This will be fascinating for future internet archaeologists.
The original author wrote "I have had responses from several Indian friends and readers today who had nothing but positive and encouraging responses. I’ll have to see if anything I said offended them." And the ultra-triggered guy who kicked off the criticism wrote back "Instead of asking your Indian friends to perform more emotional labor for you and assuage your white women’s tears, maybe do some reflection..."
I guess we should all reconsider sharing cultural experiences and questions with each other. Too much "emotional labor."
It's also an (increasingly common) misuse of the term as originally coined.
Originally it referred to things like cashiers needing to remain calm and cheery even in the face of unreasonable and hostile customers. The claim is that this kind of labor goes beyond the job description and should therefore be compensated.
As a person from India I feel literally nothing. Yeah this lady is over-exoticising India but that's between her and her eventual disappointment. But she's not wrong that India is VERY different and it's not wrong to compare it to going to another planet. Exaggeration is at the heart of excited metaphors. Fuck these people getting offended on my behalf.
- The identities are real, so there is danger of external real-life impact (harassment of friends/family, job loss, etc)
- Craving for approval - might get ostracized by the community
- Internal impact - might e.g. lose business from the community if it's some kind of store
Sticks and stones will hurt my bones, and all that.
Who defines what insensitive means in a public forum? As a willing participant in the discussion, the onus is on you to opt out if the discussion makes you uncomfortable. Nobody is targeting you.
If the world has to censor all public discussion that may be painful or dredge up old trauma for some random person, then it is going to get extremely quiet.
As a response to you, true. It was just one of the most obvious disproofs of the 'sticks and stones' adage.
> Who defines what insensitive means in a public forum? As a willing participant in the discussion, the onus is on you to opt out if the discussion makes you uncomfortable. Nobody is targeting you.
Who defines any of our social or moral concepts? I'm not arguing for some kind of language police, I'm saying I care about whether my words are likely to cause harm, and I think other people should too.
> If the world has to censor all public discussion that may be painful or dredge up old trauma for some random person, then it is going to get extremely quiet.
I think you're creating a dichotomy where actually there's a massive continuum. You can care about the way your words affect other people, and modify them accordingly where appropriate, without self-censoring every thought that could possibly hurt anyone.
If you and I were talking face-to-face, then I may adjust how much I care about your feelings. But even then, it is entirely possible that your hurt feelings are unreasonable.
But maybe we disagree less than it seems:
> I can control my intent, and I have to be satisfied with that.
If this includes modifying what you say when you learn unexpected things about the effect of your words, that makes perfect sense to me.
But if it means refusing to take that information into account, I don't think you can really claim good intentions.
That first critical comment goes against what I like about HN's rules - the idea of arguing in good faith. Don't look for a way to be offended, but give someone benefit of the doubt. She was excited about being brave to visit somewhere away from home - first with Paris (where she felt some advantage in knowing the language) and then with India (where English will get you by in most places anyway).
Bringing in Mars to talk colonialism was just next level.
> Instead of asking your Indian friends to perform more emotional labor for you and assuage your white women’s tears, maybe do some reflection on how your equation of India with an alien world reinforces an “other” mindset that is at the core of imperialism and colonialism.
Aside from being mean and insane, this sort of thing is an absolute gift to the political right, including its extreme elements. There are people who don't know many 'liberals' or leftists IRL, whose perception of the whole left half of the political spectrum can be significantly shaped by a few links to idiocy like this. And there are people who have had bad experiences at the hands of bullies using 'progressivism' as a cloak for cruelty and status games and intellectual laziness, whose suspicions this will only serve to confirm.
To anyone in those categories: please believe that 'the left' is not all like that, and although this bullshit is more common than it should be (and far more widely tolerated), it is still a fringe thing. And think about how your beliefs and your 'side' would appear to someone focusing on its worst or dumbest elements.
Might be way off track, but I think of some of this type of response or outrage-on-behalf-of-others as a form of busywork. If you are somewhat housed and somewhat fed, your basic needs are met, do you look for drama or a fight to win?
Definition 1: Most jobs sometimes require you to demonstrate a certain set of emotions, and if you're feeling differently at the time to succeed you'll have to change gears pronto or be really good at faking sincerity. Some jobs require a lot of this - so much it's the most difficult part of the job.
For example, if you work for a call centre and have to convince people not to cancel their cable service, the company will probably want you to be upbeat and friendly every time you answer a call, while many callers will be frustrated and mad at your employer, and keen to share those feelings with you.
Obviously, every job has a certain element of this - but for some jobs it's a big, difficult part of the job.
Definition 2: The same, but including non-employment activities and reducing the big-and-difficult-part requirement.
For example, I don't much enjoy talking on the telephone, so if I've got to phone several plumbers to get a quote for some work, overcoming that dislike is emotional labour under the second definition.
What do you mean?
The spiral will always find new victims, go to new heights, so it might be better to refuse to kneel, weather the frenzy, your 15 minutes of fame, and then move on once it passes.
Maybe. I don't know, it would be fascinating to know what the best way to defeat this phenomenon is.
Alternatively, I tend to play a straight bat (this might be an Australian/English saying) in response to something like this and with minimal text - less you say, less there is to attack in response. If you indulge them too much, it only encourages more.
Because it works. People who want to join the in-group are vulnerable to its criticism, but people who don't want to join don't give a shit in the first place.
So when the woman in the article responded to the attack, the attackers smelled blood, and piled on, and increased their attacks. prompting her to defend herself even more, thereby giving even more material for the attackers. So it seems you have to defuse it before that point in time. Easy for me to say, really hard to recognize in the moment.
Because that's the annoying paradox. If you get attacked, and you start thinking that you maybe were wrong, that you maybe wrote something bad, that you maybe hurt someone else, having those thoughts, those doubts, show that you didn't intend to. Yet the very proof of you not having ill intent, simply invites more attacks.
There was an recent news article about how J.K. Rowling managed to do what you suggest: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/has-jk-rowling-figur...
The "transphobia" purity spiral is absolutely maddening, it just hasn't eaten itself completely yet. The current orthodox view inside of it is that anyone who claims to be trans is trans, regardless of their biological gender, psychological gender, gender expression, name, pronouns, or gender dysphoria. So a person who was born female, is female, presents female, uses a female name and female pronouns can still be trans simply by virtue of her saying that she is. Anything else is "gatekeeping", and expressing this view is "transphobic", and sentenced with immediate purity spiral mob justice.
I'm hoping this spiral dies out quickly, so that the LGBT movement can go back to sanity, it's not in a good place right now.
There are a lot of unwritten rules and informal relationships in any forum with a persistent membership, and in my experience it takes months, sometimes years of observation to be able to read them accurately.