Feelings travel faster than thoughts. If you’re paying attention, it’s obvious these days. If you’re not, it’s easy to get sucked into conflict. We can have enthocentric responses to others and, if we don’t analyze them, it’s easy to get sucked into bias.
Completing a course on managing emotions and finding common themes in a couple of novels recently has helped me stop and at least think about some “culture war” motivations and root causes of thinking.
There is a poignant moment in The Covenant of Water when Joppan comments on caste and slavery:
The ‘kind’ slave owners in India, or anywhere, were always the ones who had the greatest difficulty seeing the injustice of slavery. Their kindness, their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favored them. It’s like the British bragging about the railways, the colleges, the hospital they left us – their ‘kindness’! As though that justified robbing us of the right to self-rule for two centuries! As though we should thank them for what they stole! Would Britain or Holland or Spain or Portugal or France be what they are now without what they earned by enslaving others?
Is wielding power over anyone better when you’re “nice?”
Starr comments on what the father of the officer who shot Khalil (and potentially could have shot her) said in an interview in The Hate U Give:
“My son loved working in the neighborhood,” One-Fifteen’s father claims. “He always wanted to make a difference in the lives there.”
Funny. Slave masters thought they were making a difference in black people’s lives too. Saving them from their “wild African ways.” Same shit, different century. I wish people like them would stop thinking that people like me need saving.
What makes us feel that others need “saving” from themselves? If we thought about it, would our response be different?
Recharting at a new latitude 