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I have been thinking about social-justice culture recently.
More specifically, I've been thinking about issues like the ones Marabet-ing raises in this blog post on callout culture, as well as one of the (many) reasons I'm no longer active on Tumblr. I am not entirely sure how to put these thoughts into words at all, especially not words I am confident will be understood. But the thoughts aren't going away, so I have to try.
.
This is about my individual reactions and convictions, and is not intended as a critique on others' behavior, though it may come across that way. I am imperfect; my words are imperfect. It is an examination of why I do not feel safe in certain spaces. The reasons I feel unsafe in these spaces, which are spaces created by others, are because of the perceived assumptions of others, and the actions of others. I want to avoid saying either that I am right and they are in the wrong or that they are right and I am in the wrong. This is an examination of a predicament that exists between external conventions-and-assumptions and my own experiences-and-reactions. Casting these into the roles of "right" and "wrong" distorts, grossly simplifies, and imposes a moral judgement which is not inherent to the predicament itself.
.
I have an interesting relationship with my own marginal identities.
One of the first times that I began to thoroughly understand this was in a college course on African-American culture. The class was taught by an African-American professor, and had a number of African-American students in it. And then there was me.
Until that time, I had identified as African-American. After all, my father was a Yoruba man, born in Nigeria; I have the Yoruba nose, the curly hair, the darker-than-Nebraskan-average skin, the single sickle-cell gene. I have the name. I had been aware, before that class, that I didn't fit into what I thought of as the stereotypical African-American image, but I had just taken that, whole-cloth, in a sort of "Well, stereotypes are semantically empty" way. It wasn't until I took that class that I really grasped, in a visceral way, the degree to which the stereotype of African Americans was a gross distortion rather than a whole-cloth invention of a real culture – one I had never engaged with.
African-American culture and identity has roots tangled in the slave trade, and in the unbroken thread of its interaction with a dominant American culture which has continually sought, through overt, covert, or learned and unexamined means, to subjugate it. The African-American culture I learned about had a history of cultural interaction which was inextricable from the foundations of its cultural identity.
My father – the source of my African blood – came from Nigeria to attend college here. He became a professor. I was born in Nebraska to a middle-class family, with access to educational and economic privileges which have been and continue to be quietly withheld from vast swaths of African American culture. In short, my inheritance was not the same.
.
That isn't to say that I never witnessed or experienced racism. I did. But when I came to the class on African-American culture, that culture to me was as foreign as Latin@ culture would have been, or Russian culture, or even – because I was raised in the Midwest, in a family which tried to expose me to elements of Yoruba culture but was not a Yoruba family in a Yoruba community – as foreign as Yoruba culture would be, although I've been assured that is in my blood.
.
I have come to every topic I've engaged with, with some form of privilege surrounding me. Whether it's educational, or economic, or neuronormative. (It's worth noting that if you're reading this, in your free time, on your computer, with your literacy, so have you.)
.
One of the things that drove me away from Tumblr was seeing someone, a trans activist, make a claim something like the following:
"Every single one of you, unless you are trans, has made these mistakes."
I know that the logical inversion is not always true, but it is often implied. I felt, given the tone of the post, that the inversion there was all but screamed at the readers:
"Every single one of you, if you are trans, has not made these mistakes."
I identify as trans. The word I've found which fits me best is neutrois. I experience dysphoria, though not as bad as some. I still cannot get over a moment of dissonance when I see or hear myself referred to by the standard English pronouns.
I have made many mistakes.
.
There is, I think, a lot of talk about mistakes and ignorance. These are the enemies which must be vanquished. But more than that, a person must be held accountable to their ignorance; they must often be made to answer for their ignorance. Ignorance and mistakes have real consequences on real people who suffer real abuse, be it physical or emotional, individual or cultural. And so do mistakes and ignorance become unforgivable.
I find that I cannot exist in a space where mistakes and ignorance cannot be forgiven.
I cannot inhabit a place where mistakes and ignorance are signified as evil.
.
It occurred to me, that had I been talking to this person, had I made a mistake, it would have been used as evidence against me.
You actually think that? You've never REALLY experienced what means to be trans.
It has occurred to me, when I catch myself with a thought or assumption that I can trace back to implicit racist underpinnings, that while this is a thing unacceptable for others, it is inexcusable for me. You had what gut reaction on hearing Black vernacular? What kind of a traitor person of color are you?
I remind myself that there is a metaphor for our culture: that we are, every one of us, swimming in an ocean of shit. No matter who you are, no matter how careful you may be, no one can swim in this ocean without getting some of the shit on them.
.
I want to talk about ignorance and ignorance, though. Because I see them sign two different things.
A quote, though I'm not sure where I read it, stuck with me for many years. The quote is by Thomas Aquinas, and in my memory, it goes:
Leaving aside any argument over blindness, this is the difference to me between ignorance and ignorance. There is one ignorance which is the privation of knowledge: the systems which keep ignorance in place. The cropping out of marginalized groups in our media; the people who turn away from acknowledging who they've hurt because it is easier to deny that and keep hurting. These are not states of not-knowing; they are states and systems of prevented knowing.
But there's that other ignorance, which is the state of not-knowing. This is the state we are, quite literally, born into. Everything we learn, we learn while standing within our spots of ignorance. Without that spot of ignorance, the concept of learning is meaningless.
And it is impossible to learn anything complex without making mistakes.
.
I am more ignorant than knowledgeable. My one redeeming grace is that I'm aware of that. And this makes me afraid to enter a place where a mistake will brand you as the enemy.
When I write, I find myself looking at things and saying not only "Have I offended? Could I do better?" but also "Should I even try? Will there be something I've overlooked which will brand me as a racist, an exoticiser, a promulgator of colonial values, something which will stamp me indelibly as an ignorant and dangerous person, an enemy, for life? Should I just keep my mouth shut until I know everything there is to know?" The first thought is healthy, yes. The second is privation. A privation of interaction, of growth, of learning.
I cannot exist in a space where the prerequisite for participation is perfection.
.
.
.
I think a lot about consequence.
.
When I was much younger, knowing I wanted to be a writer because I liked making up stories, and I wanted to do that all the time, I didn't want to be "an African-American writer". I didn't want anyone to tell me "This is what you have to write, because it's the color of your skin." In my hazy understanding, being an African-American Writer meant that you wrote boring, literary things about What It Was Like Being African-American. I didn't want to write about What It Was Like Being African-American. I wanted to write about What It Was Like If There Was A Nuclear War And You Were The Princess Of A Demolished Faction In Ravaged North America And Got Sucked Up Into A Group Fighting To Terraform The World Back To Health Again.
It took me many years to figure out that "African-American Writing" was a pigeonhole, and there were other ways to tell the stories of PoC without hewing to a didactic formula for Relating The African-American Experience. (And, of course, it took me until college to get – really get – that "The African-American Experience" wasn't a descriptor that could be stretched, universally, over everyone with brown skin and ancestors from that particular continent.)
But the realization I had, pretty early-on, was this: it doesn't matter if you don't want to. Someone has to. You're someone.
Everyone else can shrug this off and say "Hey, it's got nothing to do with me." So if you don't bother to do it, who will?
.
But that's only one kind of consequence, that consequence of living in a world which is not fair, where the mechanics are set up so the people who are shoved down are handed the burden of pulling themselves up. That's one of them: that the people who are beaten-down and signified and threatened and mocked and murdered are the ones who are expected to stand up and be vocal and fight, or they get nothing. It's not right; in fact, there are aspects upon aspects about it which are wrong. It is not only unjust, it is multifacetedly unjust. But the system exists; it's a calcified, solid thing. A thing which must be interacted with.
That's one kind of consequence.
The other that I think about is the consequence of speech, of language, of anger, of how we position ourselves.
One thing that people forget – often people in power, exhorting their views – is that freedom of speech is not freedom of consequence. If you say something offensive, you are not exempt from people being offended. If you lash out and hurt someone, you are not exempt from the reaction of the person who is hurt.
And if you are angry, you are not exempt from driving people away.
.
One of the reasons I so rarely participate in these discussions any more is that anger is deeply uncomfortable to me. When confronted with injustice, I can function better while experiencing sadness, compassion, sympathy, empathy, regret. But anger tightens me up; it makes it difficult for me to think, difficult for me to act rationally. It makes it easy to act in ways that I regret. In damaging ways. After I'm done feeling angry, I'm still caught up in wrestling with my anger. I feel physically sick.
As anyone does, I get angry at times; I need to vent, I need to express myself. But I cannot engage constructively when I'm angry.
For me, in the ways in which I relate to things, in which I experience them and come to understand them, anger is damaging.
There is a thread in these conversations – a thread which I've found particularly prevalent in discussions I've seen on Tumblr – that anger must be unassailable. That there is every reason to be angry, and that people have been shut down by those who say "Well, no one can listen to you when you're that irrational" while saying, as soon as one is calm, "Well, clearly you're not that upset by this." That "if you're not mad, you're not paying attention." That if you object to the anger then you're a derailer, you're the enemy. That a safe place to be angry must exist.
And many of these things are true. Any show (or lack-of-show) of anger will be used against people, by someone trying to shut them down. Anger is a valid and honest response to things that many people experience, often every day, often far beyond the limits of their endurance. And there must, there must, be a way for people to experience and express anger.
But if anger is the only valid tone – the only way to show that you're paying attention; if the experience of anger, the prolonged endurance of anger, is the price of admission to a conversation, then I cannot not pay. Anger is only useful in making me suffer; my suffering helps no one. I will not pay.
If there is too much anger in a space, I will disengage. Many others may, also.
This is another kind of consequence.
.
Consequence is not interested in balancing the scales. It is not just, as in a perfectly just moral equation. It may lay the burden on those who already have too many burdens to share.
But it is a real thing, and it must be interacted with.
.
.
.
The culture I exist within has laid out expectations for me which I must work with, work around, rewrite, reshape, and navigate. This is difficult. Sometimes there are monolithic stumbling blocks in the way. Sometimes the barriers give, and with less resistance than I had been expecting.
I've disengaged from certain conversations, in certain venues, like the certain conversations I was exposed to on Tumblr, because I found them to be more prescriptive than the world I lived in, not less. There was a space to be trans, yes, but the ways in which you could talk about transness were prescribed; the things you could claim in your transness were prescribed; the language was prescribed and prescribed again. The narratives were examined so closely – appropriative or not appropriative? properly disclaimed or not properly disclaimed? is the terminology precisely representative of consensus terminology? is what is described a trans experience, or does it fail one of these careful bounds that we have set? does it reinforce a stereotype? does it comment in opposition to a thing we hold to be true? – that I felt that the examination had overridden the narrative itself.
I found myself, not just in discussions of transness or race or gender or any other singular axis of identity, but in all of them – I found myself more concerned with how I should position myself in relation to the narrative than with engaging with the narrative itself.
I was more concerned with analyzing whether or not there was anything wrong with what people had to say than what they were saying.
Even when what they were saying was an honest expression of their personal experience.
Even when what they were saying was a well-meaning attempt to understand.
And yes, it is true, what they say: intent isn't everything. Things with good intentions can aggravate, damage, harm.
But I cannot exist in a space where intent counts for nothing at all.
.
I withdraw from certain conversations because I can't exist in a place which does not acknowledge my existence as a person: a fallible, learning, growing, considering person, with a complex relationship to the issues that are discussed. I can't exist in a place where I have to judge these issues, based on some assumed expertise conferred to me by my ability to identify in broad terms with some overarching quality characteristic of the group. I cannot present myself as an expert, when in many cases, I have never had to be; I have never learned to be. I cannot deal in absolutes. In firm, authoritative answers to messy, complicated questions. I cannot stand with one foot in anger and the other in positive community.
And so for these reasons, except with a few people whose tones and styles of discourse I trust, I simply disengage.
More specifically, I've been thinking about issues like the ones Marabet-ing raises in this blog post on callout culture, as well as one of the (many) reasons I'm no longer active on Tumblr. I am not entirely sure how to put these thoughts into words at all, especially not words I am confident will be understood. But the thoughts aren't going away, so I have to try.
.
This is about my individual reactions and convictions, and is not intended as a critique on others' behavior, though it may come across that way. I am imperfect; my words are imperfect. It is an examination of why I do not feel safe in certain spaces. The reasons I feel unsafe in these spaces, which are spaces created by others, are because of the perceived assumptions of others, and the actions of others. I want to avoid saying either that I am right and they are in the wrong or that they are right and I am in the wrong. This is an examination of a predicament that exists between external conventions-and-assumptions and my own experiences-and-reactions. Casting these into the roles of "right" and "wrong" distorts, grossly simplifies, and imposes a moral judgement which is not inherent to the predicament itself.
.
I have an interesting relationship with my own marginal identities.
One of the first times that I began to thoroughly understand this was in a college course on African-American culture. The class was taught by an African-American professor, and had a number of African-American students in it. And then there was me.
Until that time, I had identified as African-American. After all, my father was a Yoruba man, born in Nigeria; I have the Yoruba nose, the curly hair, the darker-than-Nebraskan-average skin, the single sickle-cell gene. I have the name. I had been aware, before that class, that I didn't fit into what I thought of as the stereotypical African-American image, but I had just taken that, whole-cloth, in a sort of "Well, stereotypes are semantically empty" way. It wasn't until I took that class that I really grasped, in a visceral way, the degree to which the stereotype of African Americans was a gross distortion rather than a whole-cloth invention of a real culture – one I had never engaged with.
African-American culture and identity has roots tangled in the slave trade, and in the unbroken thread of its interaction with a dominant American culture which has continually sought, through overt, covert, or learned and unexamined means, to subjugate it. The African-American culture I learned about had a history of cultural interaction which was inextricable from the foundations of its cultural identity.
My father – the source of my African blood – came from Nigeria to attend college here. He became a professor. I was born in Nebraska to a middle-class family, with access to educational and economic privileges which have been and continue to be quietly withheld from vast swaths of African American culture. In short, my inheritance was not the same.
.
That isn't to say that I never witnessed or experienced racism. I did. But when I came to the class on African-American culture, that culture to me was as foreign as Latin@ culture would have been, or Russian culture, or even – because I was raised in the Midwest, in a family which tried to expose me to elements of Yoruba culture but was not a Yoruba family in a Yoruba community – as foreign as Yoruba culture would be, although I've been assured that is in my blood.
.
I have come to every topic I've engaged with, with some form of privilege surrounding me. Whether it's educational, or economic, or neuronormative. (It's worth noting that if you're reading this, in your free time, on your computer, with your literacy, so have you.)
.
One of the things that drove me away from Tumblr was seeing someone, a trans activist, make a claim something like the following:
"Every single one of you, unless you are trans, has made these mistakes."
I know that the logical inversion is not always true, but it is often implied. I felt, given the tone of the post, that the inversion there was all but screamed at the readers:
"Every single one of you, if you are trans, has not made these mistakes."
I identify as trans. The word I've found which fits me best is neutrois. I experience dysphoria, though not as bad as some. I still cannot get over a moment of dissonance when I see or hear myself referred to by the standard English pronouns.
I have made many mistakes.
.
There is, I think, a lot of talk about mistakes and ignorance. These are the enemies which must be vanquished. But more than that, a person must be held accountable to their ignorance; they must often be made to answer for their ignorance. Ignorance and mistakes have real consequences on real people who suffer real abuse, be it physical or emotional, individual or cultural. And so do mistakes and ignorance become unforgivable.
I find that I cannot exist in a space where mistakes and ignorance cannot be forgiven.
I cannot inhabit a place where mistakes and ignorance are signified as evil.
.
It occurred to me, that had I been talking to this person, had I made a mistake, it would have been used as evidence against me.
You actually think that? You've never REALLY experienced what means to be trans.
It has occurred to me, when I catch myself with a thought or assumption that I can trace back to implicit racist underpinnings, that while this is a thing unacceptable for others, it is inexcusable for me. You had what gut reaction on hearing Black vernacular? What kind of a traitor person of color are you?
I remind myself that there is a metaphor for our culture: that we are, every one of us, swimming in an ocean of shit. No matter who you are, no matter how careful you may be, no one can swim in this ocean without getting some of the shit on them.
.
I want to talk about ignorance and ignorance, though. Because I see them sign two different things.
A quote, though I'm not sure where I read it, stuck with me for many years. The quote is by Thomas Aquinas, and in my memory, it goes:
Evil denotes the lack of good. Not every absence of good is an evil, for absence may be taken either in a purely negative or in a privative sense. Mere negation does not display the character of evil, otherwise nonexistents would be evil and moreover, a thing would be evil for not possessing the goodness of something else, which would mean that man is bad for not having the strength of a lion or the speed of a wild goat. But what is evil is privation; in this sense blindness means the privation of sight.
Leaving aside any argument over blindness, this is the difference to me between ignorance and ignorance. There is one ignorance which is the privation of knowledge: the systems which keep ignorance in place. The cropping out of marginalized groups in our media; the people who turn away from acknowledging who they've hurt because it is easier to deny that and keep hurting. These are not states of not-knowing; they are states and systems of prevented knowing.
But there's that other ignorance, which is the state of not-knowing. This is the state we are, quite literally, born into. Everything we learn, we learn while standing within our spots of ignorance. Without that spot of ignorance, the concept of learning is meaningless.
And it is impossible to learn anything complex without making mistakes.
.
I am more ignorant than knowledgeable. My one redeeming grace is that I'm aware of that. And this makes me afraid to enter a place where a mistake will brand you as the enemy.
When I write, I find myself looking at things and saying not only "Have I offended? Could I do better?" but also "Should I even try? Will there be something I've overlooked which will brand me as a racist, an exoticiser, a promulgator of colonial values, something which will stamp me indelibly as an ignorant and dangerous person, an enemy, for life? Should I just keep my mouth shut until I know everything there is to know?" The first thought is healthy, yes. The second is privation. A privation of interaction, of growth, of learning.
I cannot exist in a space where the prerequisite for participation is perfection.
.
.
.
I think a lot about consequence.
.
When I was much younger, knowing I wanted to be a writer because I liked making up stories, and I wanted to do that all the time, I didn't want to be "an African-American writer". I didn't want anyone to tell me "This is what you have to write, because it's the color of your skin." In my hazy understanding, being an African-American Writer meant that you wrote boring, literary things about What It Was Like Being African-American. I didn't want to write about What It Was Like Being African-American. I wanted to write about What It Was Like If There Was A Nuclear War And You Were The Princess Of A Demolished Faction In Ravaged North America And Got Sucked Up Into A Group Fighting To Terraform The World Back To Health Again.
It took me many years to figure out that "African-American Writing" was a pigeonhole, and there were other ways to tell the stories of PoC without hewing to a didactic formula for Relating The African-American Experience. (And, of course, it took me until college to get – really get – that "The African-American Experience" wasn't a descriptor that could be stretched, universally, over everyone with brown skin and ancestors from that particular continent.)
But the realization I had, pretty early-on, was this: it doesn't matter if you don't want to. Someone has to. You're someone.
Everyone else can shrug this off and say "Hey, it's got nothing to do with me." So if you don't bother to do it, who will?
.
But that's only one kind of consequence, that consequence of living in a world which is not fair, where the mechanics are set up so the people who are shoved down are handed the burden of pulling themselves up. That's one of them: that the people who are beaten-down and signified and threatened and mocked and murdered are the ones who are expected to stand up and be vocal and fight, or they get nothing. It's not right; in fact, there are aspects upon aspects about it which are wrong. It is not only unjust, it is multifacetedly unjust. But the system exists; it's a calcified, solid thing. A thing which must be interacted with.
That's one kind of consequence.
The other that I think about is the consequence of speech, of language, of anger, of how we position ourselves.
One thing that people forget – often people in power, exhorting their views – is that freedom of speech is not freedom of consequence. If you say something offensive, you are not exempt from people being offended. If you lash out and hurt someone, you are not exempt from the reaction of the person who is hurt.
And if you are angry, you are not exempt from driving people away.
.
One of the reasons I so rarely participate in these discussions any more is that anger is deeply uncomfortable to me. When confronted with injustice, I can function better while experiencing sadness, compassion, sympathy, empathy, regret. But anger tightens me up; it makes it difficult for me to think, difficult for me to act rationally. It makes it easy to act in ways that I regret. In damaging ways. After I'm done feeling angry, I'm still caught up in wrestling with my anger. I feel physically sick.
As anyone does, I get angry at times; I need to vent, I need to express myself. But I cannot engage constructively when I'm angry.
For me, in the ways in which I relate to things, in which I experience them and come to understand them, anger is damaging.
There is a thread in these conversations – a thread which I've found particularly prevalent in discussions I've seen on Tumblr – that anger must be unassailable. That there is every reason to be angry, and that people have been shut down by those who say "Well, no one can listen to you when you're that irrational" while saying, as soon as one is calm, "Well, clearly you're not that upset by this." That "if you're not mad, you're not paying attention." That if you object to the anger then you're a derailer, you're the enemy. That a safe place to be angry must exist.
And many of these things are true. Any show (or lack-of-show) of anger will be used against people, by someone trying to shut them down. Anger is a valid and honest response to things that many people experience, often every day, often far beyond the limits of their endurance. And there must, there must, be a way for people to experience and express anger.
But if anger is the only valid tone – the only way to show that you're paying attention; if the experience of anger, the prolonged endurance of anger, is the price of admission to a conversation, then I cannot not pay. Anger is only useful in making me suffer; my suffering helps no one. I will not pay.
If there is too much anger in a space, I will disengage. Many others may, also.
This is another kind of consequence.
.
Consequence is not interested in balancing the scales. It is not just, as in a perfectly just moral equation. It may lay the burden on those who already have too many burdens to share.
But it is a real thing, and it must be interacted with.
.
.
.
The culture I exist within has laid out expectations for me which I must work with, work around, rewrite, reshape, and navigate. This is difficult. Sometimes there are monolithic stumbling blocks in the way. Sometimes the barriers give, and with less resistance than I had been expecting.
I've disengaged from certain conversations, in certain venues, like the certain conversations I was exposed to on Tumblr, because I found them to be more prescriptive than the world I lived in, not less. There was a space to be trans, yes, but the ways in which you could talk about transness were prescribed; the things you could claim in your transness were prescribed; the language was prescribed and prescribed again. The narratives were examined so closely – appropriative or not appropriative? properly disclaimed or not properly disclaimed? is the terminology precisely representative of consensus terminology? is what is described a trans experience, or does it fail one of these careful bounds that we have set? does it reinforce a stereotype? does it comment in opposition to a thing we hold to be true? – that I felt that the examination had overridden the narrative itself.
I found myself, not just in discussions of transness or race or gender or any other singular axis of identity, but in all of them – I found myself more concerned with how I should position myself in relation to the narrative than with engaging with the narrative itself.
I was more concerned with analyzing whether or not there was anything wrong with what people had to say than what they were saying.
Even when what they were saying was an honest expression of their personal experience.
Even when what they were saying was a well-meaning attempt to understand.
And yes, it is true, what they say: intent isn't everything. Things with good intentions can aggravate, damage, harm.
But I cannot exist in a space where intent counts for nothing at all.
.
I withdraw from certain conversations because I can't exist in a place which does not acknowledge my existence as a person: a fallible, learning, growing, considering person, with a complex relationship to the issues that are discussed. I can't exist in a place where I have to judge these issues, based on some assumed expertise conferred to me by my ability to identify in broad terms with some overarching quality characteristic of the group. I cannot present myself as an expert, when in many cases, I have never had to be; I have never learned to be. I cannot deal in absolutes. In firm, authoritative answers to messy, complicated questions. I cannot stand with one foot in anger and the other in positive community.
And so for these reasons, except with a few people whose tones and styles of discourse I trust, I simply disengage.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-18 09:05 pm (UTC)From:Because of my past, my anger is something I struggle with as it has been a bit of a source of shame and it is not a productive emotion for me personally. Sometimes I can channel it in a productive sense, but I fear my anger as well. It has caused me to hurt people and that is something I do not want.
And yes, even if you're part of a marginalized group such as being trans (which I am as well), you can still make mistakes, which happen so we can learn from them. I agree that shaming people for a mistake they've made, especially if they're a person who suffers from anxiety of some sort, is a bad idea. It can make a person afraid to speak out and in the end do nothing.