You Are Not Your House and Other Statements of Fact: Exploring the Systemic and the Personal

We have a problem in America. Maybe we have a problem all over the world.

We don't understand the difference between the systemic and the personal.

I mean, we understand it in a theoretical "oh I learned about that in school" kind of way, but we don't get it.

So first a refresher course; what do I mean when I say systemic and what do I mean by personal?

"Personal" is related to you, or at least to someone or something. It is about a real person and their actions or beliefs in the world. Personal is the "this happened and here is who did the action and here is who was the target of the action." Personal is an attribute or quality of, well, a person or thing.

If I use an adjective to describe a person, their thoughts, or their actions, it is primarily personal.

Lars is a kind man.
Jim is a a black man.
Marika is a racist.

No snoozing in the back. This is important.

People have specific attributes for a host of reasons, some innate and some learned and some forced on them.

Some personal attributes can be changed easily: a haircut, a tan, a job. Some are harder or impossible to change even if someone wanted to: base skin color, handicap, levels of personality traits like kindness and empathy.

We all have at least some agency over some of our personal traits and attributes.

Got it? Good.

A system is an interlocked group of interrelated and interdependent parts that is either natural or artificial/human created.

Think of your household as a system. There are independent pieces like people, and pets, and bits of furniture. Each of the independent pieces has personal qualities, like shape and color and personality traits. The independent pieces all impact each other, work together or clash, and make-up a whole that impacts the world as a unit.

You are a subset, a part, of your household system. It is not you, and you are not it. It impacts you and you impact it.

It reflects on and changes you, and you can reflect on and change it.

Now, here's the tricky part.

The system and its parts may not match in attribute; personal attributes of pieces of a complex system do not have to match the attributes of the system of a whole.

What the hell does that mean?!?!?! How can they not match?

You have red hair. Your household system does not.

Your house is 130 years old and infested with roaches. You are immaculately clean and neatly dressed.

Now, let's go one further.

Sometimes you inherit a fully functioning system.

Your parents die, and they leave you their fully-furnished house. Until they died it was theirs; you were not able to make large changes outside of your room, even though you lived there.

Now you own it. 

The furniture is ugly and outdated. The wiring isn't up to code. The paint is peeling. There is a fence around it that has a sign saying "No Admittance!" It has 17 steps up to the front door, and is totally inaccessibly by anyone in a wheelchair.

But now it is all yours. And you are responsible for it. You didn't build it, or shape it. You couldn't control how accessible it was. You didn't do anything other than be born to get it handed to you, and you didn't cause its decline or obvious faults. 

Until you inherited the responsibility, you had no power, and now that you have the power, you are also responsible, even though you didn't create it.

Ok, hope you're still with me. Now that you understand the difference between systemic and personal, what is the problem?

It's this. Some attributes can be applied to either a person or the system they are in, and some people can't understand that the attributes of the systems they are in do not refer to them.

No, really.

In America we have inherited a battered house. We've inherited a set of interlocked white supremacist, male-dominated, heterocentric, ciscentric, and abelist systems of applying laws, selling houses and cars, schooling, politics, and interaction.

But the attributes of the systems of America are just that-systemic. They do not have to apply to all parts of the system. 

You are not innately falling apart just because your house is.

Here's the catch. Remember when I said personal and systemic attributes reflect one another?

Yeah.

So if you inherit that old house, or that racist system, and you leave it battered and broken when you have the money to fix it, if you leave it white-centered and ugly when you have the agency to make change, then you do become responsible.

Then you do take on attributes related to your personal actions within the larger system.

But you are not taking on the attributes of the system itself.

You are not a racist "because the system is racist." You are only a racist if you accept a racist system. You are only a racist if your personal actions say you are.

Who cares?

You do, or at least you should.

Because people tend to conflate systemic critique with personal criticism. Maybe you do. Maybe people you are talking to do.

When they are told, for example, that they are in a racist system, what they may hear is "I'm being called a racist." 

No, you're not. Or at least hopefully you personally are not.

If I say your house is purple I'm not saying that you personally are purple. I'm saying the greater piece you live in has that color.

I'm saying the purple reflects on you.

I'm saying you can change the purple if you will.

We have to be able to critique and criticize systems based on fact, without reacting as if we were the pieces being critiqued.

So if your house is damaged and falling down, and I tell you I can see it and it's dangerous, I still love you. I am not saying that you are broken. I am not saying that you are bad because you inherited it.

But the house has to be fixed.

Our country has become a nightmare, and we have inherited it. Please, help me to fix it before it's too late.

Before it does become personal.