Friendship, Intolerance, and Social Media

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

12 minutes ago, Kal Corp said:

I'm literally saying that it's on the bigot. Not some ephemeral 'someone else'. It's very bizarre how you continue to avoid giving bigots personal responsibility for fixing their own shit!

And is it not in some way your job to help the bigot realize they're in fact a bigot, or going down that path? If you do nothing, how are you preventing the spread of bigotry, Kal? Telling likeminded people that bigotry is bad isn't going to stop the spread of bigotry if said group agrees that they don't have to do the hard part and engage with the bigots.

[mormont]

I've been reading this thread and it's actually quite interesting and stimulating, even if for many of you it's clearly quite a personal and difficult topic. Kudos to all of you for your ability to put down quite coherent thoughts despite that.

Personally I don't have a hard and fast rule on this. A lot depends on context. I will repeat something I've said before, which is that there's no universal answer. It's possible to change people's minds, but not always. Some minds can't be changed, because people don't want to change their minds. Some minds can be changed, but need a variable mix of positive engagement and negative consequences to do it. None of us can say for sure that either thing on its own is 'the best' strategy because doing so requires us to read minds and know why another person holds a particular hurtful prejudice.

But I do agree that it isn't the duty of oppressed groups to change bigots' minds. Some choose to try and should be praised for it, but nobody should be condemned for not exposing themselves to the pain and trauma of attempting it. That does leave work for the rest of us to do, and I'm not always the best at stepping to that plate. And I don't ever want one of my friends hurt by exposure to nonsense on my social media, so please, if you feel that's happening, feel free to let me know. Engaging is one thing, but harm is quite another.

[polishgenius]

55 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

As a long time activist, I am of the thought that people should be willing to suffer a bit to make their point. It's not easy to advocate for a cause you care about, which you know will have some backlash to you directly, but does that mean you should avoid the fight? I think not.

 

 

This is fair, but I think what it ultimately comes down to is that people shouldn't be obliged to be activists just to be who they are- often times it's not about standing for something, it's just about being, which the other side see as a political statement of itself and I just can't bring myself to think in that position anyone has any responsibility to engage or that they're shirking if they do. A trans person (using this example coz it often comes up visibly on twitter in the circles I follow, sadly) is not obligated to justify their existence to every transphobe they run into, be they friends or not, and I don't think they're avoiding making a point by just refusing to engage. We'd basically be saying that if you want to be an out trans person you have to be a pro-trans activist and while the world does sometimes seem that way it damn well shouldn't be (and that's why I also bring up 'our' obligation as allies to take up the fight, if we're gonna be allies). 


But I do take your point about sometimes cutting people off is more to show fellow 'lefties'/not-bigoted people etc you mean business than to achieve change. Often it isn't- sometimes it's for one's own mental health, or for pure safety, and it's not for me to litigate who's who and who is 'allowed' to do it and not. But I get the point. 

eta: guess I could have just waited, quoted Mormont's last segment, and written 'this'. Summed up my feelings pretty closely.

[IFR]

There is a good passage in a book by Richard Feynman. He is talking to a Swedish princess during a dinner after the Nobel Prize laureates have won their awards. She observes that he is a winner and asks in what field he won his prize. He tells her physics. She then responds that they cannot continue to talk, because she knows nothing of physics.

He responds: "On the contrary. It’s because somebody knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics. It’s the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance—gold transfers we can’t talk about, because those are understood—so it’s the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!"

I think it's very common for people to have an abridged understanding of an issue, develop an emotional connection to this limited understanding so it becomes the "truth" to them, and from there it is very difficult to dislodge them from that perspective. Social media has shown itself to be a superb medium in which to induce people to share their perspectives more freely.

As it turns out, this has become a destructive influence to our social interactions. Like so much of human behavior, we do better with the out of sight out of mind approach, which social media violates.

I feel - and this is borne out by much of the research I've encountered on this issue - that avoiding social media is the best way to maintain one's mental and social health, and has far better results than maintaining a presence with the expectation that you'll have to battle views that don't mesh with your own.

I'm very skeptical of any positive impact in having a social media vendetta.