If you are a cisgender, heterosexual, white person, please do not write about Orlando
Peak something – peak doing social justice wrong is perhaps the best description of it. Mariella Mosthof at Bustle says nearly everyone should say nothing at all about Orlando.
The title alone is terrible:
Dear White, Hetero, Cis People: Please Don’t Co-Opt This Tragedy
Excuse me? Co-opt?? It’s not co-opting to express grief and outrage, and it’s not some ideal opposite of co-opting to ignore terrible things that happen to other people. If only people who are neither white nor straight nor “cis” can talk about Orlando, few people would even know it had happened.
Then the first sentence is even worse:
If you are a cisgender, heterosexual, white person, please do not write about the largest mass shooting in American history, which took place this Sunday at a gay club called Pulse in Orlando during the venue’s Latino night.
Please do not write about it. Just like that. Shut up. Say nothing. Look away. Ignore it. Talk about baseball instead.
The hell I will. Don’t you dare tell me to ignore horrors inflicted on people for belonging to a despised group. Don’t tell me to ignore the children slaughtered in Peshawar or the college students slaughtered in Garissa or the churchgoers in Charleston or the cartoonists in Paris or the atheists in Bangladesh or the clubbers in Orlando. Don’t tell anyone to do that. Stop that shit right now.
Of course, share condolences, express how horribly you feel for the victims and their families, tell your queer Latinx friends that you love them, lend support. But please do not take it upon yourself to publicly point out the hypocrisy of Paul Ryan tweeting “thoughts and prayers” when the legislative agenda of his party actively marginalizes queer people all the time.
Why the fuck not?? Why wouldn’t I, why shouldn’t I? What’s this “do not take it upon yourself” shit? It’s not presumptuous to point out the hypocrisy of Paul Ryan; we all get to do that.
Please do not wax poetic about the outrage of Trump supporters doing the same, while their presidential hopeful advocates building a wall intended to keep out the very folks Pulse was aiming to create a safe space for. Do not condemn confused conservatives who are blaming this on radical Islam. If you are a straight ally, please do not write about the infuriating injustice of Orlando health centers being in desperate need of blood when the queer community is not permitted to donate it.
Queer people are already saying these things. (Hi.) Latinx people are saying these things. Muslim people are saying these things.
“Muslim people”? So Muslims get to talk about Orlando and atheists don’t? Non-Muslims don’t? Seriously?
And while we’re at it, do not write an article or a Facebook post patting yourself on the back for not saying any of these things, because even that takes valuable space away from the marginalized people who this story is really about. This is the time for their voices to be heard, and for the rest of us to listen. This is the time for the authenticity of their lived experience and their communities’ history of collective trauma to radiate. This is a time to share their stories.
Says Mariella Mosthof, in the act of doing exactly that – patting herself on the back for telling 99.99% of people to say nothing about Orlando.
That the largest mass shooting in American history was perpetrated in a queer space is not a designation that any of us wanted. Queer history is already so painful, so traumatic, so violent, and so unjust. We didn’t need this to make our point. But now that we have it, the least allies can do is let us make our point.
Chances are, queer voices, Latinx voices, and Muslim voices are already saying what you wish to express, and you will likely find that they are expressing it in a more articulate way than you are able to. Make the choice to share those voices instead of centering yours.
Except a lot of those voices are bound to be white or straight or “cis” or all three and you told all of them to shut up, remember?
Peak awful. Peak the worst.
The way it reads is almost like a The Onion article… seriously though, WTF?
I know. It’s so bad it strains credulity.
I am sure the friends and relatives of the dead will take these admonishments to and grieve silently in private so as not to upset the self righteous asshats like this one by objecting to their loved ones being called the pejorative ‘queer’ by a stranger. Criminy!
We’re almost right back at square one, where we were 50 or 60 years ago
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/rex-murphy-the-sterile-vapid-chauvinistic-alley-of-identity-politics
I spent Saturday night alone in a hotel room, imagining. I have a bi son and a butch daughter, and when I saw (fleetingly, before I deleted FB from my phone for 24+ hours) the texts young men sent to their mothers, I felt ill with grief for them and their parents. I can so easily imagine my young adult children in those situations. This call for silence is insulting to those young men, insulting to their families, and ultimately insulting to the community connections some people (but apparently not the staff at Bustle) are trying to create.
It is also so terrifically gendered, because of the age of the victims and their efforts to reach out to their mothers. Apparently women who imagine themselves receiving those texts should shut up, make the cool young activists some sandwiches, and cry silently in a corner so as not to make those cool young activists realize that they are not the center of everyone’s world.
This is a perfect example of the problems with the online, male-owned-and-directed “women’s media”, which says, over and over, “hey women, be silent and still and let the more important oppressed people speak; don’t try to find unity and common ground, because you can’t imagine how cool and new our lives and ideas are.” Funny that it’s men that are promoting this vision.
Ach. That’s beautifully said, alona – and I’m so sorry about that night you had.
I was nearly a social scientist so I will write about anomie and alienation. I was a pupil, a parent and a school governor and I will write about a very rich country with so poor an education system that it equips many of its citizens only to live in fear. I am a feminist and I will write about the damage which rigid definitions of gender and gender roles do to us all. I am an internationalist and I will write about the horrors of imperialism, including American imperialism, and how the damage of that imperialism goes on harming people for generations. I was the chair of a political think tank and I will write about politics – the politics of social justice and the politics of segregation by religion, by skin colour and by sexual orientation. I am a socialist and I will write about all this and much more. I am human and I will weep when I hear the soundtrack of the Gay Men’s Choir singing in Old Compton Street last evening, where not everyone present was gay but all were united in grief and in solidarity. I am free both legally and mentally and I will speak and write what I please.
Once I have written it, only when I have written it, I will trust my friends and my political sparring partners to tell me whether what I have said or written is bollocks. This is not a judgement which can be made before the event.
As for you, Mariella Mosthof, go take a running jump!
[…] a comment by Maureen Brian on If you are a cisgender, heterosexual, white person, please do not write about […]
If you’re not an Oklahoman, don’t talk about the Oklahoma bombing. If you’re not an abortion worker, don’t talk about the abortion clinic bombings. If you’re not a teacher, don’t talk about school shootings.
Sometimes I think the world accidentally turned the wrong way, and we are now orbiting backwards.
“Dear White, Hetero, Cis People: Please Don’t Co-Opt This Tragedy”
Says the writer for a “feminist” site run by a dude.
Oops. I didn’t see alona’s comment. Sorry about that. But it is largely the responsibility of women to “let others speak first,” and as someone who’d been told most her life to, quite literally, “shut up,” I don’t take kindly to it anymore.
That being said. I’ve been “peaking” for a couple of years now. Suggesting that anyone gets to “own” a tragedy of this magnitude is, at best, misguided.
Oh, it bears saying twice, or more.
“Care less about people who aren’t just like you” and “don’t express your outrage or fear or disgust about tragedies that befall others” sounds like idiotic advice to me.
Everyone knows that the worst possible thing to bring to a social justice movement is solidarity.
One thing I notice about militants like Mosthof is their lack of empathy. Looking at her Twitter timeline, she makes no effort to sympathize with the victims. Her only comment is this vague reference to the shooting, on 13 June:
Who cares about dozens of dead folks and their grieving relatives when you can sit around and fret about the wrong kind of people having opinions on the internet?
Identity politics is poison.
No right-wing blowhard’s snide comments about PeeCee-dom can approach the absurdity of the real thing.
I just read an essay of Hitchens’ on the topic. For an example of PC speech in action, he chose Clarence Thomas. The language of censorship, division, euphemism, normalization of evil etc. is amazingly bipartisan.