Sigh.
Okay. I feel like this has been said, in various ways (most of them, probably, a lot more eloquent than I'm going to be able to say it) a million times throughout the past couple of years' fannish discussions, but I'm frustrated, I've been running into it even in my friends' comments, and so I'm saying it again: it is not the duty of marginalized people to educate privileged people, or to fit some gold standard of "niceness" in calling them out on their privilige. Derailing For Dummies lays out well why coming into a conversation to raise these concerns constitutes derailing (If You Won't Educate Me How Can I Learn and You're Being Hostile, respectively), and I'm going to try to communicate why it's actively harmful. Again, I have no doubts that other people have done this better than I have, but apparently I like banging my head against walls, so what the hell.
Let's work backwards -- first, the part about how it's not a marginalized person's duty to be nice. Here is the thing: I'm a white, lower-middle-class American. I've got a lot of privilege, especially with regards to race and standard of living. I'm not straight and I'm a woman, I have ability issues, and I'm Jewish, so there are ways in which I'm lacking in privilege, but that doesn't cancel out the fact that I'm white, middle-class, and American, and so have a lot of privilege based on those qualities.
I have been called out on that privilege. I have been called out in no uncertain terms. There's been capslock involved, and italics. It was embarrassing, it was unpleasant, and I completely deserved it. Of course, that wasn't my reaction at the time. At the time, yeah, my instinctive reaction was generally "why are you being so mean to me? I didn't mean to be *ist," because holy shit, I didn't mean to do anything, I was being perfectly nice, and here was this person yelling at me, what did I do to them?
Answer: I stomped all over them, their experiences, their emotions, and their life. Maybe this was the first time I had been confronted by Issue X in Y Way, but it wasn't the first time they had.
Some anonymous person asked me why I wasn't working harder to make fandom a "safe space" for promisethstars, and I'm not gonna lie, my initial reaction to that question was "seriously, if you can't see the irony in that question, I don't think we are actually going to be able to communicate". Yes, that's a fairly flippant phrasing, but I'm not being entirely facetious: if you don't see the irony there, I really don't know how much of a conversation we'll be able to have, because I suspect we're just not in any way on the same page. To spell it out: promisethstars, a privileged person, made no effort to make fandom a safe space for me, a Jew, but I was being lectured by this anon for not working to make fandom a safe space for promisethstars. And, okay, as I said in in-person discussions yesterday (that's another thing -- if you think I was being hostile in the big post about it, you should've seen the flocked ones I was making, or the email conversations I was having, before I calmed down enough to make a public post), I think that in these discussions, the mere fact that you're calling someone out period is going to get you labeled "hostile". But leaving that aside for the moment, here is why this assumption that I ought to fit some standard of "niceness"* is not only mistaken, but actually harmful: it is explicitly valuing the feelings of the privileged person over those of the marginalized person.
(Scare quotes around "nice" because -- whose standard? Who should be the arbiter of whether I'm being "nice" or "overly hostile"? And again, there is that niggling feeling I have that there are a lot of people for whom saying anything, no matter how mild the phrasing is, constitutes hostility.)
By the same tack, the issue of using *fail as a Learning Experience. This is a similar problem -- namely, it values the edification of the privileged party over the feelings and experiences of marginalized people. By saying "well, tell me why this is bad so I don't do it again," you are asking that Marginalized Person A spill their guts in front of you, for the sake of your ~learning experience~. They owe you nothing, and indeed, if they do have the spoons to discuss their very real experiences so that you can learn, you owe them -- you owe them your thanks, for sharing what might be extremely painful details, and you owe them your respect.
Don't even get me started on the attitude that Jewish folks in fandom have -- as I recall, this was an actual phrase that came up sometime in the past couple of years -- a "persecution complex". This was actually before I converted, but my reaction then was the same as it is now: when there has been, within living memory, a nearly-successful attempt to wipe you off the face of the earth, I don't think you're imagining the persecution. I think there are a lot of mistaken assumptions about race and ethnicity going on there, starting with an assumption that all Jews are white, but I don't even know how to begin untangling that.
After extensive discussion with a friend, I'm screening anonymous comments on this post. If you're based over on LJ and don't have a DW account, use OpenID, or sign the comment with your LJ handle and I'll unscreen it.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth.
comments; reply there with Dreamwidth ID or OpenID.
Let's work backwards -- first, the part about how it's not a marginalized person's duty to be nice. Here is the thing: I'm a white, lower-middle-class American. I've got a lot of privilege, especially with regards to race and standard of living. I'm not straight and I'm a woman, I have ability issues, and I'm Jewish, so there are ways in which I'm lacking in privilege, but that doesn't cancel out the fact that I'm white, middle-class, and American, and so have a lot of privilege based on those qualities.
I have been called out on that privilege. I have been called out in no uncertain terms. There's been capslock involved, and italics. It was embarrassing, it was unpleasant, and I completely deserved it. Of course, that wasn't my reaction at the time. At the time, yeah, my instinctive reaction was generally "why are you being so mean to me? I didn't mean to be *ist," because holy shit, I didn't mean to do anything, I was being perfectly nice, and here was this person yelling at me, what did I do to them?
Answer: I stomped all over them, their experiences, their emotions, and their life. Maybe this was the first time I had been confronted by Issue X in Y Way, but it wasn't the first time they had.
Some anonymous person asked me why I wasn't working harder to make fandom a "safe space" for promisethstars, and I'm not gonna lie, my initial reaction to that question was "seriously, if you can't see the irony in that question, I don't think we are actually going to be able to communicate". Yes, that's a fairly flippant phrasing, but I'm not being entirely facetious: if you don't see the irony there, I really don't know how much of a conversation we'll be able to have, because I suspect we're just not in any way on the same page. To spell it out: promisethstars, a privileged person, made no effort to make fandom a safe space for me, a Jew, but I was being lectured by this anon for not working to make fandom a safe space for promisethstars. And, okay, as I said in in-person discussions yesterday (that's another thing -- if you think I was being hostile in the big post about it, you should've seen the flocked ones I was making, or the email conversations I was having, before I calmed down enough to make a public post), I think that in these discussions, the mere fact that you're calling someone out period is going to get you labeled "hostile". But leaving that aside for the moment, here is why this assumption that I ought to fit some standard of "niceness"* is not only mistaken, but actually harmful: it is explicitly valuing the feelings of the privileged person over those of the marginalized person.
(Scare quotes around "nice" because -- whose standard? Who should be the arbiter of whether I'm being "nice" or "overly hostile"? And again, there is that niggling feeling I have that there are a lot of people for whom saying anything, no matter how mild the phrasing is, constitutes hostility.)
By the same tack, the issue of using *fail as a Learning Experience. This is a similar problem -- namely, it values the edification of the privileged party over the feelings and experiences of marginalized people. By saying "well, tell me why this is bad so I don't do it again," you are asking that Marginalized Person A spill their guts in front of you, for the sake of your ~learning experience~. They owe you nothing, and indeed, if they do have the spoons to discuss their very real experiences so that you can learn, you owe them -- you owe them your thanks, for sharing what might be extremely painful details, and you owe them your respect.
Don't even get me started on the attitude that Jewish folks in fandom have -- as I recall, this was an actual phrase that came up sometime in the past couple of years -- a "persecution complex". This was actually before I converted, but my reaction then was the same as it is now: when there has been, within living memory, a nearly-successful attempt to wipe you off the face of the earth, I don't think you're imagining the persecution. I think there are a lot of mistaken assumptions about race and ethnicity going on there, starting with an assumption that all Jews are white, but I don't even know how to begin untangling that.
After extensive discussion with a friend, I'm screening anonymous comments on this post. If you're based over on LJ and don't have a DW account, use OpenID, or sign the comment with your LJ handle and I'll unscreen it.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth.
comments; reply there with Dreamwidth ID or OpenID.