The Appearance and Actuality of Prejudice.

[sibelian]

.... But if there isn't a mechanism in place to differentiate between the appearance of prejudice and the intent of prejudice the ability to accurately guage prejudice and, consequently, efforts to thwart it, are compromised by wilful misinterpretation on behalf of agencies seeking not to bring about positive change but to sharpen their own cognitive bias.

I am not in a position, as a gay man, to legitimately take offense at someone telling me I'm being a drama queen, even though it can be seen as homophobic, until I have satisfied at least myself that I'm not being a drama queen but in fact have some legitimate greivance. I could choose to behave as if the use of the term is insulting no matter when or how it used, but that becomes a communication block.

Prejudice is a logical fallacy. It isn't wrong to make assumptions about, for example, gay people because doing so makes them feel bad, it's wrong to make assumptions about gay people because it doesn't make any sense. The emotional reaction consequent to such assumptions proceeds from the fact that it doesn't make sense, and it's the making sense that has to happen to fix the problem, not the management of the symptomatic reaction.

So if someone says something to me that makes me feel bad it might be homophobic ir it might not. But unless there is some specific indication that they wouldn't have said it to me if I were straight, I cannot legitimately claim that it was homophobic even if I really, really, really think it was.

[sigmasix]

1. i see what you've done here and I approve

I agree with your assesment and find the appeal to pragmatism suggested within your critique of the uselessness of bigoted language and ideas to be interesting.
What will it take to support the spread of common sense in the fight against the anti-humane forces of bigotry, homophobia and racism?
One of the reasons it's so hard to point to a definite proof of bigotry is that the forces of evil are constantly moving the lines and changing material definitions of prejudice. This approach adds to the dissonance created by right wing media and "think tanks" over America's collective attitude concerning bigots and prejudice.

[Kurovski]

2. Confronting religion is the most powerful way.

President carter has done it. Amina Tyler in Tunisia has done it. it is the surest road to change. Arguing language is a pastime or an egocentrics folly at this stage in our history. serious movements will begin to confront and transform religion. Even the Pope, who is still a disaster, is moving in this direction. It's building, it is the only effective way at this point.

Note that transforming religion does not mean destroying it. Though if the religions do not change, they will die out in a couple hundred years. this idea has been my pet nag for a year or so. I wrote in Meta about it, and I'm sorry I didn't have a copy of the posts.

Also passing laws. that's great too. Work from the bottom up to change laws. The SCOTUS will eventually have to side with america on marriage equality.

[sibelian]

6. I think a lot of prejudice is just blatant...

Last edited Sun Mar 31, 2013, 11:46 AM - Edit history (3)

See CNN's response to Steubenville.

I firmly believe the most powerful weapon against prejudice is fact-based rebuttal, not attempts to manage perceptions. If prejudice is to be overturned then leaving it to the arena of "interpretation", which is almost unavoidable if we focus on discussing "perspectives" and how things make us "feel", then we give prejudice a legitimacy it doesn't deserve. There have been recent attempts to control how women manage their reproduction, this is just blatant, disgusting prejudice. It was a very simple matter to thwart that fool of a man who thought women's bodies would "shut down" and not become pregnant if they were raped, but that's primarily because he was just flat out wrong. However, it was very interesting to me that the vast majority of people, on discussion of his nonsense, focussed on how it made them feel or what personal qualities he might have rather than the subject under discussion, which was women's bodies, of which he was clearly completely ignorant. And, if we're keen to rid ourselves of prejudice, that's kind of my point - if he WASN'T ignorant of them he wouldn't have come out with the nonsense but clearly nobody, in his life, had seen fit to establish a useful undertsanding in him of women's bodies! I find this extraordinary.

Prejudice comes from ignorance and ignorance isn't a personality trait, it's an absence. To my mind the appropriate way to react if someone lacks the understanding of something because of a hole in their knowledge is to fill the hole, not point at and and scream "HOLE!!!".

Gay people are still considered subnormal by substantial numbers of entirely ignorant people, these ignorant people are not going to change their minds by being told there is something wrong with *them* they are only going to change their minds when confronted with the external fact that they are wrong. If you make your opponent the subject of the discussion, they will automatically reach for explanations of your behaviour that make themselves feel comfortable, which isn't surprising as the assertion is essentially controntational. Usually they will assume that you yourself don't believe what you're trying to get them to believe and are trying to manipulate them into helping you feel good about yourself. If you leave your opponent the option to *choose* your view, they are far more likely to listen to you.

If you instead show them that the hole in their knowledge can be filled, they will almost always reach for the knowledge. This is something I've experienced time and again as an out gay man. I've been in many many work and study environments, and having to come out every time teaches you that the ignorance of my life in other human beings is normal and entirely understandable. How could they possibly be expected to know what it's like to be gay? They're not gay!

More than once I've been asked "Who is the man in your relationship and who is the woman?" This is an opportunity for me to take offense and take the interrogator to task, but they don't ask such questions to cause offense, their ignorance is very often also genuine innocence and in the vast majority of cases if you treat it as such, the interrogator is more than happy to confess his or her ignorance. In fact the question itself is at least a partial admission of ignorance, so to react as if it rests on an assumption about me and then treat that assumption as a statement of knowledge and then to throw the ignorance of the interrogator back in their face with some kind of emotionally charged spin is a flat out thwarting of their honest attempt to understand. Such behaviour would just be petulant self-interest, and probably recognised as such, and, quite rightly, ignored. "I offer you my ignorance, how can we change it?" "YOU'RE IGNORANT!" "Yeah, I thought you'd infer that from my asking the question. Why are you treating me as a lightning conductor?" The emotional pattern underlying that last hypothetical scenario is something I've seen played out again and again in activism, and it's been done on this here very site we're posting on right now.

Almost all prejudice, as far as I can see, stems from a refusal to take into account the natural variance of the human being, from a monolithicisation (I coined a term, go me!) of human behaviours which are not amenable to such processes. For example, "Gay people are narcissistic", well... some of them are, that's undeniable, but it doesn't mean anything to make the observation regarding some gay people as if it applies to all and it's not difficult to see that some straight people are also narcisstic. The observation really rests on the idea that for some reason gay people shouldn't be narcissistic, which is a monolithicisation regarding gay people..... ".o0(they're all the same) and, you know they really ought to be kinda humble. For, you know, reasons..." It's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that this is homopobia, but without careful discussion to tease out what is actually thought it's impossible to isolate the phenomenon in those who utter such things from their opinions regarding narcissism in general, very probably the focus of their observation really is narcissism itself rather than gay people, typically such individuals would be just as put off by narcissim in straight people.

People think prejudice is about people. I don't think it is at all. I think it's about behaviour. I think the main reason someone ends up with a prejudice about some group very often has very little to do with any focus on the group, I think it's typically much more about sensitivity to some perceived habit of the group and it's the perceived habit that the predjucial individual objects to primarily. I think the identification of the group with the "habit" is a secondary process and serves as a smokescreen for the prejudicial individual's inability to cope with or process the behaviour that's being "smeared" all over the target of the prejudice. I think Christians mean it when they say "love the sinner, hate the sin" and I think it's very revealing, also it's a shame that more on the left haven't realised that this structure underlies a lot of prejudice. The oppression comes about because of a misidentification of demographic with some (also often misunderstood) behaviour.

[bemildred]

3. Good for you. I think you've got it.

And besides that, it can ruin your day.

[redqueen]

4. So if someone calls a woman a b or a c,

they might be right, and in that case it isn't misogynist?

Is there a link to the rest of this?

[sibelian]

7. So presumably someone calling me a faggot

is alright if I'm actually being a faggot.

Is that what you think you're responding to?

[mzteris]

5. You feel how you want

other people may choose to feel differently.

The "veiled" insult. The "oh, I was just joking". The but "I didn't mean it that way". It is all saying, YOU have the problem, of course. THEY are innocent. Oh so innocent.

Uh-huh. Ain't buying it for a second.

[sibelian]

8. If you choose not to take what someone else says at face value

... it's you who has made the choice, not them.

[mzteris]

9. Sorry, have to disagree.

Context is everything. Knowing the person who is saying it is everything. Knowing the culture with which they identify is saying everything.

There is no "face value" in any thing. There is always underlying meaning of some type - whether for good or ill - but the person speaking is using specific terms for a reason. It could be an innocuous one. It could be an ignorant one.

This day and age, however, I think one would have to live under a rock to not know the connotative meaning of certain words.

[sibelian]

10. "There is always underlying meaning of some type"

There is sometimes underlying meaning and that underlying meaning is the property of the person speaking, not the person listening.

I don't agree that context is not "everything", context is secondary, not primary. Content is primary. If someone says to me "I don't have a problem with gay people" and then it turns out that they don't like going to gay bars, I'm not going to re-interpret their original position and accuse them of homophobia because I have no privileged access to their thoughts.

If someone is explicitly disbarred from the right to be believed when they say something (and from what you've posted you seem to be suggesting that one has a right to believe whatever one wants about what someone else means no matter what they actually say, I think your language seems very wide-reaching), then I can see no point in having any sort of dialogue with them at all. One may as well be talking to a wall on which one paints what one wishes was said. There are acts where secondary, covert agendas may be identifiable behind contradictory or misdirective behaviour, whether conscious or unconscious, but to avoid wilful misinterpretation these have to be supported by phenomena external to the act, otherwise you're just making stuff up. If that's what you mean, then I think in some sense we agree, but my position is that one believes them first and suspects alternative interpretations second, and when this is done it should be for good reasons. Randomly twisting people's words into patterns that affords one the opportunity to treat them as a lightning conductor for the charge left over from previous conflicts is just abusive.

I'm sorry, but nobody really has the right to assume that they know what someone else is thinking.

[mzteris]

11. Look up Contextuality & Intertextuality

It's everything. While the speaker may mean one thing, the hearer may hear something else entirely based on their own feelings/experience. Is either wrong?

Once a painting is painted, I can interpret it any way I wish, regardless of what the painter had in mind. The same goes for the written word. We bring to everything our own experiences, biases, interpretations, and exposure to the world in a particular way. What I think is no less important - nor valid - that what one may have intended.

Like I've always told my kids, it's the person who is the recipient of the "joke" who gets to decide whether it is offensive/hurtful, or not. You MAY just "be joking", but it doesn't mean anything if the person you're joking about/to is offended.

Words have power. Use them wisely.

[sibelian]

13. I disagree.

.... here we go....

What you seem to be saying is that utterances by people expressing political opinions are to be treated as the same kind of thing as a work of art or a piece of fiction? I think this is in the category of Very Bad Idea... Art and fiction are not at all the same kind of thing as political discussion.

"Once a painting is painted, I can interpret it any way I wish, regardless of what the painter had in mind. The same goes for the written word."

You can interpret anything however you like, but it does not follow that your interpretation means anything. The interpretation has to make sense before it's worth anything and in the absence of any agreed external standard against which the meaning of an utterance can be measured, the author is the canonical source because they are the only person capable of signifying intent. The subtraction of canonicity is subtraction of agency. If you can't see that, we're lost. (The most grotesque subtraction of agency is when texts are reinterpreted and the author is held responsible for the false interpretation! No doubt many on this board on every "side" will relate to that... it's almost impossible to remain innocent of committing this sin, I'm guilty of it, everyone is, but it doesn't follow from its ubiquity that it's a useful way of communicating!)

"What I think is no less important - nor valid - that what one may have intended."

Have you tried subjecting that naked idea, absent any obvious qualifiers, to any criticism?

If one genuinely believes that one can decide that anything one hears can mean anything one likes (which I suspect you sure you don't really mean - see what I did there? Was I right? If your position is taken as the standard, then I am!) then as far as I'm concerned the entire process of communication is invalidated - the whole point of communication is to open oneself to meanings that one DIDN'T invent, not re-interpret them into things that one already understands. Meaning is a shared enterprise, not a solipsistic game of "you reminded me of stuff"...

"It's everything. While the speaker may mean one thing, the hearer may hear something else entirely based on their own feelings/experience. Is either wrong?"

Yes. The listener is wrong.

Let's suppose I've decided to interpret your post as an attemt to legitimise Holocaust denial. OMG! YOU'RE DENYING THE HOLOCAUST! It's a legitimate interpretation, after all, by (a very literal interpretation of (! your standards. Is it right? Of course it isn't. I made it up, didn't I? I invented it. But now, because I've said that you remind me of Holocaust denial any attempt by you to deny this association can, according to you, be casually brushed aside by me with with "that's how I see it and my opinion is equally valid". Which is clearly bollocks.

So there must be something about my interpretation of your post that is *different* from its true meaning (and your post does have a true meaning, although that meaning is one with which I disagree).

The point I'm trying to make with that slightly off-kilter hypothetical is that an interpretation of a text must have some identifiably authentic relation to the text to prevent it being the kind of silly trick I just pulled. So we need some way of establishing the authenticity of the interpretation, and there is no such system in human communication. It just doesn't exist. So for words to mean things at all we need a frame of reference from which meaning can be extracted and the only available frame of reference is the author.

I am aware of the concepts of contextuality & intertextuality. As far they relate to politics they are, as far as I'm concerned they do more harm than good in understanding politics. (I can't see that they're particularly useful outside politics either, as is reasonably apparent when one subjects either of these shiny words and what they represent to any criticism of any kind. Intertextuality in particular is so overused and allowed to mean so many things that it seems pretty much as useless as post-modernism. I find it impossibel to rid myself of the impression that all it's really saying is "oooooh, look.... we have thought deep and long and discovered that THINGS are related to other THINGS... If I think about things in a certain way then I have found a new way in which things can be thought about by me!.... profound, dude". Hmmmm.)

"Like I've always told my kids, it's the person who is the recipient of the "joke" who gets to decide whether it is offensive/hurtful, or not. You MAY just "be joking", but it doesn't mean anything if the person you're joking about/to is offended. "

I am opposed to this. It rests on the emotional pattern of "thing make me feel bad so thing am bad!" which I think is pretty much how reptiles think, not adult human beings... although will confess that that's a slightly extreme position of mine that I sometimes have trouble maintaining in the face of convincing counter-examples... It's primarily the "grey area" of things that can be seen as offensive that I was referencing in my OP.

I think this:

Guy says [i[jokey jokey! bad thing to you about yourself...

a. If it rests on a false premise, tell him he's wrong and tell him why! If he doesn't believe you after a reasonable effort, forget about him. Life's too short.
b. If it's true, well you better fess up and change yourself, hadn't you?
c. If you're not sure whether it's true or false and this bothers you, you'd better find out which it is and move directly to otions a. or b.
d. Guy says he doesn't really mean it. Well, that it's nothing to do with you, then is it? You can forget about it and him.
e. Guy says he doesn't really mean it but you don't believe him. Well screw him! The only reason it would matter is if there was some option to respond to his overtly upsetting opinion other than a. b. or c., which there isn't!

Q.E.D.

(All of this is completely seperate from calling people "faggots" or stuff like that, which is just openly offensive. Different thing, to my mind).

If you want Guy not to think the bad thing about you that he thinks you have to show him that it's false. It's no use just telling him that it's false... because of your original point which is that he gets to not believe you. See what happens? The sword cuts both ways.

None of the options a. through e. really require emotional disturbance as some kind of bargaining tool. My feeling is that you do not have to covertly propose "bargains" with him by being pissed off. You are the owner of yourself, not him. His opinions of you are of value when they match yours or reveal something you didn't see and in no other way...

Unless...

...he is in a power relationship with you, in which case we're in a whole new ball game about how text is used to manage power, and in that arena it is of vital importance that words are not allowed to stray and mean multiple useless things. The supersolvent of intertextuality can be used by both sides. Very bad for the powerless.... Intertextuality allows South Park to call everything "gay". Do I like it? No, sir, I don't. Do I get to decide that Parker and Stone are homophobic? No, sir, I don't, (and not just because because intertextuality doesn't ever seem to dissolve the words of the powerful, only the words of the powerless!!! Hmmmmmm. Why is that?) because, firstly, demonstrably they aren't and secondly the relationship between fiction and reality is not the same as the relationship between political discussion and reality. Fiction does not aim for truth, fiction aims for familiarity, which is not the same thing. (I am unimpressed with South Park, but not because it's offensive, I'm unimpressed with South Park because it isn't really saying anything worth listening to...)

You say "words have power", and you're right, but turn that around and it's kind of my point, if you let them mean whatever you want then they don't have any power, for anyone...

The idea that words need to be used according to how people feel about their use is something that I really cannot get on board with because the underlying theory is that the world should be a place where people are allowed to feel good about themselves all the time, which is IMPOSSIBLE. We cannot construct a world where everyone feels good about themselves all the time. We can do our best to make a world that is fair, where law does not limit the options available to individuals who might otherwise be disenfranchised, but we cannot construct a world where human beings don't have creepy feelings about each other, because that's just not how human beings work. We can let rip on those who stuff the air with garbage like "faggot" and so on, but that's not what my OP was about, my OP is about the grey area where it isn't neceesarily clear what the intention is, in which case, if one wants oneself to be taken at face value one has to take the opposition's stated intention at face value. It's entirely reasonable to be pissed off with someone filling the air with vaguely offensive stuff that somehow always stops just short of something that they can be called out over, but it's no use making them responsible for the interpretation, if they are responsible for their words then I am responsible for mine, if I get to decide that their words mean what I want them to mean then they get to decide that my interpretation of their words is similary reinterpretable as something that suits them... There's no end to it.

As is abundantly clear from the numerous "grey area" threads that clutter up GD on a daily basis...

You can say "Please don't say stuff like that. Thanks." which I find to be reasonably effective. Saying "You have neurotic problems that you're unaware of if you say things like that!" doesn't seem to ever change anything... I get fed up of people accusing homophobes of being closetted gay people because it's easy to think that it's just a way of avoiding discussion of any heterosexual homophobia, but I don't get to tell those making the "he's in the closet" observation that they don't think heterosexuals can be homopobic, I have to ask them if that's what they think or request, politely, that they reconsider the value of assuming everyone who says anything nasty about gay people somehow has to be cast as "not the responsibility" of their sexual orientation. (We can get onto the insane twists and turns of heteronormativity some other time...)

There have been threads recently pointing out various politicians have suddenly changed their minds about gay marriage. As if we even needed to guess what the true motivation is behind that! It's blatantly apparent. But even so we now have to accept their statement that their position has actually changed even if we don't want to. We need to leave them the option of openly changing their minds. (If nothing else there exists the (admittedly somewhat faint) possibility that some of these politicians have actually changed their minds as a result of the sea change in public opinion on the subject - many politicians view themselves truly democratically as representatives of their constituents and consequently will accept being in the wrong on social issues if society contradicts them.)

There will always be homophobia. This has been clear to me from a very early age. The best I can hope for is a world where it has no effect on me. I'm surrounded by people making fatuous pronouncements about me all the time, well-meaning nonsense from ignorant people, overt lies, grubby political machinations on both sides, distortions, wilful misinterpretations and the assembly of vague nonsense like "the gay agenda"... it's the subtextual right to reinterpret the positions of gay activists that allows the construction of the "gay agenda"...

If someone tells me they aren't homophobic, I'm believing them. What's in it for me to hang onto ancient conflict? Things are bad enough without us all convincing ourselves that they're even worse! And they are definitely bad enough that we can't allow the opposition the right to misinterpret what we say, and we cannot pretend that we're allowed to think what they say means what we want it to without them being able to claim the same right!

Phew...

[Phillip McCleod]

12. most of the bigots i've met or known in life..

..and growing up in the country that was a lot.. don't have a lot of content to their bigotry. it's very casual & vacuous 99% of the time. cold hate. empty hate.

but then these bigots made no pretense to be otherwise. the dog-whistle is one thing, and then there's great-grandma who usually gets a pass because why? her bigotry is so empty. there's nothing there to back it up and there's no changing it. it's who she is.. she's just a really shallow human being.

i think this vacuous content of most bigoted speech places context into greater prominence. if one hears a trigger, and pauses to consider the intent of the speaker in the context of the conversation, it may not always be clear if the speaker even understands how it sounded. they might be happily going along thinking they just paid a compliment, and i'm seething.

a lot of bigoted comments i hear and overhear have been very off-handed, and the speaker is surprised on those occasions when they elicit a reaction.

[sibelian]

14. Yes. This.

In my experience it's rarely the case that a casual bigot gives the subject of their bigotry more than a passing thought...

Active bigots are a very different breed. I think it's a bad idea to confuse the two.