Eschewing Objectivity
a little less white supremacy, please
On of my goals this year is to spend each month reflecting on a characteristic of white supremacy. March’s characteristic is objectivity: the belief there is such a thing as being neutral & humans can achieve rationality apart from emotionality.
I’ve existing long enough to know the phrase “Let’s look at things objectively” means the inherent value & worth of a person or thing has become inconvenient and must be ignored. Here’s an example from a former employer:
“Let’s think about this objectively: If David were not wildly toxic as reported by multiple employees, if he hadn’t actively harmed this specific employee, it would be appropriate for the employee in this role to report to David’s department.” Objectivity ignores that David is wildly toxic & that the toxic behavior has been documented by multiple employees & David has actively harmed the specific employee in question & expects the employee to accept reporting to David because it’s ‘objectively’ the right choice.
How embarrassing.
Objectivity lets people in power declare something as right or good because it ignores the complications of lived experience in favor of a hypothetical idealized state.
I have a systematic, analytical mind. I think in a linear|logical fashion & my lines are a three-dimensional web. I was born with this feature, and I love this about myself. The benefit to this mental framework is an ability to follow the intellectual paths of most people to most places, while also seeing a wealth of equally valid alternatives. Yes, this means I can be grossly indecisive. & yes, I die inside when someone chooses the dumbest path to the stupidest decision that helps no one including the decision-maker despite a veritable cornucopia of alternatives.
Since I see many logical paths, I do not tend toward the concept of objectivity in the sense of one right way. But another layer of objectivity is “invalidating people who show emotion.”
This is a space where I am focusing my observations for March because while I work very hard not to invalidate people who show emotion, I really struggle when people are feeling all their feelings in a moment.
Earlier this week at work, a coworker and I had a heated moment: she adamant that I would provide a deliverable within a timeframe, me reiterating that the request was infeasible given requirements & time constraints. She amped up the volume of her feelings. I internally screamed at myself her feelings in response to you saying no are valid. I needed the voice in my head to be a fence of a voice because all the logical paths forward in my brain were elbowing their way to my mouth, crawling across my molars, fighting to springboard off my tongue.
Those of you who’ve read a bit of my work may be asking “And do you extend that empathy to your own feelings—do you tell yourself that your feelings are valid? Do you avoid telling your feelings to think about things objectively?”
Of course not.
My feelings are to be tossed into the gristmill of One Right Way™ and ground into obsolescence.
I am sitting with the disparity between the work I’ve done to love the world and the work I clearly have not done to love myself. I spent a lot of last year dwelling on internalized capitalism, including how that manifests in macro-aggressions against myself. Now I am sitting with white supremacist cultural norms & again realizing the work I have done to decolonize, to reframe in how I see and experience and love the world.
But to love me? Oh no. Not this wretch called me.