6:03pm November 9, 2013

➸ Nico: Creating safer spaces via callouts

girljanitor:

bankuei:

biyuti:

girljanitor:

A lot of people on tumblr have this massive problem with what they refer to as “callout culture”.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: the only thing that has ever made a difference for me in my life, in the way people…

‘Callout culture’ to me is this thing that happens (actually usually by white people, that I’ve seen) where people get really invested in finding more and more things to call bad, for reasons other than that the things are actually bad (or out of proportion to how bad the things actually are).  I can’t say exactly what things should be like, and nobody should have to say exactly what things should be like in order to say there are problems with something.  I haven’t see so much of 'callout culture’ among PoC.  I see it mostly among white people who become obsessed with a sort of idea of purity and perfection to the point where scale and context are not taken into account, at all.  I don’t see anything wrong with objecting strenuously to things that are causing serious problems.  But the people I’m objecting to, are people, again usually white people, who make it their mission to find more and more terrible things everywhere.  And yes, I see anti-SJ people as just doing the same thing in reverse.  But I don’t know how to talk about this without having words for it, so I use the words available to me.  To me context is everything, so the same action in two different contexts can be entirely different, in one context acceptable to me and in the other context not.  It’s hard to explain.  Because there’s no way to simply explain it all and have a perfect description of what is right and what is wrong.  So when I use the word, I’m not objecting to everyone who ever 'calls people out’, I’m objecting to a very specific set of people, actually usually white middle-class people and other privileged people, who get obsessed with a notion of perfection and enforce it in intense out-of-context out-of-proportion ways.

537 notes