Diversity Kills Inclusion

Diversity Kills Inclusion

Obviously, a lot of people are going to disagree,  Usual commenting rules apply.

This is a bit of a ramble, but bear with me a little.

What do men (and women) want from marriage?

The simplest answer is sex, but – sooner or later – sex palls.  The more accurate answer is that men (and women) want to be comfortable.  They want to come home to a safe place – a safe space – where they are accepted for what they are, where they don’t have to keep their shields up and phasers set to stun and so on and so on.  Indeed, if you think about it, most of the stereotypes about bad husbands and wives revolve around people who made their partners uncomfortable (by cheating, by overspending, by being lax or nagging or … (etc)).  People want a safe place and if they don’t get it, they get annoyed and start looking somewhere else.

Now, what does this have to do with fandom?

One of the best explanations of fandom is that it is a ‘safe space’ for people who weren’t very popular anywhere else.  The nerds, the geeks, the people who played D&D when the [insert long rant about jocks and mean girls here] were marginalised everywhere else, so they built fandom so they’d have a place of their own.  Like all such communities, it grew in ways its creators – insofar as it had creators – didn’t anticipate.  Now, science-fiction and fantasy fandom can be divided into two separate factions, as outlined by this post:

First, a faction that prioritises acceptance over politeness.

Second, a faction that prioritises politeness over acceptance.

At their extremes, both factions are dangerous.  The first faction finds itself defending the undefendable, such as Walter Breen, and – in doing so – sacrifices its moral authority.  The second faction finds itself punishing the socially inept, often over more socially adapt wrongdoers who are either capable of presenting themselves in a good light or possessing attributes that make it harder to conceptualise opposition (such as Requires Hate).  In doing do, it sacrifices its moral authority too.  Thus we have the first faction branded as witting hosts to racists (etc) and the second faction branded as humourless wokescolds who just won’t stop nagging and shut up.

Both factions have a tendency to make people uncomfortable, but the second is considerably worse.  Why?  Because the definition of something that needs to be punished – i.e. impoliteness – keeps changing.

I may be socially awkward, but even I know there are some things that give offense … and quite reasonably too.  No one will fault someone for complaining they were called a n***** or a b**** or h**** or whatever.  If someone goes to a convention, gets wildly drunk, gropes everyone within reach and generally makes a complete ass of himself, I wouldn’t fault the convention for not inviting him back.  And I wouldn’t fault other conventions for taking note of his behaviour and saying ‘no, we’re not taking a chance on him.’ 

The problem with the second faction, however, is that it’s hard to know what’s considered offensive ahead of time.

What started this train of thought was skimming through lists of links I’d saved over the last year, including a number concerning the incidents prior to Worldcon 76.  (There are links here, here and here, plus plenty more – fair warning, most of them have an axe or two to grind.)

The basic facts of the first incident, or at least the ones everyone seems to agree on, are that non-binary writer and editor Bogi Takács was given the wrong pronoun by the convention staff.  Takács uses e/em/eir/emself  – or singular they – for his pronouns.  And what struck me, the first time I heard of the affair, was that I’d never heard of anyone using such pronouns until now.  As a couple of other commenters pointed out, it’s quite likely that the convention staff copied the bio, ran a spell check when they’d finished compiling the document and changed the pronouns without realising they weren’t a spelling mistake.  (My MS Word seems to think that em/eir/emself is wrong.)

Now, this is the kind of error that creeps in all the time.  I’ve had my name misspelled quite a few times.  I don’t blame Takács for being annoyed.  But it’s also the sort of error that can be corrected with a simple email.  People tend to respond better to a polite request to change things than they do to public humiliation.  If you lash out at someone, particularly for a mistake others can make easily, you run the risk of making yourself look bad and/or unreasonable.  On the other hand, if you give someone a chance to fix their error, you make yourself look reasonable (and if they refuse to fix the mistake, you can – reasonably – make a fuss about it.)

So, you ask, what’s the point?

The problem with diversity sensitivity training is that it draws attention to differences between people.  It draws lines between groups of people.  Worse, it puts you in the wrong for offending someone from a different group, even when you honestly never meant to offend them.  There are, for example, words in UK English that are quite offensive in US English.  I’ve had editors point them out to me.  But if someone took offense, they’d be taking offense at something I never meant to do.  I’d see them as the villains.  I’d have stepped on a landmine I didn’t know existed until it was too late.

Going back to the two fandom factions, the first faction understands that it’s easy to make a faux pas.  The second faction, however, has no such understanding.  It demands punishment and is merciless to anyone who argues for simple human decency.  And that makes people scared to step out of line.  If they don’t know what’s likely to cause a tempest in a teapot, how can they keep from starting one?  And this, in turn, tends to poison people against inclusion.  They’re scared to be inclusive because, the more people they include, the greater the chance of stepping on one of those landmines.   They are not comfortable.

Indeed, this attitude can be seen everywhere these days.  From one point of view, this is outrageous.  From another, it’s simple self-defence.  When you think your fellows don’t have your back, when you think you won’t get a fair trial if you make a minor faux pas, you cover yourself as much as possible.  And if this means not opening up your community, well … so what?  You want to be comfortable.

The more diverse a community becomes, be it fandom or something larger, the more tolerant people need to become.   There must be an understanding that people make mistakes.  There must be steps taken to prove that someone acted out of malice, rather than simple ignorance or being pressed for time or something along those lines.  And if relatively minor mistakes are fatal, there’s a strong incentive right there to refuse to admit fault and change.  A great many problems, these days, exist because someone could not afford to admit they were wrong. 

And if we don’t find a way to live together, we’ll wind up tearing ourselves apart.