I guess what bothers me about the bullying thing is that it’s another triumph of identity politics, in that a bullied kid needs to have a named political faction that they can call on to defend them from their peers.
eg. protect nonbinary kids! protect trans kids! protect gay kids! protect kids of the non-dominant ethnic group! and so on.
Yes, these are all worthy causes. But what about kids who are just too quiet, or too loud, or look a little weird, or just don’t fit in with the others?
I mean, at some point protecting bullied kids is a necessary step.
If a straight kid gets bullied for being gay, because kids don’t give a shit about whether anyone actually really is gay, then is that structural oppression? And is setting up a LGBT-friendly student society actually going to help that kid?
It feels like identity politics is being used as a hammer on every problem.
On the other hand being able to name the thing which causes people to be bullied can be instrumentally useful. If a straight kid is bullied for being mistaken for gay, then yes eradicating homophobia could help with their problem, and the people whose job it is to remove structural oppression might be useful in that.
In addition, it can be argued that the basic mechanisms of bullying are extremely deep-seated in human psychology and vicious status systems, so trying to remove bullying itself might be less effective than removing pretenses of bullying which leaves less openings for it to happen. Knocking down ladders of hierarchy (and replacing them with status assigned on meaningful grounds, if removing status differentials altogether is too hard) is probably likely to aid in that.
However, there is definitely the thing where kids select the one which has the “bullying target” trait and then decide which status ladder to claim they fail on as the pretense (“gay” etc.) and at most removing the pretenses would make them make up a different one for that kid.
That doesn’t mean that the “bullying target” trait isn’t something to intervene on, just that it’s probably a harder problem. The weird kids are definitely suffering from other forms of structural oppression, just ones that we haven’t managed to pin down and name as easily yet (growth mindset!). “Bullied” is a vague and nebulous cluster in thingspace and clearly carves reality at strong joints, but it’s hard to see what exactly is the core issue and how to turn removing that into an actionable strategy, so the best we have been able to do so far is either generic anti-bullying, or identity politics which finds a more easily definable subset of the whole and focuses on the simpler question of doing something about that one. Both have their strengths and sometimes fatal flaws.
Being normative in ways that aren’t strongly linked to valueful things (it’s good to enforce the norm of “don’t yell at people who mind being yelled at” when done within reason and not overzealously enough to hurt those less able to control their voice, but not useful to try to force everyone to conform to “talk to people enough to seem normal even if you don’t have anything to say to them and the whole thing makes you uncomfortable”, also different spaces for different access needs can be very awesome in this) does confer privileges, and ableism etc. are kind of approaching some edges of this but I haven’t seen the core thing itself named. If someone came up with a practically applicable theory for that one it could be inserted into the tool labeled “identity politics” and the people who know how to use that tool effectively could do something useful about it. Or alternatively an entirely different tool could be developed but it would need to pull the right memetic levers; there’s a reason “let’s just not bully anyone mmmkay” pretty much never actually helps.
(In other words, feel welcome to give links and suggestions: I do have those 4000 SJWs to inject the memes into, after all. And to anyone who is reading this: you’re probably erring on the side of underestimating the value of your possible contribution. Unless it features slurs or other easily recognizable features of schoolyard bullying it’s unlikely be completely worthless and it could provide some important insight to this stuff at least indirectly. Some really good ideas have come from “okay this is wrong, but why exactly is this wrong?”)
(Also, the kids who called me gay all the time turned out to be totally right after all; it was my gender they had been mistaken on)
(via endecision)
4 months ago · tagged #steel feminism · 291 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
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