Idealism and Privilege

On the topic of "agreeing to disagree" about GLBT issues int the church and the less-than-positive undertones of such a suggestion: In one of my courses I had students read a play by a African-American performance artist named Robbie McCauley. The play--I should say "performance piece"--is Sally's Rape, and it concerns McCauley's great-great-grandmother Sally, who was a slave and was raped.

I call it a "performance piece" to indicate that it's not a play in the sense of presenting a self-contained story with characters (and actors pretending to be those characters). Rather, the piece features Robbie as herself and a younger white woman named Jeannie, who in the piece seems to be a particularly close student of Robbie's. Robbie and Jeannie, one gathers, have worked for some time on the history of Robbie's family. Much of the play consists of their testing out different ways to imagine, enter, and explore Robbie's family history, a process that inevitably raises present-day issues about race.

Both performers address the audience directly, walking out into the audience at times. They divide the audience into three parts: one section they tell to yell encouragement and affirmation ("That's right!" "Yes, indeed!"); one section they charge with expressing disagreement; and one section they challenge to offer dialogue, observation, and commentary. Such a request leads to frequent improvisation; much of the script contains provisos to the effect of "this scene is always different in performance; here's how it worked one night."

Such interactive, presentational (as opposed to the fourth-wall-style representational) dramaturgy charges the performance with a sense of danger and possibility. The people--not characters, but people--on stage are of two different races and are having explicit conversations about how to talk about racism's past and present. And the audience can't simply watch and listen; they have to participate--and the people on stage talk right back.

Nor do they sugarcoat the difficulties of having a conversation about white privilege and continuing racial minoritization. One particularly brutal (as in brutally honest) scene features Jeannie and Robbie having, well, an argument of sorts. They face each other and tell each other hard truths. Jeannie is sure that Robbie thinks she's too idealistic, that she's not getting something vital about Robbie's position. Robbie expresses frustration that the language they use has trouble capturing this sense.

One section of this scene stood out to me. Jeannie, challenged by Robbie to say in her own words what it is that Robbie finds troublesome about Jeannie, suggests this: "About my idealism. I have some idea of humanism. Something that we share, something more than our differences."


Robbie responds, "Let me see if I can use the language to say what I feel about your idealism. I think it covers over something in your history that makes your idealism still a whim. It angers me that even though your ancestors might have been slaves—because they did have white slaves . . . only made Black slavery mandatory for economic reasons, so they could catch us when we ran away—that history has given you the ability to forget your shame about being oppressed by being ignorant, mean, or idealistic . . . which makes it dangerous for me."

That line resonates with me: "something in your history makes your idealism still a whim." I might say, in reference to the GLBT debates ripping denominations apart currently, that something about the seemingly idealistic push to "just stop fighting and get along" signals a serious underestimation of the stakes of the debate. If you can choose whether or not to fight--if your idealism is a whim, an equally viable choice among many others, then you may not be in the best position to dictate to those for whom concern about the issue in question is not a choice.

I get annoyed, actually, when the call to stop fighting about GLBT issues from some spot of moderate higher ground. "I'm not on either side," goes such a call, "I just want us to get back to [X activity of the Chruch]. It's those on the extremes who are making this an issue. I just don't care about it. Can't we get back to what's important? We moderates just want to be Methodist (or Episcopalian, or what have you)."

McCauley's line highlights how this moderate position, the we're-really-all-the-same-so-stop-fighting, depends upon a great deal of often unacknowledged privilege. To be unconcerned about a major issue takes effort. It's not easy to be uninterested.

To be sure, often the work involved is someone else's. A spoiled adolescent, for instance, may experience life as a worry-free succession of distractions, never realizing the hard work that someone (parents, grandparents, household staff, etc.) has to go through in order to achieve for the child that work-free environment. But work there is.

I do not mean that those calling for an end to debate, a "let's just agree to disagree" on GLBT issues, are spoiled; I think their intentions are often sincerely peace-loving. But that idealism, as McCauley argues, spings from the soil of a particular historical and cultural situation, a situation that lets some people and not others off the hook of having to grapple with such issues.

I cannot, as a gay man, simply ignore the reality that many in my Church believe me unfit to take communion. I cannot ignore the fact that I may not pursue ordination or get married to my partner. And I hear those on the other side of the issue saying similarly that they could not simply "live with it" were gay couples allowed to be married or were a lesbian to be ordained as a pastor.

As much as I disagree with people from that latter perspective, I feel even more frustration toward those who instead of listening carefully to the debate decide that the entire discussion is unimportant and make a virtue of their disinterest.

That, I submit, is detrimental to everyone.

More tomorrow,

JF