The Geek Feminist Revolution, page 17
The question is, which are we? And are we willing to stand up against those systems, or say that they are just too big for us to confront? No doubt apartheid looked like an impossible system to overturn without a bloody revolution. And the British were still the most fearsome colonizers in the world when the American colonies broke away from them.
These systems are built on stories about their inevitability, about their power, about their enduring legacy. We tell stories about our own oppression that make oppression seem like a biological inevitability. An entire rhetoric was created around race to justify the slavery of black people in the Americas, just as we see an entire rhetoric dedicated to why women are not suited for anything but babies and making house. We are born and raised hearing these stories, and we internalize them as if they are truth.
But internalizing a story does not make it true.
When I challenge people to interrogate evil, and our narrative of terror and fear, I am in turn challenging them to interrogate their own self-narrative … and the narrative of the societies they grew up in. Because it is only by challenging these narratives that we will effect any change in the world.
So who are we if all the stories are made up? Who are we if what’s monstrous or heroic is really just a matter of who’s telling the story? Who owns our story?
We must own our own stories. We must tell our own truths. Without this, we will become casualties of our own governments’ rhetoric, the court of public opinion, and inevitably, the history that others perpetuate.
This is why I write. This is why I keep speaking. This is why I endure. Because if I don’t tell my stories, someone else will.
Giving Up the Sky
I went hiking at the park recently, and finished up the five-mile jaunt in an open meadow, sitting in an Adirondack chair that forced me to gaze up at the sky. For a long moment I was transfixed by the billowy puffs of clouds moving slowly across the flat blue sky. When was the last time I’d stopped to look, really look, at the sky? I’m in my midthirties now, hurtling quickly toward middle age in a life I felt I only really started living in my twenties.
I remember being ready to leave the house at thirteen, frustrated by my lack of legal autonomy and my loving but worried parents whose permission generally didn’t extend beyond letting us play at the neighbor’s house for a few hours. My great-grandfather had left his own home at thirteen and traveled across the country by hitching a train, and made his living shining shoes and doing odd jobs. Clearly my life was very different.
At seventeen, I tried to leave the house amicably, figuring I was close enough to legal age to jump, but my parents (rightly) insisted that I needed to be eighteen before I could leave. By the time I got out of there I was practically crawling out of my skin to get away. Not because I had a terrible house life or my parents hated me; quite the opposite. I was aware that my childhood had been a carefully constructed bubble of minimal strife and unhappiness, and I knew that my insulation from the real world meant that I had no idea what I was really made of. I didn’t know what I could really do, or if I could deal with real problems. Could you say you were strong if you never had to be?
My first year out of the house, predictably, was a spectacular failure. Laid low by serious depression induced by birth control pills and desperately trying to make my way at a hostess job while I went to community college classes, my relationship with my mad, misguided high school boyfriend eventually imploded too. His grandmother stopped supporting him, and he ran off to join the Marines, leaving me with an apartment I couldn’t afford on my own and a car I didn’t have insurance on. When I got a $500 ticket for driving without insurance and had my phone turned off because I couldn’t pay the bills, I knew eviction was next. The notice on the door didn’t surprise me. I walked a mile to the nearest pay phone and used change I’d scrounged from the seats of the car to call my parents and asked them to drive the five and a half hours to come get me. I pawned everything I could, and my dad and brother came and picked up the rest. We didn’t say a word about my failure at being an adult. There wasn’t even an “I told you so.”
I had realized exactly where my blind spots were. I’d never been taught to budget or deal with relationship conflict. I had no idea how to manage my finances or connect with potential roommates. I’d never even signed up to rent movies before. I had no knowledge of how utilities were set up and paid for. Here I was with all this education and supposed “smarts” that people had been praising me for since I was a kid, but I had no idea how to take care of myself in the real world. I had no idea how the real world worked.
I wonder sometimes what would have happened if my parents hadn’t taken me back. Would I have ended up on the street, or found a room to let and persevered? Was I even mentally equipped to do that? Probably not while that depressed, no. The lesson I learned the second time around, when I left the house at nineteen to go to college at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was that I needed to figure out these very basic ways of taking care of myself. And I needed to figure out how to do that without relying on anyone else to manage it for me. I’d trusted in my boyfriend to handle the apartment and the utilities and the car, and when he failed at that, I had no idea what to do about it. If I was going to make it, I didn’t need to learn about partnership; I needed to learn, first, to take care of myself without anyone’s help.
It’s no surprise that this was also the same time I discovered feminism. How had I fallen into this weird trap? Why did I rely on my parents and my boyfriend to handle everything? Why was I constantly trying to be this good girl who listened to what everyone else thought was good for her?
Nobody else was going to provide me with transportation, or half the rent. No one else was going to save me out there in Alaska but myself. I resolved that I would never have to call my parents to come and get me ever again.
There is a self-loathing that comes with knowing you are soft, breakable, unprepared. And there are two ways you can deal with that. You can cry into your cornflakes and accept it, or you can remake yourself.
When I moved to Alaska I said yes to every opportunity. I accepted a ride from a stranger. I learned to bowl and to roll my own cigarettes. I learned to hot-wire cars. I drank too much and went on stupid dates. I learned to shoot while drunk. I made out with some questionable characters. I used an outhouse at forty below. I spent five days in a cabin on the coast with a guy I’d only been out with once, and went hiking into the middle of nowhere with him and his friends. I drove out to part of the Arctic Circle in the middle of the night and spent hours in a car stuck in a snowdrift, drinking beer and smoking to keep from freezing.
My parents were not impressed when they saw pictures of the people I was consorting with, but I needed something different. I needed to acquire skills and tackle challenges that good, nice, middle-class kids didn’t deal with. Living in Alaska was the happiest time in my life, and I remembered, as I stared up into the sky fifteen years later, it was also the last time I had looked up at the sky like this. I’d sit out in the big field adjacent to the university and just lie out there and look at the sky while the wind rushed through the birch trees. I grew so attached to the sound of those white birches that I planted three of them at my house in Ohio.
In many ways, I feel that I have gotten soft again. I traveled throughout my twenties—eight different countries—and moved nine times in nine years. When people ask me what stopped the constant moving, I admit it had a lot to do with getting tired of moving all of my books. I started to fantasize about permanent bookshelves. Simple as that.
The more interesting question is why it took fifteen years for me to stop and see the sky again. Have I been afraid to look up, afraid to stop, to see what I’ve become? By all accounts I have a large measure of the success I strove for when I was seized by the need to leave my house at thirteen. On the other hand, the cost of this success, particularly during the last four or five years, has been ceaseless work and hustle on a scale I never imagined. There has been less travel, and the word “yes” only leaves my mouth in response to writing gigs and speaking engagements, not camping trips and tree climbing.
I’ve gone from wandering free spirit to calculating businessperson, and though I very much enjoy not being evicted or scrounging for money in my car, I wonder sometimes if it’s worth giving up the sky.
REVOLUTION
What We Didn’t See: Power, Protest, Story
My parents taught me not to stare.
As children, even as adults, prolonged staring at others is something we do when we first encounter difference. It’s a long, often critical or fascinated look at something to try to understand it, to gauge where it fits in our taxonomy of things. First: Is this a threat? Should I respond with a fight … or flight? Second: Where does this person fit within my existing boxes? Woman or man? Black or white? Friend or foe?
We have nice, neat boxes for everything—boxes we learned in childhood that have been reinforced as we grew older by stories, by media, by our peers. We stare longest when we cannot fit what we see into an existing box, when we cannot figure out if it’s dangerous, or merely different—which many of us, unfortunately, still feel are the same thing.
And if, after staring long enough, we decide that this different thing is dangerous, we kill it.
* * *
I grew up in a town that was about 98 percent white.1 I would learn, decades later, that it was purposely constructed that way, as were many other places in the United States. (California went so far as to ban the immigration of free and enslaved blacks into the state,2 though that did not prevent those already there from continuing to eke out a living. Also see: the exclusion laws of Oregon.3, 4)
When I was three or four years old, my family took me to Reno, Nevada. We stayed at the Circus Circus Hotel, and while my dad went downstairs to play cards, my mom ordered up a special treat: cheesecake, delivered in a way totally new to me—via room service.
The knock came on our door. My mom opened it. And there was a very dark man in a very white coat holding a silver-colored tray.
“Mom!” I said, three or four years old and having never seen anyone much browner than a pale person with a suntan. “Why is that man so black?”
My mom, mortified, laughed and hushed me and tipped generously, I learned later. These were not polite questions. They revealed where and how I’d grown up. The question revealed the constructed lie of how we lived.
When he was gone, she told me, simply, that some people were born with different colors of skin, like different colors of hair. Being three or four years old, I was perfectly contented with this answer, and went on to happily eat my cheesecake. It would be four or five years more before I realized that in our society, skin color was not seen in the same way hair color was, even if, in my kid’s view of the world, it made exactly the same amount of difference as blue eyes or brown, red hair or black.
Even a child cannot escape history. We can’t escape what came before us.
Looking back, the irony is not lost on me, of course: the irony that the first person of color I ever saw, as a white child, was a black man serving me cheesecake on a polished platter.
* * *
Difference has been managed in a variety of ways, across times and cultures. Because difference is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. The Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder” posits a world where beauty itself is interrogated as a construct.5 A female patient spends nearly the entire episode covered in bandages while her doctors converse with her, always with their own faces out of sight, in shadow. In the end, it’s revealed that the woman has a movie-star beauty of a face: pale skin, pale hair, sparkling eyes, pleasingly symmetric features.
Hollywood beauty. The beauty our American culture, collectively, is told to strive for—even if it is so far beyond and outside what any of us actually look like.
Her doctors, nurses, the “normal” people in her world, are revealed to have the melted-looking faces of deformed pigs. They are the beautiful ones. She is the anomaly.
She is the difference.
In the end, she is shuttled off to a concentration camp. A ghetto created for people of her “kind.” They say she will be happier there, among those like her. Most importantly, though, she will be hidden from the eyes of those unlike her. They will be free from seeing her ugliness.
Her difference makes them uncomfortable, and for that grave crime, she must be locked away.
* * *
Sometimes difference from a culturally defined norm is celebrated—a mark of the gods, divine. Sometimes it is feared—a mark of evil. But most often, in the culture we call American, what we’ve done the last couple hundred years is lock up6 and shutter away7 and refuse to showcase all but the very narrow subset of humanity those in power would like us to believe are the true normal. This dangerous lie has led to the dehumanization of millions, and people who are dehumanized are not simply written out of the cultural narrative. They are, very often, utterly and literally8 removed from the face of the earth.
I have written before about how our broken sense of what is “normal” feeds into dangerous narratives, and how it limits the lives of women.9
But the reality is, this system of stories goes far beyond rewriting history to limit how we believe women fought, or lived. These stories—that there is this very narrow subset of “normal” people: upper middle class, white, women being women, men being men—serves to make the rest … not. Anyone who doesn’t fit is, of necessity, abnormal.
“Abnormal” often meaning “not human.”
And not human … well, we know what we do to things that aren’t human, don’t we?
The fastest way to dehumanize a person, or a subset of people, is to make them invisible. To lock them away. To say, “This is the stuff of circuses and mistakes. This is the stuff of nightmares.”
It’s easier to reject,10 fear,11 and destroy12 what we don’t understand.
It’s impossible to understand what we’re never allowed to see.
Even if, in many cases, what we never see is ourselves.13
* * *
I passed a man and his son headed to a football game one day. The news was, at the time, all about the protest and unrest in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, where peaceful protests in reaction to the shooting of an unarmed teenager were met with an increasingly violent police response.
One would think there would be a profound backlash against this militarized police response, no matter the race of the victim.
But one would be wrong.14
The boy and his father crossing the street to the stadium were white; the boy was about eight or nine years old, and he asked, “Dad, what if it had been a black cop shooting a black kid? What about a white cop shooting a white kid? Why are people upset because it was a white cop shooting a black kid? Would it be different another way?”
There was an uncomfortable moment of silence from the father, and when he responded, I could hear the tension in his voice. “I don’t know,” he said.
I don’t know.
These two people, likely growing up in neighborhoods as artificially constructed as the one I lived in, had no reason to know. They had not spent their lives terrorized by police the way that nonwhite people are.15 They had not had loved ones shot in the street outside of their homes, as continues to happen in largely black and immigrant communities. They had not grown up in neighborhoods where simply looking the way they did meant they were quite likely to spend a great deal of their time in prison.16 The statistics, for these two people—a white boy, a white man—were very different than for others.
Of course they don’t know.
People in power don’t want them to know. They want these people’s allegiance against the Other.
Divide and conquer is a time-tested strategy. Divide and conquer works.17
How do you explain four hundred years of prejudice, oppression, exclusion laws, and terror to an eight-year-old middle-class white boy on the way to a football game?
The truth is, he will likely never see it. Never even notice it.
And that’s the fault of mainstream stories. It’s the fault of our laws. It’s the fault of the culture we call “ours” but that isn’t really representative at all. It is the culture of a select few, assumed to be the culture of many.
But “us” is the fiction. “Ours” is the lie.
Who is “us”?
* * *
My academic advisor in graduate school was born with phocomelia, a rare congenital disorder that results in atypical formation of the limbs. We went into town one day to print and bind copies of my hundred-and-some-odd-page thesis, and she popped into a fabric shop to run an errand before we went to the printer.
I remember seeing a young child at the counter, standing next to his mother, staring at my advisor, whose shorter arms and legs made her much smaller than him. His eyes were so big. Staring. Forever and ever. No break. Goggle-eyed.
I remember being irrationally angry at this child for staring, and I stepped between him and my advisor to shield his view.
Now, I couldn’t tell you why I did it. She had to deal with these stares every day, and worse. It was me who was angry. It was me who was uncomfortable. It was me frustrated with how we notice and process difference.
My mother always told me not to stare. It was rude. It said, “You are different.” And difference, acknowledging difference, was bad. To acknowledge difference was to acknowledge everything that was broken. Yet … how was pretending not to see someone any better?
