Also the problem that I have with the whole “activists are allowed to take whatever tone they want” online is that… In my experience with offline activism, there isn’t one tone. There are toneS.
There’s the nice friendly explainer who sits down with people who are unfamiliar with the concepts and carefully explains and answers questions as patiently as he can. There’s the firebrand who stands in front of the government building screaming FREEDOM NOW and doesn’t explain how she is unfree because that’s not the point. There’s the erudite columnist or presenter who backs claims of injustice up with facts and figures. There’s the rollicking motivator who gets his people fired the fuck up. There’s the passionate but polite person who writes letters to the editor to a hundred different publications that can’t stop getting it wrong and never loses her urgency or her patience.
All of these people are real activists. All of them are needed.
Saying to someone “you’re using the wrong tone” can be about dismissing him. Of course.
But it can also mean “Call in the Erudite Presenter. On the bat-phone. You need her.”
Focusing too much on what activists are ‘allowed’ to do sort of distorts the fact that activism isn’t meant to be self expression, it’s meant to accomplish things — and when your main way of accomplishing things is persuasion, you need to be able to adapt tone and tactics to the situation.
this is rly smart and for the most part (as a neophyte activist myself) i agree.
however — if i may assume that this post is, at least in part, talking about interactions that occur on tumblr? that creates a new wrinkle here.
most people on tumblr aren’t activists, though they may occasionally dabble in an internet-activist sphere. even if they are activists, they aren’t always “on” on their own blogs. tumblr is mostly a collection of personal blogs, on which people sometimes adopt an activist stance.
so this thing can happen: a person makes a post where they are just venting about their personal life, in a way that ties into larger social issues; the post gets widely reblogged; somebody else assumes that OP was in fact making a didactic activist post, and responds accordingly. (e.g., by saying ‘call in the Erudite Presenter,’ or by pointing out a logical inconsistency, or ways in which the social issue at hand can present differently.)
and then OP gets rightfully mad, because how dare you question or attack their tone when they were just talking about their life.
this is primarily a problem with the format of tumblr, and i don’t have easy solutions to it, but i do think we need to be aware and careful about it. we’re interacting with people, not professional activists, and the lines between different kinds of social interactions can blur easily.
Yeah, I think that’s fair. I definitely know what it’s like to make a post like GOD DAMMIT ALL I HATE THE THING and then have a quintillion people reblog it assuming that you’ve cursed them all to fiery doom when all you were actually saying was “fuck im frustrated rn guys” and your intended audience was mostly sympathetic e-friends.
But I also think there is sometimes a thing where people take the stance that reblogging is activism (which, in some cases, it is, but in others, it’s not) and then they say something SJ-ey in a really nasty and seemingly challenging tone but when told “whoa, that was kinda rude” go “…I was just venting.”
I’ve seen that phenomenon enough times that I feel skeptical of “I was just venting” in some instances.
Like, yeah, sometimes it’s true, but — have you seen that feminist joke about Schrodinger’s Douchebag? “Makes gross creepy remarks about women and decides whether or not he was joking based on women’s reaction”?
I think there are SJ Schrodinger’s Douchebags too, and their characteristic call, rather than “I was joking! Lighten up,” is “i was just venting oh my god”
Bolded the last part, because I’m pretty sure that is exactly what happens.
Also when any extreme examples of abusiveness or just plain faulty logic get publicized people go “but those are obviously just trolls,” or otherwise say they’re not real social justice bloggers.
Sometimes they are obvious trolls, like those people who always seem to think slapping on “Dorito otherkin, god/godself pronouns” makes them “look like an SJer har har,” but the rest? You can’t just magic away the parts that make what you’re doing look bad.
If you do want a socially aware community, this is how you foster abusers in it. :l By hiding or excusing them- or pretending they’re just not there- just so that people won’t think there’s anything wrong with the community itself.
Published
Tumblr backup 