Whose Story Is This?

 Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

Rebecca Solnit (2019, Haymarket Books)

     In these essays, once again, Rebecca Solnit has things to say that will be obvious only after she has said them. She's making a historical record of the changes we're living through now, because we won't remember. "Forgetting is a problem; words matter, partly as a means to help us remember. When the cathedrals you build are invisible, made of perspectives and ideas, you forget you are inside them and that the ideas they consist of were, in fact, made, constructed by people who analyzed and argued and shifted our assumptions." Indeed, people are still arguing and shifting our assumptions: we're nowhere near the end of history. Nor are we near the beginning of history: the Me Too movement would not have happened without other events and movements going back decades.

     One of the sea changes we are now experiencing is a dramatic widening of whose story we are telling, or hearing. The history of America has so often, for so long, included only white people, nearly all of them men. Even outside the corridors of power, there's often an elision of non-white Americans in the eyes of the media. "In the aftermath of the 2016 election, we were told that we needed to be nicer to the white working class, which reaffirmed the message that whiteness and the working class were the same thing and made the vast nonwhite working class invisible or inconsequential. We were told that Trump voters were the salt of the earth and the authentic sufferers, even though poorer people tended to vote for the other candidate." We know we're not going to change people by yelling at them that they are racists, but that doesn't necessarily make it healthy to pretend that they aren't.

    One way to stay safe when you're powerless is to pretend not to know what you know. House-cleaners and secretaries keep all kinds of secrets, as a condition of their jobs. This skill may amount to a gift for invisibility: how much did Pullman porters overhear when the white passengers assumed nobody was listening? Meanwhile, "the powerful swathe themselves in obliviousness in order to avoid the pain of others and their own relationship to that pain. It is they from whom much is hidden, and they who are removed from the arenas of the poor and powerless." If they don't know that their students or employees are being sexually harassed, they don't have to do anything about it.

      Other people tell lies on purpose, abusing their power to be believed. "What's clear now is that...a minority of us think they can enforce a version of reality divorced from factuality, and that they always have. It corrupts everything around them, and the corruption begins with them." The current presidency is one example, of course. Black Lives Matter exists to shine a light on other examples, cases when the police believe that their version of events is the only one that will be heard, even when there is videotape that contradicts it.

     Another way that lies affect our public lives is the promulgation of anti-abortion laws that contain willful misrepresentations of pregnancy and childbirth. "Sometimes the mostly white, mostly male legislators pushing these lies seem like amoral strategists. Sometimes they just seem like idiots." Ohio Republicans introduced a law instructing doctors to treat life-threatening ectopic pregnancies by re-implanting the embryo in the womb, a purely imaginary procedure. "So this is a bill to force a procedure that doesn't exist to save an embryo or fetus who's doomed while risking the life of the mother, who can be saved. It isn't pro-life, it is pro-lie."

In the long arc that bends toward justice, lies and secrets don't get the last word. Anita Hill spoke up, and so did Christine Blasey Ford, even in the face of threats of violence, and the near-certainty that the Senate would write their stories off. A study from 2003 showed that three out of four women who reported workplace harassment faced professional or personal repercussions. Solnit wonders, "What would women's lives be like, what would our roles and accomplishments be, what would our world be, without this terrible punishment that looms over our daily lives? It would surely rearrange who holds power, and how we think of power, which is to say that everyone's life might be different. We would be a different society." 

 

If we keep fighting, it could still happen.

 

 

Any Good Books, December 2020