Americans love to indulge, watch, analyze and discuss their nation pastime, and my national pastime I don’t mean baseball, I mean outrage. Americans enjoy more than nearly anything else exercising their right to get irrationally angry about almost anything. And since sporting events have closed to the public for the foreseeable future, obviating any possibilities of enjoying our actual national pastime, it’s not as though we can find anything else worthier of our attention. Our obsession with getting mad about things being so important to is, it is only natural that we turn this rage against each other.
Getting furious with one another affords us the opportunity to do what we so enjoy, and this being right, and pointing this out to other people. Especially important to us is being able to tell other people that our points of view possess truth so insurmountable that it obviates the need for explanation of any kind. And this, in the age of the internet, and mobs both figurative and literal, prompts certain parties to utter – or write – one of the most odious, obnoxious, disingenuous phrases to have entered our public discourse: “it’s not my job to educate you.”
Maybe part of my frustration with this phrase originates in my professional life: it actually is my job to educate people. But this cannot be said for the great majority of people. If you take it upon yourself to argue a particular position, however, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to ask you for evidence, elaboration, or explanation if they find your position confusing or unclear. Falling back on claiming that it is not your job to educate – especially in a situation in which that appears to be exactly what you are trying to do – is a tactic frequently of the lazy, the ignorant, or the terminally un-serious. Take these examples, both from Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times. She’s not the only one who does this, but she is a high profile user:
Note the complete absence of an attempt to persuade. The assertion of a fact without evidence or clear explanation must be taken at face value. Otherwise, we perpetuate systems of oppression, or something to that effect. If you are going to engage someone in conversation and simply expect them to affirm uncritically every nostrum you throw in their face, then argumentation, persuasion, and truth do not matter to you.
What is really at issue here, I think, is that which concerns postmodern man more than anything: power. Postmodernists and those who have followed in their footsteps have long understood life as nothing more than a system of relations of power. We can distill every system, every institution, and every relationship down to power, whether we are talking about marriages, families, religion, or close to anything else. Power is actually very important, but I don’t think that is all that life has to offer. Regardless, if your only tool is a plunger, every problems starts to look like a clogged toilet. If your only way of understanding reality revolves around power, than that will color your interactions with others and how you conduct yourself in day-to-day life.
When we say “it’s not my job to educate you,” what we really say is “it is your responsibility to agree with me and if you don’t, you must be a bad, wicked person.” Those who do not agree with everything a “marginalized” person – or more importantly, their white Ivy-educated representative – says, than we have perpetuated their marginalization and oppression. In a society in which polite society no longer openly countenances racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry, to accuse someone of such things carries real weight. A great many people have a lot to lose by being thought racist or bigoted. Social ostracism is immensely powerful. To shame someone with the charge of racism or oppression, dare I say, to “cancel” them, is itself an exercise of power.
In the cultural conversations that dominate national attention, accusing someone of bigotry is a way of wielding power, and those who can credibly level such accusations with the aid of our media and educational institutions are those who have it. To call ironic the constant declamation of power and its use coming from those who employ it most readily seems so on the nose as to abuse the word. If claiming to be oppressed always came from a place of weakness, then Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug would not exist. We live in a perverse world in which those who already have privilege pretend they do not in order to justify holding the privilege itself. The cruelty is not just that this had lead to false allegations of bigotry, but that it has meant that people now have permission to take actual discrimination less seriously. The veritable scourge of fake hate crimes that have occurred in recent years speaks for itself. To state it plainly: there is power in claiming to be powerless.
Maybe you think I’m being tendentious. Maybe you think I’ve overstated my case. Maybe you think a reasonable examination of available evidence can lead to a different conclusion. That may be true, but guess what?
It’s not my job to educate you.