Your essay should be Muslim immigration should be banned

longweekend58 wrote on Jan 3^rd, 2017 at 10:37am:


I seem to recall it was you who refused to submit your entry on the topic you were supposed to. You handed in something on a totally different topic that you had plagiarised from someone else.

I’m an artist first. But I decided long ago that my art would be in the service of fighting oppression.

Since then, I’ve waded more deeply into social justice spaces, and I find myself surrounded more and more by people professing these same aspirations.

Being in these spaces has been therapeutic in so many ways and has created some of the best support systems I could ask for.

It’s comforting not to have to constantly explain yourself and your work. It’s beautiful to learn from and be around folks who understand ideas like microaggressions, gaslighting, white fragility, and all the other odd terms that describe the myriad, important, and insidious ways oppression operates.

But some of those ways are too insidious to recognize even within these spaces. Some are, in fact, unique to these spaces. Some oppressions are fostered by the very things supposedly set up to help justice spaces thrive. Inadvertently, they create power structures mirroring those they’re working to address.

Being in these spaces for a while now, I’ve noticed that I’ve been increasingly receiving feedback that my writing is inaccessible. I dismissed a lot of this critique on the basis that I am, at my core, a big idea and theory girl. My way of communicating isn’t supposed to be meant for everyone.

But that became a more difficult excuse to embrace once I noticed these concerns coming even from those who generally embrace theoreticals.

So when I read Kai Cheng Thom’s piece “9 Ways We Can Make Social Justice Movements Less Elitist and More Accessible,” I understood how many of the things she listed were problems.

But it took me a while to piece together how so much of what I learned and embraced in these spaces would inevitably lead to those problems – like not being able to address certain mistakes or ignoring activist hierarchies.

It seemed clear that some of the items addressed in her piece are based on systems of power that only benefit a select few, just like those systems I have dedicated my life toward eradicating.

I wondered: What if my increasing inaccessibility was proof I was on the road to those same problems? What if it was less about whether or not my big ideas are a problem and more about whom those ideas seemed to be for and in service to? What did it mean that I hadn’t always found weird academic jargon comforting, even while theorizing, but I do now?

Being someone who often thinks and writes academically, I needed space to engage with the issues important to me in a way that made sense for me.

Activist spaces provided room to flesh out big theories and concepts, but many also implicitly prioritized those things. Often being set up for and by other people like me, these spaces sometimes benefitted us to the detriment of everyone else.

So I started vigilant observation for any problematic behavior I felt encouraged to take part in simply by being amongst people (like me) who would benefit from it.

And in doing so, I recognized ten patterns that demonstrate how activist spaces can inconspicuously feed ideas of elitism and inaccessibility.
Read on at
http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/05/inaccessible-elitist-activism/

These guys are ludicrous.

longweekend58 wrote on Jan 3^rd, 2017 at 11:09am:


Excuses, excuses, excuses.  Weazel, weazel, weazel.

Cowardly conduct.

Big Donger wrote on Jan 3^rd, 2017 at 10:17am:


Yes. Why?

Excuses, excuses, excuses.  Weazel, weazel, weazel.

Cowardly conduct.

Black Orchid wrote on Jan 3^rd, 2017 at 11:36am:

agree..

The rules are a bit strange..for instance a lot of people will vote based on their personal like/dislikes of a particular poster.. unless they are submitted anon.