Re: Debian supports pridemonth?
On Tue, Jul 02, 2019 at 11:07:39AM +0200, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Actually I felt something like similar like this myself before (not
> related to the pridemonth thing). There still a lot of oppression of
> women and a lack of progress on equal pay for equal work and so on… I
> acknowledge that. On the other hand with everything around feminism… I
> sometimes wondered "So as a male I cannot have any feelings of being
> excluded or unwelcome cause I am a member of a dominant group"? What if,
> just what if I do not buy into that crap, but I am still made a member
> of a group I do not identify with? This is violence as well. And beware
> if I would even be a white male. Then I better shut up, cause… I am a
> member of that dominant, violent, aggressive group. But what if, just
> what if not every white, heterosexual male is violent or aggressive? I
> even asked myself whether I would even be a man if I cannot see me as a
> member of that group.
[Yet another straight cis white man writing here.]
It's of course true that Not All Men (etc.) are individually oppressive,
dominant, violent, rich, and so on. A lot of people get hung up on
that, and I can understand why. But this isn't really the point that
feminists and other people working for greater equality in society are
generally making. The point of identifying privileged groups is to
point out that, on average, members of those groups have an easier time
than people who aren't in those groups. And it's really important to
notice that this is not solely about how you see yourself, but about how
others react to you for things you can't reasonably control.
People can benefit from this kind of thing on some axes and not others.
For example, from time to time I've been on the wrong end of racial
abuse because I'm Irish and living in England. On the whole I'm lucky
that this is a pretty minor thing for me, though: people don't look at
me and cross the road because they assume I'm going to pick their
pocket, or turn me down for jobs because they assume I'm going to be off
on maternity leave soon, or systematically single me out for harassment
while travelling because of the colour of my skin, or attack me because
they saw me holding hands with another man, or chase me out of public
bathrooms, or any of a whole swathe of problems that are based much more
strongly on how other people perceive you than on what group you
identify with.
That isn't to say that any individual straight white man is necessarily
better off than any individual bi black woman, or that individual
straight white men don't have problems! Rather, on average and as a
group (not necessarily a group we identify with, but rather an
unavoidable aspect of how others perceive us and treat us), we get to
play life on easy mode relative to how it would be if all other things
were equal but we didn't belong to that group. Thinking about society
in those terms helps us to counter it and to level the playing field.
And this is not a zero-sum game - for example, one key point of feminism
is that many men also find societal expectations of masculinity to be
suffocating, and fixing gender-based inequalities helps them too. One
thing I would expect free software developers to understand more than
many other groups is that we do not lose out by other people's lives
being improved.
As I understand it, Pride is about protesting the situation of groups of
people who still suffer, on average, from systematic discrimination that
people who aren't in those groups don't encounter, and taking a positive
stance to celebrate diversity as a counter to that. It's not something
I'm particularly involved with since I'm not really (depending on your
definitions) in the affected groups, but I'm happy to see Debian making
a small gesture towards celebrating it. I would echo Russ's comments on
feeling that making a similar gesture towards straight white men would
be more about reinforcing global inequities than advancing equality.
I'd be overjoyed to see a day when none of this is necessary; sadly I
don't particularly expect it to be in my lifetime.
Finally, on whether all this is on-topic: the older I get, the harder a
time I have separating ethical behaviour in one part of my life from
ethical behaviour in others. To me, free software is an inherently
political endeavour, and one part of that endeavour is eliminating
inequalities of access to technology. I don't see it as at all
off-topic for us to consider and to work to address the problems that
affect people who aren't perceived as the "default human", particularly
when it comes to things like computing education, access to technology
workplaces, low-cost computing, and protection from attacks; but the
occasional more wide-ranging discussion seems fine too because
technology does not exist in some kind of ideal vacuum disconnected from
society as a whole.
If you feel that Debian should hold itself aloof from this and strive to
be apolitical and solely about technology, then I understand your
position and used to sympathise with it myself, and I'm sure we can work
together in other ways, but we aren't likely to agree on this one. I'd
ask that other straight white men in Debian who feel aggrieved by the
promotion of other identities and appearances take a step back and try
to think about why you're aggrieved. Are you really being
systematically underprivileged in the sorts of ways that other groups
often are? Does it in fact harm you for other groups to be promoted, or
is it more about correcting an imbalance that you've always been used
to? Are there reasons why people who are seen differently by the rest
of society might not see being apolitical as a neutral position? Do the
demographics of Debian's membership relative to other projects and to
the population as a whole suggest that we have problems that need to be
addressed? It can be very easy to stick with ingrained assumptions
about these kinds of things, but they're worth thinking about.
Thanks,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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