Telling Stories
Let me tell another story. I've been thinking about this story quite a bit in the last few days. I'm not particularly proud of this story, but I think it is worth telling.
When I was in law school, someone I knew well and cared about quite a bit came to me and told me a story. A very well known and much beloved and admired by a certain segment of the legal world (though, not my segment--more on that below) federal judge came to speak at the school, and several students and prominent faculty went to dinner with this judge afterwards. One of those people was my friend. At this dinner, the federal judge groped a number of the female students, evidently in public and in front of the (male) faculty members. My friend did not say so specifically, but I believe she was one of the one's groped.
She told me this story a day or so after the incident. I believed her--truthfully, it never occurred to me to doubt what she was saying. But I also never wavered in what I thought she should do. The only right and correct thing to do was to publicly expose this incident, to make a public accusation, to call out this judge. This, to me, was obvious and unambiguous and without significant nuance. This was an entirely black and white issue to me.
She was equally insistent that she was not going to say anything, that she was not going to make a public accusation. She talked about the consequences for women who speak up, the dragging through the mud that they can expect, the lack of support. She talked about the impossibility of having a career in a field like law when you are known as the woman who make claims against such a prominent person. She talked about how she would never be anything other than "the woman who claimed Judge X groped her."
I let the matter go--only she could tell her story or not tell it. But the truth of the matter is that I lost a great deal of respect for her as a result of her decision not to say anything. I viewed it as craven, as mercenary, as putting her own personal advancement ahead of doing what was right. I thought her fears and objections were pretextual, self-justifications to assuage her conscience and convince herself it was OK to value getting ahead over any other consideration. And, because my poker face isn't as good as I would like to pretend, I am pretty sure she knew what I thought about all of this.
I've been thinking about this story recently, in light of the torrent of people coming forward to accuse a host of public figures of sexual misconduct. In thinking about that incident ten years or so ago, several things have become clear to me now that were not clear to me then.
First, her concerns about what would happen if she spoke up were assuredly not pretextual, or at least not nearly as pretextual as I thought them to be at the time. What I did not appreciate at the time was that these concerns were not some hypothetical musings on what might happen, which is how I understood them; they were grounded either in experiences that happened to her before or the experience of people she knew very well. The pervasive nature of conduct of this type, which I did not appreciate, means that almost every woman has a set of concrete data points with which to base her conclusions about what would happen if she spoke out. If my friend had made an accusation against this judge, it is very likely that all of the things that she predicted would in fact come to pass. I was wrong to discount that, and wrong to assume that she was jumping at shadows.
This flows into my second realization. There is a great deal of talk now, especially in what you might call the "intellectual left," about the concept of privilege. My reaction to this situation is one of the more subtle, yet nevertheless real, examples of privilege. It was and is easy for me, a white straight guy, to seize the moral high-ground and insist on moral clarity. It was easy because I would never have to face any consequences from such a position, because I am extremely unlikely to ever find myself in a similar position. Insisting that people should publicly confront and challenge prominent people who use their position to exploit others is an example of cheap virtue when you are highly unlikely to ever be the one called upon to confront and challenge. Insisting that others make sacrifices you will never have to make, and then judging them when they won't do it, is privilege. At its heart, it is a failure of empathy, a failure to carry other's burdens. I had a chance to carry a bit of the weight off of my friend, and I didn't do it, content instead with my self-righteous moralizing.
Third, much of my self-righteous moralizing was grounded in the fact that this particular judge was someone whose judicial philosophy was one that I opposed. It was not at all lost on me at the time that calling out this individual might be "striking a blow for our team." This raises the problem--what if the judge in question was one of the ones on my team? Would I have been so quick to call for him to be exposed? If not, then I was completely full of shit, and demonstrated that I didn't really care about the incident itself and the people who were harmed, but only how it could be weaponized and exploited. I can't say for sure if I would have had the same reaction, but the fact that I am unsure means that I failed to truly empathize with my friend and her situation.
Now, having said all that, do I think it would be better if this incident had come to light? Probably. The revelations of the past few weeks have brought to light much was hidden in darkness, and I think that is for the best. But I was wrong to expect, or sotto voce demand, that any particular person be the one to tell their story. And I did not do what I needed to do in that moment on behalf of my friend to support her. My job was not to impose a set of demands on her, but to help carry a bit of her burden. And I didn't do that.
We have to do a better job. I have to do a better job.
When I was in law school, someone I knew well and cared about quite a bit came to me and told me a story. A very well known and much beloved and admired by a certain segment of the legal world (though, not my segment--more on that below) federal judge came to speak at the school, and several students and prominent faculty went to dinner with this judge afterwards. One of those people was my friend. At this dinner, the federal judge groped a number of the female students, evidently in public and in front of the (male) faculty members. My friend did not say so specifically, but I believe she was one of the one's groped.
She told me this story a day or so after the incident. I believed her--truthfully, it never occurred to me to doubt what she was saying. But I also never wavered in what I thought she should do. The only right and correct thing to do was to publicly expose this incident, to make a public accusation, to call out this judge. This, to me, was obvious and unambiguous and without significant nuance. This was an entirely black and white issue to me.
She was equally insistent that she was not going to say anything, that she was not going to make a public accusation. She talked about the consequences for women who speak up, the dragging through the mud that they can expect, the lack of support. She talked about the impossibility of having a career in a field like law when you are known as the woman who make claims against such a prominent person. She talked about how she would never be anything other than "the woman who claimed Judge X groped her."
I let the matter go--only she could tell her story or not tell it. But the truth of the matter is that I lost a great deal of respect for her as a result of her decision not to say anything. I viewed it as craven, as mercenary, as putting her own personal advancement ahead of doing what was right. I thought her fears and objections were pretextual, self-justifications to assuage her conscience and convince herself it was OK to value getting ahead over any other consideration. And, because my poker face isn't as good as I would like to pretend, I am pretty sure she knew what I thought about all of this.
I've been thinking about this story recently, in light of the torrent of people coming forward to accuse a host of public figures of sexual misconduct. In thinking about that incident ten years or so ago, several things have become clear to me now that were not clear to me then.
First, her concerns about what would happen if she spoke up were assuredly not pretextual, or at least not nearly as pretextual as I thought them to be at the time. What I did not appreciate at the time was that these concerns were not some hypothetical musings on what might happen, which is how I understood them; they were grounded either in experiences that happened to her before or the experience of people she knew very well. The pervasive nature of conduct of this type, which I did not appreciate, means that almost every woman has a set of concrete data points with which to base her conclusions about what would happen if she spoke out. If my friend had made an accusation against this judge, it is very likely that all of the things that she predicted would in fact come to pass. I was wrong to discount that, and wrong to assume that she was jumping at shadows.
This flows into my second realization. There is a great deal of talk now, especially in what you might call the "intellectual left," about the concept of privilege. My reaction to this situation is one of the more subtle, yet nevertheless real, examples of privilege. It was and is easy for me, a white straight guy, to seize the moral high-ground and insist on moral clarity. It was easy because I would never have to face any consequences from such a position, because I am extremely unlikely to ever find myself in a similar position. Insisting that people should publicly confront and challenge prominent people who use their position to exploit others is an example of cheap virtue when you are highly unlikely to ever be the one called upon to confront and challenge. Insisting that others make sacrifices you will never have to make, and then judging them when they won't do it, is privilege. At its heart, it is a failure of empathy, a failure to carry other's burdens. I had a chance to carry a bit of the weight off of my friend, and I didn't do it, content instead with my self-righteous moralizing.
Third, much of my self-righteous moralizing was grounded in the fact that this particular judge was someone whose judicial philosophy was one that I opposed. It was not at all lost on me at the time that calling out this individual might be "striking a blow for our team." This raises the problem--what if the judge in question was one of the ones on my team? Would I have been so quick to call for him to be exposed? If not, then I was completely full of shit, and demonstrated that I didn't really care about the incident itself and the people who were harmed, but only how it could be weaponized and exploited. I can't say for sure if I would have had the same reaction, but the fact that I am unsure means that I failed to truly empathize with my friend and her situation.
Now, having said all that, do I think it would be better if this incident had come to light? Probably. The revelations of the past few weeks have brought to light much was hidden in darkness, and I think that is for the best. But I was wrong to expect, or sotto voce demand, that any particular person be the one to tell their story. And I did not do what I needed to do in that moment on behalf of my friend to support her. My job was not to impose a set of demands on her, but to help carry a bit of her burden. And I didn't do that.
We have to do a better job. I have to do a better job.
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