Tag: racism

You Don’t Really Get What “Mental Illness” Means – The Killing of Walter Wallace

Among the litany of ignorant and inflammatory comments I’ve been finding on YouTube in response to the recent killing of Walter Wallace by Philadelphia police – the same tired-out claims I’ve seen time and again – something that stuck out to me today is this: don’t pretend you know what mental illnesses are, or that you know anything about their implications.

“I know he had mental illness… BUT…”

“So what if he had mental illness, you still can’t…”

Look, dingwipe. You’re lying to yourself and everyone else if you think you believe that mental illnesses actually exist. Why? Because the very concept of mental illness has huge ramifications for how we as a society view free will, hold people accountable for their actions, and grant people special care and consideration. And you’re not considering any of this. Frankly, it scares you. Believing in the existence of mental illnesses means you can’t assume anything about how someone is going to behave just by looking at them. It means you can’t just tell someone to “suck it up” or “cut it out” and expect them to behave prosocially. It means some people don’t have as much control over their actions as you think they should… and perhaps, neither do you. Hell, maybe we ALL deserve more consideration. But you can’t accept that. Your identity depends on your ability to cope with a lack of consideration from others. You need this story that people do bad things because they’re greedy and vain. The world is so much simpler that way. You can crank someone’s hardships up to eleven, but they’re still equally required to pull through.

After all, we suffer equally, don’t we…?

Anyone who complains just doesn’t want to put in the effort and expects everyone else to cover their asses, isn’t that right?

I get that you’re not going to change, not from this. Not from me. I only ask that you stop pretending that you’re on our side when you enter a debate about social justice for people of color and people with disabilities. You’re agreeing that people can have mental illnesses so you don’t look bad. You’re lampshading. Mental illness means that you will not be capable of responding to situations the way most people can. And as for the claim that having mental illness doesn’t give you a pass to misbehave in society… you’re right. In our society, no, it doesn’t. You are expected to carry yourself the same as everyone else.

Maybe there’s something wrong with that. Maybe that’s something we should change.

What’s ultimately terrifying about mental illness is that we fail to acknowledge it.

People Miss the Whole Point of Political Correctness

Ah, the joy of r/fatlogic.

I already knew what the commenters would write as soon as I saw this. This argument has been applied to other forms of verbal abuse and microaggressions such as sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and misgendering: you don’t get to decide how someone should feel in response to how you treat them. If someone tells you that the manner and content of your speech causes them to feel uncomfortable, afraid, or sad, the burden had ought to be on you to change your behavior instead of them sucking it up. I generally agree with this maxim, but I don’t think this is the best argument for why people should check their privilege and bigotry. People on the other side of this – usually conservatives and libertarians – claim that feelings are primarily one’s own responsibility (though conservatives are plenty offended by certain things). And people can feel offended about anything. That in itself does not make all feelings logical. Honoring everyone’s feelings as truth would probably amount to cultural relativism when feelings are shared among groups – this dreaded so-called “identity politics”.

            I would caution two things. One, it is technically correct to acknowledge that someone has a feeling. Feelings are not under anyone’s control. They are automatic. They can be rational, but they don’t need to be. Erasing someone’s feeling because it’s illogical or inconvenient to you is a pointless endeavor. And two, you shouldn’t change your language or behavior around someone because JUST because it offends them personally. You should do it because you understand the specific ways that people are treated in society based on their group membership and how that creates a different experience than yours – even if they haven’t experienced it yet. It’s the reason why doing blackface is wrong even if your black friend doesn’t know the history and tells you they don’t care. This political correctness crusade has never been about exhausting yourself by constantly catering to individuals’ whims. It’s about understanding general patterns.

            If you yell at a woman, especially if you are a man, you should understand that A) as a woman she might have had the experience of being abused by a man in the past – a particular dynamic that most men can’t experience, and B) she probably experiences low levels of verbal harassment most of the time, and your behavior will add to this accumulation of stress.

If you’ve been thin all your life and some of your friends make fun of fat people, with jokes ranging from playfully using fat stereotypes to being downright annoyed by them, you will probably laugh along with them even if you’re neutral or apathetic toward fat people personally. But then what happens if a year or two later you’ve gained 60 pounds? You’re not just so fat that only you notice – you’re so fat that everyone else has noticed too. You’ve never been one of “those people”, but now you are. How do you think all the jokes and insults your friends made about fat people are going to affect you? You’ll probably hate yourself and you won’t know what to do. You probably won’t have many sympathetic friends or relatives to fall back on.

           I guess what I’m trying to say is, you can’t just assume that since an individual has not yet experienced explicit instances of discrimination for their group affiliation(s), it’s okay to make jokes or share negative views of their group. You might have a black or Muslim friend who may have been subject to systemic discrimination but happens to not have had insults and slurs hurled at them by strangers or been threatened with racist symbols or Islamophobic messages. But they can still experience these things in the future, and if they do they will probably not recognize it right away, because you’ve been deriding Muslims or black people for years. Just because you don’t see them as “one of those people” and you’ve convinced them that they aren’t, that doesn’t mean they won’t eventually be treated that way by others.

       The point of political correctness is to try – at least TRY – to educate yourself about the experiences of marginalized groups and use what you’ve learned to treat strangers and kin with more empathy and respect. But more than that, it’s about fighting for systemic change; a kind smile and a conversation will only do so much. It’s dishonest and misleading to reduce fights for social equity to policing individuals’ language. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. But people who are truly “woke” know that people get their beliefs from SOMEWHERE, and they spend more of their time fighting the institutions that produce loyal followers rather than simply shaming people into compliance, or exiling them as punishment for their personal failings.