[HISTORICAL NOTE: this post was cited in Julia Serano’s Excluded, to which I say: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.]
Callout culture, for those who are not familiar, is a toxic dynamic that social justice communities, especially those on the Internet, tend to fall into. Callout culture essentially means that when you do something oppressive, everyone is allowed to yell at you as much as they like and whatever they like, even if you apologize. It reaches its epitome on Tumblr, in which people occasionally tell suicidal people to kill themselves because they used the word “crazy.”
If you don’t know much about callout culture, I recommend you go down to the “further reading” section: there are lots of links that explain it on a more 101ish level than I am going to here. This is definitely inside-online-social-justice baseball.
Tone arguments are a real concern. I am going to put the points I agree with about callout culture rhetoric up front in the vain hope that people will not attempt to disprove me by talking about them in the comment section. There are people who will use another person’s perceived anger as a reason not to engage with them. This is shitty, and also a logical fallacy. After all, if someone says “you motherfucking asshole, the sky is blue, I hope you kill yourself” the sky is still blue and you should not believe the sky is green because that person was a dick.
It is also relatively common for people to use accusations of someone else being a jerk to recenter the conversation around that person’s jerkishness rather than around whatever thing the first person did to make the second person be a dick to them. That’s derailing! And kind of awful!
In addition, the kyriarchy is in general a lot better at recognizing asshole moves against privileged people than asshole moves against marginalized people. So you get people saying “Jeez, I just said ‘tranny’ and this crazy tranny blew up at me. So oversensitive!” No, dude, you’re a dick and she got pissed at you cuz you’re a dick. Reasonable people get pissed at dicks.
Anger can be empowering. Marginalized groups in general are policed about their anger against their marginalization. Some groups, such as people of color and the mentally ill, are stereotyped to be angry, so even the slightest expression of anger by those groups ends up being read as Scary Black Man or Monstrous Mentally Ill Person. Other groups, such as women, are not expected to be angry at all. For these reasons a lot of marginalized people tend to repress their anger.
For these groups, the right to be angry matters. Having a space where they are free to express their anger is liberating for a lot of people. Instead of pushing their anger down and smiling and making nice, they finally have a chance to express the emotions they actually feel. I mean, there’s a reason telling people that their emotions are Wrong Things and they Should Not Have Them is a tool of abuse: invalidating people’s emotions is seriously shitty for their mental health.
That doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want. Probably the biggest flaw I see in callout culture thinking is the inability to separate “my anger is valid, liberating, and empowering” from “literally anything I do because of my anger is valid, liberating, and empowering.”
Guys: there are some things that are beyond the pale. Beating people up. Any sort of threats. Doxxing people, unless it’s to keep them to cause greater harm to other people (doxxing Violent Acrez? Fine. Doxxing some random kid who said something racist on the Internet? NOT FINE). Telling people to commit suicide. Et cetera, et cetera, you get the idea.
I’ve seen people say “I’m not comfortable policing how oppressed groups express their anger.” BullSHIT you aren’t. You are perfectly comfortable saying that you shouldn’t send people rape threats or call a black person a nigger even if they say horribly oppressive things. I am just suggesting that we expand the list of things that are Not Okay a little.
Not all people who do oppressive things are privileged. See also: Michelle Malkin. Trans women who believe in Harry Benjamin Syndrome. Misogynistic women from Phyllis Schalfly to Suzanne Venker. “Ex-gays.” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is a natural fucking consequence of the fact that marginalized people are not a hivemind. Sometimes marginalized people believe different things! Sometimes they believe actively evil things, or things that are oppressive to themselves or other people! I literally have no idea where you people get this idea that “people who have suffered” and “people who are assholes” are non-overlapping groups.
It’s relatively common for social-justice-type people to say that they don’t care about the precious feefees of some white cis dude, they care about being welcoming to the women of color he’s oppressing. Okay, cool. But there are women of color who think that affirmative action is unjust, or white people should be allowed to say the N word, or whatever the white cis dude was yammering about. Do you care about welcoming her? Do you care about her precious feefees?
As far as I can see it, your options here are as follows: say that you don’t care about the precious feefees of people who are doing oppressive things, including trans/queer people, women, and people of color who are doing oppressive things; not be a douche to people until you’ve confirmed that they’re white cis dudes; or not be a douchebag to anyone.
Unfortunately, the online social justice community has decided to go with a different plan, which is as follows:
- Pretend anyone who disagrees with you is a white cishet man, even if they aren’t. (Seriously, until you’ve seen a woman of color told that she’s ignoring the voices of women of color, you haven’t lived.)
- Classify trans people who were female assigned at birth, white cis women, and gay men in the “we’re allowed to be as douchey to them as we want because they are PRIVILEGED OPPRESSORS” category.
Not all people who don’t like anger are privileged. To oversimplify a lot: there are two kinds of people in the world. There are people who are angry! about! INJUSTICE! and want to shout a lot about it, probably with lots of insults. And there are other people who don’t want to be yelled at.
There is a certain tendency to assume that marginalized people are the ANGRY ONES and privileged people are the ones who don’t want to be yelled at. I have no idea where this conclusion came from. I mean, I could argue that privileged people have the spoons to get angry about social justice, and marginalized people have to deal with oppression all day every fucking day, including people being angry at them constantly, and would really just like a place where people are calm and civil and kind and they can relax a bit.
But I’m not, because that’s stupid. Instead, there are angry people who are oppressed, and people who hate anger who are oppressed, and while some of this has to do with oppression a lot of it is just natural personality variation.
Not silencing people is not an option. Not silencing people is a great plan; I am totally okay with everyone being able to speak out. But not silencing anyone is not going to work. If you say “no, you have to stop yelling and insulting people,” you silence some of the people who are angry! about! INJUSTICE! On the other hand, if you let people yell insults whenever they like, you are silencing the people who are afraid that if they speak up they’ll be yelled at. And the second group is not going to loudly spew insults about how they’re being oppressed; they’re just going to be quiet and stop talking and censor themselves and eventually leave the movement altogether.
I’m not sure what the ultimate solution is to the problem, other than “everyone becomes more compassionate.” For instance, when I get angry, I need to recognize that there is another human on the other side of my computer screen, one that has life circumstances I don’t know about, and avoid hurting them. On the other hand, when I end up sobbing because someone else is angry at me, I also need to understand that their anger comes from a place of suffering and pain and to have empathy for them.
The block button exists. This is advice I’m directing at both groups! If you are so angry at someone that you can’t do anything except scream contentlessly, then perhaps it would be better to block them. On the other hand, if someone is making you sob or curl up in a ball of triggered, then perhaps it would be better to block them. Thankfully, online, you don’t have to put up with people you don’t like.
I think that might be Part Two of the angry people/people who hate anger solution. Both groups can say their piece, but not necessarily in the same social circles.
Furthermore, there is no ethical requirement that you try to convince every idiot who stops by. If you are unlikely to change your mind, the person you’re talking to is unlikely to change their mind, and your readers are unlikely to change their minds, DON’T TALK ABOUT IT. If taking care of yourself requires that you don’t engage, DON’T ENGAGE.
Rational arguments work better. When you argue with someone online, you’re not arguing to convince them, you’re arguing to convince the other people who are reading your argument. Arguing to convince someone who is firmly enough convinced of their point of view to argue about it on the Internet is unlikely to be effective. (Exception: if you’re arguing with someone who already has deep respect for you.)
With that in mind, consider. If you happened to stumble across people arguing about some topic you don’t know anything about– the Singularity, Israel vs. Palestine, whatever– are you going to be more convinced by the person who uses logical reasoning and facts and cites their sources, or the person who screams DIE DEATHIST SCUM?
My point.
Callout culture comes from a place of class, educational, and ability privilege. If you have ever taken a gender studies class, you have educational privilege and almost certainly class privilege as well. If you have enough time to keep track of whether transsexual, transgender, trans, or trans* is the preferred term this week, you have class privilege. If you can understand dry academic feminism books, you have educational and ability privilege. (Actually, bell hooks has some great writing, particularly in Feminism Is For Everybody, about how academic feminism and its children, including nearly all of online social justice, have made feminism greatly inaccessible to the people it’s supposed to help. …Aaaand I just proved I’m exactly the sort of person I’m complaining about.)
It is amazing how a group of people whose whole thing is checking their privilege refuse to check their privilege when it’ll stop them from feeling like a Super Cool Activisty Person. But you know what? There are lots of people who are trying to figure out where they’ll sleep tonight or what food they’ll eat, who are barely literate, who are trapped in an abusive household, and for the vast majority of them whether you call it “equal marriage” or “gay marriage” is a complete nonissue.
Callout culture has some incredibly oppressive dynamics. For all its conversation about not caring about the precious feefees of the cis white dudes, callout culture has this remarkable tendency to target women and queer men. See also: the incredible amount of energy directed by the online social justice community against radfems, a tiny and powerless minority of transphobes, as opposed to against literally anyone else. Or Dan Savage hate. Sure, Dan Savage is a fuckwit, but is he any more of a fuckwit than every other advice columnist ever? (Captain Awkward and Ms. Manners aside.) And yet the amount of hatred Dan Savage gets is disproportionate to the amount of hate other advice columnists get.
Partially, this is because Dan Savage and radfems are Part Of Our Community (TM), and leftist groups are always far more interested in fighting the People’s Front of Judea than we are in fighting the Romans. And partially it’s because nothing is more perennially popular than femmephobia, queerphobia, and misogyny.
Well-intentioned knowledgeable people can disagree. Okay, look, people. Most of the callout culture nonsense is not actually about, you know, important issues, because nearly everyone that participates in callout culture agrees that Western society is racist and you shouldn’t murder trans women and so on. Instead, we tend to have arguments that look like this:
Person A: Nonbinary people who were female assigned at birth experience privilege that nonbinary people who were male assigned at birth do not.
Person B: Yes, but it is also kind of fucked to divide up nonbinary people by our assigned genders, as if female-assigned nonbinary people are pseudomen and male-assigned nonbinary people are pseudowomen.
Person A: TRANSMISOGYNISTIC SCUM.
Person B: BINARIST SCUM.
When, uh, actually, if we stayed away from the screaming, we’d notice that both Person A and Person B are kind of right. As a female-assigned-at-birth trans person, I am far less likely to be a victim of a hate crime (for just one example); however, it is also fucked to classify me as a pseudo-dude. Callout culture makes complicated, nuanced discussions like this much more difficult to have.
Final ethical guidelines.
1) Whenever you have the energy for it, rationally and civilly argue with those you disagree with.
2) Whenever you don’t have the energy for it, consider blocking them instead of shouting.
3) Some views are so beyond the pale with adherents that are so unlikely to be convinced that shouting and insults are called for in order to convey that This Is Not An Acceptable Thing People Believe. It’s generally better to put some rational argument between the insults in order to explain why it’s not acceptable, though.
4) Not every view that disagrees with you is so beyond the pale that no one sensible agrees with it. If you think so, then maybe you should quit activism, because the whole point of activism is convincing people and it seems like rather a waste of energy.
5) In general it is better to shout at people who are not part of your audience rather than people who are. They are less likely to feel insulted and the fact that shouting at people makes convincing them difficult is less likely to come up.
6) If someone who is generally sensible says something horrible, clarify if they meant what you think they meant before you start screaming.
7) Stop fucking assuming people you disagree with are privileged.
8) Try to criticize people who are outside your community too, it’s good for you.
9) Remember that you do not know what other people are going through– both people you’re criticizing and people you are being criticized by– and that it is better to err on the side of kindness. Or the block button. The block button is awesome.
10) If other people do not follow these rules, listen to them anyway. Note that I don’t say “agree with them”; it’s possible that they are an asshole and also wrong. And obviously if something is detrimental to your mental health, the block button, it is awesome. But as much as you can, listen to everyone. People might not phrase things in the most compassionate and persuasive way possible; they might, in fact, phrase it in an obviously douchey way. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
Further reading
Alicorn, Me And The Abstracted Persona of the Anti-Ism Community At Large.
Flavia Dzodan, Come one! Come all! Feminist and social justice blogging as performance and bloodshed.
Jo Freeman, Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood.
Natalie Reed, Five Ways Cis Feminists Can Help Build Trans Inclusivity And Intersectionality (mostly the first point, but the rest are also good and you should read them)
Thing of Things 
I remember reading this blog post on your old blog (from a link on your old tumblr) and being like YES YES YES I LIKE THIS PERSON I WANT TO BE THEIR FRIEND. And then a few weeks later you disappeared off the face of the internet and I was :((((((((((((((((((((
And then months later you returned to the internet and I was :))))))))))))))))))
And now we are dating! Eeeeeeeee! ❤
(If this was on Scott's blog this comment would meet the true and kind rules, but I will try to say something necessary.)
So… point 10? It is really hard to listen to people who are like “you motherfucking asshole, the sky is blue, I hope you kill yourself.” Is there an effective way to stop your brain being uncharitable to grumpy/mean/threatening people?
Personally, I have this weird reaction where rude rhetoric and hate make things I disagree with LESS scary, because I find it easier to laugh at them. Which is not epistemically hygenic. Or kind.
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“There are people who will use another person’s perceived anger as a reason not to engage with them. This is shitty, and also a logical fallacy. After all, if someone says ‘you motherfucking asshole, the sky is blue, I hope you kill yourself’ the sky is still blue and you should not believe the sky is green because that person was a dick.”
Someone being angry doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re wrong, but there are still two relevant considerations here. First, someone who is angry is more likely to be mindkilled about the topic, and less likely to reasonably consider counterarguments and think about the issue calmly, so while they’re not necessarily wrong, they’re more likely to be wrong. Second, regardless of whether they’re right or wrong, them being angry makes them less pleasant to interact with, and that by itself is a good reason to disengage with them. “You’re angry and therefore you’re wrong” is fallacious, but “You’re angry and therefore I will disregard you” is not.
“Partially, this is because Dan Savage and radfems are Part Of Our Community (TM), and leftist groups are always far more interested in fighting the People’s Front of Judea than we are in fighting the Romans.”
This makes sense when the goal is to fight against the problems in one’s community, rather than against problems outside of it. Because people tend to interact with their communities more than with random people, problems in their communities are understandably more important to them. They’re not engaging with neo-Nazis or garden-variety racists/sexists because they’re not a part of their garden, nor are their ideas likely to take root there. But radfems are more of a problem in that regard, which is why there’s effort expended to deal with them.
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On the latter point, yep. For example, it’s true the TERFs are a powerless bunch in the broad culture, but last time I tried to find a cool queer writing group I found a nest of TERFy-TERFs and decided to stay away. Which sucks cuz I cannot find any other decent queer-focused writing group around here.
Sure, I could start one myself, but still, that other group is like waaaaay super popular and everyone talks about it and so basically mine would be trans-folks only and there aren’t enough of us. So basically I kinda lose.
Plus, while TERF attitudes are broadly rare, they seem fairly common among people who run women’s shelters and similar things. This has a material affect on vulnerable trans women. It’s a real problem.
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I am uncertain that claims anger are truly a good sign someone is being irrational. First, many displays of anger online are symbolic, done for signalling purposes or to make a rhetorical point. Second, there are many things which are worth getting angry about. Third, an empirical observation: I have much more often seen someone use someone else’s anger as an reason to ignore their argument in cases where they are in my judgement wrong than in cases where they are right. If I had to guess at an explanation for this, I’d say it’s because proving someone wrong is more appealing and so is generally chosen whenever possible, but in cases where that is not possible the easiest way to save face is to accuse the other person of violating a social norm (one that, in other circumstances, you might not even have bothered to take offense to).
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Anger is an extremely reliable indicator that someone isn’t thinking clearly about a topic. Showy, “righteous” anger is an almost infallible indicator. That’s why it’s justly satirized as “Won’t someone think of the children?!”
One of the (many) things I profoundly dislike about online social justice discussion is the way in which it fetishizes the anger of the oppressed, especially by people who are not, themselves, oppressed. This leads to a typical race-to-the-bottom scenario where individuals compete for social capital using ever louder, more obscene, more violent expressions of anger. Since anger is addicting, giving it social reinforcement is very much like egging on an alcoholic to do a keg stand — unproductive, socially ugly, and sort of evil.
Saying that you shouldn’t disregard someone’s argument merely because they are angry is, in theory, good advice. I don’t think it’s the right good advice, though, especially in the current climate of the internet.
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The thing that’s really trapped me, especially as a nonbinary person, is communities that say “This is the only place you will be safe! The outside world will laugh at you and eat you alive! Inside our enclave is the only place you can express your true identity without being attacked for it!”
Sometimes it’s kinda true. Frequently it’s not–young urban enclaves tend to drastically underestimate the number of middle-aged suburban squares who will accept you with a shrug and a “different strokes for different folks.” But the scary thing is that these same communities tend to be the ones most riddled with the callout culture you’re talking about. So it turns into:
“Hey, extremely young and vulnerable marginalized people, acceptance with us is your only hope! Whoops, you said something bad and now we reject you utterly and forever.”
Even if that something bad was legitimately very bad, that’s still a hell of a psychological blow to deal someone.
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Frequently it’s not–young urban enclaves tend to drastically underestimate the number of middle-aged suburban squares who will accept you with a shrug and a “different strokes for different folks.”
This, this, a thousand times this. Fear of transphobia has caused me almost more anguish than transphobia itself. I might have come out years ago if I didn’t keep seeing the message “everyone hates trans people a lot.” even suffixed with “and that’s bad.” And even though most people have been really nice about it since I’ve come out, I’m still afraid of using the women’s washroom. And when I discussed this with my therapist, she said “Those fears might be adaptive. Women get really protective of their bathrooms.” The SJ incentive structure that rewards recognizing oppression everywhere and condemning it in harsh terms really makes it hard to find non-terrible communities outside of SJ itself that.
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I typed quote instead of blockquote. Evidently I can’t HTML
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I remember reading a study about how economists act more like rational agents than the general population, implying that studying a model of human interactions causes you to behave more as that model predicts. I wonder if this applies to social justice communities in any way?
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I’ve been affected by something of the sort from fat acceptance, which tends to aggregate the admittedly huge amount of stigma against fat people– the thing is, I’m left feeling much more under attack than I actually am.
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“Pretend anyone who disagrees with you is a white cishet man, even if they aren’t. (Seriously, until you’ve seen a woman of color told that she’s ignoring the voices of women of color, you haven’t lived.)”
Oh yesssss.
http://www.reddit.com/r/NotYourShieldProject/top/?sort=top&t=all
Like, I’m seriously not a gamergator, I’m highly critical of the whole culture war around GG, but #NotYourShield has really exposed the worst in SJ. I personally think #NotYourShield is kind of misguided on the object issues – like, they seem identify with gamer culture to the point of studiously ignoring its multi-level awfulness – but it’s THEIR damn choice.
I’d much rather support #NotYourShield than the SJ crusade For A Totally Different Hip And Progressive Gaming Culture, as valid as many of its object-level goals are. Because I simply can’t stand this damn Pharisaic attitude, this SJW entitlement and authoritarianism. As Kazerad says, it’s everything that SJ *ought* to be against.
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The real irony here is that gamer culture is fucked up in ways that’re largely symmetrical to the ways SJ culture is fucked up. They’re both refuges for people that see themselves are marginalized, and they’ve both ended up fetishizing (different trappings of) marginalization to the point of reinforcing it.
Seeing them go ten rounds with each other over l’affaire du reproductively viable worker ants has been kind of grimly funny.
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That second link seems like a complete strawman to me.
The #notyourshield thing got bad, but our skepticism followed a history of 4chan stunts where they pretended to be women and minorities, such as the “ban father’s day stuff”. Perhaps the SJ side blew that stuff out of proportion. Perhaps not. It certainly existed and it made it hard to trust the claims of some pro-GG minority person who I’d never heard of.
Personally I stayed away from that side of the discourse cuz 1) I couldn’t really be sure who people were and 2) it doesn’t matter if some minorities are pro-GG. Plenty of the GG crowd were exactly what we thought they were. I knew precisely who Adam Baldwin and Milo Yiannopoulos were. I have a basic sense who RogueStar is. Plenty of angry nerd-bros were exactly what they seemed. To call the movement anti-feminist is to me undeniable. It is reactionary and explicitly anti-social justice — which is more broad than being anti-SJW.
Regarding the abuse of nerds, yeah, we need to talk about that. On the other hand, the nerd-bros can be really toxic and “gee I’m autistic” isn’t an excuse to be an jackass, especially since I’m not convinced the majority of these guys are autistic. There is plenty of complete bullshit in that social space, this enormous reverse discourse deployed against women and lots of others. And to say they’re powerless misses the fact that they are powerless against most people, but when they have power they can be shockingly horrible. We need to talk about this also.
Internet pile-on culture is really broken and no side seems to avoid it. This sucks and I hope it gets better. Social justice culture is based on sound ideas that I strongly support, even if I dislike how the most extreme voices drive the pile-ons. GG, on the other hand, was based on malice and toxic hate. It’s leaders were terrible people who want a terrible world.
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Veronica, I regret to say that your comment proves Kazerad’s point. The ONLY thing it says about the #NotYourShield minorities, who I think merit discussion, is that “they don’t matter”.
I even agree with much of the other things you’re saying! But it’s STILL derailing!
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It’s not that they don’t matter as human beings, but they don’t really change this particular discourse. Which is to say, if someone from #notyourshield wants to talk to me about something non-GG related, like makeup or lambda calculus, then yay! But when they literally act-like-a-shield to something fundamentally bigoted, which is what the wrongly named #notyourshield was, how much do I need to engage? Especially when I didn’t know these people, had no prior contact with them, and had to deal w/ the lingering suspicion that whoever was talking was some nerd-bro pretending?
Which look, the existence of that suspicion was not my fault. GG emerged from 4chan space. 4chan has a history of this shit. You reap what you sow.
In any case, it is important to engage with ideas, not each particular person who wants to talk.
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How much do you need to engage? I actually think that has a simple answer.
If you claim to be an advocate for social justice you need to engage to defend them from anyone who tries to silence their voices. Be it by calling them a straight white male or an uncle tom.
If you believe in call out culture, you need to call out the people who jumped to conclusions and got it wrong. There’s nothing wrong with honest skecpticism, but a good skeptic doesn’t jump to conclusions. The people responding to #NotYourShield jumped to conclusions and the results were simply disgusting.
Oh, and one last thing. This particular discourse is about Callout culture’s tendency to “Pretend anyone who disagrees with you is a white cishet man”; and the #NotYourShield example in particular. Trying to talk about what’s wrong with #Gamergate is (attempted) derailing.
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Just to quickly clarify a point, for pedantry’s sake.
When I say “defend them from anyone who tries to silence their voices”: Silencing is bad, disagreement is perfectly acceptable.
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The reductio ad 4chanium meme is quite interesting. It justifies painting everyone not harshly critical of GG as an horrible bigoted shitlord freely, because everyone knows that GGers come from 4chan and that the only people on 4chan are horrible bigoted shitlords.
In the real world, one of the first persons on the “ethics in journalism” frontlines, so to speak, was TotalBiscuit, not exactly a 4chan fanboy. And his lukewarm comments on the ethics of issuing DMCA to block criticisms earned him bucket-loads of hate.
And about 4chan and shitlords:
/tg/ is quite a nice place (especially if you want free playtest guinea pigs, ask the writers of Maid RPG and Song of Swords, and especially if you compare to the twin cesspools of twitter and tumblr), half of the /fit/izens are decent people trying to help and put together a lot of useful material, /d/ had (has?) advice threads regularly linking to authors discussing consent and safety questions, including some featured on the blogroll of this very website, /a/ and /b/ (!) have tracked down animal abusers who posted gore videos. They also pissed off the CoS, which is chaotic awesome in my book, but YMMV.
It also allows morons to start #cutforbieber and #bikinibridge, certainly.
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When I disengage with someone over tone, 90% of the time it’s for me. I know that I get mindkilled really easily when people start yelling, and at that point there’s very little chance we’re going to make any progress. If the other person’s arguments are still available on the internet for me to come back to I usually try, but only with the resignation that I’ll be ruminating about it all day and end up very unhappy.
On that note, it’s also frustrating for me to see people trying to communicate topics that could be really interesting if presented calmly, but just get completely lost in all the yelling. I feel like I could’ve gotten behind fat acceptance a lot earlier if someone had bothered to actually lay out their arguments rather than just yelling about the offending party being an oppressive shitlord.
In general I’m rather skeptical about callout culture’s ability to accomplish anything other than silencing one side of a debate. When our cross country team had a mandatory meeting about rape and consent, the presented told us 100% seriously that a woman could not consent to sex after one drink. Predictably, no one spoke out for fear of being labeled as a rape apologist, even though every single one of us knew it was bullshit. Quite honestly, that sort of thing is about the only kind of result I can imagine seeing.
To those who support callout culture: what exactly is the goal in silencing peopel who say horrible things? Is it to change their view? Is it to change the view of bystanders? To just not have to listen to them? The first two don’t seem achievable with callout tactics, and the last one is, at best, a bandaid solution. Am I missing something here?
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I oppose callout culture, but I think I can play Devil’s Advocate for it. I apologize if this is going to sound like strawmanning; that is not my intention.
As far as I understand, there are two reasons to participate in callout culture: 1). Some views are so vile and degrading that merely voicing them is an incredibly damaging act that must be stopped, and 2). Silencing people who say horrible things, even if they are not as horrible as (1), is the best methodology we have for effecting positive social change.
Point (1) may sound controversial, but if you think about it, we have already adopted it as a society, to some degree. We treat yelling things in general as an acceptable thing to do; however, yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is illegal. Similarly, saying negative stuff about gay people is generally legal, but making specific plans to incite a gay pogrom in your neighbourhood is not. Unfortunately, mainstream society lags behind social justice on many issues, and has mis-classified some likewise harmful speech as legal. Because this kind of speech causes direct and severe damage to people belonging to vulnerable groups, it is up to us (as social justice activists) to silence it, because the legal system will not.
That said, point (2) is more generally applicable. What we ultimately want to do is create a more accepting society, where various minority groups are treated as first-class citizens. Unfortunately, in our current society, these minority groups are often treated as less than human. Some people do so explicitly, but most do not; instead, they simply have a built-in suite of incredibly powerful cognitive biases which prevent them from even realizing what they are doing. Even more unfortunately, most of these biases cause the person who has them to perceive minorities as less reasonable, less intelligent, and more entitled than himself and others like him. This means that engaging in public debate with such a person is worse than futile: at best, you will end up reinforcing the aforementioned stereotypes about yourself; and at worst, you will reinforce the perception that your basic humanity is somehow negotiable.
Given that we cannot change people’s minds in conventional way (or, at least, not enough minds to matter), the best we can do is prevent the spread of harmful memes — and that means silencing. Your racist uncle will remain a racist to the end of his days, but if he is not allowed to voice his racist opinions (at least, not without becoming a social pariah), then the next generation of people who follow will grow up free of such opinions, thus ensuring that, over time, our society will gradually become a more welcoming place for everyone.
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I endorse point (1) rarely and grudgingly. It just seems like it’s very easy to justify silencing e.g. Snowden. Once you declare silencing to be occasionally a legitimate strategy, it will be invoked whenever powerful groups have something they want to silence. With regards to point (2), I’m skeptical that it’s a useful or desirable method. It would require a great deal of faith the Elua and Cthulhu will move in the same direction. Also, again, we have the problem of it being coopted by powerful groups. See: people being sent to the guillotine for not being enthusiastic enough about the French Revolution, people being sent to death camps for denouncing the Glorious Leader, etc.
I realize these are extreme examples, but I really do worry about what happens when you try to make a view unacceptable rather than merely pointing out why it’s wrong. I also wish to distinguish the creation of walled gardens from attempts to make views unacceptable anywhere.
Finally, I admit that I may be typical minding a bit here with regards to what I think will change people’s views. When all I heard was people calling out transphobia I just saw it as a stupid fringe movement. Then I read A Human’s Guide to Words and I was like “Oooooohhhhhh….”
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Personally, speaking as myself, I mostly agree with you. That said, in my role as the Social Justice Warrior Advocate ™, I would say something like this:
Your opposition to (1) is basically the Slippery Slope fallacy. There is no logical chain of reasoning that inevitably leads from silencing some speech, to silencing all speech. If there were, we’d be living in such a dystopia now, seeing as we silence some types of speech already (yelling “fire” in the aforementioned theater, national secrets, hate crime agitation, etc.), and have been doing it for hundred of years.
Your primary point of opposition to point (2) is somewhat unclear, since you’re talking in colorful metaphors about gods instead of actually saying what you mean (and regular!Bugmaster agrees with SJW!Bugmaser on this one). Your fear of the powerful groups co-opting the tools of silencing is understandable, but misguided. Powerful groups already engage in silencing minority views, all the time; that’s what it means to live in a kyrarchy. Our silencing tactics are in fact quite weak compared to all that power, but they’re all we’ve got.
You say that you are skeptical that the callout culture is “useful”, but what do you mean by “useful” ? If you mean, “it is effective at reducing offensive/oppressive speech”, then I believe there is plenty of evidence for that. Certain sentiments, such as “woman, get back in the kitchen” used to be commonplace, but are now considered absurd. Practically all major organizations, including corporations and government institutions, have recently put in a lot of effort into policing the offensive speech of their employees and executives, because they know that should they fail to do so, the public outcry will create the kind of negative PR that even weeks of public apologies could not erase. Major social media companies (such as Twitter and Facebook) have begun implementing features that make it easier to silence their most offensive users, for the same reason. Certain avenues of “research” which are clearly designed to reinforce oppressive social norms are being defunded, due to the public outcry. I’ve got lots more examples, but I think you get the idea.
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@Bugmaster: I don’t think that your examples indicate that we’ve already adopted “silencing”, in the sense of call-out culture, as a legally enforced rule. The example of threatening gay people involves direct threats to someone’s physical safety. The act of voicing the intention itself is not what is judged by society as unacceptable; rather, it is an indication of a future hate crime. Call-out culture believes in silencing because the speech is considered to be unacceptable in and of itself, I suppose on the grounds that it’s a threat to someone’s emotional safety. I think calling out “fire” in a theater comes closer to those conditions, since the objection to it is that it creates panic. But even in that case I expect the real problem is that it creates massive disruption and perhaps winds up distracting the fire department from tending to real fires. In no way have we (at least in America) enforced laws forbidding certain kinds of speech purely on the grounds that voicing the very idea is wrong; for instance, only a few countries have illegalized Holocaust denial.
I tend to believe that the gradual changes in what is socially considered acceptable or unacceptable to say have resulted from changes in public perception mostly due to certain types of social activism and also use of reasoned argumentation, but generally not from the silencing tactics of call-out culture.
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@Liskantope:
Yes, these are pretty much the same objections I myself would make to the arguments I present above. That said, I am quite uncertain about this point:
> I tend to believe that the gradual changes in what is socially considered acceptable or unacceptable to say have resulted from changes in public perception mostly due to certain types of social activism and also use of reasoned argumentation, but generally not from the silencing tactics of call-out culture.
I think that we can take “reasoned argumentation” off the table; the social justice warriors are IMO correct when they say that no one listens to reason (at least, no one that matters, anyway). At least, not to reason alone. The combination of reason + social activism is a good one, but then, “social activism” pretty much means “mass protests”, at the very least. This is not callout culture, but it’s close; the sentiment “say what we want you to say or we wreck your town” is pretty close to “say what we want you to say or we wreck your life”. Obviously, not all protests are violent; however, I believe that the social justice activists would argue that violent protests are the most effective ones — or, in some cases, the only effective ones. I’m not sure if they’re right or not.
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I always assumed that the reason “shouting fire in a crowded theater” (note the word “crowded” is always included) serves as an example of speech that is not protected is that people are likely to be crushed to death in the stampede for the exits.
In other words, disallowing this is also about directly preventing physical harm to the listeners.
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@Liskantope
The thing about that standard is, what is the difference between organizing a pogrom against gays and organizing a political party or voting to organize pogroms against gays?
I guess this means that if a faction I agreed with was in charge I would want to ban people with sufficiently different terminal values from running for office and possibly voting. But then this is another one of those things where I would only support it in conjunction with the rest of my ideology and never alone in of itself, and someone with an otherwise very different ideology adopting it would be bad (as opposed to something like, say, universal healthcare, in which case even a fascist or theocratic government adopting it is still a good thing and is better than if they didn’t).
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Did they actually say, not “a person”, but “a woman”? FFS.
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Yes. I know this is a weak man, but people like this do exist. It’s weird because he was otherwise a pretty reasonable guy.
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If you take seriously the arguments of a person shouting at you, you’re incentivizing people to shout at you. If you disregard arguments from shouty people, you are closing your mind. One solution is to set a policy of disengaging when people are shout-y whenever convenient, and avoid backing down when being shouted at, but also consider the criticism at a later point.
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Callout Culture strikes me as somewhat like Communism. A reasonable idea in theory but impossible to implement well in practice.
The power to call people out is a desirable thing; safety from being called out is an even more desirable thing. This incentives people to play Oppression Olympics – to assume they’re always arguing against a straight white male so they can call them out, to ignore or attempt to invalidate the views minorities who disagree with them because under the rules of callout culture they cannot win in a fair debate.
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This is a general response to the comments above. Can we distinguish a call out from an Internet pile-on? These are not the same thing, although I think we confuse them. Likewise, there is a difference between a healthy critique of call-out culture and a rejection of social justice in general.
On @bugmaster’s points above, on how “silencing” can be an effective tactic, I say this: even if “silencing” has certain failure modes, I ask people to look at the broad range of social justice and how it unfolds.
I would suggest we need the angry people just as we need the calm, rational people. They all have a role to play. Genderbitch has some thoughts on this here: https://genderbitch.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/a-m-o-communication/. Furthermore, if we take a broad look at the advances of LGBT rights, we start from a literal riot at Stonewall — and Stonewall was not a peaceful sit-in; it was throwing bottles at cops. The rioters tried to set the bar on fire with the cops inside. The riots lasted three days.
During the riots many members of the “low-profile, within-the-system” Mattachine Society opposed the riots. To them, such antics unseemly, risky for their stable, secret gay lives.
Anyway, from that we move to the complete failure to “work within the system” during AIDS, cuz the American right-wing (and plenty not-so-right-wing people) were literally willing to let every gay man die instead of face the crisis. And those working within the system got pretty much nowhere. And even when not-gay people started getting the disease and folks got serious, they really only talked about non-gay victims in the media.
The extreme behavior of ActUp was fucking necessary. People were pissed, beyond angry, cuz their friends were dying and nobody cared.
In the 90’s and beyond the gay liberation movement changed. AIDS was being managed [1]. Marriage was on the horizon. The HRC was rising, along with its steady supply of “corporate gays.” The “assimilationists” had the upper hand.
Which, that all worked. But it did not work alone. While the assimilationists were convincing everyone that your gays neighbors were great for property values and isn’t their lawn well-kept, there was a movement to make homophobes seem really uncool. For example, think of how homophobes and right-wing types get treated by The Daily Show or the Colbert Report.
Your average hipster or bro-dude or party girl watches these shows, cuz that’s what their friends watch. Frat boys watch these shows, and they laugh at the homophobes.
Homophobia, how gay!
This is a dual process. Gays are cool. People who don’t like gays are not cool.
You want to be cool, don’t’cha?
(Trans people, particularly trans women, seem to lag about 20 years behind cis gays regarding rights and acceptance. So the idea “Well, you’ve won the fight” is way off for me and mine. Furthermore, if it’s getting better, it’s getting better because of social justice.)
And here, look, this “making bigotry uncool” thing is a big part of it. A gay liberation movement that lacked that message would be one that lagged behind the one we have. Gay lives would be diminished. The “fierce urgency of now” would not be met.
It perhaps sucks that this is an effective way to improve our lives, cuz society is a mess and in some places it will go too far and in others it won’t go far enough. A society with this message will occasionally force out someone like Brenden Eich. In such a society, some angry person might yell at you on Twitter, and then other people will decide you’re an asshole — cuz you’re obviously uncool — and pile on.
And the pile-ons suck, but social justice in an evolving process and we learn from these things.
So yeah, there are failure modes in social justice. They need to be talked about. But there are much bigger failure modes when social justice ain’t around.
[1] AIDS is in many ways managed for cis gays, particularly for economically well-off cis gays. For trans women it is not managed, in fact it remains at epidemic ranges for us. See http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/transgender/.
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> Can we distinguish a call out from an Internet pile-on?
I don’t know if we can. Scott wrote on this topic much more eloquently than I ever could, but let me add my two cents.
When you say “Internet pile-on”, you evoke the image of some offensive troll in his basement getting de-friended on Facebook or something. But when I think of this term, I think of people getting their careers destroyed, their identities revealed, getting death threats mailed to their house — all because they made some mildly offensive remark, possibly even in private.
I cannot argue against the fact that such tactics are effective. They are. But they do not lead to a world where “homophobia is uncool”; instead, they lead to a world where everyone is afraid to say anything, lest they be branded ideologically impure and destroyed. Some SJ activists explicitly say that yes, they are working toward building such a world. Bad people should be afraid to voice their terrible opinions, so that good people can flourish.
The problem is that we can’t agree on who the “bad people” are. I mean, obviously homophobic straight white men are bad. And so are sexist white dudebros. And maybe neckbearded geeks. And maybe accomodationist women who see no problem with being homemakers. And maybe those duplicitous trans people, but maybe not. But what about abortion doctors ? Are they bad ? Should we doxx them ? You say “no, they are good”, but almost everyone in (e.g.) Alabama disagrees, so now what ?
I’d much rather live in a world where public shaming, character assassination, witch hunts, death threats, and other similar things were extremely rare, because they were simply Not Done in polite society. Murder is kind of at this place right now in our society: no matter how much you hate someone — even an evil baby-killing abortion doctor — most people would be appalled if you picked up a gun and shot him. Even if they agree with you.
I understand that the standard response to this is to say, “Of course you’d say that, you are the man in power, you are risking nothing. Meanwhile, we are fighting for our very existence, we can’t afford to disarm just because it makes you feel better.” But, sadly, that’s not what’s happening. To borrow Scott’s metaphor, you think you’re building a superweapon that only shoots bad people, but what you’re really doing is mass-producing superweapon parts, and packaging them up with little disclaimer slips that say, “for use on offensive people only”. What could go wrong ?
Another standard response would be to say that a society where everyone is afraid to say anything is preferable to the one we live in now, where the privileged are free to oppress the weak. I don’t have a good response to that, because ultimately, it is a question of different values. I come from a place where ideological purity was strictly enforced and all forms of public (as well as private !) expression were explicitly treated as tools for the advancement of the One True Way. I was very lucky to escape that place, so it’s possible that I am over-sensitive to that kind of rhetoric.
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(looks like my previous comment is in moderation, this is just an addendum)
Regarding protests, I’m not sure what to feel about them. On the one hand, yes, it is the only voice available to the voiceless, and an effective one at that. On the other hand, when you are running down the street setting cars on fire, I am pretty sure you don’t have the time to check each license plate to make sure that the car belongs to a registered oppressor. And yes, I understand the concept of “collateral damage”, but when the entire point of your movement is to cause collateral damage, then maybe your acquisition of the voice for the voiceless comes at too high a price.
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Can we though? Internet pile-ons happen organically, as I understand it. I think I might have been part of a couple on accident, for some definitions of “pile-on”. People have posted internet callouts with like a million disclaimers saying “Don’t harass this person, don’t all go out and send them angry comments about why they’re wrong”. These, and I’m not even sure these are the norm, have led to harassment and hundreds of angry comments about why they’re wrong. Any time you post a call out which might have a wide reader base, you risk an Internet pile-on.
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I think you’re missing that pile-on culture isn’t unique to SJ.
In fact, it seems you want to bring up elevatorgate and donglegate.
Uh, last time I looked at elevatorgate it was Watson who got the pile-on. In fact, it’s kinda hard to blame SJ culture for one of the biggest events that brought people like me into online SJ. (Was the dude in the elevator ever revealed? By Watson? I have no idea who he was. I know who she is cuz she got all the rape threats.)
And any pity for guys like Thunderfoot — just don’t even.
And donglegate. Hmmm. Did Adria Richards get piled-on?
Seriously, do you even know. She lost her job also, cuz people kept DDOS-ing her employer till they gave up.
(And for the record, the dude in the picture should not have been fired and AFAIK Richards did not ask for that and the dude’s former employer insisted they had wanted to fire him anyway for other stuff and I don’t know if I believe them, but what the fuck!)
After his employer fired him they got DDOS-ed by angry nerd-bros.
Did Anita Sarkeesian get piled-on? Did Zoe Quinn? Did Kat Háche? Did Chloe Segal (who attempted suicide again two nights ago and is homeless at the end of the month)? Did Samantha Allen? Did Kathy Sierra? Did Randi Harper?
Many moons ago some Fox News dipshit retweeted something I said and my Twitter turned to complete shit for days.
And look, I get that you all have little sympathy for Zoe Quinn. Fine. I can see why. But I read the IRC logs where they talked about how they’d drive her to suicide. Like, I’m sure we’ll find some “just joking” out there, but I believe them.
It worked on Chloe.
So do you really think the pile-on is something unique to social justice, or that it is our primary aim? Really?
As long as we have “retweet” and “reblog,” we’re gonna have this shit.
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> So do you really think the pile-on is something unique to social justice ?
Absolutely not. That was kind of my entire point.
What I want to do is make “pile-ons” (more commonly known as witch hunts or harassment campaigns) unacceptable for use by anyone, against anyone, ever.
What social justice wants to do is to make “pile-ons” unacceptable for use by anyone, to anyone, ever — with the exception of social justice activists, who would of course only use them against bad people. The links I supplied were in support of the second part of that sentence.
My argument is that a), “pile-ons” carry so many negative side effects that they are overwhelmingly likely to be a net-negative event (this is another way of saying “pile-ons are immoral”), and b). even if you disagree with (a), there’s no mechanism that prevents other groups (besides social justice) from using pile-ons, so by normalizing the use of pile-ons by yourself, you are also normalizing the use of pile-ons by everyone else. Given that you are in the minority, it is quite likely that pile-ons will be used on you sooner rather than later.
Or, to put it in a more controversial way: I argue that we could either have 1). a world where events such as GamerGate, where two opposing sides are sending death threats to each other, are the norm; or 2). a world where it never (or at least very rarely) happens because people tend to be polite to each other; or 3). a world where few, if any, unscripted public conversations happen at all because people are afraid to say the wrong thing and be labeled Enemy of the State.
You want to build 4). a world where GamerGates happen all the time, but only against bad people; but that’s incredibly unlikely to happen. If you try to build (4), you will end up with (1) or (3).
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I’m a social justice activist and I don’t want pile-ons. Neither does Julia Serano. Neither does Katherine Cross. I’m pretty sure Anita Sarkeesian does not want more of this.
Nor did SJ invent this stuff. The idea that fanning the flames of public outrage was invented by us, or even on the Internet, kinda forgets Yellow Journalism or what a whisper campaign could do to a gay man’s life in the 1960’s.
Or like, it forgets the literal origins of the term “witch hunt.”
I take the long view of social justice, the systemic view, the “big picture,” lotsa strategies view.
Personally I avoid pile-on culture and short-trigger outrage culture. To me they seem counterproductive. On the other hand, I think they are kinda inevitable with large numbers of people. They just happen, and if you don’t grab the tiger by the tail others surely will. There are people who really want to hurt me. Such people are happy to use outrage culture however they can.
And look, I get it. That genocide guy is a nutjob. But do you know the history of AIDS? — and I don’t mean some paranoid “the government created it” nonsense. I mean the actual story about how the US government responded to the crisis in the early 80’s, how the Reagan administration refused to release funds for research and then lied to congress about it? About how the media avoided any stories that talked too much about gays, how they didn’t dig into the government lies, on and on?
They let us fucking die and literally did not care until they were forced to care.
Until they were forced to care — and yes, I’ve heard anti-SJ types hold up those words as some great danger, some sign of social justice gone too far. But AIDS was a thing that happened and forcing people to care was goddam necessary and something like it could happen again.
Gamergate is stupid nonsense. Twitter is full of foolish people fighting over trivial things. I wish we were better. However, the people who fuel gamergate are actually dangerous to me. The world is an uncertain place and things can change fast. Should such people be marginalized, silenced? Should we do all we can?
It’s complicated.
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> I’m a social justice activist and I don’t want pile-ons.
Awesome ! Then you and I agree. And of course, yellow journalism and fanning the flames of outrage were invented long ago, before the Internet. However, what I find especially objectionable about some members of the SJ movement — not you, obviously, but still — is not the mere fact that they are fanning the flames and going on witch hunts. As you said, humans being what they are, this is pretty much inevitable. What I am opposed to is the fact that these people are proud of what they do, and that (most of) the rest of the SJ movement seems to be on board with it. The sentiment is not, “ok, these people went overboard, but it’s understandable given how emotionally charged the situation is”, but rather, “yes, these people burned up a bunch of evil witches, and if you’re not burning witches right now then you’re a traitor”.
You say that you take the “systemic, lotsa strategies” view, and normally that’s fine. However, in this case the two strategies — normalizing harassment (but only against evil targets, of course) vs. deprecating harassment (against anyone, even evil people) — are opposed to each other, so you have to pick one or the other. And I think that by thinking them solely as strategies for achieving social justice goals, you may be overfitting your decision algorithm. Ultimately, there are lots of other strategies that will achieve social justice goals even more effectively (such as the ever-popular “kill all men” solution), but the reason we don’t seriously consider them is because their massively negative side effects are obvious. In this case, the negative externalities are less obvious, but still quite severe.
> But do you know the history of AIDS?
I don’t. You say that people were “forced to care” about AIDS, but I don’t really know what that means. But if you mean something like, “we blew up a bunch of government buildings and killed some people, just so that the rest of them would take notice”, then… let’s just say that you and I are not on the same side.
Furthermore, on the topic of AIDS specifically, I think it’s important to remember that it’s not some sort of a privilege-based social construct. AIDS is a viral disease, and the virus that causes it doesn’t care about your gender or sexual orientation or race. Thus, if a person contracts AIDS, it is not due to some sort of a moral failing on their part; it is not a sign of social persecution; it’s just a really shitty event that needs to be mitigated by medical technology as soon as possible. Framing AIDS as a uniquely gay problem is, IMO, a mistake.
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Well, I don’t want to dig this ditch, but I’ll say this. This statement:
> Framing AIDS as a uniquely gay problem is, IMO, a mistake.
shows a serious ignorance of history. As does asking if we blew up buildings. This is history that actually happened. I was there, although still a teen. At the time, the early 80’s, I had no idea what was really happening cuz the people doing the hard work were ignored by the media and I lived outside of NYC/SF and had little insight.
But see, people write books.
(Reading that book is really spooky for me cuz I remember friends-of-friends getting sick and I remember being terrified of AIDS but not know what it really was. Also I recall once telling my health teacher I was terrified of AIDS and then everyone thought I was gay and thus terrible. To see what was really happening, it’s freaky. And it makes me furious.)
Anyway, my point is not to argue the history of AIDS, although I suggest people learn about it cuz it’s important, but instead to show one episode of social justice and to show why this-or-that Twitter kerfuffle is a poor tool to understand what drives people like me.
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Ok, so I wasn’t here in the 80s, I was in a whole other country with a whole lot of other issues. I probably won’t have time to read the book in the near future, but I will eventually (I’m not trying to snub you, just being honest).
That said, I stand by my two previous points:
1). Framing AIDS as a gay rights issue is a mistake, because it infects everyone. I understand that it hit the gay community the hardest when it emerged, and that sucks; but now, several decades later, AIDS is pretty much a fact of life for everyone.
2). Even if your cause is just, and even if it is in desperate need of attention, you have to draw the line somewhere when you decide how to draw attention to it. If you draw the line at, “screw you, I will keep killing people until someone listens”, then you’re a terrorist who should be stopped. If you draw the line at, “I don’t want to inconvenience anyone at all”, then you’re useless. If it’s something in the middle, then it depends on the situation, since you are trading off the harm you do to others vs. the benefits for your group (and thus the society overall, since you are living inside of it). But it would be disingenuous to pretend that the tradeoff isn’t there.
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@bugmaster — I forget that you’re not USAsian, so fair enough.
Anyway, in the US AIDS was seen as a gay disease and that is why we did basically nothing to fight the disease from 1981-85, which if you think about exponential growth represents a lot of dead people in the meanwhile. And the medical folks working on the problem knew this. They knew it would not be confined to gays. They knew the numbers of dead would grow to be tremendous. No one wanted to listen.
And for those of us who are queer this is fucking serious. Our death toll was staggering. Nations have gone to war over less. Revolutions have been justified by reasons far more tame. We here in America had less reason to split from the British than gays had reason to fight back, but power is what power is.
I am not advocating armed revolution. I’ve never bombed a building. I almost certainly never will. That stuff happens in the US, but it is incredibly rare. Our social justice movements don’t work like that.
All that said, if gay liberation costs a few jerks like Brenden Eich their jobs, I can live with that. The question is, what are the boundaries?
To answer that I look at the history of social justice. What worked? What did not? How did things combine to work [1]? What were the costs?
Just looking at unpleasant fights on Twitter misses much.
[1] On how things combine to work, I insist that the success of someone like Martin Luther King must be understood in the context of white fears of black resistance. Back then, inner city riots were common and there was a social text about armed black revolution. In this context MLK delivered his message. Whites today like to only see the message of harmony, but I insist that whites in the 60’s were eager to hear such a message insofar as it stood in contrast to the rhetoric of violence. Together they functioned to advance racial justice.
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