Social Justice 101 Part 3: Why We Do It

“Hey, wait a minute, fuckass,” some of you might be thinking right now. “So we all are a part of the kyriarchy. But the kyriarchy as a social system doesn’t work well for anyone!  Okay, maybe there’s an upper-class cis straight white gender-conforming abled conventionally attractive Protestant couple in Ohio somewhere for whom the whole system works really well, but under the kyriarchy about 99.99% of humanity is oppressed! Why the hell do we all participate in it?”

The Typical Mind Fallacy

It should not be a surprise to anyone that human beings are really, really bad at figuring out what those other people who are not like us are going on about. For instance, I remain continually puzzled that other people seem to legitimately prefer getting drunk on Friday night to gaming. I mean, there’s Arkham Horror! And Magic: the Gathering! And Illuminati! Why the hell would you willingly choose to go to parties instead? I mean, there are costumes sometimes, those are fun, and dancing, but some people don’t dance or wear costumes and they still prefer the whole getting drunk thing. I do not understand it.

My confusion over people’s lack of interest in Arkham Horror has pretty negligible effects on the world. Unfortunately, this stops some people from realizing that members of marginalized groups are even marginalized. My favorite example comes from when I was in high school. A friend of mine got a Lexus for his birthday. I said I was jealous of how rich he was. He said, “Oh, my family’s not rich. I got a used Lexus.”

It’s not like my friend was a bad person. It’s just that he was rich, and all his friends were rich, and the only times he really talked to poor people is when they asked him to move so they could vacuum under where he was sitting. Poor people were strictly theoretical for him.

…Which worked out really well when he decided that homeless shelters coddled homeless people, who ought to just all get jobs, dammit.

Ignorance is an extremely common cause of kyriarchal shit. No one means to make the meeting inaccessible to people in wheelchairs. They just had the meeting up two flights of stairs without ramps and, well, it never occurred to them that some people might have problems with that. Why would it? They’re not in wheelchairs, it’s never been an issue for them.

Tribalism

Human beings are social animals. We like creating groups. In fact, literally assigning people to random groups is enough to get them to (a) create opposing in-groups and (b) make them hate each other.

So I am a member of Group White. The subconscious parts of my brain want me to advance Group White at the expense of the various People of Color Groups, because they are “like me” and part of my group. (My brain also wants me to advance Group Upper-Middle-Class, Group Able-bodied, Group Mental Health Issues, Group Queer, Group Gender Egalitarian, Group Geek and Group Manboobz Regular.) I don’t necessarily intend to; it’s not like I woke up one morning and said “hey, I’m going to help out the white people today, for lo, my skin is white.” I just feel more comfortable around them. They’re “like me.” They’re “my kind of people.”

If I, say, preferentially hire Group Geek, that’s unlikely to be a social-justice issue, because someone else is preferentially hiring Group Jock over there and it evens out. However, Group White has historically been in charge of all the things, so if I preferentially hire members of Group White, who are like me, then suddenly members of Group Black and Group Asian and Group Hispanic will find themselves less likely to be hired. And that is a serious problem.

Power Corrupts

The old cliche is that power corrupts. The kyriarchy gives a large number of fallible human beings power over other human beings. One can imagine that this is not going to end well.

Which is to say: it ends in people arguing about why they ought to have the power, and how those other groups are just inherently less awesome than they are, and they don’t have that much power anyway, and you ought to give them some more power because they clearly know what to do with it.

Stereotyping

A heuristic is a quick shortcut to thinking. For instance, if you say “the aliens from the planet Googolplex are controlling my brain,” my heuristic suggests that that’s absurd so I shan’t examine it further. On the other hand, heuristics can go wrong– for instance, if I decide your statement that humans evolved from monkeys is absurd so I shan’t examine it further. Stereotypes are a subtype of heuristic– the assumption that people in Group X all have Trait Y.

Stereotypes are not bad. If you stereotype geeks as mostly Star Wars fans, or Dirty Hippie College students as mostly pot-smoking liberals, it’s just a cognitive shortcut that makes it easier to predict the behavior of a random geek or Dirty Hippie College student. Problems happen when your stereotype heuristic suggests, upon seeing a Muslim person, that said Muslim person is probably a terrorist.

Stereotypes can go wrong lots of ways. There’s the availability heuristic: because you can think of more Muslim terrorists than you can think of Muslim non-terrorists, you assume Muslims are mostly terrorists, even though this is not actually the case. There’s confirmation bias: once you think Muslims are terrorists, you look for more information that supports the idea that Muslims are terrorists; the Christian who blows up a building is an extremist, the Muslim who blows up a building is proof. There’s stereotypes that don’t carve reality at its joints: a stereotype about “black people” includes a recent immigrant to America from Haiti, an African American who is mostly white by ancestry, a Brazilian who doesn’t even identify as black, an urbanized Kenyan, a Somali pirate and a South African farmer; it is very difficult to figure out what all these groups have in common beyond some quantity of melanin. And so on and so forth; a full list of the ways human beings are irrational would fill up several books.

These inaccurate stereotypes can lead to a lot of really awful behavior. For instance, profiling all Muslims at airports would be a sensible countermeasure if Muslims were Always Chaotic Evil like orcs; since they aren’t, it’s Islamophobic. The overwhelming likelihood is that the nice Muslim family who moved in down the street are not al-Qaeda members, so you shouldn’t treat them like al-Qaeda members.

There’s also the way stereotypes influence the behavior of people actually in the group, but this post has gone on for long enough and that plays a huge enough role in gender (remember? What this blog is actually about?) that I think it is deserving of its own post.

(Digression: some people have complained the kyriarchy’s definition is too broad. How does “the set of all ways some groups sapient lifeforms are unjustly harmed specifically because of their membership in a particular group” sound as a definition? Lots of worthy causes are mostly unrelated to the kyriarchy, such as environmentalism, civil liberties, fighting corruption in government and ending Nickelback’s musical career.)