Chait's "Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say"

I was EXHAUSTED after reading one Facebook comment war about it on a friend's wall. It was around this time a playwright friend talked to me about an idea for a show we both had kind of come up with, and he said, 'It would be great to examine straight male privilege in this.' And I said, 'Please. No. Write the story...whatever commentary on privilege will just exist. Don't make it about that.'

I agree that the suppression of speech or ideas because of sensitivities can be damaging. I cannot tell you how annoyed I get when 'check your privilege' is used to cut short a conversation that could be far more beneficial if the ideas were actually hashed out. At the same time, it stuns me how my friends in the trans community can be cut to the quick by truly thoughtless behavior. I had to give a very sweet co-worker a talking-to when she made a stupid Bruce Jenner joke the other day.

I found this to be on the responses to it I most agreed with.

Chait’s myopia about his own ideology does make you wish someone with more perspective had taken on this worthy subject. In a particularly galling moment, Chait quotes Salon’s Brittney Cooper as if she were being absurd or frightening in suggesting that the applicability of “reasonable debate” might be tempered by histories of power. “The demand to be reasonable is a disingenuous demand,” she wrote. “Black folks have been reasoning with white people forever. Racism is unreasonable, and that means reason has limited currency in the fight against it.” Interestingly, he leaves the following sentence from her original piece—“Black folks understand, just like white folks do, that reason should be wielded as a tactic, not adhered to as a rule”—out of his essay.

Chait does not like the idea that reason might not be equally appealing or accessible to all parties at all times, so he presents Cooper as “extreme.” She is not extreme; she is merely stating facts.



Lefty P.C. Culture Has Some Problems. But So Does Jonathan Chait

Updated On: 2/12/15 at 02:03 PM

I'm with Sonof's major points completely. And I found the Lowder piece in Slate -- which I read twice -- very savvy and measured. I appreciated the extent to which he honored the spirit of Chait's complaints. The spirit of Chait's concern, leaving out specifically sited anecdotal evidence, is too important to dismiss outright, as a shocking number of bloggers have.

I come a this with more pragmatism, maybe with the boomer's POV about the actual politics with a larger P. As we head into 2016, we don't need to eat our own. I'd like to see us give up the myriad real-time litmus tests for liberal street cred. As someone who's ridden a bus to DC with a bunch of cranky Unitarian war protesters in the past decade, and over 4 decades been involved in everything from Viet Nam demonstrations to the mother's march on gun control, I bristle when an acquaintance attacks me on Facebook for being "a part of the rape culture" simply because I refuse to boycott Woody Allen movies. (I recall this time last year when Kristoff's NY Times editorial resurrecting the Dylan Farrow case provoked an outcry that Cate Blanchett not accept her Oscar.) It's that sort of instant with-us-or-against-us rhetoric and the climate that often explodes among 'friends' on social media that galls me. I have no patience with it, which is sort of Sonof's point above.

(Sidebar: This happened over the weekend about BOYHOOD, when I didn't rally around the film's denunciation by a blogger simply because I didn't agree with a thesis comparing the movie's supposed racism to BIRTH OF A NATION -- no hyperbole there, right? -- because the Arquette character inspires a Latino boy. The offense taken seemed so out of proportion to the storytelling crime; yet there was a litmus test, and I was told I'm not in the club. The gloating and arrogance that often accompanies these progressive tests pisses me off. We become cliquish, and why? In light of all we must fight together on the right? Maybe another subject.)

And I say this with some irony, as someone who's far to the left of Hillary Clinton and discovers daily that many people are appalled if I merely voice my resentment about her presumption of ascendancy to the nomination and the WH. Rather than the far left dictating solidarity, those who rabidly support Clinton demand that we fall in behind her. I end up being the marginalized lefty, merely bringing up the Bernie-Elizabeth agenda as closer to my heart that Clinton's finger-to-the-wind politics. (When I said I still hadn't forgiven her for her Iraq vote, a woman friend exploded, "That's irrelevant! It's her time, now!" Well, I get a say in whether it's her time. It's called a vote. At least in the primary seasons.)

So these are gnarly issues. And I never thought I'd agree with David Frum, but his piece in the Atlantic says Republicans are finding a lot of Schadenfreud post-Chait, watching us splinter the way the GOP did post tea-party. I'm not sure we're there (the Lowder piece makes a persuasive case that these debates are happening in very, very rarefied air, far removed from most concerns of the Democrats needed to block the right's comeback). But as the Obama years come to a close, we must keep our common goals in the forefront. There's enough in Chait's argument to hold onto, at least in the backs of our minds.

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Updated On: 2/12/15 at 04:07 PM