dialogue | Aaron Hood

In the context of justice and liberation work, civility silences.

Civility doesn’t create space for understanding. Civility sets the, generally unspoken, expectations for the conversation. When we expect civility in the face of injustice we dictate the ways injustice can be communicated. Civility continues the pattern that silences oppressed groups of people by establishing rules for the ways to speak to majoritized people. The violators of the unspoken rules of civility then face a punishment, typically some form of ostracization.

Civility sets the tone of the conversation and makes it about how the message is delivered. It means we’re no longer talking about justice when someone raises a concern about injustice. It means the focus shifts to how the delivery of the message makes us feel, rather than learning about the injustice.

Civility whitewashes the history and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to turn him into a moderate while simultaneously holding him up as the only acceptable model for all organizing. Civility changes black peoples’ demands for the police to stop killing black people to all lives matter. Civility promotes the status quo because it pushes back to comfortable conversations. It prevents us from finding uncomfortable truths. And if we don’t find the truth we can’t find our way to liberation.

A one way sign points to the left in front of a road and hill.

Civility creates a whole class of politicians who tell us that we cannot teach the truth of history. Civility defends whiteness and capitalism and patriarchy and imperialism. When we demand civility we demand silence. It means we’ve heard enough of your complaints and we refuse to believe them. It means we refuse to do anything to create change and we buy into the status quo.

We need to scrutinize civility and find the insidious ways we use it as a cudgel. Civility browbeats us into staying on the surface so we cannot grasp things at the root. And if we cannot grasp things at the root, we never find the sources of the many injustices in our world. I hope we let civility go and/or radically redefine it. I hope we analyze the unspoken rules of discussion in our culture and see how those unspoken rules stand in the way of change.

When I’m facilitating a training, I frequently provide examples of whatever it is that I’m talking about. So if I’m talking about microaggressions based on race, I may provide some examples that I’ve overheard or witnessed (Where are you really from?) Another example that I’ve used to talk about privilege is the relative privilege that faculty have over staff at an institution of higher education. I think examples of concepts (in this case, a specific microaggression) highlights the reality of the concepts that I’m training on. It allows people to “see” a real life example and use that to fully understand the concept.

That’s the purpose anyway.

Most of the time it goes to plan with some quick conversation on the validity of the example. Sometimes the dialogue goes completely off the rails because people apply their critical lens to the example instead of using the example to critically consider how their experiences or thinking may be limited and then to learn using the example. Those are the times that I want to discuss for a brief moment.

If we are so stuck to what we believe to be true we can never learn anything. That means that hearing an example of a microaggression or privilege and then trying to find ways to dismantle the example is avoiding learning. What it does is misdirect the conversation to finding ways in which the example is somehow flawed. What this means is that we’re applying the same knowledge or lens (which could be inherently flawed or informed through privilege) that we’ve always had to the example instead of understanding how the example can change our perspectives and knowledge.

I’ve seen this play out in conversations where a person telling a story about how they’ve been the target of a microaggression is told that must not be what the other person meant. Which essentially is defending the person who said something ignorant. And while it isn’t necessarily the microaggressors’ fault that they said a microaggression (because privilege usually prevents those with it from understanding what they’ve said is harmful), it is harmful to defend the ignorance of a statement once it’s been defined as inherently ignorant.

Or sometimes it’s finding ways that one small piece of the conversation may not fit entirely within the conversation. I’ve heard one conversation about faculty relative privilege over staff derailed by bringing up the fact that some staff members’ salaries are higher than some faculty salaries. While this is true for a few cases, overall staff are at a disadvantage and using a small example erases the other issues in the different treatments that staff and faculty receive.

All of this is to say that when we’re in a space designed for us to learn, we need to critically reflect on how we’re engaging with the material. Are we asking questions that poke holes in examples? Or are we using the examples and the dialogue to poke holes in our thinking? Those are important self-reflective questions to consider within the context of social justice education trainings that if we do not answer for ourselves we can end up learning nothing and preventing the learning of others.