as small as a world and as large as alone

3:29pm February 22, 2014

nenya-kanadka:

sophiagratia:

there’s a thing that happens in internet apology discourse that i want to address.

‘when someone calls you out, it is your job to immediately apologize. do not defend yourself, apologize.’

this is a reaction to people who say racist/sexist/transphobic/classist/misogynist/etc things, and then instead of examining what they’ve said and trying to take a lesson in self-awareness and humility, get defensive and resort to tone-policing, gaslighting, derailing, good old-fashioned patronizing, or any of a number of other possible rhetorical postures designed to make the injured party sit down and shut up. to that degree, encouraging self-examination as a first instinct is important.

and how this works depends a lot on who receives this discourse, it really does.

HOWEVER.

i see ‘shut up and apologize’ being used as a general, universal rule of thumb, the law of how to engage with being called out.

and i believe that it is also wrong to encourage people to assume that because someone on the internet has told them they are wrong, they must necessarily be wrong, must necessarily owe an apology. it is wrong to preach ‘shut up and apologize’ because call-out culture can very easily function as a form of bullying: by adopting an ostensibly righteous political position and using the terms of what passes for ‘social justice’ discourse, one person can easily set themselves up as an authority in a way that does not give their interlocutor any room to maneuver. the caller-out might be wrong. ‘shut up and apologize’ dismisses that possibility.

'shut up and apologize’ discourages active, continuous critique. kneejerk political correctness stands against engaged thought.

but above all it enables the accuser to disregard their own blindspots. the accuser needn’t be a careful reader. the accuser needn’t consider the multiple axes of power and meaning at work in a given statement.

'shut up’ might be a good first step. do not react immediately. sit with your discomfort for a while. ask yourself why it is uncomfortable. what specifically is this person reacting to in what you’ve said? disregard their tone for just a minute, and ask yourself what the content of what they’ve said conveys about what you might not know or understand, what experiences might not be available to you. take that time for thought, because thought takes time, and because you owe yourself the opportunity to learn something.

but don’t apologize as a first instinct. even if an apology is due (and admittedly, it’s not unlikely that an apology is due), it only matters if you know what you’re apologizing for. i often find myself saying to people, ‘i don’t want you to apologize, i want you to think about this. i want you to not do it again.’ i don’t care about the apology. i care about the thought, the learning.

and it is possible that you do not owe an apology. it is possible that you are being bullied by a call-out artist who is using the framework of ‘social justice’ to leverage some authority for themself. it is possible that they are being just as thoughtless as they are accusing you of being.

accusation and apology are shitty tools for a rhetoric of justice. ‘shut up and apologize’ does not look to me like a path to liberation.

“i believe that it is also wrong to encourage people to assume that because someone on the internet has told them they are wrong, they must necessarily be wrong”

“one person can easily set themselves up as an authority in a way that does not give their interlocutor any room to maneuver”

—-

This, yes. The instinct to stop, think about it, consider that the other person may have a point even if they’re not expressing it the way you would or are telling you you’re wrong is a GOOD one. But you have the right to engage your brain. You do not have to knuckle under every time someone disagrees with you, even if they are doing so loudly. Even if they are doing it in the name of a good cause. 

I think this is especially important for people socialized female, and/or survivors of emotional abuse, and/or people with anxiety issues. 

You are not always wrong. Just give it a second, think about it, take some deep breaths, and don’t reply with either apologies or flames in the heat of the moment. 

[Someone put a bunch of very relevant hashtags into this.  I’ll paraphrase:  "I’ve literally seen this devolve into 'You’re calling ME out?  Well I’ll call YOU out!’  Because this is the only way within these social rules that you’re allowed to respond.  And nothing short of calling the person calling you out 'problematic’ will convince others that you have a right to disagree.“]

Completely and totally.

I know that a lot of people will have a knee-jerk reaction to this series of posts.  They’ll say that the only people who have anything to worry about are being *ist.

I once got flamed because I acknowledged the reality that oppressed people can be wrong about their oppression.  I didn’t say we’re usually wrong, even.  I just said we can be wrong, that we aren’t always right when we call people out on their (ab)use of privilege.  And that was enough to set people off – friends of mine, even, who ought to have known that I wasn’t trying to deny the existence of oppression or the need for a means of discussing it and listening to people with experience.

When they responded that way, I said something on the order of, ”…but of course, most of the time, people are going to be right when they call people out, so it barely matters that they can be wrong.“  But that was my fear talking, it wasn’t what I believed.  And this culture creates that fear, and people learning to step into line for fear of being flamed even by friends who ought to understand more of our meaning and intent than strangers.

I feel like the rules of this culture have given people a dangerous weapon.

That weapon is the ability to be right all the time.  To be reactive and enraged and not examine the origins and nature of our own feelings and reactions.  To not have to look at ourselves because we can then point the finger at others.  To avoid responsibility for our actions and reactions.  To act on the emotion of the moment, to do whatever our emotions tell us to do, to not have to listen to our consciences saying that our unexamined emotional reactions are leading us astray.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with emotions.  They’re important and they often have a lot to tell us.  But to follow your emotions without heed to any other part of ourselves is dangerous.  It’s dangerous to us, and it’s dangerous to other people.  It hurts us, and it hurts other people.

It not only allows people to react without examining our reactions.  It also stifles us from being able to voice dissenting viewpoints.  All dissenters are assumed, with rare exceptions, to be "anti-SJ” people who just don’t want to examine our own privilege.  If dissenters are from the same oppressed groups as the people in question, we’re assumed to have internalized oppression at work.  It’s never, ever that we might just be right, we might just have an idea or two about how horribly wrong this is all going.

Please don’t misunderstand what I’m about to say.  Please just listen to it and don’t think a million objections to what you think I mean, before I explain myself:

The only way we can make lasting change about oppression is through love.

This does not mean it’s always wrong to get angry, to vocally denounce people’s actions, or any of those other things.  It doesn’t mean I want everyone holding hands and smoking weed together or something.  It doesn’t mean I don’t want to examine inequality and oppression.

But it does mean that those things have to genuinely come from love.  And not in an excuse-y way.  Not “Well all of my rage and call-outs and everything do come from love, and so do all the norms of this community, so everything we do is okay.”  You can’t just go on feelings to determine if something is love, you also have to look at consequences.  And the consequences of this culture that’s been built over the years (and was being built long before tumblr) are not good.  This is not love.

Love can be hard and harsh sometimes, don’t get me wrong, but it… isn’t like this, this isn’t it, something is going very wrong.

Imagine you suddenly realize you’re going to die ten minutes from now.  Everything unimportant falls away, you suddenly see everything important in stark relief, everything unimportant disappears.  You realize, all you ever wanted to do, all you ever want from life, the only question you have, is “Have I loved enough, and have I expressed that love in my actions?”

I guarantee that those actions won’t be “Have I unleashed my self-righteous rage on as many people as I possibly could?”

That’s not just an idea I plucked out of nowhere.  Facing the possibility of my own death, although it wasn’t ten-minutes type imminent, is what made me realize how awfully unimportant these battles are.

I don’t mean that the battle to end oppression isn’t important.  But the way people are trying to do it here is horribly, tragically unimportant.  Even if your goal is to make people confront their own privilege, this is rarely helping.  Making a culture of people who figure out more and more ways to create an elite of people who are 'in the know’ (by creating more and more weirdly specific rules about what’s right and wrong, all in black and white with no shades of grey) and casting out people who can’t keep up, is not helping at all.  Every week there are new things that are right and new things that are wrong, and nobody who isn’t obsessively keeping score could possibly measure up to the standards that are being created.

This is hate.  This is destructive in a bad way.  This is not helping.

Neither is most of the anti-SJ stuff, which can be just as virulently hateful, contain its own set of toxic rules and destructive ways of belittling and mocking and putting people down, that is just as toxic and ego-driven and hateful and bullying as the worst of the SJ community.  

How do I know these things?  Because I’ve been periodically sucked into the norms of the SJ community from before it was called the SJ community.  It does that.  It sucks people in, particularly oppressed people, and oppressed people are often pretty messed up from a lifetime of oppression.  And this community comes along and fuels the worst of our egos, our rage, our self-pity, and elevates it and calls it justice.  It gives us an outlet for all of our emotional reactions, whether those reactions make sense or not.  

And at the same time that it’s fueling those messed-up things that draw us to it, it teaches us fear.  Fear of putting a toe out of line.  Fear of annoying people in high places (or people in low places, since often authority in this community comes from the most convincing claims of the worst oppression).  Fear of saying the wrong words.  Fear of not being able to keep up with the community’s ever-shifting norms.  

And it sucks you in, and your mind begins to frantically dodge, and weave, and try to stay on the right path, and not stray onto the wrong path, and it becomes a full time job… but nothing gets done, nothing gets fixed, and very few people are truly helped.

And that’s the tragedy.

Having been there, I can see others doing the same things.  I see people trying to call others out first, because the one who calls the other out first is the most likely to be believed under these norms.  I see people trying to jump in and find things other people are doing wrong, so that they themselves won’t be caught doing something wrong.  I see people, sometimes, responding to things people say when we try to bring all this into the light, in the same way I would have once responded to the same things being said, for the same reasons.  

And some of the things make sense.  Some of the reasons make sense at first.  Because there are people who would say things that sound similar but are not at all the same underneath (and that’s a big flaw in this movement, the inability to look underneath surface appearances, the tendency to judge entirely on those surface appearances, and to condemn anyone who has the wrong surface appearance) who mean something entirely different.  Who mean that they just want to not examine their own role in oppression.  Who mean that they don’t believe oppression exists.  Who mean that they believe that “love” is as simple as black people and white people getting married and having mixed-race babies and that’s the solution to racism, or that love means not talking about difficult things or never getting angry or something like that.

And that’s not what I mean.  At all.

And this, all of what I’ve said, is why I have noticed that both many SJ and many anti-SJ communities have sort of tried to temporarily adopt me, and people with opinions much like mine, as a spokesperson, and then run away or condemn us when we’re not what they expected.  Both communities tend to be, at the core, all about widgets, and many of us who dissent here are not about widgets at all, so we don’t fit, even when we try really hard to fit, and then bad things happen.

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