It should never be the oppressed who must manage the pain of an oppressor realizing his wrongfulness.

flickr/Gigi Ibrahim

T he well-known South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was created to help form a unified society out of the ashes of racist division. Moving from a society carved out by legalized bigotry called apartheid to one made whole by equality was a mammoth task no one could achieve perfectly. Despite the violence done to people of color, particularly black Africans, the TRC called for “a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation.”

To obtain closure, victims and victims’ families could confront the agents of violence who had acted out of political motivations (from both the apartheid and anti-apartheid sides). The TRC aimed to provide amnesty for such people, if they gave satisfactory testimony: There was a fear that people would never find out the fate of loved ones or the identity of transgressors if amnesty was not offered. Instead of answers, there would be only silence. Amnesty would allow truth to blossom, and, as many know, silence is not conducive to stability, because when things are unsaid it also means they’re not resolved.

Whether the TRC was a success is its own discussion. But for all its faults, it recognized that it should never be the oppressed who are forced to manage the pain of an oppressor realizing his wrongfulness. It wasn’t the victims attempting to convey to their oppressors why they had done wrong. The wrongdoers themselves — out of fear, shame, desperation, or whatever — were the ones coming forward, carrying a knowledge of wrongfulness to the altar of amnesty for all to see. However bloody that altar became, we did not expect the victims to maintain it.

The wrongdoers themselves were the ones coming forward, carrying a knowledge of wrongfulness to the altar of amnesty for all to see.

This lesson doesn’t appear universal.

A few months back, in the United States, Frederick Sorrell was “charged with … intimidation after following a black Muslim couple in his car while hurling threats through the window.” He did this for twenty blocks, yelling racist threats and making violent gestures.

He pleaded guilty, and after being sentenced, Sorrell wept, claiming “I guess my ignorance and my stupidity is why I opened my mouth, and I shouldn’t have and I claim full responsibility.”

If he had stopped there, that would be dodgy enough: He doesn’t actually acknowledge he did anything wrong, only that he “shouldn’t have” acted the way he did. Does that mean he shouldn’t have acted then and there? Or that he should’ve waited for a better time when he would not have been caught? He claims responsibility for his actions but doesn’t tie his actions to being wrong. (In case you’re wondering, that’s how you make a proper apology.)

But he continued, saying “I would love to sit down and have an open conversation with [the couple he targeted] and have an open mind and apologize.” If Sorrell had his way, his victims would give up time, to sit with him and have an “open conversation.” They would gain nothing, while he would get a free education and good PR. They would sit in a room with a man who conveyed pure hatred and violence toward them, all for the gamble that their aggressor might emerge a better person.

Too often, people from various spectrums of privilege who might say or do something offensive to a marginalized group put out a call to be “educated.” Men who do or say something sexist call for women to “educate” them; white folk want to hear from black people why they can’t say the N-word; and so on. Like Sorrell, people like this are asking those already targeted by the status quo to do the emotional labor to educate them.

Consider men and our alleged ignorance about feminist issues. As Lindy West noted in her New York Times column, a lot of men claimed ignorance when confronted with various issues raised by #MeToo, such as affirmative consent and gendered socialization. But, especially in the digital information age, this can longer be an excuse. “The reason [nuanced conversations about consent and gendered socialization] feel foreign to so many men is that so many men never felt like they needed to listen,” she wrote. “Rape is a women’s issue, right? Men don’t major in women’s studies.”

They would sit in a room with a man who conveyed pure hatred and violence toward them, all for the gamble that their aggressor might emerge a better person.

These discussions didn’t emerge when women finally had Twitter accounts. Feminists do and have written on these various subjects for decades, so they’ve already carefully researched and argued the very points men continue to feign ignorance about. If you can work out how to operate a computer, you can find books and blogs and articles written by feminists on feminist topics you are ignorant about. Books exists, podcasts exists, blogs exist. You can even give money to such wonderful publications that aim to educate on feminists matters.

This applies to issues of race, disability, and so forth. Ignorance is only seriously condemnable if you do nothing to alleviate it once it’s pointed out. And it’s easy and lazy to respond by wanting those who’ve called you out on your ignorance to solve it for you.

The flipside of laziness is the condescending insult of assuming this education is what you are owed. Consider Sorrell again: How entitled must you be to think that the people who you targeted with horrific, racist bile should then sit down with a cup of tea and become benevolent educators? That they should be the ones to forgive what you haven’t apologized for? While ignorance might explain part of racism, it doesn’t explain aggression, targeting, and threats. Sorrell didn’t unintentionally make a rude remark in a public space this couple overheard: He followed them for a mile for the grave crime of walking in public while Muslim.

There Is No Middle Ground Between Racism And Justice

It is not the job of the oppressed to sit with those who think that, to one degree or another, they are less than people. It’s a nice, cozy ideal to expect the oppressors to be “better,” to go “high,” when everything is dragging you low. This is why it’s doubly insulting when alleged allies call on oppressed groups to not be “too hasty” or “dismissive,” to have a “dialogue” — as if we’re disagreeing about the best Marvel movie, not our personhood. If you think there’s “both sides,” rather than recognizing one side is bigoted and the other a target of bigotry, I’m not sure you’re the ally you think you are. If you want a calm response to bigotry, and you are not part of that targeted group, feel free to enter the fray. Indeed, as men, it is on us to call out other men’s sexism; it is our job as straight people to call out homophobia; it is our job as cis people to call out transphobia.

But we ought not to entertain these opinions as mere political views arising out of ignorance: They harm. To paraphrase Dr. King, sometimes the biggest obstacles are not the screaming bigots but the moderates who, even if they’re not the ones planting the seeds of hate, are flattening the soil with their shovels of civility.

The oppressed are not lost for words: books, articles, speeches all exist and those with bigoted views are welcome to them and, better, moderates are welcome to direct their bigoted friends to these words. We’ve spoken them already. We’ve in fact already done the work. It’s time to stop expecting oppressed groups to, with some preternatural calmness and civility, simply smile and calmly discuss a bigot’s bigotry, to their face, until it unravels and he reaches Enlightenment.

It’s not our job to yank them out the dark well they wallow in. They put themselves there and many ladders have already been stitched together. It’s their job to grab a rung and pull themselves out.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-problem-with-cancer-miracles-268266250649-2/ Mon, 02 Apr 2018 22:54:59 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2528 Read more]]>

Although cancer patients already have enough on our plate, we are tasked with the labor of managing other people’s emotions about our disease.

flickr/christina rutz

On the pilot of the CW’s new feel-good dramedy, Life Sentence, a young woman with terminal cancer, Stella (the lithe, doe-eyed Lucy Hale) picks out a cake for her own funeral. Later in the episode, the cake is repurposed for a celebration, because Stella finds out that her cancer has been miraculously cured. Instead of a projected six months left to live, she now will now enjoy a normal lifespan. In typical Hollywood fashion, a reevaluation of her priorities and relationships ensues.

Let me tell you about someone who did not luck out like Stella did.

Candace* a mother in her mid-thirties, was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer when she was young, like me. Along with her friends and family, she created a Facebook page, “Candace Crushes Cancer,” to update others on her medical journey, as soon as she realized how serious her case was. It happened quickly. Metastatic lesions invaded her hipbone, then ate away at her liver, and finally appeared in multiple spots in her brain. Terminal. She tried medication after medication — harsh chemotherapy regimens that sapped her energy — and attempted to enroll in clinical trials for experimental drugs. She rapidly ran out of options as her blood counts tanked. Candace posted that she wasn’t ready to die. She wanted to fight. It was October, but her doctors cautioned that she probably wouldn’t see Christmas. I don’t need to tell you what happened next, but, to put it crudely: Cancer Crushed Candace. In the final photos from just before she entered hospice care, she was bald, weakened, unrecognizable. She left behind a partner and four young children.

To The ‘Cosmopolitan’ Editors Who Offered Cancer As Diet Advice

This is unfortunately the real outcome of almost all terminal cancer cases, in 2018. Early stage patients have a very good shot at curative interventions, remission, and long life spans, but for many of us — those with cancer that hides out for years before making itself known, or is repeatedly misdiagnosed, or mutates into a treatment-resistant subtype, or simply spreads very quickly — it’s too late for a miracle. By definition, the cancer will win, and not the long-suffering patient, unless they get hit by a bus first.

Fantasies that tell us otherwise are dangerous and insulting, and they don’t only come from Hollywood. The idea of the “miracle cure” represents a conglomeration of media mythmaking, mainstream religious tropes, New Age spirituality, pseudoscientific quackery, and good old-fashioned commercialism. It’s based on the imperatives of hope and optimism that pervade our conversations about illness and disability, to the detriment of patients who grow weary from having to perform a “positive attitude” about experiences that resemble physical torture.

It’s a grave offense to be fatalistic in the face of cancer.

It’s a grave offense to be fatalistic in the face of cancer. When you get sick, the trite messages found on embroidered pillows, pastel Instagram graphics, and t-shirt slogans become directives for how to approach your illness the right way. You are somehow supposed to “expect miracles,” while watching fellow patients waste away, drop dead, and orphan their children. You notice that sympathy is reserved for the most upbeat survivors, and that fear, anger, and especially candid resignation make other people deeply uncomfortable. Although patients already have enough on our plate, we are also tasked with the labor of managing other people’s emotions about our own disease. I discovered early on that presenting as cheerful and hopeful yielded more support from strangers, acquaintances, and caregivers, while being honest about my fears left others unsure of how to react, or eager to dismiss my feelings as too “morbid.”

My friends and family, understandably, don’t want to think about my death. But I do. In fact, it’s the only real way that I’m able to process what has happened to me, and what is likely to happen in the future. I have to confront it, to stare it in the face. The problem is, because of social taboos, I am left to do this daunting work on my own, tossing and turning in the dark each night imagining the assortment of painful ways my body will one day shut down. It’s a very lonely reckoning. The silencing of “negativity” is a recipe for patient isolation.

The Cherry Blossoms Tattoo Where My Breast Cancer Scar Was

The reality is, my cancer doesn’t care how I feel about it, and while a positive attitude may help some people get through the day, it cannot actually stop one’s illness from progressing. “If you visualize your body receiving a cure, a cure will manifest,” a well-intentioned nurse told me on the day I was diagnosed, as if the “Law of Attraction” could be applied to the genetic mutation that caused my cancer. As if the rogue cells in my body could possibly know how much I wished for them to stop multiplying, and then simply bend to my will.

The most visible voice of dissent in this tyranny of “good vibes only” has been journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, whose work critiques the “sugar-coating” of cancer as a way of burying a grim reality “under a cosmetic layer of cheer.” Sadly, little has changed in the decade since Ehrenreich wrote about her own experience navigating a cancer diagnosis in a culture of positivity so relentless that it borders on delusional. After all, just last year, a company invented a high tech handheld mirror for cancer patients that only reveals your reflection if you smile. Otherwise, the implication is, you might as well not exist. You are nothing without compulsory optimism.

It’s no coincidence that “hopeful” people are more likely to spend money chasing miracles, as the line between blind optimism and gullibility can be blurry. Ehrenreich and others have written about the pink ribbon symbol as a crass corporate marketing strategy, but the problem goes beyond breast cancer, and has infiltrated the current wellness movement. Companies that sell unproven homoeopathic remedies in the forms of vitamin supplements, juices, essential oils, cannabis products, healing crystals, and other pseudoscientific modalities are banking on the fact that sick people will try anything for a potential cure. When “alternative” doctors peddle special diet programs and alkaline treatments, they anticipate that our desperation for a miracle will override our critical thinking skills and better judgment, and optimism is warped into something actively harmful.

The Path Of Living With Chronic Illness

The media plays into the miracle narrative with fantasy shows like Life Sentence. In episode three, we learn that Stella was cured because of her participation in an experimental clinical trial. While mainstream Western medicine certainly has a better track record compared to alternative therapies, clinical trials are notorious for disappointing results when it comes to curing cancer. Too many terminal patients are given false hope when they enroll in these studies expecting recovery, as new cancer drugs typically only prolong life by a few extra months rather than years. Life Sentence perpetuates the tendency to showcase medical anomalies rather than the average patient, whose journey is much more of a bummer.

When covering real-life cases of cancer, the media is often guilty of using what disability activists call “inspiration porn.” Sometimes, these are stories about the rare statistical outliers who beat the odds, framed to make it seem like they did so by virtue of impressive internal fortitude rather than sheer luck. (The message: if these model patients can cheat death, everyone else must be doing something wrong.) Other times, inspiration porn presents buoyant dying patients as examples to show healthy, able-bodied people how to live meaningfully — “as if each day is your last.” But most of us sick folks would happily trade in our newfound insights and emotional resilience for a clean bill of health. We shouldn’t be trotted out as motivational teaching tools to help everyone else put their own banal problems into perspective.

But most of us sick folks would happily trade in our newfound insights and emotional resilience for a clean bill of health.

In the vast majority of cases, terminal cancer patients do not make sudden miraculous recoveries, no matter how much they fight, rally, love their children, and don’t want to leave their families. No matter if they travel outside of the country for costly alternative treatments, or eat apricot pits or vape cannabis oil. They still die. They are prayed for, sometimes by hundreds of loved ones. They die anyway. If my own cancer metastasizes to my bones or organs before a cure is found, I will die, anyway.

I had to confront this horrific reality at thirty-one years old, and integrate it into how I understood the world. Now it’s everyone else’s turn. But it means facing some distressing truths about death, disease, and our sense of justice. First: the fact that humans are mortal, and sometimes we die too young, for no good reason, and by no fault of our own. (This clashes with several adages about God working in mysterious ways, never making mistakes or giving us more than we can handle. It also contradicts the widespread belief that we all ultimately get what we “deserve.”) Second: cancer remains a death sentence for millions of people, even during a time of impressive, awe-inspiring technological and medical progress. It takes time — years if not decades — for the latest laboratory discoveries to jump from petri dishes to mice to human subjects, so when you read about a promising new finding, remember that it won’t actually help the people who are living with/dying from terminal cancer today.

I had to confront this horrific reality at thirty-one years old, and integrate it into how I understood the world. Now it’s everyone else’s turn.

And third, medical miracles — to the extent they exist at all — are much more likely to happen against the backdrop of care that is affordable and accessible to everyone, something we don’t yet have in the contemporary United States. My chemotherapy treatments were about $20k each, and there were six of them. One night recovering in the hospital was $75k. I am lucky to have a robust health insurance plan (thanks, Obamacare) but I still needed to crowdfund for the various expenses that weren’t covered. In my cancer support groups, fellow patients with no insurance, or ones who live in states that did not expand Medicaid as part of the ACA, are on the hook for thousands of dollars they don’t have, during a time when they can’t actually go to work and earn income. The financial stress takes an emotional toll. I imagine it is easier to stay positive when you don’t have to worry about going bankrupt.

If there is anything at all to be hopeful about, it’s that the culture of toxic positivity might one day shift. The fact that “thoughts and prayers” are now recognized by many young Americans to be an insufficient way of addressing gun violence suggests we may be amenable to reevaluating our stubborn magical thinking in other areas. I sure hope I’ll be alive to see this happen.

*The name has been changed to out of respect for the privacy of her family

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]>