The First Rule of Fight Club Is Wrong
Destroy the secret and you destroy the violence
Fight Club, a film about anomie and disengagement and the dangerous actions people take in response to their unhappy lives, came out 20 years ago.
Not much of the movie is memorable to me except for the famous line from about an hour into the film: “The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club.”
It’s a secret, see. And it’s underground, a venue that does not seek recognition, that is for the select few who find violence a soothing and fulfilling contrast to their empty lives. It can’t function unless it’s secret. For the creator of Fight Club has an agenda, and . . . well, you’ll just have to see it. All 151 minutes of it.
Exposing the secrecy of Fight Club destroys its purpose. So, talk about it. Destroy the secret and you destroy the violence.
I thought of Fight Club the other day while listening to a conversation between a friend and one of his friends. (I’m not connected to his friend. I just listened.)
My friend is Black. His friend is white. My friend mentioned that it’s an emotional and spiritual grind to be uncertain about his treatment every day when he leaves his house. Sometimes it’s a stranger yelling at him or calling him out for behaviors that would otherwise not be remarkable. (Sitting in a car in his own driveway, for example.) Sometimes it’s the dismissal of his integrity and worth when he is asked to speak about Black issues and then does — outside the bounds of what was expected. (“Be Black, but not that Black.”) Sometimes it’s just when speaking about his feelings and others come in to check his speech and tell him he’s wrong.
It’s tiring. I see it, and I hate it, and I’d like it to stop.
But the conversation continued.
The response of the white person to my friend’s openness was classic: If you want to do away with racism, you need to stop talking about it. Always talking about racism just makes racism worse.
My response at that moment was largely along these lines.
What is it that we think talking does?
- Talking about cancer does not cause cancer.
- Talking about wealth does not create wealth.
- Talking about education does not lead to knowledge.
- And talking about racism does not create, spread, encourage, or defend racism.
It’s okay to talk about racism honestly and openly. It is not a magic word designed to wound white men and women.
Racism is not a word that imputes moral depravity or guilt in and of itself. Racism is a bad thing, sure, but being racist is not something that makes you bad in and of itself. It’s almost impossible for white people not to acquire racism as easily as we acquire whiteness.
It is in the mother’s milk we drink, so to speak. Imagine being beaten every day for reaching out to open a door. After a time you’d stop, not because trying to open a door is bad, but because you’ve been shaped by the terror and the pain. Whiteness is shaped in us white people through a variety of methods and with a variety of messages. We exhibit racist actions even without the slightest notion that we’re aware of acting out as racists.
Racism is a state of using race to discriminate, both individually and systemically, both actively and passively, joined with the power to enforce the discrimination. The discrimination isn’t just some harmless slotting of people into circles. It’s active harm, sometimes direct and often indirect. It’s the continuation of choices whether someone fits the “culture” of a company, or is “smart enough” for a scholarship, or “wise enough” to be the leader of an organization, where the primary identifying condition isn’t behavior or education or leadership but is instead based upon the race of the person or people making the decision and the race of the person or people who are targeted for discrimination.
Systemically, white people have the power to enforce racial categorization and to use it for advancement of our own and the dismissal and degradation of others. (But don’t get hung up on the idea that “racism” is the sole dominion of white people. Take a look at Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be Antiracist for more about that.)
We can all have biases and even prejudices. In the system in America since the time of the Doctrine of Discovery and the colonizing of the lands and the actions taken against the people who were living on these lands, only white people had the power to individually and systemically enforce race as a method to discriminate between who was considered “good/innocent/useful” and who was considered “bad/guilty/useless.”
There is an entire history of the United States where race has been gleefully used to make decisions to enhance the success and privileges of white people vs. those of everyone else, most especially Black people and the Indigenous. Over and over again.
This was bad, and is still bad. But pointing it out as having happened and as still happening doesn’t make it happen. Uncovering a nest of mice in your kitchen doesn’t make the mice appear — this is not Schrödinger’s Racism.
Talking about what the lived experiences is for those who are adjudged as less-than is talking about what actually is.
White people (raises hand: I’m white!) can live an entire existence of being white and not knowing we’re white. It is just the world we have. How else could it be? We’ve earned our place by hard work; anyone can do so if they just work hard enough. We don’t see that we’re white because that’s part of being white: innocence and blindness.
People who aren’t white should be able to live in the same kind of existence as we do. If they just ignore being Black or Indigenous or Brown or otherwise a Person of Color — well, then, it all just goes away. Like magic.
It’s a nice fantasy, but it’s completely false. It is a fantasy that being white is nothing more than a shade on a Pantone wheel of color. Being white in American automatically — and at first, mostly against your knowledge and will — puts you first. Always. Laws are written to enhance the success of white people. Policies are enacted to enhance the success of white people. Rules, courts, policing, education, religion, culture, economics — white people in American have had an extraordinary leg up.
It just is.
It doesn’t make you a bad person to see this, much less acknowledge this. It doesn’t make you a bad person for saying it affects you negatively — my friend isn’t bad for pointing it out, and I’m not bad for pointing out that whiteness corrupts me, too.
It is okay to have the discussion. The words will not literally kill us.
Here’s one way to understand:
Imagine your entire 24-hour day, from the moment you wake, through every activity and meal, to any shopping or entertainment, any driving or transportation, any need for personal or professional services, to how you get from your home to your work and back. Or even where you live and how easy it was to find the place and move in when you found it.
Now ask yourself how many times in your imagined day did you say “this will be more difficult/expensive/frustrating/painful/hurtful/destructive/impossible because I’m white”? And of course, ask yourself if you said “this will be easier and more productive and less stressful and lead to better outcomes because I’m white”? Consider the question, not whether you know the answer. This is just to think, without fear of causing trouble. Did you for a moment even think of saying any of these things?
Now — imagine one of your friends, Black or Indigenous or Brown or who identifies as a Person of Color.
How many times a day do you think they say or respond “This is harder because I’m Black. This is more insulting because I’m Indigenous. This is a worse encounter with the police because I’m Hispanic.” How many times a day do you think your friends who are not white have to realize that they’re not white?
I won’t answer for you or for your friends. I think it would be useful for you to do the work, though.
Really think about what they’d say. And think about whether they’d tell you.
Discovering that we live in a deeply racist society, with about 500 or so years of history behind it of white supremacy and the inferiority or all others, doesn’t make you guilty of causing it to happen.
What it might do, if you’re lucky and God touches you, is to wake you up to where you ask yourself “What can I do to destroy the work of racism, as myself and my individual choices? What can I do, as a member of a society that lets me move almost entirely freely through it, to disrupt and interrupt and break the work of racism, performing anti-racist acts?”
Talk about it. Talk about your part. Talk about how it affects your friends, your family, your co-workers, your religious groups, your social affiliations.
Listen to what your friends say. I mean, listen and do not correct them.
That’s all I’m asking.
For the first rule of anti-racist work is that we talk about racism.
