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Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post. Feel free to speculate in the comment section about this person’s identity!
[ETA: An earlier version of this post was posted without links.]
1. What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?
I take pride in generally
– interpreting things people say charitably
– trying to phrase what I say really rigorously
– trying to be kind
The “why” is partly that I genuinely value these things but mostly that this is my most natural mode of interaction most of the time. I seem to have a sort of built-in charitableness filter that I actually find it really hard to switch off.
I think that the world would be a better place if most people followed these norms most of the time, but I do not think they should be obligatory in many contexts. There are many people whose natural emotional responses are much stronger and more turbulent than mine. This is especially common for people who have experienced painful and frustrating things like various oppressions. Requiring people to be maximally charitable and kind at all times would exclude lots of people from discourse, and it would disproportionately exclude people who are hurt by the very thing being discussed, which I think would be a really bad outcome.
Also, being really charitable does have failure modes – for example, I sometimes find myself confused that my friends are outraged at something which actually is totally outrageous but sounds reasonable after passing through my charitableness filter. Being charitable can keep me from seeing the worse implications of what someone says unless someone less charitable and more realistic points it out to me, and I appreciate when people do that.
I do think it’s a problem when people use this reasoning to be unnecessarily mean and abusive.
2. What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?
The reason I started being social-justicey is because of statistics about things like implicit bias and resume name studies and various other demographic-related-bias studies which showed me that even though my society basically embraces equality (at least for race and gender), bias persists.
I have since read that some of those studies’ conclusions may not really hold up. I have not delved into the research enough to know exactly what to believe, but I think it is likely that many but not all social justice claims about the state of the world are true.
What keeps me feeling an affiliation with social justice is social justice values, and the usefulness of social justice tools and concepts in understanding the world. Regardless of the empirical question of exactly how common various forms of (for example) sexism are, social justice allows me to name, describe, and oppose sexism when I encounter it.
Some examples of what I’ve learned from social justice:
– Microaggressions: an extremely useful concept for the dynamic where a really small thing will make me feel disproportionately angry because it’s the tip of a much larger iceberg
– How to spot double standards and unequal expectations (for example: beauty standards; the way people sometimes criticize marginalized people for perfectly normal behavior)
– How to spot (sometimes) my own biased reactions/reasoning
– Trans acceptance & the norm of accommodating pronoun preferences
– Good consent and boundaries practices (in sexual and non-sexual contexts)
– How to understand & describe not-totally-blatant bigotry
– How abuse works
– What some common problems faced by members of various groups are
– What signs to watch out for to try to make a space welcoming to a diverse set of people (do people from different demographics all get to talk equally? Are a certain group’s perspectives ignored until someone from a different group brings them up? Is the event venue/activity/time set up to exclude a certain group of people? What assumptions am I making about what people do and don’t want and what tradeoffs are acceptable?)
I know that there is a distressing number of people who use social justice abusively or carelessly and hurt people. The reason this does not cause me to turn away from social justice is that I think we can make social justice self-correcting. In much the way that the fix for bad science is more science, the fix for bad social justice is more social justice.
What I mean is: I believe that most harmful social justice is caused by bigotry of the very sort that social justice generally condemns. (Most often ableism.)
– Nerd-bashing: ableism, sometimes racism (against Asians and Jews), gender & appearance norms
– “It’s okay to say arbitrarily mean things about privileged people because they won’t be hurt by it”: ableism (ignores that there are lots of people with mental illnesses that make them way more easily hurt than you might expect – and also just individual variation in resilience to this kind of stuff), ignores intersectionality (people who are in the privileged group may also be in a different marginalized group), ignores the complicated position of people with complicated identities (e.g. closeted or self-closeted LGBT people, mixed-race people)
– in particular, making fun of men for being upset about something (generally something allegedly more trivial than sexism) sort of reinforces the norm that men shouldn’t have emotions, which feminists generally oppose
– TERFs: self-explanatory
– being mean to people who don’t have thorough knowledge of social justice concepts and terminology: classism, ableism, English-centrism
– “you can’t talk about this unless you’re in X demographic”: requiring people to out themselves, which social justice normally objects to
– mocking political opponents often devolves into classist stereotypes and body-shaming
While in certain cases a bigoted social-justice-adjacent ideology does become entrenched (e.g. TERFs), and social justice people can be really stubborn in defense of their ideology, there is at the same time a norm in social justice communities that when one is told one is being bigoted, one should listen. Thoughtful social justice people can and do accept arguments that their activism is bigoted. And I’m not totally atypical in my opinions here – here are some Everyday Feminism articles saying some of the same things. (I know EF is often silly and bad, but (a) not always (b) it is certainly an example of social justice land.)
There are also social justice failure modes that don’t fall into this category, and those also need to be addressed, but I don’t think they doom social justice as a whole.
How you could try persuading me not to affiliate myself with social justice:
– convince me that if there was no history of sexism, racism, etc., the marginalized groups in question would not be substantially better off today than they are in reality. (I’m not sure how you would go about this, however. Also, you would probably need to convince me of this for most of the groups in question – e.g. I think there is a better case for this to be true for women than for black people in the U.S.)
– convince me that there are few true findings of modern-day bias
– convince me that the inclusiveness-optimizing behaviors I’ve learned from social justice don’t actually do much good
– convince me that social justice is overwhelmingly abusive in practice
I’m not sure exactly how many of those things would need to be true in order for me to be persuaded.
3. Explain Gamergate.
I really don’t remember it well at all, but here’s a go.
– I accept Ozy’s argument that Zoe Quinn emotionally abused her boyfriend. (I have not independently read the Zoepost so this is largely on trust that Ozy summarized it accurately.)
– Said boyfriend posted chat logs showing this.
– Lots of people on the Internet got really mad at her and attacked her, and because this is The Internet this involved a lot of really terrible misogyny and stuff
– People were also mad about her (a video game developer) sleeping with a video game reviewer because they thought this meant video game journalism was corrupt. These accusations sounded really overblown to me but I did not examine them closely. (Also I don’t know whether this or the Zoepost came first.)
– I think there was also a backlash against feminist critics of video games, which of course also became super misogynist. (Note: I know nothing about video games so I have no idea how reasonable the feminist critics were, but I am in general extremely in favor of feminist reviews of various media.)
– From what I heard the anti-Gamergate side got pretty abusive too; I do not know whether the amounts and types of abuse were comparable. (If nothing else it looks like most other anti-Gamergaters did *not* consider Quinn to be abusive, which is a problem (though again, I haven’t independently evaluated this).)
Thing of Things 
Is there an explanation for why some of the polls have only said “Anti-SJ” or “Pro-SJ” and some have required us to declare our own position in order to vote? I’ve been abstaining from the four-option kind because while I’m definitely not anti-SJ I’m not comfortable identifying as SJ either. Or does that put me outside the poll’s target audience?
Apologies if this has been brought up before; I’ve been skimming the comments but might have missed something.
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It’s been brought up. You can round yourself to the nearest one, or choose one at random.
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Sincere, and… Ozy?
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If so, then either the author is not sincere about not having read the Zoepost or Ozy is some kind of psychic. 🙂
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This is (1) very well written from a moderate SJ perspective, (2) anticipates and responds to ASJ criticisms of SJ very effectively, (3) addresses all subjects at reasonable length, and (4) is very light on jargon. (Ableism, TERF)
I think pro, and I have a theory about who it is that I won’t share.
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This is the core anti-SJ position written up in SJ language, with a few acknowledgements that SJ isn’t the literal opposite of truth. Good job whoever wrote it. If you are a SJW you are an absolute credit to your side. If you aren’t you’re still great but lol you are bad at ITT.
I’m voting fake.
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I’ve seen non-anti-SJ people in the rat-adj community express basically this exact position, outside of the context of an ITT, entirely sincerely.
I find the argument that, therefore, this must be the work of an anti-SJ poorly faking actually caring about social justice (because surely the audience of this blog would contain nobody who could sincerely write this) to be somewhere this side of absurd.
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Oh, I’m not saying it couldn’t be real, or even that I feel all that confident. Just that my money is on fake.
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The first answer about discourse norms definitely gave me this feeling. As an anti-SJ, when I was thinking about how I would answer these questions, the first thing that came to mind for #1 was “charitableness”. But an SJ who lists being charitable as one of their core norms of discourse… I’m sorry, I really hope this doesn’t come off as too aggressive to the SJs here, but it just doesn’t seem compatible with the SJ axiom of “it’s not how you intend your words, it’s what your words actually do.” Being charitable, to me, means putting the focus on the speaker’s intent and feelings, rather than the listener’s. I’m not saying that SJs have to be actively against charitableness, just like anti-SJs don’t have to be actively against kindness, but I wouldn’t expect an anti-SJ to value kindness as a core norm, nor would I expect an SJ to value charitableness as a core norm.
The criticisms of SJ given in answer #2 make me want to classify this person as some sort of in-between position rather than pure SJ, if it is indeed a genuine answer. If it’s a fake, then the whole thing comes off as an anti-SJ trying to write an honest and fair evaluation of how they feel about SJ.
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I wouldn’t call this an anti-SJ position (I voted real, FWIW). There’s one part in particular I have to point out, which is the bit about “In much the way that the fix for bad science is more science, the fix for bad social justice is more social justice.” This is a pretty limited set of solutions! Yes, a lot of the problems here can be put into SJ terms and fixed on that basis, but is that really the fundamental problem in each of these cases? Sure, it’s certainly a good thing to get them to say “Oh, I guess we should stop doing that then”, but if the goal is to come to agreement on the underlying truth, not just to implement policies that are agreeable to everyone, then this is insufficient. And this certainly can’t address problems like “Actually your whole framework is wrong, the notions you are using are incoherent and based on lumping things that cannot usefully be grouped together in most cases”. The better method of self-correction is the same as it’s always been: Actually arguing with those who disagree.
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@Lawrence d’Anna
I was SO tempted to tell you you were wrong. SO tempted.
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lol. You got me!
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Pretty clear pro.
>I have since read that some of those studies’ conclusions may not really hold up. I have not delved into the research enough to know exactly what to believe, but I think it is likely that many but not all social justice claims about the state of the world are true.
Implicit bias is definitely not a thing (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23773046 and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjop.12288/abstract).
On the resumes: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9938. Maybe check out http://ftp.iza.org/dp8517.pdf (and perhaps this one which is quite strange: https://economics.missouri.edu/working-papers/2014/wp1419_koedel.pdf).
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I was curious about the résumés thing so I checked out your first two links about that (but not the third). I skimmed the first study and couldn’t find mention of résumés; would you mind pointing me in the right direction?
And on the third page of the study in the second link (http://ftp.iza.org/dp8517.pdf), the authors describe the reasons they suspect are to blame for their strange findings and they both have to do with possible failure modes of the study (insufficient company participant randomization by way of self-selection, etc.) rather than racial implicit bias not existing. Which part of the study refutes the idea of racial bias in hiring, in your view? The authors seem to disagree with you.
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I really hope this person is Pro-SJ. I’ve voted as an anti-SJ person thought the posts so far, and really like Maxim’s ‘value-aligned anti-SJ’ label from the 8th thread. The answer to the second question covers a lot of the points I would in an answer to it, but ultimately switches the truth values on the conclusions. Nothing seems specifically out of place in the other two answers.
I will admit my sin in a rationalist adjacent space of voting more on what I wish were true than what I know to be true. But the answer to the second question awed me in an unexpected way. I also fully acknowledged the this could be from another value-aligned anti-SJ, wishing for the SJ movement they would like to see.
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It seems like an attempt at a “kinder, gentler, more moderate” SJ position; I hesitated a bit but decided it was more likely to be sincere.
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Seems genuine to me, if a bit kinder than the norm.
Walter Picks:
1: ASJ, certain
2: SJ, certain
3: SJ, unsure
4: SJ, unsure
5: ASJ, unsure
6: ASJ certain
7: SJ, certain
8: SJ, unsure
9: SJ, certain
10: SJ, certain
11: SJ, certain
12: ASJ, unsure
13: ASJ, certain
14: ASJ, certain
15: SJ, unsure
16: SJ, certain
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Huh, this sounds surprisingly like the Unit of Caring on tumblr, but the Gamergate aspect and some aspects of the tone don’t match up to what I know about her. I expect this is a somewhat rationalist SJ-critical person who still sees themselves as pro.
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One odd detail – the author says that SJ goes too far when it leads to “nerd-bashing: ableism, sometimes racism (against Asians and Jews), gender & appearance norms.”
I would think based on the rest of the essay that this author would be against bigotry even when directed to abled, non-Jewish, non-minority white cis males (and would see it as bigotry.) Nailing down that bigotry is a problem when directed to everyone on the planet except one narrow slice of the population seems a little inconsistent with the author’s otherwise liberal values.
I still lean pro, but I’m less confident – down to about 60%
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I’m going to be genuinely shocked if this turns out to be fake.
Not because it would be impossible to fake, exactly, but because I agree with it so closely. This is almost exactly what I would have written, with maybe a few tiny changes in emphasis and phrasing.
It would genuinely cause me to wonder about my own beliefs to learn someone understands my position so well, chose it as their example of a paradigmatic pro-SJ person, and still disagrees with me.
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Damn, now I have to cross you off my list of suspects for this one 🙂
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May I ask what your list was?
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I have to confess that calling it a “list” was a shameless exaggeration. And, to make matters worse, my only note for this entry is “good”, so apparently I just gave up on guessing 😀
In any case, I didn’t actually know who was participating, so it was more of an exercise in finding the most similar-sounding person among those I’m more familiar with.
E.g., I thought Meaningless Monicker sounded like unknought, wingedcatgirl sounded like Ozy, and Sylocat sounded like “David Gerard, but nicer”.
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Voted no because of shibbolething, and no one came around to SJ because they read some studies on stereotype threat etc.
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“No one”?!
Ok my main reaction here is to be offended and indignant and also want to gloat a little that you’re wrong, but actually – would you mind explaining what you meant by this? In your view, what drives people to identify with SJ? Why do you believe it’s implausible for someone to be convinced by research?
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“No one” may have been an exaggeration. I admit I’m still surprised. Before you read those studies, what did you believe? Did you think diversity, equality, and respect for oppressed people’s experiences were important values?
It seems people are much influenced by how they think the world works from art, and what they’ve seen in their life, and then highlight a few studies that confirm these feelings.
Later in your answer you admit that a lot (some?) of these scientific conclusions don’t hold up, but you’re still attached to the structure of SJ logic. That sounds quite real.
It is very hard to let your entire world view turn on a dime based on what scientific studies you read, and when they are replicated or invalidated. I salute anyone who can do it consistently, but if you told me someone claimed to join an ideology because of a study, and whether that is real or fake, yeah I’d vote fake.
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My values didn’t change; my understanding of the world changed.
I was pro-equality but basically thought racism and sexism were basically absent in the modern U.S. To be fair it wasn’t only studies – it was studies, and pro-SJ articles with lots of statistics, and anecdotes that surprised me from my friends’ lives (but the statistics were the most convincing for sure). The way this went was that I got into a couple of arguments with a friend of mine in college about feminism and also about racism, and then later that friend compiled basically a library of links about racism & sexism in the U.S., and I read the whole thing over the summer and was like, ok I am not convinced about literally everything but in general yes I see where you were coming from and I think I was wrong that sexism and racism do not meaningfully affect people’s lives in the present day.
So like, part of it is that social justice ideas were much more present in my social circles in college than before; you could argue my “conversion” is just a reaction to my social/intellectual milieu. But certainly it wasn’t what I grew up with, or just what fit my priors, or even based on my personal experience.
To clarify, I am currently somewhat agnostic (read: ignorant) about the current state of the research. This is suboptimal, but I’m not sure when I’ll get around to fixing this.
I am comforted to see you meant your comment as a general statement about humans and not as a dig at SJ! This was not clear from your original comment.
I do not think anyone should change their ideology because of a study. A bunch of studies is a different thing.
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An obvious followup question to my comment above is “if the reason you became pro-SJ is that you were convinced by evidence that racism and sexism substantially exist, and you’re no longer sure that evidence is true, shouldn’t you go back to being probably-not-SJ?”
To which the answer is basically the rest of my answer #2 – if I were now convinced that the evidence that initially convinced me into SJ is false, my worldview would still be really different from what it was before, and substantially enriched by SJ concepts.
But also yeah I wondered a little about participating here because I was like “well I clearly feel an affiliation with SJ but I feel like I’m not typical” but decided to do it anyway.
Also I feel like it is somehow significant that people commenting here said this wasn’t really SJ and people commenting on my anti-SJ entry said it was basically SJ.
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Well-researched, balanced, and it seemed honest to me. Also a somewhat unorthodox position that I’d not quite call Pro-SJ (but I can see someone holding it and self-identifying as Pro-SJ).
If it was Pro-SJ, I commend the writer on their balanced and differentiated view. If it was Anti-SJ, you kind of missed the whole point of this exercise by choosing a very non-central position (but it was a rather clever trick).
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That spooky thing when you read something that you could easily have written.
Voting pro, and getting a bit worried now as I swear I’ve done that on at least 3/4 of these. I doubt the control group is three times the size of the study group. Which means I’ve been suckered by some of these.
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Learning that the voters identify as majority SJ has me worried the other way. I’m pretty close to even, which means that if the authors have a similar split, I’m way too suspicious.
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Some of them were just too short and vague to provide much evidence. I mostly voted pro in such cases myself, but it doesn’t really show much to be “fooled” when there’s really insufficient data.
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*nods*
It usually takes 20-30 cross referenced questions for the Voight-Kampf Test to work
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This one opens by praising charity, rigour, and kindness – three things I don’t particularly associate with SJ. It’s not that SJ conflicts with any of them, exactly (though it’s more clearly compatible with kindness than the other two), But I wouldn’t say any of them are characteristic of it either, and I’ve even seen explicit SJ-aligned arguments *against* each of them. In particular, much SJ or at least much visible and publicly influential SJ is built around the idea that how someone responds to your words is more important than what you intended, or maybe even than what you actually said – pretty much the opposite of what I understand by “charity” in this context. This made me initially inclined to go anti-SJ on this one.
However, the more I read the more I got the impression of someone sincerely SJ-aligned trying to change the movement for the better from within. While I myself gave up on that project a long time ago, I ended up believing, or perhaps just *hoping*, that this is in fact that rare SJ person I could see having a friendly coffee with and talking SJ topics.
It’s not unusual for me to agree 90%+ with an SJ person on the object level, but it’s rare for me to agree this strongly with one on underlying principles. But I went with a cautiously optimistic “pro” on this one.
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There is no conflict between these two ideas. It’s like the Robustness principle (“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others”). In this case: be responsible in what you say, be generous in how you interpret others.
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There are plenty of SJ people who would quite clearly and explicitly argue against the “be liberal in what you accept from others” part. I like to think they’re not the majority but if not, they’re publicly visible out of proportion to their numbers.
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Well, the question was “what norms do you tend to follow”, not “what norms do you think would be accepted by 100% of your SJ friends”.
The author does say that charity can cause them to be less (and perhaps “insufficiently”?) outraged about some things, and obviously the people whose personal discourse norms cause them to be more outraged more often are going to be more visible.
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Now that I can finally reply 🙂 –
For me there’s not necessarily a conflict between “intent is not magic” and being charitable, though not for the reason Nita said.
(Though independently of this, I sort of do hold myself to higher discourse standards than others, because it’s relatively easy for me and being able to do discourse well sometimes feels like a superpower I guess)
Rather, I think intent and impact are both independently important.
Scenario from my life: in a Japanese class in college, we learn some new words and to practice, we’re instructed to practice expressing to each other what we want in a boyfriend or girlfriend – “girls, what you would want in a boyfriend, boys, what you would want in a girlfriend”. This is heteronormative and I don’t like it.
On the one hand, it’s really important to me to know whether my professor is actively anti-gay or was just thoughtless in the moment, because that determines whether it’s safe to be out, for instance.
On the other hand, the fact that she said it makes me sad all by itself, because it means that in her mind there is a default relationship structure and it semi-excludes me (I’m bi). Also, while I can charitably assume that probably she is not actively anti-gay, part of the impact is that I have to wonder about this.
Charitableness primarily matters if I’m trying to judge someone’s intent. For impact it matters much less – I mean, it does help to ask “what is the best-case plausible system of assumptions and attitudes that could have led to this comment?”, but as I said, part of the impact is that I have to consider the whole space of possibility.
Furthermore – and you might argue this is either too charitable, or extremely uncharitable, depending on how you see this – in my opinion, most of the SJ folks who say “impact, not intent” are actually misdiagnosing their own beliefs and they actually care about both impact and intent like I do. I realize it’s rude to say other people are wrong about their own beliefs, but this is the best conclusion I can draw from their behavior.
After all, most SJ people do care about the difference between a casual racist and a KKK member, or between someone who accidentally said something thoughtless and someone being actively malicious. I think most would agree there’s a big difference between a parent who is worried about their kid being gay because they just want the best for their kid and they think same-gender relationships aren’t as fulfilling as opposite-sex ones, and the parent who disowns their kid for being gay, even though both have homophobic attitudes.
I think the thing that distinguishes SJ is the opinion that impact matters even if there was no ill intent. I think there’s a couple reasons that keeps being phrased somewhat inaccurately as “impact, NOT intent”:
1. SJ people keep finding themselves in arguments where they point out that a thing someone said/did was bigoted, and the other person responds with “but I didn’t mean it that way!” and so the focus is on convincing the person that impact matters.
2. Current norms in most of the U.S. are such that few people will intend to be racist (and even those who do will likely not say so). If intent and impact both matter, but you hold intent constant, it looks like impact is doing all the work. (The reason I keep coming back to homophobia as an example here is that actually thinking being gay is wrong is substantially more common than actually thinking that being black makes you inferior, so you have more variation in intent in the case of homophobia than the case of racism. (I don’t mean this in an “oppression Olympics” way, there are things about racism that are worse than homophobia too.))
I once saw in a discussion someone bring up the point that intent DOES matter if someone is being intentionally bigoted, and they concluded that “intent can make things worse, but not better”. I think that’s the wrong conclusion – it’s based on an experience where most people will not intend to be bigoted, because we’re lucky to be in a place and time where that’s true – if you normally encounter very bigoted people, then finding out someone doesn’t intend to be bigoted is a welcome relief even if they still carry some bigoted assumptions. But like, this is why I say that intent does matter to SJ even though it’s deemphasized.
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Language is very sloppy and expressing yourself accurately is actually very hard for many people, especially when speaking off the cuff. People base their statements on an internal model which is always a simplified version of reality.
In my opinion, one should not fault people too hard for being primarily brief and understandable, rather than (completely) inclusive. At a certain point, one should accept that people have reached the limit of their abilities.
Demanding more than that is itself anti-inclusive, as less intelligent and/or verbally gifted people become shut out of daily life, as they will get bullied into silence by being called out to do things that they cannot do. IMO, education/IQ privilege is far too often ignored in SJ.
If the statement is heteronormative, then it is only so in the weakest way: by speaking to the majority and not addressing every possible exception. I see it more as not being SJ-normative, than actually enforcing heterosexuality as the norm. It’s not like the statement insinuates that being non-hetero is wrong.
The instruction also assumed that the students are not asexual and/or actually want a partner. So the question cannot be asked at all if the goal is to be maximally inclusive.
I don’t like it when the lowest common denominator becomes the norm, so I think that there is a clear limit to how inclusive one can be expected to be. At a certain point, people should be allowed to assume things that are generally true. Then it is up to the people in the small minority to object (or they can simply adapt the question to their circumstances). Of course, the instructor then has to respond appropriately.
Ultimately, for each minority and issue affecting them you have to decide whether the majority has to shoulder the burden or the minority. At the one extreme, pretty much everyone agrees that the majority has to adapt and at the other extreme, pretty much everyone agrees that the minority has to adapt. The difficulty is where to draw the line.
My criticism of SJ on this issue is that the movement(s) often exclusively advocate for the minority and thus ignore or downplay the burden on the majority. Furthermore, disagreements are too often fought out with very harsh language (like calling people racist/sexist/etc), which turns disagreements on a subjective issue into the dismissal of people as being evil. The sad thing is that this works, up to a point, as you can bully some people into submission. But it is an evil tactic, that also creates strong opposition.
Of course, there are anti-SJ people who do the same, the other way around. The same criticisms apply to them.
IMO, if someone acts defensively that way, it is usually because the person feels accused of having bad intent. I would suggest that SJ people would be better off to express themselves so that people don’t feel personally attacked.
For example, not “that is sexist,” but “that assumes that the person is a man, perhaps you can replace ‘he’ with ‘he or she’, so women understand that this applies to them.'”
My suggestions:
– Don’t assume intent or use words that imply bad intent, to allow for the possibility that the person didn’t consider the alternative
– Give suggestions for improvement, rather than simply say that something is wrong. People resist/get upset if you take something away from them without giving a good replacement.
– Don’t demand, suggest. Be open to alternatives & accept that you don’t speak for all people in a group
– Give the person time to think it over. The person may not be very knowledgeable about this and it’s unreasonable to expect them to always be able to decide right away.
I understand why this is important to you, but at the same time, I think that it is unreasonable to expect other people to volunteer that information without even being asked (especially if they themselves may face repercussions, if the environment is unaccepting); nor do I think it reasonable to jump to (strong) conclusions based on very weak evidence.
Also, at a certain level of general acceptance in society/specific environments, it seems more reasonable/productive to me to simply assume good faith. I don’t know where that Japanese class was given or whether the teacher was Japanese, but in Japan, acceptance of homosexuality is fairly high, AFAIK.
At a certain point, I think that emancipation only continues if the emancipating group normalizes themselves by no longer holding back in fear.
That reasoning actually made me (and many others) anti-SJ, so I don’t think that this is good way to define SJ.
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@ Aapje
I agree, and this isn’t necessarily always a problem. The issue here is the particular way in which the model of reality is simplified, namely by forgetting about non-straight people. In my opinion, this is harmful.
I agree with you about ableism & elitism in a lot of social justice rhetoric – if you’ll notice, I wrote about this in my essay above. However:
– In this particular case this was a college professor so like, this concern does not entirely apply
– It’s not actually that difficult for most people to grasp the idea of non-straight people and to talk about potential partners in a gender-neutral way (at least in languages like English that don’t make this unnecessarily difficult). (But even in other languages, it’s not actually that hard to just say “boyfriend or girlfriend” and not go out of one’s way to specify which you should want based on gender.) I can accept that for some people (not many), this can be genuinely difficult. But that’s not really a reasonable assumption to make in a particular case without evidence.
– Notice that I was not calling for bullying this professor into submission. In fact I had not proposed any potential solution at all. Pointing out a problem does not mean that I think that all possible responses to the problem are justified.
In fact if I was to propose a solution, it would basically be “I or another student talk to the professor after class and point out that this prompt was non-inclusive”. It’s just that this is a pretty scary thing to do, because confrontation is scary in general but also because confronting a person in position of authority is additionally scary, especially when you don’t really know if the person actually wants to be inclusive. The risk that the professor is actually anti-gay is maybe not large, but the downside in that case is pretty big. There’s also the fear that the professor, like you, will think that I’m being overly picky and complaining about trivial things, and that this will negatively influence their opinion of me going forward. (Also in this case the norm was to talk to professors in Japanese, and I didn’t really know the right words.)
If I was sufficiently motivated, I could have sought out some third party (LGBT office?) to pass along this concern to the professor. I think this probably could have been done and just didn’t occur to me. Though I probably would have been slightly concerned about whether this could lead to the professor also being disciplined somehow, which I wouldn’t want (I don’t think this is actually likely, but it would have gone through my mind too).
This is why I said “heteronormative” and not “homophobic”.
For what it’s worth, this incident is from before I was familiar with SJ, and it bothered me anyway (note how I still remember this years later). My feelings about heteronormativity are not based on fitting my experiences to an SJ model – most of my views on the matter were developed as a somewhat scared semi-closeted bi teenager. In the Bay Area! And yet.
I agree, actually. I think this is not a great question to ask even if you phrase it in an LGBT-inclusive way, because as you point out some people are aromantic and/or asexual, and also because some people are not out and forcing them to either come out or lie is not good either. I don’t necessarily fault the professor for not thinking of these things, but I think it would be better to either use some other prompt entirely or have some kind of disclaimer like “or if you don’t want a partner, just describe some fictional person you like” or something.
I agree there is a limit to how inclusive one can be. But I think people should generally try to be as inclusive as they reasonably can, and I think LGBT-inclusiveness is well within the range of reasonableness. For one thing, it’s not that uncommon to not be straight. But I think even relatively rare situations should be considered and accommodated when possible, because the burden on someone who’s typically not included is rather high.
Like, the percentage of people who are non-binary is quite low. If you’re designing a survey and you only let participants identify as men or women, your data won’t be very wrong. But if you’re a non-binary person and every form or survey you ever fill out and every government document you have makes you identify as a man or a woman, that’s an experience that shapes your life and makes you feel generally exclude.
Or if you’re disabled and you use a wheelchair – for any given business, people who use wheelchairs are probably a pretty small portion of their potential customers, so it may make sense to not bother building accessible doors and ramps and stuff. But if every business independently makes this determination, you as a wheelchair user basically can’t go anywhere.
The case for deliberately including minorities is even stronger when that minority also sometimes faces discrimination and deliberate exclusion, because one major benefit of deliberate inclusion is that it signals acceptance. I am of the opinion that it is extremely important for authority figures to signal acceptance of things that are unjustly stigmatized, because unfortunately for people with those traits, charitably assuming acceptance without evidence of such is not actually safe when it comes to authority figures. (Also sometimes with other people too, it’s just especially clear with authority figures.)
Like, as I said, I went to high school in the Bay Area, which is famously one of the most LGBT-accepting places in the world. But there were two people in my school who were out to more than just their close friends, and both of them reported that this was a terrible experience, so clearly it wasn’t accepting enough. (My sibling reports that this significantly changed in the few years before they attended the same high school, so yay progress.)
I did not have evidence to know what my teachers and most of my classmates thought of LGBT people. This is much better than having evidence of them being anti-gay – but it’s much worse than having evidence that they are not anti-gay, and it kept me more closeted than I might have been otherwise. This effect was even stronger with my parents, since they both had more influence on my life and also came from a pretty homophobic society. Being closeted in one’s own home is pretty unpleasant but less unpleasant than being out with homophobic parents, so I stayed closeted for a while (and it turned out that it was about as unpleasant as being out, since my parents were just moderately homophobic – but I couldn’t have known it wouldn’t be worse).
So if I have kids, it will be really important to me that they know I think being gay or bi or trans is completely okay, so that they know that if they turn out to be LGBT they can come out to me safely as soon as they want.
I do think this will become less of an issue as the world gets more accepting. But I also think that heteronormativity will itself go down as the world gets more accepting, because it’s difficult to keep being heteronormative when one is aware of gay people.
I sort of agree that calling people racist or sexist is bad (though there are exceptions, like if someone clearly has a pattern of racist or sexist conduct), but I completely disagree that calling an action or statement racist or sexist is “very harsh language” or “dismissal of people as being evil”.
I agree that strategically saying “that’s racist” has the downside that it’s somewhat likely to provoke defensiveness. But this strategic concern is overriding only in the specific narrow situation where you’re trying to convince someone who is not already on your side to consider your point of view. I think it would be very bad if because of this concern we stopped calling racist things racist in all contexts – ironically, this would basically be sacrificing truth for political correctness.
In practice when I want to point out that something someone says is prejudiced or non-inclusive, I do use pretty much exactly the kind of language you describe – trying to avoid emotionally/ideologically charged words and pointing out the specific problem rather than the systemic error it’s part of. Like if I’d gone to talk to the professor about her heteronormative instruction, I wouldn’t have said “that’s heteronormative”, I would have said “I just want to point out, the way you phrased that prompt sort of left out people who are gay”. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t in my own mind or when talking about general societal patterns think of this as heteronormative.
56% of Japanese people think homosexuality should be accepted by society; 34% think it shouldn’t. This is relatively okay-ish on a global scale but it’s still pretty bad – a 1/3 chance that my interlocutor thinks my orientation shouldn’t be accepted by society is way too high a risk. If anything the fact that this was taking place in a U.S. university lowers the risk.
But as I said, even in a place like the Bay Area this can be a concern.
If I was just talking to someone on the Internet and they made a heteronormative comment, I still wouldn’t like it that much but there would be no risk to being maximally charitable. If it’s someone actually in my life, especially an authority figure, there is risk, and protecting myself from that risk takes priority over being charitable.
Yes, coming out is an effective form of activism, and one that LGBT people have been using for a longish time. But coming out when you don’t know what reaction to expect is scary and it shouldn’t be mandatory. Straight allies can absolutely help by making the environment friendlier.
I mean, do you think the impact of one’s actions doesn’t matter at all?
The thing is, in most areas of life, this is how people normally operate – even if you didn’t intend to hurt someone, it matters if you actually did hurt someone. There’s a reason the “someone steps on your foot” thing is a frequently used analogy – even if you didn’t mean to step on my foot, you’ll apologize if I say “ow” and you’ll stop standing on my foot if I ask you to.
Like, let’s say someone recently moved to the U.S. and started learning English, and they don’t know that the n-word is a slur, and they use the word and people are shocked and the black people they know are hurt and afraid (partly because they don’t know that this person doesn’t know the word’s meaning, partly because they already associate this word with so much pain that hearing it is unpleasant even if it’s not actually intended to hurt). The person didn’t do anything wrong based on what they know – so if you only look at intent, there’s no problem. But I think a world in which someone tells him what the word means and he stops using it is clearly better than a world in which he keeps using it, because he’ll stop accidentally hurting people with it.
Like I don’t really know how you do morality in general, but I think if you accept any form of consequentialism you have to accept at least some form of “impact matters even if there’s no ill intent”.
I think what’s happening is when I say “this comment is heteronormative”, you hear “the person who made this comment is a homophobe and a bad person”, when I don’t actually mean the latter. This is a pretty common SJ 101 argument.
It is true that there are SJ people who will loudly condemn anyone who says or does anything even slightly bigoted (and it is thanks to rationalist anti-SJ that I know and accept this). But like, this is by no means universal, and it is not something that I am doing right now. And opposing bullying people in the name of SJ does not require opposing SJ itself.
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I would argue that these words are considered extremely offensive by most people. I’ve seen quite a few cases where anti-SJ people called SJ people by the same kind of words that I frequently see SJ people use, like ‘misandry,’ ‘racist,’ ‘you have female privilege,’ etc.
I practically never see a SJ person react with introspection to such a statement, it is nearly always rage. To me, it is a problem with a culture when certain statements are considered acceptable to use against others, but the people in that culture tend to find it unacceptable if those words are used against them. To me, this shows a lack of empathy, while that empathy is demanded from others, which is rather hypocritical.
This empathy gap is even rationalized by some SJ people (‘punching up is ok, punching down isn’t,’ ‘anger against oppressive groups is justified’), which I find extremely objectionable (as it is not just unconscious bias, but rationalized as being acceptable).
On the contrary, I am anti-SJ because I believe that the impact of mainstream SJ is overall negative on society, despite the good intent of (most) SJ people.
IMO, there is a severe misunderstanding of reality, combined with high levels of hypocrisy (where SJ theory is applied selectively), which means that if mainstream SJ gets their way, we will have a severely oppressive society where only the concerns of certain groups are recognized, only some research is allowed to be done (and only with a certain bias), only some speech is allowed, etc, etc.
Of course, oppressive groups tend to generate their own backlash and radicalizes the opposition (see the oppression of communists in the US and the murder campaign in Indonesia against them). So I would argue that it’s better for everyone is SJ is checked and made to operate differently. Extremism tends to result in many victims on both sides (and among the neutrals in between).
My criticism is not an attack on anyone personally, but rather, a more general cultural criticism.
Cultural dynamics can rarely be blamed on individuals anyway, it emerges from many small choices by many individuals, where they often don’t understand the greater impact of their actions.
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@Aapje
I notice that you don’t refute anything that tchaejklf (?) said.
I’m not sure if this is you gracefully conceding the argument, or you trying to win without addressing her major arguments.
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@Aapje
I notice that you don’t refute anything that tchaejklf (?) said.
I’m not sure if this is you gracefully conceding the argument, or you trying to win without addressing her major arguments.
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As I’ve explained, I don’t have a disagreement with the basic idea that minorities must be accommodated by the majority, although I disagree with many SJ people to which extent, the language that may be used to ‘educate’, etc. tchaejklf seemed to agree with me that the demands, reactions, etc can go too far, which was really my point.
tchaejklf segued into specific experiences, which were clearly solid examples of cases where an SJ response is not invalid and where there was no overreaction. These cases are fine as proof of the idea (that minorities must be accommodated by the majority) on which we agree, but not very useful to find the line between acceptable and unacceptable demands, reactions, etc. However, I did not feel like like expanding the debate that much.
Frankly, I was quite content with the strong agreements we did reach and didn’t feel like mucking it up by seeking conflict in that way.
There were just two points where tchaejklf that were more on an abstract level that I wanted to clarify.
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Also, hi! If you’re in the Bay Area I’d totally be up for a friendly coffee with discussion of SJ topic.
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uh, topics, plural, I presume
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I’m in Winnipeg which is nearly as far from there as you can get and still be in a more or less habitable part of North America, but I do appreciate the sentiment.
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Voted pro because of the detail this person gave about SJ. It’s definitely possible that this person is in fact an anti who was formerly pro, but this seems like a detailed enough defense of their position that I’m convinced it’s not true.
That being said, if they hadn’t written such an extensive response to question 2 I would have been substantially less convinced. This person seems to be only barely SJ.
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Voted Pro-SJ, am Pro-SJ, for future reference.
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Pro-SJ side of rationalist/rationalist-adjacent land, which is really what we’re getting, instead of an actually representative sample of pro-SJ people.
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