Heidi Li's Potpourri

Sometimes you give back to the community in ways you never thought you would

I am not often deliberately autobiographical here at Heidi Li's Potpourri. But sometimes an ally asks you to join in a project and ...

Petunia Politik tagged me.

Apparently, some in the Pumasphere are playing the following game: if tagged we are asked to write six things about ourselves AND tag six other bloggers to do the same, as part of a way of supplying some diversion for those who will be sauntering the web with care over this weekend.  So, in name of community building and camaraderie:

1. Yes, I am 5 feet, 9 inches tall. If you have seen me in person, and you are insightful you know this and will not get bogged down in discussions of whether height is relative and what my height means for you. Recently, I attended an event where a very insightful person questioned my height, and when I asked whether he really did indeed want to get into a conversation about the nature of reality, he quickly replied that given his full head of dark brown hair, completely ungreyed, he saw no point in going there.

2. According to my mother, I never asked for a brother or a sister (after me, my mom went through some pregnancies that the babies didn't survive) but when I was about three or four I requested a cat, so I would have "somebody to talk to" when she and my father were talking to each other. I named the cat that arrived Mischief Funnyface Feldman, and no better black and white alley cat has ever been a better companion. Mischief was also an excellent conversationalist which was fortunate since my parents were plenty able to spend time in good conversation with each other.

3. I love to nap.

4. I love to laugh, and probably the reason I am still with my husband and always will be is that he is uniquely able to crack me up.

5. I was raised in a fiercely anti-racist home, really one that was unusually like that for its time and place. My mother, in particular, instilled in me the attitude that skin color simply is not relevant to evaluating a person. She and my father established the authenticity of their own view by not batting an eye when the first person I ever lived with - and the person who became the aforementioned husband - turned out to be brown with a name that most Americans find to be quite the tongue-twister. They met the young man and the first thing they said to me when we spoke in private was that THIS was a person who showed the sort of kindness and intelligence that they thought would make me happy.

Now I knew that this color-blindness was quite uncommon. Still is, I imagine. I was not, and am not, naive about the lack of color-blindness in this world. And until this election year I felt my life was nothing but the better for having had instilled into it both anti-racism and color-blindness - for never thinking that color of a person's skin was relevant to his or her value. But here is a paradox: while I understand intellectually that the election of a non-white to the Presidency of the United States of America is historically remarkable, I cannot become interested in President-elect Obama's imminent inauguration simply because of the color of his skin. And that's because I have never really paid attention to the color of his skin. So, in a slightly perverse way I am alienated from the obviously authentic joy other people take in the fact that we are about to have our first non-white President. Again, I stress that I get it on an intellectual level. I do not even think that it is per se racist to be moved simply by color of the our incoming President's skin. The paradox arises for me because skin color has simply mattered so little to me throughout my life, I cannot suddenly make it matter to me now.

6. In a way, I wish I could make it matter, because I admit I feel a loss at not being swept up in pure joy that many people of good will are genuinely feeling as they see the upcoming inauguration like Rev. Jesse Jackson does: “It is a huge civil rights moment,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson. “Barack Obama has run the last lap of a 54-year race for civil rights."

The last lap: from where I sit, with no ERA, with 51 Percent's goals far from realized, with misogynist, homophobic Rick Warren about to bless the new president's term we have laps and laps and laps still to run. But I do hope the inauguration of Barack Obama is at least part of the tortuous path in the quest for a truly liberal society, one where accidental features of individuals - their skin color, their gender, their sexual orientation, their nation of origin - have nothing to do with how we measure one another's worth. Only time will tell.

I will be extending invitations to the following blogs' authors to join in the game of tag. (Note, given the evolving nature of how people use the term "Puma" I am taking the liberty of identifying blogs I find interesting and in keeping with the self-governing independence of thought that to me characterizes the emerging core of Puma political thinking).

Katalusis ~~ DoublejointedFingers ~~ Bud White's World ~~ Donna Darko ~~ Stray Yellar Dawg ~~ American Indy in Italy

Time out for reflection...

A friend wrote to me yesterday that he agreed with the claim that 'our political "views" are almost entirely dictated by our background and circumstances, not by us reasoning our way through to them.  The evidence for that view is, I think, overwhelming. Which suggests that blogging -- and any other kind of political writing -- can rally and inform the already convinced but persuade nobody (not counting those persons who take the rest of us for fools and claim to be of one persuasion when they are of another in the vain hope that their pathetic ruse will lend weight to their view: "I'm a lifelong Democrat but I'm supporting McCain").'

I adore and value my friend, but my own experience this year as a writer of this blog, reader of others, and reader of much other political writing runs completely counter to the view endorsed by my friend. My own experience as a political writer has been transformative: the regular discipline of thinking through my positions in order to articulate them has led me to take positions that cut against the entire grain of my background and circumstances. I was raised a dyed-in-the-blue Democrat; my nearest living relatives while still displaying strong love for me are shocked and unhappy with my resistance to lending my vote or approval to Senator Obama's candidacy; and as an academic my circumstances are such that every colleague with whom I have discussed politics this year has disagreed with this resistance. Because I have had the good fortune to attract a fairly wide response to what I have written I have been exposed to people from very different backgrounds from my own; as well as some with similar ones. Some with different backgrounds express what seems to be sincere agreement with me; some express criticism. Those with similar backgrounds tend to be harshest in their criticisms, somehow seeming to take my disagreement with them as a sort of traitorous act; although others with similar backgrounds and circumstances write in support of what I have written. Many people who have commented or written to me have made me think harder and reflect more about why I take the stands I take.

Those who write regularly for RiverDaughter's blog The Confluence or regularly comment there seem to have had a similar experience. Likewise for Murphy at Puma Pac. Or Shtuey at Oh My Valve or Dakinkat at Skydancing in a Man's World or democraticjack at ISO steady ground (There are plenty of other examples, but these are representative stand-outs.) I do not agree with everything each of these writers or their regular commenters say but I have literally observed the writers at these blogs think their way through to the positions and stands they adopt.

Maybe what makes my own experience this election year so different from the one my friend describes is that this is the first year in which I have a taken a series of highly public stands; and when I take a public stand I am doing something other than just maintaining "views". For me, taking a public political stand differs from holding a view in that taking a stand means being prepared to explain and defend that stand, even against - especially against - those who one deeply respects but with whom one disagrees. I realize that other public speakers may have a more shallow approach and rather than take stands, they adopt postures without feeling compunction to explain or justify these stances. But if one believes, as I do, that the ethics of communication include an obligation to self-criticize and to weigh seriously any reasonably articulated criticism of one's ideas, then the very practice of systematically presenting one's ideas in public tends to force one into reasoning one's way to the positions one ends up sticking with.

My friend's comment did make me realize something about why this election cycle has been so deeply wrenching and painful at times. The bit of truth I see in what he wrote is that in other years I have held political "views" and when doing that I probably did not do the hard, tiring working of reasoning my way to stands I was I willing to publicly take and defend. And reasoning one's way to stands sometimes put you in places other people, especially friends, did not expect to see you in, causing them shock and dismay that you have not come out where they have. Dissension among friends hurts. It is tiring. It is hard. But if my friends or my colleagues were always in agreement with me then the claim my friend advanced would seem more evidently correct to me.

I am not claiming that sentiment, passion, and intuition play no role in the evolution of my political stands. But that is because I think that sentiment, passion, and intuition play an important role in reasoning, providing clues and guideposts, just as the more cerebral activities of analysis and study reshape one's sentiments, passions, and intuitions. That is a topic to which I have devoted scholarly attention and will not delve into here. My point is that  the act of political writing or political reading can indeed persuade somebody rather than merely rally them or provide information to reinforce a position she or he would have adopted anyway.

The irony of this post is that the friend who sent me the comment which provoked this post is a person whose political and social views are not, based on my knowledge of his background and circumstances, "almost entirely dictated" by them. I do not know whether he believes he has arrived at via reason at the positions he defends that run most counter to his background and circumstances. His understanding of reason is more purely cerebral than my own, so he might say that his positions are a product of his experiences not a result of reasoning. But one can have a knee-jerk reaction to one's experiences or a reflective one. I have found my friend to be reflective about his experiences (sometimes when he would rather not be, because, as I said before honest self-reflection is hard and tiring). I  know I am about my own. So whether we would agree that we reach the positions we hold that run counter to our background and circumstances via reasoning or via experience, I believe my friend and I both have found ourselves at odds with the views that would be dictated by our background and our circumstances.