I’m not sure if this article’s point is that “anarchists say shitty stuff in private” or “These grievances are ones people feel scared to bring up” it’s interesting either way.
1) “Call-out culture was developed to allow activist groups to confront leaders who abused their privilege, but now it is being used to settle petty scores on the level of interpersonal politics. I now have a hard time believing some people when they make call-outs because I have seen too many that were based on nothing. Call-outs have become a way to acceptably inflict social violence and rarely are followed up in any way resembling transformative justice because people are not interested in doing the hard work of working with those who are called out.”
I’ve seen this one happen, often to deflect criticism from the accuser by misdirection. It’s a mess.
2) “As a white person, if I don’t automatically agree with whichever person of color is directly in front of me, I run the risk of being labelled a racist. This is a result of good intentions where we want to center people of color and their experiences, but it makes no sense because people of color are not a monolithic block who all agree or share the same experiences. I am basically forced to perform a kind of double-think where I am expected to be able to agree with multiple conflicting viewpoints at the same time – or at least pretend to.”
I feel like this one is often a thing that sort of signals “hey this isn’t really my issue” or at least is more about not talking over people
5) “Calling people out for using the wrong language, for example saying ‘biological female’ instead of ‘person assigned female at birth’, is harmful and makes no sense because not everyone has access to the same information, they’ll never learn if they’re excluded, and the ‘correct’ languages changes every couple of years anyway. People don’t want to be associated with us because they see how punishing we are to each other and it turns them off.”
and like making people feel safe and respected is a balancing act, like saying something misogynistic to a woman because you’re uneducated and don’t have the privilege of being educated on that subject means that like on the one hand the woman feels unsafe because misogyny, and the person without education on that issue feels unsafe because they’re being jumped on for a lack of education they didn’t have access to, and like ultimately there isn’t an easy answer to this stuff, it’s a balancing act.
8) “Who cares about who you personally fuck when we’re talking about a broad political movement? Get off the ego trip. What we want is health care, affordable housing, jobs, prison abolition, immigration rights, sex workers rights, and the end of capitalism. ‘Queer’ has become so fashionable that it’s being confused with ‘radical’.”
This one just feels uncomfortable to me, it seems like there’s a failure to acknowledge violence done against LGBTQETC people
10) “We’ve completely failed to build frameworks for accountability and transformative justice, and instead rely on callouts and social exclusion that replicate the prison system without the benefit of having trials.”
Like this overstate the case a wee bit, like I see your point, but like the prison system is really really horrible, but like the witch hunt atmosphere of a lot of spaces is really gross.
Things That Anarchists Say to Me in Private But Never Repeat Publicly
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 