[CW This post may cause cerfs (see below) to get defensive. Go open the door and then sit with that discomfort. Have a cookie.]
I recently participated in an online “debate” (I know, I know, I should know better) with a person I thought was ally, who turned out to hold views about me and my community that I find abhorrent. This was a personal disappointment to me because I thought we held the same values, but it helped me to focus some threads I’ve been worrying into a useful knot. I’m going to explain it three different ways, so you can skip ahead to the part about the animals if you like.
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about what to do with people in our activist community who suck. Like trans exclusionary people, surprise Zionists, islamophobes who don’t like hijabs but have no Muslim friends, who want to criminalize sex workers, or who think they can arrest their way out of the drug crisis.
So often within our movement, these people call themselves anti-imperialist, anti-racist, feminist and progressive. Often they are explicitly campaigning for the groups they are talking about- getting lots of credit and grants and cookies-without listening to the people closest to the issue- here Palestinians in occupied territories, hijabi women, sex workers, drug users, trans and non-binary folks and indigenous people. Some of them I care about deeply and their ignorance about the damage they cause is amplified by how much I care.
I expect that members of many marginalized communities experience betrayal by their shitty allies as disappointment, cynicism and rage. I have certainly felt this in my own work as a trans person working on trans inclusion issues; but I also experienced it from the other side when people of colour called me in for saying something racist, and when people with disabilities pointed out that saying “that’s lame” and “that’s crazy!”, are in fact ableist and mental health slurs. I’m grateful to those folks for having enough faith in me to come and get me, and engage with me about what I said, and I’m still sorry it was necessary to nudge me to make me come around. I’m trying to pay forward some of that uncompensated emotional and political labour, and to be less shitty myself.
Defensive tantrums; and how accurate labels aren’t insults
People get all mad at being corrected or accurately labelled with terms that destabilize their views of themselves as good activists. Sometimes they mobilize weaponised etiquette by focusing on the tone that understandably fed up people use to correct them. Sometimes they make contextless appeals to ostensibly democratic notions like open debate or free speech. They call their allies to help them. These are examples of subject-specific variants of white fragility which is a super defensive outrage at being called to be accountable for what they do and say. I was certainly horrified to be called a cultural appropriationist, or to be told I was using language that hurt my comrades in the social justice struggle.
You know what though? If you said something racist, people of colour (who are experts in racism) get to say you said something racist. Saying you said something racist, or sexist, or transphobic is not an insult, if it is actually accurate; and your denying it or having a little activist tantrum and virtue-signalling is just noise in the way of you learning something, and a bunch more bullshit the people good enough to put up with you have to deal with; while you get around to hearing them. Saying something racist doesn’t necessarily make you a hood-wearing, cross-burning racist- it means you said something racist. But saying something racist and not stopping, denying that you said it, or complaining to racialized people about how hard it is to not say hateful things to them, are signs that you are a shitty ally to them and may also be pretty firm indicator that you are, also, in fact, at least a little bit racist.
The Activist part:
How responsible social justice works, or privilege bullseye
Here is a picture of a bullseye. Lots of concentric circles. Let’s put power and justice and safety and comfort in the middle- lets label it privilege; and let’s put equity-seeking groups of all kinds and the sorts of things that hurt them, closer to the outside. Literally on the margins. This is where abuse and violence and weathering oppression are. This is not a coincidence. The system is designed to work this way until we blow it up.
People farthest from justice get to decide if you are actually an ally to them, because you are standing closer to justice. They can expect you to be accountable for what you say, and they can evaluate how you are doing. This is because you are standing in the centre of power, relative to them.
This means for racists, (or anti-Semites of TERFs or SWERFs or sexists of whatever you are; whatever we all, on some level, are), deciding if you are anti-racist or pro-marginalized group, or not-part-of-the-problem, is not up to you. It is up to the people affected by the oppression you are claiming to mitigate to evaluate your alliance. Trans people decide if you are trans exclusionary. Women decide if you are sexist. POCs decide if you are racist, or if what you said or did was racist. Indigenous folks get to dispute the way you are doing (or not doing) decolonization. Pregnant people get to decide if your policies are anti-choice, not their fathers. The Prime Minister doesn’t get to declare that his blackface is not racist.
Also, because there is a clear centre of privilege and chances are that you are close to the centre of it if you are being called in or out for your remarks or your conduct, you don’t get to lie about the fact that you are in the centre. Claiming you are actually on the margins relative to other people when you are not in disingenuous.
Similarly, you don’t get to continue behaving like you being in the centre is not problematic by relying on people outside the centre to do your social justice and education work for you, by answering all your questions or by engaging in protracted debate as if their oppression is somehow an academic exercise on a balanced playing field. It is wrong to make people who are doing less well than you, or who are oppressed by a system you benefit from, take care of you, and manage your feelings as you struggle with your complicity. Seriously, this is the entire reason therapy exists – to help you grow- and also to help people recover from the shitty way privileged people have tantrums while they learn. Go pay a very patient counsellor a living wage to hold space for your processing; and don’t expect anyone to do it for free, especially folks farther from justice than you. Maybe turn around and spew your shit uphill, use your spoons to listen to someone who can’t access social services (a friend, not a project) and use your privilege for good.
You also don’t get to decide how marginalized people talk about themselves. Trans women are women because they say they are women. This is not debatable, and it is certainly not up to cis people, even cis women. Nobody gets to reclaim slurs like the n word unless they have been targeted by people using that word. The word that starts with T and ends in Y which sounds like an abbreviation for the word transmission, is used to oppress trans feminine people, but not non-binary people, so I will never use it, but those folks can. (yes, this means my views on whether the Luke Cage series was political enough don’t matter a bit. Black and bulletproof people are the authorities here, not me.) This is fair because the people being evaluated for their alliances have privilege over people who don’t.
And since we are talking about language, using very serious words like abuse, harm, and danger for how you feel about request to talk, (because you needed to have your privilege checked so much that other people have to come do it for you), is unfair- especially when you misapply these words to describe your feelings to people who are experiencing actual abuse, harm. This doesn’t mean you have not been abused or traumatized (that is horrible, I’m so sorry, how can I support you).
Know that you won’t heal by packaging your bad life experiences into anecdote projectiles and launching them at people outside your silo with weaponize social justice words *for the purpose of excluding other people* who incidentally are also trauma survivors, plus they have to deal with oppression from people who should be and claim to be their allies. No cookie for you.
If you are earnestly working for social justice, claiming that you are not being shitty when you are; demanding to have your shittiness explained to you while not listening; or saying that not being shitty is too hard is not acceptable. Learning happens when you recognize and admit that on this issue (if only this issue, gah this work is heavy and slow) you made a mistake.
Glass house
If metaphors are helping you, consider where you are standing in a glass house with power and freedom at the top, and deprivation at the bottom. Many of us picture ourselves closer to the bottom that we are, but here we are, working away at the things that keep us down. Let’s say we are focused on taking down that glass ceiling. Are we being careful enough about who we are dropping glass shards on, or how much we have reinforced the glass floor to keep out people beneath us? Have we recognized that our room might be one silo among many? Have we mistaken our neighbours, or downstairs neighbours, as our oppressors? I think some of us have. I’m going to put the cookies away now.
Safe house (the part about the animals):
[Image of Cerf looking out one window, and Rabbit looking out another. This is the cover illustration of the children’s book I’m about to talk about]
I think it is the duty of everyone in a safe room to open the door when someone seeking safety knocks. I saw this on a coffee cup the internet was trying to sell me, but of all the platitudes this one has some legs. I used to talk about this using the example of the French children’s’ song where a rabbit (herein “Rabbit”) goes to knock on a stag’s door (“Cerf”) to ask for help hiding from the Hunter, or in some version, the Wolf. It goes << Cerf cerf ouvre moi ou le chasseur me tuera>>, which for folks who didn’t have bourgie-aligned parents who got them into French Immersion means: ‘Stag, stag let me in, or the Hunter will kill me”. The largely Anglophone audiences I speak to usually don’t get this reference so here is an adorable video that tells the story with cloying musicality. In the subsequent verses various different forest creatures come to ask Cerf’s help and they all get let in, overcoming their differences and avoiding the predator.
This comfortingly radical kids book called Cerf cerf…ouvre moi by Émile Jadoul takes this lesson one step farther by making all the animals’ reason for coming in to Cerf’s house be the surprise birthday party for Wolf- so everybody gets to come in.
The point I’m trying to make is that we need to open the door, and if Cerf who has the privilege of not being at large in the big forest and about to be shot doesn’t open the door, Rabbit has every right to say he is not a good ally and also a mean jerk. This is exactly the right moment for Rabbit to be outraged, and to express their point in a way that animals *not running for their lives* might find to be curt and slightly less than respectful.
The Academic part:
[Image of a light switch. The panel is dirty and there are three switches]
This part is about social science models. I’m sorry I went to school for too long. There is more about the animals later I promise.
To employ a different metaphor, we know there are a bunch of binaries in the world. A binary is a choice of two options that I am using here to describe social system. First among these systems are the social science trinity of class-race-gender, expressed in binaries as: rich/poor; white/POC; man/woman. These names for these systems are capitalism, racism, sexism or genderism. Equally important categorical divisions also exist, expressed in binary as straight/queer; intersex/endosex; cisgender/transgender; Anglophone/not; documented (citizen)/not; literate-credentialled-degreed/not; able/disabled; ok/traumatised etc).
These binaries are not neutral, by which I mean they are intentionally unbalanced. They are purpose-built drivers of inequity. The first term (rich people, for example) are better off than poor people by design because of the structure of our economic system, (degree-havers in the secret exclusionary language of academia call this late capitalism, or post-modern imperial capitalism).
If we plot out these sets of unfair binaries here on the chalkboard together one above the other; and line up all the privileged terms on one side; we can see a series of global winners and global losers.
Rich – poor
White – POC
Man – woman
Straight – queer
Endosex – intersex
Cisgender – transgender
Anglophone – not
Documented – not
Credentialed – not
Able – disabled
Ok. – traumatised
Free – caged
etc.
Never mind the labels I’ve chosen for now, just look at the chart. Also try to forget that I’ve made a bit of a career out of complicating these binaries by talking about how none of these are actually a binary, but really a continuum (more like the dimmer on a light than a switch that is either on or off) because as a non-binary trans queer person I live in lots of the in between places. For a second, pretend this simplified model is true and real.
Now circle all the ones that apply to you. Go on, right now. I won’t look. Feel free to add any sets I have forgotten. I’m used to talking about these ones but I care about the other ones too. You can go ahead and google the unfamiliar terms now if you need to.
Good. Pretend we shared our circling exercise with the class. I’m an enby trans person with some health issues, but I’m also a tragically over-educated white lawyer, with citizenship, living in the global north with enough disposable capital to keep two giant dogs to whom I am not allergic. Another imaginary classmate is a disabled cis lesbian of colour imprisoned at the American border because she doesn’t have magic papers that make her a person there. Another imaginary classmate doesn’t have a computer or read English, and yet another got mad at the big words that reduce the lived experiences of a chart, and went outside to have a smoke instead. Some are quite affluent and check a lot of high-powered boxes. They have lost interest and are managing stocks on their phone during this seminar because they think this is not about them. Several people who were waitlisted for this class are outside being assaulted, because of the structures we are talking about here, as if this was only an intellectual exercise.
Notice how our classmates plot all over the place, and some of our charts line up and some of them don’t. Look- not all queers are New Democrats for example! Over here on what I like to call Our Side of the Barricade, but which others call our Community, or social justice activists, or socialists, or “trans activists” (Boo!), hardly any of us are winning all the sets. Some of us are winning none of the sets.
There are implications for how we do social justice given this undeniable, true, context.
First of all, in any one binary set, because they are uneven, there are winners and losers. The losers are farther from justice, so they are experts in how the system works, because it is designed to exclude them. No actually, on purpose. The system functions in exactly in way it was designed to work. Racialised people are experts in racism because they experience it every day. They get to look across the privilege divide and see who is winning and they are totally entitled to tell those people to fuck right off.
Conversely the winners are winning. Some of us got lucky. The unfair system is designed to be invisible to us. This is how white people can claim they don’t see race (seriously stop doing this), or that blue lives matter, or that all prisoners or drug users deserve to be punished. This is what makes well-meaning able people without kids hold the meeting in the room at the top of the stairs right at bedtime, because it hasn’t occurred to them to do otherwise. Legion unfair systems have been designed on purpose to oppress and exclude, and to favour some over others. Part of the structure makes these inequalities invisible to the people not suffering from them, who are conditions to believe they are winning because they worked hard, they are better, or they are deserving for some reason. This is the central lie of inequality- that people who are winning because of the accident of their birth deserve to benefit from an unfair system.
The Spider-Man part, or the tax on privileged
The radical social justice implications for the winners of any binary was best expressed by Uncle Ben when he said to Spider-Man “with great power comes great responsibility”. If you are winning any binary, it is your duty to reach across the privilege divide and help up people who are losing. This means violence against women and rape culture is men’s responsibility too. White supremacy is something white people need to work actively to dismantle and we need to demand this work of other white people. Decolonization is an uninvited settler concern. If you agree that the binaries are unfair (and I think you do because you read this far, on a weekend, thank you), then you shouldn’t be able to abide the sets where you are winning and other are not. We already agreed that the status quo is harmful, right? You should not pretend the set doesn’t exist, that it is fair, or that you deserve it, when you haven’t done anything to deserve it, or even that justice is only for the deserving. Because if you don’t, you are part of the problem. The tax on privilege is activism.
Responsible social justice work also means winners don’t get to drive the effort to dismantle any binary. White people and other people of relative privilege don’t get to rescue anybody. We have a responsibility to use our privilege for good, but we must not seek to lead the liberation of other folks, but be guided by folks we are hoping to ally with in an ethical and responsible way.
I will be extra radical and say the responsibility of winners in any social system that privileges us over others is not merely to level the binary, but to dismantle the system. In the way the point of the Communist Manifesto was not to help everybody up to be petty bourgeoisie, but rather to explode the system. (There you go Marxists. I know y’all feel a little left out of the identity politics talks). And like how one of the early goals of feminism was to dismantle gender as a category.
Now. Intersections.
We also can’t pretend that any one set of exclusions is more important than any other; or that only the ones you are losing are important. It is a fact that being on the losing end of more than one binary is worse than 2x bad. It is actually bad to the power of 2. (There you go Math folks. I know y’all feel left out if this social science hub bub. There is Venn diagram coming up so hold on). The famous example is that black women have a worst time than both black people as a group, and women as a group. They are always both black and women- and these exclusions compound one another. And when white women don’t take racism seriously; or black folks don’t take gender seriously, it sucks extra for black women. I’m neither a black person nor a woman, but Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is, and I believe her when she and others had the patience to explain this white feminists (which I, reluctantly, am).
So in our chart above (remember the chart?) there are lots of losers or have-nots in lots of categories- and they all have some things in common. These things are mutual and compounding oppression. This means their struggles, solutions, and their liberation, are caught up together with other equity seeking groups. So the world is not fair when white women are equal to white men. It is actually my job as someone who doesn’t need a handrail in the toilet or childcare or large print materials or ASL interpretation to demand them. Here is a complicated Venn diagram about it (there you go again Math types) to underline the point that these systems overlap in complicate ways and my chart, above, is a gross oversimplification.
Activists tips for rabbits and cerfs – more animals here
If, like me you are coming to hate the chart and want this another way, it means all the forest animals are in it together. Cerf has to let *all* the other animals in, and if they so choose and they feel safe enough, they should all go in to Cerf’s house. Because Cerf has an actual house, where it is warm and safe, hopefully with a ramp at the front door, and likely Cerf, being a house-haver and likely therefore resourced in other ways, has thought to make some gluten-free vegan baked goods, is providing childcare, and has free transit tickets. Possibly Cerf’s government is inadequately funding the rabbit rights non-profit that runs out of Cerf’s garage (staffed largely by cerfs with a token rabbit for the calendar), but that is a fable for another day.
With me still? Intersectional means all the forest animals together in the same house. Shove over a bit Cerf and make some more room.
But what about…?!
I know. There are some issue with this. Obviously, the herbivores should have places safe from Wolf and from the Hunter. Obviously, rabbits have their own discreet issues which are none of Cerf’s damn business. They should organize by themselves without other animals telling them what to do, but they should expect solidarity and sufficient-no-strings-attached-funding from the bigger faster animals, (and especially the ones with houses and foundations), and they also should listen to the mice that Wolf and the Hunter squish on their rabbit hunts, and think about how maybe rabbits don’t have a monopoly on trauma and that their agendas could, and should align with other animals.
There is also the issue of what to do with Wolf. Wolf is probably a cop or a child-apprehension social worker. It is not Wolf’s fault that they exist in a structure where they eat everybody and don’t have to think about it much. But they do need to see the impact of eating everybody and stop it. I need to have hope Wolf can be shown the system that employs them is unfair and that they should be invited to help change it. I need to believe Wolf can be put out of a job if the system that allows the Hunter to shoot everybody can be changed. I know Wolf is entitled to a Just Transition so they don’t starve while this happens. I think conversations with Wolf could be useful, but I don’t expect Rabbit to have to have them, especially when Wolf is drooling over the soup pot.
There could be times when Rabbit needs Cerf to do the heavy lifting of getting through to Wolf about their behaviour, and for maybe recruiting Fox to persuade Wolf to try having a good snarl at the Hunter. See how that works?
There is also the problem of what to do with the Hunter. I agree with Angela David and others that handing the Hunter over to Wolf is no help at all. I think this is true for cerfs and rabbits who hurt each other too, and as a reforming Wolf (lawyer), I’m interested in community responses to violence and harm that don’t rely on criminalizing aggressors, because I believe that hurt people hurt people and we can’t just shun all our attacker. I hear Cerf that they had struggles with the Hunter too, but I give those struggles less credence because of the relative safety that Cerf has achieved, sometimes even to the point that they get to go to the nice clubs and socialise with wolves, so they think it is ok to express publicly that wolves should be allowed to march in the Unicorn Parade. the I’m also not sure how to resolve the discussion the forest animals are having about a diversity of tactics, and what to do when Wolf and the Hunter won’t voluntarily change. That is yet another fable.
But back to shitty allies, which I think is where I started.
A Cerf who leaves the door unlocked, and leaves rabbits out on the porch is not quite a Wolf, but they are a shitty ally. A Shitty Cerf might be your alarmingly racist grandmother you have to see at holiday supper who gives to catholic charities and leaves peanut butter balls out for the winter birds. Maybe this Cerf calls Wolf to tell on Rabbit for trying to get inside, for setting up a warren in the park so only some rabbits have to keep a constant lookout for wolves, or for fighting with other rabbits because the doorstep is only so big.
If Cerf wants to be a good ally to forest creatures and have them agree, then Ceft has to walk the talk. Cerf can’t join the Hunter in saying Wolf Lives Matter, or join Wolf in saying Hunter Lives Matter, or to say Moose is just like Wolf and the Hunter. It is wrong for Cerf to say the house doesn’t exist, or that the forest is fair, that bullets or inevitable, or that this setup is something Rabbit deserves or should just lean past. Cerf doesn’t get to say they are afraid of that “bad ombre” Rabbit, or “nomadic and uncivilized” Moose, or anyone else who is still outside. They shouldn’t think that having once had to run from an angry Moose is the same thing as Rabbit getting eaten by Wolf. Cerf can’t say feeling uncomfortable is the same as actually being unsafe.
Equally it is not Cerf’s business to Cerf-splain how the rabbits should arrange their tent city; whether Hare counts as a rabbit, or anything else which is rabbit business. Cerf doesn’t get to clutch pearls and ring hands about how hard it is to have a house [ahem, I seem to remember this is actually Moose’ house that Cerf occupies] and how bad they feel for the rabbits that they would like to rescue but can’t because they rabbits are too rude sensitive or disruptive; or how heavy and fiddly the door latch is. They don’t get to say it is abusive for Rabbit to point out basic facts that a) the Hunter is coming, b) Ceft is saf(er) inside, and c) actually as matter of fact, in very polite terms if it isn’t too inconvenient, Rabbit is still shivering their little cotton tail off a mat that says “Welcome”. If they are trying to be good a Cerf, they especially don’t get to have a tantrum and argue through the keyhole to the remaining rabbits on the porch about how opening the door after the Wolf comes, but before the Hunter arrives should get them a cookie.
Happily, ever after
Now close your eyes and go to sleep. We have a big Revolution tomorrow and I need you not to be cranky. I think the accountability session with the Badger yesterday went really well. I’m glad Moose felt safe enough to talk antlers with us, and Wolf enjoyed their birthday cake. Thank you for the baked goods and the transit tickets. I can drop those leftovers at the park unless you need them. Moose and Rabbit are already asleep in the big room and I will leave the door wide open on my way out.