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<pre># Explaining schizoanalysis to a 10-year-old


[A mother and her 10-year-old daughter somehow end up discussing anarchism. Inasmuch as it's relevant, neither of them are Black.]

*Girl*:  Mom, why were so many people standing in a police station?

*Mother*:  Oh, that's very complicated. They don't like the police beating people up, and they're trying to change the law. There's a lot to it but that's basically it.

*Girl*: I thought that to change the law we voted for people that went to Congress.

*Mom*:  Well, sometimes that doesn't work.

*Girl*: Why not?

*Mom*:  Some people are racist and they don't want to accept the new laws.

*Girl*: Why are people racist?

*Mom*:  No one really knows. But many people think it has to do with how they were raised and what the people around them taught them.

*Girl*: But when you teach people racism it just means people don't get along and they fight each other.

*Mom*:  Yes. That's why we're trying to teach people to stop being racist.

*Girl*: But why do we have to do that if being racist doesn't have any point to it?

*Mom*:  Sometimes people do things without really knowing why they're doing them individually. The group does the thing rather than the individuals.

*Girl*: But then... are you saying racists are a bad group of people? I thought stereotypes were bad.

*Mom*:  Stereotypes _are_ bad. But racists aren't their own group of people.

*Girl*: Why not? I heard there was something called "Black nationalism" on TV. Aren't those people their own group of people? How can they form a Black nation if they're not?

*Mom*:  Well... [sighs]
*Mom*:  A nationality is a group of people but the Republicans and Democrats aren't, and racists aren't. The United States is a group of people. Unless it gets divided in two by racists. That's into White people and Black or brown people, that's not into Republicans and Black nationalists.

*Girl*: Are the rabbits in _Zootopia_ a nationality?

*Mom*:  Uh... hmm. I think. I think with all the animals in one city, none of the animals are nationalities. You can read them as identities, but if there are any nations, they're all one nation.

*Girl*: But if they're all one thing then how do they get divided into two things? How is there a group of racists or a group of rabbits if they aren't really a group of anything?

*Mom*:  Well first of all, rabbits and racists aren't going to be the same thing.

*Girl*: [starts to say something, then pauses in thought confused]

*Mom*:  I know you know about _Settlers_, but it doesn't mean White people are the same thing as racists.

*Girl*: The science magazine said little kids already have racist biases. Doesn't that mean White babies are racists?   [*s]

*Mom*:  I mean, assuming that's true, some of them are, but some of them isn't all of them.

*Girl*: So is there some secret group inside White people which isn't racists?

*Mom*:  Uh...... something like that.

*Girl*: What's it called? Does anyone have a name for it?

*Mom*:  Well, you could call them anti-racists. Sometimes there are groups called Antifa. But they don't exist formally. Each person just decides not to be racist.

*Girl*: And then they all end up in the police station.

*Mom*:  Yes, something like that.

*Girl*: How do they all get there at once? If they aren't a group of people and they all decide on their own how do they even end up at the same place?

*Mom*:  Okay, there are movement organizers, and when there is a critical event that happens the movement organizers and the anti-racists all come together and call people into the event. And they might not get all the anti-racists that exist but they just try to get enough of them.

*Girl*: So people are just going around in the population being anti-racist, but they aren't a group of people? Just like how racists are in the population and for some reason they keep being racist?

*Mom*:  Yes, that's basically how it works.

*Girl*: Okay, but if the country contains a bunch of racists and a bunch of anti-racists, what actually makes people one or the other if they're not a group of people?

*Mom*:  That would be what they each believe in.

*Girl*: Are Christians and Muslims groups of people?

*Mom*:  I don't think they are any more. Maybe hundreds of years ago when the Pope was more important. But now, they're all one nation, like the United States, or wherever they are.

*Girl*: But then why is there a First Amendment if religions aren't groups of people? It says the government can't discriminate against religions.

*Mom*:  Well, people belong to different groups of people originally, but when they unite into a nation, they stop being separate. Any time anyone tries to artificially divide people, there is no real reason to split anybody back up.

*Girl*: So racists and Black people haven't actually joined into a nation yet?

*Mom*:  No, they have, they just don't want to accept it.

*Girl*: But if racists and Black people have joined together, you wouldn't be able to split them up.

*Mom*:  [pondering] ...That _is_ what I said, isn't it.

*Girl*: Why is it so easy to split people apart if there's no reason for it?

*Mom*:  So, people are part of small groups, but they're also fused into a big group, and the small groups are all inherently part of the bigger group at the same time they're separate. It's like... it's like the Swords of Justice. They're all different Types, but you can't remove any of them, they all stick together.

*Girl*: But you can put any Pokémon on any team. Now I'm just more confused.

*Mom*:  Okay let's start again. All the Pokémon in your box have various different Types, but when you put them on a team, then they can't be divided. None of the Pokémon on the team is any less than the others, they all equally belong there or don't belong there.

*Girl*: [looks puzzled]
*Girl*: But you can always keep dividing them. You can always take them out of the team and put them in another box.
*Girl*: If you lived in _Pokémon Mystery Dungeon_, Pokémon could form a team but a Zangoose and Seviper could just start fighting each other and you wouldn't be able to hold the team together.
*Girl*: Do you know about Warrior cats?

*Mom*:  Yes, I read those when I was younger — younger than I am now, anyway — and I can't believe that series is still going.

*Girl*: The Warrior cat clans don't ever unify into anything.

*Mom*:  That's because... That's because. Uh. I don't know why that is.

*Girl*: Brokenstar tried to turn them into one big clan but the books thought that was evil.

*Mom*:  They... [pondering] I don't know why they can't all be a single tribe.

*Girl*: So the guides said the cats used to live in the forest without borders but they had a big battle and a lot of them died so StarClan showed up and said they had to live in the four clans.

*Mom*:  —No, no, wait now. I remember that book. StarClan did _not_ make them form four clans. They only said the cats had to stop fighting, and the clan leaders were the ones that invented the clans.

*Girl*: But the cats invented clans so whenever the clans fight, they can stop fighting and agree to peace.

*Mom*:  ...Is that why they have clans? I never understood that. [puzzled] That can't be the reason. It... Can it?

*Girl*: Well, they don't live in clans in StarClan. But they aren't alive in StarClan either.

*Mom*:  ...They don't have clans when they aren't alive, but they do when they're alive.

*Girl*: I wonder why Digimon never invented StarClan.

*Mom*:  What?

*Girl*: Digimon are alive, they eat and sleep and stuff. And they form these big armies on the show. But they never invented StarClan.

*Mom*:  Uh... I guess you can't remove them from the single world they're in. They die, but they all just respawn into the same Digital World. I'm. I'm going to have to think about this.

*Girl*: If you put Digimon into four clans it would probably work just as well. But Digimon can also run into each other and fight with just two Digimon.

*Mom*:  ...I see what you're saying now. Digimon all fight each other whether they're Virus or Vaccine Attribute depending on the day. And in principle it's that way for Warrior cats, and Pokémon. What you're trying to get me to answer is what it is that makes them fight even as individuals.

*Girl*: Well, my question is if Digimon are basically like animals and the animals in _Zootopia_ are animals then when do animals ever stop fighting?

*Mom*:  [intrigued] Huh.
*Mom*:  In nature, I guess they never do. I guess animals _usually_ want to eat each other. And not _all_ animals eat each other, but even animals that live in herds... herd animals are not that different from pack animals. If somebody was causing them trouble from another herd there just might be a fight.

*Girl*: There was a nature program on where the male lion fought the other one out of a pride.

*Mom*:  [thinking] Those are the family units. Lions... also wolves. Mostly they stay put until they become adults, and then the males go over to another pack, and there's a fight.

*Girl*: And zebras.

*Mom*:  Zebras?

*Girl*: There are six. Or seven? There's one male. The zebras live in small groups and they combine into a herd.

*Mom*:  Okay, and zebras.

*Girl*: How do the animals in _Zootopia_ get along if animals are always fighting each other?

*Mom*:  Uh. I guess, because it's an imaginary story? I don't really know.

*Girl*: Zootopia has cops. But if a zebra was fighting another one over their six girlfriends, if it isn't violent they can't do anything.

*Mom*:  There have to be other ways.

*Girl*: In the first draft of the movie they had to put the foxes in shock collars.

*Mom*:  They _what_?

*Girl*: They put the foxes and the bears and all the carnivores in shock collars. Whenever the predators have a strong emotion the collar goes _bzzt!_ and they have to stop.

*Mom*:  That is _disturbing_.

*Girl*: It's not as bad as when a Vaccine Digimon finds a criminal and has to cut it in two.

*Mom*:  ...Because they don't have any place to put them. There's never any State or prison powerful enough to hold a fantasy villain so they always end up having to kill them. Like the superhero and villain are kings of the world.

*Girl*: Did you know zebras have a pyramid where the oldest mares get the grass first but the stallion follows behind them? It's like zebras but it's really big.

*Mom*:  That is even more disturbing.  [stares through wall for a second]
*Mom*:  We think there's a difference between leaders and criminals but in the natural world there are only pyramids and attacks.

*Girl*: If it's so easy for groups to not go together, how do we ever do it?

*Mom*:  Well... When you think about it most fantasy stories are times of war. But people can't be at war all the time.

*Girl*: Have we been at war with Iraq for 10 years, or more?

*Mom*:  That was... I don't know how many years that was.
*Mom*:  Let me pull it up on my phone. I don't even know how many of them there have been by now.
*Mom*:  [stunned] The first one was eight years. Then... there was the Shia one... and then the U.S. got rid of them... and this is still going into 2021. Has it really been eighteen years?

*Girl*: What's the difference between the Shia one and the normal one?

*Mom*:  There are two groups of Muslims in Iraq, the Sunnis and the Shia, and so when the second conflict happened, the Shia spilled over from Iran to fight the Islamic State. Wait. Wait no, I got that mixed up. Let's see here, the Sunnis and the Shia were fighting, then the United States was getting rid of the guerilla armies, then al-Qaida formed the Islamic State, and the Shia spilled over from Iran — no, I had it right the first time, I just said the same thing twice. The Sunnis formed ISIS, and the Shia spilled over from Iran, but the United States had to stop them by attacking Iran. With... a drone strike? ...We pulled United States troops out of Iraq and then it looks like we kept fighting the war with a couple of planes.

*Girl*: And religions aren't groups of people.

*Mom*:  No.
*Mom*:  Iraq could stop being two different groups of people and be a single nation if it wanted to.

*Girl*: What makes the people of Iraq be two different groups of people if they aren't being divided by racism?

*Mom*:  Intolerance between the two religions, I guess.

*Girl*: Do you know about _Pokémon Legends: Arceus_?

*Mom*:  Yes, there was the Diamond clan and the Pearl clan.

*Girl*: And they all stopped what they were doing because they eventually saw Dialga and Palkia were both part of the same Arceus.
*Girl*: But real life isn't like that, is it?

*Mom*:  Uh...

*Girl*: I know religions are made up, just like _Pokémon_. But that means the two groups of Muslims can never return to a single Arceus. Because if there are _no_ gods there can't be just one god.

*Mom*:  I mean, that's true. Religion wouldn't be the thing that _unites_ people who believe in religions. But couldn't they still unite into something greater than them just because they don't want to be divided?

*Girl*: Is this Deleuze and Guattari?

*Mom*:  Yes.

*Girl*: I tried to read the Wikipedia page about them and I didn't understand any of it.

*Mom*:  Well, the important part is that when people come together they stop being one thing or two things and they simply become an uncountable mesh of thing. It's, there are zero _things_ because there are no big things that are separate.

*Girl*: But then why would there be political parties?

*Mom*:  Uh...
*Mom*:  Okay, I think the best explanation for that is that _we_ live in Liberalism while Deleuze and Guattari are describing _anarchism_.

*Girl*: Why hasn't the U.S. merged into Canada?

*Mom*:  [puzzled]
*Mom*:  I have no idea.

*Girl*: The United States is divided and Canada is divided but all the liberals in the United States and Canada could come together and all the conservatives in the United States and Canada could come together. So why are they different countries?

*Mom*:  I... I really couldn't tell you.
*Mom*:  Maybe because... Canada is part of the Commonwealth and the United States isn't? Canada is a subject of the Queen.

*Girl*: There was a king of the United States in _Pokémon_.
*Girl*: Do you think that's why they came together?

*Mom*:  [dumbfounded] ...I don't know.

*Girl*: In _Pokémon_ the United States is divided into two dragons of Truth and Ideals. They say it used to be one dragon, but... is it?
*Girl*: If people divide into factions based on what they believe in, how could those turn into one thing, or zero things? If Truth is what exists right now, and racism exists right now, but Ideals are what you believe in, and anti-racism is what people believe in, how can people come together around Ideals? The dragon burns everything down if you have too much of Ideals. The two of them have to be balanced because neither of them wants to stomp over the entire country.

*Mom*:  Hmm. [searching] That's...
*Mom*:  I don't think that's how Truth and Ideals actually work.

*Girl*: Is racism Ideals then? Because it isn't true?

*Mom*:  I _guess_ it would be. It's not true, but somebody does _want_ it to be true.

*Girl*: So racism and anti-racism are Ideals but somehow we have to balance them both against the truth.  [*L]

*Mom*:  I don't think that's how it works either.  [*L]
*Mom*:  Taking anti-racism, what would you even balance them against? I don't know how we'd know what was the underlying truth.
*Mom*:  Maybe that's what the point of the dragons is? That we can't know what's true so the best we can do is tell all the Legendary Pokémon to get along.

*Girl*: [impressed]
*Girl*: That's probably it.
*Girl*: [awkwardly silent for a few seconds] ...But why is one of them called True then?

*Mom*:  Uh. [blank]
*Mom*:  Because they wrote it that way?
*Mom*:  [suddenly remembering] No, No. Wait. Reshiram and Zekrom are black and white. This is basically Buddhism. But they got Buddhism wrong, I think. The point of the yin-yang symbol is that neither of them is right. It's not supposed to be that either of them is True.

*Girl*: That makes a lot more sense. Zekrom isn't Truth, it's just Electric-type while Reshiram is Fire-type.

*Mom*:  Yes.

*Girl*: But... if we never know what's true, then how can the good Ideals win out? Nobody would ever know they were true.

*Mom*:  ...Oh no.
*Mom*:  But, it will be obvious what's good and what's bad.

*Girl*: But don't the racists believe in racism? How do _they_ look at things?

*Mom*:  Uh...

*Girl*: How did anyone know the First Amendment was a good idea? Or... the one that ended slavery?

*Mom*:  —The Fourteenth Amendment.

*Mom*:  [thinks in silence for a moment]

*Mom*:  Nobody _did_ decide that. They all just... took their positions behind their separate borders away from the United States constitution and fought a war.

*Mom*:  [stares through wall into the universe, watching a car on the next street, a bird, images of animated _Zootopia_ animals mostly just going about their day and getting into hijinks but as if from the angle of an invisible airplane arcing over, something at a protest scene burning in the night, a still residential road with only a distant dog barking, the coffeepot being turned on by herself from outside herself specifically a week before now, Reshiram and Zekrom flying around in fragments of a Pokémon anime opening, a random frog on a leaf croaking for the camera, an image of a news broadcast containing the full substance of what an average Thursday news broadcast would be but no real words, fragments of a PBS gardening program, a view into the other room from through the wall of the light coming in on the table rather strikingly but with nobody there, the coffeepot simply sitting where it is specifically eight days from today, the table as it is right now, the room as it is currently being experienced, the present moment, the reality, the totality of all entities currently existing in the room and in the house and immediately outside the house, she is hyper-back, and then she is back]

*Mom*:  I am terrified for the future of this country.



------

[*s] I have not seen any actual children claim "White babies are racists", although I occasionally still see adults bringing up these studies in 2025.

[*L] This would be a meta-Marxist position on truth. Even if at any given moment we can't know exactly what the single most accurate model is (truth), every model more accurate to material reality than any particular set of "ideals" is worth bringing up to temper each of the Idealist positions.
Within this dialogue the mother disputes this point specifically because she is a schizoanalyst and does not think reality can be understood as its own phenomenon independent of individual embodied experiences of reality and the potential for prejudice and division inside each of them — to deny that reality is two different clashing experiences is to squash and dehumanize Lived Experiences.</pre>

== Footnotes ==

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