In yesterday’s post, I started talking about the minority town I would build as a way to improve DEI. More to the point, it would be to let people in the majority expeience what it’s like to be in the minority. None of the truly cruel stuff like physical attacks or sustained emotional harassment because that’s not ethical or moral. More to the point, I most emphatically want anyone to experience that.
Except. The problem is that for many people, it’s not possible to truly empathize with someone until you actually go through what they did. There’s a mystery book I read several decades ago in which the female protagonist was a cop. Her boyfriend was also a cop. One side plot was that her boyfriand had to go out on a case of a woman being mugged at midnight. He came back and said that she should not have been jogging at midnight, which really got under the woman’s skin.
Putting aside whether anyone should be running at midnight, the boyfriend had been implying that a woman specifically should not be running alone at midnight. This was in the ninties or the early aughts, so it wsa quite a feminist statement that the womna decided not to stand for it.
Her boyfriend had a little garden in the front yard that he was meticulous about. Or lawn. The details are fuzzy, but the main gist is that the woman started messing with the garden–pulling up flowers and things like that. The guy lost his mind and started plotting how to catch who was doing it.
She confessed after a week or so, and he was furious. She explained her thinking, which was that she wanted to give him a taste of what women had to go through all the time (constantly being vigilant about all the things that could happen).
I’m explaining it terribly, but it made sense to me. I appreciated it at a time when women were given a long list of things that they should and shouldn’t do. It becomes second nature. Some of it is reasonable for anyone (giving the name and number of a first date to your bestie, for example), but is overly emphasized for women.
When I think about my mythical town, I immediately run into problems. It’s easy to say that it’s for cishet white men (to have the ‘experience’), but what about, say, cis gay white men? Many of them are almost as privileged as cishet white men, and they have many of the same blind spots. If they are middle/upper middle class, that is.