Not enough

[liv]

A few months ago, just before I got very busy and then went away, several people made locked posts discussing the issue of not having enough capacity to address all possible problems in the world. This connects to a bunch of stuff that I've been thinking and reading about lately, and I am particularly interested in the question of how to interact productively with people who have different priorities. Also a lot of issues to do with intersectionality seem to be very relevant here. I will try to keep this post moderately focused but I'm rather at the swirling ideas stage of thinking about this.

I think it's rather striking that all the posts which got me thinking along these lines are access-locked. There are numerous reasons for this, but I think one factor is that these conversations can go really badly if you have them in public. Simply admitting that someone's pet issue is not your priority can mark you as the enemy, if your comments happen to come to the attention of passionate, vocal activists for that cause. So maybe I'm being foolhardy in stating openly on the internet that, for example, I'm not a committed anti-racist ally, let alone an activist. Maybe, but one of the reasons I am doing so is that I really want to have a conversation about how people of goodwill can negotiate this kind of thing in public and community space.

Now, I'm not asking for anyone to absolve me for being insufficiently committed to anti-racist work. It is a failing that while I do very much believe that all people of all ethnic backgrounds are equally deserving of respect, I'm not personally doing very much to address the areas where the real world falls short of this ideal. It isn't because I think racism is unimportant (that in itself would be a rather racist position, if I assumed that POC are somehow less worthy of my energies than white people). In some ways it's not even a conscious decision to focus my energies elsewhere, it's more that the course of my life so far has left me with substantially more skills, knowledge, experience and opportunities useful in contributing to other issues. Which of course is not just random chance, it's the result of a series of choices and responses to the circumstances I find myself in, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of those choices were informed by subconscious or systematic racism, but however it may be, I can't do everything.

And of course racism is just an example, there are all kinds of issues where I have a vague feeling about how things should be but I'm not doing much to bring that about. The whole broad range of things that come under the heading of environmentalism, for example. I try to make personal choices which are relatively environmentally responsible, but I'm not highly educated on the technicalities and I don't ever campaign to convince other people, or large organizations and states, to tackle the problems of climate change, habitat destruction, resource depletion etc. Global inequality, poverty and development: my main charitable giving goes to development charities, notably Kiva, but I don't give all that much in direct charitable donation and I haven't done a lot of research into whether Kiva is the best possible charity, it's just one that emotionally appeals to me. And I don't do anything beyond giving money to promote better conditions for people in the global south, not because it's unimportant but because frankly I have absolutely no idea what actions or campaigns are effective and if I took the time to educate myself on this interlocking set of complex issues sufficiently (let alone actually acting on my understanding), I wouldn't have time to do my job or to contribute to other causes I care about or be the sort of friend I want to be to the people I love.

There are likely to be some causes out there I actively disagree with, but for the most part, I want to make sure I don't obstruct people who have chosen different priorities. I don't, for example, go around yelling at people who are trying to have conversations about anti-racism that they're wasting their time and should be tackling GSM causes instead. The thing is, it's not enough to simply avoid such obviously unhelpful actions (though I have to say that some activists don't meet even that bare minimum, especially on the internet!). It's very likely that I am actively harming causes I know little about through my ignorance, and worse, harming the actual people the cause is supposed to be supporting. If I come across some anti-racist activists proclaiming that racism is "gay" or "lame", is it obstructive for me to point out that this kind of language is harmful to GSM and disabled people?

I'm picking rather simplistic examples here. Some of these conflicts can and do exist between different broad causes, certainly, but perhaps an even bigger problem is different, possibly even conflicting, priorities and goals within the same broad area of effort. For example, the conflicts I've been discussing here recently and seeing discussed in lots of my circles around the fight for legal marriage equality for same-sex couples. This could be couched as an issue of priorities; perhaps resource is being taken away from suicide prevention for gender non-conforming teens, or trans* equality, in order to support same-sex marriage. But it can also be about direct conflict, because there is a strong argument that legal marriage equality itself is actively harmful for many groups of Queer people. Or it could be that the activism (as opposed to the desired outcome) is harmful to minority groups; an example would be blaming African-Americans for the disappointing decisions on same sex marriage in California, which is, well, kinda racist, not to mention ignoring the existence of African-Americans who are themselves in same-sex relationships or identify as LGB.

The ongoing intersectionality debate within feminism falls squarely within this sort of thing. "Feminism" is a huge and interlocking set of different causes, if only because the category "women" includes people in just about every imaginable state in life. I have great sympathy for Dzodan's intersectional or bullshit view of feminism, but a the same time I have to admit that no one person can be equally active for and knowledgeable about all possible feminist-related causes, just as no one person can be equally active for all possible causes in general. Non-intersectional feminism, the kind of feminism which promotes the rights of upper-middle-class, white, cis, able-bodied women in rich countries is absolutely a valid and worthwhile cause. Because financially well-off women, even when they are cis and able-bodied and young and attractive, absolutely do face significant workplace discrimination and exclusion from positions of influence in all kinds of fields, and I absolutely do care about rampant discrimination against mothers in the society I'm living in, that alone is a cause one could devote one's whole life to.

Actually the main reason I started calling myself a feminist even though I had experienced a lot of feminism as being about a relatively narrow special interest group was that I began to perceive rape, sexual assault and domestic violence as gendered hate crimes as well as acts committed by one individual against another. That's most certainly an issue which affects women with any number of other advantages in life. And I'm not aware of any political movement other than feminism which directly confronts rape and rape culture. (Talking of conflicting priorities, please don't take that statement to mean I don't care about rape of men or other non-female people; I think feminism can be somewhat helpful in addressing those issues, and I don't know of many other forms of activism which are doing anything about rape of non-female people at all.)

One problem is that all too many non-intersectional feminists not only don't make it a priority to deal with issues affecting women unlike themselves, they go around actively attacking trans women, or sex-workers, or women who simply disagree with them politically. I'm afraid I don't have anything very subtle to say about that kind of thing; I think it's just a case of people who agree with me on one cluster of issues (that women should be given equal chances in education and employment etc) also being extremely unethical and bigoted. It's just unfortunate that "agreeing with me about women's employment rights" has a particular identity label, namely "feminism", which means that when people who agree with that proposition behave badly, it reflects on all the rest of us and causes trans women, sex-workers and others to be very reasonably reluctant to trust feminists.

I'm more concerned about non-intersectional feminists who hurt women (and men) from other minority groups out of ignorance rather than deliberate malice (and the same the in the case of other forms of activism which is more for one cause than the rest). That's partly because some of the social changes that may be seen as desirable for eg white, upper-middle-class women are negative for poor women and women of colour, and it's also partly because people who know nothing about racism are liable to be accidentally racist in the ways they go about campaigning for their cause. And even though I'm taking the position that everybody has to prioritize the causes they work for, there does come a point where ignorance is culpable, if your words and actions persistently lead to harm to the people whose concerns you're ignorant about and you refuse to do anything about it. I'm not really particularly picking on feminists here, it's something that all activists are prone to, it's just that there has been a lot of discussion about the problems with non-intersectional feminism recently. For example karnythia has had some very incisive things to say about racism coming from the white-dominated feminist blogosphere, including starting the #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag.

I also want to talk about how disability and disability rights fit in to other kinds of activism. I am somewhat more vocal about and interested in disability issues than some other causes, but I'm also a very long way from being an expert or a committed activist. I am seeing some really interesting but also disturbing discussion about the harmful effects of activism that ignores the realities of disability. Part of it is that a lot of activism, at least in the anglosphere and contexts that I'm most familiar with, is implicitly or directly working towards the goal of offering people from whatever minority every possible opportunity to succeed, to attain power and autonomy. But for many people with chronic illnesses and disabilities, this goal can be in itself negative, because the definitions of success, autonomy and so on don't mesh with the realities of living with some kinds of limitations. I am definitely in favour of improved equality, legal rights and social standing for disabled people! But I'm considering the idea that being treated "equally" with able-bodied people may not necessarily be positive for all disabled people if that implies being treated "like" able-bodied people.

Another powerful essay that was much linked at the time I started thinking about this was Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg laying out why this disabled woman no longer identifies as a feminist. Interestingly, she doesn't focus very much on ableist assumptions and rhetoric within mainstream feminism, but more points out that much of the feminist movement completely fails to acknowledge disability and disabled women at all. [Cohen-Rottenberg personally rejects person-first language so I am respecting her preferences in discussing her article.] On reflection, I'm not even convinced that disability is a special case here. While prioritizing a small subset of causes is absolutely unavoidable, there needs to be real awareness of other causes for multiple reasons. Partly to avoid obstructing the equally valuable activism of people with different priorities or different approaches. Partly to avoid using language or taking actions which harm people through ignorance of their issues. But also to avoid pursuing harmful and counter-productive goals through simple lack of information about the range of different goals that different people can have.

The thing is that in order to avoid these pitfalls, activists have to be able to engage with people who support and are knowledgeable about other, perhaps conflicting causes. So the discussion I want to have is, what's the best way to connect to causes that you personally are not committed to, don't have room in your life or abilities to be committed to? Is there any way to achieve this without just devolving into everybody yelling at everybody else for not being (sufficiently or at all) on the side of good? I note that I'm presuming goodwill here; there is always backlash, there are people who are actively trying to undermine any given worthwhile cause as opposed to not happening to be involved in supporting it. I'm not really talking about how to deal with that sort of actual malice. But I would very much welcome any thoughts.

And thank you to the people who have been having interesting conversations about these issues; I'm not acknowledging you by name because I want to respect the choice to restrict access to your take on potentially controversial discussions.

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

Hmm. I don't have the answers here. I suppose there is some level of minimum allyhood, or not-actively-harmful, which one might hope for across intersecting issues. If Person A is uninterested in actively pursuing queer rights, one hopes they aren't setting up obstructions - are not actively homophobic or transphobic, for a start. Then the next step would be to hope that they might engage in activisim on common issues with the awareness that it *is* a common issue, and with respect for the problems on the 'other' side. Person A's union organising might take into account the need for queer couples to access partner leave, for instance, even if person A isn't going to marriage rights rallies. If person A isn't personally up for that, one hopes they might promote others in their group who *are* interested in pursuing this particular intersectional issue.

There are some conversations about this going on in the atheio-skepticsphere, under the topic of mission drift. Greta Christina recently did a brainstorm post of skeptic intersectional issues, or areas where skeptic activists could constructively contribute to other movements.

[liv]

Yes, it seems like your thinking on this is somewhat congruent with mine. Identifying potential common issues is a useful idea, as is making connections between people who could do with support and activists who are enthused about the types of support or campaigning they need even if you're not in a place to help directly. I should check out the skeptics discussion; Christina's stuff is basically always worth reading!

[jjhunter]

I will have to come back to this post when I have more time, but the sparknotes version - my thinking about this was powerfully shaped by a short, devastating book I read in high school: War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Near the very end of the book, the author Chris Hedges talks briefly about why some people, some communities don't get caught up in perpetuating genocide or war or other systematic harms when the society they live in normalizes / privileges doing so. His answer echoes the philosophy of Paul Tillich et al. - community and sense of independent identity matters. Active strengthening of bonds between people, norms that reward cultivating and maintaining mutual respect & self-respect, and forth - these give people the roots they need to live lives consistent with their values.

So I guess my version of intersectionality is that you don't have to be splitting yourself between all the possible causes of the world in order to support those causes. Living your day to day life in a way that affirms the norms you want to see is its own kind of norm-setting. Building community wherever you find soil for it enables other people to do the same.

I think the tradition of fannish auctions whenever a major disaster goes down is an excellent example that it doesn't matter so much what you're building community around; what matters most is the quality of the personal relationships formed, and whether there are regular efforts at community organizing where people can learn & practice related skills.

[highlyeccentric]

I mean, short of overwhelming people / taking over, there is not really such a thing as *too much* allying or intersectionality. But if you're going to be, say, a disability activist and not a race activist, step one is not to be a *racist* disability activist!

[liv]

Wow, I really, really like this response, thank you so much. You're saying really smart and thoughtful things, and thank you also for providing some names to follow up. I'm temperamentally inclined to like the idea that strengthening bonds between people and building communities is part of the answer to this, because that's pretty much what I do. Not necessarily with the goal of promoting intersectional attitudes, but it's really heartening to see an argument that this is a morally effective path to take. And yes, fannish auctions are a really good example of the benefits of community-building in general, no matter what the community's ostensible purpose is.

[chordatesrock]

I suppose you could divide oppression into action and inaction. So there would be oppressive actions (Thing #1), oppression-perpetuating/facilitating inaction (Thing #2), activist actions (Thing #4) and passive oppression-nonfacilitation (Thing #5). Refraining from Thing #1 by doing Thing #5 would be common decency; refraining from Thing #2 and/or doing Thing #4 would be activism.

You have a lot of problems and limited resources, so you allocate those resources. If you allocate them to problems that you understand better or problems that affect you more, well, so? Would you rather be a mediocre activist for every cause under the sun? As counter-intuitive as it sounds, choosing to just do what interests you in probably a perfectly moral solution.

[wild_irises]

I really appreciate you opening this up to public discussion, and you (and your commenters) raise all kinds of points that I know I haven't thoroughly thought through. Right now, I'm in an activist group (U.S. foreclosure defense) that is right on the point of disbanding, and I would say that one of the prime fractures is around class; foreclosure defense is, to a large extent, class-based work, but our most vocal member plays his "working class/semi-homeless" card a lot in a way that frequently leaves many of the rest of us feeling like we are lower-quality activists because we have homes and jobs.

I think intersectionality is crucial, and I deeply appreciate all the work that's being done to consistently remind me about inclusion, about considering the effects of decisions on under-represented groups, and especially "nothing about us without us." At the same time, I think intersectionality can be (and sometimes is) used as a club to drive potential allies away (now there's a statement which I could be pilloried for, if anyone chooses to do so).

I also agree with chordatesrock above that we have to choose, because otherwise we spread ourselves so thin that our work is useless.

All food for more thought.

[kaberett]

Thank you for the recommendations!

[kaberett]

Thought for tonight: the place I most consciously run up against this is in the form of activism. I fairly often wryly remark to people that as far as science goes, I am all blue skies (I don't care about human impact; I am bored about human impact; and in some cases I actively disregard human impact because when I weigh up evacuation of an entire island against the incredible data we get out of it...); but in my activism, I am all about how I can help this person right here right now.

I'm not interested in the long game.

I'm not at all interested, even idly, in what political system might work best. I'm not interested in the work of tearing down what we have right now and rebuilding it all from the ground up. I don't want to make the human sacrifice that arises from diverting my energy from my very here-and-now human focus.

But. That doesn't mean I think people playing the long game are wrong, or are wasting energy - it just means that I don't think that's the work I am best put to. I don't think people doing climate science are bad or wrong or boring, either: I'm grateful they're interested and they're doing it, but I find it tedious beyond words as soon as I go from "ooh, cool, atmospheric chemistry" to "... pollution regulations".

With activism, it's less "this is dull; I don't want to do it because I'm not interested" and more "I am not the best person for this job." I am damn good at sex education and GSM/LGBT+ and disability activism. I'm a good advocate for immigrants, because I can lever my considerable privilege to make Very Pointy Points about it (I have a strong immigrant identity for all I'm third-gen, but I am also The Immigrant Whom Noone Suspects, because I am very white and very upper-middle class and in many respects Very Establishment).

I'm in some respects more and in others less useful when it comes to anti-racist work, because fundamentally I do not have that experience. So: it isn't as personally exhausting; and I will get listened to. Shit White People Can Do To Help, etc. So in places that aren't my active focus - and anti-racist work isn't - what I strive to do is:
- call people on their shit where it arises in our discussions
- be aware of racism, trust POC who tell me that shit is racist, go away and think about it if I don't spot it, and then anti-rec the fuck out of that shit where I see it uncritically praised among white folk
- just... try to be aware

... and these are things I do that I don't consider being actively anti-racist. Because - it's not like GSM stuff, disability stuff, where I can quote statistics and give compelling personal testimony, it just isn't - but it is what I can do, and it is what I can do with minimal investment, and - well, it really is quite literally the least I can do with my knowledge. So I do it.

[kaberett]

Actually, that's the other thing: as with Dreamwidth volunteer work, for areas of activism I am not a specialist in I try to keep track of which people I know are specialists (or at least know more than me), and which of those are willing to educate, so that I can refer onwards. Failing that, I try to at least keep track of essays I can refer people to.

[nicki]

I think the do no harm approach is probably the best we can do in many cases. Whether we admit it or not, most of us have a hierarchy of causes that we are or are not interested in that we care about either more or less. Frankly, nobody can care about everything in equal measure and, on occasion, we have to choose. So, for example, you might have a room full of gay rights activists. Some of them might also have feminism as their next most important issue and others might have race as their next most important issue, and others might have disabilities as their next most important issue. It doesn't make one of them more or less activists for gay rights if they aren't all also focused on, say, health at any size or campus rape or access to higher education or homelessness. You care about the stuff you care about and otherwise try and lend a helping hand or at least do no harm on the other stuff.

[atreic]

If I come across some anti-racist activists proclaiming that racism is "gay" or "lame", is it obstructive for me to point out that this kind of language is harmful to GSM and disabled people?

I know it's a simplistic example, and so I am probably making a simplistic conclusion, but I think with this sort of thing it's all about context. It's important to watch for

a) what is the situation of the group, how pressing are their priorities, and do you expect them to be able to engage? For example, if they've just set aside 6 months to draft a 'racism is gay' leaflet, then that's a more reasonable time to try and talk to them than if they're in the middle of being attacked by police.

b) whether you're (err, I want to say 'one is' but it always sounds so pretentious!) always just attacking other activists. If you find it easy to criticize 'racism is gay' people, but you're never calling out bad behaviour in friends, workplaces, the government etc, then it might well be the case that your subconscious is being obstructive, and it should be poked towards arguing with a broader spectrum of people.

I've been really interested by the comments on the Orientation Police comic - some of them are from trans people saying 'OMG, thank you, this is awesome and helpful' and some of them are from trans people saying 'this is really offensive, these panels are propagating hurtful things a, b and c'. I think he's done a good job of letting these comments through and letting people have a voice (he was screening all comments for excessively transphobic rubbish) and trying to reply to them. It's an interesting example of 'less important issue that I care about a lot' trying to interact with 'people with bigger problems but that are not my problems that I'm trying to address here'.

[highlyeccentric]

Another part of the value of community-building, especially in structurced activist context, is resourcing. If within your field of interest you're able to advise, train, or provide resources to people at the intersections of various issues, then, one, your group won't end up dominated by one demographic, and two, they'll have skills useful on the other side of the intersection as well. Ideally.

[liv]

I think there might be too much allying and intersectionality, mainly because of opportunity costs. The world needs people who are deeply committed to a particular cause (even if that means they're not so great at working on other issues), also people who are committed to their jobs or their caring responsibilities or volunteer work which may not necessarily be directly activist.

I agree that step one is not being an X-ist supporter of cause Y. But that's actually quite a big step one. Not being racist (vel sim) is not just a default state or an absence of obviously racist actions, it requires actual education and effort. And specifically it requires talking to and learning from people who actually are race activists, and one of the things I'm really interested in is good ways of having those kinds of conversations.

[liv]

Thank you for joining in this discussion. I am definitely taking it as a given that you have to allocate your resources. In many cases it's entirely the right thing to prioritize according to where your interests lie, I don't have a problem with that at all. And I think the mediocre activist for every cause thing quite often comes up among younger people; they often have lots of time and energy for arguing on the internet, but relatively limited specialist skills and experience to allow them to make a really substantial contribution to a specific cause. That's not a bad thing in itself, it's just not the only way to be a good person.

Taking the division into action and inaction, I think that does help to clarify things a bit, but even refraining from oppressive actions is harder than it looks. Like, there's quite a lot of research that suggests that people who don't make an active effort to educate themselves hold loads of unconscious biases. I'm not sure it's possible to simply passively not oppress through inaction. So probably someone who thinks they're doing the common decency thing of doing #5 and not #1 is probably actually doing thing #1 and actively oppressing people without realizing it, or at least lots of thing #2.

[liv]

Ooh, thank you so much for commenting, I'm really flattered to hear from an activist I really look up to, and to have come up with some angles that aren't completely obvious to you.

The example of a group being driven apart because one person has more activist cred than some of the others is a really cogent one. I mean, it's genuinely important for privileged people not to just take over activist groups which are supposed to be working on behalf of people who really need it, but driving away relatively privileged people from supporting at all might well make the campaign less effective. I do like nothing about us without us, I think bearing that in mind goes a long way towards reminding people about inclusion, intersectionality, and not just repeating oppressive dynamics within supposedly activist circles.

I can equally see why articulating this kind of thing can be unpopular, because it shares some surface characteristics with the decidedly oppressive situation where the privileged person effectively says, oh, I'm not going to support your rights or be an ally unless you beg me with exactly the right degree of deference and bolster my ego and generally allow me to continue to enjoy all my privileges. Navigating a course between leveraging your privilege to be able to support the cause effectively, and hurting the people you're supposed to be helping, is really sensitive, and definitely one of the issues I'm trying to address here.

[liv]

Thankyouthankyouthankyou. I really appreciate your responding to this discussion, because you have loads of good insights about this sort of thing and you're amazingly clear at explaining your perspective to people who aren't as clueful.

I can very much relate to what you say about science versus political activism. As a scientist I am very much about understanding how things work, and even when I direct my curiosity-driven questions towards cancer drug discovery I'm quite aware that I'm probably doing less good for cancer sufferers than I would be if, say, I worked for Macmillan, but I would be rubbish at providing practical and emotional support to sick people and wouldn't find it fulfilling, so that's not the life path I've chosen. As an activist, well, I'm not even sure it counts as being an activist, but I am much more interested in and capable of supporting individual people than I am at tackling the political reality that leads to people needing the support.

And thank you also for the concrete examples of the ways you approach high priority (for you) and lower priority but still important causes. The immigrant activism makes me smile, cos my Mum's really like that. So I really do get the thing of a white middle-class Very Establishment type with an immigrant identity as being a very effective advocate in some situations. Being aware of racism and listening and calling people when they're less aware, that's a really good example of some ways to avoid being obstructive / oppressive even if it's not your primary cause. But I note that what you're describing is very much not doing nothing, it's not just ignoring the issue and assuming that makes you not-racist.

[liv]

I agree, but I also think that not doing harm requires a level of effort and engagement, because otherwise you can do loads of harm through sheer ignorance. I'm trying to look for productive ways of reaching that do-no-harm minimum level, without taking away from causes and responsibilities that may be a higher priority.

In the gay rights activists room example, it's not just that some people might also be feminists while others might be anti-racists or disability activists. It's that, unless the gay rights group is doing something seriously wrong, the group is going to include people who are actually female, people of colour, and disabled. So it's not just a case of not having enough time and energy and skills for a different cause because you're busy with gay rights, it's a case of not hurting the members of your own group who might have different life experiences and issues from yourself.

[liv]

Thank you, these examples are helpful illustrations even if they're on the simple side. You are absolutely right that choosing when to engage is definitely part of not obstructing work which is more important to other people than it is to you. And that you can't just always be attacking, because that's the worst of both worlds, you're obstructing people with different priorities and you're wasting energy which could be used for pursuing your own priorities. I can imagine this could be a result of (possibly subconscious) bias, eg being kind of racist so being much more sensitive to homophobia coming from people of a different race from your own.

The Orientation Police comic and ensuing discussion is a fantastic example, thank you for bringing that up. You've got someone from one community, gay men, trying to be an ally to another (partly overlapping, of course) community, trans people. And inevitably he's going to get it somewhat wrong in the eyes of people who are more expert on trans issues, plus there's the whole underlying controversy of whether saying "x sorts of people are attractive" is actually a compliment to x sorts of people.

[liv]

This is another comment that I find easy to like, because precisely one of the things I'm good at is matching people with issues up with people who can help on that issue. But yes, if you have a bunch of people with different skills and awareness, you can get synergy if you manage the intersectionality carefully, it's not just a case of reducing harm in this context. I do appreciate that this is an ideal that's easier to describe than put into practice, of course.

[liv]

I really admire you for the ways you keep track of resources and make connections like this. It's something I try to do as well, as well as consciously working on creating communities and environments so that people can encounter eachother and come across new ideas, even without me actively facilitating this kind of thing.

[kaberett]

My approach to this largely involves listening, and checking in with people. So: making sure that I read (or at least skim) articles not directly related to my principle focus; in part I do this by subscribing to RSS feeds of same on DW, so that I am at least aware of current issues in $notmyfield, and so I can set the mental flag of "this thing is problematic" and investigate it more if I need to. [This is actually how a lot of my "this person is fail" works - I will read something that explains why, set the "THIS PERSON IS FAIL" flag, and forget the reasons, but then be able to dredge them up if I come across uncritical praise of same, etc.]

(I think I should mention that when I talk about checking in with people who know better than me, or directing others to them, where I actually want the person to respond/engage, it's always someone I've (a) cleared this with and (b) given clearance for a reciprocal arrangement, i.e. they're welcome to send people my way for education.

[kaberett]

This is something that comes up a fair bit in helping to maintain vaginapagina as a safer space, actually - we sometimes have situations where someone has posted, clearly in crisis, and has used oppressive language. Finding the balance between getting them the help they need and minimising harm to the community as a whole is... interesting.

[green_knight]

Nobody can do everything, and even people who have energy to spare for activism often have it only for a time - they break the trail, and when they get tired, someone else has to take over.

On the other hand, anything useful you do is better than not doing anything. If *everybody* picks up one piece of litter, stops one friend from saying something -ist, refuses one needless plastic bag... when you multiply it by millions of people, that's still a lot of goodness, even though each of them could theoretically do ten times as much or more.

And a lot of intersectionality lies in pattern recognition, I feel - once you realise *how* people are gaslighted, marginalised, ignored in one area, it becomes easier to recognise the same things happening with different arguments in another.

[jjhunter]

This is a lovely, thoughtful comment, and I'm laughing at my brain for getting stuck on wanting to know what the unmentioned Thing #3 would be.

[chordatesrock]

*dies of embarrassment*

I had not noticed that. Well, Thing #3 could be getting your spiritual house in order, and Thing #6 could be maintaining your own mental and physical health, in order to be able to help others. I like that idea so much I'm going to call it intentional.

[chordatesrock]

Perhaps there should be some inclusion of Minimum Research Time in the basic standards of decency.

Here's a flowchart for someone with average energy and slightly above average free time:
IF claim of oppression
THEN research what the oppressive experiences are
Use discernment to rule out that this is a member of a hateable group mistaking that for oppression ("hateable" is a term I did not coin-- either amorpha or Amanda Baggs coined it-- to refer to people who experience widespread prejudice without the institutionalization of discriminatory structures, like Otherkin).
Use discernment to rule out lying and trolling.
If it's legit, continue until you've researched for an hour or until you know what Thing #1 mainly consists of, whichever is last.

I'm sure that's flawed, but it's a first draft and it's more the idea of the thing anyway.

[liv]

Thank you, I find this comment really helpful as it gets to the heart of what I was talking about here. I think the people who break the trail aren't only the ones who have the most energy, they're the ones who are most suited to starting up something new. It sees to me that some people are creators and innovators and they don't just run out of energy, they get bored and burned out once the cause is up and running. Whereas some people, like myself, are sustainers, we're more drawn to the day-to-day work of keeping organizations going and supporting people than in creating something brand new.

I definitely like the idea of making small contributions where possible, because it's true that lots of little things multiply. And yes, pattern recognition; I am wary of just assuming that all oppressions are interchangeable, but sometimes what you learn working for one cause can be generalized.

[liv]

Did I mention that you are awesome? I do try to read and link to stuff that's outside my main sphere of knowledge. And I definitely do have people and reading material I can send people to if they want info about something that others know more about than me. (I'm not very good at media criticism, though, it's too easy for me to just get caught up in the story and ignore the FAIL.)

[liv]

That's a really interesting suggestion. I think for my part I don't really want to put time and energy into verifying claims of oppression; if someone tells me that something I'm doing or saying is oppressive I'll basically take them seriously, and just wait for more experience to happen in order to triangulate whether this is actually a systematic problem or just that person's individual quirks. If I sometimes apologize to liars or trolls, well, that's better than going around unwittingly hurting people.

I admire Baggs a great deal and I can see the use of having a category of "hateable". I'm just not sure that we need official lists of categories of people who are Oppressed rather than only victims of prejudice; I'd rather not make life worse for Otherkin or anybody else, even if they're not a historically and systematically discriminated group.