The people who claim the world is a cold cruel place and no one’s going to hold your hand or coddle you are 100% the people making the world cold and cruel in the first place lmao
my friends if you ever need someone to hold your hand or coddle you call me.
Well, first of all, I’m use they/them, but thanks so much for misgendering me!
You wanna talk about how Muslim women and and woman-aligned people are treated? Fine, we can talk about that.
We can talk about how the Quran was revealed in 632 AD, saying how women are equal to men. (“And their Lord responded to them: ’…be you male or female – you are equal to one another.’” [Quran 3:195])
We can talk about how in the 16th century, western men were still debating if women had souls.
We can talk about how in 632, the 1st century, Muslim women had the rights to choose who to marry, to divorce, to work, to educate and be educated, to have their won inheritance, to their own land and property, to have their own businesses, to participate in combat, to half their husband’s wealth, to have their own opinions, to have custody of their children, and on and on and on.
We can talk about Muslim women’s right to have a voice in government. Tell me, when did the USA give (white) women “equal participation in the political process,” or voting? 1920. Muslim women have had that since 632.
We can talk about how Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Turkey, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, and Senegal have all had female Presidents or Prime Ministers. How 1/3rd of Egypt’s parliament is female. How in the lovely USA, we haven’t even had a women vice-president yet.
We can talk about the hijab, niqab, abaya, and burqa, how they’re mainly worn to protect women from leering men, and to allow women to interact freely in public without people being able to judge their bodies or looks and only having their minds and personalities to make judgements off of.
We can talk a out how the Western world has twisted our clothing into “women have to cover up because they’re indecent!” and women and feminine-presenting people get attacked and have their coverings yanked off, either because of Islamophobic hatred or misguided attempts at saving us.
We can talk about how I’ve had my hijab ripped off twice, both times by white men, once outside my community’s masjid (the Muslim place of worship.) And oddly enough, my clothing didn’t stop me from breaking one of those men’s noses when he went after my sister. Just like it’s never stopped me from going to school, or playing sports, or doing anything a white woman or woman aligned person could do.
We can talk about how outside of the masjid, where men and women are required to cover their heads, I’ve never once been made to wear a hijab.
We can talk about how the only people who have lectured me about dressing modestly were non-Muslim teachers and other educators.
We can talk about how people want to preach about how Muslims think women are indecent, when western schools freak out when a girl shows her shoulders.
We can talk about my cousin who once made a joke about women belonging in the kitchen and how out of thirty people in the room, the only person who laughed was his white friend. How his father immediately corrected him.
We can talk about how the first university ever, the University of al-Qarawiyyin, was founded in 858 by Fatima al-Fihri, a Muslim woman. How despite that, the summer I was thirteen and taking extra courses at the community college, an instructor praised me for joining even though “I know Muslim parents don’t let girls have higher education.” I had to look her in the eyes and ask who she thought was paying for my classes.
We can talk about the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.a.w.) who denounced all forms of enslavement of women, and assisted women in issuing their rights to exist freely.
We can talk about people who rush to condemn Muslim men for hurting the “defenseless” girls, then turning around and making jokes about raping and hitting women.
We can talk about the “saviors of Muslim women,” talking about how they’re so oppressed, they don’t get to make their own choices.
We can talk about how these people completely ignore anyone who says they’re wrong and call them brainwashed. Because of course millions of women have been coerced into believing in a tradition that views them as subservient, what other explanation is there?
We can talk about how patronizing and infantalizing this is, how it denies Muslim women and woman aligned people agency and puts our “saviors” on a pedestal. “We need to be their heroes! Because obviously they can’t fix their problems without the aid of white people!”
We can talk about how it’s true that Muslim women suffer from misogyny. How there are Muslim men who think of women as lesser, how some Muslim women are forced to cover themselves and marry. Because guess what? There is no culture that is exempt from misogyny and sexism, gender discrimination is a problem everywhere. But you cannot call an entire culture and religion inherently misogynistic, that is in no way true.
We can talk about how somehow there’s this incredibly untrue idea that Western cultures have “progressed forward, and sexism doesn’t exist here, only in other countries and cultures.”
We can talk about how if people want to help Muslim women, all that is needed is for them to listen to us and follow our lead.
We can talk about how Muslim women and woman aligned people do not need white people to save them. We have always been capable of helping ourselves.
There are a lot of conversations to be had about the treatment of Muslim women, if it’s something you want to discuss.
But the thing is? People who talk about how oppressed Muslim women are generally don’t.
You want a deflection from your misogyny, “You think I’m bad! You should see how Muslim girls are treated.” You want an excuse for your Islamophobia, “We need to criticize Islam, they treat women awfully!” You want justification for western imperialism, “These wars are necessary! We need to save the poor girls!”
You don’t care about Muslim women and women aligned people.
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.)
queerhomestuck 