re:appropriate

So this thing started here, grew into another thing here, blew up here, had frantic emails sent off-screen, got replied to here and apologised for here, and has finally come back ’round here. Not because I feel like I have to have the final word, but because I, personally, need to process the way things went down. In class we call this the “dialogue about the dialogue,” or the meta-dialogue: how are we doing? How well did we stay in dialogue instead of growing into debate? How well do we feel we were able to communicate what we felt, and what if anything held us back from expressing the whole of our opinions?

I can only speak for myself, of course. There are a number of emotions that have been running ’round my heart through all of this, though they’ve mostly been tamped down by “facilitator mode,” aka educator mode, as in, put aside the anger, the annoyance, frustration and remember that, though valid, they will not help you right here, right now. You don’t yell at someone who’s in pain, especially when you’ve caused that pain, no matter how intentional it was or how well-deserved you think it may have been. You just don’t. Or, I don’t. You might, and who knows, maybe it works for you.

But for me, what happened was that I saw the costume, thought it was awesome, read the comments and was like, “Oh, less awesome.” I highlighted various parts of that thread in my original post on the matter specifically because the arguments being used were practically textbook examples of the kinds of things I hear all the time, the kinds of things that come up in How To Suppress Discussions of Racism. I wrote that post feeling very angry and helplessly frustrated by the whole thing, without stopping to think about what might happen if the creator of the costume found that post.

And, well, she did. And shit rolls downhill, as they say. My words caused her a great deal of pain and no small amount of stress and frustration herself. I have to own that; I can no more hide behind “well I didn’t mean to” than she can, because while intent can matter, it ultimately doesn’t change what has already happened — it can only mitigate the effects to some degree. The truth is? I feel really fucking shitty about that. I feel like I should’ve known better than to put that out there, without some kind of context letting other people know that it was less about her than about the specific arguments she was making.

Which probably helps her … none. I cringed when I read one of her final comments:

You know when you twist someone’s arm behind their back and get them to say “uncle”? They say it because they want to stop their arm from hurting.

I don’t like knowing that I’m partially responsible for that feeling.

At the same time, though — and this is where it gets tough — the pain she is feeling, the pain of privilege, is one that I cannot and will not apologise for. If a differently-abled person calls me ablist (as they rightly could) for saying things like “that’s so crazy” or “that’s retarded,” and it hurts, because I of all people do not want to think of the ways in which I enable oppression or actively participate in it — the thing is, I don’t get to be mad at them for a perfectly legitimate criticism. It hurts, but it’s a hurt I should feel, that I need to feel, not because wallowing in guilt is useful but because if nothing else it is a reminder that I am privileged, and that just as straight people, white people, and men have an obligation to help end their oppression of queers, people of colour, and women — I have an obligation to help end my oppression of the dis/abled.

Does that make me a better person than Nicole? Absolutely not. She does a lot of good work for her own community, arguably more than I do for mine — she “create[s] educational videos for the first nation people in Canada, to try to help restore their languages which are getting lost to the dominate culture. ” And we’ve emailed back and forth a bit, and from those emails I feel she’s a very decent, good-hearted person.

And that’s the trouble with dealing with things like privilege and oppression: because you basically are dealing with decent, good-hearted people. All the time. My students, the ones who frustrate and amaze me on a weekly basis with the depth of their insights and the heights of their privilege — they’re good people. I love them to death for the things they’ve shared, even when those things have made me rather twitchy. And part of the problem we’re facing is that we’re asking them to look at a systemwide pattern — the destructive social habits of The Evil -Isms — and to then look at the ways in which they themselves have supported it. And that’s hard to do, because for the most part these good-hearted folk simply cannot believe that anything they do actively encourages and supports system-wide injustices. Knowing that kind of thing about yourself is painful, especially if you’ve spent your whole life learning that racists are the people in the white robes burning crosses on people’s front lawns, or that sexists are the rapists in the bushes, or that homobigots are the kind of people who killed Matthew Sheppard, because then all of a sudden you’re no different from them in your own mind and, well, fuck, what the fuck can you do?

We — anti-oppression activists of all stripes — can and should be doing more to make it understood that privilege isn’t personal. I’ve seen some very good posts to this effect, most recently A Primer On Privilege, which states straight up:

Privilege is not: About you. Privilege is not your fault. Privilege is not anything you’ve done, or thought, or said. It may have allowed you to do, or think, or say things, but it’s not those things, and it’s not because of those things. Privilege is not about taking advantage, or cheating, although privilege may make this easier. … Privilege is not inherently bad. It really isn’t.

But somehow that message keeps getting lost, or it keeps getting assimilated into a lifetime of thought patterns to the contrary.

And somehow — and this is my own piece, drawn both from this experience and from things that’ve come up in class — somehow we’ve got to make it understood that anger is valid. I’m sure we’ve all heard the old standby, “Why are you so angry? Why can’t you just let it go?” and this may sound hypocritical, especially since earlier I made a point of asking myself to put aside my anger and frustration because I knew it would not be useful at this point and time. Which is silly because anger can be useful, it can be transformative and cathartic and dammit, it’s perfectly natural to be angry about an injustice that affects you, personally, that you deal with on a daily basis, personally, and that you, personally, can only take small steps to deal with before you have to rely on the good-heartedness of other people to recognise and affirm that anger and do something about it themselves.

That’s why I commended Nicole for actually taking the space to think about the criticisms she’s heard. It’s not that she’s apologised — an apology is nice, but we’ve seen other apologies in the past that have basically amounted to nothing, because there’s no sincerity or genuine concern in them. It’s that she’s thinking and feeling her way through this, taking the route of self-examination, asking questions that don’t have neat, clean answers. It’s a damn hard thing to do, and it’s commendable specifically because the easiest route would be to simply say “bah, fuckers bitching at me on the internet don’t know what they’re on about,” or to otherwise ignore or dismiss what’s been said. It takes a very strong person to confront that within themselves and the fact that she’s done it, is doing it, is a victory in my eyes — for her, for me, for all of us. It’s one step along that road to true equality for everyone.

And you know what? At the end of the day, when all of the messy social shit is done or at least back-burnered until it can be dealt with more effectively, Nicole still makes some hella awesome costumes, and I know I’m still looking forward to seeing what she’ll do next.