Many of us, perhaps even a vast majority, hold that homophobia, racism of all kinds, sexism, the psychological brutality of book banning along with, not all that surprisingly, climate change denial and waging wars of aggression, are not only inherently wrong but belong to the same species of malevolence that leads to moral wastelands and human suffering across the spectrum of fear and pain.
Many of us also feel that such bigoted fabrications — woven from anger, ignorance, fear and dark suspicion — fall into the same category of human folly that includes all kinds of malicious falsehoods that turn people who are merely different from us, living their own lives and minding their own business, into enemies and scapegoats.
This is not to say we all don’t have the right to disagree, dissent, refuse, oppose what we think is wrong, dangerous and untrue. That is a given in any kind of society worth living in. We also have the right to support, defend and espouse what we believe is right and true and good and real. That is a given, too. So is our right to hold opinions and say and write them without fear of mob retaliation or authoritarian reprisal.
These human rights fit into the spectrum of “liberty” as envisioned by British historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin — both “positive liberty,” the self-rule that enables us to do and say and think what we want, and what he calls “negative liberty,” the freedom to be unimpeded by any kind of obstacle that is foisted upon us unjustly by a force inflicting itself by means of a power differential much greater than our own.
All this holds true, as long as what we do and think does not hurt other people and impinge upon their positive and negative liberties. A society or way of life that isn’t grounded in such liberties isn’t worth its own existence.
Hurting other people is always a form of oppression, and includes everything from rape, murder and prejudice to propagating lies, attacking a neighboring country, gaslighting those who come under your influence, failing to obey the admonition to “do no harm,” or reacting to what you don’t like as if it is actively attacking you when it is not.
What makes the present moment so difficult to bear, and so imponderable, is that the full range of oppression is coming to dominate the social climate of our times. Homophobia, for instance, is on the rise around the country. So is book banning, antisemitism and sexism, as are the intractable arguments of climate change deniers and the fanatic narcissism of those who behave as if might is right.
Book banning has a particularly nasty history when it comes to New Mexican authors. And across the nation lately, attempts to ban books, many about the LGBT community, and prosecute librarians for welcoming such books into their collections has become a troubling trend, the New York Times reports. And last week, Marisa Demarco, editor-in-chief of the independent news outlet Source NM, reminded readers in the Arizona Mirror, that ten years ago Rudolfo Anaya’s beloved classic “Bless Me, Ultima,” was banned in Arizona classrooms. Anaya told Demarco then that “the problem is real … there are people who still think their way is the only way. … Quite frankly, they’re bigots, and they exist everywhere. We have to be vigilant, and we always have to fight against censorship …” Anaya reminded readers that in 1981 a copy of “Bless Me, Ultima” had actually been tossed into the flames of a book burning in San Juan County that was instigated by a state legislator there.
New Mexico poet, feminist and human rights activist, Margaret Randall, one of the world’s greatest living authors, was almost deported after returning to the United States from Mexico in the 1980s under the aegis of the McCarran Walter Act of 1952 on charges that her writing was fundamentally subversive and “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” That’s an extreme form of book banning. Sen. Pat McCarran of Nevada was also the author of the Internal Security Act of 1950, sometimes called the “concentration camp law,” that provided for the detainment of Americans for political crimes, including writing in support of “communism.” It took another anti-communist witch-hunter, Richard Nixon, to repeal McCarran’s detention provision in 1971. The lingering power of McCarran’s hatred and scapegoating, though, almost drove Randall from her home many years later, but she prevailed in 1989, after five nerve-wracking years in court.
Both Anaya’s and Randall’s confrontations with book banning illustrate the terrible dangers of government oppression that denies the basic freedoms of both positive and negative liberty by associating individuals with “forbidden” groups and accusations of their alleged nefarious activities.
But governments, of course, aren’t the only oppressors of liberties. The number of anti-LGBTQ hate groups, for instance, rose in America by 43 percent in 2019, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and by the end of 2020’s fiscal cycle had raked in $110 million in contributions. A hate group is defined by the SPLC as having “beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”
Most of the anti-LGBTQ groups were associated not only with former President Trump and his wing of the Republican Party but with what the SPLC calls “grassroots churches” like the Faithful World Baptist Church in Tempe, AZ, that believes homosexuality is punished by God with the death penalty. Some 4.5% of Americans self-identify as LGBTQ. That’s something close to 14,850,00 people, more than seven times the population of New Mexico, and more than twice the population of Arizona.
Homophobes would deny the basic human right — the right to be who you are — to almost 15 million Americans because of their groundless hate, fear-mongering distortions and the malicious power they derive from scapegoating. Like sexism itself, which is on the rise in America, too, homophobia is among the most odious forms of liberty-denying oppressions.
According to the American Sociological Association (ASA), surveys taken after the Trump election victory, marred so outrageously by sexist obscenities, show alarmingly that about half the American population “slightly” or overwhelmingly believes that women are either both inherently inferior and unworthy of high responsibility, a view the ASA calls “hostile sexism,” or so incapable of self-advancement they need to be paternalistically protected, a view the ASA calls as “benevolent sexism.”
Misogyny, I believe, is the primal form, and therefore the definitive expression, of all liberty-denying oppressions based on hate, fear, intimidation and the morphing of ignorance into doctrine.
Bigotry of all kinds is perhaps the major obstruction to the exercise of individual liberty, be it Jim Crow’s monstrous tenacity, the hatred and genocide of Native Americans, or the racism against Hispanic Americans, the kind that saw American’s first Hispanic Senator, Dennis Chavez, of New Mexico, booed when he took his seat in the U.S. Senate in 1935, or the brutal and relentless oppressions of antisemitism that are also on the rise in America. NPR, in October of last year, reported that surveys had found nearly 1 in 4 American Jews have recently experienced antisemitism directed against them.
The species of liberty-denying oppression that spawns such horrors has two separate strains that deal in the acquisition of power through narratives of deceit. They are the propaganda of war in which a whole country of people is scapegoated for villainies invented in the service of the ultimate political oppression of mass murder. And there’s the propaganda of what we might call “the emperor with no clothes,” or interests that drape their opinions in narratives of misinformation — like those of the fossil fuel industry — misinformation obviously naked of truth, transforming undeniable realities like climate change into intellectual “straw men” that are easily defeated by bogus arguments in the service of retaining or gaining power.
That’s why the lies that deny for profit the overwhelming oppression of human-caused global warming, and the manufacturing of vilifications that try to justify a war of aggression against “nazifed” Ukrainians, have such a familiar stink to them, over and above their undeniable and unconscionable horrors. Because all of us suffer, directly or indirectly, from the oppression of hate-filled propaganda, we know what is malevolent and what is not. Hate and harm are the most glaring sins of our times, no matter what we call them. Both war and denial of the clear and present danger of climate change arise from lethal con jobs exactly like those of the haters who burn books and deny the human rights of anyone, for whatever reason, setting them up to be easy pickings, enemy devils to clobber and oppress in their merciless and unconscionable march to power.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Thank you for this article. You covered the spectrum bad behaviors so many of us have to deal with quite well. Como siempre. John
In this tragically pertinent column, it moves me to read about my own struggle with being banned as a writer–now more than three decades behind me. I remember that time as if it were yesterday. Many of my titles were freely sold in this country, yet my writing was deemed “beyond the good order and happiness of the United States” by the administration in power. What it objected to, as evidenced by passages highlighted with yellow magic marker in a half dozen of my books laid out on a table during a taped interview down at the Federal Building, were mentions of the roles the US played in backing dictatorships in Central America and Southeast Asia, situations supported by ample evidence and even then acknowledged by most thinking people. I won my case in 1989 because there were still judges who dared protect freedom of expression. Today we watch in horror as Texas, Florida and other Republican-controlled states ban classic texts from their school curriculae: texts that confront our country’s history of racism, recognize the broad spectrum of sexual desire, or encourage critical thinking. Ignorance and fear are behind such posturing. I recently saw a prescient meme that read: “Teaching about frogs doesn’t turn students into frogs.” Most importantly, teaching about the breadth of human experience and reading books that reflect that experience is the only way we will produce generations that respect difference which, as Mexico’s Benito Juarez so aptly put it a century ago, is the bedrock for peace.
V.B., another terrific article. Thank you! Hope you and family are well during these challenging times. Ray
So grateful that I was directed to this newsletter. VB Price always speaks the hard truths with breath-taking eloquence, so much better than any of the nationally syndicated columnists I read. How can we get you to a broader audience?
I remember after the war my father who was a english teacher in a small town in New Mexico at the same time as McCarthy ism. He had a friend a fellow teacher, Alex who had a student who did not like him and turned his name in to McCarthy’s group.
My father when this had happened had moved on to be head of the WPA in Art for the state of New Mexico at the time. He had to go to washington to say that Alex was not a communist. Alex with that later became an Ambassador for a US.
My father new gays back then, and taught me to seem them as just people.
Now I am married to a woman who is not of my race and the far right could say we are not married.
People always want to have control over others, want power, want to use fear and non education to control or pay less to, or walk on.
Womans rights has been in the works for a long time and like the blacks have gained rights that they should have had before the beginning of this country.