JANUARY 2021/PANDEMIC READS

Coffee in a good mug always goes well with early-morning reading.

In 2020, I had some extra time on my hands, which resulted in me reading 118 books over the course of the year, over 20 in December alone. That high December number can be accounted for by the generous two-week Christmas vacation most employed people in Germany enjoy and also, by me hurting my back, which resulted in my waking, repeatedly, at 4am, unable to remain lying down any longer. Instead, I haunted the barely lit kitchen, coffee mug in one hand, book in the other, and read while roving. Suffice it to say, I have become very good at reading and walking at the same time, though I wouldn’t trust myself to try this outside, the reason being that bumping into the couch is one thing, bumping into a car traveling 30-40/kph is another.

Then came the end of the year, and around the same time, thanks to some deep heat treatments at my doctor’s office and a lot of kineseotape, my back healed up and sleeping to, say, 6 or even 7am became possible once more. Sleep is really wonderful, I have to say, and suddenly I found myself with less time to read. AND THEN on January 6, 2021, I watched on live TV as the Capitol Building in Washington DC was breached by right-wing insurrectionists, and the next week, next two weeks, who knows how long after that, involved me spending most of my free time watching CNN International or refreshing the NYT feed on my smartphone. I only read six books.

Probably my favorite was When No One Is Watching, Alyssa Cole’s gentrification-based thriller, which I thought was very-well plotted, totally engaging, sometimes even funny, and always pointed.

I also enjoyed Fee Griffin’s poetry collection, For Work/For TV, winner of the inaugural Amsterdam Book Prize from Versal Editions.

In terms of German-language reading, NSU: Der Terror von Rechts und das Versagen des Staates by journalist and professor Tanjev Schultz was a sobering, eye-opening read. You may be able to make out the title for yourself, but if not, here’s a rough translation. NSU [National Socialist Underground]: Right-Wing Terrorism and the Failure of the State, and that about says it all. The book details not only the crimes of a (possibly) small group of Neo-Nazi terrorists who, among other things, murdered 9 Germans of Turkish or Greek heritage, plus one police officer, but also the blisteringly awful ways in which German authorities, bolstered by un- or maybe even conscious biases, failed to even consider that the perpetrators could be right-wing extremists (as opposed to members of Turkish organized crime organizations) and thus missed numerous chances to apprehend the suspects. There’s also a lot about how various German crime-solving authorities failed to work together and the book goes into detail about how paid informants work in Germany, which is kind of mind-blowing, in that a lot of times, those informants are very well-paid and a lot of that money just goes back into supporting their criminal and/or deeply racist activities. Throughout my read, I found myself wondering what parallels could be drawn to how the threat of right-wing terrorism took a backseat to the threat of Islamist terrorism in the US after 9/11. (For the record, 9/11 also played a role in how German authorities viewed terrorism.)

Finally, sometimes I read books that I am pretty sure I will disagree with, at least in part, mostly because I would like to see for myself. I’d heard some negative things about Phoebe Maltz Bovy and her understanding of the concept of privilege, so I read The Perils of “Privilege”: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage. My first thought is that marketing can be misleading. Putting the word privilege in quotation marks in the title does, in my view, make it sound like the author might be about to argue that it doesn’t exist, which is not the case. (Even though that’s not what double quotation marks mean, that reading would be more justified if the title read ‘privilege’ in single quotes. But…I think that distinction probably gets lost.)

I ended up having a lot of thoughts about this book. And a lot of questions. Some of the author’s arguments made sense on first reading, though email discussions with a friend helped clarify a few things for me. One argument Maltz Bovy uses to strengthen her argument that privilege isn’t the right rubric through which to work toward achieving social justice is that what often gets referred to as privilege, for example, white privilege in the case of Dylan Roof being treated humanely by law enforcement officers after murdering nine Black churchgoers, is framed as the beneficent of that so-called privilege receiving something extra. Whereas in actuality, Eric Garner’s rights were violated because of racism when he was murdered for the infinitesimal crime of selling loose cigarettes. Not to mention the countless Black individuals whose rights are violated, to the point of being murdered by police officers, when committing no crime at all. This did make a lot of sense to me, most particularly because of how this argument centers racism as the mechanism working in the background. My friend, however, pointed out that it’s worth holding in mind how the concept of privilege (in this example, again, white privilege) is wrapped up in how some of us (white people) more reasonably can expect to be treated humanely in our dealings with the criminal justice system.

What I have also been thinking a lot about is Maltz Bovy’s argument that asking people to check their privilege has, in a pragmatic sense, not brought about a more just world, a conclusion I would in general concur with. The conclusion she draws from that, though, is that we should therefore divest from the concept of privilege altogether. Maltz Bovy also writes a lot about how asking people who are suffering to consider the various privileges they may simultaneously enjoy to be insensitive and unhelpful. I see her point, to a point, though mostly only in terms of timing. My friend, however, pointed out not only the value in being able to empathize with others even as we ourselves are suffering, but also how this experience of empathy can be the beginning of the process that leads to liberation for all (as opposed to only for ourselves). His point dovetails with my own experience of suffering, but that’s a long-ass story, maybe for a never-time.

In terms of my own thoughts on asking people to check their privilege, I know it is typical (or used to be typical) of American communication to begin what may be uncomfortable feedback for the listener with either a positive statement (impossible in many cases) or, at the very least, a statement of empathy. In my experience, beginning with that statement of empathy conveys to the other person that I hear them, decreases kneejerk defensiveness, and primes them to hear me. The idea that there are people who don’t deserve so much as a statement of empathy from me on account of the obliviousness or even –isms they may be spewing is tempting to grasp hold of sometimes, but as a white person whose position in life is not at the moment in any way precarious, I think in such instances I need to remind myself that there exist in this world Black and Jewish people who have befriended Klansmen and/or other white supremacists and that as a direct result of those friendships, those Klansmen and other white supremacists have divested from their racist and/or anti-Semitic views.

In the end, I found Maltz Bovy’s book worth a read in that the process of thinking about and discussing her arguments with others helped me to clarify my own views. Her book centers privilege checking in the context of online discussions, so it’s tempting to slide in here with a statement to the effect that in-person communication is more conducive to effecting actual change (which I think it genuinely is), but the internet is here to stay. Online is where we’re at. This is the world we live in now.

(In January, I also line-edited the rewrite of my novel and wrote a few poems, cooked a bunch, upped my zucchini-bread game, and worked out a bunch. I’m tired. Very underemployed right now for pandemic-related reasons, but I am determined to hold on to the idea of structure. Until next month, or so, with more reads.)