LAUSR

Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, W. E. B. Du Bois opens his seminal The Souls of Black Folk with a simple formulation that encapsulates the workings of structural inequality even still today: “How does it feel to be a problem?” The question is striking in its disingenuousness, masking the questioner’s complicity in the interrogee’s predicament. When I ask you to talk to me about a thing that has happened to you, “your” thing, the fact of my asking asserts my ignorance as innocence, even as I know enough to presume it is safe to refer to you as a problem. The fact of my asking also weaponizes my imagination of good will: I am asking because I am concerned about you, which transforms a thing that is happening to you into a thing discussed squarely in terms of how it has been processed by you and can be narrated to me. Even as it ostensibly expresses concern for you, again, how are you feeling, the question transfers the responsibility for making meaning onto you—you who are special, tell me more. To be a problem is to carry an identity that a structure is unable or unwilling to accommodate. To ask the question is to acknowledge the dissonance while abdicating responsibility for its resolution.