The Anatomy of a Call Out (And Why It Needs To Change)
I recomend reading this first, to get a proper understanding of some of the terms used in the article.
I’m sure we’re all familiar with the activist community privilege or bigotry “call out”.
For those that aren’t, it is a method for either revealing privileged, bigoted or problematic behaviors to others publicly or to attempt to reveal to an ( Read more... )
The first one because it's such a great classification of activist personality types and how they are all necessary and useful in conjunction with each other, as well as having their own unique pitfalls. It helps me classify myself and how I need to change, too. I already knew that I needed to use more pathos in my arguments, but somehow having it in the form "I'm a Logic Bomber who needs to switch to Emoting when the situation calls for it" seems shinier and more official.
The second one because I think it's a very appropriate reminder for this community. I've thought something similar before, but didn't know how to phrase it to not sound like a tone argument. This article explains it well, though:
If you burn down a section of rot and disease in a forest, you do actually have to replant the trees in the spots you burned, or you’re really not doing anything useful. And calling out does not involve any rebuilding. It is reactionary, a tool designed to reveal and pressure, only useful in the context of the entire repertoire of activist methods. And I mean the entire repertoire. Like creating dialogue around the call out (using the situation the call out was used for as a subject), Appeasers coming in and playing good cop to the bad cop of the caller outer, offshoot posts extending off the topic of the call out into other zones and using it to foster further dialogue, and offshoot posts discussing the topic in an abstract fashion applicable to all zones of kyriarchy.
If it is just a call out, a simple call out by itself, then you have failed in the central aim of activism. Because the aim of activism isn’t revenge. The aim of activism isn’t getting an apology. The aim of activism isn’t upsetting those in privilege (that’s just a side effect). The aim of activism is to make change. And calling out is one single, very limited tool and it cannot and will not create change on its own. We don’t try to cut down trees by shooting them with a handgun. Why are we trying to use call outs alone to fix the world?
Edited because I used an italics tag instead of a bold tag in one spot. Fail.
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Sometimes it isn't. Really isn't.
Again, please, if you want to change people we will congratulate you. But don't tell the oppressed their goal is to change their oppressors because a lot of the time it's not.
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Edit: Oh, now I understand where I was going wrong with my previous comments. No, changing society isn't the "whole" point-- I should've said "ultimate goal" or "most important point." I was being hyperbolic and confusing things.
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"I used the first person for a reason, because I'm not going to look at people in marginalized groups who aren't doing whatever is theoretically the maximally efficient action for changing society in a way that's beneficial to them, and say they're shirking their moral duty. Sometimes people just don't have the emotional energy to do anything more than vent and be frustrated. This probably describes me at least 50% of the time. But from the standpoint of the whole activist movement, I can say, look, we're straying too much from Y, which are the set of actions that can get us our goal of X (a changed society). Therefore, we "should" push ourselves to do Y more. But it's for each individual to decide how far they can push themselves in that direction without burning themselves out."
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What I was trying to say is that we don't have a moral onus to do Y, we have a pragmatic onus to do Y. Which is the same thing in the sense that I will still do my best to do Y, and urge other people to do Y, just minus the moral judgment of "I'm a bad person if I don't do Y" or "we're bad people if we fail at reaching our goal." That last part is important.
Of course there's no guarantee that society will be changed. But the better we operate, the higher the probability that society will be changed, and the less time it will (likely) take for this change to happen.
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I don't get what you're establishing here. You're saying activists/the oppressed should try to fulfill a standard for change, that it would be more efficient if they did, and you don't like it when people say that they don't care about what privileged people think. In other threads, you say that oppressed people should try to educate until they get burnt out, but then you say that no one can expect stuff out of oppressors*...so basically, you're advocating that oppressed people take a streamlined, nicer way to activism all for what's probably naught.
It is on the oppressor to change their behaviors and their beliefs. I can sit there and try to explain all day why Black people have issues in America, why it's not okay to use the n-word, etc., etc., but no matter how much I do there is no guarantee that the person will ever agree with more, or act on it if they do. Plus I'd have to deal with the double standards and the logic bombs and the trotted out arguments. If I'm not expecting something out of that person, why am I there? Why am I allowing myself to be hurt?
*And I have seen spaces that enable the tone argument, where people are expected to explain as NICELY AND COMPREHENSIVELY as they can and all they get back is, "That's not fucking true, omg how dare you make presumptions about my life, you don't know my privilege, I am not bigoted, I have X friends." In order to educate people have to open up about their life and their experiences and when they do, and they get rejected, that hurts. It's harmful.
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1) It doesn't bother me when people say that they personally don't care what privileged people think. It bothers me when people say that privileged people will never change, because this implies that it is impossible to change what privileged people think. One statement is saying that they individually don't want to spend their time changing people's minds, which is fair enough. Another is saying that it's impossible to change people's minds, which implies that all efforts in that direction by anyone are futile. But seriously, I don't want to harp on this point any longer because even though that mindset makes me D:, I understand why someone would come to it and it's not a big deal in the scheme of things unless everyone adopts it.
2) I think the idea of "the onus is on the oppressor to change" or "the oppressor is the one who should change" confuses things more than it helps. There are two definitions of "onus" and two definitions of "should" that are being confused, which is what I was trying to delineate in my other comment. One involves placing moral blame and duty, judging who is a good person and what a good person would do. One involves determining what the maximally efficient actions for achieving a goal are, and where we may be falling short. The two are being confused in the sense that someone might say "activists should be doing this" and mean "should" in the second sense, but it's read as "people who don't do this are bad people" which is interpreting it in the first sense. I wish there were a word for "should" and for "onus" that took out all the connotations of morality and good person/bad person, because that's how I'm trying to use the words, and it's just creating misunderstandings. But I can't think of other words to use instead, either.
Sorry for editing twice, I know it gets sent to inboxes.
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... is it wrong to express helpless frustration?
Because that's exactly what the phrase you dislike -- "But I don't care about what white people/men/cis people/straight people think, they can't ever change anyway." -- is doing.
Is the only choice "try to change someone's mind or else remain utterly silent"?
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