Everyone I follow: I’m leaving tumblr because of the nsfw ban, here’s my twitter and instagram.
Me, who’s been using tumblr as my sole source of social media since a crisp autumn day in 1648, hates change, and is terrified of a different social media experience:
Listen, Twilight could have been completely solved if they had just chosen a college over the Grand Forks high school. Like? Y’all look 18 forever? I know college seniors who look 16, it’s cool. They don’t eat? Man we’re poor too, y’all don’t see me eat ever. Y’all glitter in the sunlight? It’s cool I went to a rave once too, that glitter shit it hard to get off. Like c’mon. Why would you wanna be in high school for a milenia anyways.
“PBS News Hour featured a quiz by Charles Murray in March that asked “Do You Live in a Bubble?” The questions assumed that if you didn’t know people who drank cheap beer and drove pick-up trucks and worked in factories you lived in an elitist bubble. Among the questions: “Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American community with a population under 50,000 that is not part of a metropolitan area and is not where you went to college? Have you ever walked on a factory floor? Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?” The quiz is essentially about whether you are in touch with working-class small-town white Christian America, as though everyone who’s not Joe the Plumber is Maurice the Elitist. We should know them, the logic goes; they do not need to know us. Less than 20 percent of Americans are white evangelicals, only slightly more than are Latino. Most Americans are urban. The quiz delivers, yet again, the message that the 80 percent of us who live in urban areas are not America, treats non-Protestant (including the quarter of this country that is Catholic) and non-white people as not America, treats many kinds of underpaid working people (salespeople, service workers, farmworkers) who are not male industrial workers as not America. More Americans work in museums than work in coal, but coalminers are treated as sacred beings owed huge subsidies and the sacrifice of the climate, and museum workers—well, no one is talking about their jobs as a totem of our national identity. PBS added a little note at the end of the bubble quiz, “The introduction has been edited to clarify Charles Murray’s expertise, which focuses on white American culture.” They don’t mention that he’s the author of the notorious Bell Curve or explain why someone widely considered racist was welcomed onto a publicly funded program. Perhaps the actual problem is that white Christian suburban, small-town, and rural America includes too many people who want to live in a bubble and think they’re entitled to, and that all of us who are not like them are menaces and intrusions who needs to be cleared out of the way.”
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Whose Story (and Country) Is This? On the Myth of a “Real” America a lithub article by Rebecca Solnit (via rubyvroom)
“You liberals and your safe spaces/trigger warnings/elitism/anti-fascist protests are the reason we have the alt-right” isn’t wrong just because it’s cruel and victim-blaming. It’s wrong because…well, follow that to its logical conclusion.
Suppose you’re right. Suppose we live in a world where a group of overeager progressive students demanding trigger warnings can actually cause large groups of Nazis to march with assault rifles and elect a leader who promises to bankrupt, deport, imprison, assault and/or kill millions of people. Suppose we live in a world where one punch thrown by an Antifa protester naturally and rightly leads to mass curtailment of civil rights for everyone.
Suppose we live in a world where those on the side of justice have to be perfect, have to moderate our language and keep our voices down, have to assemble politely and calmly, or else we can and should expect violent repression.
What kind of world is that?
If we live in a world where overeager college kids naturally provoke Nazi aggression, then the Nazis have already come, and the college kids and the Antifas and whoever else you want to blame today are just convenient targets.
So I wanted to discuss a topic in social justice, because I genuinely believe it’s something we all need to be better at, myself included. Long post warning, sorry.
The above anon message was sent to me after I contributed to a Tumblr post here. The discussion was about the decision by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to support a controversial right-wing blogger’s right to speak. (If you prefer to get your news from sources, you can read NPR coverage from February 2017 here.) Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, said things like “What’s amazing about the First Amendment is it protects us, regardless of our viewpoints, regardless of the causes we hold dear.” (1)
As you can see from the first few comments on the Tumblr post, some people in the social justice community found this stance abhorrent. They explained that the ACLU is tainted by this decision, and that everyone who supports the ACLU (and all of the ACLU’s work) should feel bad. In the notes and discussion, people express their disappointment with the ACLU, adding that they have defended icky people in the past, as well. The message is clear: the ACLU has fucked up in their eyes by defending icky people and is now a Bad Organization, forever.
These people belong to the slash-and-burn school of social justice and online activism – where if an entity fucks up, that entity is tainted forever and can never be forgiven. Anything that the entity does for good is erased, forever, by That Time They Fucked Up. Under this school of thought, the massive amount of work that the ACLU does in defense of American civil rights – that important, life-saving, world-shaking work – is undermined because they have also defended the civil rights of icky people. This is the school of thought that recommends you discard all attachment to something if it has a problematic aspect. This line of thinking is interesting, and I believe it has good intentions somewhere, but I don’t subscribe to it.
My post addition, and those of others before me, pointed out that a nation’s civil rights must necessarily extend to everyone in the nation. My post addition specifically said that in order for a justice system to work, it must provide equal representation and protection for the accused. The entities that defend the accused are not evil for doing so, even if the accused is literally Satan. They are part of the necessary machinery for ensuring justice. “Everyone deserves equal representation,” was my point. “Try to design a better system [than equal representation].”
Anon, as you can see above, did not like me doing that. Fair enough.
They wrote “Also “try to design a better system”? We are. Look up prison abolition or even criminal rehabilitation.”
They meant to disarm me with these buzzwords, indicating that “they” – the Truest and Purest Social Justice Clerics – are more knowledgeable about criminals than conservative Elodie, who lives in a cave and supports rights for icky people.
Here’s the thing that I want to point out.
If you belong to the slash-and-burn school of social justice thought, in which you believe that one problematic thing (defending icky people) destroys the entity (ACLU) beyond redemption, so that the entity should no longer receive any good things (our support) ever, and anyone who questions that is an enemy (me), who must be punished (with anon complaints)…
YOU ARE NOT DESIGNING A BETTER SYSTEM,,
YOU ARE NOT A GOOD PERSON TO BE INVOLVED WITH CRIMINAL REHABILITATION.
YOU HAVE LITERALLY THE OPPOSITE MINDSET FOR THAT.
Because if you want to get involved with criminal rehabilitation, you stand a higher-than-ordinary chance of interacting with rightfully-convicted criminals who have done icky things – such as literal and genuine rapists.
And you are supposed to take those icky people, who have done incredibly problematic things, and you are supposed to direct them towards redemption, and give them good things, and assure them that they can still be a positive member of society who deserves support. And you have to believe in this.
Even if the criminals hate you, and are constantly lashing out in pain and fear and disgust for you, insulting you and abusing you and berating you. If you want to rehabilitate a criminal and abolish prisons, and build a society where equal representation is not needed because everything is PERFECT AND FAIR, here is what you have to do: if you want to take the people whose actions have placed them outside of society, and bring them back into society – you have to believe that One Bad Act does not define people. That people can learn from past mistakes. You have to stake your life and soul on the fact that people can make incredibly bad decisions, and hurt others irreversibly, and behave in incredibly icky ways – and that they can THEN do enough Good to erase that, or at least balance it.
If you want to rehabilitate criminals, you have to take people who fuck up and fuck up and fuck up, and say “Well, you still have plenty of value as a human being, and you can absolutely move past this.”
If you want to rehabilitate criminals, you have to offer them the reward: “If you stop fucking up, and put some positive things into society, then you will earn support. You will no longer be an icky person who fucks up. You will be a better person who will deserve every good thing. You have this capacity, and I will help you get there.”
If you want to rehabilitate criminals, then you will be tired sometimes, because some of the people are horrible criminals, and some of them really aren’t, and some are wrongfully accused people, but others are deeply awful people who never had a chance to be anything else. People who abused because they were abused, and people who killed their abuser (a cool motive, but still murder).
Believe me, criminal rehabilitation will be harder work than simply disliking someone on Tumblr. Things will be so complicated and so hard, and you will feel sympathy for the strangest people, in the most unexpected ways. You’ll be one of the people with dirty hands. And then people will accuse you of being icky because you defend rapists.
So I think even at the bottom of it, we still need equal representation. And we haven’t escaped that truth, despite the Clever Use of Buzzwords.
But I think that in the social justice community, we could stand to reflect upon this. Does the slash-and-burn principle of eliminating problematic things… actually work? Can we reconcile that ideology with beautiful liberal ideas like criminal rehabilitation and prison reform? Can people be icky, and still deserve every good thing? Or should icky people only have limited access to good things? How should we limit that access, and why?
Can we be redeemed?
Because I am a sinner, I have to believe we can.
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(1) It’s worth noting that this is an American cause. Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. There are no exclusions in the First Amendment for hate speech.
In the United Kingdom, hate speech is not protected speech, and it is defined more rigorously. Certain expressions of hate are indeed illegal and can be punished. The right-wing blogger’s speech and actions would not receive equal protection in the UK.
That is one of those awkward things about laws.
I agree with…some of this. On the one hand, yes, an organization like the ACLU cannot ethically decide some people don’t deserve protection based on the content of their speech and still call itself an organization dedicated to civil rights.
On the other hand, the statement about freedom of speech including hate speech is somewhat…oversimplified. The First Amendment states specifically that “Congress shall make no law” abridging free speech. However, American notions of “free” speech are not universal to all speech. Rather, there are certain forms of “protected” speech.
These protected forms do NOT include speech that incites needless panic, illegal activity, and/or imminent violence. They also don’t include obscenity, defamation, and libel. And importantly, the First Amendment in no way protects speakers from public censure or other consequences arising from what they choose to say. Consequences such as losses of private funding, speaking engagements, reputation, etc.
And to me, this is where the ACLU loses its mission when it chooses to defend people like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos…when it chooses to defend the rights of literal Nazis to march in cities filled with Holocaust survivors. Because the speech of these people is not just hateful. It’s malicious. It does incite violence and it does present a direct risk to the people their speech targets. Yiannopoulos’s presence and speech carries with it an enormous risk of violence toward those he considers worthy of his hatred, and moreover that is his intention.
The same goes for Nazis marching in the streets. There is no such thing as a benign, purely theoretical Nazi. Nazis have literally committed acts of genocide and advocate openly for more acts of genocide. The fact that they have well-dressed spokespeople who turn to the cameras and say “oh, but I’m not actually advocating we kill people of course” doesn’t make this any less true.
And when the ACLU chooses to defend these people, they are doing what centrists everywhere make the mistake of doing: mistaking what freedom of speech actually protects, and then putting that flawed idea of freedom of speech above all other civil rights. Even the law itself doesn’t do this. The limits placed on protected speech are there specifically because it is built into our laws that one person’s freedom of speech is not more important than another person’s rights, including their rights to life, liberty, and privacy.
Has the ACLU done a lot of good for a lot of marginalized people in the past? Absolutely, and my hope is that they will continue to do so. But does that get them a free pass when it comes to the ways in which their definition of freedom of speech is flawed, and the ways in which their application of that flawed definition results in the public defense of people who actively seek to cause great harm to minority groups? No, it doesn’t. Nor should it.
If 2016 was really a “change” election, you would have seen incumbents at all levels defeated as voters opted for something new. Or if it were a “change” election specifically aimed at ousting Democrats and bringing about a new era of Republican rule, you would have seen many Democrats defeated. But neither of those things happened. In the House, only one incumbent Democrat was beaten by a Republican, while six incumbent Republicans lost to Democrats. Ninety-six percent of the seats stayed with the same party that held them before the election. In the Senate, all of the incumbent Democrats won, while two incumbent Republicans lost. Only one incumbent governor was defeated, Republican Pat McCrory of North Carolina. There wasn’t much change in state legislatures around the country either: Republicans took control of three chambers, while Democrats also took control of three chambers.
It won’t matter, of course, because Republicans play by a different set of rules than anyone else. But there’s an important lesson here for Democrats: stop acting like the other party acts in good faith, because it doesn’t. Stop trying to find bi-partisan consensus, because Republicans aren’t going to ever compromise or cooperate, and why should they? They never face any consequences for that behavior from voters or the press, or – especially – from elected Democrats.
Trump is the most unpopular president-elect in history, and the only reason Republicans have a majority in the house is because of gerrymandering. They have no mandate, they have no popular majority. Democrats are the opposition party now, and they need to act like it. Republicans are going to bully and complain and act like petulant children, so treat them like the petulant children they are.
This is not a tumblr. 