as small as a world and as large as alone, fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton: ...

1:36am August 4, 2015

withasmoothroundstone:

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

If I had a solid piece of advice to give anyone it would be just “calm down”
And I don’t mean that in a dismissive sense but like
One of the things being involved in SJ did was give me an immediate panic response every time I saw someone talk about something Forbidden
And slowly learning that talking to people about things is not actually on par with trying to put a fire out before it kills someone has been extremely helpful for me
It’s incredibly important to be able to gain a little perspective. No, someone on the internet being wrong is not the literal equivalent of a bullet on its way to murder someone. Working out right from wrong requires time and patience. It can’t be done with panicked urgency or rage.
I think what’s especially saddening is that you get so many splinter groups within social justice itself because people don’t know how to deal with different perspectives without making it into “you’re wrong, and that’s dangerous, so now we’re enemies.” When some in-group thing becomes controversial, like, “Disabled people all think (thing),” and some disabled people go, “No, we don’t,” I never see that reconciled as a valid difference of perspective. I always just see it turn into enemy factions. It sucks.

I like the tags used by someone before me on this:
#I don’t think stupid is an ableist slur #that doesn’t mean I care less about people with ID than people who think it is
That’s a really good example of something that’s split people into warring factions, when it should just be left as a valid difference of opinion among disabled people.
There’s a website I’ve been reading as I watch Star Trek. The guy has reviewed every episode and it’s fun to go there and read what everyone has to say in response, and then sometimes even add comments of my own, even though they’re so long after the fact that I doubt anyone actually reads them at this point, or that I’ll ever get replied to. (If I do, it’ll probably be a year from now or something.)
But.
The author there… he has really good intentions. And I respect anyone’s right to run their website however they want to, and moderate or ban people on whatever criteria they choose. But I still wish he had somewhat different criteria.
He’s not, to my knowledge, disabled. I could be wrong about that, but the way he talks about disability is very different than the way he talks about marginalization that I know he experiences as a gay man of color.
But he’s heard, somewhere, about The Unwritten List Of Ableist Words Never To Say. And he enforces that. He warns people if words like ‘mad’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘dumb’ or ‘crazy’ are in the books he’s reading or shows he’s watching. And he does not allow people to use those words on his site, saying they are ableist slurs.
And I know that he probably thinks he’s doing right by disabled people, but as a disabled person whose disability makes it hard for me to do a search-and-replace function on individual words I use, I really don’t like being asked not to say words unless the words are so heinous that there’s really no excuse. Like, I would not say the n-word. And the only reason I say retard (as in REE-tard, not as in re-TARD, which is a completely different word) ever at all, is because it’s a word that’s used against me frequently so I feel I have the right to use it as long as I don’t use it for real. Like, I can say the word, such as for discussions like this one, I just can’t say it as an insult or a way of actually describing real human beings or something. But those are two words that I would have no problem with someone banning from their website, at least as used by white people and people without cognitive or developmental disabilities.
On the other hand, banning stupid and dumb just makes it hard for me to write, because although I don’t throw those words around all the time, they’re still words for actual concepts that have nothing to do with disability. And it makes me unsettled that people have become so factionalized over this issue, that even my talking about this has led to people telling me I just don’t give a crap about [insert groups of people that I either belong to or am routinely thought to belong to], or that I’ve never been hurt sufficiently by being called stupid or dumb, because if I had, I’d agree with them.
And the guy who runs that website? He probably believes what he’s been told, which is that disabled people all agree about these words, or at least the disabled people who count when it comes to discussions like this. I’ve seen so many disabled people state outright that all disabled people, or all autistic people, or all people with intellectual disabilities, believe one particular thing. And it’s never true. Ever. But people say it anyway.
And people like me either don’t exist or are uncaring monsters who don’t get how much words can hurt people, because if we did we’d agree.
And there’s that… thing people can do. And people become very adept at it. Where they can link anything at all back to a heinous crime against some marginalized group of people. And then they can say that anyone who disagrees with them is doing the equivalent of allowing that heinous crime to happen.
What do I mean? Well… I forget exactly what was being argued about, because this was back when I was first on tumblr, and people were first forming the #actuallyautistic tag, to give some background on how long ago this was.
But there was an argument between an autistic adult and a nonautistic parent of an autistic child. This is not surprising, these arguments happen all the time online. It was over something about… how parents should behave towards adult autistic self-advocates, or something like that. Whatever the parent had done, it was a social gaffe at best and disrespecting autistic people at worst.
But then.
The autistic person somehow tied – and it took a lot of twisting to do this – the parent’s behavior, back to the murder of autistic people.
So now, the argument took on new urgency. The people on the autistic person’s side were suddenly not just correcting a parent’s behavior towards online autistic adults. They were, in their eyes, preventing murder. And the parent was, in their eyes, contributing to murder in some manner.
It took a large stretch to get there, and it took a lot of links in a long chain that would not hold up to close scrutiny without falling into pieces. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that now a difference of opinion was elevated in importance, to the level of murder prevention. And this meant that the autistic people in the conversation now viewed what was happening with an intense urgency that had not been there before.
And that disturbed me greatly.
Because the ability to tie relatively minor disagreements to things like murder, genocide, sterilization, torture and other crimes against humanity, is a skill. And some people on here have honed that skill, turned it into a high art form in fact. And that skill is so very destructive to anyone who is trying to communicate, to cooperate, to learn from each other. But it’s pulled out and used like a weapon. And it’s not right, and it’s not fair, to anyone involved.
And it’s late, so even if I had a direction I was going beyond this, I don’t remember it. I think I’ve said enough for now.

Yeah, when people can’t outright mentally strip you of your minority status, they like to impose a hierarchy of “who’s affected the most by oppression” instead, so they can still dismiss your perspective. And they have this thinking where the person who is most upset is the one who’s most “right” about something.
And yes, that- making every discussion about murder, and making it seem like people disagreeing is tantamount to murder. Why did this become a thing, and how does it make sense to anyone? It makes it so difficult to have honest conversations about things. I am really tired of seeing thoughtful objections to trending social justice ideas being shut down by people who are terrified of the “harm” simply talking about these things will cause to “oppressed people who are being murdered every day!” Just talking about things on your blog is not killing people. And the fact that most of us who are objecting are also oppressed, it’s like… you’re trying to stifle the growth of your own community. People could be sharing valuable insights and perspectives, and you’re going to stomp all over that, because you’ve convinced yourself that words are bullets.

Also the panic when you see someone talk about something Forbidden, or when you want to talk about something Forbidden yourself… that’s very familiar to me. When I first came onto tumblr, I got blindsided by that element of things, and a friend had to tell me “you don’t seem like yourself at all, you seem like you’re dodging and weaving to try to avoid doing and saying the wrong things, while trying to always do and say the right things”. Which was true. And also, I was already bad at doing that, and only got worse over time. So, yeah. :-/

Notes: