Community and difficulty
(Nimue)
Here in the UK we have not descended into civil war. The racists, looters and rioters turn out to be quite a small percentage of the population, while the people willing to get out there with placards and samba bands turn out to be numerous. Neither of these things surprise me. However, for many people this has been a point of discovering what kind of unpleasantness lurked in their community all along.
We are all inclined to think the best of our friends, and of the communities we participate in. We like to tell ourselves the comforting lie that it isn’t people like us who do the terrible things. This has the unfortunate effect of making life easier for haters, abusers and all the rest. We don’t see them in our communities because we are pretty sure they aren’t there to be seen. We ignore the little red flags, determined to think the best of them. It’s only… we tell ourselves, we minimise and look away.
No group is magically free from problem people. Most of the time they aren’t that visible – especially if you aren’t the target of their predations, sexism, racial hatred and so forth. It’s harder to see what’s not being done to you, and when someone is nice to you, it can be unpleasant imagining that they aren’t always nice. Often, we prefer not to hear it, not to be made uncomfortable about our friend choices. It is easier to believe the victim has over-reacted, or fabricated the whole thing than to believe that someone you have invested in is acting in a deliberately nasty way.
Simply being willing to accept the idea that your community *could* have shitty people in it, helps. It puts you in a position to notice and act if there is a problem, where the wilfully oblivious just won’t notice. Knowing that your people could be problematic is essential for making safe spaces.
Willingness to be uncomfortable is so important. We can’t build safe and healthy communities without being willing to be uncomfortable sometimes. If we close ranks to protect ‘our own’ to protect our own image and personal tranquillity, we become complicity. We enable harm to continue.
We have a responsibility to hold each other to account, and to demand the best of each other. The more power we have in any communities we are part of, the greater the responsibility we have not to ignore problematic behaviour. Abusive and bigoted people often believe that everyone around them agrees with them – if you give them tacit support through silence and inaction, you keep them feeling entitled to cause harm.
If you aren’t a confrontational person, one of the best tools is to politely ask for an explanation. It works really well in face of ‘edgy humour’ where just asking them to explain why the joke s funny can make them expose their own prejudices. Quiet bemusement can get a lot done. Asking why they think what they do can be effective in face of people just repeating what they’ve heard elsewhere. For the more extreme cases, the new American model of just identifying it as ‘weird’ can get a lot done. Explicit non-support can take many forms.
It’s all to easy to end up online picking fights with strangers where that changes nothing. This is not a good use of your energy. There’s a limit to what any of us can do. If you want to work to promote justice and reduce hate, then your best focus is the spaces you move through physically. Do what you can to make those spaces safe and inclusive, and to challenge any small signs you see of prejudice and bullying. People who do not think everyone similar to them agrees with their hatred are less likely to feel they can act on it.
