With my own two ears, I just heard Sarah Silverman on the Savage Lovecast say that even though she acknowledged Obama had no obligation to do so and there was no reason it would have occurred to him, he could have invited Trump over, been nice to him, and defused his anger.
This isn’t an “I saw Goody Proctor with the devil” post. It’s something I find fascinating because my anger at it was immediate even though I personally have actively “converted” misogynists with incel attitudes in this way. So I wanted to tease out why.
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And the why is this: an anger-defusing tactic like “now now, I’m sure you have the wrong idea about me, let me take you into my circle and make you feel better”, when undertaken by a leader, serves as a performative model to others about how they should respond to similar slights
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I think the tactic of “you hate me but I don’t hate you, let’s talk this out” can be highly effective, though often less effective than people would like to tell themselves. It took me 3 years to ease a misogynist away from hatefulness and even then they didn’t move all that far.
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But to take that approach as a leader, and particularly as a leader from a group (Black people in America) that is often pressured to respond to bigotry and racism without ever showing pain or anger or defensiveness or even self-protective reticence...
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When a leader does something visible in the public eye, especially something related to conflict defusion, it becomes a behavioural model, something everyone should do, even if it is safe for a leader but neither safe nor reasonable for people in far more vulnerable positions.
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And when a leader is from a minority and is constantly being described in terms designed to separate them out as a “model”, as “not like those other x”, their example of behaviour becomes something that can be used to bludgeon others into taking actions with high costs.
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The other upsetting element inherent in the proposition, which I find more INTERESTING, is that with Trump specifically, I can almost imagine it working - not to defuse his racism as a whole, which is part of a generational legacy and comprised of many moving parts. Not to stop -
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- the presidential run, because that too derived from motives far beyond resentment of Obama, which we may not fully understand until the conclusion of the Russia investigation, but which include boundless ego and a desire for self-aggrandisement.
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No, I can see it working in that I can see it causing Trump to like Obama, as an individual human, because Obama would have legitimised Trump’s approach to conflict and paid him tribute by treating him as someone whose mind it was important to change.
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So where would that leave Trump? Feeling basically the same about race and immigration - because please never doubt that a man who spent a long time in the NY social scene would be having some new and revelatory demographic meeting if Obama had personally tried to soothe him.
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But feeling pacified, feeling legitimated, feeling like a big deal maker who made another great big deal by throwing his influence and undermining power around. And leaving black people in America knowing folks were gonna expect them to invite danger directly into their homes.
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And leaving every person watching feeling that the squeaky wheel does and should always get the oil, that it is good and reasonable to respond to the vilest and falsest of comments by lending your own credibility and stature to soothe someone else’s ill feelings toward you.
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Leaving people believing that Trump was important enough that the White House wanted him happy, which would be its own deeply terrifying thing.
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What haunts me is the utilitarian argument you can cobble together out of this, which is that if hugging every bigot and making them feel special and important would stop them from making life awful for those against whom they are bigoted, we should all devote our energies there.
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That every bigot is just a troubled soul waiting for conversion. Oh, right, Holocaust Remembrance Day just passed, I forgot. The Germans had a LOT of Jewish friends and neighbours; their society wasn’t particularly segregated. They didn’t lack for Jews who’d been warm to them.
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Silverman is speaking about responses to outrageous performances of bigotry based on her experience defusing a misogynist-sounding troll. That’s the experience from which she is generalising.
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(In the podcast, she’s now talking about how he’s chatting away in her DMs as a new friend; admittedly I’m hearing that as “no good deed goes unpunished”/“guess that is exactly what someone who makes random celebrities pay for his rage would do”, but she doesn’t see it that way.)
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But what should we make of generalising that experience out to other forms of bigotry or expressions of them? How does that foster a misleading sense of others’ motives? Would it be worth it if it “worked”, which I think it often doesn’t?
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Anyway, nah, I’m going to mull more on why exactly I disagree. I think it has a lot to do with characterising Trump not as a strategist nor as a bigot but as a hurt person who needs his hurt soothed, but that’s probably all I can say for now without further mulling.
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End of conversation
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