Re: [sudo-discuss] cuddling it

Rachel, I partially agree with the special status of the identified targets of slurs for self-determination about how the socially acceptable language evolves. But there's still a trump card aspect to it that doesn't sit right with me. The slutwalk you described, which I had admittedly never heard of, doesn't seem to be the same as walking in someone else's shoes by the way, or sensual clothes for that matter. Walking around with just about anything written on your forehead has a high likelihood of being humiliating - with that word being slut removing any doubts of misinterpretation. I worked at the Museum of Tolerance (http://www.museumoftolerance.com/) in Los Angeles during high school and during vacations in college, sometimes giving tours. There's a "Whisper Gallery" in the bottom floor exhibit that they take school kids through especially. It's a darkened hallway about 50 feet long with speakers hidden in the walls all around. They're all set on loop and to go off with all these horrible racist, sexist, etc. insults at you as you walk through. Unfortunately, my impression of what the junior high kids got out of it, in particular, is the delight at having learned some new words they had never heard before. A couple of examples that come to mind to challenge the Re-Appropriation trump card rules you described below. Granted, they are both examples of extraordinary artists piercing through dominant culture in provocative ways. John Lennon co-wrote "Woman is the Nigger of the World" with Yoko Ono (http://www.songmeanings.net/m/songs/view/3458764513820543055/), neither of whom were black. And from the other perspective of the provocative tightrope on black racist reappropration, I think Dave Chappelle's public struggle is another important example to consider. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Chappelle) My suggestion for a Sudo-Libs kind of thing, by the way, is intended to help try to toe the line between making the point about the harmful impact of biased language and the particular sensitivity of entrenched discrimination through semi-(blind)-randomness, with an ability to have some prior control over the context. sent from eddan.com On May 8, 2013, at 10:03 AM, rachel lyra hospodar <rachelyra(a)gmail.com> wrote: On May 7, 2013 11:15 AM, "Anthony Di Franco" <di.franco(a)gmail.com> wrote: connotations words have and the implicit assumptions they throw over everyday discourse. Does Heeb Magazine have a place on sudo room's shelves? Sure, right next to Bitch Magazine. But woe be unto you if you think that makes 'heeb' or 'bitch' appropriate descriptors for anyone, or that they can be used by you in casual conversation. You are basically bringing up the practice of reclaiming language, a process where members of oppressed groups take words that are/have been used pejoratively towards them, and defiantly use the language for themselves. I did some quick google searching around this issue and would like to share two links that seemed most helpful here. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation http://www.womanist-musings.com/2011/11/reclaiming-language-and-who-gets-to… Basically, any white folks wanting to REclaim language around the african-american experience, can't. Boo hoo. It's because that language is already CLAIMED by white folks, for its pejorative purpose. If you don't like that, well, sit on it. Meditate on our white supremacist culture and cry big salty tears. Whatever. Similarly, if you want to help women at large reclaim some kinda nasty word, but you are a man, too bad for you. There is no way for you to use those words without reinforcing their negative meanings. Unless & until a woman invites you, eg, to go on a Slutwalk. Then you can write the word 'slut' on yourself & walk down the street amongst a group doing the same thing. R. alcides888(a)gmail.com> wrote: phrases and not try to replace anything. Instead of characterizing any current or past lingo, we could just go ahead and move on... NEW LINGO! frustrations due to sensitive associations and differing perspectives of describing whatever random related concepts. can just submit positive words and tech words into a bucket and creatively combine them to attach to whatever cool concept. (BEAUTIFUL CODE! = GREAT DISCUSSION!) fun to me!!! What if it was a raffle / poetry / public reading party???? I'm sure there would be great code there! oppression bingo. i will make this brief. 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 "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 "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?" 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 http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noble_savage 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. 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. 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 dictionary.com, 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. 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. 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. 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. di.franco(a)aya.yale.edu> wrote: 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. rachelyra(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. am sure I will stay connected in many ways. wrote: itself apart from and gives up and projects on its image of the noble savage though? wrote: appropriation of african american vernacular by the mainstream. and immense progress. it has a violent, forceful connotation. 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." _______________________________________________ sudo-discuss mailing list sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss _______________________________________________ sudo-discuss mailing list sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss