breakdown the real social justice vs the tumblr version of social justice for me

yourequestriansecrets:

starfieldcanvas: herimperialnootness-deactivated: Real Social Justice output: Advocacy of egalitarianism

Raising awareness of discrimination of the disabled

Raising awareness over mental illnesses and treatment

Acceptance of all sexual orientation in the LGBTQ spectrum

Acceptance of all races as equal and the halt of racial profiling and discrimination

Raising awareness of women’s rights in lesser privileged countries where education is scarce and child marriage is prominent, while progressing the achievements of the ones that are privileged with education and choice.

Raising awareness and aiding men’s rights in gaining equal opportunity in divorce and child custody courts, raising awareness of silenced male rape victims, etc.

The list can go on. Tumblr version of social justice’s output: Justice in terms of revenge

White guilt should be acceptable

Erasure of some peoples’ struggles simply because they’re white (See: Eastern Europeans and the Irish)

“Misandry is okay”

“No such thing as racism against whites”

In some parts, transphobia in the name of feminism

Shaming the other opinion for no valid reason This reads like major concern trolling. “Real Social Justice” vs. “Tumblr Social Justice” is not actually a thing, for one - it’s like “Real Geek Girls” vs. “Fake Geek Girls,” it’s a dichotomy intended to allow people who already have privilege to dictate the terms of engagement - and if it were, the top of its list would NEVER be “egalitarianism.” As nice as it sounds, “egalitarianism” has become an obvious buzzword for “I don’t want to have to acknowledge diversity, I want to treat everyone the same and have that be adequate.” I’m sorry but I agree with Flosephstalin.



This isn’t an issue of “prove you’re passionate,” like the Geek Girls one is. This is an issue of people taking a good cause and then abusing it to push their own agenda. I have literally seen tumblr social justice warriors tell white people who have mental illness that their illness is not as serious as racism against minorities.



There are also frequent accusations of ableism just about everywhere, even when ableism isn’t an issue.

Wait, how did you go from “SJWs are bad because they tell people with mental illness that their illness isn’t always the most important issue” to “ablism isn’t always the most important issue” in the space of literally two sentences?

At any rate, you may have “literally seen” random people on tumblr say stupid things, but the comparison to the Fake Geek Girls debate is valid because it’s not about the existence of out-of-line Social Justice Warriors or Genuinely Fake Geek Girls, it’s about how people who are already in a privileged position want to frame the discussion.

There are actually girls who will play up their interest in video games for gifts or male attention. There are girls who claim to be fans of things that they really don’t know anything about, just to be trendy. But the furor over “Fake Geek Girls” is still stupid because of the context. Just because some girls sometimes adopt geeky behaviors in a manner that might make some sense to describe as “fake” does not make it a trend worth writing countless articles about. And blowing things out of proportion, acting like this is some horrible phenomenon, has serious consequences - again because of the context. Male geeks are clearly in the majority and hold the power when it comes to discussions about geekdom. Far too many male geeks consider themselves judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to determining who can and can’t be taken seriously as a geek, and they use that power to make women and girls feel unwelcome and insecure in geek spaces. By setting up this dichotomy of “Fake Geek Girls” and “Real Geek Girls” and foaming at the mouth about it, they aren’t accomplishing anything other than silencing and alienating female geeks. They’re setting the terms in their own favor and they’re pushing out women and girls in the process, cementing their own privilege even further.

The same basic thing is happening in the original post above, and I see it happening a lot in critiques of tumblr’s social justice element. As always: context! In real life and in most of the rest of the internet, being white/male/western/cis/het/able-bodied/thin/middle-class/neurotypical is going to confer privilege. It still does, even on tumblr. But tumblr is infamously/commonly used as a platform through which to challenge the comfortable position of people with privilege, and therefore you’re likely to run into a lot of people speaking out against societal trends and power dynamics that you may never have noticed before, using vocabulary that may be unfamiliar to you, taking things for granted that you never learned in school and being uncommonly bold in their declaration of their own opinions when contrasted with how taboo it is to call out privilege in “real life.”

One can react to that in a variety of ways.

The most obvious is probably with denial in the form of anger and hate. Anons telling anti-racism bloggers that they themselves are racist, anons leaving flames about how women should get back in the kitchen, anons leaving rape threats or whatever. “Standard” internet backlash.

For people who are not cut out for anon!hate, there’s always the way of the concern troll. Concern trolling is very very popular. The concern troll says that they, too, are very invested in social justice, but they regret to inform you that you’re just not doing it right. You’re far too rude, they say sweetly. You’re ranting about how much damage men as a group have done to women as a group and it’s making men nervous, so really you should stop talking about it so much because you want men to listen to you, right? And nobody will listen to you if you’re so blunt and angry and confrontational all the time. Nobody is going to want to hear what you have to say about privilege and rape and power dynamics if you refuse to pull your punches! You have to be sweet and gentle and kind, you have to tell straight/white/cis/het/male people about the problems of the world without making them feel the slightest bit uncomfortable otherwise nobody is ever going to listen to you. So maybe you should just, you know, give up. Stop talking. Because every time you tell it like it is, every time you describe exactly what’s wrong with the social order, every time you say straight out that things are really honestly pretty fucked up, you inevitably get some straight/white/cis/het/male person’s knickers in a twist, angsting at you about how they have it bad, too, and how they’re not like that, really, and how we’re all the same on the inside and how we just have to treat each other nicely and “not see color” and everything will be fine, fine, fine if you just shut up and stop making such a big deal out of it.

Then you try to pull out the sociology textbook and say, no, really, look, it is this bad: we’ve been studying this for decades and we’ve honestly got a pretty good idea of how fucked up things are, we didn’t just make this up to rustle your jimmies. But you have to pull out the textbook every single time some white/straight/cis/het/male person doesn’t “get it” and depending on how much you interact with those around you and how vocal you are, you might end up having that kind of conversation fifty times a day and eventually you just give up and you start snarking about it and making jokes at their expense because oh my god, fucking white people, what is their damage?

Because you can’t just stop caring, you can’t walk away from seeing how broken the world is, you’re trapped, and it breaks your heart every time another person comes up to you and throws it in your face how little they understand. “It isn’t broken!” they say, or “It’s broken but you care too much about the parts that affect you, not enough about the parts that affect me,” and sometimes the only way to deal with that is to take a step back, point, laugh, and make terribly morbid jokes about men being pigs and cis folk being scum. Or you are so tired of running into the same stupidity, the same ignorance, the same defensiveness and denial and entitlement, that the only thing you can do is growl in anger; then privileged folks who don’t see the shape of the cracks in the world just edge away from you and tut-tut at how uncouth you are.

In the end you realize that there is no way to get it right. There is literally no way to couch the truth so that they will listen. They don’t want to listen. But they don’t want to believe that about themselves - they’re the good guys, they think - so they keep asking you to explain; they keep promising that if you just use the right tone of voice, if you just emphasize the right things, if you just focus on the right kinds of problems, they’ll join you in the fight and they’ll use their privilege to take apart the system. They tell you to be nice and sweet and soft-spoken, but then they just ignore you. They tell you to show them the numbers, but then they argue with your sources. They tell you to prove that this actually happens in real life, but then they dismiss your personal stories as mere anecdotes. Nothing will satisfy them. And so you give up and you snark and you say things like hooray for misandry and delicious male tears because they were never going to listen to you anyway and it hurts and you would rather find some solidarity with the people who are actually on your side, your real allies, rather than waste your breath playing nice with people who only pretend to be concerned about whether or not you’re doing social justice “right” because they want to shut you up.

Now, me, when I run into some “social justice” post that levels an accusation at a group with which I identify, I take it in stride. I’m white/straight/western/cis/het/thin/middle-class and that comes with a buttload of privileges and I totally respect that people on the wrong end of the stick are often going to be angry and lashing out at the system screwing them over, using humor and sarcasm and satire in ways that may seem harsh and alien to me sometimes. When I read a quote talking about what’s wrong with “white people,” I don’t get offended and throw a tantrum just because “not all of us are like that!” I look at my own attitudes and behaviors for any traces of whatever is being described, and if I don’t recognize whatever it is they’re talking about in myself, I don’t take what they’re saying as a personal affront. I instead recognize it as a critique of a system I’m trying not to be a part of. Asking them to rephrase so it’s 100% obvious I’m in no way implicated would be ridiculously self-important. I’m not going to waste anybody’s time whining about how I, an individual white person with her own battles to fight, am not on the same level of horribleness as the entire system of white people oppressing basically every other kind of people throughout history. I know the contextual differences between generalizations about women that reinforce their subordinate status and generalizations about men that challenge their institutional power; I’m not going to be put off by generalizations about people with my privileged skin color because I know it’s the institution being attacked, not me. I have learned to “sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up,” as they say.

It’s hilarious that the original poster classed “no such thing as racism against whites” as a tumblr thing. It’s actually an academic thing, a relatively basic definition of terms you will often see in sociology papers. If you haven’t even gotten past Racism 101 you are in no place to be authoring a list of what Real Social Justice Output ought to look like!

And if you’re still hung up on the idea of feminists saying “yay misandry,” you might just need a more sardonic, world-weary sense of humor.