Some Thoughts Are Bad...And Relevant

Sometimes when my wife and I find ourselves arguing (because...marriage), I find myself asking her to “please not say (x) like that.” Maybe she said it with a particular tone, or maybe she said something I found particularly hurtful, but whatever it is, it stings particularly harder than other barbs tossed. I'm sure you can picture a similar argument with family or friends. Her response, at times, has been to say that my asking her not to say something is a sort of attempt to shut down her feelings, to keep her from expressing herself. Perhaps, in a moment of frustration, that is how I'm feeling at the time. But once things are calm, I do realize that her thoughts, and those of anyone else I may find myself in disagreement with, are always valid, no matter where they come from. Be they influenced by personal experiences, emotions, or pure logic, they give us a greater understanding of the influence of various factors on our thoughts, and they hopefully allow us to constructively solve issues at the heart of a disagreement.

The Ferguson, MO situation is sucking up all of the news room oxygen right now, so you know this is going to tie into that somehow. If you're familiar with the “open thought” blog called Thought Catalog, you know that it can carry a lot of very thoughtful content (you'd hope, with that name), but it can also carry almost as much throwaway content based solely on one's person's personal vendettas. It has a reputation to invoke strong opinions, especially when some ill-informed or angry or prejudiced stuff lands on it like a sack 'o crap. So when an article titled“Ferguson, Missouri Looks Like a Rap Video” landed on TC, it wasonly a matter of time before Internet Person Opinion Muckraker OutletGawker was covering said article. Let's set aside the pedantic argument about which “rap video” looks at all like the Ferguson protests (what rap videos look like the Arab Spring come to America?). The article was obviously based in prejudice, ignorance, racism, who knows. Whatever it was, it came from a bad place. Gawker, being irreverent as it is, responded with this regarding Thought Catalogue: “Thought Catalog believes all thinking is relevant. Fuck Thought Catalog.”

Most people reading this probably recognize the ugly truth that we are hardly the post-racial nation that some overly optimistic media figures announced following the 2008 elections. Legislation didn't end racism. Public and private censure of racist acts and thoughts didn't end racism. The very notion of talking about “ending” an ugly product of centuries or bad teachings and ignorance is incredibly naïve. I myself came from a racially divided community, about half black and half white, in a town that had separate black and white schools until the early 70s. I've seen racism, discrimination, and prejudice, even with the passage of laws and time. I can't claim to be able to identify with it. I wasn't a part of the cohort held down by Jim Crow. What I can say is that anyone who tries to defeat situations dealing with race by simply saying “be colorblind” or “we all just need to treat each other nicely and things will be sorted out” is trying to shut down other's feelings the same way my wife claimed I was trying to censor her feelings. You don't have to be some raging progressive warrior or guilty white person to say that the thoughts and feelings coming out of the pain you see in the streets right now are Valid Thinking. You just have to be a human being who can look past the end of their nose. It's the product of something much more than whatever you've dreamt up in your own mind without actually bothering to take it the emotions of the angry party.

That said, I disagree with the sentiment of Gawker that Thought Catalog's policy of believing “All Thinking Is Relevant” is bogus. It can be mean. It can be unhelpful towards a lasting peace. And it can probably be better expressed on some angry personal blog rather than sharing space with empathetic people. But it's very relevant in the same way that George Wallace's thinking and Lester Maddox's and David Duke's and anyone today who claims a “War on Whites” thinking is. It's ugly, but it's relevant. 

Without the Wallaces of the South, the need for a true Civil Rights act would not have been cast in such stark relief, to show us that it's not simply bad laws being removed, but reactionary thinking from diseased minds, products of unfortunate environmental influences, that have to be taken into account. Simply saying “everyone's equal because we passed a law” or “we elected a black president, racism over” won't move the cause of justice forward. You must know your opposition. You must treat them as deadly serious. In the same way I must consider my wife's feelings in our argumentative moments (NOT TO SAY SHE'S LIKE THESE OTHER UGLY PEOPLE, LOVE YOU SWEETIE), we must consider theirs as as serious as a heart attack. Unlike in my domestic situation, however, we can't expect to solve that via some amicable conclusion or utopian harmonization of values (because I live in a utopian marriage, surely!). We have to instead stay vigilant and keep working to improve. To paraphrase Romans 12:12, we have to be vigilant in hope, patient in times of trial, and always, always, always keep going forward in prayer.