Further reflections

[mia_konsgen]

I read Yancy's letter to White America and found the ending very poignant, powerful, on point: "If you have young children, before you fall off to sleep tonight, I want you to hold your child. Touch your child’s face. Smell your child’s hair. Count the fingers on your child’s hand. See the miracle that is your child. And then, with as much vision as you can muster, I want you to imagine that your child is black." This demands that one uses one's power of imagination and be willing to confront oneself with one's own biases in this most intimate way. Yancy does not allow a continued blissful ignorance for the privileged. I read parts of the second chapter of his book "Look, A White!" and I feel that the methodology he is proposing and reinforcing, is up against the internalised, implicit idea that discomfort (of any kind) should be avoided at all costs - an easy feat when one belongs to the privileged. I wouldn't know where to pinpoint the origins of this idea, but I do agree that it must be challenged. And the emergence of the current era of convenience in which - when one lives in the "first world", in privilege - one can access anything, anytime, almost instantly etc., will certainly only have exacerbated this problem of avoidance. There is something pertaining to the human condition here: the refusal to look life in the face, to see it for what it it is by becoming conscious of our radical freedom of choice and the responsibility that comes with it.

By openly claiming he is sexist, Yancy acknowledges his wrongdoings and fallibility, while signalling that he will never not be sexist but that he will spend his life in the process of addressing and deconstructing it. In doing this, he is showing his readiness to work on himself, to accept his fallibility, and he is showing his openness to listening to those who suffer from his privilege and biases. I think there is great power in doing this because it opens up the possibility for dialogue and growth, in a space occupied only by people who intend to be respectful and learn from their misgivings and from others. While this is of course tragic - for the oppressed to have to teach and guide their oppressor - it is necessary (as Yancy says in his introduction to his book, 9).
In his letter to his nephew (24), Baldwin writes "we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it." and "We cannot be free until they are free". This shows his understanding of the issue at hand is similar to Yancy's - in the proclaimed necessity of giving (with love, as a gift) to the oppressor, despite everything the oppressed have had to and still endure at his hand.

Reflecting on Yancy's and Baldwin's writings brought to mind Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity. De Beauvoir’s existentialist philosophy is distinctive through her concept of ambiguity that draws on Sartre’s ideas of existence as being determined by both our facticity (situatedness) and our transcendence (freedom). What she describes as ambiguity is the ever-present tension/duality between, and co-existence of, both human subjectivity and objectivity. In other words, humans experience themselves as conscious and willing subjects in the world. But they are also equally and at the same time objects in the world, in the sense that they are shaped, objected by their environment, and by other human subjectivities. De Beauvoir emphasises that our freedom and our facticity are two sides of the same coin, and that the former is limited by the latter. For her, human existence is therefore the constant tension between the two, and only in recognising this ambiguity, can we realise our freedom. But freedom is also shaped by structural forms of oppression and the question of violence. That human freedom is constrained by human facticity makes it necessary to acknowledge the collective. She recognizes the inherently intersubjective nature of human freedom, entailing the interconnectedness, interdependence and mutual co-existence of an individual’s freedom with that of others. Echoing Baldwin and Yancy, she argues that actively taking up one’s freedom, rather than fleeing it, and recognizing it, involves recognizing the freedom of others as well. Only in recognizing the ambiguity of human freedom, that is becoming aware, can one do so (but in the sense that it is and will always be in the process of creating and reshaping itself). Indeed, in de Beauvoir’s account of freedom, identity is never fixed as we are constantly creating ourselves and this fashioning is never purely of one’s own making alone. Ethics are at the center of her philosophy. An individual’s freedom is intrinsically bound to the freedom of others due to human facticity. According to her, one must actively assume one’s own freedom rather than fleeing it. This is done by actively taking up projects – what she calls a “constructive moment” –, but it equally entails rejecting oppression for oneself and others – a “negative movement” (156). In her conception of freedom, others play a role in determining the ethicality of an individual’s freedom.