Hulk's Friends
This is a diary about pro-wrestler Hulk Hogan. It's also about how we keep growing the list of "Bad Apples" who are racist or otherwise terrible. It's mostly about Bad Apples. I've been thinking about this for a while.
But when they came for the Hulkster, it was the final straw. I don't know much about what he said to get in trouble or even if the penalty was appropriate or not. I just know that as a kid who grew up on 80's wrestling, that Hulk Hogan was just a player in a much larger drama.
We keep on trotting out more and more "racists" and otherwise Bad Apple's to be publicly executed. But the problems of racism and injustice persist. The Hulkster is right when he says "I'm not racist" because the answer is much closer to the idea that we all are.
I know that seems like a dumb thing to write about. But I think we can learn something very important about how racism functions in society by looking at Hulk Hogan's situation to make people like him scapegoats to distract us from is really going on.
We keep treating racism like it's a personal flaw. Like if you say or do something dumb, it is because you are a flawed person. I'm NOT saying that folks who do those things sometimes don't deserve punishment (they do. Especially those in power who shouldn't be in power). I'm just saying that we have a lot more in common with them than most of us really want to consider.
Last week Hulk Hogan, pro-wrestler, became the latest white guy to be "Donald Sterlinged". He says something clearly racist and terrible and then gets pushed out and hung to dry. The clear implication is that Hulk Hogan is the one true racist person. That he is bad and needs to be dealt with.
Now let's look at a picture of some of the top pro-wrestlers today...
It kind of seems like there is a trend... yes all they are all white guys. It's almost like the institution of pro-wrestling is racist but doesn't drop N-bombs. Well
sometimes
In fact, we do often like our heroes as white men. The recent run of Marvel super hero movies seem to strongly suggest that greatness comes in white male packages.
I don't know much about Hulk Hogan or his recent rant. I do know his kids cartoon from my youth was inclusive AND very racist. Also probably very sexist and homophobic and probably a lot of other things. Junkyard Dog, Mr. Fuji. Ack! But they were there.
Definitely homophobic
Adrian Adonis
Now, that the Hulkster was busted as someone who is racist,
he has done what so
many others have done -
deny being racist.
Here's the real problem:
Individuals are not racist. OK - well maybe they have racist ideas- but racism is not a question about individual virtue. It is about an oppression that is created by a racist system. As long as we continue to let individuals get scapegoated as "racist" then we fail to shine the light where it needs to be - on the system.
Here is one of the most heartbreaking videos you can ever watch. It is children of color who given the choice between a black or white doll, they say that the white doll is prettier and good.
And there is the trend in Bollywood of whitening one's skin.
Clearly Hulk Hogan did not mastermind all of this- or even a part of this...
I am sure we can all find many more examples like this.
As it has been noted here many times, Donald Trump is gaining popularity because he has dispensed with the racist code words and dog whistles that so many at Fox News and in the Republican Party have perfected.
But code words are still important. Hulk Hogan got busted not for being racist (he clearly participated in pro-wrestling a very racist system) but for not using the right code words. Pro Wrestling's billion dollar industry depends on everyone using enough racism and bigotry to make things interesting but to keep things under wraps enough so that it isn't clear.
Back to Donald Sterling. His crime wasn't being a terrible person. He was.
His crime was getting caught showing his racism clearly.
In modern America, racism is like Voldermort, we dare not speak its name in the hopes of it going away. Just like the other wizards could not deal with the enormity of the idea of Voldermort returning, we cannot deal with the enormity of how racist, classist, sexist and homophobic our whole system is. (You can throw in a lot of other oppressions too).
Instead, we buy "fair trade" coffee hoping that it justifies something. We spend extra money on free range chicken which still has to die somehow. We buy our clothes from Old Navy and Gap because the clothes are cheap
We still haven't gotten sufficiently angry over the Redskins name.
It's still there.
I don't have an answer to how to live in this system with perfect integrity. I suspect one person cannot. I'd like it if we all dropped the pretense that we can.
It's hard to come to terms with the enormity of the problem. So we like to feed individuals to the dragon. Hogan and Sterling are just the latest.
And this brings me to the one time, an O'Reily guest got it 100% right
Fox News
Monica Crowley, PhD
"are there individual racists in this country?"
Oreily: "Of course"
MC: "Sadly yes. Does institutional racism exist anymore? No it does not....There are people on the far left who believe America was a nation founded on Genocide, theft, crimes, and lies
Oreily: "slavery"
MC:"And slavery."
Oreily: "Right"
MC:" And therefore we are undeserving and unworthy of our power."
If institutional racism is THAT pervasive, then "we are undeserving and unworthy of our power." And this train of thought can be carried further.... What if we, as Americans, are undeserving of our wealth? What if the fact that
2.5 billion people don't have access to proper sanitation is actually a ghastly crime?
Now the game is up on all of us. Now we really need to change our ways big time.
Or we can go back to blaming the Hulkster while eating our quinoa.
See the idea of "Bad Apples" is critical to keeping our system going...
bad apple
In a recent scandal involving Wall Street trading this happened in
April 2008:
“We know that we’re not posting, um, an honest” rate, a Barclays employee told a New York Fed official, according to transcripts. The employee indicated that other big banks made similarly bogus reports, saying that the British bank wanted to “fit in with the rest of the crowd.”
How is a system drenched so much with cheating that you have to cheat to "fit in with the rest of the crowd" deal with this kind of issue- Bad Apples!
2 traders blamed at Deutshe Bank
"Good. We got rid of that problem" the banks would say. See we took care of the bad apples.
Then when the same problem happens 5 year later what do you do? That's right- Bad Apples! Even if there was an "instruction manual"....
Libor trial: Hayes handed over a UBS 'instruction manual' on rigging, prosecution says2013
“This is where what UBS is doing in terms of throwing individuals under the bus is really wrong,” Tom Hayes
"It was too widespread and open that people could be unaware,” Mr Hayes had told the SFO. “It was so blatant."
Yes this happens for a reason
"the financial sector has long benefited from a “bad apples” approach to its misbehavior. Our financial and political leaders have long argued that illegal, unethical, and reckless behavior in financial markets has been limited to a few bad apples."
George W. Bush asserted that “the vast majority of business people are living by the rules” and that the scandals were the product of a “few bad actors.” (The bad included Bush’s good friend “Kennyboy” Lay.) And President Obama blamed that the 2008 financial crisis on “the schemes of a reckless few.”"
"We need not worry about the system; we just need to root out the evil-doers. And since there are not very many of them, we might as well wait until something goes wrong. So ultimately, the “bad apples” theory becomes an argument for both lax regulation and lax enforcement."
"So why do our political leaders promote the bad apple approach? Much of it has to do with social acceptance of white-collar crime. Prosecuting Wall Street doesn’t generate the electoral rewards that come from going after street criminals. In particular the financial sector’s wealth and political connections inhibit pursuing Wall Street. But there are limits to such explanations."
"Investigations, civil and criminal, have tended to focus on specific bad low-hanging apples such as Goldman’s Fabrice Tourre or the specific traders involved in the manipulation of the Libor index. In these cases, no higher up was charged with “failure to supervise.”"
Liz Lin at The Arts Collective spoke to this larger issue...
"We like to blame atrocities on individual bad apples because that line of reasoning is comforting; it lulls us into thinking that the problem is contained, and that we and the people we know and love could never be capable of such things. It gives us the illusion that the world around us is safer than it actually is. The reality – that we never know when these things might happen, and given the right circumstances and the right group of people, most people will do just about anything – is much scarier -
I would like to even extend the Bad Apples theory to the issue of police brutality. As the famous
Stanford Prison Experiment showed, that once most people are given power over others, it is hard to prevent abuse.
"The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue."
Also - studies have shown that if most of us are presented with an authority figure telling us to do something horrible.
We will do it.
torture. polite.
So what is the solution? I think it's two fold :
(1) stop blaming individuals. OK -sometimes those in power who are super racist, sexist, etc have got to go. It sounds like getting rid of Donald Sterling was a good thing. Blaming him as individually "bad" is another issue.
(2) become maladjusted. As MLK once said "there are some things in our society and in our world for which I am proud to be maladjusted."
We have to start to become maladjusted to the common American idea that it's all up to us. It's our fault:
* I can't be loved because too fat
* I'm ADHD so I can't sit still in class. I'm dumb.
* I need coffee to work
* It's my fault I don't save for retirement
While it's true that we can do things that are amazing, we mostly just products of our environment. As Warren Buffet once said
"I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner."
In fact that limited role of individuals is well known to the business world. Index funds, comprise more than
$2 trillion of the $16 trillion in US mutual fund assets and they are growing in popularity.
Index funds are investment vehicles that rely on almost no human input. It's just a simple formula that allows you to invest in real estate, international bonds or really anything. It's like betting on the No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Basketball tournament to win it all each year. More often than not, you will be right.Sure you miss some upsets and some great individual achievements, but the reality is that most of the time the best teams win.
In fact, what investors have found when digging deep into investment returns (PDF!) makes a lot of sense when talking about racism and other oppressions:
"In general (after controlling for interaction effects), about three-quarters of a typical fund’s variation in time-series returns comes from general market movement, with the remaining portion split roughly evenly between the specific asset allocation and active management. In a year like 2008, almost all funds are down, whereas in a year like 2009, almost all funds are up, despite their specific asset allocation or active management activities."
In other words, 75% of what happens to an individual mutual funds, happens because of what everyone else is doing. And another 10%+ coming from where you happen to be when those big changes happen.
So over 85% of return have nothing to do with individual effort.
Or as, Louis CK recently put it:
"I grew up in the '70s, so I'm not racist. However, I do have mild racism"
70's racist
So while I don't know whether Hulk Hogan or Donald Sterling should actually keep their jobs, I do know that they are not Bad Apples. I'll even go a step further, for all of those who think Bill Cosby is a Bad Apple, you have to listen to this clip and remember that the signs were there for us to see but we didn't.
Instead we laughed and said "It's true. It's true"