Proximity, Relationality, and the Selective Suspension of Prejudice
The mere exposure effect—a well-documented phenomenon in social psychology—suggests that repeated exposure to someone increases our affinity for them. It’s a pragmatic principle of social life: we come to like what is near, familiar, and regularly present. On the surface, it’s benign, even heartwarming. But beneath it lies a darker symmetry: the arbitrary nature of who we accommodate, who we excuse, who we make room for.
Consider the all-too-familiar figure of the racist who "isn’t racist" because he has a Black friend. Or who only dislikes those Black people—loud ones, angry ones, the imagined other who lives somewhere outside his circle of relational comfort. This is not transformation; it is exception. The individual Black friend is absorbed into the racist’s social world, excused from the category he otherwise disparages—not because of a reckoning with the structures of racism, but because of proximity.
Relationality often works like this. It’s not moral in itself. It’s situational, contingent, and largely guided by pragmatic, even selfish, needs: Who do I rely on? Who shows up in my daily rhythms? Who is close enough to be real to me? Proximity bestows legibility.
That’s why people say, half-jokingly, that 99% of success is just showing up. The mere presence of someone in a room alters perception, softens edges, nudges the unfamiliar toward the tolerable. But this ease is not virtue. It is cognitive laziness dressed as openness. It means we extend empathy not because we’ve deconstructed our biases, but because someone has breached the membrane of our indifference.
This is how structural prejudice survives. It survives not only through hate, but through the selective warmth we offer based on who is close, familiar, or useful. Proximity can humanize—but it can also conceal. It becomes the loophole that allows us to maintain our prejudices while absolving ourselves of them.
Relationality is not neutral. It is a force, a logic, a form of gravity—pulling us toward some, away from others. It explains why people will defend a violent uncle but dehumanize a stranger. Why a corporation will support LGBTQ+ employees in its New York office while funding anti-trans legislation in another state. The moral claim of proximity is not consistent; it is contextual, opportunistic.
Understanding this allows us to ask better questions: not just who do we relate to, but under what conditions, at whose expense, and with what blindness. If 99% of success is showing up, then maybe 99% of injustice is who doesn’t get the chance to show up at all—whose face never appears in the room, never becomes familiar enough to be spared.
If showing up is the key to being seen, what happens to those who cannot show up? What about those excluded from rooms, institutions, networks—those whose absence isn’t noticed, or worse, is designed? The mere presence of one “acceptable” outsider in a dominant space can serve to hide the structural conditions that keep the majority out.
This is how structural inequality launders itself through friendliness. Proximity becomes a tool not of justice, but of plausible deniability.
Proximity is powerful. It does change people. It can break down defenses. But if left unexamined, it simply creates pockets of tolerance within a system of dominance. It invites a kind of moral minimalism—where the mere fact of knowing someone from a marginalized group becomes its own alibi, its own proof of enlightenment.
Affective Containment and the Politics of Tone
First you imagine the Other as angry, then you treat them as if they are, and finally, when they bristle, you say, see? I told you so. It’s a self-fulfilling attribution trap. You expect defiance, so you prod for it. You frame someone as volatile, so when they resist being reduced to a stereotype, you take it as confirmation rather than protest. The imagined anger becomes the lens through which every gesture is read.
Outgroups are often framed as "angry" or "aggressive" before they say or do anything that would warrant such labels. And when they do express discomfort, grief, or even measured dissent, it is instantly coded as confirmation of the earlier prejudice. It's a double bind: if you stay quiet, you're invisible; if you speak up, you're aggressive.
This phenomenon is deeply connected to proximity-as-exception. The accepted friend or colleague is usually the one who has learned to suppress anger, to reassure those around them that they are not that kind of Black person, woman, queer person, poor person, disabled person. They perform legibility. But this performance is often exhausting, self-negating, and predicated on the comfort of the dominant.
So what comes first: the anger, or the attribution? Often, it’s the attribution—projected, entrenched, circulated. But even more than that, it’s the structure of relational control that demands subservience to imagined traits, punishes deviation, and then points to that deviation as proof of pathology. Anger is not always reaction—it can be strategy, signal, survival. But when it is pre-labeled, any genuine expression of it is retroactively criminalized.
This is why proximity isn’t enough—and why we must be suspicious of “inclusion” models that operate on the condition of performance. What’s needed is not just room for others to enter, but space for them to speak in tones not sanctioned by comfort. That means letting the imagined Other be angry without interpreting their anger as a threat. That means not congratulating ourselves for making room, but asking what violence required them to be excluded in the first place.
If proximity creates the illusion of inclusion, affective containment maintains it. It is not enough that the marginalized be allowed into the room; they must also speak in tones that do not disrupt its mood. This is where tone policing emerges—not just as a rhetorical device, but as a structural demand. You can be present, but not loud. Visible, but not too expressive. You are allowed to speak, but only in a register that reassures those who invited you in that they are still good people.
Tone policing is often subtle, framed as advice or concern. It is a mechanism of affective control. It communicates that your legitimacy depends not on the content of your critique, but on the comfort of your delivery.
This is the emotional tax levied on the marginalized. To be legible, you must perform grace. And if you don’t—if you let slip the exhaustion, the grief, the indignation, the justified rage—you risk confirming the very stereotype that necessitated your containment in the first place. It becomes a self-fulfilling affective loop: the more pressure you’re under to appear calm and grateful, the more any deviation is read as deviance.
Some are already coded as volatile. Their presence alone is a breach. So when they do respond—defensively, passionately, honestly—it’s seen not as a consequence of unjust treatment, but as evidence of why the suspicion existed to begin with.
This isn’t just psychological; it’s social discipline. It teaches people to internalize the boundaries of the room they’ve been allowed into. To modulate themselves in ways that keep them from being ejected. To smile while being diminished. And often, to question their own responses—Was I too harsh? Did I make them uncomfortable? The burden of civility always falls harder on those whose personhood is already under question.
The demand for affective containment is thus deeply entwined with the politics of proximity. The "good" marginalized person—the one who makes it through the filter—is almost always the one who has learned to manage others’ projections, to navigate their fear of being called out, to carry the double burden of representation and reassurance. They become symbols of progress, while those outside the room remain outside precisely because they are unable to or refuse to perform legibility.
True relationality cannot be built on these terms. True solidarity does not require people to smile while being harmed. It cannot require docility. It must make space for discomfort—not as a problem to be solved, but as a necessary condition for ethical encounter. If someone’s pain or anger makes us uneasy, the task is not to mute it, but to examine what within us resists hearing it. The task is to reject the idea that emotion is irrational or unprofessional—especially anger, grief, and mourning, which have deep inter-personal and political roots.
Anything less is not inclusion—it’s surveillance.
Class and Neurodivergence: Whose Difference Is Tolerated
This whole process is saturated with class dynamics. The conditional acceptance extended through proximity or relationality is often predicated on one’s ability to signal middle- or upper-class norms of comportment, language, and emotional restraint. The apparent tolerance extended to neuroatypical individuals like Zuckerberg or Musk is indeed shaped by class and power. Their perceived neurodivergence—whether in expressions of flat affect, social awkwardness, or hyperfocus—is often reframed as eccentric genius rather than social deviance because it is accompanied by immense capital, institutional legitimacy, and white male privilege.
Meanwhile, working-class or poor neuroatypical people are not afforded the same interpretive generosity. Their differences are often criminalized, pathologized, or treated as burdensome. Where Musk’s affect is seen as visionary aloofness, someone else’s might be read as threat, failure, or incompetence.
So the politics of proximity and emotional containment are not just about who is allowed in, but who is allowed to be strange, to be awkward, to be blunt—without punishment. Neurodivergence at the top is romanticized; at the bottom, it’s pathologized. Gay billionaires like Sam Altman are afforded legitimacy not because of who they are, but because they embody class-coded traits: affluence, education, discretion, and a style of emotional containment that flatters institutional power.
In contrast, poor and working-class queer people are not just more likely to face structural violence; they are more likely to be perceived as improperly queer—too loud, too angry, too disruptive. Their marginalization is compounded by their refusal—or inability—to perform the sanitized, professionalized identity that higher status spaces require.
This adds a further layer to the politics of affective containment: only certain people are granted the freedom to be ordinary. Others must constantly translate, pacify, and apologize just to remain proximate. Class doesn’t just mediate who gets in the room—it shapes what kinds of affect are permitted once inside.
Affect is not a private, individual experience but something that is socially and culturally shaped. How we read and interpret emotion is heavily influenced by proximity to power, especially class privilege. Sara Ahmed's work on affect is deeply relevant to this discussion of class, neurodivergence, and the politics of proximity. She explores how emotions—like anger, happiness, or frustration—are not just individual feelings, but are socially distributed and shaped by power dynamics. Ahmed frames affect as something that "sticks" to bodies, shaping how they are read and how they interact with others in a social context. Emotions don’t simply emerge from within; they are made through social encounters and cultural scripts.
For instance, in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed argues that certain emotions are seen as “sticky,” attaching themselves to particular bodies or social groups. Anger, for example, often becomes attached to racialized or gendered bodies, especially when those bodies express frustration or dissent. The queer or neurodivergent body that refuses to conform to norms of composure or social engagement is frequently marked as irrational, volatile, or unfit. These emotional labels become affective markers, making it difficult for people to move beyond their prescribed emotional roles.
In relation to class and neurodivergence, Ahmed's theory deepens the critique: emotions are not just personal but are tied to structures of inclusion and exclusion. Her work on emotions highlights how proximity to power—class, capital, status—determines not just who gets in the room, but who can move freely within it. She writes that emotions help to construct the boundaries of communities, shaping who belongs and who is excluded. In this sense, class and neurodivergence interact with affect to shape who gets to be seen as “human” or “normal” and who is marginalized as “other.”