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.
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.