When it rains, it pours. Bigotry on Medium
Three things in life are important. The first is to be kind.
Happy Friday…
You’re a writer, you have an imagination. Imagine this. Imagine someone wrote a story called “How to teach your kid not to be a Jew.”
Wow, right?
For that matter, insert any other marginalized group. For example… Teach your kid not to be Islamic. Teach your kid not to act black. Teach your kid not to be brown, or disabled or autistic or mentally ill. Or gay.
Can you see how that would be a problem?
Can you see how that would be bigotry?
Some people can’t. They don’t get what’s wrong with that.
They think it’s just an opinion. We’ll come back to that…
When it rains, it pours. Bigotry on Medium.
It’s been some week. In addition to the TOS debacle and the plagiarism issue, and the sites scraping Medium, we needed more this week, right?
When it rains, it pours.
Yesterday, Illumination published a homophobic, bigoted post about how to teach your kids not to grow up to be gay. Ouch.
Don’t go looking. It’s been removed.
I don’t know who published it. Or why. I don’t know if it was an oversight, or if the editor didn’t read it thoroughly in the rush to clear the submission queue.
For that matter, it may have been published accidentally.
When you have 400 stories in the submission queue every day and you’re opening them in tabs as the list keeps growing, it’s real easy to hit something wrong and publish something you didn’t mean to.
Full confession... I’ve done it.
I had a mouse slip with too many tabs open and published a submission I didn’t read first. Muttering crap, crap, crap. But then I read the post. Whew. It’s okay. It was a nice poem, actually. Be still, my nerves.
We’re human. We make mistakes.
So, a bigoted post was published. By whoever, for whatever reason.
Then the you-know-what hit the fan and the post was removed.
Immediately. The writer was removed, too.
Hate speech is against Medium’s content guide.
As it should be. Thank you Medium.
The issue isn’t making a mistake. We all make mistakes.
Show me a human that doesn’t. (Hint: You can’t)
The key isn’t whether we make mistakes. It’s what we do once a mistake has been made. That’s how you sort the wheat from the chaff.
Fault and responsibility are not the same
Years ago, my neighbor’s kid trampled my flower bed. To the ground. I was as broken as those flowers. Why, I wondered. Why?
Why doesn’t matter once it’s done.
Then it’s only what we do about it.
Fault and responsibility are not the same. It wasn’t my neighbor’s fault. But it was her responsibility. Her kid, her responsibility. So she made him weed my garden and spend his allowance to bring me flowers.
When that little guy looked up at me with tears in his eyes and said he’s sorry he made me sad, I knew he’d learned something.
Good on you, Mama. I knew I liked that lady for good reason.
Because here’s the key.
He didn’t say he’s sorry he trampled my flowers. That apology would be better than none, but it would only have been about him. What he did. Instead, he said he’s sorry he made me sad.
That little boy learned about empathy that day. At all of 6 years old.
He understood the effect his actions had on someone else.
It’s a lesson many adults haven’t learned yet.
Not all opinions have equal worth
As a culture, too many of us think all opinions are equal. They are not.
On some level, we all know that. You don’t go to a foot doctor if you have a heart problem. You don’t call your mechanic when you need a haircut. You don’t call your accountant if someone sues you, you call a lawyer.
We understand the concept of being qualified to speak on a topic. We understand that when it comes to the law, a lawyer’s opinion has more weight than an accountant’s.
We just don’t apply that concept to daily conversation. Particularly on the internet. Sometimes, we don’t even see when our opinions are contrary to someone else’s human rights.
Opinions are for ice cream, not people.
You get to say if you prefer salted caramel or chocolate marshmallow. You get to say if you prefer country or jazz or Billy Bob’s sounds of the seventies.
But when your opinions start stepping on someone else’s rights? Not okay.
If your neighbor is of the opinion that you need to be punched in the head or shot, does he get to act on that? Nope. Because it violates your rights to not be abused.
Human rights supersede personal opinions. They have to.
We also don’t get to tell people how to express hurt
When that little boy trampled my flowers, I didn’t lose my nut. Some people would. Some people would have yelled at him. Been angry. Livid.
How the hurt person reacts doesn’t change the wrong and make it right.
The world is full of people telling marginalized people to chill out.
Patriarchs telling feminists not to be so damn angry.
White people telling people of color not to be so damn angry.
Tone it down, tone it down. You don’t need to be so mad.
There’s a phrase for that. Tone policing.
You do not get to tell people how to react when they are not treated with the same accord other people are given by virtue of race, religion, color or gender or any other thing people are discriminated by.
If you aren’t a woman who gets paid less for the same work because of gender, you don’t get to tell her to tone it down.
If you’re a white person who’s never had to teach your son how to stay alive if the cops pull him over, you don’t get to tell black people not to be angry.
You have no clue what those things are like to experience once — much less every day of your life. So you don’t get to tell people to tone it down.
If someone being upset about bigotry, racism or any injustice makes you uncomfortable, that’s kind of your own problem.
And if you do an injustice, even accidentally, you need to apologize like that kid who trampled my flowers. With understanding and empathy.
An apology that lacks empathy or understanding isn’t really an apology, is it?
It’s more just trying to end the strife. So you don’t feel uncomfortable. So you don’t feel attacked. It’s not about the person who was hurt at all. It’s just more about you.
This whole world is a mess and most of it is driven by ego and finger pointing. It solves nothing and perpetuates the problem. We do not need more hate.
Kindness, consideration and listening don’t cost us a penny.
Why, then, are they in such short supply?
We can do better than this. I know we can.
“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.” ― Henry James
This week’s reading:
If you made it down here, thanks for reading. You’re who I write for.
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Also? Comments are open. If you’re reading this in email, click the title and you’ll be able to leave a comment, too. Usually some great conversations in there.
Have a great weekend.
:)
Linda
Thanks for your considered response to an emotional event.
Kindness, consideration and listening are learned by practice. Hate and anger cause a fight or flight reaction in all living things.