Ladies, gentlemen, everyone in between, welcome to Everything You Know Is Wrong, a series of blog posts that look at what I perceive to be common misconceptions of almost equally common ideas, inviting you to re-examine your existing conclusions on things that you may think you know, and challenge you to consider the possibility that Everything You Know Is Wrong. I can’t speak for the rest of you folks, but I personally had a blast doing this a few weeks back with the concept of pessimism, so why not make this into a regular feature? And we should all be doing this in our lives anyway; remember, the “Zen” in “iZentity” isn’t just because I like the letter Z. Have you all got your lights ready to be unto your own paths? Great, ’cause HERE WE GO!
Everything You Know About the Nature of Offensiveness Is Wrong
If you are white, straight (hereafter defined as simultaneously heterosexual and cisgender), a man, or any combination thereof, it is possible that at some point in your recent memory, you have been chastised for saying something “offensive”. You may have observed that it seems that nowadays, concern over the offensiveness of words, concepts, and cultural artifacts is at the highest it’s been in your lifetime, or at least since that awkward period around the turn of the century when white folks in Canada didn’t know whether to call black folks “African-American” or “African-Canadian”. It would seem these days that everyone’s worked up about offending people, and ironically, the people most likely to identify as politically “liberal” are the loudest voices proclaiming that people shouldn’t use these offensive things.
Jonathan Chait recently wrote a piece about this perceived phenomenon, that liberals have become very conservative in what language and behaviour is considered permissible, all in the name of avoiding offensiveness. Chait is not alone; in a recent interview, Chris Rock posited that stand-up comedy is more difficult than ever, with campus audiences becoming less tolerant of potentially offensive jokes. While those two examples feature prominently in my mind, they are far from the only ones. One needn’t look far to see people complaining about having to walk on eggshells to avoid offending certain groups, groups that they believe will be offended by “everything”. “Fragile”, “Humorless”, “Uptight”, and other colorful adjectives are but some of the many used to describe the “easily offended” among us. Included among such ranks are feminists, race activists, queer activists, and just about anyone who takes issues with jokes at the expense of people who are not in power. So it is that these people just have to loosen up, and harmony will flourish as naturally as the naturopathic clinic Flourish Naturally.
But hold on…
While it is certainly true that people have become increasingly eager to brand jokes, concepts, and in some cases people as “offensive”, the truth of the matter is that in my experience and in the experience of many, no one is more easily offended than straight white men. Don’t believe me? Here’s a fun experiment you can try to test this theory and observe the results for yourself:
Step 1: Be a woman.
Step 2: Find a group of people mostly composed of men. Suggestions on where to find such groups include bars, team-based sporting events, pubs, Transformers movie marathons, drinking establishments, LAN parties, and bars.
Step 3: Make a joke at the expense of men. Nothing too fancy, something as simple as “Men are pigs, am I right?” ought to do the trick.
Now, for those of you struggling with the first step, have no fear, because you can substitute “woman” for “person of color” or “queer person” and “men” for “white people” or “straight people” as your situation may warrant. If, however, you are none of these things, then it’s statistically unlikely that you’re even reading this, because you went storming straight for the comments after that joke in Step Two. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
“You know,” one man might say. “I could never get away with saying something like that about women”, notedly oblivious to the irony of that statement. “How come it’s okay to say that about men when any guy saying that about women would be crucified?” chimes another, because obviously being harshly criticized is relatively equivalent to being summarily executed. “Whatever happened to ‘equality’?”, another may ask, as if right up until that very moment, all the people in the world were living in an egalitarian utopia until you showed up with your joke and RUINED EVERYTHING. Ruiner.
After this tension passes (retroactive cautionary advisory: it is best to avoid performing this experiment in situations where escalation is likely), these folks will soon go back to using “gay” as a pejorative, equating weakness with femininity, and demonstrating their practiced “foreign” accents with each other. For extra credit, jump in at any time to declare any one of these things “not cool”, and of the people who will immediately tell you to lighten up, make note of how many of them were the same people who spoke in objection after you followed the initial steps. You may find a ratio close to 1:1. Darnedest thing. It seems the group that prides itself on its ability to “tell it like it is” only seems to be able to cope when they’re the ones telling other people, not when they’re being told.
But let’s go even deeper. Let’s assume that calling something “offensive” is fundamentally not even about the idea of offending another person. After all, contrary to popular belief, marginalized folks don’t think and act as one, and we all have individual beliefs with regard to where the mythical “line” is between ‘all in good fun’ and ‘whoa, not cool’. It is therefore unreasonable to expect to be able to adhere to a single metric of what people do and don’t find offensive, and impractical to frame the concept of “offensiveness” around the people potentially being offended.
Indeed, it’s not about the people being offended, so much as the people NOT being offended. As hurtful as these remarks are, the truth of the matter is that the people hurt by them have been hurt by those and other words many times. As this comic by the brilliantly talented Abby Howard points out, it’s not a matter of just one or two people being assholes, but an entire culture steeped in these sorts of messages. In truth, the people we should be worried about are the people who believe that the jokes are funny because they’re true. The people who, by all definitions and standards, would be considered by the average person to be “actually sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/ableist/etc.” These people hear the same little remarks that so many consider harmless, so many jokes that “don’t actually mean anything” according to the people telling them, and they assume that because no one’s resisting any of them, that they’re in good company. “These people get it”, they think, because allowing the offensive things to go unchecked gives them every reason to believe in the sincerity of the speaker’s intentions, whether or not that speaker is actually being sincere. By not speaking up when this sort of thing happens, you’re curating an environment where the people who consciously, genuinely hold those beliefs feel safe and supported. And speaking of feeling safe and supported…
Everything You Know About Safe Spaces is Wrong
Also experiencing a rise in popularity are what are referred to as “Safe Spaces”. As the name implies, ‘safe spaces’ are intended to act as a sort of refuge from the prejudice and ignorance that pervades the everyday lives of marginalized people. Examples may include LGBTQ resource centres, women’s shelters, or support group meetings. The common understanding of a safe space is that people within a safe space should be able to act and speak as they wish, without fear of the sort of judgement that these sorts of actions and ideas might incur outside of the safe space.
It stands to reason, then, that a safe space should, by virtue of its title, be a safe space to all people. Ideally, it is a place where no one should have to hear anything that might offend their sensibilities or make them feel, in any way, shape or form, unsafe. Safe Spaces should be exactly that; a space that is safe for everyone, and if there are any exceptions to the range of people whom the safe space is intended to protect, well then it’s a fair assumption that the so-called Safe Space has failed in its mission.
But hold on…
Everyone, brace yourselves, because I’m about to say something that’ll knock your socks off. Something that you’d never have expected me to say. I hope you’re sitting down for this, because here it comes:
It turns out, the reactionaries are right about one thing: It’s impossible to not offend anyone, and no one, least of all Safe Spaces, can possibly accomplish this.
Now before you take that statement as a license to wander into any safe space you can find and start hurling about slurs to everyone you see, hold your horses and keep reading. The very simple truth about humanity is that we are such a diverse species in terms of varying worldviews, beliefs, and understandings that there is no possible way that any one location can be singularly inoffensive to all of them. To be blunt, our ideas of what is and isn’t offensive are in direct conflict with each other, and so it is not possible to accommodate all of them within any single context.
Thus, it becomes the imperative of a Safe Space to prioritize the needs of those for whom the safe space exists: marginalized people. And marginalized people, subject as we are to being shat upon by society at large, are sometimes going to have some complaints about the people doing the shitting. And maybe, just maybe, some of those complaints are going to have more than a few unkind words in them. Therefore, if the intention is to create a safe space free of judgement for marginalized people, then that safe space must necessarily allow the opportunity for such people to vent their frustrations without having to worry about backlash.
This is kind of a tricky balance to strike, of course, and obviously limitations will have to be drawn. And that’s it in a nutshell: every designated “safe space” must carry its own definition of what its “safe space”ness entails. Otherwise, we end up back in the territory of placating the majority, and frankly, I don’t think I need to rehash all the reasons why I don’t want to do that.
So, in direct contradiction to the sentiments of that last statement, here’s some advice for allies regarding safe spaces: The most important attribute of an ally is humility. The ability to take a step back and be a sympathetic presence, understanding that expressions of frustration with a larger culture are valid, even if you happen to directly belong to that culture. As such, if you’re in a safe space for a group of which you are not a part (eg. a straight person in an LGBTQ space), you must learn to differentiate between what is personal and what is systemic. A queer person that says “Ugh. Straight people” is complaining about something much bigger than you, so let us vent in peace. We already know you’re not like that, or else we wouldn’t be sharing it with you. If you feel this is unfair, then read on, because…
Everything You Know About Equality is Wrong
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single [white] man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. And also, that his favourite book is The Dictionary. I figure it would have to be, given how often I’ve had it quoted at me during arguments. Typically such an occasion looks like this:
Straight White Guy: “Scholarships for native people is racist against white people!”
Me: “Racism against white people doesn’t exist in this country”.
Straight White Guy: “rac·ism
ˈrāˌsizəm/
prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race. Preferential treatment of native people is racist!”
Me: “Your impressive ability to speak in phonetic spelling aside, racism is more complicated than mere prejudice…”
Straight White Guy: “Nope, racism is unequal treatment based on race, the end!”
What’s curious is that every copy of the dictionary but mine, it seems, seems to exclude the definitions of “systemic” and “institutional” as they relate to discrimination. Maybe Amazon sent me the Super Ultra Dictionary Deluxe as a bonus for a shipping company failing to meet its overnight guarantee. I guess we’ll never know!
These technical definitions of words and how they’re used in conversations such as these speaks to an understanding of the concept of ‘equality’ as hinging on the root word “equal”. And from a context completely removed of anything resembling the entirety of human history, the logic is sound; equality is as simple as treating everyone equally regardless of any arbitrary characteristics of that person.
But hold on…
So let’s say you’re in charge of giving out cookies, and in front of you are two plates: one plate has 1 cookie, and the other plate has 3 cookies. You have 2 cookies in your bag. What do you do?
If you want to treat everyone equally, you put a cookie on each plate.
So now what? Now the first plate has 2 cookies, and the second plate has 4. Even though the owner of the first plate has more cookies than they had before, it’s kind of meaningless when compared to the owner of the other plate, which still has more cookies than they do. I mean, credit where it’s due, things are better for the owner of the first plate than they’ve ever been, but the owner of the second plate is still the clear winner here.
If you want to create equality, you would put both cookies on the first plate.
Voila! Now both plates have 3 cookies! This outcome is only possible through unequal treatment. The owner of the second plate might get way indignant over your methods, but in the end you can sleep soundly knowing that you really helped out some one who actually needed it. Who knows? Maybe now that both plates have the same amount of cookies, the owner of the first plate will harbour less resentment for the owner of the second plate’s good fortune, and maybe both plates’ owners will come away from the whole affair with a new friend. Hooray!
Now here’s a twist: I’m not going to explain this metaphor. Hey, I gave you guys a freebie in the last section, you have to expect to do at least SOME of your own thinking.
That about wraps it up for this edition of Everything You Know Is Wrong. Hope it was as magical for you as it was for me!
~Joselyn