Part 4: Un-Wise Stereotyping

Tim Wise scores some trenchant points about civility in his "Not Ready to Make Nice." I nod along with him when he complains how rural white Trump supporters are rarely tasked with the same kind of "be more civil/understanding" narratives that urban (and often nonwhite) Trump resisters are. Somehow, he observes, small-town red-leaning folk get to be the "real Americans" who claim the moral high ground against intolerant blue-leaning folk, even as Trump's policies target the most vulnerable people in society. It's selfish, hypocritical, and willfully ignorant, yet conservative pundits often seem to prize those attitudes as proof of moral authority.

Hear, hear.

But--and here's the thrust of my "dear white progressives" rant--I'm dismayed at how Wise feels it necessary or effective to mobilize some rancid stereotypes. A sampling:

As the administration launches ICE raids on hard-working parents in Mississippi, ripping them from their kids on the first day of school, all talk of compromise with these people is perverse. To speak of understanding those who sanction such evil is a sickness.

I need not sit around and discuss politics with people such as this as they wolf down their biscuits and gravy or sop up their toast in a cholesterol pond of runny eggs, while adjusting their dirty trucker caps and holding forth about the Mooz-lims or the Mex’cuns who have come to take their jobs. Especially when those they’d be griping about would already have been working for three hours while Billy Joe Jim Bob sat there telling me about how he can’t work anyway because of his disability. For which he receives a check, along with his Medicare. But he wants me to remember that he’s tired of people living off the government.

What. The. Fuck. Ever.

I understand these folks all too well. There is nothing more to learn.

It's weird to read someone whose career as a writer and speaker involves dismantling stereotypes apparently forget all the lessons he teaches about why stereotypes qualify as odious in the first place. Shall we review? 

Stereotypes are wrong intellectually because they emerge from and deepen unexamined preconceptions. We fall back on stereotypes when we're too lazy--or perhaps too scared--to be curious. Wise insists he understands these folks. I'm not sure what underlies his insistence, but it isn't (at least in the piece I'm referring to) hard evidence, quantitative or qualitative. I mean the kind of evidence found in works like Arlie Russel Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land, Katherine J. J. Cramer's The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, or Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. I (as a gay white progressive) read these works and come away no less frustrated at rural red-leaning folk. But neither can I condone the kind of simplified flyover-state-country-bumpkin smear that Wise uses here.

Stereotypes are wrong strategically because they give us false images of the world, illusions that hinder us as we seek to repair and reform that world. Even if I view these people as my enemies, surely it behooves me to desire as accurate and nuanced a picture of them as I can get. Stereotyping works as an accelerant for my own outrage or contempt, not as a good guide for navigating the world. One of Isenberg's main points is that the very classist stereotypes of poor rural whites that Wise regurgitates in his piece have long been a tool that the economic elite uses in concert with racism to prevent organized mass resistance against itself. To traffic in stereotypes about poor rural whites is to abet the systems of oppression I seek to fight.

Finally, stereotypes of this sort are wrong morally because they reduce other human beings to objects of contempt. That is, they turn people who are capable of suffering, loving, changing, thinking, and growing into something that it is OK for me to disregard. Such dehumanization, as Wise well knows, lies at the heart of prejudice. 

It does not undermine this point to argue, as Wise does, that "these people" have dehumanized others first and worse. Suppose that's true. Suppose we can say confidently that all rural conservatives espouse racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQ+ views. That, we can say, is wrong. And that wrong does not make it OK for us to fight fire with fire and dehumanize them, too. It is wrong to dehumanize persons, full stop.

The kind of liberal humanism that fuels Wise's progressivism (and my own) insists that human regard shouldn't be a privilege earned only by a moral elite. It is an unalienable feature of being a person. To be sure, the liberal humanist tradition is defined by its failure to live up to its own standard. Throughout history, the concept of "human" has shown a worrisome tendency to cast a shadow of inhumanity, a shadow that falls too often on vulnerable populations. I know I'm human because I'm not one of those animals there. I do not need for rural white people to be equally or more vulnerable than, say, trans Native Americans, in order to object to their being dehumanized.

As Amy Olberding says, holding the humanity of people in our minds does not preclude strong negative feelings toward them. I'm disappointed, mystified, exasperated, furious, and disheartened by the attitudes of some of my rural neighbors--sometimes all these at once. And I can say so. But once I season those expressions with the kind of stereotypes about appearance, hygiene, diet, income and education level that Wise does, I've left the realm of the good, true, and useful.

More tomorrow,

JF