Essay - All Aid Is Insult
Over the past year – I have had an increasing number of discussions about race. Race has been very central part of my upbringing and not something I consider myself shy or naïve about – I have written about my thoughts around identity including race elsewhere. But something about racial discussions over the past year feel markedly different. When talking about race it seems many people are reading off a script – coming with copy-paste thoughts about how to approach, think about, and interact with the concept. I plan on writing more thoroughly about these dynamics later - but one area in race relations I find strikingly discouraging is the manner in which aiding and assisting racial minorities is handled.
As an example, for over twenty years, my mother has worked to build diversity initiatives in the various corporate environments that she has meandered through. Many of these initiatives focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) trainings and similar programs fostered to supposedly ease the manner in which minority groups can assimilate into a corporate environment.
Personally, I find these types of programs icky if not outright detestable for numerous reasons. For one (and bear with me as I blow through this) they represent coerced thought and speech from institutions. (I have shared my ideas around institutionalized thoughts and beliefs here).
Furthermore, if people are actually incapable of understanding how their limited perspectives shape and bias their actions, then they aren’t racist/sexist/etc., they are incompetent. Understanding that there are a multitude of perspectives and backgrounds is a baseline critical thinking skill and a core aspect of being a functioning adult. When these programs are promoted within an organization, that org is either admitting to employing incredibly deficient persons – or is trying to glibly substitute a messy and complex issue like race in America with a superficial replacement so simplistic it can be fixed through PowerPoints. This does not even broach that through these trainings more resources are going to assisting and providing a crutch to incompetent white people than actually hiring and paying more minorities – so the training in itself is a self-thwarting and absurd contradiction.
Despite all these aspects my main qualm is that diversity training rests in the idea that white people need special training to deal with minorities. This last point is obscenely insulting. Why would a white person need training to be able to interact with me? Why would specialists need to coach white people in their interactions with those different from them? The underlying implications here seem incredibly insidious. What about me would imply that I require special handling and care from my white peers? The basic idea of diversity training construes minorities as circus animals rather than people, posing them as special daunting challenges.
Even more so these trainings block people off into monolithic groups. Why should I, just because I am black, be handled with off-the-shelf manners and techniques rather than being dealt with as an individual who has his own thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and background? Am I (and my concerns, wants, and needs) and any other black person truly so simplistic that a one-size-fits-all approach can be utilized? For similar reasons I have qualms when people parade around the concept of allyship or accomplice-ship: it’s demeaning. If you think your relationship to me can take the form of an off-the-shelf label then I have no want for it in my life.
These trainings and coerced interactions force disingenuous conversations and relationships between people. Rather than treating one another as individuals - people read off scripts and walk on egg-shells around each other because the implication is that minorities cannot navigate the rough seas of regular social interaction on their own. Instead of allowing minorities to interact naturally, the manner in which people comport themselves is policed for thoughts and verbiage akin to Orwellian wrongspeak that could harm us. Have we really grown so soft and flabby that messy, pointed, perhaps even insulting conversations and disagreements are ruinous to us? Forget sticks and stones – we now tremble at the thought of being around difficult dialogue. Perhaps Dave Chappelle put it best.
The above thoughts come from shifting the focus from a simplistic “people are trying to help” to a more nuanced question of “what are the implications of this help?” When a more thorough analysis is done on attempts to support and uplift groups, all too often, fairly sinister aspects appear nascent. In this light, help, like the help provided from diversity and inclusion training is at best patronizing if not outright degrading to the people it is allegedly attempting to assist. However, DEI is far from the only insistent helping hand that truly looks to put down and ridicule people, examples abound in the dialogue around current events.
The newly enacted voting laws in Georgia have been decried and protested by corporations and activists for social justice. They claim that the laws are racist because they demand that people have identification to send in absentee ballots and that gifts (including food) cannot be handed out by non-officials within 150 feet of voting sites. The inherent assumption here being that black people are so inept that they cannot get ID’s and perhaps so feeble-minded that they cannot problem solve around not having food handed to them while they wait to vote (i.e. pack a snack). Detesters of these regulations went so far as to decry them as reinstallations of Jim Crow laws. Equivocating the horrors of the pre-civil-rights era south, which my parents and grandparents personally witnessed to this law is a misjustice to those who actually lived through the horrors of that experience.
The same twisted story plays out when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccine as well. When looking at the disparity in vaccinations between blacks and whites – Joe Biden insinuated that black and Latino people do not know how to use the internet[1] and the Financial Times stated that black people were hesitant to receive vaccination because of historical malfeasance by medical institutions in the black community. The implication is that either black people are again fundamentally incompetent – or solely at the mercy of larger social forces and unable to come to their own reasonably deduced conclusions about what is best for them on an individual level.[2]
The perverse implications are not solely manifested around race either. Around my neighborhood are a series of posters done by a local artist that state “Protect Black Women.” Why is the thought that black women, or women in general need our protecting, that they are unable to do and fend for themselves? The undertone is again general ineptitude for women – as if they were simply small children or pets. I find similar instances around conceptions of what is appropriate language to be used around a workplace to ensure that woman feel accepted. In a cartoonish regurgitation of Victorian-era beliefs women are portrayed as being too dainty and fragile to deal with the coarse and ribald talk and actions that take place among men. Note how in all of these actions, agency is taken away from the person who is the attempted receiver of help. The thought is to protect women and black people, not to put them in a position or give what is needed so that they can protect themselves and succeed.
More generally speaking, there is a much broader tendency for people to be blind to the fact that any form of assistance contains within it an insult. Any hand reaching out to help you up is implying you are unable to get up on your own. Even someone implying they can help you up is a de facto placement of themselves over you.
Please have some nuance in considering these points. This is not a polemic demanding that all help and assistance be wiped from the face of the earth. Humans aren’t humans if they do not help one another and there will always be hierarchical dynamics in society that interplay with this. You cannot have a family unit if you make all newborns fend for themselves, or a community if no one assists other people. What I am trying to do is highlight an all-too-often ignored facet of a necessary social dynamic. Help and assistance have their drawbacks and negative consequences. By ignoring these aspects we turn a blind eye to the malignancy of much more baleful implications and outcomes.
Acknowledging the imbedded insult in aid allows us to be more thoughtful in the nature and manner of supporting others. I am not stating that all help comes from nefarious intentions, but all aid does have insulting tendencies. However, there are degrees and variations to this. Aid can be less insulting and more empowering to the person gaining assistance by shifting the dynamics of their agency and ownership in the process.
Take for example again: black people. Black families are disproportionately impoverished and lacking in property ownership, having just one-eighth the median wealth of white families.[3] And black men are incarcerated at much higher and disproportionate rates.[4] It seems that high level they are having a bit of a rough go of it. But black people are far from the first impoverished group in this nation. In fact, many white people came to this country in an incredibly underprivileged position – and they received a lot of aid. Examples stretch back to the Homestead Act of 1862 – which placed ownership of 10% of the land of the US in the hands of white people, up through the New Deal’s National Housing Act of 1934[5] which provided essentially free home-ownership for American families (and explicitly excluded minorities), to present day where we have a heavily-subsidized domestic farming and agriculture industry (white people operate about 93% of farmland in the US).[6]
Contrast this with how approaches to assist black people have historically been put forth, usually through social welfare programs and handouts. The tendency with respect to assisting white people with aid is to put them in direct areas of ownership and empowerment, while for black people the mindset has been to make them dependents upon the state and other institutions.[7] Again what were and are the nature of these attempts to help – does it look to promote or enfeeble people?
I don’t want to get into social engineering and architecting the perfect utopia – I don’t think I can craft the greatest of all worlds. But I cannot help but think that part of the disparity in outcomes I noted above can be drawn back to the difference in approaches to assistance. One looks to foster agency and ability – the other to propagate and insist upon the incapacity of its subject.
There needs to be a much more critical lens taken to doled out assistance. Help and support cannot be promoted simply for help’s sake. The thorns on the rose of succor must be understood, so that a healthy balance is kept in warding off infantilizing the individual. It is time for a paradigm shift in this regard. Seeking (and coercing) empathy, assistance, and magnanimity from others cannot be done in preeminence to and at the sacrifice of values such as self-reliance, discipline, and resiliency. If people had a more critical view of receiving support – coupled perhaps with a healthy dose of pride and self-respect, then maybe we could do away with patronizing and ultimately crippling helping hands and actually overcome some very real obstacles.
[1] I have now directly used Joe Biden as a foil twice – I feel badly about that, because for one he is a pretty easy target, and also I do not mean for this to be a political rant. I am an apolitical person, I do not align with any party or movement, and do not want to appear to be rooting for or against either side – they both can go to hell.
[2] An aside: I think the hyper-focus on social forces and away from individual actors as the shapers of history leads to a lot of this largescale removal of individual volition and personal responsibility, and puts in place trite and patronizing ideas.
[3]https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.htm
[4] DoJ Statistics state black males made up 38% of the male prison population in 2018 https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p18.pdf
[5] I highly recommend reading Richard Rothstein’s book “The Color of Law” – he elucidates how property ownership has historically been divided along racial lines.
[6] Data from the 2012 Census of Agriculture link under table 60 on page 69 (nice). Out of a total 914,527,657 acres of farmland in the US, white people are reported principle operators of 854,850,891 acres.
[7] I look at envy at a lot of immigrant communities – who tend to focus on starting businesses and owning property for early generations then push their progeny to learn hard skills. Nassim Taleb has remarked that countries tend to get rich then become educated. I think the same applies at community levels too. While institutionalized learning seems like a great way to burn money and time – it does not lead directly to wealth accumulation – especially when degrees are in the humanities or social sciences. (Full disclosure I have a social science bachelor’s degree). Women garner the majority of graduate degrees, yet there still continues to be an income and wealth gap. Black women have been making large gains in academic achievement… how is that working out for them?