by Matt Kelemen
Look around a café or a meeting room or a subway car and find all the people over 40 years old. Then ask yourself this. How many of them have been imprisoned for their beliefs? Or had their mothers or uncles or grandmothers disappear forever? How many of them recently returned after long exiles, finally convinced that it was safe to come home? How many of them are the sons of army officers who ordered political prisoners to be tortured in dark jail cells? Or the daughters of soldiers who carried out those odious orders? Grim thoughts, I know. In the cafés and meeting rooms I inhabited in San Francisco, I didn’t think to ask the question (even though I’m sure I came across more than a few people in one or more of these categories).
But here, any given crowd in an elevator or a movie theater or a supermarket is filled with people who suffered losses and pain during seventeen years of military dictatorship, right alongside people who were party to those atrocities, maybe even committed them. What must it be like? What goes through your head? I put that question to an older friend who fled with his family in 1973 and came back after the return of democracy in 1990. Some of his acquaintances from college days invite him over to homes where portraits of Pinochet hang prominently. With them, he says, “I don’t talk about it.”
Of course, there are many who have talked about it. Some have dedicated their lives to seeking justice for the crimes of the Pinochet regime. They’ve written indelible songs and books. They’ve built a museum of memory; one visit there and you leave with the words “never again” on your tongue. They’ve brought military men to trial, trying in vain to put Pinochet himself behind bars. Others have focused on building a new society. They’ve won elections at all levels of government; the President was a political prisoner after the coup, as were some members of her cabinet. They’ve passed policies to rein in the free market and raise the standard of living for poor people, using education as a major lever for change. And they’ve been in power for all but four of the last twenty-five years. Their political coalition is aptly named the New Majority.
But now, the voices of the Right are rising again, telling the same story they told before overthrowing Allende. From behind the gates and electrified fences of their houses, they cheer when the police send surveillance balloons into the skies above their pristine exurbs (it’s a truly Orwellian sight to behold). From their corner offices, they complain that the government’s reforms — more rights for workers, more funding for education and health care — are depressing the economy that they had carefully built through decades of free market policies. It is resonant of the narrative that Pinochet and his minions propagandized to great effect: “The dangerous leftists are ruining our country and it is up to us to save Chile by any means necessary. If we have to cross some uncomfortable lines, it’s for the greater good. The alternative is too terrible to consider.” For those of means, it is a powerful and compelling narrative. But it is also a narrative of privilege, one that gives its listeners license to overlook terrible things that many Chileans have endured.
I have been thinking a lot about the narrative of privilege as I read the news from the States. Like the story of Kim Davis, the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky who refuses “on God’s authority” to affix her name to legal documents allowing gay people to marry. To her fervent supporters, Kim Davis is a victim. The marriage laws changed and, all of a sudden, she is being told to do something that cuts against her core beliefs as a Christian. In response, the Right is apoplectic. Put aside all of the hucksters who are using her for their own ends — the politicians like Mike Huckabee who need a way to stay in the headlines and the lawyers at Liberty Counsel who need to gin up more clients — and focus instead on the true believers, those conservative Christians who truly think that Kim Davis is facing the worst form of discrimination. Are they bigots? Probably (some, certainly). But for some, maybe it’s just that they’ve always had the privilege to live in a system that preferences their beliefs. To be a Christian in America is to have government and businesses close on your sabbath; it is to have your prayers said before Friday night football games; and it is to have your religious holidays and customs secured in Federal law. Never mind that whole classes of people are denied rights and privileges because the laws are written in your favor. All of those people are simply invisible… until they are at your desk demanding their Supreme Court-endorsed right to get married.
And so it goes with the Right’s reaction to Black Lives Matter, the movement borne out of several high-profile killings of black people by police. The movement has made public some very disturbing facts about how black people experience law enforcement. Police are being shown as bad actors and our system of justice is being exposed as demonstrably unfair. And again, the Right is apoplectic, with commentators going to great lengths to blame the victims of police violence, deny that systemic racism exists, or shift the conversation away from race. When it comes to dealing with the police in America, it sure must be nice to believe, based on your personal experience with law enforcement as a white person, that the system works as intended to keep people safe and treat them fairly. Never mind that that’s simply not true for people of color. All of those people are simply invisible… until a video shows one of them getting shot in the back by a police officer.
Sometimes the narrative of privilege is loud, ugly and absurd, including most things uttered by Donald Trump. Other times, it’s a deafening silence, like a year going by without anyone being accountable for the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice at the hands of a police officer. But mostly it’s mundane, quotidian, like the regular warnings I get to “watch my pockets” if I’m planning to go to downtown Santiago or to the Bayview in San Francisco. And that’s what makes it so insidious.