What I learned about tone
ide-cyan said in the context of RaceFail2009, the bit after coffeeandink was outed Politeness (under which requests for the "right" "tone" seems to fall: it's not specifically a soft tone or a pleading tone or whatever that's requested, but something more abstract, especially in written discourse) is a product of cultural conventions that grow out of historical and political dynamics. It's a product of society: it reflects the order established in that society. Discourse that upsets the dynamics of society fails to comform to that order. (Sometimes it's on a micro scale, sometimes it's on a macro scale.) There is no way that anti-oppression talk can come off as polite, because it upsets the established order of a society based on oppression. And the rudeness of the oppressors toward the oppressed is invisible as such because it doesn't upset that order (as well as because the people at the top have the material means of getting away with it).
. This seems to me a great insight, which I wanted to share with anyone who has been directed to this essay on tone. Back to the original post.
So, last week I asked if there had been observation of a polite tone used by a person of color preventing the person they were challenging on racist language or behavior from flipping out.
People came up with a few different examples. One of them did not fit my explicit criteria. Several others did not fit my implicit criteria: in mediafandom and online. Those examples that did fit all five criteria pre-dated livejournal.
Intersectionality
To begin, Miriam Moules recounted that her position was changed in the Doctor Who/Mammy Martha imbroglio by jlh’s post. I can’t find the post to which she refers, but I thought the origin post was neadods’ in Life on Martha, thus, causing the jlh example to fail on part 1. In any case, the entire Martha imbroglio clearly fails criteria five, since people lost their shit in it.
What Miriam’s case does bring up, interestingly, is that intersectionality is a blocking factor. Miriam Moules couldn’t focus on the racism arguments until she was heard about class, some of the people in the Life on Mars imbroglio seemed to feel that specifically not wanting to see Gene as racist meant thinking Gene was okay as sexist, ablist, and homophobic, and people were totally distracted by the use of cunt as an insult in the Lana Lang imbroglio. If there’s an intersectional oppression at work, or if a different form of prejudice is invoked in the decrying of racism, and people notice and say something, it behooves the challenging speaker to acknowledge the intersection. Because some percentage of people will be incapable of listening to one’s thoughts on racism as long as they’re focused on the cisgender privilege.
This Medium
Several people said that they had success bringing things up face to face. I’m just going to pull an “I’m an unverifiable expert” card here (I wrote my thesis on CMC) and say that asynchronous computer mediated many-to-many communication and face to face individual communication are not the same in ways which tend to have a large effect on politeness and hostility. Further, while on livejournal it is not uncommon for someone who gets challenged on their racist actions and behaviors to go off and sulk unlocked in their livejournal, in real life, people try to make sure that only like-minded individuals are in the room when they start spouting off about how an uppity negress attempted to school them. Some of the hostility which I counted as a fail for purposes of this discussion is simply not witnessed or recorded when a challenge happens in real life, so what appears to be a win by our reporters might not have been one had we possessed the All Seeing Eye of Truth.
Outside of fandom
People brought up two instances outside of fandom where they had seen a polite tone work.
1) Fashionblogger recommends shoe named egregious racial slur (kaffir) and apologizes.
2) Korean adult adoptee criticizes cooption of Umma/Appa (Korean affectionate parental titles) by white adoptive parents and white adoptive mother gives up pendant reading Mother in Korean.
I am speculating that part of the reason both the Manolo and Third Mom were able to listen is that they are in situations where they’re sensitized to racial issues. Manolo recommended the shoe in the context of his professional column for a Washington, DC newspaper, after the Don Imus incident. Third Mom is a blogger about international adoption, and the question of cultural appropriation and appropriate cultural learning is a subject of much discussion in this arena. My understanding is that many American adoption agencies who do international or interracial adoptions discuss these issues with adoptive parents as part of the process.
In Fandom
1) Lilacsigil remembers that in 1993 an Australian accepted that using the word Negro would not work for Storm and Bishop, and some Americans believed him when he said that, to him, Black = Australian Aborigine, which Storm and Bishop were not (at the time)..
2) sameoldhope remembers racial challenges working on private Homicide mailing lists.
I suspect that, in the case of the Australian, matters were helped along by the fact that fandom has a script for the correcting of cross-cultural English errors, and it does not include personal attacks.
I also wonder if, both in this case and in the case of Manolo the fashionista, part of the reason the criticism was readily acceptable was because it was dealing with foreign racist terms, in which the poster’s own culture wasn’t implicated, and because it was about something which the original poster had relatively little investment. (Manolo’s recommendation of the offending shoe was offhand, and it doesn’t seem as if calling Storm and Bishop Negro vs. African was a big deal for the story this Australian wrote.)
If distance is part of the formula for success, then the implications for fandom are rather unfortunate. It seems to me that most of the time, when speaking of racially suspect fanactivity, people are going to have an investment in what was said. In fact, an anonymous commenter E linked to a review of a book called Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) which suggests that the cognitive dissonance of a good liberal person finding out they’ve done something racist will make it near impossible for said liberal to admit what they did was racist (unless, of course, their worldview specifically includes the idea that everyone, including themselves, is capable of unintentionally racist behavior.)
In the case of Homicide, there were two factors at work here. One, as Hope describes the culture of the mailing lists on which these challenges were made, their culture did not allow for personal attacks because of disagreement. On one, there was an explicit civility code. On the other, there was an accepted culture of critique. Two, Homicide as a text explicitly addressed racism, so its fans had ideas about race and racism as part of their fannish culture in a way that, say, Heroes fans do not.
oyceter reports having successfully had people listen to her via private communication, but those people were personal friends already working on racism. She also appears to have had a polite exchange with people who said some pretty godawful things at Wiscon this year, starting with her LJ post and moving into blog responses. This one is interesting to me because it combines face to face and online communication. I think it’s also an example of people who have been sensitized to race issues, since Wiscon is where the Cultural Appropriation debate of 2006 began. For those who don’t know, Wiscon is a feminist science-fiction convention, not a media fandom convention.
Not In My Backyard
There were no reports of successful challenges made in livejournal mediafandom more recently than the Homicide interaction, which I’m going to guess happened, oh, before the movie in 2000 (Hope, please correct if I am wrong.) ithiliana (a dreaded acafan, noes!) has been making a formal study for a paper presentation, and some other people who specifically reviewed the racial discussions with which they were familiar couldn’t find any.
To sum up:
A lot of discussion was had on the question of who the actual audience for these discussions of racism was. There was wide agreement that a calm and measured tone meant that many more uninvolved third parties would positively respond. I have a bunch of feelings about that which are mixed together.
First, I was sort of annoyed that people kept bringing it up in my LJ. I know that calmness attracts third parties, and it’s evident that I know that from the posts I have made in the past. By the time the third person said something about third parties, I started to feel like there was some sort of backdoor tone argument going on. I never claimed that angry tones would be more likely to make the challenged person pay attention, or that third parties would take your side if you acted like a troll.
Also, frankly, that wasn’t the issue at hand. This really was, “Is there a way that a person of color can challenge someone else’s racist behavior/language and not have that person (or their minions) flip out?” aka the tone argument that will not die. How to raise general awareness of issues of race and racism is, frankly, an entirely separate discussion which is very interesting but upon which I was not focused.
On the other hand, I do believe that a more dispassionate tone does garner a much wider swathe of third parties to one’s side. Also, reacting calmly while the person you are challenging jumps up and down like a winged monkey makes other people not want to associate themselves with the airborne simian.
But this discussion of third party observers fails to take into account a few things.
First of all, not everyone is going to follow the rational, dispassionate argument, but some people are really good at the emotional logic. When they see that actual people are actually saddened or enraged by something, that’s when the issue achieves importance to them. (Which isn’t to say call such people irrational or unable to follow logic, but that they have either a communication style or a value system where emotion rates higher when they’re deciding what to care about in human relations today.)
Second, just because a person of color opens her mouth about race or racism, that does not mean she’s volunteering to teach for a day. Sometimes, screaming at livejournal is what one does instead of cutting a bitch. Sometimes, she’s calling on other people to go attack some Big Fandom Fail. Sometimes, she’s pulling a fandomwank and inviting people to watch the big mess which is going to occur in 5-4-3-2-1. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be class sesson 237 of Racism 101.
Last but not least, people losing their shit perform a valuable service for those of us who are about to pull out the chalkboards and learn ignorant folks. They expand the margins, so that a calm and dispassionate tone looks like a regular person talking, at least in contrast to the crazy, scary person over there. They help introduce the idea of race and racism, the idea that people care about this issue, and they make somebody like me not the crazy, whacked out edge case, but somebody with whom one might have an actual conversation. In political terms, if the far left of American political parties were really communism and socialism, then progressives might seem like centrists instead of crazy pipedreamers.
I think this last point is the most important, the any publicity is good publicity angle. Because I really do think that the most valuable tool in getting people to not flip out when they’re called on racist behavior or language is that they know that racism is an issue on which one may get called out in fandom. These issues have to be on the table in a general way before people can accept being called on the carpet in the specific.
I also think that there needs to be a serious discussion in fandom about intentionality. The short version is: the only people who get called out about their racist behavior are the ones that the challenger assumes is not intentionally racist. If we (fans of color and their white allies) think you are intentionally racist, we’re probably passing your name around friendslock and preemptively bansetting your ass.
So, if you think I got my analysis wrong, or if you felt like I ignored something big, please say so. (Right on, sister! or refinements of my analysis are also welcome, of course.) I will be reading all comments, but I won’t be commenting quickly, because I’m still having RSI issues.
Also, I have anonymous comments turned on with screening. If you comment anonymously, please sign with a pseudonym, even if it’s not your regular pseudonym. For instance, if I were to comment anonymously, I might sign as Martha Jones, even though my regular pseudonyms are witchqueen or zvi.
I will be deleting unsigned anonymous comments, and unscreening signed anonymous comments.
. This seems to me a great insight, which I wanted to share with anyone who has been directed to this essay on tone. Back to the original post.
So, last week I asked if there had been observation of a polite tone used by a person of color preventing the person they were challenging on racist language or behavior from flipping out.
People came up with a few different examples. One of them did not fit my explicit criteria. Several others did not fit my implicit criteria: in mediafandom and online. Those examples that did fit all five criteria pre-dated livejournal.
Intersectionality
To begin, Miriam Moules recounted that her position was changed in the Doctor Who/Mammy Martha imbroglio by jlh’s post. I can’t find the post to which she refers, but I thought the origin post was neadods’ in Life on Martha, thus, causing the jlh example to fail on part 1. In any case, the entire Martha imbroglio clearly fails criteria five, since people lost their shit in it.
What Miriam’s case does bring up, interestingly, is that intersectionality is a blocking factor. Miriam Moules couldn’t focus on the racism arguments until she was heard about class, some of the people in the Life on Mars imbroglio seemed to feel that specifically not wanting to see Gene as racist meant thinking Gene was okay as sexist, ablist, and homophobic, and people were totally distracted by the use of cunt as an insult in the Lana Lang imbroglio. If there’s an intersectional oppression at work, or if a different form of prejudice is invoked in the decrying of racism, and people notice and say something, it behooves the challenging speaker to acknowledge the intersection. Because some percentage of people will be incapable of listening to one’s thoughts on racism as long as they’re focused on the cisgender privilege.
This Medium
Several people said that they had success bringing things up face to face. I’m just going to pull an “I’m an unverifiable expert” card here (I wrote my thesis on CMC) and say that asynchronous computer mediated many-to-many communication and face to face individual communication are not the same in ways which tend to have a large effect on politeness and hostility. Further, while on livejournal it is not uncommon for someone who gets challenged on their racist actions and behaviors to go off and sulk unlocked in their livejournal, in real life, people try to make sure that only like-minded individuals are in the room when they start spouting off about how an uppity negress attempted to school them. Some of the hostility which I counted as a fail for purposes of this discussion is simply not witnessed or recorded when a challenge happens in real life, so what appears to be a win by our reporters might not have been one had we possessed the All Seeing Eye of Truth.
Outside of fandom
People brought up two instances outside of fandom where they had seen a polite tone work.
1) Fashionblogger recommends shoe named egregious racial slur (kaffir) and apologizes.
2) Korean adult adoptee criticizes cooption of Umma/Appa (Korean affectionate parental titles) by white adoptive parents and white adoptive mother gives up pendant reading Mother in Korean.
I am speculating that part of the reason both the Manolo and Third Mom were able to listen is that they are in situations where they’re sensitized to racial issues. Manolo recommended the shoe in the context of his professional column for a Washington, DC newspaper, after the Don Imus incident. Third Mom is a blogger about international adoption, and the question of cultural appropriation and appropriate cultural learning is a subject of much discussion in this arena. My understanding is that many American adoption agencies who do international or interracial adoptions discuss these issues with adoptive parents as part of the process.
In Fandom
1) Lilacsigil remembers that in 1993 an Australian accepted that using the word Negro would not work for Storm and Bishop, and some Americans believed him when he said that, to him, Black = Australian Aborigine, which Storm and Bishop were not (at the time)..
2) sameoldhope remembers racial challenges working on private Homicide mailing lists.
I suspect that, in the case of the Australian, matters were helped along by the fact that fandom has a script for the correcting of cross-cultural English errors, and it does not include personal attacks.
I also wonder if, both in this case and in the case of Manolo the fashionista, part of the reason the criticism was readily acceptable was because it was dealing with foreign racist terms, in which the poster’s own culture wasn’t implicated, and because it was about something which the original poster had relatively little investment. (Manolo’s recommendation of the offending shoe was offhand, and it doesn’t seem as if calling Storm and Bishop Negro vs. African was a big deal for the story this Australian wrote.)
If distance is part of the formula for success, then the implications for fandom are rather unfortunate. It seems to me that most of the time, when speaking of racially suspect fanactivity, people are going to have an investment in what was said. In fact, an anonymous commenter E linked to a review of a book called Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) which suggests that the cognitive dissonance of a good liberal person finding out they’ve done something racist will make it near impossible for said liberal to admit what they did was racist (unless, of course, their worldview specifically includes the idea that everyone, including themselves, is capable of unintentionally racist behavior.)
In the case of Homicide, there were two factors at work here. One, as Hope describes the culture of the mailing lists on which these challenges were made, their culture did not allow for personal attacks because of disagreement. On one, there was an explicit civility code. On the other, there was an accepted culture of critique. Two, Homicide as a text explicitly addressed racism, so its fans had ideas about race and racism as part of their fannish culture in a way that, say, Heroes fans do not.
oyceter reports having successfully had people listen to her via private communication, but those people were personal friends already working on racism. She also appears to have had a polite exchange with people who said some pretty godawful things at Wiscon this year, starting with her LJ post and moving into blog responses. This one is interesting to me because it combines face to face and online communication. I think it’s also an example of people who have been sensitized to race issues, since Wiscon is where the Cultural Appropriation debate of 2006 began. For those who don’t know, Wiscon is a feminist science-fiction convention, not a media fandom convention.
Not In My Backyard
There were no reports of successful challenges made in livejournal mediafandom more recently than the Homicide interaction, which I’m going to guess happened, oh, before the movie in 2000 (Hope, please correct if I am wrong.) ithiliana (a dreaded acafan, noes!) has been making a formal study for a paper presentation, and some other people who specifically reviewed the racial discussions with which they were familiar couldn’t find any.
To sum up:
- In livejournal mediafandom, no one has observed tone successfully used as a mitigating factor, or they have not so far come forward to admit this.
- Successful challenges in related arenas lead to the suspicion that having an audience which is alreay aware of race and racism issues will lead to more thoughtful and less hostile responses.
- Private messages are sometimes well-received between friends, but sometimes not.
- Critique goes best where there’s a script for how to give and how to receive critique.
A lot of discussion was had on the question of who the actual audience for these discussions of racism was. There was wide agreement that a calm and measured tone meant that many more uninvolved third parties would positively respond. I have a bunch of feelings about that which are mixed together.
First, I was sort of annoyed that people kept bringing it up in my LJ. I know that calmness attracts third parties, and it’s evident that I know that from the posts I have made in the past. By the time the third person said something about third parties, I started to feel like there was some sort of backdoor tone argument going on. I never claimed that angry tones would be more likely to make the challenged person pay attention, or that third parties would take your side if you acted like a troll.
Also, frankly, that wasn’t the issue at hand. This really was, “Is there a way that a person of color can challenge someone else’s racist behavior/language and not have that person (or their minions) flip out?” aka the tone argument that will not die. How to raise general awareness of issues of race and racism is, frankly, an entirely separate discussion which is very interesting but upon which I was not focused.
On the other hand, I do believe that a more dispassionate tone does garner a much wider swathe of third parties to one’s side. Also, reacting calmly while the person you are challenging jumps up and down like a winged monkey makes other people not want to associate themselves with the airborne simian.
But this discussion of third party observers fails to take into account a few things.
First of all, not everyone is going to follow the rational, dispassionate argument, but some people are really good at the emotional logic. When they see that actual people are actually saddened or enraged by something, that’s when the issue achieves importance to them. (Which isn’t to say call such people irrational or unable to follow logic, but that they have either a communication style or a value system where emotion rates higher when they’re deciding what to care about in human relations today.)
Second, just because a person of color opens her mouth about race or racism, that does not mean she’s volunteering to teach for a day. Sometimes, screaming at livejournal is what one does instead of cutting a bitch. Sometimes, she’s calling on other people to go attack some Big Fandom Fail. Sometimes, she’s pulling a fandomwank and inviting people to watch the big mess which is going to occur in 5-4-3-2-1. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be class sesson 237 of Racism 101.
Last but not least, people losing their shit perform a valuable service for those of us who are about to pull out the chalkboards and learn ignorant folks. They expand the margins, so that a calm and dispassionate tone looks like a regular person talking, at least in contrast to the crazy, scary person over there. They help introduce the idea of race and racism, the idea that people care about this issue, and they make somebody like me not the crazy, whacked out edge case, but somebody with whom one might have an actual conversation. In political terms, if the far left of American political parties were really communism and socialism, then progressives might seem like centrists instead of crazy pipedreamers.
I think this last point is the most important, the any publicity is good publicity angle. Because I really do think that the most valuable tool in getting people to not flip out when they’re called on racist behavior or language is that they know that racism is an issue on which one may get called out in fandom. These issues have to be on the table in a general way before people can accept being called on the carpet in the specific.
I also think that there needs to be a serious discussion in fandom about intentionality. The short version is: the only people who get called out about their racist behavior are the ones that the challenger assumes is not intentionally racist. If we (fans of color and their white allies) think you are intentionally racist, we’re probably passing your name around friendslock and preemptively bansetting your ass.
So, if you think I got my analysis wrong, or if you felt like I ignored something big, please say so. (Right on, sister! or refinements of my analysis are also welcome, of course.) I will be reading all comments, but I won’t be commenting quickly, because I’m still having RSI issues.
Also, I have anonymous comments turned on with screening. If you comment anonymously, please sign with a pseudonym, even if it’s not your regular pseudonym. For instance, if I were to comment anonymously, I might sign as Martha Jones, even though my regular pseudonyms are witchqueen or zvi.
I will be deleting unsigned anonymous comments, and unscreening signed anonymous comments.