Read on Twitter
This exchange between @EricLevitz and @jbouie neatly encapsulates the struggle I'm having regarding people like Ashli Babbit—the woman shot to death at the Capitol yesterday.
1/ https://twitter.com/EricLevitz/status/1347544936070180867
1/ https://twitter.com/EricLevitz/status/1347544936070180867
When I think about Babbit, my mind reflexively goes to the power of situational and cultural forces—ideologies that promote false consciousness, propaganda and conspiratorial lies, childhood socialization that fosters authoritarianism and racism, and so on.
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These forces lead ultimately to the existence of a social reality that doesn't resemble "ours"—not even in terms of its basic factual premises. By all indications, Babbit existed within a virulently racist, paranoid informational ecosystem.
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My bent is to see these forces as extremely powerful. And, consequently, they are the units of analysis in terms of which I think about how society might end authoritarianism and white supremacy. How can we design a society in which racist, authoritarian social realities die?
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This bent also makes me recoil at the the more extreme rhetoric aimed at Babbit.
The idea seems to be that to note the forces that created her, and to regard her as a type of victim, is to excuse her behavior—and that anything short of dehumanizing her is complicity.
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The idea seems to be that to note the forces that created her, and to regard her as a type of victim, is to excuse her behavior—and that anything short of dehumanizing her is complicity.
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(Note that I'm not attributing any such rhetoric to @EricLevitz or @jbouie, whose exchange exhibited very un-Twitter-like thoughtfulness and diplomacy.)
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I get it. All this situationism does feel like it militates against agency and accountability. Of course domestic terrorists are adults who can make their own decisions. Of course they must be held accountable. Of course they shouldn't be tolerated in polite society.
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To make progress on social justice, however, attention to social forces and individual accountability must be made to coexist. It's intuitively hard—and, I think, only possible if we dispense with the tendency to dehumanize those who dehumanize.
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Failing to do so sets up a cycle of dehumanization and meta-dehumanization: We think they're not-quite-human, they think we're not-quite-human, they think we think they're not-quite-human, and we think they think we're not quite human.
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As @NourKteily, @GordonHodsonPhD, and the late great Emile Bruneau show, this is a social trap that leads nowhere good.
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I don't bring any of this up because I think the world turns on Ashli Babbit's fate, but because the broader issue of how we regard people like her—the everyday vessels of hateful ideologies—is absolutely critical.
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Are such people symptoms of larger cultural and structural pathologies—or the primary progenitors of our problems? The answer the that question has everything to do with the steps we take to confront authoritarianism and white supremacy.
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