The #MeToo movement has
revealed deep fault lines in modern society, between those who persist in
accepting and engaging in traditional male domination of women and those who
reject and condemn those behaviors. It may seem as if this split has suddenly
developed, but we have been approaching this moment of reckoning for many
years. The current crisis of gender behavior means that the tipping point has
at last been reached.
The controversy over whites
costuming themselves as black represents the racial side of the same
phenomenon. What was once accepted as normal
white behavior can now cost prominent people their exalted positions.
It was never okay for men to
use their social power to coerce sex from women or for whites to amuse
themselves by lampooning the racial subordination of blacks. Sexism and racism
have always been moral transgressions. But in the American society in which I
grew up, these transgressions were ubiquitous, rarely challenged, and socially
accepted. They were wrong, but normal.
The challenge to normality,
the recognition that not just individuals, but society itself was immoral, has
been a shock to my generation, to anyone who learned how to behave before, say,
1970. The fact that these lessons were long overdue, that they reflect obvious
ethical and religious precepts, has not made them easier to absorb.
I excuse no form of racist or
sexist behavior, then or now. But I understand the wrenching difficulty of
realizing that we were taught to emulate inhumane behavior, to acquiesce in a
deeply flawed system, to perpetuate the denigration of our fellow human beings.
When I remember the jokes I laughed at, the derogatory names I repeated, the
lines of thinking I followed, the attitudes I carried around as I grew up and
went to high school and college, I am ashamed. But it was not easy to stand
apart from the culture of male superiority and the distinct, but overlapping
culture of white supremacy, to see the undeserved privileges they conferred on
me and the pain they caused those on the outside.
I believe I was helped toward
enlightenment by being Jewish. Not that Jews are smarter or better. But our
position as not quite insiders, subject to occasional reminders that we were
never safe from racism, helped me perceive other forms of social condescension
embedded in daily life. My rejection of normal antisemitism made rejection of
sexism and racism easier, more logical. When I realized that there was a
profound difference between Jews joking among ourselves about ourselves and
Christians laughing at Jewish jokes that they made up, it was an easier step to
recognize how male jokes about blondes proclaimed permanent sexual supremacy.
But I could never have made
this transition from complicity to awareness by myself. I had to learn hard
lessons from female and black friends, from writers, filmmakers, singers, and
countless others who have been teaching these truths for years.
It is nevertheless difficult
for anyone to give up a learned superiority. The implications of undeserved
superiority go beyond language, the so-called “political correctness” that
retrograde voices lament, because they don’t want to change. Men still
continually interrupt
women. Whites still view unfamiliar blacks as potential
criminals.
The categories deeply
embedded in our subconscious do not dissolve even when we consciously agree
that they are inappropriate. I don’t remember how I learned the concepts “woman
driver” and “slut”, but they were already firmly planted in my thinking by the
time I was 15. Even though I haven’t used those words to explain what happens
around me for decades, the concepts still rattle around in my head, unbidden,
unwelcome, fundamentally misleading, but impossible to erase.
The consequences of centuries
of assumptions about who is superior and who is inferior reach into every
corner of our minds and lives. Just one example: there are several recent news
stories about how adults, including doctors, take women’s and girls’ pain less
seriously than male pain. This can lead to delayed
or incorrect diagnoses. This subtle bias may have contributed to the
ability of serial abusers like Dr. Larry Nassar to get away with assaulting
girls for years after they first began to complain about him.
Right behavior is easy to
define, but harder to practice. A right society does not yet exist and its
details are not yet fully imagined. We don’t yet know all of the changes we
will need to make in our attitudes and actions in order to create full social equality.
The work will be difficult, but the goal will be glorious.
Steve Hochstadt
Berlin
February 19, 2019
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