1:12pm September 15, 2014

What madeofpatterns is saying is really important.

She’s said twice now: Being wrong about something doesn’t make a person worthless.

I assume she’s responding to a situation, current or past. But it almost doesn’t matter the specific situation, because I’ve seen it so many times before on tumblr. (Note when I say “on tumblr” I don’t mean something’s exclusive to here, I just mean here is where I’ve seen it.)

What happens is someone will say something ‘wrong’. And it may be something actually wrong, or it may just contradict the echo chamber of the moment. Or both at once.

And people turn around and shun the person. Sometimes the shunning takes place a long time after the fact. Like someone will have said something in 2011 that someone found to be sexist, and someone in 2014 will find the possibly-sexist remark, and start telling everyone “This person is sexist, don’t listen to them.” In the best case scenarios, the person just gets a bit of minor bullying. In the worst case scenarios, the person loses friends, loses access to their community, and is publicly shamed and shunned.

And the thing is, it’s not that people shouldn’t point out that the person was sexist, if they really were sexist. It’s that the reaction is out of proportion to the 'crime’. And honestly, everyone has beliefs that are wrong. Everyone has beliefs that are so harmful they draw blood. Everyone. So it feels hypocritical to me, for people to shun one person but not to see that they themselves are just as bad if not worse, in some other area.

I think it’s better that we accept that living in a world that is racist, sexist, transphobic, transmisogynist, homophobic, classist, ableist, sizeist, and ageist, that we all have these things embedded in our brains, that the idea that anyone can just remove it all from their brains and be pure and clean, is a pipe dream. It’s not going to happen. We’re not going to clean out our brains and find them empty of the ugliness we’ve absorbed from the world around us. None of us can do that.

So when we see it in others, we have to remember that it is there in ourselves too. And even though we may have a duty to do something about it when we see it in others (especially when the others are doing active harm, not just saying something we disagree with). We also have a duty to be compassionate and remember that we are no better, not in terms of thoughts anyway. We may be doing better than people who act on certain thoughts, at certain times. But having the thoughts? Give me a break, we all have them, and shunning people for voicing a thought, we might as well shun everyone.

Notes: