’re upset because they feel like they’re on the right side and they should get more points for trying; or because, like Jindal, that status quo is their bread and butter. To quote the comedian Hari Kondabolu: “Telling me that I’m obsessed with talking about racism in America is like telling me I’m obsessed with swimming when I’m drowning.” Grappling with rape culture, police violence, the murder and suicide rates of trans people – these things aren’t fun or frivolous, and they’re certainly not profitable, but they’re simple imperatives. They’re survival. We harp on about them because they matter. And, by the way, these ideas are not new. The internet is a cesspool in a lot of ways, sure, but the flipside of that is its absolutely staggering power as a democratising force. Now marginalised groups can speak directly, en masse, to the people neglecting them, or using them as a punchline, or shooting them in the streets. These sentiments were always there, always being expressed somewhere – the Chaits of the world are just upset because suddenly they can hear it. That’s why political correctness has become such a handy bogeyman for people who want credit for being “good liberals”, taking the “reasonable” high road, without actually doing the legwork. Because do you know what the legwork entails? Listening. Learning. Letting other people talk. Changing your behaviour. Holding yourself accountable. Saying you’re sorry. Those things are hard, and sometimes embarrassing, but they are part of our job as human beings. This is the work of humanity: to get better. To crawl, incrementally, out of the toilet. And, to be clear, we aren’t even close – we almost certainly aren’t going to get there in this generation or even the next – but there’s simply nowhere to move but forward. I can’t imagine digging in my heels right here and saying, “Upgrade my software!? But I just did that 12 years ago!” History rolls on, with you or without you. Choose. |