Here's a vexing question: what if you are, a little bit, the problem?

or at least, the way you're thinking about things; inspired by a fraught email exchange I had with an author/DEI consultant

Me trying to figure out why up is down and what was wrong five minutes ago is now fine, apparently

Back when my eldest son was an infant (he’s about to turn 14), I underwent some therapy (and medication, which I still take) for postpartum-induced depression. One of the most useful takeaways from cognitive behavioral therapy was the concept of cognitive distortions.¹

For a helpful list of cognitive distortions, I’ll turn to an expert (Wikipedia):

"overgeneralizing, magnifying negatives, minimizing positives and catastrophizing" with "more realistic and effective thoughts, thus decreasing emotional distress and self-defeating behavior.” Cognitive distortions can be either a pseudo-discrimination belief or an overgeneralization of something. ²

Uhhhhhhhhhh anyone noticed any cognitive distortions anywhere lately? Like, maybe, news? And, um, social media?

The truth is, over the past couple of days I’ve had a frustrating email exchange with a writer whose work I’ve supported and followed for many years. She’s been delving into race relations in recent years (important! necessary! let’s do it!), but lately more and more of what she puts out there has a strong flavor of hardcore standpoint theory.³ The main thrust of standpoint theory is, you’re the expert on your own lived experience. This is true.

But. As decades and decades of psychological study has gently pointed out, our perceptions aren’t always accurate, and they certainly aren’t always beneficial. My online friend DanT of Technopoptimism addressed some of this today in his post about the general fear of self-driving cars and nuclear power sites.⁴

I’m not going to share too many specifics about the email exchange. I’ve decided it’s time just to move on from following her work and look to other teachers and thinkers whose views I can better understand. Not that I have a big platform or anything, but I’m not a fan of putting people on blast, even when I disagree with them, especially if it’s not a public debate.

Let me be clear, though: she specifically invited discourse about her essays. Very specifically. And said she didn’t just want heart emoji responses, but push back.

So I pushed back.

In response to an essay from a few days ago, I asked if she could help me understand how making blanket statements about the moral inferiority of an identitiy group was appropriate (especially since she’s an author and a DEI consultant); that if someone like me (a white woman, FYI) made the exact same statements about Black people that she was making about white people, it would be completely unacceptable. I asked her if she could explain to me why it was okay for her to make generalized disparaging comments about an identity group because that group was “white.”

She disagreed that it was unacceptable. In fact, she felt that I could say something like “Black people fail to rise to the occasion, over and over” (that’s a direct quote from one of her essays, only with “Black” inserted where she had written “white.”)⁵

What’s so frustrating about this to me is, it's a perfect example of the slippery nature of cognitive biases and distortions. Standpoint theory has the makings to be the ultimate cognitive distortion.

I’m not saying don’t trust yourself or disbelieve your own experiences. And certainly don’t automatically disbelieve people when they share their lived experiences.

If someone is rude to you, they’re rude to you, but that doesn’t mean [insert whatever group that person appears to belong to] are rude. If many men have been violent toward you, then many men have been violent toward you, and that is a horror and a shame. It makes total sense for you to distrust men.

But saying “I distrust men because of my experiences” is a different thing than saying “men aren’t trustworthy.” Further, saying “men aren’t trustworthy” to your best friend is different than being a paid educator and saying “men aren’t trustworthy” in a public venue.

This woman and I were talking past each other. She interpreted my questions as discounting her lived experience—she actually said I had over the years repeatedly implied she was ignorant of her own lived experience.

If she was my real-life friend, and she told me she didn’t trust white people, I’d be sad, but I wouldn’t be upset with her. But she’s not my real-life friend. She’s a public figure who has taken on the mantle of cultural education. I’m upset that she is an educator, and she’s making prejudicial statements to a general audience who are there for cultural awareness education.

She also said what she heard in my comments was a strain of “not all white people” (as in, “not all white people are racist” or whatever, a common refrain that activists have frequently pointed to as a deflection of personal responsibility). Then later, in another response to me, she said I’ve followed her work long enough to know she doesn’t mean all white people. Even when she generalizes “white people.” There’s no countering standpoint theory.

The whole exchange was really distressing. I felt misunderstood (I assume she did, too). I felt judged; she said I was minimizing her truth. I said she was discounting my lived experience. She said my response was proof positive of the negative generalizations she made about white people. I claimed that as an author and consultant with a significant online audience, she in fact had the upper hand in the power differential: I’m a random nobody with a bachelor’s degree who’s been an at-home parent for more than ten years, with no public or academic influence and no real platform.

In the end, we agreed it was just time to part ways. Which is a fine outcome.

I guess I’d call myself a humanist. According to the dictionary that means I maintain “beliefs [that] stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems.”

I believe that prejudicial thought patterns about identity groups isn’t right. She apparently believes that it’s fine. Is it any wonder there’s rampant confusion about what “racism” even means anymore?

I’ve been trying to figure out why this has been so upsetting to me. People say stuff like that all the time, and it rolls right off. Maybe it’s because I came to trust this person’s insights over the years, only to learn she finds my good-faith questions about her work proof that I’m morally inferior. Maybe it’s because I find a lot of language of current activism—like, within the past couple of years—to be a mirror of in-group/out-group religious language (a point I made that she ignored). Maybe she’s right and my chafing at her words is evidence of a deep, secret rot. Maybe I’m just misreading her.

Maybe we’re both a little bit wrong. I still think one of us is wronger than the other.

1. Sometimes therapy isn’t enough. Vast numbers of people suffer mental illnesses that can’t be solved solely with therapy. Please take your medicine.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy#Cognitive_distortions

3. Standpoint theory is a component of CRT; I wrote about that awhile ago, and the reasons why I don’t think it’s a great way of framing the world. It’s a long post and kind of pseudo-academic, since there’s a lot of references to the source Theory materials I studied in college, but that kind of close look is imporant so we’re all talking about the same thing. The jist: there’s some stuff central to CRT that I find mentally unhealthy—and it’s not “white people might feel bad.”

4. For a little standpoint credentialism, DanT is a car crash lawyer. So he knows a thing or two about the safety or not of cars and drivers.

5. We could play a little word game here: insert identity group, then judge the statement (“the occasion” being a moral moment). “Straight people have failed to rise to the ocassion, over and over.” “Women have failed to rise to the occasion, over and over.” “Trans people have failed to rise to the occasion, over and over.” Now imagine who’s saying it: is it a woman saying that about women? Or is it a man saying it about women? Is it a straight person saying it about a trans person? Or is it a trans person saying it about trans people? If anything, my objection was to this woman’s positioning as an educator, making a moral judgment about an identity group she’s not part of, in a public setting. I’m taking the standpoint theory at face value, and claiming she doesn’t have the right in her capacity as an educator to make such a comment.