Essentialism

Here’s an exercise from a user interface designer I was reading a while back (and I regrettably don’t recall her name):

Imagine a man. He’s English, in his seventies, a multimillionaire, and deeply family-oriented. He’s a world traveler, has been for decades. And people around the world know his name. But there are a lot of mixed feelings about him wherever he goes. Some people see him as a hero, others as a symbol of archaic and vile traditions that society would be better without.

Take some time to really picture him.

No one will judge you for the assumptions you make here. This is an experiment you’re only doing in your head. Be free. Imagine the clothes that this character would wear. Imagine what kind of events they would attend. What kind of events would they host? Who are their friends and admirers? Who hates them? Why? Let a little scene play out that involves them and the service staff in a café.

Now, did you imagine Prince Charles or Ozzy Osbourne? (He was still a prince at the time I encountered this morsel.) I don’t imagine I’ll ever meet King Charles, just can’t think of where we’d ever run into each other. But, I just barely missed Ozzy one day. He came into the coffee shop where I worked to grab hot chocolates for his kids on their way to a Hanson concert. I can report second hand that, even out of the reality TV gaze, he’s quite chummy. He was genuinely excited to take his family to a Hanson concert at the Pepsi Center and flew into Denver, Colorado for the occasion.

Here’s another example — one that pertains to people without private jets. There’s a guy I used to work with, Mike. He was a decently successful tradesman who participated in local politics in advocacy of underrepresented workers — mostly undocumented workers. I knew a few people who greatly distrusted him because he was a white guy who owned a business. The assumption was that he was exploiting Mexicans on one hand and speaking in front of congress on the other, probably just to make himself look good.

Mike owned his privileges. He knew that he got the benefit of the doubt in a lot of situations — outside of activist circles — a benefit that the guys he worked with didn’t get. He knew that as a tall, muscular, white guy that there were certain obstacles that weren’t in his way. And, he learned that at a very early age. As a child, whose name was not Mike, his family fled Soviet rule to the United States. They found work as migrant farmers alongside immigrants from Mexico and points south. They didn’t speak a word of English. Their names were involuntarily altered to suit American tongues. And, they shared in all of the experiences common to poor immigrants to the States — and probably all poor immigrants through the ages. Only, as Mike grew older and more American, he found that the world accepted him more than it accepted the other families from the fields. He chose to neither stay in poverty or leave behind the people he grew up with. He built a business where he could really help people. But he could only ever help so many. So, he sought greater routes to change. But, when he encountered activist circles, those supposedly working to help migrants to succeed, many of them didn’t see a young a man struggling with the memories of a brutal war in which his native country was smeared off of the map. No one saw him as survivor of imperialism and the genocide of his people. Genocide and imperialism don’t happen to guys who look like him. Finally, it was Mike’s turn to be the victim of racism. The only place that could happen was in the ranks of the antiracists.

And Mike didn’t complain.

He did what he had always done. He did what every migrant worker did. He set his chin. He did the work that was put in front of him. He did the work he was given and he asked for more. He had escaped a war he could only recall through the eyes of a child. The home of his birth, and every stone of his people, was gone. There was no changing the past. So, he worked to help the people he could — the second family that took him in when he reached America.

In these examples, we have a couple of celebrities and one successful immigrant with a mixed bag of challenges, privileges, and opportunities. This is where I’m choosing to start my description of the problem of essentialism. But these are outliers. All outliers are more diverse, in more or less every aspect of life, than those who live closer to the mean. I’ve worked with federal scale politicians and campaign leaders who are more hypersensitive than any other professional could get away with and those who couldn’t be rattled by a firing squad. People at the extremes of any field or circumstance are always those who have found a way to lean into their rare traits and use them in a way that gives them an edge that’s hard to compete with. So, Chris Do succeeds at wooing his audience through being consistently comfortable and optimistic. Nathan Macintosh earns love through the exact opposite traits. And, they can attract the exact same people — me — at the very least. Those are two of my favorite people to listen to. I would take either of them over anyone trying to affect a balance in the middle.

People who are rich or famous may become so because of being unique. So, obviously, most of them will have characteristics very different from the conventional expectations about people from their backgrounds. Sure. And the other example is about a guy who was very different from all of the people in the same situation as him. So, obviously, he’s going to end up being very different from the average middle class, white, land owning dude.

But what about people who are neither rich nor famous nor have a novel and harrowing origin story? Are there things that we can say are generally true about most people because of their demographic characteristics?

It seems like a simple question, but it really isn’t.

Weird truth, stereotypes come from somewhere. But, they aren’t the average of a certain kind of people. They’re a fetish. Fetishes don’t come from the overall character of a group, but rather the part of a group that outsiders are fascinated by. Still, we do form fetishes for very real and important reasons. And they don’t come from thin air.

In this chapter, I’m going to address why black folks I knew growing up loved Jim Carrey more than any other white comedian. In this chapter I will demonstrate why the entire popular narrative around the idea of BIPOC identities is antithetical to all of the early work of critical race theorists. I will point to the limitations of reductionism, identarianism, and all glorification of superficialities. And, I will do it in scathingly simple and thorough detail.

As some may have noticed, this particular critique of this particular branch of popular leftist doctrine is not from the common conservative angle. This is my Inigo Montoya moment. There’s something you don’t know about me. I am not a conservative. No. The call is coming from inside the house. I am someone who accepts many of the more well established axioms of the left — which I will go deep into in this chapter. I am someone who has spent many years in direct service to the interests of leftist organizers and genuinely hopes to remain of use to many of them. We have common interests. And. And! I have concerns.

If you have concerns, or if you would like to keep your finger on the pulse of these concerns, come along for this ride by signing up for the sqglz newsletter. It’s gonna get real. Like, real, real.