Emotional Privilege

Is anything sadder than the long list of people in our country who have known hatred and exclusion imposed by this county’s dominant male, wealthy, white culture? Immigrants, people of color, queer folks, fat folks, those who wear a hijab, people who live on the streets, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, poor people, victims of sexual or domestic abuse, people with a mental illness, Muslims, Jews, the physically disabled.

Living in a culture rife with haters, the hated ones remain on high alert. Wherever we go, we carry within our being the trigger for someone’s hate, however irrational that is, however unjust. As a result, we experience a complex set of emotions and reactions that are not experienced by the emotionally privileged: that is, those who live free from the dread of hatred and humiliation.

Imagine, if you will, what the “fight or flight” reflex might feel like. As if an armed robber suddenly walked into the bank where you had just stopped by to make a deposit. As if an ear-piercing smoke alarm in the hotel just woke you from a sound sleep. As if a bear came up behind you when you were picking berries. Which way to go? Fight, or flight?

Your brain coagulates with terror. Your physical being enters into a state of such heightened tension it is nearly unbearable. Your nerve fibers begin to burn, each one taut as can be, stretched and strained to breaking. Which is worse, the terror or the need to resist?

Now imagine that this happens frequently: some days, every day, or even multiple times a day. The mere fact that you are in some way a member of some group that some people are prejudiced towards means that you need to stay hyper-vigilant and ready to grapple with confrontations with haters. Opportunities for “flight” are rare. To choose “fight,” on the other hand, means mustering a lot of courage to stand your ground.

Or having the rage to stand your ground. The rage of the oppressed is not hate. It is a “fight” response to degradation, humiliation and the ongoing threat to our well-being. The stress is tiring, often exhausting.

Daryl Davis (pictured above) is a black musician who plays the blues all over the south. Sometimes he gets to talking with white men who come to listen to his music – some of whom have told him outright that they are members of the KKK. Daryl long ago decided to invite such individuals to talk to him over dinner. “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” he asks each one. Face to face, he listens to their racists beliefs and engages them in conversation (Daryl Davis; Washington Post, 9/29/2017).

More often than not, these KKK members come to realize after talking with Daryl that their hate is based on bits and bobs of misinformation promoted by whites to preserve the myth of white superiority. Or it is based on nothing – it’s an ingrained and ignorant mindset passed down from family and friends.

After thirty years of dinners, Daryl now has a collection of over 200 KKK robes that those individuals have handed over to him. What a lot of work he has had to do for that. The emotionally privileged cannot imagine having to work so hard to earn basic regard from strangers whose hatred is automatic, unthinking.

When you are living among culturally condoned haters, you spend time and energy every day on an activity that is unknown to the emotionally privileged: figuring out how to navigate the hostilities. The Sikh man in a turban about to take the bus to work. The gay teen heading down a crowded corridor in between classes at school. The migrant worker hitching a ride to the next job. The woman walking home alone at night. The young black male on his way to the store, wearing his favorite hoodie. Their apparent freedom of movement masks the way their emotional energies have to be tethered to the chances of a random act of hatred.

Hatred also comes from bullies: people who threaten the well-being of a particular child or adult with words or actions designed to be demeaning. For me, it was a mother whose hatred of me was so pure and unadulterated that she turned her wrath on me every day for eighteen years. I feared her looks and words and humiliations from the time I was a toddler until I left for college, from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed.

I can tell you this from first-hand experience: victims of hatred spend a lot of mental and emotional energy on anticipating and thinking through the everyday potential for encountering verbal and physical assault. It becomes habitual, a way to steel ourselves against the intended harm. That is what being terrorized does to  person. The terror alone can cause physiological and psychological damage in the strongest among us. The emotionally privileged cannot imagine having to live that way.

White supremacists entered Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017, proclaiming their hatred of all others. They had not had their rights removed or curtailed. They had not seen huge numbers of their people wrongly arrested and jailed, nor had they been profiled for arrest. They had not been routinely humiliated or excluded from job consideration because of the sound of their name or their customary attire. Their children had not been sent to a school away from family and community, where their native language and customs would be repressed. They had not been confined to a reservation or an internment camp. They did not have to consider the dangers of stepping outside of their own homes in order to attend this rally.

In fact, even with assault rifles and torches in hand, these particular male white supremacists encountered a (predominantly male, white) police force in Charlottesville, VA, that observed rather than intervened in their openly hostile demonstration. Already privileged by our culture as white males, white supremacists got a free pass to terrorize that community. Their chants, augmented by marching around in the dark of night while holding torch lights, proclaimed the goal of creating a whites-only society, and only certain whites at that (NPR, 8/12/2017).

Their freedom to express hatred of others who are not like them, combined with their freedom to flaunt that virulent hatred, put some of the unchecked emotional privilege embedded in the dominant white culture on public display. In stark contrast, when Black Lives Matter organized a protest march in Baltimore, and when Native Americans organized a peaceful, prayerful protest against pipelines in North Dakota, they were met with a militaristic show of force and threats of bodily harm.

We know –  those who have dealt with prejudice, those who are marginalized and those who continue to be oppressed by society’s ignorance – we know how fortunate the rest of the population is, how privileged with society’s good will. And we look upon these expressions of hatred as such a waste of a human life.

Hate can consume oppressors like fire. Their faces twist into ugly shapes to reflect the grim hatred inside. Their voices are menacing and hollow, as if coming from a dungeon. They spend their thought, emotion and will trying to find ways to oppress you more, to express their hatred in another way.

And it’s not just you. Those who hate tend to hate a lot of different people. The same groups of people have showed up for anti-LGBTQ rallies, anti-Obama rallies, anti-science rallies, anti- immigrant rallies, anti-Black Lives Matter rallies. The postings on their Facebook pages include anti-Semitic material, anti-Muslim material, misogynistic material; in other words, a wide range of subjects for their hatred. It’s as if it doesn’t matter what the object of hate is.

Part of the injustice of hatred is that it leaves people without access to a profound emotional life. For both the victim and the hater, the richness of the emotional realm is circumscribed by the climate of hate. The luscious landscape of emotion becomes more like a fenced in, chewed up pasture.

When you are the victim of oppression, you don’t waste your own energy on hate or retaliation. Being relentlessly humiliated is so hard to understand it demands constant mental attention. “What will they think of next? How can I deal with that?” You spend your emotions on how to survive, how make sure the essential you will come through this, while your will is preoccupied with how to escape, and how soon, and by what means. You live by such different barometers than the emotionally privileged.

If you are among the multitudes of American citizens dealing with unfounded bias and hatred, you yearn for your birthright: equality, justice, human rights. The actions you contemplate are not murderous, inflicting harm on others. Your mind works on escape from the circumstances, assisting others with escape, finding ways to make inhumane circumstances public and widely known, exposing your plight to the bright light of public opinion, lifting others up and out of their suffering. You become an advocate, a volunteer, a teacher, a reformer, a journalist, a pastor, an example to your community of someone who stood up for what is right.

As a victim, you have witnessed the black and spiraled stairway to nowhere and nothing good that comes from hate. The last thing you want is to fall into that pit. What you want is to reach a hand down, as Daryl did, to see if you can pull someone out of there.