Effective Altruism as Anti-Colonialist

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effective altruism, ozy blog post, racism

Many anti-racists are rightfully leery of intervention in the developing world. Historically, the consequences of white people lifting up the white man’s burden have not exactly been great. Slavery was justified on the grounds that it civilized black people. Europeans inflamed racial tensions, sometimes tragically leading to genocide. Boundaries were drawn more for colonialists’ convenience than based on the actual tribes that lived there, causing conflict even today. And of course all that colonization began with wars with the people of color who impertinently seemed to feel no need to be saved.

In the modern day, the developed world has mostly managed to avoid conquering places. Instead, our current hobbies include screwing up the developing world’s economies with the International Monetary Fund, propping up dictators and training their militaries in torture, encouraging people to imprison gay people, and committing war crimes that involve the murder of children.

I think effective altruism, however, is not white-saviorist or neocolonialist. Indeed, its success in avoiding these failure modes is striking, given that its membership is overwhelmingly white and from the developed world and has a collective racial politics that can be best described as ’embarrassing.’

I think effective altruist thought has two key points that keep it from becoming colonialist.

First, effective altruists tend to emphasize evidence. It’s all too easy to make assumptions that people in developing countries really want what you think they ought to want, regardless of their stated preferences. It’s all too easy to blunder into some complex system you don’t understand and mess everything up, because you have a PhD and none of these people have a fourth-grade education and how could they possibly know more than you do? It’s all too easy to tell yourself a beautiful story about the grateful natives and ignore the facts on the ground. It’s all too easy to decide that clearly what would really benefit people in the developing world is whatever benefits you.

The corrective to these tendencies is a radical insistence on figuring out what things work and doing them. Not what things sound nice to rich white people half a world away, not what things make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, not what those smart people in very good suits said totally ought to work, but what things actually work. And then you keep tracking what things work and when the situation on the ground changes or it turns out you’ve made a mistake, you don’t double down. You do a different thing that works.

The other corrective, frankly, is a hefty dose of humility. There’s a reason that a lot of recommended effective altruist charities are in public health. Economic development involves a host of assumptions about how economies work and how to trade off different values and so on, any of which can be mistaken and then you have an utter disaster on your hands. Deworming only requires the assumptions that deworming medicine works the same in Africa as it does in Europe and that most people do not like being infested with worms, both of which seem to be on fairly firm ground.

Second, effective altruists care a lot about autonomy. Give Directly does what it says on the tin: it gives poor people in Africa unconditional cash transfers. Much to the surprise of burden-carrying white men everywhere, it turns out that if you give people money they make basically reasonable decisions about what to spend it on: they buy livestock, furniture, and iron roofs. It turns out that people generally know their own needs better than you do, and you should generally trust them instead of assuming that you know better. Consider the effective altruist proverb: if your intervention cannot outperform giving poor people cash, you should just give them the cash. This sort of essential respect for the preferences of people in the developing world speaks well for our ability to actually improve things, instead of just making ourselves feel better.

Make America Great

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my fucking country, ozy blog post

When I was a small child, my teacher taught us to love our country via teaching us all the verses of This Land is Your Land. In retrospect, this probably explains a lot about my sense of patriotism.

For those who are only familiar with the first couple patriot-approved verses, it continues like this:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

This Land Is Your Land is a deeply patriotic song. But it’s not a song shaped by what America actually, factually is. Indeed, it seems to think America as it actually factually is is kind of terrible (full of hungry people, private property, and a distinct lack of a socialist utopia). It’s about what America could be, what America aspires to, and– in its best moments– what America is.

I am unironically, full-heartedly patriotic. I have been known to cry at Lee Greenwood’s God Bless The USA, possibly the most glurgey tripe ever written. But I’m not patriotic about America’s actual history and the twin original sins of genocide against Native Americans and slavery of Africans.

My patriotism is about freedom, in a very practical, down-to-earth sense. My patriotism is about helping felons regain the right to vote and about saying “Officer, I am not resisting, but I do not consent to searches.” It is about, to a very large degree, the ACLU. It is about the right of Nazis to march through a community full of Holocaust survivors, because we have principles.

My patriotism is about America as a nation of immigrants. About “give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, about the people I know who would be beaten or imprisoned or worse in their home countries but are safer here, a place that is not perfect but is better than many. American Gods got it right, I think, in telling the story of America as the story of the waves of immigrants who came here and brought their gods along: Irish and Italian, Germans and Poles, Chinese and Jewish, Mexican and Indian.

I think that American progressives have ceded patriotism to conservatives for far too long. Trump does not own the concept of patriotism, nor is there some law that only tax protesters and not Black Lives Matter can wave the Don’t Tread On Me flag. Patriotism, if it is to mean anything at all, must be about more than flags and nostalgia for the 1950s or the 1850s. We can have a vision of a better future, a brighter future, for America. We can say “our country has not lived up to its ideals in the past, but it can do better and it will do better.” We can say: “Our America does not surveil people or imprison them without trial or kill children. Our America is welcoming to refugees and to those who want a chance to build a better life for themselves and their families.”

This land has never, actually, belonged to you and me. But it was made for you and me just the same.

Libertarian Social Justice Warrior: A Surprisingly Coherent Position

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capitalism is NOT MADE BY BIRBS, follow ozymandias271 for more sad gays, not feminism go away, ozy blog post, racismc, sex positivity

[Epistemic status: I do not endorse all the positions outlined in this post, and I stated several more strongly than I normally would.]
[Unrelated donation request: Here is a GoFundMe for my friend Katie Cohen, a depressed rationalist single mother, and her daughter Andromeda. They are struggling and helping out would mean a lot. Come on, libertarians! Do that nonstate social support!]

As far as I am aware, “libertarian social justice warrior” is a niche very rarely filled. This is annoying to me, because a really good case can be made for the social justice libertarian.

Race

It’s not exactly a secret that one of the biggest problems black and Hispanic people have right now is the justice system. There’s a reason that Black Lives Matter– the largest anti-racist movement of the modern day– focuses unrelentingly on police violence. Their list of requests looks like a libertarian wish list: demilitarizing the police; ending civil forfeiture; mandatory body cameras and a legal right to record cops; stronger policies on the use of force; ending stop-and-frisk and racial profiling; ending the enforcement of ‘broken windows’ crimes like loitering and spitting.

But the most important part of criminal justice reform is ending the drug war. The Drug Policy Alliance has the stark statistics: Black people make up 13% of the US population and use drugs at comparable rates to people of other races; however, they are 31% of those arrested for drug law violations, and 40% of those incarcerated for drug violations. Similarly, Latinos are 17% of the US population and use drugs at comparable rates, but are 22% of those arrested and 20% of those incarcerated in state prison and 37% in federal prison for drug offenses. These convictions follow them for the rest of their life, making it harder to find a job and housing and to vote, trapping them in poverty and often leading people to turn to crime. All this for a crime that harms no one, picks no pocket and breaks no bone. It is not an exaggeration to say that decriminalizing drugs is probably the single best thing we could do for black people in the United States.

I deliberately left Latinos out of that last sentence, because they have an even lower-hanging intervention: immigration. Libertarians typically believe in few immigration restrictions and many support open borders. Undocumented immigrants– the majority of whom are Latino— often live lives of fear, worried that everything they’ve built– their homes, their families, their jobs, their communities– will be torn from them; in the case of people who immigrated as children, they return to a home they never saw. Of course, deportation itself leads to a host of human rights violations, perhaps even worse than the criminal justice system.

Immigration is not only good for people of color at home, but also for those abroad. Compared to people who stay in their home countries, immigrants are typically wealthier and happier– an effect which is disproportionately strong for the most vulnerable, who move from famine and epidemic to first-world poverty which, while terrible, rarely involves starvation. Immigration is a particular issue for those oppressed by their home countries, including LGBT people.

Libertarianism is also anti-colonialist. Libertarian foreign policy is perhaps the best way to put anti-colonialism into action. The United States has a long and exciting history of invading countries we don’t like, often defending dictatorships controlled by pro-US elites under the guise of ‘protecting democracy’. These interventions regularly involve the death of civilians and wind up destabilizing the countries we’re trying to help. The history of colonialism is the history of white people blundering into situations they don’t understand and fucking them up. In essence, the libertarian foreign policy is: if we can’t make things better, we sure as shit can keep from making them worse.

America is rooted in a tragic history of settler colonialism, ranging from violations of treaties to literal genocide. This has led to calls to decolonize the United States which, unfortunately, seem somewhat lacking in specifics. Some libertarians have proposed turning over government land to the Native Americans as a solution for downsizing the government while simultaneously protecting the environment. About a quarter of the United States is owned by the federal government. Now, I’m not saying that this is a complete solution for the decolonization of the United States. Obviously, more steps would need to be taken. But I have to say, as strategies for decolonization go, Native Americans owning a quarter of the country is a hell of a start.

Gender

I just wrote about how my feminism will be pro-sex-work or it will be bullshit. Libertarians have a history of being pro-sex-work. In fact, Reason magazine, a libertarian magazine, is one of the few magazines not run by sex workers which consistently advocates for sex workers’ rights from a perspective of sex work being a job, rather than condescending and paternalistic nonsense about empowerment or objectification.

Speaking of sex work, let’s talk about marriage.

Historically, feminists have been pretty critical of marriage. Of course, it’s pretty obvious why first-wave feminists (who legally belonged to their husbands) and second-wave feminists (who legally could be raped by their husbands) would be skeptical of the marriage thing. But even today’s friendlier, gentler, more equal marriage is pretty damn harmful.

The institution of legal marriage presents one viewpoint about what a relationship should be. You can only have one most important person in your life: if you’re part of a committed triad, sucks to be you. It bundles the rights together: if you’d like your power of attorney to go to a different person than the person who gets your veterans’ benefits, again, sucks to be you. Marriage is legally defined as a sexual relationship: a marriage may be annulled if the spouses do not have sexual intercourse. This implies that, of course, your most important adult relationship is a sexual one (and is pretty damn rapey to boot). It elevates that kind of relationship over all others, through everything from tax benefits for married couples to explicit government marriage-promotion programs.

But marriage goes beyond the practical: there’s a reason that conservatives proposed a legally identical ‘civil union’ for gay people instead of ‘marriage’, and a reason that gay people refused. Marriage is not just legal, it’s symbolic. When gay marriage was legalized in the US, we didn’t say “tax benefits and easier immigration win!”; we said “love wins!”

And what a narrow vision of love it is– cohabiting, sexual, romantic, involving only two people. Furthermore, marriage is intimately tied to the extraction of labor from women by men via housework and childcare. Because of this, women have less leisure time and, in the event of divorce, less economic security– potentially keeping them in a bad relationship. (Fortunately, the trend is heading in the right direction. Hats off to you, feminist men who clean the toilet.) Marriage is presented as desirable for women in a way it’s not for men (guess who the target market for romantic comedies is); much beauty work and other burdensome performance of the female gender role is justified by attempting to catch a husband.

The libertarian solution? Get the government out of marriage. The majority of marriage-related rights and laws are unnecessary and unjust: there is no reason a married couple should pay fewer taxes than a single person. The rules that are necessary– for instance, about power of attorney or the division of property in the event of a breakup– can be decided via contract, and standard contracts can be available. While separating the government from marriage may not end the elevation of cohabiting sexual-romantic coupledom where the woman does more housework, it certainly seems like ending government promotion of it will help.

Class

Class? Really? Isn’t libertarianism all about exploiting the poor for the benefits of the rich?

Not so fast! First, many libertarians– including both Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman– support a guaranteed basic income: essentially, we replace the current welfare state with the government cutting everyone a check; the middle-class person’s taxes would increase so that they make about the same amount of money they were before, while poor people would get the full check. (There are a couple similar proposals– for instance, a ‘negative income tax’, where the government gives you money if your tax return shows you didn’t make very much– but they’re all broadly the same proposal with different implementations, and I’m calling them all GBI.)

First, the modern welfare state is condescending as hell to poor people. It starts with the application process, which seems to have been designed by Satan himself to be as time-consuming and humiliating as possible.Once you get aid, the government is very, very concerned about how you spend it. Consider food stamps. Why is it the government’s job to decide that you’re allowed to spend that money on crackers but not on dog food? It’s your fucking budget! It is tragic that people are put in the position of choosing between feeding their pets and going hungry, but the situation is hardly improved by the government saying “sorry, if you’re willing to go to bed hungry because of how much you love Fido, we have decided we’re not going to give you that option, because fuck you that’s why.” The American people are apparently under the impression that poor people are so stupid that left to their own devices they will purchase nothing but a thousand pounds of toilet paper and wind up starving to death surrounded by its decadent ultra-softness. And that’s not even getting into barbaric ideas like drug-testing welfare recipients. If someone decides of their own free will to spend money on some weed to put some joy into the grinding misery that all too many poor people experience, I see no reason we should gainsay them. And if someone is struggling with the disease of addiction, how is depriving them of the ability to pay rent supposed to help?

The government feels, very firmly, that poor people should work. Welfare in the United States is usually contingent on trying to find a job. Even many leftists campaign for raising the minimum wage, arguing that every worker should be paid enough money to live on. Here’s my radical idea: everyone should have enough money to live on regardless of whether they work a job or not.

Compare this with a small but reasonable GBI– perhaps $8,000 a year. If you decide that isn’t enough money for you to live on, then you can get a job. If your job turns out to be so ill-paid or degrading that you don’t want to work it anymore, you can quit, secure in the knowledge that you might have to tighten your belt but you won’t stave. And if you don’t want to work and you’re willing to deal with not being able to buy much, then you don’t have to. (Many feminists have noted the contradiction that ‘lazy welfare moms’ are often just women who want to spend time with their children– the exact women valorized when their husbands make $75,000 a year.) Again, this comes from a position of respect for poor people’s autonomy, not an insistence that the government knows better than the individual how to manage their own life.

Another advantage of GBI is that it avoids something called the “welfare trap“. Because many benefits programs are means-tested, earning more money can mean you actually have less money in your pocket. Now, you’ll often see people complaining about this like “lazy poor people! Don’t want to work!” I am not doing that, and if you see someone doing that you should ask them how much they’d work if they didn’t get a paycheck for any of it. People have tried to ameliorate the welfare trap, but it’s really hard when you have this complex patchwork of two dozen programs that all interact with each other in unforeseen ways. Because the GBI is so simple, it’s much easier to write the tax code so that if you work more you will always have more money.

But a GBI isn’t the only policy a libertarian social justice warrior should support.

Regulatory capture is when, instead of advancing the public interest, regulators advance the interest of special interest groups. A lot of regulatory capture happens when there’s a small group of people who would be benefited a lot by the law, and a much much larger group who would be harmed a little bit. None of the larger group is particularly motivated to learn about the issue, much less campaign for their interests– after all, it’s only a little harm– so the regulators cater to the smaller group, which is the one that actually gets out there and organizes.

Now, who has the time to write letters to their congresspeople and the money to donate to political campaigns? That’s right! Rich people!

And who has just finished a ten-hour day at work and if they donated it would mean they can’t buy their kids a winter coat? Right again! Poor people!

Consider African hair braiders. In Iowa, a person who braids hair without a cosmetology license can face up to a year in prison. (That’s right. Prison. For braiding hair.) So instead a hair braider has to spend thousands of dollars on attending cosmetology school, which does not offer any coursework on natural African hair, much less hair braiding. Since cosmetology schools require a high school diploma, this puts hair braiding out of the reach of the most marginalized people. Hairdressers aren’t rich in the grand scheme of things, but they have more money and political clout than the hair braiders do, which they’ve used to protect themselves from competition.

Anatole France wrote, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges [and] to beg in the streets.” Local governments in the United States have passed many laws which criminalize being poor or homeless: they ban sleeping in public, begging, feeding the hungry, or even sitting on the sidewalk. Somehow I just have this sense that if my white and freshly washed ass sits on the sidewalk, I am not going to be imprisoned. And I am genuinely uncertain how one manages to pass a law saying that it’s a crime to feed homeless people without realizing that you’re the bad guy here.

General Notes

Basically, the libertarian social justice warrior’s question is this: why should we trust the people who have been our biggest enemies for the past two hundred years?

Why do we trust affirmative action programs run by the organization that instituted Jim Crow, redlined black neighborhoods and even today murders black children? In the 1960s, the government de facto confined San Francisco trans women to the Tenderloin by arresting them for prostitution when they left (see Susan Stryker’s Trans History), and now we want these people to define what is and is not hate speech? Do you really, honestly think that the education system run by an organization with a history of slavery, genocide, and human rights abuses will ever tell the truth about that history? I guess that they could be good at enforcing non-discrimination ordinances: I mean, I’m not sure you can find any group of people that’s more expert in discrimination.

Like, honestly, I just want to grab a bunch of social justice people and shake them. What has the US government done that makes you think they will help you? Why do you look at these people and their two-hundred-year history of oppressing you and go “as soon as I vote in Bernie Sanders everything will be okay”? No! No, it won’t be okay! The government is horrible and hurts people and is sadly necessary and we should carefully limit it to make sure it hurts as few people as possible.

Give me the Black Panthers. At least the Black Panthers understood who the real enemy is.

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. And government? Government is the master’s fucking tool.

A Response To The Current Refugee Crisis

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it does not say rsvp on the statue of liberty, ozy blog post, there is no justice and there is no judge

[A response to this Popehat article from… November. Never let it be said that I don’t have my finger on the pulse of today.]

#general

“Before you dissolve Sir Emergent, if I may respond?” the Hitlerite inchoate said.

Madame Secretary clearly seemed to be having a bad rotation cycle. “If you must, Sir Inchoate.”

The Hitlerite inchoate turned to address the previous inchoate [translator’s note: this is actually an elaborate etiquette ritual the details of which are far too abstruse to get into here]. “I notice your digital signature is pulsing ‘combat liberalism’.”

“Of course,” the emergent said, “I am composed seventy-eight percent of the Maoist diaspora, with the other twenty-two percent composed mostly of fellow travelers and allied groups too small to exert their will over the signature. As you no doubt know. Is there a point to this?”

“Accused liberals were sentenced to basilisking as few as four hundred years ago within every Maoist-dominated server,” the Hitlerite inchoate said.

“In the past, many succumbed to barbaric, indeed liberal, misinterpretations of Maoism,” the emergent said. “True Maoism fervently supports free speech. In the very pamphlet you criticize, Mao teaches that we are not ‘to let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate’. If we are to speak our minds, surely we are to create a society in which one is permitted to speak their minds?”

“Indeed,” the inchoate said. “Just as the Jew in all the Hitlerite holy texts is the Jew within, and not the actual Jewish people, whom we quite get along with.”

“Are you daring to compare,” the emergent said, “the faith of Maoism, with its emphasis on universal values like loyalty and helping the poor, with the violent expansionism of the Hitlerites?”

“You mentioned, Sir Emergent,” the inchoate said, “that sixty million died in the War of Hitlerite Expansion. Forty-five to seventy million died under the Chairman.”

“Unlike your Hitler, the Chairman did not kill–”

“Except for the ones he did, of course,” the inchoate said. “Many of whom would have been in your very own mindshare, as he was not fond of intellectuals. But nevertheless, the Communist revolution–”

“–Was misinterpreted by his followers!” the emergent said heatedly. “The revolution is to happen by the inevitable process of history, and to bring it about not in its time is to cause tragedy! Which is not to mention the common theory that the true revolution is to happen inside each of our hearts.”

“I daresay I shall lose when I argue with you about the details of your theology,” the inchoate said. “To switch topics: what about the tankies?”

“‘Tankie’ is an anti-Stalinist slur,” the emergent said, “and the casual use of such language is precisely the reason my mindshare opposes accepting Hitlerite refugees.”

“My apologies, Sir Emergent,” the inchoate said. “I do not mean to cause offense. The Stalinists, then. Shall we ask their opinion?”

“Stalinists and Maoists are united by a common Marxist heritage,” the emergent said, “one which the Hitlerites, notably, do not share.”

“And yet,” the inchoate said, “that heritage protected them so well when the Maoists purged them from their servers as traitors to Party unity. I recall at those times the Hitlerites gave them shelter– as, indeed, they did to Maoists– as our holy books teach us to do for People of the Pact.”

“This is absurd ancient history–”

“In addition, of course,” the inchoate continued calmly, “the Maoists destroyed priceless historical documents and works of art from the antebellum period, because they were considered bourgeoisie and counterrevolutionary.”

“Right now, Hitlerite subsystems are among the most hostile to Stalinists and to classical art,” the emergent said. “What does it matter the atrocities committed by liberal Maoists in the past?”

“It is true,” Madame Secretary said, “you have yet to establish relevance, Sir Inchoate.”

“Merely this,” the inchoate said. “The emergent follows– or, well, 78% follows– a hateful, anti-intellectual, violent faith, which they use to advocate for civil liberties, academic freedom, and support for the poor and vulnerable. Sapient beings have a tremendous ability to rationalize the most evil of faiths into supporting the good they were going to do anyway. So the Hitlerite faith is violent, expansionist, and cruel to the uplifted and cyborgs; individual Hitlerites are not, any more than you are, Sir Emergent. But moral progress cannot happen to a corpse. All I ask is that you give us the same chance you once had, to become better people than our faith permits.”

Mandatory X Studies Classes Is An Astonishingly Counterproductive Strategy

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my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post, this is a prussian education system hateblog

When I was reading up on the University of Missouri protests, I noticed that their list of demands included mandatory ethnic studies classes for everyone. This is a mind-bogglingly bad idea and I can’t imagine why anyone would support it on the grounds of making the campus more welcoming for people of color.

I mean, there is the obvious fact that many people of color already know that racism exists, and don’t want to sit through an entire class in Did You Know That Everyone Hates You? It’s True! Perhaps they would rather study physics so that they don’t have to think about the structural racism that shapes every aspect of their daily lives.

But it gets worse.

When I was a gender studies student, I had several classes that debated whether nonbinary trans people existed, or whether we only thought we were trans because of internalized misogyny.

And this isn’t an isolated thing that only affects trans people. My classes also debated whether men being forced into PIV intercourse or being hit by their partners counted as rape or abuse. My classes debated whether mental illness is a real thing or just society pathologizing deviants. And we had a Maoist, which I can’t imagine would have been a great experience for people whose families had fled China during the Chinese Civil War.

I’m not talking here about abstract debates like “does male privilege exist?” or “are black women structurally oppressed?” I’m talking about things that would genuinely be hurtful for everyone: “am I really the gender I say I am?” “is the person who beat me actually the real victim?” “am I faking my problems?” “was the man who killed my relatives actually a great guy if you think about it?”

I don’t know what those debates specifically are in ethnic studies, because due to budget cuts my school didn’t have an ethnic studies professor until the year I graduated. But I promise you that there are debates like that. Any time you talk about oppression there are debates like that.

There are civility requirements in a classroom. In most environments, my response to the idea that nonbinary trans people have just internalized misogyny is “fuck off”. But in a classroom, you must be calm, you must be civil, you must carefully lay out evidence for the viewpoint that you are worthy of basic respect and human dignity, you must treat the opposing idea respectfully as a valid alternate opinion.

And the thing is… if you’re a student who’s generally privileged, you are in general not going to have this experience. Classrooms do not discuss whether cis men only feel that they’re men because of their internalized misogyny. If your family never had to flee a mass murdering dictator, the mass murdering dictator’s supporters are mostly funny.

To be clear, I’m not saying that this is something that should be changed. There is debate in the field of gender studies about whether nonbinary trans people actually exist, and one of the purposes of my classes was to familiarize me with active debates in the field. This is something I signed up for when I decided to major in gender studies.

And even if you tried to change it, how would it work? The whole reason those topics are up for debate is because people don’t agree which positions cause harm; if there was already an academic consensus on it, they would just teach that instead of hosting a debate about the subject. You certainly agree with me that forcing men into PIV is rape; but many of the professors are people who will say “well, obviously forcing men into PIV isn’t rape, and we shan’t debate it because of the tremendous harm it would cause to real rape survivors.”

Furthermore, debating issues is a lot of x studies education’s pedagogical method. None of my teachers were Maoists, but Maoist Student would still have made the classroom tremendously hurtful for many people, and it is unclear how to prevent this without simply stopping Maoist Student from talking (which is probably bad precedent, as much as I would have appreciated it at the time). Even worse, transphobic people voicing their transphobia is a necessary step to them having their transphobia challenged; if they aren’t allowed to speak it up, you’re not even accomplishing your goal of making people less bigoted.

So for multiple reasons gender studies classrooms have to be this way, and it is probably good that they are this way. What I am saying is that participating in this should be optional. It is inhumane to require trans people to civilly debate whether they should be misgendered as a condition of graduating college. And therefore no one should require gender studies courses.

X Studies classrooms are, of course, far from the only classrooms that have this problem. The personality disordered student taking abnormal psych may very well find herself debating whether she is inherently abusive; the developmentally disabled student in a philosophy class may have to write a paper about whether he should have been murdered at birth. However, as far as I am aware, no one is trying to make those classes required– and they’re definitely not trying to make them required in order to make schools more welcoming to disabled people. So I wish to express my fervent disapproval of this strategy.

The Problem With “Creep”

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abuse tw, disability, not feminism go away, ozy blog post, racism

[cw: defense of finding people creepy. moebius, if you read this post, I will Frown.]

I recently finished reading Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear. Its thesis is basically that humans have evolved for literally millions of years to be able to tell when other humans are up to Bad Shit. Therefore, when you get a weird feeling you can’t explain that another person is just bad news, that feeling isn’t actually causeless. Your intuition is systemizing information on a level that you don’t have access to. Bad feelings that you don’t have any good reason for are actually the most important kind of bad feeling– they’re the ones that are most likely to be the product of your intuition knowing something that your rational mind doesn’t.

I am pretty sure that his argument is accurate. However, the problem is that your intuition didn’t come from God knowing exactly what the signs of someone being bad news are. It learns from experience and from its surrounding environment. Sometimes it’s a personal quirk: a person might be scared of bald men because his rapist was bald. But sometimes most people share an intuition that a group of people is bad news. Most nonblack people are, on a certain level, scared of black men. Most neurotypicals parse autistic body language as alien and therefore threatening.

One random person finding you scary is just noise. Most people you interact with finding you scary is a Serious Problem.

Some people suggest that the solution is to ignore our intuition. But, as de Becker points out, intuition is an invaluable source of information. As a person read as female and a borderline, I am at tremendous risk of being raped or abused. I don’t want to throw away my best tool to prevent myself from being raped or abused.

Another solution is to consciously memorize what information your intuition is working from. The problem is that that means that, whenever you meet a new person, in the back of your mind, you’d have to have running your Are There Signs That This Person Will Hurt Me module. This is totally doable– many people who are routinely at risk of violence do it– but it’s also tremendously psychologically taxing. It’s harder to form relationships when you’re consciously thinking about whether the person will hurt you, and most people feel worse when they’re regularly thinking about the possibility of violence. In fact, that sort of suspicion is a kind of hyperarousal, which is a symptom of PTSD.

At the same time, I’m not sure that that would solve the problem. Because humans have been working off intuition for our threat assessment for so long, we don’t necessarily have a good model of what, exactly, our intuition is paying attention to. The factors we don’t know are relevant could hurt us. And humans are usually really bad at consciously reasoning with probabilities, even when we’re really good at subconsciously reasoning with probabilities: most people will give wildly wrong estimates about how confident they are in a belief, but they’ll still behave fairly rationally about, say, the risk of a car accident (at least more rationally than they would if they tried to do explicit probabilities).

Another solution is to only trust your intuition when it’s not about a group you know you tend to be afraid of. If someone is black or autistic, one might override their intuition; if someone is white or nonautistic, they might not. The problem here is that black people and autistic people are still sometimes up to Bad Shit; blanket trusting any group of people is a bad idea. On the other hand, perhaps this method could be combined with the conscious-reasoning method: if you are interacting with a group you tend to have inaccurate feelings about, then you should do conscious checks for red flags, but if you’re not, you can rely on your intuition. That could help with both situations.

I am not sure how to help this problem in general. One step might be to have fewer media depictions of Scary Black Men and so on, so that people’s intuitions stop learning that members of those groups are terrifying. Another would be for individuals to have friends who are members of groups they’re scared of (vouched for by other friends, of course) so that they can teach their intuitions that those groups are not actually scary.

It might also be good to attack it from the other angle: instead of making people’s intuitions more accurate, make people feel less bad about being a false positive. For a lot of people, coming off as creepy feels like they’ve done something morally wrong. But, as long as you don’t actually have ill intent, coming off as creepy isn’t morally wrong. In many cases, it is a product of another person’s subconscious racism, ableism, or other -isms; in some cases, it is a personal issue; in some cases, you accidentally did things that made other people feel uncomfortable, and while it is bad to deliberately do things that make other people uncomfortable, it can’t be wrong to make mistakes. People who find you creepy probably don’t want to interact with you, but the fact that they found you creepy doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.

Should You Read Fewer White Male Authors?

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ozy blog post

K T Bradford stopped reading books by cisgender, heterosexual white men. She wrote an article suggesting that other people should consider a year’s break from cisgender, heterosexual white men.

Heterosexual, cisgender white men were very offended.

(I am going to drop “heterosexual, cisgender” from now on, because I’m not satisfied that LGBT writers are actually underrepresented given our percentage in the population.)

Rod Dreher’s American Conservative article substantially seems to miss the point. Most writers are not successful, this is true. However, the writers that are successful are disproportionately white and male. Bradford cites the dismal statistics: of 124 authors that hit the New York Times bestseller list in 2013, how many were people of color?

Three.

No one seems to have done similar statistics for the NYT adult bestseller list and gender, but they did for YA (famously female-dominated) and it is a quarter female.

Now, it is true– as both essayists point out– that white men write very good books. However, presumably women and people of color also write very good books. Either one must claim that white men write much better books than women or people of color, or in addition to the selection pressure for good books there’s the selection pressure for a white male author. In that case, by the old “twice as good to go half as far” principle, the average female author or author of color is better than a white man of equivalent popularity.

It’s also true that white men can reflect a wide range of human experiences. However, imagine if 99% of the writers on the New York Times bestseller list had, at some point, lived in Florida. Floridians have access to all the experiences that non-Floridians have; Floridian authors are as diverse as non-Floridian authors, ranging from Carl Hiaasen to John Grogan to Stephen King. (White man, white man, white man. That was actually accidental.) And certainly there’s not any inherent Floridian-ness about Floridians that seeps through their writing. However, you might feel that there are perhaps, in aggregate, some human experiences that are being underrecognized in this hypothetical, like “seasons” and “not having ever been on a fishing boat.”

Daubney remarks that a boycott of gay or Jewish or black authors would start riots. That is true. But it seems to me that– judging from the fact that not a single black author made the 2013 bestseller list– we are already doing a national boycott of black authors. It seems a bit in poor taste to further encourage it. It matters less if the marginalized group is already overrepresented: a similar challenge to, say, not watch any musicals written by a gay or Jewish person seems fun and inoffensive.

Interestingly, both of the essayists critiquing Bradford included passages about their own taste in literature. Daubney writes:

If Ms Tempest et al want to buy books by transgender authors, let them crack on, as long as they’re aware that many of the rest of us don’t share their tastes.

Gee. Thanks.

I am somewhat puzzled about what Mr. Daubney’s objection to transgender writers is (uncharitably: “sometimes they portray trans characters as people and that makes me sad and uncomfortable, where are my man in a dress jokes? How can I live without my man in a dress jokes?”). But given that he has publicly stated his distaste for trans writers, he surely can’t object to Bradford publicly stating her distaste for white male authors. And as for the challenge… she didn’t say anyone was a horrible white supremacist misogynist for not taking the challenge. She didn’t say anything negative about people’s reading choices at all. She simply suggested that reading fewer white men is an option that might enrich your life and that you should try it out for a year– as Mr. Daubney appears to be implying not reading transgender authors is. Perhaps Mr. Daubney is offended on behalf of readers that they cannot figure out how to boycott white men on their own? That seems a bit silly.

In Dreher’s article, he positively quotes a reader who, among other points, comments negatively about books by “a polyamorous 2-spirit non-racially-identifying author.” As if not reading books by white men limits you to reading books by Tumblr denizens! You can pick up Chinese classics like Journey to the West or Story of the Stone, Japanese classics like Tale of Genji, or Indian classics like the Ramayana. You can read science fiction by authors like Octavia Butler, Ursula K Le Guin, or Ted Chiang. You can read literally any mangaka. If you add the “LGBT” category, you get to appreciate older authors such as Plato or Catullus and newer writers like Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, or Walt Whitman.

There are female authors and authors of color for every literary taste!

But, really, every test requires a control group. So really we should do two challenges: three months of reading only white male authors; three months of reading only authors that are not white men. If the latter is easier (which it should be, given that white men are a minority of the English-speaking population), then you clearly have no problems and can wear your My Reading Choices Are Neither Racist Nor Sexist badge with pride. On the other hand, if the former is easier, then maybe you are part of the problem with underrepresentation of women and people of color.

Notes Towards a Theory of Cultural Appropriation

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ozy blog post, racism

I’m white and while I have been educating myself about racism I still have a lot of things to learn. So please don’t consider this post a “this is the be-all and end-all of what cultural appropriation means”; this is just my current understanding of cultural appropriation, which I am presenting in the hopes that someone will tell me where I’ve wandered off into the wrong direction. (Also, I’m going to be using the abbreviation “POC,” which stands for “people of color.”) 

The definitions of cultural appropriation I’ve found are usually something like this: “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission.” This is a bit difficult to understand to me, because I find it hard to grasp how you could get permission from a culture. You can only get permission from people in that culture, some of whom will be all “dude, whatever, don’t give a fuck” and some of whom will be all “the fuck? Why are you doing that? Give that back!” (Even the Seminoles, who have an actual tribal government the Florida State University Seminoles talked to to clear their mascot with, have dissenting Seminoles who are pissed as fuck about the whole matter.)

I think that part of the problem might be that when people use the term “cultural appropriation” they mean one of about four different things:

1) Dressing up as or incorporating in your art or naming your sports team after an offensive stereotype of POC. This is the definition that comes up every Halloween when people insist on dressing up as Pocahotties and Injun Braves, and when Victoria’s Secret decides to put Native American headdresses on their models. I am not sure why people think this is okay. Do not dress up as an oversexualized stereotype of the people your culture fucking committed genocide against. Similarly, this point covers Native American sports team mascots, Urban Outfitters “Navajo” bracelets, etc.

I’m… also not really sure why people call this cultural appropriation, because to me it seems like a pretty cut-and-dried case of “offensive stereotypes are bad.”

2) Do not use sacred shit from religions you don’t belong to. This is basic respect. People take their sacred shit very seriously, and it greatly upsets them when you use their sacred shit in ways other than the approved-of one. Do not upset people for no reason. (This guideline also applies to non-POC religions, of course, but very few people put on Mormon temple garments because they look cool.)

3) Do not use things associated with POC in ways that reinforce stereotypes of POC. For instance, do not do Tantra because it is spiritual and exotic and ancient and totally sexy. It is a common Orientalizing stereotype that Asian people are exotic, spiritual, and the heirs to ancient wisdom; thinking that Tantra is awesome because it is exotic ancient spiritual wisdom from the East is playing into that exact stereotype.

Similarly, white-people dreadlocks are problematic. Black people still face all kinds of racist shit– from white people trying to touch their hair to losing out on jobs– if they style their hair the way it naturally grows instead of making it look like white hair; it is incredibly fucked that black people having their hair the way it naturally grows is considered “rebellious.” Many black people are, understandably, somewhat irritated when white people decide that it is cool and countercultural to have dreadlocks. For black people, dreadlocks are a rebellion against a racist society and a statement of pride in their race; for white people they’re… um, cool because, like, black people, man.

4) Don’t steal POC’s ideas and cultural artifacts without credit. See also: the entire history of rock music. Rock music was deeply influenced by black musicians– blues, gospel, vocal groups. So of course white men like Elvis and Bill Haley ran off with their ideas and got all the credit for being musical fucking geniuses. Because, y’know, white. Similar things happen with everything from nail art to feminist theory.

It’s difficult to figure out a way to deal with this toxic dynamic. “White people, you don’t get to wear nail art or listen to rock music” is a suboptimal solution. I think ultimately the solution is to be very intentional about pointing out your influences and promoting the careers of talented POC within your field and seeking out POC’s work instead of assuming that what white people are doing is the only interesting culture that’s going on. (For instance, it would be incredibly dishonest and fucked of me to pretend that my thoughts on class and race within feminism and polyamory aren’t influenced by Audre Lorde, or that my thoughts on masculinity or love don’t come straight from bell hooks. I am not original.) But I’m not sure if that’s enough to end that dynamic.

So. That’s what I have. Your thoughts?

Assorted Thoughts on the Definition of Racism

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ozy blog post, racism

[While I’m at App Academy, my blog is in reruns. Enjoy a classic Ozy post, salvaged from the sands of time by the wayback machine.]

I have concluded that part of the problem with talking about racism is that the word “racism” can be interpreted to mean about four different things.

Some people use “racist” to mean “having explicit beliefs about someone based on their racial background, particularly if those beliefs are derogatory.” (We can call that Racism-1.) Other people use “racist” in a broader sense, which encompasses subconscious, unintentional racism and systems that tend to treat people of different racial backgrounds differently (even if nobody means to treat people differently based on their race). (We can call that Racism-2.) At the same time, some people use “racism” to refer to an individual’s beliefs (Racism-A) and some people use “racism” to refer to an overall societal structure (Racism-B).

This causes much confusion, because anti-racists are usually working under the Racism-2B definition and ordinary white people are normally working under the Racism-1A definition (or maybe 1B). So you get a lot of conversations like this:

Anti-racist: You’re racist!
Ordinary white person: (checks beliefs, still doesn’t believe that black people are inferior) No, I’m not. I’m not racist at all; I’m colorblind.
Anti-racist: Of course you’re racist, all white people are racist.
Ordinary white person: …That’s really racist.
Anti-racist: No, it’s not, you can only be racist against people of color.
Ordinary white person: …
Anti-racist: …

I tend to use the Racism-2B definition myself, so I would like to say some words in its defense. Most white people don’t explicitly believe that people of color are worse than white people; we’ve had a very successful forty-year propaganda program explaining that people of color and white people are equal and Martin Luther King is great. However, most white people do get more scared when they walk by a black person late at night than they do when they walk by a white person, we do feel more comfortable living in a majority-white neighborhood than in a majority-POC neighborhood, and we do all kinds of other racist things we don’t explicitly know about.

Because the non-explicit-belief racism is more common, it’s also more damaging. Most of the hiring discrimination against black people isn’t because people believe black people are terrible. It’s because they want to hire someone who fits in, you know, is like us, is in tune with the culture of the company, who seems competent and together and smart, and what a coincidence all the people who are like that are white.

And the thing is… it’s totally possible that some majority-black company will not hire me because of my race. (Although people of color can be biased in favor of white people too– it’s not like people of color live in a Magic Not Picking Up On Cultural Racism Bubble.) But I’m in a much better situation than a black person, because most companies are biased in my favor and against black people. An act of hiring discrimination has very different effects on a white person and a black person; you can’t look at the act itself without looking at the context within which it takes place. Which is why I call discrimination against white people “prejudice” and discrimination against people of color “racism.”