Is there another color pill besides blue or red?

I've referred a lot on this site to my past as an evangelical. There are a lot of reasons I keep recalling those days. One is that even though I was only an evangelical for about seven years, it has continued to have a pretty profound psychological impact on me for decades since. Another reason is that there are a number of sociological phenomena I witnessed in evangelical churches that I've seen play out in other settings.

But are we sanctified enough?

The church I went to as a teenager had a schism where about one-fourth of the church left. The argument? How to correctly understand the roles free will and pre-destination play in salvation through faith. It is very common in evangelical churches for believers to segregate themselves from other believers based on what would seem to an outsider to be small differences in belief. Those segregating themselves justify their decision to do so based on the notion that God would rather have a small group of believers truly committed to the right set of principles than a large group of only half-correct believers.

If homo sapiens had evolved with more than two hands, would we have become less binary in our thinking? 

I see this attitude reflected in the politically liberal circles I tend to orbit these days. Liberals naturally see themselves as distinct from conservatives. I'd argue that there is a respectable form of conservatism that liberals could learn from and use to refine their own beliefs, but let's accept here that we as liberals ought to generally have beliefs that set us apart from conservatives. That being said, there is a kind of liberal that is becoming more ubiquitous, one for whom accepting the general principles of liberalism is not enough. One has to accept an ever-growing set of specific beliefs, and if you do not accept their highly refined version of what being a liberal is, then this person will not consider you fit for fellowship.

An incident in the literary world from this past summer helps to illustrate this point. Anders Carlson-Wee published a really good poem in the Nation. It was a short narrative poem in which one homeless panhandler teaches another homeless panhandler how to play on the emotions of people to get donations. It has some great lines in it: "It's the littlest shames they're likely/to comprehend." Or, "What they don't know is what opens/ a wallet, what stops em from counting what they drop." It's a smart look at what motivates people to give to those in need, and suggests people are often motivated by what giving says about them rather than love for the person in need.

The objections to the poem

As the poet said, he hoped the poem would help "address the invisibility of homelessness." So it might seem surprising that there was an outcry against the poem, mostly coming from people who likely identify as politically liberal and who would tell you they believe it's important to think of the less fortunate in society.

There were two reasons, basically. One was the "ableist" language in the poem. At one point, the adviser-narrator of the poem tells his protege, "if you're crippled don't flaunt it." This criticism is incredibly thin, and can be dispatched pretty easily. The presence of something in literature doesn't equate approval of that thing. This is something we all learn pretty early on. A poem that includes a homeless person using a word that he plausibly would have used in real life doesn't mean the reader is supposed to approve of the use of that word. Rather, the reader is supposed to imagine a person who would use such a word. Using the correct lexical terms for the situation is part of building the imaginative landscape necessary to seeing the world through the narrator's eyes. If you are writing about a racist, it's appropriate for that character to use the N-word. That doesn't mean the N-word is a good thing.

The bigger objection to the poem seemed to be that it used what has been termed "literary blackface," a white poet using AAVE, or African American Vernacular English.

Use of dialect--aesthetic and ethical considerations

Aesthetics

Can a writer borrow from a dialect that isn't the writer's own dialect? This isn't just an ethical question, it's also an aesthetic one. Over the last few decades, heavy use of dialect has fallen out of fashion. We don't get much Huck Finn anymore. It's not just that people find it untoward; it's also a little tedious. At some point, the reader is usually saying, "Okay, I get it, the character talks in dialect, and you know the rules of the dialect. Can I just read the story now?" Generally, the "rule" for using dialect now is to throw in enough to let the reader realize that the character speaks in dialect and that what is on the page is something of a translation of that dialect for the reader. That's what Colson Whitehead did in The Underground Railroad. He didn't kill the reader with 19th Century slave dialect, but there was enough "sampling" of the dialect that we were occasionally reminded that the characters were living in a different time and place. This keeps the story from being dull for the reader. It also keeps the author from having to spend years researching dialect in order to get it right. Whitehead is black, yes, but that doesn't mean he has any advantage over a white writer in knowing what a slave sounded like 175 years ago. So he picked a good compromise.

Aesthetically, Carlson-Wee seemed to follow this compromise fairly competently. His narrator speaks in dialect, but not obnoxiously so. A good taste of it is right in the opening two lines: "If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl,/say you're pregnant." That's twice it says "you" where schoolboy American English would give you "you've," or "you're." Having done this, though, the poem then shifts to the use of "you're" where it could have justifiably said the dialect-derived "you" again. (One of the characteristics of AAVE is a reduction in the number of verb tenses.) But on that third "you," the narrator reverts to "standard" English, because we've already had enough AAVE to establish how the narrator is really talking without needing to keep hearing it over and over.

In fact, I wouldn't have even been certain this was AAVE. It shares characteristics with other English dialects. "You got" isn't just AAVE. Neither is "you is." It could have been someone other than a black narrator. 

Ethics

The ethical considerations of using a different dialect than the one the writer speaks in her daily life is a little trickier than the aesthetic one. We definitely consider it offensive for a white actor to wear makeup to look like another race. I'm not exactly sure why this is; we accept using makeup to look older or younger. Is it because it's creepy? Is it because the old minstrel shows were so insanely racist that anything with even a single point in common with them nowadays is too much to take?

Would anyone argue this is ageist? 

Whatever the reason, it seems a pretty commonly accepted point. Since ethics often comes down to common consent, let's accept that as a solid principle. The question then becomes, "Is using dialect from another community than the writer's own equivalent to blackface?" I am yet to hear a convincing explanation of how it could be. It's true that one can mimic an accent or a mannerism to be cruel and to mock. One can affect a Southern accent while saying something outrageous to make the point that one thinks Southerners are stupid. A racist might fake a "black English" dialect in order to mock that dialect. But there are clearly ways to use the accent that aren't cruel or mocking. One is simply to demonstrate it. For example, "Marylanders sometimes extend and round their long "o" sound, as in "I'd like to drink a Cohke and a Natty Boh while watching the Oehs."

For a white person who is not from an area of the country where he actually learned to speak AAVE as a "native language" to "try to talk black" in an everyday social setting is almost always offensive. To try to write a black character and let him talk in his own voice, however, is neutral. It works if it works. It doesn't if it doesn't. It has nothing to do with the race of the writer. I don't believe anyone would have objected to this poem if a black author had written it. Which is the same as saying there's nothing to object to.

Having a character speak a dialect so we can inhabit that character's psychological reality is more akin to the explanatory type of use than it is to mocking. For this reason, perhaps, we tend to accept an actor's use of an accent that isn't the actor's own accent much more readily than we accept manipulation of the actor's physical appearance.

Perhaps sensing there was something not quite right about calling Carlson-Wee's use of language inherently racist, those who objected to the poem didn't always take this route. They didn't all suggest that his use of AAVE was appropriation. For example, when Roxane Gay objected to this use of AAVE by a white writer, her objection was more pragmatic than ethical. She believed it was impossible to do it right:

To argue AAVE can't be used and learned like other languages is to deny its rightful status

I think "no white writer can ever write AAVE correctly" is a hard point to argue. We have an entire profession, employing millions of people in the world, that is built on the supposition that it is possible to take words in one language and render them in the words of another language. I'm one of those millions of people who make a living doing this. We have always accepted this as necessary and even useful. We often see translators and interpreters as necessary to achieving understanding between people. Nobody has ever suggested that there is a moral issue with translating from one language to another. We might wonder, on a philosophical level, how efficacious translation really can be, and whether it's really possible to fully translate from one language to another, but nobody questions that translation is, to the extent possible, a good thing to do.

If we believe that I can take a language like Korean, spoken by people on the other side of the world, and, after years of hard work, become skilled enough to sort of use it correctly, surely someone else can do the same for people who speak a version of the same language living ten miles away? Especially if they're not really trying, as in this poem, to fully reproduce AAVE, but just to give a flavor of it to help keep the reader in the character's point-of-view?

I include words in foreign languages all the time in my stories. They're right. I know they're right, because I've done the work to know they're right. That doesn't mean I'm going to give you the same insight into a Korean character that a Korean person might. But as a white person writing for an English-speaking audience, that's okay. I can offer a translation of that character. If I can do this for a character who thinks in a language where the syntax is all backwards from English, others can probably manage it for a dialect most white people can understand without ever taking a single class in it. If I can't do everying to AAVE I can do to French, then AAVE isn't a valid language (which it is).

No true Scotsman and why it's uncomfortable to be a Liberal

I return now to my days as an Evangelical. It is always possible to continually narrow the terms of what is necessary to be a part of your community. Doing so will help to prevent disagreement within your community, but it will also reduce your impact, because it will reduce your size. While it's true that a small but ideologically unified and motivated community can achieve a lot, this isn't typically what happens. Typically, the group becomes perpetually embroiled in the effort to achieve ideological unity, and it never gets around to the accomplishment phase of its existence.

When a church continues to require more orthodoxy of its members, when it requires that you not only believe that Jesus was the Son of God and that he died for our sins, but also that God created the world in seven days and that women are supposed to be subordinate to men because that's what Paul said, you are going to get objections.

"You can't be a Christian unless you believe in a literal seven days and a rest!"
"But I'm a Christian, and I don't believe in that."
"You're not a true Christian. No true Christian would doubt Genesis 1 is literally true."

It's the perfect example of the No True Scotsman fallacy. It seems to be more and more common among the community of people who identify as politically liberal. Something comes up like the controversy around Carlson-Wee's poem, and if I do not immediately declare that I found the poem terrible and ridiculous, I will be accused of being a Fox-quoting alt-right conservative. I will counter that of course I'm a liberal, because I support ideas X, Y, and Z that are textbook liberal issues. But because I do not agree with a position that isn't a core liberal belief, I am then met with an attitude that I must be a "red-pill" alt-right acolyte.

Isn't there something besides the red and the blue pill?

"Redpill" (which is now a verb somehow) refers to the realization some people believe they have when they awake to the lies they have been fed by a media in thrall to liberal ideals. It is "the beginning of a process of radicalization in which an individual becomes enculturated in an extreme, reactionary worldview," as Bharath Ganesh said. 

It very much feels to me like if I offer any critique of where I think liberal culture is headed, I will be seen as already on that path toward radicalization. This is true even if I go to great lengths to indicate that I am not trying to "redpill" anyone, nor have I redpilled myself. In fact, I'm not. I care about liberal ideas. I want those who fight for them to have their agendas as uncluttered by erroneous thinking as possible. So I express reservations when I think some movement is headed in the wrong direction. That's not equivalent to abandoning the basics of liberal political philosophy, and it certainly doesn't mean I'm a racist or a misogynist or anything that ends with -phobe. 

Taylor Swift recommended voting for Democrats this fall after years of being an ambiguous symbol of...something... for neo-Nazis (I still haven't figured all this out, and I don't want to...Google it yourself if you're interested). When this happened, instead of embracing her turn, a lot of liberals gave her a cold shoulder. This prompted one of the funnier Tweets I've seen lately (although I can't find it now). It said, in essence, that Liberalism is the only religion that punishes its own converts. I think that fits for what happened with Anders Carlson-Wee. He's a guy who obviously cares about things liberals care about. He fully apologized for his poem, although I believe he had nothing to apologize for. But if you Google the guy now, this story is what he's about. It will follow him around for the rest of his poetry life. 

You're never "saved" as a liberal. You always need to be purer, holier, more sanctified. You can't just agree to some broad, core beliefs and disagree about side issues. You have to keep accepting every non-essential belief. This seems to me to be especially true in writing circles. I'd do much in my quest to become better known if I uncritically co-signed and retweeted every statement from literary luminaries. Instead, I post long blog entries like this one about my own ambivalence, entries I'm sure get misread by the few literary editors out there energetic enough to read my blog before they decide to publish me. I wouldn't guess this blog has ever helped me get a story published. 

In the New York Times review of the Carlson-Wee story cited above, the NYT noted that the story was mostly covered by conservative outlets, who took a certain glee in pointing out the ridiculousness of liberal PC culture run amok. This doesn't do wonders for liberal outreach, or evangelism, to use the Christian term. Seeing us turn against one of our own over the application of a string of unexamined assumptions and logical fallacies isn't going to bring a lot of thinking people over to our camp. 

Beyond the liberal political camp, it's probably not great for serious poetry, either. Almost nobody reads serious poetry anymore. Folks have opted for easy-to-digest pop poetry, which now occasionally makes it onto the best sellers list, while top poetry journals pay contributors in copies of the journal. When the only press poetry gets is a spat over a man who obviously meant to do something good getting attacked for not doing good in the right way, I doubt that makes serious poetry seem attractive to anyone.

There's another lesson to draw, though, from the fact that conservative outlets are happy to pick up stories about liberals attacking each other. It's that when someone within the liberal camp is unhappy, he will have an easier time finding a voice in a conservative outlet than a liberal one. Unable to fix speak his doubts to the faithful, who will often be shocked to even hear the doubt exists, the wavering liberal ends up going underground and effectively redpilling himself. There is no alternative to the red and the blue pills. This is why we are becoming increasingly polarized. To belong to either camp is to fully take one or the other pills. There is no purple pill. You can't even argue for a better version of the blue pill.

When we force this kind of orthodoxy out of the people in our own communities, we make it impossible that there would ever be anything in common between completely different communities. If we are that suspicious of signs of unorthodoxy in our own members, we'll never find anything worth salvaging in the camps of those outside our tribes.