2:51pm June 17, 2014

Thoughts on listening to marginalized people

realsocialskills:

Marginalized people are, first and foremost, people.

Marginalized people are not a hive mind. Not as a whole, and not by group, either.

Listening to marginalized people means listening to actual people who you encounter.

That means listening to what people tell you, even if it’s not what social justice theory or any other ideology told you that they should think. Listening means listening. It doesn’t mean you have to agree. In fact, you *can’t* always agree since people who experience the same category of oppression believe contradictory things about it).

What listening means is understanding what they are actually saying, without talking over them with your theories about what their life means. Talking over people with social justice ideology is just as bad as any other form of talking over people.

It means, also, acknolwedging that margianlized people don’t all agree with one another, even on really important things. And that, sometimes, you have to take a position. And you have to evaluate what you think, sometimes. But, you never have to be a jerk about it.

And it starts with listening to the person who is actually before you, and assuming that they understand their life better than you do.

behemothblogging said:

YES THIS.

I don’t want you to listen to what a self-declared spokesperson for my group has decided we want, feel or need. I want you to listen to what I say I want, feel or need. And to respect that when dealing with me, and to listen to what others feel and need and respect that when dealing with them, and to (ideally) come away from that with a broad-spectrum understanding of what concerns and issues among us might be but not treat those as absolutes that can never be contradicted.

I know this can be hard— hell, I don’t get it right a lot of the time. I’m autistic and I grew up pretty sheltered, despite my family’s best attempts, and I tend to assume that everyone operates like me and be notoriously hard to disabuse of that belief. So no one should hate on you for getting this wrong, and if they do, they are in the wrong and need to look at the situation more thoughtfully.

But it is how you treat other people with politeness. (Of course, it’s incumbent upon them, if they want to treat you with politeness too, to respect that this may be hard for you.)