Pushing back from privilege?
Louise
Epiphanies Host
in Epiphanies
Basketactortale wrote: »I know this isn't directly the discussion above and I'm not trans so I'm not at the receiving end of the bigotry.
However as an older white person, I'm increasingly being the target of bigoted comments, because somehow the way I look means that I'm a safe person to blurt out this stuff to.
Previously I challenged these comments. But it has got to the stage where I'm so grumpy that I can't be bothered. These days I just look through people I know who are *phobes of all kinds. When they speak I ignore them and pretend they're not there. If they say something disgusting I immediately walk away. If it comes from my relatives I change the subject.
It is a form of privilege and a minor form of protest, but somehow we have to try to change the atmosphere that allows this pollution to be released around us.
I was in a taxi recently and could feel the driver testing the waters on saying bigoted things. At first I just pushed back and queried him or contradicted him when he said highly questionable things ( as a woman alone in a cab I didn't really want conflict and was trying to be polite.) Then he came out with absolute slam dunk conspiratorial antisemitism about the Rothschilds controlling Trump and at that point I told him to stop the cab I was paying him and getting out.
He was furious and started going on about 'freedom of speech' and I was taking too much offence - so I pointed out to him that I had freedom of speech too and he could hear from me as well that I absolutely wasn't having it.
I did this once before a long time ago with a racist Brexiter.
My feeling is that people like this test the waters and if out of politeness you don't push back firmly they take that as permission to go further. So maybe I should have pushed back sooner.
Something I have started doing is wearing pride pins/ badges ( Progress pride flag, neurodiversity pride, trans pride) so people can see or find out if they ask that I don't hold with various prejudices.
I also have made a point of writing to politicians as a cisgender woman to dissociate myself from prejudices emitted supposedly on behalf of people like me.
Nobody should endanger themselves but if we have privilege then maybe we need to tilt the balance of politeness a bit more towards nipping prejudiced stuff in the bud so as not to give permission for it to be emitted around us.
I'm open to ideas on this - what have other people done and how do you tackle people assuming you are OK with prejudice because you look or present in a certain way?
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I figure that if they're entrenched enough to start talking like that to random people of a similar age on a bus there is no opportunity for changing hearts and minds. It's more about not having to listen to this crap.
That taxi ride sounds horrendous @Louise. Sending hugs. The pins etc sound like a great idea though. I will go and have a rummage.
Before I got married I was aware of and (obviously) against anti-semitism.
Then I married someone of Jewish heritage. She wouldn’t claim to be Jewish but had grandparents in the camps.
I have *never* been as aware as I am now of the depths of casual anti-semitism in Britain* just listening to the chat in pubs when no one knows my connection. It’s been life changingly jaw dropping. My children are Jewish enough for an Israeli passport (one Jewish grandparent), my wife, being half Jewish, definitely is.
But in the current world - re your pride badges - I can’t imagine cutting about wearing a Star of David going well.
In my very real lived experience in the last couple of years I know that in places like the Ship anti-Israel absolutely doesn’t mean anti-Jew.
But put in the streets, the unguarded conversations in pubs?
Something else entirely. I’m not sure whether people don’t know where the line is, or do and cheerfully cross it.
*I can only speak for Scotland and England as that’s where I’ve mostly been and have links.
Yeah, a lot of folk are willing to go full-on "those people" about Jews in a way they wouldn't about another ethnic minority, except maybe Gypsy/Roma/Traveller communities.
In our family I bring the latter to the party!
Judith Butler's book Who's afraid of gender? starts with a question, and asks other questions - what is it that people fear, and why, and whose interests does that fear serve?
Pushing back against someone else's fear without understanding that fear, and without understanding our own, often leads to an escalation of fears.
Where I live there's not really a whole lot of anti-Semitism because there hasn't been a sizable Jewish community for a long time and the synagogues have been sold off to turn into flats.
But as recent events show, it doesn't take much to flip the narrative onto other groups. I am sure there would be anti-Jewish hatred here if there were more visible Jews to target.
At present it is the Roma and trans and whatever other group the Reform party are currently talking about who are the main target.
As a counter point, after after decades trying to understand, I am now of the opinion that there's nothing there to understand.
Someone was telling me a story about a trans person in a hospital who allegedly complained about a nurse and led to then being fired. This person who told me this stupid story is perfectly aware that people in all groups are capable of bad behaviour (even if the story is true, which it might well not be) but they were repeating it because it fits the narrative about trans people.
There's nothing there to understand, it is simple bigotry.
I am, in large part, arguing against myself here, but that is what I have observed, especially in a church context.
That’s sort of my point though- I live 30+ miles from the nearest synagogue in a very monocultural English rural area. I think the absence makes people think they can get away with it.
It is absolutely just not my experience that no Jews = no antisemitism I’m afraid. Listen in to some conversations in the pubs, cafes, etc and I pretty well guarantee it’ll be an eye-opener.
True, and people forget how ‘local’ you can be and still be other.
There’s the famous trope of villages locked in enmity having been on opposite sides in the Civil War (1640s for the non-UK here) - we’ve got a pair of those in real life in our area, well off the tourist track.
However, we’ve also got two villages that still hate each other because of what happened in the Black Death. 1346-1353.
Which is both a genuinely nasty (and genuine) ongoing feud, and also weirdly impressive.
What villages? Enquiring minds and all that...
Really? What do those things actually look like?
On behalf of the people in your life who made it so, I am very sorry. When my son came out I had lots of questions which he answered patiently and graciously, only once giving a little protesting whimper of Really, Mum? after the nth question. It was only later I considered the fact that although it was all new to me he had lived with it for years...
I’m absolutely not naming them on here, because even now I’m worried people will guess anyway.
In answer to what that looks like - bearing in mind each village can see the other - you can’t really drink in the pub in the ‘wrong’ village, they stay away from each other’s fetes and occasions. There’s a certain allowance for the (few) incomers to not know any better, but the born and bred judge each other if they transgress.
*’deep’ England
**Ronald Blythe’s landmark 1960s social history of a composite Suffolk village
My father is in hospital. He is very old, the end is near. His wife, my mum is also very old, impaired, frightened and lonely.
Mum says horrible racist things to us about the nurses. She is lashing out in a horrible way. What she is really saying is that she is frightened and lonely. But she doesn't want to say that to her children.
It's easy for us to end up having the wrong conversation with her. The one where we push back, and she ends up more lonely and scared.
When we get it right, we manage to have the conversations she needs to have.
We don't always get it right.
Nothing about this is easy. Little is good.
Heron
The main person I hear racist comments from (in fact the only person on a regular basis) is an older friend that I meet about once a month. I think it mostly stems from a very negative relationship with her son’s ex wife, whose parents are Indian. She’s generally more “unfiltered” in what she says about people following a stroke a few years ago, and finds it harder to retain information. I can’t abandon her because of her views and usually just say “Sorry, I don’t really agree with you on that” and change the subject.
This is so hard. I’m glad that you see so clearly what she’s really needing.
Yes, I understand the point, I just don't agree with it. I don't think the "root" is really disgust either, although that's certainly part of it.
In my view these things are learned behaviours, repeatedly practiced until they become second nature.
That said, I was reading experiences others have posted and remembered that I've experienced similar things. When one elderly relative was near death in hospital she experienced vivid racist hallucinations. Another became extremely violent and verbally abusive to her carers.
This is of a different order/type of thing to people who are basically of sound mind and who think that proximity means that others will share their bigotted views.
At the same time it perhaps indicates that these things are socially conditioned and have to be fought against within oneself. When minds are weaker or when a person feels that somehow they have a "right" to tell others their opinions, they come out.
I've been thinking about the experiences related here (which I also recognise). But I don't think these are different categories of thing. I think we're all bigots (that is, the vast majority of us posting on these forums). The only difference is that most of us (here) have our bigotry "under control", most of the time. But it's only a question of circumstances. As we start losing our faculties, who's going to have put up with whatever emerges from the recesses of our minds?
The eurocentric mindset is steeped in centuries of imperialist, colonialist and religious othering and bigotry. This isn't something one generation, our generation, can purge from our system just by not thinking about it.
Forstater appealed against the judgment, and this was heard by the Employment Appeal Tribunal in April 2021. Judgment was reserved, and the decision in her favour was published on 10 June 2021. As with the original hearing, the appeal was specifically on the narrow issue of whether her beliefs were protected under the Equality Act, and thus amounted to a protected belief. The judgment found that Forstater's gender-critical beliefs were protected, meeting the final requirement in Grainger plc v Nicholson, specifically that they were "worthy of respect in a democratic society". However, in its judgment, the Tribunal clarified that this finding does not mean that people with gender-critical beliefs can express them in a way that discriminates against trans people. A full merits hearing on Forstater's claim that she lost her employment as a result of these beliefs was heard in March 2022, and the decision was delivered in July 2022. The decision of the Employment Tribunal upheld Forstater's case, concluding that she had suffered direct discrimination on the basis of her gender-critical beliefs. The judgment for remedies was handed down in June 2023, with Forstater awarded compensation of £91,500 for loss of earnings, injury to feelings and aggravated damages, with an additional £14,900 added as interest.
An overlapping narrative (not Wikipedia):
NB Please be careful if considering what to say about individuals who have won court cases.
And I think claiming the initiative is important.
Last time this happened in person, ironically as I was removing a conspiracy-theorist-advertising sticker from a light pole, I gave my interlocutor a series of neutrally skeptical interjections until she said something I could take personally and then It old her directly that I took her comment personally and she was just plain wrong about that. She promptly stormed off.
I should've cut her off when she started going after George Soros, but part of me wanted to see what subset of nutjob I was dealing with so I let her talk for a bit. I did make my objections clear at the end when she accused Planned Parenthood of being a eugenicist organization.
What makes me dangerous is that I'm naturally empathic in a way that makes it more shocking when I very abruptly decide to open fire. I can relate to the feelings that someone has about something, but that doesn't mean I'm going to flatter their opinions. Some people find that confusing.
This makes it sound like saying bigoted things is like farting. Some have lost control of themselves, some never had it.
What does it say about us if it is true?
I don't think I believe in this vision of the world, which seems vaguely Hegelian to me. That we've been so immersed in colonialism, racism, misogyny that it is the water we swim in and the default we all return to.
Which can't be true. We have friends and family who are not "the norm" in various ways. We've all grown up in a multicultural society.
I'm not looking forward to the point where I lose my mental faculties, but I sincerely believe that I will not turn into a sexist transphobe because looking deep within myself I can't see those things. I do have deep hatreds of other things, particularly the far-right, but not that.
Stepping right back to basics ... The case was won becuase the court ruled that gender critical views qualified as a protected philospohical belief under the equality act. Other protected beliefs include ethical veganism and Scottish Independance.
Similar cases have ruled that policies requiring employees to use transgender persons’ preferred pronouns at work are justified.
So, it looks like the current status quo for employment law is that you can think what you like but you can't use that as a excuse for disciminating against others.
But then I was reflecting on the above and was wondering whether TERF is a protected belief and whether that means that it would be possible to have "no TERF" toilet facilities.
I'm not a lawyer I don't really understand this stuff, but it seems possible for someone to set up facilities for trans people which were then shut down because other people complained that there were trans people using them.
I think it would be relatively easy to say something like:
"These toilets are not designated single sex spaces under the Equality Act 2010 and we invite you to use whichever you are comfortable with, requiring only that you respect the privacy and dignity of other users. Please report any instances of harassment or other inappropriate behaviour to a manager."
It may or may not be necessary to add:
"TERFs may find a convenient bush 150yrds →"
1. Flush
2. Brush if necessary/available
3. Wash your hands
If you can abide by those, I'm happy to share a bog with you.
You forgot
4. No queue jumping except by mutual consent
I realise that the concept of having to queue for a public toilet may be alien to those who have only experienced the men's loos...
Ah yes, classic male mistake!
The post quake new buildings like the Library and the Bus Interchange have all been built with individual cubicles likewise the hospitals.
The ones on the "Kingswear Castle" paddle steamer are fairly hard to get to, but rather lovely: https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/08/fa/26/cf/paddle-steamer-kingswear.jpg
Inaccessible Toilets - Wetherspoons. Unless you have a team of sherpas and survival kit.
I dread to think what will emerge from the recesses of my mind, but a few days ago I went to visit an aged relative who has dementia. She said to us at one point 'there are a lot of Black people here' (about half the staff) and then went on to say 'they're really lovely people.' She's in her nineties, so I don't think her attitudes are a generational thing.