That Blog About That Queer Kid

Mar. 23, 2012 at 7:00am with 189 notes View comments

I am transmisogynistic. I have internalized racism and been through white-washing. I am sexist. I have internalized and perpetuate ableism. I am ethnocentric. I have internalized and perpetuate sizeism. I have, do, and will take part in all forms of oppression that exist for I was socialized in world where they exist and was socialized to ensure that they continue to thrive. This does not mean that I cannot and will not do my best to work against these efforts. This is the purpose of activism.

Call outs are an important part of this process, but they don’t exist in a vacuum. Tumblr call out culture says that how people call each other out doesn’t matter, but it does. This is not to say that people can’t show anger or call people names when calling them out. They certainly can. What I mean is that oppression doesn’t stop before the call out and start again once it’s done. Our privileges and marginalizations come into the conversation with us whether we like it or not.

I often find that many people who participate in Tumblr’s call out culture will use their privileges to their advantage to call out someone else’s privileges while targeting their marginalizations if that makes any sense. For example, some people who call me out will use really academic-centric language because they’re college students. They have the right to use that language, but it doesn’t change that I’m not academically privileged. Doing this is to anyone in a similar dynamic is using privilege over them.

Call Out Culture teaches us that these things don’t matter and that, when calling people out, we are incapable of being oppressive in that moment for our actions are justified in terms of specific forms of oppression. The lines between the privileged and marginalized are not as clear as we’d like to think. So, yes, white folks are privileged in terms of racism, but white people can also be trans*/queer, disabled, fat, poor, illiterate, neurodivergent, etc., and all of the above. The same goes for any other privileged or marginalized group. To deny that these lines are blurry is to deny the existence of intersectionality. To refuse to look at the possibility of intersectionality in the process of calling people out is taking part in oppressive behavior.

We need to recognize that we all are oppressive beings who have been programmed to think in ways that marginalize ourselves and others. To deny this is to deny that oppression is institutional, and, therefore, deny its very existence. Calling people out doesn’t make us perfect in the moment nor does it mean that we can’t take part in whatever behavior.

This is probably going to be incredibly unpopular since Tumblr is notorious for this, but this is why I don’t take part in call out culture: it trades in the difficulties of oppression dynamics for the ones that favor us individually.