No, you’re touching on something that’s been bouncing around my head for a while now.
There’s a line of thinking out there, which is particularly well-represented among the hard left culture warriors out there, that at some point in the last decade went from “we need to listen to minority/marginalized voices!” – a laudable position – all the way to “there is nothing a majority voice can add to this discussion, so we need to not listen to them!” (generally meaning straight/white/cis/whatever, whoever’s in last place in the oppression Olympics this week)
This really bothers me. I’m not even opposed to “what this queer fella has to say in conversation about gay rights should probably count for more than what you, a straight guy, think.” But I’ve seen way too much outright hostility to, well, me.
I mean, I’m nobody special. I’m probably a reasonable approximation of a voice that’s about as left as you can get while still being on the mainstream American political spectrum, a middle-class straight white guy. And I’ve basically run into “fuck you, we don’t need you, PATRIARCH” one too many times.
I mean, yeah, boo hoo Adam, how will your viewpoint ever be represented? Sure, I’m not the most specialest snowflake in the world - I don’t even demand my own pronoun! - but it turns out that having your viewpoint spit on because of who you are isn’t any more fun when you’re a straight white guy than it is when you’re a gay Latina or whatever.
I find the right-wing culture warriors far more vile, obviously, but the epistemic closure on the left can be pretty bad too.
I hope you’re not trying to participate in conversations like these while talking AT people with approaches like this as opposed to talking with people in a… less condescending that what is shown here. No one is going to hear you if you try it this way… why should they? You’d be approaching it by belittling their point from the start.
Heh, got it. These are touchy subjects for sure. There’s validity on both sides, but one side has been in a position of power, the default and dominant voice while the others is pushing to be heard. I don’t know that there is a perfect way to approach something like this, but I see no reasons why voices shouldn’t be be heard as long as those voices are also listening.
My personal experience with this, there isn’t so much a contribution so much as an attempt at overall dismissal. Once that happens. a wall just gets erected and the exchange of ideas can’t penetrate that. For example, if you’re talking about racial tension and bias, someone comes into the conversation and says they want to participate, okay. Then the next thing out of their mouth is it’s “water under the bridge” and we should stop talking about. Not really contributing is it?
I am. Even if we restrict the topic down to “what it’s like to be discriminated against for being gay,” an honest attempt to portray that by someone who hasn’t experienced it has tremendous value, because it can a) speak more directly to others who might do the discriminating, and b) provide a good example of what is wrong with the portrayal. If the only thing that’s wrong with it is that it was written by a breeder, it should be lauded as it would regardless of the author’s background. If there are subtle things it gets wrong, though, those should be the focus of criticism. Of course, many works of art are more complex than simply portraying a single topic- they also have story or actions or context that could provide a different message or create additional problems. For example, a book with a really great portrayal of what it’s like to be a cultural Jew that also has the main character being a sociopath who tries to constantly swindle kind people he meets would have an offensive feel to me, despite its accuracy about the Jewish aspect. If I found out it was written by a neo-nazi, I would be rightfully more offended than if it was written by a cultural Jew, because the negative behavior would be more clearly an attempt to denigrate a group. Applying that same logic to all heterosexual people or to all cis-gendered, or all whites, or all men, etc, doesn’t make sense because it assumes that all members of a demographic group share a bias (as opposed to assuming that all members of an ideological group do).
That said, I think the instinct to tell straight, white, cis-gendered, christian men to just shut up for a moment is mainly a response to the size and loquacity of that group. If we measured demographic groups by volume (both quantity and forcefulness) of speech, that one would surely be the largest.
It’s a debate (or really, brick yelling argument) as to whether what is being said or who is saying it is more important.
I think the reaction you see in ‘majority’ (i.e. White males) is the sense that these arguments don’t exists in a void but lead to conclusions if their assumptions go unchallenged or accepted axiomatically. It isn’t a far stretch to lead from correlation to causation through the continued assumption of certain sorts of arguments and principles which become more and more accepted. IOW it’s not implausible to see the trajectory of saying to one group “be quiet” because other voices need hearing, to “be quiet and stop oppressing other voices”, to “those people are oppressing us”, to “admit your guilt in your role in our oppression”. And in fact to a certain extent certain forms of privilege politics already have this aspect to them depending upon the groups involved. So when someone comes in and challenges this trajectory they are seen as fifth columnists, trolls or traitors in arguing against some of these assumed first principles, like they are arguing that there are no problems at all, because to not accept one thing is to reject all the things, and so the pitchforks come out and the torches are lit and the workers are rallied to march on Fort Privilege to disabuse them of their errors, even if those persons may well agree with most of the discussion.
It is so weird to me the generations that stopped calling people Mr and Miss and Mrs X and Sir and Ma’am is so hell bent on no further changes in language. Hell, I can’t even get my father to accept any variant of Grandfather. He demands my child calls him by his fist name. I’m sure he’d have gotten hit by a ruler or something if he tried that as a kid.
Kids these days don’t understand the value of tradition fill-in-the-blank is so weird to me when the Baby Boomers and Gen X are defined so much by how many traditional things they stopped doing. And it’s not like there weren’t some changes that didn’t catch on or work out along the way.
Even if this is a particular specific pronoun route is a dead end and is the gender role version of the inner city projects ‘solution’ to racial inequality, are we any better for not trying it? Instead of building the projects in the 70’s should Chicago have just been like ‘this seems like a bad idea, I bet this is as close to racial equality we’re going to ever get so let’s just call it a day’ and freeze society at this moment?
In the last 50 years gender roles and equality and acceptance that the world is not binary straight women and straight men have taken a huge leap forward. How could you think you can tell that we’re at just the right spot now, the tipping point between good and some kind of bad?
I can totally see not having the zeal to join some of the new causes, or frankly not even thinking it is a good idea, but it is so weird to feel so strongly about holding the line frozen in time at the state of society the day you turned 32 or whatever.
Just wait another decade for the next generation to wage a holy war on paper towels and consider us all primitives.
Gender role is more than language. To say there is no gender is more socially challenging than Mr or Miss. It’s also, to be fair, harder to accept, especially when the argument seems to be that gender doesn’t exist except when it does.
Yeah, I agree with that line of thinking in a general sense. In order to understand what someone is saying, you need to understand the subtext, not just the text, and knowing who the speaker is can help you fill in subtext. But knowing someone’s skin color or sexual orientation doesn’t tell you a lot about their agenda or philosophical underpinnings (even if it does help predict their vote in, say, the current presidential election). “You don’t know what you’re talking about” is still a way of shutting down discussion, though, which is really only appropriate when the voice in question threatens to drown out ones you’d rather hear. So, for example, if we are talking about diversity on TV or in movie roles, there’s a legitimate argument that while there can be something valuable about a white actor portraying an Asian character, we’ve already seen that a lot and it really should be the exception rather than the norm.
Well, that’s basically rejecting identity politics, which is going against the philosophical trend of the times. It’s clear to me that identity politics is, at a minimum, relevant in many instances, like police harassment/brutality, as well as having explanatory power regarding encounters with casual racism, sexism, or misogyny.
I think what Trump has shown me, at least, is that my belief that we’re all basically decent aside from a few loudly bad eggs has been shaken pretty substantially. I’m significantly more “SJW” after Trump than before. Things like GamerGate/MRA/Alt-Right and the rise of Trump through Fox and friends show the dangers of informational and cultural bubbles founded on discrimination, secured with misinformation and fed by hatred, and that these things aren’t just bored 19 year old “beta” males (by their own admission) with nothing better to do than bring everyone else down with stupid memes and gross out gifs.
Identity politics is a pretty nebulous concept that can be squeezed into a convenient shape for a lot of arguments, I think. I’m not advocating for the idea that we ignore the demographics of police shooting victims, but I’m also not willing to say that black people can’t be racist against blacks and women can’t be misogynists. These are all coherent positions to take, because what I’m saying is that people are people - if you are afraid of someone because they are black you are confusing demographics with personality.
What i dislike… though dislike is perhaps too strong, maybe find intellectually inconsistent? is the idea that subjective experience is objectively true. I don’t like where that goes. It seems to lead into a gray indeterminacy, where there are no solid lines, where nothing is sure, where everything is contingent. You can’t ‘invalidate’ subjective experience either, so it’s something of a paradox. Which, as far as it goes, isn’t yet a problem. Where it “goes wrong”, so to speak, is that to untangle the knot you script an order of operations out by their identities according to some intuitive but unwritten hierarchy and then hit apply.
OTOH you can’t deny the reality that these identities aren’t “true” in the sense that they do have affects, mostly negative effects, unfortunately, on people who hold them, due to the actions of others. It’s the ‘French by blood spilled’ thing; people have died and suffered because they held these identities, and in a sense, those deaths have purchased the right to that identity for posterity.
White cis males have an important voice because they’re able to communicate as a sort of translator to those of their kind that aren’t very good at empathy, which is most people.
Most people aren’t very good at being a calm go-between either, so there’s some challenge here.
