Not My Thing
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About This Book
In the spring of 1973, a teacher in a Lincoln, Nebraska classroom handed the author, then eight years old, a blue paper armband printed with a single letter, an S, for slave. The brown-eyed children wore brown bands marked M, for master, and ruled the room for the day. The next morning the roles reversed. No one in that classroom was Black. The teacher said the lesson was empathy. Not My Thing is the case against that lesson and the whole family of exercises bred from it.
The book lines up the eye-color demonstration, the privilege walk, the poverty simulation, the mock slave auction, the scared-straight tour, the Gestapo role-play with a real Jewish child cast as the villain, and the mandatory diversity seminar, and it shows that these rituals, whatever their politics, run on a single machine. A caste assigned by accident. An authority no one may refuse. Cruelty licensed from the front of the room. An audience for whom the humiliation is staged. A reversal at the bell that exposes the whole thing as a performance the authority could switch off. It is the method of the oppressor, and it trains submission to cruelty whatever cause it claims to serve.
Drawing on the documented record and on the research that returned to the famous experiments and found them wanting, the book presses three charges. A coercive method teaches its own lesson regardless of its goal. The empathy exercise often hardens the attitudes it sets out to soften, an injury caused by the treatment itself. And each of these rituals depends on the absence of the people it claims to be about, collapsing the moment one of them is in the room. The book is hard on the method and loyal to its goal, and it ends where it begins, with an eight-year-old's refusal to wear the band.
A Caste Made of Paper
Strip the eye-color exercise to its parts and the design shows. It assigns a rank by something the child cannot change, a band or an eye color or a card drawn at random. An adult holds an authority no child may refuse. The favored group is licensed to demean the rest, and an audience is gathered so the humiliation has somewhere to land. Then the roles flip or a bell rings, and the cruelty turns out to have been a performance all along, switched off on schedule. A real caste has no off switch. The lesson a child carries home is the shape of the thing, obedience to cruelty staged by a trusted adult, and it holds whatever slogan rides on top of it.
One Machine, Many Costumes
The armband was an early specimen of a method that grew into an industry. Its other forms are familiar once the pattern has a name: the privilege walk that turns advantage into a line on the floor, the poverty simulation, the mock auction staged in a grade-school room, the prison tour sold to frightened parents, the role-play that casts a Jewish child as the villain of the Holocaust, and the sensitivity seminar a working adult sits through to keep a paycheck. The politics of these exercises run in every direction. The mechanism under them stays the same, which is why a book about a left-coded classroom game and a right-coded loyalty drill can be one book.
Hard on the Method, Loyal to the Goal
The book keeps its aim on the mechanism, because the mechanism outlasts any single program or platform. It presses three charges. A coercive method teaches submission to cruelty no matter how worthy its cause. The empathy exercise often hardens the feelings it meant to soften, the way a treatment can leave a patient worse than it found him. And the whole genre depends on the absence of the people it claims to serve, since one of them in the room ends the pretense in a sentence. The goal behind these exercises is honorable, and the book says so plainly. What it refuses is the means, and the cure it reaches for is slower and quieter than one vivid afternoon, built on presence and testimony and the patient work of learning a life from the person who lived it.
Table of Contents
Front Matter: Copyright · Dedication · Epigraphs · Contents
Overture: Not My Thing
Part One: The Specimen
Chapter One. The Armbands
Chapter Two. April 5, 1968
Chapter Three. The Anatomy of the Machine
Part Two: The Family
Chapter Four. StarPower
Chapter Five. The Privilege Walk and the Tunnel
Chapter Six. The Auction
Part Three: The Law
Chapter Seven. The Pedagogy of the Oppressor
Chapter Eight. Iatrogenic Empathy
Chapter Nine. The Absence of the Subject
Part Four: The Industry
Chapter Ten. From Stunt to Standard
Chapter Eleven. The Rented Conscience
Part Five: The Science
Chapter Twelve. What the Evidence Says
Chapter Thirteen. The Collapse of the Dramatic Paradigm
Part Six: The Cure and the Refusal
Chapter Fourteen. The Vulnerable Days
Chapter Fifteen. What Works
Chapter Sixteen. Not My Thing
Coda: After the Armband
Appendix: Where to Start
End Matter: Acknowledgments · A Note on Method and Sources · Notes on Sources · List of Terms · Bibliography · Questions for Discussion · About the Author · Also by the Author
The Epigraphs
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
Robert H. Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943).
“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”
Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience” (1849).
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Frederick Douglass, “West India Emancipation” (1857).
A Note on the Free PDF
A book about coercion should make its own case easy to check, so the full text is free to read. The reading edition is a formatted PDF with embedded fonts and a page-numbered table of contents, two hundred thirty-five pages of US Letter, set for screen reading, home printing, or the archive. The complete book is here, front matter through bibliography. Download it, read it, and weigh the argument against the sources it names.
Dedication
For Janna Sweenie,
and for the ones who would not play, and paid for it.
Author Interview
Further Reading
Discrimination Day: How a Classroom Stunt Trained Children to Obey and Called It Empathy (Boles Blogs) · Texas Mud and Racism in The King and I (Boles Blogs) · The Rented Crowd: Nero's Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America (Boles Blogs) · Terms of Endearment: Driving Martin Jurow (Boles Blogs) · The Rented Crowd · About David Boles