I recently commented on a Facebook debate that was happening on my newsfeed. A Facebook friend of mine had posted up a video in which a woman talks about her experience of wearing the hijab. Here is that video . Nobody involved in the conversation on my newsfeed wore a hijab.

The lady in the video expressed how she regards her hijab as a feminist statement rather than one of oppression. Her broader point though was about the importance of context and lived experience, and how (like many things) the hijab can have different meanings to different people and in different circumstances.



On my newsfeed, this broader (and, I’d say, more important) message was being ignored because people were arguing back and forth in terms of whether or not it was oppressive. “It’s oppressive!” said one person. “It’s emancipatory!” said the other. It was very black and white, and back and forth they went.

I posted to comment that I agree with the woman in the video (who actually wore a hijab and who was being ignored), in that it’s all about listening to people and (a) respecting their interpretation of their experience and (b) considering the context of it all, rather than making blanket statements. I didn’t really think people were particularly fussed about my opinion itself, but I felt the more important message of the video was being ignored and I felt that it was worth referring back to it.

After I’d posted a couple of times, echoing in both cases what was said in the video itself, the person who posted the video told me that ‘as a white male I don’t think you have anything to add to this conversation.’

Ouch!

With that kind of statement, no matter what the context is, it naturally makes me pause to consider whether my race and my gender (being a privileged white male etc.) may be making me a bit presumptuous in how I’m going about things. I think I’m quite reflective in general, and it would prompt reflection regardless of whether or not the statement makes any sense in reference to what’s going on.



After reflecting on it, I figured that referring to my race and gender in the context of the conversation didn’t make any sense at all, as it just seems completely irrelevant. I was referring directly to what the woman in the video was saying, who had lived experience of the hijab and whose broader point was being ignored. I wasn’t adding anything new. My inclination is to think that it was said without much forethought as a means of shutting me up saying things that they didn’t palatable, although I’m really not sure.



I should say that the rest of this is an exploration of how I believe it is possible for certain tropes around identity politics and social justice to be used in inappropriate, ‘problematic’, and, in the long-run, probably destructive ways. It’s a broad reflection of the importance of attitude and maintaining a dialogue so as to foster learning and growth from people – around issues of identity but also in other areas of life. I’m working on the assumption though that most people would regard the above comment as inappropriate in the context in which it was used. If this doesn’t reflect your own feelings on it then fair enough, but so long as you can acknowledge that it is at least posssible for people to come out with things like that at inappropriate times, then the rest of the piece may be something you can get along with anyway.

But anyway, that is what has inspired this post. It’s not so much about identity politics per se but about how most things of any importance can be twisted to end up producing behaviours and attitudes that are unhealthy and harmful.

My interpretation of it is that this person didn’t appreciate my input in to the conversation because it acknowledged nuance, wasn’t incendiary and so didn’t encourage an emotional reaction, and so perhaps (I can only guess here) they wanted to provoke such a reaction. I honestly don’t know though. Another explanation is that ‘you’re a white male therefore [x]’ is just widely regarded as an appropriate thing to say to people nowadays, regardless of context. This last possibility is a bit scary. You’re [group] therefore [x] is exactly the kind of thinking we should be getting away from, last i checked.



Identity politics becoming more prominent has provoked a dialogue and has in many ways given a voice to people who would not usually have one. As with anything of any import though, it can also become cultish and fragmentary, with tropes and rituals and people self-consciously towing the party line without thinking about it very much. It can also result (and I think it often seems to, especially online) in people never speaking to anyone with a different opinion to themselves. What results from this is that they can’t do so without demonising that person.

It’s the same with other things, such as religion and politics generally, in this respect; it has the potential for doing good, but if people go about it in a certain way then that same potential can be twisted into something insidious and awful.

It’s the sense of unreflecive righteousness people have that I find concerning, because that sense is only likely to make people complacent about questioning their own underlying thought processes, which is vital for any organic system of beliefs to adapt and grow and to fight off dogma.



Privilege

I agree that being white carries privilege, as does being male. These are things that we need to fight. I’ve known white males in my job though who have been through the most horrible things imaginable, and I’m a bit hesitant with the kind of generalised, reductive thinking that would involve include seeing them through that lens. I have met people who cannot hold down regular work or have any kind of intimate romantic or social relations because of traumatic and horrifying things that have happened to them. Throwing stats about most rape victims being women or people of colour being more likely to struggle with mental health issues is probably not going to be much comfortable to a whit male who has gone through those things anyway. In Sociology we talk in trends across millions of people; I don’t agree that we should take our ideas of those trends and apply them to categorise people on an individual level. In fact, I think it is completely dehumanising.

Of course we can flip this and consider the many people who belong to demographics that are commonly flagged with an ‘oppressed’ category and acknowledge themselves as such, and yet nevertheless deeply resent the idea that them being a ‘victim’ and ‘oppressed’ as though it is the defining feature about them; the entirety of their existence. To give anyone an all-encompassing ‘victim’ label is insidiously disempowering. In all situations, there is more to a person than the fact that they have been a victim of something.

As far as I understand it, what I am describing here is essentially intersectionality, which is the acknowledgment that people can be oppressed (and privileged) across numerous different intersections at once – for example by their race, gender, and sexuality – and that these different intersections can influence each other in incredibly complex ways. My issue here is that many people tend to stop once they look at only a handful of strands on the intersection – for example race, gender, sexuality and possibly a couple of others – when actually there are millions of them. Some may be relatively insignificant (‘dominant hand’, for example) while others could impact your life in a huge way (‘whether or not your parents loved you’ or ‘whether or not you grew up feeling safe in your home’, for example). The point though is that the place at which a person stops adding intersections is entirely arbitrary – and that if you wanted to, you could carry on cross-crossing and becoming more specific until you’ve boiled the whole thing down to an individual level, rather than a ‘group-identity’ level.

Privilege (my own)

Aside from this, I personally see my most significant privilege as being the fact that I haven’t needed to work for fifteen hours per day, every day, since the age of five or six, in order to barely avoid starving to death. That’s the fate of hundreds of millions of people in the world, and there’s no real reason why they should need to do that while I get to live in relative comfort. I’m reading Facebook on a laptop in a warm house, with a job that earns me enough to not have to worry about whether or not I’m going to pay my bills or have enough to eat. In my view, to live in those circumstances and yet be bothered by something as ultimately frivolous as a throwaway Facebook comment would be a testament to the fact that I’ve lost any kind of meaningful frame of reference for my life, and would imply to me that I need to check my privilege.



The comment didn’t bother me on a fundamental level, of course. Life experience has (I like to think) made me quite cognizant of many ways in which I’m privileged, and so I’ve got a frame of reference that enables me to regard this whole incident is quite trivial really.

It’s still annoying to see unfold though, because I see it as an example of a tendency that is ultimately harmful. What worried me was that this response – “You’re a white male, you need to check your privilege!” seems to have been regarded in this case as perfectly appropriate in all circumstances. It can become as cold and ritualised as any of the more archaic religious practices, if it turns into a mantra to be done unthinkingly, rather than as a response to the actual circumstances that you find yourself in.

Having a dialogue with people

If you’re not in the habit of actually conversing with people of different opinions, then before long you’re inevitably going to caricature them in some way. Your perspective of them will come less from an acknowledgement of them as a nuanced, complex human being with idiosyncrasies and uncertainties and hopes and dreams and all the rest of it, and will instead become more representative of your own biases and prejudices.



The less you are used to dialogue, the more you’ll have caricatured people who believe differently to you, and the more difficult you’ll find it to actually engage with someone who has these ‘other’ perspectives while maintaining a fundamental level of respect for them on a human level. Dialogue is the absolute cornerstone of a working liberal democracy and of any critically conscious, socially aware population, and so I think the habitual shutting down of dialogue in this way is a bad thing.

The internet is an obvious massive contributor to this too, as it becomes all too easy to ‘ignore’ anyone who is saying things that you don’t like very much. Once that starts happening, you can start caricaturing them and maybe further down the line you won’t ignore them at all but jump into a tirade over how wrong but also how immoral they are. Unreflectingly equating your own perspective with righteousness and others with immorality is probably the end point of all this. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that perhaps most atrocities in history have stemmed from this attitude in one way or another, and that it is often a prerequisite for horrible things to happen. It’s worrying that political rhetoric (on the internet, at least) seems to have gone in this direction.



I’m not suggesting that that is where this kind of thing will lead, but hear me out: If you want to commit some atrocities, then you first need to dehumanise the people you’re wanting to commit your atrocities against. It’s hard to dehumanise someone if you have regular conversations with them and engage with them on a personal level. It’s much easier to dehumanise people if you see them merely as a category that you read about on the internet while you’re sat in your bedroom. Either way though, the blind faith in your own righteousness is the first step towards horrible shit happening in my opinion and, if nothing else, dialogue tends to keep that kind of stuff in check.



Nothing but Categories

I believe that identity politics is great in the sense that it gives people a praxis (cool word, unsure if using it properly) by which they can begin to consider and resist the kinds of prejudice that is embedded in our society. That’s fucking awesome, and I don’t for a second want to moan about that. This potential for awesomeness demands vigilance though, so that it doesn’t become ritualised and doesn’t make people complacent about reflecting on what they’re actually doing and saying to people. It can also make people dismiss opinion which may be different, which can result in the whole thing becoming cultish and fragmentary, which ironically is kinda the opposite of the whole point of it.



People can go overboard in seeing everyone as merely the representation of a category. This is really less to do with identity politics itself as with human psychology more generally, and this applies to a lot of other areas too, like religion. Regardless of what we’re talking about, I don’t think you can reduce a person in such a way without doing great violence to who they are as an individual, and I think that if you’re going to categorise people – which needs to happen sometimes – you should at least keep in mind the fact that you’re simplifying things. Nuance is important, and I think it’s awful to strip it out of awareness.

If you can acknowledge that, then fine – you’re doing it properly. If you think that a person’s identity amounts to nothing more than a composite of labels relating to their nationality, sexuality, gender identity, age, race, political alignment, physical and mental ability, religion (etc) though, then there’s issues. To reduce everyone to categories might have its uses, but these categories are a form of short-hand and do no justice to the complexity of an individual human being.

I feel that a keen awareness of these labels carry with it a danger of becoming dogmatic, and of people viewing everyone in terms of these labels instead of fully experiencing the uncertain and idiosyncratic person that’s directly in front of them. I wonder about people who think in this way. I wonder if some people walk around the streets taxonomising everyone and weighing up the amount of ‘privilege’ that they have, as though it’s some kind of quantifiable commodity. I wonder how difficult it must be to actually connect with other people on a genuinely intimate and personal level while you’re doing that kind of thing.

Categories are descriptive, not prescriptive. If you’re assuming things about a person before you’ve even spoken about them, based on your understanding of the labels that you assume they belong to, then…well, it’s just not a good thing to be doing, in my opinion. To the greatest extent possible, I think you should do your best to put any preconceptions to one side and then listen to that person on an individual level (i.e. not as an example of a wider category), and build up your impression of them based on your direct experience of them. This may be more of an ideal than an achievable aim because we all make assumptions and have prejudices…but I think it’s still a good thing to aim for.

Narratives: Fictional and Otherwise

Generally, fictional characters serve some authorial purpose and are basically a means to that end, and for that reason it can be handy and fun to ruminate on their dramatic role and fix them in place in the way I’m moaning about above. At some point you get to put a big circle around them and, at least to yourself, decide what they are all ‘about’ in a conclusive kind of way. With fictional characters it’s cool and appropriate to consider them within a broad narrative because that’s kinda the entire point of their existence; to serve a narrative in some way. There’s no endless complexity and nuance to who they are, because ‘who they are’ is limited by the author’s imagination.

The real world isn’t like that. Real people tend to just do shit and then afterwards do some other shit. A lot of people do stuff that is completely stupid and meaningless and that does not serve any kind of understandable purpose or narrative whatsoever. If people do meaningless shit in art then, paradoxically, the meaninglessness itself is usually the point, but in real life it really is just meaningless.

You can weave a broad narrative around real people if you want, but while that might help you understand something in some sense it is still merely a frame of reference; a simplification of the actual reality. It’s like using the biggest paintbrush in the pot; great if you want to cover lots of ground, but not so good on details. Narratives are vital to try to understand broad and complex issues, but the map in your head when thinking like this is a simplification of the terrain itself and it’s important not to confuse the two. In fiction it is different because there is no ‘terrain’, because it’s not real.

On the flip-side, the only people in the real world who can ever completely symbolise an idea or who fit perfectly into a broad narrative are people you do not know very well. If you don’t know someone then they can feasibly symbolise something, but that becomes harder when you see them for the sweating, farting human being that they are, with vanities, hopes, insecurities, fears and dreams just like everyone else. When you know someone and see that vulnerability, the person tends to come first. Labels come naturally only if you don’t know someone, and can get in the way of knowing someone if you let them.

Everyone’s a bit more complex and…frilly (I really can’t think of a better word) in the real world than they are in fiction. Nobody in the real world is a 100% bastion of any concept or ideal. Nobody is purely good and virtuous, or evil. These labels are just abstract concepts that we have invented to help us understand the world anyway – they describe the world, but they are not the things that they describe. Our concepts are far too clumsy to ever capture the world itself in its entirety; the map is not the terrain.

Ghandi apparently didn’t like black people, and Hitler was apparently very nice to his dog. Labels like ‘scumbag’ or ‘saint’ or ‘[whatever label you like]’ are a poor substitute for understanding. It doesn’t matter what nouns you use to label people – a person is not a noun to be pigeonholed; they are always in process and I’m very skeptical of people who use language in such a way that doesn’t acknowledge this and instead tries to fix everyone in place. If the abstractions come first and the person second, then everything is upside down and I think, one way or another, damage is being done.

To summarise…



We all hold assumptions about people, and the best we can do is be vigilant in challenging our assumptions as and when we notice them. The world is (and other people are) simply too complex for us to fully understand in full, and so we have to take shortcuts. The best we can do is to be aware that we’re doing that.

If you see a problem with the reductionism involved in prejudicial thinking – e.g. ‘all [label] are like [judgement]’ – then I don’t think you can take the moral high ground if you respond by being reductionist yourself – e.g. ‘well you’re [label] therefore [judgement]’. It’s kind of the same stupid, dehumanising thinking but twisted in a different way.

I find it hard to take seriously people who talk about society at large (involving millions of individuals) without any acknowledgement of how much they are needing to generalise in order to make sense of any of it. We need to talk about society at large in order to understand it better and to fight the injustices that exists, but I think we should be humble enough to acknowledge our own limitations in understanding something so unfathomably complex. It’s good science, if nothing else.