3:51pm September 15, 2014

➸ When you write a post aimed at a specific group of people...

youneedacat:

…and as far as you can tell, none of such people are responding to your post. Meanwhile you’ve managed to hurt a bunch of totally innocent people who can’t do the things you’ve asked people in the post to do, because their brains don’t work that way, who were never a part of the target audience…

I don’t want to add more stress to a situation that is clearly already stressing you out, but there is one thing in these posts that I want to address.

First I want to thank you for taking the time to clarify when people misunderstood you, because the follow-ups were really helpful to me as one of the people who can’t understand nonverbal communication and has a very hard time communicating without jargon.

But one thing you’ve been doing in even your follow up posts is use the words ‘ordinary people’ in a way that I, at least, find upsetting.

I might be getting into language dickery here and if so I apologize, but it hurts to read definitions of ‘ordinary people’ that clearly don’t include me.

I don’t know what exactly you mean by ordinary people — if you mean, people who haven’t learned all the academic concepts used to describe oppression, then I’m not a particularly ordinary person, and that’s okay. But that is not what ‘ordinary people’ usually means.

And when I just see those words, over and over again, clearly meaning ‘not me’, it’s hard not to feel like you are calling me a snob. Or a weirdo. A freak. Things that we’ve all been called. Or more complimentary things that many of us have been called, that still came down in the end to “weirdo, freak, not like us, doesn’t belong, doesn’t count.”

I don’t think you are calling me those things. I don’t think you think I don’t count. But it took a lot of time and thought for me to come up with an alternate understanding of what you might mean by “ordinary people” and I don’t know whether I got it right. So, I guess this post is to request that if you can, you explain what you mean when you say ‘ordinary people’, because it hurts to be excluded from that category, especially by someone who knows how bad it can feel to be considered special.

TL;DR It hurts to not be considered an ordinary person. If you can, could you say more about what you mean by those words?

When I say ordinary person in this context, I mean like… people who haven’t absorbed these very academic ways of looking at the world, whether through actual academia, or through places like tumblr where these ideas are propagated even though tumblr isn’t an academic site. This may mean people who have never been exposed to the ideas, or also people who have never been able to absorb the ideas whether they’ve been exposed or not. (Most people in my building have never even been exposed to the ideas. I’ve been exposed but have extreme trouble absorbing them.)

I don’t really think there’s a word I’m going to come up with that won’t end up having some unfortunate connotation or another. A lot of the people I’m dealing with on tumblr really are pseudo-intellectual snobs who would look down on me and the people I deal with every day in the offline world, and would assume we had no actual awareness of our own oppression until and unless we expressed it in exactly the right words and concepts. Not everyone, not by a long shot, but that is a thing here, and it’s a big thing here.

There are plenty of ordinary people on tumblr, mind you. But most are staying far away from the SJ world (which really also includes the anti-SJ world, the two can’t exist without each other), because they know how people there would look at them. Occasionally I see someone brave it, but not often.

And not knowing you, I don’t know if you’d be what I’d call an ordinary person or not. But in a way it shouldn’t matter. Because even though it does sort of have unfortunate connotations, I can’t come up with any words that say it better, and “ordinary people” has lots of connotations that capture what is happening here perfectly. Because there’s people who’ve set themselves up as an elite who understand what oppression is really about, and then there’s ordinary oppressed people, who are not part of that elite but are sometimes actually more effective at creating lasting change in the world. And I’m setting the word ‘ordinary’ up against the elitism that happens on tumblr all the time around the topic of oppression.

Any given individual, though, it’s not meant to make a statement about. As in, it’s not meant to make a statement about you personally, unless you’re either part of the elite or part of the ordinary people I’m talking about. These conversations are always by nature oversimplified. So there are going to be people who are neither what I mean by 'ordinary people’, nor are they elitist pseudo-intellectuals who look down on ordinary people.

Unfortunately the bottom line is that I have to choose words and every word is going to have connotations, and ordinary people has a lot of very important connotations for me, even if it also has some unfortunate ones as well.

I’m not calling you a snob though. Not unless you are one, in which case I am. But I assume you’re not? And by ordinary I don’t mean “normal”, at all, like I don’t mean neurotypical or something like that. There’s ordinary autistic people, ordinary trans people, ordinary disabled people, and what I mean by that are the sort of people you meet every day just going about your life, rather than the relatively small but vocal groups of people who make up the rules in the echo chambers and pass them down to the rest of us from on high.

I know there’s all kinds of ways it can be taken badly, but I can’t stop saying it just because of that, because I really don’t have better words, and there are very important things I need about these particular words. I do feel bad that it could make some people feel like I’m calling them a freak (especially because if I’m calling you a freak I’d probably be calling myself one too), but that’s not what I mean by it. I can’t explain everything I do and don’t mean by it though. I just tried and all I got was a mess of words, not really anything enlightening.

Notes: