#topic: privilege

7 Ways Social Justice Language Can Become Abusive in Intimate Relationships

February 17, 2016 by Kai Cheng Thom

There aren’t a lot of things I know for certain in this life, but there is one thing I have known for a long, long time: What lives at the heart of abuse is fear – and the power to turn that fear into violence and control.

When we live in fear, when all we have known for all our lives is fear, we are capable of transforming even the best causes and ideas into weapons of abuse – even the cause of social justice.

Let me tell you a story to show you what I mean: A few years ago I took a deep breath, looked one of my closest friends in the eye, and told him that I thought he should stop beating up his boyfriend.

He blinked at me in surprise. He shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what I was saying. Then he said, “But it isn’t abuse if I hit him. I’m more oppressed than he is.”

It was my turn to shake my head in disbelief as I struggled to get a grip on what was happening, what was true, what I believed, what my responsibility in the situation was.

It was true that my friend was, on a systemic level, “more oppressed.” He was racialized, and his boyfriend was white. He was raised in a working class family, and his boyfriend was upper middle class.

Like me, my friend had grown up knowing trauma after trauma as a result of systemic oppression, while his boyfriend had lived a life of relative privilege.

In feminist and social justice communities, intimate partner violence, or domestic abuse, is usually understood as the violent use of power by one partner to control and terrorize the other.

Feminism, anti-racism, queer and trans advocacy, and other kinds of social justice-based thinking also recognize that people of certain identities – for example whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality – are given greater power and privilege in society.

Because of this social power imbalance, social justice communities tend to believe that it is much easier for men to abuse women, white people to abuse people of color, and so on. Social statistics on intimate partner violence support this belief. And this is what I have always believed, as a feminist and activist.

But in that moment with my friend, I was forced to wonder, does this mean that a “more oppressed” person can never be responsible for abusing a “less oppressed” person? Can a woman never abuse a man, or a racialized person a white person?

And how many times had I, in moments of fear, terrified of being abandoned yet again by a white, cisgender male partner, resorted to using the only power I had – the language of feminism and social justice, words that had given me strength and saved my life when no one would – to try and seize control of my relationships?

“If you leave me, then you’re just as racist as all the other white gay boys. You don’t want have sex with me anymore because you’re transphobic. I’ll scream at you and call you whatever I want – don’t tone police me.”

The thing is, I believed those things when I said them, believed them with all my traumatized, terrified trans girl of color heart. A part of me still does.

Because it’s true that social oppression plays itself out in romantic and sexual relationship. Too often, privileged people hurt and exploit their marginalized partners and are never held accountable for their actions.

But there is a difference between expressing oppressive relationship dynamics in order to expose privilege and incite self-reflection, and manipulating the language of social justice to win a fight with your partner.

There is a big difference between pointing out that your partner is more privileged than you and using that fact as an excuse for hitting them.

This conversation is so, so complicated and scary to open up, because it forces us, as feminists and activists, to question the foundations of our beliefs about identity, power, and violence. It forces us to question ourselves and what we are doing, in the world and in our bedrooms.

But I think we need to go there.

We need to look at abuse through a more complicated lens.

We need to learn to understand what is happening in our own relationships not just by ticking off identity boxes, but by deeply and carefully examining specific behaviors and the motivations that can lead to violence.

We need to start looking at the ways in which social justice ideas – the same ideas that liberate and empower us – can also be used to harm and dominate people.

So let’s begin.

I mentioned previously in a reblog as well as my post on Thought Policing, that being inside the SJW community made me feel largely like I was a pawn on a very large game of moral chess.

It is something the community demanded out of me, and ultimately drove to me demanding it out of my peers. My about page was thoroughly detailed of my identity, my mental problems and illnesses, and to a point where at one time I felt the pressure to surrender information about sexual abuse I had endured. This being all information I would never have thought to surrender to a stranger on the street, or someone on a forum topic somewhere, in order to gain the “permission” to speak my opinion.

I had began to think about it upon seeing a humorous tweet, which I’ve lost the source of now, but more or less mocked this culture by comparing the details we need to surrender to things like our social security numbers and credit card pins. And it was the first time the absurdity of feeling pressured to give up information about such sensitive, private topics, in order to feel ... safe, actually was.

And now my existence, something I could not readily control, was simplified, refined, as a tool, a label, a handle to use me in a discussion against my will. I no longer was a complex, living creature, with an interweaving web of complexities that came upon from my means of existence and personal life long experiences. I was forced into a cookie-cutter existence, and any bit of myself that did not fit these labels were either discarded... or defined as something else entirely.

While still deep inside the toxic circles of the SJW community, I began to liken my daily experiences online in the blogosphere as a game of chess. I would often refer to my own about page, and other’s. Did my preened, simplified and defined set of labels allow me to produce a checkmate for those I argued against? Sometimes, it did, but many times, I was defeated by the simple fact that the other’s labels outpaced mine in the oppression olympics. Never mind the fact I was disabled, had PTSD, was trans, etc. If one label was lesser than another’s label, I could be trumped, and ultimately my experiences and opinions never mattered at all.

And as this culture evolved, as this culture progressed and spiraled in on itself, I began to see people trumping other people based on vary vague labels they either attribute, without actually asking the person in question, or gleam from a quick glance on their blog.

The amount of times I’ve seen things said like “This post has good points but the OP is a ____ so it probably should be discarded.” Even if the post had nothing to do with the “sin” designated to them. The mere fact that the OP was deemed something undesirable immediately doomed them to a silent holding cell labeled with their ‘crimes’, and were no longer considered a person to be reasoned with, if even a person at all.

And it’s interesting to compare this behavior to racism and xenophobia. When discussing of certain groups of people one cannot relate to, generalizing terms are used to distance the group of people from humanity, and humanity is usually always defined by who is othering the outsiders.

And this post and understanding has absolutely nothing to do with my personal opinions, values and beliefs. But to silence someone based on vague definitions of projected “sins”, is to deny their existence as a sentient being. I’ve seen this dehumanization time and time again, people eager to discard the complex experiences of someone’s life, often times experiences that cannot be defined easily by a handful of labels, and certainly not a single one.

This continued blinding of ourselves and our peers in the SJW community only lead to a lot of confusion, and severe bouts of cognitive dissonance, the word used to describe the distress stemming from holding two incompatible ideas. Ideas like, “This point is good, but... the OP is evil. So is this post really good? Am I actually evil for agreeing with them?”