Origins
When Einstein posited his theory of General and Special relativity in 1905, he did not foresee that its implications would go beyond mere gravity. Most people envision the classic example of a train when they try to understand the theory. However, when the conscious person quips that something is relative they mean, in essence, that the influence and reality of a person’s lived experience and daily life are often determined by factors outside of one’s control and where lack of control begins folx began to have varying and often contradictory experiences.
In today’s global community relative means that the intersection of poverty, race, gender and being and one’s encounter with difference is no longer, for some, assumed to be universal. Most people are now aware that the world is bigger than themselves, that their experiences, no matter how often they occur in certain populations, are not universal to all people at c times. In other words, and to misuse Einstein, it matters whether you are on the train, on the platform, at the ticket master, loading one’s luggage or just working your eight hours a day.
For instance and for sure a black person’s encounter with the police is weighted by systemic racism and police abuse of power coupled with a long historical narrative that began before Jim Crow and has not come to an end. The failure, in particular, of a black man to recognize the propensity for danger in dealing with the police, can be a matter of life and death; the difference between surviving an encounter and being another statistic. No list of names are needed, depending on who you are you can make your own. Unless, you get to wake up every day in a different reality.
An Anecdote
As a student teacher I was placed in a majority white school of 1500 students and less than ten black faculty members. And, yes it came with a plethora of encounters with zombies but there were some wakefulness too. The world is shrinking–just not fast enough. Somehow, in a class of mostly white students we got on the subject of Viola Davis and if you know me, you know I admire everything about her. But try as I might I could not remember her character’s name from The Help. The lead teacher had the DVD in her collection and pulled it out. Aibileen Clark was the name and I mentioned that despite the movie making her very popular, Aibileen was a role Ms. Davis later regretted. The lead teacher, a youngish white woman, was perplexed. It was a great role. Why did she regret it?
In her own words, what Viola found regrettable is a regret I understand well. Ms. Davis stated in her interview with Vanity Fair that she “just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard. I know Aibileen. I know Minny [played by Octavia Spencer, who won a best-supporting-actress Oscar]. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom” (Desta 2018). Of course the novel was written by a white woman. I think of Harriet Jacobs and Maya Angelou and Sojourner truth–so many truer sources to understand a black woman’s relativity. Like Viola, I understand that it is discomforting when the lens must come through the narrowest margin, when one has to explain the realities of your life to someone who has been in a self perpetuating narrowness of mind and reflection. People are justly outraged over Ahmaud Arbery, but how many lives could have been spared if the same outraged had been poured out over James Byrd Jr. or Trayvon Martin? How many deaths do we not know about? What if it had stopped at Emmett Till?
All of this brings me to those people who wake up everyday in a world where they are on the train. Oh, how fast everything zips by; how busy and at work it all is as they sip a drink and scroll the internet. They live and die on the train. They don’t haul the heavy bags, they don’t push food rich carts, they don’t ask why it stopped, whom it’s letting on or off or why. They get their news delivered to them and never break a sweat. They can wake up wrong one day and remain that way for a life time, simply closing the sash on the ugliness if they want or confirm biases if they watch. These are the same people who deny science unless it increases the power of their WiFi or lights their homes; who elected a troll and are quiet as he derails the cars way in the back, out of sight–way back there; who are perfectly happy so long as they are keeping up with whomever there is to keep up with.
Unbridled autonomy is the belief that you should have your way and wants at the expense of other peoples’ reality (lives, well-being, dignity). It is the belief in a self that is at the apex of a life well-lived, to decry what you don’t want to believe as not real or fake or non existent. Most people do not get to exercise such autonomy because the system–the mean little clerks on patrol, police and guards–is there to prevent such realities. Unbridled autonomy is to reduce other people. At the core of such autonomy is a monster with many isms on its back and I will not name them because if you don’t know then it is time to educate yourself. Of course some know them very well. But that monster perpetuates this autonomy, this greedy feeding of the self, and lives in fear of being recognized for the recalcitrant child it is at heart, selfish and spoiled. It cannot refute what it knows to be a lie and so it keeps watch over tombstones, resurrecting old theories. It peddles hate and blunt stupidity pretending to be patriotic and moral and right. Unbridled autonomy always withers when confronted with real and valid differences, each a relevant as the next–depending on where you are standing. Its empty morality is laid bare at each train stop, at each derailment.
Last, in her short story Revelation, Flannery O’Connor’s Mrs. Turpin asks the question for the ages, “How am I hog and me both?” This short story full of Christian pathos is still one that reminds us that our carefully constructed good manners and good names are rendered worthless if our hearts, the inside person, is vile. An unbridled autonomous person is the definition of hypocrisy. Are any of us as good as we pretend to be? O’Connor argues that none of us are as good as we want to be and the role of salvation is to make us give up on the self. This story points to the cruel crux of judging from a seat of privilege. In the next world, to take O’Connor’s vision further, we will be seated next to the people we hate most. I’d like to think that Einstein would appreciate the applicability of his theories to every day life. For one to understand relativity, both the theory and the practice, one has to understand what it means to be seated and safe and standing and waiting.
Angry Mule 