One of my favorite internet apologists has a saying that people who don't have good arguments have to resort to bad tactics, and for many people that I've had conversations with (especially among the left, but also among the right) this has often been very, very true.
While I don't support BLM/M4BL (the hashtag, not the sentence), I do think that several valid points have come up. And even though I disagree on their conclusions and sometimes their methods, it has at least caused me to think critically about how I understand the situation and what should be done about it.
I hope that the future can continue to be a place where we don't think of ideas as either "safe" or "unsafe". Any view we come across that challenges us can frighten/scare us away. Maybe it causes us to change our views, maybe it doesn't, but the introspection is valuable. I feel that's what a lot of people who want to silence debate are missing. Perhaps they don't want the introspection. Maybe they just want an echo chamber.
Regardless, let's fight for a world where ideas aren't crimes, and that people are strong/wise enough to debate and engage them in a way that makes everyone better.
I think it's important to consider the primary audience here. If this were a Wikipedia article, a neutral perspective would be important, yes. But this isn't a Wikipedia article. It's a persuasion piece aimed at the members of the left, and writing from the perspective of the left (or at least not from blatantly outside that perspective) makes it more effective.
"An open mind is like a fortress with its gates left unguarded".
Thing of it is, there ARE safe and unsafe ideas (or, more commonly, safe and unsafe presentation of ideas). And it's critical thinking skills that render you capable of safely handling unsafe ideas / presentations.
You're right that the introspection is valuable, and that encountering "unsafe" ideas should lead to it; so I'm going to suggest: it's a person's attitude towards introspection that realizes the risk posed by an idea.
> who want to silence debate
IMO these people are just very badly communicating the idea "stop talking about other people's lives, and have those people speak instead" (plus layers of baggage and trauma). Halle Berry's recent controversy over a trans role is a good example of this; people talked about how she should't play the role (and some other issues), what they meant was "someone who lived this story should tell this story".
> people are strong/wise enough
Yes. Do you support massively more funding for education? Or do you see something else as a means to fight for this?
A nit to pick: The consequences of ideas can be safe and unsafe. The words "The police are racist" can be questioned, examined, and judged accordingly. The _result_ of the ideas and how you process them are the issue here. Gasoline is perfectly safe if left alone. But thrown in a live fire it will cause major damage.
Discarding ideas simply because others might abuse them isn't the right way to go about this.
> "someone who lived this story should tell this story"
I feel that there is a danger to this argument. It is in the same vein as what I have encountered before: a refusal to hold any sort of meaningful conversation due to an intersectional party who claims that their point is "more valid" because of lived-experience. And they would not allow anyone else to say anything because they were not <insert intersectional crossroads here>.
This promotion, if left unchecked, can mean that the person lives within an echo chamber and can be very unhealthy. They are unwilling to have other people influence them. It can be very detrimental.
> Do you support massively more funding for education?
We homeschool, so I'm not really a proponent of state-run education. However, as a parent just talking to our children and fostering good relationships with everyone around us should be a priority. I'm for the idea that this concept starts within the home and then extends out. Kids mirror what they see at home.
"What, pray tell, is an outcome? When can the consequences of an action ever be fully accounted for?" (https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-112-2/)
> a refusal to hold any sort of meaningful conversation
Hmm. I disagree. This is how you have meaningful conversations; you speak of your own experiences, and you ask people of theirs. I don't see this happen all that often. Mostly I see people, to put it harshly for clarity, dictating to others what those others' lived experiences were. AKA, speak for yourself, not for others. If you find yourself speaking for others, pause, and turn it into a question and ask those others.
I really do mean "this is HOW". As in, if you, the person reading this, does this practice, I would expect you to have a bunch of meaningful conversations where before you might not have. That's how it's worked for me. I'd be interested in hearing experiences to the contrary.
> We homeschool
Do you support maternity/paternity leave, or other societal support for more parents having more capacity to home-school?
In my experience, when dealing with someone who works from an intersectional framework, this isn't something they tend to do. Maybe I've just talked to the wrong people, though. Perhaps I ought to broaden my horizons some!
> Do you support maternity/paternity leave, or other societal support for more parents having more capacity to home-school?
That would be wonderful. I am hoping that many people realize the wonders of homeschooling during the stay-at-home stuff.
Yeah, IME too, most people don't do this, and to be charitable, it's because they haven't realized it's a thing to do. I promote it, because at this time I really believe in this theory and method, and would very much like more people to use it.
> That would be wonderful.
I'm hearing you say "I am supportive of this" but not "I support this". For example, is this an issue that informs your voting, and what other issues take precedence (aka, are more important)?
Can you point me at something in particular so I can see clearly what it is you're talking about? I'm not doubting you, I just don't have something clear in my mind to go look at.
> what you say
A lot of the time I see this happen, what's being said is some variation of "this is the experience", "this is our experience", or "this is your experience". I generally don't see people be ignored or discounted who say some variation of "this is my experience".
When I do see people ignored or discounted who say "this is my experience", it's usually some variation of: in a conversation about a movie, one person saying "I watched the movie" and another saying "I did not watch the movie" and like duh, the second person has a very different role in the conversation than the first. And if the conversation is, say, a critical analysis, their role is "audience".
My views pretty much depart from the mainstream, so if you mean that is discourages me greatly when I vote, then yes.
Here is the Terry Crews stuff: https://twitter.com/i/events/1277983929966813191
In Christian circles there are several people who I am aware of: Samuel Sey, Voddie Baucham, David Shannon are a couple that come to mind. Specifically Sey, because he has a blog where he publishes stuff like this: https://slowtowrite.com/does-systemic-racism-exist/
Hey also posted a blog in June 2019 that asked why America's black/white disparities are also mirrored in Canada, and asking why those same disparities exist, given the difference in history and culture: https://slowtowrite.com/our-fathers-our-failures/
He has been called a fair number of slurs from "his people": https://twitter.com/SlowToWrite/status/1049674519458312192
Do you take any actions to support other people becoming more capable of homeschooling?
Terry Crews expressed a concern. A bunch of people popped up to say they didn't think the concern was present. Great! Like saying "Let's make sure the boat isn't leaking", and then people pop up and say, "yeah, the boat's not leaking".
The SlowToWrite examples are heavily based on the Bible. That's only going to be relevant for other people who also hold the Bible as a source of truth. Like saying "We don't have a problem with the sails on this boat"; that's only relevant to the other people on the same boat. I'd need to see where they're being discounted to see more, and I'd have to go look at where he's been called a slur to see what's going on there, too.
Did you read any of his work? While he is a Christian, he writes using researched data as well as personal/theological insights.
Before you discount theological sources, just remember everyone as a religion—a set of beliefs that molds their actions and character. Just because you don't believe in someone's religion doesn't mean that you cannot learn from them or glean from them.
Here's an example, and the start of what I saw:
"Therefore, under that vague and subjective reasoning, racial disparities—and especially, racial perceptions—are the basis for identifying systemic racism. That, however, presents several logical and theological problems.
Under that definition, black people—not God—are the authority on what constitutes as racism or systemic racism. This is why Voddie Baucham defines social justice ideology or systemic racism theory as ethnic Gnosticism."
Like, right off the bat, too. Of course I'm going to discount this, and it's the foundational point of the rest of what he's got to say. I'm going to discount it because, to me, what it's saying is that someone else's viewpoint is invalid, because Bible.
He does ask a bunch of reasonable questions at the end, all of which already have answers, so yeah, it's reasonable to me he's discounted. I don't see anything (in this example) that he's adding to the conversation.
Everyone has an authority.
Poetic indulgence aside, any understanding is going to complex (made up of multiple component concepts, which are likely to be complex themselves) and nuanced (without clean, precise English definitions). Some elements will be more objective, others more subjective. It's the world, it's messy, that's how there's things.
Yadda yadda, I suspect we'll get a more "objective" understanding as fairness research in neural nets continues (it's super cool and you should go check it out).
Isn't everyone's authority ultimately themselves? You either hold it yourself, or choose to invest it (whole cloth or piece wise) in something or someone else; either way, the first and last decision is yours.
That all said, there's pretty clearly a set of observed experiences (from slavery to George Floyd to red line districts and food deserts) and a theory to explain those observations (racism; personal, structural and systemic).