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

From: alias_sqbr Date: April 6th, 2009 06:27 am (UTC) Part of me was hoping this was a satirical example of an archetypical derail (Link)

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

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From: ataxi.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 07:07 am (UTC) Still hoping I can stop the words coming out as "I am pompous punch-bag. Please attend with fists." (Link)

Well, my first comment was well out of line, sadly. Not only badly expressed, hopelessly positioned in relation to the topic of the post, leaving me hoist well and truly by my own petard, and crass and dismissive, but terrible in a number of other ways to boot (use of the phrase "minority politics" as a single labelled grab-bag to begin with).

From behind the keyboard, this was a classic case of me projecting stress from my own life into an online venting, and it has taken me a while to get rid of that head of steam. Such is life. I did a similar thing last week (which was when I tweeted "totally failing at internet communication" or similar :-). When I attract the ire of distantcam, who rarely if ever bothers to respond to anything I say online, I can probably be certain I'm doing it wrong.

"Inspired by the discussion but more general in scope and able to be appreciated out of context"

This seems to me to equally be "derailing" ... if you want it to be. Isn't the whole practice of identifying and fighting "derailers" (like me) about reclaiming control of the dialogue's frame of reference from "others" who want to distort it or drive it off track? But wanting to discuss representations of POC in SF&F is already "derailing"/culture-jamming the SF&F mainstream in that sense, isn't it? That is to say there's evidently a point where insisting that any evolution in the topic of discussion is "derailing" is a type of silencing. I'm sure this is also addressed somewhere, in great and intelligent detail.

Not that it turns out "hey guys this conversation sucks" is an earth-shattering insight for anyone involved with RaceFail -- browsing around I see it on recently developed lists of derailing tactics everywhere, d'oh -- but on the other hand it's hardly surprising that it hasn't turned out to be a widely prevalent view within the community of discussion, since everyone who genuinely thinks the mode of conversation sucks will eventually depart. As I should: just keep my trap shut and not participate, because the part of me that wants to rampage around criticising everything outweighs the part of me that thinks there's real good to be done.

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From: alias_sqbr Date: April 7th, 2009 07:54 am (UTC) Re: Still hoping I can stop the words coming out as "I am pompous punch-bag. Please attend with fis (Link)

this was a classic case of me projecting stress from my own life into an online venting

Yeah, I've been there and done that (in my way) One of the reasons I posted about RaceFail on my lj was because I was going through a difficult period when it started and didn't trust myself not to make a fool of myself on other people's ljs (people who friend me have only themselves to blame)

I was ambiguous: I think there's nothing wrong with posts inspired by the Fail which are more general and can be read out of context. Coming into someone else's conversation on, say, why X person's behaviour was bad and making vague, not very relevant statements about the general nature of racism would probably be a derail.

To continue from one of tevriel's examples: there's nothing inherently wrong with posting about class, even if from someone involved in the Fail. It's when people say "I'm posting about class because that's what REALLY matters, not this petty race crap" or start talking about classism in the comments of a post/thread about racism that it's a derail.

I think there's a balance between stopping derailing and keeping everyone so narrowly on topic that the conversation is stifled. Where I think it's better to tend towards the former is when the SAME off-topic ideas come up repeatedly and the original topic is almost always ignored/avoided. I vaguely recall a post a few years ago the last time something like this happened (on a smaller scale) and the (POC) writer said "My last post on cultural appropriation ended up with lots of white people commenting about how nordic/irish etc culture is 'appropriated'. That's a valid topic, but I would like THIS post to just be about how POC culture is appropriated" and the comments were still full of almost identical "I'm of irish descent and conflicted about green beer on St Patrick's day" etc comments, with added "ARE YOU SAYING IRISH CULTURE DOESN'T MATTER??".

everyone who genuinely thinks the mode of conversation sucks will eventually depart

You'd think so, yet many stick around at length being loudly critical :/ Then again, a lot of them were people who were being criticised for being actively racist (or friends of such people) trying to come up with excuses for why they were being such prats and refusing to give up the last word.

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