Conscious Choice Seattle: Forked Tongues

March 2005

Forked Tongues

Does Seattle Have a Problem with “Passive Aggressive” Behavior?

by Silja J.A. Talvi

About a year ago, I attended a birthday party in the Central District.

The person celebrating her birthday wasn’t a friend of mine; she was a friend of a friend. I’m still not quite sure why I went, except for the fact that the winter doldrums had gotten the best of me. I needed to get out of my small apartment, and so I walked a few blocks to the small house. I regretted my decision to attend almost instantaneously.

The party was in full swing, and the ambient noise was both drunken and deafening. I couldn’t just turn around and walk out without looking obvious, and so made the decision to stay for at least an hour. The plan was to then make a relatively graceful exit.

Anyone who truly knows me is aware that I dislike “small talk” immensely. To some, that comes across as a character flaw. Folks who like to throw house parties think I’m strange for not enjoying the company of pre-selected strangers, but I simply don’t like feeling trapped into small talk or, for that matter, having to talk my way out of singing on the karaoke machine (oh, the sheer horror!).

For me, this is more a byproduct of my Finnish cultural upbringing than anything else, and I’m done apologizing for it. If there’s nothing substantive to talk about, I don’t want to talk just for the sake of saying something to fill the space between people. On the other hand, when something gets me going, I’m capable of talking a mile a minute, complete with wild hand gestures and animated facial expressions. Otherwise, I’m the type of person you’ll see in a coffee shop or a bar with my nose buried in a copy of The Nation or some new piece of research on the criminal justice system.

This is one of the reasons that I love Seattle; there’s a place for people like me. I can roll out of bed and hop on a bus reading the morning paper, park myself at the Central Library to write for several uninterrupted hours, and then grab kappa maki and a Sapporo at a restaurant that offers free wi-fi. I read and write into the night, parked at a noisy bar with my ear buds and my iBook. People might occasionally be curious about why I hang out in bars just to write, but it’s rare that someone is overtly disrespectful. This is a city that lets people like me exist, relatively undisturbed and unjudged.

Handshakes All Around

For the Central District, this birthday party was a surprisingly homogenous party, at least where ethnicity was concerned. After a half-hour or so, a young African-American man walked in to a setting that was overwhelmingly Euro-American. I didn’t know the man, but we greeted each other with a friendly nod. I got something to nosh on, and then sat down in a corner facing the room where most of the guests were hanging out. I watched as a few young white guys smiled at the African-American man and introduced themselves with a hearty round of handshakes.

A few minutes later, they planted themselves a few feet from me, and started to speak their minds. “Nigger,” one of them said. “What is he doing here?” They shared snickers and knowing glances.

I nearly choked up my food on the spot. Instead, I collected myself, uttered a few angry, choice words to the people involved, and headed out the door. I debated whether to tell the man who had been the target of the comments, but saw him laughing and drinking with a group of people who actually seemed to be his real friends. I opted against imparting something he hadn’t been witness to, and ruining his night as a result.

I walked home feeling sick.

Even in the 21st century, racism is real and present, and I’ve never thought otherwise. But there’s another, underlying issue here that I want to tackle.

I wasn’t so much shocked by the fact that a half-dozen white men unmasked their racism in my proximity as by what they said and did in the presence of the man that they harbored prejudice toward.

These young men had looked this guest in his eyes. They had smiled, introduced themselves, and pretended that he was welcome in their midst. And then, they proceeded to unleash their hatred and aggression in secret, away from earshot. I could tell that they were too cowardly to say anything in his presence, but that didn’t diminish the hatred of their speech.

Hampering Our Social Progress

I’m not the first to say that Seattle has a pervasive “passive-aggressive” streak that, in turn, seems to hamper its own social progress.

This example is also an extreme manifestation of what I’m talking about. Not all of Seattle, of course, has this problem. There are plenty of straight shooters here, and I’ve met (and love the company of) people who actually say what they mean.

But I’ve witnessed Seattle’s passive-aggressive streak enough to say that it happens far too often for its own good. First, though, I should be clear that the term “passive-aggressive” refers in psychiatric circles to something even more serious: “a pervasive pattern of passive resistance to demands for adequate social and occupational performance."

That’s the medical definition. The average Joe (or Joelle) thinks of passive-aggressive behavior as a way that people act out their aggressions indirectly, in ways that can be equally or even more harmful than direct, on-the-spot anger. The term has worked its way into our vernacular. Over the years I’ve heard many people use it to describe something that they specifically dislike about living in Seattle.

One argument in favor of passive-aggressive behavior is that Seattleites just want to avoid confrontation and conflict for the sake of social harmony. According to this logic, tolerance in society comes with a price, and it’s better for to have someone biting his or her lip than spitting bile.

But conflict avoidance just isn’t a good thing, especially when it’s being practiced on a regular basis. Being honest about how you feel can actually clear the air and help people to move forward in one way or another. It’s not always pretty or pleasant. It’s not always clean-cut. But it’s honest.

Honesty, Yes, Brutality, No

I’ll take honesty over falsity any day. To be absolutely clear, I’m not talking about people being “honest” through violence or brutality.

But I’m not alone in saying this: I want to know where a person is coming from. It’s not just so that I can have a better sense of whose company is worth keeping, versus whose company is better kept at a long arm’s length.

The simple truth of the matter is that in a diverse society, we’ve got a lot to learn from each other. No one way of communication or self-expression is the right way. No one way of anything is the right way. Even if I don’t end up liking you, there’s a good chance I’ll be educated on something in the process.

As imperfect as we are, we’re just not always going to get along. But we can do a lot more to understand what’s going on with each other than to smile, shake hands, and speak to each other with forked tongues.

Silja J.A. Talvi is an award-winning journalist and columnist for Evergreen Monthly.

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