Category Archives: Unpopular Opinions

Cyborgs and Aesthetics

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In countless dystopic stories, such as more recent films of the Terminator franchise, robot-controlled future Earth is a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

In many ways, this imagery seem intuitive. Indeed, a world in which humanity has been pushed to the brink of destruction by robots bent on the eradication of mankind, seems like it ought to be rather bleak.

But I wonder – how much of this imagery is driven by our own sense of self-importance? Or rather – why don’t cyborgs care about aesthetics?

To be fair, there are a number of reasons why such an assumption might be reasonable. If nuclear weapons were unleashed during the early days of the robot uprising, for example, there would surely be terrible repercussions.

But which side, do you suppose, would turn to nuclear weapons first?  Would cyborgs, bent on destroying the petty beings that created them, move to eradicate humanity using our most deadly weapons?

Or would humanity, terrified of the powerful beings we created, move to destroy them before they destroy us?

I’m rather convinced that it is humanity which would do the nuking.

More generally, there’s the sense that robots, dedicated beings of practicality and efficiency, would gladly sacrifice aesthetics to advance the end they are programed seek. The future is a post-apocalyptic hellscape because, to a robot, it hardly matters whether the environment is a hellscape or not.

I’m not convinced of that either. Are aesthetics, indeed, aspects of pure fancy with no practical connotations? A clear day is not only a beautiful sight to behold, it is important for the lungs; no matter how ‘indestructible’ a cyborg may be, exposure to nuclear radiation – or shielding thereof – is likely to be costly.

And, of course, is there no value in beauty in itself? It’s easier, perhaps, to think that cyborgs wouldn’t have capacity for such appreciation – that the awe of the universe is something humans can uniquely behold.

Yet, isn’t that the very aspect of consciousness? The very moment when intelligent becomes intelligence?

Perhaps that moment when a computer becomes alive, when it thinks for itself, “I am,” perhaps that, too, is the moment it realizes – this is a remarkable world we live in.

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Does Anger Lead to the Dark Side?

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Anger is generally considered to be an “negative” emotion.

It is often intense, powerful, and unpleasant for everyone around it. The emotion may have several negative health effects, and may be especially bad for your heart. Anger management resources are widespread. Because of the problematic nature of anger, that it is “such a forceful negative emotion and makes people uncomfortable,” as one Psychology Today article puts it, “taboos about expressing it are widespread.”

To further complicate matters, many psychologists “believe that holding anger in is bad for you, that it only builds pressure to be expressed.” On the other hand, the American Psychological Association (APA) now says that freely expressing anger may be “a dangerous myth” used “as a license to hurt others.” Furthermore,  “research has found that ‘letting it rip’ with anger actually escalates anger and aggression and does nothing to help you (or the person you’re angry with) resolve the situation.”

Feeding into the taboo nature of anger, it seems as though our best solution is to simply not have any anger in the first place – thus avoiding the conundrum of holding it in or letting it out.

Recognizing the seeming impossibility of simply deleting anger from our lives, the APA puts this a little more constructively, recommending: “It’s best to find out what it is that triggers your anger, and then to develop strategies to keep those triggers from tipping you over the edge.”

This strikes me as the advice you give when you don’t know what to say.

Most notably, this advice seems to imply that most anger is unjustified. Figure out what makes you angry and avoid it, the way a person with Celiac ought to avoid gluten.

But what if what makes you angry is…injustice? What if you are angry because of historical legacies of power and oppression, because of deep disparities which are so entrenched as to seem normal?

A coping mechanism hardly seems appropriate for the task.

In one of the few memorable lines from The Phantom Menace, Yoda uses a line of thought similar to the APA when he proclaims, “Fear is the path to the dark side…fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering.”

Yet, this is the the logic of someone in power – it subtly assumes that anger is little more than the selfish reaction of someone who doesn’t get their way.

There is, of course, a certain truth to Yoda’s claim – there are plenty of instances throughout history where fear mongering has proven to be an effective, though unfortunate, tool for power, hate, and suffering.

But the idea that all anger intrinsically leads to hate goes too far.

This is a danger, no doubt, but the power of justified anger is a force to be reckoned with. A power which can critically be harnessed for positive social change.

As Hitendra Wadhwa writes in a 2012 piece on Martin Luther King:

Great leaders do not ignore their anger, nor do they allow themselves to get consumed by it. Instead, they channel the emotion into energy, commitment, sacrifice, and purpose. They use it to step up their game.  And they infuse people around them with this form of constructive anger so they, too, can be infused with energy commitment, sacrifice and purpose. In the words of King in Freedomways magazine in 1968, “The supreme task [of a leader] is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.” 

 

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Feminism and Nietzsche

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It is no secret that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a lot of problematic things about women.

Of course, he is hardly alone in this, but Nietzsche’s pointed and ironic style make many of his comments particularly brutal. He plays into many typical tropes about women:

“Women are all skilful in exaggerating their weaknesses, indeed they are inventive in weaknesses, so as to seem quite fragile ornaments to which even a grain of dust does harm,” Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science. Women are manipulative, dangerous creatures who only feign weakness in order to beguile man and “defend themselves against the strong and the ‘law of the jungle.'”

And, of course, women are not capable of real connection with others; they are shallow creatures. “Woman’s love involves injustice and blindness against everything that she does not love…Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women are still cats and birds. Or at best cows…,” he writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Or, if you prefer: “Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman has one solution—that is pregnancy. For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.”

Thanks, Nietzsche.

Yet, none of this is a reason to throw out all of Nietzsche – he does make some more meaningful arguments – and some feminist scholars have even embraced his works.

In the collection of essays, Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall explain why a feminist would read Nietzsche in the first place:

How do feminist reconcile his apparent woman-hating aphorisms with the plethora of female figurations that ‘haunt’ his writings? Far from evading and ignoring femininity and maternity, as other canonical philosophers do, Nietzsche seems compelled to speak of them. His texts abound with references to women and the feminine, and specifically to feminists themselves. He continually deploys women as a trope – for life, for art, and for truth.

This argument is somewhat problematic in its own right: feminists should study Nietzsche because while other philosophers show their misogyny by ignoring women, Nietzsche at least has the decency to display his misogyny directly. But, it’s not quite as simple as that.

Oliver and Pearsall go on to describe the two approaches feminists take to reconciling with Nietzsche.  The first approach, which seems to me to be the most pervasive, is to generally write Nietzsche off as the terrible misogynist he portrays himself to be. A feminist philosopher might still salvage some worthwhile remarks from other portions of his works, but these readings all must start with outrage over his “privileging of masculinity and denigrating of femininity.”

The other approach – which I find myself drawn to – is to consider Nietzsche’s comments with irony as part of his esoteric approach. These feminist philosophers “view his sexual dualism with the context of Nietzsche’s anti-essentialism and anti-dualism. They cite his ironic treatment of an ‘eternal feminine’ or essential woman. They see his perspectivism as questioning the fixity of sexual difference in favor of social constructionism.”

At worst, this approach finds Nietzsche, as Maudemarie Clark argues, caught in a contrast between his philosophical beliefs and his own misogynistic sentiments.

At best, this approach credits Nietzsche with – rather than expressing his own misogynistic beliefs – exposing the misogynistic beliefs of society.

That last reading is perhaps too kind, but I find myself intrigued by the idea nonetheless.

When Nietzsche writes about women, I rarely read him has writing about women. From his work, I’m not sure he has every actually met a woman – rather it seems as though he looked the term up in a dictionary and found a social construct that would serve as a perfect foil for his ubermench.

Did Nietzsche really think such terrible things about women? Perhaps, though as feminist philosophers have noted many of his comments are dissonant with his deeper beliefs. But, one thing I am confident of is that Nietzsche did not invent these images of women.

He writes about women as beguiling, as shallow and manipulative, as weak but somehow strong in their weakness. These are tropes that have been oppressing women for centuries. Nietzsche’s writings bring them to light – and, as modern reader – seem to mock them.

Nietzsche writes like a little boy having a tantrum. But beneath all the pomp and circumstance, beneath his exhausted peacocking, Nietzsche strikes me as deeply ironic in all that he writes.

Words have the power to create, not simply reflect, Nietzsche argues, but his words create a dark reflection of society’s misogyny indeed.

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Othering

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I’ve been noticing a troubling trend in the wake of our ongoing cycle of tragic news stories: othering.

Othering is by no means new, but I’ve been struck lately by the ease with which it slips out into the open, from people of all political backgrounds. One person might other Muslims while another might other Christians, but neither form of othering should be welcome in the good society.

Sociologist Steven Sideman has a great paper exploring the theory of othering, in which he explains the term:

An elaborated account of otherness assumes a social world that is symbolically divided into two antagonistic orders: a symbolic-moral order conferring full personhood and a respected civil status and its antithesis, a defiled order. Othering is a process in which certain persons and the spaces they occupy are excluded from what is considered to be the morally sanctified civil life of a community. 

Typically, as sociologist Stephen Sapp writes, othering is a “processes that dominant groups use to define the existence of secondary groups,” but I am inclined to agree with Sideman that “disadvantaged status in one or more social spheres does not necessarily mean subordination across all spheres.”

Our American red state/blue state rivalry is indicative of this: some liberals other conservatives just as some conservatives other liberals. It’s hard to say which group is dominant, but either way, we are unlikely to find a way out of our political gridlock until we stop othering each other.

Othering itself may be endemic to the human condition and may have its roots in less insidious thinking.

Sociologists Keith Maddox and Sam Sommers talk about the related field of implicit bias in terms of heuristics, or mental shortcuts: “Humans often rely on cognitive shortcuts to get things done. We categorize people and place them into preconceived notions.”

We literally could not function without these cognitive shortcuts: these are the same mental processes that allow us to navigate a subway system in a new city or recognize an object as a “table.” Humans categorize things to make sense of the world, and we’re very, very, good at doing so subconsciously.

This logic illustrates for Maddox and Sommers the problem of a “color-blind” approach to racial injustice. We can’t simply wash away our implicit biases: rather we must be made aware of them and we must work to confront them in ourselves.

Othering at times may be similarly implicit – I am certainly guilty of my own biases, and it’s easy to think of people different from oneself as an “other.”

But, just as color-blindness is not a solution, we must call ourselves out for our othering, and we must actively seek to not hold whole groups responsible for the actions of a few.

Following the recent attacks at a Planned Parenthood, it is fair to ask why white shooters seem to be perpetually treated more justly than unarmed black men. It is fair to point to the injustices in our system and to demand that all people be treated justly. But it is not fair to make jokes about registering Evangelicals or shutting down churches: we should never judge the whole by the actions of a few.

In the last few days, I have been heartened to see some of my pro-life friends share messages of support for Planned Parenthood. But, of course, I should hardly be surprised: regardless of how one feels about abortion, any reasonable person would be saddened by the shooting in Colorado. Only an extremists wanted that to happen, and we should never judge the whole by the actions of a few.

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It’s No Longer Our Policy to Put Out Fires

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There’s a great scene in West Wing about a fire in Yellowstone. “When something catches on fire, it’s no longer out policy to put it out?”

The scene was based off a real incident of fire management strategy. In 1988, Yellowstone suffered the largest wildfire recorded in it’s history, burning 30% of the total acreage of the park. The fires called into question the National Park Service’s “let it burn” strategy.

Implemented in 1972, this policy let natural fires run their course and remains policy today. As per a 2008 order from the director of the National Park Service, “Wildland fire will be used to protect, maintain, and enhance natural and cultural resources and, as nearly as possible, be allowed to function in its natural ecological role.”

The let it burn strategy may have had impact on the Yellowstone fires, but as a 1998 article in Science argued, the problem may have been that they hadn’t implemented the policy soon enough.

Using network analysis to model the spread of forest fires, the researchers conclude, “the best way to prevent the largest forest fires is to allow the small and medium fires to burn.”

This is because forest fires follow a power law distribution: small fires are more frequent and large fires are rare. Most fires won’t reach 1988 magnitude and will burn themselves out before doing much damage. Allowing these fires to burn mitigates the risk of larger fires – because large fires are more likely in a dense forest.

This logic can be generalizable to other systems.

A 2008 paper by Adilson E. Motter argued that cascade failures can be mitigated by intentionally removing select nodes and edges after an initial failure.

Cascade failures are typically caused when “the removal of an even small fraction of highly loaded nodes (due to attack or failure)…trigger global cascades of overload failures.” The classic example is a 2003 blackout of the northeast which was triggered by one seemingly unimportant failure. But that one failure lead to other failures which lead to other failures, and soon a large swath of the U.S. had lost power.

Motter argues that such cascades can be mitigated by acting immediately after the initial failure – intentionally removing those nodes which put more of a strain on they system in order to protect those nodes that can handle greater loads.

This strategy is not entirely unlike the “let it burn” policy of the park service. Cutting off weak nodes protects the whole and mitigates the risk of larger, catastrophic events.

 

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Confidence

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I am not sure, but I think I may be developing a sense of confidence.

I came to this conclusion through a somewhat different observation: I’ve started to spend a not insignificant amount of time concerned that I sound like an a-hole.

I’m pretty sure that’s what confidence sounds like.

And before you start to offer any words of encouragement, let me clear – this post is hardly about me. There has been much research done around imposter syndrome, especially its disproportionate impact on women. As a study by Pauline Rose Clance & Suzanne Imes describes:

Women who experience the impostor phenomenon maintain a strong belief that they are not intelligent; in fact they are convinced that they have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise….In our clinical experience, we have found that the phenomenon occurs with much less frequency in men and that when it does occur, it is with much less intensity.

Recently, the clinical diagnosis of “imposter syndrome” has been generalized and popularized as the confidence gap – perhaps not a pathological condition, but still a challenge that many – if not most – women face.

I myself have always been skeptical of the solution that those who lack confidence should simply work to develop it. Particularly given the gender discrepancy of the problem, this solution reads more plainly as an argument that women should just be more like men – a problematic argument in itself which is only further weighed down by the stereotypes of a gender binary.

The real question, then, is how much confidence ought a person properly have?

The answer is trivial if you assume a transparent, universal metric for one’s ability: a person ought to be confident in the skills and knowledge they have mastered, and not confident in the skills and knowledge they do not.

Of course, life is not that easy. There is no universal metric and my perception of what I haven’t mastered may be quite different from your perspective of what I have mastered.

Certainly, there are tests and reviews and other accomplishments that may help us put our own ability into a standardized context. But all such metrics seem strangely unsatisfactory. It is well documented, for example, that test score correlate to parental income, so while a high test score may indicate that you’ve had lots of opportunity, it doesn’t intrinsically follow that you have lots of ability.

I think of this challenge partially in terms of Wittgenstein’s concerns over the inaccuracies of language in conveying a unique experience:

If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word “pain” means – must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly? Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case!

No matter how many proxies indicates we surround ourselves with, we cannot determine an appropriate level of confidence because ultimately, there is no way to accurately determine our competence.

One might assume that a good person will do their best to have a level of confidence appropriate for their capacity to tackle the task at hand, but the inescapably reality indicates that we will inevitable err – either on the side of under confidence or over confidence.

From there I can go no farther. I do not have a perfect solution, and even if I did, I would not be so bold as to assume it would be perfect for everyone.

Perhaps it is best to err on both sides equally – averaging out your moments of overconfidence with appropriate bouts of under confidence.

Perhaps it is fine to just embrace under confidence – accepting the feeling without letting it hold you back.

I am most skeptical of always erring on the side overconfidence. It may get you far in life, but – I’m pretty sure that’s what makes you an a-hole.

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The Republican Candidate Who Makes Me Feel Like Less of a Partisan

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In many ways, I am a fierce partisan. Loyally Democratic, though the mainstream of the party is too moderate for me.

In a Republican vs. Democrat show down, I want to win.

Quite honestly, I’d probably be willing to over look many of a candidate’s questionable actions if it meant putting a Democrat in office over a Republican. If this was the 7th season of West Wing and Alan Alda’s Republican was running against a terrible, not-Jimmy-Smits Democrat…I’d probably still vote Democrat.

The partisan in me likes to see terrible Republican candidates. I was scared of McCain when he was moderate, but breathed a sigh of relief as he ran to the right.

The partisan in me would like to see Sarah Palin run for president. She still has some appeal, no doubt, but her inability read a newspaper and her tenuous grasp on international relations could only serve to fracture the Republican party more.

There’d be a certain morbid delight in that.

Or at least it seems that way in theory.

What I’ve discovered in this election cycle, though, is that when there’s a big, hulking, troll in the room, sucking up all the air time with his bombastic personality and offensive comments – I genuinely feel bad for the Republican Party.

Last night’s Republican debate – the prime-time one, mind you, not the “happy hour” one – shattered viewership records, averaging 24 million viewers and claiming the spot of most-watched non-sports show ever on cable TV.

And all the news coverage today is about the troll who took center of the stage. Everyone is discussing whether his antics gained him favorability or whether his post-debate move to attack Megyn Kelly will ultimately backfire.

In some ways I should be delighted. I can hardly imagine him winning a general and his efforts to get there – especially if he launches an independent bid – will only hurt the Republican party.

But instead, I’m just tired. I don’t want to hear about him any more. I don’t care what racist or sexist thing he said. I don’t care about his backwards views on the issues.

I don’t want to hear from him any more.

I want to hear from some sane conservatives. I want to hear from people whose ideas and experience differ from my own, but who have come to their conclusions through rational thought.

I want to see two parties who can truly balance each other – who can have spirited disagreements which force both sides to improve.

I want to see Republican candidates I can respect and who I can imagine respecting me.

I want an Alan Alda Republican.

…And then, I want to vote for a Jimmy Smits Democrat.

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Bar Fight with Socrates

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So, I have a running list of miscellaneous “post ideas.” Topics I’m thinking about but not ready to write on yet or things the come up over the weekend or a vacation.

I consult the list periodically to see if I’m moved to tackle a subject I may have neglected. And when I checked the list earlier this week, I saw I’d previously suggested a rather intriguing topic:

Bar Fight with Socrates, I’d written.

I’m not quite sure what I meant when I wrote that, though I hope someday I’m inspired to write a post far better than this one on the topic.

All I can imagine is that I was thinking – if I had a drink with Socrates, we’d probably get into a fight.

And not a proper dialectic debate with a little heat of intensity. I imagine a full our bar brawl.

Perhaps this image particularly struck me today because I just finished Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations – a work which I would desperately like to see turned into a one act play in which the protagonist gets increasing inebriated during his philosophical soliloquy.

Seriously. Wittgenstein writes like a drunk man talking to himself.  Which I mean, of course, as a complement.

What I want to teach is: to pass from unobvious nonsense to obvious nonsense.

A lot of Wittgenstein sounds like madness, but there’s a certain Zen meaning in his words. It reminds me of that old koan:

Before you study Zen, a mountain is a mountain
When you study Zen, a mountain is no longer a mountain
When you master Zen, a mountain is a mountain again

Wittgenstein is at home in the uncertainty. He tries to reason it all out using thoughtful, well crafted arguments. He tries to get at the root of language and meaning through examples and thought experiments. But even in doing so, he cleverly shows the folly of such an approach:

To say “This combination of words has no sense” excludes it from the sphere of language, and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary, it may be for various kinds of reason. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out; but it may also be part of a game and the players are supposed, say, to jump over the boundary; or it may show where the property of one person ends and that of another begins; and so on. So if I draw a boundary-line, that is not yet to say what I am drawing it for.

Compare all this to rigid Socrates, who always seemed to me to proudly use his skill in dialectic to belittle those around him. I have no doubt I’d lose to him in a debate, but I’m not sure I would consider it a fair fight.

Dialectic is a remarkable skill, no doubt, but is it wisdom?

I prefer the approach of Wittgenstein, who reflects:

But if someone says, “How am I to know what he means – I see only his signs?”, then I say, “How is he to know what he means, he too has only his signs?”

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Searching for Inspiration on Dark Days

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I’ve been thinking a lot about actionable steps, recently. Amid the murders in Charleston. Following the deaths of Walter Scott, Kalief Browder, Michael Brown, and far, far too many others.

I’ve read articles on how to be an ally, read commentary and analysis on the perpetual racism pervading our society. I’ve added my voice to those calling for change. I’ve joined mailing lists calling for action, attended protests and demonstrations. I’ve given financially where I can.

And none of it feels like enough. Nothing feels like it’s changing.

I woke this morning with the words of Oscar Wilde ringing in my head:

We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or give our anguish scope:
Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.

I rather wanted to spend the day hiding in my closet sobbing silently at all the ills in the world, but that didn’t seem like it would do anybody much of any good.

Besides, who am I to take the bench when people of color are dying? Not everyone has the privileged to just look away.

As I am wont to do at such times of despair, I re-read Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.

They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

I generally suspect that I’m the only one who finds the words of Camus a comfort. Who, after all, likes to imagine that “the workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd” than the fate of Sisyphus. The man who defied the gods and was pushed to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain.

Sisyphus, “powerless and rebellious.” (impuissant et révolté)

What an interesting juxtaposition of words!

Sisyphus knew he was powerless and yet he rebelled. The Gods couldn’t punish him, for still, he rebelled.

In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa examined the role of social power in maintaining the oppression of the poor in the Appalachian Valley.

Gaventa identified what he calls the three dimensions of power.

In the first dimension, A has power over B insofar as A is has more resources or can use more force to coerce B. The first dimension is a fair fight, where one side is stronger than the other.

In the second dimension, A constructs barriers to diminish B’s participation. Voter ID laws, monolingual meetings. In the second dimension, A rigs the game.

The third dimension is the most insidious. Not only does A control and shape the agenda, but A’s power is so absolute that A influences the way B sees the conflict. In the third dimension, B is not even sure she’s oppressed. It’s a woman who just naturally does all the house work.

I sometimes think that the pervasiveness of racism in America stems from Whites’ inability to reach this total level of dominance.

We brought people over as chattel and expected them to obey. We beat them and tortured them and did unspeakable things to break them, but they continued to resist.

We fancied ourselves as gods, and yet among those who were most powerless we found ourselves impotent. Unable to exert total power. Still they rebelled.

There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

Sisyphus is stronger than his rock.

But I imagine that it’s of little comfort to one who looks back on generations of oppression, who looks around to see their brothers and sisters dying. It’s of little comfort that some dead, French philosopher thinks you’ve won.

Yet there is something in this, I think –

For the battle goes on.

The battle goes on, and slowly bending the arc of the moral universe can feel very much like futile labor, it can feel like an effort in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.

But still the work goes on.

For we know that all is not, has not been, exhausted, and we know that fate is a human matter, which must be settled among men.

And there is so much work for us to do.

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Race, Gender, and Social Constructs

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This story about Rachel Dolezal – the NAACP leader who represented herself as black even though she is white – has been blowing my mind since I first heard about it.

Seriously, I have so many questions.

But with Dolezal announcing her resignation today, it seems unlikely that I’m going to get any of the answers I’m looking for.

But the whole affair has raised some interesting questions.

Isn’t race a social construct? How is being ‘transracial’ different from being transgender? Why should we celebrate Caitlyn Jenner but shun Rachel Dolezal?

Those are good questions, and they are important questions.

In my circles, these questions have mostly come from well-intentioned liberals – myself included – trying to articulate what our instinct tells us so plainly: ‘transracial’ – if that even is a thing – is not the same as transgender.

There may be some parallels, sure. For example, I can imagine Dolezal claiming that she is a “black woman on the inside,” or that she was born into the wrong body. I’ll never know Dolezal’s true motivations, but I have personally heard at least one white person make such a claim.

My instinct is to scoff and to find such a statement deeply offensive. I mean, what kind of white privilege do you need to feel comfortable declaring such a thing?

But perhaps that’s how transphobic people react to the struggle of the transgender. I couldn’t say, but it seems tenuous to simply trust my instinct with such a response.

There have been some great take downs of so-called “transracialness”: in pretending to be black, Dolezal indulged “in blackness as a commodity.”

Transgendered people face a real struggle – as Jenner told Vanity Fair, “I’m not doing this to be interesting. I’m doing this to live,” while “Dolezal is not trying to survive. She’s merely indulging in the fantasy of being ‘other.'”

Or as another article puts it: “Rachel didn’t want to be Black because she *felt* Black, because Black is not a feeling.  Black is an existence that was created for us by racists as a tool to justify ill-treatment and codify oppression into law.”

These are helpful arguments, but they still don’t quite satisfy me.

After all, it was just last week that I was hearing that long-time feminist leaders felt uncomfortable with Jenner’s decision to come out as femme. After all, what does it mean to “feel” like a woman? Certainly it is more than being a pin-up girl.

While it is easy to dismiss such concerns as transphobic, I think it’s more productive to engage assuming good intentions.

Elinor Burkett writes that “Women like me are not lost in false paradoxes; we were smashing binary views of male and female well before most Americans had ever heard the word ‘transgender’ or used the word ‘binary’ as an adjective.”

Whether appropriate or not, I can see why she might be disappointed to see a person who has benefited much of her life from male privilege choosing to showcase her womanhood in such a gender-stereotypical way.

So all of this has gotten us nowhere.

Power and privilege are make it more inappropriate for a white woman to claim blackness, but its not solely an issue of power and privilege.

After all, there is a power dynamic at play when it comes to trans women – but I believe it is our moral responsibility to welcome trans women as sisters and invite them to (re)define womanhood with us – whatever that means to them.

The situation with Dolezal is different. I wouldn’t presume to tell the black community what they should or should not do, but neither would I fault them for refusing to embrace Dolezal and for finding her blackface routine offensive. It is offensive.

The reality is that race is a social construct, and that gender is a social construct, but that does not mean that we should treat them the same.

That fact that this is all so confusing is good – it emphasizes the constructed nature of these institutions and forces us to re-evaluate what it means to have a gender or a race, and it makes us confront the important question of who has the right to define those terms.

As a white person, am I comfortable leaving it to the black community to define blackness, but as a woman I would be dissatisfied with any definition of “female” which excluded trans women – even if that’s what was wanted by the majority of people who were identified as women at birth.

So power is a critical piece of this, but there is some more.

Michel Foucault brilliantly documented how mental illness is a social construct. And how, like many other constructs, it can be dangerous – giving those in power permission to detain and torture those who are found to be outside the norm.

But just because it is a social construct, doesn’t imply that anyone can declare themselves mad.

In fact, mental health can be a positive social construct – allowing people who need help to get the help that they need. And hopefully, someday, removing the stigma around mental health.

All of that is to say that “social construct” is not one thing. They are not universally bad and we should not deconstruct them all to be universally permeable.

Social constructs are how we make sense of the world around us. They are how people in power maintain their power, but they are also how those who are oppressed reclaim their power.

It’s messy and it’s complicated and its complex – because by its very definition a social construct is “constructed” by society. It’s a thin facade that quickly looses coherence when questioned.

These are our rules, our collective rules, and we have the right to change them – or not – as we see fit.

The social construct of race has a very different history from the construct of gender for one simple reason – they are not the same and they shouldn’t be treated as such.

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