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AG: I suppose I'm more on my way out in terms of Barbelith than I'm on my way in, but I can't see the percentage for the board in general if people are going to be assumed to be likely to say this or that dreadful thing before the bile has actually emerged.
This approach differs from my own, and perhaps if I explain a little about how I see this stuff it might help us work out our way forward.
The way I understand it, I've been immersed in a largely sexist, racist, anti-semitic, homophobic society since I was a small child. That's in spite of being brought up in a house and a church community where feminists, jewish people, gay people, people of various skin colours, were part of my upbringing and in spite of being taught about oppression in conversations and classes as long as I can remember. I don't think any of us get to live entirely in cultural isolation: the oppressive and the creative/revolutionary cultures both programmed me as I was growing up.
I come across sexism, racism, anti-semitism in my own thoughts and attitudes more frequently than I like. I have that awareness of my own thoughts and attitudes because I've worked on developing my awareness of how my words and actions contribute to the culture people around me are experiencing. I don't regard myself as a closed system devoid of the oppressive attitudes in society: I experience that racist Other within myself and I try to address it there.
So, I do expect people to say dreadful things. I've said and done some fairly dreadful things in my life, though I think I have mostly been lucky enough not to do the worst offending stupidities in public or in well-archived text. Although I hope everyone's more or less trying not to be an idiot, idiotic things do get said - if only because stupidity is widespread in our culture and not all of us manage to debug everything that comes out of our mouth or typing-fingers. I want to live in a world where we can get back to some collective agreement even after idiotic things have been said. As I see it there are requirements for that to happen though, and one of them is that the poster of idiotic stuff is willing to consider how their actions affect others.
I've not been on the board that long, but in the banning cases I've observed it seemed that it was failure at this requirement of listening to the views of others and considering how they were being affected by the idiot that were the cause for banning. Do other people see it that way? There have been many more incidents where people trotted out unexamined assumptions, but in most of those the posters in question were willing to reconsider when appealed to, by their own conscience or by other posters.
I think people expressing stupid and hateful stuff happens probably in all communities, to most people (perhaps even to those who have achieved permanent serenity), and that getting rid of these oppressive habits is a work in progress in which all of us are involved. I expect that stupid things are going to be said, and the important thing for me is that there's a critical response to those idiocies, and that people who act as if they are incapable of considering how their attitude affects others are made unwelcome, by banning or ridicule. The advantage of expecting it is being prepared to address it constructively, by challenge and by banning. I guess metaphorically it's the advantage of having an innoculated immune system that recognizes the flavour and is able to go into relatively efficient action in challenging it, rather than the situation of a naive immune system that ends up taking more damage before a suitable clone of antibodies is generated and selected for.
I understand the mechanisms of these oppressive habits of action (sexism etc) as being largely unconscious, and the work of eliminating them as involving raising our consciousness in collective discursive processes. There's a long history of studies of how these things work, and to me it would be a shame if we ignorantly neglect what's already been brought to consciousness in previous communities of resistance and cultural creativity, including academic studies of how oppression is enacted. Those learnings include the unconscious nature of much oppressive behaviour.
I like to see the aim of Barbelith as being an equal-opportunity unsafe space. Lots of people on here work at making sure the board is almost as unsafe for the unconsidered racist, sexist, homophobic, etc attitudes which are horribly common in the rest of the world, as it is unsafe for people who live with and in resistance to various kinds of oppression. To me that's a fine aim. I don't see it as possible to create safe space on a public messageboard, but I do see it as possible for us to create unsafe and discouraging space for idiots, as has already been said by others above.
cusm: I've got to say that I have never experienced knee-jerk claims of anti-semitism. My experience is that speech I now recognize as anti-semitic has usually been tolerated or ignored in groups and rarely challenged. It's the same with sexist and racist behaviour, in my experience.
Where oppression's being experienced, it is often very difficult for those who are suffering to explain or express it. The way I understand it, oppression works by teaching us that we are hated and unimportant to the dominating group, and it teaches us that we have much less of a right than members of the dominating class to contribute to the collective understanding of reality. When oppressive behaviour's being enacted, those feelings are likely to be looming large, and such states of mind are unconducive to constructing of precise and well-reasoned teaching material, though there are exceptional individuals who are able to do so.
I guess my point is, if I was having the experience where people were making challenges about some kind of oppression such as anti-semitism, I would probably pay attention and consider how they were seeing it. But as I have explained, when I'm in the situation of recognising racist behaviour, my question is more like 'How am I expressing the racism that's in me and in society? How can I best challenge it, address it, and change?' rather than 'is racism is occurring?'. Given the vastness of racism in culture at large, even after the huge progress made in the last century, it's not really a question to me whether racism or other forms of oppression exist.
I think it's possible that people who have been socialised as male/white/het/class etc find it much more difficult to consider that other people have an equal share in the definition of reality: I know my own whiteness has affected how I have needed to learn about racism. It helps me consider other people's point of view when they are able to explain where they are coming from, what their worldview is and what their socialized and consciously chosen position is in relation to oppressive cultural habits. |
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