David Michael Miller
When I moved to the famously liberal city of Madison six years ago, I had some doubts about how well I would fit in. I am a critic of the welfare state, I want peacetime budget deficits outlawed, and I’m certain that people produce more when they are taxed less.
My saving grace is that I’m quite liberal on social issues. I speak the language of equality, too. I am completely comfortable with terms like intersectionality and cisgender.
Lately, however, I have heard a few things from fellow social liberals that I am not so comfortable with. Trying too hard to be empathetic and understanding can, I have come to believe, devolve into silliness.
My parents taught me that white people should actively repudiate racist ideas and behavior. The better among us go further, maybe by pushing for diversity in our workplace.
For some, being good — even very good — is just not enough. Apparently, the final frontier in the fight against racism is … to declare oneself hopelessly racist! This extraordinary self-sacrifice is based largely on the dubious theory of implicit bias, which holds that everyone favors white people, if only subconsciously.
Evolution surely installed some xenophobia in every person’s psyche. I bet an experimental psychologist could tease some out of me, testing my split-second reactions to people of different races.
But well-adjusted people subdue their ugly, primitive impulses as a matter of ingrained habit. It never even crosses my mind, for example, to use physical force to get what I want, despite having been congenitally programmed to do so. In the same way, decent white people reflexively suppress any vestigial traces of racism they were unfortunate enough to inherit.
I wonder if implicit bias is just a bourgeois way to paper over the real racism that still infects our society. I don’t know how, exactly, two black men ended up in handcuffs at a Philadelphia Starbucks last week. Tellingly, the cries of implicit bias are coming from the intelligentsia, including the media and the leadership of Starbucks. The on-the-ground protesters, on the other hand, seem to see plain old racism — aka explicit bias — at work.
So let’s please remember that there are actual racists out there. If you’re fretting over implicit bias, however, it’s safe to say you’re not remotely among them.
Being an upright guy in the #TIMESUP / #MeToo era is as simple as being anti-racist. You vocally condemn boorish behavior toward women, and keep your own conduct way above-board.
I have that covered, no problem. Yet I still don’t qualify for honorary feminist status. Problem is, I have the unenlightened habit of keeping an open mind when I hear an allegation of sexual misconduct.
Liberal thought leaders are not cool with such forbearance. Prominent feminist Zerlina Maxwell has asserted that “[w]e should always believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says.”
For interpersonal situations, Maxwell is right on. We should offer complete and unconditional validation to any friend or loved one who shares a painful story.
When it comes to public revelations, on the other hand, wherein no immediate judgment is required, shouldn’t the fact that the world is filled with liars, male and female, give us pause? Outside of court, we are free to ignore maxims like “innocent until proven guilty” and “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” But it feels un-American to do so, even when social pressure demands it.
The left can be similarly overbearing in its linguistic demands, arguing against using the term “illegal immigrants” because there aren’t any “illegal human beings.”
Of course there are no illegal human beings. Use of the term “illegal immigrant” suggests nothing of the sort. It simply identifies a contextually crucial characteristic of a person: that he or she committed the crime of entering the United States without authorization.
University of Massachusetts professor Jonathan Rosa argues that “illegal immigrant” is a linguistic outlier in the way we identify criminals. “We call a person who crosses the street illegally a jaywalker, not an illegal walker.” But that’s only because we happen to have a specific shorthand for that crime, as we do for poacher and speeder. There is no acceptable shorthand for a person who immigrated illegally. Likewise, a Google search for “illegal gambler” returns tens of thousands of hits.
Media style guides used to recognize that “illegal immigrant” and “illegal gambler” are linguistic analogs. As recently as 2012, The New York Times’ public editor defended “illegal immigrant” as “clear and accurate.” By the following year, many newsrooms around the country had forbidden the term. Entering the U.S. illegally is, evidently, a special kind of crime, one that warrants gentle linguistic treatment.
Many on the right greet overblown expressions of fairness, equality, or empathy with mocking derision. But having accepted a brutish bully as its leader, the right should probably keep quiet. Getting carried away with fairness, equality, and empathy is merely a foible. Turning your back on them completely is a sin.
Michael Cummins is a Madison-based business analyst.