The flight from normal

To be healthy and and happy is to live under political suspicion

In the new Mean Girls revenge fantasy, the straight, pretty girl gets recruited to Team Oppressed. She is offered belonging if she can learn to hate the right people.

The other day I was talking to my friend Joe Davis, a sociologist at the University of Virginia who interviews young people and tries to tease out their self-understandings. He noted the prevalence of upper-middle-class college students self-diagnosing with some mental ailment or another, far beyond the incidence of any clinical-grade impairment or dysfunction. The conversation got me speculating about how this tendency responds to the wider political culture.

If (like the modal student at UVA) you are white, self-disciplined, smart, fit, good-looking and socially adept, you are equipped with advantages for life. But in significant ways, you find yourself disadvantaged in the moral-political landscape of the present. Those same advantages may be liabilities, when it comes to your standing in institutions. In the college admissions process, for example, one must claim to have overcome some hurdle or disadvantage. It is a competition in pluck, but more fundamentally a competition in woe.¹

If this were merely a cynical game played by students to further their chances at college admission, that would be bad enough. But such institutional demands percolate down into a young person’s “self-articulation” (the term is Charles Taylor’s), that process by which she fills out a picture of herself as reflected in the mirror of the surrounding culture and its authoritative moral codes. Thus reflected, what does she see? The current phrase among the kids is “basic white bitch.”

That is not something it is good to be. But you hear the term used sardonically as a self-description by basic white girls who want to indicate that they are self-aware. Here, “basic” names the absence of any distinguishing features of the sort one could pin an identity on and expect to have it affirmed. Distilling what he learned from his interviewees, Davis writes,

Similarly, those from a “privileged background,” such as “being white or upper-class,” need an “offset.” In both cases, students said “having a disorder” can show that they also struggle. It provides an “identity” that allows even the privileged to “voice their thoughts and feel included.”