This is a calling-in for anyone who went to a 50501/No Kings Day protest. Please - we need y'all, and we need you to stay informed and engaged about what is needed to *actually* pull our country back from fascism and work towards liberation.
#Repost @theconsciouscitizens:
If you are a 50501 supporter, listen up. History already tells us what works and what doesn’t, so let’s reflect, because if we aren’t careful we’ll waste our time walking in circles.
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Hey-- there is a discussion happening about racism in the bandom and that's a good thing. We need to have this discussion and to continue having this discussion.
If you are white and feel overwhelmed by this, pay attention to that feeling and sit with it for a moment. Consider why. Allow yourself to room to breathe in that discomfort and recognize that this is not about your personal feelings, although you can personally make a change.
If you are white, you can make the scene better and more inclusive by ceding your space to BIPOC. You can actively listen. You can make a point of stepping back when folks who are not white are speaking and by amplifying their voices.
Are all your friends white? Why is that?
If you have friends who are people of color, do you uplift and support them when they talk about racial issues?
What actions do you take in your daily life to make your space in the scene more inclusive?
This is not an issue that we solve by making a few posts on blogs and then tucking it away until the next time somebody does a Racism. This is something that each of us must actively confront every day in all spheres of our lives.
The encumbrance of debate or discussion via backlisting, deplatforming, demonetizing, shadowbanning, censoring, etc. does not obolish or prevent the spread or consumption of information you dislike - it pushes it underground into fringe corners of the internet, and outside of the public sphere where it goes uncontested and unquestioned, is harder to monitor, and grows more twisted and disfigured than it already was.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant and the best way to combat bad ideas, misinformation, and/or disinformation as you see it is to address them and their perpetrators head on with more speech. Instead of calling out, canceling, censoring, and pretending your above debating people you disagree with or ideas you dislike, which has consistently proven itself ineffective at achieving anything aside from driving people further away into their echo chambers, and you into yours, where none of our collective preconceived notions are ever challenged - confront what you are at odds with.
If you (especially public intellectuals and people of influence) refuse to change the minds of people you disagree by "calling in", or through kindness and conversation, with art and satire and creativity, and by your own actions and the way you conduct yourself - then mercilessly combat those ideas head on in the squared circle of long-form debates or discussions on the largest stage possible.
"How long is it going to take before lawyers realize that the simple act of trying to repress something they don't like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see (like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort) is now seen by many more people? Let's call it "The Streisand Effect."
- Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the term in 2005 in relation to a holiday resort issuing a takedown notice to urinal.net (a site dedicated to photographs of urinals).
A veteran human rights educator explains the value of teaching students to call each other in rather than out.
Calling in is a technique that does allow all parties to move forward. It’s a concept created by human-rights practitioners to challenge the toxicity of call-out culture. Calling in is speaking up without tearing down. A call-in can happen publicly or privately, but its key feature is that it’s done with love. Instead of shaming someone who’s made a mistake, we can patiently ask questions to explore what was going on and why the speaker chose their harmful language.
Call-ins are agreements between people who work together to consciously help each other expand their perspectives. They encourage us to recognize our requirements for growth, to admit our mistakes and to commit to doing better. Calling in cannot minimize harm and trauma already inflicted, but it can get to the root of why the injury occurred, and it can stop it from happening again.
We can change this culture. Calling-in is simply a call-out done with love. Some corrections can be made privately. Others will necessarily be public, but done with respect. It is not tone policing, protecting white fragility or covering up abuse. It helps avoid the weaponization of suffering that prevents constructive healing.
Calling-in engages in debates with words and actions of healing and restoration, and without the self-indulgence of drama. And we can make productive choices about the terms of the debate: Conflicts about coalition-building, supporting candidates or policies are a routine and desirable feature of a pluralistic democracy.
I’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic.
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I called off work for the first time. Immediate guilt. But I won't be able to work with chills, running to the bathroom to puke, and my head feeling like a dirty washrag that's been set on fire.
Calling In, Take 2: Power, Accountability, Movement, and the State
In the winter of 2013, I wrote a piece titled, “Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable.” Over the next four years or so, this piece would become the bane of my existence. Let me explain.
This piece sort of exploded – I was receiving emails and messages that the piece was really resonating with folks doing justice work across all types of communities. It was true and probably is still true how tired we all are of the constant worry that we cannot make mistakes – not even among those who we call friends, family, and/or comrades.
There have been numerous challenges that have arisen since the publication of this piece. The first is that it was so wildly appropriated by white people to rationalize or justify their own racist behavior. It’s been wildly appropriated to push away valid critique of racist or otherwise oppressive behavior. I remember as Ani DiFranco was being called out for playing music at a slave plantation, that white lesbians were quoting “Calling In” to tell Black women and women of color that they shouldn’t be critiquing Ani (or other white people) in such a harsh way. I don’t think I need to offer any more examples on how this piece or this concept has been misconstrued to mean, “I can do whatever I want and you have to be nice to me.”
The second challenge actually has a lot more to do with my own political development than external factors—how it was being read by my community or how it was being used by those inside and outside of my community. In the four years since writing this piece, I regret to some extent not writing more about the relationship we have to each other in movement versus our relationship to each other and that relationship to the state – the apparatus which seeks to and often succeeds at dividing, repressing, and conquering (literally and metaphorically) us.
I have become regularly frustrated by some of the contexts in which “calling in” has been used or named. It’s less about people annoying me (because people annoy me a lot) or some idea that I am the arbitrator of what “calling in” as an accountability practice or process actually means. It is actually more about the individualistic ways we think of accountability, power, and our relationships to each other. In many ways it is not surprising that we conceptualize ourselves as simply individuals. We are born into this world by ourselves (unless we’re a twin or a triplet, or something, but you get my point), we experience much of the world with only ourselves (even if many of our experiences involve others), at night we fall asleep and wander into the dream world on our own, and when we die – and we all die – we die alone.
We take the reality of the human experience as being both terrifyingly and rewardingly lonely and compound it with the deadliest economic, political, and social system in existence, capitalism, and most of us end up having a lot of shit to unpack around our individualism, and specific to this context, our understanding of harm and repair.
So what does it mean to hold each other accountable in a world that is incredibly messy? In a world where we don’t have much to rely on but the reality that things are incredibly messiness? That isn’t to say that there aren’t topics or issues where we are capable of drawing a clear line. We know how to do that – that’s why we have vibrant social movements.
But we have to start figuring out the space that exists between ourselves and our communities, our communities and the movement, and the movement and the state. Not only do we have to start figuring out that space, we have to do this in a way that is honest, transformative, and real.
I don’t think that I can say this enough: we are human beings and we have our shit. We carry with us the traumas we experience from early ages, that we don’t start developing different coping mechanisms for until later in life. For some of us, it is much later in life or it is never actually dealt with at all.
Being in movement has taught me that movement brings together the maladjusted weirdos of society who have decided or have been led to doing something about their own and others’ maladjustment. When I say “maladjusted” I am capturing a pretty broad stroke of people who are, by the standards of this system and society, not fit to be a part of this system and society. We are rightfully upset, uncomfortable, and angry. In most aspects of our lives – at our jobs, in our classrooms, in our neighborhoods, and most public spaces, including those that are allegedly democratically elected to represent us, we do not belong nor do we have power.
Movement is where we have power. Movement is where those of us who have seen the most fucked up shit; have made a whole lot out of the nothing slapped to us by capitalism; have had to endure the incredulous crimes against humanity, whether it be gentrification or police brutality, homelessness or addiction, incarceration or unemployment; have once believed that we might not survive another day have managed to find others, to find a way, and to fight for our right to life every day.
The power we have in movement spaces is beautiful, transformative, and sometimes (and increasingly so) threatening to those who have power over us. But the power we have can sometimes fuck us up. Let’s be real. Sometimes we get power and suddenly no one is a friend, it’s only foes. And it’s especially foes if not everyone agrees with us. Sometimes we get power and we become stagnant, we start operating in the interest of preserving our own power, instead of remembering why people’s power means anything to begin with: we have to build with other people to win. Our fingers tight as a fist are much stronger than they are a part. Our arms linked are a much stronger barricade than our shoulders alone in the cold. The harmony of many voices is much louder than just one.
The movement gives us power and we start acting like calling out greedy politicians and corporate profiteers or politicians who want to rid the world of queer and trans people is the same as calling out our cousin who makes sexist jokes at the family reunion or even a fellow organizer who takes up a lot of space as a white person. These are fundamentally different relationships. Our relationships to capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy as pillars holding up a destructive and deadly system is fundamentally different than our relationships to the human beings who have to survive these systems.Â
The state is an oppressive force that seeks to cultivate division and thrives on our disconnection and alienation from each other. Let’s try our best to not feed it with our harms and grievances as if it could help us resolve them.
Our movement is, in many ways, fighting to confront the state. We are disrupting the institutions and systems harming our people. Our movement is not mechanized with an oppressive ideology; we are not weaponizing ourselves toward profit; we are not propping up fake democracy to make the rich more comfortable; we are not fighting to dispose of our people, leave our people behind or for dead. If we are truly building our movement to confront the state, we’ve got to stop treating each other like the mistakes we commit are the same heinous crimes that the state commits against our people. We are all capable of causing harm but we can’t operate as if the harm we cause to each other is the same as what we experience from the state. Often, the harm we cause to each other happens in the process of trying to build a different world.
Somewhere along the lines, the idea of “calling in” was put in opposition to “calling out.” I don’t believe that such dichotomy exists, since I think that our accountability should be more rooted in our understanding of power, to each other and to the forces that seek to exert power over us, than rooted in our individualism and selfishness about who gets to be right and who is wrong.
But ultimately, whether you want to call in or call out, let’s all try to be on the same page about who our shared enemy is – and it is not each other. I stick by a lot of what I originally wrote in that piece in 2013. Movement building is about relationship building. And it’s also about nuance. In the piece I elaborated on how we use our relationships as the basis for determining whether we "call in" or "call out." I’m still less interested in how we label our processes for holding each other accountable and more interested in the process itself. Some questions that I would pose to folks when they are deciding how they want to deal with an oppressive situation are: what is the depth of the relationship I have with this person? Are they someone I consider an acquaintance? A friend? A comrade? What values do we share (if any) and what are they?Â
There are deeper political questions that should inform how to hold people accountable, too -- because everything is political and more importantly, because everything requires us to think of ourselves within the context of a broader society. Our society necessitates harm in order to thrive and it can either continue to thrive or be delegitimized based on our responses to harm.
We live in a real society of disposability. We talk about it a lot but I think sometimes we forget how entrenched we are in it. When we talk about the prison industrial complex, we are talking about a world that puts people in cages for the rest of their lives because of an accountability system where the state arbitrates who gets to make mistakes and who doesn't. The structural violence carried out by the state shapes and informs how we relate to each other interpersonally.
Lately I’ve been returning to the fact that we are human beings. This kind of statement is obviously a little oversimplifying. We are human beings who are greedy, selfish, cruel, unforgiving, vengeful and also deeply feeling, compassionate, remorseful, creative, apologetic, loving, and caring. Some of the human beings on this earth commit viler nastiness than just being human – we know that this shows up in our communities and in the broader world as sexual, emotional, and physical violence, all tied and connected to capitalist exploitation and oppression: white supremacy and anti-blackness, transmisogyny and homophobia, islamophobia and xenophobia, Zionism and anti-Semitism and more.
I'm not saying that there is never harm nor that we should martyrize ourselves to minimize the harm we experience. I'm saying we should remember we have all caused harm, have the propensity to cause harm and if causing harm or making mistakes were the basis for whether or not we maintain community with each other instead of our humanity, our dignity, our aptitude for change, and our belief in a radically different and better world, we'd have no community. And probably just as scary, if not more, we’d have no movement.
There is no perfect way to deal with harm or conflict. We are trying our best to maintain our relationship to each other and ourselves in a world that is routinely dehumanizing, under a system that doesn’t care about what we mean to each other. But we should care about what we mean to each other.
As a queer and gender non-conforming person of color, a migrant from Viet Nam, and a communist, what keeps me alive is the fact that everything changes – that in fact, everything must change. When something has stopped changing, it’s dead. If there’s nothing that is useful from this piece, any of my (largely unoriginal) musings on power, accountability, movement, and the state – I hope at least that we can all remember and respect that everything changes. That this be a gift we do not take for granted, that this be a gift we give to each other in service of a better world, a world where not only are we capable of transforming but one that our transformation made possible.
In the spirit of change, I acknowledge that four years from now I might write a totally different piece, depending on where the forces of this gruesome planet are, depending on the tenacity and resilience of humanity, I might write a take three. But for now, I hope that I’ve done some justice to those who I am fighting alongside with each and every day, whose mistakes I share in, whose vision I believe in and co-create, whose wisdom, commitment, and revolutionary optimism reminds me that healing, being free, and almost anything is possible.
