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Derailing for dummies
[Everything herein will be extremely old hat to many regular readers, but it's new to me and so I thought I'd share. Consider this part of my ongoing project of self-education.]
Charlie Stross, in the comments to his most recent blog post, posted a link to the site Derailing for Dummies. The conceit is that it's a guide to arguing with members of marginalised groups for people who want to drive them to apoplexy and/or despair as quickly as possible - this allows the author to explain why such conversational gambits as "you're just being oversensitive" won't help your interlocutor's blood pressure.
As a "white, heterosexual, cisgendered, cissexual, upper-class male" (plus a bunch of other things besides - able-bodied, literate...) I've only had conversations about race, sexuality, etc, from the perspective of a member of the privileged¹ group [from which perspective the conversations often look like this :-( ]. So I found the site to be rather uncomfortable reading, but also very educational, and I'm glad the author chose to ignore their first two points (If You Won't Educate Me How Can I Learn? and If You Cared About These Matters You'd Be Willing To Educate Me). I've definitely used the lines
If You Won't Educate Me How Can I Learn
You're Just Oversensitive
You're Interrogating From The Wrong Perspective
Aren't You Treating Each Other Worse Anyway
Well I Know Another Person From Your Group Who Disagrees!
You Are Damaging Your Cause By Being Angry
from the page (in all innocence! And with the best of intentions!), and probably a bunch more. If I've said that to you, I'm sorry, and can only plead that I didn't know how upsetting it would be. Now I have some idea of how that feels to the other person, I'll try not to do it any more.
¹ "Privilege" in this context is a term of art that (AIUI) means something like this. Suppose group X is in some way marginalised. Then the world will be set up in such a way that non-X people benefit from their non-Xness in all sorts of ways, big and small, that the non-X people simply don't notice, because they've known them all their lives and think that that's just how the world works for everyone. This means that (a) they simply don't realise many of the ways in which life sucks for X people, unless they've made a positive effort to find out, (b) they are almost certainly unwittingly contributing to the further marginalisation of X people, because they don't understand the effects of their actions - as non-X people, they never experience said effects. Hence, if you haven't made an effort to educate yourself about the lives and difficulties experienced by X people, you're probably part of the problem.
This effect could, I suspect, be understood as an especially unfortunate interaction of various well-understood cognitive biases. To my utter lack of surprise, I am not the first person to think of this.
Non-X privilege also applies to people who are non-X but members of some other marginalised group Y: while the difficulties experienced by X and Y people will probably have some overlap, they won't be identical, and privilege applies to those experienced by X but not Y. The D4D author actually wrote the piece after observing exactly this: conversations in which X¬Y people used the same lines on Y people that ¬X people had previously used on them.
Charlie Stross, in the comments to his most recent blog post, posted a link to the site Derailing for Dummies. The conceit is that it's a guide to arguing with members of marginalised groups for people who want to drive them to apoplexy and/or despair as quickly as possible - this allows the author to explain why such conversational gambits as "you're just being oversensitive" won't help your interlocutor's blood pressure.
As a "white, heterosexual, cisgendered, cissexual, upper-class male" (plus a bunch of other things besides - able-bodied, literate...) I've only had conversations about race, sexuality, etc, from the perspective of a member of the privileged¹ group [from which perspective the conversations often look like this :-( ]. So I found the site to be rather uncomfortable reading, but also very educational, and I'm glad the author chose to ignore their first two points (If You Won't Educate Me How Can I Learn? and If You Cared About These Matters You'd Be Willing To Educate Me). I've definitely used the lines
If You Won't Educate Me How Can I Learn
You're Just Oversensitive
You're Interrogating From The Wrong Perspective
Aren't You Treating Each Other Worse Anyway
Well I Know Another Person From Your Group Who Disagrees!
You Are Damaging Your Cause By Being Angry
from the page (in all innocence! And with the best of intentions!), and probably a bunch more. If I've said that to you, I'm sorry, and can only plead that I didn't know how upsetting it would be. Now I have some idea of how that feels to the other person, I'll try not to do it any more.
¹ "Privilege" in this context is a term of art that (AIUI) means something like this. Suppose group X is in some way marginalised. Then the world will be set up in such a way that non-X people benefit from their non-Xness in all sorts of ways, big and small, that the non-X people simply don't notice, because they've known them all their lives and think that that's just how the world works for everyone. This means that (a) they simply don't realise many of the ways in which life sucks for X people, unless they've made a positive effort to find out, (b) they are almost certainly unwittingly contributing to the further marginalisation of X people, because they don't understand the effects of their actions - as non-X people, they never experience said effects. Hence, if you haven't made an effort to educate yourself about the lives and difficulties experienced by X people, you're probably part of the problem.
This effect could, I suspect, be understood as an especially unfortunate interaction of various well-understood cognitive biases. To my utter lack of surprise, I am not the first person to think of this.
Non-X privilege also applies to people who are non-X but members of some other marginalised group Y: while the difficulties experienced by X and Y people will probably have some overlap, they won't be identical, and privilege applies to those experienced by X but not Y. The D4D author actually wrote the piece after observing exactly this: conversations in which X¬Y people used the same lines on Y people that ¬X people had previously used on them.
no subject
how much should I spend investigating any particular theory before I decide that it's rubbish?
Depends on the topic, I'd have thought. In the case of feminism etc, you don't have to look far to find real-world negative effects of prejudice against women, gay people, trans people and so on. So there's obviously something real there, and it's at least plausible that people who've thought hard about this stuff for decades will have better ideas about how to tackle it than you'll come up with on your own. So I'd say that this topic at least merits a reasonable investment of time and tolerance of apparent craziness.
should I keep reading more books until I find one that I agree with
Coming back to the education thing, this is something else that bugs me about it. By Sturgeon's Law 90% of writing on a given topic is crud, so if I just pick books off the "Feminism" shelves at the library at random I'll expect to read 10 before I hit one that's OK. In practice I can do a bit better (by looking at Amazon rankings and so on), but this is where the personal touch is really appreciated: if my friend knows a lot about this stuff, then a personal recommendation from them carries a lot more weight than one from an Internet random, because I have some idea of how extreme and/or well thought-out their views are and I can calibrate accordingly.
In practice, though, I've read exactly one book on feminism, and that was this one (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Introducing-Feminism-Susan-Watkins/dp/184046058X), some years ago. So I should probably make a bit more effort.
Surely it would be fairer for the people who advocate a particular theory to actually say what their views are?
And again, on the education thing... different people use words in different ways, and the question "The word 'foobar' seems to mean a variety of things depending on who's speaking: what do you mean by it?" seems to me entirely legitimate, but (given the anti-kyriarchy crowd's cultural norm against expecting spoonfeeding) it's important for the student to differentiate that question from "What does 'foobar' mean, I can't be arsed to Google it?"
That implies that "You're either with us or you're against us" - no middle ground.
I don't think that's what she's saying - I think she's saying that if you know a bit (or even a lot) about this stuff, you can kid yourself into thinking you know it all, and consequently do Bad Stuff while thinking "I'm so enlightened, I never do sexist things, go me". The answer here, I guess, is to realise that it's really hard to not be sexist if you've been raised in a sexist milieu, and that overconfidence leads to slip-ups.
That's the point where I just say "sod it", and decide that it's best just to follow my own conscience.
Yeah, that kind of conversation can be really frustrating, can't it? The trouble is, if privilege theory is right then your conscience is miscalibrated, and you'll end up doing hurtful things unintentionally :-(
no subject
But stereotypes are so useful, why can't I use them all the time???