I've been thinking about the Bill Cosby rape accusations lately, and how a Black woman I greatly admire recently shared a lecture by him where someone had commented something about "This is the man they're trying to silence in the time of Ferguson and Eric Garner" (paraphrase from memory). I felt that there was something terrible about framing the many, many accusations leveled at him from a diverse array of women as some sort of conspiracy to silence a powerful, political Black man and therefore harm his people. But I kept silent, because I didn't know how to wade into such thorny territory and didn't think it was my place.
Last night I was reading a variety of radical Black women bloggers, starting with Trudy of Gradient Lair. I don't remember the name of the one who posted Beverley Johnson's piece and highlighted that the experience she was talking about was misogynoir, further explaining the trap that she and other Black women experience of knowing that they will be accused of disunity to the Black community if they speak their story of assault by a black man. This is the link to that interview, however: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/12/bill-cosby-beverly-johnson-story?mbid=social_retweet
My own thoughts that I want to share are about the fallacy that my friend may have fallen into: This idea that if someone's speaking, especially if they're doing it well, to important social issues in a way the person listening agrees with, that person will then conclude the speaker must be a moral person. After all, they're delineating such a powerful and important moral vision, right?
I learned the hard way--through surviving a sexually and somewhat emotionally abusive relationship--that this isn't true. So now it seems really obvious that, no, articulating a good vision doesn't make someone a good person. That's bad news at first--you can't trust the social networks you've trusted so far--but eventually it settles down into good news: You default back to evaluating how safe and positive a person is to be around based on observing their behavior over time and gradually becoming closer if they pass the tests, just as you would if politics had never come into the picture. It's freeing, because politics brings in all kinds of strong, often nasty, almost always exhausting emotions into play, so it's nice to be able to say no and push back on them dominating every aspect of your life.
But some people might still be struggling with how someone could be a great activist for a great cause and still be a serial rapist or otherwise horrible. And one answer is that the power-hungry, totally selfish people of the world see the social sphere as something to manipulate, and a great way to get away with serial rape is to look like a great person. But it's one thing to admit that someone you have a great deal of trust in has done bad things, and it's another thing to believe that person has never, ever believed in any of their expressed ideals and has only been using them as a means to power. Sometimes that leap of thought is true, but human motivations are seriously complex, so I'll offer a more flexible understanding of how bad people can fight for good things.
And here it is: Activism, politics, and rhetoric are a non-physical competitive sport. They're human pitted against other human as well as against self, using skill with emotions, performance, facts, and logic to push toward a goal. This is inherently rewarding because it's a difficult, multi-faceted skill with endless applicability, because of the chance to win in the competition, and because of the emotional payloads associated with feeling righteous and so on. A human being can, I believe, horribly harm others just because the harmer doesn't care, while also having an emotional need for feeling righteous and moral. Just like someone who needs emotional catharsis might watch a tear-jerker drama, intentionally turning on the sorrow and turning it back off to go about life, an abuser can turn on and off their need for morality (and that's if they haven't at least partially convinced themself that their actions actually are justified).
Lately I've been thinking about how morality itself isn't actually, despite what our culture usually teaches, about a set of abstract logical rules that exist outside of any actual human. Rather, it's a recognition of humans' and animal's social and emotional needs, and an ongoing process of trying to maneuver ourselves into meeting more of those needs and violating them less severely. If we understand that two of those needs are actually to feel and appear moral, it lets us step back from involvement with politics on the surface level and actually examine political discourse as a social behavior and way of inducing interesting internal sensations.
Another point I want to make on hero-worshiping people who make the best speeches or otherwise rhetoric or activist well: Who can influence others in a way that's recognized as, e.g. "smart", is not a politically neutral thing. People who have more power already are more likely to have their words and deeds recognized as powerful even if they're the exact same words, but they're also more likely to have the education and socially-valued ability to produce words that would be recognized as better even were the author unknown. Yes, wanting it badly enough and practicing for a long time are important factors, but there is a large component of privilege in who comes across as a powerful speaker and who is given the opportunity to be heard. Thinking good speaker = good person is pretty congruent to thinking well-educated, highly able-minded, well-connected = good person (and therefore uneducated, disabled, and/or socially marginalized = not good person).
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