A Perceptual Black Hole

The day after the debate, Marcy Wheeler asked why the pundits didn’t listen to Kamala Harris the several times before the debate when she said what she was going to do. She notes that they paid attention to Donald Trump’s comments about the debate. The easy answer is that she is an Indian and Black woman and he is a white man, so of course sexism and racism are in play. That’s not wrong, but I think we can narrow in on further understanding. Here’s Marcy’s answer:

Journalists missed the Vice President’s clear intent because they treated Donald Trump as the protagonist of this story.

And why would that be? I have an answer, but it requires a setup. I am not talking about the gutter-variety sexism and racism that issue from Trump’s or JD Vance’s mouths every time they open them. Nor am I talking about elite media disdain for reality. I am talking about something much subtler but widespread. It is a factor in the coverage of abortion rights and other “women’s issues” in the news. It is a factor in the election.

I am going to start from my experience of something I might call a black mental hole. Some subjects simply cannot be comprehended by some people. They may be able to read the words and even parrot some ideas, but then the ideas drain out of their heads, beyond the event horizon. It is not a denial of those ideas or argument against them. It comes before those mental processes. The subject simply does not exist in their universe.

This is not confined to women’s issues. It happens with issues of racism and colonialism. Sometimes all three at once.

This is the story of how I came to recognize these black holes. It’s hopefully a less controversial example than those happening in the campaign.

A few years back, I wrote a piece on President Barack Obama’s red lines in Syria and his decision to take a different road. I submitted it to an editor with whom I had worked before. Most of my experiences with editors have been easy and pleasant. They make suggestions, and I accept most of them, unless they change the meaning. This editor had been no exception, and an earlier piece for him had been widely read.

But there were problems with this piece. These are taken from the editorial comments, the wording simplified in some cases.

• What actually is your point?
• Bring in opposing viewpoints, with examples, and refute them.
• Moar “Both sides do it.”
• What is your point, again?
• You haven’t made your case. Please add academic references.
• You need more examples.
• Why are you giving examples?
• You also need to litigate a couple of peripheral foreign-policy issues that nobody agrees on.
• Why do you keep making this point? Could you say something else?

And then Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Obama and gave some details that I had surmised through my analysis, details that hadn’t been reported earlier. Of course, that made publishing my article pointless, and I withdrew it. Had the article been published earlier, well, I might have looked pretty smart.

Another article, another editor: I wrote a thread on Twitter, and a lower-level editor at another publication asked me to work it up into an article. I did, sent it to him, he sent back good edits, and I accepted them. Then came the next editor up. He wanted the article completely rewritten. Many of his comments were similar to the list above. The lower-level editor and I saw it was hopeless. Here’s the piece with the first edits.

I still stand behind that piece and its backstory. I have seen patterns remarkably to the path the two editors followed, and two very public ones in the recent past, not necessarily in editing.

What I think went wrong in both those cases was that I brought gender into the analysis. Red lines are about as gendered as your local bar fight.  In the case of the second, racism and colonialism also played a part. Some people cannot deal with analyses that include those factors. It’s not that they reject the arguments; they never get to that point. Something happens in their minds that simply disallows understanding. It’s like a black hole. They are uncomfortable with the analysis, but they can’t put their finger on why. So they go through the contortions of the list above.

In that first experience, I too long assumed that it was normal editing and that I needed to improve the writing. But when contradictions piled up, I began to suspect that something was off. The similarity of the second experience made me look for that something.

The pattern showed up again recently when the push started to remove President Joe Biden as candidate. There was a black hole in the discussion: the Vice President of the United States, the person who had appeared on primary ballots with Joe Biden, the person designated to take his place if he could not serve as president. In particular, one Kamala Harris, a woman of Black and Indian parentage. She was not part of many of those calculations.

A great many of those advocating Biden’s removal proposed an “open primary” or a convoluted method for finding a replacement candidate: three party elders, two convention votes, and a partridge in a pear tree. The black hole bent all the discussion around it.

Nobody was jumping up and down shouting “Kamala Harris must go!” She just wasn’t there at all. Fortunately, there was pushback, and, over a few days or a week, the event horizon began to dissolve, climaxed by Joe Biden’s definitive resignation and endorsement statements.

Similarly, Marcy points out that Harris outlined her plan to defeat Trump in the debate ahead of time, but a great many didn’t notice. I’ll argue it’s because of the woman/ Indian/ Black – induced black hole that swallowed her words before they reached their minds.

We’ll see it again. But my sense, in bringing it up indirectly over the past few weeks, is that these mental black holes are becoming more visible.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner