It's challenging for me because the values motivating these complaints are completely in-line with both my personal politics as well as my professional passion for catering to niche markets and semi-marginalized cultures.(This post was republished in the Guardian.*)
...This is where this kind of conversation begins to feel more like liberal bullying, where the only correct response is agreeing and acquiescing. Any other response is seen as ignorant at best, hateful at worst.
My priorities with online discourse are dialogue and respect. In my little corner of the online world, I keep my focus on constructive critique and articulate, compassionate communication. Shouting down people who disagree with you (even if I agree with your argument!) simply doesn't feel productive or helpful. If I had a dollar for every time we have to delete a blog comment that I personally agreed with because it was stated as an attack… I could get rid of those in-image ads...
So, here are the contradictions as I see them. As an ally, my job is to not impose my own beliefs of what’s ‘right’, but instead amplify the voices of the oppressed people that I’m trying to be an ally for. Except that I shouldn’t bug them about educating me, because that’s not what they’re there for. And it’s my duty to talk about the issue of oppression in question, because it’s the job of all of us, rather than the oppressed people, to fix it. Except that when I talk, I shouldn’t be using my privilege to drown out the voices of the oppressed people. Also, I should get everything right, 100% of the time. Including the terminology that the oppressed people in question themselves disagree on. This is what I consider The Unicorn Ally phenomenon. The effect of these demands, for me at least, is to make me less likely to say, well, much of anything, except a) to correct other people who are clearly even more wrong than me, or b) on issues where I have direct experience of oppression. The latter relies on a process I think of as Oppression Top Trumps..."Boldly Go - "Liberal Bullying" Nonsense (and also You Don’t Need Oreos, You’re The Baker’s Son)
Every time I bother to mention to someone that something they’ve said is problematic, believe me, I’d LOVE to have a discussion about it. But unfortunately, the other people have to be interested in a discussion. This enforcement of “discussion” and “respect” is something that almost always comes up when people tell me that it’s my responsibility to educate them. I have no idea when I engage someone in a discussion about social issues if they will listen to me at all. And if you’re someone that DOES engage people very frequently, you learn pretty damn quick that 90% of the people you engage in discussions with you about this are not interested in learning or addressing their privilege in any way, shape, or form. But no, I must always be the one to educate someone politely and kindly. I must slap on my smile and become a tour guide through the Museum of Bigotry. And if I can’t say anything nice, I should never say anything at all.*Fatihah Iman - What we expect from allies, and the view from both sides of that fence
The problem with that? If people went by that rule I would literally know nothing about white privilege. Nothing. The only reason I know anything about it is because someone got pissed off because of something I said... as a white person who refused to recognise my own privilege, I was not interested in any discussion that didn’t make me a good guy or part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. I was not interested in any interpretation of life that would in any way paint me as any type of racist, unintentional or otherwise. So being nice about calling me out would not work. Because I had been called out before in very nice ways for saying very racist things by my friends...
The thing that pisses me off about this is that we’re willing to acknowledge the good intentions of allies and people who fuck up, but the marginalised person or someone getting angry about something doesn’t really get the same support or acknowledgement. Yes, I have witnessed cases where I’ve felt that someone was being angry and sarcastic at someone who didn’t mean any harm. But that angry and sarcastic person is also a person. You want compassion for people who fuck up but people who get angry and have a bad reaction to something are supposed to smile and take it. And if they don’t they’re not being true to their ULTIMATE GOAL, gaise. Just like you can’t expect yourself to never fuck up, you also can’t expect everyone to be nice all of the time. The nature of privilege and marginaliations, of microaggressions and oppression is that it causes a lot [of] emotions. A lot of anger. A lot of hatred. A lot of shit that’s not so easy to cope with and deal with 100% of the time. So how about for once we extend a bit of compassion towards people?
The effect of these demands, for me at least, is to make me less likely to say, well, much of anything, except a) to correct other people who are clearly even more wrong than me, or b) on issues where I have direct experience of oppressiona) seems to be plausibly a big part of the dynamic - where you get stuck in this place where the only think you feel you can safely say about a topic is what is or is not the right way to discuss the topic. Hmm. I'll have to think about that a bit more.
This is parallel to a situation that I see happening all of the time, and I was reminded of it by an article called “The Unicorn Ally” about why allies need less hostility and more cookies from oppressed people, and I disagree. Allies are not entitled to cookies and I really hope people consider this before giving cookies to companies like Oreo. Why aren’t they? The number one reason being: You already get them. In abundance.Fatihah Iman's piece about what she, personally, would like to see from her allies is also super great. I especially appreciated the food for thought about how to be supportive of people who are less privileged than you on certain axes, even if you yourself are marginalized along other axes.
I’ll first address the cookies I get as an ally. Though I’m not fully white and have lost indigenous heritage due to racism and white supremacy, I am, for all intents and purposes, white by society’s standards. As a white person, I have privilege that I no longer deny. But accepting that I have privilege does not rid me of it. In fact, accepting I have privilege and being a white person who speaks out against racism means that I take on a privilege that very few people of colour get – I’m actually listened to. As an ally for people of colour, I occupy a precarious position. Yes, I am there to help. Yes, I am on the side of anyone who fights against white supremacy. But it is that same white supremacy that means that when I speak, my voice has more weight with other whites than people of colour. I consistently see this in both my lived experiences and in real life, reflected in the media. Being a white ally means that I can say the exact same thing about racism that people of colour have said for decades and I get far more credit for it.
I think there's a difference between different kinds of calling-out that not all these articles recognise.posted by restless_nomad at 3:04 PM on December 2, 2012 [35 favorites]
On the one hand, there's this situation: somebody genuinely shows their ass, other people call them out on it, and sometimes there's an argument. The callers-out are probably regulars in places where this kind of thing happens a lot, and depending on the state of their patience, they may be more or less sharp in their language. (I know I've varied a lot in how rude or conciliatory I've been depending on how much I'm just up to here for one month.) Telling these people to hand out more cookies and mind their tone is usually counter-productive and often completely unfair.
On the other hand, there are some people who do make calling-out a hobby. This is problematic in itself, because there's a difference between rising to the occasion and getting a taste for the hunt, and because the act of calling-out shouldn't be done to amuse the caller. But there's a worse problem with it, which is that of the hobbyists, some of them are people with ... well, issues.
Now, we all have issues, but some people have more than others. The Internet, unlike physical spaces, is a place anyone with computer access can join, and even people who can't sustain any human relationships in the real world can hang around there comfortably, and often make friends. Which can be a beautiful thing. Sometimes it's even a healing thing. But sometimes, those issues aren't going away, and sometimes people aren't trying to heal themselves. Instead, they're looking for an outlet.
Some people like to engineer psychodramas to reenact certain situations that are important to them. There are parts that have to be cast. The bully who creates your victim status (and who is, if you're choosing the cast, not going to be somebody who would actually pursue and bully you, because that involves far too much risk to yourself). The Wrong person you can angelically educate and save (and who will garner great resentment if they won't conform to that role, even if what you're trying to 'teach' them is something reasonable people can disagree about). The parent, who guides and supports and sometimes corrects you (and who again can garner great resentment if they ever deviate from that role, and sometimes can find themselves changed from 'nurturing parent' to 'controlling parent' in the programme). The comforter or comforters, who truly see you for the pure soul you are: the people you play for, and who, if several people with this kind of issue get together, can form a circle to reenact the drama again and again.
None of this is actually about social justice. But social justice is an arena highly liable to attract such people, because education and the support of victims are very much part of its value system. Some people define themselves as victims for reasons that are less political than personal, and look for circumstances under which they can play out the drama that reconfirms that identity.
And while they can be mistaken for the former kind of caller-out - very often, because that's how it works in the first place - there's a big difference. Some social justice activists are emotionally unstable because some people just are in any group, but some of them are people who are all about the instability. Social justice, with its tendency to ever-widening circles of identified problems, actually lends itself to this in another way: I've seen people declare straight out that they're emotionally fragile people by nature and that it's therefore discriminating against them to ask them to deal with problems directly when the only way they feel 'safe' is to round up an angry mob - people who feel that it's persecuting them to require a basic level of maturity and constructive discourse. And if you're supposedly committed to supporting the vulnerable, and that commitment includes 'respecting people's experience' to the point where you can't say, 'Seriously, you're crossing the line into special snowflake here,' that's pretty much a checkmate move.
And once a culture of that is established, it can get really, really bad for the people who've been cast as the black hats. There's a reason I'm not using my usual handle for this.
I have the strong suspicion that a lot of the most exasperated comments are not from people getting all wounded about a social activist with a point saying something snappish, but from people who have, for one reason or another, found themselves with a lot of psychodramatists on their hands. And social justice is best served by recognising this as a side-effect that needs to be minimised rather than conflating it with people who are genuinely just pissed off.
I am always torn because I think the logic is this: people who are marginalized suffer incredible physical, cultural and language violence all the time, so it's only fair that marginalized people use the most aggressive language they can muster back at their oppressors. Living as a white middle class person you benefit from the system that perpetually exhausts, traumatizes and insults working class people of color, for example, so you think that violent language is Oh So Terrible And So Painful because you are too ignorant, sheltered and selfish to have experience with the real violence of the world.As in, we should all try not to hurt good people unnecessarily in these sort of debates, but when it does happen, we should not try and redirect the discussion about that, about how this is hurtful to white blokes. At least not without recognising that the person of colour mad at you very likely has had to deal with much more of such shit in her life than you ever had to.
This is why you don't do your laundry in public.I'm not sure consensus reached through backrooms and star chambers is any better than even no consensus at all
If Time magazine publishes an article about the moshing controversy, that's fucked upwho decides who's punk enough though
I wasn't talking about Metafilter, or at least my own experience of it. While any site this size must have its share of unreasonable people, Metafilter's policies about derailing and its close moderation make it difficult for the psychodramas to get as toxic and prolonged as they get elsewhere. Though that said, it is a big site and I haven't read everything on it, so if other people feel it's happened to them, I'm not in a position to comment. But I wasn't talking about my experience of it.posted by restless_nomad at 9:29 AM on December 3, 2012 [8 favorites]
The reason I wanted to be anonymous is that it's very possible that a site this large is read by some of the people who've cast me as a bad guy in psychodramas of their own elsewhere. Not, I should add, because I even said things that were racist or sexist, but because I disagreed with people on other, non-political subjects, like 'Is this a good book/movie/website?'. I'd state my opinion on apparently open topics, and found them attacking me using social-justice victim-speak, to the effect that they were victims, I wasn't (though I'm not a straight white man), and that it made them feel victimized when I disagreed with them. About pretty much anything. Because I had, it was implied, a social responsibility to defer to them constantly to make up for all the victimization elsewhere. (And if I felt I'd been the victim in other social dynamics that didn't personally affect them, they didn't want to hear it.)
Some people have serious control issues and will use the victim role to attack anybody they've tagged as more privileged than themselves every time that person makes them feel uncomfortable, even if the discomfort has nothing to do with social justice issues and quite a bit to do with 'I'm over-invested in this subject because I'm not a very functional person, and I've decided to treat that as an identity rather than a problem'. 'People with issues/problems shouldn't get put upon' can turn into 'I have issues/problems so I should never have to hear anything I don't like on any subject.' And if a person is well versed in social justice terminology, they can very often get bystanders feeling that the person they're going after is probably being insensitive if they try to defend themselves or their right to have a different opinion.
Things have gotten very poisonous for me in the past and I've had to make some drastic changes in my online life because of it. I'm just starting over, and the idea of one of those people getting after me again scares me.
And I'm sorry if I caused confusion on that point. I'm trying to keep the identifying markers as limited as possible, and I think I overdid it. I want to stress that I'm not saying 'All social justice types are like this.' Social justice communities can develop bad habits, but the worst problems I've seen come from people who aren't really about the social justice but about whatever gets them the maximum advantage and attention. Actual systemic injustices can play out in this system: women can be expected to nurture and be 'nice' in a way that wouldn't be demanded of men, for instance. So I'm not saying this is a social justice problem at its roots; it's more that there are people who are, to use social justice terminology, appropriating the language of social justice because they have a psychological need to feel like a victim defending themselves, and if that situation doesn't exist, they'll do their best to create a safe imitation of it. Safe for them, anyway.
My editors respond with comments like, "I understand what you're saying, and share your concern — but I disagree that this usage is problematic." Alternately, sometimes we just say, "I agree that this usage is problematic, but I'm going to leave it."As a publisher, I think it's really important to acknowledge the reader feedback, validate the concern that motivated them speaking up, and emphasize that we're fighting for the same team... while also making it clear that no: we're not going to make any changes to what's been said.
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Slow, astonished applause building to a rapturous crescendo.
I haven't read any of the links yet but this is a hilariously apropos post for mefi, and the big ol' greasy t-bone of links below the fold is amazing.
So much props, flex.
posted by kavasa at 9:10 AM on December 2, 2012 [26 favorites]