Saira Rao Pointed Me To Something Valuable

seriously, she did

Removed the paywall in honor of my friends in the Disaffected Discord, who were having a great conversation about this woman.

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Several of you lovely readers regularly send me Twitter links to things you’d like to see me write about.

I had clicked a link to look at one of these when I saw that Saira Rao had just retweeted a thread from a black male PhD in “counselor education” who does research into “race-based trauma.”

Many of you remember Saira Rao. She is the Indian-American millionaire who lost a Congressional race in 2018 and quickly developed a new career decrying American racism. She is one of the cofounders of Race2Dinner, the non-sexual BDSM submission exercise where white women pay her for the privilege of serving her dinner while she berates them about their racism.

White men are not considered for these events (or weren’t, the last time I checked) as they are deemed beyond hope of understanding their own privilege. She is also the co-author of the recent book, White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to do Better. She has done quite a lot of infamous tweeting about how evil and terrible America is, and many unintentionally hilarious interviews, including one with Sargon of Akkad and another one with the Femsplainers.

This thread she retweeted was so revelatory — I finally understand many things about the anti-racism movement that I really and truly did not grasp before. I wish I could send her a thank-you card for pointing me to this thread.

My eyes are opened and I am grateful. I finally, finally understand what the anti-racist activists mean about the trauma of racism and all the emotional labor they must do to recover from it — labor that, naturally, a white woman therapist and college professor offered to pay him for.

Let’s examine the thread and I’ll share what I’ve learned.

First, screenshots for those of you not on Twitter or not inclined to click away.

A Close Reading of this Thread

Dr. Green here relates that he experienced racism, and brings up a graphic he uses to conceptualize race-based “traumatic stress.” Let’s look at this graphic more closely.

The most noteworthy thing about this graphic is that it is entirely ordinary. Take the center bubble, “race-based trauma,” and replace it with almost anything that any person, of any race, has a serious reaction to, an emotional response that activates their nervous system.

My experiences that could be placed in the center-bubble without changing its meaning or accuracy even slightly include the activation of just about all of my PTSD triggers, of which there are fewer than there used to be, but still several big ones. It also includes things like the fire during my freshman year of college, where the house I was renting a room burned down. That experience did not become part of my PTSD, but I experienced these symptoms and effects, specifically related to the fire, for about a week afterwards.

These experiences and effects are in fact entirely normal when dealing with a traumatic event. It is only when they go on for too long, become a sustained pattern of living, or cause extreme distress that goes on for a long time that PTSD becomes part of the conversation.

If you experience something serious and traumatic — like a fire — having intrusive memories of it, difficulty sleeping, feelings of depression, anger, and grief, and everything else on this chart is entirely normal.

After explaining a bit more what he specifically experienced from this chart in the areas by the words intrusion, mood, arousal, and avoidance, he mentions cognition. This is the process of intellectually processing the traumatic experience, examining the parts of one’s life that it has caused you to question and seeing if changes are necessary in one’s beliefs about oneself or the world.

Lastly, he gives us his “process of coping and healing.” This includes support from friends, breathing, externalizing the negative messages, reminding himself of the value of his blackness, and writing it out.

He reached out to friends, centered himself in the moment, externalized the negative messages (as opposed to internalizing them), consciously counter-acted the negative messages, and did some writing.

I Get It Now

I finally, finally, finally understand what the anti-racist warriors like Rao, her partner Regina Jackson, Robin DiAngelo, and the hundreds (probably thousands) of academics on twitter who specialize in these issues mean when they talk about the need to do “emotional labor” to heal from “race-based trauma” and explicate how grave and serious a burden that this work entails, one for which white people should be offering compensation, thanks, and sharing the wisdom of the work involved with their students:

I really and truly did not get it before. Now I do.

What they mean when they talk about these things is that life is unfair and sometimes people say mean things and hurt their feelings, which they then have to take some time and emotional energy and focus to direct towards their hurt feelings, to deal with being upset before returning to their lives.

The anti-racism movement’s goal, from this thread (which academics are adding to syllabi, so surely it represents a pinnacle of human wisdom): to create a life for each non-white person that is free from life being unfair or their experiencing hurt feelings and needing to cope!

Now I see that there really and truly is no way that their goals can ever be reached even for one hour of one day, and as such, they, and their utopian bullshit, can be dismissed without further consideration.

What a gift for a Sunday morning!