It's not commendable, certainly, but it's a stretch to think of it as malicious.
I'm scratching my head trying to think where I ever attributed malice to anyone. Something doesn't need to be malicious to be unacceptable; indeed, those forms of injustice which are still motivated by real malice tend to strike me as relatively uninteresting. It's the unintentional perpetuation of unjust structures which I'm most interested in opposing; I hope and pray we've already enacted enough social change for the more overt sort of intolerance to die out on its own, even as I fear that as long as the more subtle forms of injustice remain in our society it will create spaces for the more extreme forms to flourish.
Indeed, it strikes me that more often than not, malicious injustice is a sign of progress: a slaveowner (for example) can truly believe they are doing the loving thing toward their slaves (not to mention wife and children); it's only when oppressed groups begin to exercise their autonomy that hate appears.
Does it mean, among other things, that when one chooses which causes to support (and in doing so drops others), that the resulting disinterest is support of the problematic status quo?
I'm not sure I would claim that (even if it is--and I'm not sure that it is--the logical endpoint of what I've said, there may well be something I've said which is not necessary to the main thrust of my argument and which I would reject upon reflection), but neither does it strike me as the reductio ad absurdum you seem to be treating it as. I'm not saying that no one who falls short of being a moral superbeing deserves to live--there'd be no one left in that case--just that we should be aware of our failings. There are only so many hours in a day and, yes, some things need to be dropped in favor of others--but never should we treat those choices as innocent, because they aren't: they reflect our values, our upbringing, and our culture in sometimes painful ways.
Mostly, my concern is more for the log in my own eye (and I never for a moment doubt it's there; it is hard to unlearn white het male privilege even when one has had the benefit of being raised by a feminist mother) than the speck in my neighbor's, to fix problems and oppose systemic injustice rather than to lay blame: blame is an instrument of an unjust, patriarchal system.
As I said, how is it not acceptable to say that one is not interested in watching, for example, shows about women?
First off, this was more an empirical statement about a specific set of social norms than anything else: if you say you're not interested in female characters in the femslash and meta circles I frequent, the response will probably be the equivalent of an eyeroll; if you say you're not interested in characters of color, you'll probably be lucky to get off with the eyeroll. However, there is an underlying logic to these norms which I think is objectively right (for some suitably postmodern value of "objectively right"--on the offchance you care, you can find a detailed discussion of my metaethics here), so it's worth going into.
Again, the claim isn't really that no--not one--collection of the words "I'm not interested in X" in that order where X is a group of marginalized/oppressed people should ever under any circumstances be uttered in discourse. What I am saying is that it is a warning signal like saying "I'm not a racist but...." and the influences leading up to such a statement will be quite rightly automatically suspect--even if in a small number of cases those influences may be unproblematic--because in the vast majority of cases such a statement will be able to be traced back to underlying systemic structures of injustice at work in our society. (Again, this doesn't make one a horrible person; it just means they're human in an injust global culture.)
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Date: 2008-06-25 09:39 pm (UTC)I'm scratching my head trying to think where I ever attributed malice to anyone. Something doesn't need to be malicious to be unacceptable; indeed, those forms of injustice which are still motivated by real malice tend to strike me as relatively uninteresting. It's the unintentional perpetuation of unjust structures which I'm most interested in opposing; I hope and pray we've already enacted enough social change for the more overt sort of intolerance to die out on its own, even as I fear that as long as the more subtle forms of injustice remain in our society it will create spaces for the more extreme forms to flourish.
Indeed, it strikes me that more often than not, malicious injustice is a sign of progress: a slaveowner (for example) can truly believe they are doing the loving thing toward their slaves (not to mention wife and children); it's only when oppressed groups begin to exercise their autonomy that hate appears.
Does it mean, among other things, that when one chooses which causes to support (and in doing so drops others), that the resulting disinterest is support of the problematic status quo?
I'm not sure I would claim that (even if it is--and I'm not sure that it is--the logical endpoint of what I've said, there may well be something I've said which is not necessary to the main thrust of my argument and which I would reject upon reflection), but neither does it strike me as the reductio ad absurdum you seem to be treating it as. I'm not saying that no one who falls short of being a moral superbeing deserves to live--there'd be no one left in that case--just that we should be aware of our failings. There are only so many hours in a day and, yes, some things need to be dropped in favor of others--but never should we treat those choices as innocent, because they aren't: they reflect our values, our upbringing, and our culture in sometimes painful ways.
Mostly, my concern is more for the log in my own eye (and I never for a moment doubt it's there; it is hard to unlearn white het male privilege even when one has had the benefit of being raised by a feminist mother) than the speck in my neighbor's, to fix problems and oppose systemic injustice rather than to lay blame: blame is an instrument of an unjust, patriarchal system.
As I said, how is it not acceptable to say that one is not interested in watching, for example, shows about women?
First off, this was more an empirical statement about a specific set of social norms than anything else: if you say you're not interested in female characters in the femslash and meta circles I frequent, the response will probably be the equivalent of an eyeroll; if you say you're not interested in characters of color, you'll probably be lucky to get off with the eyeroll. However, there is an underlying logic to these norms which I think is objectively right (for some suitably postmodern value of "objectively right"--on the offchance you care, you can find a detailed discussion of my metaethics here), so it's worth going into.
Again, the claim isn't really that no--not one--collection of the words "I'm not interested in X" in that order where X is a group of marginalized/oppressed people should ever under any circumstances be uttered in discourse. What I am saying is that it is a warning signal like saying "I'm not a racist but...." and the influences leading up to such a statement will be quite rightly automatically suspect--even if in a small number of cases those influences may be unproblematic--because in the vast majority of cases such a statement will be able to be traced back to underlying systemic structures of injustice at work in our society. (Again, this doesn't make one a horrible person; it just means they're human in an injust global culture.)