I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I didn’t see the posts/thread that caused this most recent flurry of posts so please keep that in mind, I’m not sure if what I am saying is relevant to that specifically. This is not meant to be a comment on the piling on aspect people have been mentioning either, so much as the initial reactions that I’ve noticed in myself and others sometimes when we learn something we did was less funny/more harmful than we had intended.
We have all (maybe a few of us haven’t but at least most) been swimming in the water of a deeply capitalistic, white supremacist, and colonial society for a long time. There are many things about this water that isn’t great for anyone and some of them are hard to see. But these things have been normal and accepted for so long that many of us, especially if we haven’t been hurt by them, have no idea that they’re hurting people. We are just minding our own business, going along making jokes that everyone we know has always thought were funny and whatnot. We aren’t trying to be hurtful but we are all products of a society that makes it almost impossible not to be hurtful.
And this society has also always protected the feelings of people in power who might be harming over the feelings/experience/needs of safety of people who are not in power. Because of this, we have become enormously sensitive about learning that we are harming people with our actions and words when we did not consciously intend that harm. George Bush famously said that the all time low point of his presidency was being called a racist by Kanye West. Since the forum seems to be primarily as far as I can tell, people who really want to be kind and do right to others, it makes sense that we would feel very hurt to discover that we are acting in a way that is harmful. It’s really hard to push past those feelings of hurt and realize that someone else is also hurt and they are inviting us to be the kindest people that we want to be by letting us know that what we said was problematic.
One of the last chapters of So you want to talk about Race is about how to react when someone tells you you are hurting them, because everyone who has been a part of this society has been touched by these toxic parts of it and are going to hurt someone as we stumble through. Next time I have my copy, I can write out some of her suggestions, but I don’t have access to it right now. Perhaps some of these steps would be helpful in shaping forum rules. I do recall though that it’s really important to listen, to apologize, and to change your actions, and also that if you really think about it and still think it’s an “agree to disagree” situation, that you don’t stick around and argue with the person about it, because we don’t need to invalidate someone’s pain just because we disagree.
I fully expect that some things I am doing, despite trying really hard and being really conscious about it, are harmful. I have been swimming in this water so long, it’s just hard to see. I also know I’ll feel like a jerk and be very sad when someone points this out to me because I really don’t want to be harmful to others and I’m trying my best. and yet, I’ll never stop doing that harmful thing if no one speaks up so I need to deal with my feelings about it.
I’ll remove this tag if you want because I know you said you were going to drop some knowledge and run but as an example I really appreciated @tardis’ comments about the straight white man phrase. I just yesterday morning sort of used that to describe a cartoon character to a friend and I realize that I meant “those entitled fucks” for sure. It wasn’t a comment made in front of my kiddo, but without that note about it, it could have been. I learned something for sure. I also learned a ton on the fatphobia thread, including some things that have really changed my life and mind, but unfortunately not fast enough to be able to engage in a really positive and helpful way as that thread became so difficult.
This turned into a novel, and so I appreciate it if you’ve read this far. I think this is a really special community and I hope we figure this out in a way that people don’t feel they’re being run off the forums for things and we can also still learn and grow.
Even if we have no magic answers.
so the people worried they’ve done the wrong thing - you haven’t!