"It's not our job to educate"

[firecat]

This is based on a comment I made in a thread in rmjwell's journal here. The thread is about the idea "It's not our job to educate you about []ism."

My take is: Sure, I can choose to educate people. Sure, members of a group of people who are discriminated against can choose education as a way of getting more access to what they want. But people cannot require me/the group to do so.

Some people in the cultural mainstream or closer to centers of power take the attitude that whenever someone not in their group speaks up, that person *MUST* *JUSTIFY* their taking up public space; that person must take on all the work and all the responsibility for whether mainstream people are listening to them.

It can be a tactic for keeping people's ideas out of public discourse, insofar as they can just sit back and say "Yes, but" or "Sorry, I didn't like they way you put that" until the end of time.

If I want more power or access, ONE WAY is to try to educate people who have it to understand me better, so they'll decide I'm nice and give it to me. But it's not the only way, and I'm not required to go that route. There are other ways.

And in the situation where mainstream people are saying to a group farther away from the mainstream, "Why won't you join our movement?" and the group farther away from the mainstream is saying "Because you don't understand us," then it's DEFINITELY not the JOB of that group to educate the mainstream people. If they want to, then that's a good thing. But it's not their JOB.

I have no idea whether this is anyone else's take on the issue. It's my take on explaining to people how discriminiation and prejudice affect me as a member of some groups who are discriminated against. I do plenty of educating, but I resent the hell out of the attitude that I have to justify myself to people who have no interest in really hearing what I'm saying. I resent it so much that I would rather get far away from those people, and that means not spending energy on supporting whatever cause they would like me to support.

Comments

Re: "It's not our job to educate"

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

hm. i am definitely with you on most of the statements, such as that i can get power some other way than asking people for it (which i don't find to be a really efficient way anyway, unless other decent avenues are blocked). i also don't think that minorities should have to justify their taking public space; that should be a given, and i get really irate when i see people in the mainstream walk all over that. i think this is a bug in democracies as we know them, that tyranny of the majority.

and i don't exactly feel it's my "job" to explain myself to people in the mainstream. but i do think that, if i am different, the responsibility to say so is mine, and the responsibility for educating is mine, and i actually like it that way -- who better to explain myself than me? i've rarely yet been happy when people in the mainstream have taking it upon myself to educate the mainstream about me; they seem to often get it wrong in odd ways.

of course, if the other person isn't really interested, no educating will happen, but i am usually perfectly willing to give it a shot first.

Re: "It's not our job to educate"

[firecat]

Sure, me too on "giving it a shot," especially when I'm just talking about me. But when it's a systemic form of discrimination that affects a lot of people other than me, I consider that a pretty fundamentally different issue. Partly because saying something once in a while is a fundamentally different experience from saying it every two minutes. One thing that makes systemic discrimination a problem is that many people on the receiving end experience it over and over again, many times a day, and it wears people down.