I wish I lived in a world where I could support this. I am definitely worried about how recent events may have harmed minorities and women and made it harder for them to trust the movement.
However, coming out of a few years where the world essentially went crazy with canceling people, sometimes for the most absurd reasons, I’m naturally wary of anything in the social justice vein, even whilst I respect the people proposing/signing it and believe that most of them are acting in good faith and attempting to address real harms.
Before the world went crazy for a few years, I would have happily signed such a statement and encouraged people to sign it as well, since I support my particular understanding of those words. Although now I find myself agreeing with Duncan that there are real costs with signing a statement if that then allows other people to use your signature as support for an interpretation that doesn’t match your beliefs. And I think it’s pretty clear to anyone who has been following online discourse that terms can be stretched surprisingly far.
This comment is more political than I’d like it to be, however, I think it is justified given that the standard position within social justice is that political neutrality is fake and an attempt to impose values whilst pretending that you aren’t.
Maybe it’s unfair to attribute possible beliefs to group of people who haven’t made that claim, but this has to be balanced against reasoning transparency which feels particularly important to me when I suspect that this is many people’s true rejection. And maybe it makes sense in the current environment when people are leaning more towards sharing.
I wish we lived in a different world, but in this world, there are certain nice things that we don’t get to have. That all said, there’s definitely been times when I’ve failed to properly account for the needs or perspectives of people with other backgrounds and certainly intend to become as good at navigating these situations as I can because I really don’t want to offend or be unfair to anyone.
I wish I lived in a world where I could support this. I am definitely worried about how recent events may have harmed minorities and women and made it harder for them to trust the movement.
However, coming out of a few years where the world essentially went crazy with canceling people, sometimes for the most absurd reasons, I’m naturally wary of anything in the social justice vein, even whilst I respect the people proposing/signing it and believe that most of them are acting in good faith and attempting to address real harms.
Before the world went crazy for a few years, I would have happily signed such a statement and encouraged people to sign it as well, since I support my particular understanding of those words. Although now I find myself agreeing with Duncan that there are real costs with signing a statement if that then allows other people to use your signature as support for an interpretation that doesn’t match your beliefs. And I think it’s pretty clear to anyone who has been following online discourse that terms can be stretched surprisingly far.
This comment is more political than I’d like it to be, however, I think it is justified given that the standard position within social justice is that political neutrality is fake and an attempt to impose values whilst pretending that you aren’t.
Maybe it’s unfair to attribute possible beliefs to group of people who haven’t made that claim, but this has to be balanced against reasoning transparency which feels particularly important to me when I suspect that this is many people’s true rejection. And maybe it makes sense in the current environment when people are leaning more towards sharing.
I wish we lived in a different world, but in this world, there are certain nice things that we don’t get to have. That all said, there’s definitely been times when I’ve failed to properly account for the needs or perspectives of people with other backgrounds and certainly intend to become as good at navigating these situations as I can because I really don’t want to offend or be unfair to anyone.