An alternative to “don’t say that word”
I prefer “why do you use that word?”
Recently, in a left-wing White men’s group I organize with, I was party to two moments in which one person requested that another person not use a specific word. Both times I saw both sides of the issue—the reason the first person said the word and the reason the objection to the word was raised—but at neither time was the objection brought up in a way that made much space to talk about it.
This struck me as symbolic of what many people complain happens in left, liberal, and social justice spaces—that rigid political correctness stifles conversation and ends up discouraging people from saying what they think. I certainly don’t want organizing spaces to feel like that.
“Metooed” and “feminazis”
In the first example, somebody referred to “men who have been ‘metooed’,” i.e., men who have been held accountable in some way for sexually-charged harm they have caused. Another person objected to using “metoo” as a verb; the narrative that #MeToo is something that is “done to men,” he said, centers perpetrators and de-centers and ultimately delegitimizes survivors’ voices.
I remember thinking that this intervention — “let’s not use that word” — primed me to feel like he was trying to silence me, rather than ask questions about what I was saying.
I agreed with this point. Wouldn’t it be good, though, to have a nice, pithy, easy-to-understand word for what the first guy was talking about, though? Those folks who’ve been held to account, male and otherwise—how can they properly seek to repair the harm they’ve done, and how do we refer to them? I remember thinking, as White men working on issues of our own accountability, this should be our wheelhouse. Besides, “perpetrator,” “abuser,” etc. don’t quite capture the huge range of situations that a better equivalent of “metooed” could imply, right? “Harmer,” maybe? I’d have liked to have that discussion, if not at that moment (we were in a time crunch) then at least explicitly bookmarked for a better moment.
The second of these moments happened when I was writing a short private review of bell hooks’ book The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity and Love for a list of foundational intersectional feminist works for White men to read. I characterized it as a “great book for men who have misgivings about ‘feminazis’,” (with the word “feminazis” in quotes). Another person curating this list wrote a response to my review which finished with “also, let’s not use the word feminazis please.”
And again, I could understand the argument. “Feminazi” is a word that associates feminism with nazis, which I have every intention to avoid doing. But I thought to myself: How can we effectively counter the ideas of the alt-right if we can’t even name the bogeymen that they think up and successfully mainstream?
I replied by saying that I wanted us to familiarize ourselves with the terms that many White men can get drawn to, which was why I felt it important to invoke this particular word in this context. The other curator thanked me for my explanation and there was no further back-and-forth. But I remember thinking that this intervention—“let’s not use that word”—primed me to feel like he was trying to silence me, rather than ask questions about what I was saying.
Making room to question speech healthily
a moment of questionable speech may simply be an opportunity for mutual learning — if we choose to welcome it that way.
When somebody who is generally interacting in good faith says something questionable, we must cool the urge to clamp down so that we can have room to get at the questions that need to be asked: “What do you mean by this word?” Or, “why do you use this word?”
I say “interacting in good faith” because some people like to appropriate open spaces to troll and provoke. Trolls make the problem worse, because they grab any free space we could otherwise use to ask questions of ourselves and hear the answers clearly. I have no problems ignoring people who engage this way.
It’s also important, when we ask our questions, to ask them in good faith—in ways that are genuinely interested, rather than simply interesting. Insincere questioning (that isn’t truly interested in the answer) is in the same boat as trolling; you might as well not ask.
Making sure trolls and other hegemony-seekers don’t dominate the space is also really important for another reason: The more a space is ceded to this kind of verbal sparring, the more likely people with sincere, necessary questions are likely to stay silent and not ask them. This pattern of silence compounds the silence that a “don’t say that word” approach encourages—and while silence can be good when there is nothing to say, it is pernicious when there is much that needs to be talked about.
Sometimes people get ugly when called to answer for their speech. Free speech does not mean freedom from accountability for what you say. But it is the case, more often than many of us think, that a moment of questionable speech may simply be an opportunity for mutual learning—if we choose to welcome it that way.
I think we all know this, as individuals. There are people in our life who say things in ways we object to, but we give them some leeway and hear them out. We ought to put those reflexes into practice more in our organizing spaces—most of all those of us whose privilege effectively protects us from being silenced even when our silence is called for.
