It’s time to stop making heroes out of humans: commemorating Ruth Bader-Ginsberg
Pia Keeley-Johnson makes a plea for the humanising of our “heroes” in order to hold them accountable.
Image source: Susan Melkisethian via Flickr
When did we forget that superheroes are fictitious and, if we’re honest, pretty frightening?
Let’s think about Superman. Created by DC Comics in 1938, Superman was designed as “the gold standard of heroism, compassion and responsibility”. His strength lay in his awareness of the huge responsibility resting on his cape-clad shoulders, and the knowledge that he truly had the capacity and intent to do right by all. This narrative fitted cleanly into national efforts inciting aspirations of success and justice during and after the hardships of the Great Depression. To inspire broken American men, Superman became the one true hero, sacrificing none and breezily turning back time to save everyone if he ended up one man (or even one Lois Lane) down. The emblem of American justice and bravery. Scary responsibility.
Until September, 2020, we had our own hero. Our emblem of justice was, very literally, an Associate Justice: Ruth Bader-Ginsberg.
Where did my Superman comparison come from? Well, Pi Media recently published an emotive and beautifully written opinion piece commemorating the life of Bader-Ginsberg: a “hero” with a “fierce determination to help America fulfill its promises for equality for all people”. Sounds Superman-level heroic to me. Its author heralds the late Associate Justice due to her extraordinary legislative and personal achievements. To her credit, Bader-Ginsberg has been a fervent advocate for gender equality, herself experiencing gender-based discrimination throughout her career, while simultaneously battling personal hardships with her health.
My fellow Pi author is not alone in their reverence. Bader-Ginsberg’s bestowal with pop-culture icon status is epitomised by her catchy moniker, the Notorious R.B.G. At her memorial service, Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt remembered Bader-Ginsberg as “a prophet”. Her heroic divinity was reaffirmed by a mass mourning: social-media tributes, merchandise, and heartfelt statements of grief from strangers and friends alike that painted a beautiful portrait of “R.B.G.: Our Moral Martyr” (of sorts).
But the passing and consequent immortalisation of such a figure stirs less-than euphoric remembrances from marginalised groups. While R.B.G. acted defiantly and with occasional heroism in support of women’s rights throughout her 40-year career as judge and Justice, she was by no means a hero for all. Analyses of her record on race and indigenous rights show mixed and inconsistent support for marginalised groups. Often, this stemmed from a gross ignorance that only results from a lack of interest in affairs transcending the jurisdiction of white feminism. For example, R.B.G. apologised for her exclamation that quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem in 2016 - a pivotal and iconic moment in the history of athlete activism which symbolised Black resistance to racialised police brutality - was “dumb and disrespectful”. While she admitted that she had responded in ignorance, “barely aware of the incident or its purpose”, R.B.G. was obviously no champion on the ongoing battlefield of Black Lives discourse - a shameful position for a justice warrior purportedly emblematic of equality for the masses.
She has also been critiqued for her ignorance towards federal Native American law and history, largely in reference to her majority opinion in the 2005 Sherrill vs Oneida Indian Nation decision. This opinion precluded the Oneida tribe of New York from reviving sovereignty over ancient reservation land it had repurchased, bluntly dismissing tribal prerogative. So, not so much the hero for all when “all” includes marginalised indigenous people, either.
In the months before her death, however, R.B.G. voiced her regret for the opinions she wrote regarding the Sherrill vs Oneida case. In a seemingly reparative act, she more recently contributed towards several small victories for indigenous groups in the Pacific Northwest, acknowledging land rights and tax exemption in line with recognised tribal nation treaties. Perhaps a result of growing familiarity with Native American history, these wins symbolise R.B.G.’s fluctuation between white feminist ways and the radical feminism that could have made her a true people’s hero.
Alas, we forget: humans aren’t made to be heroes. Despite this hopeful start, only earlier this year did R.B.G endorse the construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline under the Appalachian Trail. The resource extraction projects that intersect Native American communities tend to coincide with increased sexual violence and crime that endangers the lives of Native American women. Legal loopholes mean that tribal communities are often not within their own jurisdiction to prosecute non-Native offenders. But the pipeline enchants with notions of economic growth and clean energy, complicating the debate by posing it as a tug-of-war between infrastructurally-barren communities across North Carolina and Virginia and the interests of Native American tribes. A classic trolley problem, and one which R.B.G. solved by neglecting Native American wellbeing. Is this what it means to be a hero?
As a child, I replayed old Superman scenes again and again. I couldn’t wrap my head around why people wordlessly accepted Superman’s hero status. After all, in hastily rushing off to save Lois Lane, surely he was sacrificing those people he left in that overturned car? I soon worked out that to be a hero meant that if you did enough big, romantic things right, people would ignore the things you did wrong.
At the end of the day, heroes don’t exist, and certainly not in human form. And would we want them if they did? The popularity of Superman surged when more recent movies began to explore his encounters with moral relativism. The enchantment with the hero, I would argue, came from the inevitability of their sacrifice and failure. Superman became more human, more relatable, because of the choices he chose to make for some at the expense of those he deemed less important. He was humanised by being held accountable for his wrongs and honouring the lives he’d lost.
And so it follows that the hero-ising of humans, R.B.G. as a prime example, does the opposite. The hero-ising of humans obscures their true legacies and negates any attempt at accountability. It renders invisible those who have been wronged. To make a hero out of R.B.G. does an injustice not only to the people who have suffered at her hands, but to the enormity of the moral responsibilities she faced while in the Supreme Court, as well as to any attempt she made to resolve her wrongdoings. And R.B.G. is not the only one. To make a hero out of Kobe Bryant, killed in a tragic helicopter accident in January this year, silences not only the victim of his sexual assault but his own honourable admission of wrongdoing. To make a hero out of Winston Churchill, British military genius, mutes and condones his white supremacism. The list goes on. But please: to truly honour the complexity of our species, let’s stop making superheroes out of humans.
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