The Invisible Shield

I have been working in the education sector since 1999. In the past four years I have been laid off from two jobs, first at a for-profit then at a non-profit. At my last full-time job, there was this video of a high school lesson on how diseases spread, focused on HIV. The video was chosen by folks at the top of the organization to be used as an example mediocre lesson to be critiqued. The content of the lesson was inaccurate and full of misconceptions about HIV/AIDS, the kind of scare-tactic misinformation that makes infection seem inevitable and unavoidable. The lesson was also poorly taught, which is why it was chosen. It did not occur to the people who selected it that the video might get a reaction out of anyone with a personal experience of HIV/AIDS, by distracting, angering, insulting or just annoying them. They might not be able see and critique the lesson clearly through all the bullshit.

Two straight white women selected this video, a mid and upper level manager. They must never have really thought about what it is like to be positive, or to have a parent or a lover or a friend with HIV/AIDS. How else could they fail to notice the content? This is how heterosupremacism protects straight people from seeing reality that is not even outside their experience or world, but just right outside their cubicle. We worked in the same office but in different realities. Unknowing participation in the day-to-day hetero-centric power dynamics allows straight people to get by without taking responsibility for their homophobia. Privilege forms a shield of ignorance that deflects responsibility for the harm that others experience through unwittingly homophobic actions. This shield is itself an instrument of homophobia, no less so for being invisible to the people it is protecting. The protection likely makes it easier to consistently plead ignorance than to take responsibility for learning about homophobia.

It made me go a little crazy to watch the reality I live in and know so well not be given a moment’s consideration. Our team managed to block the video from being used by arguing that it would create a disadvantage for anyone whose life had been impacted by HIV/AIDS. A modified version was used instead. Considering the NYC schools and neighborhoods we worked in and served, that adds up to a lot of people. The thing that was so stunning about this experience was the extent to which something so central to my experience was so nonexistent to the people running the organization I worked in. I felt betrayed because I had trusted that forward thinking educators were forward thinking in other areas too. My trust was misplaced.

And all this really illuminates the protection afforded to some straight people by heterosupremacism. It is the delusion of being morally good even in the very moment when they are excluding anyone outside of their privileged circle. They fall back on their good intentions and persist in ignorance. In contrast, straight people who have personal experiences with HIV/AIDS lose their ignorance, in that they literally cannot ignore HIV/AIDS. They come into contact with a form of stigmatization related to sex and the body that more privileged straight people never experience. It would be easier to separate out all the different forms of privilege, to make this simple, but that would do a disservice to the people who were on my team at work, all of whom are straight, some are white, more are black, some single and some married. They don’t spend time with lots of queer people besides me, but they also don’t go around in a stupor thinking no one they know has HIV/AIDS. They live in a world that includes people with AIDS and know it is not neutral content for assessing good and bad instruction. We all work in schools in neighborhoods with disproportionately high impact. So their access to heterosupremacist privilege intersects with race and/or class and/or geography and is consequently limited in this particular context. We were all severely pissed off about the selection of this video and took effective and strategic action. I was so grateful to not be alone in my anger! I had spent over two years on this team, slowly and painstakingly building relationships and trust, sharing myself and learning about each of my colleagues as individuals. So I felt like I really earned the support I received from them and offered to them during this particularly challenging incident.

The woman who selected that video lesson was barely held accountable because, well, she just Didn’t Know! And her boss Didn’t Realize! She expressed embarrassment but not responsibility. When her boss first heard that our team had objections about the video, she immediately offered to talk to me about it, assuming it was the queer person alone who had objected. But every person on my team had a visceral reaction to the video and found the ignorance at the top of the organization inexcusable. Either way, the folks responsible for selecting the video pleaded ignorance and were ashamed. But they didn’t take responsibility for educating themselves. They viewed it as a one-time occurrence, an embarrassing oversight, not as an indicator of a huge blind spot in their human awareness that only they could fill in for themselves through active self-education. Not to mention the fact that we were all professional educators!

Privilege means never having to really imagine or understand the differences and experiences of others. I used to theorize that being conservative was a result of a lack of imagination. I thought it came from not being able to imagine what it is like to be anyone but yourself. I thought conservatives wanted to maintain the status quo at all costs because of being unable to imagine anything better. But systems of oppression protect the privileged from more than just their imaginations. And this kind of conservatism is a default state, with the imagination being actively blocked from a richer understanding of human experience. “I just didn’t know” and “I never realized…” are not only excuses but also the very stuff of privilege itself. Heterosupremacism protects the privileged from the work of having to notice, from having to pay attention, from having to think, from having to know things. It protects them from being uncomfortable and from taking responsibility. And it also precludes them from experiencing empathy and connecting across differences.

Audre Lorde talks about this very phenomenon in her classic The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. The title is often quoted but the context is less often discussed. The short essay was originally a talk given at a feminist conference, where she was invited to be on a panel, the only panel where black and lesbian feminist perspectives were considered. Lorde courageously decided to take up this fact in her talk, and specifically to take on the conference organizers’ privileged response of Not Knowing Who To Ask and Not Realizing They Were Doing Anything Wrong. Instead of taking responsibility, the conference organizers relied on the very person they were excluding. They felt like their lack of knowledge was a neutral fact. But this studied lack of knowledge about difference is no accident; it is how exclusion and dehumanization work to perpetuate themselves. This combination of ignorance and irresponsibility in the face of difference is exactly the “master’s tool” that Lorde is referencing:

This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women -- in the face of tremendous resistance -- as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought…

Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

What I want is for us to take up some of the hardest problems in front of us. One of the reasons these problems are so hard is because no one wants to take them up! Sincerely taking them up will start to produce a change in us. People who dig into their discomfort and fear will be different from people who keep their blinders on and proceed as usual. It is a process that challenges us to persist through discomfort. Even before the evolution of ideas or opinions, the very act of taking up heterosupremacism will change us. And people don’t exactly fear change, but fear that change will produce loss with nothing tangible to be gained. People fear loss, and they are right, they will lose something. To start they will lose the fantasy of their sexuality being natural and normal and the fantasy of being morally righteous. Facing this loss will take courage.

Straight people who take up heterosupremacism will become other than what they are, because the process will change their self-concept. The hard problem for me is staying with them, sitting with the pain and not going into a rage and subsequently shutting down. The questions that came up for me there remain with me. Can I love straight people well enough to see them through their loss, even when I am feeling rejected as a consequence? Can I encourage them? To support them in accepting that they will no longer have access to self-affirming myths of human nature, or that the mythology might change entirely? I want them to see and be curious about our differences, and be curious about the implications of these differences. And I want us ALL to be more in touch with reality, more connected by understanding, and more comfortable with complexity. I am no longer in that workplace sitting side by side with straight people working through our differences, but the learning and patience I took away from the practice of sitting with heterosupremacism and building alliances was infinitely more valuable than my minimal severance payment.