Right now, the best solution I can offer is for everyone to take a chill and go spend the rest of the summer quietly educating themselves, and then we can all come back and talk on the first day of Autumn.
Oh, wow, what a dream. That would be glorious, and would help so much.
This isn't a merely matter of one bro telling another bro to chill with the sexist comments he's making in his workplace. It's about fundamentally changing the mental frameworks within people's heads.
I suppose I think that that kind of casual one-bro-tells-another-bro-to-chill conversation DOES change the frameworks within people's heads, but it does so slowly and with repetition. Like the influence of fiction media, I think stuff that comes in subtly, from the sides, really influences our mental framework. But it's preventative-health type influence, and what we need right now is trauma care.
I think the heart of what I am really saying is this is NOT a battle to be won on facebook or by using quick slogans that are made for the internet era...This is only a battle that can be won through the hard slog of face-to-face dialogue. But from what you are saying, I think we pretty violently agree on this. ;)
Yeah, we do. And when you put it that way, I think what I'm wrestling with is actually what a LOT of people are wrestling with: is it possible to frame something that needs to be a long slog discussion a way that gets people addicted to short slogans to actually READ it? And the answer is 'probably not'. So we A) keep sharing the long, well thought out things, in hopes that at least a few people do the reading and B) keep having the long slog discussions when the opportunities arise. And I'm lucky to know lots of people willing to have those long-slog conversations, but it's sure exhausting to think about changing the world one-by-one, so I suppose it's not surprising to hope a more shotgun approach would work! But perhaps I need to recognize that it's as much a daydream as your idea of everyone taking a break and reading until autumn.
I guess my point is that I'm pretty damn uncomfortable with the fact that much of america suddenly woke up to something they don't know how to tamp back down -- and this waking up occurred after years, decades, (centuries) of being told "Hey, America, there's a problem" and being ignored.
Yeah, I totally understand finding that deeply uncomfortable.
I know that I only woke up to the existence/extent of current anti-black racism during Obama's first presidential campaign. I know that for others it's taken getting THIS bad. I believe that waking up is important even when it's late, but that doesn't make it easy for more informed people to watch. I don't know, though, how you deal with the fact that it's a problem that it took this long, and that everyone is in different stages of waking. Or rather... no. We deal with the last point by having the long slog individual conversations, because one-on-one is the only way we can reach people where they are and try and move them in the right direction, and a LOT of down-the-rabbit-hole arguments i see on the net happen because the participants are at different stages of that kind of awakening/awareness.
(again, hope this wasn't too rambly -- you read my medical post, I'm a bit more mentally twitchy than usual, too).
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Oh, wow, what a dream. That would be glorious, and would help so much.
This isn't a merely matter of one bro telling another bro to chill with the sexist comments he's making in his workplace. It's about fundamentally changing the mental frameworks within people's heads.
I suppose I think that that kind of casual one-bro-tells-another-bro-to-chill conversation DOES change the frameworks within people's heads, but it does so slowly and with repetition. Like the influence of fiction media, I think stuff that comes in subtly, from the sides, really influences our mental framework. But it's preventative-health type influence, and what we need right now is trauma care.
I think the heart of what I am really saying is this is NOT a battle to be won on facebook or by using quick slogans that are made for the internet era...This is only a battle that can be won through the hard slog of face-to-face dialogue. But from what you are saying, I think we pretty violently agree on this. ;)
Yeah, we do. And when you put it that way, I think what I'm wrestling with is actually what a LOT of people are wrestling with: is it possible to frame something that needs to be a long slog discussion a way that gets people addicted to short slogans to actually READ it? And the answer is 'probably not'. So we A) keep sharing the long, well thought out things, in hopes that at least a few people do the reading and B) keep having the long slog discussions when the opportunities arise. And I'm lucky to know lots of people willing to have those long-slog conversations, but it's sure exhausting to think about changing the world one-by-one, so I suppose it's not surprising to hope a more shotgun approach would work! But perhaps I need to recognize that it's as much a daydream as your idea of everyone taking a break and reading until autumn.
I guess my point is that I'm pretty damn uncomfortable with the fact that much of america suddenly woke up to something they don't know how to tamp back down -- and this waking up occurred after years, decades, (centuries) of being told "Hey, America, there's a problem" and being ignored.
Yeah, I totally understand finding that deeply uncomfortable.
I know that I only woke up to the existence/extent of current anti-black racism during Obama's first presidential campaign. I know that for others it's taken getting THIS bad. I believe that waking up is important even when it's late, but that doesn't make it easy for more informed people to watch. I don't know, though, how you deal with the fact that it's a problem that it took this long, and that everyone is in different stages of waking. Or rather... no. We deal with the last point by having the long slog individual conversations, because one-on-one is the only way we can reach people where they are and try and move them in the right direction, and a LOT of down-the-rabbit-hole arguments i see on the net happen because the participants are at different stages of that kind of awakening/awareness.
(again, hope this wasn't too rambly -- you read my medical post, I'm a bit more mentally twitchy than usual, too).