In exchanges with friends and family and alleged students, I often find it challenging to get folks to reflect harder before speaking as if “the left” or “maga” or “the right” or “the media” are a person doing things. It is not possible to rightly quote an abstraction, but it is catastrophically easy to attribute words and motives and actions to one and then, like magic, imagine that a real and living someone said something that they did not in fact say. It seems to me that, at our healthiest, we take it one person at a time, getting really specific over who said and did what and when, and thereby avoid succumbing to hot generalization in our imaginings and our speech. Unexamined generalization generates heat without light. Generalization is fascism’s oxygen supply. Specificity cuts it off. […]
…most Americans and most human beings can distinguish between fear and love and behave beautifully. It starts, I think, with feeling and seeing and speaking and acting with precision and specificity, with wanting to know what’s true. Be specific. We have work to do.