When you sit in the front seat, the conversations are so much better.
In the past month, I have taken over 30 rides with Uber in the Triangle. Some were short—a seven-minute ride downtown or a trip to the doctor’s office. Others were longer—20 minute rides to The Streets at Southpoint to visit the Apple Store with a broken MacBook on more than one occasion. Each time I leave with a new story.
There was the father driving so that he could afford to keep his daughters in college, the man from the Philippines who handles patient transportation in the Duke Hospital and the guy whose car smelt like cigarettes and who reminded me on multiple occasions that he had lost his laptop to a stripper. Then there was the husband driving so his wife, a nurse at Duke Hospital, could take less hours, the lifetime Durham-ite who mused about the city’s gentrification and a guy who had bet far too large a sum of money on the Preakness.
My favorite ride happened this past week around midnight on Sunday when I arrived back in Durham from a friend’s wedding. I didn’t even need to break the silence, he jumped right in, and soon enough, we were discussing his history as a subway graffiti artist in New York City where people who just write their name on a wall continue to give his work a bad reputation. Now a single father driving to keep his son enrolled in a top, local private school, he spoke of how he was pushing his son to focus on school and of his perception that college students like us were a dying breed in our society given the increasing cost and the decreasing value of a four-year education.
Aside from the fact that nearly all of my drivers were men, a fact supported by checking all my receipts, the diversity of narratives has consistently amazed me. Uber allows you to enter for a brief moment the world of someone else, sitting in their car right next to them with the window down and not a barrier in the way.
I have truly started to enjoy the ride, even the awkward silence that always penetrates the car when you first get in. It makes that gem of a moment when you connect with another person all the more gratifying. The stories have their own nuance and complexity. Each life followed a different path to our interacting in that moment, and one could easily assume the stereotype for the person driving without ever scratching the surface of their narrative.
Part of the challenge of intellectual discourse, especially columns, is that we often reduce narratives to generalizations and caricatures of reality spinning them at will. I’m doing that right now with my experiences riding around the Triangle in a bunch of random people’s cars. Facing facts, Uber is honestly glorified hitchhiking. However, such hyperbolic analyses and summations are fundamentally what is wrong with campus dialogue and with intellectual discourse as a whole in the age of social media, the Internet and unsurprisingly poorly written and reasoned Chronicle columns.
For a publication I have spent the better part of three years writing for, the click friendly, insert [biased, offensive, or otherwise misinformed] word here columns continue to find new ways to surprise me. Last week’s foray into this field of columns followed a tragically familiar pattern. The author was not a part of the group he was writing about, the column proscribed ways to fix other people’s problems while denying those people their humanity and inherent value and the column managed to complete the trifecta by claiming that, once and for all, these suggestions were the only correct way to change society’s ills.
My peers who are black can address the first two because they actually identify with the community the column discusses. For a great starting point, see this beautifully done piece.
I’ll instead address the third point, namely the denial of potentially being wrong. The most pernicious threat to campus culture beyond the bias and racism overtones has become freedom of expression itself and refusing to engage with a different opinion’s argument, a hot topic of late for columnists across the country.
Many of these columns argue that opinions differing from the liberal horde are being squelched from the classroom and from public dialogue simply because they may be “offensive” or “difficult to deal with.” Commonly, these critiques come from conservative voices blaming blind liberalism for society’s challenges, harkening back to some imagined golden age when people used to be able to sit down and have a conversation.
The failure of constructive dialogue lies in that argument itself. Intellectual analysis is the nuance of recognizing that you might not always be 100 percent correct. We have our beliefs, but until someone proves otherwise, we stick to them understanding they may well be outdated or incorrect. A black and white world—one it seems the media inhabits more often than not—is one of binary and single archetypes, and one that asserts that my one way is correct and can never change.
But we live in a world of narrative and nuance where truth is elucidated from experience, and we each have something to bring to the table. Our world is one of front seat stories and of shared motivation, not the binary of front seat and back seat, each person shielded blindly from the other by social and physical barriers. By failing to acknowledge the possibility of viewpoints being wrong, often spreading lies that reinforce societal injustices and reject common humanity in the process, these articles fuel rather than quench the thirst for constructive discourse dragging us further toward blindness.
We have to begin to honor the narratives of people’s lived social realities with equally complex and nuanced arguments that restore rather than reject the humanity we share.
When we learn to sit in the front seat, the conversations can be so much better.
Jay Sullivan is a Trinity senior. His column will run bi-weekly in the fall.
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