if you complain about “sjws” at this point i probably feel unsafe around you
no honestly stop trying to pretend there’s an entire movement of people who purposefully violently bash innocent people and are “too politically correct”, for god’s sake we all know that nobody actually self-identifies as an sjw anymore and I’m tired of seeing fandom bloggers complain about ~sjws~ harassing them when they mean they don’t want to hear things they’ve done are racist/transphobic/ableist/etc/and more
you know who are fucking violent on tumblr when it comes to social justice? grown ass adults who call themselves “anti-sjws” and label every person who wants to not have the same prejudice spat at them every day continued online an “sjw,” an extremist, stop it just fucking stop
I’m not going to lie. As far as I’m concerned, this sort of attitude does as much to make social justice spaces feel unsafe and/or alienating as anything else. It’s so easy to just build a strawman of the “anti SJW” and knock it down as some bigot who just can’t take criticism. But this whole thing is incredibly disingeuous.
Honestly, I don’t know if the OP is deliberately simplifying to absurdity the motives of anyone who criticizes the excesses of modern social justice–a large, amorphous, and varied group that includes people of diametrically opposed beliefs. At best they simply don’t realize that many of the critiques are coming from inside the house (still a weak generalization, if not actively malicious). But let’s be honest with ourselves.
Social justice movements are highly imperfect. Sometimes they are a good deal more than imperfect. Many suffragettes were horrifically racist, many civil rights leaders were horrifically misogynistic, there were 70s sexual liberation circles who harboured known pedophiles and were rightly called out by radical feminists of the time, who then turned out to be ragingly transphobic. Bigotry and kyriarchy cut through all levels of society, including social justice movements.
What makes SJ different is the fact that, by definition, we are pushing for justice. Simultaneously, we’re trying to carve out spaces for ourselves where we can escape wider society–spaces where we can be angry, pathetic,
vengeful, tired, triumphant, whatever, where we can find validation for whatever our responses may be. But it’s so, so easy for that to lead to excess. There’s the leap from validating anger, to requiring anger to be heard at all (excluding many people with disabilities, for instance). The leap from acknowledging the suffering that can come with an identity to suffering as legitimization of an identity. Or the leap from insisting that it’s appropriate to respond when you’re wronged, to insisting that if you’ve been wronged, no response is disproportionate.
That’s where a lot of the criticsm comes from, because that idea is dangerously widespread. But–for examples that spring readily to mind–you can’t justly call for suicide, rape, and murder. No matter who you’re addressing and what the offense was, you can’t. It’s neither fair nor morally acceptable. And you can’t justly tell another oppressed group that they don’t deserve to be heard, they don’t deserve their frustration or anger or desire for awareness, but it happens. It happens all the time. I don’t really want to name names (I could; I’ve been around for awhile), but I’ll say that in my experience, the excesses of social justice are particularly appalling wrt Jewish, Rroma, aboriginal, non-lesbian/gay LGBT+, disabled, and/or non-US people.
(These excesses also make social justice circles particularly vulnerable to incredibly bigoted abusers, in much the same way that domestic abusers exploit the language and structures around domestic abuse advocacy. The–okay, I will name names here, the gamut from Hugo Schwyzer to Benjanun
Sriduangkaew.)
None of this is to say that there aren’t people who cry “SJW!!!” at the slightest provocation, people who dismiss all criticism as PC SJW blahblahblah, inane, oblivious, generally bigoted anti-SJ blogs out there. There are. There’s a lot of that. But that doesn’t give us license to shove everything else under the carpet and pretend that our communities don’t have severe problems.
#I….think this makes sense? #But I also don’t think ‘sjw’ is a label that makes sense anymore #just as ‘politically correct’ doesn’t and never did #but also… #tumblr social justice #in my opinion at least #is HUGELY unsafe for disabled people #as in…..the very principles it is built on seem so dismissive of disabled people that I half wonder if it’s deliberate #I think the System needs fixing