Prove You're Human

[tim]

In the space of 24 hours, a place that I thought was relatively safe for me has flipped to seem totally unsafe. I linked to the Planet Mozilla admin post before; most of the subsequent comments have defended "free speech" (which is to say, bullies' right to bully) and demanded that those of us who are LGBTQ prove our humanity. I had this to say in response:

Most of the replies I'm seeing are replies that ask me to engage in a debate to prove that I'm human and that I deserve the same rights and respect that heterosexual cisgender people with cissexual bodies do. I refuse to engage in that debate, because being asked to prove I'm human in a work space is exactly what is making that space a hostile environment for me. (Mozilla prides itself on its distributedness, thus there should be no denial that online spaces with mozilla.com or mozilla.org domains attached are no less work spaces than the physical offices are.) White, heterosexual, able-bodied cisgender men who have cissexual bodies are never asked to provide an intellectual argument that they're human -- their humanity is taken as a given. That the rest of us apparently have to have a debate contest to prove it is why we're not, apparently, welcome or equal.

The blog software just gave me a blank page when I hit submit, so I'm not sure if the comment went through; I'm posting it here for posterity.

Of course, it's not that I'm surprised that any individual in my organization holds views that are inimical to my life and existence. Individuals are entitled to hold those views and express them using personal resources, during personal time. What I'm surprised about is that the institution has so far vociferously defended using institutional resources to promote the view that says I should be stamped out.

If you're hiring software engineers in the Bay Area (especially to do work on advanced programming languages) and your workplace doesn't tolerate hate speech against people in any protected class, please take a look at my résumé.

Edit: I have always maintained an internal rule that I'll delete any comments on this journal that use any of the silencing tactics listed at Derailing for Dummies or the Geek Feminism Wiki's list of silencing tactics. I've never had to employ that rule until now. There is plenty of derailing and silencing speech everywhere on the Internet; my blog doesn't need to be a place to host it.

Comments

[tim]

It's really disturbing that when there's a disagreement between the powerful and the less-powerful, the reaction is so often to defend the powerful, as if they need the help.

Yes. I think this post nails it pretty well in that the author points out that many people would rather see themselves as "people who could potentially screw up and be criticized for it" rather than "people who could potentially end up oppressed and powerless", thus they reserve all their empathy for people who say oppressive things (with supposedly good intent). What to do about it, I don't know, besides (as rymenhild suggested) mandatory sociology classes.

[luinied]

What to do about it, I don't know, besides [...] mandatory sociology classes.

This isn't quite a concrete suggestion of something to do, but I did notice at the capitol protests last year a lot of enthusiasm for solidarity with the less rather than more fortunate, even if they're people who aren't just like us (whoever "us" is in a given context). Sure, plenty of people at the protests had taken sociology classes or had some history of involvement in one movement or another, but there were also plenty who had not, and yet everyone seemed receptive to the repeated messages of, for example, support for people of color who are being disproportionally hurt by [insert Republican policy here].

I can't say for sure how much of it stuck, but it felt to me like a damn conducive environment for encouraging people to expand the scope of their empathy. And it was really inspiring to me, because I grew up in small town Wisconsin, and, yeah, people in small Wisconsin towns haven't historically always been known for empathy towards the oppressed and powerless.