On "political correctness bullshit" in fandom and microaggressions.
There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty.
The more deeply immersed I became in the thinking of the prophets, the more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the Prophets sought to convey: that morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
Abraham Joshua Heschel; emphasis mine
So there was a post making the rounds in fandom this week, about how someone is sick of the ~PC Brigade~ and their bullying, and shouldn't we all be focusing on real problems?
IDK. I've taken a few steps back from fandom recently, because it just took so much out of me. But I kept starting posts and then they would turn into me responding to that one, so what the hell.
To put it baldly, I am appalled and disgusted at the idea that to think about language, to examine our small everyday acts of bigotry, is useless, unimportant, trivial, self-indulgent back-patting, "wank". To me, this represents a fundamental and perhaps willful misunderstanding of the nature of injustice, the idea that it's a block of stone with an elephant in it and there are some things that just don't look like elephants and thus can be disregarded, that there are "real" injustices and then there are stupid little ones like making jokes about cab drivers in fic featuring South Asian characters, things that don't really count.
These things are connected in complicated and insidious ways; our everyday casual devaluations and dehumanizations do have logical conclusions of dramatic gestures of destruction, and these dramatic destructions pave the way for more casual devaluations and dehumanizations. They feed off of each other, they lead to one another. Bigotry isn't black and white, it's not even a spectrum: it's a vicious circle.
(Even these attempts are probably overly simplistic on my part; I'm not a sociologist, I'm not an academic, I'm not really more than halfway decent with words on a good day. But the point I am trying to make is that sometimes you have to say something, so here we are.)
Note: I apologize for the US-centrism, or at least Anglophone West-centrism, of the examples, here and to come; I can only speak to the everyday microaggressions in American/Anglophone West society because it's the only culture in which I am steeped enough to pick up the subtleties and thus to feel I can speak with any kind of confidence on the mechanics and operations of injustice and oppression. I feel that to list other examples would be presumptuous and a far more aggressive kind of US-/Anglophone West-centrism, because it would represent an assumption that what is true in the culture I am familiar with must be true everywhere; that injustice must operate everywhere the same way that it does in my culture.
IDK. I've been trying to think of a way to talk about all of this for a few days now, and I couldn't decide whether it was tacky to do it now or not, whether it was tacky to mention yesterday's date in this post or not. Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and something I want to call attention to is that the date, January 27th, is not the date of Kristallnacht or the anniversary of Auschwitz's opening or any of the many, many dates we could've picked which marked the beginning, the commencement: it is the anniversary of its liberation. This happened, and it is a scar on humanity, but it was, in the end, stopped.
That's not to say that there aren't scars, that we can commence patting ourselves on the back and we never have to worry about it again: when news sources were explaining the history of the phrase "blood libel" mere days ago, they felt the need to explain that it's not true, that matzoh is not and never has been made with Christian babies' blood.
Do not ever forget that it started small, that the Holocaust was merely the logical conclusion of the gradual devaluing and dehumanizing of large swaths of people -- some people claim that focusing on microaggressions and trying to end them is reductio ad absurdum; I'd go in a different direction and call the Holocaust an increscio ad absurdum: a completely logical series of steps from one degree of devaluing and dehumanizing to the next, on up to the most horrifying and completely logical conclusion. But don't forget either that there were a lot of people, along the way, who did fight, who didn't simply accept the tiny little ways their society had told them, day in and day out, for their entire lives, that certain lives were worth less than others, that certain people were less human than others. Don't use the latter fact to write off the former, because if more people had spoken up from the beginning, if more people had examined their assumptions and their language and the casual everyday ways they devalued and dehumanized the undesirable, maybe the more dramatic actions of the Righteous wouldn't have been necessary. But don't let the former cause you to lose hope, to think that there is nothing you can possibly do in the face of widely-held, systemically-enforced, popularly-approved and -perpetuated injustice. And by God, don't let it be an excuse to do nothing, to ignore the microaggressions because there are "real" problems, "real" injustices: because -- I know I am saying this over and over again, but seriously -- if more people had stopped and examined the small injustices they were committing or simply ignoring from the beginning, there may not have been a need for a few people to give up their lives trying to stop huge injustices.
Start looking at these issues and you will, eventually, start to see them everywhere. That's because they are everywhere, to one degree or another. Nothing in human society happens in a vacuum. And yeah, that's a depressing, exhausting, infuriating thing, the ubiquity of microaggressions, and the uncomfortable, painful realization that you have committed them yourself. But maybe we can find some kind of comfort in it, too, because if it's everywhere, if thousands of examples exist in the minutiae of everyday life and language and interaction, then so, too, do thousands of opportunities, in the minutiae of every day life and language and interaction, to stop it. You don't have to go to law school so you can single-handedly appeal Kelley Williams-Bolar's case to fight racism. You can start with signing the petition demanding her pardon, and continue by listening to people who tell you that the whitewashing of characters of color in film is a problem -- because it is no coincidence that a society where filmmakers cannot believe that people would listen to stories about heroes of color is one where a woman of color was imprisoned, her work to create a better future for herself and her children ground under a judge's heel to make an "example" of her, for the crime trying to get her children a better education.
The things that people point to when claiming we shouldn't worry about microagressions (within fandom or without) because these "real" things are going on do not happen in a vacuum. The murder of Matthew Shepard and the ubiquitous use of "that's so gay" as an insult, a way to say something is boring, passe, worthless; these are both symptoms of the same thing, both clear and ugly statements about how much we value the queer members of our society. No, I don't think we should get too myopic in looking at the microaggressions, but I don't know of anyone who does: as I said before, outrage is not a zero-sum game. I have never encountered anyone who got so caught up in the microaggressions that they no longer had the capacity to recognize or care about the macroaggressions; I have a hard time believing such a person exists, that he or she is not a straw man, a creation of people who would never murder a nine-year-old in cold blood, but don't want to accept the that they are complicit in her death because they have created a culture which devalued her life. Accepting such a thing, examining ourselves and realizing that yes, you are complicit in this -- no question, that's painful and awful. You know what's even more painful and awful? What the woman whose husband and child were murdered in cold blood by "patriots" has endured and is enduring.
I don't know. A lot of this sounds like a fundamentally pessimistic post. Maybe it is. But I don't feel like that. I feel like it is a hopeful post. I went to work out this morning, and the news story playing at the gym was about the repeal of DADT, and man I am glad that there was only one other guy there and he was in the row in front of me, because not gonna lie, I started weeping openly. Not a couple of little prickles in the corners of my eyes, I'm talking full-on bawling as I got on the elliptical and started it up. Yes, there are thousands and thousands of little tiny ways that we contribute to continued injustice every day -- but what that also means is that there are thousands and thousands of opportunities for us to fight injustice every day.
I'm a queer Jewish mentally ill woman. I'm also a white American from a lower-middle-class background and my disabilities are not immediately obvious. I have my share of blind spots and I have made my share of screw-ups and I have a long way to go, but thanks to the people who've spoken up about and drawn attention to the subtle little ways I've contributed to their hurt and oppression, I have made progress and I am making progress and I try to think a little harder, every time I speak, about exactly what I'm saying. I hate how much that sounds like I'm patting myself on the back, because that's not what I want to do with it: I want to illustrate how important it is that people have spoken about these things, not only because they've helped me but because like I said at the beginning of this paragraph, I have my own hurts too, and they've made me less afraid to say something when I'm the target of someone else's microaggression, or just a little less ashamed of being angry when I'm on the receiving end of one.
Microaggressions are not nothing. They are not less-important or unimportant versions of macroaggressions; rather, micro- and macroaggressions are both symptoms of the same problems. Taking notice of and talking about the subtle, everyday ways we hurt each other is not nothing. And I have never seen evidence that an increased capacity to notice the subtle everyday injustices inevitably leads to a decreased capacity to devote energy to the blatant, violent, and large-scale injustices. Just the opposite: the greater one's capacity to notice and appreciate and be troubled by the ways we hurt each other and perpetuate unjust systems, the greater, in my experience, one's capacity to be appalled and outraged by the blatant, violent, large-scale, and inevitable conclusions of those perpetuations.
TL;DR: this is from Mishkan T'filah, a Reform Jewish siddur and the one that my temple uses. Between that and the Heschel quote, I think you can get the gist.We oughtn't pray for what we've never known,
and humanity has never known
unbroken peace,
unmixed blessing.
No.
Better to pray for pity,
for indignation,
discontent,
the will to see and touch,
the power to do good and make new.
Baruch atah, Adonai, ham'vareich et amo Yisrael bashalom.
IDK. I'm not sure I'm up for a big extensive discussion, but comments are on, including anonymous ones, with the caveat that I'm not sure I'll have the time or energy to do a whole lot of debating.
ETA: A few people have asked -- linking is absolutely fine, and I'm honored that people have found it useful as a response.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth.
comments; reply here or there with your DW username or OpenID.
The more deeply immersed I became in the thinking of the prophets, the more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the Prophets sought to convey: that morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
Abraham Joshua Heschel; emphasis mine
So there was a post making the rounds in fandom this week, about how someone is sick of the ~PC Brigade~ and their bullying, and shouldn't we all be focusing on real problems?
IDK. I've taken a few steps back from fandom recently, because it just took so much out of me. But I kept starting posts and then they would turn into me responding to that one, so what the hell.
To put it baldly, I am appalled and disgusted at the idea that to think about language, to examine our small everyday acts of bigotry, is useless, unimportant, trivial, self-indulgent back-patting, "wank". To me, this represents a fundamental and perhaps willful misunderstanding of the nature of injustice, the idea that it's a block of stone with an elephant in it and there are some things that just don't look like elephants and thus can be disregarded, that there are "real" injustices and then there are stupid little ones like making jokes about cab drivers in fic featuring South Asian characters, things that don't really count.
These things are connected in complicated and insidious ways; our everyday casual devaluations and dehumanizations do have logical conclusions of dramatic gestures of destruction, and these dramatic destructions pave the way for more casual devaluations and dehumanizations. They feed off of each other, they lead to one another. Bigotry isn't black and white, it's not even a spectrum: it's a vicious circle.
(Even these attempts are probably overly simplistic on my part; I'm not a sociologist, I'm not an academic, I'm not really more than halfway decent with words on a good day. But the point I am trying to make is that sometimes you have to say something, so here we are.)
- The casual use of "bitch" in a rape culture is not some kind of magical coincidence; they are both symptoms of the same problem, and that we notice one (maybe, arguably, not really) more than we do the other is merely another symptom in and of itself, because it speaks clearly to how ingrained the devaluing of women is.
- That Fan A says "hey, this triggered me" and Fan B's response is to express disgust at Fan A's inability to cope, to tell the people around them that Fan A and the whiners like her just need to suck it up when they're triggered by something, because life is pain; that popular opinion of and the state of care for mental health issues is such that everyone in Jared Loughner's life knew it was only a matter of time before he did something exactly like what he eventually did; these are not accidents of fate with no connection; they speak, in horribly clear tones, of just how much regard we have for the mentally ill in particular and the disabled in general.
- It is deeply disingenuous to imagine it's pure accident that "that's so gay" is an un-blink-at-worthy insult in a world where GLBT people are denied basic civil and human rights.
- Anyone who can look at the cold-blooded murder of a father and his nine-year-old daughter by white supremacists who'd been lauded by right-leaning media voices as heroes and true patriots, and not see how it connects with the tendency of Americans to look at someone who isn't white and ask them where they're from, no, I mean originally, is kidding themselves; the two instances are both symptoms of the way America views race, nationality, and the possible connections between them.
Note: I apologize for the US-centrism, or at least Anglophone West-centrism, of the examples, here and to come; I can only speak to the everyday microaggressions in American/Anglophone West society because it's the only culture in which I am steeped enough to pick up the subtleties and thus to feel I can speak with any kind of confidence on the mechanics and operations of injustice and oppression. I feel that to list other examples would be presumptuous and a far more aggressive kind of US-/Anglophone West-centrism, because it would represent an assumption that what is true in the culture I am familiar with must be true everywhere; that injustice must operate everywhere the same way that it does in my culture.
IDK. I've been trying to think of a way to talk about all of this for a few days now, and I couldn't decide whether it was tacky to do it now or not, whether it was tacky to mention yesterday's date in this post or not. Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and something I want to call attention to is that the date, January 27th, is not the date of Kristallnacht or the anniversary of Auschwitz's opening or any of the many, many dates we could've picked which marked the beginning, the commencement: it is the anniversary of its liberation. This happened, and it is a scar on humanity, but it was, in the end, stopped.
That's not to say that there aren't scars, that we can commence patting ourselves on the back and we never have to worry about it again: when news sources were explaining the history of the phrase "blood libel" mere days ago, they felt the need to explain that it's not true, that matzoh is not and never has been made with Christian babies' blood.
Do not ever forget that it started small, that the Holocaust was merely the logical conclusion of the gradual devaluing and dehumanizing of large swaths of people -- some people claim that focusing on microaggressions and trying to end them is reductio ad absurdum; I'd go in a different direction and call the Holocaust an increscio ad absurdum: a completely logical series of steps from one degree of devaluing and dehumanizing to the next, on up to the most horrifying and completely logical conclusion. But don't forget either that there were a lot of people, along the way, who did fight, who didn't simply accept the tiny little ways their society had told them, day in and day out, for their entire lives, that certain lives were worth less than others, that certain people were less human than others. Don't use the latter fact to write off the former, because if more people had spoken up from the beginning, if more people had examined their assumptions and their language and the casual everyday ways they devalued and dehumanized the undesirable, maybe the more dramatic actions of the Righteous wouldn't have been necessary. But don't let the former cause you to lose hope, to think that there is nothing you can possibly do in the face of widely-held, systemically-enforced, popularly-approved and -perpetuated injustice. And by God, don't let it be an excuse to do nothing, to ignore the microaggressions because there are "real" problems, "real" injustices: because -- I know I am saying this over and over again, but seriously -- if more people had stopped and examined the small injustices they were committing or simply ignoring from the beginning, there may not have been a need for a few people to give up their lives trying to stop huge injustices.
Start looking at these issues and you will, eventually, start to see them everywhere. That's because they are everywhere, to one degree or another. Nothing in human society happens in a vacuum. And yeah, that's a depressing, exhausting, infuriating thing, the ubiquity of microaggressions, and the uncomfortable, painful realization that you have committed them yourself. But maybe we can find some kind of comfort in it, too, because if it's everywhere, if thousands of examples exist in the minutiae of everyday life and language and interaction, then so, too, do thousands of opportunities, in the minutiae of every day life and language and interaction, to stop it. You don't have to go to law school so you can single-handedly appeal Kelley Williams-Bolar's case to fight racism. You can start with signing the petition demanding her pardon, and continue by listening to people who tell you that the whitewashing of characters of color in film is a problem -- because it is no coincidence that a society where filmmakers cannot believe that people would listen to stories about heroes of color is one where a woman of color was imprisoned, her work to create a better future for herself and her children ground under a judge's heel to make an "example" of her, for the crime trying to get her children a better education.
The things that people point to when claiming we shouldn't worry about microagressions (within fandom or without) because these "real" things are going on do not happen in a vacuum. The murder of Matthew Shepard and the ubiquitous use of "that's so gay" as an insult, a way to say something is boring, passe, worthless; these are both symptoms of the same thing, both clear and ugly statements about how much we value the queer members of our society. No, I don't think we should get too myopic in looking at the microaggressions, but I don't know of anyone who does: as I said before, outrage is not a zero-sum game. I have never encountered anyone who got so caught up in the microaggressions that they no longer had the capacity to recognize or care about the macroaggressions; I have a hard time believing such a person exists, that he or she is not a straw man, a creation of people who would never murder a nine-year-old in cold blood, but don't want to accept the that they are complicit in her death because they have created a culture which devalued her life. Accepting such a thing, examining ourselves and realizing that yes, you are complicit in this -- no question, that's painful and awful. You know what's even more painful and awful? What the woman whose husband and child were murdered in cold blood by "patriots" has endured and is enduring.
I don't know. A lot of this sounds like a fundamentally pessimistic post. Maybe it is. But I don't feel like that. I feel like it is a hopeful post. I went to work out this morning, and the news story playing at the gym was about the repeal of DADT, and man I am glad that there was only one other guy there and he was in the row in front of me, because not gonna lie, I started weeping openly. Not a couple of little prickles in the corners of my eyes, I'm talking full-on bawling as I got on the elliptical and started it up. Yes, there are thousands and thousands of little tiny ways that we contribute to continued injustice every day -- but what that also means is that there are thousands and thousands of opportunities for us to fight injustice every day.
I'm a queer Jewish mentally ill woman. I'm also a white American from a lower-middle-class background and my disabilities are not immediately obvious. I have my share of blind spots and I have made my share of screw-ups and I have a long way to go, but thanks to the people who've spoken up about and drawn attention to the subtle little ways I've contributed to their hurt and oppression, I have made progress and I am making progress and I try to think a little harder, every time I speak, about exactly what I'm saying. I hate how much that sounds like I'm patting myself on the back, because that's not what I want to do with it: I want to illustrate how important it is that people have spoken about these things, not only because they've helped me but because like I said at the beginning of this paragraph, I have my own hurts too, and they've made me less afraid to say something when I'm the target of someone else's microaggression, or just a little less ashamed of being angry when I'm on the receiving end of one.
Microaggressions are not nothing. They are not less-important or unimportant versions of macroaggressions; rather, micro- and macroaggressions are both symptoms of the same problems. Taking notice of and talking about the subtle, everyday ways we hurt each other is not nothing. And I have never seen evidence that an increased capacity to notice the subtle everyday injustices inevitably leads to a decreased capacity to devote energy to the blatant, violent, and large-scale injustices. Just the opposite: the greater one's capacity to notice and appreciate and be troubled by the ways we hurt each other and perpetuate unjust systems, the greater, in my experience, one's capacity to be appalled and outraged by the blatant, violent, large-scale, and inevitable conclusions of those perpetuations.
TL;DR: this is from Mishkan T'filah, a Reform Jewish siddur and the one that my temple uses. Between that and the Heschel quote, I think you can get the gist.We oughtn't pray for what we've never known,
and humanity has never known
unbroken peace,
unmixed blessing.
No.
Better to pray for pity,
for indignation,
discontent,
the will to see and touch,
the power to do good and make new.
Baruch atah, Adonai, ham'vareich et amo Yisrael bashalom.
IDK. I'm not sure I'm up for a big extensive discussion, but comments are on, including anonymous ones, with the caveat that I'm not sure I'll have the time or energy to do a whole lot of debating.
ETA: A few people have asked -- linking is absolutely fine, and I'm honored that people have found it useful as a response.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth.
comments; reply here or there with your DW username or OpenID.