The best post I’ve read all month is over at Feministe, and it’s from guest poster Nezua: Love is Revolutionary (the Threat of Friendship). It’s a very long, superbly written and compelling essay on the ways in which engaging in political dialogue (particularly in cyberspace) makes us dangerously prone to “othering” (seeing those who disagree with us as embodiments of the very evils against which we struggle).
I feel expansive and at peace, when I can listen to a fellow human being with a different kind of intent. Where I remember that the person in front of me may be just like me. Too often, instead of using the facelessness of online dialogue to strip away those visual and aural cues that might make someone Otherly and thus more easily identify with them, we use the anonymous, dissociated vehicle of online text to dehumanize; to strip the message of worth or heart or meaning so that we can pounce or perhaps just to rouse the negative energy buzz.
Sometimes people talk to me certain ways in threads and I say to myself Where are these people? Who are they? Because they only seem to exist online. I do not meet them in my life walking about. I have lived and grown up in a number of places, and for almost forty years and in city, country, and suburb—and I have never seen a conversation in a room progress, on a regular basis, into people rising up, shouting, leering, screaming, getting high on mob fever, dropping cruel and indiscriminate barbs. That’s jail behavior, if anything. But in everyday life and society? I do not run into people spitting invective or insult at me in our disagreements during the course of a day or in their very first statements to me being utterly and blatantly unfeeling. Nope. It does not happen
Nezua (who is moving towards Chris Clarke territory as potential blog-crush material) writes at his own place as well at Feministe: the Unapologetic Mexican. They very title makes it clear that his defense of friendship and kindness isn’t just another well-meaning but clueless attempt by the privileged to silence the legitimate anger of the marginalized and the oppressed. What I find so engaging about Nezua is that he is committed to the notion that kindness and forgiveness and friendship ought to be priorities even for those who are doing the hardest work in the trenches, fighting for social justice and global transformation. And let’s be honest: when well-meaning white folk say “Love your enemies” it often rings hollow; when those whose life experience has given them far more enemies than I will ever know, whose sense of disenfranchisement is more visceral than I can understand, when the likes of these speak of dignity and kindness it carries considerably more weight.
using the facelessness of online dialogue to strip away those visual and aural cues that might make someone Otherly
The flip side being, that online communication is absent the visual and aural nuances that make someone non-Otherly as well. Cold, hard print can’t be modified by a smile, a certain tone, volume or pace of delivery, a gesture, a gaze. To me, it’s a difficult medium to communicate in because of that nature.
And at the same time, blogging encourages a false sense of intimacy amongst the participants—folks who frequent the same blogs get to communicating as if they know each other better than they really do.
Yeah, funny how two people can espouse the same principles, but only one of them is legitimate. Funny in kindof a racist sort of way.
The principles of compassion and gratitude are so important to me that I would like to try to sort out, maybe to defuse, what I hear in that last comment.
Personally I don’t quite agree with setting myself up as the arbiter of the “legitimacy” of others’ anger. But if I am compassionate, and kind, I will do my best to perceive what it was that roused that other person to anger. I will do my best to notice the conditions and experiences that made that other person angry, and often enough, I will feel a fellow feeling and solidarity for it.
If I am also compassionate and kind to myself, I will not use that other person’s anger as an excuse to do harm or violence to myself, even psychologically. I will not “internalize” that anger. I will continue to accept myself, but I will extend myself in compassion to that other person.
It is in the nature of compassion that I cannot command it of another. Nor do I need to. All I need is to feel it in myself and for myself, and to understand the other as she or he is, as best I can. If someone does extend friendship and compassion to me, I should accept it as a gift, in the spirit it is given. If someone is angry at me, I should, ideally, also accept it for what it can teach me, without, as we used to say in the old encounter groups, “catching the medicine ball” to my solar plexus, and letting it destroy my spirit.
It is easy for me to see why a privileged person preaching compassion and gratitude to others can be an arrogant fool. But that does not mean that the same privileged person should not undertake to make compassion and gratitude central to his or her own life, and in that spirit, there will, ideally, be no need for resentment that others do not do the same. For the moment one resents the lack of compassion in another, one loses one’s own, and one’s own is the more valuable, to oneself.
Jeni, I believe Hugo was referring to the way some former commentators to this blog have accused him of exactly that — silencing the legitimate anger of the marginalized and oppressed — when he refuses to let them trade bile with the anti-feminist trolls here.
Yeah, funny how two people can espouse the same principles, but only one of them is legitimate. Funny in kindof a racist sort of way.
I think it’s more of a thing where Nezua is obviously not being two-faced about it. If a privileged white person who participates in oppression (and we all do in some ways) makes this kind of call for understanding it’s kind of bullshit unless they’re actually taking the steps to really understand where the oppressed are coming from and how their own actions hurt others.
And trust me, if someone is a priveleged white person who really understands the way the system is stacked and has compassion, they wouldn’t expect people who are oppressed to meet them halfway, because it isn’t fair.
Nezua’s call is very self-reflective. He looks at his own flaws and understands that others have them too. Too often when similar things are said by the privilege, it’s simply a request that people who are being seriously oppressed lay off them for awhile because, hey, nobody’s perfect. Nezua isn’t advocating making excuses for racism, he’s just saying let’s not dehumanize racists. Two different things.