Brave Thinkers and Grave Risks

by Shaker RachelB

[Trigger warning for sexual violence, for state-sponsored violence, for domestic violence.]

Not long ago, I got a letter from my employer, a public research university, announcing that one of its physics professors had been named to The Atlantic's annual group of "Brave Thinkers".

According to The Atlantic, these are "people risking their reputations, fortunes, and lives in pursuit of big ideas." I read the physics prof's story and was impressed. Setting out to investigate the role of bias in climate change research, he discovered that the predominant findings in the field are…true. It isn't what he discovered (i.e., that climate change really exists) that was new: It is that he discovered it while funded by the Koch brothers' money. I'm not a scientist, but some of my best friends are, and it cheers me to see a scientist publish results because they are correct, not because they are what the company funding the study wanted. So who else is a "Brave Thinker" this year?

Dr. Hawa Abdi is on the list: A medical professional and human rights worker, she is trying to make a safe space for refugees within Somalia, and her policy forbidding domestic violence within that space makes it clear that she is specifically looking out for women within the settlement. Isabel Castillo is on the list, too: She is an advocate for her fellow undocumented immigrants, at the risk of her own deportation. Also on the list: An Egyptian citizen deeply involved in social networking, Wael Ghonim founded a Facebook group called "We are all Khaled Said"; while that Facebook group began to assemble in Tahrir Square, he was jailed for and interrogated for nearly two weeks. Reporter Lydia Cacho Ribeiro is on the list, too—she who did not stop covering violence against women even after a retaliatory rape and assault she was lucky to survive.

Another person on the list: Former State Department employee P.J. Crowley. Fair enough; I suspect his resignation from the Obama administration, after he called Bradley Manning's treatment "ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid," was not voluntary. Crowley spent 30 years in public service (variously in the Air Force and think tanks), garnering a lot of respect along the way. I greatly admire the way he used the leverage of his privilege and position. But I feel simultaneously compelled to point out that speaking out against Manning's abuse was not the career-ending gesture that The Atlantic seems to think it is; he has already been hired for a joint academic post shared by three colleges.

At this point, I had a certain song from Sesame Street uneasily stuck in my head.

Now, I don't mean any disrespect for Prof. Muller's project, which drew me to The Atlantic in the first place. Not only do I like science that rests on actual evidence, I have some empathy for Prof. Muller. I am a very risk-averse person, and I can understand why bearing "bad news" feels risky. I get nervous making phone calls to public officials about issues that matter to me. I feel really uncomfortable when people think ill of me, especially if they're people on whom I depend for my research budget. But I don't treat the risk of disapproval and the risk of—oh, I don't know—dying as if they're the same thing; how can The Atlantic in good conscience elide that difference?

Reading a little further, I discovered that there are some names on the list that I just can't fathom, because the "risk" in their proposals looks to me as risk that other people will bear. Peter Thiel, Paypal founder and professional libertarian, is proposing that students avoid college and start businesses (a proposition that seems far riskier to those students than to him), for one. And Peter Mosk, a former police officer, argues that it would be more humane to substitute actual judicial violence (e.g. flogging) for the state-sponsored violence we use now (e.g. confinement).

(A point on which I disagree with Atlantic staffwriters: I don't think that "A little corporal punishment never hurt anybody" is actually all that rare or edgy a sentiment. Would that it were. Witness a conversation on policing in my city or some statistics on child abuse worldwide (pdf), and anyone can see that it's not.)

The brave thinkers who have risked (or continue to risk) death or physical harm are overwhelmingly women and/or people of color. Their white counterparts on the list mostly risk losing money, credibility, or elected office. (I mean, really, Atlantic? A football coach who—gasp!—talks in public belongs on a list with human rights activists?) What's going on here? There are a number of factors at work here, some of which I've identified below, and I encourage you to tease out additional factors in comments:

First, perhaps the magazine's "bar" for perceiving risk is higher when the person taking the risk is a woman and/or POC. Just as women and/or POC have to be more impressive than their white male peers in order to get an interview, let alone a job, no less advance at that job, maybe The Atlantic ignores the risks that women and/or POC take until they're Peace Prize-level accomplishments.

USian society demands that women and/or POC to sacrifice themselves on behalf of others in ways that we do not demand of white men. Think for a moment of all the action movies where the token POC dies, heroically and tragically, usually in the first part of the film. Also, think of all the movies where a character of color is present as an instrument of enlightenment for a white person. And recall the very durable Cult of True Womanhood trope, which may have been officially over in the 19th century but which makes a pop cultural return (pdf) every time women get too learned or uppity.

Fiction is not life, but fiction reflects and comments on life, and this sort of fiction reflects a society that persists in treating men and women of color as if they are on this earth to serve white people, while treating women of color and white women as if it's their responsibility to tend men who are quite capable of taking care of themselves.

(Incidentally, the Cult of True Womanhood is pretty racist and classist, too: While staying home to take care of a dude and kids was supposed to be the pinnacle of womanly achievement, the CTW essentially heightened social distinctions between women who could afford to stay home and women who could not—i.e., the women who were providing underpaid household labor for the "True Women," whose household role had become supervisory.)

Another set of factors: The fields in which the white male "brave thinkers" work—diplomatic bureaucracy, professional sports, the hard sciences, the financial sector—are fields that don't carry with them the expectations of physical heroism that human rights activism does. But they are also fields in which women and/or POC have continually been underrepresented. For instance, to take big but sustainable financial risks in a capitalist economy, you have to have a fair bit of money to start with. (This seems to apply doubly if you're going to be taking risks with other people's money and long-term earning potential, as I would argue Mr. Thiel is.) And given long-standing barriers to POC's ownership of property in the United States—along with a host of systemic barriers to high-paying or high-status employment—very wealthy people, who can lose significant sums of money without losing their ability to feed and house themselves, tend to be white.

Furthermore, many of the risks the women and/or POC on this list have faced are risks common to women and/or POC, even those of us who are not working in a region at war. Even those of us who are not writing about cartels. Even those of us who are not on the scene as needed witnesses to state-sponsored violence. Women of color and white women are both likelier than men to be victims of rape or sexual assault. Women and men of color are likelier than white women and men to be victims of other violent crimes. Women and men of color are far likelier to suffer police violence (statistics vary from one place to another, but here's what New York City looked like in the mid 1990s, to be arrested, or to be incarcerated for infractions for which their white peers are exonerated. And incarcerated people are at heightened risk for rape.

Even as women and/or POC disproportionately bear those risks—rape, assault, police brutality, and incarceration—in the United States, The Atlantic's coverage falsely suggests that those are risks specific to developing nations. They're certainly not risks in the United States. Except that they are.

Treating misogynist and racist violence as if it is something that happens elsewhere is all kinds of problematic. It leads to colonialist foreign policy. It increases rancor against immigrants—because if violence against women is a problem limited to developing nations (recall, for example, then-First Lady Laura Bush justifying war in Afghanistan as "a fight for the rights and dignity of women," certainly preventing immigration from countries that condone or ignore the abuse of women and/or POC will keep abuse of women and/or POC from spreading to the United States. (So nobody gets to immigrate! Truly, that will be awesome. NOT.) It leads to undeserved smugness among USians, especially privileged white men-who-matter who have relatively little risk of being the victim of a violent crime and who are often sheltered from having to think about violence. (Such shelter does not necessarily extend to "men who don't matter"—men who are on the QUILTBAG spectrum, neurodiverse men, and/or men with mental illnesses are at greater risk of violence than their heterosexual, cis, and neurotypical peers.) And it leads to the dangerous conclusion that we don't need any human-rights movement in the United States.

And the brave activists I know—well, they know that just isn't so.