Thank you for this, it is insightful with always, and I'll be sharing it with friends, especially some who I've been lucky enough to have stick around as I grew up from also being extremely this same type of teenager.
With regards to your third question, learning to discern between "distinguish[ing] yourself from people with the wrong political opinions" and "try[ing] to keep yourself safe from people whose beliefs were directly harmful to you" is really something I am still working on. Growing up gay/trans in a conservative rural area, I grew up associating these two things very closely, and often get an "I'm in danger" feeling when I engage with someone with "wrong political opinions", and it's definitely often very unhelpful!
When I see adults lean really hard into the "performance of correct politics" thing, I often see a trauma reaction in there, and understand how compelling it is to think of things in very binary, good/bad terms and to be desperate to place yourself on the "good" side. This isn't to excuse that behaviour, which can play into some really nasty stuff, but it's one I have compassion for, especially as I often see it arise among people who've been through some shit. I really appreciate work like yours that helps illuminate ways to deal constructively with one's own hangups in order to better connect with and work in solidarity with other people.
This was really, really timely for me to read... I think that you're absolutely right that the need to identify clear boundaries of who is right (and thererofre safe) and who is wrong (and therefore unsafe) is so often a trauma response-- and remembering that, as you so wonderfully note, doesn't mean ignoring the ways that response might be unhelpful, but it does help in empathizing with why and how it might be so persistent and hard to shrug off.
so much to ponder with your writing and, thank you, Garrett. I'm in a training today, so not enough time to really think this through...However, you are pushing me in a very good way and thank you.
A few thoughts, mostly in half-answer to your questions:
- I remember as a young adult labeling myself "Independent" on some survey somewhere, thinking it meant that I was outside the Dem/Rep binary, and then years afterwards finding that "Independent" on voter registration perhaps means something different and more akin (whether true or not) to Libertarian or some other conservative-attached ideology. I've put Democrat ever since but I sort of miss the idea of "independent" as a truly independent thing.
- As a teacher, I loved this issue of the newsletter and have lots to think and say about students "debating" one another, especially as a pedagogical choice. What is the purpose of debating? Are we proving who is more right? Are we expecting someone's mind to be changed? Someone's ideas to be broadened? Is a debate - a polarizing fight - actually the way we want to do this? (Obviously, perhaps, I don't think so.) Yet it is a constant in classrooms across the country. Why, as educators, are we drawn to it?
- Similarly, the idea that politics is a performance. Wow. How do and can we teach this as something we see in history? Political history tends to be taught as absolute and real and clear - the benefit of hindsight perhaps and also the struggle to teach tangled things in clear ways (in tiny amounts of time). But what might it do for us if we tried to illuminate the ways in which being "political" is about identity and always has been? When we talk about propaganda, maybe we can talk about everyone - Lincoln and Washington as well as Hitler and Big Brother - and try to see our political heroes as humans with agendas that they were actively trying to manage. Makes me also think of Judith Butler's gender performativity, that it is through a repetition of acts that we perform our gender identity. What does it look like to perform our political identity and when/why do we start this? What are the repetitive acts?
- One of the things that is so punishing about teenagerdom, as I see it from my educator-vantage, is that the things you say/do may be temporary on your journey of self-finding. But you say them out loud, or write them down online, and they get saved and recalled and thrown back at you later. And there is so little available modeling of how to say, "I was young, I was misguided, I was experimenting, I am sorry" and to be greeted with grace. And/but, how do we help young people understand that you can make mistakes before you (or we) even know they are mistakes AND sometimes you have to take responsibility for your past mistakes (the big ones) EVEN IF you were young, you were misguided, you were experimenting? I want them to try on new versions of themselves and be willing to make future mistakes, but that is hard to encourage when they see all around them folks getting called up for their past sins. It pushes my kids further into "secret" spaces and defensive postures. If they're saying something, it's forever (or it may as well be) and they'll die on that hill.
- I'm a parent and I have the "anti-racist baby" book (both the actual one and the metaphorical one). One more thing to do wrong? One more thing that's about me and not the baby? I am...stymied by this question. But maybe after another cup of tea I'll take a shot at it.
These are all such powerful, helpful reflections... I find myself drawn in particular to your reflections about one of the "punishing [aspects of] teenagerdom"... oh my goodness that's so, so real. As you point out, the fact that IS such a public, visible moment of trying/failing/experimenting/backtracking should make it the space where we also learn about grace, forgiveness, evolution and accountability... and it's so dangerous that instead young people learn the exact opposite lesson in that moment. Wow. Yes!
I saved this to read when I could give it full attention because it's so much everything related to what I think about all the time -- a "what is broken at the center of the human species" question that I walk with all the time. And I think, rereading the questions, that it's important to look at it as a species-scale problem rather than purely an American one. My dad is Russian and my husband is English and we've lived in a few different countries and the kinds of divisions/tribalism/identity we're talking about isn't any different. It's something deeper and I still don't know what it is.
I have been rereading Pankaj Mishra's 2017 book "Age of Anger," which is useful for context of these questions. There's a lot in there I have to backtrack and think about, but the brushstrokes of anti-elite populism and where it comes from (and how art and poetry, for example, can heighten a calling for national identity that relies on hate of an out-group) is the main thesis, and it covers several countries over several centuries.
Debate is something that can be valuable, but not with this kind of structure. I personally love having that in my background because it forced me to take the given question and learn to defend it from any angle. It's not the winning of debate that provides the deeper thinking; it's learning to see issues and values from a variety of perspective -- not just see them, but convincingly defend them. Maybe it's just me, but it taught me to always at least attempt to understand the other side of a question.
As always, so thoughtful (and another great book rec!)... really appreciate the nudge to expand my gaze here from merely being an American phenomenon to a human one!
No that your work has to be international! I just personally always need reminders that tribal tendencies are human rather than cultural. (One of the first books I read after the 2016 election was The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and psychologist Howard Cutler, and it forced me to look at that broader perspective because it focused a lot on the Rwandan genocide and the Serbian civil war in the 1990s and how people who were neighbors and colleagues one day could be killing each other the next.)
A wonderful thing about growing up in Cambridge Massachusetts was there essentially wasn't that type of White guy. They really kind of didn't exist. I first encountered them at Jewish sleepaway camp, and boy did I hate them with all of my body and all of my soul. And the feeling was mutual. Then at Columbia, they existed but they were a tiny niche -- just two or three frats that barely registered in campus culture. So I didn't really start to think about political signaling until social media started to be a thing.
Totally non-leading question: Would you say that growing up in Cambridge that there was a fair sense of "we're growing up in a kind of community that's way different from other places?" If so, was there a sense of exceptionalism attached to that? I asked because, in a Montana context, there's definitely a sense of that in the town I grew up in (Missoula)... and even if it's not there in how Missoulians perceive themselves compared to the rest of the state, it's definitely how the rest of the state THINKS Missoula is looking at them.
For the most part, I'd say no, there wasn't much of a sense that things were different, or were done differently, here in Cambridge. For one thing, there just wasn't as much language at our fingertips around, say, DEI and racial integration topics -- I never once heard anyone, adult or child, comment on the diversity in my elementary school. I just assumed that every town, say, had school buses that kids took all over the place, and that lots of kids lived far from the school. In high school, there was more of a consciousness of the school being a special place -- e.g. those of us involved with the gay/straight alliance knew it was the first one in a picnic school on the east coast, we knew there were more languages spoken at home, and parents' countries of origin, than in pretty much any school on the country, etc. And we knew there were people who were closed minded. But we were focused mostly on the closed minded people around us, in Cambridge, who there were plenty of! I think Cambridge seemed like more of a hardscrabble, working class and lower middle class place than it does now. It didn't seem so polished, clean and self-satisfied. There were very few Republicans, but that didn't seem weird, that seemed normal -- we didn't have much exposure to the existence of people who liked Reagan, we didn't really think about the gulf between Cambridge and Reagan supporters.
Thank you for this, it is insightful with always, and I'll be sharing it with friends, especially some who I've been lucky enough to have stick around as I grew up from also being extremely this same type of teenager.
With regards to your third question, learning to discern between "distinguish[ing] yourself from people with the wrong political opinions" and "try[ing] to keep yourself safe from people whose beliefs were directly harmful to you" is really something I am still working on. Growing up gay/trans in a conservative rural area, I grew up associating these two things very closely, and often get an "I'm in danger" feeling when I engage with someone with "wrong political opinions", and it's definitely often very unhelpful!
When I see adults lean really hard into the "performance of correct politics" thing, I often see a trauma reaction in there, and understand how compelling it is to think of things in very binary, good/bad terms and to be desperate to place yourself on the "good" side. This isn't to excuse that behaviour, which can play into some really nasty stuff, but it's one I have compassion for, especially as I often see it arise among people who've been through some shit. I really appreciate work like yours that helps illuminate ways to deal constructively with one's own hangups in order to better connect with and work in solidarity with other people.
This was really, really timely for me to read... I think that you're absolutely right that the need to identify clear boundaries of who is right (and thererofre safe) and who is wrong (and therefore unsafe) is so often a trauma response-- and remembering that, as you so wonderfully note, doesn't mean ignoring the ways that response might be unhelpful, but it does help in empathizing with why and how it might be so persistent and hard to shrug off.
so much to ponder with your writing and, thank you, Garrett. I'm in a training today, so not enough time to really think this through...However, you are pushing me in a very good way and thank you.
Appreciate it, Tony!
A few thoughts, mostly in half-answer to your questions:
- I remember as a young adult labeling myself "Independent" on some survey somewhere, thinking it meant that I was outside the Dem/Rep binary, and then years afterwards finding that "Independent" on voter registration perhaps means something different and more akin (whether true or not) to Libertarian or some other conservative-attached ideology. I've put Democrat ever since but I sort of miss the idea of "independent" as a truly independent thing.
- As a teacher, I loved this issue of the newsletter and have lots to think and say about students "debating" one another, especially as a pedagogical choice. What is the purpose of debating? Are we proving who is more right? Are we expecting someone's mind to be changed? Someone's ideas to be broadened? Is a debate - a polarizing fight - actually the way we want to do this? (Obviously, perhaps, I don't think so.) Yet it is a constant in classrooms across the country. Why, as educators, are we drawn to it?
- Similarly, the idea that politics is a performance. Wow. How do and can we teach this as something we see in history? Political history tends to be taught as absolute and real and clear - the benefit of hindsight perhaps and also the struggle to teach tangled things in clear ways (in tiny amounts of time). But what might it do for us if we tried to illuminate the ways in which being "political" is about identity and always has been? When we talk about propaganda, maybe we can talk about everyone - Lincoln and Washington as well as Hitler and Big Brother - and try to see our political heroes as humans with agendas that they were actively trying to manage. Makes me also think of Judith Butler's gender performativity, that it is through a repetition of acts that we perform our gender identity. What does it look like to perform our political identity and when/why do we start this? What are the repetitive acts?
- One of the things that is so punishing about teenagerdom, as I see it from my educator-vantage, is that the things you say/do may be temporary on your journey of self-finding. But you say them out loud, or write them down online, and they get saved and recalled and thrown back at you later. And there is so little available modeling of how to say, "I was young, I was misguided, I was experimenting, I am sorry" and to be greeted with grace. And/but, how do we help young people understand that you can make mistakes before you (or we) even know they are mistakes AND sometimes you have to take responsibility for your past mistakes (the big ones) EVEN IF you were young, you were misguided, you were experimenting? I want them to try on new versions of themselves and be willing to make future mistakes, but that is hard to encourage when they see all around them folks getting called up for their past sins. It pushes my kids further into "secret" spaces and defensive postures. If they're saying something, it's forever (or it may as well be) and they'll die on that hill.
- I'm a parent and I have the "anti-racist baby" book (both the actual one and the metaphorical one). One more thing to do wrong? One more thing that's about me and not the baby? I am...stymied by this question. But maybe after another cup of tea I'll take a shot at it.
These are all such powerful, helpful reflections... I find myself drawn in particular to your reflections about one of the "punishing [aspects of] teenagerdom"... oh my goodness that's so, so real. As you point out, the fact that IS such a public, visible moment of trying/failing/experimenting/backtracking should make it the space where we also learn about grace, forgiveness, evolution and accountability... and it's so dangerous that instead young people learn the exact opposite lesson in that moment. Wow. Yes!
I saved this to read when I could give it full attention because it's so much everything related to what I think about all the time -- a "what is broken at the center of the human species" question that I walk with all the time. And I think, rereading the questions, that it's important to look at it as a species-scale problem rather than purely an American one. My dad is Russian and my husband is English and we've lived in a few different countries and the kinds of divisions/tribalism/identity we're talking about isn't any different. It's something deeper and I still don't know what it is.
I have been rereading Pankaj Mishra's 2017 book "Age of Anger," which is useful for context of these questions. There's a lot in there I have to backtrack and think about, but the brushstrokes of anti-elite populism and where it comes from (and how art and poetry, for example, can heighten a calling for national identity that relies on hate of an out-group) is the main thesis, and it covers several countries over several centuries.
Debate is something that can be valuable, but not with this kind of structure. I personally love having that in my background because it forced me to take the given question and learn to defend it from any angle. It's not the winning of debate that provides the deeper thinking; it's learning to see issues and values from a variety of perspective -- not just see them, but convincingly defend them. Maybe it's just me, but it taught me to always at least attempt to understand the other side of a question.
As always, so thoughtful (and another great book rec!)... really appreciate the nudge to expand my gaze here from merely being an American phenomenon to a human one!
No that your work has to be international! I just personally always need reminders that tribal tendencies are human rather than cultural. (One of the first books I read after the 2016 election was The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and psychologist Howard Cutler, and it forced me to look at that broader perspective because it focused a lot on the Rwandan genocide and the Serbian civil war in the 1990s and how people who were neighbors and colleagues one day could be killing each other the next.)
A wonderful thing about growing up in Cambridge Massachusetts was there essentially wasn't that type of White guy. They really kind of didn't exist. I first encountered them at Jewish sleepaway camp, and boy did I hate them with all of my body and all of my soul. And the feeling was mutual. Then at Columbia, they existed but they were a tiny niche -- just two or three frats that barely registered in campus culture. So I didn't really start to think about political signaling until social media started to be a thing.
Also, really interesting point that, whether we grew up doing this "signaling" or not, social media has made it so that's all the water we swim in
Totally non-leading question: Would you say that growing up in Cambridge that there was a fair sense of "we're growing up in a kind of community that's way different from other places?" If so, was there a sense of exceptionalism attached to that? I asked because, in a Montana context, there's definitely a sense of that in the town I grew up in (Missoula)... and even if it's not there in how Missoulians perceive themselves compared to the rest of the state, it's definitely how the rest of the state THINKS Missoula is looking at them.
For the most part, I'd say no, there wasn't much of a sense that things were different, or were done differently, here in Cambridge. For one thing, there just wasn't as much language at our fingertips around, say, DEI and racial integration topics -- I never once heard anyone, adult or child, comment on the diversity in my elementary school. I just assumed that every town, say, had school buses that kids took all over the place, and that lots of kids lived far from the school. In high school, there was more of a consciousness of the school being a special place -- e.g. those of us involved with the gay/straight alliance knew it was the first one in a picnic school on the east coast, we knew there were more languages spoken at home, and parents' countries of origin, than in pretty much any school on the country, etc. And we knew there were people who were closed minded. But we were focused mostly on the closed minded people around us, in Cambridge, who there were plenty of! I think Cambridge seemed like more of a hardscrabble, working class and lower middle class place than it does now. It didn't seem so polished, clean and self-satisfied. There were very few Republicans, but that didn't seem weird, that seemed normal -- we didn't have much exposure to the existence of people who liked Reagan, we didn't really think about the gulf between Cambridge and Reagan supporters.
I think there’s a typo above, and you might mean Marsha P. Johnson?
Very much so! Thanks for catching!