While reading the Theory Toolbox by Jeffrey Nealon, Susan Searls Giroux for inspiration for this week’s Civic issues, I asked a very interesting question. The text inquires why people of the Penn State community chant “We are” repeatedly at home football games (and basically every rally type function). We learned from one of the group presentations last semester that this chant tradition originated at Cotton bowl in 1947 when Penn State’s black players were encouraged not to play. The We Are rally cry drops all restrictive characterizations of people of the Penn State community and unites them under a single name. Thus, the phrase We Are implies the inclusion of all people of Penn State regardless of culturally defined differentiations.
In our modern, globalized society, such an attitude as We Are is the only appropriate way to interact with others. Although society acknowledges that people are different, it is taboo to derive meaning or action from these differences. Of course, we do not yet live in a society sensitive to the intricacies of realizing differences yet disenfranchising no one. One sadly common form of such behavior is racism.
CNN recently published a story and video of a group of men chanting “we are racist” and pushing another man of a different race while boarding the train. http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/20/sport/chelsea-football-racism-paris-metro/index.html
The article goes on to say that the group of men are likely part of a subculture called the “Lad” culture. The Lad image, according to Wikipedia is an image that started in the 1990’s when young men portray a traditionally masculine persona, hang out with the bros, and indulge in activities like drinking and watching sports. The CNN article also claims that men of the lad culture often become boisterous and pick on other people for obvious physical traits like race, which materializes as racism.
Although I am not a psychologist, I believe that the reason the “lads” in Paris acted the way they did, besides being inebriated, was because they wanted to feel a sense of inclusion by making their self-perception exclusive. Most people like to feel included in some niche group. We were always taught to include the lonely kid on the playground in our game of tag or invite them to sit with you at lunch to make them feel wanted. The apparent homogeneity of society somehow threatened the lad’s notion of being included; without their imposed exclusion and division of society, they felt as though their identity was not distinguished than therefore lacking the sense of inclusion. Is the feeling of inclusion possible without the potential of exclusion? I am in no way sympathizing or otherwise agreeing with the actions of the lads in Paris, I only seek to understand what possible explanation may exist for their continuation of racism.
It might be interesting to note that on some level, the “We Are Penn State” chant acts in a similar manner to the Lads “We are racist” chant. Although they vary greatly on the subject of cultural appropriateness, both chants aim to generate unity of the speakers at the expense of all excluded from the speakers’ context. Penn state generates unity and inclusion from the populous without a connection to the university, and the lads generate unity and inclusion by differentiation of race. Of course, in our cultural framework, the two chants obviously have very different implications.
A similar phenomena occurs in the novel 1984 by George Orwell. In an effort to unite Oceania, the government led by “Big Brother” stages an ongoing war with supposed neighboring countries. Fictional military campaigns and self-imposed missile strikes, along with Hate week and daily 2 minutes hate, unite the people of Oceania with the collective disenfranchisement of all other societies. Whether or not the war exists is arbitrary; the collective feeling and built competition provides the government the backdrop for control since the government provides the means of inclusion, i.e the government is maintaining security and fighting the war.
The base of many human interactions is the desire of security through inclusion. One must be attune to feelings of inclusion, as some are inherently acidic to those inevitably excluded and should be avoided.
