Frederick Douglass

The very human feeling of compulsion towards something that you fancy is lovely when you are not in its thrall. I remember when we had a rat (or two) in the Marsden Ave apartment and used peanut butter as a lure for our traps. It worked like a charm and the reward was the disgusting removal of a feral corpse. If aliens want to trap me they'd just have to put a jar of almond butter mixed with honey and basically all fear would go out the window and my fate would be experimentation out of the world. 

Books, when they are a compulsion, is a quaint idea. We can imagine easily the compulsion of food and drink, sex, and computer games but books can captivate. Audiobooks, too, it seems. If I could say that I dread the weeks when I don't need to commute to Hamilton it might surprise. Why? Because I have an excuse to listen to my books. Recently it has been the Asia Saga from James Clavell some of whose books go into 50 hours which no normal busy person could finish in four weeks without a strict regiment. Right now it is a biography about Frederick Douglass whose 40 hours I still need to work hard to complete.

I didn't know anything about Douglass until a few years ago when President Trump described him as "an example of someone who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more" which betrayed the Don as it made it obvious he though being someone who can speak with full confidence and bluster about someone or something that he knows nothing about Frederick Douglass. The grammarian will notice that Don was using the present perfect tense with a person who died in 1895. Don may have thought one day that he'd have to give Frederick the Medal of Freedom. But Frederick Douglass did do an amazing job. I am not half-way though and I'm already convinced of that.

He was a slave for 20 years until he escaped but emerged not only as a charismatic speaker but one with clear principles, the power of literacy much beyond those who had spent their youth in education and the wisdom for the ages. In this modern age we know the population-scale effects of deprivation and discrimination on a group while also observing those few sparkling lights of the extraordinary who stay strong and not be cut down as they distinguish themselves where most others would fall. His spectacular emergence was an antidote to that of age racism - a slave who was or became a gentleman and a scholar. Or should have been the antidote but for the dogmatism of white superiority, or that the real politick realised that emancipation of the slaves would devastate southern states regardless of moral questions. Any realistic person could say that slavery as an institution and racial notions are not of an objective rational mind. But what we can say about the blinkered prejudiced minds of the past, it is also pleasant to hear the lives of the anti-abolitionists of the times. Some people really were passionate in their support and desire to subvert slavery system, hiding slaves, supporting their escape to British colonies. While the politics of any moment in the past is hard to grasp in the competing persons and policies, that time in America, the emergence of the Republican Party and their very first elected US president, Abraham Lincoln, was part of the tumult of the times. 

So here is to compulsions of learning of lives. I will blog about the Asia Saga once I can listen to the final 50 hour novel and complete the full view. 

The Project of Rehumanisation

Names are funny little beasts. I remember a time in my youth when I assumed names actually imbue the person with a characteristic. If I met someone with the same name as any of my childhood peers, I would expect someone similar. Kanes are bad boys. Davids are honest and shy. Tims are a bit rough. Natalies are tomboyish, and so on. It is not a surprise that this phase didn't last and I even got to meet some Daniels who were rather undeniably unDaniel. Such are those strange assumptions and realisations of growing up, even thinking that something as shallow as names or words could be definitive of the person, rather than a living vital person be defining, and filling the name. But there are examples galore where people, either with words or narratives, define the others. 

If I could draw a very amateurish theory, I'd say there is an uneasy relationship in our minds between language and real things in our minds, language is such a convenient shortcut to dealing with things, but are inarticulate when applied to people. When we observe something about a person or thing that goes against a label, there is a dissonance and we feel a greater faithfulness to the label rather than what we see with our own eyes. The language or narrative we put on people, though adaptive in these complicated times, seems to butcher the rich four dimensional reality of someone. 

One of the crudest skills of the bully is to take someone's name and bend it into something worse. Trump was masterful in having the media repeat his nicknames for his rivals and enemies, and have his followers and mouthpieces repeat them: Crooked Hillary; Low Energy Jeb; Crazy Nancy. He did it with mini-narratives that are accessed through labels such as Hillary's e-mails or Hunter Biden's laptop. In New Zealand we have had a spate of this with the variety of names our Prime Minister is referred by her detractors ("Jabcinda"). And the function of name-calling is that others will have a caricatured image that others can see despite what they might see or know. It also sets up for confirmation biases, or give reason for partisans to create narratives around them to reinforce them.

Racial stereotyping or gendered thinking is a more garden variety of this. This is nothing new - we shouldn't judge a book by its cover and experiencing a broad range of any category of people will usually show diversity. The quote that was profound on me ages ago that I'm glad to have been able to track down: "There is more genetic variation within self-identified racial groups than between them." (Professor Audrey Smedley) Living abroad helps when you know that there are quiet "Americans", arrogant outspoken "British" without any sign of a tight upper lip; you'll find numerically challenged "Chinese", and some not so inscrutable "Japanese". It's not just for race and gender but for any what that replaces our idea of knowing the who.

People also have the strange ability to equate a person with a single act from the opus of their lives, or take an utterance to be their a saying representative of their soul and being. To be clear, there could be plenty of heinous acts which in their very doing do tell you something significant about who a person is (although nothing even remotely close to their totality). However, there are plenty of poor choices, as well as occasions of poor execution made by people that may somehow singularly transform how they may be seen... even when we do not have the context for what was said or done, or even worse, we rely on someone else to tell us what was said or done, and despite their lifetime of saying and doing all sorts. If I were to insert a thematic segue to my previous post, people who have been "cancelled" may feel this the most. As individuals we can feel for a while that one mistake or something poorly said is our everything, that we could creep into a hole and die, at least for a while, and it doesn't help when the world seems to agree, at least for a while. 

To me, these things are all kinds of dehumanisation, where someone holds a caricature in their mind of others, even despite evidence to the contrary, which robs them of their dignity and uniqueness. Holding such a shallow representation is adaptive to the observer because it is consistent and does not require too much extra mental processing and adaptation to differences in people. Stereotypes after all are a kind of a heuristic and means we can make practical decisions quickly. But inside every Tamati, Dietrich and Hashimoto is a beating heart, who has beat through a childhood, maybe with a mother that loves them, and making mistakes, longing and learning. They have a body with marks from scraps and sickness, of predisposition, of summertime outside. That is a full person and to recognise the space to know someone. And that would be what I would say is to rehumanise someone in our minds.

Besides the banal not judging a book by its cover, there are other rehumanising practices, such as "be kind - you will never know the battle others are fighting". Another one is the awareness that we often attribute our own failings to circumstance, and the failings of others to their character, and that we should always look to see others failings in the context of circumstances. Or meditating on the basic physicality of others and ourselves.

Probably the interesting part of my job has been to be more and more aware of the cultural norms around introductions. I'm typically all business when it comes to my intros but have tried to broaden them out because in Pacific and Māori cultures, introductions are important - they should be more personal and they should be paid attention to. With students of that background, unless I want to be dehumanised to a short, bald white guy, I should show some feelings, values, habits, hobbies and origin rather than just my role and responsibilities. I remember shortly after returning having a tikanga training and having the facilitator first ask us to introduce ourselves without any prompting, to which we gave various depths of responses, after each of the intros she would ask a deeper question, or to note something in common, which she later said was a function of the habit of introductions. People do have a desire to know with whom they are working with and commonality builds trust, and it shouldn't be replaced just with a handshake. There are situations where we do not naturally have introductions but where small-talk allows some way to fill in the backstory of someone to get over the labels and assumptions that we might have. And there is a delight in speaking with a real person.

Those are easier because a new person is a new page. It is harder to rehumanise people you have known for some time and for whom their are bygones, mutually spent time but not with mutual discovery. Some of my colleagues fall into this category. They are caricatures to an extent: I know their working persona, their good and bad deeds either first or second hand; they tend to know me the same way. It could be easier to lump the Indian females into a common person, the males into another. The Sāmoan women who speak English as a second language, and for whom English has a certain tone and articulateness, which makes them sound ignorant or lowly educated, even if they have a doctorate, and that does all of them harm, even if they do not have a doctorate.

Our ways of interacting with people can often be culture-bound, and that to adopt another cultural mindset can help overcome the power of shallow impressions. One word from te reo Māori that is useful to know is tapu, which is often translated as "sacred" or "restricted". Everything and everybody has a degree of tapu, and it has to be reduced by becoming familiar (whakanoa) if you are going to be in contact or conducting interactions with another. Another word from te reo that has had quite some currency in teaching these days is "mana-enhancing" (whakamana), describing to a mode of education that ensures the dignity of people in the education process, that we are building people rather than sorting them out into elite, the also-rans and the failures. Whakamana though is to recognise the dignity and integrity, the inherent and accumulated mana of someone else. When you see all others as tapu and having mana as part of the framework to your world, they are humanised or rehumanised and you will have the humility to let them be themselves.

No matter how you do it, I think there is value in indulging in a project of rehumanisation of others in your life, especially with the people who are often in your life, but also for those that are very familiar and may have be incidentally dehumanised by a label or an event and have been incidentally harmed. I could talk about how we can rehumanise ourselves who we harm with labels and narratives but that can wait till another time.