The trigger warnings for college classes debate is interesting because it’s a debate where my “side” is entirely unrelated to my position on the actual issue.
My position on the actual issue is that “trigger warnings on syllabuses!” is a solution you can come up with only if you didn’t think for five minutes about how to accommodate triggers in the college classroom. Trigger warnings were originally developed for blogs and are perfectly reasonable in a blogular context, because there is no way I can learn the triggers of everyone who stumbles across my blog on Google, so I have to warn for the most common things and leave people with weird triggers to themselves.
However, in a college environment, courses contain a small and finite number of people, a smaller and more finite number of whom have mental health issues. You could just make it routine for disability services to ask students seeking accommodations whether they have any triggers and then send an email to professors along the lines of “students who are considering taking your class in fantasy literature are triggered by teddy bears, zombies, and discussion of Hogwarts sorting. Are any of these involved in the class? If so, could you eliminate them without harming the educational purpose of the course?” This seems like it would work far better and take just as much effort (although it does involve the perhaps unrealistic expectation that college disability services would not be a useless pile of garbage).
I have had friends whom I respect deeply and agree with about mental health issues and who align themselves with the anti-trigger-warning side. Their primary critique of the pro-trigger-warning idea is that routine trigger warnings only make sense if you assume that triggers are a small number of obviously evil things. People may be triggered by rape, abuse, racism, and misogyny, but not by spiders, body positivity, and bald men. I’ve seen a lot of people campaign for “trigger warning: racist slurs” in courses on Twain, but no one campaign for “trigger warning: loud noises” in physics demonstrations, despite the fact that loud unexpected noises are a very common trigger for PTSD flashbacks.
After a certain point, you have to admit that the pro-trigger-warning side isn’t about making a safe environment for people with triggers, it’s about leftist neurotypicals signaling how Very Offended they are. And, you know, as a person with triggers, I really don’t appreciate a conversation allegedly about disability accommodations actually being an excuse for a Who Hates Abuse The Most contest. Can’t you guys go off and, I don’t know, luridly describe how you want to torture abusers to death on your own time?
Nevertheless, I consider myself broadly on the pro-trigger-warning side.
Partly, that’s because the anti-trigger-warning side doesn’t believe in weird triggers either. My favorite source of the anti-SJ consensus, wtfsocialjustice, enjoys making fun of people’s lists of strange triggers.
A lot of anti-trigger-warning arguments seem to boil down to an opposition to accommodations in general. Consider this article, chosen scientifically because it is the first result on Google for “against trigger warnings.” Filipovic talks about college as “a space for kinda-sorta adults to wade neck-deep into art, literature, philosophy, and the sciences, to explore new ideas, to expand their knowledge of the cultural canon, to interrogate power and to learn how to make an argument and to read a text… a space where the student is challenged and sometimes frustrated and sometimes deeply upset, a place where the student’s world expands and pushes them to reach the outer edges.” She valorizes “the challenge of exploring their own beliefs and responding to disagreement.”
I mean, that’s great! I want to explore my beliefs and respond to disagreement and expand my knowledge of the cultural canon and interrogate power and the rest! But you know when I can’t do any of that shit?
When I’m having a panic attack.
Triggered people– for pretty much any value of ‘triggered’ you can imagine, from eating disorders to OCD– are notoriously bad at making rational arguments, seeing both sides of the issue, or expanding their intellectual horizons. oh god oh god I want to be dead I want to be dead is just not a good mindset to be in when you’re trying to grasp the nuances of Derrida.
And, sure, someone can use trigger warnings to avoid challenging material. But college students already get to pick their own courses! If someone doesn’t want to engage with gender studies, they can just… not take a gender studies course. The act of asking for a trigger warning is a statement of commitment to learning; it is a statement that the person genuinely wants to engage with the material and they’re trying their best to be able to make sure that they can.
I’d like to more closely examine two of Filipovic’s arguments. First, her suggestion of mental health care instead of accommodations. This is terrible on about a dozen different levels.
Recovery takes time. Many times, it’s measured in years, not weeks. Some people never get better. What do you do with people in the meantime? Because if you let crazy people in recovery go to school or get jobs, then you are going to have to accommodate people with triggers, because triggers do not go away immediately the first time you fill out a CBT homework sheet.
And if not…
Most people, including mentally ill people, are happier and more functional if they have structure, a sense of purpose, and something to do all day. Unfortunately, all three of those things unavoidably involve mentally ill people existing in public. But what is the other option? Should those people put their lives on hold until a day that may never come? Are my intellectual horizons to remain unexpanded until I become sane? Are mentally ill people not allowed to wade neck-deep into art, literature, philosophy, and the sciences?
I am crazy, but I am not going to let that stop me from making the best life I can as a crazy person. Part of that is wanting to go to school and learn. And, frankly, making sure that I can learn is, quite literally, the college’s job. It is what I am paying them tens of thousands of dollars for.
Second: Filipovic frets that trigger warnings “contribute to the general perception of members of those groups [women, people of color, LGBT people, and mentally ill people] as weak, vulnerable and “other”.”
Unfortunately, not too put a fine point on it, weak and vulnerable members of marginalized groups exist. If only we had talked to Filipovic before we had the nerve to exist while in pain! I am sure she would have set us straight about all the harm we were doing to The Cause by having needs.
You do not get to throw the– by your own stipulation!– weakest and most vulnerable members of marginalized groups under the bus so that you look good and stereotype-defying to privileged people. That is Bad Social Justice.
(Man, I love the inclusion of mentally ill people there. God forbid that someone think that mentally ill people tend to be weak and vulnerable.)
I don’t care about your opinion about trigger warnings on college campuses, really. But I care a lot whether you’re going to hurt me. I am a person who has triggers. And it matters to me whether people are going to respond to me asking for accommodations with “why don’t you just get therapy?”, or decide I’m harming social justice by existing, or assume my accommodations are unnecessary things I just want because I want to be sheltered from the world instead of things necessary for me to be able to engage with it, or think my triggers don’t exist because I’m triggered by weird shit, or care less about me than about their virtue signaling. And so this shit matters to me, even though I don’t care about the actual issue at all.
Thing of Things 
The cynical explanation is that labeling something with a trigger warning is the first step to removing it from the course altogether – not for the benefit of the triggered person, but to prevent anyone else from being exposed to it too. First it’s labeled as triggering, then, through SJ norms, “triggering” is mentally substituted with “bad”, and then someone makes the argument that bad things shouldn’t be taught except to condemn them and therefore the triggering thing should be removed. Of course the list of possible triggering things is so large that it wouldn’t be possible to substitute “triggering” with “bad” if they were all taken similarly seriously, but instead there’s an Approved List of Triggers that makes that substitution easy.
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Has anyone actually made that argument? IME, social justice people (and people in general) find condemning things both fun and useful. Why would they want to eliminate this valuable activity?
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Yeah, seriously. Somehow I am unable to see SJ-ish liberals wanting to stop teaching about e.g. American slavery or colonialist atrocities.
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Ah, but that’s the thing. They’ll only teach American slavery and colonialist atrocities. Which is a terrible way to teach history.
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@InferentialDistance That criticism, while in some contexts valid, seems unrelated to the legitimacy of trigger warnings, no?
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We’re in the context of blacktrance’s slippery slope argument. Trigger warnings sliding into biased condemnation of triggering topics seems a bad outcome.
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They may also want to change how some part of a class is taught – something previously taught as neutral would be labeled as “triggering” and then that would be used as leverage to get the class to portray it more negatively.
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It can also be used to censor without inducing others to mentally substitute “triggering” for “bad”. First, you label some part of a class as triggering. Then you say that because the class is triggering, it doesn’t accommodate you, and you have the right to be accommodated and take whatever classes you want, so the triggering part should be removed.
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I just have one basic (and, I assure you, sincere) question. How come no one ever brought up trigger warnings when I went to college, back in the Paleoz^H^H^H^H^H^H 1990s? I mean, if students were suffering panic attacks and/or being forced out of school and no one even noticed, that’s horrible. OTOH, it also seems a little unlikely. What gives? I have no objection to trigger warning questionnaires; they seem like a simple and low-cost way to make a positive difference in some people’s lives. I’m just curious why it’s suddenly an issue.
I’ve been accused of harming social justice by my very existence on at least five occasions! Welcome to the club.
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Why would it be remotely unlikely that students with psychiatric disabilities would be struggling in higher education without most people noticing? That happens all the time today and very few people notice. We have new tools, among them the ADA and reasonable accommodations. This does not mean that the needs these tools are designed to address did not exist prior to them being more societally recognized.
Sincerely, I have a hard time understanding why this would be surprising. Society recognizes and acts to address previously unacknowledged need all the time. It’s essentially the whole process of social change.
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OK. I do remember some accommodations being made — one of my psych professors mentioned that the next class would contain graphic descriptions of drug effects, and that anyone who’d struggled with addiction was welcome to make it up one-on-one. We weren’t barbarians back then! We were even kind to the lab trilobites!
Perhaps this is a case of awareness being elevated; perhaps, joking aside, I’m not old enough to differentiate real change from the fads and moral panics that happen on shorter time scales.
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With all due respect, I don’t think the solution of contacting the professor ahead of time is as simple as you think it is. You may have gone to a school with small class sizes, but undergraduate universities can have classes of over a hundred students. I don’t work in college disability services, but I do work for the department of a law school that handles exams and works in concert with the disability services department, and it takes a tremendous amount of work on the back end to handle even basic accommodations. (I’m not just talking about students with disabilities, by the way – a student who has to delay taking an exam who deviates from the written procedure for calling it in can set off a chain of events that leads to 30+ emails in my inbox in the span of a quarter hour. True story.)
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Yeah, the class size is prohibitive. Plus in some courses, cutting out everything offensive isn’t an option. Try teaching criminal law without talking about violence.
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I didn’t mention the cutting out aspect because Ozy did specify in their proposal that students would ask if a given subject would be present, and if so, whether it could be cut. In the case of Criminal Law, the answer would be a no, and under Ozy’s model the student would simply not attend.
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Whether something can be cut is less clear than it might seem.
My crim law professor, discussed (insulted) in a comment below, chose to teach rape and sexual assault law as part of a basic, mandatory crim law class. At the time, not every law school did this. Our professor introduced the course by pointing out that many schools did not include this in the basic curriculum out of concern for its sensitivity as an issue, but he believed that our education would not be complete without including this material.
So on one hand, he conceded that it “could” be removed on some levels, as other instructors did in fact remove it. On the other hand, he believed that removing it was a bad idea.
I have no idea how things would turn out if we made “does or does not include frank discussions of sexual assault” into a disability accommodation issue, considering that you can sue a school for failure to accommodate.
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@Patrick
TIL you can theoretically cut sexual assault discussions from Criminal Law classes.
Today I also learned that the world is stupider than I expected.
Regarding accommodations, I only know how they work in terms of eviction law, but the standard we worked with was reasonable accommodation. (Your landlord would be forced to allow you a seeing eye dog, for example, but if you were hoarding to the point where you were a health hazard to everyone else in the building, the landlord could evict you.) Requiring a professor to remove a core facet of their class to accommodate a student strikes me as closer to the latter example than the former.
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It’s reasonable accommodations in the college disability level too.
Ideally I think the teacher would get discretion about what is and isn’t necessary for their course. But there’s a difference between “the PowerPoint slides on Halloween are decorated with zombies, I can remove them” and “unfortunately, Night of the Living Dead is a core part of this horror films course” (even though you could theoretically teach a horror films course without it).
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@ninecarpals Precisely – the reasonableness standard is also the relevant one for educational or employment accommodations. Generally, the issue of reasonableness is connected to whether or not the removal would constitute a fundamental alteration of the underlying program or service. The removal of core aspects of a curriculum would probably not qualify as reasonable. Providing notice to a student prior to them taking the class or allowing them to review the material at a different time or place probably would be.
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@Lion
Thank you, I had a feeling it would be similar! I’m always a little hesitant to comment on legal matters because I know just enough to get myself in trouble. 🙂
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One of the issue flops I’ve most done because of you is stop thinking trigger warnings are generally silly.
I think it’s super reasonable to try and treat triggers on a special accomodation notice and probably ADA compliance mandatory. I’m still very unhappy about how people will actively try and use “it’s triggering” as a way to stop discussion on campus from racist homophobic people etc on political issues from happening at all in public spaces.
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Trigger warnings remind me of gluten-free foods. We have one set of people who genuinely need a thing because they have a serious illness, and will suffer if their need for this thing is left unmet. We have second set of people who do not need that thing at all, but are demanding it for a stupid reason that cheapens the needs of the first group. Then we have a third group of people who are really angry at the second group for being stupid, and tend to ignore the needs of the first group in their desire to stick it to the second group.
I think people who demand/support trigger warnings for to score political points are huge jerks. And I think people who demand gluten-free foods when they don’t have a gluten allergy are douchebags. But I think I can think these things without pretending that people with PTSD and people with gluten-allergies don’t exist.
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I don’t necessarily disagree with this assessment (that trigger warnings are often misused as a means of political combat rather than a disability accommodation). Having said that, I suspect that the costs of attempting to gatekeep more are likely to cause more harm to the people who need it than they will prevent people who don’t from making use of it for their own purposes. Generally speaking, increasing gatekeeping of disability accommodations – particularly for hidden and harder-to-diagnose disabilities like PTSD – tends to cause more problems than it fixes.
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Wasn’t there a Thing of Things post way back about universal design?
Strip away all the political signalling, content warnings seem like a cool thing to have in general, whether or not you have triggers. Although there needs to be more education about how people with triggers use them.
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I think the major objection people would make is that saying that something triggers you is a good way to censor something you don’t like. This makes it different from many other disability accommodations, because it has a failure mode where evil people can abuse it to gain power over others.
To make an analogy, people would probably be much less gung-ho about installing curb-cuts everywhere in the city if the city was in imminent danger of being invaded by evil robots with wheeled bodies. That is because in this case there is a way for that accommodation to be used by evil people.
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Gluten free food strikes me as a rather bad analogy. The more people who want gluten free food the more available gluten free options will be. The more people who go gluten free the easier and better it will be for those with serious intolerances to gluten.
” And I think people who demand gluten-free foods when they don’t have a gluten allergy are douchebags.”
I don’t get this. People go gluten free because they think its healthier or will make them feel better. How is this being a douchebag? If they are gluten free they almost surely think gluten is going to make them sick, so of course they do not want to eat it! Is it wrong to try to be healthier and feel better? Or maybe its a moral failing to be wrong about nutrition?
Another explanation is that you object to people “hi-jacking” concern for Celiac’s victims in order to get respect for their dietary choices. For one almost everyone doing this is doing it unconsciously. And secondly I a very, very slow to blame people for doing what they need to in order to get respect for their dietary choices. A large number of my friends and family refused to respect my desire not to eat dessert while I was dieting. I do not mean they merely offered me cake. Many of them offered the cake over and over again despite multiple refusals or tried to guilt me into eating the fucking cake! This should not matter but my BMI was between 31 and 34. (I have since actually lost alot of weight and kept it off, I am very lucky). Many people who are vegetarians get constantly douche’d out too. I have a ton of sympathy for people trying to eat in a non-standard way (even just a fucking diet).
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Possibly apocryphal, but I’ve heard that celiacs often dislike the rise of gluten free options. The reasoning goes that because people are demanding gluten free for silly aesthetic reasons, restaurants are less than stringent about making sure something is completely 100% free of gluten, and it actually makes it harder to get true gluten free than it was before.
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@stargirlprincess: It’s the demand part that’s infuriating.
And yes, it is a moral failing to be wrong about nutrition if the reason you’re wrong is that you choose to trust sCAM proponents over scientists.
@briancpotter: The only celiacs I’ve spoken to about it personally (2 that I can think of, and I feel like there was a third that I’m forgetting, so not a huge sample size) have shared a consensus that the rise of gluten-free options is good, and the bulk of the people responsible for it are annoying as hell, and neither of these facts negates the other.
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>>>I don’t get this. People go gluten free because they think its healthier or will make them feel better. How is this being a douchebag?
I specifically chose the word “douchebag” because it is often used to denote someone who is annoying, oblivious, and full of themself, rather than someone who is a horrible person.
I personally find people who make health choices based on bad science and bad data to be incredibly annoying, especially if they are willfully ignorant. For instance, I also think people who use alternative medicine are douchebags. People without gluten-allergies eating gluten-free food seems extremely analogous to people who use alternative medicine to me.
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@briancpotter
I know a guy with celiac, and the one instance he said was bad is that one of the chain pizza joints (I think Dominos) offers gluten-free crust, but they knead and bake the dough in the same ovens so there is gluten in it. They did put such a disclaimer on the food on their menu, at least.
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@Obresend @Ghatanathoah
Many people find people being “preachy” about incorrect diets or alternative medicine annoying. But I was genuinely surprised you find the act of being wrong about medicine/nutrition intrinsically annoying and/or morally wrong (the second only applies to obresend).
Though I thought about it awhile and realized I do feel intrinsically annoyed when the “obviously correct” argument is right in front of someone and they do not get it. Or if the truth is calmly and clearly explained to someone and they do not understand. But I mostly stopped feeling this way after lesswrong hammered home the concept of inferential distance. What seems clear and obvious to me may be very, very non-obvious to others. If people have different views than you probably their intellectual back story is different. And what seems clear to you may not be clear at all to them (and vice versa).
But still I can understand being annoyed at people who have wacky beliefs in fields where the truth is clear. But we are talking about nutrition and medicine! The truth in these fields is far from easy to find and verify. I think the best way to see this is to look at all the very smart people who have held some silly beliefs on these topics.
For example Elizier Yudkowsky was once very convinced of (at least the gist) of Gary Taubes work on carbohydrates. The medical establishment (which contains many smart people) considers Taubes view to be rather nutty. So either O. Elizier held a crazy view or the medical establishment did. (seems clear to me it was O elizier). One can actually look at the history of nutritional advice to see that the advice at time T and at time T+H often have serious contradictions (though the basics are pretty stable). On the issue of “alternative medicine” I think Scott’s blog shows how hard it is to understand any medical topic. It seems unnecessarily cruel to fault someone for getting medical issues wrong, the evidence is mixed and hard to put together.
Implicitly I think most people are willing to fault people for not “just trusting their doctor and the medical establishment.” But how is a person supposed to know the medical establishment deserves mostly blind faith? The issue is actually quite complicated because the medical establishment often gets things wrong or is following pretty simple and non-sophisticated methods. So the true advice isn’t “your doctor’s advice is probably good” its “your doctor’s advice might be wrong but if you try to figure this out on your own you are likely to be much worse off than if you just followed your doctor’s advice.” But again the issue is its non-obvious that (something like) this position is correct and I understand when people do not come to it. And since medical science is so hard to understand its easy to be convinced of a very wrong position.
(I will also note it does not help that the medical establishment has stated genuinely crazy things on popular topics. The most obvious, to me, is the “official” position on the safety of marijuana. If someone sees the government outright lying about marijuana safety how is this supposed to affect their trust in the medical system? I think the answer is “do not change your trust much except on highly political issues” but this answer is non-obvious).
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Similar to Ghatanathoah, it seems that part of the problem is that “I’m triggered by X” used to narrowly mean “X causes me to have a panic attack/PTSD episode/other serious mental health issue,” but now also has people attempting to use it for things like “X makes me uncomfortable/stresses me out/other thing that is not actually an excuse to avoid exposing yourself to the material.”
On a different note (and yes, I understand that PTSD is not the same as a phobia), while I understand the point of trigger warnings in terms of “you may want to brace yourself for what’s coming,” it seems like using them for “you may want to just leave” runs counter to what the generally successful use of exposure therapy suggests one should do to deal with a disproportionate negative response to a stimulus.
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Um. You do realize that exposure therapy involves being terrified and often having panic attacks until you stop being terrified at that particular stimulus? It is not like “and then by magic all your negative emotions go away the second you look at the thing you’re triggered by!” If it were, then no one would be crazy.
It is hard to learn things if you are shaking with fear, much less having a panic attack!
Like… if you are going to use college classrooms as a sort of informal nonconsensual exposure therapy, I hope you at least give all the phobics an automatic A.
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nonconsensual
I didn’t suggest either not warning students or making the courses mandatory from the direction of the college. I was only suggesting that total avoidance might not be optimal from the point of view of the student.
It’s hard to learn things if your panicked. It’s also hard to learn them if you aren’t there at all.
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Similar to Ghatanathoah, it seems that part of the problem is that “I’m triggered by X” used to narrowly mean “X causes me to have a panic attack/PTSD episode/other serious mental health issue,” but now also has people attempting to use it for things like “X makes me uncomfortable/stresses me out/other thing that is not actually an excuse to avoid exposing yourself to the material.”
This.
Today, I was kicked out of a group that I (used to) volunteer with. This had been building for a long time, but the most immediate cause was that my comments in the last meeting I attended “triggered” “numerous people.”
There were maybe 20 people at that meeting, probably fewer. Did “numerous” of them (3? 4? more?) actually suffer from panic attacks or self-destructive compulsions as a result of my calmly defending my point of view, while everyone else who spoke (at least 5 of them, maybe more) all argued against it? And when that point of view was merely that racism is bad and must be opposed, but the concept of “white privilege” presented in “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” is both in principle the wrong way to think about it and in practice counterproductive (because many white people have a strong negative reaction to it that makes it harder to recruit allies), and (as a side note, when someone else brought it up) that the same goes for “male privilege?”
I don’t believe it!
I believe that they were upset, maybe even seriously upset, and that the norms of discourse in the Social Justice community lead them to believe (quite accurately) that describing their getting upset as “being triggered” would cause those in authority to treat it as an intrinsic evil, rather than something for them to work on.
Some of them probably even believe in that description themselves. And that worries me. Because as long as they believe that, they’re never going to accept that they need to just gonad up and deal with the fact that people will disagree with them, even about things they care about, and that sometimes, it will even be because they are wrong.
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A few things:
1) Based on what (and how) you’ve made your classroom points in this comment, I find your point really interesting and would like to hear more about ways you think particular staples of certain classes fall short in encouraging new folks to engage with the material.
That said, however,
2) I can and have had panic attacks (to the point of not being able to speak coherently and seeking escape) from the language used by someone trying to posit an otherwise “reasonable” argument. Personally, I find this happens when points (even ones I may agree with) are made in ways that carry a lot of history for me. There are phrases that are – on the surface – not particularly problematic but that I have only heard as a set-up for a significantly more attacking or invalidating or even violent conclusion. Speech that usually falls under the label “victim-blaming” is one example I can think of. Trying to understand details of a situation may come from a place of respectful intentions, but when the questions are asked in the manner of “at any point, did you…” then I have a lot of priors that start noisily clambering and put me in a place mentally where I’m fighting against a very real sense of “Danger! Danger! Danger!” So I guess I’m saying I’m perhaps less skeptical about the idea that something like that could trigger someone.
3) In spite all of that, I do actually think that the thing you are describing (using the word “trigger” as a way to signal to authority that THIS IS SERIOUS) happens, and perhaps happens more in some social environments than others. And while I think some people may use it as a knee-jerk reaction to the sensation that they may be wrong, I think that continuing on isn’t going to foster the kind of engagement that would be needed to actually work on the issue. (I also don’t think that removing the source or shutting down the conversation does either, FWIW. )
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I’m a little confused by (1). I didn’t think I had said anything about classes (my allegedly triggering people occurred at a weekly meeting of an on-campus activist group), so I’m not quite sure what you’re asking (or whether you were intending to ask someone else). I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have for me following clarification, though.
2. I understand this phenomenon in general. But I have a hard time understanding how it can operate when the suggested meaning is explicitly disclaimed.
That is to say, I can see how you might be triggered by someone simply asking “at any point, did you . . .” But would you be triggered if someone said “I want to be clear, what happened to you is not your fault, regardless of what you said or did. With that in mind, and purely in the interest of understanding the details of what happened, any point, did you . . . ?”
Because I make (now made, I guess) a real effort to be careful to couch things like that when talking to other members of the group, even though I feel instinctively like I shouldn’t have to.
But even if that’s not enough, that might explain some other occasions on which I’ve allegedly triggered other group members on other subjects (particularly what constitutes valid consent (affirmative, applicable, and understanding of what one is consenting to, but not necessarily sober, provided that that understanding is still present)). But on this . . . what traumas could someone possibly have related to how to conceptualize racism? And not just one someone, but three or more, out of no more than 20?
The only way I really imagine that is if—and this dovetails a bit with what one of the people who met with me to kick me out said about people feeling “invalidated”—people actually find it triggering to have someone disagree with them about something they care about strongly, as such. And if that’s the case, then I may regret the outcome, but I have zero sympathy for any expectation of accommodation for that outside of explicitly therapeutic spaces.
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@osberend
Sorry for the later reply.
1. My apologies for being unclear. I don’t spend a lot of time in the SJ community socially, so most of my priors for the kinds of discussions and situations you described occurred in classes where we did read “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” and other literature like that. My brain made the connection and stuck with “class setting” and I didn’t catch the mistake. I am mostly interested in the ways you (or others) have found the general consciousness-raising literature to be problematic and what sorts of approaches or arguments or information you think would be more effective (and why).
2. I am generally less likely to have the automatic fear response when someone does open with a disclaimer of the sort that you described, but it doesn’t always prevent it. For me personally, it’s often less the words themselves and more the delivery that kicks this response off. (Though there is a tipping point here – for phrases that are very highly correlated in my memory with the kinds of “danger” points/conclusions even the “best” delivery may not prevent that response on my end.) With the delivery, it’s again linked to my priors – so I don’t know how generalizable my details will be. But I’ve definitely had people issue explicit disclaimers, then turn around, and build an argument that either implicitly or rhetorically supports the same ideas that the crappier, non-disclaimed phrases espouse. I really wish I had been better at identifying and tracking this stuff before my brain got all twitchy about it, because I’d love to go back and look at the numbers, update and identify trends.
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Re: having trauma related to how we conceptualize racism.
You asked “… what traumas could someone possibly have related to how to conceptualize racism? And not just one someone, but three or more, out of no more than 20?”
First, I don’t have a lot of personal experience with that particular oppression, but I can speak to my experiences and the impressions that I think might likely generalize.
Second, I am so glad you asked that question! I do actually think someone can have trauma associated with conceptualizations – especially those that are heavily used in maintaining structural oppression and that manifest harm over the social resources domain.
My own disclaimer: Communicative clarity on this particular set of impressions/observations/experiences is… something of a work in progress for me. I don’t have many people that I can have conversations around this topic about with, so I am still figuring out what I can do to be better understood. But it’s one that I feel is really important to talk about, so I definitely am looking for more people who are interested in exploring the subject or are even just comfortable engaging with a less-than-polished idea/theory.
To sorta walk out the context of some of my experiences:
I would say that I have been more harmed by conversations about consent and their supporting conceptualizations than I have by the actual crossing of my boundaries that brought the topics up. (I’m using this language because I don’t want to minimize the fact that I did feel genuinely powerless in this particular situation. But I also don’t want to apply a particular label to the event, or go into much detail about it, which adding a label sometimes seems to invite.)
It’s been my experience that bringing up a grey/soft consent situation where I didn’t feel safe expressing reservation, or even asking for time to decide, invites more aggression, threats, and dehumanizing behavior and language than I ever felt from the person who crossed that boundary with me. Even when I make every attempt to recognize the difficulty we have in talking about these topics and even when I acknowledge that I didn’t think this person had any malicious intentions and was likely unaware of things going on that I was unable to communicate at the time.
And, unlike a specific situation, sometimes the conversations continue to happen repeatedly. There’s also no shortage of exposure options to very similar kinds of conversations. At some point I started to recognize that some kinds of righteous responses seemed to be more likely coming from folks who strongly espoused particular… families? types? of underlying ways of conceptualizing identity, morality, and power. And it’s hard not to start associating those underlying concepts with the kind of behavior that has come from some of the people espousing it.
For me, encountering these concepts makes me uncomfortable to varying degrees. Any off-handed comment generally leaves me feeling at least vaguely ill-at-ease. I can and do certainly feel invalidated at times when I encounter them.
Things that escalate that feeling in me to more distracting/interfering-with-functionality levels tend to be related to:
+ engagement level (how much time to I spend with these people, are these people who’s ill-will can cause trouble outside of a conversation, etc),
+ using the concepts to justify or excuse violent language or behaviors (do they use othering language as a show of support, does the fundamental attribution error show up a lot in their descriptions of events),
+ a visible aversion to nuance or serious conversations, in general but also around topics that also invite strong emotional responses (“discussions” or “processing” being used as a generalized indicator of bad-ness)
When enough of those factors are present/strongly supported, I will almost always opt to greatly limit my interactions with that person until I get to know them significantly better. I proceed significantly more carefully until I can more accurately determine how likely those factors are to combine with my own aspects in an explosive fashion. But generally speaking, that’s as far as it goes.
When those factors are instead identified in a GROUP of people, as opposed to an individual, (or in a particularly charismatic individual inside a group I am strongly tied to) my personal sense of danger skyrockets. An individual can, for the most part, be avoided or slowly won over if necessary. Groups run by different rules and can be far more necessary and dangerous. Or at least they have been for me.
Which ties into how I see the above experiences generalizing:
I think that if one has an awareness of how words can hurt and how valuable that status of validity is to keeping yourself safe in a highly interconnected and social world, then it’s not hard to see how conceptualizations can seem dangerous.
I see some of those concepts a lot. I see how easily we accept and mimic them for ease of communication and general social lubricant. And I see a tendency to treat this kind of interaction as one that is both important enough and also dismiss-able enough that it allows a lot of space for some of the nastier ways we can use language and socialization and status to hurt people to come out.
I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to identify, break down, evaluate, and decouple (if supported) some of these associations, and I’m still far from being successful in avoiding a triggered response if I stray into, for example, the comments on almost any article about consent.* So I guess it doesn’t seem surprising to me that a lot of times someone’s system 1 might just run through all those associations and trigger a fear response to nothing but certain kinds of concepts about oppression and the people involved.
How I might guess this applies to the situation you described above:
While I don’t know enough of the specific interaction to know how they used it, I have really liked the use of the concept of valid/invalid for situations like these that I have run into, because it helps identify the areas we are actually disagreeing.
I know everyone doesn’t hear that word the same way I do, but for me, invalidated ties REALLY CLOSELY into my understanding of valid and invalid logical arguments (which is, admittedly, pretty rudimentary). If the conclusion I’m reaching would be true IF the situation/worldview I’m positing were also true, then it’s valid. Even if you disagree that the perspective I have is complete.
So, for example, I feel invalidated when people won’t acknowledge or engage with my perspectives or experiences as being real or worth consideration, or when people won’t follow through or engage with the chain of “if/then”s to the conclusion. This is when I hear a lot of those phrases that I struggle to react effectively to, honestly. The easiest example I can think of is that most folks seem to want to disregard my entire perspective because I do things differently than them in some way that is attached to other identity or group status markers. I frequently find myself in a place conversationally where I have to make the point that “I’m not the only one who feels like this” in order for a person to keep listening. I find this incredibly invalidating in the more felt-sense that I think some people use the word. My experiences literally mean nothing and are irrelevant – which would be a different argument that I don’t hear people explicitly making but seems to be tied up in the idea that I am always an exception in their head. It’s also very terrifying in a social sense because I am hearing that there is no room for me or things that might make me feel safe in the conversation or the social group – which is something that makes me feel incredibly unsafe. Especially when the only way for me to get that room is to advocate for it in ways that people find uncomfortable or irritating – which costs me general good will and different kinds of protection within that space.
When I bring up stuff like this, I WANT disagreement, but I want it done in a way that doesn’t feel (to me) profoundly unsafe on a social or conceptual level. Which means that we have to be able to discuss it on a more nuanced level of detail. I want to discuss those disagreements,and I want to work together with other people to improve that chain so that it’s more reliable and accurate. It’s hard to hear that when it’s coming from a position that is poised to say (or has already said) – before getting a full understanding of what I’m saying – “so you / your entire thing is wrong and why are we wasting time on this.” Even if they’re not trying to set it up that way, the fact that I am having to defend every little point before I’m even heard out makes it feel like a very antagonistic situation. (It also seems really inefficient to me, because if the logic chain is flawed then we don’t have to get into the details unless there’s an easy fix to that, and we’d save a lot of time. If it’s not then we can work together to get the accurate information.) And if the other person is also (like me) not communicating at peak effectiveness, then some of the ways they’re trying to communicate those objections are often, in the moment, indistinguishable to me from other situations where a person of influence has said “Your experiences don’t count.” And if I can’t tell, and I can’t easily remove myself, and I don’t think it’s likely we’ll be able to engage on this productively later… then I get very scared and I spin out.
While I can’t speak for the people in your group, I will say that – for me – “invalidated” isn’t ever intended to shut the conversation down. It’s intended to help clarify where I’m having trouble with the conversation so that we can find a way to continue that is productive and informative for everyone involved. Because I assume we’re talking about something important, and I want to hear and be heard and I want to find better solutions – and I think collaboration is necessary to come to that in any timely fashion. It sounds like it might have been used that way or interpreted that way by the consensus or “leadership” of the group in the situation you described, which really sucks, in my opinion.
* Side note, the reason I initially followed this blog is because the post “On Consent as a Felt Sense” and its comments is the FIRST time I have ever read a conversation about consent on the internet that I didn’t have to stop reading because to continue would be self-harm. It’s been incredible to find conversations that go into high levels of detail and nuance about their topics, which are also really clear and understandable (which I am also working on becoming).
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@osberend
Sorry about the username confusion. I follow this blog with both accounts, and that comment got posted by the one I reserve for my (as yet unposted) fiction. Once my WP-foo levels up, I’ll switch it if I can. In the meantime, just know that was also from me.
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A minor point– I’ve hit a point where I’m not exactly triggered (it’s more like a trained in rage, I think) with by any statement that other people’s emotions are so important that mine are irrelevant. Long polite explanations of this strike me as worse than overtly angry statements.
I’ve been thinking about what courtesy is worth. It’s certainly possible to be formally polite and utterly nasty at the same time, but on the other hand courtesy prevents some types of blow-up.
Maybe (sudden thought), Ekman is right– what wrecks relationships isn’t anger or fighting, it’s contempt.
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@nancylebovitz:
I think that some of my automatic responses are definitely rooted in the impression that someone IS making the point (intentionally or not) that their emotions are important and mine are irrelevant. And sometimes this point /has/ been made in a polite way, which is why disclaimers don’t always prevent those responses for me.
I… can’t tell if your reply is (also?) an indication that you took what I wrote to be saying that my emotions are so important and yours (or osberend’s or anyone elses) are irrelevant. The “long polite explanations” comment I think might well apply to what I wrote above. I was very excited to be able to give examples of things I’ve encountered that seemed to relate to the questions (which I rarely hear!) being asked. So I think it’s very possible that my delivery came out in ways that I would normally notice are less effective. If it did come across that way, I would be VERY interested in hearing more about what gave that impression – because that wasn’t my intention or meaning at all.
I would almost always prefer anger to contempt. It may not be the healthiest, but at least there’s motivation to continue to engage, which means there’s hope for understanding or resolution. I just don’t see that happening as much with contempt…
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“I… can’t tell if your reply is (also?) an indication that you took what I wrote to be saying that my emotions are so important and yours (or osberend’s or anyone elses) are irrelevant.”
No, I didn’t put your comment in that category.
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@ellbee82: No worries; I’m pretty sure I have some replies that I’ve been meaning to make for weeks now and just haven’t had enough time.
I actually don’t spend time in SJ spaces socially (other than, I suppose, this one, if this counts) intentionally; when I started volunteering with the group a year ago, I didn’t realize how social justicey it was until several meetings in, and I made a probably poor choice to stick with it anyway, because I cared about the group’s core mission.
I am mostly interested in the ways you (or others) have found the general consciousness-raising literature to be problematic and what sorts of approaches or arguments or information you think would be more effective (and why).
Fundamentally (and this is the basic argument that I presented at the meeting), I disagree with the core concept that not being oppressed (when others are) is “privilege.” My basic disagreement with this lies in my view that there are three sorts of ways that racism (or any other ism, for that matter) can impact an individual’s experiences (or lack thereof) of a certain type: Racism can improve those experiences, leave them unaltered from a neutral default (i.e. from what they would be in a racially homogeneous society), or worsen them. Only the first of these three types of impacts is properly privilege, but over half of the experiences listed in The Invisible Knapsack fall into the second category. The particular example I gave was not being followed on account of one’s race in shops. Obviously, in a racially homogeneous society, no one would be followed on account of their race (by definition). Therefore the white experience in this case, and in many others (although not in all), is the natural, default experience, and it is wrong to describe it as “privilege.” The author denounces this viewpoint, but she is wrong.
None of this is to diminish the badness of being followed in shops of course; it just means that that badness is oppression, but its lack is not privilege. Yet even though I explicitly asserted this, people tried to argue as though my position implied that I did not understand how bad being followed in shops is. It was very bizarre.
The one thing that may have been a factor in this is that I (implicitly) dismissed the badness of negative purely positional goods as unimportant. But that strikes me as an entirely correct position to take. That is to say, my stated position was (after someone tried to introduce a non-racial analogy) that one is no better off with regards to literacy itself if one is an illiterate member of a society in which everyone else is also illiterate than if one is an illiterate member of a society in which most people are literate. I acknowledge(d) that one may be a greater economic disadvantage, but also made this part of a broader point: Viewing privilege and oppression as two sides of the same coin, while still imperfect (because oppression can shrink the total pie), is often a tolerable approximation to reality when it comes to matters of relatively pure competition, as one might expect for an essentially Marxist framework. But it’s wildly inappropriate outside of that domain, and much of what SJ folks apply that idea to is far outside that domain indeed.
My own disclaimer: Communicative clarity on this particular set of impressions/observations/experiences is… something of a work in progress for me.
Fair enough.
(I’m using this language because I don’t want to minimize the fact that I did feel genuinely powerless in this particular situation. But I also don’t want to apply a particular label to the event, or go into much detail about it, which adding a label sometimes seems to invite.)
Also perfectly reasonable. This does mean that I’m somewhat uncertain about whether some things I’ve previously said would apply to you or not (see next paragraph), but if you prefer not to disambiguate, that’s entirely up to you.
Side note: I’m going to comment on several things you mention about conversational threats in relation to me specifically. That’s not because I think those issues are inherently important in a general sense, nor (conversely) because I want to warn you off from talking to me, but because some of the thing you mention make me uncertain (not a euphemism, actually uncertain) whether talking to me about certain issues is likely to be harmful to you, and because I don’t want that. If you feel the need to stop reading, at this or any other point, feel free. (I would ideally appreciate being notified at some point if you’re never going to respond to anything I say, though, just so I can be aware of that.)
I would say that I have been more harmed by conversations about consent and their supporting conceptualizations than I have by the actual crossing of my boundaries that brought the topics up. [. . .] It’s been my experience that bringing up a grey/soft consent situation where I didn’t feel safe expressing reservation, or even asking for time to decide, invites more aggression, threats, and dehumanizing behavior and language than I ever felt from the person who crossed that boundary with me.
Hmmm . . . if you haven’t already read (and been fine with) some of my prior comments about consent, that might (again, I am genuinely uncertain) be something you would be better off avoiding/it might be better if I don’t fully engage with you about consent specifically. I think I can confidently say (and if any of my interlocutors from those discussions want to disagree (or back me up on this), feel free) that I haven’t said anything threatening or dehumanizing about people in situations like that, but “aggressive” is probably more debatable (depending on what exactly constitutes a situation like that—which, I cannot re-emphasize enough, you are totally justified in not sharing; I’m just stating uncertainty on my part here).
At some point I started to recognize that some kinds of righteous responses seemed to be more likely coming from folks who strongly espoused particular… families? types? of underlying ways of conceptualizing identity, morality, and power.
Do you have a verbally expressable picture of what those families/types (genera?) are?
a visible aversion to nuance or serious conversations, in general but also around topics that also invite strong emotional responses
I’m not averse to nuance, but there are some sub-issues on which my stance is fairly unnuanced, and previous discussions on this site suggest that people often read my statements as implied much stronger positions than I actually hold.
(“discussions” or “processing” being used as a generalized indicator of bad-ness)
I have a definite negative reaction to “processing,” although I don’t use it myself as a pejorative (or at all), but am always up for a good “discussion.” I’m not sure what the implications of that are.
how valuable that status of validity is to keeping yourself safe in a highly interconnected and social world
There may be a major inferential gap here.
If the conclusion I’m reaching would be true IF the situation/worldview I’m positing were also true, then it’s valid. Even if you disagree that the perspective I have is complete.
That seems like a reasonable definition of validity, as long as you recognize “that’s a valid argument linking your premises to your conclusions, but your premises are wrong, and consequently, so are your conclusions” as a reasonable response.
I frequently find myself in a place conversationally where I have to make the point that “I’m not the only one who feels like this” in order for a person to keep listening.
I’ve noticed people saying that sort of thing, and it baffles me that it works. My perspective is that none of the validity of an argument, the reality of a subjective experience, or the accuracy of a belief have any connection to how many people make/feel/believe it. I tend to react to people making statements like that with “That’s probably true, but what does that have to do with anything?”
I suppose people might be taking that as a demand for an even larger or more “important” sample? Maybe? That would be a pants-on-head-bizarre way of parsing it, but I suppose it’s theoretically possible.
My experiences literally mean nothing and are irrelevant – which would be a different argument that I don’t hear people explicitly making but seems to be tied up in the idea that I am always an exception in their head.
Having at times been on the receiving end of this, I find this completely bizarre—okay, I’m an exception, but I am an exception, and I’m the one you’re talking to, so . . . ?
[1] Strictly speaking, I also have some issues with the idea that a group can be oppressed, but those are both somewhat esoteric and not part of the argument I was making against The Invisible Knapsack at the meeting.
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[cw: discussion of fundamentalism and threats of damnation]
@nancylebovitz, ellbee82: For me, the real rage-trigger and conversation-killer isn’t even contempt[1], so much as dismissal of my stated subjective experiences and/or conscious motivations.
My go-to example for this is religion: I am more likely to be able to have a meaningful (if not necessarily truly productive) converation with a Christian fundamentalist who declares that I have been deluded by demons, my gods are idols, and I am surely damned if I do repent than with a New Age type who wants to explain that all religions—including both my own and those that I loathe—are the same at heart, only the trappings are different, and really the gods I worship and the Christian god are the same being, and we’re all equally right, it’s like blind men and an elephant . . .
The former, at least, is taking me at my word about what I believe, even though he regards that belief as (literally) damnable.
Now the Christian fundamentalists who will tell me that I really believe in the Christian god, and am just telling myself that I don’t in order to justify my rebellion, on the other hand . . . those are even worse than the New Agers, since they combine hostility and a refusal to treat my statement of belief as sincere.
[1] At least, assuming we mean the same thing by that word.
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@ osberend
RE: the semantics of “privilege”
You know, people often accuse the SJ movement of giving new meanings to existing words, but this time it seems the other way around.
When someone says, “I had the privilege of giving the Sir George Brown memorial lecture”, they probably don’t mean “I enjoyed a benefit no one would have in a just society, muahahahaha!” They’re just saying they consider themselves fortunate to have had that opportunity.
I am fortunate in many ways. My parents weren’t poor. I have four working limbs and a healthy body. There has been no war in my country during my lifetime. My family, friends, teachers, co-workers and even the state have been very good to me. I am pretty smart, and attractive enough for my needs.
Since every one of those good things is enjoyed only by some people, I can call them privileges. It helps me not to take them for granted — both to avoid typical-life and just-world biases and to consider what I personally can do to make things a little bit better.
So, the responses along the lines of “how DARE you call me privileged?!” have always left me confused.
Pure competition is not the only thing that can perpetuate a suboptimal state of affairs. There’s also simple indifference — it’s not my problem, why should I care?*
* e.g.: Sometimes developers react with incredulity to accessibility suggestions — “You want me to make blind people able to use my app/website? Come on. I’m not a wizard.” But blind people already use software and the web. All they ask is that you don’t break any built-in accessibility features. And if the developer cared enough to do a few minutes of research, they would already know that. Sighted people don’t benefit from the developers’ indifference in any way. But their needs are not dismissed outright, and currently that’s a privilege.
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@Nita: When someone says, “I had the privilege of giving the Sir George Brown memorial lecture”, they probably don’t mean “I enjoyed a benefit no one would have in a just society, muahahahaha!”
No, of course not.
They’re just saying they consider themselves fortunate to have had that opportunity.
I think this is a little too weak though, unless one is giving a much stronger meaning to “fortunate” than you are.
I think that a key aspect of privilege (from the Latin privilegium, meaning a law granting benefits (or detriments, originally; this sense has obviously been lost) to a specific individual, from the Latin phrase meaning “private law”) is that while it need not be unjust, it is by definition un-default. A ninety-year-old in good health might reasonably consider themselves privileged to still be alive and in a state in which life is worth living, but it would be very odd for a twenty-year-old to do the same, even though some people do die before the age of twenty.
And McIntosh clearly understands this, although she doesn’t use the word “default”; she writes, about her views prior to coming to a “realization” of her white privilege:
My basic contention is that that “pattern” is, not as regards every issue, but as regards many or most, entirely correct.
Moreover, at the heart of the idea of privilege as I (and I think most others) see it is that a privilege is not a right.
The first context in which many—the overwhelming majority, I believe, but I may be typical-lifeing—American children encounter the term is their parents stating firmly that something the child wants and that parent is not allowing (often, but not always, because of misbehavior) “is not a right, it’s a privilege.” This contrast also continues to shape the predominant usage of the term in (non-SJ) serious discussion in adulthood; it is not a coincidence that the first example that merriam-webster.com gives for the word is “Good health care should be a right and not a privilege.”
So, the responses along the lines of “how DARE you call me privileged?!” have always left me confused.
When you call someone privileged, you are implicitly saying (given the above) that they don’t have a right to what they have. Of course this will anger people, particularly when many of the examples you give are of things to which they do have a right.
Pure competition is not the only thing that can perpetuate a suboptimal state of affairs.
No, it’s not. But it is the primary, if not the only, context in which oppression intrinsically generates advantages for the unoppressed.
By which I mean this: I have brown hair. Is it advantageous to me if, whenever a redhead in my town leaves the house, someone punches them in the face? Well, if I’m competing with redheads for jobs, or university admissions, or various other limited resources, then probably. They’re apt to be distracted (and possibly concussed), and they won’t do as well, which will give me a leg up. But if we’re not competing, then no.
My experience of leaving my house (and not being punched) is not in any way improved by the fact that they are punched whenever they leave the house, unless I hate them personally. But the whole point of the discourse around “white privilege” is that oppression benefits the “privileged” even when they do not bear malice toward the oppressed. In this context, McIntosh would say that “I can leave my house without being punched in the face” is an example of “brunet privilege.” That’s silly.
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@ osberend
RE: “default”
Ah, this might be an important point of difference. “Default” is not a neutral word — thinking of your experience as the “default” experience and of yourself as a “normal” person can negatively impact your judgment. There are two issues with it:
1) it’s not actually true — there’s no pre-defined neutral human experience, and the average experience is significantly different from yours;
2) “normal” is readily used to justify mistreatment of minorities.
For instance, here’s a sentence from the program of a local conservative party: “As conservatives, we believe that normality is the norm.” Although it looks like a silly tautology, it’s obviously code for “if you vote for us, we will fight against the gay menace and other abnormal stuff — society is for normal people like you!”.
So, people have tried to weaken the associations between “normal” or “default” and various socially dominant groups:
– instead of “normal people and homosexuals”, we have “straight people and gay people”
– instead of “normal people and transsexuals”, we have “cis people and trans people”
– instead of “all men + all women = mankind”, we have “all men* + all women = humanity”
And, instead of “normal people and those unfortunate wretches”, we have “people who have or lack certain kinds of privilege”.
In a way, the un-defaulting is an intended effect, which should both counteract bias and relieve many people from being constantly labeled “abnormal” and thus pushed into an out-group to the whole society.
* (we should still bring back “weremen”, though)
RE: “right vs privilege”
That’s a fair point, but:
1. Obviously, most these things do not currently have the status of rights — for instance, you can’t demand that a store employee stop following you around.
2. You don’t seriously believe that SJ people want to make everyone disabled and discriminated against, right? So, the logical conclusion is that they want to convert the “normal” privileges either into rights or into truly normal, universal experiences.
I think there is a substantial difference between experiencing treatment that is truly normal because it’s applied to everyone, and treatment that should be normal but is actually exclusive.
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It’s not actually true — there’s no pre-defined neutral human experience,
Not in the abstract, but often “in the absence of X.” So, for example, the default human experience, in the absence of intra-societal racism, is the experience of someone living in a monoethnic society[1]. Would such a person be followed in a store on account of their race? Obviously not! So that is the default experience.
Obviously, not every pattern of typical experiences of white Americans is default, as I noted in my previous post. In some cases, popular racism has resulted in whites possessing (on average) benefits above what they would have in a monoethnic society. But for over half of the aspects of “white privilege” enumerated in Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, the white experience really is the default one.
“normal” is readily used to justify mistreatment of minorities.
It can be. But there’s a very big difference between saying “my immutable trait is normative, and so much the worse for those who lack it!” and saying “my life experience is normative, and I want to ensure that it’s available to everyone who wants to share in it.”
The latter, of course, still discriminates in favor of those who want that experience over those who don’t. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing, provided that (a) one exercises good judgment in determining what life experiences should be regarded as normative[2] and (b) one does not discriminate excessively against those whose deviations are only slightly wrong and/or mildly bad for society as a whole.
Put another way, I am strongly in favor of active assimilation, in all matters in which the dominant group’s norms are better, and also in all matters which are indifferent, but in which (some degree or another of) uniformity is desirable[3].
instead of “normal people and homosexuals”, we have “straight people and gay people”
And I would say that we should have “normative people—whether straight, gay, or bi—who want to get married, settle down in a nice community, and raise children . . . and the sort of people who use ‘queer’ as a positively-valenced verb.” The latter shouldn’t be crushed under our boots, of course. They should be allowed to live their lives. But one should discourage ones children from growing up to join them.
In a way, the un-defaulting is an intended effect, which should both counteract bias and relieve many people from being constantly labeled “abnormal” and thus pushed into an out-group to the whole society.
It seems to me that the problems here are (a) the conflation of “default” and “normal” and (b) the conflation of “normal” and “morally good to be,” not the acknowledgment that some experiences are default and some aren’t.
Obviously, most these things do not currently have the status of rights
Confusingly, “right” means at least three different things: (1) That which it is rights-violating for one to be denied (probably my most frequent usage), (2) that which it is wrong for one to be denied, and (3) that which it is illegal for one to be denied. I think that for the purposes of this contrast, (2) is probably the most salient sense. Also . . .
for instance, you can’t demand that a store employee stop following you around.
You probably theoretically can, if you can prove it’s on the basis of race, under existing American anti-discrimination law and the Supreme Court’s complete mockery of a reading of the Commerce Clause[4]. Proving that, though . . . that’s another matter.
You don’t seriously believe that SJ people want to make everyone disabled and discriminated against, right?
Not consciously and in general, no. But hints of that do poke through, here and there, like the (handful of) idiots who claim(ed) that it’s wrong for opposite-sex couples to get married if they live in states without marriage equality, because doing so is exercising their straight privilege. Or the people who crop up occasionally saying that men shouldn’t go shirtless in public because women can’t. Or the people who rage against gender-flipped versions of “women, love yourselves!” messages, because “men don’t need to be told to love themselves, all the world to love themselves!”
Sure, these are fringe idiots (although enough of them to make someone’s life very miserable when the swarm). But they’re fringe idiots who are acting on the logical implications of a bad conceptual framework that is theoretically held by far more people than them, and that comes out in subtler ways too.
So, the logical conclusion is that they want to convert the “normal” privileges either into rights or into truly normal, universal experiences.
So what does this mean, then?
Does one end a knapsack’s existence by ensuring that everyone has one?
[1] Bear in mind that a society with a sufficiently low level of (internal) racism, reasonably stable borders, and a sane rate of immigration (and sometimes even without one or more of those) will naturally over time become monoethnic, even if it didn’t start that way—that’s why there’s such a thing as an Englishman (from Saxons, Normans, and Danes), a Russian (from Slavs, Norseman, Uralics, and a smattering of others), a Frenchmen (from Franks, Romans, and Gauls), and so forth.
[2] I’m weird; I would hardly back a standard of “being an outlier is intrinsically bad,” even if that didn’t conflict with other principles of mine. But there are some ways of being an outlier that are bad, just as there are some ways of being typical (in this society; hopefully not in the future) that are bad.
[3] For example, I believe that we ought to pursue policies aiming at achieving universal fluency in English among citizens and permanent residents. That people should speak another tongue as well is desirable, and that they should prefer another tongue is fine, but they should all be competent in a common language. English is not necessarily intrinsically better than others, but it is extrinsically better, by virtue of being the dominant language of this nation already.
[4] In the interests of clarity: I think this legal outcome is entirely correct as regards corporations, although tyranny as regards individuals doing business as individuals. But that’s a whole ‘nother issue. (And not one I brought up at the meeting.) The way it’s achieved, though, is appalling as regards the fundamental notion that governments shouldn’t be able to reinterpet the law into whatever they want it to be.
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Nita; “You don’t seriously believe that SJ people want to make everyone disabled and discriminated against, right?
I don’t think that’s where they started, but it was very nice being in the unmarked state so far as race is concerned. Now, if I see someone described as white, I wince slightly because I’m expecting an attack.
Osberend: what sort of mistreatment do you have in mind for people who don’t want children?
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@nancylebovitz: Mistreatment? None. I just think that children should be taught the following:
Marrying, settling down, and raising children—whether biological[1] or adopted—well is the normal and, in general, most desirable course of action. Some people can’t do that (whether because of specific impairments, inadequate financial resources, or simply because they’re truly unable to do a good job at it), and it’s commendable for them to realize that, and not to try to do it anyway. It’s regrettable, but that’s life.
Others could do it, but choose not to. With the exception of a handful of extraordinary individuals who do not also have the capacity to be extraordinary parents, this is an undesirable choice, and not to be commended. If someone you know openly states that they are making it, you shouldn’t harass them, but should let them know that you don’t approve. If someone you does not openly state that, but does not appear to intend to have children, then you shouldn’t hassle them about it at all, as they might be in the “can’t or shouldn’t” category without you knowing.
This is still discrimination in the strictest sense, and I’m perfectly willing to bite the bullet of calling it that. But it is both reasonable and mild, and does not violate anyone’s rights.
[1] In which case the number of such children should not be excessive with respect to the quality of the parents’ genome and the size of the population relative to what it ought to be[2].
[2] Presently, much less than it is.
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Sorry, but no. I didn’t have children because I didn’t especially want to, and I noticed that they were a lot of work– too much work unless you actually want to have them.
In your ideal world, I’d be better off if I hid about making that choice. I don’t want even lightweight punishment about it, and it isn’t obvious that the world would be a better place if I’d been pushed into having children.
What are you trying to accomplish?
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An edit and an addendum:
“men don’t need to be told to love themselves, all the world to love themselves!” should have been “men don’t need to be told to love themselves, all the world tells them to to love themselves!”
And for evidence of this sort of reaction (as well as some far more sensible and decent ones), see the responses reblogged here. (Also, that invertedgender is pretty awesome in general, and occasionally highlights MRA/redpill bullshit in additon to feminist/SJW bullshit.)
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That’s more likely to result in them having fewer friends than more children. Also, I guess interactions like that is where the childfree people who mock “breeeders” and call kids “crotchfruit” get their motivation.
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As I understand it, there are two types of exposure therapy. One of them involves exposure to a high level of the stimulus. This seems to fascinate a lot of people in the same way (till recently), people kept talking about the sort of meditation which involves getting hit with a stick.
The other sort of exposure therapy involves teaching the person with the phobia how to relax, then carefully introducing them to graded levels of what they’re afraid of, with relaxation after each exposure.
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ughsocialjustice is a much better (and more Diverse!) anti-SJ tumblr than wtfsocialjustice, IMO. Doesn’t make so many blunders of such stupidity, at least. Occasionally willing to just side with mainline SJ when its readers go too far.
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I wonder what people mean by ‘triggered’. I feel like by some definitions I don’t have triggers: very little really causes an instant panic attack/flashback upon hearing about it or thinking about it.
But under some other definitions I do get triggered: there are topics that trigger intrusive memories and intense negative emotions, but these are very short (< 15 seconds) and manageable. Is that a flashback and/or a trigger? There are also topics that will cause me to have a panic attack/intense free-floating anxiety if I'm exposed to them for a significant period, say 15 minutes. If I only have brief exposure, it makes me feel bad but it is manageable and normal.
And what about topics that cause significant emotional stress, but aren't acute like a panic attack? There was once a radical feminist guest speaker in a class of mine who made me so anxious and upset that I was on the verge of tears for literally hours afterwards, yet I could still drive, have basic conversations, etc. Was I triggered?
Also, it seems that triggers can be literally anything, so what then? There are certain common topics that are frequently triggering, but if in principle anything can be triggering, where's the line? Some of the things that trigger/cause deep emotional distress in me are really weird and not things anybody but me would even guess would be triggering/upsetting.
As somebody with significant anxiety disorders, I think ultimately there's no practical way to manage this except through the anxious person doing research and making choices themselves. Perhaps talking to the professor beforehand? Actually, I heard of one professor do something where she would ask students to write their names on notecards and list anything she needed to know about them for the class, which presumably included things like triggers. The cards would not be seen by anybody else. That could be a potential solution.
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Back when I went to college, trigger warnings weren’t a thing. Even in the most painfully politically correct spaces.
But college courses still told you what content their course had, with an eye towards warning people who might not be up for it.
The difference was in attitude.
Usually the message was, “This course involves X. If you do not feel that X is something you can engage with, you should not take this course. Taking this course constitutes agreement that you can handle X.” And from that point on, it was on you. No accommodation- except for all the other courses you could enroll in instead.
In the literally most obnoxiously social justice course I ever took- a criminal law course taught by a professor so SJ in attitude that I LITERALLY had to unlearn a huge percentage of what he taught me because the bastard taught us the aspirational feminist view of sexual assault law as if it were real- the closest thing to a “trigger warning” we got was “This class involves a serious discussion of sexual assault law. I expect everyone to treat this material with the gravity it deserves. If you have to leave the classroom you can, but this course is a required part of law school curriculum, and I expect that anyone who has chosen to enroll in law school understands that these issues will be addressed.” Close to zero accommodation.
It’s possible that additional accommodation could have been obtained through disability services. But presumably that would only have been for students who wished to inform the school that they had a disability.
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What puzzles me is why the social justice vanguard has fixated on trigger warnings in particular as opposed to specific content warnings. “Be aware that this class will deal with sexual violence”, “Be aware that the course on the Sri Lankan civil war includes material with images of graphic violence” are the sort of things that are put on course descriptions and syllabi all the time, and reasonable attempts to accommodate people who indicate that they might have issues with particular assignments are also common. If the idea was “People should be more aware of the importance of doing this” there wouldn’t be much disagreement and the whole discussion would have taken a different course.
The only extra thing that the language of “triggers” brings to the table is impossible vagueness. Every single article and discussion I’ve seen on the subject emphasizes the fact that triggers “could be anything”. And in all the material on this I’ve read, I’ve never yet seen a single practical example of how an instructor is supposed to preemptively warn students about this fuzzy free floating “anything” that might or might not trigger someone.
One begins to wonder why, exactly, certain elements of the SJ left has latched onto this particular by-design-unworkable version of content notices.
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The anti-trigger-warning people are skipping ahead and correctly anticipating the perversion of “reasonable accommodations for people with PTSD” into “whiny entitled kids playing status games”. The theory is that this perversion is unavoidable. Per Freddie deBoer:
(note: he is definitely not anti-TW, but I found the “quick learners” line to be important)
Under the corrupted theory of triggers, claiming to be “triggered” by something weird actually is silly, and potentially even bad because you are making it harder for the “truly” triggered (i.e. the people triggered by colonialism or whatever).
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While I think the idea of helping people with anxiety issues is great, your solution arguably makes it worse. There’s a massive chilling effect in colleges when people start getting in trouble for “triggering” others, especially, as triggering moves from being a real issue in people’s lives to a signaling effect. This isn’t really the cut curb effect; it’s more like insisting every car must come with a built in wheelchair lift. You’re increasing the cost to everyone else for little to no gain.
In the case of triggers the issue is more about making adjuncts terrified to challenge students thanks to the idea of triggering having moved from PTSD to more general anxiety. When you make trigger warnings the new norm, that means people get in trouble for when something slips through. That’s a godawful state of affairs for academia, what with them having no job security until they’re tenured as is.
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The entire discourse over trigger warnings stuck me as odd because it seems like such a non-issue. The idea that people should know what they are getting into with content seems entirely noncontroversial. We have movie ratings and those seem to be basically accepted (I acknowledge here that there are some very valid criticism of the MPAA but they aren’t strictly on-topic so setting those aside). It isn’t just in hippy-liberal-SJ-whatever circles, many conservative Christian groups run websites to inform parents about the content of media. Everyone seems basically ok with the idea that we should warn people ahead of time about potentially disturbing topics/imagery/discussions, in those terms it seems like basic human decency, so why when we call them trigger warnings do people suddenly lose their shit?
I think Ozy’s point about leftists using it as a showy way to signal their morality is a good one but I think it goes beyond that. One of the uglier strains of the social justice left (to be clear not all but it’s certainly somewhat mainstream in SJ circles) is attempt to use the language of social justice to create institutional barriers to dissent and justify actual government censorship. Trigger warnings, in their broad application, seem like another variant of this. If homophobic speech is “triggering” (and for some people it probably is) then we have a plausible justification for clamping down on it in some contexts. If racist speech is triggering then discussions of IQ-race correlations (not endorsing, using as an example of speech that is viewed as racist by many but still has traction within some communities) should probably be avoided. Once you accept the triggering frame you have leverage to draw some pretty broad lines in acceptable discourse.
Of course the reason I find this so disturbing from the social justice left is that if successful, it can, and probably will, backfire incredibly badly. The social justice left has more political power now than it ever has before and that’s a good thing but it isn’t always going to be that way. The same hate speech/triggering arguments that can be used against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. can be used against a anti-Christian speech or anti-Israel speech (see Steven Salaita). We’re already seeing it in some contexts, in addition to Salatia one of the successes of #gamergate was its use of the “bullying” frame to get advertisers to pull advertising from Gamasutra, Gawker and others.
I’ve gotten somewhat off topic at this point so back to trigger warnings. Trigger warnings should be uncontroversial and in a reasonable world they would be uncontroversial but so long as they are linked with certain destructive aspects of the social justice left they can’t be.
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” oh god oh god I want to be dead I want to be dead is just not a good mindset to be in when you’re trying to grasp the nuances of Derrida.”
I must respectfully disagree. It in undoubtedly a failing of mine, but I’ve never been able to understand why Derrida is considered somehow more profound than Wittgenstein.
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Let us not forget the story of how Marijuana started to become legal in the US. It is almost uncontroversial that Marijuana helps many sick people. In particular those undergoing chemo therapy (but also others). Once this became public knowledge it was impossible to argue against medical marijuana. No serious politician can be against sick cancer patients. However some conservatives were wary of medical marijuana because they thought the prescriptions might not be tightly controlled and that medical marijuana would be a step toward legal cannabis.
The pro medical marijuana people, of course, assured everyone the conservatives were just crazy. But in fact medical marijuana was the stepping stone to legal cannabis! Many states, such as California, were very lax about how could get a medical license (who could have seen that coming!). In California marijuana was made de-facto quasi legal and the sky didn’t fall. The voters in all states saw that California (and some other states to a lesser extent) survived semi-legal pot without much calamity and became much more open to marijuana legalization.
I am very pro marijuana legalization. But a accurate description of what happened is as follows imo: “The pro-marijuana people exploited the plight of sick people, mostly cancer patients, to try to make cannabis legal. There constant reassurances medical-marijuana would be controlled were completely dishonest. The “crazies” who wanted to hold the hold the line in the sand were completely right. Once we gave an inch on marijuana they took a mile.”
I personally am very pro-accomodation of everyone (not just SJ approved oppressed groups). But the anti-trigger warning people aren’t crazy.
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And the success of gay marriage was followed by op-eds about how maybe polygamy should be legalized.
It was also followed by op-eds about how maybe pedophilia is just a disorder — and “homosexuality is just a disorder” was the first step toward the normalization of homosexuality. But they tried that shit in the ’60s and it backfired hard on them.
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I think that people who object to triggers might be modeling “triggered” emotional problems as similar to Victorian fainting, rather than PTSD.
In the Victorian era, women fainted when they became over-emotional. It was a huge thing, especially among upper-class women.
If a disability accommodation consultant from Mars arrived on Earth in Victorian times, they might think that fainting is an uncontrollable part of the female brain. They would conclude women need to be protected from anything that might trigger a fainting spell, and make an effort to curate what women are exposed to.
But if the Martian dug a little deeper, they might discover something called “benevolent sexism.” They might discover that Victorian society pedestalized women, treated them as sensitive and dainty things, and that a woman in such a society would feel pressure to act according to the role society set out for them. Maybe some of the women were genuinely fainting, they actually internalized benevolent sexism to such an extent that they could be shocked into fainting.
I think that actual panic attacks and other things like that are disabilities that need accommodating. They are probably caused by genuine trauma or emotional difficulties, rather than a desire to conform to society’s expectations. But a lot of other commentors are complaining about people who use “triggered” to refer to merely feeling mildly uneasy, unpleasant, and offended (or even worse, refer to anger at being disagreed with). I think those people are probably trying to score points in the social justice community the same way the fainting women of the Victorian era were trying to score points in a world full of benevolent sexism.
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Did said women often wair corsets, because when I tried one on I had to take it off after a minute or so lest I faint (plus the colour didn’t go well with my suit).
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So, since the topic has come up, this seems a good time to talk about exploitability in general. Because this isn’t just an issue that some people have with trigger warnings, but with a lot of the things that SJers want. There are some patterns of argument I’ve noticed and I think it’s worth discussing them in general.
So a common thing is that SJers want some accommodation for people who need it, and frequently they don’t want there to be any gatekeeping on it; and so other people are worried that people will falsely claim to need it and exploit the system that way. Arguments that this will not be a problem can take (at least) the following forms:
1. This just benefits everybody; there’s nothing to “exploit”. (E.g. Ozy’s post about the curb cut effect has a number of examples.) When true, this is a solid argument.
2. The worst-case harm from such exploitation is minimal. Closely related to #1 (not too hard to slide between “minimal” and “zero”), this is another very good argument when it’s true.
3. There’s enough disincentives to taking the benefit that people won’t want to exploit it. (E.g., there’s lots of reasons you don’t want to claim to be trans if you’re not.) This argument makes sense at a fixed time, but has a potential hole if time is allowed to vary: The SJers are trying to get rid of such disincentives! Now in some cases there’s an obvious SJ response, which is, sure, and when such disincentives are gone, such accommodations will be unnecessary! However, this doesn’t apply in all cases. Moreover, in the cases where it does apply, I think one can make a nonuniformity counterargument — if things change unevenly in different contexts, then this leaves some contexts open to exploitation. Doesn’t mean that such a counterargument will always make sense, but I think if you’re making such an argument you should be prepared to address this.
4. Empirically, people are not exploiting it in large numbers. Again, to a large extent this makes sense at a fixed time — shoplifting isn’t that hard, and yet this doesn’t pose a huge problem for society because only a small fraction of people do it. But this has the same time variability as #3; if you’re changing the incentives in ways that would make exploiting it easier or more profitable, it’s not clear that one should expect this to continue to hold.
5. Sure, people might exploit this, but the people who keep exploiting things will eventually make themselves obvious. It’s not clear to me whether or not this is true, and this does require some sort of “gatekeeping by reputation”.
We can make a somewhat-corresponding list of strategies for handling exploitability, which can of course be used in concert:
A. More gatekeeping. Probably not the best solution if there are others, basically for all the reasons the SJers typically go on about, especially that it’s frequently expensive. But this may be unavoidable sometimes (e.g., I don’t see any alternative for dealing with some of the problems arising from fake service animals).
B. Taking measures to reduce the worst-case harm from successful exploitation.
C. Taking measures to somehow improve detection of people who repeatedly exploit accommodations? This would seem to require A in addition, as mentioned above.
I gather the SJer’s general preferred strategy is B, and I think this probably is the best strategy a lot of the time. But I would caution that B is a strategy that has to actually be carried out, just as, when it’s true, argument 2 is an argument that has to actually be made; #2 isn’t necessarily true automatically, or equivalently, you can’t necessarily carry out strategy B by doing nothing.
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Oops, that was supposed to link to the actual article, not to a page on Reddit that links to the article.
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Thank you for bringing this up. It’s why I want to bang my head through a brick wall whenever I hear the argument that lowering the standard of proof in rape cases won’t lead to more false accusations because false accusations are rare. Regardless of whether they are now, when you change the incentive structure then you will change the bloody outcomes as well.
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…and now I guess I really should have been even more general, since my comment above was based around the notion of “accommodation”, and this is a good example of a clearly related mistake (essentially #4, just applied in a different context) that doesn’t quite fit under that framework.
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SJ people do engage in gatekeeping, but they usually say “appropriation” instead of “exploitation”. For instance, look at this discussion on the phenomenon of men who take testosterone (and women who take estrogen) calling themselves trans: http://chronicallyqueer.tumblr.com/post/6100735089/has-anyone-heard-of-mtm-and-ftf-tw-possible
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Good point! Guess I made a false assumption of uniformity there. I guess really I had a particular subgroup (those more like Ozy?) in mind there. Not sure how to specify them.
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