Who Needs to be Convinced?

Bathruminations' Origin Story?

I got a little lazy this week, and also I have several exciting things coming up that I need more time to work on, so here’s a piece about recognizing what I have control over and part of the reason I started this blog. Before that, here’s a few good articles I read this week.

Reading Roundup

1. Along the lines of my post on The Whiteness of Wealth, and Caste, this article from last August in Time looks at county-level data on Alzheimer’s rates and research and finds big racial disparities. This is due to the social determinants of health, in which a person’s socio-economic status, along with their geographic location, and many other social factors such as access to education, jobs, public transportation, etc., affect their health outcomes. From the article:

“The CDC states this clearly,  “Lower levels of education, higher rates of poverty, and greater exposure to adversity and discrimination may increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.” Researchers can see this clearly in the data. Older Black Americans are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s as older White Americans according to the National Institute of Health. Hispanic Americans are 1.5x as likely to develop Alzheimer’s, and researchers also found that for each one-point increase on a scale of socioeconomic deprivation, there was an 8% increase in the odds of developing Alzheimer’s.”

2. There is a Pennsylvania cryptid called the Squonk and it’s an ugly, sad, crying thing. You’re welcome.

3. A slight change this week, but may become more frequent in my posts, here’s a call to action. Metro DC DSA is fundraising to provide backpacks to DC students. If you live in the area (or anywhere!) and want to support a good cause, you can donate here.

4. Finally, I posted this in Substack notes, but for those who don’t read them, I came across this excellent Time article on school vouchers through Peter Greene’s Substack (I guess it’s a Time week). A few highlights:

   1. Vouchers mainly give money to those already in private school.

   2. Voucher schools have huge churn rate with many closing after just 4 years of operation.

   3. Vouchers also have huge student turnover, with 20-30% of students leaving voucher programs each year (or being pushed out by their private schools).

   4. Statewide voucher studies showed that students who switched from public school to private using vouchers saw large test score decreases (I know, standardized tests don’t tell us what people say they do, but they are the measure that privatizers hold up to support their programs, and vouchers fail by their own standards).

   5. Private schools can discriminate!!! They often reject students for their religion, or for being LGBT, or students with disabilities.

   In summary from the article:

   “That is what research on school vouchers tells us. Vouchers are largely tax subsidies for existing private school families, and a tax bailout for struggling private schools. They have harmful test score impacts that persist for years, and they’re a revolving door of school enrollment. They’re public funds that support a financially desperate group of private schools, including some with active discriminatory admissions in place.”

The Post

I had many reasons to start this blog and many reasons to continue writing. Initially, I set myself a reading goal, but once I started reading a lot I thought to myself “ok, and now what?” What is the point of gaining knowledge if you don’t use it? Of course, I do believe there is value in learning for its own sake, and that knowledge will always eventually serve you, so the reason is probably more that I was impatient. So I started writing about what I read, and realized that it’s an excellent way to formulate your thoughts and that, as many people before me have said, “writing is a way of thinking”. In the end, I basically reinvented college for myself.

Another reason for writing though, is that I became tired of rehashing the same arguments with people. I know people who approach new information or contentious topics with an open, but critical mind who bring new insights to a topic and help you think through the implications of a potential change (illuminators). I also know people who play the devil’s advocate on everything and have no goal in a conversation but to dazzle you with their rhetorical skills, unconcerned with whether they are ultimately correct (dazzlers). Finally, I know people who see their knowledge in one area as preparing them to be knowledgeable about most other areas. They will spend most of their effort trying to teach you (regardless of how much they have learned about a topic), but will be completely closed off to learning from you (LEDs? because diodes allow current to flow one way, but not the other).

Regardless of what we choose to call this third group, it took me quite a while, but I learned an important lesson. I am not responsible for changing people. People can be influenced by others to a greater or lesser degree, but they themselves must be the ones who choose to change. The above categories are, of course, generalizations and people are more complex than that, but they’re useful to my experience. I write in the hopes that people will read with an open mind, take something useful out of what I say, and leave what they don’t need. This is much harder to do in a spoken conversation because generally a conversation is with a specific person and it is obvious when they disagree or just refuse to listen.

With that big personal exposition out of the way, here’s the question I’ve been thinking about recently: who needs to be convinced? Who is it, exactly, who needs to change their mind to create a more just society, and why? We often hear in the news about “moderates”, “centrists”, “the mainstream”, or “the average American”, but those are intentionally vague buzzwords so as to allow a lot of people to identify with them without having to think about what they actually mean.

My answer to the above question is: people with power. Or at least people who understand themselves to be served by power. But also, people who recognize that rhetorically, they are in a much stronger position when they assume their view is standard. This is why the recent use of “weird” to describe far-right positions works so well. It takes away the need to prove that a stance (such as supporting research-backed care for transgender people) based in respect for humanity should be the norm. There’s no need to prove it, it actually is the norm for most decent people. It is also why so much of the most insightful and sharp analysis comes from people who are not of the dominant culture or ideology. They are forced to understand how those with power think to exist, but they live in a way that doesn’t fit into that narrative.

This dynamic plays out in so many realms and is a feature of the unlimited accumulation of wealth (wealth being a form of power). We see it with foundations and donors, who require jumping through absurd hoops for people to prove their cause is worthy of support (seriously, check out that link, it’s great). We saw it in the Civil Rights movement when the white moderates needed more and more proof to stop being racist (which is still a work in progress), and also to change the racist institutions that were harming black people (also a work in progress).

What I’ve learned from all of this is that I do not want to be the person who needs to be convinced. I would like to be an illuminator, for sure, but failing that I’d at least like to know that I was seeking information on my own. That I was attempting to learn more and understand the needs of those who are not well-served by our current political and economic system. There is only so much each of us can do, but one of the most important things is to avoid complacency. To avoid thinking “I’ve learned everything I need to know about this topic and I have all the right answers now.” Because that’s almost never the case, but also because anyone who starts from that perspective is avoiding the complexities of humanity and imposing their rigid view on the world.

I write this blog in the hopes that some people who are seeking information will find a starting point and to maybe create a forum for those dazzlers and LEDs (it’s a thing now) to change their minds if they choose. My advice to those folks comes from Thomas Zimmer’s blog on politics

“Whenever you are weighing in on politics, society, and culture, ask yourself: Would you feel comfortable making this argument directly to the face of the people whose lives, rights, and dignity are most immediately affected by the issue in question?”

Allowing people that freedom to choose how they want to be has not freed me of responsibility to do my best and try to convince others, but it has freed me of the worry of trying to convince specific people at specific points in time. If the ideas are good, they may eventually recognize it, and if the ideas are bad, I may eventually change my view.

Purchase My Recommended Books

If you’d like, you can purchase some of the books I’ve recommended in this blog through bookshop.org. It’s a way to support local bookstores (or me if you use the link I provide), and avoid the Amazon monopoly.

Here is the link to my store page, with all of my recommendations.

You can also use the store locator and select a local book shop for the profit of your purchase to go to. According to the website:

When you select your local bookstore on the map above and visit their Bookshop.org page, we place a cookie in your browser that identifies you as that store's customer, and the store will get the full profit from all your Bookshop.org purchases (30% of the book's list price).