6.21.16 - Wendy Bell

Camus said that he wrote The Stranger to tell the story of someone who was sent to jail for not crying at his mother's funeral. You can tell now how dated the idea is. To Camus, getting sent to prison was the most meaningful form of punishment society could dole out. These days, we've added a few extra nodes on the spectrum of public opprobrium. One could argue which of them is worse than another.

You could be Wendy Bell, for example, and lose your highly-public job in a highly-public spat for the sin of voicing an open secret.

Bell was a broadcaster on the Pittsburgh ABC affiliate until she was fired in the wake of controversy over this Facebook post.

There are a couple of things that immediately rub you the wrong way about this. First, she's wading into waters every modern white person knows are full of sharks. We all live in agreement that the easiest way for us to wash away the original sin of the inequity that founded and endures within American society is to admit fault and then run away from the debate. The people who don't heed this advice are either clueless enough to not be in a class worth defending or prejudiced enough to warrant banishment from the tribe. So the second impression you get is of the tackiness of her post.

After all, what are we supposed to learn from this? Her central insight is obvious enough to be banal, banal enough to mock her thinking she really had something to say. Especially knowing what it would do to her career.

Following her cardinal sin of eliciting "ew mom stop mom please just stop," you hit all of the other problems: the salvific delusion, the nagging and indulgent tone, the homily length of the post.

In whatever order and proportion, all of it conspired to do her in. A "firestorm" erupted upon the station — "We don't just say things like that around here!" — and she was canned. 

Now she's suing the station for discrimination, claiming that she wouldn't have been fired had her heartfelt post come from a black anchor. Clearly, Wendy Bell still hasn't gotten her head around the rudiments of the American racial tiptoe. Her sequel post is going to question why we all can't say the N word.

What's most interesting to me is how concretely we all recognize that the proper tones through which to discuss race is, first off only when absolutely necessary, and secondly, unerringly aspirational. We have no need, and therefore no patience, for statements of what is. What is bothers us and makes us think thoughts we're supposed to have eradicated. What we need more of are brushstrokes of a possible future, one in which our children's children don't even have impure thoughts to eradicate in the first place. We want to hear a rhetoric in which, because it's white people's fault that black people are an ossifying underclass, it is also entirely white people's waking that will lift them out of it.

When someone doesn't conform to this imaginary, even if it's just to deviate into calling attention to rampant violence in neighborhoods we live next to, we throw them into the stocks.

In our society that can't stop imprisoning black people, we have an entirely separate carceral state for white people who fall out of line. Had Camus written about someone punished for failing to be unrealistically aspirational, he could have had Merseault pilloried on Facebook and fired from his news anchor job.