Moments of Permanence - On differences in oppression, derailment, and the hierarchies of hurt

From: arallara.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 01:02 am (UTC) Re: sorry for the tl;dr reply, but this journal is the natural habitat of teal deer (Link)

Well, thank you for the tl;dr, actually--never really a problem for me. :) And I forgot to say before, here via rydra_wong.

I just wanted to be sure I was clear that I'm not suggesting Enlightenment values are "inherently wrong/imperialistic" and should not be "spread" in any cases. In fact, I think judgments like that need to be made contextually! :)

However, I was suggesting that the particular Enlightenment value of "equality for individuals under the law" as a "universal" ideal of social justice presents a barrier to contextual thinking for some white people in cultures that define themselves by that ideal, even if it's a kind of weird, fetishized, reductive understanding of that ideal that permeates our culture. I think it's the same underlying cultural value that enables white people to argue for "colorblindness" as an an antiracist ideal.

So, no, the Enlightenment project isn't inherently evil, but the legacy of its constructs of personhood and justice sometimes makes it difficult for white people in Western cultures to think contextually, to move intellectually outside the box of the belief in universality, which in many ways remains a signifier of our un-self-aware position of privilege at the cultural "center."

Your thoughts on linguistics are interesting, and I can see the value in incorporating that perspective into our formal education, especially as the world becomes increasingly globalized.

(And that ended up more tl;dr than I thought it would, but I'm actually just sort of thinking this through as I comment.)

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From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 01:11 am (UTC) Re: sorry for the tl;dr reply, but this journal is the natural habitat of teal deer (Link)

It's okay, thinking it through as I comment is how my comments end up so long. *g* And I like discussing things with interested people.

The linguistics element... well, I'm a History/Linguistics double major, does it show? ;)

You make a good point about it making it difficult for people to move outside that belief. It does brush up against something my brother-out-law pointed out more than once - often the problem in arguments is that people are operating on different base assumptions, and the argument will get nowhere until they (or a mediator) can identify the point of disconnect between their assumptions. Once you find that you can try to lead people by stages to your own point of view.

He argued, somewhat convincingly, that what the RaceFail discussion needed was not a moderator but a mediator. The problem is, people who tried to step in placing themselves as the Neutral Observer were generally victim to the exact same faults, and were trying to be moderators instead. The mediator needs to be someone who's not declaring "bad behaviour on both sides", who's not making any value judgements at all, just breaking down people's arguments until they find the assumptions on which they're based with which the other side disagrees.

Most participants in RaceFail would have agreed instantly with, say, "All people deserve equal respect." But that's a very broad assumption point, and there are a lot of ramifications of that which, patently, did not provoke agreement.

Sadly, people who are good at that kind of mediation are rare, and even rarer are people who'd be able to do it successfully in an emotionally-charged subject like this one, and I'm not sure it's even possible to do it on the internet.

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