6:51pm August 27, 2012

➸ flip flopping joy: i don’t know when it happened

youneedacat:

The comments are as important as the post. A thoughtful discussion of disturbing and destructive trends in the “social justice blogosphere”. Particularly the act of viciously attacking and dogpiling people who don’t deserve it. The author and many commenters have taken part in this practice and are looking for alternative, deeper ways of dealing with issues. Also touches on the misuse of the otherwise completely valid idea of the tone argument. Where it is misused in ways that allow people to justify acts that are unjustifiable for reasons that have nothing to do with tone. Highly recommended, as this is one of the more nuanced discussions of the matter I’ve seen.

The crux of my disagreement here is that sometimes engaging someone makes them think that their “opinion” or “point of view” is just as valid as anyone else’s, and that is not the case.

Especially when the “debate” is your inherent worth as a human being.

What I have seen in a lot of bubbles of society is that everyone outside that bubble becomes reduced to a debate, an idea, an “other” that the people IN the bubble discuss and debate what “should be done” about them. Basically, this metaphor is meant to illustrate the privilege that elevates white people, abled people, allistic people, straight people, cis people, et cetera, and makes them feel entitled to decide who “deserves” rights and who does not.

This is not a valid argument.

And not for one second do I want anyone to think that this is a valid argument. Debating people’s humanity is not a valid argument.

The thing is, these beliefs are linked to emotions; they are emotionally held beliefs that people who are privileged will cling to desperately in order to continue to oppress people; to talk over them, to tell other people what they should do, how they should speak, and to limit the ways in which they interact with people who are actively oppressing them.

My “tone” since we are discussing the “tone” issue, is consistently punitive, sharp, and often condescending, because when a person cannot be engaged on an intellectual level (since there IS no intellectual basis for their argument), a sharp verbal
“slap” is what is necessary to correct the behavior.

In our society, the lack of accountability, the lack of negative reaction to unacceptable behavior, is extremely alarming to me. When there is a large negative reaction to something you’ve done that is hurtful, dehumanizing, and oppressive, it sticks with you on an emotional level. It is an emotional argument. It corrects confirmation bias and bypasses psychological justification that people wrap around themselves in order to feel like they are “Good People”, that their actions and words are justified, and that as long as they are stating their ideas “rationally” they must of course always come out ahead. When all of society and media is skewed in order to support that kind of thinking, the verbal “slap” must be all the harder in order to counteract that.

As a society we are obsessed with protecting privileged people’s feelings away and above even the LIVES of marginalized people. Tone policing is about saying, “You must engage with me on the subject of your own oppression under MY terms, on MY time, and accept my logic.” It’s abusive and destructive, and should NOT be engaged with. Causing bad feelings in people who use abusive logic is wholly productive and guilt and shame are what you are supposed to feel when you’ve done something wrong that hurts another human being and denigrates their worth.

This is some kindergarten level stuff, and ain’t no elevated discussion gonna happen between me and someone who think they can tell me who I am, how I function, what I’m like and what my life is like. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.

The real conversation can only start after the encrustation of denial, justification, and abuser logic has been stripped away.

Two notes:

1. It’s easier to respond to everyone all at once than each person who has disagreed with the link I’ve posted. I’m sick and it’s not easy to separate everything out. Sorry.

2. Some of the words and concepts I am using are either not how my mind works, or vastly oversimplified from how my mind works. Sorry again. I can’t find words that would both be understandable, and reflect how I actually think.

I agree with much of what you and everyone else have said. My main point of disagreement, is what you think the OP said, and why you think she said it.

She was not the average privileged person being called out and responding to it by saying call-outs were bad. She was not new to these ideas, her understanding of these things was not shallow at all. She was not saying all this just because her own methods had been turned against her. She was not even saying this for the first time. She was not saying call outs were bad. She was not saying the tone argument was wrong.

She was a disabled, Chicana, working-class woman who had been deeply involved in creating an online culture where calling people out had morphed into something more ugly. She had been having second thoughts about the ugliness and voicing them for a long time before whatever happened (I can’t remember and it barely matters) to spark this particular one of many discussions on the topic. She had an intimate understanding of the matter. She did not think people’s lives were issues, and she in fact wrote a good deal about why they were not.

What was the more ugly thing that had begun happening? It involved several different things changing at once. People had started out calling people out, with or without perfectly legitimate outrage and anger, when people had done something wrong. The idea of the tone argument existed because people with privilege seemed to think people should all be perfectly calm or something when calling people out, and if they were angry or even sounded angry, their opinions were being dismissed. What that changed into? Legitimate outrage turned into vicious hateful attacks. The provocation for this could be as little as using the slightly wrong (in some people’s opinion) word. Upon that provocation, numbers up to dozens of people could dogpile the person in ways that could not possibly avoid really hurting the person. But if the person reacted as if they’d been hurt… they’d get accused of making the tone argument even when the problem was never the tone of the people doing this. This meant that as long as people were oppressed people attacking a privileged person, they could always excuse their own behavior no matter how extreme, by invoking the tone argument, as if, again, the problem was ever what tone they used as they trampled people into the ground. And while this isn’t covered in the original post, this actually attracted bullies and people who just enjoyed being mean, because they had a perfect setup where they could get away with it and even be praised. This is all still going on today. And I’m talking for real. I know that this is how some people see all call-outs because of their own privilege, but there’s a real difference whether you agree with the idea of call-outs or not.

But for the person who wrote this, and other people there, we were people experiencing various oppressions, who had witnessed this transformation. We had been part of this transformation. We had felt things spinning out of control underneath us. We had been spun out of control along with it. And we were beginning to question our own involvement with it. We were not people new to this, some of us had been around a very long time.

And we were beginning to reflect on what this was doing to us. What kind of person this was making it become. What happens when you are out of control and don’t know it. What happens when you are being mean rather than righteously angry, but it feels only just barely different from your own perspective.

How to pull back and not do that. How to find alternate ways of dealing with this stuff. How to incorporate your own life experiences into what you do and make it work. How to bring self-examination into a situation that has become more reactive than reflective. How to do things in new, different ways. Ways that are more productive, less likely to spin out of control. How to create something that isn’t practically only call-outs, whether the good or bad kind.

And that is so completely different than what most of you seem to think you’re reacting to. I’m watching people’s responses. And some of you, you’re reacting to this using the exact same words and ideas you would use if a white straight nondisabled middle class cis man came along and flipped out because a bunch of people got pissed at him because he thought he should be allowed to say the n-word. Or as if someone inexperienced and not quite as privileged but still confused came along and said “Can’t we all just get along?” And that’s… not okay. That’s not what this discussion ever was.

And this discussion would be a lot more both useful and interesting, if people were engaging with who people actually were, what they were actually doing, what they were actually saying.

And apologies to those of you who did get what she meant but just disagreed. Or were trying to respond in a more nuanced way. Ironically the person I’m directly responding to looks like they may be one of them. But some of the other responses just look like stock responses to ordinary discussions of the matter and that kind of pisses me off given how much thought and heart and soul and blood and actual serious self-reflection on one’s own participation in this stuff went into the initial discussion. (Unfortunately with my own track record, most responses to what I wrote here, won’t be to what I wrote, either.)

Notes: