“Exceptional” seems like a compliment until…
Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director
Earlier this week, a friend of mine posted on Facebook a 3-minute video of U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recounting her experience of the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. She describes loud banging on her office door, a staff member telling her to hide, flattening herself against the wall in a bathroom, a white man in a black beanie entering the office, yelling, “Where is she?” Ocasio-Cortez tells her supporters that she understood that she might be killed, and that she thought of them in that moment, certain that they would continue the work to which she and they are dedicated. Then the video ends.
I was stunned. I hadn’t realized any members of congress had been that close to harm. I wondered how she’d escaped, why we hadn’t heard this until now.
Then I did a little searching and quickly found a 90- minute live-post on Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram feed. The video I saw first was a 3-minute clip from the middle of that longer post. The white man in the black beanie turned out to be a Capitol police officer, who ordered Ocasio-Cortez and her colleague to run to another building. Questions remain about why he didn’t identify himself sooner or escort them to safety, and the rest of the story is harrowing, raising even more questions about why many were left so entirely vulnerable to harm that day. We also learn why Ocasio-Cortez had waited to tell the story, and why the experience was particularly traumatizing to her.
I’ll leave you to watch the whole post to learn the details, if you choose, but here‘s the thing: the video I saw first was a tiny slice of a very complex situation, aggravated, we learn in the long version, by Ocasio-Cortez’s complex life experience. The clip was not even close to the whole of her story.
I was reminded of the response to U.S. Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman’s reading at the presidential inauguration a few weeks ago. People on my social media feeds, and in many media reports, were amazed. Commentators spoke of her as surprisingly impressive; one referred to her “astounding eloquence, grace and poise.”
Just a little bit of looking reveals that, while Gorman is clearly a talented poet and performer, her eloquence, grace and poise is not actually that astounding. She has been writing and reading publicly since she was very young, she long-ago made peace with auditory and speech challenges, she was raised by her single mother in challenging economic circumstances, and attended a K-12 private school. She graduated cum laude from Harvard University. While those few minutes of beautifully delivered poetry introduced many of us to Amanda Gorman, they were clearly just a moment in a very complex life.
And that reminds me of Rosa Parks. Embarrassingly well into adulthood, I thought Rosa Parks had simply gotten fed up and sat herself down in the front of a bus. I was in my early thirties when I visited the Highlander Center (see resources), and saw photos of Parks, well before her famous bus ride, with Fanny Lou Hamer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and Pete Seeger among others studying and planning for nonviolent resistance. I realized then and have learned more deeply since that Parks was a learned and well-rehearsed activist for decades before that bus ride, that pin-point in her complex life.
Ignoring the whole of Parks’ life diminishes her humanity just as ignoring the whole of Amanda Gorman’s life diminishes hers, and ignoring the whole of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s story diminishes hers.
The danger in this is two-fold. When we limit our vision to moments in lives out of context, we risk seeing individuals as exceptional. “Exceptional” seems like a compliment until one considers the question, exceptional relative to what? The answer is, relative to the rest of the people with whom we associate the ones we deem exceptional. The rest of their people, it stands to reason, would in our minds be decidedly unexceptional. That diminishment leads to systemic harm, especially to those historically under-seen, underserved, and already deeply over-harmed.
It’s tempting to call Rosa Parks extraordinary. Insofar as the thousands of people who worked for years to design and prepare for a movement that changed the course of history were extraordinary, so was Rosa Parks. She insisted throughout her life that she be seen in that complex context, and still, what many know of her is a single bus ride.
And there’s the other danger: violence begins the second a complex human being is reduced to one thing -- their skin color, ethnicity, dis/ability, gender, religion, or one moment in their life. This understanding often pulls me up short. If I diminish a life in this way, I am committing an act of violence. On the other hand, when I work harder to see others’ lives as complex wholes, I contribute to a less violent world.