The best I can offer is an oblique reference to the idea of “It’s not my job to explain that to you” type discourse.
Hang with me for a sec. I promise, I’ll try to refrain from declaring anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders deserves to be imprisoned for a whole post! And I’ll even kick this one off by saying that, on the whole, from what I’ve read about this particular situation, Price isn’t a hill I’m gonna die on, in particular.
Okay, so, stuff:
Minorities get treated like shit a lot. Not by everyone, not all the time, but a lot. Black people get profiled by police, mistreated by service workers, viewed with unveiled suspicion and fear in their own neighborhoods. Women get catcalled relentlessly, pressured into sex by selfish partners, and passed over at work on the regular. And so on and so forth ad infinitum.
It’s fucking exhausting. I mean it’s infuriating, and depressing, and soul-crushing, and unfathomable, but most of all, it’s exhausting having to be wary, every second, every day, because elements of the world and portions of the populace all around you have it out for you, actively and passively, all because of one of your immutable traits. And even the people who don’t have it out for you usually won’t even stick up for you in front of the people who do, so when that cop pulls you over for no reason, his ridealong buddy doesn’t say shit, and when that guy in the pickup whistles at you on the street, the fifteen other people walking nearby don’t say shit.
So, you’re isolated, afraid, and hurt. You live on the defensive. You might go hours or days or weeks without feeling like anyone’s got your back or your best interests at heart. Your life’s harder than it would be if you weren’t black or a woman or whatever.
And now, now it’s coming at you in a new venue. People are “talking about” this stuff all the time! America’s getting woke, y’all! Which seems great, right? This shit’s finally gonna stop now that everyone can clearly see it, right? Exhaustion over!
But not so fast. Regressive hate-fueled shitheels are pissed about that and staking their claim and pushing their agenda and doing everything they can to maintain the status quo of keeping you down. And some of them really are just dumbfuck hillbillies who can’t help but just say “Fuck the blacks, women are for having babies not opinions, all the queers gonna burn in hell.” But a big chunk of em are just aware enough to realize they can’t say that shit out loud, no matter how much they might hold it in their hearts. Those are the scary ones. Those are the dangerous ones. Cuz they’ve got just enough patience and self-awareness to realize that they can win this war by other means.
And then you’ve got this whole other big chunk of the populace who just can’t imagine it’s that bad all the time forever. These people mean well! They certainly don’t have that kind of pure, black hatred burning in their hearts. I mean, they’re not racist/sexist/bigoted! And none of their friends are! And we had a black president! And a woman won the popular vote for president! Gay people can get married! Things are getting so much better! Surely it can’t be that bad, can it?
Which is a really easy thing to say, if you don’t have to live that exhausting, hellish experience 24/7/365. If you haven’t lived your whole life being demeaned, looked down upon, mistreated, talked down to, disrespected, passed over, and ignored. What are they so upset about, anyway? We beat racism and sexism in the 60s! We marched over bridges and burned our bras! Everything’s okay now! Why are you still fighting, anyway?
And, here’s the kicker: the outright, furious-burning bigots love that messaging. Oh, oh yes, everything is fine now. There’s no need for more activism and social justice! The world is just great the way it is, you see! In fact, isn’t it a little uppity of those blacks and women to keep talking about it like there’s some big problem to solve when we can all clearly see everything is fine? How obnoxious! They’re shitting up our forum threads and twitter feeds and Facebook walls with all these calls to action and complaints and furious overreactions, and they’re marching and blocking highways and making demands, and gosh, didn’t you hear about those antifa over in Europe?
It’s such an easy narrative to buy into if you don’t live that exhaustion day in, day out. Sure, okay, Donald Trump said some pretty gross things about women and wound up becoming president. But, I mean, that’s just Republicans voting Republican and Hillary being like, the worst candidate ever! I mean, not all women are horrible nags, but she was pretty bossy, huh? And sure, we’ve got footage of cops beating black people for no reason and planting weapons and drugs on them and admitting on camera it’s all because they’re black, but I mean, c’mon! They can vote and marry white people and own houses, and all the good schools let them into college when they don’t even get good scores like my white kid did! We can’t swing too far in the other direction now that racism is basically dead except a couple of cops on Youtube! And didn’t it look like that thuggish kid was reaching for his pocket anyway? And why was he trying to sell water in a neighborhood! I wouldn’t want youths loitering around my neighborhood like that! C’mon, let’s all be reasonable here!
It’s insidious. It creeps in. You almost can’t help it, because the annoyances and fears and pains and difficulties you and the people close to you face are so much more real to your primitive monkey-brain than the struggles you can never see or experience that others are laboring under, because empathy is really goddamned hard, y’all. It’s fucking work. It means listening to someone say that the world you exist in every single day and are sure of the certainty of is a lie and that you are missing the truth.
And so, here in this new woke world, the conversations spin around, guided by insidious forces of hatred who know how to use the tools of propaganda to make themselves look reasonable and intellectual and dispassionate and logical and calm. And they spin around and swirl around the truth that minorities tell us about every day, desperate for someone to finally listen to them. And they spin around this “divisive” climate where civility is dead and everyone is just so angry all the time, on social media where trolls and bots shape the conversation and likes and shares amplify voices with no regard to truth or substance and anyone can insulate themselves from any opinion that’s hard or scary or disagreeable.
And so it all gets muddled, and people do genuinely wonder how it can possibly be that bad, and they don’t feel like they’ve got the tools to figure it out for themselves, and their own experience is coming into direct opposition to what these people are saying is real, and that’s confusing and scary and worrying and maybe even a little guilt-inducing, because shit, if things really are that bad and I’ve not been doing every single thing in my power to fix it this whole time, that’s on me a little, isn’t it? But I’m a good person! I’m not one of those crazy racist hillbillies! No, no, this can’t be right. I gotta check.
And meaning perfectly well, they go to what’s obviously the best source here: those same minorities. The folks who’ve been screaming to high heaven about how bad it is, desperate for anyone to listen! Well gosh, here I am, and I will totally listen: please explain to me exactly all the ways that you are oppressed and be willing to explain away all of my doubts and be ready to explain away all my ignorance on this subject. In short, please relive the exhausting, soul-crushing hell that is your everyday experience one more time to save me the time and effort of educating myself.
Except the active, malicious racists and sexists and bigots haven’t been quiet, and they haven’t satisfied themselves just spewing their hate into their 4chans and their Breitbarts and their Fox News. No, no, they’ve gotta go out there and fight the people they hate and challenge them and keep them down where they should be. And so they dox women on the internet and threaten to rape and kill them and they comb the life of every single black kid who gets beat up by cops in search of anything to make him look like he “deserved it.” And so they insidious tactics of debate in bad faith to lord themselves over their “inferiors” with their cool dispassionate logic and their statistics-that-are-evidently-devoid-from-lies-or-bias, and they pick apart the statements of their foes line by line, word by word, to “reveal” their inadequacies and therefore “win” the debate.
And it’s constant on places like twitter and forums and reddit. The Gamergate hate brigade is incredibly large and well organized. The alt-right is recruting new members left and right. You almost can’t turn sideways on the net as a minority without having some bigoted shitheel leaping into your comments section to belittle and demean you and tear you apart and keep you down. Just like in real life, it is constant, and it is exhausting.
And you try to fight on, and you try to do the right thing, and you try to be the bigger person, and you try to prove your case, and you try to fight for what’s true. Day after day after day after day, you wage that war as it sears away your patience and your kindness and your hope and exhausts you.
And eventually, you get tired of arguing perfectly and you get tired of being the better person and most of all you get tired of fighting fair, because the bigots are using every insidious, unfair, propaganda-derived tactic available to them to discredit and destroy you and it never ever stops. Reddit admins refuse to try to police “hate speech” and ban the guy asking them to. Twitter won’t ban Trump while he actively destroys our alliances online but they’ll ban your feminist group’s account because you called an asshole out for what he was. People demand you debate the white supremacist loony as though his ideas have merit because civility trumps everything in these discussions, don’t it?
And finally one person too many comes up and makes a demand of your time that you can’t can’t accept, challenges your truth and your experience one more time than you can handle, asks if things really are that bad one time too many. You snap, you lose your temper, you act irrationally, you get “triggered.”
And the bigoted trolls who’ve been camped on the sideline, rubbing their hands with sinister delight, shout with pride as “another leftist SJW cuck shows themselves for what they really are: the real problem with America!” “Look how mean and unreasonable and demanding they are!” “Look at these terrible things they said about someone who just wanted to have an open discussion with them!”
And you know what? For all the shitty, actual, obvious, literal bigots and trolls you’ve fought off and ignored and calmly discussed shit with up to this point, for all the times that the evidence of what you were saying was writ plain for everyone to see, for all the times you did every single thing right, the one time you didn’t, that–that’s when everyone finally pays attention. How can you be credible if you’re so angry? Why don’t you want to just tell me about this, I was only asking a question! God, why are you always so uptight and mad all the time?!
Nobody is perfect. But someone who has been worn down, ground down, pushed down over and over again and exhausted beyond measure by the neverending war they have to fight just to be treated like a goddamn human being is expected to be if they want anyone to believe them.
So, I mean, yeah, this one dude on twitter might well have totally meant well and had no beef with Price because of her gender and no agenda to pursue but a genuine love for this game and a desire to see it succeed and a frustration that it wasn’t all he wanted it to be.
But for better or for worse, it’s not really about that one guy. It’s not really about that one exchange. It’s not really about this one slip-up on Price’s part, no matter how egregious or undeserved.
It’s about the larger war. The one that most of us can’t even see and will never be affected by. The one being waged against people like Price every single minute of every single day, invisible and insidious.
That is the context of this action. That’s the battle that ANet stepped into the middle of. And that’s why those of us on the progressive end of things who can recognize that Price slipped up and pushed too far and struck out at the wrong target still try to have this discussion. Because she can’t anymore. Her voice has been tarnished and discredited.
Cuz, y’know, whispers the darker parts of the internet. She’s just one of them bitchy feminists on twitter now. Can’t even be professional. Tsk, tsk. Well, anyone who listened to her would have known that was coming. It always does.
That’s how they win the PR war. That’s how they recruit people to their side. That’s how they break their opposition down and destroy them.
It’s a war of attrition. It’s a war of exhaustion.
