Call-Out Culture is Failing
Part of what might help us out in the socjus community re:infighting and the abuse of callout culture is not making a callout post every time someone pisses us off and couching it in social justice language.
Just because someone pissed you off does not mean they are engaging in abusive tactics. Just because you don’t like them does not make them a bigot seeking to personally destroy you and everyone like you. Just because they disagree with your methods of social justice does not mean that you have a right to incite a harassment mob against them.
Why am I specifying this? Because there are actual bigots out there, and they are many and they want to kill us. When we throw our own under the bus and attack and harass them, we are doing the work of bigots for them.
What this has done is create a toxic environment where abuse, bigotry, and harassment thrives. It’s an attack-dog mentality that questions very little about what it’s being pointed towards and why, only eager to destroy. This allows abusive manipulative people to come in, photoshop tweets and status updates, or make vague callout posts couched in social justice language in order to create smear campaigns against their targets. One would hope that these attempts would be laughed off by us as a community, aware that these tactics exist and we’d not willingly put someone’s entire livelihood and well-being at risk on hearsay. This isn’t the case.
There are still individuals who were targets of similar campaigns by Gamergaters last year who are still attempting to shake the stigma brought on them by vague storifies and EncyclopediaDrammatica articles that alleged they were rapists and dog fuckers. Despite the fact that the twitter accounts posting these storifies were known trans-exclusionary radical feminists holding to the belief that when trans women sleep with lesbians that it’s somehow rape, and that ED is a known violently homophobic, racist, and transphobic site commonly utilized by channers and gamergaters.
But if someone writes about it on the internet, it must be true, right?
We need to be better than this. We need to be smarter than this. We need to be more discerning and less willing to harm others.
If your social justice is harming marginalized people, then your social justice has failed.
Call-out culture must first and foremost be utilized as a method of signal-boosting harm for the awareness and protection of other people. Instead, it has been utilized as a weapon for the destruction of reputations and the enabling of mass harassment.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be constantly vigilant and aware within our own communities, but that our motivations must always be the support and protection of marginalized people. When we are spending more time attacking each other over slight offenses and petty disagreements rather than actual known bigots who want to see us rounded up in camps and executed I think it’s safe to say that our priorities are fucked up.
Remember what it is we are fighting for.
