(This isn’t saying anything new, it’s just taking another angle on a commonly discussed topic in case some people find this angle easier to relate to or engage with).
Most people can tell the difference between communities where they matter and communities where they don’t. It’s often really hard to nail down, specifically, the set of differences between these communities, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get a feel for it. There are places where people see you and people like you as a peer, a partner, a friend, and there are places where they see you as an imposition they tolerate for the sake of politeness, or a potential threat, or a waste of time and energy.
So lots of people go into a community and they get a visceral sense of ‘wow, this is a place where people like me aren’t welcome.’ And it’d be nice if they could pin it down beyond that - say ‘this is an interaction I had which sucked’ or ‘these are the rules that exclude me’ or ‘this was the thing which made it clear to me that people like me were unwelcome’ - but often you can’t pin it down that precisely. You know perfectly well what you experienced, but all of the evidence that got you there is nothing all by itself, or is almost completely intangible. Sometimes communities have an explicit rule that everyone is welcome, and if you say “I’m unwelcome” they will point at the rule and say “no you’re not”. But you are.
I know a lot of people who are confused or stressed by the discourse surrounding microaggressions. They read through lists of them and see a mix of some things that are obvious misconduct and some things that look harmless, that they do all the time with people of every background, that don’t seem horrible at all. So they dutifully memorize every list they run across and anxiously try to avoid it in future, even though they don’t have any idea why it’s bad, or else they unhelpfully argue with people about how it isn’t that bad.
But I think the actual thing with microaggressions is that feeling of ‘people like me are not welcome’ or at least ‘people like me are only conditionally welcome, welcome if we’re friendly and careful and unthreatening and reassuring and match other peoples’ narratives about us and aren’t angry and don’t make anyone uncomfortable and toe the party line’. It’s really helpful for people to collect and corroborate and discuss and complain about all of the little cues which add up to that impression, but scrupulously memorizing the list of cues and avoiding the things on your list won’t actually make spaces where people feel welcome. The problem is the 'this space is not for people like you’ thing.
I think this is also what’s going on with a lot of discussion of bad allies. Lots of bad allying seems to amount to 'loudly saying that people are valued while continuing to be the kind of space where they are palpably not valued’.
Which, of course, isn’t worse than being a space where people are not valued while not even giving lip service to the idea that they should be, but it can be uniquely frustrating because in a space that says 'we hate gay people’ you can say 'I am uncomfortable there because they hate me’ while in a space that claims to be supportive and fails at it all you can really say is 'uh. it sucks, for some reason’. Or you can give reasons that seem trivial and insignificant and which, if they were fixed, wouldn’t actually be sufficient.
Aye, this is so.
And the corollary is: you cannot make yourself welcome in a community by force.
Logical argument, guilt, and bullying are all powerful tools. They can accomplish a lot. But they mostly cause people to be less comfortable with you, not more. If you try to use them in order to make people be comfortable with you, then those people will respond by avoiding you or striking out at you or lying to you, or (mostly likely) some combination of the above. It will make the problem worse rather than better.
This is a positive claim, a matter of practicality. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it. It doesn’t matter how unfair people are being to you; it doesn’t matter how good your points are; it doesn’t matter what sins lie upon their souls; you do not have the power to force them to welcome you, because that is not how welcoming works.
(It is a failure to understand this principle, I think, that underlies the systematic universal lying about comfort and acceptance that underlies American elite culture.)
Note that you don’t always need to be truly welcomed, within a given space. Sometimes other things matter much more.
Which is important, because while you can’t get people to welcome you by means of social force, there are other things that you can achieve that way. In particular, you can force acceptance, at the cost of culturally strip-mining the space and ensuring that everyone will be perpetually a little bit uncomfortable.
…those are some nasty-sounding words, but I don’t mean to be pejorative. Sometimes cultural strip-mining and minor discomfort are exactly appropriate. That’s how Truly Public Spaces (government, literal public thoroughfares, etc.) are supposed to work, and so long as we continue to have anything like a capitalist economy, it’s a good way for professional and commercial spaces to work as well. Everyone gets to be present, everyone gets to participate, including weirdos who set you on edge – and there will be weirdos who set you on edge. Everyone is carefully neutral and polite. Everyone knows that, under the thin veil of etiquette, a lot of the people around are going to be contemptuous or at least totally indifferent. No one gets to make assumptions about other people’s fundamental values or passions.
It’s not good to try to live forever in spaces like that. Not having a Real Welcoming Home is torment. But trying to make society’s neutral ground into your Real Welcoming Home is tyranny. The first step towards civilized life is learning to thread that needle.
Not absolutely true, but it’s often true.
(Whenever someone says “this immoral thing can not succeed, so that’s why you shouldn’t do it”, you do need to ask “Okay, but least convenient world, if it did work - if you could force welcome from a community - would it be ethical to?”)
Most of the people to whom this is notionally addressed believe that forcing welcome (at least for certain reasons) is not only acceptable but morally obligatory.