Hi all,
Transitional Justice
This section is mostly directed at white people, so you might want to skip it if you're not — I imagine it could be frustrating.
This is a stomach churning and at times sickening hour, but worth it. If a lot of it still feels contemporary, I have a theory as to why: white cultures have spend the past few hundred years in a sort of cultural 'Peter Pan Syndrome' — a centuries-long refusal to grow up and deal with adult realities. Our task as white people is now to grow up.
Here's one easy way to be white: split white people into 'good white people' (including yourself) and 'bad white people'. You take responsibility for everything the good white people do and totally distance yourself from the bad white people.
On an individual psychology level this strategy is called 'splitting', and it's used to defend the self when the person doesn't have the ability to integrate the good and bad aspects of themselves or others. This can happen for example when you rely heavily on someone who hurts you, or you have a poor opinion of yourself, or you're just too young to know better. It's a very sophisticated and threatening mental leap to engage with things as having both good and bad aspects.
This is useful for the individual, because they can deal with good and bad separately. However, it does block authentic personal growth. If you get to just respond to all of your mistakes with "yes, I am 100% irredeemably bad" you give up the responsibility to be better. To become better, you have to be able to understand yourself as simultaneously having both bad parts worth overcoming and good parts that will help you do it.
I've noticed that most white people (myself included) have a lot of trouble believing that white culture has both good and bad parts. It's either totally good (white supremacy) or totally bad (white fragility/denial/nihilism).
Growing up means accepting that white civilisations have done truly awful things, that we have a lot to answer for, but that there is still potential for us to be better. That it is at least possible that in a hundred years genuine racial equity and justice will exist, that we will have done the work, and our descendants might be able to relate to their race in more positive, balanced ways.
Which is all to say, I am trying to look at these far-right demonstrations with not mere disgust and fear but also disappointment and responsibility. What can I do to stop more people taking this path? And genuinely considering what paths there might be for them to change, without compromising accountability.
After all, it's not totally inconceivable for someone to go from "I like Churchill because he killed Hitler" to understanding and supporting BLM. That's not an impossible cultural project for white people to undertake.
That said, the guy 'winding up' his fists to fight the police is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen.
That's a wrap
Christo of the artistic duo Christo & Jeanne-Claude died this week. They were one of my favourite artists. They're known as 'the artists who wrap things', like this:
But actually that's not quite true, they mostly just do work with fabric. Like this:
But though that's all beautiful, that's not why I like them so much. I like them for reasons like this moment:
For their immense perseverance, and dedication to winning people over while still staying authentic to their vision and their own selves. They often said that the bureaucracy and persuasion were a large part of the art itself.
For the intense force of personhood it must take to have an idea, and make it happen at this scale, with all these engineering challenges:
For the fact that they funded all of these projects themselves and retained, due to this, almost total creative control. For having all of these immensely complicated projects only last a few weeks ("It takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain")
For this:
Jeanne-Claude passed away in 2009. It must be hard to be working without her.
Jeanne-Claude and myself were born on the same day, the same year, the same moment, on 13 June 1935. We met in 1958 when we were both 23. She was extremely argumentative, very critical and I miss that so much. She was always asking questions and I continuously miss her. I always think when things become very difficult, what would Jeanne-Claude think now?
I remember when I first watched the Running Fence documentary, I felt like I was seeing not just two people achieve impossible things, but also some strange other version of love that they had discovered. It wasn't exactly free of all of the trappings of heterosexual romance, but it seemed somehow to live beyond them too.
If you're interested in more, here's an interview with them both, and I'd really recommend watching the full Umbrellas film I've excerpted above. It gives a balanced portrait of one of their projects, both good and bad.
That's it for this week! It has been a pretty discouraging week to be trans, but one of the great things about being trans is that you have very low expectations of how you will be treated by society. Scared but prepared.
Hope your week ahead treats you well.
K