feynites:

runawaymarbles:

averagefairy:

old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive

Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.

I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great – where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master. 

So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’

meeresbande:

realsocialskills:

Privileged people rarely take the voices of marginalized people seriously. Social justices spaces attempt to fix this with rules about how to respond to when marginalized people tell you that you’ve done something wrong. Like most formal descriptions of social skills, the rules don’t quite match reality. This is causing some problems that I think we could fix with a more honest conversation about how to respond to criticism.

The formal social justice rules say something like this:

• You should listen to marginalized people.
• When a marginalized person calls you out, don’t argue.
• Believe them, apologize, and don’t do it again.
• When you see others doing what you were called out for doing, call them out.

Those rules are a good approximation of some things, but they don’t actually work. It is impossible to follow them literally, in part because:

• Marginalized people are not a monolith. 
• Marginalized people have the same range of opinions as privileged people.
• When two marginalized people tell you logically incompatible things, it is impossible to act on both sets of instructions.
• For instance, some women believe that abortion is a human right foundational human right for women. Some women believe that abortion is murder and an attack on women and girls.
• “Listen to women” doesn’t tell you who to believe, what policy to support, or how to talk about abortion. 
• For instance, some women believe that religious rules about clothing liberate women from sexual objectification, other women believe that religious rules about clothing sexually objectify women. 
• “Listen to women” doesn’t tell you what to believe about modesty rules. 
• Narrowing it to “listen to women of minority faiths” doesn’t help, because women disagree about this within every faith.
• When “listen to marginalized people” means “adopt a particular position”, marginalized people are treated as rhetorical props rather than real people.
• Objectifying marginalized people does not create justice.

Since the rule is literally impossible to follow, no one is actually succeeding at following it. What usually ends up happening when people try is that:

• One opinion gets lifted up as “the position of marginalized people” 
• Agreeing with that opinion is called “listen to marginalized people”
• Disagreeing with that opinion is called “talking over marginalized people”
• Marginalized people who disagree with that opinion are called out by privileged people for “talking over marginalized people”.
• This results in a lot of fights over who is the true voice of the marginalized people.
• We need an approach that is more conducive to real listening and learning.

This version of the rule also leaves us open to sabotage:

• There are a lot of people who don’t want us to be able to talk to each other and build effective coalitions.
• Some of them are using the language of call-outs to undermine everyone who emerges as an effective progressive leader. 
• They say that they are marginalized people, and make up lies about leaders.
• Or they say things that are technically true, but taken out of context in deliberately misleading ways.
• The rules about shutting up and listening to marginalized people make it very difficult to contradict these lies and distortions. 
• (Sometimes they really are members of the marginalized groups they claim to speak for. Sometimes they’re outright lying about who they are).
• (For instance, Russian intelligence agents have used social media to pretend to be marginalized Americans and spread lies about Hillary Clinton.)

The formal rule is also easily exploited by abusive people, along these lines:

• An abusive person convinces their victim that they are the voice of marginalized people.
• The abuser uses the rules about “when people tell you that you’re being oppressive, don’t argue” to control the victim.
• Whenever the victim tries to stand up for themself, the abuser tells the victim that they’re being oppressive.
• That can be a powerfully effective way to make victims in our communities feel that they have no right to resist abuse. 
• This can also prevent victims from getting support in basic ways.
• Abusers can send victims into depression spirals by convincing them that everything that brings them pleasure is oppressive and immoral. 
• The abuser may also isolate the victim by telling them that it would be oppressive for them to spend time with their friends and family, try to access victim services, or call the police. 
• The abuser may also separate the victim from their community and natural allies by spreading baseless rumors about their supposed oppressive behavior. (Or threatening to do so).
• When there are rules against questioning call outs, there are also implicit rules against taking the side of a victim when the abuser uses the language of calling out.
• Rules that say some people should unconditionally defer to others are always dangerous.

The rule also lacks intersectionality:

• No one experiences every form of oppression or every form of privilege.
• Call-outs often involve people who are marginalized in different ways. 
• Often, both sides in the conflict have a point.
• For instance, black men have male privilege and white women have white privilege.
• If a white woman calls a black man out for sexism and he responds by calling her out for racism (or vice versa), “listened to marginalized people” isn’t a very helpful rule because they’re both marginalized.
• These conversations tend to degenerate into an argument about which form of marginalization is most significant.
• This prevents people involved from actually listening to each other.
• In conflicts like this, it’s often the case that both sides have a legitimate point. (In ways that are often not immediately obvious.)
• We need to be able to work through these conflicts without expecting simplistic rules to resolve them in advance.

This rule also tends to prevent groups centered around one form of marginalized from coming to engage with other forms of marginalization:

• For instance, in some spaces, racism and sexism are known to be issues, but ableism is not.
• (This can occur in any combination. Eg: There are also spaces that get ableism and sexism but not racism, and spaces that get economic justice and racism but not antisemitism, or any number of other things.)
• When disabled people raise the issue of ableism in any context (social justice or otherwise), they’re likely to be shouted down and told that it’s not important.
• In social justice spaces, this shouting down is often done in the name of “listening to marginalized people”.
• For instance, disabled people may be told ‘you need to listen to marginalized people and de-center your issues’, carrying the implication that ableism is less important than other forms of oppression.
• (This happens to *every* marginalized group in some context or other.)
• If we want real intersectional solidarity, we need to have space for ongoing conflicts that are not simple to resolve.

Tl;dr “Shut up and listen to marginalized people” isn’t quite the right rule, because it objectifies marginalized people, leaves us open to sabotage, enables abuse, and prevents us from working through conflicts in a substantive way. We need to do better by each other, and start listening for real.

This! Also, I’ve lately heard a speaker at an event talk about how frustrated he was that instead of having substantial discussions (which include disagreements), his allies didn’t bring their own ideas into their shared work. Of course not everyone will feel that way… but it’s definitely something to think about. In any case, like you said: because oppressed people are not a monolith and have all kinds of different opinions and demands, it is ultimately our responsibility to actively engage with those and chose who to support and how. Hiding behind “I’m only an ally, listening to the oppressed and shutting up” can often obscure what choices one made and why (Why am I listening to this particular opinion/demand when it’s not the only one that is being voiced by this group? Why am I listening to this group more than to another? etc)

Although when it comes to fighting against blatant bigotry, ‘splaining or saviourism, the “shut up and listen to people who actually make those experiences” rule still applies imo.

Or in other words: It’s only ok to stop shutting up once someone is actually willing to consider the humanity of the marginalised group in question and honestly wants to change something about the oppression (and usually also only after having at least a basic level of understanding about the issue.)