Tribalism, defensiveness, and the art of nuance

Two have ganged up to kill the other.

I read this interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and things she said resonated. It’s always interesting when that happens, a writer with a completely different upbringing and life experience than mine says things I think are spot on. I had some thoughts like:

Liberalism and Conservatism threatens diversity with expectations of tribalism.

Discrimination has made us defensive.

Nuance is dying.

All of this leads to the habit of self-editing, as Ms Adichie mentions. That’s Very Bad for writers. As is the Single Story, which means we are reduced down to one action, one side, one belief. Writers worth their salt would never do it to their characters, but we seem to regularly do it to our fellow human beings. 

Adichie brings up a point about something she said that created a dogpile and goes on to explain it:

“I did an interview in 2017 in which I said, I think a trans woman is a trans woman. And I think that because I think it’s so important for us to make distinctions, because I, as a person who was born with a body designed to create a certain size of gametes, that has completely shaped my life.  […] I grew up in a culture in which, because I’m a woman, I cannot inherit property, all of those things. So it’s shaped so much of my life. […] I remember thinking, Well, why would anybody think that I meant harm? Because people said, Well, you’re creating a hierarchy. People said, You’re a murderer. And I thought, My whole life has been about the celebration and the embrace of diversity, and I love the idea that we are different in the world.”

Look I’m as hotbutton reactionary to trans talk as maybe anyone around, even if I don’t always show it. I wouldn’t blame people for misunderstanding that clumsy statement. But this has an obvious explanation: She meant how the life experience of transitioning influences womanhood is like how being a born a cis woman influences womanhood. Of course it's a dangerous sentiment because it absolutely ignores the sameness that links all women, no matter how we came to be one. 

But I applied my above thoughts to see how they color my reaction. For me, because TERFs (among others) hijacked the notion of womanhood and makes us all so defensive, and because a single sentence cannot encompass the nuance of an entire thought on a complicated issue, it’s a tough one to stop and parse. Tribalism doesn’t encourage doing that either, nor does it actually encourage anything stepping slightly outside the tribal thought.

I used to not self-edit quite so much. I’ve had couple of instances since I was back on Facebook when I stated what I thought was a particular piece of truth about something. One was about my experience with having COVID the second time. I was calling it Covid-lite because the strain I had, the vaccines I’ve had, and my prior bout all contributed to it being not as bad. I dared mention I was going to stop worrying about it so much, personally, that COVID wasn’t even the same disease now that so many of us have defenses about it. (Background, we were knee deep in fire repairs and having to move four people to three separate homes, we had some other personal issues, I’d been suffering from Long COVID issues for 18 months, and any baggage I could dump, I was gonna. Anyone who followed my FB at that time or knew me even remotely had to have some idea of the pressure I and my family was under then.)

I immediately got railed for ignoring people with Long COVID and no amount of explaining (expanding on what had been an initial few sentences) would pacify my disagreers. The thing that was most disappointing was the zero allowance for different people having different experiences. The expectation was that if you were not 100% DANGER WILL ROBINSON you were wrong and should feel guilty and wary and all kinds of other nasty feels because some other fewer/minority of people were still suffering and in danger. I don’t blame liberals in this; conservatives would have likely been guilty of yammering how I never should have given COVID any passing thought at all so yay I saw the light, or it's just a government invention, or some other bunk.

And I find myself wondering how is that expectation of belief and action really different than a few people expecting everyone else to obey their religious laws? One the one hand the expectation to mask and live carefully (and in fear!) in a less dangerous pandemic situation for the benefit of the few for whom COVID legit can be a death sentence hardly equals banning abortions and books to accommodate a segment of the population that equates fundamentalist beliefs with truths … or does it?

This is a false equivalency of issues, of course, but the actions and results, enforcing tribalism, ignoring nuance, and keeping us on the defensive, are eerily the same. Disagreements are treated uncomfortably similarly by people on each (every?) side thinking they have really damn good reasons for creating the expectations and rules they do.

It worries me how this affects fiction. I was thinking of a writer on Bluesky I saw recently asking about how to write diversely with Own Voices being a legit thing and the responses were really kinda mean. I get it. We’re all tired. A lot of us have established rules for how we handle it. But would it kill people to say, instead of PAY SENSITIVITY READERS AND DO YOUR RESEARCH ASSHOLE!!! (ok the asshole was implied) “hey yeah, so pro writers have some established ways to do this. Research some sensitivity readers and look for some classes and articles.” Cuz I think the latter might help him try to explore it rather the former, which basically screams “Go back and write tropey white boy fantasy, kiddo.”

I used to not self-edit and I used to say all kinds of outlandish things. Now I’m finding myself too fucking tired to have those fights anymore, so there is much I do not say. But after reading this interview it occurred it might not be me being old, it might be that the disagreements really are different than they used to be, say, a decade ago.

Letting a single, fairly innocuous statement erasing all worth and thoughts is ABSURD, but it’s eclipsed by my tribalistic fear: Please don’t kick me out of the clique!