# 21 Jun 2016, 12:28PM: On A Fraught Word:
(This is a blog post specifically aimed at people who aren't in or from the United States and who have conversations with people from the US, especially online. Also, content note: I explain what lynching is and why it's a bad idea to joke about it, with examples.)
Sometimes when people are joking about vigilante justice, they might use the word "lynch," like "we ought to lynch so-and-so," and think it is a harmless and hyperbolic way of saying "we ought to punish them". As a person who likely (if you are reading this blog) cares about inclusivity and social justice, you probably should not use this term in this way. While some people certainly think it has that generic and benign meaning, in the US (the country whose history I know best), it mostly means white people getting together in mobs to kill black people -- for succeeding, for daring to buy houses or vote, or simply for anything deemed unacceptable by those angry racist mobs. It very rarely still happens here, but it was a more common occurrence not so long ago, such that the history and ramifications of this particular form of race-based terrorism are still very present in the American conscience.
In the summer of 1955, Emmett Till, a 14 year old black boy from Chicago, was spending the summer with family members in Mississippi, when he was suddenly accused of breaking the South's unwritten rules of interracial conduct by catcalling a white woman. He was abruptly apprehended by an angry white mob, tortured, and lynched. His mother asked for him to have an open-casket funeral, so people could see the extent of the battering and butchery, and newspapers around the country published the photos. This raised the consciousness of Americans across the nation and helped to spur the movement for civil rights in the United States.
More recently: in the 1990s, a black man (Clarence Thomas) was nominated to be a US Supreme Court justice. Anita Hill, an accomplished black female lawyer and Thomas's former employee, came forward and publicly stated that he had sexually harassed her. This accusation, and the subsequent televised judicial hearings, were a watershed moment that brought the issue of workplace sexual harassment into widespread national debate. Thomas responded to the accusations by calling them "a high-tech lynching". Hill was alternately applauded and attacked; however, the hearings ultimately proved no obstacle for Thomas, as the legislature went on to confirm his appointment. Twenty-five years later, Justice Thomas still sits on the US Supreme Court.
I know the basic facts above from memory, and those of us who were raised in the USA basically know much of this stuff by heart as part of the history of hate crimes. So that's the kind of shit that we are reminded of when someone jokes about lynching, and why you probably just shouldn't do it around us.
(Thanks to Camille Acey for suggesting revisions that improved this piece. And thanks to the white person I spoke with on this point in private conversation; I adapted that conversation into this post.)
# 30 Jun 2016, 11:19AM: Ambition And Failure:
People who are trying to make stuff often feel like we're failing. Ira Glass's articulation of the gap between taste and skill gets at this. He suggests making more stuff, for deadlines, for others, as a rhythm to push you to progress through that gap. But how do you keep up your morale during that push?
I'm a Recurse Center alumna, and that community often shares learning tips that are relevant to this struggle. For instance, I recommend Allison Kaptur's "Effective Learning Strategies for Programmers", which suggests reframing failure -- and reframing praise and success. Even if the tips I get via RC are programmer-centric, I can usually reuse them in other activities, such as growing my business. And earlier this year, in Ramsey Nasser's keynote The Unfortunate Value of Failure at !!Con 2016 (transcript & video), I heard a different nuance that really spoke to me. Here's the chunk of the captions/transcript that particularly resonated:
I have the same anxieties at 29 as a programmer that I did when I was a teenager. I don't feel measurably better about myself as a programmer over the last ten years, although it is objectively true that I'm a better programmer. Just looking at my GitHub repo, I can see rationally that I have actually improved, but I was trying to figure out why I didn't feel any better.
And my understanding of it... This may be different for other people, but this is my take on it. I don't think that my feeling about my skill as a programmer is actually tied to my skill at all. It's actually tied to the things that I'm trying to do, at whatever skill level I'm at. So when I was 19, I was just trying to make websites. And it was really hard. Right? And ten years later, I'm trying to write a symbolic compiler. And that's really hard. And the diff between what you're trying to do and what you're able to do is how you feel. And as I got better as a programmer, I just kept trying harder and harder things.
So the feeling is constant. Right? That's why there's no point where everything will just feel wonderful. Because I have to do this. I would have to just make basic websites for the rest of my life. And I would feel great. My anxiety would go away. I can whip up a website really, really quickly. But that's not actually what I'm excited about anymore. So my ambitions and the things that I'm excited about grow with my skill. And that's what keeps that feeling constant. That's what it's been for me. Like, right now, I'm running this whole presentation out of custom slide show software that I wrote, and I'm terrified that it's just gonna explode. Like, eat this presentation in front of everybody. And I hope it doesn't.
So if we can't eliminate it, I think we need to learn to love it. Right? We need to embrace it as part of the craft of programming. And not as this thing to be avoided. Failure... When you fail, that means you're pushing yourself. That means you're reaching beyond what you're capable of, because you want to be better. When you're failing, you're learning and you're growing. Right? You're sort of saying to yourself... Whatever you know now is great. It's wonderful. But there's more that you want. Right? It's a sense that you haven't given up on just absorbing as much as you can. When you're failing, you're exploring things that are in that grey area. That there may be interesting surprises there, or there may be things that you don't want, but you're willing... It's a sort of brave commitment to go there and to see what's out there. Failing is not wrong.
As a homeschooling parent once wrote: "The only thing that makes you smarter is doing hard things." (From the same parent: "I do think that one of the greatest educational gifts I can give her is confidence that she can seek out challenges and master them." and: "being out there on the edge of what you maybe-can't do. That's the place that you value, because that's where you stretch".)
