by

My Biggest Writing Fear

Everything I know about the “Black Lives Matter” movement, I learned from CNN.

I lay on the couch during the late nights of November, 2014 and watched the Ferguson protests play out as if they were regularly scheduled programming.

“Look at what the blacks are doing now.”

“This is ridiculous, they just need to follow the laws like everyone else.”

Those were comments made by late-teen, white, well-to-do, upper middle class college students at Wake Forest University. They sat alongside me in a comfortable living room of the dorm while I watched the protests, just waiting for the halftime show of Monday Night Football to end.

Honestly, I am not sure if that’s what those college students said at all, but I do remember the silence that ensued. That silence came from me.

In my head, I thought most of the people who protested in Ferguson were probably law-abiding citizens. Those who smashed the storefront windows and set fire to the police cruisers were probably just hooligans taking advantage of the police having their hands full elsewhere. This was a good explanation, I thought. But still one that I couldn’t verbalize to my white peers.

I justified the silence to myself. I thought that the world of the Ferguson protests and “Black Lives Matter” was geographically, racially and culturally foreign to where I reside in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I care about it, but who am I to speak out about it? I do not have enough evidence to support my claims. So then, others find it so easy to file me under the category of “just another guilty, white liberal” because I’ve only seen the social injustice of America through the lens of a 24-hour-news-network camera.

But in conversation, sometimes the threat of labels alone has the power to silence you. I was scared. Scared to have meaning put in my mouth. Scared to have to defend myself against a label that my peers could have given me.

So when I write, I try to avoid the conversation altogether. That’s why I write food and humor columns for the college paper. No one has ever put a label on me for that, except for maybe “burger-lover” or “beard-enthusiast.” But a few weeks ago my editor censored a piece that I had written. The piece revolved around some banter on which dining hall on campus served better quality food. I wrote, “At Wake Forest University, we debate a lot of hot-button issues, from the Confederate flag to climate change. Now we can add another huge debate to that list: which dining hall reigns supreme?” My editor struck out those lines. “Showed your privilege,” said the editor. “It’s funny but insensitive.” I asked what she meant, and she told me that I trivialized the Confederate flag debate. I realize now that I reacted just as I had while I was watching the Ferguson protests. My editor brought me into a conversation I never thought I would have. So once again my gut reaction was fear and silence.

Once again, when I found myself in the conversation, I remained silent. I took out the lines in question and thanked the editor. She really saved my ass. Maybe no one would have picked up on the racially insensitive subtext. I know I didn’t. But it was worth the censorship to avoid the letters and the tweets and the emails and the written responses from the other publications on campus. I justified my silence again. I could not justify my writing against the labels that someone could tack onto me. But this time, I thought about the number of people who I could reach by writing that article. When I thought of myself as a writer in the time of social media, I realized that the audience was so much bigger than a couple people. Expression began to feel like high-risk wealth management to me. All at once, everything could come crashing down.

Social media has had that effect on expression. If you were to copy and paste the censored lines from my article into a tweet, you would get exactly 140 characters. So then you send it out to, let’s say, 208 followers (the twitter average). Now let’s pretend that tweet gets retweeted and another 200 followers see it. That adds up to around 400 people that I don’t know reading about three lines of my 1000-word work. If those people are like the editor of the newspaper, then that’s a lot of people seeing my privilege.

I searched for a real example of someone revealing another person’s privilege on social media, and it did not take me long to find one. Recently, a Facebook post written by Neema Githere, a female Yale student, reported that brothers at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity discriminated against her. The post read, “I’d just like to take a moment to give a shoutout to the member of Yale’s SAE chapter who turned away a group of girls from their party last night, explaining that admittance was on a ‘White Girls Only’ basis; and a belated shoutout to the SAE member who turned me and my friends away for the same reason last year.”

I first read this Facebook post in The Washington Post, and the article tried to gather the story surrounding the incident. Unfortunately, what I got from it was mostly “he said she said” kind of stuff. A fraternity brother responded by saying that they denied the women admittance because the police told them to stop admitting people. According to the brother, the men at the door were all minorities and denied the girls admittance on the grounds that the party was too full. He then reported that a woman they turned away kept shouting “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” By this account, the incident was sparked by misinterpretation, not by an act of discrimination.

However, this side of the story is not easy for me to accept for two reasons. First off, I do not know of any fraternity brother who would ever turn away girls when the party gets too full. Secondly, if the bouncers at the door were really minorities, like the brother said, that would make the reaction of the black woman highly unlikely. According to social psychologists who study the experience of prejudice, the black woman would most likely not interpret her denial of admittance as discrimination because the bouncers were from minority groups themselves. The phenomena is called attributional ambiguity, and the fraternity brother used it to cast a shadow of doubt on the allegations of discrimination. But to me, it all sounds like an invention.

A look at the other side of the story does not make me any surer about what actually happened. The testimony of Sofia Petros-Gouin, who was turned away at the door, says that the bouncer was a white fraternity brother who told her the party was for “white girls only.” Now that the story has changed so that a white brother was the bouncer, I can see how discrimination could have been in play. At the same time, I could see how the women misinterpreted the brother’s denial of admittance as prejudice, although it was based on orders from the police. So is this girl’s story just an invention as well? I am left with many interpretations of the same situation, but no solid evidence to conclude what actually happened. These stories without evidence hold no water to me. These stories do not appeal to my reason.

But in the world of social media, evidence and reason are not so crucial. If you have an opinion or an interpretation of something, you can let 500 or 600 people know about it by just clicking the “Post” button. Facebook posts will only show you the numbers but not proportions, as long as it defends the writer’s viewpoint. Correlation always implies causality in social media, as long as the writer posits it as such. The writer uses the one example of the bad person in the group and gives those qualities to the whole group. Someone posted a comment to the Facebook post I referenced earlier. She said about the SAE brothers, “reminds me of the time they asked me and a group of other Latino, predominantly Mexican, friends for our passports when we tried to go to their [expletive] party a little over a year ago. … So sorry this [expletive] is still happening! Can’t stand those rich, spoiled and rude brats.” Rich. Spoiled. Rude. All labels that the SAE brothers will contend with from now on. I question how many of them are actually deserving of those labels. Not many, I reckon.

I get my usual fear whenever I log on to Twitter or Facebook. When a typically mild-mannered friend posts a hateful picture about Caitlin Jenner or about “Black Lives Matter,” that is my cue to scroll down the page to something about football or a picture of a fluffy dog hiding in a blanket or something. They seem to think that they know the “right way,” the right way to live and the right things to believe.

While they tell others the “right way,” I try my best to find my own way. But when think I get at it, some new evidence comes along and ruins it for me. I came to college a Catholic, turned into an atheist because I took an anthropology course. Then I took a philosophy course, found out that I am not a very good atheist, and now I can’t figure out what I am. I just want to be a good, honest writer more than anything. I want to be a writer like James Baldwin. I want to be the James Baldwin that Richard Rodriguez described, the Baldwin whose “arching eyebrows intercepted ironies, parenthetically declared fouls; mouthfuls of cigarette smoke shot forth ribbons of exactitude.” Baldwin was cruel, but he was also compassionate. He spoke honestly about the lives of African-Americans in Harlem and in the United States, and sometimes he went against them. He decried their hatred and fear and the rumors they created, rumors like the one in Notes of a Native Son that incited the Harlem race riot of 1943. The rumor was that a white police officer shot and killed a heroic black soldier who was protecting an innocent black woman. However, Baldwin points out that the soldier was not dead, and the girl “seemed to have been as dubious a symbol of womanhood as her white counterpart in Georgia usually is.” Baldwin cuts past the rumors and gets to the truth. And for that, he was a controversial figure, so controversial in fact that he was barred from speaking at Wake Forest in the 1980s. As a writer, if it turns out that telling the truth makes me controversial someday, then I want to be just that.

But do I have the chops to be that kind of writer? My dad always told me that I need thicker skin in this world. He coached me in baseball and he would always stand in the dugout just a bit away from the gap in the fence that I passed through to get to the batter’s box. I felt his presence as I stood in the batter’s box. It was like he imposed a 50 foot shadow over me, and all I wanted to do was please him. All I wanted to do was hit the ball hard, or at least swing hard so he would not think he raised a weak son. However, I was afraid at the same time. I was so afraid of swinging and missing and letting my teammates down so that when the pitch came in it went by me in slow-motion. And it hit the glove with a snap and then things sped up all of a sudden and the umpire said, “that’s strike three, son.” So I had to move my legs that seemed as heavy as lead and walk past my dad as quickly as I possibly could and sit down on the bench with my head down and pretend that did not just happen. I had to pretend that I did not just freeze in fear at the plate. I guess I have never stopped pretending, pretending that fear did not keep me from swinging the bat or standing up against those students who so insensitively put down the Ferguson protestors. I keep pretending that fear does not keep me from speaking my mind. How can I be a writer if I am afraid to speak my mind? I reinforce this fear by never writing on social media. That way, I never say anything polemic and, therefore, never need to defend myself. I never see my “friends” label me as a privileged and rude.

When I thought about it further, however, I figured that this fear would always be in conflict with my desire to find out new evidence, my desire to keep learning. The other day a conversation broke out in the coffee shop where I work. We started to talk about radical Islamist groups and how they defend their violence. I drew upon some Netflix documentary that I had watched (back when I was an atheist) and said that extremist groups could use holy texts to defend their violence. My coworker called me out. She said “my parents are Muslim and I have been raised to understand the Quran, and nowhere does it say to commit violent acts.” Then she actually quoted the holy book and her passage said to never practice violence. So I sat there in complete silence, my cheeks flushed. I could not back up my claim. She returned the silence. For about three hours we said nothing to one another, all due to my lack of understanding. It took all of me not to fake nausea and run out of the shop to safer intellectual waters. But then I thought, if I had not said the wrong thing I would not have been taken to that passage. If I had not been wrong, my coworker would not have given me new evidence to form a better opinion.

I cannot reinforce my fear of expressing myself any longer. For while social media seems to have made it easier for people to label me and pass judgments on me, I cannot learn anything new without saying what is on my mind. I can be the great, honest writer I want to be if I pursue the truth without fear of making mistakes. At least, that is how I will survive in today’s social-media-crazed world. And if others are like-minded, then the entire intellectual landscape could change. We could write in a world where expression does not seem like a high-stakes game, but an avenue to pursue in order to learn new things. I have hope that someday we will stop trying to fix others to our perspectives and instead share our knowledge in order to get at the truth about the world around us. I even have hope that someday I can use social media again.

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