Benjamin Joffe-Walt Responds to Misinterpretations

To The Editor:

My last letter seems to have been misunderstood, so I write again attempting to form a more step-by-step analysis, hopefully easier to discern....
Imagine a society in which violence exists. In this society violence operates in specific discernible social patterns, such as one group of people is generally found to be subjugated by violence of a particular nature. There are numerous examples in mainstream history: Lynch mobs, slave labor, mass genocide, sexual slavery, forced sterilization, etc.…all examples of violence that follows specific social patterns/systems in which one group is violently dominated and exploited. This imagining, I hope, has so far been ‘easy.’ Now try to imagine that these patterns and systems of violence enacted upon an oppressed group is almost always to and for the explicit benefit of another group of people, and very rarely the result of individual madness. Imagine that lynchings are one of many violent tools used in the maintenance of a system of racialized power, that there is a pattern of gendered sexual violence so intense that a penis becomes a tool and a weapon at the disposal of almost any man, even those nice guys who are ‘made sick’ by the possibility that they have the potential to do harm to another. Now the imagining begins to become a bit more difficult on a personal level…‘where do I fall into all of this?’ we must rightfully ask. Finally, then, try to imagine that I/you/we are indeed implicated in these systems of violence…that they by nature create structures of social power, in which certain groups enjoy the profound privilege of freedom from violence, while other groups by necessity experience violence in their daily lives.
When a person of color walks down the streets of Oberlin scared that a violent incident of racial profiling will occur, it is likely not a fear of the ‘crazed’ assault of one individual looking to attack just anyone. Rather, it is a fear of systemic violence embodied in white people, borne of a long history of racialized oppression and of aggressive/violent nativism in the face of ‘national crises’ that dates back centuries. When a women walks down the street scared at night it is likely not a fear of ‘the crazies that lurk about,’ but rather a fear of a pattern and system of gendered and sexualized violence that has shown its ugly face time and time again and makes it almost impossible to ‘just trust’ men. Such violence exists at Oberlin, and to deny its existence in patterns, within larger social systems, on a local, national and transnational level, is simply reactionary.
As a white man, I enjoy the privilege of being able to walk down the streets of Oberlin whistling along, anytime of day or night, without even the slightest fear of violent attack. I not only have the privilege of materially not having to deal with such violence, but the much deeper privilege of personally, politically and culturally not having to reflect on why such violence occurs, how I am implicated in it, how it benefits me. Time and again in our everyday lives, those of us with extreme material, political and cultural privilege make a critical decision of whether or not to be complicit in the face of violence we so clearly benefit from. I fear that the former is true of most of us, but if we are to choose to work to end these systems of violence and oppression, then we must first do so a personal level. As Audre Lorde so powerfully writes, “the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor that is planted deep within each of us...for the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
A fundamental part of oppression that ‘people of privilege’ have the power to change is silence. As a man I have the privilege, for example, of not having to worry about being violently attacked when in the process of becoming sexually involved with a female friend. Eighty percent of acts of sexual violence are committed by a perpetrator known to the survivor, and in that I have the pain of knowing that such a female friend does not enjoy the same privilege. I could choose to be silent in the face of such violence and continue to be complicit in its existence both in my relationships and in society in general, or I could choose to try my best to take responsibility for that privilege, seek out education on sexual consent, change the ways in which I sexually interact, and in general try to challenge ‘that piece of the oppressor planted deep within me.’
Last week, both Paul Wilczynski and Mark Simmons made such a choice when writing their respective articles. Rather than writing from the standpoint of men trying their best to take responsibility for the privilege they have, they chose to reproduce that privilege both directly through the use of sexist ideas and indirectly through their silence about the reality of sexual violence. In responding to an article I wrote encouraging men to engage and challenge the blatant material realities of sexual violence, both authors completely neglected to address the article’s substance… simply put, it is quite difficult for me to read responses that not only do not focus on the problem of sexual violence, but worse do not even acknowledge the problem’s existence. I asked myself, do they think sexual violence exists? How does it operate and why does it occur? Their arguments lead me to believe that they simply did not think about such questions (particularly the latter) in their response.
Why then, did these two men write letters in the first place? If they are seemingly uninterested in why sexual violence occurs, but rather seem more interested in attacking the minor legal arguments and language tangential to the substance of my letter, what does this indicate? My guess is that their response comes more out of defensiveness and feeling threatened as men with a significant amount of power they are either not willing or ready to recognize, than out of a genuine engagement with the possibility that they may be implicated in, indeed benefit from, systems of violent subjugation (such as rape and sexual violence). Public mainstream discourse on sexual violence is historically reflective of this type of correspondence. Not so long ago white public discourse on lynchings was similar when white anti-racist activists began to challenge institutional white supremacy that allowed and encouraged such violence to exist.
It is easy to critique someone’s ideas of legal process. It is even easier to take sentences they write and attack them outside of the larger political and material reality they are trying to reflect. Rather than take the easy route in public discussion, we must ask ourselves what is so difficult in an interrogation of why sexual violence exists, how it operates, and how we are involved in it. What is so threatening?
I encourage all of us, particularly those of us that have enjoyed the privileges afforded us through systems of violence, to begin dealing with the ways in which social difference (sexism, racism, heterosexism, classism, nationalism, etc.) affects our lives…the ways in which we benefit from it. Rather than feeling threatened by a challenge that involves critical personal interrogation, we must “reach down into that place of knowledge inside of [ourselves] and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.”

–Benjamin Joffe-Walt
College senior