50books_poc | Policy Discussion: Insults, etc.

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Policy Discussion: Insults, etc.

I'm elevating this to a new post, because the mod team is small and we want a wider range of input than what we can bring to bear ourselves.

The topic under discussion is whether or not insults, mocking, jeering, and/or personal attacks are acceptable on the comm, in what context, and directed toward whom.

First: that's probably not a complete list. One of the things I'm noticing in the comments and pms is that people have different characterizations of what is in dispute here.

Second and related: not everything in the list above may be comparable to everything else in that list. We might choose to give a pass to some of the above and yet reject others.

Third: I'm expecting that there might be some context dependency in these decisions. My gut sense is that insulting an author is not the same thing as insulting another comm member. Being white and being POC is not symmetric. Being the original poster and being a non-OP commenter in an exchange may also change the context. There may be other factors.

So let me lay out some of the issues that the mod team has been discussing.

Because of the way the tone argument gets used, we have been reluctant to implement a blanket "no insulting, no jeering" rule. There are times when it is more important that something gets said than how it gets said; there are times when the clearest and most straightforward way to communicate an idea is to mock the original statement. Additionally, any given demand for politeness or patience made by this community is happening in the context of numerous asymmetric demands for politeness and patience; as mods, we strongly dislike the prospect of increasing those burdens as the price of participating in the comm.

We are trying to negotiate two conflicting chilling influences: one of them is the chilling effect of someone knowing that they might encounter insulting or jeering comments if they post; the other is the chilling effect of a "don't say it any meaner than this" rule. The latter can make people walk away from a comm just as the former can. (I personally have walked away from a comm because it wasn't worth it to me to deal with the emotional stress of trying to negotiate such a rule; I have heard more than a few similar stories from others.) What particularly worries us as mods is that who walks away because of either environment is often asymmetric along axes of privilege.

(Obviously, I would prefer a policy that doesn't have people walking away, if we can swing it.)

I additionally have concerns about how this plays into our sense of who the community is "for". There are at least three distinct ways that members use this forum. Some are using it for personal improvement, trying to correct biases or lacunae in their own personal education, environment, or knowledge. Others are using it as a tool to focus attention on authors of color, who face systemic biases in the publishing, reviewing, reading, and fan communities. Others are using this community as a social refuge, as a place where conversations about books are not forever reverting back to white authors and white norms. (Obviously, these uses are not exclusive to each other: there are many people who use this comm in two or more of the above ways.)

I am not at all sure that the comm serves the last group well. In the process of setting policy on this, I would like to avoid making this community serve those people less well. Unfortunately, it is not clear to me what would or would not do that.

So, the questions we have for you:

What constitutes a personal insult?

Are they never acceptable, sometimes acceptable? Are some more acceptable than others?

Does it make a difference if the insult is directed at an author or at another community member? Where another community member is concerned, does it make a difference as to whose post it appears in the comments to (your own, or someone else's)?

Do we want one blanket policy of acceptability for the entire comm? Should OPs moderate their own comments as they see fit? Some combination of the two?

Are we correct to be worried about an asymmetric effect on white and POC/chromatic members of the comm? And if so, what kinds of policies do you specifically see being a problem? What would be acceptable?

What are we missing?

If you wish to reply privately, you are welcome to PM me or send me an email (this username at gmail).

ETA (6/29): I've turned anonymous commenting off -- there's at least one person who is harrassing people. If you have something to say and need privacy to say it, you've got my pm and email.

ETA2 (6/30): My draft position on some of the interactions under discussion, specifically some of the earlier posts about N.K. Jemisin's books. Re everything else, I'm still reading, still digesting. I haven't begun replying to pms yet, but I'm reading those, too.

ETA3 (7/5): FYI, we're still working on the policy post; we hope to (but cannot promise!) to have it posted by Friday.

ETA4 (7/9): progress updates here.

ETA5 (7/13): Policy post is now up. Comments here are locked.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Thanks for being so proactive on this issue!

I read the reviews here and a significant proportion of my book-buying decisions are based on them. (FWIW) Personally, I'd prefer not to see any comments about authors (good or bad). Tell me about the book, what you loved, what you hated, what yanked your chain, what pushed your buttons. Judge the prose, the cover art, the characters, whatever. Leave the author out of it. A bad book does not equate to the author being a bad person, any more than a good book equates to the author being a good person. I don't care what the author looks like, who they sleep with, what their politics are, or why they wrote what they wrote.

Ditto for comments about commenters. If the reviewer loved a book and a commenter says they hated it, this does not mean either of them are bad people or stupid people or uneducated readers or whatever.

My $0.02

It might be worth looking at other communities' policies.

debunkingwhite,

deadbrowalking, and

sex_and_race they all have policies against personal attacks and/or trolling. The more newbie-focused comms, like

racism_101 do as well.

ETA: Corrected typos.

Edited 2011-06-29 00:07 (UTC)

I don't think the tone argument should be used as a shield or an excuse for an "anything goes" policy.

What's wrong with keeping to the simple guiding principle that posts and comments should be topical and appropriate to the primary purpose of the comm? Which is, according to the FAQ and the profile, getting more people to read works by people of color (bold emphasis per the profile page). I'm not sure how personal insults directed toward either an author or a fellow comm member would achieve that purpose. (Happy to be corrected with an example, but I'm skeptical.) If it doesn't serve that purpose, it should be considered off-topic and inappropriate, and swiftly shut down.

Otherwise, the mods or OPs or whoever gets appointed for the task will have to police every post and comment to determine whether something is "more acceptable" or is asymmetrically upsetting white people versus POCs. In my opinion, that kind of debate makes more sense in a discussion space with a broader/different focus than this one. (Also, I really don't like the idea that comm members would have to be "counted" for race purposes.)

As for what constitutes a personal insult, I think the distinction between attacking a person and attacking a statement or action of that person is a helpful one.

I think there is a group of words that means, in one way or another, "serving to perpetuate or defend oppression in one of its forms," that are necessary parts of any anti-oppression discussion, bui that are also often interpreted as insults. "Racist," "sexist," etc. White people particularly get our panties in a twist over the word "racist," or any implication that points to that word, which makes discussing racism with us extremely tedious for many POC, from what I can see. So I think any suggestion that "insults are not ok" would need to have some kind of clarification that calling someone privileged or invoking -isms are not insults, or not usually anyway.

That is exactly how I was thinking about this. It's a book discussion comm, plain and simple. Something relevant I've learned in working with kids is to separate the behavior from the child--when speaking in negative terms, stick to the action or end product, don't insult the child.

I haven't seen any of these conversations, but I mostly lurk and note down interesting-looking books for my reading list. :-/

that's not a comparable dynamic to author vs. reader.

in general, i'd say insults along the lines of "the author is an asshat/jerk/loser" are not helpful critiques, but i did feel uncomfortable that people seemed to be focusing more on the one or two lines that were like that in the previous post versus the entire rest of the poster's critique of the gender/race politics of the book they reviewed, which jumped out at me more as offensive. sometimes it's refreshing to not be expected to go with the flow and clap along to fucked up things.

"This is a place where WOC can relax and vent their spleen. It is not a place where we will attack each other. It is meant to be a restful space free from having to argue over the basic tenets of anti-racism, feminism, and related subjects. Remember that when you attempt to join us."

which is not to say that i'm characterizing critiques of that post as "no negative reviews". but i guess this comm is different from other spaces that i would consider "safe spaces" precisely bc there's space in places like snr to vent one's spleen as a woc.

I don't know what I've been missing that this has become a problem, but for me, explicit insults are almost never the problem in a comm like this. By explicit I mean stuff that the person who said it would cop to "damned right I was insulting them that was the point." Bitch/slut/whore on the gender axis; faggot/dyke/etc. on the queer one; I'm not going to make a list of racist ugly since I'm on the privilege side of that (un)equation, but y'all know what I mean. Or stupid, lazy, rude, selfish, to get out of the group and into the individual.

In my experience, which is obviously not complete, people who want to engage in that kind of obvious name calling almost never also want to engage with any of the goals of this community. (With the possible exception of ableism-as-metaphor.)

The problems for me arise mostly in trying to get into other people's heads. Which we kind of have to at least try to do, if we're going to understand what they're saying, but it's very easy to become reductionist or condescending in summing up what you see as someone else's point, especially if it's one you disagree with.

And defending their point sometimes isn't all that much better, especially if it's on the grounds of their experience shaping their beliefs -- not that all our experience doesn't, but somehow there's something disagreeable about hearing that of course somebody WOULD think that, given where they came from, as if they had no free will and could not rise above their circumstances -- perhaps it is the implication that the speaker is not similarly the sum of their parts.

There's also the "you must not understand" stance, which is so popular because it is supposedly less insulting, but it does sort of assume cluelessness/ignorance on the part of the disagreeing person, and imply that anyone who understood would have to agree with the speaker.

I dunno. I tend to feel that where there is another comm member who can speak for themselves involved, it is better not to assume you can guess what they were thinking other than what they said. I don't feel quite so strongly about that when it comes to authors since they probably won't step in to clarify.

But then again, I also want people to be able to called on their BS if it is chronic, and i don't want a situation in which being oblivious or in denial about the implications of your words gets your off the hook for their harm.

Personally I'd rather be insulted than worry about rules about what is insulting to someone else, but I don't know that my preference should really count here much. First, because I'm white, and second, because I have big honking personal issues about when and how much I am allowed to speak my mind if someone might be hurt by it. This makes me both paranoid in holding myself to a probably inappropriately stringent standard, and probably too touchy about being held to someone else's. But this is all the remnants of my Daddy Issues and not something that a group for public discourse by reasonable grownups needs to take into account.

I actually do care about the author's politics to some extent. I tried not to, because one of my erstwhile favorite authors turns out to have really objectionable politics. I argued for a long time that it doesn't impact the work, but eventually I found that for me it did.

Not because knowing any bad thing about them personally automatically poisoned the well, but because with that additional information about how he thinks I was able to identify patterns -- and rather disquieting ones -- in his books that I had heretofore not noticed or discounted as being without significance, artifacts of a particular imaginary society or narrator's shortcomings or plot convenience.

Now that I know that's not the case -- that's they are part of a coherent worldview which I consider to be counterfactual, not just repellant -- I can't look at any of the works in which that pattern appears the same way as I used to. It hasn't made me completely stop reading or liking them, but it has complicated them a lot. It is definitely a loss of innocence that I in some ways regret and yet in other ways am grateful for. (Like most innocence it seems in retrospect quite scary that I was walking among horrors and could not protect myself because I did not see them.)

One of the things I value this community for is that kind of consciousness raising about issues that I might be even more blind to, since they don't implicate me directly, as this one did. If I could miss MY OWN OPPRESSION for so long, how often must I be missing other people's? That's not to say I want a simplistic "don't read so-and-so, they're a schmuck", but I do like to see, where relevant, an analysis of what the author professes and how it interacts with their fiction. Especially in cases where they appear to be at odds.

I would worry a lot about such a policy, as a lifelong feminist who has had an awful lot of arguments with other lifelong feminists about what the basic tenets are and whether they allow me, as a feminist who writes and reads BDSM porn and submits to men sexually, to even exist. I don't particularly enjoy having those arguments, but I would enjoy not having them a lot less if it means having somebody else's interpretation of the basic tenets accepted as inarguable.

I was only commenting on this particular discussion...though I agree on that recent post, the discussion about language used toward the author overshadowed the other issues. But that makes another good reason to keep the ctitique to the book material--so that they don't digress the way that one did.

Well, the existence of this comm assumes that at least one personal quality of an author does matter: their race. By participating here, we're all implicitly agreeing that our knowledge of the author's real-world identity and experiences can inform our critique of their work. I suppose the question is whether it goes the other way -- can we read a work and draw valid conclusions about the author from it?

And, if we can draw those conclusions, are they on-topic to discuss here? And if they are on-topic, are positive conclusions okay to share ("this author is intelligent and insightful") but negative conclusions not ("this author is stupid and ignorant"). And if we can share negative conclusions, are some ways of phrasing them acceptable and some unacceptable?

And that attitude was the very reason I dropped Debunkingwhite and a host of other "anti-racism" sites run by white folks.

It was the previous post on Fury of the Phoenix.

This is really simplified, and I both apologize for and acknowledge that (I'm unfortunately short on time and brain power rn), but basically, here's my take:

What I think's fair game to criticize: one's actions and arguments.

What I think's not fair game: a person's identity/personhood (e.g. sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, physical/mental abilities).

I think

winterfox did a fantastic job in dismantling the fuckery that is Pon's Fury of the Phoenix. I LUXURIATE in the vitriol 'cause fuck the tone argument--what needs to be said SHOULD be said and politeness be damned. What the hell has being polite done for oppressed folks except keep them in the same damn place? But calling Pon a "stupid fuck" (emphasis mine) is ableist, and there's where I'd draw the line.

Calling people out on their bullshit doesn't and shouldn't have to be at the expense of others.

So, I pretty much see it as a respect v. ~courtesy issue: feel free to give a person hell if/when they deserve it, but respect that the person is, y'know, a person and avoid demeaning them or others on terms of their gender/class/what-have-you.

Background: I am a white woman. I acknowledge the inequalities to which authors of colour are subjected, and thus I listen at this community to pick up recommendations I might otherwise miss. I am not active in the literary blogosphere. I am also a sexual assault survivor living with PTSD.

Even though I rarely read YA, I checked multiple bookstores in my area for Cindy Pon's Silver Phoenix based on the glowing reviews I read here.

Just to check to make sure I wasn't misremembering, I went through 190 reviews tagged "young adult" and another 230 tagged "sf/fantasy," going back to 2007 in both cases, and (http://50books-poc.livejournal.com/254106.html?mode=reply) found (http://50books-poc.livejournal.com/279487.html#cutid1) five (http://50books-poc.livejournal.com/232708.html?mode=reply) other (http://50books-poc.livejournal.com/216470.html?mode=reply) mentions (http://50books-poc.livejournal.com/156871.html) of the book. None of them mention the graphic attempted rape or the extremely problematic ways in which it is handled.

And yet

winterfox -- the one who finally pointed this out and spared me the triggering experience of reading the same sorts of things people told me about my own assailant --

winterfox is the one a mod is calling out for sexism (http://50books-poc.livejournal.com/373367.html?thread=1279351#t1279351)? That post, even though no one has challenged its central arguments, is the one spurring the mods to ask if we need new rules about not saying mean things?

This does not make sense.

I very much agree with this.

WHAT

Also, I can't help noticing that the author of that particular review is one of the people trying to shut you up.

I don't post/comment here a lot (OK, ever, apparently) so take my contribution with a grain of salt.

But what I think is relevant is engaging with the book/story you're talking about, and making it possible to engage in further productive discussion about it.

I don't much care about being insulting to authors (whatever that means). Scans-daily over on DW has a specific rule about not making personal attacks on creators (that is, "This enraged me so much I wanted to hit him"), and while it's well meant, it's one of a number of factors that's been arguably problematic, over the past few years.

I mean, I /prefer/ it if people take down a text with a certain flair that is more dispassionate than actively vicious or gleeful, but that's a personal style preference and nothing more.

(I don't know how this would change along the axis of POC author/white reviewer; obviously, it would change /somehow/. That's something I'll have to ponder more.)

I do care far more about posters actually engaging with each other at least vaguely as if they share common community. I don't care if you harsh someone's squee, tromple over their favorite author, or take down their post logically, point by point. (Fuck, please do.) I do care if any of that has a chilling effect on discussion, which is hard to pinpoint in the heat of the moment but can be clear in the long term. And though I'm aware of the

I don't think specific rules are useful there. I do think long-term moderating is. And that moderating can address trolling/abusiveness while still observing the reality of problematic inequalities.

And to answer this one specifically: Are we correct to be worried about an asymmetric effect on white and POC/chromatic members of the comm?

I'm white. I haven't fuck all idea, frankly, which I've found generally tends to eventually mean, "Yes, in fact, you should be worried." Because you know, I can not notice the general trends in communities and groups quite effectively.

But I don't know how that plays out in a community trying to be aware of it.

nimgnoyk said some things that resonated, too.

I think it should be possible to write a scathing review of a book without launching an ad hominem attack on the author. As hesychasm said, there's a difference between attacking a person and attacking something that that person said.

I also think that being rude to other users is (or should be) unacceptable. If someone has an issue with a comment made by another user, I would prefer them to take it to the moderators and have the moderators deal with it as they see fit.

Thanks for clarifying the different ways that people use the comm - I mainly fall into the "using it as a tool to focus attention on authors of color" category, and it's easy to forget that other people don't look at it that way.

ETA: that should say "if someone has an issue with a comment or post..."

It means that I don't like the idea of comm members having to declare their race just so the mods can determine whether an insult they made is acceptable or not. Which is the implication of the mod's questions: "Are we correct to be worried about an asymmetric effect on white and POC/chromatic members of the comm? And if so, what kinds of policies do you specifically see being a problem? What would be acceptable?"

Bottom line: the comm's stated purpose is to get people reading more works by people of color. Posts and comments should remain geared toward that purpose, and I don't see how personal insults (whether made by white people or POCs) could ever be deemed "acceptable" for that purpose.

I'm fine to continue talking to you if you want to stop playing Oppression Olympics and address the actual point of my comments. Or do you only talk to people you believe are POC?

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

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Policy Discussion: Insults, etc.

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vague natterings.

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