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+1<br>
<br>
Thank you for that.<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 05/06/2013 01:40 PM, hep wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAFa6jsfmjTLCoyafCaXU822EVZVT=8N4xd2Z_yG64bNGsWem-g@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">it is really sad that this list is literally
turning into a game of oppression bingo. i will make this
brief.
<div><br>
</div>
<div style="">1. using terms like "civilization" to refer to a
class of dominant majority with a huge history of
colonialistic oppression, at the expense of any class who has
experiences colonialistic oppression is pretty offensive. if
you want to qualify this as "what they wrongly refer to
themselves as" then use quotes and indicate as such. ie "<span
style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif;font-size:13.333333969116211px">Doesn't
the so-self-called 'civilized' psyche secretly crave the
things it sets itself apart from and gives up and projects
on its image of the noble savage though?" it would be better
however to reword this overall to say something like "</span><span
style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif;font-size:13.333333969116211px">Doesn't
the privileged majority psyche secretly crave the things it
sets itself apart from and gives up and projects on its
image of the oppressed culture though?"</span></div>
<div style=""><span style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif;font-size:13.333333969116211px"><br>
</span></div>
<div style=""><span style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif;font-size:13.333333969116211px">2. using
tropes like "noble savage" is ok as long as everyone
involves understand that you are referring to the named
trope and not using that term as an offensive term. this can
be solved by referencing the trope at hand. ie </span><font
face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noble_savage">http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noble_savage</a></font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><br>
</font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif">3. some
people are still going to be offended by this term, because
it is still hugely offensive to native peoples even as it is
used as a handy moniker to call out offensive behavior by
the privileged majority. </font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><br>
</font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif">4. using the
term noble savage in reference to african americans is
doubly offensive, even if it fits the point you are trying
to make fyi. if you MUST use tropes to refer to POC, make
sure you are using the correct one that examines the
colonial aspects of the behavior being discussed. </font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><br>
</font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif">5. when
someone is offended by your choice in language, the correct
thing to do is not double down and try to explain that you
weren't being offensive. the correct thing to do is to say
something like "i am sorry my language choice offended you.
what i was trying to say was___". do not attempt to use <a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://dictionary.com">dictionary.com</a>,
etymology, wikipedia usage, etc to try and prove that you
weren't being offensive. offense is not in the eye of the
person who offended, it is in the eye of that person
offended. so just accept that you behaved offensively even
as you did not intend to and move on. trying to explain to
the world at large how you totally weren't offensive citing
media to try and "prove" it just makes you more offensive,
and it is incredibly disrespectful to the person you are
communicating with who likely doesn't give a shit what you
were actually trying to say at this point, and did not sign
on for a weeks long multiple page scroll email battle/war of
attention attrition. accept, move on. don't become a
cliche. </font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><br>
</font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif">6. free
speech is not a get out of jail free card. you have the
right to say anything you want. and we all have the right to
think of you as an asshole for saying it. if someone says
"don't say that" they aren't depriving you of your right to
free speech, they are trying to save you from losing friends
and allies in your community. "congress shall make no law
abridging free speech." there is nothing in there that says
someone HAS to remain your friend after you were
unintentionally a racist asshole. </font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><br>
</font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif">7. most
people who fight oppression in their communities do not want
to argue about it in their hobbies. respect that. just
because you have the time and inclination to have a
long-winded email argument does not mean that you are not
also being totally offensive by assuming the other person
wants/needs/is going to engage in it. often times i see
people "win" arguments on email lists only because they were
the more persistant asshole, not because they are right. and
be aware that that is totally obvious to people not involved
but still reading. </font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><br>
</font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><br>
</font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif">8. a point
to everyone: native american peoples are not dead. there are
still many thriving native cultures, and people need to
understand that when they refer to native things or topics
they are talking not just about past people that were wiped
out, but also active real working native peoples still here.
the bay area is full of native people who are active in
their tribal affiliations, who work to promote native
rights, and who are invested in the topics of native
americans. when you frame out things like that there is a
"civlized" society, and native societies (implying not
civilized) many of those people are GOING to be super
offended. Like when native people try to call out white
people on wearing headdresses as culturally appropriative,
and white people rebut with "YOU ARE ON THE INTERNET. THAT
WAS INVENTED BY US MAYBE YOU SHOULDN'T USE THAT". fucked up.
(for the ignorant: native people are americans as well and
have equal rights to share in american culture as any other
american. besides which: last i checked many native peoples
have also contributed to the internet, even as there are
colonial privileged oppressionistic usages of native culture
as well, such as apache.) try to keep that in mind as you
use terms that may evoke native americans, at the risk of
being seen as a total racist asshole. </font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><br>
</font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif">also
everything that rachel said. </font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><br>
</font></div>
<div style=""><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif">-</font><span
style="font-family:'arial narrow',sans-serif">hep</span></div>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 2:10 PM, Anthony
Di Franco <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:di.franco@aya.yale.edu" target="_blank">di.franco@aya.yale.edu</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif">Rachel, I've had a bit more time to
reflect on what you wrote, and while I don't have
anything to add about the immediate question beyond what
I said yesterday, I'd like to talk about some of the
broader context you brought up in your reply and the
more general issues involved.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif">The first thing is that I am
primarily viewing what we are trying to do as having a
discussion, so it seems to me that when there are
misunderstandings that is exactly when we should be
having more discussion to clarify what we are trying to
say and find out effective ways to say it, not less.
Meanwhile, you are using the terms of some sort of power
struggle where I am being attacked and defending myself
and allegiances are forming and shifting around the
patterns of conflict. I do not see a power struggle but
rather a community trying to communicate and
communication depends on shared understanding among
senders and recipients of symbols and how to use them to
convey meaning. Where this is not immediately clear,
clarifying it explicitly seems the most direct way to
move towards better mutual understanding. I hope this
can be reconciled with your own views and I welcome
further discussion on this.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif">Within the attacking and defending
point of view, I am also uncomfortable with some things.
To speak of attacking and defending and also then to say
that the subject of the attack should *stop defending*
reminds me too much of the revolting cries of "stop
resisting" from police - I could certainly never
meditate on such an ugly phrase and I find the
suggestion grotesque. It's something I've heard while
authoritarian thugs victimize people who are not
resisting but only perhaps trying to maintain their
safety and dignity under an uninvited attack, perhaps
not even that, and one way the phrase is used is as a
disingenuous way of framing the situation so that later,
biased interpretations of what happened will have
something to latch onto. I am glad we have much less at
stake in our interactions here than in those situations
but I still really don't like to see us internalizing
that logic in how we handle communications in our group.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif">There is another aspect of this I am
uncomfortable with, which is the idea that people should
respond to feedback only by silently assenting. This
reminds me too much of other situations where people,
sometimes myself, were supposed to be seen and not
heard, and it deprives people of agency over and
responsibility for what they do by expecting them to let
others determine their behavior unilaterally. I am happy
to take feedback and, generally, I hope you can trust
people to act on feedback appropriately rather than
trying to short-circuit their agency. The more
informative feedback is, then, the better, and it should
contain information people can use themselves to
evaluate what they are doing the way others do so they
can figure out how to accommodate everyone's needs. When
feedback consist simply of naked statements it is too
much like trolling in the small or gaslighting in the
large, and especially then, amounts to an insidious way
to deprive people of agency by conditioning them to fear
unpredictable pain when they exercise agency, and has a
chilling effect. In general, the idea that certain
people are less able than others to handle the
responsibilities of being human, and so they should have
their behaviors dictated to them unilaterally by others,
is a key to justifying many regimes of oppression,
especially modern ones, and because of that I am very
uncomfortable when I see any example of that logic being
internalized in our group dynamics.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif">I don't know what passed between you
and Eddan involving trump cards but if the card game
analogy really is apt then it may be a sign of
trivializing the question of safe space by saying that
certain people's concerns trump other people's concerns,
based not on the concerns themselves, but only on who is
raising the concerns. Both are important. I have heard
some justifications for 'trumping' as I understand it
that remind me of the debate around the Oscar Grant
case. There, defenders of Mehserle's conduct claimed
that police should be the judges of what legitimate
police use of force is because they have special
training and experience that give them a uniquely
relevant perspective on what violence is justified and
what demands of compliance they can legitimately make of
people. Another justification I heard was that police
are especially vulnerable due to the danger inherent in
their duties and so things should be biased heavily
towards a presumption of legitimacy when they use
violence or demand compliance. To me both these
justifications seem problematic because they create a
class that can coerce others without accountability and
can unilaterally force standards of conduct on others. I
am happy that there is much less at stake among us here
than there is in cases of police brutality or Oscar
Grant's case, and that there is no comparison other than
this logic being used. But the logic that certain
people's perspectives are uniquely relevant, or that
their vulnerability gives them license to force things
upon others unilaterally, is still a logic I don't think
we should internalize among ourselves, because it
produces unaccountable authoritarianism that can be
exploited for unintended ends, and does not help with
the ostensibly intended ones anyway. It results in us
'policing' ourselves in a way much too much like the way
the cities are policed to the detriment of many people
and of values we share.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif">Finally, you mentioned the evening
at Marina's apartment and I want to clarify my
experience of what happened there. My 'aha' moment
didn't have anything to do with the point you were
trying to make - I can't even remember exactly what that
point was, because it is so strongly overshadowed by my
memory of how you treated me. You called me out for
something that had passed between you and me in the
middle of a social gathering among a mix of friends and
strangers, none of whom were involved, which immediately
put me in a very uncomfortable situation. Then, you
dismissed my attempts to defer speaking to a more
appropriate setting, and to open up a dialog with you
where I shared my perspective. The only way out you gave
me was to assent without comment to you. My 'aha' moment
was when I realized that things between us had
degenerated to that point; it was when I realized I was
mistaken in trying to have a discussion because we were
interacting like two territorial animals, or like a
police interrogator and a suspect, and you were simply
demanding a display of submission or contrition from me
before you would let me slink off. While it felt
degrading, I took the way out you offered to spare
myself and the others in the room the experience of
things continuing. I take the risk of sharing this
openly with you now because I think we know each other
much better than we did then and we would never again
end up interacting like potentially hostile strangers
passing in the night, or worse. I think we can and
should and have been doing better, and overall it's best
not to let a mistaken assumption about what I was
thinking and how I felt influence an important
discussion about how we treat one another in our
community.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif">I, like you, hope you can appreciate
that I am taking the time to write this admittedly
long-winded reply, not to suck the air out of the room,
whatever that means, but to contribute to a discussion
that moves us towards a better shared understanding of
how to respect our shared values and towards more
appreciation of one another's perspectives.</div>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'arial
narrow',sans-serif">Anthony</div>
</font></span></div>
<div class="HOEnZb">
<div class="h5">
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 10:14
AM, rachel lyra hospodar <span dir="ltr"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:rachelyra@gmail.com"
target="_blank">rachelyra@gmail.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<p>I am really sad about this whole thread.</p>
<p>Anthony, I think I know you well enough to say
that your intent here was not to be offensive,
but unfortunately... Here we are. I am
responding to the specific message below because
it is the one that made me want to unsubscribe
from this mailing list and unassociate myself
from this group. Everything that came after,
gah.</p>
<p>Anti-oppression for the priveleged class, ie
not being an unintentional giant jerkface: if
someone points out that you are offending or
harming them, they are not seeking an
explanation, but a change in behavior. Perhaps
an apology or acknowledgement, even a query. If
someone says 'i think your POV is fucked up and
harmful' please do not go on to elaborate on
your POV to them. Even if you think they don't
get your amazing nuances. Your amazing nuances
are not always important, and part of
'oppression' is that some peoples' nuances are
always shoved in other people's faces. Sometimes
being a friend means keeping your opinion to
your damn self.</p>
<p>This relates to something that eddan has on
occasion termed 'the trump card'. We are all
individuals, and as such we ultimately need to
keep our own house in order. The trump card
concept relates to safe spaces - as safe as
eddan might feel in a space, I'm not going to
average it together with my safety levels to
achieve some sort of average safety rating. My
safety reading of a space will always, for me,
trump eddan's, and while I am happy if he feels
safe it doesn't really matter to my safety
level.</p>
<p>The interesting thing about telling most people
they are making you feel unsafe, or that they
are offending you, is that for some reason their
response is almost never 'gosh, whoops!'. It's
more usually like what happened here - a bunch
of longwinded explanation that completely misses
the point, and then a perceived ally of the
offender jumping in, also talking a lot, and
sucking all the air out of the room. People
always have reasoning for why they did what they
did. Requiring offended folks to read about your
reasoning for why you said what you said misses
the point, and to me makes this conversation
read like you don't care if you were offensive.</p>
<p>It's deja vu to me that you are giving all this
definition and explanation around the terms you
used. It seems identical to our debate around
the use of 'constable' and it is sad to me to
see you take refuge in the same pattern of
defense. It doesn't matter about the
etymological history of a phrase. It doesn't. As
fun as you may find it to think about, the way
things are *heard*, by others, NOW, is a trump
card for many. </p>
<p>Anthony, I hope you can understand that I have
taken the time out of my life to write this
message in the hopes of helping you to modulate
your behavior to be less offensive. I am sure
you remember the first time I engaged with you
on this topic, at Marina's house. Perhaps you'll
remember the aha moment when you *stopped
defending* and simply accepted the input,
thanking me. Perhaps you'll find in that a sort
of meditative place of return.</p>
<p>Good luck to you all. I enjoy many things about
sudo community and am sure I will stay connected
in many ways.</p>
<span><font color="#888888">
<p>R.<br>
</p>
</font></span>
<div>
<div>
<div class="gmail_quote">On May 3, 2013 3:05
PM, "Anthony Di Franco" <<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:di.franco@gmail.com"
target="_blank">di.franco@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br type="attribution">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px
#ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial
narrow,sans-serif">Doesn't the
civilized psyche secretly crave the
things it sets itself apart from and
gives up and projects on its image of
the noble savage though?<br>
<br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial
narrow,sans-serif">Your description
seems more like meditatively flowing
through it.<br>
</div>
<div style="text-decoration:none">
</div>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, May 3,
2013 at 2:58 PM, netdiva <span
dir="ltr"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:netdiva@sonic.net"
target="_blank">netdiva@sonic.net</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc
solid;padding-left:1ex">Here I was
thinking "killing it" was just
another example of appropriation of
african american vernacular by the
mainstream.
<div>
<div><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 5/3/2013 2:46 PM, Leonid
Kozhukh wrote:<br>
</div>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc
solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div>
<div>
"killing it" is a recently
popular term to denote
excellence and immense
progress. it has a violent,
forceful connotation.<br>
<br>
friends in the circus
community - through empirical
evidence - have established a
belief that operating at the
highest levels of talent
requires mindfulness,
awareness, and calm. thus, a
better term, which they have
started to playfully use, is
"cuddling it."<br>
<br>
thought sudoers would
appreciate this.<br>
<br>
cuddling it,<br>
<br>
--<br>
len<br>
<br>
founder, ligertail<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://ligertail.com"
target="_blank">http://ligertail.com</a><br>
<br>
<br>
</div>
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<div>hep</div>
<div>hepic photography || <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.hepic.net" target="_blank">www.hepic.net</a><br>
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