Baggage Check

Life disclosures, so readers can know me, and where I come from, a little better

Redlands, CA, gloaming in a window

Since I’m out here trying to attract readers and convert them to subscribers, I feel like I owe it to everyone, including the people who’ve been with me for years, to say a little bit more about myself.

Most of what I could share would be pretty irrelevant, unless maybe I reconstructed my inner monologue in a Proustian rumination. But like everyone who writes, I carry biases—sorry, I’m Shaped By My Experiences—and want to be transparent about those, insofar as I’m aware of them. 

It’s a fun (“fun”) little hobby of mine to detect the eccentricities and fixations other writers bring to their work, or develop over the course of their careers, and guess at the life circumstances that explain them. Usually it’s the commonplace-but-transformative joys and setbacks that change most people at some point in their lives—parenthood, loss, trauma—but everyone experiences those kinds of things differently, and so to each, they feel novel. I’m sure I have one or more that I’ll never recognize absent years of therapy, but there are some that I understand pretty well just through self-examination, and I want to share those with you—both to help you get to know me and as a form of disclosure. If you wonder where this or that eccentricity or fixation of mine comes from, you can refer back to this and perhaps one or two future pieces, and hopefully it’ll all make more sense. 

I wasn’t born into a family of doctrinaire liberals, and I was honestly pretty provincial about politics until after my first year of college. Redlands, CA, where I grew up, was a pretty reactionary place (my sense from afar is that it’s become less so in the past two decades), and the contrast with Berkeley, CA, where I was an undergraduate, came as a culture shock. I think (though I can’t be certain I remember correctly) that I voted for Harry Browne, the libertarian candidate, in the 2000 election; I didn’t grasp the significance of Bush v. Gore as it happened, nor the way it seemed to alarm many of my peers. I studied physics and astronomy, two of the least political majors, so for that first year at least I was out of place, acclimating without really grasping what acclimation feels like. (It feels like stress.)

The September 11 attackers struck just a couple weeks into my sophomore year, and ultimately sent me down a well-traveled road: from vengefulness, to mystification (what’s Iraq got to do with anything?) to flirtation with what were ultimately glib humanitarian pretexts for war, to eventual opposition, and then deep disdain for the George W. Bush administration—all by 2004. I voted for John Kerry that year, and have voted for Democrats ever since.

It was only long after that transformation—and most fully after Donald Trump took over the GOP—that I gained enough self-knowledge to understand why my early years in parochial Redlands didn’t make me a lifetime rightist. As it turns out, it wasn’t just thanks to Bay Area hippies and the horror of the Bush years. 

Our family was Jewish—highly secular, but culturally devout. No synagogue, no Bar Mitzvah, but no Christmas decorations or presents either—that would’ve been unacceptably conformist, a disloyal way to assimilate. My mother was an immigrant from Chile who spoke English with a thick accent, and there was a tight parallel between our relationship to Judaism and our status as an immigrant household. We were not part of a tight Hispanic community, or even really a two-language home, but we would never dishonor her heritage. 

My mother, in Chile, many years before I was born

The problem as I saw it through a child’s eyes was: I really wished we would. I hated being different in both of these ways, and didn’t quite understand why we couldn’t do more to better fit in. I didn’t hate Judaism or immigrants or my mother, but I wanted so badly to be normal that, if I’d had any say in the matter, I would’ve suppressed or changed core aspects of our lives. When I transferred to a new elementary school in fourth grade, I was excited to be among people who didn’t know much about me, so I could pretend to come from a family that celebrated Christmas. I grimaced when my mom would say simple words incorrectly, particularly if other people might hear her. One September, my parents had a huge fight because they disagreed over whether I should be allowed to attend school on Yom Kippur. My father thought ignoring the holiday would evince a sense of shame; my mother thought (because I told her) that I wanted to be with my friends, and that I should thus be allowed to go. If my dad could work on a high holiday, I could learn and socialize. I don’t even remember who “won” the fight in the end, but I do remember that the real impetus for it wasn’t anything like FOMO or extraversion. I just didn’t want people to know I wasn’t like them. 

Casual antisemitism infuriated me, but reacting to it would expose my terrible secret, so I kept my mouth shut or laughed along. On the rare occasions when I heard strangers mock my mother I’d seethe like any protective son, but would also secretly wish she’d just get rid of her accent so nobody could hurt us in that way.

This awkward duality—a desire to fit in strong enough to make me rebel against inseverable aspects of my identity, enviousness of “normal” people but a hatred of excluders—never fully left me. I just learned to deal with it in healthier ways, and honestly Donald Trump deserves some of the credit for that (even if you don’t, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to him).

Long before Trump, I had to grapple internally with whether and how to identify myself on application forms. In high school, I knew someone who represented himself to colleges and universities as African American because his parents were immigrants from Egypt, and I remember finding that appalling. An act of total selfishness. When I applied, I knew I could defensibly check the Hispanic/Latino boxes, but chose not to, in part because I didn’t have a strong Hispanic or Latino identity, but in larger part because it would’ve felt fraudulent. I knew the spirit of the question was to find and elevate people with much different backgrounds—whose parents had immigrated from Mexico or Central America, or who had immigrated themselves; who were working class and had brown skin and all the social difficulties that go along with that. My mother’s nationality and language had shaped me in profound ways, but I wasn’t underserved and I didn’t experience discrimination the way people who can’t hide their identities do. 

As I got older and had more boxes to check, I would consider whether the questions were meant to elicit survey data or trigger racial preferences, and tailored my answers accordingly. If my whole life history of box-checking were to be revealed in a data breach, a casual observer wouldn’t be able to make any sense of it. Sometimes Hispanic/Latino, sometimes white, sometimes both, sometimes declines to say. But there was a method to it. (If you’d like, you can ask me how I feel about the whole Elizabeth Warren/Native American imbroglio in the comments.)

And then Trump demonstrated so catastrophically how potent immigrant and Jew hatred remained as political forces, and I jettisoned whatever was left of that youthful shame. Self-denial had long since stopped serving the purpose of belonging, but Trump transformed it into cowardice. Who but cowards would lie about or conceal themselves to hide from neo-Nazi internet trolls? My friend and fellow Jewish Media Personality Sam Stein helped me realize I wasn’t alone in my late awakening when he published this short essay after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. 

But the Trump era hasn’t fully inverted my outlook. To this day, I wouldn’t make my ethnic or family heritage a central focus of a dating profile (I don’t have a dating profile, I’m happily married, but you get the idea). Though I became more comfortable with and proud of who I am, I continue to feel that it shouldn’t be determinative of my ideal community and shouldn’t qualify me or people like me for preferential treatment. 

So here we get to my heavily alloyed worldview.

I despise bullies. I wasn’t exactly bullied as a child, but I let myself be cowed as if under threat, and carry grudges for years against people who intentionally make life harder for others. When their comeuppance arrives, I revel in it gracelessly.

I harbor special revulsion for the cynically cruel. I’m not exactly fond of the sadistically cruel, either, but find something uniquely and contemptibly debauched about people in positions of trust and influence who are aware of humanity’s propensity for barbarism, and seek to exploit rather than vanquish it. I was and remain aghast at how seamlessly many of Trump’s White House principals and allied members of Congress and their many aides—the people who knew better—bled back into polite society after his administration, and to this day I wouldn’t shake hands with any who had not meaningfully atoned. The institutions that welcomed them back, sometimes straight away, sometimes after a brief time out, tarnished themselves forever in my mind.

I’ve supported affirmative action for many years, and hope colleges devise new methods to find and recruit racial and ethnic minorities with low socioeconomic status to their campuses—at least until the Supreme Court changes hands. But I bristle at some of the ways the sentiments underlying affirmative action get deployed in the elite world as stats-gaming and status chasing and professional climbing. To this day there are scandalously few Latin writers at major newspapers who have the kinds of backgrounds U.C. Berkeley was looking for when it asked for my racial identity, and editors wouldn’t really be solving that problem by hiring me. (Unless you’re reading this, in which case, let’s talk!)

I also believe the numbers-gaming manifestation of race preferences contributes to widespread suspicion of affirmative action, and of progressivism in general. And by the same token, liberal stridency about representation in elite institutions (though an absolutely worthy and essential goal) feeds some fairly toxic politics. I don’t know if my Egyptian high school peer succeeded in gaming the system all those years ago, but I know it fed my youthful skepticism of race preferences, and makes me concerned about abuse to this day. There are white adults in America who hear stories like that and suspect preferences will make things harder, unfairly, for their children. There are many more who extrapolate from there and worry it will seep into other realms—their workplaces, their doctors offices, their local governments. I know that, because I grew up with them. 

I would try, and have tried when possible, to convince them that they’re wrong, or their instincts are misplaced, but it isn’t an easy sell and it would be extremely counterproductive in those settings to call them racists. It’s a mistake at the level of individual persuasion and a moral and political error to equate mass opposition to affirmative action, at least on those sorts of grounds, with bigotry.

These have not been the forefront facts about my adult life or career, but they matter now, both to this project, and, by coincidence, because they happen to be salient in our politics at the moment. I might have let on to some of it earlier on other platforms—if so, I have no recollection—but never at this length. I have misgivings about the personal-essay genre and there isn’t a lot of space in progressive and mass media these days to explore these issues in lengthy and nuanced ways—which is why I haven’t said much about it publicly, and why I’m disclosing it here.