some terms i've been thinking about
1. Charitable Blackmail: a form of social control in which genuinely helpful and necessary assistance is used to discourage criticism of the harmful systems, behaviors, and actors that make the assistance necessary in the first place.
This is when a person (or group of people) provides genuine and necessary assistance to a vulnerable person (or group), as a way of silencing criticism of their harmful behavior. The assistance they offer is genuinely helpful and necessary enough that it cannot be reasonably turned down, but never truly resolves the root issues, keeping the vulnerable dependent. The people offering the assistance use the perception of themselves as "charitable" to distract from exploitative and abusive practices, often arguing that those who criticism them are unreasonable and overlook their good deeds.
In traditional blackmail, the victim is silenced by the threat that they will be harmed. In charitable blackmail, the victim is silenced by the perceived selflessness of the perpetrator and their genuine need for the assistance, which is used to make any critique or resistance appear irrational and extreme.
Example: A country in the Global South had its agricultural systems wrecked by colonial violence. Post-independence, those colonial nations set up a "charitable" system of "donating" seeds from wealthy companies to native farmers, keeping them dependent on their former colonizers and suppressing native crops. When people attempt the critique this system, the backlash fixates on the fact that the program helps people and "is better than nothing," and accuses critics of themselves being privileged or ignorant of complexity.
2. Anti-nuance: the use of complexity, caveats, contextual details, or the performance of balanced thinking in ways that prevent genuine synthesis and aim towards simplistic conclusions or predetermined judgments.
This is when the genuine moral complexity of an issue or topic is appealed to in order to launder false dichotomies and black-and-white thinking. Nuance is a process by which we develop a "big picture" understanding of an issue by understanding all aspects and sides, with the goal of coming to a decision on what to do that takes everything into account rather than defaulting to sweeping conclusions.
In comparison, anti-nuance appeals to complexity with the goal of justifying sweeping conclusions. Details are presented selectively and without proper context, making the discussion appear nuanced without sharing the goals of true nuance. Nuance is always open to new critiques and expanding understanding, while anti-nuance will always resist critique and any complexities that cannot be used to support the desired conclusion. Nuance seeks out a diversity of facts and experiences in order to synthesize them and move forward, while anti-nuance typically stops at "there are a lot of different facts / perspectives," acknowledging complexity only to justify not engaging with it and returning to the status quo.
Example: The Israel/Palestine conflict is so complicated, because Jewish people have suffered so much over history, and taking hostages is never okay. So it's really both sides causing problems, and you can't get mad at the Israel for protecting itself!
Charitable blackmail and anti-nuance often play off each other. Those who criticize exploitative benefactors may be accused of "lacking nuance" under the assumption that acknowledging that real assistance is provided automatically means seeing the benefactors as "good people" who cannot be held accountable for contributing to harm. Charitable blackmail itself tends to keep the focus on the "small picture" of an issue and fairly black-and-white questions (is there aid being given or not?) and prevents "big picture" discussion (why is this happening at all? what forces perpetuate it? what are the long-term impacts?). Anti-nuance tends to create false equivalences, treating nuance as if it requires both sides to have equal amounts of criticism and praise, decontextualizing facts in order to create an artificial sense of balance. For example, treating the violence done by Hamas as equivalent to the violence done by Israel simply because both have been violent and engaged in immoral behaviors, while avoiding the massive difference in both military and international-political power, levels of destruction, levels of control over the other, etc.
My goal with coining these terms is to make it easier to identify and critique these behaviors and prevent necessary discussions from getting bogged down and distracted by them.
gracieabrams
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
kianamaiart
blakekathryn
