Talking to Strangers

I'm more than a little gobsmacked by this one.

When did Malcolm Gladwell get red-pilled into a right wing apologist? Or is it just after countless bestselling books and a lucrative podcast empire he thought he'd just go for it with this Fox News ready hot-take?

I mean it starts with Sandra Bland, pulled over in Texas, arrested, jailed and found dead by suicide in her cell three days later. In a book called Talking to Strangers about our inability to properly communicate with people we don't know, this seems a narrow view of the whole interaction. It's like the conversational equivalent of “you shouldn't have worn that dress.”

Let's ignore the fact Bland was jailed 3 days for a failed lane signal. That Starbucks baristas have better de-escalation skills than the arresting officer who was, let's not forget, indicted for perjury. This reads like yet another story of “driving while Black” not one of crossed wires and an incomplete transfer of information.

But then Gladwell decides to weigh in on the case of campus rapist Brock Turner.

Brock Turner of course is the former Stanford University swim star, son of a civilian contractor for the United States Air Force who was charged for “20 minutes of action” and served 3 months of a six month sentence after Judge Aaaron Perskey (a Stanford Alumnus himself) felt that prison would have a severe impact on him.

And here comes Gladwell using this, of all incidents, to put forward the notion that sexual assault is a failure to agree on the rules of consent because alcohol causes mental myopia. That Brock Turner simply was ill-equipped to know what he was doing when we was raping an unconscious woman, neglecting the fact he still somehow had enough of a self-preservation instinct to try and run away when he was discovered.

That we're to minimize this is a crime of violence where individuals exert their power and control over another individual sexually and instead speak of it as miscommunication - to shifting the blame to the victim for their failure to communicate clearly is a hard fucking no. And it's not just reprehensible on the page, it has real world ramifications. In fact, just this year the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that it isn't rape to have sex with an unconscious woman if she's gotten drunk voluntarily. What.The.Fuck.

And there the book goes from being willfully dumb, narrowly focused, and cherry picking whatever helps the preexisting argument to downright dangerous. I've just read a 300 page opinion piece from a Conservative rag with all the hard-hitting, well-researched rigour of an online anti-vaxxer. Hard pass.