12.7

[My previous post was spurred by this thought: What would I think if I were this man, receiving this question? I think his response was wrong. So does he.]

Full disclosure: there are a few curse words I quote.

I pray to Jesus, but I'm not a Mormon. I've eaten at Buffalo Wild Wings, but I'm still vegetarian. I live in a society that represses, but am I a racist? That's a really unbelievable thing to say--that "everyone is a little bit racist," (Schierbecker 2015) or that all people are sexists, or that everything is problematic in some way. There's a whole lot of troubling fallacy in that statement. If everything is problematic, every argument that disproves your position is also problematic and equally easy to discard. If every white man is racist and sexist(and no black person can possibly be), white men don't "deserve to be listened to." You can shout them down. Let me simplify: modern collectivism is unfalsifiable.
Mark Schierbecker cowers like a whipped dog. It's exactly what the questioners seem to want. You should watch his interview all the way through to find when people ask him why he's pressing charges against Melissa Click and somehow promoting white supremacist arguments. He tries so hard to support the movement he believes in, but the moment his personal motivations don't align with the group, he's targeted. Instead of being intellectually honest about his first amendment beliefs, he cowtows to the angry voices. He scrambles to say something that will make him likable again: "Fuck racists! . . . Fuck me too." His friend the publicist doesn't help him, and in fact left him in the lurch a few days later. Why did he say he was racist and go out of his way to acknowledge his white privilege? Why did she recant her support and actually accuse him of saying "indefensibly racist" things? I can tell you why: there are two main types of activists I can currently see. The first type are real humans who care about each other and are trying to fix the incredibly obvious social problems in the United States. The second type are members of a mob who don't allow themselves to see the humanity in the people they're lining up to crush. They've been given incredibly powerful weapons of guilt and shame and hate, and this poisonous second type of activist is so dedicated to the purity of their group that they're willing to destroy anyone who threatens its ideology.
The first activist is the kind of person I strive to be. I fail a lot, but it's not due to a belief system that holds "my type of people" as better than another. It's just simple human selfishness. It's because I think I'm better than everyone. Before you think you can disprove me, remember that you're not inside my head, and that I have no respect for when people think they know what other people's beliefs or emotions are. So you won't win that one. Regardless, when I fail to love other people in the same way God loves them, I am disappointed in myself. I recalibrate, and I try again. Today, I got so mad I yelled at a student because I'm awful. I will do better tomorrow.
The second kind of activist is the kind of person who wears pink on Wednesdays. I'm still trying to figure out how to sort these bilious mouth-breathers from the forward-thinking human-lovers they mix with. These are people who belong to a clique. Their social activism excludes others on purpose and often as a tactic for keeping the clique pure and the message dominant. White guilt is a really stupid side-effect of othering by activists. But the most disagreeable thing is that these sort of feel-good crusading activists tend to target their own supporters. A blog that tears apart conservative cartoons gets the treatment sometimes. So do people making beautiful comics about the cultures in which they live. So does Emma Watson. So does an autistic photojournalist trying to give an extremely difficult answer in front of people who hate him because he thinks they have a right to be heard. Schierbecker is me. He's you. He's every one of us who says anything problematic, which is, remember, anything. This isn't about being right. Not one of us has the whole truth. This is about not being the most spiteful, vitriolic, exclusive, victimizing, parasitic, selfish people on the planet. Mark Schierbecker, I stand with you. I don't care if that gets me in trouble. From what I've seen, it's a safe stance.

All of this came from things I have read or seen in the past. I think often people just google stuff and then link to it to look good. I didn't. This post is years of my life distilled. Now, my knowledge does not make me an expert, and of course I will continue to read A Good Cartoon and to watch both Sargon of Akkad and Feminist Frequency videos. I read Concerned Student 1950's twitter posts and Penny Arcade. I'm not afraid of ideas that disagree with mine.
My friend Janelle posted a response to my first post, and I keep going back to it and reading it and I want to respond in some intelligent way, to dissect it point by point and to remark on it, but I cannot find an entry into it. I cannot. I'll just cut the pound of flesh nearest the heart of it.

So anyway, I think what most minorities object to is not cis white men themselves (or cis white women).

If I'm to be judged by the worst representatives of a group I involuntarily belong to, it's not fair to say #NotAllMinorities. If they get to say that only white people can be racist and only men can be sexist, and then follow that with the sweeping generalization that all white men are racist sexists, I think it's incorrect to forgive the actions of a few bigots with the good intentions of a few activists.

I don’t think they object to us speaking about anything, ever.

I disagree. Watch that for a full minute. He doesn't deserve a microphone--in effect, to be treated like a human being--because he's "in a color space right now."
I disagree. Listen to the excuse someone gives at the beginning. "He doesn't deserve to be listened to."
I disagree. Free speech isn't as important as the philosophy of the group or the continued ability of the group to categorize people as "other."
I disagree. Anything I say is objectionable.

I think what they object to is that so many of us talk about issues we don’t have a personal stake in as though we’re supposed to be the #1 authority on the issue. “I’ve researched; I’ve studied; I care about this,” we say. And then we get up on soapboxes and talk loudly enough to drown out the people who have actually experienced it.

Firstly, what people have as a "personal" stake is highly subjective. You could argue that Jonathan Butler has as personal a stake in establishing strong minority education as I do. My town is the 412th poorest town in Missouri per capita, and Ferguson, the only town with schools so bad the State shut them down, is 266th (side note: I can only find a few of the statistics I'm looking for). Fully one quarter of my students are living in poverty.
Second, the major complaints of the protesters have been that reporters don't respect them, or that reporters tend to make the story about themselves (white people), or that the story has been spun. No one is respected by all the members of the media. Our society is too voyeuristic. Also, reporters make the story about themselves when they're doing the sort of reporting that specifically calls for that. Finally and perhaps most importantly, a story hasn't always been spun when the coverage disagrees with you. Firstly: when two stories disagree, one of them does not have to be wrong. Secondly, if one of them is wrong, the activists don't seem to accept any possibility that it is their viewpoint that could be the one in the wrong. I don't think he has spun the story about Melissa Click physically threatening a student, calling "can I get some muscle over here?" and the crowd physically pushing ("Don't I have a right to walk forward?" [the answer is no, you don't]) reporters out of the way. In fact, I think they've done remarkably little spinning. I think a flat presentation of the facts is very hard to describe as spin, and yet the protesters have called it spin. If you find that other people are gravitating to the account of your opponent, consider first that you might be wrong, and then second that your opponent is a shady hell-cat sent by the devil to dissemble and lead the faithful astray.

Maybe I haven't spent enough time here advocating for civil rights.Maybe if I am accidentally unclear on that front, I open myself up to an ad hominem attack on my views. Maybe just by disagreeing with a group that styles itself "black," people will say I'm being racist. Maybe it's too late and you've stopped reading in disgust, but I think it's worth saying that actions that incite violence against minorities are wrong. Limiting a minority person's rights is wrong. Pushing minority people out of a space based on their skin color is wrong. There are no defenses against these things. They're just wrong.
Why do I feel like it's risky to change the word "minorities" in those previous sentences to include any other group? Why does it read incorrectly when I say that inciting violence against Mark Schierbecker is wrong? Why do you shake your head when I say that limiting a reporter's rights is wrong? Why do you gear up to argue me when I say pushing Tim Tai out of a space based on his profession is wrong? There are no defenses against racism, but why do you think there's a defense when I change the words?
I think it's possible to advocate for and promote the rights of disenfranchised groups without denying the rights of already-enfranchised groups. Maybe I'm crazy for thinking that segregating a space based on color is a bad idea. Possibly I'm thinking wrong, but creating black spaces, black programs, and black campsites is just like creating white spaces, white programs, and white water fountains. And we need to cut that out.