Bishop: Who is The Twit Here?
Thursday, January 17, 2019
I have exactly zero interest in Twitter, but that’s to be expected in someone who counts paragraphs, not characters. So I am not a twit. Those who are seem inspired by this medium’s equation of brevity and wit to say something pithy and provocative that somehow rises above the chafe of cyber discourse. Indeed, that is supposed to differentiate Twitter from the faceplace or email.
Email is over, apparently. I never got the memo . . .eer email. I guess with inboxes so full of dubious offers to enlarge varying parts or our bodies, the prospect of it enlarging the mind seems fleeting small.
And thanks to the merging of blogs, email, and daytimers in social media, everyone is a commentator these days with virtually every post a reaction to current events. That’s both empowering, everyone’s a pundit, and disempowering, the consumers per comment are spread pretty thin. So, if you want to be noticed you have to be short, not sweet. This leads the Warwick Beacon to editorialize that maybe legislators would be better served by not reacting quickly on social media.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTI don’t share that emphatic caution that anyone who jumps in is a twit, but I’m shocked, shocked to find someone who used Twitter to complain is complaining about what she got back. It seems the contemporary aphorism ought to be: if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the Twitter.
In proof, though, that I too pay scant heed to life’s lessons about not touching a hot stove, once more a white guy into the racial breach. This started off sounding more like the Rodney Dangerfield routine on how teachers don’t get any respect than a hotbed of racism when Rep. Marcia Ranglin Vassell tweeted:
“Most people who offer opinions abt teaching & learning have never been in a classroom haven’t taken a course in education or educational psychology have never had a real conversation with teachers or students Then you should just stop giving opinions U are not an expert#ITeach”
But, in the face of chiding from Rep. Brian Newberry who suggested that this argument from expertise undermined respect for citizen input, Rep. Ranglin Vassel went full metal rhetoric, accusing him of trolling, bullying and worst, racism.
That charge was first reported by GoLocal (always grateful for a controversial headline) and quickly attracted a raft of skeptical comments here and on talk radio. While some of those comments focused on the substantive debate about educational outcomes, the majority of the attention was focused on the charge of racism and whether it amounted to crying wolf. I’m not sure about that, but it certainly amounted to crying uncle in the debate about student performance.
What is a cyber bully?
One could say, though, Rep. Ranglin Vassell didn’t lose the argument, but was triggered to disengage. More attention than should be paid to the allegations of trolling and cyber-bullying. There are some folks – including myself – who predictably adhere to certain issues and certain people in local discourse on social media. You see the name pop up in the comments or hear the voice over the radio and your instincts say immediately: “here we go again”. If this rises to the level of hounding somebody -- constant prissy and pedantic calling out, correction, qualification, name-calling (you know like a troll, bully or racist for instance) -- it can take on the character of stalking. Of course, the very nature of Twitter is the desire to be stalked . . . I guess they call it following.
We should be readily able to identify the pattern of Rep. Newberry’s social media presence to which Rep. Ranglin Vassell was referring. There’s a problem here though, facebook and twitter reveal he had previously mentioned her precisely zero times! Now that’s based on several hours of hand scrolling through their respective facebook and twitter feeds because onboard and third-party social media searches are useless. (You will get some results, but you can have no faith that you get them all. Facebook claims they are showing you what you want. Me, I’d prefer to see what I searched for). But one can hardly find any pattern here, even if I missed one or two.
How permanent is Social Media?
What one does find is the fading of even the memory of this week-old incident in classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fashion, as if Rep. Ranglin Vassell wishes it had never happened. Her Facebook post, pictured in the GoLocal story extending the Twitter theme to the faceplace: “Rep Newberry the Republican Rep from HD48 is and have been cyberbullying me” has apparently been deleted. It had garnered the backlash to other social media outlets with kneejerk support for Ranglin-Vassell paralleling the metoo movement with exhortations such as “believe women”, basically taking for granted the circumstances alleged with possibly one exception. Journalist Linda Borg had a single word post: “How?” Now, this entire thread has vanished into the celestial infundibulum suggesting to me that there isn’t a good answer to that question.
That leaves the charges of racism: “Stop trolling and trying to cyber bully me with your racist attitudes.” The tweet implies that racism could be found in Newberry’s critique: “All part-time legislators have expertise and experience in some areas and not others. That said, we should all respectfully listen to the views of those we represent and, if we disagree and know better, seek to educate and inform, not rudely dismiss. Give Respect, Get Respect.”
What is racist?
The lack of racial animus or even content in this remark lead many, not unreasonably, to be outright dismissive of her claim. But the Golocal story did offer additional context. Rep. Ranglin Vassell recalled an incident about a year ago on the house floor in which Newberry made a pointed reference to house rules the day after Rep. Ranglin Vassell had made an impassioned speech regarding the death of a youth in Central Falls.
“I think there's a pattern. If I say something on Twitter -- my profile is public — when he responds directly to me, it is derisive and disrespectful in his language to me. He does it to me and not in the same vein when he does to other legislators . . . So yes, I’m saying he's doing it related to my race -- and gender”, Ranglin Vassell is reported as saying.
Not exactly parliament but . . .
Thus she offered one other example, hardly a “pattern”; but, more to the point, she implies that Newberry does not aim such barbs at his white male colleagues. This I knew to be untrue, recalling an exchange between Newberry and Rep. Christopher Blazejewski (about 2:06 of this link):
“I have a lot of respect for leader Newberry, he’s a good lawyer. But his argument on this makes absolutely no sense at all . . . . there is no good argument in favor of leader Newberry’s position”
“Representative Blasjewski, I’m sorely disappointed in you. As a Harvard educated man, I would expect you to have a better understanding of our constitutional history. . . . unlike you, I recognize there are good arguments against my position.
This is followed by former Rep Cale Keable interjecting: “I’m sure leader Newberry would probably nominate himself. He clearly thinks he’s smarter than everyone else in the state . . .”
This kind of sharp discourse is indeed characteristic of the body. There is no hesitation at remarks that might be thought to give offense. Blasjewski has no problem saying Newberry can’t make an argument. Newberry effectively calls him a constitutional illiterate and Keable takes his Democratic colleague’s cause in calling Newberry an intellectual snob.
Hypersensitivity perpetuates racism
I absolutely think that racism, in the sense of viewing input from ‘the other’ differently, is endemic. We are conditioned as a matter of the development of our species to notice differences in human populations. Color is only the most treadworn facet for our fixation. We notice face and hair and body types. These were natural adaptations to the increasingly complex human society. Our mental rolodex shuts down at less than a couple hundred names and we couldn’t keep up as our bands of hunter-gatherers exceeded that size and began to undertake agriculture and urbanization.
So we developed habits of categorizing folks from beyond our regular social circles based on exceedingly quick assessments of appearance, carriage, and dialect. There can indeed be cues from our culture on what we make of these categories and it’s worthy to bear that in mind in attempting to resist stereotyping our interaction. Not allowing one’s buttons to be pushed on the basis of race is a constant conscious effort to take control of an otherwise instinctual process.
But methinks that is a two-way street. The irony is that excessive sensitivity to the outcome of any exchange between those who differ in race or gender can exacerbate rather than extinguish differential treatment. Who, after this scrap, would want to take Marcia Ranglin Vassell to task for something on the house floor? Yet such actions are the epitome of the legislative debate. So she will be isolated from and treated differently than her colleagues, not because of the color of her skin but its thickness. Deep passion and thin skin are not a good mix for a legislator. She shouldn’t be worried if her colleagues criticize her, but rather if they don’t.
Brian Bishop is on the board of OSTPA and has spent 20 years of activism protecting property rights, over-regulation and perverse incentives in tax policy.
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