Pressure Builds Diamonds: An American Hypocrisy

There are many phrases in the American lexicon that suggest an admiration for people who overcome struggle and adversity. Only The Strong Survive! Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger! Pain Is Weakness Leaving The Body! But in the wake of this election season and the various autopsies to determine how and why America re-elected Donald Trump, one that has been stuck in my head has been Pressure Builds Diamonds.  I don’t know where I first heard this, but it sounds like something, despite being technically true, that one would find on a cheesy motivational poster in the cubicle of an energy drink salesman.  But I wanted to reflect on how this country has and is treating those under immense pressure and how it regards those who do rise from it as figurative diamonds.

I have always had an admiration for people who persevere through struggle.  And American history is full of people and groups who have done this.  In my own life, I think my aversion to quitting things, even when they cause me great frustration and distress (college basketball and comedy are the two big ones that come to mind) comes from my Mom.  If pressure builds diamonds then my Mom is double proof (as she has achieved both the results of a diamond and exerts the pressure needed to produce them).  For brief biography (as best as I remember from my mother telling me): my Mom’s grandfather came from Ireland and died young in a factory accident in Buffalo. His daughter, who was a newly born child in Buffalo, was sent back to Ireland because her mother, my Mom’s maternal grandmother, could not take care of her, given her work as a domestic.  My grandmother’s brother, my Mom’s uncle, passed away as a teen from polio. When my grandmother returned to the United States as a young adult, she married my grandfather, an Ellis Island-arriving Irishman (Northern Ireland – County Fermanagh – as my Mom tells it, he never liked that his passport said UK and not Ireland) and they had three children. My Mom was the middle child and at 9 saw her Mom pass away from an infection during gall bladder surgery and at age 21 saw her older sister pass away from Leukemia, when she was just 24.

My Mom went on to marry a Haitian immigrant, my father, and with a high school diploma went on to own a home and send her sons to Northwestern University and Williams College, allowing both of us to incur far less debt than many of our contemporaries because she had an intense and desperate belief in the American dream and that education was the most vital tool to achieving it.  But as I grew up I could see that my Mom’s American Dream was not really for her. It was almost like the tragedies dealt to her, combined with the frustrations of being a strong-willed woman in a country that still does not seem to know how to react to strong women (let alone 60 years ago) had led her to be angry and resistant to happiness for herself. Instead, she poured all that energy, mostly good, occasionally bad into her two sons. Despite whatever natural talents or skills I have, it was my Mom’s work ethic (both the lessons and material benefits of it) that laid the considerable foundation of my life.  But my Mom’s well-deserved sense of accomplishment (which she rarely acknowledges for herself, unless she feels disrespected) always manifested itself in praise or happiness through my brother and me.  I believe the loss of her mother at such an early age created in her a sense of “I’m on my own” for herself, but created a deep intensity in her as a mother to be such a devoted and indefatigable caregiver for her own kids to make up for her own experience as a child.

Why do I bring this up? Because I think the experience of seeing my mother, over the course of my life, fight for the American Dream at a cost and effort so high that it is almost like she cannot fully enjoy it, has made me appreciate and admire the different groups of Americans and immigrants who have given so much to this country, and yet are treated like everything from impediments to abominations in the story of America (current chapter included).  It is this emotion that lies dormant in me sometimes, but in the wake of the 2024 election, has stirred more angrily.

My Mother is a white woman. So this is not the liberal lamentation of an ivory tower resident who has not seen how white people can be sometimes dealt a short straw in modern America.  From outsourcing jobs to opioids to feeling like a rhetorical punching bag in comedy, culture and politics, white people are not without struggles and valid complaints.  But the struggles of white people, especially the struggles of more recent vintage affecting white men have become a crisis for this nation that simultaneously makes white male problems a code red/all hands-on-deck issue and renders the continuing addressing of more long standing issues affecting other communities as “woke”/”DEI”/out of date complaints.  Whether it is hearing Professor Scott Galloway rattle off the apocalyptic stats of less sex and motivation for young men (the same young men who might have a “pressure builds diamonds” poster featuring Joe Rogan rubbing testosterone gel on his nipples) or seeing a political campaign swing, in part, on the demonization of trans youth, it is clear that this country has a double standard when it comes to “pressure building diamonds.”  It seems like pressure builds diamonds for others and a bomb we must avoid if it’s white men.

If you want evidence that pressure builds diamonds, you can look to the Jewish community in professional fields, the Black community in arts and athletics, women outnumbering men in law school/higher education, the gay community in the arts and GOP politics to name a few. This is not to suggest stereotypes but to say when America has exerted enormous pressure on groups of people (short of genocide) these groups have often made brilliant lemonade out of the lemons they were allowed to have or forced to grow, in part because they had little other choice.  But when a person, for example a Black woman like Ketanji Brown Jackson, achieves a high honor in a field not classically thought of as a “Black job,” if I can quote a Black labor scholar named Donald Trump, then it is deemed a DEI/unqualified/Woke hire, as if the pressure of America’s racism could not produce diamonds in fields other than the ones prescribed to them by the dominant power structure?

And whether it is Justice Neil Gorsuch having a Constitutional soft spot for Native Americans, or Yellowstone allowing for very sympathetic stories of Native tribes and women, it is clear that some of what stops many white people from fully empathizing with the plight of today’s groups is proximity.  Caring about native issues has sort on academic feel to a lot of America and their remedies (the ones allowed) won’t break the bank.  But Americans’ need to be all powerful and super victim at once are much more resistant to equally valid claims for reparations, affirmative action, equality, etc.  Because rectifying those wrongs may force certain people to address their own biases, prejudices and actions in concrete ways. And so diminishing and distorting those issues and communities is both self-serving and satisfying.

In my life, I am not sure any group has had more to overcome (and is still overcoming) than the LGTBQ community.  They have made great strides but I am speaking beyond the discrimination and hate they still face.  Just as Barack Obama should have embodied, for all Americans, the true inter-generational American Dream that I believe my mother wanted for my brother and me, I believe the LGTBQ represents the greatest current spirit of perseverance that American is supposed to be about.  In my lifetime, the LGTBQ community has dealt with legal and social discrimination hate, a fu*king plague that, as I have thought, and recently read in The Great Believers (review on my Patreon – what you thought an earnest blog would not have any shameless plugs?), was akin to a war, becoming a political punching bag, and the newest shame on our already shameful Congress (the New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Sarah McBride is absolutely worth your time) in the case of trans people.  And what do they keep doing? Rocking out with their cocks out (literally in many cases). But for a group to constantly seek a deeper engagement with America, whether in arts, culture, politics or marital bliss, despite the mistreatment, is a testament to their strength and resilience, values that mean nothing if they only apply to straight Americans and are “woke” or “annoying” or “immoral” when applied to other groups.

And yet, Republicans and their voters want you to believe a deep inconsistency that Trump represents so well: straight white people are simply the best (with some token and subservient exceptions) and anyone who gets “their” stuff did not earn it or do not deserve it, but also “why is everyone making us the bad guys and why don’t people try to reach our community and help us?”  What I would say to every Trump voter who felt genuinely left behind by the country is “I hear you and I understand you and know that (some of) your concerns are real.  But do you not understand how tough it is for other communities and how they’ve been dealing with this for longer, in many cases to a degree far worse?  I am not telling you your struggle is invalid, but how can I, in good conscience, support your struggle if you disregard the longer struggles of others and support the demonizing of a small group of people who are fighting hard to just be treated as equals in 2024?”

So I guess I am writing this not to say I “support” all the identity groups that the Left is attacked for defending (not at the expense of white people, but that is how it is treated), but that I admire them. I won’t get into discussions of white privilege or “wokeness” as those terms have been so bastardized and weaponized to delegitimize real issues through oversimplified caricaturizing.   So I will simply write from a place of admiration. From centuries ago to present day I respect and admire all the groups that started on lower rungs of our society and have fought to be a part of the society and make it better, stronger and more inclusive (sorry, but the Constitution is meant to be a document of ever increasingly inclusivity – so even if you don’t like the D or the I of DEI, increased inclusivity, despite setbacks along the way, is the arc of the Constitution).  And people who fight for it and for their American dreams have my admiration.  My mother fought for the American Dream as have so many people and communities. But when Americans drain the dream of all its joy, rendering it a bitter, thankless slog, you can make people you should admire and praise feel unappreciated and unvalued.

I am reminded of The Prodigal Son parable told by Jesus. It boils down to one son takes his inheritance and spends it all on booze and women. When he finally returns destitute and ashamed, his father is so glad he throws a feast for him. Meanwhile, the prodigal son’s brother is pissed. He wants to know why he never got this feast despite his loyalty and service. And the father tells him, this was always yours, but your brother was lost and he is now found.  For me, America is the prodigal son. Every time the rights and privileges of this country are expanded and its promises closer to fulfillment, we should be happy.  To the MAGA voters and their ilk (the brother) who see this as not just – this country in deeper ways than mere economics, has always been yours. But now America finding itself should be viewed as something to celebrate, not as something being taken from you.

The people and groups in this country who fight for this and work for it are the proof that pressure does, in fact, make diamonds.  But if you believe that this aphorism only applies to straight white men, I’ll remind you that White Diamonds is just a perfume by Elizabeth Taylor.