Once more, with feeling: Being “polite” is not a goal of mine.
Reblogged from youarenotyou-deactivated2012022
[trigger warning for rape, religious abuse]
My parents are always very “nice” and “polite” when they tell me they refuse to call me my name. That one pastor who wanted to forcibly poison me with testosterone was very “civil” when “suggesting” the idea to me. And my rapist was very “kind” when he was grooming me for what was about to happen.
There’s a certain subset of activists who are under the misapprehension that the real root cause of all our social ills is just that everybody is too mean to each other, and that if we could all just learn to get along, we wouldn’t have the problems that we do. This is why they can say, with a straight face, that those of us who give voice to our rage are “making things worse” and are “just as bad as the bigots are”: to them, the problem is not that power disparities force marginalized people into conflict to preserve themselves, but that there is conflict at all. Or, as MLK would have it, they prefer “a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice”.
(This is, of course, also the sentiment that underlies the “We’re just like you” strategy, which in turn underlies cis gay transmisogyny among many other things.)
That type of thinking may work for short-term gains here and there, but it is not enough to win liberation, or even basic safety for a lot of us. In fact, a common tactic used by a lot of abusers is to act “civil” while their victim becomes infuriated, and then go, “See, I’m perfectly calm and civil, and you’re losing your shit, so clearly you’re just being unreasonable/irrational/crazy.”
Besides, in my experience, it’s not possible to have meaningful conversations/activism/whatever about gender, race, queerness, social construction of bodies, etc. without acknowledging power disparities. Well, I mean… you can, if you’re just coming out, or you just became aware that prejudice was a thing, or if you’re fighting for a relatively minor thing that doesn’t actually require system-smashing, or whatever. But there are only so many times you can go, “Boy, those bigots sure are mean to us, aren’t they?” before it just grows stale, and you can’t really go beyond that until you’re willing to look at why the bigots are mean, and acknowledge that there’s actually a lot more going on than just “so-and-so is ignorant/hateful/stupid for not liking us”.
And yes, sometimes this acknowledgement does come in the form of calm, “civil,” “polite” explanation. And sometimes it comes in an outburst of rage that may seem “disproportionate” to privileged people who are only looking at the one isolated incident, but that is actually very reined-in and measured considering what marginalized people have to deal with every day.
Don’t fucking gaslight us by telling us that our rages “proves” how untrustworthy we are when it comes to our own lives. And don’t fucking demand “politeness” from us, especially since “politeness” usually means “not making privileged people uncomfortable.”
