eternalsailordianamon:

danceswchopstck:

violent-darts:

couragetobe:

feminist-typhoon:

dxmedstudent:

thosearewritingwords:

icecoldcaffeine:

gingerautie:

I recently saw a post where someone commented that the incredibly charged issue they were arguing about followed them home, and they couldn’t escape it. And it reminded me why this pattern I see of people (especially young people) where the majority of their downtime is spent on tumblr, and their tumblr is mostly some form of activism, from thought out long posts to clicking reblog on a petition, is so worrying to me.

Various forms of oppression are background noise to a lot of people’s lives. Fixing that is not likely to occur within your generation. It might get better, but the chances of it completely vanishing are minuscule. Some activists go home after dealing with bigotry all day at work, and talk about oppression on tumblr. And if they sit down and watch a TV show, they think about how it’s bigoted. If they have a musician they love, they feel obliged to think about how they’re problematic.

This is awful for you, your metal health, and the people around you. You burn out, you start blowing up at people for tiny things because you’re so tired of it. It makes you miserable and unpersuasive, it’s emotionally exhausting.

And this isn’t just me saying this. When my grandpa was training to do work with the labour party, he was told that you had to have a hobby to be good at it. Because otherwise it destroys you. You have to have something in your life that is totally disconnected from the horrific things you are seeing everyday.

If you can’t find TV shows to watch because you can’t switch off the social justice analysis part of your brain, do something else your activism can’t creep into. Take up knitting. Build shit out of cans. Play the recorder. Lock yourself in your bedroom and play minecraft. Whatever you do, please, please don’t let activism and fighting oppression take over every aspect of your life.

Have a separate activism tumblr and a cat pics/memes tumblr. Or blacklist activist things on your tumblr. Set aside some time where you don’t think about how shit the world is.

You have a right and an obligation to look after yourself. Please don’t drive yourself into the ground for the sake of social justice. You can’t fight all the time, and you’ll be no good at it if you can’t take a break.

Activists (irl activists) are told to clearly separate their two main tasks which are providing help and making demands. You cannot help anyone in an environment where you are also making demands. You cannot help anyone in an environment where you are also complaining about systematic oppression or asking for change.

Tumblr completely conflates the two. The result of this is:

> Tumblr transgender activists, for instance, tell transgender people they are valid and important, then in the same breath, in the same post and on the same blogs, remind transgender people that they are unloved and unwelcome by society, along with factual proof of transphobic violence.

This is incredibly destructive. I don’t think I even need to explain why. It’s the best way to crush transgender people’s self-esteem, bar none. The message it carries is, “even those on your side know the whole world hates you”. It’s just plain dangerous.

> In so-called LGBT safe spaces on tumblr, for instance, there is near-constant bickering about straight passing privilege versus monosexual privilege versus allosexual privilege. It often escalates to absurd levels of aggressiveness (because it’s the internet, duh) and occurs nearly everywhere, making safe spaces unsafe. The solution tumblr found is to build tiny, microscopic safe spaces for each minority within the LGBT.

Because segregation fixes everything. Spoiler alert: it only makes people more afraid of each other and breeds wariness, misunderstanding and conflict.

When you want to help a marginalized community, you either provide help to individuals, OR you raise awareness about their struggles and make demands for social change. You can have a blog for each, and if you do irl activism you most likely have a separate schedule for each.

The most basic rule for helping minorities is that shelters, help lines and safe spaces should never host debates. The most basic rule of safe spaces is: everyone fitting the requirements to enter is equally welcome, no questions asked, no debate allowed on anyone’s legitimacy or identity or privilege.

Safe spaces, shelters and help lines must be happy, uplifting places where people feel welcome, loved, and important. Otherwise they’re unsafe and toxic. If you can’t provide acceptance and compassion for all members in equal measure regardless of their background, privilege or opinion, you’re not fit for the job, stay away from administrating safe spaces.

Raising awareness and making demands is something tumblr does very well an OP explains well how compassion fatigue works and how destructive activism can be, so I’m not going to dwell on it.

Just remember that not everyone has the emotional strength for it, including those in the community you’re trying to help. Most men who have sex with men, for instance, don’t want to hear about how their community makes up 40% of the french population tested positive for aids. We know, and we also know that nearly 20% of that population has aids, but we also need to think about something less dreadful from time to time. It’s a matter of survival. Also, when you’re staring at your or someone else’s misery 24/7, you become so bitter you lose the ability to help anyone. Self-preservation makes us more useful, as activists. 

(Apparently a lot of tumblr activists missed the point of OP’s post, which was compassion fatigue, by a few hundred miles; and assimilated it with something like “hahaha I’m so privileged I can afford not to think about discrimination evar”. I’m not surprised.)

Great posts. I really liked the discussion of safe spaces by the second poster, since there’s an LGBTQ muslim group that I go to and recently we had a facilitator who was very debatey, and at one point cited an academic paper in response to someone’s story.

And it was weird.

Because while I definitely agree that some debate is required (especially behind the scenes) in order to make safe spaces safer for everybody, the way it was done made me feel like I was constantly being tested for how problematic I was, and that the facilitator was assuming I was problematic until proven otherwise—in part because of the contrast between their gentleness with the friends they’d invited to the space (and whose opinions they therefore already knew) and their manner with the rest of us.

Which—I’m happy to question and rethink my assumptions, but I don’t want to go to a safe space and feel like the facilitator is automatically assuming bad faith or unkindness on my part, or that I need to be carefully watched so that I don’t make the space unsafe for other participants. I mean, I’m a woman-liking-woman who wears the hijab; people make those assumptions about me (that I’m a danger to other LGBT people) all the time, even when they know my orientation. I don’t want to also face that in a safe space that’s supposed to be specifically for people like me.

This made me think a lot about safe spaces, communities like tumblr, and the sheer fact that we are all human and aren’t always going to get it rght first time round.

I am so thankful that I was exposed to this post. My training in activism didn’t include separate distinctions between providing help and demanding change. I never thought of those as being separate to begin with. So when I was running an activist space and my number 1 goal was to be as safe for marginalized identities as possible, I was operating under the philosophy that educating people on privilege was the best way to make a safe space. Even when I was personally experiencing conflict between feeling safe and educating I didn’t have the words to describe what was happening or the rift I was watching unfold.

Part of it may be that I don’t feel safe unless I am with people who I know will react out of humility and kindness if I tell them they are doing something to hurt me. I still haven’t figured out if that is a healthy way of experiencing safety or not. But it makes things difficult because people who have the best intentions will still bring societal violence into spaces that are supposed to be safe purely through ignorance that has been fostered and encouraged by society. So it isn’t that I am upset with the person for displaying what they have been taught to display as much as I feel scared when I don’t know how someone will react if I tell them that something they displayed was violent or oppressive towards me.

I definitely am interested in other peoples thoughts on this because these dynamics have been really difficult and painful. And I am also wondering if that means that education is generally not safe or a safe space. Because I would really hope it could be and I want to know if it can’t so I can do what I can to stop perpetuating this issue.

Same. I have had the same experience and issues and am having the same thoughts. Anyone who as more know-how in community building, safe spaces, and social justice education giving guidance would be fantastic.

My experience of “safe space” ideology, in general, has been overwhelmingly negative. 

Which is not to say I have not experienced spaces in which safety, even safety of a particular group, has been prioritized and facilitated and worked very hard towards. It’s just those spaces do not use the term “safe space”, and don’t fit themselves into that framework. 

What “safe space” has always ended up meaning, in my practical experience, is: 

– we have decided that X Category are the people we care about

– we have decided what X Category people look like and need. We have also decided they all look like/need the same thing, that their experiences are the same, that they match our (that is, the facilitators’) experiences, and that we all value the same things. 

– we know that X Category people are always victimized, and never victimize others; X category people never possess power, but are always disempowered

– in this space it will be assumed that institutional power is the same as interpersonal power: if someone’s institutional category has more power than someone else’s, this is without alteration reflected in their personal and small-scale social spheres

–  there is no method whatsoever to deal with anyone taking advantage of these assumptions; there is no recognized possibility of abusive interpersonal dynamics occurring within the Safe Space, or being perpetuated by people from X Category

– when/if conflict arises, right/wrong will be determined based on who most closely fits the understood Ideal of What Category X People are supposed to look like/think/have experienced. Those who are further from the understood ideal will be understood to be Less Valid/Less “Really” Category X than others, and their concerns will be deprioritized thru ignored thru framed as attacks. 

– but we are a Safe Space. If you do not feel Safe, it is because YOU are the one making things dangerous by not adhering to what is understood to be Safe; if you feel unsafe here, it is an automatic sign that you yourself are bad and dangerous, and will be treated as such, unless/until you can prove that you are More Oppressed than others by Accepted Means (hint: this is not likely)

– the feelings of those who socially dominate the group will be interpreted to reflect reality. Ergo if a space facilitator feels attacked, you are attacking them; if they feel hurt, you are morally responsible for their hurt, and must accept that responsibility and be humble and contrite, regardless, unless likewise to above you can prove that you are More Oppressed via the Accepted Scale. 

– we believe “safety” is something it is possible to achieve by Sticking Close Enough To Orthodoxy/praxy as determined by whatever theory of oppression/power dynamics/etc we like best. 

– we believe that the way to balance out the fact that the harms done to Category X people are cared less about by general society than the dominant group is to stop caring about harms done to individuals from the dominant group. 

So at this point the terms “safe space” will literally tell me “you’re about to walk into a minefield and you may be blown up at any moment; do not, for one second, even start to believe you are ever on safe ground.” 

The places that have actually striven and more or less succeeded at being safer for various groups I am part of than Society At Large, in contrast, have mostly focused on finding mechanisms and specific behaviours to empower those who are threatened, to facilitate communication, to recognize that sometimes needs are literally irreconcileable and thus provide separate opportunities/spaces depending on need, are very well aware that while institutional and systematic oppression fucks some groups up more than others individual/small-scale interpersonal toxicity and abusive behaviour can come from anywhere and small-scale vs large-scale power dynamics are very different things, and in general have focused more on having people be less shitty to each other in the here and now than on anything else. 

And they absolutely 100% have been, as OP notes, quite separate from spaces where the active and explicit purpose is to educate/yell at/make demands/etc. 

Now, the same umbrella organization may run both programs. They may have their support wing and their advocacy wing! But. 

(eta: oh god I also made the mistake of looking at the notes and I just have to say that every time someone says “yeah well SOME people are LUCKY enough to get to tune out because THEIR oppression doesn’t define their whole LIFE!” I laugh with bitter hysterical acid and work so, so hard not to go look up and find out what torture has been inflicted on a neuroatypical child today. It gets particularly hilarious – for values of black hilarity – if I’ve just gone through a new week of realizing the ways in which my neuroatypicality and mental illness have come within hairsbreadths of killing me.) 

There is SO much here that I want to think about. Thank you.

A universal safe space is impossible, and things get especially bad when people treat reducing the oppression in the world as a zero sum game. I have basically been ruined forever by “therapy” and IEPs I had when i was a kid, but I’m one of the lucky ones- a lot of autistic people are killed on the regular, and proposing killing us all isn’t outside the Overton Window of anywhere except spaces especially for autistics. Countries will refuse to take us as immigrants, and because i was autistic my abuse was constantly ignored and my chronic pain and illness denied, to the point where I almost died and have had surgery three times. Still, I consider myself one of the lucky ones, and am confused about people who would not have their humanity denied insist that I am not “defined by my oppression” when literally all my life has been circled around it, and acting as if to attempt to find a method of escape is immoral, rather than a necessity for people, because when your life actually has been defined by it… you only have what tiny releases you yourself can make. I would imagine that the people screaming about how everything need be political have some way to decompress or cope, or something- a group of close friends, or a healthy home life, or the ability to focus, or the health to have hobbies that don’t require that. I am only just learning now how to do anything more than barely survive, how to do things that I enjoy again without feeling tremendous guilt or inadequacy. I think maybe the people who say things like that may be stuck in the same place I was. I can’t help but pity them, which is horrible, as I know how painful it is to be pitied, but I never really learned proper sympathy- I suppose that I ought to learn that too, at some point.