Changing Your Ideas About The Incarcerated

 At first, I thought Leigh Sugar's What to Read When You Want to Destabilize the Binaries Between Good and Bad (The Rumpus) would fit in better with a post I am drafting on magical realism.

Among the 14 “Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” as outlined by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, are “Either/or Thinking,” “Fear of Open Conflict,” “Belief in One Right Way,” and “Perfectionism.” As a white person who came of age in predominantly white neighborhoods and schools, I recognize these characteristics in my own history and tendencies, and that of so many institutions (educational and beyond) in which I’ve been involved. Additionally, I have severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), a condition that is evident across time and cultures but whose symptoms often overlap with those described in Jones and Okun’s “Characteristics of White Supremacy,” particularly with regards to “Either/Or Thinking” and “Perfectionism.” The precise details of how and when and why these qualities show up in my mind and actions (often unintentionally), and/or whether a certain urge is due to white supremacy culture/my whiteness or my OCD, are less important than the fact that they do.

Instead, it made me examine my own thinking. 

Either/or thinking never came easy for me after I got to be a teenager; maybe before then, Black and white thinking always left a fool. Then I read in John Toland's Hitler that either/or thinking was a hallmark of Nazism. Another good reason for embracing ambiguity.

Perfectionism was always put to us by my mother as a goal that we could not attain. The only perfect being was Christ. Another point in raising one's child in the church - the knowledge that perfect is impossible. The best we can do is try doing our best.

My mother's family is chiefly Scots and Irish. No worry there about disdaining open conflict.

Outside of Christianity, I do not know of one right way. My methods were always more experimental. Even within Christianity, we do not know who God will save.

Then the essay goes into how we view the incarcerated; even providing a reading list. And that, folks, is why you should go back, click on the link to the essay, and read it. The prison system allows us to exercise our collective Id without distinction on the less fortunate and stupid as well as the malignant. Not all the incarcerated are malignant growths on the body of civil society; they may even be the products of our civil society.

sch 6/30