So I found out about this woman on twitter. I think twitter is generally dangerous as a platform specifically because it only supports ‘bites’ of the issue by limiting what you can say to a few sentences per tweet. When I say I think it’s dangerous, I should probably qualify that I think it’s dangerous to take what is said on twitter as a fair accounting of anything. Twitter is fine as a launch pad to look deeper into a subject, but if I read someone’s hot take and decide that’s enough information for me to make a sound judgment, I’m fooling myself. So I did what I usually try to do, and looked up the original interview and listened to what she had to say.

Something she said was a catalyst for me to sort through some thoughts on a ‘white-centric’ view of history.

 Dr Khilanani’s Interview The woman in question is Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a forensic psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and she had made some very serious comments in a forum at Yale. There was a lot of blowback on her, and to try to get to the bottom of what she was trying to say, Marc Lamont Hill interviewed her.  

MLH: Are white people psychopathic?

DAK: I think so, yeah. The level of lying that has started since colonialism- we’re just used to it.

MLH: What kind of lies?

DAK: Every time you steal a country, you loot, you say you’ve discovered something; this level of lies is actually a part of history. We don’t say we killed all these people, we got rid of all the Native Americans. We say we discovered America. You don’t talk about the level of death, you don’t talk about the level of what actually occurred. You wipe the slate clean, you sanitize the violence.

This level of ‘discovery’ is everywhere; you’ve discovered vegetarianism, you’ve discovered yoga, yet it’s actually stolen. 

For full context, the entire interview is here, but I don’t believe this snippet misrepresents her at all.

[Note for myself: Psychopathy (says Wikipedia) is a personality disorder characterized by persistent anti-social behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits.]

The Whitewashing of History My response would have to be: these facts are neither ‘wiped’ nor ‘sanitized’. They are well-known about our history. We are, in fact, taught about them in school from the time we’re small. Claiming that the “slate has been wiped clean and the violence sanitized” is false. One could of course make the claim that we don’t talk about them enough, but what constitutes “enough” is a subjective claim. Her claim of not talking, at all, about the negative of our history is demonstrably false.

Discovery instead of Robbery Then there is the fact that she ties our use of the word discovery to what she sees as pathological lies we tell ourselves about history.

I’m also mystified at her understanding of the word ‘discovery’. Discovery means to uncover something, whether physically or metaphorically. Saying Columbus discovered America is only saying it was uncovered …. to him, and by extension, to Europeans. People of the west aren’t saying they found an uninhabited land or created it. When they say Columbus discovered America, they are saying that at that point, the new world was uncovered to them.

 But to be fair, I think the main argument is that what Europeans called discovery, was really just robbery. Of course, we did push the tribes that inhabited the land to the side and took it by force. But again, that isn’t being disputed.

When it comes to someone saying they discovered yoga, or vegetarianism, that is only saying that they personally found out about this, not that they invented it. How this is conflated into the previous false statement about whitewashed history is, as I said, mystifying to me. It looks to me like a basic misunderstanding of the word ‘discover’ is at the heart of tying it to the pathological lies of white people.

Stolen Granting the equivocation on the word discovery when robbery was really meant, to say that something like yoga has been ‘stolen’ is nearly incomprehensible. Yoga isn’t a ‘thing’, such that if X has it, Y can’t. White people engaging in yoga makes no difference whatsoever to Indian practitioners.

So are these things “actually stolen”? No, not actually.

While cultural appropriation was not mentioned per se, I would imagine that’s the justification for stating that something like yoga has been stolen. I don’t have much respect for the usual whining about cultural appropriation. On one hand, I grant that it can be a cheapening of culture. But even granting that, it just looks like whiny brats saying ‘That’s mine, and you can’t play with it!’.

I’m of Italian heritage, and I can complain all I want about deep-dish pizza not really being ‘pizza’, but ultimately, no one cares, and you just have to get on with your life. Rather than whining on about how Italian culture is being cheapened by deep-dish pizza, I take my friends to a real Neapolitan pizza place when I can, so they can experience the real thing. But if they prefer deep-dish “pizza”, that’s up to them. I know it’s not really pizza, and it’s not really Italian, but it’s also not really important. Italian culture isn’t harmed because some yahoos in Chicago made something vaguely related to pizza and called it the same thing.

 Euro-centric History The charge of history being ‘euro-centric’ is of course true…. But I grew up in the west. I expect each culture will focus on important elements of their own cultures and histories, just as we learn important elements of ours. It would be strange if we didn’t concentrate on our own history. A Californian who knew nothing about the history of California would be considered an ignoramus. So yes, we here in the west tend to spend most of our time on western history.

Reading Dead White Guys I read a lot of classic literature by, well, I guess…. white guys. I don’t think of what they have to say as being ‘by white guys’, I think of it as wisdom written by men. Undoubtedly this color-blindness would itself be labeled as white-privilege, but I don’t see any wisdom in that label. I read to gain insight and knowledge about the way humanity works in this world.

I expect true wisdom to be applicable to life, regardless of the author’s, or my, race. Perhaps people of color think in terms of what race the author of a work is in order to gauge the fitness or applicability of its wisdom to their life. I can only imagine that must be severely limiting. There may be times when voices of color would be necessary, but in general, I’m not reading anything with a racial lens.