(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.
That’s because frankly, it does work and I think the idea that it doesn’t is based off a very limited idea of “working.” There are three general outcomes of a forced policy from above; revolution, schism, and grudging acceptance. The first is the only time where I’d say it’s a true failure, as it’s when a large enough part of the culture overthrows the rule makers and reinstitutes the old norms. The second is fairly common but not a failure mode; if the heretics split off the culture is arguably weaker for it, but the rule makers become far stronger as those people on the fence who stayed behind will quickly become supporters thanks to a brand new close range enemy to rail against.
The final outcome, which you seem to be speaking of, tends to eventually become a pure win as the old membership cycles out and is replaced with new blood who have only known this new norm and thus simply accept it as true. Group cohesion is a hell of a drug, especially when you have no attachment to old norms to hold you back.
To give an example, I don’t think the military is secretly hiding it’s desire to re-segregate it’s units based on race or kick out it’s gay spec ops members, and those were by definition forced from above
This kind of thing works much better, and is much more likely to happen, in the aforementioned “professional and commercial spaces.” Which is to say – spaces where most of the people are there for some reason other than comfort and culture, because there’s some kind of concrete project going on.
@theunitofcaring is (as far as I can tell) talking mostly about communities and other social spaces, and social spaces have a lot of “soft resistance” options when faced with possible members or proffered norms that they don’t like. They can quietly crumble, and maybe later reform in some nigh-identical edition that hasn’t yet been infected by the Outside Thing (or maybe not). They can become more consciously exclusive. Most important, they can do exactly the the thing that @theunitofcaring is talking about: act vaguely uncomfortable and unwelcoming, and hope that the Outside Thing gives up and goes away.
This is not going to work at a company, where the uncomfortable unwelcomed outsider is going to keep showing up so long as someone is paying him. It is definitely not going to work in the military.
Right, they have better access to Schism or Revolt; my argument is that the uncomfortable unwelcomeness is bring grudgingly accepted and eventually leads into full blown acceptence as new members are selected for those who accept the norm and otherwise don’t have attachment to the old norm. It’s slow, but as the firebrands against the old norm get purged fast you don’t really have any way to fight against the normalization if the new norm outside of an early fight or a slow fade of membership. You can see this at play with Country Clubs whose current membership would balk at the idea of not letting in rich black people or single rich women. After all, the new norm is that they’re one of us, not some sort of underclass pleb after all.
You just can’t enforce a rule for too long without it either becoming the new normal or honored in the breach (either via a Revolt/Schism or via everyone ignoring it as the leadership didn’t really have the power to enforce it) as a group will eventually come down on one side or another of said rule. For the short term you’re right, there will be plenty of people who follow the rule in letter but not in spirit, leading to the uncomfortable feeling. But that just doesn’t last in any group I’m aware of.
One important distinction is figuring out what the actual rule that is being pushed actually is however. There’s an ocean of difference between “don’t discriminate” and “don’t make raunchy jokes.” Plenty of people see the first, infer the second, and are confused when the actual norm is just the first
There’s some kind of weird communication failure going on here. You are talking about a model that relies on old members leaving (voluntarily or through purge) and new differently-socialized members coming in. But those old members don’t just disappear from the Earth, and they don’t stop having social lives – and if the thing you’re talking about is a community or a social scene, those old members are in fact the entirety of the thing to which you’re seeking access. You can maybe drive them away with coercive norm-setting, but if they just go hang out somewhere else, effectively all you’ve done is change the address of their clubhouse.
It’s different if they’re parked on top of some kind of valuable infrastructure (like a company or whatever). Then, well, you can steal their infrastructure out from under them. But if you want is access to them…
My own experience suggests that (at least certain kinds of) groups can sustain some level of cultural-dissonance discomfort for quite a long time, if the discomfort is less painful than either fracturing or openly confronting the values clash.