This posts talks about the main problem right now with SJW or “Social Justice Warrior” culture online. Now let me just preface this by saying that our site posts about social justice issues all the time. We are often called “SJWs” as a pejorative by angry dudebros. So we are not in any way “anti-SJW” or anything like that. But we have been seeing this issue pop up in our communities so this is just constructive criticism.
The problem is that many people assume the absolute worst of everyone and immediately go on the attack when a genuine question is asked. This is not in regards to assholes deliberately asking disingenuous or inflammatory questions to start arguments. Or people who are sealioning (a form of trolling where you fire off incessant, bad-faith questions while pretending to be sincere). This is in regards to people asking genuine questions (albeit perhaps ignorant ones) in an effort to learn and understand.
It’s also important to add that it is never your obligation to educate people. That can be incredibly exhausting and a mental burden because the work will never end. But there is no need to immediately go on the attack. For example I recently saw a post from an older man asking about trans people and he was instantly called a bigot for no reason. Instead of piling on I posted the Explaining How Someone Can Be Transgender link for him and he read it and thanked me. This took very little time or effort to do. And it resulted in a much better outcome than someone being attacked and learning nothing. Anyway, here is the post:
(via: Vellum and Vinyl)
Ironic that this is coming from Vellum and Vinyl, which is a sky high bastion of the exact kind of toxic wokeness this post identifies and condemns
I get this crap a lot, I used to be ignorant about a whole bunch of race issues, I made an ignorant post on facebook about it, and a woman I was acquainted with started arguing with me about it, because I learn most efficiently via arguing I argued back until I understood what was wrong with what I said, I thought the whole thing was fairly civil and she knew she was educating me, so at the end I thanked her for educating me (via private message) and deleted the initial post as it no longer contained anything I agreed with. A couple years later I was involved in a discussion in the comments on a mutual friend’s post where I was taking a fairly nuanced take on a different controversial topic that I’m not sure I explained my position on accurately and she brought up the other thing (again, from years prior) to say I was racist and therefore shouldn’t be trusted on any other controversial issue either, which prevented me from being able to get my own point across and possibly get educated via argumentation if I was misunderstanding things again.
That’s also an issue I’m having with learning about non-binary stuff, when it was originally explained to me I think it was explained poorly as it doesn’t seem logically consistent, so I want to find someone who understands non-binary gender stuff to sit down and argue with me so I can correct my clearly flawed understanding of what it is, when I’ve tried just starting arguments I get called a bigot and shouted down instead of anybody engaging with me, and when I directly ASK people who supposedly know what they are talking about to argue with me for the purpose of educating me, or to even just EXPLAIN it for me, nobody has been willing to do so. Like, I WANT to be an ally and be supportive, and I WANT to be respectful, and I do TRY to be respectful and supportive, but it’s difficult when it makes zero sense to me, and frankly the longer I go actively ASKING for people to explain it to me and nobody is willing to do so, the more it feels made up. For the record, I genuinely believe that non-binary stuff is real and there’s just something I’m missing to make it all make sense, and I try very hard to not be dismissive, but on a few dozen occasions at this point I’ve encountered discussions on public forums about NB issues, and I’ll ask for clarification or for somebody to argue with me or explain it to me, and at BEST I get ignored, at worst I get treated like a bigot when I just want to understand, and that makes it very difficult to not get bitter about.