Let’s all take a moment of silence for anyone who has to work retail the next couple of months.. And please remember that as busy as the holiday seasons are, and you might be in a hurry, your cashier/other employees are working really hard to make you happy and also have feelings like you. 🙏🙏
An additional moment for those in packing, sorting, and shipping jobs, those who spend eight mind numbing, back breaking hours a day getting your holiday stuff to your house. The labor that goes into working at Amazon, UPS, FedEx, etc is miserable so please appreciate the work they do
Just gonna add:
If an employee wishes you a Happy Holiday, instead of offering felicitations on the religious seasonal festival of your choice, don’t tell them off. Be kind.
Employees are only saying what their employer tells them to say, because they need the paycheck. In the United States, it’s perfectly legal for family-owned businesses to force employees to conform to the owner’s religion while on the job, so people who don’t personally celebrate a particular religious holiday may be obligated to wear aprons that say, “Blessed Christmas” and so forth. Be kind.
Whether someone wishes you a Happy Holiday, a Merry Christmas, or a Happy Hanukkah, smile and say, “You, too,” or “And a Happy New Year!” Whatever your religion, or whether you have none, ‘tis the season for being a decent human being. Be kind.
Privileged people rarely take the voices of marginalized people seriously. Social justices spaces attempt to fix this with rules about how to respond to when marginalized people tell you that you’ve done something wrong. Like most formal descriptions of social skills, the rules don’t quite match reality. This is causing some problems that I think we could fix with a more honest conversation about how to respond to criticism.
The formal social justice rules say something like this:
You should listen to marginalized people.
When a marginalized person calls you out, don’t argue.
Believe them, apologize, and don’t do it again.
When you see others doing what you were called out for doing, call them out.
Those rules are a good approximation of some things, but they don’t actually work. It is impossible to follow them literally, in part because:
Marginalized people are not a monolith.
Marginalized people have the same range of opinions as privileged people.
When two marginalized people tell you logically incompatible things, it is impossible to act on both sets of instructions.
For instance, some women believe that abortion is a human right foundational human right for women. Some women believe that abortion is murder and an attack on women and girls.
“Listen to women” doesn’t tell you who to believe, what policy to support, or how to talk about abortion.
For instance, some women believe that religious rules about clothing liberate women from sexual objectification, other women believe that religious rules about clothing sexually objectify women.
“Listen to women” doesn’t tell you what to believe about modesty rules.
Narrowing it to “listen to women of minority faiths” doesn’t help, because women disagree about this within every faith.
When “listen to marginalized people” means “adopt a particular position”, marginalized people are treated as rhetorical props rather than real people.
Objectifying marginalized people does not create justice.
Since the rule is literally impossible to follow, no one is actually succeeding at following it. What usually ends up happening when people try is that:
One opinion gets lifted up as “the position of marginalized people”
Agreeing with that opinion is called “listen to marginalized people”
Disagreeing with that opinion is called “talking over marginalized people”
Marginalized people who disagree with that opinion are called out by privileged people for “talking over marginalized people”.
This results in a lot of fights over who is the true voice of the marginalized people.
We need an approach that is more conducive to real listening and learning.
This version of the rule also leaves us open to sabotage:
There are a lot of people who don’t want us to be able to talk to each other and build effective coalitions.
Some of them are using the language of call-outs to undermine everyone who emerges as an effective progressive leader.
They say that they are marginalized people, and make up lies about leaders.
Or they say things that are technically true, but taken out of context in deliberately misleading ways.
The rules about shutting up and listening to marginalized people make it very difficult to contradict these lies and distortions.
(Sometimes they really are members of the marginalized groups they claim to speak for. Sometimes they’re outright lying about who they are).
(For instance, Russian intelligence agents have used social media to pretend to be marginalized Americans and spread lies about Hillary Clinton.)
The formal rule is also easily exploited by abusive people, along these lines:
An abusive person convinces their victim that they are the voice of marginalized people.
The abuser uses the rules about “when people tell you that you’re being oppressive, don’t argue” to control the victim.
Whenever the victim tries to stand up for themself, the abuser tells the victim that they’re being oppressive.
That can be a powerfully effective way to make victims in our communities feel that they have no right to resist abuse.
This can also prevent victims from getting support in basic ways.
Abusers can send victims into depression spirals by convincing them that everything that brings them pleasure is oppressive and immoral.
The abuser may also isolate the victim by telling them that it would be oppressive for them to spend time with their friends and family, try to access victim services, or call the police.
The abuser may also separate the victim from their community and natural allies by spreading baseless rumors about their supposed oppressive behavior. (Or threatening to do so).
When there are rules against questioning call outs, there are also implicit rules against taking the side of a victim when the abuser uses the language of calling out.
Rules that say some people should unconditionally defer to others are always dangerous.
The rule also lacks intersectionality:
No one experiences every form of oppression or every form of privilege.
Call-outs often involve people who are marginalized in different ways.
Often, both sides in the conflict have a point.
For instance, black men have male privilege and white women have white privilege.
If a white woman calls a black man out for sexism and he responds by calling her out for racism (or vice versa), “listened to marginalized people” isn’t a very helpful rule because they’re both marginalized.
These conversations tend to degenerate into an argument about which form of marginalization is most significant.
This prevents people involved from actually listening to each other.
In conflicts like this, it’s often the case that both sides have a legitimate point. (In ways that are often not immediately obvious.)
We need to be able to work through these conflicts without expecting simplistic rules to resolve them in advance.
This rule also tends to prevent groups centered around one form of marginalized from coming to engage with other forms of marginalization:
For instance, in some spaces, racism and sexism are known to be issues, but ableism is not.
(This can occur in any combination. Eg: There are also spaces that get ableism and sexism but not racism, and spaces that get economic justice and racism but not antisemitism, or any number of other things.)
When disabled people raise the issue of ableism in any context (social justice or otherwise), they’re likely to be shouted down and told that it’s not important.
In social justice spaces, this shouting down is often done in the name of “listening to marginalized people”.
For instance, disabled people may be told ‘you need to listen to marginalized people and de-center your issues’, carrying the implication that ableism is less important than other forms of oppression.
(This happens to *every* marginalized group in some context or other.)
If we want real intersectional solidarity, we need to have space for ongoing conflicts that are not simple to resolve.
Tl;dr “Shut up and listen to marginalized people” isn’t quite the right rule, because it objectifies marginalized people, leaves us open to sabotage, enables abuse, and prevents us from working through conflicts in a substantive way. We need to do better by each other, and start listening for real.
except sometimes people are wrong. i’m so tired of the “just get along with nazis!” attitude i see people spouting.
Correct! But we can still use dialectical thinking to help. *sparkle!*
In this case a more helpful dialectical formulation is like,
“I need to fight Nazis” AND “I need to rest”
or
“I need to do everything I can to fight Nazis” AND “I am a single person with limited capabilities.”
or
“I need to speak truth to power” AND “This awful person has power over me and I might get in trouble for speaking up”
In this trying time, it’s tempting to lose sight of both choices–people tend to pick one OR the other. “Fight fight fight all the time” OR “give up, it’s hopeless”. Leaning too heavily on either one or the other will lead to negative outcomes, either through burnout/being targeted, or through passivity leading to Nazis running shit.
It is by maintaining awareness of BOTH options, and using them together to synthesize a third path that allows for both activism AND self-care, that we will make it through. 🙂
see that is a just a truly bloody lovely example of demonstrating dialetical thinking to help someone who was approaching dialetical thinking in a black-and-white way.
And it can be more useful than that, too! Dialetical thinking offers a foundation to build constructive activism on. Because if people are thinking in the world of extremes, the options offered seem to be “just get along with Nazis” or “literally punch Nazis.” The first is not acceptable, but the second is only accessible to a tiny minority of people, making it feel like a more realistic solution is to just give up. No wonder people feel tired. That makes me feel tired too.
Instead, people can try the two separate and related thoughts of “I need to fight Nazis” and “I need to rest” and hold them together in their heads. With both of those thoughts together in your head, weighted equally… now what? How can you fight Nazis, but also get the rest you need? What would that look like?
Perhaps this will help you to think of a bite-sized, actionable piece of activism that you can actually DO – and doing it will feel rewarding, leading to empowerment and energy! So instead of feeling shitty and trapped and nihilistic because you aren’t punching Nazis right now, you canactually get somewhere in your activism, and feel less tired, and do small things to make the world better…
My personal feeling is that fascism thrives when the people are divided, confused, afraid, ignorant, broke, and vulnerable to specific types of abuse. Fascism thrives when people feel hopeless and confused, because it appeals to them and offers hope and strength and security. Every time fascism has risen to power, it has done so in specific social conditions. We’re seeing a repeat of many of those right now.
So, I personally like to create and share stuff that unites people, explains helpful things, and helps people to cope. I like to offer things that lead to hope and strength and unity, but building that from WITHIN, not by latching on to patriotism or racism. And part of that is by sharing stuff like resources about stuff like dialetical thinking and self-care.
everybody just latched onto “terf = enemy” and then never again put any thought into why that is, and what transmisogyny is, so they just make a big deal out of being an anti-terf instead of understanding the problem in the first place
Some stuff to know:
TERF – Trans Excluding/Erasing Radical Feminist:
Someone who believes that trans women are not women and don’t belong in women’s spaces. They believe that trans women are predatory cis men pretending to be women in order to have sex with lesbians.
SWERF – Sex Worker Excluding/Erasing Radical Feminist:
Someone who believes that sex workers (those who make money from pornography or prostitution) are not feminist / not valuable / should not be welcome in feminist / women’s spaces. They believe that women participating in pornography or prostitution are upholding patriarchy and damaging the feminist movement.
Truscum aka transmedicalists:
Someone who believes that you must experience body dysphoria in order to be trans. They also tend to be attached to the gender binary and erase or exclude anyone who does not conform to a male / female gender identity (genderfluid, non-binary, agender, bi-gender, etc)
Ace exclusionists:
Someone who believes that ace-spectrum people are not inherently LGBTQ+ and do not belong in LGBTQ+ spaces. They see ace people as secretly cis/straight invaders and leeches to LGBTQ+ programs and resources. They also tend to believe that the definition of LGBTQ+ centres around those who experience discrimination for same-sex attraction, and therefore ace folk do not belong.
Trans women are women. Non-medical trnas people are trans. Ace people are LGBTQIA+.
the number one indicator that you should see a therapist is thinking “hmm, should I see a therapist?”
I want to make one thing clear that I don’t think a lot of people even realize: you don’t need to be mentally ill to see a therapist. You don’t need to have experienced serious trauma or be deeply unhappy or think your brain is Up To Something in a Major Way to benefit from therapy. If you just want help sorting through your feelings, dealing with heartbreak, or venting your fears about the future, you can talk to a therapist! It’s allowed! It’s encouraged!
support aces of colour who are struggling to reclaim their sexuality while being actively fetishized, hypersexualized, and/or desexualized based on their race and intersections of neuro-atypicality, physical disability, etc.
i’m op of this post (i’ve since changed my url) and the amount of bloggers who have reblogged this and tagged it with some variation of “thank you” shows you how important it is to recognize people of colour who are on the ace spectrum
Some people used to identify as bi, and now they identify as gay. They’re not “fulfilling a stereotype” about how bi people always “pick a side.” Their own journey of self-discovery and sexuality is valid.
Some people used to identify as gay, and now they identify as bi. They’re not “fulfilling a stereotype” about how “all lesbians still actually want to fuck men.” Their own journey of self-discovery and sexuality is valid.
Some people used to identify as ace, and now they don’t. They’re not “fulfilling a stereotype” about how ace people “just don’t know what they’re missing”. Their own journey of self-discovery and sexuality is valid.
Some people used to identify as aro, and now they don’t. They’re not “fulfilling a stereotype” about how “everyone finds True Love in the end because it’s the Most Important Human Thing”. Their own journey of self-discovery and sexuality is valid.
Your understanding of these terms and yourself will evolve.
It’s okay if a label you used to identify with doesn’t fit anymore.
Sexuality is fluid. You’re not faking. Your identity is valid.
Gather round, children. Auntie Jules has a degree in psychology with a specialization in social psychology, and she doesn’t get to use it much these days, so she’s going to spread some knowledge.
We love saying representation matters. And we love pointing to people who belong to social minorities being encouraged by positive representation as the reason why it matters. And I’m here to tell you that they are only a part of why it matters.
The bigger part is schema.
Now a schema is just a fancy term for your brain’s autocomplete function. Basically, you’ve seen a certain pattern enough times that your brain completes the equation even when you have incomplete information.
One of the ways we learned about this was professional chess players vs. people who had no experience with chess.
If you take a chess board and you set it up according to a pattern that is common in chess playing (I’m one of those people who knows jack shit about chess), and you show it to both groups of people, and then you knock all the pieces off the board, the pro chess players will be able to return it to its prior state almost perfectly with no trouble, because they looked at it and they said, “Oh, this is the fifth move of XYZ Strategy, so these pieces would be here.”
The people who don’t know about chess are like, “Uh, I think one of the horses was over here, and maybe there was a castle over there?”
BUT, if you just put the pieces randomly on the board before you showed it to them, then the amateurs were more likely to have a higher rate of accuracy in returning the pieces to the board, because the pros are SO entrenched in their knowledge of strategy patterns that it impairs their ability to see what is actually there if it doesn’t match a pattern they already know.
Now some of y’all are smart enough to see where this is going already but hang on because I’m never gonna get to be a college professor so let me get my lecture on for a second.
Let’s say for a second that every movie and TV show on television ever shows black men who dress in loose white T-shirts and baggy pants as carrying guns 90% of the time, and when they get mad, they pull that gun out and wave it in some poor white woman’s face. I mean, sounds fake, right? But go with it.
Now let’s say that you’re out walking around in real life, and you see a black man wearing a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans.
And let’s say he reaches for something in his pocket.
And let’s say you can’t see what he’s reaching for. Maybe it’s his wallet. Maybe it’s his cell phone or car keys. Maybe it’s a bag of Skittles.
But on TV and movies, every single time a black man in comfortable, casual clothes reaches for something you can’t see, it turns out to be a gun.
So you see this.
And your brain screams “GUN!!!” before he even comes up with anything. And chances are even if you SEE the cell phone, your brain will still think “GUN!!!” until he does something like put it up to his ear. (Unless you see the pattern of non-threatening black men more often than you see the narrative of them as a threat, in which case, the pattern you see more often will more likely take precedence in this situation.)
Do you see what I’m saying?
I’m saying that your brain is Google’s autocomplete for forms, and that if you type something into it enough, that is going to be what the function suggests to you as soon as you even click anywhere near a box in a form.
And our brains functioning this way has been a GREAT advantage for us as a species, because it means we learn. It means that we don’t have to think about things all the way through all the time. It saves us time in deciding how to react to something because the cues are already coded into our subconscious and we don’t have to process them consciously before we decide how to act.
But it also gets us into trouble. Did you know that people are more likely to take someone seriously if they’re wearing a white coat, like the kind medical doctors wear, or if they’re carrying a clipboard? Seriously, just those two visual cues, and someone is already on their way to believing what you tell them unless you break the script entirely and tell them something that goes against an even more deeply ingrained schema.
So what I’m saying is, representation is important, visibility is important, because it will eventually change the dominant schemas. It takes consistency, and it takes time, but eventually, the dominant narrative will change the dominant schema in people’s minds.
It’s why when everyone was complaining that same-sex marriage being legal wouldn’t really change anything for LGB people who weren’t in relationships, some people kept yelling that it was going to make a huge difference, over time, because it would contribute to the visibility of a narrative in which our relationships were normalized, not stigmatized. It would contribute to changing people’s schemas, and that would go a long way toward changing what they see as acceptable, as normal, and as a foregone conclusion.
So in conclusion: Representation is hugely important, because it’s probably one of the single biggest ways to change people’s behavior, by changing their subconscious perception.
(It is also why a 24-hour news cycle with emphasis on deconstructing every. single. moment. of violent crimes is SUCH A TERRIBLE SOCIETAL INFLUENCE, but that is a rant for another post.)
Let me be clear, as much as I want to just respond CRY MORE, BABIES I object to the use of the word ‘doxxing’ in this case.
I have BEEN doxxed. I have been stalked online. I have had people go through my journals and my pictures to try to identify me for malicious purposes. I have had people search me on court websites to try to find the charges I filed against an ex when he stole from me, for the purposes of trying to humiliate me about an online roleplaying game. (No, really.) I’ve had people try to match up pictures of the flowers outside my synagogue and the building in the background with pictures of synagogues in the Philly area to try to fuck with my life.
So I know the kind of gut-clenching, cold down the back of your neck, hands-shaking fear that comes with being doxxed. I do. It’s happened to me more than once. It will probably happen to me again, because I’m a loud fat queer femme Jewish disabled activist, and boy does that piss people off.
But let me be clear: I was existing as a person that someone else didn’t like in those cases. I was existing as queer, I was existing as ‘someone I don’t like on a game.’ I was not showing up in public, carrying a torch, and advocating for the massacre of millions of people. When you show up in public carrying a torch, you are not being doxxed.
I'm a defeatist but I don't have to be 