Voices

[wildeabandon]

Yesterday was the first time since I got married that I experienced a specific concern that someone would assume from my name that I was not white and therefore take my opinion less seriously. The context was an email I was sending to the Archdeacon of London about a young black priest who tweeted an admittedly somewhat incendiary critique of the particular valorisation of Captain Tom Moore, the backlash of racist and homophobic abuse that followed along with calls for him to be fired, and the diocese's depressingly unsupportive response. I ended up phrasing the email in such as way as to refer to "our white privilege", although whether my guess that this might make the Archdeacon slightly less likely to discount my view as being motivated by personal bias has any sound basis I'm not really sure.

It did make me think about which voices we listen to, value, ignore, or aggressively silence. I'm going to use the lens of queer and straight voices now, because I feel a lot more comfortable doing so, which in itself is a part of the conversation. I know that there isn't an exact parallel between the power structure dynamics of race and those of sexuality, especially when it comes to people on the intersections of multiple marginalised identities, but I think there are enough commonalities that the conversations can inform one another.

I think that all of these things are true:
- Queer people have a far better and deeper insight into queer experience, and particularly the experience of being on the pointy end of homophobia, than straight people do.
- We live in a culture that treats straightness as default, so queer people have more insight into the straight experience than vice versa, but we still don't have the actual lived experience of being straight.
- Everyone has biases, and we are not immune. It can be harder to be aware of and adjust for our biases on issues that affect us deeply.
- Queer voices are not a monolith. (Neither are straight voices, but I don't think they are treated as such nearly as frequently.)
- In some conversations about queer issues, our voices get dismissed as being biased, whereas straight voices are erroneously assumed to be purely objective. This dynamic is more common in straight dominated spaces, which correlates highly with the power to make changes and decisions which affect our lives.
- In some conversations about queer issues, straight voices are made unwelcome or subordinate, on the assumption that straight privilege will prevent them adding any value. This dynamic is more common in queer dominated spaces, but is becoming more widespread, and is paid lip-service to a lot more widely than it is actually enacted.

I"m not quite sure where I'm going with this, but I think there's something about the disparities in the different ways and contexts in which establishment and marginalised voices are heard and responded to and acted on which particularly stokes the fires of 'anti-wokeness' and reactionary populism. Something about how the idea that the pendulum of social justice has swung too far might have some limited validity when applied to the narrow field of what views are socially acceptable to express, but that at the same time, has a long way to go when it comes to the actual power structures that enact justice (or injustice) in our society. Something about wondering whether if there was less reaction to people saying bigoted things that would leave us with more energy to make real changes in the world, or if it's a bit like saying that you should just ignore bullies to make them go away, and would instead just lead to them feeling more empowered to escalate.

Comments

[ewt]

I think there's something here about discussion spaces or platforms that reward listening and finding common ground where we can vs spaces that reward 'engagement' and controversy. I can't articulate it well at the moment. I think the church needs to have a serious and open conversation about white nationalism, I don't think Twitter is a good place to have it, and the whole messy affair illustrates both of these points.

But we also don't always get to choose where the conversations emerge; and I'm not suggesting we should find common ground with bigots.

[rmc28]

I don't think letting bigoted things pass without comment is a good idea; silence is taken by the bigots as agreement, and by the fellow-uncomfortable as a lack of allies if they were to say anything. But I imagine there is some useful room between "hey! that's a pretty awful thing to say, please don't" and extensive effort dunking on someone.

(Ditto also copious use of the block button. Don't waste time on people you aren't going to convince.)

[wildeabandon]

So I think that the point that I was trying to gesture at was almost that them being able to take silence as agreement wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Or rather, not so much them taking it as active agreement, but if they take it as absence-of-strenuous-disagreement, then they might be less inclined to characterise themselves as persecuted and silenced.

Obviously there are degrees, and I think letting actual hate speech pass unchallenged is a terrible idea. Perhaps bigoted was the wrong word, and something like problematic would have better captured what I was trying to express.

[minoanmiss]

Hi *wave* I'm a random Black American woman who was perusing her Networks feed and found your thought-provoking post. So.

Or rather, not so much them taking it as active agreement, but if they take it as absence-of-strenuous-disagreement, then they might be less inclined to characterise themselves as persecuted and silenced.

I think this is a very generous but not very accurate supposition, based on my personal experiences and many experiences I've viewed. In my experience, starting as a Black scholarship student in a majority White secondary school, and in the experiences of many people I've talked to, read the writings of, and so on, the moment one challenges a bigotry that someone with privilege views as a truth, they turn it back around on one, insisting that one is not only wrong but actively and consciously trying to harm people and the world by speaking up.

I remember being in high school and trying to talk about how being told "you're smart for a Black person" and "but Black people commit all the crimes" and so on was both inaccurate and hurtful, and being told I was the one bringing race into it, the real bigot, and so on. I look around me now at those using major news outlets to proclaim themselves "silenced" and "censored", and I see the same processes in action.

Privilege does not cede ground without a fight.

[wildeabandon]

Hi - thanks for commenting.

I don't disagree that there are people who will turn around even the mildest challenge to bigotry and claim that it's censorship. (There's been a particular spate in the last few years of transphobic 'feminists' writing articles about how they're no longer allowed to express views that they're literally having published in a major newspaper right now...) At the same time, part of what they're seeing and reacting to is a genuine change in the level of social censure and disapproval of those views, so I can understand why it feels as though they're being silenced, even though they're not.

I think your final paragraph is really important and true. But it also seems to me that often privilege doesn't cede ground with a fight either - that pushing back against it causes the people with privilege to dig themselves in and push back harder. And yet paradoxically, if neither fighting nor not-fighting succeeds, we have seen real change; not uniformly, there are steps backwards as well as forwards, but on balance. And I think part of that is that the negative reactions are very visible, but the changes are quiet - people saying nothing at the time, and going away and thinking about things and gradually changing their minds.

But I also wonder if there are different processes at work, and that positive change is happening not because of directly challenging bigotry, but because of supporting and amplifying the marginalised. I think both an example and an analogy is the idea that the answer is always more stories - it's a problem when all the narratives are about straight white men, but we can create and share and celebrate more diverse narratives without insisting that anyone who values Catcher in the Rye or Fight Club is wrong to do so.

And of course it's not that simple - a lot of the time we're competing over finite resources, and if there is to be more for the marginalised then there will be less for the privileged, but even then, I wonder whether at least sometimes, we would succeed more easily if we were see to be working for, rather than fighting against.

[obandsoller]

I don't disagree with the tweet. But I generally think that twitter isn't a good good place to make statements like that. It's too easy for your statement to be spread in a way that has its context removed, and for people to change the context. This applies so much more the more eyes you have on you.

I'm not entirely happy with the Church's response. But honestly the fact that they denounced the people sending him racist abuse is more supportive than many other stories I've heard of people who have faced backlash online like this.

Doing some googling tells me he's the chaplain of KCL, which somehow makes this feel a bit more personal.

The KCL student newspaper's article is worth a read:
http://roarnews.co.uk/2021/kings-reverend-under-fire-for-divisive-tweet/


Doing some searches I find one instance of someone talking about this as a free speech issue, saying that: He's deleted the tweet and apologised, the matter should now be closed if the church cannot forgive than who can.

I see no-one talking about this in connection to cancel culture, except to note that some of his critics are generally concerned about it.

I tried to think of a similar situation and see whether people did frame it in those terms. But then I found the following article, which is quite depressing and think that I'm probably done googling about this for a while:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/20/california-state-university-free-speech-blackface