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 individual their own mistakes and hopefully trigger some accountability. It generally involves some sort of verbal response to the actions (or written for online) that not only outlines what was done wrong but also why it was wrong, along with the expectation of some sort of retraction and even possibly an apology (I personally never ask for apologies, just retractions, because apologies often become an excuse to beat oneself up and look good through self flagellation, or alternately fauxpologies like apologizing for your target being offended, not for your actions). Call outs, structurally at least, are not conversational. They’re not really dialogue starters either. They are a public burst of information regarding a mistake made or a purposeful nasty action done and while they can trigger dialogue, they certainly aren’t a component of dialogue in and of themselves.
Call outs are a way to keep mainstream groups, individuals and small organizations on their toes about bigotry. They break the silencing that marginalized people (and sometimes the privileged people who have the basic human decency to help us/them out) are often encased in all throughout these venues and mediums. And they are exceptionally functional for dealing with entrenched privileged entitlement and bigotry, where dialogue becomes a simple derailing set of excuses or attempts to downplay the mistakes or awfulness done. Calling out is especially useful when dealing with trolls and the gotcha game players, where dialogue is a quick way to be turned into the meat to feed someone’s sadistic kicks or attempts to make an activist movement look foolish.
Calling out can be used by any activist but because of its less conversational nature it’s tougher for Appeaser archetypes to use effectively (See AMO Communication here for information on the archetypes). While Emoters and Logic Bombers will both use it equally (just with different styles) the most prominent user of the call out is the Nuker Archetype.
Now, and let’s not forget this, calling out is a tool. Like any tool it can be abused. It can be overused. And it can become broken. And as the culture of activism becomes more and more dependent upon the call out the anatomy of one has begun to evolve.
Are you starting to see where issues could arise?
Nukers alone are subject to some seriously dangerous pitfalls and you will notice that many of these pitfalls detailed in the aforelinked post are almost verbatim the same issues coming up again and again in call outs. But it isn’t the functionality of Nuker Methodology alone that is responsible for this. It’s a question of balance, which in the end was the entire reason behind writing the AMO series, to help activist communities achieve balance in methods.
Now, the anatomy of a call out is strongly linked with triggers and triggering language as well (and there has been some discussion on tumblr regarding it). I won’t go into too much depth on that, but certainly the concept of avoiding triggers often directly conflicts with the concept of calling out (as calling out is almost always a little bit confrontational and confrontation is often a major trigger for abuse survivors). A whole other post could be written about triggers in activism and the ableism of expecting people to just take it so I’ll step away from that for now.
Let’s get back to that balance thing.
Read the rest at Genderbitch