social justice

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Just sort of piggybacking on that very good post I reblogged earlier, regarding comprehension and ableism in otherwise progressive spaces…

For years I’ve been hearing the phrase “intent doesn’t matter” in regards to what you say or do. I see it a lot less now, luckily, but it used to be used almost as a catch-all for “you’ve done something problematic, but we’re not going to listen to any mitigations and we certainly won’t forgive you”.  And for years it’s made me lowkey uneasy, because intent…does matter.

It matters in regards to disabled and mentally ill people. A man hitting his wife, for example, is a terrible act and we know it, but there’s a huge difference between a man hitting his wife because he’s angry with her and a man hitting his wife because he genuinely believes she’s a hitman in disguise come to kill him. There’s a huge difference in the eyes of the law, too, or there should be.

People navigating social justice spaces who have comprehension issues are at a huge disadvantage, too, I don’t think we even realise how huge. No, it’s probably not your job to educate people, but there are people out there who legitimately cannot educate themselves, who may turn to Google but can’t understand it, who find themselves social pariahs because they’re struggling with concepts no-one has taken the time to explain to them and using the wrong words.

But, currently we punish misunderstandings with the exact same viciousness we punish malice, and that’s never not going to be ableist, and it’s a problem. Intent does matter.

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byakuya-mioda:

aiajean:

actual Tumblr Social Justice problems:

– antisemitism is often veiled as “combating white supremacy”
– lack of focus on mental illnesses besides depression
– honest mistakes tend to be poorly dealt with
– “callout culture” (people looking for others to mess up, solely in order to defame them)
– in-depth education on terms tends to be scarce, leading to people having only a vague understanding of terms, and using them
– bigots are able to redefine these (poorly-defined) terms in ways that hurt the oppressed
– emotional manipulation / guilt-tripping (“i see my followers ignoring this”; “why is nobody talking about this?”)

re-reblogging cause i thought of things

  • Excessive and abusive punishment of young teenagers over mistakes made in discourse they don’t completely understand by bloggers much older than they are
  • US-centrism
  • Reliance on fear of retribution for spread of information (contributes to rapid spread of misinformation)
  • Moral absolutism – the line between “perfect innocent angel” and “disgusting shit trash” can be as thin as one mistake
  • Reliance on followed blogs for education about social issues

While I’m on the subject of the, er, less salubrious side of social justice.

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stele3:

mindthelspace:

Holy fucking US centricism batman. 

Something I’ve been noticing about them lately is they don’t seem to realise American culture is actually a distinct thing. They’ll talk about ‘black culture’ or ‘white culture’, when in fact they mean ‘black/white American culture’. For instance, they describe AAVE as ‘black language’, even though the vast majority of the world’s black people don’t use it. They describe miracle whip and wonder bread as ‘white food’, even though neither of those things are available anywhere outside North America. The ‘American’ qualifier is always left off. 

They do similar things with politics. They’ll lump other continents in with America in contexts where doing so makes no sense. For instance, the numerous posts suggesting Europeans and Americans experienced the world wars in the same way. Likewise, if you mention Chinese people, Irish people, or Indian people, their minds will jump straight to the Chinese/Irish/Indian diaspora in the USA, as opposed to China, Ireland or India. I’ve seen this logic go the the extreme where Japanese people in Japan were described as ‘struggling to hold on to their endangered culture’. 

There’s also a big problem where they’ll refuse to accept that situations are different in different parts of the world. American standards are a universal barometer which everything has to match up to. If a word is offensive/correct in the USA, it is assumed to be offensive/correct everywhere. If a group are accepted in the USA, any persecution they face in other parts of the world will be brushed off as irrelevant.

Now, my country is more similar to the USA than most others. It would still take me ten hours to write a list of American theories, stereotypes, problems, tropes, terms and jokes that don’t apply here. God knows how little of what Tumblr social justice say must apply to for instance, Nepal or Ethiopia. 

I have been guilty of this in the past. My apologies, I’ll try to be better about this in the future.