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May 21, 2019 8:33 AM   Subscribe

In 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an award winning essay on reparations (for American Slavery, and all the economic benefits built on black bodies and profited on by, largely, white slaveowners and their descendants, and the nation). Today, 5 years later, some 2020 candidates are using reparations for political football. Some marginalized people need to approach reparations from a humorous perspective, for self-care and mental health reasons.

Take for example, The DiDi Delgado's recent essay about how broke ass white people are still on the hook for reparations.

We've gotten used to comedy as a part of current, contemporary, political discussion and debate, partly because of comedic and satirical efforts by late night comedy hosts, but is it still okay if the comedian/satirist is not white, and not a man? And what if it's not meant to be entirely funny? What if in the satire you're meant to still consider hard concepts that might implicate your own thinking, living, or existing as not entirely blameless?

Throughout recent history, social justice and other progressive activists have argued for the validation of and encouragement of real emotion as a valid response to injustice. In the face of tone-policing and civility arguments, calls for rationality, silence, and other supremacy-enforcing rhetorical gambits, these activists argue that tone-policing is a silencing impulse with a chilling effect, and that marginalized people are justly entitled to their emotions - that emotional expression is rightly, and should be, part of how we express ourselves and should be part of what is taken seriously about our arguments.

Some argue that we ought to take humor and satire's subjects seriously in political debate, discussion and parlance. Aside from anger, frustration, fear, and sadness, humor and satire are also, and should be, part of the allowed, valid, and encouraged emotional vocabulary when talking about difficult, political subjects. Not least because it cushions the creators from some of the emotional toll surrounding their chosen subjects and the political violence and threats that are endemic to their experiences anyhow. But also because it helps engage different critical faculties in the audience, when the ones they use to be serious are all but burned out with constant exposure to difficult news.
posted by kalessin (5 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- frimble



 
And what if it's not meant to be entirely funny? What if in the satire you're meant to still consider hard concepts that might implicate your own thinking, living, or existing as not entirely blameless?

Isn't that the point of satire? If it doesn't do that then it's just comedy. A Modest Proposal, for instance, was definitely supposed to bring up uncomfortable issues.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 10:01 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


I feel like I’ve seen the tone policing comic before, and it’s a good one. While I think it’s probably a good idea to remember that tone is a tactic, telling someone else that is never a good idea, because, in the best case, it distracts you both from what you are trying to do. In worse cases, of course, it’s done to shut down people who the policer doesn’t see as comrades but tools. And now I’m just summarizing the comic, so go read it.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:27 PM on May 21, 2019


I don't know what to do about tone policing, because on the one hand it is horrible and on the other hand every piece of available research I've read on how people change opinions indicates it only happens when one is willing to invest a lot of time and emotional labor and engage one's opponent in a completely compassionate, patient manner and spend a bunch of time basically convincing said opponent that each of you are part of the same "tribe" through establishing a positive emotional connection. Expressing anger works against that. To make matters worse, changing opinions is even more effective if you're a member of the marginalized group taking on all this work. So basically because humans are terrible and tribalistic actual changes of opinions demand a bunch of anger suppression and emotional labor from the very people who should not be burdened with it. I don't know what to do with that information and it is something that deeply bothers me in discussions about tone policing because I don't think people's emotions should be policed, tone policing is often used as just another way of perpetuating injustice, and at the same time I don't know how we change opinions unless we are willing to rein in all the extremely justified negative emotions we have about said injustice.
posted by Anonymous at 6:28 AM on May 22, 2019


Throwing this question out to any of the quite excellent metafilter mods who happen to read it -- how do you moderate an inclusive community like metafilter while staying aware of tone policing?
posted by Richard Daly at 7:25 AM on May 22, 2019


schroedinger: I don't know what to do about tone policing, because on the one hand it is horrible and on the other hand every piece of available research I've read on how people change opinions indicates it only happens when one is . . . basically convincing said opponent that each of you are part of the same "tribe" through establishing a positive emotional connection. Expressing anger works against that.

In my experience, Good Cop / Bad Cop teamwork can get decent results. Eg, Marginalized Person "Sally" says something mildly challenging. Oblivious Higher-ish Status Person "Bob" freaks out about how Sally is the baaaad one here. Woke Person "David" (who's already In-Group with Bob, via skin color or cishet identification, etc.) deploys emotional labor all cheerful, light, camaraderie-like, "Hold on, Bob, I hear you saying that you think Sally said XYZ, do I get that right? OK. Cuz I thought she said [paraphrases mildly challenging thing]. I think she has a point cuz of ABC. Does that fit with your point, Sally? OK cool. So Bob, if you see what I mean. Maybe there's room to consider this in a different way? Yeah?"

Or even just "Huh, weird, I thought Sally was calm and matter of fact when she made her point. I think her point is reasonable. I would like to hear more from Sally, if she wants to say more" can be helpful, said by a Woke In-Group Person to an Oblivious peer.

Easier in real life than online. But even online, I have had Woke-ish Higher Status people say this to Oblivious people who were freaking out about some mildly-phrased point I'd made. People speaking up don't even have to be very Woke at all. Like, they themselves needed a few more sentences from me before they got understood my point. What mattered was, they spoke up -- de-centering themselves enough to do it in a way that de-escalated Oblivious Person.

In my experience, most of the Oblivious people back off. The Woke-ish people who de-escalate them, they create room to breathe, and validate the worth of my voice in that conversation. Good Cop skills are useful across multiple axes.
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 5:22 PM on May 22, 2019 [4 favorites]


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