Monday, January 30, 2012

No One Hates Like Family: Are Black People a Group of Professional Naggers Towards White Folks?

Nagging—the interaction in which one person repeatedly makes a request, the other person repeatedly ignores it and both become increasingly annoyed—is an issue every couple will grapple with at some point. While the word itself can provoke chuckles and eye-rolling, the dynamic can potentially be as dangerous to a marriage as adultery or bad finances. Experts say it is exactly the type of toxic communication that can eventually sink a relationship.

Why do we nag? "We have a perception that we won't get what we want from the other person, so we feel we need to keep asking in order to get it," says Scott Wetzler, a psychologist and vice chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. It is a vicious circle: The naggee tires of the badgering and starts to withhold, which makes the nagger nag more.
No one hates like family...

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has been running a series on marriage and relationships. Generally, I am not a fan of such psychobabble pablum. This is not a rejection of the value for some to be gained by reading about how to improve one's love relationships; rather, for me so much relationship advice boils down to common sense. Treat each other well; follow the golden rule; and find an Adrian to your Rocky where you fill in each other's gaps.

However, the WSJ's "Meet the Marriage Killer" struck a chord with me. There is something wonderfully generalizable about its narrative. The essay sharply and efficiently captures the roles of trust, communication, power, acceptance, and ego in a relationship. For one party, nagging is just persistence, a cry for justice, help, and attention. For the other party, nagging is annoyance, pestering, and results in a lack of cooperation as he/she becomes increasingly intransigent as a means of self-defense against a perceived assault.

In all, that dynamic sounds a bit like that centuries long intimate relationship between blacks and whites in America. Does it not?

While the marriage analogy may not hold as a perfect metaphor or analogue, there is a deep relationship between blacks folks and their white "brothers and sisters." Historically, this (forced) marriage has been contentious, unequal, violent, dysfunctional, bloody, exploitative, parasitic, and destructive. This relationship has also been creative, productive, energetic, and synergistic. I would suggest that black and white folks can get along fine with each other on a micro-level as individuals; it is the messy business of social institutions, structures, and "who gets what, when, how, and why," that is the cause of so much upset.

There is so much codependency here. Thus, I must ask: as a group, do black people nag whites? In mass, are people of color a class of professional naggers?

This is not an over-simplification of complex dynamics. Moreover, it is not a rejection of the fact that nagging can result in positive change. For example, if Dr. King was anything at all, he was a professional scold...and a great one at that. Let's substitute some language in"Meet the Marriage Killer" and see where it leads us.

****

For students of the colorline, this passage should sound very familiar.
It is possible for husbands whites to nag, and wives blacks to resent them for nagging...And they blacks tend to be more sensitive to early signs of problems in a relationship. When women blacks ask for something and don't get a response, they are quicker to realize something is wrong. The problem is that by asking repeatedly, they make things worse.
Men Whites are to blame, too, because they don't always give a clear answer. Sure, a husband white people might tune his wife blacks out because he is they are annoyed; nagging can make him white people feel like a little boy being scolded by his their mother. But many times he white people don't respond because he they don't know the answer yet, or he white people know that the answer will disappoint her black people.
It is not a perfect match (because "marriage" presumes a level of mutual respect, and a shared investment in love and success). However, there is some resonance here. Black and brown folks (and the Other) are the miner's canary and conscience of a nation, a people who are simultaneously more sensitive to changes in society, precisely because they are most vulnerable to them. And what are "white guilt" and white racial resentment, if not feelings rooted in a profound sense of "annoyance," and for the former, a dual fear of disappointing and sense of (ironic) powerlessness?

This example is evocative of how conversations about race and racial justice in the post Civil Rights era almost inevitably recenter whiteness and white people as victims of reverse racism--a group who must be treated carefully lest claims of white victimology--and manufactured elephant tears--fly fast and furious.

Ultimately, Whiteness imagines itself as benign and vulnerable. Be careful or you could hurt its feelings:
Ms. Pfeiffer decided to soften her approach. She asked herself, "How can I speak in a way that is not threatening or offensive to him?" She began writing requests on Post-it notes, adding little smiley faces or hearts. Mr. Mac Dougall says he was initially peeved about the sandwich note but did show up at Home Depot that evening smiling.

Ms. Pfeiffer sometimes writes notes to him from the appliances that need to be fixed. "I really need your help," a recent plea began. "I am really backed up and in a lot of discomfort." It was signed "your faithful bathtub drain." "As long as I am not putting pressure on him, he seems to respond better," Ms. Pfeiffer says. Mr. Mac Dougall agrees. "The notes distract me from the face-to-face interaction," he says. "There's no annoying tone of voice or body posture. It's all out of the equation."
"Meet the Marriage Killer" concludes with a list of tips and guidelines for breaking the nagger-naggee cycle. These include "calming down," "understanding each other's perspective," and "managing expectations." If black folks are indeed a class of professional naggers, I would suggest that we do none of these things. Our holding to these principles has gotten us few rewards in recent years. But then again my advice is quite suspect, as I have the recurring habit of finding myself in unhealthy relationships.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

professional naggers, useless eaters, and lives devoid of value...,

KS said...

"I would suggest that black and white folks can get along fine with each other on a micro-level as individuals; it is the messy business of social institutions, structures, and "who gets what, when, how, and why," that is the cause of so much upset."

"evocative of how conversations about race and racial justice in the post Civil Rights era almost inevitably recenter whiteness and white people as victims of reverse racism"

The big question left is how does the micro-level influence outcomes on the macro-level. If everyone is treating each other as individuals then the question of institutions would be irrelevant, you just make race-neutral laws and enforce them and that is the end of it.

The complication is that of explicit and implicit discrimination. Most reverse discrimination against whites is explicit and involves non-race neutral policies... such as preferences in academics/hiring. Anyone can see how this could be potentially discriminatory, it's simple enough such that your typical media outlet can sensationalize these stories and keep viewer interest.

Of course the justification for preferences is to balance out racial discrimination against blacks. But when people talk about this it is usually described as structural and the biases against them as implicit. This is a fairly heavy sociological topic and your average person would probably be quite bored trying to understand the details. It's not something that creates easy news to report on very often.

"If black folks are indeed a class of professional naggers, I would suggest that we do none of these things. Our holding to these principles has gotten us few rewards in recent years."

That is what the "managing expectations" is about. Following this advice is not really about 'getting rewards' of any sort, it's about preventing outcomes which are arguably worse. Marriage involves reciprocity, and if one side stops following the principles then it's unlikely that the other side is going to suddenly start doing so if they weren't before.

For "understanding each other's perspective", we have to remember there is no single perspective on either side. There are racists, individualists, and those that are just plain indifferent to these issues from both groups. Those that are genuinely interested in understanding and fixing these issues should consider themselves a collective before anything else.

Patience on this issue is certainly warranted though. Structural unfairness and bias is a complex problem to sort out and in the meantime its not totally clear what can be done politically with such limited proof of it's existence or the true nature of the problem. Many are still justifiably skeptical of the whole enterprise of linking macro outcomes to implicit/structural discrimination near the micro-level. We don't know if differential outcomes are the result of micro-level actions related to skin color per se, or if outcomes are more related to mechanisms that act through culture/wealth/historical circumstance. This sort of structural unfairness could easily apply to individuals of any race in similar situations and the system should be fixed for them if possible, too.

Tom said...

Those that are genuinely interested in understanding and fixing these issues should consider themselves a collective before anything else.

But the reality is they don't.

Nebris said...

I suppose it speaks volumes that I, a chap who is very conscious of his White Privilege etc, first read that as "Professional Niggers. I could only sigh when I realized my mistake. Of course, I then needed to make contrition here.

I expect this shall not be truly sorted out until all our descendants have interbred to various lovely shades of brown. *sigh* One can hope, eh?

Comrade PhysioProf said...

Chauncey, your analysis makes a lot of sense and explains a lot. For example, white complaints of non-whites "playing the race card" are equivalent to "would you stop nagging?"