stormdog | Entries tagged with social justice

The trend of beginning events by acknowledging the people from whom the land they are on was stolen has bothered me almost since I first became aware of it. This piece, drawing on thoughts of native people and anthropologists, does a good job at explaining why.

Discussing what kind of land acknowledgements would *not* be harmful, the authors write "What many Indigenous persons want from a land acknowledgment is, first, a clear statement that the land needs to be restored to the Indigenous nation or nations that previously had sovereignty over the land."

I'll give you one guess at how likely that is to happen. And without it, land acknowledgements feel, both to me and to some native people whose opinions matter *far* more than mine do, like saying "We're not giving your land back, but we are sorry about all that genocide and land theft. We're cool now, right?"

https://theconversation.com/land-acknowledgments-meant-to-honor-indigenous-people-too-often-do-the-opposite-erasing-american-indians-and-sanitizing-history-instead-163787?fbclid=IwAR12-KNbMGOsn518ReQH2qmEcTEUsGwrLr_ZnTFeOClb-VglnIXqiKwarNA

I'm feeling sad at the moment about this response to a recent post I made.

"I am committed enough to queer freedom to be available to random passing people as I am my own beloved friends and family."

It makes me feel like people see me as someone who doesn't care. Who isn't committed to wanting things to be better.

Do you see me that way? Am I making things worse somehow when I want to make them better? That thought hurts me too.

I feel like maybe I'm bad at this stuff. When, in various situations, I upset someone by asking them their pronouns, and I'm dismissed and rejected for expressing my concerns about trans-phobic language, and am seen as uncommitted to queer people's well-being, and when I never seem to have any feedback from people saying saying things like 'I see what you're doing and you're helping, or at least trying to help, and that means something to me...it makes me wonder if I'm helping at all. Maybe the care I feel isn't being expressed in actions that make a difference for anyone and I need to rethink them.

Maybe that's the kind of feedback people get from memes and that just whooshes, unheeding, past me.

I'd just...like to know that I'm helping, at least a little.

(Please don't say anything negative about anybody else, including anyone who I'm referring to here. I know that we're all trying to help in our own ways and that's important.)

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I had so many reassuring comments to this on Facebook from people I care about and respect. That really helps. I wish I could share them all here.

Current Mood: sad
Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1318894.html

I'm feeling extra frustrated about memes. Last week I saw one about how celebrating the year 2020 the 100th anniversary of national women's suffrage in the US would be white-washing history because not all women had the right to vote until 1964. Native American women couldn't vote until 1924, Chinese women couldn't vote until 1943, and so on.

This kind of thing bothers me a great deal. It feels decontextualized and misleading. I immediately took it to mean that rights for those women were specifically established in those years. What actually happened is that voting rights for members of all sexes of those groups were created at that time (though even that is a simplification because many Native Americans could legally vote prior to 1924). Those seem like ethnic minority rights issues rather than a women's rights issue. Not mentioning that elides the civil-rights struggles for minorities.

I expressed that view and the person who posted the meme was upset with me about it. I don't know how to respond to people being angry with me; I never have. It makes me want to run away. I didn't see any way to make things better and still express my feelings. I certainly don't want to tone-police someone, or seem like I'm arguing against the importance of women's rights. The only thing I felt like I could do, other than continuing to make them upset at me, was unfriend that person.

I asked Danae what she thought and she said that the meme makes an important point, and that she thinks I do as well. I didn't understand what that point was at the time. I guess I understand a bit better now, after thinking about it off and on for a week. Those statements, though, just seem disingenuous. Of course it's true that there were women who could not legally vote. But there are women *now* who can't legally vote; female felons for instance.

These thoughts have helped clarify for me some of the resistance to Black Lives Matter. Many critics attack the movement's name, saying that it is exclusionary, or racist, or decontextualized. That it implies that non-Black lives don't matter. I vehemently disagree with that. However, one could argue that I'm attacking those statements about women's voting rights similarly; that I'm accusing them of implying that men's voting rights don't matter. That was not my intent, nor was I even conscious of the issue, but I see how it might be interpreted that way. Communication is so damned messy.

I don't know what to do in cases like this. fully contextualized history is so important to me that it makes me really distressed to see bits and pieces used to support ideas in the present. I feel like it hurts our society. But, in adding that context whenever it seems to be missing, am I being like one of those people who pick on BLM [which I always feel weird about abbreviating because my first connection with BLM is the Bureau of Land Management] because of message form rather than message content? I feel like a lot of that is willful misunderstanding and it makes me angry.

But what *is* the content of the women's voting rights meme? What do people take away from it? I can't help but think that it puts those later voting rights changes later on in the same category as the 1920 change; that these were issues of women fighting for the right to vote and that because they are minorities we aren't told about those fights. But those fights *are* taught; just not in the context of women's history. Understanding history is inescapably a process of categorizing and isolating pieces of the infinite whole. These things probably deserve a sidenote when talking about the 1920 suffrage movement, but it seems to me that they fit better in discussions of minority rights movements in the context of the Magnuson Act and World War II for the Chinese, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the '60s for African-Americans (1964 was the year that poll-taxes were made unconstitutional by the 24th amendment).

I don't have any good answers for this. I wish I could just not see all these things, but I don't think I can install the meme blocker that a Facebook friend told me about on my work computer. I don't want to upset people. I want to support people fighting for social justice. Am I too much of a pedant sometimes? I really think *all* this stuff is important; social justice and history both.

How can most people just scroll by these things with just a thought or two and move on? *sighs* Maybe they place a higher value on their sanity and personal relationships than I do.

Current Mood: sad
Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1239949.html

I wrote this in response to a discussion on Facebook and some thinking I did afterward about what it is for a word to be a slur and how language is a political battleground. It started with a meme that said both that TERF is not a slur, and that all TERFs should be drop-kicked into the sun, thoughts that seemed incompatable to me. I had a discussion about that with a couple people, then wrote this this morning. Sorry if any of it seems out of context.

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I've thought about this over the last evening and worked on integrating some of what people have said about it. Here are some thoughts on the political fight over language and what it means for something to be a slur:

It seems like whether or not a word that is a true descriptor of a group can be a slur is a fairly minor issue in the grand scheme of things. I won't object to people saying it's not a slur on those grounds. However, I feel that saying so is, in a small way, ceding some ground. I expressed earlier that I don't think using a slur is inherently a bad thing, and TERFs should stop being ignorant assholes if they don't want their name to be a slur. But it seems easier and simpler to allow the word to become a thing that inherently reflects negatively on the user. I'll accept that.

To more fully explore my thoughts on this:

The ability to define and redefine words in the popular consciousness is a huge, huge part of politics. Meaning drift sometimes happens organically and unintentionally, but when it comes to politics, in most cases there is a concerted, conscious effort by one group to associate particular concepts with particular words. One that really gets me, for instance, is the way that 'entitlements' has been turned into something negative by the right wing to the point where there are numerous memes decrying the description of social security as an entitlement. My thoughts are always something like "Damn right it's an entitlement, and people receiving it are damned well entitled to it." I hate to give up the battle over the meaning of a word like that.

There are a couple of reasons why TERF in particular feels so complicated to me. The one relevant to this discussion is that I feel like it's disingenuous to say that TERF is not a slur because of the connotations of the word. Negro and colored were once polite descriptors referring to Blacks, but because of pervasive hostile use, they have become rude and disrespectful. In that sense, they are slurs. I have seen TERF used in a very dismissive, dehumanizing way, just as slurs like nigger and faggot are. For example:

"TERFs are fixated on dick and worship patriarchy." (https://medium.com/@sealinc2/terfs-are-fixated-on-dick-and-worship-patriarchy-d01a66337c8e)

"tbh TERFs are literal inhuman scum that deserve to burn w/ the nazis and japs for what they did to the transgender community"

(A representative, though particularly offensive, comment here: https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/you-are-a-terf-terf-terf/)

Clearly TERF is sometimes used to be intentionally offensive, dehumanizing, and dismissive. In that sense, it is a slur. It feels to me that, in saying that TERF is not a slur while some people use it in a vicous and dismissive way is trying to have your cake and eat it too.

It's very important that people are able to define their own identity and the terms used for that identity. Native people who are fighting back against the derogatory names that have been applied to them for so long by colonizers, for example: Inuit instead of Eskimo. It's a matter of respect for identity. Calling a group of people something that they have said that they object to being called, in this case TERFs, is an inescapably disrespectful act. Saying that TERF is not a slur while some people on the left use it as a slur is difficult to reconcile.

I'm not saying that they don't deserve disrespect. It certainly is satisfying, and TERFs are dead wrong. Maybe it comes down to what is trying to be accomplished. I have a feeling that talking to TERFs and calling them TERFs is going to get things off on the wrong foot right from the beginning. If we want to have a dialog, it might be better to find some mutually agreeable way to refer to them. (It is possible that there is no mutually agreeable way I suppose, in which case conflict over self-identity of TERFs and imposed identity by those interacting with them would be unavoidable.) I just feel that if a group feels attacked by a particular term, and others continue to use that term over said groups obejctions, it will serve to further cement an attitude of unified group defense against attackers. It makes it that much more important for them to stick with their brethren against a hostile world.

I'm not saying it is, or is not, a good thing to keep calling TERFs TERFs. (You may note that I am doing so here.) I don't really know what the other options are, or what will help most in the long run, or any of that stuff. It's above my pay grade. It's just the stuff I'm thinking about. I'd welcome comments.

Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1217876.html

I upset the acquaintance whose child was wearing the baby onesie I mentioned in my previous post. That's reasonable and predictable, and I should have given more thought to how to broach the topic; I feel bad about it. But even now I'm not sure what the best thing to do is in such situations.

It's become increasingly important to me to be an active voice against many kinds of largely unexamined social ills. If we don't recognize and talk about these things, they will not change. My worldview has become increasingly socially left and activist as time goes by. The popularity of the kind of racist xenophobia right now thanks to Trump's candidacy strengthens those feelings. I want to do more than not make the world worse; I want to be a part of making it better.

Inevitably, that's going to put me in awkward social situations with people who make unexamined statements with no ill-will, but which I see as part of a marginalizing or unjust social paradigm. I'd ask how you, my readers, deal with those situations, except I think the answer to that is entirely contextual. The internet has complicated things, with Facebook or other social media putting me in regular touch with people I only vaguely know. People are naturally defensive when criticized, especially when that criticism comes from someone who, on the face of it, has no standing to criticize their life choices. I don't see any good way to start a conversation in that situation, nor do I feel ok looking in the other direction. Silence too often equates to consent.

Maybe I should be more direct. There have been a couple instances in the past where I directly expressed to someone on Facebook that a particular political position or belief they expressed was odious enough to me that I was going to unfriend and/or block them. That was a much easier choice to make when it was someone saying, for instance, that police violence against African-Americans was justified, or that anti-Muslim xenophobia is acceptable. When it's an attempt at a cute joke that's only funny because it draws on injurious structural power imbalances that are common enough to be the water we swim in for so many people, it's a lot harder.

I'm leaning toward the direct approach being better. Posting an anonymized version of the issue is too much like passive-aggressiveness and feels wrong, especially in retrospect. Whatever communicative potential exists in that approach that doesn't exist in confrontation is out-weighed by the likely offense given. While an unfriending accompanied by an explanation feels like cutting off communication, it at least leaves a door open for a response. In the broader picture, I suspect that I'll just have to get used to the idea that some people will not be interested in interacting with me due to my inclination to be confrontational regarding some of these things. And while that's not direct communication in itself, there is a message conveyed by enough people expressing that same kind of discomfort. I hope to at least be part of a critical mass of society at large saying 'hey, that thing you just expressed deserves a little bit of a second look.'

In the meantime, I offer pre-emptive apologies for offense given!

Current Mood: thoughtful

I'm reading Ronald Dworkin's "Taking Rights Seriously" for one of my classes. From that piece (and referring to the charges against the "Chicago 7" under an anti-riot law):

"A man cannot express himself freely when he cannot match his rhetoric to his outrage, or when he must trim his sails to protect values he counts as nothing next to those he is trying to vindicate. It is true that some political dissenters speak in ways that shock the majority, but it is arrogant for the majority to suppose that the orthodox methods of expression are the proper ways to speak, for this is a denial of equal concern and respect. If the point of the right [to free speech] is to protect the dignity of the dissenters, then we must make judgments about the appropriate speech with the personalities of the dissenters in mind, not the personality of the 'silent' majority for whom the anti-riot law is no restraint at all."

It's impossible not to think of recent protests and expressions of political sentiment in light of Dworkin's thoughts. If we are to take a right such as free speech seriously, he argues, it cannot be abridged because it violates some form of right of the majority. Strong moral rights of the type that the United States claims free speech to be can only be curtailed when they infringe directly on someone else's individual moral rights. To do otherwise is to reject that these are moral rights at all.