I actually read this before reading Chait's article and completed sided with this guy (and Chait). I'm not familiar with Chait's entire back catalog but to me he's not a jerk or a-hole for writing the article. He's completely right that it stifles debate. The social justice warriors while completely noble in their cause, need to do a better job of identifying overt racism and hatred from other forms, like institutional racism. If neonazis are marching down the street, they deserve ridicule and public shaming. However, when someone lacks an understanding of the struggles of blacks in MPLS or hold stereotypical views of them, they shouldn't be lambasted as the second coming of David Duke.
While I am sympathetic, I think a lot of this thread is somewhat missing the point.
If you believe, as I do, that various types of prejudice (racial, gender, sex, class, etc.) are basically omnipresent in society (even if we can quibble about how strongly), calling out the David Dukes and the neo-Nazi marches isn't enough. David Duke isn't the problem; normal, well-intentioned people
who still have unconscious prejudice are.
For a lot of people in this country, saying that people need to focus on "the real issues" is really a way of dodging the question of their own culpability. If you're a guy who puts his hand on his wallet when he passes a black guy on the street, it's easy to justify it: "the guy looked sketchy," "I'm just being cautious," "it doesn't hurt anyone," and so on. But it's never just that. That black man notices when you look at him suspiciously, and it affects his life, his relationships with (overwhelmingly white and privileged) authority figures, and a thousand other things that are invisible to those of us who don't face those kinds of problems. It also encourages you--and those you deal with--to respond to people like him similarly in other situations.
That's one of the biggest problems I have with Freddie deBoer's piece. His first example is this:
I have seen, with my own two eyes, a 19 year old white woman — smart, well-meaning, passionate — literally run crying from a classroom because she was so ruthlessly brow-beaten for using the word “disabled.” Not repeatedly. Not with malice. Not because of privilege. She used the word once and was excoriated for it. She never came back. I watched that happen.
The easy thing for us to say is: how horrible! That poor girl!
But then you think about it. We don't have any of the details of this story. What we have, instead, is Mr. deBoer's frame. This girl is presented to us with a host of positive characteristics: she's "smart," "well-meaning," not acting out of prejudice, not malicious, etc., while whoever disagreed with her use of the word "disabled" gets comments which lead you in the other way: "ruthless," "brow-beating," "excoriation." From deBoer's characterization,
of course she's sympathetic, but that's because we aren't really getting a true story, we're getting one man's perspective. We don't even know what they were talking about, or who else was in the room!
I teach Greek and Roman literature at the U, texts which are full to the brim with sexual violence and misogyny, racist and xenophobic language, justifications and praise of slavery, and a host of other unsavory things. Sometimes, when interrogating the text, people can end up interrogating each other. Sometimes people say ignorant things. Sometimes, people make mistakes. What I very rarely see--actually, only once--is the sort of interaction Mr. deBoer says occurred here, with outright hostility. What usually happens... is more like this:
Person 1: blah blah blah Disabled blah blah blah
Person 2: You shouldn't say "disabled," it shames people/gives the wrong impression/whatever
Person 1: That wasn't my intention!
Person 2: Intention isn't the only thing that matters
~~anger~~
When people are confronted with something like this, there is an almost inevitable tendency to push back. Almost no-one will actually admit to themselves that they have prejudice, or that their prejudice changes the way they interact with disadvantaged groups. Instead, people get hurt, or they get angry, or they get defensive. Situations escalate. As a teacher, my job is to intervene (which Mr. deBoer apparently failed to do), to change the course of the conversation, to defuse it while not undermining whatever people have expressed or felt. It's hard, and yes, it can lead to hard feelings. But what's the alternative?
One of the most problematic things about Mr. deBoer's example is the fact that ableism and related concepts are still controversial enough that some of us can legitimately wonder whether "disabled" really warrants the trouble. If we changed the setting a little bit, though, it changes everything:
I have seen, with my own two eyes, a 19 year old white woman — smart, well-meaning, passionate — literally run crying from a classroom because she was so ruthlessly brow-beaten for using the word “nigger.” Not repeatedly. Not with malice. Not because of privilege. She used the word once and was excoriated for it. She never came back. I watched that happen.
Is this girl as sympathetic? She used a racist term, got called out for it, and was so offended to be called out that she left the room crying. Does it matter if she's smart or well-meaning or passionate? Would it matter if she were from some community in remote Appalachia where that was "just the word people use"?
Of course, in an ideal world, I would love to be able to tell someone that they're being prejudiced without the potential for hurt feelings or embarrassment or anger. But if you were a black person in that room, would you really think that the potential squeamishness of some (mostly white) people is a good reason to avoid having that discussion?