Nooses vs. Positive Thinking
Okay, follow me here... there will be a couple twists and turns.
Since the Jena 6 case became big news, there have been a series of "noosings"... incidents in which a noose was left somewhere public to terrorize, harass, or at least annoy black folks.
As an Associated Press article says:
Nooses were left in a black Coast Guard cadet's bag, at a Long Island police station locker room, on a Maryland college campus, and, just this week, on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University in New York.
A noosing is not a lynching, not by any stretch. But it can call up a specter of violence. It can also distract the targets and keep them tied up by the racial-harassment dialogue rather than continuing their work.
We at News & Notes sometimes get letters accusing us of spending too much time talking about racism. If you look, there is always plenty of documentation of racial incidents. The question for a journalist is how and whether you cover them: one by one; with over-arching big-think discussions; or only when they cross some heinous line.
Protesters rally at Teachers College at Columbia University.
Mario Tama, Getty ImagesAnd just in the way we journalists have to choose how to cover racial incidents, individuals who are navigating race (and isn't that all of us, on some level?) have to choose how to react to negativity. If someone at school or work says something out of line, do you let it pass, quietly discuss, or go for the jugular? What if things are more serious, escalating into harassment or violence? How do you react?
And what if... it's all in your head? Or if at the very least you generate the reactions that come your way?
That's one popular line of thinking these days.
Take The Secret. The best-selling book is the latest in a centuries-long tradition of narratives that say you can attract wealth, love, health... and basically whatever you want. It's been all the rage, on Oprah and on book sales lists.
But a few months ago, Newsweek's Jerry Adler put The Secret and the laws of attraction on blast.
In an article called "Decoding the Secret," he writes:
On an ethical level, The Secret appears deplorable. It concerns itself almost entirely with a narrow range of middle-class concerns; houses, cars and vacations, followed by health and relationships, with the rest of humanity a very distant sixth. Michael Bernard Beckwith compares it to the law of gravity: "If you fall off a building it doesn't matter if you're a good person or a bad person, you're going to hit the ground."Which is equally true if someone pushes you off a building; or, let's say, beats your brains in with a club during a bout of ethnic cleansing. The law of attraction implies that you brought that fate down on yourself as well. "The law of attraction is that each one of us is determining the frequency that we're on by what we're thinking and feeling," [Author Rhonda] Byrne said in a telephone interview, in response to a question about the massacre in Rwanda. "If we are in fear, if we're feeling in our lives that we're victims and feeling powerless, then we are on a frequency of attracting those things to us ... totally unconsciously, totally innocently, totally all of those words that are so important."
Ouch and, hmmm....
The question here is: do you believe -- and I am honestly asking -- that you can avoid something as complex as racial harassment by the power of positive thinking? I don't mean: can you avoid getting angry about it? I mean, do you believe you can actually avoid racism, harassment, and violence by staying in a certain positive frame of mind?
Does this ethos of "the laws of attraction" run counter to the quest for justice, or even to the religious traditions that preach justice comes in the by-and-by, not in the here and now?
Is it an either-or?
F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of my favorite writers, penned this:
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
So: can you believe in the power of positive thinking (and/or the laws of attraction) and still believe that racism, violence, and terror can visit without a psychic invitation?
As a person, how do you put your positivity in the world and deal with the attacks that come your way?
How do you retain an essential openness and optimism that allows you to dream without ignoring the sometimes ugly realities of human interaction?
Those are big questions ... and this inquiring news host wants to know ...
9:38 PM ET | 10-10-2007 | permalink
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