nonbinarypastels:

I think there’s a major issue with conservatives using accusations of ‘virtue signaling’ (an accusation frequently used whenever someone shows the slightest concern for marginalized people and how certain issues affect them) as a way to shut down conversations about social justice but I also think there’s a major issue with people on tumblr being involved with social justice on a purely performative level. These two issues, I think, are both real and the fact that one is happening doesn’t mean that the other isn’t.

When I talk about people on this site being performative with their social justice what I’m talking about are things like this:

  • people who put anti-TERF in their blog description and constantly talk about hating TERFS but who still buy into and reblog post after post chockfull of radfem rhetoric
  • people who love to talk all day about punching nazis but who actively ignore (or even shut down) posts about antisemitism and racism, who make no effort to boost the voice of Jewish people, and who do nothing to share information about anti-fascism that’s actually useful beyond memes about richard spencer getting his ass kicked
  • people who claim to care about abuse survivors, who want to help us and make spaces safe for us, but who are actively involved in harassment campaigns that harm survivors, who never reblog posts calling out actual predators on this site, and who never put any time into efforts that actually support survivors
  • people who claim to care about the lgbtqia+ community and wanting to protect lgbtqia+ people while actively trying to exclude certain people, harming multiple groups along the way, and spreading hateful rhetoric that damages both individuals and the community
  • people who yell “eat the rich!” and reblog basic “capitalism is bad!” posts but who never say or reblog a word about classism or how poor people are oppressed in our society, much less share resources for the poor or ways to help us
  • people who say they support neurodivergent people and the mentally ill but still make and reblog ableist posts, actively shame mentally ill and neurodivergent people for the slightest thing, and are willing to ostracize us for any ‘odd’ or ‘abnormal’ behavior or interests or symptoms

etc etc etc

Performative social justice is essentially when people are talking the bare minimum amount of talk needed to look like they care about social justice but aren’t actually walking the walk. It’s when people create and reblog very surface level, ‘look how woke I am’ posts and adopt the current buzz-wordy woke labels and descriptions (anti-terf, X critical, an entire list of bigots they hate in their blog description) but who never do anything beyond that — they never actually make any effort to educate themselves on issues beyond that surface level, they don’t make the effort to listen to the very marginalized people they claim to support, they never reblog informative posts, they never accept criticism or correction, and they—very often—are saying and doing other things which directly contradict the ideals they say they have and the image they’re trying to project.

It’s “I want to look like I care about social justice but I don’t want to actually have to think too hard about any of it and if anyone tells me I’m wrong about anything, I’ll use the same rhetoric and tactics used by the people I claim to be against to shut them down”.

Pointing these examples (and similar ones) out and discussing them is not on the same level as conservatives who will scream “virtue signaling!” every time someone so much as breathes a word about meeting the needs and seeing to the well-being of marginalized people, and talking about how a lot of people on this site only engage with social justice in a performative way is not lending credence to the arguments these conservatives are using to make claims of 'virtue signaling’.

To conflate these two things, I think, is not only disingenuous but it’s also harmful as the people calling out performative social justice are almost always marginalized in some way ourselves and the behavior that we’re calling out has an impact on us and a baring on our lives and safety in any space that’s meant to be for social justice activism or support around our marginalized identities—because when we’re in a supposed safe space or a space for activism surrounded by people who claim to care about us and want to fight for us but who only mean that in the most fairweather friends sort of way and they actually either don’t give a shit or are actually harming us themselves, that makes the spaces we enter with them in it unsafe and it stifles any progressive action we may want to engage in.

We can talk about how accusations of “virtue signaling” are being weaponized and used as silencing tactics while also talking about issues within social justice spaces and the issues with how some people engage in social justice. These things are not mutually exclusive. We don’t need to shut down one conversation to have the other.

8 months ago / 280 
via: nonbinarypastels
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