I love this so much. Haven’t read the book, but I really appreciate the discipline you brought to this—emotionally, literarily, and otherwise. What a great model for all of us.
Thanks pal! I think it helped unlock something for me when I decided to write out loud some of the tension I felt between the urge to ask questions and the urge to critique.
Thanks Julia. I think a big misconception about "reaching across the divide" conversations is that you either are supposed to pretend to be falsely agnostic or else you just have a "let's just make our arguments with each other" back and forth. I think there's another way! There are always a lot of questions I have for folks that aren't "why do you have an opposite take on this thing than I do?"
yes! leaning in to generative conflict allows us to stay in and some times deepen relationship with the other person and allows us to hold on to our dignity.
I will, if she's up for it! My assumption is that she's on a very busy, buzzy press run right now and that this post is, quite understandably, not her biggest priority!
Thank you, Garrett, for modeling how to constructively and openly enter into conversation with those with whom we so obviously disagree. It's gorgeously done, and heartfelt, and exactly the kind of concrete how-to that I, for one, need reminding of.
I have had to listen to the kinds of comments that Bowles expresses most of my life in my right wing family. I assumed, as most children do, that there world view was "reality" or "the truth." It took me alot of years to realize that the reality they had constructed was just that, a construction, and that I found it a judgemental and cold worldview that did not align with what I believed.
After coming out to them as an earnest social justice warrior (one of their favorite objects of scorn) and dealing with the anger and grief of knowing I was an object of scorn, we are now working through how to accept each other (my parents are gone so it's just my siblings and I, and one "grumpy uncle") and maybe even learn from each other.
We never cut ourselves off from each other and were able to put aside our differences to do our best for our parents during their decline.
Maybe this family work will help me navigate the challenges we face as a society of seeing each other with compassion and honoring each person's dignity. We all can so easily be manipulated by those in power to turn on each other, instead of finding common ground in our struggle against those who are stealing this beautiful and awesome world from us and future generations.
Jean, if you can do some of this work WITHIN a family, you've already done by far the harder part. It's so, so much easier with strangers-- less baggage, less shared trauma connected to the rejection and being rejected, etc. I applaud the fact that you've stayed so committed to relationships that are really, really tricky.
"I've found that questions are more useful than opinions." This is a good challenge for me and a useful framework/structure to approach difference. Thanks for modeling such generosity toward others and yourself in a way we have all experienced (said as someone who often finds myself hate-reading, against my better judgment).
We all do it (the hate reading!) I know I do. And why? I'm not sure! I tell myself "It's important to know what the other side is saying" but, like, I think I do by now!
Your writing and thinking remains generous, and it took me a minute to realize Ms Bowles is Bari Weiss’ spouse. I recently read a piece that made me think about the intersection between gamergate and cancel culture (https://popular.info/p/the-real-cancel-culture), but mostly have been thinking about polarization, the whiplash of everyone who gets hurt in the process
(https://open.substack.com/pub/theconnector/p/no-exit-from-the-israel-palestine). Mean girls I know. Intimately. They are compensating for or preempting hurt. But we all get hurt and feel unloved and shunned. Even the increasingly vindictive Donald Trump and his I-Don’t-Care-Do-U-cloaked Melania, who wouldn’t wear such a thing if she didn’t care about fashion and what people think of her.
If Neil Young and his music is a boulder in a river, these Bowles, Trumps, mean girls seem to have swum from one bank to the other, to throw rocks. It is sad. Because we can all choose how to behave and interact. That’s my primary take-away for every bomb and book
that gets thrown to reaffirm borders where the most vulnerable live, where they are being ‘cancelled’ by those who use culture to do so. Thanks for reading and reporting on this book. I wasn’t curious and am even less so now, by their unbearable sadness of reviling and being reviled.
I don’t think this book probably deserves your thoughtful treatment tbh! But I love your questions here, they are spot on. And you would be (and are) a really great teacher! Those are the exact kind of curious questions that expand conversations instead of shutting down.
I often fall on my face at a lot of aspects of being a better person/community member/etc. but it's notable that, at the moments that I feel like I'm contributing something more useful, I'm copying a technique/stance/approach/etc. I learned from a great educator!
Loved this piece @whitepages. Thankyou for putting your brain and heart around these complex issues and teasing them apart. You do it with such respect. I’m appreciative by what I learn about writing from your writing. 🫶🏼💗
i really loved this! did you actually send her that letter? i would be desperately curious what she thinks of it. i'm also curious about the moments you describe in her book where she demonstrates vulnerability and curiosity, even briefly. i am absolutely not curious enough to read the book, but i appreciate your service in doing so.
I don't have her email address, so all I have done thus far was a tag on the entire world's favorite social media site, Substack Notes! I would love to send it to her, and also love if she could respond, but also I understand if she doesn't! It's a pretty heady set of questions, and we're all super busy! If I got these questions, I might be into them, but that might also not keep them from sitting in my email inbox for a long time.
I appreciate the primacy of curiosity over judgement toward another person’s perspective because I firmly believe that everyone arrives at their beliefs “honestly” - through their life experiences - and if we lived their same story, we may believe the same things.
At the same time, I think it’s important to respectfully challenge beliefs you deem harmful (not be “falsely agnostic” as you said)… even if you can appreciate their origin.
Ultimately, I think it takes a lot of emotional maturity to do this well and I’m not sure too many of us have/aspire to develop this ability.
But thanks for giving us a model of how it can be done!!
That's such a good point, Sarah (about how everybody arrives at beliefs, even beliefs that aren't rooted in facts, honestly through their life experiences). It's interesting-- when we're asked "why do you believe ____" we often launch into the stump speech for that belief. That's not all that interesting! What is interesting, though, is the story of WHY holding a belief is so important for us, what "useful" role that belief is playing in our life, and why it would feel scary to abandon or reconsider that belief. As you note so well, there are stories there, especially about the life experiences that shaped us!
Garrett, I have THOUGHTS. But hopefully by the time June 5 rolls around I will have let them go. (Nemo is very talented! I would have voted for Croatia, though.)
My wife and I told our kids that we would spring for six votes apiece for each of them this year (up from five last year! look at us getting soft as parents!). Olof did his on my phone-- Sweden, Croatia, Finland and a fourth I'm forgetting. Ida was largely Armenia-focused. She may have spread a couple out with others but I'm forgetting now. In both cases, I agree with my childrens' takes.
You know how Melodifestivalen breaks down the votes by age bracket? I'll bet Windows95Man KILLED with the youngest demographic. (Though admittedly my husband, who's not nearly as Eurovision-pilled as I am, loved him too.)
the age voting breakdown is one of my favorite Melodifestivalen things. Our family LOVES blaming each other for the various voting sins of our age-group peers.
Amazingly gentle and generous writing. I have a curious question too. Do you find it easier to write gently and generously to people you disagree with? How about to other White people? I know that I have been trying to be very conscious about who gets my gentleness and generosity and why. I think you are asking this author some of the same questions.
Also, did your notes suggest that New York is the Windy City because the Windy City is Chicago (my hometown)!
The Windy City was a dumb joke on my part (trying to take New York down a notch by pretending to not know anything about it).
As for your more important question (such a great one), I think multiple layers here. I think that I'm quite frequently less conscious of the ways that I'm less likely to be curious about the experience of folks across racial/gender/sexual orientation lines AND for much of my teenaged-to-adult-outwardly-politicized life, the group that I've been most CONSCIOUS of being least generous to is other people with whom I share layers of privilege (other White people, other men, etc.). What about for you?
I think I notice that it’s very easy for me to be generous and gentle with bad actors, many of whom are White because of white supremacy culture, demographic concentration and affiliation. My gentleness and generosity stem from various factors such as feeling a deep need to understand abusive people in my youth in an attempt to prevent or stop abuse, which doesn’t work but makes sense as a response and a type of personal cultural anthropology of studying allistic (not autistic) people as an autistic person who doesn’t get that communication style intuitively.
I am intentional about being as conscious about being gentle and generous with people of the global majority but I find that the way I need to do that differs. I don’t run into a lot of people who are like Candace Owens or Clarence Thomas. I mostly feel like it’s about staying in my lane and listening. I’m a big talker, less so as with age I feel like I’ve just had more opportunity to be heard, but I think it’s easy to listen to respond or to expect that because I already understand a lot of things I know what’s going on for a particular person. So it’s being generous in with my time and attention rather than by giving grace.
I love this so much. Haven’t read the book, but I really appreciate the discipline you brought to this—emotionally, literarily, and otherwise. What a great model for all of us.
Thanks pal! I think it helped unlock something for me when I decided to write out loud some of the tension I felt between the urge to ask questions and the urge to critique.
I really loved this piece and how you modeled curiosity while maintaining a clear commitment to your values. So much we can learn from this!
Thanks Julia. I think a big misconception about "reaching across the divide" conversations is that you either are supposed to pretend to be falsely agnostic or else you just have a "let's just make our arguments with each other" back and forth. I think there's another way! There are always a lot of questions I have for folks that aren't "why do you have an opposite take on this thing than I do?"
yes! leaning in to generative conflict allows us to stay in and some times deepen relationship with the other person and allows us to hold on to our dignity.
PS will you please tell us if she writes you back?!
I will, if she's up for it! My assumption is that she's on a very busy, buzzy press run right now and that this post is, quite understandably, not her biggest priority!
Thank you, Garrett, for modeling how to constructively and openly enter into conversation with those with whom we so obviously disagree. It's gorgeously done, and heartfelt, and exactly the kind of concrete how-to that I, for one, need reminding of.
I have had to listen to the kinds of comments that Bowles expresses most of my life in my right wing family. I assumed, as most children do, that there world view was "reality" or "the truth." It took me alot of years to realize that the reality they had constructed was just that, a construction, and that I found it a judgemental and cold worldview that did not align with what I believed.
After coming out to them as an earnest social justice warrior (one of their favorite objects of scorn) and dealing with the anger and grief of knowing I was an object of scorn, we are now working through how to accept each other (my parents are gone so it's just my siblings and I, and one "grumpy uncle") and maybe even learn from each other.
We never cut ourselves off from each other and were able to put aside our differences to do our best for our parents during their decline.
Maybe this family work will help me navigate the challenges we face as a society of seeing each other with compassion and honoring each person's dignity. We all can so easily be manipulated by those in power to turn on each other, instead of finding common ground in our struggle against those who are stealing this beautiful and awesome world from us and future generations.
Jean, if you can do some of this work WITHIN a family, you've already done by far the harder part. It's so, so much easier with strangers-- less baggage, less shared trauma connected to the rejection and being rejected, etc. I applaud the fact that you've stayed so committed to relationships that are really, really tricky.
So much of what I appreciate about your writing and your work, right here.
Thanks Nia!
"I've found that questions are more useful than opinions." This is a good challenge for me and a useful framework/structure to approach difference. Thanks for modeling such generosity toward others and yourself in a way we have all experienced (said as someone who often finds myself hate-reading, against my better judgment).
We all do it (the hate reading!) I know I do. And why? I'm not sure! I tell myself "It's important to know what the other side is saying" but, like, I think I do by now!
Your writing and thinking remains generous, and it took me a minute to realize Ms Bowles is Bari Weiss’ spouse. I recently read a piece that made me think about the intersection between gamergate and cancel culture (https://popular.info/p/the-real-cancel-culture), but mostly have been thinking about polarization, the whiplash of everyone who gets hurt in the process
(https://open.substack.com/pub/theconnector/p/no-exit-from-the-israel-palestine). Mean girls I know. Intimately. They are compensating for or preempting hurt. But we all get hurt and feel unloved and shunned. Even the increasingly vindictive Donald Trump and his I-Don’t-Care-Do-U-cloaked Melania, who wouldn’t wear such a thing if she didn’t care about fashion and what people think of her.
If Neil Young and his music is a boulder in a river, these Bowles, Trumps, mean girls seem to have swum from one bank to the other, to throw rocks. It is sad. Because we can all choose how to behave and interact. That’s my primary take-away for every bomb and book
that gets thrown to reaffirm borders where the most vulnerable live, where they are being ‘cancelled’ by those who use culture to do so. Thanks for reading and reporting on this book. I wasn’t curious and am even less so now, by their unbearable sadness of reviling and being reviled.
"The unbearable sadness of reviling and being reviled!"
Oh wow to that line!
I don’t think this book probably deserves your thoughtful treatment tbh! But I love your questions here, they are spot on. And you would be (and are) a really great teacher! Those are the exact kind of curious questions that expand conversations instead of shutting down.
I often fall on my face at a lot of aspects of being a better person/community member/etc. but it's notable that, at the moments that I feel like I'm contributing something more useful, I'm copying a technique/stance/approach/etc. I learned from a great educator!
Loved this piece @whitepages. Thankyou for putting your brain and heart around these complex issues and teasing them apart. You do it with such respect. I’m appreciative by what I learn about writing from your writing. 🫶🏼💗
That's super kind Ashley. Thank you!
You are really good at asking thoughtful questions
That's really kind, thank you!
i really loved this! did you actually send her that letter? i would be desperately curious what she thinks of it. i'm also curious about the moments you describe in her book where she demonstrates vulnerability and curiosity, even briefly. i am absolutely not curious enough to read the book, but i appreciate your service in doing so.
(also the wolfe recap made me laugh)
I don't have her email address, so all I have done thus far was a tag on the entire world's favorite social media site, Substack Notes! I would love to send it to her, and also love if she could respond, but also I understand if she doesn't! It's a pretty heady set of questions, and we're all super busy! If I got these questions, I might be into them, but that might also not keep them from sitting in my email inbox for a long time.
I appreciate the primacy of curiosity over judgement toward another person’s perspective because I firmly believe that everyone arrives at their beliefs “honestly” - through their life experiences - and if we lived their same story, we may believe the same things.
At the same time, I think it’s important to respectfully challenge beliefs you deem harmful (not be “falsely agnostic” as you said)… even if you can appreciate their origin.
Ultimately, I think it takes a lot of emotional maturity to do this well and I’m not sure too many of us have/aspire to develop this ability.
But thanks for giving us a model of how it can be done!!
That's such a good point, Sarah (about how everybody arrives at beliefs, even beliefs that aren't rooted in facts, honestly through their life experiences). It's interesting-- when we're asked "why do you believe ____" we often launch into the stump speech for that belief. That's not all that interesting! What is interesting, though, is the story of WHY holding a belief is so important for us, what "useful" role that belief is playing in our life, and why it would feel scary to abandon or reconsider that belief. As you note so well, there are stories there, especially about the life experiences that shaped us!
Also, I owe you an email! I want to come knock some doors in the mighty 14th district!
Right! Oftentimes, the “why” is rooted in feelings, not logic… that’s why they are so difficult to dislodge.
Thank you for this master class in conversation and curiosity. Taking notes.
Was thinking of your school as I wrote this (and trying not to have that make me too livid).
I'll see you on June 5! Just put it on my calendar. I'll be the only one in the Q&A asking questions about Melodifestivalen.
Yay! And oh my God where to even begin with Eurovision discussion this year? EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE CONTROVERSY!
Garrett, I have THOUGHTS. But hopefully by the time June 5 rolls around I will have let them go. (Nemo is very talented! I would have voted for Croatia, though.)
My wife and I told our kids that we would spring for six votes apiece for each of them this year (up from five last year! look at us getting soft as parents!). Olof did his on my phone-- Sweden, Croatia, Finland and a fourth I'm forgetting. Ida was largely Armenia-focused. She may have spread a couple out with others but I'm forgetting now. In both cases, I agree with my childrens' takes.
You know how Melodifestivalen breaks down the votes by age bracket? I'll bet Windows95Man KILLED with the youngest demographic. (Though admittedly my husband, who's not nearly as Eurovision-pilled as I am, loved him too.)
the age voting breakdown is one of my favorite Melodifestivalen things. Our family LOVES blaming each other for the various voting sins of our age-group peers.
The best moment of Melfest this year was when it was revealed that a bunch of preteens had voted for "La La Gunilla."
Amazingly gentle and generous writing. I have a curious question too. Do you find it easier to write gently and generously to people you disagree with? How about to other White people? I know that I have been trying to be very conscious about who gets my gentleness and generosity and why. I think you are asking this author some of the same questions.
Also, did your notes suggest that New York is the Windy City because the Windy City is Chicago (my hometown)!
The Windy City was a dumb joke on my part (trying to take New York down a notch by pretending to not know anything about it).
As for your more important question (such a great one), I think multiple layers here. I think that I'm quite frequently less conscious of the ways that I'm less likely to be curious about the experience of folks across racial/gender/sexual orientation lines AND for much of my teenaged-to-adult-outwardly-politicized life, the group that I've been most CONSCIOUS of being least generous to is other people with whom I share layers of privilege (other White people, other men, etc.). What about for you?
Ah, a joke. My Chicago Pride couldn’t tell!
I think I notice that it’s very easy for me to be generous and gentle with bad actors, many of whom are White because of white supremacy culture, demographic concentration and affiliation. My gentleness and generosity stem from various factors such as feeling a deep need to understand abusive people in my youth in an attempt to prevent or stop abuse, which doesn’t work but makes sense as a response and a type of personal cultural anthropology of studying allistic (not autistic) people as an autistic person who doesn’t get that communication style intuitively.
I am intentional about being as conscious about being gentle and generous with people of the global majority but I find that the way I need to do that differs. I don’t run into a lot of people who are like Candace Owens or Clarence Thomas. I mostly feel like it’s about staying in my lane and listening. I’m a big talker, less so as with age I feel like I’ve just had more opportunity to be heard, but I think it’s easy to listen to respond or to expect that because I already understand a lot of things I know what’s going on for a particular person. So it’s being generous in with my time and attention rather than by giving grace.