Modern Tribalism After All These Years

Two years before I was born the US Congress passed the Civil Rights act of 1964. An aggressive move to end what was, in the states of the old Confederacy, an American Apartheid, it represents the high point of American unity. Ever since we’ve been engaged in an ugly divorce from each other: blacks from whites, Hispanics from non-Hispanics, women from men, the religious from the agnostic, and so on.

Today I’m listening to Tori Amos and Silent All These Years comes up. Of all of Tori’s compositions it speaks to me the most. It speaks to me nearly every time I write. It especially speaks to me on the kind of material that makes up this blog. The second part of the chorus that end in the title, “Hey but I don’t care/Cause sometimes/I said sometimes/I hear my voice/And it’s been here/Silent All These Years”, are what writing is. Any writer who is growing and learning the craft will hear out of their words every now and then their voice and every time they hear it, it will be as if it was silent until that moment.

Because if you ever hear your voice in all you write and it sings through in every word you will have become one with the Tao and I do not believe there is a way to do that short of death.

But Tori’s words aren’t what I really want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is why, to many people, I’m not allowed to be inspired by them. To many Tori is a feminist artist and for a man to lay any claim to a woman’s expression of being silenced is ridiculous at best. This regardless of what Tori has said about the song or her intention. The tribe has claimed her and the rest of us are alone.

For a time nearly any book recognizably by a black person was shelved in the African-American section of Barnes & Noble. A Thomas Sowell book on economics andBlack Boy by Richard Wright were reduced to equivalence by tribe. Eminem couldn’t be a rapper and In Living Color couldn’t be a rock band because that was for blacks and whites respectively.

Modern tribalism is nothing more than a way to dis-empower us from two ends. Not only does it steal the power to be inspired by those not like us but it steal our power to inspire those not like us. Instead it forces us to engage the power of inspiration only through approved sub-group role models. For straight, white males it might seem empowering as they have the broadest visibility across our culture. However, that is only true if empowering means the least restricted. It is most damaging to the poor, non-whites whose circle of inspiration is drawn with curtains of dependency and a peephole into paradise that is an opiate Marx couldn’t have even conjured in his nightmares.

More importantly, modern tribalism encourages us to live our lives on the terms of the approved spokesmen for our group and not our own terms.

Embrace what you will for inspiration and solace. Don’t let the fact it was written by someone with a different eye shape or fiddly bit stop you. Sing Maybe I’m Amazed for whoever you damned well like with the lyrics intact. Your inspiration is yours alone and your voice, although silent to you, might be heard by the person you least suspect when you are true to which speaks to you.

It might even inspire her to hear her own voice.