Jodi Shaw has no shame

And we are all better off because of it

Is shame the most powerful human emotion? 

I think there’s a case to be made that it is.

And I think it is the emotion driving so much of the divisive political and cultural moment we are living through. 

Shame, like every negative emotion, has certain limited applications. Have you stolen from a granny or a sick child? By all means, feel shame. Do you make a habit of kicking dogs? Shame on you, definitely. 

But for the most part shame is useful only as a powerful tool to control human behaviour. Shame is the emotion below fear — we are kept in line by fear, yes, but very often it is the fear of being shamed. 

And the spectre of being shamed in front of the world casts a spell from which it is very difficult to break free. 

Jodi Shaw has no shame. She has proven herself to be beyond the reach of that toxic control mechanism twice now. First, in October of last year, when she made her first Youtube video asking her employer, the uber-liberal Smith College, to stop reducing her to a racial category. And now, by releasing a week ago the much-ridiculed (by Twitter leftists, anyway), library rap she wrote for her job as a librarian at Smith, which her boss told her at the last minute she could not perform because she is white.

When Shaw’s story started gaining widespread attention, I noticed a lot of the criticism she received was focused on this rap (which was only the opening salvo in her drawn-out conflict with her employer); and it was very much in the tone of middle school taunting. It was as though a large section of Twitter rolled their eyes, flicked their hair, Mean Girls style — “OMG a rap? How embarrassing for you” — and thus missed the point entirely. Quite a few others, being edgy, challenged Shaw to “release the rap,” no doubt assuming she would never have the balls to do so.

Well, they were wrong. She released the original verses (which were written to tell Smith freshmen how to use the library system) and, more importantly, added in new ones challenging the woke orthodoxy right back.

“This ideology

Is not what it seems

The end you use to justify being mean

I’ve watched you engage in debilitating teens

Prey upon young adult angst and anxieties

…

I know some of you think oh how very very

To make a rap song about a library

Was a little bit ballsy for a middle-aged Mary

You thought it was cringe but au contrary

You have no idea what it took to make me talk

And place my middle-aged neck upon that block

Instead of standing around staring at the clock 

I got busy getting honest with myself and with God

Someone had to say it, up and spit it out

I probably wouldn’t have done it if I had more clout

More money to lose and a much bigger house

A lot more debt and a lot more self-doubt”

Before she had kids and got a family-friendly day job, Shaw was a professional singer-songwriter with several albums under her belt. She lived in the hipster artistic Meccas of Portland and Brooklyn. Her social and creative circles were made up of the very people who would now shun her for her stance. So in releasing this piece of work, Shaw has put her whole self, her authentic self, her character and her creative abilities on the line, knowing full well there are plenty of her peers who want nothing more than to see her go down in a fiery ball of humiliation.

Jezebel’s hot take on the Jodi Shaw Library Rap, from Feb. 21 2021

That is why the Library Rap is — for something so innocuous, even dorky — an important cultural moment. Because it was the moment when one random, ordinary person decided it was worse to do nothing than to be publicly ridiculed and shamed. 

Jodi Shaw and her homemade, make-up free, filmed-in-the-supermarket, middle-aged white lady rap video may have just broken the spell.

To step away from the Liberal-Left-Twitter Approved Discourse, which is what Jodi has done, is to invite a particular kind of shaming — snide, snarky, bad faith ridicule —  from a particular kind of person: media darlings, adjunct professors, and others whose self-worth is entirely wrapped up in being the smartest/coolest person in the room. (See: Spiers, Elizabeth.quoted below.)

“Media entrepreneur” Elizabeth Spiers misses the point on the Shaw story while subtly informing her readers that SHE IS PART HISPANIC YOU GUYS

The Library Rap hot takes just kept on coming

Shaw saw this derision, this invalidating of her genuinely expressed concern, this condescending misrepresentation of what she was about, and decided, fuck it. I’m doing it anyway. I can’t think of another woman in the public discourse right now who would be willing to do this for her cause.

What does this mean for the rest of us? Us poor, confused, politically homeless, alienated ageing hipsters and indie music fans who suddenly have the uneasy feeling that maybe things have…gone too far?

At the risk of overstating my case, it sets us free. Free from shame. If Jodi did it, we can do it too.

Shame isn’t just a bad feeling. It also distorts our perceptions and influences our behaviour and warps our values. And by values I do not mean those of our particular tribe or religion or era. I mean our common human values, values that transcend faddish pseudo-political movements. Such as: all people have a right to dignity in life and work; we must protect the innocence and the health of our children; we must allow those who work hard to reap the rewards from that work; and we must allow dissent.

What so many liberal-left people are refusing to recognise is that in many places in the English-speaking world, those basic non-political values are being flouted, disregarded or turned on their head. We live in an age when ninth graders are assigned novels in which girls “suck dick”; when health professionals tell us that children must wear masks over their mouth and nose while playing outside in the summer heat; when an award-winning “journalist” claims burning down family-owned businesses doesn’t count as violence; where a biracial teenager receives a failing grade for refusing to “confess his white dominance;” and where a single mother can be charged with a hate crime because she tweeted. 

I think at this point, more and more people can see the lies, the distortions, the lunacy in these realities. Yet many continue to turn a blind eye, because to speak out is to invite a public shaming (and in the case of Marion Millar, who is the single mother of autistic twin boys mentioned above, the possibility of spending two years in prison).

I am beginning to suspect that a lot of the nastiness directed at those who stand against the Twitter-approved narrative comes from people who subconsciously feel guilty for not standing up themselves. And shame produces rage as well as fear.  As the (also white) rap artist Tom MacDonald says in his now-viral smash hit Snowflakes: 

“Damn dog, we all afraid to speak the truth 

And the more afraid we get the more we hate the ones who do.”

In Shaw’s case, the people doing the ridiculing may have been sincere, though it’s more likely they were trying to maintain their position on the greasy pole of the virtue-signalling hierarchy. It’s hard out there for a pimp. 

But even if I give them the benefit of the doubt in that regard, they still must face the music on this: while they were busy looking for micro aggressions to complain about, their worldview moved from being liberal to being tyrannical. The liberal-left position is now one of blind acquiescence to ideology, racial hierarchies and oppression. If you think I’m exaggerating, please see again the case of Marion Millar, who — I repeat — is facing two years in prison for her tweets. As hard as it is to hear, the left is the new right.

It is very, very difficult to step out from underneath the shadow of shame. But Shaw and her “lame” library rap show us that there is creative, meaningful life on the other side, when you allow yourself to really see what is happening around you. When you stop being controlled by shame, you become powerful.