Tom's Book Club: James Ellroy

Tom\'s Book Club: James Ellroy

LARB Quarterly, no. 39: Air

Megan Wachspress is an environmental lawyer living in Berkeley, California, where she earned a PhD in jurisprudence and social policy.

Megan Wachspress

AS I’VE WATCHED many Jewish people on college and university campuses react to others’ reactions to Hamas’s massacre on October 7 and Israel’s siege and bombardment of Gaza, I keep coming back to James Baldwin. Specifically, his <a href="https://faculty.gordonstate.edu/lsanders-senu/On%20Being%20White%20and%20Other%20Lies.pdf">short essay,</a> originally published in Essence, entitled “On Being White … and Other Lies,” and his 1967 New York Times <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-antisem.html">essay</a> “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” Baldwin’s claim in the former essay is stark and resonating: the Jewish community in the United States “came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here, in part, because they were not white,” but American Jews have “opted to become white” by embracing the subjugation of Black people. Whiteness is not a phenotype or ethnicity but a position, a status, a membership. Numerous immigrant groups, in Baldwin’s telling, have become white by assuming this status (his examples include the Irish and the Norwegians), but because Jews were not white in Europe, and were not even white in the United States for a time, they have “paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white.” To bowdlerize Baldwin’s point: Jews’ whiteness is contingent, perhaps uniquely so. 
 
Baldwin’s essays are rich and challenging texts that I am not equipped to fully unpack. But as an American Jew who spent a decade engaged in political activism on various university campuses, and as an employee of a large nonprofit that has largely embraced the anti-racism canon that emerged following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, I believe that they provide insight into the current struggle over claims of antisemitism in the academy and other “liberal” spaces. News coverage and social media posts have described broad pro-Palestinian feeling on US college campuses in the days following October 7, which has crystallized in various missives and marches. Many of these—according to media reports—took on the character of outright celebration of Hamas’s “victory,” with explicitly anti-Israeli statements made at a louder volume and among a wider swath of students and faculty than most campuses had seen before. This in turn prompted many professors and students to complain about an atmosphere of antisemitism on campus, with <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-10-29/antisemitism-college-campus-israel-hamas-palestine">many Jews claiming to feel unsafe</a> due to what they saw as a celebration of the murder of Jews (the dozens of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/26/israel-thai-nationals-hamas-hostages">Thai farmworkers</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/29/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-arab-bedouins.html">Bedouin</a> who were kidnapped and killed by Hamas being inconvenient for both sides of the narrative). 
 
Ironically, the claim that Jews on campus feel unsafe (physically or psychologically is never quite made clear) is being advanced at the same moment when the US government is deploying billions of dollars worth of weapons in an ostensible effort to maximize the physical safety of Israelis and making repeated statements intended to assuage the psychological suffering of American Jews. The response among many of those who oppose the Israeli state (Jewish and not) has been to ridicule these fears or to accuse those articulating them of playing the victim in order to gin up more support for the bombing of Gaza. 
 
What Baldwin helps me to see is that something complicated and unarticulated is happening in the campus protests. I think what many Jews on campus are in fact reacting to is the perception that, among white progressive, liberal, or left-wing students and professors, support for the Palestinian cause has become not just canonical but of high salience today. These white students and (largely junior) faculty have spent the last few years suffused in a particular anti-racism curriculum that, in its most popular incarnation within colleges and other liberal, elite institutions, takes a Manichean view of race and racism. As should be clear from the fact that I began with Baldwin, I could not disagree more with the politicians who caricature these DEI efforts as being aimed solely at emotionally browbeating white students and who are seeking, in response, to ban the teaching of history outright. But these critiques are also not entirely baseless: the currently dominant anti-racism curriculum does tend to produce a sense of guilt in white students as its primary affective response and, in some of its theoretically sloppier incarnations, seems aimed primarily at doing so. 
 
In this context, the Israel-Palestinian conflict represents an opportunity for tremendous psychological release. Yes, white Americans are implicated in the annihilation of Gaza through US military support for Israel, but they are not personally implicated in this instantiation of white-supremacist settler colonialism, as they are in US anti-Black racism, through privilege and microaggressions and national original sin. On this view, Jews in Palestine, by contrast, are the agents of (first British, now American) empire—they are whiteness concentrated. This ignores, of course, the actual ethnic and racial diversity (and intra-Jewish discrimination) of Israeli society, which is hugely important for understanding the original Zionist project and the history of Israel. But for these non-Jewish white students, Israel presents a way to condemn whiteness without implicating oneself, to support anti-racist ideology in a way that doesn’t lead to shame and self-abnegation. 
 
The sense of celebration some saw in the post–October 7 protests was not only originating from those who were personally—historically, familially—invested in freeing themselves and their loved ones from Israeli oppression, and who thus saw in Hamas’s attack the possibility of military victory. Muslim, Arab, and anti–Israeli-government Jewish groups have been fighting for Palestinian liberation for a long time; I heard the phrase “from the river to the sea” many times on campus before this month, and no doubt most of those speaking out about unprecedented antisemitism had too. It is, rather, the fact that the white Left on campus is now shouting it that makes some mostly if not exclusively white Jews on campus­—and in other places dominated, explicitly or otherwise, by a white Left—feel unsafe. 
 
This feeling is, I suspect, the unconscious recognition that American Jews’ contingent whiteness may be threatened if “the Jewish state” becomes a means by which other white people can disavow their own complicity in European colonialism. The relationship of leftist activists to their own whiteness is informing both the size and the tenor of the current wave of anti-Israeli campus protests, and inasmuch as this aspect forces into the open the lack of racial identification between white Americans and (Ashkenazi) American Jews, it threatens the success of assimilation and the accrual of white privilege for those American Jews. To put it another way: Many American Jews are not afraid of Hamas sympathizers in their dorms (though this may be what they claim to fear)—they are afraid of losing the status their parents and grandparents won in the diaspora, and the current anti-Israel protests suggest that that status may not be as secure as they had once thought. This fear is not irrational; losing the protection of whiteness is no small thing for people who may have grandparents or great-grandparents who survived the camps. But whiteness also, as Baldwin explained, comes at an enormous moral cost. 
 
Those decrying the “new antisemitism” in colleges and other progressive spaces are therefore not entirely wrong when they attempt to articulate the presence of something ugly in the current campus protests. But what they are sensing is the product of young people working through their own discomfort with whiteness, and it would be a mistake for Jews, in response, to double down on their own. The current wave of pro-Palestinian sentiment on college campuses has to be understood in the context of the last three years of US anti-racist organizing and discourse—and the claims of a “climate of fear” for Jews on campus as a reaction, however subconscious, to facing the perceived loss of racial privilege. 
 
That this fear reaction is especially intense in relation to flagging support for Israel is telling, since Israel presents, for many American Jews, a place where they can be white. What else can it mean for American Jews to support the existence of the state of Israel specifically as a guarantor of Jews’ safety, at the same time that they point to its vulnerability to military incursion and terrorism from its neighbors as justification for billions in American military subsidies? If the United States turned on “the Jewish people,” in what way would Israel—meant to be a hedge against discrimination or worse in the diaspora—offer safety? And why would so many people talk about an “unprecedented” wave of antisemitism in the US with so little, if any, acknowledgment that 11 American Jews were murdered in a Pittsburgh synagogue almost exactly five years ago? The psychological investment in US support for Israel among American Jews is, I think, a subconscious desire that Jews should be recognized as a people with a place, as one of the hyphenated communities Baldwin describes (the Irish-Americans, Norwegian-Americans, etc.), a people who have chosen the United States and thus whiteness. It is also, in a devastating historical irony, a desire to be folded into the ethnonationalist logic for which central European Jews were a “problem” in the first half of the 20th century, and to which the “solution” was annihilation. 
 
The conflation of whiteness and safety, among those writing op-eds and Twitter threads and emails and petitions seeking the protection of white institutions by demanding official condemnation of pro-Palestinian protests and vindication of Israeli military actions, may in this light appear as more understandable and deserving of some sympathy, but it is still a profound mistake. Not only is the effort to reaffirm one’s own whiteness an immoral choice, to use Baldwin’s framing, but it is also one that, I fear, will have long-lasting and ruinous consequences for the Jewish diaspora. What I hope is that liberal American Jews who now sense the contingency of their belonging, not among MAGA Republicans but within their own progressive communities, and who simultaneously are confronted with the monstrous actions of the Israeli state in Gaza, may see this as a watershed to break with ethnonationalism altogether. Perhaps in this “unprecedented” moment there lies an opportunity for American Jews to embrace a return to universalism as a fundamental Jewish principle and to relinquish, in the United States as in Palestine, the poisoned gift of whiteness. 
¤ 
 
<div class="styles_content__pSb5R styles_body__eu8Se">Featured image: <a href="https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003653100/">[Man with horse standing near the Dead Sea]</a>, ca. 1890–1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. <a href="https://www.loc.gov/">loc.gov</a>, CC0. Accessed November 27, 2023.</div>

The “New Antisemitism” and the Logic of Whiteness

Kate Manne is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, where she has been teaching since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Manne did her graduate work in philosophy at MIT, and works in moral, social, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of three books: <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/down-girl-9780190604981">Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny</a> (2017), <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/608442/entitled-by-kate-manne/">Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women</a> (2020), and <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/722318/unshrinking-by-kate-manne/">Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia,</a> which is forthcoming in January 2024. You can subscribe to her newsletter, <a href="https://katemanne.substack.com/">More to Hate,</a> for musings on misogyny, fatphobia, their intersection, and more.

Kate Manne

The aim of <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-philosophy-no-longer-smells-of-the-earth">this curated series of essays</a> is to address the question: why is philosophy important at times like these? For many, philosophy is a field of inquiry that remains so esoteric, narrow, and specialized that it has little or no relevance to the everyday world of “ordinary” people. Indeed, philosophers are often characterized as introverted, absent-minded thinkers who are obsessed with analytical minutiae, isolated in their academically cloistered spaces (offices and personal studies) in a monologue with dead white guys, and prone to encouraging dispassionate argumentation and one-upmanship. For the thinkers writing for this series, however, philosophy is a social enterprise that strives for clarity of thought and encourages the formation of multiple cultural spaces of philosophical practice that are welcoming to a diverse range of scholars and laypeople, rather than simply those who look alike and share the same hegemonic meta-philosophical assumptions about the field. 
¤ 
WHY IS PHILOSOPHY important in times like these? I must admit, my first reaction to this question was: Is it? Might philosophy—or, rather, philosophers—contribute to the culture in ways that are actually pernicious and actively harmful? 
 
Ours is a time of accelerating attacks on trans people as well as, increasingly, queer ones. Gender-affirming care for minors has been <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/politics/states-banned-medical-transitioning-for-transgender-youth-dg/index.html">banned in many states,</a> and some are even trying to restrict such care for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/health/transgender-adults-treatment-bans.html">adult trans and nonbinary people too.</a> As Montana representative <a href="https://www.zooeyzephyr.com/">Zooey Zephyr</a>—the first trans woman elected to the Montana legislature—put it, such states will have blood on their hands very soon, if they don’t already. Gender-affirming care is lifesaving care, given the <a href="https://www.hcplive.com/view/suicide-risk-reduces-73-transgender-nonbinary-youths-gender-affirming-care">very real risk of suicide</a> for trans children and adults who are denied it. (Zephyr was <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/04/26/1172158461/montana-gop-transgender-zooey-zephyr-punishment-banned-speaking-lgbtq">silenced and barred from doing her job</a> for her advocacy.) 
 
<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/30/politics/republicans-transgender-attacks-statehouse-haley-trump/index.html">Books are being banned; drag is being censored;</a> trans kids are being forcibly excluded from sports, despite ample evidence that <a href="https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/four-myths-about-trans-athletes-debunked">their participation is both fair and valuable.</a> Florida’s notorious 2022 <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28/1089221657/dont-say-gay-florida-desantis">“Don’t Say Gay”</a> law prevents young children from being taught about who they may become in an age-appropriate, non-shaming, positive manner. Trans people who simply want to pee in a bathroom outside their home are being subject to <a href="https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/transgender-teens-restricted-bathroom-access-sexual-assault/">policing and, in many cases, violence.</a> Trans people are disproportionately subject to violence much more broadly. The murders of trans women—particularly trans women of color—<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/transgender-women-deaths.html">represents a veritable epidemic.</a> And, of course, the fact that trans people are disproportionately poor, unemployed, exploited, and <a href="https://endhomelessness.org/resource/transgender-homeless-adults-unsheltered-homelessness-what-the-data-tell-us/">unhoused</a> is intimately related to the ongoing campaign against them. 
 
Against the backdrop of this campaign, some philosophers’ efforts to <a href="https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/05/30/kathleen-stock-trans-professor-views/">question the veracity of trans experience,</a> and to employ <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-abstract/7/3/399/166955/Cisgender-Commonsense-and-Philosophy-s-Transgender">high-handed and abstract ideas to invalidate their very existence,</a> is a particularly poor showing. As philosophers, we’ve long fancied ourselves above politics. In doing so, we show ourselves to be naive, perpetuating the worst political ideas our climate affords us with. For philosophy, like all humanistic intellectual enterprises, is inherently political: we either wield our politics, and our values, deliberately and thoughtfully, or unwittingly and harmfully. 
 
Other philosophers, including Christa Peterson and Robin Dembroff, have <a href="https://www.praile.com/post/kathleen-stock-obe">meticulously analyzed</a> and <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-020-01468-1">exposed the problems</a> with anti-trans philosophy. I find their arguments compelling. But the anti-trans philosophy they effectively dismantle will not be my focus in this piece. Speaking personally, I become the most hopeless and helpless when I speak in generalities and lose track of the enormous diversity in our discipline. And while some philosophers are doing harm on this front (and others), other philosophers are doing work that is generative, creative, and—what’s more—crucial to understanding the current crisis. 
 
I particularly have in mind here work by trans philosopher <a href="https://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/talia-mae-bettcher-professor">Talia Mae Bettcher.</a> Bettcher has contributed a <a href="https://philpapers.org/s/Talia%20Mae%20Bettcher">dynamic body of scholarship</a> that sheds light on the nature of anti-trans bigotry as well as trans experience. In <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4640081">one important paper,</a> Bettcher considers the case of Gwen Araujo, a 17-year-old trans girl brutally murdered by four young cis men, for the noncrime of simply being who she was and being desired by at least some of them. The men—Jason Cazares, Michael Magidson, Jaron Nabors, and José Merél—publicly and violently “outed” Araujo at a party. The subsequent revelation that Araujo was “really a man” (that is, she had a penis), together with the fact that two of the four men had previously had sexual contact with Araujo, appears to have precipitated their vicious attack on her. Araujo was beaten to death, her body unceremoniously buried in the Sierra wilderness, a four-hour drive away. The men stopped at McDonald’s upon their return from burying her battered body. 
 
And despite the heinous nature of their crimes, it was the four men who attracted sympathy from some sources. “If you find out the beautiful woman you’re with is really a man, it would make any man go crazy,” <a href="https://xtramagazine.com/power/cis-obsession-trans-genitals-246880">said one of their mothers.</a> “[Araujo] was not honest with them and had he [sic] been, none of this would have happened,” <a href="https://iowastatedaily.com/199265/opinion/columndouble-standard-in-reactions-to-rape/">wrote a student journalist,</a> Zach Calef. The young men had been provoked into the murder in a way that was “so deep, it’s almost primal,” <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7781181">according to one of their attorneys:</a> namely, “sexual fraud, deception, betrayal.” 
 
Bettcher brilliantly analyzes these events in terms of a <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01184.x">“natural attitude” regarding the metaphysics of sex</a>—crudely, men must be born with and have penises, and women must be born with and continue to lack them—which also imposes a false moral obligation on trans people not to violate this “natural” order. Trans people are viewed, according to the logic of transphobia, as “really a so and so, disguised as a such and such.” Trans women come in for particular scrutiny, given the prevalent social interest in preserving for privileged cis men a class of people—women—with whom they may have heteronormatively sanctioned sex and (biological) children. Trans women’s existence is thus an existential threat to the patriarchy. And detecting them becomes a priority, along with policing and <a href="https://www.everythingishorrible.net/p/i-dont-think-you-exist-often-means?utm_source=profile&amp;utm_medium=reader2">even eradication.</a> 
 
Meanwhile, as Bettcher argues, trans men are often rendered invisible—erased from the discourse and subject to forms of violence that are both subtle and distinctive. This shows up partly in the obsession, sadly evident in some philosophical quarters, with defining what a woman is. Trans men often barely figure in the transphobic imagination; trans nonbinary people are regarded as a nonstarter rather than as a threat to the theory that falsely accuses trans people of perpetuating gender stereotypes. 
 
For their own parts, trans girls and women are subject to a potent double bind: to be either an “evil deceiver” merely pretending to be a woman, or a “make-believer,” a deficient and laughable simulacrum of femininity. For, as Bettcher <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23254906">writes,</a> 
[t]he trans woman’s body is taken as intimately male. As such her vagina is seen as illegitimate, in part because it’s not the completion of the moral structure of her body. In this case, the trans woman has not only “misrepresented” the structure of her body, she has “misrepresented” the genitalia to which she’s entitled and which is the moral completion of that structure. 
The alternative—to listen to what people say and, when they sincerely identify as a certain gender, believe them—is anathema to this picture. As is a healthy sense that other people’s genitals are precisely none of our business. 
 
Bettcher’s analysis of transphobia in general and transmisogyny in particular jibes beautifully with <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/down-girl-9780190604981?cc=us&amp;lang=en&amp;">my own analysis of misogyny.</a> In my view, misogyny involves girls and women facing hatred and hostility that serves to police and enforce patriarchal norms and expectations. Such norms and expectations often falsely deem girls and women to be obligated to give feminine-coded goods and services to privileged men, including the sex, affection, respect, care, and emotional and reproductive labor to which these men are (again, falsely) deemed entitled. Connecting my views and Bettcher’s reveals transmisogyny to be a case in point, wherein trans girls and women are deemed in violation of their “obligation” to deliver unto cis straight men a world where their sexual attraction never lights upon a person with a penis or someone who cannot “give” them children. The flip side of the same coin is that cis girls and women are deemed not entitled to show a lack of interest in such a man for any reason but their being previously obligated to another. Nor are we allowed to deny such men “their” children—yet another false obligation increasingly enforced within <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/roe-v-wade-abortion-laws">the political hellscape</a> that is post-Roe America. 
 
These ideas show cis and trans women to be naturally in alliance—to in fact need one another, as we face, and thus might resist, these oppressive and ugly realities together. But of course misogyny has long specialized in disrupting women’s solidarity. 
 
Bettcher wrote in a moving blog post, <a href="https://dailynous.com/2018/05/30/tables-speak-existence-trans-philosophy-guest-talia-mae-bettcher/">“‘When Tables Speak’: On the Existence of Trans Philosophy,”</a> about the frustration of watching philosophers intervene ignorantly in the debate about trans experience, as if trans philosophers were not in the room, as if they were theorizing about the existence of mere tables. As Bettcher puts it, 
It’s one thing to spout views about the composition problem with both arrogance and ignorance. It happens. It’s annoying. But it’s quite another thing to do this when we’re talking about people—people who are in the room, people trying (and succeeding) to philosophize themselves. 
I worry that if we go on as we have before, we will end up with a discipline and even a world in which there will be fewer and fewer trans thinkers to learn from—because they are <a href="https://medium.com/@transphilosopher33/i-am-leaving-academic-philosophy-because-of-its-transphobia-problem-bc618aa55712">excluded from the discourse</a>, because they will cease to be able to speak out, and because they will literally be silenced. We, and they, deserve so much better. I write in the hopes that, at times like these, we may recognize the urgency of their contributions—of thinkers including not only Bettcher but also <a href="https://www.robindembroff.com/">Robin Dembroff</a>, <a href="https://www.dal.ca/faculty/arts/philosophy/FacultyandStaff/our-faculty/stephanie-kapusta.html">Stephanie Kapusta</a>, <a href="https://shonfaye.substack.com/">Shon Faye</a>, <a href="https://dashaunharrison.com/">Da’Shaun L. Harrison</a>, <a href="https://www.perryzurn.com/">Perry Zurn</a>, <a href="https://eminism.org/">Emi Koyama</a>, <a href="https://www.susanstryker.net/">Susan Stryker</a>, <a href="https://www.csun.edu/~hcphi002/">C. Jacob Hale</a>, <a href="https://www.quillrkukla.xyz/">Quill R Kukla</a>, <a href="https://philosophy.uoregon.edu/profile/amarvin/">Amy Marvin</a>, <a href="https://www.oberlin.edu/jade-schiff">Jade Schiff</a>, <a href="https://www.open.ac.uk/people/tc2973">Sophie Grace Chappell</a>, <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/6089/rach-cosker-rowland">Rach Cosker-Rowland</a>, <a href="https://rowanbell.me/">Rowan Bell</a>, <a href="https://www.krysmalcolmbelc.com/">Krys Malcolm Belc</a>, <a href="https://philosophy.cornell.edu/adriene-takaoka">Adriene Takaoka</a>, <a href="https://drveronicaivy.com/about/">Veronica Ivy</a>, <a href="https://www.juliaserano.com/">Julia Serano</a>, <a href="https://katelynburns.medium.com/">Katelyn Burns</a>, <a href="https://www.contrapoints.com/">Natalie Wynn</a>, <a href="https://wstarr.org/">Willow Starr</a>, <a href="https://www.paisleycurrah.com/">Paisley Currah</a>, <a href="https://www.florenceashley.com/">Florence Ashley</a>, <a href="https://tulsacc.academia.edu/DrAngelaJBlack">Angela Black</a>, <a href="https://philpeople.org/profiles/e-m-hernandez">E. M. Hernandez</a>, <a href="https://www.blakehereth.com/">Blake Hereth</a>, <a href="https://philosophy.stanford.edu/people/ray-briggs">Ray Briggs</a>, <a href="https://philpeople.org/profiles/b-r-george">B. R. George</a>, <a href="https://eliclare.com/">Eli Clare</a>, <a href="https://artsci.wustl.edu/faculty-staff/tamsin-kimoto">Tamsin Kimoto</a>, and <a href="https://www.transphilosophyproject.com/event/thinking-trans-trans-thinking-conference/">so many others</a>. Space is limited, as am I. So, go read them. 
¤ 
Featured image: Frances Hodgkins, <a href="https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/281883">Untitled (Textile design no. I)</a>, ca. 1925, England. Purchased 1998 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds. <a href="https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/">Te Papa</a> (1998-0006-5). Accessed November 30, 2023. Image has been cropped.

Trans Philosophy Matters

Rumaan Alam&nbsp;is the author of&nbsp;Rich and Pretty. His writing has appeared in&nbsp;The New York Times, Elle, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He studied at Oberlin College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Rumaan Alam

Leave the World Behind

Elena Sheppard is an MFA candidate in non-fiction writing at Columbia University. Her essays, reviews, and other writings have been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, and Elle among others. She is Cuban-American. You can follow her on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/eleshepp/?hl=en">@eleshepp</a>.

Elena Sheppard

THE CHARACTERS IN Rumaan Alam’s ominous new novel, Leave the World Behind, directly grapple with a series of important existential questions: 1. How do you behave in an emergency? 2. What kind of prejudices do you, liberal you, hold quietly in your heart? And 3. What do you do when you’re afraid? 
 
The novel’s six principal characters, all stuck together in a house due to an unknown national crisis, handle these questions in their own ways. Some, like Rose, a 13-year-old girl on vacation with her family, find themselves unexpectedly and innately prepared for hardship; they are resilient, even brave. Others, like Clay, Rose’s father, are forced to confront unpleasant truths: “He couldn’t bear admitting what sort of man he was when tested.” 
 
Leave the World Behind feels right in sync with 2020. If we have learned anything in this calamitous, unrelenting year, it is that catastrophe can be slow to unravel and unexpected when it does. And even when a calamity unfolds, there are things that still must be attended to, like eating, sleeping, scratching an itch. “Business as usual, the business of being alive.” 
 
The story begins with Amanda and Clay, “middle-class people,” along with their two children Archie and Rose, driving from Brooklyn to the Hamptons for a summer getaway. They’ve rented a house for a week, the online description of which calls it a place to “leave the world behind.” The vacation affords them, along with the perks of relaxation and togetherness, the opportunity to pretend this luxurious life in this expensive house is their own. “[T]hey could pantomime ownership for a week.” 
 
That illusion is quickly shattered when the home’s rightful owners, G. H. and Ruth Washington, show up late one night begging pardon but asking to be let in. “Something happened” in the city, “a blackout” they think; but the scale of it immediately feels far bigger than that — the internet is down everywhere, and before their phones crashed Amanda received a push-alert saying the blackout was affecting the entire East Coast. “This is our house,” G. H. tells Amanda and Clay, “We wanted to be in our house. Safe. While we figured out what’s going on out there.” 
 
This, Alam’s third novel, takes place in the early days of this Armageddon-type event’s unfurling. And while the characters of the novel are geographically removed from whatever is happening, which may have spared their lives, they are forced to directly confront different challenges and dynamics. 
 
Before the Washingtons’ arrival at the house, Leave the World Behind embodies that languid summer space where minutes move like molasses but before you know it it’s happy hour. After the arrival of G. H. and Ruth, time seems to slow even further but in the way it does in an emergency; seconds feel like minutes. “That day’s morning seemed distant.” 
 
In addition, aside from the inherent awkwardness of homeowner and renter suddenly existing together under the same roof, Leave the World Behind tackles head-on some of the most pervasive social complexities of modern American life: class and race. It is at once a page-turner and a lyrical social commentary. G. H. and Ruth are Black, wealthy, in their 60s; Clay and Amanda are white, middle class, in their 40s. The fact that G. H. and Ruth are Black surfaces latent prejudices from their white renters. “The place was comfortable but sufficiently anonymous that she had not bothered to try to picture its owners,” Amanda reflects on the home and the people who own it. “[A]nd now, seeing them, she knew that if she had bothered to picture them, her picture would have been incorrect. This didn’t seem to her like the sort of house where black people lived. But what did she mean by that?” Later on adding, “[T]hose people didn’t look like the sort to own such a beautiful house. They might, though, clean it.” 
 
There is also a performance of non-racism that happens among the characters and on the page. After a consideration of whether or not to let G. H. and Ruth into the house, the omniscient narrator says of Amanda and Clay, “They let those people in because they were black. It was a way of acknowledging they didn’t believe all black people were criminals.” As Clay ruminates, “Morality was vanity, in the end.” 
 
These racial complexities are not new territory for Alam, whose previous novel, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/self-centered-or-savior-transracial-adoption-in-that-kind-of-mother/">That Kind of Mother</a>, delved into the dynamic of a white mother and a Black nanny she hires to take care of her son. Alam seems intent on exploding racism and its complexities via the analysis of very specific relationships and dynamics. 
 
While the four adult characters in Leave the World Behind try and navigate their dynamics within the house, they also are trying to figure out what is going on in the world. “It could be fallout. It could be terrorism. It could be a bomb,” Ruth speculates about what caused the blackout. But the point being underscored seems to be that it doesn’t matter what caused it; it only matters how they cope. 
 
Alam’s novel feels far more concerned with questions of character, prejudice, and morality than it does with plot. His book seems to be built on a thesis of exploring what disaster does to a person, and at times, the characters feel like vehicles for that thesis rather than characters in their own right. There is also coldness present that matches the sterility of the air-conditioned vacation home. These characters are undergoing an Armageddon of sorts — military jets soar overhead, flamingos come out of nowhere to play in the pool, thousands of deer flood the yard —&nbsp;but there is a feeling of watching these scenes from a distance. It is as if G. H., Ruth, Clay, and Amanda are trapped in a dystopian snow globe, and as we read, we are merely watching them shake, not experiencing it by their sides. Considering how visual the book is though, it is no surprise that it has already been optioned to be a <a href="https://deadline.com/2020/07/netflix-julia-roberts-denzel-washington-sam-esmail-leave-the-world-behind-auction-rumaan-alam-novel-1202989464/">Netflix movie</a> starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. The story feels ripe to make that jump. 
 
There is a pervasive sense that the characters are trapped in a tableau, which in part could be a commentary on their luxurious backdrop, the sly way this cocooned vacation home starts to feel suffocatingly isolated. Early in the novel a passivity settles over the group, and while that too could be because they are in a comfortable space, it is never satisfactorily examined. At times it even raises questions about whether or not this doomsday scenario is truly unfolding, though we get confirmation through the omniscient narrator that something terrible is indeed happening in the world outside the house: “The next day, or the day after that, certainly the day following that one, some residents of the uppermost apartments in Manhattan would fall into the delirium that presaged their eventual dehydration.” Those moments of zoom-out did not quiet this reader’s urge for the characters to venture forth and see the changed world for themselves. Instead, they pour more drinks, they go for a swim, they bake a cake. What else is there to do when the world is in danger but you’re safe and sound? 
 
Leave the World Behind is an interesting type of apocalypse examination because it focuses on what happens to those removed from the action. Rather than fully examining the ramifications of this strange new world, it looks at the scars from the old world — race, class — that must be confronted in order for these characters to survive in the new. There is a reality that when things fall apart, we want to know why, but this book puts forth the suggestion that the why is irrelevant. What is relevant includes the tiny ways you can reclaim your humanity, even as the gloom of the world presses on your door. Leaving the world behind is an illusion, just like a vacation is an illusion. Reality will catch up, and Alam’s novel examines what people do differently when it does. 
¤ 
<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/elena-sheppard/">Elena Sheppard’s writing has appeared in&nbsp;The New Yorker,&nbsp;The New York Times, and&nbsp;Vogue&nbsp;among numerous other publications. She is an MFA candidate in nonfiction writing at Columbia University.</a>

Rumaan Alam’s “Leave the World Behind” Examines What Happens When You Can’t

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, one of the college’s highest honors. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019–20 academic year). Yancy is the author, editor, and co-editor of over 20 books. His latest book is entitled Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (2023). At Academic Influence, he is cited as one of the top 10 influential philosophers in the decade 2010–20, based upon the number of citations and web presence. He has also published over 200 combined scholarly articles, chapters, and interviews that have appeared in professional journals, in books, and at various news sites. He is well known for his influential essays and interviews in the New York Times philosophy column The Stone and at the progressive nonprofit news organization Truthout. He is also series editor of Philosophy of Race at Lexington Books.

George Yancy

WHEN I DISCOVERED the field of philosophy at roughly the age of 17, I was seduced by its abstraction from—or its abstraction away from, as the late philosopher Charles W. Mills would put it—the world of nonideal theory; of harmful immigration policy; of pain and suffering; of racism, anti-Blackness, sexism, femicide, classism, genocide, oppression, poverty, xenophobia, transphobia, white domination, ableist normativity. I’m sure that this is partly why I fell in love with Plato, especially his theory of Forms, which holds that ordinary physical objects are mere appearances—images, shadows—that don’t provide us with true knowledge but with opinion only. It was the immutability of the Forms that transfixed my attention, not the contingent suffering of Plato’s teacher, Socrates, condemned to death by drinking hemlock for being a gadfly. The implication was that, as a philosopher, I had to transcend the messiness of empirical reality, had to stay focused on and seek out capital-R Reality through conceptual abstraction. 
 
This assumption was indicative of mainstream philosophy as I learned it as an undergraduate philosophy major in the early 1980s. My philosophy professors, for the most part, were mainly engaged in what felt like disembodied abstraction and conceptual minutiae. I recall that there was one philosopher who made it clear to me that he didn’t believe the stuff he taught in philosophy of religion but simply liked to argue. In the classroom, I witnessed what seemed to be a fetishization of argumentation, not to mention philosophical hubris. The objective was to escape, through pure intellection, the cave of ignorance that Plato allegorized as our unfortunate human condition. 
 
So, I was struggling there to see beyond what was before me, trying to extricate myself from what were deemed mere shadows, simulacra. It was only later that I came to realize that practicing philosophy in this vein isn’t about philosophy tout court but rather about a particular understanding of philosophy, a construction that refuses to see the ugly face of human suffering and seems incapable of doing—or unwilling to do—anything to eradicate that suffering. The questions posed, and the answers given, stem from what Mills, in his 1994 essay “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-American Experience,” calls a “perk of social privilege.” 
 
Critiquing a narrow understanding of theory in her provocative 1984 essay <a href="https://openspaceofdemocracy.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/adrienne-rich-notes-toward-a-politics-of-location.pdf">“Notes Toward a Politics of Location,”</a> Adrienne Rich writes that “theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn’t smell of the earth, it isn’t good for the earth.” The relevance of Rich’s point regarding how theory can lose the smell of the earth speaks to how philosophical reflection can function as a form of mere spectatorship (theōros), where there is no investment in the world other than to view it at a distance. In this context, I had become a young philosopher who lost his sense of smell, his sense of the mundane, the quotidian muck and mire of human existence. When I was a graduate student at Yale, I met philosopher Cornel West for the first time, not long after he was arrested and jailed for protesting the university’s investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. His actions spoke to what it means to be true to Socratic parrhesia (courageous speech) and how we mustn’t avoid what he calls the <a href="https://brotherwisedispatch.blogspot.com/2017/04/prophetic-fragments-existential-blues.html">“raw funky stinky stuff of life.”</a> 
 
In this regard, it isn’t lost on me that, at this moment in history, roughly 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children were brutally killed by Hamas on October 7, and that, since that tragic day, over 10,000 Palestinians, including over 4,000 children, have been brutally killed by Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza. That is the stuff that my early introduction to philosophy didn’t prepare me for. There were discussions of death but not of severed body parts, deep lamentation, the unimaginable grieving for brutalized children. When I was an undergraduate, ensconced within the pristine halls where philosophers pontificated about truth, reality, beauty, substance, justice, ethics, the good life, and the meaning of meaning, the whiteness and maleness of philosophy were hypervisible, and the anti-Blackness held by many of the West’s prominent thinkers, including Hume, Kant, and Hegel, was sidestepped or deemed irrelevant. The painful sounds of a George Floyd calling for his mama, the reality that he was knelt on for over nine minutes by the white police officer Derek Chauvin, would not have been discussed with philosophical vigor given the meta-philosophical policing of professional journals, college curricula, and academic colloquia, the places where “real” philosophy takes place. 
 
These days, these trying times, these moments of existential ruin, where we are 90 seconds to midnight, which is the closest we have ever been to global catastrophe, I find myself less and less moved by Auguste Rodin’s bronze sculpture of The Thinker. As a philosopher, I find myself immersed instead in Edvard Munch’s The Scream and, as a Black philosopher, located in the midst of what Christina Sharpe calls <a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a43012829/christina-sharpe-in-the-wake/">the wake,</a> the horrid afterlife of slavery. Despite my bona fides as a professionally trained philosopher, this identity in no way keeps me safe from being racially profiled or prevents me from being shot by a police officer who mistakes my cell phone for a weapon. That prospective horror—and so much more—makes up the funk, the harsh reality, that philosophy must face, must engage with, must not avoid by abstracting from the smell of the earth. 
 
The decision to curate this special series on philosophy’s importance at times like these was partly motivated by my own practice and understanding of the imperative to do philosophy as a mode of public-facing work. I wanted to demonstrate just how important and relevant specific conceptions of philosophy (implicit and explicit), and specific praxes of philosophers, can be in times of deep social, political, and existential trauma. The six philosophers gathered for this series celebrate what philosophy is capable of. Each is invested in philosophical plurality, which doesn’t mean that anything goes or that all views are equally well-thought-out or critically valid. These thinkers have no pretensions of being able to perform what Donna Haraway refers to as “the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.” Each embodied philosophical voice is deeply situated, invested not in navel-gazing but in bearing witness to other embodied voices that have been marginalized and deemed nugatory. 
 
I have curated this special series because I see philosophy as asking of us nothing less than to face the reality of the world and of who we are with as much honesty as we can manage. It asks us to grieve that world, and to grieve our own mistakes within that world, and yet also to be moved by the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love to transform that world for the better. Asking for modes of change that involve the mutual flourishing of all human beings is, as sad as it may sound, an act of deep risk-taking; it can be dangerous. My public-facing philosophical practice has made me the target of death threats, racist projections, and vicious name-calling. I was even placed on the infamous <a href="https://www.professorwatchlist.org/search">Professor Watchlist</a> for writing <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/dear-white-america/?_r=0">a letter of love to white people.</a> In these times of narrow ideological allegiances and goose-stepping conformity, philosophers who ask “why?” as a challenge to the status quo are asking an unsafe question. And that fact, more than anything else, shows us why we need philosophy in times like these. 
 
In this special series, I am honored to share this space with philosophers who understand, with clarity and urgency, the role that philosophy must play in transforming the world, in helping to push us closer to the not yet—the manifestation of worldwide justice and the recognition of the unquestionable humanity of all peoples. Coming out tomorrow are essays by Jay L. Garfield and Vanessa Wills. <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-apology-for-philosophy">Garfield draws from a panoply of philosophical voices and traditions, arguing for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary ways of seeing and doing philosophy.</a> While stressing philosophy’s ability to address pressing questions about climate change and structural racism, capitalism and colonialism, he also argues for the capacity of philosophy to generate beauty in our lives. <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/philosophy-in-times-like-these">For her part, Wills engages several issues in what increasingly feels like our inevitable march toward a dying planet: the forcible displacement of human beings, mass imprisonment, book banning, and COVID-19 denialism.</a> Both essays speak to the deep pertinence of philosophy conceived as a forceful intervention in the world, as opposed to an arcane practice performed in the confines of a stove-heated room (à la Descartes). 
 
Next Monday, December 4, essays by Kate Manne and Todd May will be published. And then, on Monday, December 11, two final essays, by Elizabeth Brake and Lori Gallegos, will appear. With clarity of thought and a refusal to think in philosophical lockstep, these six philosophers “talk back” (as bell hooks would say) to the profession of philosophy, to its hermetic proclivities, its pretensions of political neutrality, its silencing of voices that don’t reflect the interests of cishet white men, its refusal to embrace the smell of the earth. 
¤ 
Featured image: Robert Delaunay. <a href="https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/62309">Rythme/3.</a><a href="https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/62309">,</a> 1938. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Bequest of Judge Julius Isaacs, New York, 1983. <a href="https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/">tepapa.govt.nz</a>, CC0. Accessed November 3, 2023. Images has been cropped.

When Philosophy No Longer Smells of the Earth

Georg (György) Lukács (1885–1971) was a literary theorist and philosopher who is widely viewed as one of the founders of “Western Marxism” and as a forerunner of 20th-century critical theory. Lukács is best known for his Theory of the Novel (1916) and History and Class Consciousness (1923).

Georg Lukács

History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics

Mitchell Cohen is emeritus co-editor of Dissent magazine and a professor of political science at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Among his books are The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart (2017) and The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics, and a Hidden God (2016), both published by Princeton University Press.

Mitchell Cohen

Georg Lukács’s Two Natures: The Centenary of “History and Class Consciousness”

<h4>Jessica Pishko graduated with a JD from Harvard Law School and received an MFA from Columbia University. She writes frequently on incarceration and the justice system.</h4>

Jessica Pishko

Five Minutes with Bryan Stevenson

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin's Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his website</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.

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