Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
No, I do not agree with all of the speech. That is why Barack Obama was not my first choice in the primary. I discovered my “Obamaholism” (as the Field Negro puts it) after voting for him. But that speech is presidential.
2.
One of the things the Obama speech does well is to stand up to bullying mischaracterizations without falling into the traps of counterattack and defense. I have made more speeches like that at work over the past few years than I can count, although I have only recently begun to make them on my own behalf.
I am still studying bullying, a new and fascinating research lens which sheds a great deal of light on events present and past. For example, I went to Reeducation to learn how to counter bullying and its effects. I did not identify bullying as such at that time. I did not know how. I called it “poor logic.” “I have recurrent problems with a certain kind of very illogical person,” said I.
Reeducation was bullying, but taught that this was normal. That is why I froze in horror. Everything I had always found abnormal was announced to be normal, and the world turned upside down.
Then I learned about abusive relationships by getting into one. This was extremely educational. After that I started noticing that the ongoing problems in one of my departments had dynamics resembling those of my former relationship. Last week someone mentioned the word “bullying” to me so I set myself the task of investigating and identifying specific strategies of bullying, so that they can be named at the moment they occur.
It is laughably simple to see and name these once you know how. That is to say, it is laughably simple compared to the task of interpreting a situation without this awareness. For all the hours we have spent trying to understand what is going on, wondering what we might have done wrong, not quite comprehending why we are so tired and disheartened in the evening, and none of us ever, once, said we are being bullied! But it is laughably simple to identify bullying once you get a handle on it.
3.
This blog was started as an anti-Reeduation, anti-university, pro-integrity blog. I kept citing sages like Gracian on integrity, a word pointing not only to honesty, but also to wholeness. I think that bullying is fundamentally an attack on integrity, and that the most fundamental strategy of bullying is to attack integrity.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Bullying attacks strength however it finds it, and integrity is an aspect of personal strength, so it attacks that.
I read yesterday …I think it was linked to a site you linked to on bullied academics … that one of the most common causes of professional misconduct (such as doctors of various sorts having liaisons with their patients) is linked to the middle aged male who has lost his own integrity due to professional ambition. So his personal development and satisfaction in life have all been put on hold in order to assure his career success, and now that he has lost his essential self, and realises that it is too late to get it back, he starts to take ravenous bites out of other people, not caring too much about the costs.
Strength, yes. And on the ravenous bites and reasons for it, that’s incisive!
I spent some time today with my nephew, and one of the topics of conversation was my father, his grandfather, and his behavior. We didn’t call it bullying, but that is what it is, and why we have almost no contact with him any more.
Integrity–I will look for a great essay by Nadine Gordimer about that.
Integrity–I will look for a great essay by Nadine Gordimer about that.
I would like to see that essay!
This may be off-topic, but I find that one of the things that sets me very much off kilter in my work and relationships is promises made, or just possibilities discussed, that I take seriously, and then they vanish. Not only do they vanish, but if I bring up a point such as “But I thought the plan was to…,” the response is that I must have been mistaken to believe that this was the case, even though a promise had been made, or I’m simply ignored. This doens’t just happen to me but to a lot of others in my workplace, too, and I cannot help but notice that those affected are primarily women. I digress, I know. I know that this may not be a hallmark of bullying, but it’s destabilizing and seems prevalent.
The essay whose title I can’t remember is in her collection The Essential Gesture (1988). Here’s a link to her Nobel acceptance speech, where she says at the end more or less what she elaborates in the essay:
http://www.sikhspectrum.com/112002/nadine_speech.htm
Gracias Joanna for the location of the essay. I knew the remarks in the Nobel speech but didn’t know there was an elaboration. I like the way she speaks of integrities (plural) as activities – writing as an integrity, other activities as other integrities.
A.F. I think that *is* a hallmark of bullying. This is one of the main ways I have always gotten jerked around in this particular job, an had a lot of my time wasted. Your comment is very illuminating, to me at least!
A.F.: yes, yes, yes. You said it perfectly. Like we are the dummies for having proceded along the lines of plans made together or promises made. I have sometimes left meetings and wondered if I am really on the same planet as my colleagues because of this.
Like we are dummies, yes. It is so ridiculous. And the actually smart people / the ones who realize they’re at work, not in some sort of personal fief, don’t do this.
Meanwhile, on Obama, here’s Brave New Films criticizing the attacks on Obama from Fox News, which are breathtaking. Talk about self-serving spin … and utter irrationality … !