Skin in the Game

 I've talked about this before on this blog, but one of my glaring deficiencies in my current line of work is my lack of what's known as "direct experience." Periodically when opining or giving a presentation on some dimension of immigration or asylum law, I will be asked "what brought you to this work"—and I never have a good answer. I don't have a particularly recent immigration history or experience in my family. I don't have a partner or best friend or immediate family member who has had to navigate that system and seen its flaws. I don't have anything, in short, that could be described as "first-hand experience," apart from what I gleaned after I was already working on these issues in a professional capacity. 

A friend of mine tells me this is precisely why people are suspicious of "white liberals." It's completely unclear why they seem to care or feel passionate about progressive causes, because they have no "skin in the game." Worse, they may actively have an interest in maintaining the existing distribution of power and resources in our society. So why should they be trusted to actually want to change things? Is there some hidden motive beneath the surface? And is the fundamental hypocrisy of their position not the root of all the behaviors people complain about with respect to them: the savior complex, the "holy renunciate" routine, the Jekyll and Hyde pattern whereby an "ally" transforms into an enemy under the wrong conditions?

My friend is obviously onto something; there's a lot of truth to all this. But I have a few points I'd like to make in my own defense. First, I can't pretend to have experienced something I haven't. I'm periodically asked, as I mentioned, to recount my "lived experience," and always, I come up short. I can describe the thought process whereby I reached a certain conclusion. I can say why I think a given policy is wrong or needs to change. But I don't have a good story for why I should care in particular. And I can't pretend there is one if there isn't. As much hypocrisy as there may be in my current position, there would be even more in making up a convincing backstory if it's not really true.

Second, as annoying as white liberals may be when they care, they are obviously even worse when they don't. People may be in a strange position when they are uneasy about their own privilege; but being at ease with it, or even believing one is entitled to it, is surely more dangerous. 

Third, I question whether I really am so lacking in "skin in the game" across all dimensions of my personhood. What I'm investing my time in, after all, is not really the progressive political movement. What I care about, beneath this, is the preservation of a rights-based international order: this is what the whole human rights framework is about. "Progressive" or left-wing political actors may sometimes be allies in that fight; but not always. In either case, my real goal is not the victory of a particular social movement or flank of the political spectrum, but the preservation and expansion of a liberal rights regime: and the liberal intelligentsia always cares about that—in part because their own ability to think and write freely depends upon it as well. They have a stake in that outcome—"skin in the game"—in that sense. 

Fourth, I'm not persuaded there's any such philosophically-robust distinction between "direct" and "indirect" experience as people would have us believe. All experience is mediated through larger intellectual structures—i.e., one's understanding of how the world works. Even seeing an immediate family member be deported, for instance, would not lead to any policy conclusion or political conviction if people didn't also know (as they well do) what deportation is and why it takes place under the current U.S. legal regime. Any political or moral conviction therefore requires an analogical process of reasoning from one's own experience to a larger pattern. It requires an exercise in imaginative solidarity that goes beyond "direct experience." 

When I think about my friend's point about white liberals, I often call to mind Rabbi Hillel's famous utterance: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" This is the fundamental principle of having "skin in the game": it tells us that the best advocates for our own rights and interests will always be ourselves, and we should start there. To this extent, my friend is spot-on. But I then go on to think of the next line of that quote. Because Hillel continues: "And if I am only for myself, what am I?" Clearly, both "skin in the game" and imaginative solidarity have a role to play in his scheme. One may start from self-advocacy, but if one does not extend outward from there to see the connections to other people's needs and rights and experiences, then what is left of the self that you should be defending?

Fifth, and perhaps relatedly, we may need to expand our understanding of what constitutes "skin in the game." After all, self-interest takes forms more subtle and complex than direct and immediate material benefit. There's also the desire to be right, say; the desire to be moral. Beneath the actions of many an annoying "white liberal" is a desperate longing in the end for absolution and reconciliation. If not in the eyes of a God we may not believe in, then in the eyes of a posterity that will judge us. 

When I think about the thousands of Haitian asylum-seekers who were expelled this past week under the Biden administration's Title 42 program, for instance, or the countless immigrants who are routinely locked up without charge or trial in administration detention sites across the country, a passage comes to mind from the Australian author Thomas Keneally. Better than anything, perhaps, it gives away the game of what's "in it" for the white liberals. He was writing about the Australian government's policy of interdicting and detaining asylum-seekers who arrived by sea. The passage occurs as part of the framing narrative of his 2003 book, The Tyrant's Novel. His narrator, speaking to the novel's eventual protagonist, who is among the caged asylum-seekers, observes:

"You have to understand, [...] Alan [...] I need you. I imagine grandchildren I may never have asking, What did you do when the government locked up the asylum seekers? And my grown daughter, their mother, can at least say, he visited Alan. He made an attempt." 

Is an "attempt" enough? No. Do the good intentions on their own benefit anyone other than the one who exudes them? No. Here again, the critics of the white liberals are dead right. But this line of criticism in itself acknowledges already that what the white liberals are after is a form of self-interest. They want absolution and moral relief. And is this not "skin in the game"? Is it not, therefore, a starting point for engaging self-interest, which, as Saul Alinsky reminds us, is where all organizing begins? 

The analogical process here with us, as with everyone else, must ultimately go much further than this starting point. It must not stop at what benefits us or our desire to assuage our consciences. But it gives us something to work with. It tells us how white liberals' actions are not only for the other, but are also for themselves. And the important thing is then to follow on from that answer to the next stage of Rabbi Hillel's questioning. Because if we are only for ourselves—if we are just making "feel good" gestures in the end that help no one and nothing apart from our own guilt complex—then we must ask: what are we?