Callout culture, for those who are not familiar, is a toxic dynamic that social justice communities, especially those on the Internet, tend to fall into. Callout culture essentially means that when you do something oppressive, everyone is allowed to yell at you as much as they like and whatever they like, even if you apologize. It reaches its epitome on Tumblr, in which people occasionally tell suicidal people to kill themselves because they used the word “crazy.”
If you don’t know much about callout culture, I recommend you go down to the “further reading” section: there are lots of links that explain it on a more 101ish level than I am going to here. This is definitely inside-online-social-justice baseball.
Tone arguments are a real concern. I am going to put the points I agree with about callout culture rhetoric up front in the vain hope that people will not attempt to disprove me by talking about them in the comment section. There are people who will use another person’s perceived anger as a reason not to engage with them. This is shitty, and also a logical fallacy. After all, if someone says “you motherfucking asshole, the sky is blue, I hope you kill yourself” the sky is still blue and you should not believe the sky is green because that person was a dick.
It is also relatively common for people to use accusations of someone else being a jerk to recenter the conversation around that person’s jerkishness rather than around whatever thing the first person did to make the second person be a dick to them. That’s derailing! And kind of awful!
In addition, the kyriarchy is in general a lot better at recognizing asshole moves against privileged people than asshole moves against marginalized people. So you get people saying “Jeez, I just said ‘tranny’ and this crazy tranny blew up at me. So oversensitive!” No, dude, you’re a dick and she got pissed at you cuz you’re a dick. Reasonable people get pissed at dicks.
Anger can be empowering. Marginalized groups in general are policed about their anger against their marginalization. Some groups, such as people of color and the mentally ill, are stereotyped to be angry, so even the slightest expression of anger by those groups ends up being read as Scary Black Man or Monstrous Mentally Ill Person. Other groups, such as women, are not expected to be angry at all. For these reasons a lot of marginalized people tend to repress their anger.
For these groups, the right to be angry matters. Having a space where they are free to express their anger is liberating for a lot of people. Instead of pushing their anger down and smiling and making nice, they finally have a chance to express the emotions they actually feel. I mean, there’s a reason telling people that their emotions are Wrong Things and they Should Not Have Them is a tool of abuse: invalidating people’s emotions is seriously shitty for their mental health.
That doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want. Probably the biggest flaw I see in callout culture thinking is the inability to separate “my anger is valid, liberating, and empowering” from “literally anything I do because of my anger is valid, liberating, and empowering.”
Guys: there are some things that are beyond the pale. Beating people up. Any sort of threats. Doxxing people, unless it’s to keep them to cause greater harm to other people (doxxing Violent Acrez? Fine. Doxxing some random kid who said something racist on the Internet? NOT FINE). Telling people to commit suicide. Et cetera, et cetera, you get the idea.
I’ve seen people say “I’m not comfortable policing how oppressed groups express their anger.” BullSHIT you aren’t. You are perfectly comfortable saying that you shouldn’t send people rape threats or call a black person a nigger even if they say horribly oppressive things. I am just suggesting that we expand the list of things that are Not Okay a little.
Further reading
Alicorn, Me And The Abstracted Persona of the Anti-Ism Community At Large.
Flavia Dzodan, Come one! Come all! Feminist and social justice blogging as performance and bloodshed.
Jo Freeman, Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood.
Natalie Reed, Five Ways Cis Feminists Can Help Build Trans Inclusivity And Intersectionality (mostly the first point, but the rest are also good and you should read them)
Why it a logical fallacy not to engage somebody who is rude. F. ex , if I am looking at the sunset, and say”oh, I just love to look at the red sky”, then suddenly a stranger turns up saying “you motherfucking asshole, the sky is blue, I hope you kill yourself”, I would see no point engaging them and no obligation to talk.
You can feel perfectly free not to engage with them, but the sky is still blue, even if every Blue Skyist is a doucheface.
I’m really glad people are talking about this. I basically dropped out of online activism when I realized that there was no mechanism in place to combat what are, in essence, bullies- who happen to have marginalized identities- and I guess, more importantly, no apparent interest in talking about one. There was a person in one of my online communities who was very aggressive about calling people out. She seemed to me to be an… unpleasant person in general, but a lot of people I liked and respected supported her, because usually her anger was directed at “the right people”. And often I agreed with her point, but there was something that made me afraid of any interaction with her.
Then, it turned out that she had done something really terrible (I kind of don’t want to give details, because I don’t want people to speculate on whether she really did it or not- she did, she admitted it without realizing she was admitting it- and because she lives in my area and I’m completely irrationally afraid of somehow calling down her wrath on me, even though there’s no way she’ll connect my RL and net IDs.) and slowly, people condemned her for it. And it turned out that a *lot* of people disagreed with her actions in general, but were afraid to call her out because she was on the right side, and because people were afraid to be seen as *ist, and because they were afraid she would turn on her. So instead of trying to talk about it, people just withdrew and fell silent, and talked in locked posts or in IMs instead, leaving the impression to outsiders that this behavior was a-okay- heck, valorized!
And that’s… I don’t want that to be my activist community, you know? And even after that happened, people were saying, well, it’s wrong that she did [horrible thing], but that’s not connected to her righteous anger from before! But… I mean, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but regardless- people were *afraid* of her, even without knowing what she’d done. People were dropping out of the discussion because of her. And I feel like- like there’s got to be *some* way to address this, but I don’t know how. Because it’s complicated! Because- well, all the things you said, about anger being empowering, necessary. And I don’t know if there’s an easy way to sort out the sort of toxic anger from the healthy kind. It’s like pornography- I feel like I know it when I see it, but that’s kind of hard to codify. But I feel like people are in denial about the fact that people can and do use activist language to hurt other people, and I think it’s got to be okay to talk about that.
Oy. All of this, yes.
I also think there’s such a thing as people who are just buttholes. If they’re privileged on X axis they end up as X-ist buttholes and if they’re not they end up as “I’m doing this in anti-X-ism’s name, really” buttholes, but frankly, they were fated to be buttholes all along. Some people just need an excuse.
NOT every anti-X-ist! Or every angry anti-X-ist! This does not mean “anyone who makes me uncomfortable must just be a butthole and I can ignore their points!” No!
But it happens. People are still people. SOME anti-X-ists really are just buttholes who’ll use any handy justification for their buttholery.
(See also: religious people and atheists. I fervently believe that the jerks on both sides of that are both carriers of the “would’ve been a butthole regardless” personality type.)
Cliff: I still remember the time I was reading someone’s rant on Tumblr and I thought to myself “yes, if you were middle-class, white and male you would be an Internet Libertarian.”* Some people are *bad* at the concept that you’re supposed to care about issues that don’t affect you. If they’re a middle-class white dude screaming about how taxes are oppression, it’s really obvious; but if they’re a trans woman of color talking about transmisogyny and racism, it often *isn’t.*
I feel like someone came up with the idea that you are supposed to care about things that don’t affect you and named it “intersectionality” and then it turned int a stick to hit people with.
*not to be confused with actual libertarians
@talacaris: the fallacy is in the supposition that because someone is angry (rude, etc.) this means they are, de facto, wrong and therefore any facts they present need not be engaged with. In truth, whether someone is angry or not doesn’t affect the facts (unless the facts in question happen to pertain to whether that person is being angry, rude, etc).
Of course, the converse also applies IMO. As someone who often publicly critiques feminist culture (from the inside, as it were) I have often been the target of such anger. The wanton expression of anger as a means to avoid engaging with uncomfortable truths is a form of derailing just as much as anything listed on Derailing for Dummies. But, as ozy points out, callout culture defines expressions of anger as always valid and justified, which in turn entails that one cannot discuss the expressions of anger because doing so would be, by definition, derailing to the discourse the community is trying to establish. The willingness to stand up and say these sort of things is exactly why I follow ozy’s blog. As an insider, I know the reasons behind the establishment of Derailing for Dummies and the like; but, also as an insider, I hate to see a cause I believe in —justice and equality for all— founder because it is unwilling or unable to address root causes of the injustice it seeks to dismantle but too often perpetuates.
@ozymandias42: Thanks for the paragraph “For these groups, the right to be angry matters.” This is something I’ve known, of course, but the way you spelled it out really helped make things click. The difference between “knowing” and “grokking” I suppose.
@talacaris and ozy about the sky example in the beginning of the comments:
That example didn’t quite work. The sky, or parts of it, indeed looked red at the moment because of the sunset.
In such a situation, the appropriate response to someone who says “you motherfucking asshole, the sky is blue, I hope you kill yourself”, is probably recommending therapy. That is, if you wish to engage at all.
Topic? I’ve got nothing. I need to and will learn more about it.
There’s a phenomenon where people that identify with a group have trouble critically examining the actions of the group, and I feel like this exacerbates this problem. One of the major aspects of callout culture is that it’s filled with shibboleths. Anyone that calls people out will absolutely make sure that their in-group identification is obvious, and I feel like this tends to cloud a lot of people’s perspectives. The most insidious cases like this that I’ve seen involve going “you’re obviously not black/trans/whatever because X”, when X isn’t something definitive at all. It tries to create a clear in/out group conflict, and when people think that conflict is happening it seems like they’re willing to let a lot of things slide that they would otherwise be trying to do something about. You see something similar in a lot of situations (religion, atheism, the republican party) but it seems like callout culture really enables the assholes because there are so many little things that you can use to create a conflict.
I’ve been trying to wrap my mental digesters around the finer points of the Tone Argument for a while now. There is a person in my social circle who will very easily slide into an aggressive, sarcastic tone at the slightest disagreement, and it makes interesting debate impossible because this person will escalate to yelling and/or withering condescension in the face of any continued counterpoints to their argument. This for anything from important social justice issues such as racism, rape culture, all the way down to truly trivial things such as being unsure what time something happened the previous day. It really, really is not what this person says that is offensive so much as the aggressively superior way they say it, and how whatever topic is at hand becomes merely a platform for another opportunity for this person to assert their Eternal Rightness.
Is it wrong for me to be offended by this, because, Tone Argument? If so, that leads me directly around to the conclusion that I should be okay with being spoken to as if I am stupid and worthless every time we disagree about which pizza delivery service to call, which I am not okay with, and cannot make myself be. It seems something of a paradox; is there something I’m missing?
I never really got why tone arguments implied that you never have to reign your anger in. It’s a reason to be angry, sure, and anger doesn’t invalidate any point you make, but you still owe it to yourself to be angry as seldom as possible. Even if anger is a legitimate outcome of an discussion that doesn’t make it a preferable one.
I’ll be very interested to see how this series comes out. The problem I’ve seen with too many of the posts on call-out culture that I’ve read over the years (and I don’t mean to preemptively accuse Ozy of doing this) is that they’re written from the perspective of a potential *target* of a call-out. But that means by definition you’re writing from a position of privilege. One of the things I really liked about Natalie Reed’s recent discussion of the issue (http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/11/16/five-ways-cis-feminists-can-help-build-trans-inclusivity-and-intersectionality/ ) was that she clearly grounded herself in the position of the alleged beneficiary of a call-out (as a trans person witnessing anti-transphobia call-outs — as opposed to, say, a white person witnessing anti-racism call-outs) and directed her discussion toward more-privileged people’s call-out behavior.
I gave up with public activism because of this. Seriously, fuck it. It’s not worth it. The idea that some people are entitled to self-care and others aren’t, for whatever reason, is complete and utter bullshit to me. I absolutely refuse to engage with anyone on any topic where that isn’t a given.. And unfortunately that leaves me to my own personal blog with a very small following. There are many things that social justice does horribly, horribly wrong and doesn’t even want to face to possibility that it might be best to reconsider that. And that was the last straw for me. Those untouchable subjects that only deserve a mention when it’s brainless ire are actually important to me and are related to my identity. And saying “fuck you” to the SJ circlejerk is my attempt at self care in the face of this bullshit ‘callout’ culture. Thanks Ozy, but acknowledging this is so far little better than a bandaid on a veritable bullet wound.
Link Roundup 3: Conversations About Communication Across Power Gradients | Research to be Done
The Jo Freeman article was both fascinating and depressing. It was just … it’s the same thing. Freeman called it “trashing,” we call it “call-out culture,” but it’s the same friggin’ cancer eating away at movements and at lives. As far back as 1976, at the very least.
Sigh.
@anon for this, sorry
I don’t know if I’ve encountered the exact same person you have, but I’ve met persons similar. It’s why I dropped out of online SJ stuff, too. There was no good way I found of pushing back against the toxicity and outright abuse without painting a target on my own back, and dang, there are only so many hours in a day.
This is some great reading. I am a regular tumblr user – and, in order to avoid backlash from either side, I choose to remain anonymous.
Anyway, I do consider myself a feminist and a social justice advocate. However, I find that there are a lot of SJAs on Tumblr who take things a little too far (particularly when it comes to the issue of “cultural appropriation”) – including telling people to “kill themselves”, even though some of those people may be suicidal. And don’t even get me started on the “drink bleach” nonsense, which seemed to not become popular until after the story of Amanda Todd’s suicide. And the SJ community is quite divided on the whole public reception to Amanda Todd’s suicide. Those who focus on the more non-feminist branches of social activism think that her story gets too much attention, compared to Shania Gray.
However, I find much of the anti-SJ people to just just as horrible – if not more so. Basically, “rustling jimmies” has become to the anti-SJ community as “check your privilege” has become to the SJ community. It seems like this much needed “middle ground” is sparsely divided.