In her writings about how people debate and discuss political and social issues with each other, one of the points Iris Marion Young tries to impress upon her readers is the importance of certain norms of conversational etiquette, such as the “greeting”, to the project of respectful dialogue. We often view things like a greeting as a polite but fundamentally extraneous pleasantry that is outside, external to, and irrelevant to substantive content of the exchange. Young argues instead, though, that acts such as the greeting serve important functions that are essential to mutually respectful engagement — affirming people as part of the discursive community, signaling that they are a welcome part of the discussion, representing them as equals.
The importance of conversational norms to this project was further impressed to me by the experiences related to me by my girlfriend while she was taking a seminar on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Many elements of Rousseau’s writings Jill found to be quite sexist, and she would say so in class. She’d get the chance to speak her piece and then … it was as if she never said anything. It wasn’t that she got shouted down or her points belittled as stupid. It was more that the other members of the seminar didn’t view her concerns or arguments as something important enough to be acknowledged, as against what they wanted to talk about. Understandably, Jill felt disrespected, and did not feel like she was being allowed into the conversation as an equal.
This came up between Jill and I because, regrettably, I’ve done similar things in conversation — transitioning to the topics I find interesting and want to talk about without any recognition that what was said to me was important and meaningful, at least to the person who said it. That’s patronizing at best; at worst, it can be deeply hurtful when what was said to me was something that the person felt was extremely important to their sense of personhood, their equal standing as a human being, or their physical security.
Any time in conversation you want to change the topic to something different from the main thrust, you run the risk of signaling to your interlocutor that you find what they’re talking about unimportant or a waste of time. That risk is magnified when the subject of their speech is deeply tied to their personhood, identity, or human dignity. Weighed against that is the fact that conversations need to be able to evolve — they can’t stay tied to what the first speaker wants to talk about indefinitely.
I put the rest of this post below the fold — I think what needed to be said has been said, and there isn’t much purpose in pressing the issue further.
It’s time to get the obvious out of the way: this post was motivated by the interplay between my post on the anti-Semitic mob at York University and Maia’s post indicting how I talked about the YU strike in the course of my own discussion. In the comments, I expressed that I found it distressing that Maia’s post nowhere acknowledged (much less affirmed) what we both agree was the main point of the post I made — namely, the events at York University were an extremely scary manifestation of anti-Semitic activity. I rendered this objection in the comments to her post, noting that by using my post as a “hook” to talk about supporting the strike, without acknowledging the main thrust of what I was talking about or affirming it as valid, it created a “tenor” that the transition was a dismissal of the importance of what was said before. Maia said she did not want her thread derailed by discussing my concerns there. I understand that sentiment, but I regret the consequences of it, because I think creating a new and specific post on the topic represents a significant escalation and I’m not happy about that (which was the reason I wanted to try and hash it out in the comments first).
Anyway, Jill’s rule of the thumb for respectful transition is as a follows:
(a) Acknowledge: Make it clear that you were in fact, paying attention to what your interlocutor was talking about it (and find it worthy of acknowledging).
(b) Affirm: Expressly state that you affirm what your partner is saying is important and valid. Even if you disagree with some of it, or even most of it, unless you find the entirety of what was just said wholly repellent, try and find some kernel inside of it that you can sympathize with.
(c) Segue: Explain the particular move you’re making: why and by what steps you’re specifically jumping from topic A to topic B.
(d) Transition: Now, make the point you wanted to make.
This doesn’t need to take long. It can usually be accomplished in a sentence or two. In the present case, it would not have been difficult to preface with something to the effect of:
“I, too find the mob violence David described abhorrent [acknowlegement and affirmation]. But I just wanted to pull out something in how he described the York University strike, which I found deeply problematic. [segue]”
I don’t think that would have diluted the content of Maia’s criticism in the slightest. But it’s still really important to present. Seguing represents an express acknowledgment that one recognizes the other as an equal partner in the dialogue, whose contribution matters and is meaningful. It also demonstrates that the desire to talk about a different subject isn’t stemming from a belief that the prior subject or contribution is worthless or a waste of time, or passive-aggressive opposition to the point that was being made.
This is particularly important when there are aggravating circumstances which might increase one’s sensitivity to the perceived slight. I already mentioned how the risks are heightened when the prior topic is one that the speaker clearly feels is very important to them on a personal level, but other things can exacerbate the situation. The more tangential the transition is to the prior topic, the more important I think it is to segue, as an explanation for both why one wants to move on, and why one wants to move from point A to point B. If the new topic is going to be antagonistic towards the prior speaker, that I think makes it absolutely critical that a segue happen, because otherwise the immediate reaction is to view the new topic as an attack against the old.
Situations where there might be mistrust amongst the parties is another good indicator that one should segue. In close relationships, one might be able omit seguing because many of the signals it sends are already implied — we (hopefully) know that our spouse or partner thinks what we’re saying is important and worthy of attention. These same qualities can’t be assumed in more casual relationships, and they may be completely absent in situations where there is outright mistrust. In these cases, the functions of the acknowledgment and affirmation do not “go without saying”, and it is a positive good to make them explicit.
Seguing also serves to contextualize, by specifically relating the new topic to the old, allowing new participants to understand fully the terrain which gave rise to the controversy in the first place. In the present case, as we agree, my post was focused on an instance of mob violence targeted against Jews at York University. The strike was mentioned in passing, both as background and to note the contrast between what putatively “caused” the mob to form, and the slurs they chose to use (anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, and anti-Israel). It’s quite possible that the way I described the strike in the four or five lines it showed up was problematic from the perspective of one who thinks this strike is (or strikes in general are) worthy of support. But I think knowing the context would indicate that in all likelihood, I was not focusing on the strike as a political issue when writing the post. That was not the location where I was carefully weighing my word choice, not the area in which I was seeking to forward a statement of support or opposition. My attention, I have to say, was elsewhere.
That doesn’t render it immune to criticism (one can still use problematic language when one isn’t concentrating on a topic — indeed, I’d guess it’s more likely), but it does change the perception of the event. I think it tamps down on potential conflict by framing the issue as an issue of oversight while concentrating on something else, rather than a conscious decision to stake out a particular antagonistic political position. By contrast, the lack of the segue obscures the context and makes it easier to think that the or a primary (or at least significant) part of what I was getting at in the post was a statement on how we should view the York University strike. I humbly submit that a charitable reading, given the context, would belie that supposition.
Indeed, an important function of the segue is that it avoids getting into situations that we’re in now, one that I fear is rapidly spiraling out of hand. A significant chunk of Maia’s comment section and now a whole ‘nother post on AAB are now dedicated to “hashing out” something that could have been averted by the insertion of a two line preface expressing a sentiment that (I hope) Maia already agrees with.
Without the segue though, we’re left with significant questions about why it was absent and why Maia is reluctant to insert it upon request, and those questions hold a lot of potential for causing problems. Maia indicated in referencing another strike in the UK which utilized racist slogans that her response to that would be to support the strike while condemning the racist imagery carried out in its name — in other words, roughly the same position I want her to take here. What’s the reason she won’t do so? Several options present themselves to my ears. I don’t know which, or if any, are correct, but in large part that isn’t the point. The point is that the absence of the segue starts to raises these specters — avoiding the perception that they’re the case is worth avoiding on its own.
Unfortunately, the most obvious answer as to why Maia won’t write a quick segue acknowledging and affirming with the main point is simply that she doesn’t agree with it — that she does not believe that the mob violence is worthy of condemnation. And I honestly have questions as to whether that is her position, based on how I understand and have experienced her views on “solidarity”. I don’t want to tag her with that position based on suspicion. But if she does believe that, while that’s her prerogative, she should come out and say so rather than playing hide-and-go-seek.
That isn’t the only candidate though. Another is that she disapproves of the mob scene, but doesn’t consider it important enough to mention (or alternatively, finds it so obviously wrong that she thinks it goes without saying that she opposes it). But if that were the case, one would think she could throw a bone. If I disagree with something, but either find it such a trivial or such a clear case that I don’t even think to publicly register my opinion on it, if someone then exhibits distress at my silence and wants to be reassured that I do, in fact, disapprove, I think it’s an act of respect to accede. It requires very little out of me, and it comforts a partner in the conversation. That’s reason enough to do it (and refusing to do it again raises the question as to why — what makes it so important that I refuse the request?).
A third alternative is a sort of free speech absolutism: the idea that one has no obligation to talk about anything other than what one wants to talk about. Here, the resistance to the request to make the segue is a statement of principle of one’s right to determine entirely for oneself what one talks about (at least in their own thread).
Once again to the last, I think the question that has to be asked here is “why is this principle worth so much to you if the only upshot of its application in the present case is to make someone else upset while preserving ambiguity on an issue you agree on?” It’s akin how PG talks about folks who deliberately flout “PC” norms to shout out a commitment to free speech. What they’re saying is that they find this particular affirmation of “free speech” to be significantly more important than avoiding gratutiously causing pain.
But also I think we’re seeing something flowing out of the norm that’s been articulated here, that because Maia created a new post her dialogic obligations were exhausted. I understand the spirit in which she created a new post — she wanted to talk about something other than my topic, and didn’t want to derail. I appreciate that. But, the new post is still in a relationship of dialogue to the old one, and this is what makes it distinct from a situation where, say, Maia wrote a statement supporting the strike in a world where I never posted on Alas. She had no obligation to say anything in response to my post (affirming, critiquing, whatever). But once she joined the conversation — once she used my post as a “hook” to transition into the topic and specifically cast herself as against what I had written — that triggers the norms and standards I’ve been articulating.
Maia post was a response to my post, albeit only part of it — still, my post was the proximate cause that led to the writing of her post. Her post is best seen not as atomic vis-a-vis mine, but as a move in the conversation. They are in a relationship with each other, and that needs to be kept in mind when thinking about how we frame what we write. Consequently, the obligations latent in respectful dialogue, including the obligation to segue, are still present.
Indeed, this whole controversy exhibits a problem with viewing every thread — even threads which are clearly linked together (in this case, literally) — as atomized and isolated. The problem I had with what was going on fell in the interstices between the two threads: it was about Maia’s post, but it wasn’t about what Maia’s post was about. One can punt and just create a new thread (which of course, is what has just happened), but again, that feels escalating. Better, I think, to explicitly view posts that are in dialogue with each other as being part of a conversation and proceeding from there.
The point is, something as basic as a segue — pairing a transition to a different topic or speaker with an acknowledgement and affirmation of what came before, and linking the new to the old — is more than just a polite pleasantry. It occupies an extremely important role in making discussion possible. It affirms equal standing, it reduces conflict, and it offers an antidote to mistrust as to why one is changing the subject. It is, I think, the best way of mediating between the twin obligations in conversation: the need to respect what the interlocutor is saying, and the ability for the conversation to branch out and move in new directions.
You can write as much as you like about this David. It doesn’t change the fact that we have different views. I am annoyed that you presented hypotheticals about why I might not have responded, when you could have quoted what I actually said:
I disagree about the importance of segues when blogging. I frequently respond to specific things that people have written as a starting point and ignore their wider (if I was writing a post on problematic metaphors that use impairment, I might have written about your use of the word ‘crippling’). I think segues can be very dismissive, and just being specific about what you’re talking about is just as useful way of operating.
But if you don’t know what my position is: I condemn any anti-semitic violence, and any use of anti-semitic slurs, no matter who does it or under what circumstances . And any targeting of Jewish people because they’re Jewish.
wow. kudos to alas and feministe for hosting a discussion on anti-semitism, a subject of loud silence on progressive anti-racist sites, despite stats showing anti-semitism on the rise (fbi data for example reveals it to be the most common hate crime in America).
as a right-winger myself, its interesting to see left-wingers suddenly become Michelle Malkin’s, highly attuned to the phenomena of the fake hate crime, like the duke rape hoax. on David’s post re the hostage situation one commentator popped in to doubt the veracity of the story…it was from a right-wing source, the other side does it too, etc, etc. now you know how rush feels, which is not to say the commentator was wrong. its just interesting. subversive even.
but i give kudos b/c anti-Semitism is an inconvenient truth to those on the left. first of all its increasingly found on the left these days (anti-Zionist protesters dressed as suicide bombers, for ex). it //s progressive grievances: anti-capitalism and class-resentment in particular….as Hugo Chavez war against the Jews illustrates. and, as we are in a war against Islamic terror, Muslim anti-Semitism forces progressives to consider the root cause of this form of terror as part of the pathology of bigotry and religious jingoism that exist in the Muslim world, as opposed to more convenient root causes, like US foreign policy.
but at the end of the day its about power. progressives have long tried to redefine bigotry around power theories (“blacks can’t be racist!”), which, imo. simultaneously disempowers POC while enabling bigots to spread all sorts of racist ideas under the guise of their own oppression. the Jewish refusal to become victims again makes them the enemy, in this world view.
now, whether or not Maia’s post was a subconscious, passive aggressive refusal to acknowledge the York U anti-semitism of which David spoke i haven’t the slightest. i’m open to the possibility there is reason to be suspicious these events transpired the way the alledged victims say they did. but i’m quite sure if the bigotry in question was concerning a less powerful group, his concerns would be taken more seriously.
and that’s what makes this such an interesting exercise.
Manju,
David’s use of the same disingenuous bullshit language was at least passive aggressive dudgeon. Your use of it is simply inexcusable.
There was a lot of talk over at Feministe when David posted there, and a little bit on my blog, about the notion of gentile privilege, what it is, whether it exists, etc.
When we talk about male privilege, or white privilege, or straight privilege or any of the other privileges that people on this blog recognize and take for granted as real phenomenon, no one finds problematic the notion that one expression of such privilege is the rendering invisible of the concerns of the non-privileged, even when those concerns are, arguably, peripheral to what a privileged person wants to talk about at any given moment.
I would suggest, Maia, that the invisibility in your post of the antisemitism expressed at York, your use of David’s post to talk about something that is important to you without even acknowledging the context in which he was writing, is an example of gentile privilege along the lines of what I have just described above. It is not so different from David’s gaffe over at Feministe using Gaza as a way into a discussion of antisemitism, without really addressing what was actually happening at Gaza; nor is it different from any number of elisions that people here on Alas have been called out on when the silencing or invisibility in question has been female, or Black (or any other race), or fat, or disabled, or queer, or you name it. It is also not so different from the way David’s language in his post could reasonably be read as eliding the concerns of the strikers, which is what you called him out on.
Because you and I have dialogued in the past on Alas about antisemitism, anti-Zionism, Israel/Palestine, and I think other Jewish-related issues as well, I believe you when you write this:
I think it is important to recognize that the fact that you did not condemn outright the antisemitism at York in your post most probably arises, at least in part, from the fact that, because you are not Jewish, you can afford not to (which is obviously not to say that you were obligated to make antisemitism the central concern of your post). Neither David nor I nor any other Jewish person could afford not to note the antisemitism, even if we disagreed on its severity (as some commenters have done) and even if we disagreed on how to understand the relation of the antisemitism to the strike, etc.
Maia: My concern isn’t that you didn’t respond. It’s that you didn’t segue. The blockquote example I gave above hardly would qualify as a “response”. That’s not it’s purpose. It’s purpose is to effect all the discursive goals I outlined above (affirming equal standing, contextualizing, diminishing conflict, etc.).
Your reason why you didn’t do it seems close to my third alternative: “the idea that one has no obligation to talk about anything other than what one wants to talk about. Here, the resistance to the request to make the segue is a statement of principle of one’s right to determine entirely for oneself what one talks about (at least in their own thread).” As I said, I think that’s problematic for a variety of reasons that I have already given — one of which is that, at the point where adherence to the principle is so important that it leads to gratuitously causing pain instead of writing two sentences you already agree with, I think we can justifiably question what makes the “principle” so important.
You say that refusing to segue and just jumping right in is a standard practice of yours. I’m trying to argue its a bad practice. A segue doesn’t always stop something from being dismissive, but I think refusing to segue is nearly always so. And even if I’m wrong, and in some circumstances or with some people seguing will be seen as more dismissive than the lack, at the point where your interlocutor expresses the desire for a segue (or an affirmation of the values the segue is meant to imply), I think that’s an independent good reason to do it. At the very least, it demonstrates that for this person in this circumstance, a segue would be less dismissive than the lack.
It’s distressing that rather than acceding to a simple request that required almost nothing out of you, you wanted to wage a scorched-earth battle on “principle”. It sends the message of marginalization; that you have so little respect for my feelings that you’ll fight to the death to avoid even a negligible expression on my behalf.
An old phrase from the early 1970s: “I hear you saying..”. Have we lost the knack of saying that?
David,
“Scorched earth” seems a bit of an exaggeration. Also, I doubt that you would have found Maia’s post so troubling if it hadn’t explicitly criticized you: “I strongly disagree with the way David Schraub described the York TA strike in his post on Alas. … If you’re not supporting the TAs you’re supporting the university (and in fact I think David Schraub did make it clear that he was on the side of the university with the way he worded his description of the strike). Anyway I’m a unionist, and I believe that one of the most fundamental part of any politics worth a damn is supporting strikes. So I didn’t want to let what David Schraub said pass uncommented on.”
I just found her post odd because Maia seemed to think you’re obliged to state support for the union when your whole function posting at AAB is to write about anti-Semitism, yet she has no obligation to state opposition to anti-Semitic actions when that’s why you mentioned the strike in the first place at all. Either we all can write solely about what we want without others making negative assumptions based on our omissions (Maia’s position for herself, at least), or we have an obligation to make our position on peripheral matters clear to avoid having those assumptions drawn (David’s position for everyone, himself included when he remembers ;-).
In my opinion, Maia’s post was fine sans segue. I just want to speak in favor of that.
I also found Maia’s post unoffensive, sans segue.
I’d like to point out that asking for (indeed, demanding) respect from people who wish to ally themselves with you or expect your support is great. We should all demand from and give respect to our allies. But, any attempt to force politeness and decorum is utter bullshit and comes from a place of race and/or class privilege, along with an expectation that us uncivilized folks like women and POC keep our emotions in check and refrain from getting angry. Again, I reference the angry black woman, guest post by Naamen Gobert Tilahun. http://tinyurl.com/4wkfz3
Fuck that. Let’s get angry and say what we really mean. I want some honesty. Someone please give me honesty, stripped of all this false pretense and Standard Operating Procedures.
Yes, this. It’s really not your place to police anyone else’s conversational norms. You can explain why you find the lack of segue dismissive, but it’s speaking from a ridiculously privileged position to not only “request” the segue but then analyze why your request wasn’t granted.
I wonder (and I mean this not disingenuously; I am perfectly willing to accept that I have perhaps overreacted and that what I see as a glaring silence in Maia’s post does not merit the critique I have made): if the people who were vilified and harassed at York had been women or people of color, and precisely the same things had happened–i.e., they had to hide in an office out of fear, etc.–and a man or a white person had taken issue with a snippet from a post about that vilification and harassment by a woman or person of color and written another post about the snippet, critical of the first writer, as if the vilification and harassment had not even taken place, as if the snippet and the vilification and harassment were not part of the same context even, would we be as willing to say that the snippet-concerned writer had no obligation to acknowledge the vilification/harassment? If only because the person he or she was critiquing was of the community that had been vilified and harassed and had written originally out of that concern? If a woman is raped, if a person of color is beaten up, is it ever okay to talk about the circumstances surrounding those events in ways that render invisible the rape or the beating–and the sexism/misogyny and racism inherent in those actions?
This is not about asking for false politeness, or asking anyone not to get angry; it is about asking people to take responsibility for what they say even when they are angry. One could have responded to David’s comment about the strike by saying, “David, I know you were writing about the antisemitism, and that was wrong and inexcusable, but the way you talked about the strike really pissed me off, and just because you were pissed off about the antisemitism doesn’t absolve you of responsibility for the way you talk about unions and worker’s rights….” And please note: I am not trying to put words in Maia’s mouth here or tell her how she should have written her post; I am trying to point out that what David has to say about segueing does not need to devolve into a false politeness that elides anger. And, equally to the point, even if Maia wrote out of an initial anger, that does not absolve her from recognizing after the fact that what she said had the effect that it clearly has had on David and me and perhaps other readers as well.
Manju, are you arguing a position, or are you trying to attack liberals? Many liberals have a hard time reconciling traditional pro-Jewish leanings and opposition to Israeli military actions. Occasionally, this leads to befuddling contradictions. Every real world ideology suffers from this. And no, I’m not just talking the mirror image conservative. You identify as a libertarian, no? Popular right wing property rights libertarianism is rife with contradictions. Yet in an argument with libertarians, if I didn’t so much argue the position as argue the person by constantly quipping that I find it “interesting” and “amusing” that libertarians are “suddenly” saying this or whatever, I’d come across as another sad online message board warrior, no? One who thinks he’s being clever and needling when he’s actually telegraphing seething resentment like a child’s bloody drawing signals a cry for help? Think about it.
I realize many popular liberal blogs and periodicals adopt this same tone. I don’t read those, either.
But Richard, I think Maia has recognized that she should have acknowledged David’s legitimate concerns about antisemitism (viewed in the best light, that’s implicit in the final paragraph of her first comment).
But no one has returned that acknowledgment.
I think it was fine for David to ask Maia if she did agreed with him about condemning anti-semitism; that’s a reasonable request to make of co-bloggers. And Maia shouldn’t have initially ignored that question, for the reasons you state.
But once Maia has answered that question, I think it would be helpful if the people criticizing her would acknowlege her response, rather than ignoring it.
Amp,
You’re right, and I did acknowledge that in my comment #4. I think I overwrote in comment #11; I did not mean to imply that Maia had not stated her position.
Maia, if it seemed to you like I did not recognize what you said, I am sorry; I was not trying to, and I if it came out that way, I regret, browbeat you in any way. And I am now, unfortunately, rushing out of the house.
I would note that if we are talking about the segue then this is an argument for one hell of a segue in the whole discussion of antisemitism specifically in the context of Israel. That is if segues are truly important, then it seems that any discussion of antisemitism within the justice for Palestine movement needs to bring up the issue of tremendous real oppression of Palestinians both in the founding of Israel and oppression of Palestinians by Israel today, and tremendous racism against Arabs and Palestinians both within the U.S. and as a fundamental factor in Israeli politics and policy today. And if you don’t want to make this segue then maybe you should understand that your reasons might apply to others who don’t want to make the segues you request. In short, please apply the same standards to yourself you apply to others, or apply the same standards to others you apply to yourself.
Richard, I think, in this particular context, the tone I am getting is that both parties are demanding that their position be acknowledged as valid before engaging further. This is what’s causing the ‘escalation. ‘
Were all the students in Hillel @ York males of Ashkenazi descent? I can’t find any evidence that women were present. I can’t find any evidence that there were any people of a racialized ethnicity present amongst the students that were escorted out by the police.
That is the problem with kyriarchy. It is complex, and you cannot easily substitute the (apparently male?) POC beating or a woman’s (apparently white, since that’s usually what N.O.S. means) rape and get the same subtexts.
Here’s something that I think is going to trigger a lot of anger, and I’d ask that anyone who feels angry at my next argument think very introspectively and honestly about the root of their emotions. There is apparently disagreeing eyewitness accounts between the student government supporters and the students in Hillel as to whether or not anything antisemitic was ever said by the crowd of demonstrators. So, it could be argued that it’s reasonable for anyone to not take a position on the matter until they had some further proof that there actually were antisemitic chants via phone video recordings or whatnot. It’s not on it’s face an overly burdensome request, considering the messy nature of the political subplots going on between the student council and the Hillel.
It seems clear to me that not taking a position on whether or not anything antisemitic was said at the incident is offensive to anyone who feels that the eyewitness accounts from the students in Hillel were enough proof to discredit the accounts from the demonstrators. That it is indeed very offensive to David and Richard, at the very least.
So, how then can’t you understand that it’s offensive to Maia that David didn’t take a position on the union strike, and has heretofore refused to engage on the issue? At least offensive enough for her to feel that it merited a post so that readers of alas don’t feel that the opinion is unanimous.
It seems that if things continue, we are at an impasse. Someone is going to have to acknowledge the other person if any progress is to be made. Who’s going to do that is anyone’s guess. However, I do think that maybe David should consider humbling himself and reaching out first, since he is the one who is furthering the escalation at this point, with this post, and in a way that reminds me very much of the “Ladies, Ladies, now calm yourselves and behave!” intonation. It may not be intentional, but that’s how it reads to me. Then he might be practicing what he’s preaching, about acknowledging the other side before furthering his own argument. That is what this post is about, right?
By the way, for the record, I do think that it is overly burdensome for someone to request that they be furnished with recorded evidence of the demonstrator’s racial slurs in order to validate the accounts from the students who were cordoned off in Hillel. I think it speaks to many, many stereotypes of Jews as untrustworthy, conspiring, eager to play the race card whenever it suits them. And that’s disgusting.
Here’s a video of the crowd outside the press conference. I don’t think that I heard anything directly antisemitic in there, but there are a lot of people talking at once and it’s hard to hear what everyone is saying. Plus, it’s just a few minutes, and it doesn’t show the crowd outside Hillel, just outside the press conference. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOIjuB6Gpww
Okay, this conversation is like the definition of unproductive.
I propose that 1:
No one has so far said that anti-Semitic hatred, as expressed against the students in the original example, is justified by any political position taken about a university conflict.
And 2:
While communication arguably may not have been as clear as ideal, and certainly did cause discomfort from at least some readers, the actual positions on these matters have een sorted out, and what’s left is semantics.
Therefore, 3:
I suggest strongly that we all say “Oh, okay, got it now. Thanks for clarifying. Anti-semitism sucks, and so does exploited labor,” and then we move on, acting as allies in the ways that we are allied (with the acknowledgement that, at least in some ways, the political spectrum on Alas is defined by Maia and/or Jack Stephens on the left, and Shraub on the right, and we won’t all be allies in all situations).
I found another video of the crowd outside Hillel, but it doesn’t show too much. It looks like it was taken with a cell phone camera, so everything kind of looks like a blur. The only chant I hear is “racists off campus.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DtzHCY0nfI
Mandolin,
I think you are correct, except that it’s rather easy to say “anti-Semitism and exploited labor are bad” in the abstract, without being willing to acknowledge that a particular incident constituted anti-Semitism or a particular dispute involves labor being exploited.
Some people writing at AAB may feel that the incident constituted anti-Semitism by the very fact that Jews had to take refuge in their office and then were stuck there until they could get an armed guard to pass safely through another group — regardless of whether what the other group was saying to the Jews was expressly anti-Semitic (“Jews off campus!”) or merely negative (“Death to teaching assistants’ enemies!”).
Some people may feel that unless there was explicitly anti-Semitic speech, we can’t assume that there was any anti-Semitism involved in the physical intimidation of a group who may have just *happened* to be Jewish. (Although presumably we all are opposed to physical intimidation of one’s non-violent colleagues, regardless of whether the intimidation is motivated by anti-Semitism or by merely general thuggery, and the question of whether this incident was wrongful is settled, with the only remaining question being whether it was anti-Semitic as well.)
Similarly, without knowing the details of the TAs’ wages, benefits, working conditions, contracts, competition for their labor, etc., I would be reluctant to declare with certainty that the student government was correct to have supported them in their strike that deprived the York students of a semester of teaching. In contrast, Maia categorically supports all strikes and was troubled that David did not feel similarly.
David:
Shit, I didn’t realize that had happened at York… Ugh…
One thing, though. Just wondering what precisely you’ve read by Iris Marion Young? Because she’s not all that concerned with politeness. Instead (and this idea runs throughout all of her major works), she argues that traditionally marginalized modes of discourse (such as passionate speech, anger, and narrative) should have a place in deliberative democracy.
I think she concedes far too much to Habermas in the end, but I also think you’re highlighting a minor point out of context.
I’ve read most of Intersecting Voices and Inclusion and Democracy, and some of Justice and the Politics of Difference. Here I’m drawing primarily from IV (the third essay, “Communication and the Other”).
I agree with you that Young isn’t about “politeness”, and the point about segues isn’t “it’s polite to segue, hence you should do it.” I think one of the points Young makes is that deliberative democrats often seem to act as if only the “substance” (defined as cold, hard, rational speech) matters. Young is arguing for including some of which these thinkers wish to include from their theory: for example, greeting (I very much relate to this: “Especially when parties to dialogue differ in many ways, either in their culture and values or in the interests and aims they bring to discussion, their effort to resolve conflict or come to agreement on a course of action cannot begin without preliminaries in which the parties establish trust or respect.” — IV at 70).
I think Young’s promotion of the greeting is the flipside of her advocacy of including things like emotion, rhetoric, and storytelling. The traditional delib democratic view is that deliberation happens best when everyone sticks to pure, unadulterated, cold, hard, rational, logical, dispassionate universal substance. Young thinks (and I agree) that this often marginalizes huge groups of people, for a lot of reasons — because they often don’t have the experience speaking in the stylized, parliamentary voice, because they want to say something very different from what the majority is interested and they won’t pay attention without some rhetoric, humor, or passion, or simply because sometimes what they want to communicate is “I’m angry!” But precisely because of that, it’s more important to stress the importance of things like the greeting to make sure everything hangs together. As she writes (same page) “Since much democratic discussion will be fraught with disagreement, anger, conflict, counterargument, and criticism, intermittent gestures of flattery, greeting, deference, and conciliatory caring keep commitment to the the discussion at times of anger and disagreement.”
So here, there was serious disagreement, which is fine — it’s important to express disagreement and I affirm it can be expressed passionately. But I think that raises the importance of the corresponding greeting/segue part of dialogue.
This leftwing scorn for politeness reminds me of the rightwing scorn for “political correctness” — I think both are treating as superficial something that actually goes much deeper. The person who doesn’t like to be cussed out for voicing disagreement isn’t asking for etiquette so much as a recognition of “hey I’m a human being here, not a punching bag.” And the person who doesn’t like to have his minority identity mocked or made invisible by deliberately “politically incorrect” discourse is pretty much saying the same thing.
Politeness and political correctness are both seen as bad because they’re assumed to be fake and not to arise from genuine sentiments of basic respect for all persons.
More specifically, I think they’re taken to be silencing — the purpose is either assumed to be, or effectively is, to disallow certain expression. The “politeness” requirement is seen as being deployed against people who are angry or emotional, effectively disallowing outrage. The PC requirement is seen as being deployed against people who want criticize something about a marginal group, disallowing criticism.
*shrug* I don’t disdain politeness. I don’t think Maia’s post was impolite. (By contrast, I think this one is very much so.)
*shrug* I felt that the way Maia hooked her post (the lack of a segue) to my own was “impolite” (I’m not a huge fan of using that word in this context, but I don’t have a better one right now). I think this post was as well, which I’m not happy about either. That’s what happens when you write posts when you’re really upset about something and feel like people don’t understand why or particularly care. You say things aggressively, impolitely, or in ways you might otherwise regret.
But I don’t think anything more productive will flow from this discussion, so I suggest letting sleeping dogs lie.