Thoughts on "Lived Experience"

I am coming out of my blog-cave today. I have had a LOT of thoughts lately on a LOT of things. I imagine all zero of my readers have as well, since there is much to think about. I haven't had much opportunity to write in my journal (which is where I usually deposit my thoughts, since it's the only thing patient enough to listen to them), so I'm writing them all down here.

I am seeing more and more of this concept of, "You can't possibly know what it feels like to be ___." Usually it's directed toward a white person who can't possibly know what it is to be a POC, or oppressed, etc. Sometimes it's directed to a man who has no clue of what women go through day to day.

Whenever I hear this, I think, "Do people not read or write anymore?" I mean, isn't that one of the purposes, or at least one of the benefits, of good literature--to take a person out of themselves, out of their small "real world," and into the world, thoughts, and experiences of another? Movies and TV can do this too, but nothing can do the job like good literature, IMO.

No, I don't know what it's like to be the person who is telling me that I don't know, but I have an idea of what it's like to be a black man at the mercy of cruel white men, an escaped slave, a disenchanted housewife in 19th-century Russia, a Nigerian man living under British colonialism, a murderer, a monster, a hobbit in the Shire.

Reading literature, being taken into the mind and the experiences of someone not like myself, I cannot experience their lives for myself, but I can get a valuable sense of them, and that sense can help me to develop sympathy for, and even identification with, a lived experience wholly unlike my own.

When I read some of the current "anti-racist" books that are all the rage, I read anger and finger-pointing and division and "people who are not like me can never know my lived experience." Somehow I think that, if these authors were talented enough to write good fiction, they could win over a lot more people by drawing them into a world with plot, characterization, setting, conflict -- in other words, a story. Didactic screeds posing as research, or memoir, cannot do that.

And with a story, what draws us in is NOT a sense of, "Oh, it's exciting that I'm learning about someone else's world." Sure, that may be part of it, but what makes a story great is its ability to have us respond with, "Wow, this character's experience has recognizable truth to it. I can see myself in there. They may be completely different from me in their background, upbringing, ethnicity, SES, and even century, but I see something to which I can connect, and connect on a deep level. I see something that weaves me into that character, that character into me. I have learned to care about that character, that plight, that time, those people."

If you believe that one group of people can't possibly know what it's like to "be" another group of people, stop pointing the finger. Stop condescending. Show them. Take them along with you. Tell them a story. Not a teach-you-a-lesson memoir, but a story.

And listen when they tell their own stories. Because we all have stories, and those stories have more in common than you think.