On sharing spaces and being in community with others

I was talking with a close friend tonight. We both volunteered at the same queer youth organization. Its motto is Fearlessly Be Yourself!

Of course the motto is apt - nobody (human) wants young people living in fear of violence, rejection, harassment, or any of the other crap flung at queer youth.

But we both encountered a problem with how the motto was sometimes interpreted. Sometimes people at the organization would do something against the house norms, and their defense would sound something like this: "What's the problem? I'm just fearlessly being myself!" There was generally a defiant note to it.



I supervised an intern once who brought this up with me. There were youth being careless with their power/privilege by telling racist jokes. So their "just being myself" came at others' expense. It made the house an unsafe place for others. When she confronted their behavior, she got stymied by the Just Fearlessly Being Myself defense and didn't know what to say.

Here's what I told her. When we told someone to respect house norms, be careful with their power, check their privilege, or whatever, we were not asking them to live in fear. We were asking them to show the consideration that would make it a shared space for everyone - not just for them.

So do I consider it my God-given right to do whatever the hell I want? No. In my house I can make my own rules. I can sing at the top of my lungs, and I do. I can hula hoop naked, and I don't - but I could. It's my house. If somebody didn't like it, they could go find another place to hang out. But when I'm in a community space, or if I turn my home into a community space temporarily, it's a different story. Then I need to be considerate of the others I'm sharing the space with.

It's the same as how the First Amendment protects your freedom of expression, but you're still not allowed to disturb the peace, slander people, threaten others with violence, or yell "Fire!" in a movie theater that isn't on fire. It's Jefferson's famous line that "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." It's not all about you.

Anyways, both my friend and I found it frustrating that people would use the motto to get away with whatever the hell they wanted. I still love the motto Fearlessly Be Yourself! But at some point I started adding little addenda in my head, to be trotted out for those who needed to hear them. So I might have to explain to someone that they need to "Fearlessly be yourself in community with others" or "with consideration for others." That's more complicated.

But now I'll add another layer of complexity. The threats to a shared space aren't always about singing really loud, hula hooping naked, or swinging your fist. Those are really obvious examples, and they're all illegal under the right circumstances. But sometimes it's way more subtle. Maybe you hog the spotlight a bit. Maybe you're always the one who sits at the head of the table. Maybe you always have to have the last word. Maybe you reply at length to every email you get, so you're saying several times more than any other person in the group. (I've definitely done that one.) In all these cases, the space isn't shared as well as it could be; it's about you more than everyone else.

Like I said, these examples are subtle. None of them are illegal, some are hard to measure, and some of them are trends that can only be tracked over time. People do this kind of thing all the time without ever realizing it's creating/perpetuating a power imbalance.

People with privilege especially do these all the time without anyone realizing it, because we're all brought up to be used to it. Teachers favor boys over girls in a number of ways. People are more likely to treat a man like he knows what he's talking about. People are generally more comfortable when a White woman gets upset than a Black woman, and court records reflect this by using words like emotional or passionate for White women but irate or belligerent for Black women behaving similarly. (sourcing below)

We're trained to the point this stuff is the norm, and people generally don't even notice these observable, measurable marks of inequality. But what does it mean when judges have an unconscious pattern of evaluating Black women more harshly than White women? Or when women are taken less seriously than men? It means our society isn't being shared as well as it should be. When teachers unconsciously give boys more attention, the classroom isn't being shared well enough. And so on.

There's no way to notice absolutely everything. So we need to notice whatever we can on our own, in our own behavior and others' - and be wonderfully open to feedback from others - and offer feedback to others whenever we can. (That is, when we have feedback to offer, can spare the effort, and can afford the risk they'll blow us off or retaliate.)

Hooray for the complexity of social justice!

A shout out to Mia Sneed, a kickass social worker at the Travis County Office of Parental Representation, for teaching me about the imbalance she's tracked in court transcripts. Another shout out to Lisa Scheps, a trans activist who's shared with me her experiences of being taken less seriously as a woman than as a man. See, I was listening!