thebrownjomarch

Sir Francis Ford’s Children Giving a Coin to a Beggar Boy, 1793, William Beechey.

Every time I see someone on the internet going viral for saying something spectacularly misogynistic, racist, bigoted, hateful or untrue, I also see approximately 75 think pieces explaining why what was said was misogynistic, racist, bigoted hateful or untrue.

There is the original content. Then the reaction content to that content. Then the longer reaction content explaining what the shorter reaction content missed. Then a podcast where four people spend two hours discussing the original content, the shorter reaction contents and the longer reaction contents.

And we are supposed to believe, aside from the obvious engagement-farming, this is important because it starts “important conversations”.

Does it? Because I could have sworn we were already having these conversations. For years if not, decades.

I think that’s it’s safe to say that at this point, we as a society are not shocked easily. Whether that’s a bad thing to be desensitized to horrible ideologies and actions is a separate conversation. But the truth is, I am not easily shocked or even, disgusted anymore. I am not shocked that a man thinks women should have fewer rights. That’s actually at this point a pretty tame thing to say sadly. I am not shocked when men round the internet with their full government name, place of employment, picture of their wife and kids on their profile while commenting things like slut, whore, foid (female+humanoid, as we’re not full humans), sub-humans, stress-reliever and even worse. I am not shocked that people, even women, stating that working mothers are bad mothers. I am not shocked when prominent figures not only imply but with their full chests say that certain races are inherently superior, or that entire groups of people deserve less freedom because of how they were born. These are very old ideas. Disgusting, sure, but quite old.

And I am increasingly unconvinced that producing mountains upon mountains of commentary every time someone repeats them is doing much to dismantle them.

What exactly are we still trying to achieve here with, talking about this?

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” — Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.

That women are capable of working? They are working. That mothers can have and have had careers without becoming moral failures? Majority of the world does. That racial hierarchies are not a reasonable foundation for organizing society? We have the scholarship, the history, the research and the bodies.

How much more evidence must people submit before their humanity stops being an open discussion?

Of course people can change their minds. People leave racist communities, question extremist religious teachings, unlearn misogyny, and recognize beliefs they once defended as cruel. Education matters. Sure.

But there is a difference between someone trying to understand and someone repeatedly demanding that you justify why you should be allowed to exist freely. And most of the time, the debates you see online cater to the latter.

And we have seemingly chosen to treat both as equally promising educational opportunities.

A man says women should not work. Someone explains financial independence. He says women should choose better husbands. Someone explains abuse. He says abuse is exaggerated. Someone provides data. He says the data is feminist propaganda. Eventually, after everyone has supplied a bibliography and disclosed several traumatic experiences, he says women were happier when they knew their place.

And now we have this loop of wasting time, resources and energy while also simultaneously allowing more and more bigoted opinions through publicized showcasing in the name of debate and through that only make it seem that human rights is now, debatable (looking at you Jubilee).

“Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.” — Jonathan Swift, A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter’d into Holy Orders.

You cannot explain the importance of women’s independence to someone whose complaint is precisely that women have become too independent. He understands that having money makes it easier for a woman to leave. You are describing the benefit. He is describing the problem.

Likewise, telling a racist that racial discrimination harms the people subjected to it may not produce the revelation you are hoping for. Sometimes the harm is an acceptable price for the hierarchy they want. Sometimes it is part of the appeal.

We keep arriving with explanations for people who are asking for permission.

Then comes the familiar defense of these debates: “You’re not trying to convince him. You’re trying to convince the audience.”

Fine. Which audience? Through what format? With what result?

Because an audience is also watching a person receive attention, relevance, and possibly a considerable amount of money for announcing that other people should have fewer rights. They are watching his position treated as sufficiently respectable to warrant a debate. They are seeing the same claim repeated across their feeds until it becomes a familiar part of public life.

The rebuttal may reach them. So may the recruitment pitch.

And “at least people can see how extreme he is” is not much of a strategy when the people you are worried about may find the extremity attractive. Some viewers hear “women should be dependent on men” and recognize a threat. Others hear it and start imagining the benefits.

Visibility does not come with an automatic moral lesson attached.

Besides, we should probably examine why the burden of this endless educational exercise falls so consistently on the people being targeted. Women must debate misogyny. Racial minorities must debate racism. Someone whose rights are being questioned must remain patient, informed, articulate, and preferably pleasant enough that an undecided stranger does not feel alienated.

The person proposing the restriction gets to have an opinion. The person who would live under it gets homework.

“This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.” — Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider.

And after all that work, what changes?

The clip has a million more views. The man has three more podcast invitations. Everyone else has spent their evening proving something they should never have been required to prove in the first place.

I am not suggesting to conceal these beliefs or pretend they are not spreading. Expose them. Refute them. Treat them as the extreme, harmful positions they are. But we do not need to keep inviting someone to a “respectful debate” about whether other people deserve rights. Giving that question a chair, a microphone, and equal time lends it a legitimacy it has done nothing to earn.

Then we need to actually do something. And by “do something,” I mean really do “something”, work that changes conditions, not activities whose main achievement is making the participants look socially conscious. We do not need a five-hundredth period awareness campaign in a community where people already know they menstruate but cannot afford menstrual products, access clean water, or use a private toilet. What, exactly, are we making them aware of? Their own inconvenience? Awareness should lead somewhere beyond a photograph of the organizers holding a banner.

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.

We need to confront the conditions that give these beliefs power and make them profitable, with considerably more determination than we bring to discussing each new symptom. I am not saying it’s not happening, or that I am the first person to suggest this. Of course it’s happening and for a long time by incredible activists, but we need to publicize and popularize those much more than, the 76th think-piece.

And yes, that is difficult, especially when people at the very top endorse these ideas and benefit from pushing everyone else toward more extreme positions. People busy fighting over whether their neighbors deserve freedom have less time to examine who controls their own lives. There are powerful interests invested in keeping that arrangement going.

I do not have a convenient five-step solution to dismantling it. But seventy-five think pieces every time someone repeats a centuries-old prejudice is no longer a convincing strategy either.

Respectfully, we need to talk less and do more.

“Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance!” – Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot.