May 12, 2017

In a system where all things are equal…

In a system where all things are equal, debate is fine & noble thing. But all things are not equal. “Debate” is unbalanced from the get-go. I’m thinking too about people who’d like to debate me against my bodily autonomy—I know how awful that feels, and it’s not a fair debate either. For those without stakes in the game, for whom the exercise is rhetorical, debate is even fun. But it’s not when the stakes are real, your body, your life.

Along the lines of what @biancaspence wrote, instead of defending misguided good intentions, why not put your efforts toward real change? Read Indigenous writers and people of colour. Change your own mind even. Think is a verb.

@lizrenzetti I appreciate your article and I don’t think you’re wrong, but for some people “debate” is a lot to ask. They’ve got lives, culture and bodies on the line. Like all things, it is complicated. Which you know already…

I don’t know that someone should lose their job for holding an opinion, but what about for doing their job ineptly? Like for commissioning works on cultural appropriation by Indigenous writers, say, and then writing an editorial that begins “I don’t believe in cultural appropriation…” An editorial that isn’t even very good! Some claim it was satire, but that we can’t tell says something about the work AND culture of white supremacy we live in. Anyway, this is all ridiculous and grown men are behaving like petulant children when they should be in bed.

• Read this thread by Hiromi Goto‏ @hinganai:

“This should not be collapsed with the idea that writers/thinkers/journalists/activists thus don’t have the freedom to write.”

One more thing: super-sensitive jargon-talking left-wingers are sometimes really annoying. But is the answer to that to be a giant asshole? There are annoying people all over the political spectrum, my friends. How about we learn to live with each other?

Now go and buy a book by a writer who is Indigenous or a person of colour. And read Alicia Elliott’s article on cultural appropriation, which is the thing we should all be thinking about and asking questions about anyway—a far more productive exercise.