Sensitivity, Shmensitivity

This is literally my co-worker's truck. These are the attitudes I work with.

“Well that was a complete fucking waste of time!” bellowed ‘Jack,’ though his tone was jocular. “I didn’t retain any of that. I can’t believe we wasted an hour of our lives on that shit!”

Late in his book Evicted, sociologist Matthew Desmond recounts an experience observing a chronically destitute Milwaukee family. Arleen and her elementary-age sons have a cat, Little. But because they’re evicted and forced to relocate immediately, Arleen has to leave Little behind. Coming back to retrieve some belongings, the boys see Little wandering the neighborhood and react with joy. Arleen doesn’t agree:

“Put it down, dang!” Arleen yelled. She jerked Jafaris’s arm back, and Little fell to the ground.

Desmond explains, with sources, that poor families teach children to “love small.” Caring about things, people, and communities, only works when we have stability and continuity. Poor people, who change jobs and residences often, can’t afford to care. So Arleen teaches her children to love pets, neighbors, even herself, as fleetingly as possible, so they don’t get devastated later. It’s perhaps her most loving lesson: don’t love too much.

I’ve written extensively on this blog, recently, about the racism I’ve witnessed, working construction. Growing up White, suburban, and lower middle-class, I once thought naked bigotry was a dwindling historical relic. Notwithstanding the occasional David Duke or Timothy McVeigh, I assumed I’d live to see the extinction of Jim Crow-ish prejudice. Because, basically, I assumed racism arose from ignorance and backwardness.

Working this industry, though, I’ve noticed it isn’t so. Not only does racism persevere, so do other sectarian hatreds. These guys love sitting around, bullshitting on the clock, and it frequently turns to attempts to verbally destroy anybody they consider weaker than themselves. Women, homosexuals, animals: they’ll demolish anyone they consider puny, isolated, and different.

For years, I thought it reflected the nearly all-male nature of the industry. Though we have some women electricians in our area, and some women working office and bureaucratic positions, they’re the exception; I can literally go weeks without seeing a woman on the job. Not until reading Matthew Desmond did I realize these men share another important characteristic: they’re all poorly paid and economically tenuous.

Dr. Matthew Desmond

So I had low expectations when, on Friday, September 18th, we attended mandatory “sensitivity training.” That is, the company wanted to institute top-down awareness and empathy in men who’ve grown scars on their souls to insulate themselves against life’s casual brutalities. I have co-workers who have Confederate flags on their trucks, who use the N-word conversationally, who drink to numb themselves to life. A one-hour Zoom seminar is likely to change nothing.

They entered the seminar already opposed. One guy loudly bellowed: “If I’d known this was happening, I’d’ve printed a mask that read ‘Fuck Your Feelings,’” a line which got wide laughs. (Though the seminar happened online, several of us piled into a company conference room to control the number of lines into the call. To my surprise, all wore COVID masks.) Such heckling was the norm, not the exception.

In an ideal world, like a novel, some guys might’ve changed their minds. We might’ve seen epiphanies happening like leaves dropping. Instead, as the facilitator, hired from an outside consultancy, launched into her pre-written PowerPoint presentation, even I, the company’s token Leftist, lost interest; when I realized she was reading a pre-scripted litany of buzzwords, I felt the compulsive need to check Facebook on my phone.

Afterward, to my surprise, I discovered almost the entire regional company was watching from local offices: when the Zoom meeting ended, twenty guys milled around the lobby, jeering what we just witnessed. After Jack’s outburst above, a site supervisor, ‘Dan,’ emerged from a back office and sneered: “So we’re only supposed to communicate in sign language now?” Dan is the supervisor who once suggested stopping asylum-seekers by shooting their leaders.

I leaned back and let my brain drift to Matthew Desmond. These aren’t “bad” guys. They’re hard-working and loyal; most are married, mostly to their first wives, some for decades. They maintain their houses, join civic leagues, and tithe at church. But they also slap racist logos on their trucks and use epithets conversationally. They have to limit their empathy, because they’re poor. (Our company owner has an Omaha mansion and a stable of show ponies.)

And yeah, maybe it’s also because they’re all men. This unscheduled after-party was a sausage fest; the local office’s only two women, a bookkeeper and a secretary, are working from home during COVID. Nobody who does something awful does it from an isolated cause. Poverty, powerlessness, lack of women, and the fatigue that comes with difficult labor, create an ecology of antipathy. Racism, sexism, homosexism, and other hatreds, just happen.

Desmond writes that nobody hates poor people worse than other poor people. This workplace intolerance, this knee-jerk opposition to “sensitivity,” is the inevitable consequence of men kept perennially poor while working multi-million-dollar jobs. They know money’s being made, and they’re not making it. The ownership economy has left them too broke to care.