8:40pm November 9, 2013

➸ Nico: Creating safer spaces via callouts

youneedacat:

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.

This. And also who focus on weird stuff.

Like, they’ll explain privilege in extreme ideological detail, but they won’t tell people to build ramps and make braille available and give people who process language slowly time to communicate etc etc.

Or they’ll be nondisabled people who tell everyone that stupid was originally a word for intellectual disability (it wasn’t) and that ableism is all about using the wrong words, literally they’ll every time ableism is brought up make it entirely about words and nothing else. (Words can be ableist but words are not the main ableist problem out there.) They will CALL OUT DISABLED PEOPLE, especially people with language disabilities, for using the “wrong” words, for ourselves. Then they will ignore really really basic ableist things in society. Or they will say (yes I’ve seen this) that words like stupid are as bad as murdering disabled people.

Like someone will ask them what ableism is and they’ll launch into a description of ableist words, go no further, and treat the usage of all of these words as equally awful to each other, then they’ll claim that the least awful of these words is as bad as the most awful things that happen to disabled people. Except often they won’t get that far because they won’t be admitting that the most awful things even happen. Just words. But if they do admit they happen, they’ll claim that saying a word like stupid is as bad as forced sterilization and institutions and eugenics and murder. Or they’ll even say things like “what do you mean this word isn’t bad? Disabled people are murdered! How dare you say they don’t get murdered?!” That leave me completely befuddled.

Things like that.

But usually, in this context, it’s nondisabled people who ignore all non language stuff and flip out at anyone who makes the slightest language “error” even if the person themselves is disabled.

Notes: