 On differences in oppression, derailment, and the hierarchies of hurt
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Apr. 5th, 2009 @ 03:38 pm 
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Things I've Been Thinking A Lot About Lately, Part One: Derailment and Topical Relevancy. (Part two is Cultural Appreciation, Appropriation, and Inclusion: Every Damn One Of You Is Doing It Wrong.) Related partly to RaceFail and partly to various other things recently.
tl;dr: Just because you have a different problem doesn't mean other people's problems don't exist or don't matter, your problem is not necessarily relevant, and changing the rules so you win no matter what is childish and stupid and wrong.
There's this strong tendency I've noticed for people to want to derail discussions with which they are uncomfortable, or, especially, feel vaguely culpable by association. A fairly common example is for men who, say, are called out/see another man called out on making rape jokes, or the like, to declaim: Men get raped too!
The implication being that fixating on rape as a men-against women thing is wrong (and sexist!).
Ahem.
"Among all rape victims identified by the survey, 85.8 percent were women and 14.2 percent were men. Nearly all of the female victims (99.6 percent) and most of the male victims (85.2 percent) were raped by a male." -2006 Violence Against Women Survey, U.S. Dept. of Justice, page 26.
For those of you who don't want to break down the numbers, that means that 97.6% of identified rapes in this survey were committed by men. I don't want to exclude that 2.4%, or anything, but you see, there are two issues at play here that mean it's not relevant in the context of the normal sort of discussion:
1) There is nothing like parity involved. The implication of "men get raped too" is that it's an equal issue that's being sidelined because of zomg reverse sexism or whatever is false; male rape victims are a very small minority, female rapists are an extremely tiny one. This is not even taking into account the socio-psychological differences. The fact that it's a minority issue doesn't mean it's a non-issue, and I mean that sincerely, but it is not comparable, and therefore not relevant to a discussion of violence towards women, or of gender-based fears and perceptions of sexual assault. It is just not a fear which is endemic to male experience.
2) The idea that thinking of rape as a male crime is horribly sexist is wrong. Just wrong. That 2.4% of female rapists is not a big enough proportion to change the texture of the discussion, and is going to be a somewhat different issue.
Similarly, you have people like Will Shetterly, who can't take on any concept that racism is bad, or should be fought, because he's fixated on class prejudice, refusing to accept intersectionality or, it seems sometimes, that racism exists. Other people failing their way through in the RaceFail (which seems to have petered out, if only because people are too wounded, exhausted, and frustrated to keep trying to persuade the wilfully stupid, and anyone who's not wilfully stupid is largely in consensus by now; what's left is a bloody battlefield and the general sense that even if some good things came out of it, no-one really won and the gains weren't worth the pain) were bringing up their experiences with being poor, with being white in an area where white is a minority group, with being the child of an alcoholic, with whatever kind of pain makes them feel like a victim, with the fairly blatant intent of trying to silence people who feel damaged by racism, more-or-less stating outright that talking about racism is wrong and cruel because it's like the eeeevil non-white people and their liberal-guilt-overwhelmed friends don't think that their oh-so-special pain matters.
As you might tell from my increasing editorialising as that paragraph went on, I find this attitude a touch problematic.
I've had this conversation more than once over the last two and a half years, but to analogise: I am in constant pain. Less than I used to be, now, but still constant, and for a couple of years solid, it was constant and severe. I was in more pain than anyone with whom I was in regular contact. I'm probably still in more pain than most, all the time, because I'm still in constant pain and it's still fairly strong. (Remarkably so today, but then I slipped on the stairs and ow.)
This does not mean that people around me cease to feel pain, and it does not mean their pain doesn't matter. If someone I care about gets hurt, even a little, this is a matter of concern to me. I am sympathetic, and if people want me to hug them and kiss it better, I will. In the context of their pain, mine is relevant only so far as it helps me to empathise - and I'm not going to bring that up overtly, because then it sounds like I'm trying to make it All About My Pain. It's relevant to me, only.
However, if I'm having a bad pain day, and it's spiking like it does some time, and I'm biting my thumb to keep from whimpering or screaming and people nearby are trying to help me deal with that, be it fetching ice packs, getting me painkillers, or just holding my hand and being supportive... interrupting this activity is a total dick move. It's a dick move if you're interrupting and blocking the people trying to help because you want to complain about your papercut, and it's a dick move if you have a broken leg that's aching; it's only not a dick move if you've just fallen down the stairs and broken your ankle and you need someone to call for medical help.
Because your pain is just as important as mine, but it's not the issue right now.
And that's what these people don't seem to be able to see - that class prejudice is very real, for example, but it's not necessarily relevant. It intersects with race issues, yes, but outside of the ways in which that is relevant to the discussion at hand, which it often won't be, it's not relevant to a discussion on race. Nobody's saying your issues don't matter, they're just not what people are talking about.
And it's different when you're taking part of a wider discussion than if, say, you're talking to one person, or even a couple of friends. Conversation can drift. I've spent a lot of time discussing RaceFail with my brother-out-law; in the course of those conversations, we talked a lot about personal experience, and the conversation wandered over other topics, tangentially related to but not really what RaceFail was about. That's fine, because it was the two of us talking to each other, and we weren't trying to control anyone else's discourse, and we weren't making a general discussion All About Us; we were talking about what we thought, as friends do. And because we're friends, because we're close on the order of family-like bonds, understanding each other's personal experiences is something that does matter to us, where it wouldn't matter to strangers or acquaintances or even, necessarily, less-close friends.
News flash: Context is relevant to communication. Film at eleven. What's acceptable in some circumstances is inappropriate in others.
Except a lot of the people doing it know that. They'd call it in other people - and have done so. (Although people who'll accuse others of misogyny at the same time as accusing someone of "whoring" don't count as people, for purposes of this discussion, because: lolwhat.) They also know that saying that this discussion is taking place on academic lines when the topic of discussion is, actually, subjective experience and responses and the people who disagree with them just aren't up to communicating on that level is manure of the highest grade; they're just using academia as a tool to silence dissent. Again, they'd call it out if used against them.
Hence, it's deliberate derailment of the conversation (I'm going to be charitable and say it's unconscious, because I like to think the best of people, but I am not giving a pass on deliberate intent). It means - and even though this was recognised, even though people were fighting it, it was frustratingly effective - that a lot of the argument becomes very meta. The argument becomes an argument about the terms under which the argument is being held. When you know you're in the wrong, subvert the paradigm.
That's also what the stuff under the cut tag is about.
I'm all for subverting the dominant paradigm as a tool to fight oppression, but that's the point - it's the dominant paradigm, it deserves it. Done in the way and context that was happening in RaceFail 09, it's not just moving the goal posts for people trying to score a modicum of justice, it's also repainting the field boundaries and switching the rules from soccer to lacrosse. And not giving the other team any sticks.
Jack that noise. The people on the "wrong" side of this know who they are, even if they still think they're right; I'm not saying any of them are racist because of any of the above (although some of them turned out to be horrifyingly racist in other things they said and did). I am, however, saying that they're not good people, because good people don't do this, especially when they know it's hurting people.
And one final note:
"They're not like this in real life!" is sophistry at best; the Internet is real life. The people you're talking to are real people. If you're hurtful, malicious and cruel on the internet, you're hurtful, malicious, and cruel in real life. It's not right to judge people by their behaviour towards people they have a vested interest in pleasing; that's an indication of their desire to be pleasing to that person, for whatever reason. (It's not necessarily a bad reason. Enlightened self-interest is still self-interest despite the enlightenment; if I go out of my way to make my friend happy because it brings me joy to see her smile, this is not automatically me being a selfish bitch.) You can judge people by their behaviour towards strangers, because that shows their character.
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unhelpful comment.
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I agree with this.
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Re: unhelpful comment.
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It's not entirely unhelpful. ♥ It's nice to know I'm not talking out of my proverbial. ;)
Have you seen Derailing for Dummies? :) A more subtle derail is to change the topic from a particular form of racism (or whatever) you're (plausibly) guilty of to another (often more serious) sort you're not, and then when people try to change the subject back accuse them of not caring about the other problem.
Yep, a few times.
And yeah, it's more subtle, but also more jerkish. Why is it so hard for people to recognise this is the topic, that other thing is not?
Having been guilty of this sort of thing myself (to my eternal shame) my logic is something like:
This conversation is making me uncomfortable.
When conversations make me uncomfortable it generally means I need to figure out what the problem is and point it out.
HMM. What could be wrong with this conversation?
Well they're not talking about X important thing. Is that it?
Wow, that feels so right. Suddenly this conversation makes sense, and I know what to say, and I don't feel uncomfortable any more! Sweet!
*sigh* Totally over internet wank about minority politics. The thing they're calling "Race!Fail" is that Elizabeth Bear thing still, right? Or has it ballooned to include something else? That "Derailed for Dummies" essay is clever and snarky I'm sure, but still shits me to tears.
See, dismissing the whole thing as "internet wank about minority politics" has been one of the things that's really been offending people, because, no, really, it's a hell of a lot more than that. Elizabeth Bear hasn't been an issue for months, really.
It went on to encompass an awful lot, much of it interesting and valuable.
The fullest archive is here (http://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/148996.html). A summary of the first few weeks is here (http://seeking-avalon.blogspot.com/2009/01/timeline.html). A brief summary of subsequent events is here (http://rydra-wong.livejournal.com/155427.html). But probably the best starting point is here (http://logophilos.net/blather/?p=1162), a themed summary of the early stages that explains the major threads of discussion.
The thing is, being able to say, "Oh, this endless wrangling about minority issues is so tiresome..." is a majority/privileged perspective. You can find it tiresome and not have to care because as a white, heterosexual, socially-and-economically-advantaged-by-circumstances-of-birth male, you're about as far from the possibility of this affecting you as it's possible to get. You don't exactly have to search very hard to find characters in fiction with whom you can identify, and the extent to which you can expect to feel cultural alienation is the extent to which mainstream Australian culture is beneath you.
I kind of thought that a reaction like this would also be beneath you, to be honest. You're an intelligent and thoughtful man, and dismissing outright issues that are very important to people because they're just minorities wrangling about representation... I just thought better of you.
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... deep breath ...
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Right. What follows is going to look very much like a slam. However, I want you to know that it is not a slam of you. I am taking a dim view of several things today, and I take a dim view of some of the things you have just said, but I am not questioning you, your worthiness, your motivations, or your intelligence. I am going to get about as far as asking you a rhetorical question, which I hope will not give more offence than is warranted in a robust, but essentially courteous conversation about politics. That having been said, I now apologise in advance for the vigour of the comments which follow (this comment is prefatory -- they have, of course, already been typed and I'm not in a self-censorious mood). "The thing is, being able to say, "Oh, this endless wrangling about minority issues is so tiresome..." is a majority/privileged perspective. You can find it tiresome and not have to care because as a white, heterosexual, socially-and-economically-advantaged-by-circumstances-of-birth male ..." Explaining this to me is an insult to my intelligence. Not only have I been acutely aware of my personal social privilege for a very long time, I haven't had a conversation on any of these topics recently without someone involved (regardless of their relative privilege -- I've had this from people coming from positions of at least comparable social advantage, in context) taking it upon themselves to grab me by the ears and jam their mental model of me down my throat. Sometimes, they think all kinds of erroneous things about me. But you can rest assured that in general when I think about myself, I suspect if anything I tend to accord myself a position of greater relative privilege and advantage than I deserve. That pivot given up -- the acknowledgement of my educated, young, white middle-class heterosexual masculinity -- is treated as a place to grip on me, to define me and my utterances, by some people who like to participate in conversations like these, but it's not an infinitely long lever under the mass of reality. Whoever I am, there's still an outside chance I can speak the truth or the closest facsimile of the truth we've got. I haven't looked into the Bear debacle since the first few days -- when I spent about eight hours in all wading through the gutter of its comment threads -- but if it is anything resembling what it once was, I seriously doubt it's doing much good to anyone. Simply because I'm a middle class white male doesn't mean my reasoning is invalid. Simply because the debate continues doesn't mean I should invest time in returning to reacquaint myself with its evolution. Simply because it is about race, about privilege, and because all our societies have problems around race and privilege, and because discussing problems might help, and because doing things that might help fix problems is important, doesn't mean this discussion is important or does help (or has already helped, as surely we should assess given the length of time it's been going on now).
If anything, calling "debates" like that surrounding the Elizabeth Bear gaffe(s) and the responses of various actors in the debate "tiresome" would be an understatement (a comment which I base solely on my aforementioned survey of the early stages, carried out in January). They're an ineffective, scattershot, individually focused, and self-indulgent way of discussing the issues involved. For every good point made there's ten self-indulgent rants, witty perhaps but insubstantial or counter-productive, one hundred idiotic comments and one thousand blind agreements ("Yes. This."). Most people involved are only there for the thrill of the chase. Even the POC. Because people who spend a great many hours -- hours every day -- on blogging communities, people who forensically analyse comment threads with hundreds of entries, people who read every word and then summarise for the benefit of others -- tend to be defined as much by their willingness to argue as by any other trait. I should know: I'm one of them. If there was a gender, ethnicity or sexuality called "needlessly argumentative", that'd be me. From your archive links I note that the people controlling and parametrising debate via link-blogs competing for "official record of the wank!" status are the same as at the start of the "Bear thing". I note that the summary of events on "Seeking Avalon" focuses almost entirely on "personalities not issues", and I note that the overriding tone is still one of blind self-regarding snark. Take a step back and consider: are you sure it's not all a big waste of time? I mean, really sure? Are you sure this is the best way all these articulate, active people could be using their powers of communication? "I kind of thought that a reaction like this would also be beneath you, to be honest. You're an intelligent and thoughtful man, and dismissing outright issues that are very important to people because they're just minorities wrangling about representation... I just thought better of you." Thanks for the baseline rating anyway. I'd rather be viewed as "basically ok, but wrong here" than "being an idiot according to type". As you note, comments like these are relatively atypical for me. However, I have thought about what I'm saying. As for "dismissing outright issues", I'm far from dismissing the issues in whole or in part, it's the whole ecosystem of communication -- supposedly about said issues -- which I'm saying, sucks. Blows, sucks, whatever. And that has a lot to do with the tools, the texts and tracts of communication that the community of interest around race-activism in the blogosphere has developed, the cheat sheets, framing terms and argumentative strategies, the cheap shots, gloss-overs and kneejerk reactions, and it has a lot to do with the people in that community themselves, and the weird trolls who want to wind them up, and the arrogance of writers from bigger blogs, like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who like to step in over their pay grade everywhere they're not needed. For a community with such a minute interest in setting the terms of argumentation, it seems to be capable of carrying out remarkably few sensible arguments.
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| From: | ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) alias_sqbr |
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April 6th, 2009 06:27 am (UTC) |
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Part of me was hoping this was a satirical example of an archetypical derail
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Off the top of my head, posts in RaceFail09 can be divided into 4 categories:
1)Inspired by the discussion but more general in scope and able to be appreciated out of context ie general descriptions of how racism works
2)Criticisms of particular behaviors by another person or people involved in the fail
3)Defending someone (possibly oneself) against accusations
4)Complaints that the the whole thing is a waste of time and everyone should shut up about it
Whatever you think of the Fail in general, I can't see how you can complain about posts of type (1) in principle, and imo that's what Sami's post is. It's not really about RaceFail09 any more than it's about rape.
So regardless of it's merits in general, your comment was still derailing, you made no attempt to engage with the actual topic. Which was the way people try to derail discussions of racism, and interrupting a discussion to complain about how the "flaws" in the way the discussion is framed make it impossible for you to engage is one of the most common ones.
I was going to try and convince you of the merits of the other sorts of posts (except the last one, of which there have been many) but I'm not sure I can be bothered. I have trouble engaging with any discussion which begins with the term "minority politics" :P
To quote the late, great George Carlin.
I believe you can joke about anything.
I don't. Some jokes hurt, and some jokes trivialise things which need not to be trivialised.
There's a gulf between 'can' and 'should' though.
Derailing is particularly frustrating because people who derail will almost always refuse to believe that they are doing so. In fact, when you confront someone who is derailing, the result is generally that THEY will accuse YOU of derailing THEIR issues.
See the massive TL;DR comments above.
It's true.
Although the tl;dr qualities of the comments above I forgive, because the author thereof is an old friend of mine and in discussing complex issues we share a tendency to explain our positions at some length (see tl;dr original post, really), the content is highly problematic liek whoa.
It's bringing the context/relationship factors of digression/derailment into sharp relief for me, actually; were he a stranger, I'd be dismissive and perhaps a bit bitchy, but because I genuinely care about him and am convinced he's basically a good person, I haven't replied yet because I need time to frame a response that actually engages with the subject.
The same reply made to, say, a post by Avalon's Willow would have been the height of assholishness, but there are some differences in the rules of engagement with friends. (Which is not to say I don't think he's wrong, but friends can be wrong at each other without it being inherently hurtful, because our many years of acquaintance give me the luxury of knowing that he's not malicious in this.)
I really want to make this clear, I think, because - hilariously, given what I wrote in the original post - he's Not A Bad Person, and the context that he's my friend does alter some of the implications of saying what he said. I know I said that you can't give people a pass for being mean to strangers because they're nice to you, but he's not addressing strangers, he's addressing me.
News flash: Context is relevant to communication. Film at eleven. What's acceptable in some circumstances is inappropriate in others.
Thank you very much for this, especially. I've been thinking a lot lately, as a white person, about how contextual thinking is something that white people have got to get better at in order to more successfully not suck at confronting racism and white privilege. I think, in the United States maybe especially, a lot of that weakness in thinking has to do with the way modern white culture is so shaped by the history of post-Enlightenment classical liberal legal frameworks of equality for individuals and the value of "universal" justice that essentially means the same laws apply to all individuals equally, everywhere, all the time. Those ways of thinking run so deep in our culture, and critical thinking is so poorly taught in most pre-university educational settings, that I think it's a real challenge for a lot of white people to accept that the same words or acts can truly mean different things in different contexts.
Anyway, good post all around, but that point was something I was especially glad to see being made, thanks! :)
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sorry for the tl;dr reply, but this journal is the natural habitat of teal deer
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I'm not sure I think that Enlightenment values are inherently wrong/imperialistic to try and spread. I mean, they were alien at the time they were introduced to European society, too, but they were influential and persuasive for a reason. Years ago the Indonesian ambassador to the United Nations cited Rousseau to argue that human rights were a Western notion and therefore it was cultural imperialism to argue against torture and wholesale murder in East Timor; it made me angry then and I still think torture and murder are wrong. Not just wrong in my Western, Enlightenment-affected worldview, wrong.
In the same way that the Enlightenment improved Western cultures without annihilating them, I think Enlightenment values can improve other cultures without annihilating them either. It doesn't have to mean the same laws apply equally and everywhere; hell, it doesn't mean that in the areas where Enlightenment thought has already spread, and never has meant that. (Oddly, that's the exact period I'm studying right now.) I genuinely believe that equality for individuals is a right and correct goal, and therefore where cultural values conflict with that, I will be hostile to those cultural values. Honour killing and FGM and slavery are and have been all cultural values of a kind, and I'm opposed to all of them. I can't and won't dismiss things I think are abhorrent as "cultural"; it's a matter of being careful about where you draw the line of "cultural".
There are no easy answers, but it would be risky if there were, because easy answers encourage intellectual laziness. Your point about critical thinking is very relevant.
Oddly, this may feed into my belief that linguistics should be more widely-taught at a pre-university level. Languages are a relatively neutral area in which to teach concepts of inherent bias, because nobody's going to find it particularly challenging to their sense of racial/cultural identity to learn that sound value perception is profoundly affected by native speaker biases.
However, once you learn that the Japanese r/l confusion is just like English-speaker non-comprehension of aspirated and unaspirated bilabials, which to native speakers of Hindi are as different as t and d are to English speakers, which are themselves sound identical to speakers of Arrernte... it's going to be easier for people to expand that understanding into cultural preconceptions.
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April 6th, 2009 07:00 am (UTC) |
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R,
It is my opinion that, if anything, people act worse on the internet - precisely because the Internet generally provides a shield of anonymity. However, what they are doing is simply letting their true nature show, because this anonymity removes social inhibitions.
As far as RaceFail goes, I must admit that I haven't heard any but the most indirect of references to it. *Does a google search*
Having read at least a few of the key posts, as linked to in FSF Wiki's entry 'RaceFail 09', and thought some, I would suspect that you are essentially right. In the specific example (Shetterly) that you remarked upon, I am in agreement. Whatever the merits of one PoV or another in that discussion, it was about race, specifically about race and tokenism in SF, as started by Bear's post and the responses to it. To make it about class prejudice and class-based restrictions, as I gather Shatterly did, was hijacking the discussion.
Indeed, context is the key to communication. Well thought, well posted.
M.
P.S. - Ultimately, having read "Seeking Avalon"'s open letter to Bear, I would say that her last paragraph or two made me realise: the main flaw, I think, with Bear's point is that she's doing it for others. And this is where, (my opinion only) Bear is guilty of the patronising form of racism. Two questions: firstly, is an author best served simply writing for themselves? Second: is there any "how-to" key to approach racial/cultural issues? It's a thorny area that I'm trying to wrap my head around.
the Internet is real life. The people you're talking to are real people. I feel like branding this on my forehead or something. Here from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif) rydra_wong's linkspam; this is very nicely put.
Thank you.
Of course, when I made the post I hadn't entirely anticipated having an active example of the principles I was discussing take place in the comments, but such is life - sometimes you make a post about derailing with a sidenote about it being important to acknowledge that even friends you love and admire can be flagrantly wrong in public, and then a friend you love and admire posts a flagrantly wrong, derailing comment, and oh, the richness of irony. Tasty, delicious irony.
I kind of want to seek out Elizabeth Bear and be all SEE? THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT, this is how you see a friend be Wrong On The Internet and you and mutual friends jointly intervene to tell him that he's wrong and why. (Several people involved in the argument don't know him outside of comments to this post, but others, like me, have known him for many years.)
But then I'd be at risk of being just like her and her performative engagement at the outset of all this, when this wasn't about Setting An Example, it was about standing up for principle and about not letting someone I've known for so many years make a fool of himself... and besides, I still love and admire my friend and don't want to imply that he's in any way like hers, because her friends are jerks. And while mine are patently not all flawless diamonds of social perfection, they're still better than hers.
PS: I love your icon and its text. Hardison is awesome beyond words.
I stumbled across this while looking for something specifically about derailment of feminist discourse, and think it's really great. Would it be okay with you if I linked to this when trying to help derailers understand why I'm objecting to their behavior?
Er. I think the post is really great, not derailment of feminist discourse. I think that's crummy.
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| From: | sami |
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June 13th, 2009 02:37 pm (UTC) |
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Absolutely okay! Cheers. :)
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