Comment on My gender was secretly changed as a baby and I didn’t know for 22 years
Tesco@lemmy.world 9 months agoI know what you’re saying, and I don’t disagree. But in this real world that we live in, when I help people with something technical on the internet they usually thank an imaginary man. If I point out that I’m a woman, their attitude often does a complete 180 and they sometimes start offering me patronising advice when they originally approached me for help.
Definitely not going to disagree with you on that as I’ve experienced it myself plenty of times, especially anything to do with programming.
Of course we need to address the attitudes behind that wearisome nonsense. But I only have one life to live and it’s not going to happen overnight. Sometimes, neutrality helps give people a fair shot because the barriers are all controlled by middle-class, cishet, white men who often lack the self-awareness to correct their own ingrained prejudices, or even acknowledge that they exist.
Does neutrality actually help in achieving that goal though? Isn’t it just making the stereotyping worse? Let’s say purely as an example you were doing IT support and the person you were helping had no idea who you were, their just going to assume a stereotypical dorky cis white man helped them with the problem. Whereas if they knew, let’s say a cis black woman helped them, it’ll atleast to a small degree help break that stereotype. Maybe I’m just be overly optimistic here though, I’d like to think most people wouldn’t care either way, but if there is no representation at all people will just default to the general stereotype and it’ll never improve.
This is a valid and well-recognised criticism. If you mean a specific group or set of groups, name them. But whiteness being the default often means that all "people of colour"are affected to some degree. When that is that case, it’s not reasonable to require an exhaustive list of all possible non-default ethnicities. When the cause of a problem is whiteness, the language should be explicit about that.
I don’t disagree if it’s used correctly, like you’ve outlined, but if we’re honest a lot of the time these days it’s just become a blanket term with no real meaning, that’s what I take issue with. The best example of this IMO is when the media is discussing police brutality, we all know black people suffer this the most yet it’s always discussed as a “people of colour” issue. A young black man and a young ethnically Japanese man probably won’t experience the same issues with the police, so to group them together in my eyes is ignoring the problem. Its basically just an American import to replace “ethnic minorities”, which I felt the exact same way about.
JoBo@feddit.uk 9 months ago
This is absolutely true. In the early days of the internet there was loads of optimism that the anonymity would break down barriers but, as you say, it just meant everyone was assumed to be a middle-class, cishet, white man.
It’s context, I guess. If non-neutrality mean you never get a foot in the door, you need neutrality. But of course it is lived experience that changes people’s attitudes (which is why I usually do point out that the man they are thanking is a figment of their imagination even though the response will often be shitty). But sometimes, you just want to be able to do what you’re doing without the sheer hostility emanating from fragile white male egos.
Things need to change but it’s already disadvantaged individuals who have to carry the burden of making that change happen. They get to do all the unacknowledged diversity work in the background, and so get to do less of the work that gets them recognised for their skills and not just their identity. There’s no easy answers here. We’re all prisoners of history.