The·Politics·of·Difference

I am being forged in the fire of life.  It burns.  I am tired.  It feels like I haven’t slept in years.  All I can do is work.  I’ve tried to love things and people outside of myself, but life keeps telling me to keep it internal.  I’ve tried to relax, but this makes me restless.  And so I do.  I make art with fabric and thread.  I take photos of parts of myself I’ve never seen because doing is all I have.  And because I hope I come out of life’s kiln shiny and glossy, molded with my own imperfect hands, pounded, shaped, and spun into a unique piece from the ceaseless rotation of the earth on its axis.  Colored brilliantly, as the sharp and angled pieces of my personality melt into a bold, glittering, reflective surface.

My friend Kate tells me that thinking of art and my work as all I have sounds negative, but this feels like the truth.  I’m not saying this to discount the amazing friendships I have and attempt (sometimes poorly) to maintain.  I am also not trying to minimize my work.  Deciding to pursue art, this project in specific, has profoundly changed the way I live and love.  I want my work and I need my work, more than I need food and sleep some days.  I am saying that I have found myself a calling.

I woke up Saturday morning, sad, weepy, and generally lethargic after spending an evening mourning the loss of a close friend, Robert Yegee.  His death was both sudden and unexpected.  I hadn’t realized how close we were.  It wasn’t that I took him for granted, in fact, it was quite the opposite.  I considered him a brother in many ways.  Our relationship contained lots of laughing and fun and joking around.  We lived our separate lives side by side.  Our friendship developed so naturally, I hardly noticed it at all.

Robert helped keep me sane.  On good days he’d greet me with a big hug.  He confirmed my suspicions about the power of vulnerability, telling me that vulnerability is a good thing.  He held me when I needed it.  He could always tell, and usually sat there waiting with outstretched arms.  He was always willing to engage me in conversation.  We watched this video after I had had a particularly bad day at work.  Cheered me up immediately.  There was a lot of discussion and analyzing.  We shared an honesty that I have never really found in a man – especially a young, white man.  I’m really proud to have been a friend of his.

I am on the best journey of my life right now.  Art is magic.  I am 100% positive of this.  Following my creative path has lead me to some of the most beautiful and challenging places.  I keep crying and then laughing when I remember Robert.  My happiness in knowing him eclipses my sadness in losing him.

I am in the middle of planning/executing my next body-based art project (aside from Confederate Articles), and I was discussing the ideas and the plan with Robert several weeks back.  He immediately thought of the book Justice and the Politics of Difference, a text that he’d read a few years prior.

Over the course of our friendship, he mentioned that once he tried to read a passage about having a black body in a class.  He said it didn’t go well, that he came away from the experience looking like a racist.  I heard this story several times, and always chuckled when he told it.  One day, as I spoke about Sartije Baartman and how her story, the story of her body, directly influences the way people interact with me, he decided to get the book out.  He read the passage, that had so obviously influenced him, to me.  It turned out to be a Franz Fanon quote:

My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day.  The Negro is ugly, the Negro is animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms; Momma, the nigger’s going to eat me up.

I sit down at the fire and I become aware of my uniform.  I had not seen it.  It is indeed ugly.  I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is?

The book sat on my floor, in front of my makeshift photo backdrop (a sheet from the thrift store) for a few days.  I finally managed to pick it up a few Sunday’s ago, before heading to the East Bay for a photo shoot with a coworker and new friend (I will hopefully be posting about this soon).

Robert suggested that I read Chapter 5 titled, The Scaling of Bodies and the Politics of Identity.  Again (as with Art and Fear), I wish I could type the whole chapter up.  I lapped up the text with excited intensity.  I appreciated the notes that Robert had written in the margins.  It was obvious that he had engaged with the text, and was using the author’s words to challenge his own views.

I found The Scaling of Bodies and the Politics of Identity to be an accurate description of the way mundane, person-to-person interactions have influenced and shaped my experiences as a woman of color just as much, (if not more than) laws, institutions, and larger systems of oppression.

From page 123:

Much of the oppressive experience of cultural imperialism occurs in mundane contexts of interaction – in the gestures, speech, tone of voice, movement, and reactions of others.  Pulses of attraction and aversion modulate all interactions, with specific consequences for experience of the body.  When the dominant culture defines some groups as different, as the Other, the members of those groups are imprisoned in their bodies.  Dominant discourse defines them in terms of bodily characteristics, and constructs those bodies as ugly, dirty, defiled, impure, contaminated, or sick.  Those who experience such an epidermalizing of their world (Slaughter, 1982), moreover, discover their status by means of the embodied behavior of others: in their gestures, a certain nervousness that they exhibit, their avoidance of eye contact, the distance they keep.

The author, Iris Marion Young, argues that the discouragement of overt forms of racism/homophobia/agism/ableism through punishment, both legally and in the socially, have caused discrimination to go “…underground, dwelling in everyday habits and cultural meanings of which people are for the most part unaware.”

She asserts that, “Our society enacts the oppression of cultural imperialism to a large degree through feelings and reactions, and in that respect oppression is beyond the reach of law and policy to remedy.”

For the sake of me believing that all written works deserve to be easily accessible,  I will painstakingly type up the last two parts of this chapter, which fall under the headings Moral Responsibility and Unintended Action and Justice and Cultural Revolution.

I have argued that oppression persists in our society partly through interactive habits, unconscious assumptions and stereotypes, and group related feelings of nervousness or aversion.  Group oppressions are enacted in this society not primarily in official laws and policies but in informal, often unnoticed and unreflective speech, bodily reactions to others, conventional practices of everyday interaction and evaluation, aesthetic judgements, and the jokes, images, and stereotypes pervading the mass media.

The oppression of cultural imperialism in our society partly involves defining some groups as Other, specially marked, located in their bodies.  Even when discursive reason no longer defines women or people of color as having a specific nature different from men or white people, affective and symbolic associations still tie these groups to a certain kind of body.  The presumption of unconscious fears and aversions also helps to account for the violence that victimize these groups, as well as the degree to which it is accepted by others.  I argued in Chapter 2 that this form of violence differs from other forms of group-related violence –for example, warfare or repressive violence–though these forms may be intertwined.  Warfare and repression have rational objectives: to defeat a formally defined enemy, or to prevent a subjugated group from challenging, weakening, or overturning authority structures.  The violence of rape, random beating, the harassment of threats, taunts, display of pictures and symbols, ans so on, is irrational in the sense that it is not explicitly instrumental to an end.  It is performed for its own sake, for sport of out of random frustration, and has as its object only the humiliation and degradation of its victims.  An account of racism, sexism, and homophobia that includes an understanding of the deep threats to identity that difference poses for many people helps account not only for such acts themselves, but for a social climate that makes them institutional possibilities.

Normative social philosophy and political theory rarely focus on such phenomena.  The dichotomy between reason and affectivity which structures modern normative philosophy here appears in what normative philosophy, and political theory take as the proper subjects of inquiry [What?].  Typically, political theory is about laws, policies, the large-scale distribution of social goods, countable quantities like votes and taxes; it is not about bodily reactions, comportments, and feelings.  To the extent that normative philosophy ignores these aspects of oppression enacted in practical consciousness and the unconscious, however, it contributes not only little to ending oppression, but also something to the silencing of the oppressed.  If contemporary oppression is enacted through a body aesthetic, through nervousness and avoidance motivated by threats to the basic security system, and through images and stereotypes that simultaneously feed such behavior, legitimate it, and ally the fears it expresses, then normative reflection on justice should included attention to such phenomena.

Many moral philosophers would find it odd to include gestures, informal remarks, judgements of ugliness, and feelings of discomfort under the rubric of issues of justice.  They might have difficulty regarding them as moral phenomena at all, that is, as phenomena appropriately subject to moral judgement.  For the dominant paradigm of moral theory tends to restrict the scope of moral judgement to deliberate action.  Implicitly or explicitly, many moral theorists direct their attention to intended or voluntary action, where the actor knows what he or she is doing and could have done otherwise.  One of the main aims of moral theory is to discover principles and maxims that justify action of form obligations.  Such and aim implicitly conceives moral life as conscious, deliberate, a rational weighing of alternatives.  Much moral theorizing is devoted to discussion of dilemmas and hard cases, where alternatives are explicit, and the question is which one to choose.  Within this paradigm it is often regarded as inappropriate to submit habits, feelings, or unconscious rations to normative judgment, because the subjects having them are not aware of their behavior, and thus have not intended or chosen it.

The implicit assumption that only intentional actions should be subject to moral or political judgment perhaps underlies a response members of oppressed groups often encounter when the express anger or indignation at another person’s ordinary unthinking behavior.  A woman complains of a male colleague’s guiding her by the elbow out of the board room, or a wheelchair-bound person expresses indignation about not being addressed directly, while matters relevant to him are referred to his able-bodied companion.  The response frequently heard to such complaints is, “Oh, he didn’t mean anything by it.”  Such a response implies that the anger and moral judgment of the woman or he wheelchair-bound person are misplaced, that they do not have the right to complain or condemn another person’s behavior if that person intends to be courteous and respectful.

A conception of justice that starts from the concept of oppression must break with such a limitation of moral and political judgment to discursively conscious and intended action.  In unconscious reactions, habits, and stereotypes reproduce oppression of some groups, then they should be judged unjust, and therefore should be challenged.  Roberts Adams (1985) argues that everyday moral institutions include moral judgments about people’s unintended or involuntary behavior.  We judge people morally wrong who are unjustly angry at others, or who are self-righteous or ungrateful.  Larry May (1990) argues that it makes sense to condemn people morally for being insensitive, for being unable or unwilling to understand and sympathize with the way actions, social practices, and so on appear from a different social position.

If social philosophy assumes that intended and deliberate action is the primary focus of moral judgement, it risks ignoring or even excusing some of the most important sources of oppression.  Only moral judgment that extends to habitual interaction, bodily reactions, unthinking speech, feelings and symbolic associations can capture much about such oppression.

In the essay I referred to earlier, Charles Lawrence makes a similar argument for legal theory.  The dominant model of responsibility in legal judgment requires that behavior and actions which litigants claim is wrong and for which they seek legal remedy be intended – that people know what they are doing and why.  Lawrence cites several cases in which litigants argued that a certain action or policy was racist, but courts found against them, on the grounds that the perpetrators did not have race in mind in their actions. Such and intentional model of fault or responsibility, Lawrence argues, is much too narrow, and should be broadened to include actions and policies whose social meanings associate them with race even when race is not what the agents or policymakers had in mind.

My claim that unintended actions and unconscious reactions should be subject to moral judgment nevertheless poses and puzzle for moral theory.  Should unintended actions be judged in the same way as intended actions? Everyday intuitions tend to excuse people for unintended actions; even though someone has done something harmful, we often claim the person should not be condemned, because she didn’t mean it.  Conversely, everyday moral judgment is often inclined to give people moral credit for good intentions.  Imagine a white person committed to social equality, and who nevertheless sometimes has aversive reaction to people of color, makes thoughtless, insensitive remarks about and to them, and so on.  Isn’t such a person less to be condemned morally than one who insists that there is nothing left for policy to do, or that all proposed policies are inappropriate?

To take account of such intuitions we can distinguish between blaming people and holding them responsible.  It is inappropriate to blame people for actions they are unaware of and do not intend.  People and institutions nevertheless can and should be held responsible for unconscious and unintended behavior, actions, or attitudes that contribute to oppression. To blame an agent means to make that agent liable to punishment.  I mean punishment in a broad sense, including not only imprisonment and fines, but also being made to do something in restitution, exclusion from associations, removal of privileges, public censure, and social ostracism.  Blame is a backward-looking concept.  Calling on agents to take responsibility for their actions, habits, feelings, attitude, images, and associations, on the other hand, is forward-looking; it asks the person “from here on out” to submit such unconscious behavior to reflection, to work to change habits and attitudes.

A distinction between blame and responsibility is important for legal and institutional contexts as well.  In conformity with its propensity to tie fault to intention, legal judgement too often identifies liability with blame for a damage which must be “made whole.”  Social change to break the cycle of exclusion and disadvantage that women, people of color, disabled people, gay men and lesbians, old people, and others suffer will not be aided by the law unless courts are willing to require forward-looking remedies of institutions whose unconscious and unintended actions contribute to disadvantage.

And just in case that wasn’t enough for your brains, I’m also going to type up the text under the heading, Justice and Cultural Revolution.

Saying that certain habitual and unconscious actions, manners, forms of response, ways of speaking, and so on should be judged unjust means that the people who perform these actions should be asked to take responsibility, to bring to their discursive awareness the meaning and implications of these habitual actions.  But why consider this and issue of social justice rather than simply of individual moral action?  In Chapter 1 I argued that injustice should be defined  primarily in terms of oppression and domination.  The scope of justice, I argued, is not limited to distribution, but includes all social processes that support or undermine oppression, including culture.  The behavior, comportments, images, and stereotypes that contribute to the oppression of bodily marked groups are pervasive, systemic, mutually generating, and mutually reinforcing.  They are elements of dominant cultural practices that lie as the normal background of our liberal democratic society.  Only changing the cultural habits themselves will change the oppressions they produce and reinforce, but change in cultural habits can occur only in individuals become aware of and change their individual habits.  This is cultural revolution. 

Culture is to a significant degree a matter of social choice; we can choose to change the elements of culture and to create new ones.  Sometimes such change can be facilitated by passing laws or establishing policies.  Nicaragua has a law against the use of women’s bodies for advertising commodities.  A glossy magazine can establish a policy of having more articles, photographs, and advertisements that depict Blacks in ordinary life activities.  Most cultural change cannot occur, however, by edict.  One cannot pass a law regulating the appropriate distance people ought to stand from one another, or whether and how they should touch.  Similarly, in most situations one does not wish formally to regulate the expression of fantasy, jokes and so on, because the dangers to liberty are too great.  While aesthetic judgement always carries implicit rules, aesthetic judgement cannot be formally regulated.  the injunctions to “be just” in phenomena of practical consciousness and unconsciousness under the discussion, that is, to politicize them.  The requirements of justice, then, concern less the making of cultural rules than providing institutional means for fostering politicized cultural discussion, and making forums and media available for alternative cultural experimentation and play.

Cultural revolution that confronts and undermines the fears and aversions that structure unconscious behavior entails a revolution in the subject itself.  Kristeva’s notion of the subject in process suggests that the subject is always split, heterogeneous.  The monologic culture of respectable rationality, however, encourages the subject to desire a unified self, solid, coherent, integrated.  Much popular psychology in our society promotes this image of the authentic, healthy subject as unified.  We enjoin ourselves to get ourselves “together ; contradiction or plurality in our sense of self we find reproachable, a state to be overcome.  But if, as I have suggested, oppressive fears and aversions toward others have a source in fears of identity loss, the such an urge to unity ma be part of the problem.  For people to become comfortable with the heterogeneity within themselves.  They varying and contradictory social contexts in which we live and interact, along with the multiplicity of our own group memberships and the multiple identities of others with whom we interact, make the heterogeneity of the subject inevitable.  The question is whether to repress or to affirm it.

Cultural revolution that challenges the association of some groups with abject bodies also involves the politicization of theses groups definitions.  Despised and oppressed groups challenge cultural imperialism with they question the dominant norms of virtue, beauty, and rationality, putting forward their own positive definition of themselves as a group and thereby pluralizing norms.  In Chapter 6 I will discuss more extensively the meaning and implications of the politics of asserting positive group difference.

The process of politicizing habits, feelings, and expressions of fantasy and desire that can foster cultural revolution entails a kind of social therapy.  Engaging in such therapy through strictly psychoanalytical methods on a mass scale would indeed be a massive undertaking hard to imagine.  I think some cultural change toward these ends can be realistically undertaken, however, in the process of politicized personal discussion that social movements have come to call “consciousness raising.”

The phrase “consciousness raising” was used by the women’s movement in the late 1960′s  to describe a process in which women share their experiences of frustration, unhappiness, and anxiety, and find common patterns of oppression structuring these very personal stories.  They found that “the personal is political,” that  what was originally experienced as a private personal problem in fact has political dimensions, as exhibiting an aspect of power relations between men and women.  The Black liberation movement of the last 1960′s  similarly strove through personal discussion to displace oppressed people’s depression and self-deprecation onto social sources.  Aspects of social life that appear as given and natural come into question and appear as social constructions and therefore as changeable.  The process by which an oppressed group comes to define and articulate the social conditions of its oppression, and to politicize culture by confronting the cultural imperialism that has denigrated or silence its specific group experience, is a necessary and crucial step in confronting and reducing oppression.

Another form of consciousness raising involves making the privileged aware of how their habitual action, reaction, images, and stereotypes contribute to oppression.  Again, my own experience with this group process of politicizing culture derives from the women’s movement.  By the late 1970s the soul-searching generated by angry accusations that the women’s movement was racist had engendered forms of discussion concretely addressing women’s experiences of group differences and seeking to change relations of group privilege and oppression among women.  Women’s groups provided the structure for intensive, often emotion laden discussion designed to bring to the discursive consciousness of the participants the feelings, reactions, stereotypes, and assumptions they had about women of other groups, as well as the ways their behavior toward these women might participate in and reproduce relations of privilege and oppression between them.  Such group processes can be generalized to any social setting.  Institutionalize consciousness-raising policies can take many forms, of which I will give just two examples.

In recent years some enlightened corporations, motivated in part also by a desire to stave of conflict and lawsuits, have instituted consciousness-raising workshops for male managers and other male employees on issues of sexual harassment.  The very concept of sexual harassment resulted from feminist consciousness  raising among women no longer willing to accept as inevitable and individual behavior they found annoying, humiliating, or coercive.  Bringing men to be able to identify behavior that women collectively judge annoying, humiliating, or coercive, however, and explaining why women find it so, has been no easy task.

Differential privilege of members of different racial groups is perpetuated in part by the process of schooling.  If my account of unconscious aversion as a typical dynamic of racism is at all accurate, many if not most teacher unconsciously behave differently toward Black or Latinos than they behave toward whites.  A school system committed to racial justice can distribute literature describing processes of unconscious differential treatment, and conduct workshops in which teachers reflect on and discuss their own behavior and attitudes towards students of different races.

Conscious raising about homophobia may be the most important and productive strategy for such a revolution of the subject.  As I have said, homophobia may be one of the strongest experiences of abjection because sexual identity is more ambiguous than other group identities.  The border between attraction to persons of the other sex and attraction to those of the same sex is fluid.  At the same time, homophobia is deeply wrapped up with issues of gender identity, for in this society gender identity continues to be heterosexist: the genders are considered mutually exclusive opposites that complement and complete one another.  Order thus depends on the unambiguous  settling of the genders: men must be men and women must be women.  Homosexuality produces a special anxiety, then, because it seems to unsettle this gender order.  Because gender identity is a core of everyone’s identity, homophobia seems to go to the core of identity.

Thus confronting homophobia involves confronting the very desire to have a unified, orderly identity, and the dependence of such a unified identity on the construction of a border that excludes aspects of subjectivity one refuses to face.  If through conscious raising one accepts the possibility that one might become different, be different, in sexual orientation, I suggest, this loosens the exclusion of others defined as different from one’s self-conception in other ways.  Efforts to undermine the oppressions of racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, and ableism mutually reinforce one another not only because these groups have some common interest and certain persons or institution tend to reproduce the oppresion of them all.  There are more direct connections among theses oppressions in the structure of identity and self-protection.  Just as nineteenth-century stereotyping of these groups tended to assimilate them to one another, especially through the mediation of sexual images, so contemporary discourse can help subvert one group-based fear by breaking down another.

A strategy of consciousness raising presumes that those participating already understand something about how interactive dynamics and cultural imagery perpetuate oppression, and are committed to social justice enough to want to change them.  Such activity cannot take place in the abstract.  People will be motivated to reflect on themselves and their relations with others only in concrete social circumstances of cooperation where they recognize problems – the political group in which gays and lesbians voice dissatisfaction, the company that never seems to promote women and therefore loses them, the school or neighborhood with racial conflict.

There is a step in politicizing culture prior to the therapeutic, namely, the affirmation of a positive identity by those experiencing cultural imperialism.  Assumptions of the universality of the perspective and experience of the privileged are dislodged when the oppressed themselves expose those assumptions by expressing the positive difference of their experience.  By creating their own cultural images they shake up received stereotypes about them.  Having formed a positive self-identity through imperialism can then confront the dominant culture with demands for recognition of their specificity.  I shall discuss some of the implications of this process in the next chapter.

In case I haven’t provided enough food for thought, I was just directed to this apology issued from Jason Alexander (George from Seinfeld), which I think exemplifies many of the theories described in Iris Marion Young’s text.  Give it a read.  His written apology is below.

Last week, I made an appearance on the Craig Ferguson show – a wonderfully unstructured, truly spontaneous conversation show. No matter what anecdotes I think will be discussed, I have yet to find that Craig and I ever touch those subjects. Rather we head off onto one unplanned, loony topic after another. It’s great fun trying to keep up with him and I enjoy Craig immensely.

During the last appearance, we somehow wandered onto the topic of offbeat sports and he suddenly mentioned something about soccer and cricket. Now, I am not a stand-up comic. Stand up comics have volumes of time-tested material for every and all occasions. I, unfortunately, do not. However, I’ve done a far amount of public speaking and emceeing over the years so I do have a scattered bit, here and there.

Years ago, I was hosting comics in a touring show in Australia and one of the bits I did was talking about their sports versus American sports. I joked about how their rugby football made our football pale by comparison because it is a brutal, no holds barred sport played virtually without any pads, helmets or protection. And then I followed that with a bit about how, by comparison, their other big sport of cricket seemed so delicate and I used the phrase, “ a bit gay”. Well, it was all a laugh in Australia where it was seen as a joke about how little I understood cricket, which in fact is a very, very athletic sport. The routine was received well but, seeing as their isn’t much talk of cricket here in America, it hasn’t come up in years.

Until last week. When Craig mentioned cricket I thought, “oh, goody – I have a comic bit about cricket I can do. Won’t that be entertaining?”. And so I did a chunk of this old routine and again referred to cricket as kind of “gay” – talking about the all white uniforms that never seem to get soiled; the break they take for tea time with a formal tea cart rolled onto the field, etc. I also did an exaggerated demonstration of the rather unusual way they pitch the cricket ball which is very dance-like with a rather unusual and exaggerated arm gesture. Again, the routine seemed to play very well and I thought it had been a good appearance.

Shortly after that however, a few of my Twitter followers made me aware that they were both gay and offended by the joke. And truthfully, I could not understand why. I do know that humor always points to the peccadillos or absurdities or glaring generalities of some kind of group or another – short, fat, bald, blonde, ethnic, smart, dumb, rich, poor, etc. It is hard to tell any kind of joke that couldn’t be seen as offensive to someone. But I truly did not understand why a gay person would be particularly offended by this routine.

However, troubled by the reaction of some, I asked a few of my gay friends about it. And at first, even they couldn’t quite find the offense in the bit. But as we explored it, we began to realize what was implied under the humor. I was basing my use of the word “gay” on the silly generalization that real men don’t do gentile, refined things and that my portrayal of the cricket pitch was pointedly effeminate , thereby suggesting that effeminate and gay were synonymous.

But what we really got down to is quite serious. It is not that we can’t laugh at and with each other. It is not a question of oversensitivity. The problem is that today, as I write this, young men and women whose behaviors, choices or attitudes are not deemed “man enough” or “normal” are being subjected to all kinds of abuse from verbal to physical to societal. They are being demeaned and threatened because they don’t fit the group’s idea of what a “real man” or a “real woman” are supposed to look like, act like and feel like.

For these people, my building a joke upon the premise I did added to the pejorative stereotype that they are forced to deal with everyday. It is at the very heart of this whole ugly world of bullying that has been getting rightful and overdue attention in the media. And with my well-intentioned comedy bit, I played right into those hurtful assumptions and diminishments.

And the worst part is – I should know better. My daily life is filled with gay men and women, both socially and professionally. I am profoundly aware of the challenges these friends of mine face and I have openly advocated on their behalf. Plus, in my own small way, I have lived some of their experience. Growing up in the ‘70’s in a town that revered it’s school sports and athletes, I was quite the outsider listening to my musical theater albums, studying voice and dance and spending all my free time on the stage. Many of the same taunts and jeers and attitudes leveled at young gay men and women were thrown at me and on occasion I too was met with violence or the threat of violence.

So one might think that all these years later I might be able to intuit that my little cricket routine could make some person who has already been made to feel alien and outcast feel even worse or add to the conditions that create their alienation. But in this instance, I did not make the connection. I didn’t get it.

So, I would like to say – I now get it. And to the extent that these jokes made anyone feel even more isolated or misunderstood or just plain hurt – please know that was not my intention, at all or ever. I hope we will someday live in a society where we are so accepting of each other that we can all laugh at jokes like these and know that there is no malice or diminishment intended.

But we are not there yet.

So, I can only apologize and I do. In comedy, timing is everything. And when a group of people are still fighting so hard for understanding, acceptance, dignity and essential rights – the time for some kinds of laughs has not yet come. I hope my realization brings some comfort.

Thanks,
Jason

Remember to love and enjoy.

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