Stopping the Violence at Home and Abroad: The Power of our Words in Today’s Media-Driven World

Over the summer of 2014, even a passing glance at news outlets would reveal the particularly troubling state of today’s world. The media portrait that has been constructed is one of fast-growing monstrosity, whether it is based in Gaza, Iraq, Syria, or as close to home as Ferguson, Missouri. Countless politicians and political analysts have appeared on CNN and elsewhere, either calling for the President to act more forcefully in navigating these complex situations, or heralding his political strategies as brilliant and preservative of everything we the people hold dear.

I by no means intend to spend my words proffering yet another assertion about what is right in any of these current crises, for as with any binarized statement, the process of heralding one faction as right while the other as completely wrong collapses under any amount of pressure. I am also unwilling to again assert the White House as a scapegoat for the violence unfolding in the world today. Rather, I intend to highlight a troubling tendency I have found not just on the news, but also among my own conversations with friends and formidable opponents concerning the progression of these various events. There is a part each of us can play in stopping the violence at home and abroad, awareness and a desire to understand rather than retaliate crucial to the healing of this broken world in which we live.  

This morning on CNN, Republican congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida appeared on News Room to discuss and analyze the role of the President and Congress in the current conflict with ISIS. While her interview was frustrating on numerous levels, what I found most unnerving was her repetitive use of the word “cancer” to describe this radical organization, asserting that excessive force must be unleashed as soon as possible in order to eradicate this disease from the world. The image of a detrimental and violent plague spreading to infiltrate our own country was accomplished fully by juxtaposing her interview with a story about the San Diego native revealed to be a sympathizer of ISIS. Thus, thousands of humans are dehumanized and equated with a disease to be eradicated, and yet another person of color is portrayed as a violent threat on national media. Two birds, one stone.

The repetition of her phrase was obviously planned, as nobody repeats a phrase 6+ times unless they meant to say it. My question is why she felt it would be so powerful to make this parallel, and so important that people remember it that she repeat it as many times as she did. I think the answer is rather obvious, and is similar to the reason the host of the program referred to ISIS as savage at the beginning of the hour. These words function as a means of dehumanizing the Other, placing blanket assertions of inhumanity and evil over large groups of disadvantaged people as a means of justifying more and more retaliatory violence.

I want to be clear. I am not in any way attempting to justify brutal murder, threats of terrorist action, or compulsory religious compliance. I do however want to be sure we all realize what we are doing when we use the language we do, and the effect it has on the people towards which we direct it.

I recently learned of an initiative through the EU to deport individuals particularly of Iraqi or Afghani origin, titled the European Return Platform for Unaccompanied Minors. This legislation, masked in rhetoric of family reunion and reaffirming asylum programs in countries like Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the Netherlands,  has been examined by many academics who argue that its true intentions are much more sinister. Though the programs mandates shelter for those that are sent home, and professes to find their families when they arrive, the implementation of these goals is much easier said than done, and many children and young adults find themselves forced into militant groups when they are forced to return home and their families are nowhere to be found.  Are these people evil, equitable to a cancer we must eradicate with any force necessary? Certainly if they are, it is a cancer of our own making. The very people we send away, who become too much of an economic burden to help, those are the ones who later appear on our news programs and who must be destroyed.

My point is simple, though sometimes, easier said than done. The nameless individuals towards whom we are directing our blind hatred are humans too, and the popular narrative of dehumanization and mass criminalization are just as detrimental to the well-being of these people as the bombs we are dropping on their homes. When we equate people to diseases and monsters, it makes it that much easier for us to forget to be empathetic, to harden our hearts to the very thing that binds us all together in the first place. It makes it easy for us to deport children back the violent countries they fought so hard to escape, to assume just because they share the brown skin of the extremist leaders we so fear that they must also be evil. Yet every time we do this, we put another life at risk.

Luckily for us, the world is changing. Social media provides the opportunity for an alternate narrative to surface. Movements like Humans of New York, and the countless news outlets that publish the images and stories of the people caught in the middle of distant political power struggles, do the hard work of illuminating the faces and the stories that populate the stereotypes to which we cling, revealing the way their stories contrast with the popular narrative.

It is up to each of us as members of the world community to consider the impact of the things we say about others before we voice them. It is up to us to let go of fear and anger and remember our common humanity, understanding that disadvantaged and desperate people are often driven to great and sometimes terrible acts of desperation. It is up to us to do the hard work of understanding others, of learning their stories and perhaps acknowledging our implicit part in them before we condemn them to death.

One act of violence does not justify another, and suppressing the anger of the world with more violence is a temporary solution that will not lead to long-term healing.

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Trying New Things #2: The Revolutionary Act of Love

“Loving a transgendered person is a revolutionary act", said Laverne Cox at the 2014 National Conference for LGBT Equality: Creating Change, held in Houston, TX this past weekend. At this conference and in other places, Cox has used her recent capitulation into fame as a transgender actress on Orange is the New Black to shed light on the culture of violence that surrounds this community in America. She describes the bullying she experienced from a young age for not neatly filling the biological category into which she was born, the violent racial slurs she has experienced on a daily basis throughout her life, and the inequality of justice that is experienced by the transgender community as a whole. Cox says rather poetically that, “justice is what love looks like in public”, and she concludes by asserting not only the need to completely revise this assumed illegitimacy that characterizes outside perceptions of the transgender community, but the need to open up conversations between various groups, beginning the process of de-vilifying the Other “even if you don’t know what to say.” She highlights the importance of self-love within the trans community through ignoring stereotypes, maintaining a support system of family, friends, and allies, and believing in your own beauty and sharing it with others.

Laverne Cox is a rather incredible stage personality, and the entire time I was listening to her speak, I couldn’t stop asking the question, “How is it possible that a person that strong and beautiful is subject to such violence?”

And further, “What are we so afraid of?”

In America, 53% of LGBT homicides involve transgender women, and 73% of those are people of color, says Cox. These numbers are indicative of a larger cultural problem than simply a lack of understanding of the community, or an emphasis on surgery and change rather than the personal growth of the individual (though these are equally valid concerns highlighted by her speech). What I would add to the issues she eloquently raises for us is the presence of a gender-based essentialism still governing our society today, one that shapes not only the way we interact with each other, but the way we understand ourselves. I would also argue that this essentialist based thinking, one that holds individuals up to a proverbial measuring bar to deem them either human or not, leads to a profoundly individualist society and a lack of empathy in relating to one’s neighbor. It is so easy to enact violence on one another when humanity is discounted, as history has proven to us, and it only to the detriment of future generations that we continue to judge each other so harshly.

Gender essentialism is not a new concept, nor is it one without its fair share of contesters. I recently read an article in Bitch Magazine about the ways gender essentialism devalues female voices in the publishing world (Available Here), and several of my classes in Graduate School are exploring the ways that linking motherhood and domesticity with innate femininity limits female career options, and instills the belief that if a woman does not embrace motherhood at home with her children, she become a mutation of what constitutes true womanhood.

When translating the ramifications of gender essentialism into a conversation about transgender issues, it is clear that our inability to understand people outside of the neat boxes of identity into which we categorize them has violent consequences, an inability to understand sparking fear and prejudice rather than empathy and open-mindedness. In hearing Cox’s speech, it is important to note that she begins her story of oppression with a heartbreaking narrative of being chased home from school by little boys who did not understand her. The socialization of children into neat groupings of gender, race, and class identity is in my opinion where this closed thinking begins, and in order to stop this cycle of violence from repeating in the lives of our youth, we need to completely do away with parenting and education that socializes people into particular, irrevocable roles, where boys play with blue Legos and girls with pink ones (or whatever). We need to stop teaching our boys that measures of value are dependent on “how much of a man you are”, and then directly linking this measure of masculinity with violence. We need to convey to our children that it is not anyone’s place to judge another’s self-worth, and instead create developmental spaces that encourage a variety of skills, talents, and other identifiers, celebrating difference rather than creating it as a means of dividing lines. Let’s break out of our comfortable, homogenized bubbles of race or class stratification, and teach our kids how to relate to people different from them. And most importantly, let’s completely break down this individualist, “get ahead at any cost” culture in which we live that starts from the assumption that I am not my brother’s keeper.

I hope one day to live in a world where love is not a revolution, where in fact the only essential thing that can be assumed about a person’s identity is their capacity to love no matter what. Let’s start those difficult conversations with our kids and with the world, and break the cycle of assault on difference that is such an ugly part of our current cultural moment. Step outside yourself for a moment, and reach out a helping hand rather backing away, and let’s make a better world for the future.

Watch her full speech here: Laverne Cox on the Revolutionary Act of Love