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12:02pm June 9, 2014

If you’ve never heard a member of a really large group give an opinion counter to the opinion you and most people you know hold, then you haven’t met enough members of that group.

patternsmaybe:

youneedacat:

It’s pretty much that simple.  It doesn’t matter what the issue is, there’s going to be someone in that group who believes differently than you.  And usually there’s going to be large groups of people within that group who believe differently than you.  Some of them will have never met someone within that group who believes what you believe.  Because a lot of communities are kind of island-like when it comes to things like that — people mostly associate with people they agree with.  Which I think is unfortunate, but it happens.

Yes, this.

And if you think that ~listening to marginalized people~ means acknowledging only one viewpoint, what you’re doing is not listening.

Because we don’t speak with one voice.

But they’ve found a weird way to handle that one.

Basically it runs like this:

Marginalized people of any particular type, do speak with one voice.  That voice is the dominant view in the community in question.

If you dare to say that you know anyone who has a dissenting opinion and is a member of that marginalized group, then you are… I forget what they call it but they have a word for it and they consider it manipulative and derailing or something.

I mean I do understand how frustrating that particular conversational situation can be.  Like I understand why that can be considered derailing and all that.  I really do.  Because it can be used to just shut down any attempt to say “Hey, we have a community who has analyzed this situation and found a lot of things wrong here.”

But I’ve also seen the “that’s just a derailing tactic” thing used to shut down actual dissent from community members and our allies and that gets old really fast.

Because the assumption is that if you disagree with the agreed-upon opinion of the community, then you can’t possibly have a good, well-thought-out reason for doing it.  You have to be doing it for oppressive reasons, or because you don’t know better than to disagree with the oppressors, or whatever.   It can’t possibly be that you have anti-oppression values as deep as anyone else in the community, but have happened to come to different conclusions than they have.

(Weird, I thought I’d posted this, but then it hadn’t.  So this is meant to come before my other post that went into more detail about dissent.)