privilege as a meme

released an album called Chekk Yo Privil-EDGE iirc

I think that Tone Policing has been a practice used to discredit and silence marginalised people since, well, forever, so criticisms of arguments based on how "rude" they sound to a privileged person are really another exercise of Privilege.

(Which makes it even more super-ironic, when privileged persons complain that "check your privilege' is falsely equated in their minds with "STFU white man" because we all know who uses silencing techniques the most, and who, exactly, usually gets silenced by them.)

whilst i am pro-civility i've said a thousand times that the birth and practice of Good Manners is inextricably rooted in exclusion

I find you completely impossible to talk to, Branwell. I would like to, but I cannot, and the words you use are all that is standing in the way (because this is the Internet, and I know you no other way). If I say that to I you, is it tone policing? Certainly not within the four walls of my head, apparently within the four walls of your head. I suspect that we my agree on more things than would at first be apparent, but I cannot avoid the feeling that our discussions are on a "I ---> it" level, rather than a "I <---> thou" level. Is it tone policing if I point that out?

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument

here's some goddamn tone policing - TWU your tone is incredibly supercilious and patronising and as such i find YOU impossible to talk to. my rudeness is indicative of my lack of interest in conversing with you. for you to tone police one of the people actually putting effort into this thread is unbelievable.

I find i police my own tone a lot in situations where i think there's a genuine chance of educating someone as to why their position is racist, sexist, etc. There are also plenty of situations where people just need to be angrily shamed into not doing something.

whilst i am pro-civility i've said a thousand times that the birth and practice of Good Manners is inextricably rooted in exclusion

indeed.

another thing i've noticed is where a Prominent Media Figure will get criticised for something they've done, and those criticisms will come in a variety of tones and degrees of rudeness, and if there's anything overtly rude, they'll seize on that as a means to discredit the entire criticism. it's just reflective of an unwillingness to engage.

Also, to be completely clear: I am not saying "don't be rude", as that would be the height of hypocrisy. I am saying that it's good to have some idea of the effects of what and how you say something have on the other party to the conversation -- unless the other party is just the Other, in which case fuck 'em but don't be surprised when they grumble.

X-post: I am familiar with the phrase. You have misunderstood my question. Shall I rephrase it?

X-x-post: Sorry you feel that way, lex.

Sort of like how I said the word "rude" and that got seized on?

people who feel that they lack class privilege have a hard time accepting that they do have privilege in other areas

I don't normally contribute to these threads (although I do read them all) for various reasons (e.g. I am pretty clueless in this area compared to you guys, there are too many SWM voices on here already etc etc etc) but just wanted to say that one of the things I find strangest about ostensibly feminist/progressive journalists on twitter/tumblr dismissing intersectionality is that reading about the concept of intersectionality seemed to make a lot of the arguments about privilege make sense to me finally, like I was a bit defensive about "white privilege" because of class issues but I feel like I "get it" a bit more now. I'm not saying I am totes enlightened now, I'm still basically an idiot, so I'll bow out again now.

I have no doubt that tone policing is a problem but the complaint is sometimes used dishonestly to give a free pass to abuse as long as it's punching up. To take one example, a while back a WOC called a white woman on Twitter a cunt. Is it tone policing to find that abusive?

only if the word "punt" doesn't follow

Independent Tone Police Complaints Commission

God, C-Poo, no, that's great! Whatever makes a lightbulb moment happen!

Discovering Intersectionality was a similar kind of experience for me, except I'd been spending 2011 in "feminist meetings" sitting drawing diagrammes of mathematical set theory on the back of napkins going "why don't I have a word for this thing that is going on here that I am trying to get my head around" in trying and failing to articulate and understand discussions of race, and why our "feminist group" was all white, and that being a bad thing.

And it was reading Flavia Dzodan's angry and rude and ferocious - but also impassioned and intelligent and informed and completely OTM - posts on Tiger Beatdown, all through 2011, and culminating in that amazing "My Feminism Will Be Intersectional Or It Will Be Bullshit" post that suddenly gave me a WORD for this thing, for this feeling I couldn't articulate but could only draw using set theory on the back of napkins. It was like a key that turned a lock and connected a group of concepts that had been floating around just out of reach to me. I am, too, still an idiot, but at least now I had a map and the name of the street I had to get to, and it was the start of an ongoing process to try to get better at this stuff. Dzodan collectively told all of white feminism to collectively check their privilege, and that experience of being shown what privilege was and how I had it in some situations, but not in others, and gave me a fucking WORD with which to address this stuff - that was the best thing that ever happened to my understanding of political life. Like, without going all "I had my privilege checked, and it was great!" I just want to say what a useful tool it can be.

But, at the same time, recognising that the way power works, and the way power corrupts, is that some people who have lacked power for much of their experience, they are unwilling to relinquish what little power they accrue, even if it comes at the expense of people with less power than them. This is not just applicable to "white feminists" though; this is applicable on every axis of power that exists.

a while back a WOC called a white woman on Twitter a cunt. Is it tone policing to find that abusive?

I am way, way less interested in whether *this* act was abusive, than query the abusiveness of whatever act (or actions) it was that would provoke said WoC to insults.

That link up there that I posted about "tone arguments" - it covered this kind of thing.

I was using the word kyriarchy before intersectionality entered the picture. Does anyone else think they're similar enough to be basically the same?

xp This is what I mean by a free pass. It can't be that she did something wrong - it must have been justified in some way. I find that dishonest.

^^yeah exactly. it doesn't invalidate her argument, and just because the trigger may have been a professionally worded article or politely worded nonsense doesn't mean that using profanity makes her response worse. it's just a bit childish, all a bit "mummy s/he said a Bad Word!!!!"

fwiw i thiiiiink i know what DL is referring to - i only noticed it tangentially but it's not like the WOC was calling anyone a cunt out of nowhere; those two have regular, er, interactions on twitter.

xps re: BB

Screw that. If someone calls me a c*** I'm going to stop listening. I'm not enough of a masochist to spend ages finding out why they think I'm a c***. And if I called anyone else a c*** I'd expect them to feel the same way. (Asterisking because I feel weird typing that word on this thread)

I don't think that anything I said implied that anyone got a free pass.

But I think that it is a system as a whole which bears examining, rather than slapping a label on one woman as "abusive" when she reacts a certain way.

Most sane people do not just burst out calling people cunts for no reason. I think it's better to look for reasons, and reasons on a holistic level.

(And I put the "sane" in only as a caveat and a recognition that living under a system of oppression, especially a system where that oppression is routinely denied and whitewashed and gaslighted away, is really really bad for a person's mental health. If a WoC *does* call a white woman a cunt for no reason it is probably not due to "insanity" but due to the fact that it *is* infuriating and stress-inducing to live as as a Black person in a racist world. This is clumsily parsed, and probably ripe for misinterpretation, but I'm not going to delete it now.)

well, my point is that i think these two particular people had stopped listening to each other long ago, so the use of that word was less "obstacle to reasonable debate" and more "manifestation of barely concealed mutual dislike"

xp

I've said this again and again, but the freedom to discuss oppression ~impassionately~ and *not* get angry, and the ability to walk away from an argument - that is often, in itself, an exercise of privilege.

xp Ha, good point.

While saying lots that I agree with, Branwell sums up the problems I have with the arsenal of debate jargon here. All online debate gets clotted with jargon - Straw man! Ad hominem! Fallacy! - and this strand is no different. I've read so many blog posts and Twitter exchanges which contain nothing but set phrases. It's like there's no behaviour that can't be defended with "Tone argument!" or "Gaslighting!" Do those words describe real phenomena? Absolutely. Are they sometimes used cheaply to simplify a disagreement into goodies and baddies? I think so, yes.

I am willing to give more marginalised people the benefit of the doubt way more than I am willing to give more privileged people the benefit of the doubt that their experiences are, indeed, what they say they are.

I know that is the opposite of how society generally works, but it's a choice I've made, and I'm going to try to stick to it.

I mean, the whole of Intersectionality, as a thing, is a way to try to get BEYOND "Goodies" and "Baddies" and say that systems of power and oppression are WAY more complicated than good/bad binaries.

In theory, yes

i find a lot of academic language impenetrable but i don't have an issue with a lot of those words - the impenetrability is more about a style of writing than terms like "gaslighting". do i think a big problem is that academics can't fucking write to save their lives? yup. but as long as it's comprehensible, you sort of have to separate the argument from the way it's phrased.

at core it's the argument that's important, not whether an individual uses a profanity or whether an academic talks in jargonese - neither of which are reasons for people to start mocking "check your privilege" or "the intersectionals"

and iirc we talked about this elsewhere recently but academic privilege is totally a thing and a lot of people seem v blind to the fact that they have it (just like every other sort of privilege i guess)

I don't think it's impenetrable, I just think that phrases that spring out of original thought turn into cliches that get in the way of original thought. It bothers me more in arguments than it does in texts because arguments always lead people to grab whatever weapons they have to hand, however blunt.

another thing to remember is that there's often a history of certain patterns of behaviour that those exhibiting them might not see. it wasn't til i read up via tumblr/twitter etc that i realised "White Feminism" was a thing, and that black feminists' irritation at certain latter-day figures wasn't because they were easily irritated by something problematic but not malicious; it was because they'd seen it all before again and again and again, and had little reason to believe it would be different this time

Sometimes one person's "argument that gets in the way of 'original thought'" (whatever 'original thought' is supposed to mean here?) is another person's "shorthand that describes a shit-ton of experience you have never had, but are sick of spelling it out the same way, over and again."

x-post again, Lex absolutely completely OTM and I really admire your stamina here.

a lot of it prob comes down to what we were talking about the other day BB - intersectionality makes intuitive sense to us b/c we live it - we both have lives that are unarguably privileged in some ways and unarguably non-privileged in others. when i first read about it, it kind of felt...freeing from false binaries of being either Oppressed or The Oppressor, or wondering why the game seemed to be stacked against me in some ways but in others i felt like i intuitively knew the rules

all of this feeds into a lot of thoughts i have about "passing" which prob belong on the race thread if it's not been declared a US-only zone by now - "passing" as something that's not just limited to your skin tone. sometimes i feel like in the UK your ability to "pass" in various areas counts for more than what you actually are - this country is quick to give people passes if they're the right sort of black person, the right sort of gay person, but step outside that box and ohhhh boy that's not the case any more

fucking "likeability"

when was the last time you saw people debate whether a SWM celebrity was "likeable" or not smh

Multiple x-posts: You don't get to determine what experiences I have had without talking to me. And around and around we go again.

"passing" as something that's not just limited to your skin tone

yeah this passing is interesting to me because previously i'd considered the place in class i inhabit - (self)educated lower middle class child of upper working class parents - as a zone of exile, of not fitting in, but increasingly i come to see it as the possibility of existing within different spaces, and being able to pass between them, which is a privilege up to the point where i hit the gatekeepers i can't con

Ties in to something else I hate which is certain people of colour being described as 'articulate' by white ppl. Xps

"Passing" is such a complicated and fascinating concept and I'd really love to be able to discuss it in all its permutations - obviously the racial passing sense, which I first encountered it in, but also in the sexual orientation sense, and really in the trans*/gender identity sense, and whatever other senses there are (I feel like there's very likely to be a class passing sense, c.f. The Great Gatsby on out)

Identity is so complex, in ways we only started to touch on in the "Gender Identity" thread. That it's not just what *you* feel or know yourself to be, but it's also ways-in-which-you-are-treated-by-others, and these things interact with one another in subtle ways.

And I do think you're right; that "passing" in some areas counts in the "ways-in-which-you-are-treated-by-others" areas of identity way more than "being".

I don't know if ILX is the place to be trying to have the conversation, though, or if we should just invite DL along to another of our table-pounding sessions. (Can't promise not to call anyone cunts, though, once the single malt comes out.)

haha YES

related: this actual question in the bbc's interview with sampha this week - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25216843

You're from south-London, did you have a normal upbringing?

literally no fucking words

xp

x-posts and BOOM, NV brings up exactly the sense of class passing that I was wondering about. Glad you said that.

more xp I mean, when Branwell says this: "I am willing to give more marginalised people the benefit of the doubt way more than I am willing to give more privileged people the benefit of the doubt that their experiences are, indeed, what they say they are." I appreciate its clarity and honesty, and respect that, but I think the content is destructive bullshit. I become unknowable (because I am apparently totally known and understood by folks who don't need to talk to me), which, because I like to think of myself a a bunch of different things, many fluid, is going to put me in a fight or ignore you stance. Which lex don't care about, but maybe lex should. You'll never know!

And I do think you're right; that "passing" in some areas counts in the "ways-in-which-you-are-treated-by-others" areas of identity way more than "being".

which in turn unavoidably affects your own self-perception/self-definition - your own sense of being

i feel like in the UK your ability to "pass" in various areas counts for more than what you actually are

I think about this a lot wrt my privilege - I can pass for middle class because I went to public school and talk proper, so maybe it doesn't matter that if I called my dad he couldn't stop it all? Which is small beans in the scheme of things I know, I mean SWM probably makes up for any class deficiencies anyway.

xposts obv

x-post to Lex, you are shitting kidding me with that question!

Anyway, I am off to eat lunch and go shopping in my dreadfully un-normal SOUTH LONDON shops, hope that this discussion stays as interesting, DL, Lex and NV!

x-post I'll think about that feedback loop until I get back. Because being treated my whole life as "queer" whether I was identifying as heterosexual or not probably did affect my identity in ways I haven't done parsing yet.

please no more x-posts, I'm hungry

Just as a minor aside, literally nobody on this board has ever even hinted that the race thread should be "declared us-only" so can we stop making stuff up?

I've said this again and again, but the freedom to discuss oppression ~impassionately~ and *not* get angry, and the ability to walk away from an argument - that is often, in itself, an exercise of privilege.

yeah, this common tendency to shut down discussion the moment anyone gets 'angry' (which generally means showing any sentiment whatsoever) seems almost entirely the realm of people who can treat the topic as a kind of abstract parlor game, as opposed to something that has a bearing on the participants in the discussion and is WORTH being angry about.

NV, the descriptor you are looking for is LIMINALITY.

I also want in on the table-pounding and single malt, dammit!

you know in part i think i got the sense of isolation from Hardy and The French Lieutenant's Woman and other literary versions of the prole educated beyond their useful station but at some point you think "i can be a person who is taken seriously in my job and still be honest with my friends and accepted by them"

those of you from different walks of life wd be amazed how many times i still come across people who make snap judgements about my intelligence based on me failing to rein in my accent or tastes or opinions tho

can i say i recognize these issues are SMALL POTATOES and treat them as such in the big intersectional scheme of things, mainly noting them out of interest tho i get much more angry when i see fellow working class people running into the shifting barriers of "know thy place"