"Not according to many of those who wish to regulate our culture — docents of academia, school curriculum dictators, aspiring Gen Z storytellers and, increasingly, establishment gatekeepers in Hollywood, book publishing and the arts. It’s the ultimate litmus test: Only those whose 'lived experience' matches the story are qualified to tell the tale... Here’s the argument: The dominant culture (white, male, Western, straight) has been dictating the terms for decades, effectively silencing or 'erasing' the authentic identities and voices of the people whose stories are being told. The time has come to 'center' these other voices.... If we followed the solipsistic credo of always 'centering' identity when greenlighting a project, we’d lose out on much of journalism, history and fiction. Culture is a conversation, not a monologue. The outsider’s take, whether it comes from a journalist, historian, writer or director, can offer its own equally valid perspective.... Privileging only those voices with a stake in a story carries its own risks.... You may find it harder to maintain a critical distance.... You may become blinded to ideas that contradict your own or subconsciously de-emphasize them. You may have an agenda...."
From "The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’" by Pamela Paul (NYT).
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59 comments:
She went to Brown. Is it a job requirement at the NYT to be an Ivy Leagurer? Is that the only permitted lived experience.
"The outsider’s take, whether it comes from a journalist, historian, writer or director, can offer its own equally valid perspective." How come the insiders always get to identify themselves as the outsiders?
When it was restricted to insiders like you, you were happy.
Even now, are you still trying to restrict it to insiders, only you want to stay on the inside?
I get the same reaction to this as to the "Unmask Our Toddlers" story yesterday. Why is it that the fact that protests or concerns are confined to other groups doesn't disqualify those protests or concerns? One has only to say that only White people (White mothers, White Xers) care about something to trivialize such concerns.
I was going to say something obvious about the reaction to the concerns of other racial groups, but will take a different path. Why is it that the fact that something that only concerns Times readers should be regarded as a matter of interest to everyone else or anyone else? Surely, the newspaper's readers are a smaller, less consequential segment of the population than even White moms.
And what are Gen X concerns? Gen X had an identity 30 years ago. Now they are just adults and parents and don't seem terribly different from what their parents were 20 or 30 years ago.
Acting white means doing stuff found to lead to success.
Pamela Paul, a new columnist for The New York Times, might not be a columnist much longer if she continues to express such concerns in her columns.
Pamela Paul needs to get with the program quickly, or she will be gone quickly.
Then why are blacks allowed to comment on a white-dominated culture?
If you are not allowed to write something, you can always try Substack.
Substack is the new Mad magazine.
"She went to Brown. Is it a job requirement at the NYT to be an Ivy Leagurer?"
If Ivy League were the requirement, would Brown get you the job? I doubt it!
"How come the insiders always get to identify themselves as the outsiders?"
Everyone is an insider and everyone is an outsider. It's just a matter of which line you are looking at.
But she's claiming what she wants: the freedom to write about subjects without having to show she's on the "insider" side of the line around the subject.
That should be a very easy argument to make, and it's sad that it needs to be spelled out like this. But I think she did a nice job of spelling it out, and I'm grateful for it.
Progressives are sliding on the slippery slope to solipsism.
Was this a rhetorical question on her part? Because the answer is no. If they wanted someone to write about another subject area, they would have hired someone with that subject's "lived experience". This is the new normal. She will probably be issuing an apology for even questioning the concept. Many people will be hurt by her words. Her words are violence.
My simple explanation of the Bill of Rights is that it protects against the "tyranny of the majority". We are living in a "tyranny of the minority", where those who curry the vote of slivers of minority impose the minority view. At some point when those who curry such favor have surrendered rule to the minority, the people of the majority will finally rebel.
She was a bit sympathetic until she started complaining about the white patriarchy.
The woke are the Soc's and you people are the Greasers in a modern day version of that classic story by S. E. Hinton.
She does make a good argument, but I'd go beyond it to say that a good synonym for "lived experience" is "anecdote."
She’ll cross a line. Woke staffers will rebel. She’ll bend the knee, or she’ll be sacked.
We’ve seen this before at the NYT.
The oppressed freed themselves through righteous actions and now are the only ones able to share stories of their lived oppression .....or their ancestors lived oppression.
...
In reality, today, even those who helped achieve greater equality between current or formerly oppressed groups are considered less worthy to share their views.
And as a Progressive, she wants to tear it all down.
"If Ivy League were the requirement, would Brown get you the job?"
To the Times, this serves as outreach to the proles.
Howard said...
The woke are the Soc's and you people are the Greasers in a modern day version of that classic story by S. E. Hinton.
4/25/22, 8:13 AM
And the SOC's were the elites that everybody hated...even Cherry hated them. The Greasers were normal regular people who the WOKE beat up on all the time and got away with it...until the Greasers struck back. I am PROUD to be a GREASER.
Greatest book about American politics was very likely written by that French guy.
Just write about what you want to write about, and let the chips fall where they may.
What can Brown do for you?
The way I heard it is: Everybody is always somebody's snob and somebody else's slob. There are always people who are better off than you and always people worse off.
You can see this on the internet. You can rage against the Ivy League and Eastern Liberal Establishment, but if you went to an exclusive college or live on the East Coast, you are yourself the enemy in some people's eyes. You may hate everything about living in Flyover Country--until you come across somebody who hasn't been further west or south than Washington DC.
We the people populism fails because opponents can always point to people and groups who are worse off and ignored by the populists. Liberal benevolence runs around when one takes the liberals' own hostility to groups immediately below them on the social ladder into account.
Still, we do need some ground rules. Laughing at or insulting or ignoring anyone who works at an elite media operation and claims to be oppressed or an outsider is as good a rule as any. Look closer and you may understand how they feel, but life is too short and the demands on our attention are too great to be doing that all the time.
If you're so concerned about the need for "new voices" in Entertainment Industry, why don't you change the type of people at the top. Y'know the people who actually run things.
The outsider’s take, whether it comes from a journalist, historian, writer or director, can offer its own equally valid perspective
That’s a very limited set of people allowed to have an equally valid outsider’s take perspective. If only those few people, why write the rest of the article? Why not judge the validity of an outsider’s take on its own merit rather than the vocation of the person providing the take?
Ann, your 7:49 dig on Brown has a counterpoint in today’s Wall Street Journal. The book review of “Hidden Games” tells that graduates of Brown say they went to school “in Providence” in (false) modesty. I have no dog in the fight since I went to school in Charlottesville.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hidden-games-review-secret-equations-11650832764
The new “lived experience” regime is like going thru a mild version of covid. Follow me for a minute.
Sure you’ll experience some discomfort under mild censorship but having lived through it, experience it, you’ll acquire Heard impunity, I mean immunity (dam autocorrect). Heard immunity was named after Amber Heard, who, once immunized by #metoo was allowed to write on the prestigious Washington Post.
See? Once you’re immunized, when a deadlier version of censorship comes, with symptoms like a knock at the door in the middle of the night, you will not be affected, because you will have community immunity.
Resistance is futile.
"Am I allowed...?"
Ponder that.
And much as I like Jonathan Haidt, I wish he'd get over his fixed assumption that the right are the authoritarians.
This seems to be the consequent of intersectional thinking. Now no one can speak for white women say, only for Gen X, straight white women. But even that needs to be whittled down or subdivided (able or not? traditional family or not? etc.), lest there be thought to exist some "normal" core to society empowered to steer away from or through the dangers ahead.
If you want an honest journalistic account of some group (any group) you need an outsider. A member of that group will lie and distort to protect the group. The more extreme the group's ideology the worse the distortion. Will feminists tell the truth about marriage and men? Will an Antifa member tell the truth about the riots? Will a KKK member give an honest account of lynchings? no, no, and no.
When this perspective is applied to fiction, it leads to segregation of the story. If a white person can't write about black people, his fiction can then contain only white people, not a mix. If a man can't write women characters, this leads to an all-male story. It is insane.
someone's about to get cancelled...
You mean to tell me that a Brown-educated white woman of a certain age whose first husband was Bret Stephens and whose second husband is a hedge fund manager is chafing at being told her input is not always universally welcomed? The horror!
Woody Allen famously said that being bisexual increased your chances of getting a date for Saturday night. "Lived experience" is a strategy to increase the chances of non-white, non-heterosexual women getting published.
Once there is no collective experience, there can be no country.
It can then be reconstructed upon a set of authorized collective experiences we will all be forced to have.
Sure, write whatever you want, but maybe avoid Yukawa interactions and coding.
If Ivy League were the requirement, would Brown get you the job? I doubt it!
According to the internet, Brown is an Ivy League school. This is not in any way to say you shouldn't continue to look down your nose at Brown.
"But she's claiming what she wants: the freedom to write about subjects without having to show she's on the "insider" side of the line around the subject."
It's a sensible enough position to hold, but I suspect she will change her mind the first time a cis white male writes about a subject she's an insider of in a way she doesn't like.
And how many years can some New York Times writers exist/Before they're allowed to be free?
Everything is so painfully stupid now.
I thought her comments were unobjectionable to the point of being banal, but she inspired a fair number of hostile comments at the Times.....She chooses Tolstoy's Ana Karenina as an example of a male writer who got it right. Maybe Tolstoy's final novel, Resurrection offers a better example. That novel depicts how a nobleman's son rapes a poor relation who's living on the estate. The girl gets pregnant and is turned out. She becomes a prostitute....The nobleman's son later finds God and attempts to redeem her. The girl points out that much as he used her for his carnal needs, she is now being used to fulfill his spiritual needs.
Diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry), Inequity, and Exclusion.
She might have followed Josh Kraushaar and also called her column, "Against the Grain."
Lol, Soledad O'Brien on Twitter: "Pamela Paul’s column is trash, so I won’t bother linking to it. Congrats tho to the nyt on finding a whiny lady to make up things central to her thesis."
https://twitter.com/soledadobrien/status/1518278693784805376
"But she's claiming what she wants: the freedom to write about subjects without having to show she's on the "insider" side of the line around the subject."
What she's claiming is that All Lives Matter. And she'll take a fastball to the side of her head from her "colleagues" at the NYT in 3, 2, 1 ...
'The time has come to 'center' these other voices'
More gobbledygook writing.
If PoCs and 'other voices' don't like it, start their own goddamn paper or network or website or whatever.
Aren't those the new rules?
'She went to Brown.'
The more I read about people who went to Brown, the more I think you'd get a better education at the local community college.
And how many years can some New York Times writers exist/Before they're allowed to be free?
Oh come on Althouse. Everybody knows immunity from white supremacy and the patriarchy is relative and transient. It all depends on the writer’s reaction to the safe and effective booster shots. You got to get your CRT booster, your #MeToo booster and your BLM booster. These shots will be in the form of a positive 500 words column on all 3 and whichever additional organization you may be directed to glowingly write about. Otherwise you’ll be sent packing to the massless gulag, otherwise known as Substack.
She mentions Tolstoy and Ana Karenina as an example of a writer who got it right. I think Tolstoy's last novel, Resurrection, offers a better example. In that novel, a nobleman's son rapes a poor relation who's living on the estate. The girl gets pregnant and is turned out. She becomes a prostitute. Later, the nobleman's son finds God and seeks out the woman to redeem her. She points out to him that much as he used her to fulfill his carnal needs, she is now being used to fulfill his spiritual needs. In both cases, she is an object to his betterment as he defines betterment....Something of this, on both sides, is going on.
one of my favorite TV shows/books is Outlander, about the Scots who rebelled against England and later fought in the American revolution.
It was written by a women of Mexican ethnicity who has a PhD in marine biology...
so do Hispanic American have a right to write about white culture?
/s
Somewhat related, I've debated other women on whether it is 'better' to have a female physician. I say "no it's not better"; other women argue it is because a female physician has more empathy and understanding of female issues.
My response there: why would you want your physician to subjectively layer their own experience onto your diagnosis?
Will Pamela Paul last longer than CNN+?
It is appropriate to appropriate. I refuse to argue, this is an axiom of human life.
ALP,
I recently had a female physician stop my heart for an hour so she could rework the plumbing.
I knew she was the right choice as soon as I met her. Sharp, experienced, no nonsense.
She literally got right in my face and told me I better not die and spoil her record.
By the way, Sympathy is great, but Empathy is a mental disorder.
On the topic at hand, how far back do you suppose the aphorism " if you want to know about water, don't ask a fish" goes?
The way I heard it is: Everybody is always somebody's snob and somebody else's slob.
Also, everybody's somebody's fool.
Good to see someone at the Times defend a liberal worldview--shared humanity, shared human concerns anyone can write about. But lots of people don't hold this view anymore.
Tough titties, Pamela. If you wanted to be able to write about anything you should have signed on with America's newspaper of record instead of the Times.
Actually what the public needs more of is factual information, rather than another Maureen Dowd-like opinionator.
>>The book review of “Hidden Games” tells that graduates of Brown say they went to school “in Providence” in (false) modesty.
Don't know how it stands these days but, in olden times, "Where did you go to School?" "Um, near Boston" always meant Harvard.
--gpm
P.S. I went to school, um, near Boston. Um, twice (undergrad and law school). Gave them a lot of money over the years because I got a pretty good deal and wouldn't have ended up where I did otherwise. But I've cut them out completely in recent years, given the insanity continually going on in Cambridge these days.
My biggest contributions always have gone and still do go to my Jesuit high school in Chicago. Second on the list is the Catholic school system in Boston et ses environs (Lowell, Brockton, etc.). Between those contributions and the property taxes in Mass. and N.H., I'm supporting a lot of school systems I don't get much of a direct benefit from.
Does white "lived experience" count?
Lionel Shriver (“We must talk about Kevin”) gave a talk in Australia in 2016 on the same theme as Paul’s article. She was attacked by a well-known Aussie SJW Yassmine Abdel Magied. (I was going to say “grifter” but thought best of the ad hom). Magdied’s (whiny) take and link to Shriver’s speech is here ➡️ https://bit.ly/3Mzutkj. Magdied lasted no longer than 20 minutes of Shriver’s speech, btw, before storming out.
Iirc it led to quite a kerfuffle in Oz. Seems like not much progress in the six years since.
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