Mathematician. Leader. Heroine. Remembering Hidden Figure Katherine Johnson

Allyship does not mean seeing yourself as worthless

There are people who like to make others feel worthless. Some of them use the language of social justice to get away with it.

Often, this comes in the form of proclaiming to hate allies and then demanding unbounded deference from allies. This is typically conflated with accountability, but it’s not the same thing at all.

Hatred and accountability are different things. Accountability as an ally means, among other things:

Listening to the people you’re trying to support instead of talking over them.

Making good-faith efforts to understand the issues involved and to act on what you learn.

Understanding that you’re going to make big mistakes, and that sometimes people you’re trying to support will be justifiably angry with you.

Accepting that your privilege and power matter, not expecting others to overlook either, and taking responsibility for how you use both.

Facing things that are uncomfortable to think about, and handling your own feelings about them rather than dumping on marginalized people.

Being careful about exploitation and reciprocity, including paying people for their time when you’re asking them to do work for you.

Understanding that marginalized people have good reason to be cautious about trusting you, and refraining from demanding trust on the grounds that you see yourself as on their side.

When people use the language of social justice to make others feel worthless, it’s more like this:

Telling allies explicitly or implicitly, that they are worthless and harming others by existing.

Expecting allies to constantly prove that they’re not terrible people, even when they’ve been involved with the community for years and have a long track record of trustworthiness. 

Berating allies about how terrible allies are, in ways that have no connection to their actual actions or their actual attitudes.

Giving people instructions that are self-contradictory or impossible to act on, then berating them for not following them.

Eg: Saying “Go f**ing google it” about things that are not actually possible to google in a meaningful way

Eg: saying “ shut up and listen to marginalized people” about issues that significant organized groups of marginalized people disagree about. https://www.realsocialskills.org/blog/the-rules-about-responding-to-call-outs-arent

Eg: Simultaneously telling allies that they need to speak up about an issue and that they need to shut up about the same issue. Putting them in a position in which if they speak or write about something, they will be seen as taking up space that belongs to marginalized people, and if they don’t, they will be seen as making marginalized people do all the work.

Giving allies instructions, then berating them for following them:

Eg: Inviting allies to ask questions about good allyship, then telling them off for centering themselves whenever they actually ask relevant questions. 

Eg: Teaching a workshop on oppression or a related issue, and saying “it’s not my job to educate you” to invited workshop participants who ask questions that people uninformed about the issue typically can be expected to ask.

More generally speaking: setting things up so that no matter what an ally does, it will be seen as a morally corrupt act of oppression.

Holding allies accountable means insisting that they do the right thing. Ally hate undermines accountability by saying that it’s inherently impossible for allies to do anything right. If we want to hold people accountable in a meaningful, we have to believe that accountability is possible.

Someone who believes that it’s impossible for allies to do anything right isn’t going to be able to hold you accountable. If someone has no allies who they respect, you’re probably not going to be their exception — they will almost certainly end up hating you too. If someone demands that you assume you’re worthless and prove your worth in an ongoing way, working with them is unlikely to end well.  

If you want to hold yourself accountable, you need to develop good judgement about who to listen to and who to collaborate with. Part of that is learning to be receptive to criticism from people who want you to do the right thing, even when the criticism is hard to hear. Another part is learning to be wary of people who see you as a revenge object and want you to hate yourself. You will encounter both attitudes frequently, and it’s important to learn to tell the difference. Self-hatred isn’t accountability.

Tl;dr If we want to hold allies accountable in a meaningful, we have to believe that accountability is possible. Hatred of allies makes this much harder.

One of the Jacobin writers apparently found some 1856 articles about wealth inequality by Frederick Douglass that have never been republished before. They’re really incredible, and it’s fascinating to realize that Douglass appears to share the liberal socialist views of abolitionist Wendell Phillips, whom Douglass was friends with. According to the second article, he was a proto-Georgist too.

“The Accumulation of Wealth,” Frederick Douglass’s Paper, November 28, 1856:

…it is not wealth of itself that produces the dreaded effects, but its accumulation in the hands of a few — creating an aristocracy of wealth, ready to be the tool of an aggressive tyranny, or to become aggressive upon its own account. With an increase of wealth comes an increase of selfishness, devotion to private affairs, and a contempt of public — unless politics can be made to minister to the all absorbing selfishness of the individual…

We are ready to grant that the condition of man, cast as he is into the world naked, and surrounded by elements unfriendly to his continued existence, renders a degree of acquisitiveness necessary for the security of life; but is it just to plead this moderate degree of accumulation, indicated by nature, in justification of the unlimited hoarding of wealth, and monopolies of land, which has converted the entire civilized world into an abode of millionaires and beggars; which renders the enslavement of the peoples of the world possible, and shrouds the future of liberty with gloom?…

Wealth has ever been the tool of the tyrant, the readiest means by which liberty is overthrown. A nation starting with free institutions and customs, begins to increase in wealth, and that wealth to accumulate in the hands of a few, and here is the lever by which, eventually and certainly, the liberties gained in a simpler age will be overthrown.

Wealth is averse to agitation; it abhors revolutions; it calls for peace, at whatever sacrifice. A tyranny of an individual or a class may be winding its subtle meshes around the wealthy, depriving them of the right of unrestrained locomotion, the right of speech, the right of private judgment; but if it leaves them the privilege of grasping and accumulating gold, they are content — nay, will aid the tyranny to subject them who value their liberties enough to struggle for them; for the agitation might endanger their gains…

Louis Napoleon holds his seat today, and other tyrants with him, because they have enlisted the sympathies of capital, by professions of law and order; encouraging and increasing the facilities for growing rich. Say to one of these blinded instruments of tyranny, that personal liberty, the freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, is overthrown; and they will answer you, that commerce flourishes, manufactures increase, public securities are at par. The golden calf set up, they fall down and worship, and shut their eyes to the foul wrongs perpetrated every day on human rights.

Poverty, the natural consequence of wealth unduly accumulated, plays its part in the drama of national degradation. Wherever the palaces tower highest, and enclose within their walls the greatest accumulations of luxury and wealth, there does the peasant grovel lowest in ignorance and misery; there is tyranny most secure and freedom most hopeless…

From whence, in our own country, comes the danger to liberty? Who are the ready tools and apologists of slavery…? The plain answer is, the wealth and the poverty of the nation… We have the controllers of our commercial centres, blinding or buying the poverty-stricken, ignorant masses that fester in their alleys, to the unblushing support of the policy of slaveholding tyranny…

If such a statesman shall devise measures, which, while they will not hamper private enterprise, shall yet prevent the undue accumulation of wealth in the hands of individuals or associations, he will have merited and secured a fame more lasting than has yet fallen to the lot of man. He will have founded a nation which, though subject to human vicissitudes, will yet possess elements of prosperity and permanence, such as no nation has yet enjoyed.

Happy Birthday Chester. We miss you. ❤️ Feel free to post your favorite happy / funny / inspiring memory of Chester below.

Continuation from this post: some other “these events happened at about the same time or close together in history” things:

- The French Revolution happened shortly after the American Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution happened shortly after the French Revolution, and the big wave of revolution that freed Latin America from Spanish control happened shortly after the Haitian Revolution. I think this wasn’t a coincidence: these revolutions were connected!

- The first civilizations arose in Egypt and Mesopotamia at the end of the great drying of the Sahara and Arabia. Again, I think this wasn’t a coincidence! The drying climate meant people had to rely more on big labor-intensive irrigation works, which meant that cooperation and coordination on a large scale became more important. The great drying probably drove refugees into the Nile valley and the lands around the Tigris and Euphrates, increasing the population density of those regions. This would have meant even more reliance on labor-intensive large-scale irrigation, and also those extra people would have helped staff the work-gangs, work-shops, and armies of the new kings. The influx of refugees probably also meant a mixing of cultures, which probably stimulated technological, cultural, and institutional innovation.

- The peopling of the Americas and the first experiments with grain farming in the Middle East might have been happening at about the same time.

- The Norman conquest of England was within living memory at the time of the First Crusade.

- The Classical Maya period was 250-900 CE, roughly coinciding with the late Roman Empire and the Dark Ages in Europe. The collapse of the Classical Maya centers was during the 900s, about a century or two after Charlemagne’s time (IIRC the 900s CE is around the end of the Danelaw period in England).

- The moai (the big heads) of Easter Island aren’t ancient; they were built during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period.

- New Zealand was peopled during the Middle Ages, IIRC some centuries after the peopling of Iceland. New Zealand was one of the last lands on Earth to be peopled.

- Lady Murasaki lived in the late 900s and early 1000s CE; a little before the Norman conquest of England. To me Heian-period and pre-Heian Japan feels like the Bronze Age, but it’s from a completely different period of history; it existed in the same world as Vikings and Charlemagne and the Tang Dynasty; I think that’s interesting. Speaking of Japanese history, the Japanese warring states period and the height of classic samurai feudalism was the 1400s and 1500s.

- Australia was peopled at least 30,000 years before the Americas, and Homo sapiens expansion into northern Eurasia seems to have taken much longer than Homo sapiens peopling of Australia. There’s a lesson in this: cold seems to have been a more daunting barrier than ocean. That makes sense in a way: the Homo sapiens out-of-Africa migrants were likely tropical/subtropical coast-dwellers, and they could have just followed the tropical/subtropical southern coast of Asia all the way to Java (which you could have walked to from Asia back then because sea levels were lower), never leaving warm coastal regions. After that they would have needed just one big innovation to reach Australia: sea-worthy boats. Adapting to the cold northern regions of ice age Eurasia would have required more radical changes to their tool-kit and lifestyle. I think something similar happened in the Americas: there are surprisingly old signs of human presence in South America, and I suspect what happened is the first Americans were fisher-whaler-beachcomber people who lived on a stretch of ice-free coast between the Pacific and the ice age North American glaciers, and as they expanded they mostly just followed the coast south, and they kept doing that until some of them reached Tierra del Fuego within maybe a few centuries. If an alien visited Earth around 13,500 BCE I think they might have found a few tens of thousands of people living along the west coast of the Americas from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego and the rest of the Americas still almost uninhabited (maybe there’d be a few thousand people living in the inland hills of California and the inland jungles of Central America, but that’d be about it). Only the most adventurous early Americans moved inland, where they’d have to survive without the resources of the sea and the beach, and became the Clovis People and other inland early American hunter-gatherer cultures. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were humans living along the shores of the Straight of Magellan before there were humans living in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.

A somewhat different but related thing: communicating the sheer length of ancient Egyptian history:

- Sargon the Great gets called the first empire-builder, but I think that title really should belong to Narmer, or whoever the first Pharaoh of a unified Egypt was. We often don’t think of Narmer as an empire-builder for the same reason we often don’t think of Qin Shi Huangdi’s great empire as an empire: the empire was so successful and enduring that it eventually started to look like a natural fact of human cultural geography. You know your empire has really succeeded when most people don’t think of it as an empire! Sargon the Great lived about 800 years after Narmer, so the difference in time between them is similar to the difference in time between Julius Caesar and Charlemagne.

- The Great Pyramids were built in the 2500s and early 2400s BCE, about 500 years after Narmer’s reign. This was early in Egyptian history! I think it’s interesting that the Egyptians did this huge construction project early in their history and never did anything like that again. I really wonder what happened there. Did building the Great Pyramids ruin the economy? Did the mobilization of the huge workforce needed to build the Great Pyramids stir up the disease pool and cause plagues (did something similar happen when Amarna was built and populated and did that contribute to the failure of the Atenist reformation?)? Anyway, like I said, the Great Pyramids were built relatively early in Egyptian history … though the time difference between Narmer and the builders of the great pyramid was comparable to the difference in time between us and Columbus and Henry VIII!

- There were three most ancient centers of civilization that emerged at about the same time: Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley Civilization. The Indus Valley Civilization collapsed around 2000 BCE and we don’t know much about it; we can’t read their writing. I think it’d be fascinating if we could learn more about the Indus Valley Civilization! Were they politically fragmented, like Mesopotamia, or were they a single state, like Egypt? There’s some evidence that might suggest the latter, but it’s impossible to know! So many unanswered questions!

- The Thera eruption that might have contributed to the decline of Minoan civilization happened around 1600 BCE. This was around the same time as the Hyksos rule in northern Egypt; if I’m reading my Wikipedia skimming right there’s a record of the Thera eruption recorded on a stelae set up by the Pharaoh who reconquered northern Egypt from the Hyksos!

- Tutankhamun lived in the mid-1300s BCE. Tutankhamun lived more than a thousand years after the Great Pyramids were built! The builders of the Great Pyramids were as distant from Tutankhamun as the Vikings are from us!

- And Cleopatra (the famous one, Cleopatra VII) lived about 1300 years after Tutankhamun! Tutankhamun was as distant from Cleopatra as Charlemagne is from us! And the Great Pyramids were about 2500 years old in Cleopatra’s time; their construction was about as distant from her as Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates are from us! As that meme says: Cleopatra lived closer to the construction of the moon rockets than the construction of the Great Pyramids.

Remember when I said Pharaonic Egypt and the US kind of remind me of each other? Well, the US is less than 250 years from its founding. 250 years from the founding of the unified Egyptian state they’d just recently stopped doing human sacrifice (the earliest Pharaohs were buried with human retainer sacrifices, about a century or so into the Pharaonic period they stopped doing that and switched to burying the Pharaohs with little dolls that were supposed to substitute for the servants) and they were just building the Step Pyramid of Djoser, just beginning the pyramid-building tradition that would culminate in the Great Pyramids centuries later.

Alternately, the other culture that really reminds me of Pharaonic Egypt is China, and its Narmer-equivalent lived after Alexander the Great. The Chinese still have about 800 years to go before they can say their civilization-state is as enduring as Pharaonic Egypt!

I really wonder if the Pharaonic Egyptian religion would still be going strong if Christianity and Islam hadn’t come along. It survived for so long!

The internet could change next week, and not in a good way

You may have heard about the efforts in Europe to reform copyright law. The debate has been ongoing in the European Parliament for months. If approved next week, these new regulations would require us to automatically filter and block content that you upload without meaningful consideration of your right to free expression. 

We respect the copyrights and trademarks of others, and we take all reports seriously to ensure that your creative expression is protected. We make this clear in our Community Guidelines. There’s already a legal framework that works and is fair: Today we take down posts and media that contain allegedly infringing content when we receive a valid DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request. We also provide clear-cut ways for people to fight back if they believe their removed content was not a true violation. These instances are monitored and reported and live in our biannual transparency report. 

The suggestion to use automated filters for issues of copyright is short-sighted at best and harmful at worst. Automated filters are unable to determine whether a use should be considered “fair use” under the law and are unable to determine whether a use is authorized by a license agreement. They are unable to distinguish legitimate parody, satire, or even your own personal pictures that could be matched with similar photographs that have been protected by someone else. We don’t believe that technology should replace human judgment. Tumblr is and always has been a place for creative expression, and these new regulations would only make it harder for you to express yourself with the freedom and clarity you do so now. 

If you access Tumblr from Europe and want to act, you can find more information on saveyourinternet.eu. 

제딧/Jedit          -          https://twitter.com/9Jedit

Call yourself anticapitalist/socialist/liberal/woke/whatever but if you’re not nice to regular people on a moment to moment basis your politics are basically worthless.

Linkin Park & Friends Celebrate Life in Honor of Chester Bennington

scrupulosity in These Uncertain Times

do you think you are a bad person? do you feel like you constantly have to do something, anything, good to balance out your miserable existence? 

does Chidi from The Good Place hit home to the point where he isn’t funny, because you see too much of yourself in him? 

are you constantly worried about the impact your actions have on others–  to the point where you avoid your friends, deprive yourself of things you want or need, or outright starve yourself? 

you may have scrupulosity.

scrupulosity is a mental health issue that crops up with a lot of different diagnoses- c-ptsd, ocd, autism, and adhd are some of the most common, but a LOT of ND and traumatized people have it. 

scrupulosity makes you overly concerned with morality. you feel like you are Bad and have to do Good things. you obsess over your own Badness and the Badness of the world. you feel like you, personally, need to fix everything that’s Bad, and that if you don’t, you’re Worse Than Twin Clones Of Hitler.

you might try to expiate your badness by becoming a doormat– letting other people walk all over you. you might donate money to charity or GoFundMes, even if you can’t afford it, because You Need To Be Good. you might avoid Problematic things, to the point where you can’t enjoy a bar of chocolate or a children’s cartoon.

and that’s in fairly normal circumstances where the world is not actively on fire.

at times like this– where the world is full of legitimately horrible shit, where it seems like everything is fucked up beyond repair and everyone needs your help- scrupulosity can fucking kill you. 

 this post is already too long, so I’m going to reblog with some suggestions for how to help take care of yourself for people with scrupulosity, and some advice on how people without scrupulosity can help support their friends rn. 

tldr: constantly obsessing over the Badness of the world and feeling like you need to fix it can be a brainweasel called scrupulosity. it is normal to be scared and want to help, but your brain can take that to an extreme that isn’t healthy.