On drawing breaks lately, I’ve been leaving comments on Ozy’s blog, which I feel a bit guilty about since I’ve been neglecting my own blog. (Leaving comments on someone else’s blog is, somehow, easier and quicker for me than writing posts on my own.)
Anyway, on a thread over there, “Jiro” wrote:
Because of the tremendous power of an accusation of racism or sexism, you’ve created a tool that anyone not a white male can use to destroy their enemies, and it’s in the nature of an unfair but effective tool that it will be used.
I replied:
I think your premise – that “an accusation of sexism or racism” is “a tool that anyone not a white male can use to destroy their enemies” – is a ridiculous exaggeration of reality.
Look, I’ve had critics suggest that my work is sexist and/or racist. It happens. It’s not fun. But it didn’t destroy my career or my life, because I’m too obscure for stuff like that to stick to me.
But the same is true for people who are anything but obscure. A whole bunch of writers – including some quite prominent and respected writers, like Jay Caspian Kang – have argued that the hit podcast “Serial” is racist. Yet Serial is getting a second season, and it’s a safe bet that Sarah Koenig’s income and career prospects have improved because of “Serial.”
The New Yorker called the sitcom “2 Broke Girls” “so racist it is less offensive than baffling,” and that just got renewed for a 4th season.
I can think of lots of SF/F novelists who have, fairly or not, been criticized for sexism and/or racism: Paolo Bacigalupi, NK Jemisin, Saladin Ahmed, Vox Day, Larry Correia, Piers Anthony. In the movie/TV world, there’s Charlie Sheen, Chris Rock, Alex Balwin, Nicholas Cage, Sean Penn, Woody Allen, Aaron Sorkin…. I could go on and on with examples.
Your claim that an accusation of sexism or racism is a career-ending weapon, is contradicted by real life.
Jiro then admitted that they had been hyperbolic, but wrote that
It creates a system where someone who isn’t a white male can attack any work they don’t like in a way that is much more effective than and will be uncritically accepted by a much wider audience than a normal criticism that doesn’t have the added oomph of accusing something of being racist or sexist.
(Obviously, go read the original thread to read Jiro’s full statements in full context).
I responded:
I think there are three factors which are likely to make criticism harmful.
First, criticism that is so openly disdainful that it sends a clear message that the creator of the work, and anyone who enjoys that work, is an awful, evil person.
Unfortunately, this style of criticism is pretty popular, especially on some areas of the internet.
Second, people who seek out opportunities to be furious, either because they enjoy righteous indignation, or because they believe it’s politically expedient. So even small slights are interpreted without any charity and treated as major issues. This second factor combines very harmfully with the first factor.
And third, criticism that would be trivial or even reasonable on its own, but which is amplified by social media into a tsunami of criticism that is usually entirely disproportionate to the original offense. “Shirtstorm” is the obvious example.
Absent these factors, I don’t think that criticism of racism or sexism in a work is especially harmful. And with these factors, even criticism that doesn’t mention racism or sexism can be harmful.
Coincidentally, about a half-hour after writing the above, I read an interesting and persuasive defense of calling someone an awful person. Philosophy professor Joseph Levine was discussing an infamous tweet by Stephen Salaita, in which Salaita wrote:
Let’s cut to the chase:
If you’re defending #Israel right now you’re an awful human being.
11:46 PM – 8 Jul 2014
This and other tweets Salaita wrote made a lot of people mad, and caused a university to yank away a job offer.
Commenting on Salaita’s tweet, Levine wrote (and this is just a small part, I’d highly recommend reading Levine’s entire article):
Obviously, if Salaita had been tweeting instead about supporters of the 9/11 attacks as “awful human beings” no one would have been upset.
I locate the source of my initial ambivalence at precisely this point. While I shared his moral outrage… I balked at taking the next step and severely indicting the character of those who disagreed. I resolved my ambivalence by reasoning my way to the following twofold conclusion regarding the claim in the tweet: The claim itself is not true, but it ought to be, and that is the deeper truth that legitimates the breach of civility.
Why isn’t it true? Why doesn’t it follow from supporting morally monstrous actions that one is oneself a moral monster? Because the moral evaluation of character depends not only on what one does but also on the epistemic context in which one does it. In particular, we normally apply what we might call a “reasonable person” test. If a reasonable person, given the information available to her, including the evaluative perspectives available to her, could act a certain way, then even if what she does is in fact morally condemnable, that condemnation doesn’t carry over to her character as well.
By the information available I just mean the obvious — what she’s likely to know about the facts of the situation. But one brings more than just an opinion about the facts to bear in making a moral evaluation; one evaluates the facts from within a moral perspective, a system of values and a scheme of interpretation of the facts in light of those values. A person does not derive her moral perspective on her own, but develops it over time through her social interaction with parents, teachers, other role models and her wider social circle. This is why we judge racists today much more harshly than those who lived long ago; we expect more today. […]
But then this brings me to the second part of my answer: It ought to be true. Or rather, it ought to have been true, and I look forward to the day in which it is true. For if you let individuals off the hook in this case because they pass the reasonable person test, then you have to indict the social-political perspective from which such actions can seem moral and reasonable. No, these people aren’t awful, but what does it say about our society that we can support such [a view] without being awful?
Whether or not you agree with Levine about Israel, Levine’s approach here can be applied to virtually any issue. (Indeed, I have edited Levine’s quote – my edits are marked with ellipses and brackets – to make his argument more “generic,” rather than an argument specifically about Israel.)
For example, I think that being against marriage equality is a bigoted viewpoint. I don’t think it would be a socially acceptable viewpoint in any society that wasn’t homophobic. But given that people were raised in a homophobic society which taught them lies about lgb people, I can understand that someone can be against marriage equality without being an essentially awful human being.
Or a gun rights advocate might say: I think that being against the right to own and bear arms is, in its essence, an anti-liberty position. I don’t think it would be a socially acceptable viewpoint in any society that truly valued liberty. But given that people were raised in our liberal society, in which people are taught lies about guns, and are also taught (falsely) that we can rely on the government to defend us in need, I can understand that someone can be against gun rights without being an essentially awful human being.
Levine goes on to argue that incivility may be pragmatically justified:
Expressing moral outrage in this way — intentionally breaching civility by refusing to merely engage in calm persuasion — is itself part of the very process by which social-political perspectives shift. If it ought to have been true that only awful human beings would support this [view], how do we move society toward that point? One way is reasoned argument, no doubt. But it’s also important to exhibit the perspective, and not just argue for it; to adopt the perspective and provocatively manifest how things look from within it. When you do that, something like Salaita’s controversial tweet is likely to come out.
Is Levine correct? If some people act like Salaita – that is, if we treat people who disagree about a controversial issue as moral monsters – can that bring positive change about faster? My intuition tells me that Levine may be right, and that a mix of approaches – some civil and logical, some shrill and unforgiving – might create change faster than civility on its own will. If so, that’s not a conclusion that makes me happy.
9/11 supporters are few and far in between, and so have very little power or influence. You don’t really need to persuade them. Israel supporters are many, vocal, and influential. You need to persuade them they’re wrong. Methods that treat a large group as if they were a powerless minority are not going to backfire. You’ll alienate them, create a cohesive tribe of pro-Israel activists who will incorporate being attacked people like you as part of their identity. They will be driven by this to defend Israel even more vociferously.
Meanwhile, you will enjoy feeling superior at the expense of innocent civilians in Palestine and why not? It’s not your house being bombed.
And that isn’t the tweet that got Salaita into trouble. Even his opponents are willing to shrug that one off as heated rhetoric. What got him into trouble is tweets like “Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.”
And his response to three Israeli teens being kidnapped and murder – “You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the [expletive] West Bank settlers would go missing.”
And his wish that journalist Jeffrey Goldberg would have “ended at the pointy end of a shiv.”
To call this incivil is mild.
http://www.newsday.com/opinion/columnists/cathy-young/not-all-hate-speech-is-equal-cathy-young-1.9378449
I think you raise a good point. I happen to think there is a time for civil discourse and there is a time for name calling and dropping a million ton rhetorical hammer on someone’s position, depending on the stakes. It IS unfortunate that sometimes to convince someone on an issue that you have to break the code of etiquette.
however… if you want to get through to someone, you use the metaphors that they think in themselves. I would argue reflexively with Noam Chomsky or with Bill O’Reilly if I met them, and the metaphorical speech I used would be completely different in either case. I’m not saying I’d win either one over to my POV but I’d craft my presentation to the situation. In any case, I’d sway over anyone ELSE in the room to my position, which is the over all goal.
At the risk of moving from crypto-fascist to blatant fascist, there is no point in being right if your side loses. A moral victory is still a crushing defeat and the stakes are too damned high for relying on just having the moral high ground.
I recommend this when you have time, I’m working through it and wishing I could read German to get the original flavor. It’s funny as it is, but I suspect it’s scathing in the original.
The audio version is available here, and is perfectly suited for making office mates wonder what the HELL you’re doing.
Ampersand:
My (current) favorite series of essays along these lines starts here.
Grace
This is interesting, and in some ways persuasive. But it’s particularly interesting that Joseph Levine was the one to have written it. The last time I read something by Levine, he was arguing that a “Jewish” “democratic” state was a contradiction, and concluded that argument by saying at the very least, the question had to be discussed “openly on its merits, without the charge of anti-Semitism hovering in the background.”
In that context, Levine clearly viewed invocations of anti-Semitism as very similar to simply calling someone an “awful human being” and refusing to engage within on the “merits” of the issue. Anti-Semitism is not a way of talking about important issues of justice as applied to the particularities of Jewish experience and oppression, rather it is a shut down move that prevents a conversation from proceeding “openly” and “on its merits”. This type of assertion mirrors how Jiro viewed “racism” above — that the “ism” claim is so powerful that its invocation obliterates the possibility for discussion by labeling the interlocutor, well, “an awful human being” who shouldn’t be reasoned with. See also how Levine says we should react to persons who “who spouted overtly racist or anti-Semitic sentiments.” Though, I have to say, the addition of “overtly” is interesting because other than there his argument is precisely that it is okay to treat someone as a terrible person unworthy of reason even where their wrong is not overt or obvious, but represents the (contested) perspective of the particular interlocutor.
My response to Levine at the time was that his request to remove “anti-Semitism” from the discussion over the “merits” of a “Jewish, democratic state” was a “bizarre” one, both because anti-Semitism seems quite relevant to the merits (can a position be both anti-Semitic and meritorious?) and because talking about Jewish institutions without taking anti-Semitism into account means talking about them poorly. Implicit in my account is my view that an “ism” claim doesn’t mean that the target is a bad person; it doesn’t speak to individual motives, and therefore it does not shut down debate by rendering the person outside the bounds of legitimate conversation.
But adopting Levine’s frame, well, why shouldn’t I make precisely that claim? If I do think that in an ideal world, nobody with just views on Jews would adopt the positions in question, then I should be the change I want to see in the world! Taking his position seriously, Levine has no grounds to complain about anti-Semitism invocations in debates about the Jewish state even if the claimants really do mean to say that holders of views like Levine are “awful human beings” who should be excluded from respectable conversation. That Levine, elsewhere, felt justified in preemptively boxing off invocations of anti-Semitism as inimical to open discussion might simply be another case of what’s good for the goose not quite being acceptable to the gander, but it’s worth pointing out nonetheless.
Any approach that involves fairy tales and imaginary creatures is unlikely to produce positive results.
I think there is no shortcut. We have to keep doing the hard work of figuring out how to construct societies which create more space for good to flourish.
I just read the excellent piece that Grace linked to @4. I think the way that my view expressed@6 fits in with that is the last point in that article, ‘always have substance.’ Dehumanizing language is what I specifically take issue with. I’m not averse to harsh language in general. One can mock mercilessly, or rant and rave without denying anyone’s humanity.
Someone who I’m not going to approve to post here just left this comment (trigger warning, holocaust):
Yeesh.
David: I read that same essay, and I remember wondering, as I read it, what you would say to it. :-)
I think that’s a good point you make here. Levine’s approach requires having a great deal of confidence that there’s no way that one’s own view can be mistaken.
That’s a great quote, Kate.
Grace Annam, thanks for sharing that blog, I never saw that writer before. I’ll have to go through Ms. Hope’s postings, she has a firm grip on how to approach winning the great game. (Meaning she seems to agree with me… so far….)
I’m all for singing Kumbayah My Lord and holding hands, but it’s not a way to win a struggle. I was reading not too long ago about how during WWII, Gandhi was asked if the British were so wrong about everything, how would Gandhi propose to deal with the Nazi menace. There was a lengthy quote about the power of nonviolence to make the oppressor eventually feel guilt, blah blah blah.
It is a mistake to consider your enemies to be fairy tale monsters. But it is also a mistake to assume they have as much humanity as the people around you. I think Otto Skorzeny and his troops wouldn’t have been nearly as put off by passive resistance as the Mahatma assumed. The same goes for transphobic Klansmen.
Brian:
Harry Turtledove explored exactly that question in his story The Last Article. You might find it an interesting read.
Grace
Sorry; I meant to say that “methods that treat a large group as of they were a powerless minority *are* going to backfire.”
Grace, great thanks NOW I apparently have to read a lot of Harry Turtledove! I like how he thinks. Read SM Sterling’s DRAKA series yet? (When I’m trolling neoNazis on line as “otto88” I just roleplay a Draka to outnazi the nazis and freak them the hell out. Trust me, it’s fun as hell to make a neoNazi think someone is a monster.)
Also this discussion reminds me of my favorite episode of THE BOONDOCKS from the final season. Picking the best of MANY tactics is a good long term strategy. That’s why I heckle the people who ONLY want riots or ONLY want passive resistance or ONLY complain on their blog.
Practically, this is a meaningless distinction except for politics.
Harsh language historically or disproportionately directed at my favored demographic is “dehumanizing”.
Dehumanizing language uttered against demographics I hate is just harsh language, “mean”, or just the incorrigible spontaneous outbursts by lovably salty personalities.
Perhaps, but every childish jackoff who takes being called rude as a compliment probably thinks of him- or herself in the same way.
I’m reminded of two social science experiments. One in which subjects were paired and hooked up onto electrodes and asked to shock the other person at the exact same level they were just shocked. Unsurprisingly, it rapidly evolved into a series of escalating shocks, because we all rate our own pain higher than anyone else’s, let alone an adversary’s.
The other is the one where Israeli and Palestinian students were asked to rate the same neutral media broadcast for bias, and they both ended up saying it was massively biased against their side. (The Isrealis even more so than the Palestianians, for what it’s worth.)
You get a whole bunch of self-appointed rhetorical hammer-wielders, and you end up with a Youtube comment section. While theoretically your first paragraph is true, there isn’t a single political “side” I can think of that could use more incorrigible saltiness and less basic humility. I know it’s true of my side; if you think yours is an exception, you’re sadly mistaken.
There is a world of difference between the ridiculous Dakka cycle that ignores everything we know about the British government and colonial policy of the period, and the rather plausible and well researched Last Article. Comparing the two is an insult to the latter.
The most horrible atrocities are uniquely human. When we allow the wrong environments to develop (eg. war, totalitarian governmental systems), a depressingly large portion of the population becomes capable of horrible things.
For example,
This man wrote a book which was a tremendous act of moral courage. The work includes probing self-examination of his own moral character, and these lines. I don’t know whether Solzhenitsyn raped and murdered German women or not. But there certainly was a time in his life when he saw nothing wrong with it.
There are clearly times when people or groups are so absorbed in evil that it is impossible to get through to them. In such cases, it is arguable that the use violence is acceptable (I’d want at least one pacifist arguing that side in each decisive meeting, however). It is still dangerous to lose sight of anyone’s humanity. That it was a major factor in the U.S. deciding to use torture on suspected terrorists, for example. On the flip side, framing child molesters and rapists as monsters allows thousands who commit these crimes to go free, at least in part because they seem like such nice people and therefore could not possibly have done such a “monstrous” thing.
Kate, interesting point about framing monsters as monsters making it harder to convict monsters. I’ll chew on that one for a while.
I found this today, and it sort of ties into the point we all seem to be trying to make. How DOES one get through to the most people with the least effort and quickest return on investment?
Exiled From Westboro: Leaving America’s Most Hated Church
I’m not talking about trivial bullshit debates like Kirk v Picard or Harry Potter v Percy Jackson. I’m talking important disputes like “who would win in a fight, Batman or Dr. Doom?”
I think you’re missing a crucial distinction. “Ism” charges are certainly misused or given incorrectly, but then again so are plenty of other insults. People use what weapons they have.
The difference between -ism and idiot, asshole, etc. is is that in modern social justice circles an “ism” charge cannot easily be defended against by the accused. In fact, raising a defense is often seen as “proof” of the charge itself.
So for example, if a Jew accuses me of antisemitism (or a black person accuses me of racism, or a woman accuses me of sexism) my first tasks in a social-justice-warrior world are to “consider” or perhaps to “recognize and reflect” on the accusation. Not to counter it; not defend against it; and certainly not to attack the accuser (even if I think the accusation was false or malicious,) etc.
That’s unlike most other insults. If Bob Blackdude falsely calls me an asshole, it’s accepted to defend myself and possibly level the charge in turn against him. If Bob Blackdude falsely calls me a racist, that doesn’t apply. Why would it surprise anyone if Bob used that difference to his advantage, knowing that he had that hammer? Such actions are pretty much to be expected.
The thing that makes -ism accusations so powerful is that there’s a whole group of people whose social mores lead them to assume the accusation is true, to a much greater extent than other accusations. And since they are damaging and not defensible that means that the only way to disprove them is by other actions, which is why you often find people falling all over themselves to “properly demonstrate” their allegiance to the social justice cause rather than pointing out that the accusation was wrong.
I had to smile when I read G&W’s comment, since I’m finishing up a paper that argues that a defining feature of contemporary -ism discourse is that “there’s a whole group of people whose social mores lead them to assume the accusation is false, to a much greater extent than other accusations.” They will immediately counter that the charge was made maliciously and in bad faith, without pausing to consider its potential veracity.
I’m heading to the airport so I can’t leave one of my normal megacomments, suffice to say it is interesting that you analogize racism claims to asshole claims, rather than to unjust policy claims. If I assert that your policies on the homeless are unjust, it would be considered bad argumentative etiquette to immediately assume my claim is false and dismiss it without considering its potential merits. That’s no way to have a political discussion.
David,
That is certainly true. I hope you noted that I limited my points to a certain set of people, i.e. “in modern social justice circles.”
With things like this it seems at pretty clear that the views cross the spectrum. I don’t think there is really a general rule at all. There are folks for whom every accusation of racism is presumed to be false unless the accused is caught by a Fox News team burning a cross in full KKK regalia, and there are folks for whom the opposite is true. And so on for pretty much every “-ism.”
However:
Actually, I distinguished them, I didn’t analogize them. I agree that they are not treated the same way at all. Whether you’re in the overall reject or accept camp w/r/t a particular set of -isms, you probably still view claims of assholeness on an ad hoc individual basis.
Well, of course I would assume your claim is false, at least if it’s something where I spent any real time considering my own opinions. If I thought your claim was true, then I would share your opinion already, without your having to argue it.
That’s the real issue, not the assumption of falsity. Merits are what’s relevant.
I agree.
But these things are often oversimplified. One might reasonably conclude that the Israeli Gaza incursion was horribly amoral, because children were killed. They view their position as protecting children. Another person might believe that it was moral, because they think it would prevent a different kind of war which was otherwise inevitable and which would kill many more children. they, too, view their position as protecting children.
So the larger “gotcha” point that it’s “bad to kill children” isn’t really a gotcha at all: both people are operating on the same idea but with different assumptions. However, it’s socially unacceptable (as a rule) to admit to that sort of hard-hearted calculation, so it’s often an impossible argument.
Ampersand @9:
That is very close to Chesterton’s definition of a bigot
To your main question:
I think it is not correct. I think it more likely polarizes people and gets them to dig in their heels, so to speak. If you read through his article, he points out at the beginning that Salaita was then accused of anti-semitism. That is the divide: you call me awful, I will call you an anti-semite. Not very productive.
I agree with Kate @6:
The problem is that Twitter (and name-calling) do not allow for the type of complexity in thought that such issues require. They don’t acknowledge that, oftentimes, what we are really arguing about is not “truth,” as Levine mentions, but our judgment about what “ought” to be true, or what we would “like” to be true.
Using the Israel/Palestinian example: it is really too bad that innocent people died (were killed) in the Israeli attacks; it is also really unfortunate that there is a group of people in Gaza who think that there will be no downside to attacking its larger, more technologically advanced, and militarily superior neighbor. However, on balance, I have to come down on the side of Israel. And, in doing so, I am not, by that, relishing in the deaths of innocent people. I am acknowledging the need for a reaction, and their reaction fell within an acceptable part of the spectrum ranging from surrender and evacuation of the State of Israel (unacceptable) to genocidal re-occupation of Gaza (also unacceptable). It is not that what actually happened was the “right” course of action; it is just one of many possible courses of action that I judge to be acceptable, or proper, or okay.
Brian @11:
Yay! We have struck upon the primary feature that can be used to justify any human atrocity we want! There is nothing that stands in the way of “man’s inhumanity to man” so much as the belief that your adversary is your moral equal.
-Jut
The difference between -ism and idiot, asshole, etc. is is that in modern social justice circles an “ism” charge cannot easily be defended against by the accused.
Of course they can, and with precisely the same sort of intellectual dishonesty and ‘tool-using’ you decry. E.g.:
“She’s just playing the race card.”
“Why must you wallow in victimhood?”
“By reaching automatically for accusations of sexism, it’s clear that you’re the real sexist here.”
“Your accusations of bigotry are tone-policing and silencing.”
In most cases people end up arguing about the semantics of the accusation, rather than the underlying facts and policies of the dispute.
People like Salaita and his opponents know that, of course. Which is why they do it. After all, it’s a lot simpler to keep repeating “killing children is always amoral” or “people have the right to defend themselves against terrorism” than it is to make a cogent and defensible argument for a particular solution to a highly complex dispute like the Israel/Palestine problem.
The reality is that there are really very few positions which don’t have at least a few strong counterarguments, and almost no benefits which don’t have some ancillary costs. Honest discourse requires some acknowledgment of the other side’s position, which is almost always lacking when the insults start flying: after all, how can you acknowledge the merits of an argument which you just tagged as antisemitic or racist?
G&W: I agree with you that the merits are the key issue. And while it is trivially true that I presumably don’t hold any beliefs that I ex ante consider to be false, it is also the case that any remotely useful political or social discussion entails acknowledging the possibility that I might be incorrect and my interlocutor correct. Faced with the statement that my policy preferences are unjust (whether to the homeless or to certain racial groups), my first instinct should not be to “defend myself”. It should be to consider the merits of the competing claims and then think through the proper conclusion. In short, that I should “consider” the alternate view, rather than reflexively dismiss it. Or in other words, the right next step is to:
The demand you ascribe to the SJWs doesn’t seem unreasonable, rather, it seems to be the normal predicate for determining the “merits” of relevant social controversies — not accepting the charge’s “truth”, but accepting that it has sufficient potential for validity to be a worthy object of reasoned analysis.
Jut:
Chesterson’s definition, from your link, is “It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.”
That is a neat-sounding quote, and I read it and nodded. But then I had second thoughts. What is the actual difference between “certain I am right” and “unable to imagine how I might possibly have gone wrong?” Is it just that the second phrase seems super-certain rather than merely certain – so it boils down to “I am really, really certain I am right”?
Really, I think the difference might better (but less elegantly) be expressed as the difference between being “provisionally certain” and “absolutely certain.” The important thing is the presence of some tiny room for doubt on the left side of Chesterson’s equation, not the extra-strongly-worded certainty on the right side of the equation.
What you are describing here is the world as I wish it to be. But I’m not certain that’s the world as it is. Were the people who are calling Salaita an anti-Semite, ever persuadable in the first place? I frankly doubt that any of them would, in the short term, join Salaita in a position of what I’ll call “radical contempt for Israel.” The measure of Salaida’s success is if his rhetoric – and if the larger platform that he now receives as a result of the controversy – can successfully bring more fence-sitters to his side. I don’t know if it does or not, but I don’t feel able to dismiss the possibility that it does.
Switching to another issue (because I really don’t want this to be a thread about Israel), I think it’s the case that in many communities – especially communities of young people – it is socially unacceptable to be opposed to SSM. That is, if you want to vocally oppose SSM on many campuses, you have to first overcome the reasonable worry that people will judge you harshly for it. (This is, ironically, similar to the position that pro-LGBT-rights people were once in, and still are in some right-wing areas).
This couldn’t have happened without the more merit-based policy arguments that have taken place. Once the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage began being questioned, the policy argument against marriage equality collapsed with amazing speed. The courtroom wins were also essential, because many of the anti-equality arguments fell down in the face of real-world experience (i.e., the sky failed to fall).
So what we’re talking about is not the fear of being judged harshly alone, but a combination of sound policy arguments, smart legal strategy, and in addition that people fear being judged harshly. And I do think it’s plausible that those three factors together are bringing about change faster than if we had only had the first two factors.
G&W:
Easily. I honestly don’t even see the difficulty here. For example:
“You may be right that more intensive ‘broken windows’ policing would bring down some crime. But even accepting that for the sake of argument, in practice it would mean locking lots of young Black men for minor violations. Any gains would be hugely outweighed by the harm of our justice system becoming even more racist and harmful to Blacks than it already is.”
Also, I’m appalled by your offhand equation of “antisemitic” and “racist” with “insults.” Concerns about racism and antisemitism are legitimate policy concerns. (Yes, they can be used as insults, but your framing implies that the only reason for stating a concern is to insult the person you’re arguing with.)
Quick comments directed at people whose comments I don’t disagree with enough to have a response to them:
Brian, I really enjoyed that article about the ex-Westboro church dude. There could be a really good graphic novel about a child growing up in that environment.
Kate, to repeat what Brian already said,
is a really good point.
Mythago, yes yes yes.
David, thanks so much for your comments here. Really good stuff. Also, I hope you had a nice flight.
Amp @26:
The way I take it is that you start from a position of humility: you really don’t know crap about the world. Always understand the ways in which you might be wrong. It is harder to think about in a context in which you agree; it is harder to understand how a position I believe could be wrong. But, imagine you are a KKK member, who thinks that blacks and Jews are inferior to white Christians (by which I mean Protestant Christians, of course; not the Papists). Then, it would be pretty easy for you to imagine how you might be wrong.
Having been raised Christian, I can look at the Jews and say, “okay, maybe they do not think that he was the Messiah; either they are wrong or I am wrong. I believe I am right, but I understand the terms and conditions on which I may be wrong.”
Same is true with Islam. I think Christianity nicely rounded out the Bible and brought a lot of closure to some loose ends. I don’t really see the need for the Koran and I think it is incorrect. I think that it is beautiful that the God of Abraham, who taught Abraham not to sacrifice his only son, and who went on to kill the first-born Egyptians, made amends with humanity by sacrificing his only son on Passover in order to redeeem all of humanity. We do not need the Koran to “complete” the story. BUT, I understand that I am mistaken if the Koran is true.
Same thing with God in general. Even if I believe in God, I still have to understand the materialism in most atheistic positions. And, you know what: I don’t have a big problem with that. Yes, I believe what I believe, but I understand the consequences if I am wrong.
And, by consequences, I don’t mean physical consequences. I mean mental ones. You probably support SSM. What if, WHAT IF it were proven tomorrow that homosexuality is, in fact, a mental disorder? Or, to put it more mildly, what if we discovered tomorrow that homosexual behavior was SINFUL?
Would that change your point of view about anything?
I always try to take that point of view, which leads me to be pretty skeptical about anything someone tells me. Maybe that is too much philosophy; maybe it is too much legal training, but I am in total control of the crap in which I believe. And, generally, I know what I need to believe if I am wrong about that crap.
So, for most things, I try to recognize what my assumptions are that lead me to my certainty about a proposition. Because, then I know on what basis I will be wrong about something.
I know you don’t want to make this issue about Israel, but I wanted to respond to this:
That thinking goes both ways. When he calls the “pro-Israel” people “awful human beings,” is he preaching to the choir? Are THEY persuadable that Israel’s actions were justified? Going back to Chesterton, do they understand what it would take for them to be wrong (and I will say that of both sides)?
If not, they are bigots (or, to put it more mildly, they are close-minded).
-Jut
Kate, I had time to chew on your point back in @17 summed up with
Here’s my point of view on that. Since Wikipedia has pages of other people with the same philosophy I can’t be the only one. (I only wrote half of them, so at least other person makes this shit up. And I betcha didn’t KNOW I originally created Thomas Hobbes for my Iron Man fan fiction.)
Humanity and civilized behavior aren’t innate traits. Left to their own inner drives, humans would be as civilized as the average pack of chimpanzees… except with bigger brains to devise worse ways to pound the hell out of rival troops. It is only because of learned, imitable behaviors, culture and indoctrinated belief systems and all that accumulated trivia that we aren’t all large brained sociopathic predators roving in bands.
http://altereddimensions.net/2014/gombe-chimpanzee-war-four-year-war-for-territory-kidnapping-rape-murder-1974-1978
https://harvardmagazine.com/1997/01/right.chimp.html
Beliefs and culture are not objectively TRUE, but they are nevertheless important. We cooperate and function as societies based on shared belief structures. There is a lot of debate as to what the OPTIMUM socially constructed fiction for a group to remain cohesive around. For instance we now see that ISIS can win battles but can’t do things like build roads and handle trash collection. In the long run, their culture is crappy at infrastructure so they’ll crumble one way or another. Another example, The Soviet Union had some advantages in terms of team building but was undone by inefficiency and corruption. North Korea will likewise eventually crumble, even though their brainwashing of the masses is perhaps the most thorough since the ancient Egyptians who were able to maintain their civilization for thousands of years.
People who say things like “I believe X, but that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong” act as though it’s some great act of courage to be lukewarm in their commitment to their beliefs. Nonsense! If they aren’t sure about what they believe they should immediately shut up, go away and put some thought into what they believe are proper opinions to hold. Read some books and evolve your ideas.
Lukewarm believers are even WORSE than the dim witted slugs that can’t be bothered to form opinions more complicated than “I’m hungry.” Going back to Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ, just because I want some Google user in Greece to accidentally find this blog post someday.
Life may be inherently meaningless but at least pick a side and start swinging, as the Existentialists almost never put it except privately.
I’d say that the slugs and the lukewarm believers are the ones who sit on juries and give monsters a pass because they can’t be bothered to BELIEVE in something as important as evil. If you believe in evil, of COURSE you believe that your neighbor can look normal but secretly be a witch/Satanist/Serial Killer/Islamist/Heretic/Vampire. If you’re too dumb to make a choice, or too lazy, or too afraid to call a devil a devil, of COURSE you’ll shrug and say “meh, he doesn’t LOOK like a child cannibal, let Albert Fish go home.”
Now not all ethical systems and created cultures are equally “nice.” If anyone asks my advice, I push them towards one of the kinder, fuzzier, fluffier, cutesy-wootsey ethea out there. In fact, I’ll use WHATEVER tactic seems most likely to sway either the person I’m talking to or someone in the crowd over to whatever fluffy form of civilization seems to suit them. Polite reason, mocking sarcasm, reduction to the absurd, and any logical argument OR fallacy in my toolkit if it keeps one person from joining an ethos I find repugnant.
And I’ll ALSO remind them that culture is a war to the death, and ISIS, Stalinists, the Gnomes of Zurich and the Fourth Reich tend to want to chuck fluffy civilizations, lukewarm believers and slugs into giant blenders set of frappe.
So arcing back to Amp’s original post and the closing line;
Well HAPPY isn’t the point, the point is to try and make sure the future belongs to one of the fuzzier, fluffier, kinder and gentler invented belief systems that keep the chimpanzees from tearing each other apart.
Now I have uniforms for anyone who wants to line up…
What do you mean by “humanity” here? You go on in your post to talk in detail about civilisation, but Kate’s post doesn’t make reference to that, she makes reference to “humanity”.
You seem to imply (but not explicitly state) that “humanity” is a positive quality, one that is associated with the human capacity for good but not with the human capacity for evil, and potentially synonymous with what you call “civilised behaviour”. If so, I think you and Kate aren’t talking about the same thing. And regardless of whether I am right about that, it seems to me to be confusing to talk about a property of “humanity” that is not innate to everyone who is a human. Why do you want to do so, when your notion of civilisation suffices for your argument?
I think this is an interesting issue/question, and I’d like to join the conversation. But for now, I’ve addressed the matter of monsters at length before, here and here. And I never got around to writing about the Salaita controversy. It seems to me that the discussion has gotten sidetracked from the question of civility, and I’ll try to say something about that later. I think, for example, that people may be confusing moderation of tone/style with moderation of substance, which is a very common error. Has anyone else read the anthropologist F. G. Bailey’s book The Tactical Uses of Passion? It has a lot of neat ideas and insights that are relevant to this discussion.
Eytan Zweig, whenever someone picks a word or 2 or 3 out and asks “Why did you use THAT word? I can’t think about the topic or your overall theme until you explain this exact sentence fragment!” I have but one response.
“Is there someone we should call to take you home? WHERE IS YOUR MEDICATION?”
Unless you’re applying for the job of editing my MANIFESTO FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM, I remind you that picking out sentence fragments is just silly behavior and will not get you taken seriously. I don’t fall for the internet commentator trick of trying to make me parse every single word out of context.
I see you’ve bought into a recent strain of sociological and feminist thinking and conceive of racism as a system of group privilege. Good for you, I’m sure that’s a wonderful way to think about things – but let be clear, 99% of people have not read a word of post-90s sociology or feminism.
Most people use the word racism in a traditional manner, as belief in racial inferiority/animus – a la the Nazis and Jim Crow. There’s nothing offhand about this; I’m telling you that if you throw the word racist at anyone who isn’t versed in recent social justice thinking – they’re going to take it as an insult and for good reason.
It’s not as if anyone is actually unaware of the history of racism and that the conventional use of the word racist is perjorative. Unless they’re sure they’re talking to someone on the same page as them or they immediately spell out a technical meaning, it’s use is absolutely a deliberate attempt to insult someone.
To my mind, you’ve got it backwards. I think it is the framing of certain crimes as only committed by monsters that actually leads people to reduce them to “a little lapse…”, when confronted with a real human perpetrator with demonstrably good qualities as well as bad. I think that if we acknowledge that people are complicated and a person with many admirable qualities can nonetheless do something utterly horrible it will ultimately be easier to hold charismatic, likable perpetrators of evil accountable, not more difficult. In short, my answer to the “he’s not a monster” defense is “He doesn’t have to be a monster to be held accountable for the evil he did.”
I guess I do judge today’s racists a little more harshly than those from the past, but not “much more” harshly. I still judge those old-timey racists pretty damn harshly. And I notice that, even in very racist historical contexts, there are sometimes individuals or small groups who managed to do better than those around them, without having had any better information–they were just better at facing up to the information they had.
Brian:
That’s not what I said, or what I asked, though. I understand your topic and overall theme. I asked about the one aspect I was confused about, because I am curious about your opinion about the matter, not because I’m trying to invalidate the rest of your post.
That said, it wasn’t a random word I picked, it was the main word of overlap between your post and the post you are nominally replying to. If you rather I’d phrase my question as a thematic question, here goes:
Brian, I understand what you are saying, and I agree with most of it. I don’t understand how it relates to what Kate was saying. Would you mind clarifying there?
Note that when I say I don’t understand something, I mean exactly that. I’m assuming I’m failing to see something here that you had in mind, not trying to disguise a criticism.
This thread reminds me of an amusing holiday event: Child A comes up t oa group of parents, crying, saying “my sister called me a stupid asshole!” Child B, when grilled by parents, says “I didn’t call her a stupid asshole. [deep breath] I said she was BEING a stupid asshole! Because she was! Really!”
Child B didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. It wasn’t her fault that his sibling was being a stupid asshole. Was it? And it wasn’t an insult, really; she was just speaking the truth. Accuracy isn’t insulting, right?
Child A disagreed, to put it mildly.
And unsurprisingly, the conversation focused all about “what you should say to your sister” and not on “what your sister did to make you call her an asshole.”
Anyway…
Since you’ve seen me (on this very blog!) talk about both racism and antisemitism, this protestation comes across as entirely bizarre. The fact that something is used as an insult in one situation does not preclude it from being relevant somewhere else.
If you’re really appalled… well, I’m OK with that. Can I be appalled at your misreading?
Personally, I subscribe to the “everyone’s human” concept and not the unspoken-but-common “minority groups are special people who would not misuse a weapon they possess” concept. People like to win arguments and protect their position, and if they can use pejorative and insulting terms to win, they will. Accusations of racism, antisemitism, and the like are powerful weapons which can win a conversation, so they get used all the time.
Eytan Zweig;
Civilization is a positive quality; either you have it, or you don’t. You exist in a society with an ethos greater than family bonds and a loyalty to that civilization or you don’t.
Humanity is a positive quality. Either an individual has an empathetic connection to other members of humanity beyond family bonds, or they don’t.
Being HUMAN merely requires the correct DNA pattern and a pulse.
It is possible to be human without a shred of civilization. Pick any professional outlaw or bandit for an example.
It is possible to be human without a shred of humanity. Pick any North Korean authority figure maintaining a nation wide concentration camp as an example.
And of course one can be civilized without any humanity, or vice versa.
Both positive qualities can be added to any given human with varying degrees of effectiveness and ease. A barbarian can be civilized, a monster can be humanized. Obviously starting them off before the age of reason as a blank slate is a lot easier than rehabilitating a firmly established cutthroat, bandit, pirate, cannibal, concentration camp guard, Boko Haram/ISIS soldier, etc.
I had assumed the layers of meaning to “humanity” were clearer than they apparently are. I will have to add a chapter to my manifesto.
Better?
I keep my religious views secret in my real world life because I am concerned that it could lead to negative treatment or retaliation from people who disagree with them. This doesn’t require the people around me to be a slavering hatemongers- I just doubt that they’d be as comfortable with me as they are now if they knew I was an atheist, and since my career path relies on interpersonal relationships with a wide variety of people, I can’t afford to let that happen.
The same is true of my views on race, or patriotism, or a wide variety of other issues. I live in conservative territory. If I were to casually mention that I think that it is self evident that Ronald Reagan was a white supremacist who operated as President based on his white supremacist beliefs, well, that would probably do even more damage to me than coming out as an atheist. So I keep my yap shut out of sheer pragmatism.
Now none of that involves my first amendment rights, or me being “destroyed” by mob violence or anything crazy like that. But it does involve me being afraid to speak my mind because my livelihood would be at stake if I did.
Sometimes people on the political right say that they are worried that expressing opposition to gay marriage, or other conservative views, will cause them similar harms. Specifically, they worry that being accused of racism, or sexism, or whatever, can lead to witch hunts against them that would ruin their livelihood. And they feel that this creates a chilling effect on their speech.
As for whether this is a realistic thing for conservatives to fear- obviously it is. This happens, prominently, and publicly. Anyone who claims otherwise instantly loses all credibility. Not to mention that even if your career isn’t wholly destroyed, that doesn’t mean it can’t be harmed. I live in an awfully conservative area, but if I were a conservative who opposed gay marriage I would still keep my mouth shut. A non-zero number of judges in my area are liberals, and it can’t possibly help my career to make them think I’m a jerk.
Attacking the conservatives claim on the grounds that there are people out there who were accused of racism or sexism who did not have their careers destroyed by witch-hunts is ridiculous. It’s like pointing out all the unarmed black teens the cops HAVEN’T killed.
As for whether this fear is a fair thing to inflict on conservatives… On one hand, I suspect that a lot of positive social change has been driven by people becoming afraid to say awful things out of fear of social consequences. I don’t think white people were cured of racism in the 80s, for example. I think that anti-racist sentiment became politically powerful enough that saying too-obviously racist things became something people were afraid to do. So they stopped, and slowly, over time, invented imaginary pasts for themselves where they were never really that committed a racist at all. In fact, they always loved MLK! What a nice guy.
This is pathological in some ways, but better than all the white people still being white supremacists.
On the other it would be kind of morally despicable of me to pretend that being realistically and validly afraid to say what you think is not a harm.
So my overall view tends to be- my fear of social ostracism and loss of livelihood should I be overly public with my views is a harm that it is unfair of me to suffer, because my views are good and publicizing them and advancing them is a morally acceptable act. But when other people do it, well, it’s STILL a harm, but it’s one that I think they should have to deal with because their views are morally bad.
Which may sound selfish and hypocritical, but it’s not, really… no more-so than being ok with the police shooting someone in valid self defense, but not due to unjustified fear and paranoia. Moral judgments be local, that’s how they do.
And until someone else comes up with a better solution that doesn’t involve lying to myself about how my fears are valid and everyone else’s aren’t, I guess it’s all I’ve got.
Yes, thank you, this helps me understand what you meant.
This reminds me of something I realized when I first started college. My university had a pretty big population of kids like me — Jewish kids from the northeast — and also a pretty big population of evangelical Christian kids from the rural south. When I first got there, when we were discussing issues about race or socioeconomic class, I was sometimes stunned by what some of the rural southern kids were saying. But after a while, I realized — what was actually stunning me wasn’t that they were saying those things at all, but that they were saying them in public. I’d heard plenty of similar things in the northeast, but always in a whisper, after the person glanced around to see who was listening.
Thinking in terms of “us vs. them” and “civilized vs. uncivilized” makes it very hard to prosecute people who we have already established themselves as “us” within a group. The Catholic church finds it so hard to remove child molesters because those priests had already established themselves as one of “us” within the church, while their victims have not. Police forces have a great deal of trouble dealing with the domestic violence among their ranks, because those officers have already established themselves as “us” with law enforcement, while their partners and children have not. Us vs. them thinking also leads groups to commit atrocities against people identified as “them”, like the U.S. torture of suspected terrorists.
Yeah, this actually reminds me of another amusing holiday anecdote:
Child A comes up to a group of parents, crying, saying “my sister called me illogical and unscientific!” Child B, when grilled by parents, says “I didn’t call her illogical and unscientific. [deep breath] I said she was BEING illogical and unscientific! Because she was! Really!”
Child B didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. It wasn’t her fault that his sibling was being illogical and unscientific. Was it? And it wasn’t an insult, really; she was just speaking the truth. Accuracy isn’t insulting, right?
Child A disagreed, to put it mildly.
And unsurprisingly, the conversation focused all about “whether or not the first child’s views had been described accurately” and not on “what you should say to your sister.”
—–
So we’ve both got our charming little anecdotes. In mine, the children are somewhat older, mind you, but still.
The question is whether “you’re being racist” is more like “you’re being an asshole” or like “you’re being illogical and unscientific.”
For me, the question has to come down to the informational content of the claim. That is, when you say someone’s “acting like a stupid asshole,” there really not much content there that couldn’t be conveyed by pointing and hollering “BAD! NO LIKE! BAD,” or calling him a shithead, dickhead, jerk, etc. It’s a garden standard “I don’t like the way you’re acting” claim.
When you say someone is “acting illogical and unscientific,” there’s a specific informational content, and a specific claim being made. Interestingly, it’s not an interchangeable one. That is, saying someone is “acting like a stupid asshole,” (or hollering “BAD! NO LIKE! BAD!”) doesn’t convey the same information as saying that they’re “acting illogical and unscientific.”
We know this because it’s possible to be both, either, or neither. You can be illogical and unscientific while acting like an asshole or without acting like an asshole, and vice versa. There are plenty of people who are illogical and unscientific and simultaneously the nicest folks you’d ever care to meet.
Furthermore, you can analyze the claim of “illogical and unscientific” in a way that you cannot analyze the claim of ‘stupid asshole.” That is, you can look at what “illogical” means, and what “unscientific” means, and get a sense of whether they were applied correctly. It’s a lot harder to do that with “stupid asshole,” because its meaning is so broad and vague.
So when we look at this axis of analysis, which is “that thing you’re doing is racist” more like? Well, it’s clear that it’s not interchangable in the way that “stupid asshole” is. It seems to have a much more specific meaning, and what’s more, moving on to the second part, a meaning that is more amenable to analysis. So in that way, “racist” is more like “illogical and unscientific” than it is like “stupid asshole.”
And I’d suggest that we ought to treat it that way too … that is, let’s not give in to the screaming children who don’t like having their unscientific and illogical views pointed out. Let’s not allow the whiner’s veto to control discourse. If someone makes a claim of racism that you disagree with, by all means, argue about it – but to rule it out of bounds to make a possibly-true informational claim is ludicrous.
—Myca
Yes Myca @ 44!!!
An additional problem is, if you’re marginalized, using pretty mild language often results in charges of incivility, unfairness, “hysteria”, or the like. I’m thinking of the big kerfuffle over “Elevator Gate” in which Rebecca Watson described a man following her into an elevator at 4:00 a.m. and asking her to his room for coffee. She didn’t identify the man. She just said “Guys, don’t do that.” And all hell broke loose. A similar thing happened recently with “Shirtgate”.
Without people around using less-civil tactics, pretty mild criticism will be even more likely to be framed as uncivil, particularly when it comes from marginalized people. Allowing uncivil rhetorical tactics means that we can at least try to dismiss tone arguments as irrelevant and get to the content.
That’s a great quote, Kate.
Yeah, Myca, but mine actually happened, to my great amusement. on 12/26. Although to be entirely honest, it was “a fucking asshole.” And all of the people who were standing on the playground and who weren’t that kids parents were trying desperately not to crack up, because the words were so incredibly shocking, and the excuse was so incredibly funny, all from a 10 year old boy.
The point is that your anecdote doesn’t really apply here, because, “you’re acting racist,” isn’t very much like “you’re being a fucking asshole,” for the reasons I outlined above.
Truth isn’t a defense for insults, but it is a defense for true claims, even if they’re true claims that the target feels insulted by.
—Myca
Agreed.
Also agreed.
I disagree with this, at least generally.
Sure, if you’re in a CRT class or at a NAACP lecture then chances are that “racism” is considered to be an intent-irrelevant system; of social power and force; which may not require harm to an identifiable victim; which may result from microaggressions; which may result from objectively neutral behavior causing disparate impact; and so on..
But that is not how many people use the term. In fact, I suspect that is not how most people use the term: I’d bet you a beer that more than 50% of the population (I suspect much more than that) would define it to include an “intent” element; and that a similar number would reject the “disparate effect” theory; to pick a two examples of many.
That’s pretty important, especially in the USA where we as a country are incredibly focused on intent and free will.
Similarly, there are those who define “antisemitic” as “things which have a disparate impact on Jews” and those who include “…because of the fact that they are Jews.” They ain’t the same, not even close.
So, then: if you (the global you, not the Myca you) use those terms and you don’t clarify that up front–and you don’t clarify it for any third party listeners–are you lying? Are you taking advantage of a deliberate misinterpretation? Are you pretending to be unaware of how the words are most commonly used?
To riff of an article I read a few months ago, do you think that people who hear or read “___ found that the SATs are racist” actually understand the underlying meaning to be “we can’t figure out why and it may have nothing to do with the SATs themselves; and we can’t seem to be able to fix it which suggests it may not be the test; but for some reason we find that certain definable racial groups have differences in average SAT outcomes?”
I don’t.
Nor do I think that people who quote the “1 in 5” statistic actually think that their audience understands the very specific limitations of that statistic. Nope. I think they are well aware that a ton of folks will misinterpret that claim and think that “20% of women are raped.” And that misinterpretation is what they want, because it simultaneously grants them political power and a bit of a safe fallback (“I only pointed to the study, it was up to you to read it.”)
In other words, I think that a lot of the time these types of things are deceptive–either accidentally or intentionally. And THAT is because the words have such immensely variant meanings.
Don’t get me wrong: if you want to say “I believe that this program, although facially neutral, nonetheless has a disparate impact that correlates with race, for reasons we don’t fully understand” I am all for it! That is the equivalent specificity of saying “your argument is illogical because it relies on the ___ fallacy.” Everything included in the racism/antisemitism/etc. arguments can be said on its own without the problems caused by using broadly misunderstood and hotly disputed and often-insulting terms.
I don’t know if it’s a whiner’s veto or an anti-hyperbole club. Often I’m with #2. That is a matter of opinion, and I suspect you disagree.
Assuming it’s true, if someone says “your argument for a facially-neutral process ignores the fact that it has a disparate impact that correlates with race” I’m fine with it.
If they say “your argument against AA would mean we could not treat POC differently and selectively give them benefits, thus continuing the results of past inequality” I’m fine with it.
If they say “your argument would radically disempower the military of Israel and would make it very difficult for Israel to maintain its status” that’s OK.
If they just say “your argument is racist and antisemitic,” knowing or not caring that many third parties will interpret that word to align with a claim of personal animus and malicious intent, they’re being a dick.
Too rich a blog topic for me to do justice to it. But in brief, Amp entitles this thread “Being called racist or sexist does not ‘destroy’ people, and, Joseph Levine’s defense of calling someone an awful human being.” I read this as an invitation not to talk about racism or sexism or awfulness per se, but to talk about the language we use when discussing these topics.
With that invitation (or any invitation, or no invitation!), I’ll again offer my favorite strategies: I strive to speak literally and specifically. I strive to speak about myself where possible. I strive to avoid stigmatizing terms. And I strive to avoid the verb To Be.
Consider how much of the conflict discussed here involves the verb To Be. “You’re a racist!” “That’s sexist!” “You’re an awful human being!” “He’s an inhuman monster!” “She was being a stupid asshole!”
People will disagree and conflict; no amount of language tricks will let us avoid that. But language tricks may help us avoid needless disagreements and conflicts. If I do something that inspires you to say, “You’re being a stupid asshole,” I probably won’t like it. But if you express the same thought while speaking literally, specifically, and avoiding the verb To Be – I probably still won’t like it. But we might have a better chance of focusing on substance, not form.
The word “racist” has more content than “asshole” – indeed, so much content that I often cannot discern its meaning. Does the word mean to suggest that behavior has disparate impacts on people of differing races? Or does the word refer to behavior motivated by feelings about members of certain racial groups? Or perhaps merely people of certain socially subordinate groups? Or perhaps behavior motivated specifically by animus toward members of those groups? Should I regard research into cycle cell anemia as racist? Does the fact that black people disproportionately support Obama reflect racism? Different meanings would support different conclusion.
As a parting thought, I try not to rely on a word’s stigma to convey my meaning. If I can convey ideas adequately, I can rely on my audience to impute the appropriate judgment.
Sure, when I lack sufficient time to compose carefully, or when addressing lighter topics, I violate all of these strategies. Hey, I’m only human – er, I mean, I have many of the same weaknesses as others.
I think you can call someone racist or sexist, and mean that as an insult, with all the non-social-justice-usage “you’re horrible” subtext, and still have it be more substantive than just calling someone an asshole. That is, it can simultaneously be both a criticism and an insult. I don’t need to believe “racist” is a toothless, bloodless description in order to contrast it with “asshole.” (And sure, some people DO just use it as a baseless insult, but that doesn’t mean that it should be banned from use by people who mean something by the specific word–even if they’re also trying to be insulting.)
I don’t have much to say in regards to the rest of this discussion, but I’ve been reading with interest, so thanks for all the thoughtful posts from everyone.
Just wanted to point out while calling someone a “racist sexist transphobic cis-biased Eurocentric capitalist running dog for the bourgeoisie” may be a death blow insult in Social Justice Warrior circles, MOST people will laugh it off as the rantings of a silly hippie. Or they’ll say “Damn right ah am! YEEEEEE-HAW! Git me a rope!”
I’m pretty sure Amp was talking about deliberately trying to hurt people’s feelings in ways they would CARE ABOUT in order to get them to shut up, listen, and possibly rethink their positions a little. It’s interesting how SJWs feel about particular insults but the point was…..
BTW if none of you ever heard National Lampoon’s LEMMINGS tour album, I suggest it as a way to celebrate New Year’s Day.
G&W
@21
@49
If we’re limiting the discussion to people within social justice circles, they know the more nuanced definition of racism. If we are not limiting it to social justice circles, then we’re talking about people who don’t care enough about social justice issues to educate themselves about even the basics; and who will probably respond with one of the quick answers listed by Mythago @23.
G&W@24
That is a choice people make, not a force of nature. People do this when they don’t want to deal with the substance. It is a classic derailing tactic.
Yes, most of the time. But of course, being “social justice” types, they tend not to limit their discussions only to other folks like them. Because, social justice. Right?
Wow. That is a nastily elitist statement.
First, it conflates “cares about social justice issues” with “cares about our set of particular semantic definitions.” Which is a pretty blockheaded view: plenty of people can come to the conclusion that “this situation isn’t fair” without being able to preface it with the statement “as described by critical race theory…” I personally care about all sorts of social justice issues while rejecting all sorts of ridiculous claims and semantics used by social justice warriors–like this one, FWIW–and I am confident I am not alone.
Sigh. This is why they hate our freedoms.
But it also exposes another inherently elitist (and pretty annoying) theme in a lot of social justice conversations: that any disagreement with the norm is just because you haven’t been educated/inoculated/exposed enough, and not because you actually disagree.
It’s sort of the ultimate hubris, really. I mean shit, I disagree with intelligent, educated, people all the time (hi, Myca!) but I usually figure that’s because they have different opinions than I do, not because they would think like me if only they knew what I knew. For some reason, SJ types in particular all seem to think that a conclusion in opposition merely requires more training.
Do what? Label a substantive objection “derailing” and pretend that giving the label is the end of the objection? Yeah, I agree, that certainly happens a lot, almost always by a social justice type. After all, calling something “derailing” is just an elitist way of saying “I don’t think that point is relevant,” without having to make the usual followup of “…because ____.”
Oh, wait, that probably wasn’t what you meant, was it.
Anyway, I don’t understand why this is so hard.
If you want to know if someone is actually disagreeing with semantics or content, the solution is very simple. All you have to do is talk about the content without using the disputed semantics. Assuming you know the relationship between content and label (which you must, if you’re a social justice type) that should not be so hard. After all, you’re the one who is simultaneously pushing an ideology that relies on redefining some key terms, and also trying to get the public at large to sign on to it.
A good example of this done right is the gay marriage debate, where it turns out that a lot of people who are squicky about the label “gay marriage” are actually not nearly as opposed to the content of what gay marriage actually is. And oddly, the choice not to refer to them all as uneducated antisocial homophobes seems to have worked out pretty well, at least so far.
The social justice definition of racism is regularly raised on mainstream t.v. news programs like MSNBC and CNN. It is regularly mocked on Fox news. It’s not the ivory tower jargon you’re framing it as.
You don’t have to agree with any particular semantic distinction to know that there are complex debates surrounding the definition of racism, that not everyone has your perspective, and that it would be best to stop, listen and think a bit before assuming someone is just having a go at you for their own amusement.
Well, which is it? Before, you said
And now you seem to be
Well, good thing. But of course semantics and language do a lot to control outcomes of discussions. Presumably this is why you’re pushing your preferred semantics.
Well, that much is obvious, I think. I know other folks don’t have my perspective.
You know, I’ve heard a variety of people use the “stop, listen and think a bit” line, and the similar “shut up and listen” line, and I have noticed that it tends to be a bit one sided.
I mean, sure: if you want to “stop, listen, and think” while I explain my philosophy; and if you want to seriously consider changing to my side, then it would be courteous for me to do the same. That’s just normal debate rules.
But “shut up and listen” is usually a SJ byline, and unsurprisingly (given the “you just need more education” theme) it seems that the “stop and listen” is meant for people OTHER than the SJ folks. They claim that they don’t need to listen to opponents as much, it being a “derail,” or “101,” or… well, choose what you want.
I think this post by David is relevant to this discussion. (I don’t remember David linking it in this thread; apologies if he already did and I forgot).
In an interview with BET, President Obama said:
As David points out, a whole bunch of prominent conservatives reacted to this by accusing Obama of having “played the race card.” David writes:
My experience is that there are a lot of people who will say “how dare you be insulting!” or “you’re playing the race card” or the like regardless of how I phrase things. It doesn’t matter if I use or avoid the term racism.
And incidentally, G&W, most marriage equality opponents [I know] would say that equal marriage proponents constantly describe them as “uneducated antisocial homophobes” or the like. It’s a frequent complaint on their side. To some degree they’re right – of course there are many pro-SSM folks who describe the opposition as a bunch of homophobes. (Not all, but not a small number, either).
Are you accusing me of not reading and thinking about your posts? My response @54 was a direct result of my stopping, listening to you, and moderating my hyperbolic statement @53.
Listening to you in other threads has led me to really think more about how policies that I think should be in place to reign in large multinational corporations might hurt small businesses and what sorts of exemptions need to be made to protect people like you.
Maybe you are repeatedly told to stop and listen because you seem to be listening primarily to figure out how to score your next point in the debate, and not to really form an understanding of the other person’s position.
That’s been my experience as well.
I once had a discussion with an opponent of SSM where he was literally trying to goad me into calling him homophobic. Like, he’d present an argument, and then say, “And you’re probably going to call me homophobic for saying that.” I kept replying with, “No, that argument isn’t homophobic, but it is illogical,” and then outline why it was illogical. I think he took “illogical” as even more of an insult, whereas he might have worn “homophobic” as something of a badge of honor — like, “I got someone so upset that she called me homophobic, and everyone knows that calling someone homophobic is what they do when they don’t have any other argument, so that means I won the argument.” I wouldn’t play along with his game, and he kept getting more and more irritated at me, and his “You think that’s homophobic, right? RIGHT?” bits at the end of each argument kept getting more and more desperate. (His argument was essentially, “Marriage now is about having children. Gay people can’t have children, so allowing gay people to marry would fundamentally change the definition of marriage.” After I pointed out everything that was wrong with that argument, he finally backed into “Marriage SHOULD BE about having children, and if it isn’t now, then we should change the laws so that it will be,” which made even less sense than his first argument.)
From the original post:
I cannot think of a single significant progressive social change that has not depended on at least the threat of incivility (if not actual violence) on the part of those whom the change was intended to help. I would also point out that the backlash against those changes, when it has worked, has depended on at least the threat of incivility, etc. from the other side.
There is a time and a place—and I tend to think it is most times and places—for education, for the kind of patient, accurate language that G&W is talking about, but there is also a time and a place for saying, “Get your foot the fuck off my neck!”
I mean, after all, to take G&W’s example @49, your argument for a facially-neutral process ignores the fact that it has a disparate impact that correlates with race is an argument—as are all the other examples he gives. By which I mean, simply, that it can be argued with. The evidence brought to support it can, for a long time was, and in some places continues to be discounted, dismissed, trivialized. At what point is it okay to call those arguments out, plain and simple, as racist, even if the people making them are not overtly espousing some kind of racist ideology? At what point does their education, or lack thereof, become their responsibility, with the label racist—applies to themselves and/or their ideas—being the consequence of their failing to live up to it?
I also think it’s important to point out that the kind of language G&W is talking about, whatever its merits, tends to obscure the differences between what is at stake in such arguments for those who benefit from the racial disparity and those who don’t—not because the language is inaccurate, but because its measured nature, its invitation to disagreement and debate too easily serves the interests of the status quo, which doesn’t need to change as long as the argument remains unsettled.
Please note: I am not suggesting the argument shouldn’t happen, that a simple charge of racism should be enough to motivate, in this case, large scale changes in standardized testing, etc. and so on. I am merely pointing out that, at some point, the measured language of debate and reason will stop serving the needs of the people who are being discriminated against, regardless of whether there is a conscious intent to discriminate or not. And I don’t think it is my place to tell them when that point has been reached.
If we are not limiting it to social justice circles, then we’re talking about people who don’t care enough about social justice issues to educate themselves about even the basics;
Wow. That is a nastily elitist statement.
First, it conflates “cares about social justice issues” with “cares about our set of particular semantic definitions.”
I basically agree. You can care about these issues without spending much time reading about them in internet spaces like this, or taking a course, etc. It may be hard for SJ people to envision someone caring as much or more about these issues without doing the type of self-education that they do, but I think a lot of that is Typical Mind Fallacy.
But it also exposes another inherently elitist (and pretty annoying) theme in a lot of social justice conversations: that any disagreement with the norm is just because you haven’t been educated/inoculated/exposed enough, and not because you actually disagree.
But if David Disagreer [made-up name to make this sentence easier to read] knows and disagrees with the social justice definition of racism, and you are indeed talking about “in modern social justice circles”, then disagreeing with the SJ definition doesn’t meant that David doesn’t understand what the definition is, so he knows very well that the SJ-people aren’t talking about David Duke-style racism, and the SJ-people are not taking advantage of equivocation/ignorance of their definitions. So I don’t see how Kate’s statement has anything to with people who know about and disagree with SJ definitions; I think it only applies to people who have not been exposed to them in the first place. So I don’t think that this 2nd accusation of hubris is valid.
I somewhat agree with both the original post and this, from pocketjacks:
While theoretically your first paragraph is true, there isn’t a single political “side” I can think of that could use more incorrigible saltiness and less basic humility.
I’ve seen before the idea that causes need both a good cop and a bad cop, or both an MLK and a Malcolm X, etc. In a way I find that kind of reassuring, because I also don’t think it makes sense, most of the time, for the good cop and the bad cop to be the same person. And I think that there are already plenty of “bad cops” out there, better suited to that role than I am.
Something I think we should keep in mind in this discussion: another white person can call a white person racist, a man can call another man sexist… and a white person can call a black person racist/prejudiced. Shirley Sherrod did in fact lose her job due to a false accusation that she discriminated against white people. (She was later offered it back when the accusation was proved false.)
brian:
This seems like a philosophy that will lead to people becoming awful human beings (see Guantanamo, tyranical dictators, etc). The road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that.
Richard Jeffrey Newman:
Never.
Well maybe, once you’ve collected enough evidence on a given individual to demostrate a pattern of unambigious logical fallacies or blantent rejections of evidence that consistently favour racially convenient conclusions. Essentially, if you want to level an accusation about the motivations of a another person you have to spend the effect to make your case. Otherwise you’re just resorting to cheap ad hominems to counter conclusions you don’t like. Which will likely just lead to ad hominems in return and a lot of grief and lost energy and respect without much gain.
From the original post:
I think this is creating a false dichotomy. There are certainly going to be cases where logic and evidence will fail to change minds. However, I think there are many ways to provoke thought and reconsideration that don’t involve a shrill verbal assault on character, and will probably be more effective too. They probably take more effort, requiring consideration of audience and forum, as well as having empathy for the perspective of the person or people you’re trying to convince. They also won’t provide the same rush of faux moral superiority as applying offensive labels based on technicalities, so I guess it depends on your motivations as to which one you’ll use.
In some ways it seems like there’s an attempt to rationalise the belief that if you can’t work miracles by acting like an adult it’s acceptable to throw a tantrum like a two-year old.
desipis:
I think you’re avoiding the question, which is, really, how does one know that this point has been reached? My point might be different from your point, and—here I will speak for myself only—since I am white, I imagine my point will be very different from someone who is African American.
This misses the point. I was asking—and I was asking specifically in response to G&W’s point about semantics—about the point at which you can say to someone, plain and simple, “Your argument is racist” regardless of what you do or do not know about their motivations. And, again, I will point out that I think it matters a great deal whether you are imagining someone like me or someone of color making that statement.
Wow! Where in this conversation has anyone advocated acting like a two-year-old?
RJN:
There is no objective point. There will only be degrees of confidence. Obviously each individual will have a different degree at which point they consider it acceptable to use the label in an unqualified manner. Which is why it’s important to provide the basis for which the label is used, so that people can understand why they agree/disagree about the use of the label rather than simply getting into a yes/no fight over it. Essentially, I’m arguing that “racist” is such an emotionally charged and ambigious term that it’s never acceptable to use the term in isolation from an justification of why it’s being applied.
For example:
Structuring the criticism in this way enables you to rebut a specific part of my argument. For example: you could argue that you are discriminating on race for reasons based on your expectations of how society would treat people differently based on race rather than a fundamental difference between the races, that the supplied definition of racism doesn’t adequately cater to the moral nuance of your position and therefore the racist definition isn’t morally conclusive.
Compare that to being faced with rebutting a vague but significantlly offensive charge of “your argument is racist” where you would have to spend significant effort to enumerate the many ways that the label could be applied and then attempt to rebut all of them.
Thanks to Richard Jeffrey Newman for his analysis @61. Noting that appeals to reason and open-mindedness will not always succeed in changing behavior and attitudes, he argues that there is a time and a place for saying, “Get your foot the fuck off my neck!”
I ask, what does saying “Get your foot the fuck off my neck!” accomplish? And how does it accomplish this? If we feel justified in saying “Get your foot the fuck off my neck!”, are we willing to acknowledge that people who disagree with us will be justified in saying “Get the fuck back in line!”?
Yes, reason does not always achieve change. No strategy always achieves change.
On the now-defunct Family Scholars blog, Amp and I (and others) would bat back accusations about same-sex marriage. In response to one of my more persistent interlocutors (“Chairm”?), I would typically turn the tables and ask him to state the harm he anticipated arising from SSM. He always ignored the challenge until one point when he responded to a mean-spirited argument of mine with, “Fine – I’d be happy to explain the harms arising from SSM, just after you admit [something or other].”
To his dismay, I promptly responded, “Ok, you got me; I admit it. HEY EVERYBODY, LOOK HERE: CHAIRM IS AT LONG LAST GOING TO EXPLAIN THE HARM ARISING FROM SAME-SEX MARRIAGE! Chairm…?”
You won’t be surprised to learn that no list of harms was forthcoming. Nevertheless, I don’t recall ever calling Chairm names, or even explicitly accusing him of arguing in bad faith.
However, I was not shy about providing readers with reasons to draw their own conclusions on this matter. I would periodically post messages such as “Let it be acknowledged that A MONTH HAS PASSED SINCE, ON THE FAMILY SCHOLARS WEB PAGE, CHAIRM PROMISED TO IDENTIFY THE HARMS ARISING FROM SAME-SEX MARRIAGE [with link to original post in which Chairm offered his challenge]. While I cannot prove a negative, if the readership of the Family Scholars web page cannot identify a single harm arising from SSM over this period, this raises substantial doubts that anyone has in fact identified any such harms.”
Did I behave uncivilly? I don’t believe so. I expect Chairm came to feel beleaguered by my posts. That was not my purpose, but it was a burden I was willing to impose on Chairm, given that he had agreed to accept it (at least rhetorically). But I imposed the burden in an effort to counter an oft-alleged challenge to same-sex marriage in the only way I knew how. And I was always willing to shift to evaluating the harms he identified, rather than his failure to identify harms, as soon as he identified some. So if Chairm didn’t like being the focus of the debate, he had the capacity to shift the focus of the debate at will. Yet he declined to do so.
And I suspect my posts, and Amp’s posts, and the posts of others, were effective, in this: They had the effect of inspiring the conservative-leaning hosts of Family Scholars to shut the blog down. If you lack the will to expel other players, and lack the capacity to challenge other players, your only remaining strategy may be to take your ball and go home. Maybe there was no cause and effect here, but maybe so. I’ll never know — unless Amp does?
Desipis:
Then, two paragraphs later:
To me, there seems to be a massive contradiction between these two statements. Am I wrong?
Also, and more importantly to me, our hosts changed their minds and are now in favor of marriage equality.
I tend to think minds change, partly, because of the cumulative impact of a lot of things. No one changes their mind as the result of one argument; rather, over the course of dozens of arguments, bits of their own position begin to ring hollow to them, or seem insufficient answers to the questions at issue.
So in that way, yes, I think you and I and Fannie and a lot of other people contributed in small ways to changing some minds there. However, I don’t have any special knowledge.
Ampersand:
The second paragraph refers to things that aren’t “cheap ad hominems”, so I don’t see the contradiction.
It seems to me that some commenters would like to argue that calling an argument racist is so likely to be offensive that the tactic should be forever verboten in polite company.
And, broadly, I agree with Amp: when it’s effective, I would rather engage with people politely, within the bounds of what everyone involved agrees is civil discourse.
And, if this were merely a discussion for polite company, I would probably agree that no one should ever do it. But it’s not a discussion for polite company, and it’s not a game. There are stakes.
Sometimes polite is insufficient. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., made this point famously and eloquently in his letter from the Birmingham Jail. He touched on it in different ways and locations, in the letter, one instance of which is this:
…and, more famous because it’s excerpted more often, this:
Note that it is the Letter from the Birmingham Jail, not the Letter from My Desk in Atlanta. It got wide play, and is now considered a significant document, precisely because, in his very careful and thoughtful way, Dr. King acted in such a way as to create a disturbance and get himself arrested.
Much earlier, Frederick Douglas made a related point:
Finally, last year Drag Queen Panti Bliss observed publicly that certain people, who were arguing against her civil right to equal treatment, were homophobic (she is a gay man; “she” is a customary pronoun of courtesy for drag queens when they are in drag). They declared her statement defamatory, sued, and won a monetary settlement. She then pointed out the absurdity of the situation in a subsequent public speech, which was recorded, and is well worth watching it its entirety.
When people say, essentially, that it is never okay to call something racist, or homophobic, or transphobic, I can appreciate that they have had the painful experience of having an act of theirs called racist, or homophobic, or transphobic, or whatever, when they earnestly believe that it is not. (Indeed, I myself have had that experience, and I agree that it’s no fun… though in almost every case, once I stopped being defensive I also learned something…)
But at the same time, I can’t help but think of Panti’s point.
Sometimes you have to call something what it is.
As Dr. King pointed out in his aforementioned letter, to do this well there should be a process — his was investigate, negotiate, self-purify, rock the boat — but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. When the choice is between “argue strongly that it should not be legally permissible to fire or evict me because I am a certain race/ethnicity/gender/whatever” and “hurt an entitled, sensitive person’s feelings”, it won’t take long before I’m willing, if it seems necessary, to hurt some feelings.
Some people have the luxury of treating discussions like this as a rarefied academic exercise. But it’s not a party game. There are stakes.
Grace
[Edited for clarity]
Thanks, Grace. You have said, very eloquently, much of what I was preparing to say in response to desipis and others. I particularly appreciated this quote from Panti Bliss:
A couple of things, though:
Desipis wrote:
Where in this conversation has anyone argued, has anyone said they were talking about trying to justify using the word racist in isolation from providing evidence for why something is, in fact, racist?
nobody.really:
I can think of any number of ways in which this dynamic is useful—and this is just to underline the point that Grace made above—including stripping away the fig leaf of intellectual justification from those whose true feelings are get-the-fuck-back-in-line.
To make this personal: These days, when I encounter antisemitism, because there is almost never any direct threat or danger to me personally, I am usually willing to take the time to explain why something is antisemitic, and I am usually willing to take care to differentiate, explicitly, over and over again, between saying that an argument, an image or whatever is antisemitic (because these days, in the US, it rarely has anything to with policy or practice) and calling someone an antisemite. However, there have been times when those arguments don’t work, when the person to whom I am talking is so deeply invested in the antisemitism I have been trying politely to critique, that they leave me little choice but to conclude that they are indeed an antisemite. And I tell them so. And it is not uncommon for them to respond with some version of get-the-fuck-back-in-line, and that’s okay. Not because I think their position is “okay,” but because with some people it is good to have the lines clearly drawn.
There is a great deal of privilege and entitlement, as both text and subtext, in insisting that reasoned argument is always the only and best way to proceed—which is different from saying that it should be one’s first choice in dealing with discrimination and oppression. (In situations where someone’s foot is not literally on the oppressed person’s neck—because I would hope that everyone would agree, at that point, that the oppressed person is perfectly justified in doing whatever it takes to get out from under that foot.) As I said above, reasoned argument not only leaves the status quo in place for as long the argument continues; it tends to justify the status quo, for as long as the argument continues, because it requires the one arguing against the status quo to grant to the status quo the possibility of legitimacy. I am not suggesting, therefore, that reasoned argument ought to be abandoned: it is crucial in making change happen, and there are times when it can, in fact, be the source of change. I just think it’s important to remember—as Grace pointed out so eloquently above—that there are people in these arguments for whom the stakes a good deal higher and more personal than even the most impassioned ally and that those people cannot always afford the luxury of reasoned argument.
It strikes me that quotes like desipis’s
and g&w’s
make the most sense in the context of an argument that is intended to convince the person you’re arguing with to change their beliefs. And in that limited context, I quite agree with them. But of course that’s not the only function of an argument, as Grace and RJN (probably among others) discuss above: you can, for example, be trying to convince the listeners, or make your issue part of the broader discourse, or many other purposes. And there, it’s possible that the “your argument should be convincing, and insults aren’t convincing” statements don’t apply.
Grace. You might want to reflect on why in his *Letter from a Birmingham Jail* MLK didn’t use the the word racist *once*, whereas you can barely go two blogposts without breaking it out. It speaks volumes.
Grace:
OK, let’s accept that for a moment and consider a hypothetical. Imagine Alice is having a conversation with Bob about the local gangs. These particular gangs happen to be predominately African American. Alice is tired of living in fear of violence from the gangs ad the policed seem unable to solve the problem. Alice has tried talking to the gang members into giving up their life of violence and crime, but her reasoned words seem to have no effect.
So during this conversation with Bob she decides to call something what it is. She calls them “niggers“, because they are black and behaving in an uncivilised manner. Maybe the harsh words will get through to them where civilised discussion hasn’t. Even though there are many interpretations of the word, she doesn’t think African Americans are inherently this way, but rather she feels the word fits in this case.
She’s just calling them what they are, so it’s all good, right?
Of course there are stakes. All sides of a political discussion are going to be motivitated by the fact that there are stakes. This makes it all the more important for civil and ration dicussion to take place to ensure everyone’s interests are taken into account. You don’t get to unilaterly decide that your issues are ‘real’ and others’ issues are ‘trivial’ and therefore you have an excuse behave badly. That will just lead to everyone considering they have the right to behave badly to advance their own interests. At which point things devolve into bitter partisan fighting and things get ugly.
Pete Patriot: You really, REALLY do not want to cite that letter for that point. It literally endorses the opposite of your position, whether it uses the specific word “racist” or not.
“You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.”
It just goes on like that. The whole letter is a torrent of rejection of the idea that one must always debate calmly, rather than take action to make people uncomfortable and unhappy, and to force your issues thereby.
Not to mention, it does use the word “racism,” and it’s crystal clear about who it’s referring to.
If you want to argue that a lot of the people supporting call-out culture are mendacious, sure. Or that they’re going to take advantage of relaxed norms against calling people racist in order to backstab their political opponents, yeah, they probably will. Or if you want to argue that they’re hypocritical in the coupling of an endorsement of call-out culture and their belief that calling people racist doesn’t meaningfully harm them, go for it. (This blog post should probably be entitled “Being called racist or sexist does not destroy people- not for want of trying on our part though! I mean, we have a few heads on our pikes, but nowhere near the number you believe we do, and nowhere near the number we want! Crossing our fingers for 2015 though!”)
But if you go into the conversation arguing that calling people sexist or racist is somehow beyond the pale and should almost never happen, you’re going to lose, hard. Because you’re wrong, and that’s what’s supposed to happen to ideas that are wrong. Sometimes people ARE racist or sexist, sometimes the debate IS over and people are obstinately refusing to cede ground anyway, and sometimes you have to call people out. Sometimes “winning” doesn’t look like a debate opponent conceding a loss, sometimes “winning” looks like your opponent slinking away in shame, to regroup and fight the same battle again later.
The idea is just to call people out when it is appropriate, and not when it is not. I know that comes across as a tough order that leaves a lot of room for individual interpretation and abuse, but what are you gonna do, that’s life as an adult.
Yes, I do. It’s a great example, MLK was in a position where he had every right and temptation to call people racist. But he didn’t. Why? Perhaps it has something to do with principles 2, 3 and 5 of the philosophy of nonviolent direct action he was preaching?
It’s very telling that while MLK was willing to take action he was very concilliatory in his language, even in jail. It’s perverse to claim the Letter as as supporting Tumblrinas and their Two Minutes Hate.
Pete, that’s not even remotely a fair description of Grace’s position. (It’s also bizarre coming from someone who claims to be arguing against name-calling.)
Please try harder to construct your arguments in a way that suggests respect, rather than contempt, for those here you’re disagreeing with. Whether or not that’s the rule in general discourse, that’s what we’re trying to do here on “Alas.” Thanks!
(P.S. If anyone wishes to argue with my moderation, take it to an open thread, please. Thanks again.)
Pete Patriot:
You may not be aware, Pete, that I have a local copy of everything I have posted on Alas. I knew that your characterization of me, above, was absurdly inaccurate, but just out of curiosity, I did a search, in my posts, on “racist”. There is one occurrence. Scroll up in this thread, and there it is. Note that even in that case, I am careful to talk about arguments rather than to characterize — or caricaturize — people.
Then I searched on “racism”. There was one in October… oh, but it was in a blockquote of something written by gijoe sports fan. There was one in September… oh, but that was in a blockquote of this site’s moderation policy. There was one in March, where I used it in an analogy while talking about a different topic, but I’ll stand by what I said, on that one:
There was one in January. Oh, but that was in the context of a heartfelt and meaningful discussion with Eytan, where we both learned something and ended the conversation regarding each other highly, where I drew a distinction between having some internalized racism — something so common as to be practically universal — and being a racist — something much rarer.
In 2014, I posted or commented at Alas roughly 100 times. Two instances of “racist” or “racism”, and in both cases used in analogy, not in direct address against any person, or even any person’s argument.
Then we’re back into 2013.
I’m not sure who is speaking volumes to you while using the word “racist”, but it doesn’t seem to be me. Our discussion might generate more light and less heat if you actually engaged substantively with what I said, rather than attacking of a caricature which represents what you think I am.
But of course I didn’t do that, as anyone who read my comment in good faith can see. To argue that a given word or tactic should not be completely forbidden is, obviously, not the same thing as arguing that the given word or tactic is desirable in all circumstances, or most circumstances, or many circumstances. It might be appropriate only in a very limited number of circumstances.
Further, I work hard to post thoughtfully and carefully in very select locations, which don’t include Tumblr and Twitter. Really, Pete, I have no doubt that you can do better than mischaracterizations like that.
I teach the ethical and legal use of force. It’s only ethical to use force in very limited circumstances, and the greater the force the more limited the circumstances.
When desipis writes…
…they are making the argument that because I think that it can be ethical to shoot someone, then I must think it’s ethical to shoot someone in a circumstance I haven’t discussed.
No, desipis, it’s not all good. I really shouldn’t even have to point this out, but calling an argument racist (which is what I’ve been discussing, whatever it is that you and Pete Patriot are discussing) is very, very different from calling a human being a “nigger”.
But even if we want to discuss calling people names, are you seriously arguing that calling a person “racist” is equivalent to calling a person “nigger”? Because in my opinion, those aren’t equivalent, and the latter is much worse.
Patrick is right in saying:
Grace
Pete Patriot- He didn’t “call them racist” in the literal sense of “using those specific words.” He TOTALLY called people racist in the sense of accusing them of committing, condoning, or ignoring bombings of black churches and homes, violent assault of black protesters, economic deprivations, etc, etc, etc, and he attributed their actions in committing, condoning, or ignoring these things to their views on race.
He used very high class language- but the entire point of the letter is:
1) You (the people to whom it is addressed) believe that I (MLK) should just “negotiate” rather than push you in ways that make you feel uncomfortable, but that’s too bad. All talk and no action accomplishes nothing. Strategies that concern themselves with whether white moderates will feel uncomfortable or nervous or angry at me accomplish nothing. This is not your decision, and I am not going to abide by your requests except where I believe it is tactically useful of me to do so. You are fair weather friends, which means that until you produce something of value for my movement, you get nothing.
2. The reason my protests make you feel uncomfortable is because you are the problem. My protests are not aimed at the people committing bombings or at corrupt police who attack non violent protesters. They are aimed at you, who sits by and feels incredible concern about your own feelings, but very little concern about our far greater deprivations.
MLK uses conciliatory language, but he uses the conciliatory language to tell white moderates that they are racists, that he will NOT give them ANY conciliation beyond what they’ve already received, and if they don’t like it they can go get bent. Upper class language is not the same thing as a conciliatory tone or a respectful attitude.
It’s basically a primer for the argument that the people you’re disagreeing with are making.
Now you can argue that there are, as you wrote, “Tumblrinas and their Two Minutes Hate” who are unfairly using this letter as support for their position. And to that I can only say that yes, these people completely exist, definitely, you’re right about that.
But here’s the thing. Arguments aren’t just points on one side or the other’s scoreboard. They connect to the conversation in specific ways.
Let’s analogize to self defense law.
The Tumblrinas, as you called them, would be the NRA types who claim to be supporting a strong right to self defense, but are really just violent murderous loons who are willing to believe that their lives are in danger at a drop of a hat, because they really, really, REALLY enjoy the idea of shooting someone.
The Letter would be a reasonable, well written treatise on self defense.
And you’d be a radical pacifist arguing that because the the first group of people are idiots who misuse self defense law, we should throw out the entire concept.
So the Letter might not support their position per se. But it definitely doesn’t support YOURS.
All analogies are false equivalences. To say this is to miss the point.
The point here is that Alice has achieved nothing by (in her view) “telling it like it is”. She is no closer to getting the gangs off her street and, as a bonus, she’s alienated Bob.
Let’s say this is true.
To err is human, and there are two ways to err here – one, not calling someone a racist when they are and two, calling someone a racist when they aren’t.
Which type of error do you think will happen more often? The one which requires you to exercise charity while talking to your opponent or the one where your opponent may end up “slinking away in shame”?
And which do you think is more harmful to your cause in the eyes of third parties – the one where you look like an overly charitable human being attempting a civilized conversation with someone who is obviously refusing to consider the facts, or the one where you look like you’re resorting to name calling because you’re out of arguments?
You’ve been on the internet for a while – do you think there are too many overly charitable folk who make their cause look like it’s constantly conceding defeat, or too many name-callers who make people think their cause is full of awful people they don’t want to associate themselves with?
There’s another reason that you shouldn’t call your opponents racist or sexist – you’re probably wrong. For some reason discourse in the west seems to arranged itself along a left-right axis and people obstinately hold all kinds of views that are wrong. I see people who seem to be very savvy about race or gender holding very strong positions about economics even though they know nothing about the subject. They think that you can raise minimum wage to $15 with no zero effect on unemployment, or that raising minimum wage to $8 will flood the streets with hordes of jobless young people. They think that a billion dollar stimulus will have no effect on government debt, or that sharp cuts in spending will boost the economy. They stubbornly hold these views despite not being either communists or running dogs of the bourgeois.
Political partisanship can look a lot like prejudice, in that it involves people stubbornly holding on to views in the face of obvious facts. Partisanship against Israel looks a lot like antisemitism, even though it might not be.
Given how polarized debates are, is it not possible that the person arguing that women can’t abuse men, or that high incarceration among blacks is caused by “rap culture” isn’t prejudiced, but merely partisan? To call this person prejudiced (which is what “sexist” and “racist” imply) would be incorrect.
“Given how polarized debates are, is it not possible that the person arguing that women can’t abuse men, or that high incarceration among blacks is caused by “rap culture” isn’t prejudiced, but merely partisan? To call this person prejudiced (which is what “sexist” and “racist” imply) would be incorrect.”
Uh, no, I’d call both of those people prejudiced.
I’m perfectly happy with an understanding of “prejudiced” that encompasses “believes ridiculous and negative or damaging things about people that they would not believe if they could think clearly about race/gender/whatever, or if they could handle the idea of other people’s lives being as important as their own.”
“And which do you think is more harmful to your cause in the eyes of third parties – the one where you look like an overly charitable human being attempting a civilized conversation with someone who is obviously refusing to consider the facts, or the one where you look like you’re resorting to name calling because you’re out of arguments?”
I completely agree that sometimes calling people racist doesn’t help you in the eyes of third parties. But here’s where you and I disagree- you, for some inexplicable reason, believe that because this sometimes happens, we should never call people racist. I think the flaw in that reasoning is obvious.
I think it’s pretty obvious that desipis was in fact trying to make a direct equivalence between the two; I’m not sure how else to rationally interpret “She’s just calling them what they are, so it’s all good, right?” in the context of the rest of their post and Grace’s post they were responding to.
This strikes me as a distinction without a difference. If someone adopts prejudiced views for partisan political reasons, that doesn’t magically make those views non-prejudiced. And note the distinction between prejudiced views and prejudiced people – a distinction that some people in this thread are trying very hard to keep clear, even though it (to some degree understandably) seems to keep getting muddled.
@Patrick
That’s not the definition of prejudice that most people use, and the meaning of a word is determined by the way a community of speakers uses it. You’d be seen as confused at best and mendacious at worst.
You misread. I’m saying that this happens very often. Never calling people racist would be a net improvement. Of course, it would be best if people just used it when appropriate (see e.g. Donald Sterling), but they aren’t going to. And the way errors work is in the direction of too much rather than too little.
@Lee1
I think it’s pretty obvious that desipis was trying to draw an analogy. But I’m sure he’ll explain if and when he gets back. I shall not speak for him. I feel like I’m already hijacking his discussions. Can’t help it- his arguments are too good.
Regardless of what desipis intended, you and I can see an analogy. Calling someone a racist is pointless and alienating, much like calling a bunch of thugs “niggers”.
They’re very different from a “what do I do now” POV. You could shame a racist; you can’t shame – only anger – a partisan. There maybe some upside to calling a racist a racist; there is no upside – and lots of downside – to calling a partisan a racist. The tactics you have to use on racists (i.e.calling them racists) are very different from the ones you have to use on partisans (i.e. calling them partisans).
Suppose you were criticizing Israel for killing hundreds of Palestinians and someone calls you an antisemite. What, in your opinion, has this person accomplished?
Very well. Suppose you were criticizing Israel for killing hundreds of Palestinians and someone calls your argument antisemitic. What, in your opinion, has this person accomplished?
What I’ve noticed among *some* Social Justice Warriors is a 100% conviction that they are always right. If they spot anti-semitism or slights against transsexual people, for instance, they are always dead-on right.
What is funniest is when they flip their positions. Professor Doctor Hugo B. Schwyzer was good at that. A “professor” who was in reality a dopey instructor at a dopey community college. He would try to tear pro-porn people apart with a mocking smirk, until he flipped over to being a pro-porn feminist. They he would try to rip the other side apart with a mocking smirk. Same with his flips in religion across three major religions. He was always 100% right, no matter what side he was on. He told other people to stop, listen and think, but he never did so himself.
That’s not really a person I would strive to be.
How clear do I have to be? You want to argue in favor of being impolite and using the word racist on the internet. Great, perhaps you should try to actually quote support from someone going so far as to use the word racist. Citing an instance where MLK wasn’t willing to go as far as you are, even after being beaten and jailed in the deep south, makes you look ridiculous. It also shows a complete lack of understanding of his method. Perhaps you should look up some Malcolm X speeches for next time?
I guess where we differ on this is that as far as I’m concerned (since you seem to really want to talk about people being racist instead of ideas being racist) if someone is a racist for partisan political reasons, they’re still a racist – their status as a racist doesn’t depend on how they came to hold their positions, just that they hold them. I also don’t understand why you think it’s any easier or harder to shame a racist than to shame a political partisan who holds shameful views as a result of their partisanship; that certainly hasn’t been my experience.
You honestly don’t see a fundamental difference between calling someone a racist (or ideally calling someone’s views racist, with support for that claim – a distinction Grace and others have tried very hard to make) and calling someone a “nigger”? Really?
In this particular simplistic example, without any other information to go on, I’d say the person accusing me of anti-semitism is in the wrong. When accusations like racism, sexism, anti-semitism, etc. are made, I don’t think anyone here is claiming that they’re always accurate or that they don’t require some justification to be taken seriously. This seems like a fairly silly strawman argument.
I think it’s more a case of “you miswrote,” or at least you’re explaining your position very poorly. I had the exact same interpretation as Patrick, and nothing in your most recent comment (e.g. “calling someone a racist is pointless and alienating”) indicates to me that interpretation is inaccurate.
Are you under the impression that so-called “Social Justice Warriors” differ from any other group of human beings in this regard? I’d love to meet a social/religious/ethical-viewpoint group of any meaningful size that doesn’t include among its membership some proportion of people who think they couldn’t possibly be wrong and who are unwilling to engage in serious self-examination. I’d also love for it to not be almost 10 below zero where I am right now, and for the Cardinals to win the World Series every year. Sadly, none of those things is going to happen.
The discussion of the precise verbiage MLK used in his letter got me thinking. I’ve read a lot of stuff on American racism (it being one of my areas of speciality), and in the older material I very rarely recalled seeing the term “racism.” So I decided to n-gram it, and it looks like my instinct was right: the word wasn’t commonly used — by anyone, for any purpose — until about the mid-1960s (“racist” has a similar trajectory).
Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written in 1963, came just before the term “racism” really started to take off as a descriptor for the type of phenomenon the civil rights movement was attacking. MLK not using it, in all likelihood, reflects this infrequency more than any sense of politeness.
In any event, now I’m interested in why the term caught on at that precise historical moment and how it development its current cachet (which seems to include a contemporary sense that the word always had this sort of raw emotive power, even though that’s actually a relatively recent development). The more you know!
Pete Patriot:
Well, since you ask specifically, I’ll answer: With all due respect, since you are apparently experiencing frustration in getting your point across, let me suggest that you should try being clearer than you have been.
You’re a lot closer to the mark, but you’re still not understanding my argument. I’m arguing that use of that word should not be per se forbidden. I have not argued that I think it’s always a good idea.
Actually, MLK went farther than my argument, above.
I was making a general point about making people uncomfortable as being a tactic which can be useful in pushing a cause forward. In the letter I cited, MLK argued that it was not just useful, but in some circumstances, essential, a point which Douglas also made, many decades before, which is why I cited him. Finally, I gave an example of the Orwellian results of a group of people having the power to decide when and where a minority is allowed to use the term which means, literally, hatred/oppression of that minority.
Using the word “racist” (which, as I already demonstrated, I do very seldom) is one way to make someone uncomfortable. It is not the only way. It is not necessarily the best way. It depends on the circumstances.
Martin Luther King was not speaking in all circumstances; he was speaking in a specific circumstance. Sitting in the same circumstance, I also might not choose that word (which, as Doug later points out, was not used then in the way people use it now). That still doesn’t mean it should be forever off the table as an item of vocabulary in all circumstances. Use of the term (or any term) depends on when you use it, where you use it, and how you use it.
“Racist” is not an explosive. It is not a string of characters which automatically detonates civil discourse. For instance, in many circumstances one could describe an avowed white supremacist as “racist” without it even occurring to anyone to object.
Here is the essential point I am making, which I wrote out above, letter-for-letter:
I then made an analogy between my argument that impoliteness is sometimes a necessary tactic and MLK’s argument that breaking the law is sometimes a necessary tactic.
And that’s how MLK’s letter is relevant to the point I was making. Not because it’s an example of incivility, but because he was making a similar argument, and actually taking it farther.
While we’re on the topic of politeness, I think I’ve been more polite toward you, in this conversation, than you have been toward me, even as I argue that sometimes one has to be impolite and you argue that one should never, ever be impolite. My politeness doesn’t appear to have been very successful, but hope springs eternal; it’s my default and preferred mode, and while I am capable of being sarcastic or angry, that’s not where I spend most of my discussion time.
Regards,
Grace
Adding controls, you can get an idea of how commonly it was used, and racist was used more commonly then that antisemitic, homophobic and misogynist are now.
MLK would have been very familiar with the word and very familiar with exactly how it was being used at that time.
Malcolm X’s Speech at the Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity – 1964
“That’s not the definition of prejudice that most people use, and the meaning of a word is determined by the way a community of speakers uses it. You’d be seen as confused at best and mendacious at worst.”
Wow. Ok. Well, now I know why you’re so eager to de-stigmatize believing ridiculous things without reason because of a self centered view of the world.
I’m just going to put this here, since my above comments apply to everything that’s come up since. ;)
I don’t understand why you think that’s relevant. You made a misguided argument that since MLK didn’t explicitly use the word “racist” (although he did use “racism” – you apparently consider that to be a significant difference…?) even though he was clearly talking about people he considered racist, and Grace did use it (a very small number of times over the entire past year, as she documented) she “look[s] ridiculous.” David Schraub made the really interesting point that the specific words “racism”/”racist” were used much less commonly in the early 1960s than they are now, even in situations where the people/views under discussion would clearly qualify. Even given your bizarre fixation on the word “racist” itself as opposed to the concept, that should be enough to make it clear how silly your argument is. Why do you feel the need to compare it to contemporary usage of “antisemitic,” “homophobic,” or “misogynist”?
@Navin Kumar
I’d missed this comment before, but Patrick’s definition of prejudice @83 seems pretty reasonable to me, and I certainly don’t see him as confused or mendacious. What’s wrong with his definition, and why do you think it wouldn’t match with what “most people” use?
King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was written in response to eight white Alabama clergyman who believed that the fight against racial segregation should be fought only in the courts, who disapproved of the tension caused by the demonstrations King was leading and who didn’t like King’s timing. (Which is a paraphrase of Wikipedia’s summary.)
I find it telling that the people who are arguing in this discussion against using the word racist or racism to describe things that are in fact racist—that, instead, we should proceed with deliberate, measured, argument (not unlike what happens in a courtroom)—are making precisely the kind of argument that those white clergy were making.
Also, while King may not have used the term racist or racism, he had not problem using the word oppressor and oppressed to describe, respectively, white and Black people:
And here as well:
Surely calling white people oppressors carries a weight that is analogous to calling someone racist.
Richard Jeffrey Newman:
As a possibly interesting sidenote, he did use “racism” in his letter from the Birmingham Jail, once:
I ran across it when, out of curiosity, I checked Pete’s assertion that “racist” appears nowhere in the letter, which appears to be true, but I happened to typo and search on “racis”, which turned up the above.
However, I didn’t bother to mention it because it seemed beside the point and nitpicky, and I was trying to be substantive.
So, for whatever it’s worth, there’s a bit of trivia.
Grace
Brian, thanks for that clip, which I have enjoyed before. Here’s another one I’ve referred to previously here at Alas:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbdxeFcQtaU
Which, actually, can be very useful to people who have been accused of saying something which someone regarded as racist.
A quote from that video which seems particularly relevant to this conversation:
I have found that, often, people find that video interesting and useful.
Grace
I’m sure the people arguing against invective all support MLKs message of nonviolence, however hard they find it to live up to his standard.
I find it telling that the people arguing a black man with a doctorate who lead the civil rights movement isn’t going to be familiar with the word racist are making precisely the kind of judgements that those with the dogs and fire hoses were making.