This is the “complete” version of the “Equality Arts Dojo”. For the “summary” version go here:
http://www.warhw.com/equality-arts-dojo-short/
“Equality Arts Dojo”
Copyright 2009 Greg
licensed under the Creative Commons-Attribution-Share Alike-3.0 (United States) license.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/
The URL for attribution is provided as:
This post is about dealing with inequality, discrimination, bias, prejudice, and similar issues. It isn’t directly tied to how language is used to misdescribe war, but having been in a few conversations about equality, and having walked through the smoldering ruins these conversations can create, one thing I noticed is how familiar the language feels. Debates about inequality sometimes employ the same language tactics as debates about war.
So, what’s an Equality Arts Dojo? Well, it’s like a Martial Arts Dojo, but instead of learning about maneuvers and weapons to use in a physical fight, its a place where you can learn about maneuvers and weapons to use in the fight for equality against bias based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. If you want to learn how to defend yourself against a bully, you might study Aikido at an Akido dojo. If you want to defend yourself against racists, you might want to study at an Equality Arts Dojo.
There are many flavors of Equality Arts Dojos. Like there are many flavors of Martial Arts, such as Wing Chun, Taekwando, Karate, Jujutsu, Judo, Kendo, Jukendo, and so on. The Equality Arts could be broken down into Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation, among others. And as there are people with varying degrees of expertise in their specific Martial Art, so too are there people with varying degrees of expertise in the Equality Arts. Some people study martial arts for defensive purposes only, some wish to protect themselves while inflicting as little collateral damage as possible. Others can study the exact same martial art and use it to attack and use it to bully others. The same is true for the Equality Arts.
When studying Martial Arts, you start off by learning some basic maneuvers and usually practice them over and over until you get them right. The Equality Arts also has some basic maneuvers to learn as well. Here are some basics:
First Maneuver: Big Picture.
The Big Picture attempts to view the full extent of the problem of bias, from a ten thousand foot level, but also view it with the ability to spot individual behaviors and put them into the proper perspective in relation to the Big Picture. No one is born into this perspective. People learn it through their life’s experiences and through studying, such as reading this document.
The Big Picture view of bias first breaks bias down into systemic bias and individual bias. Systemic refers to social levels of bias, group dynamics. Systemic bias may or may not involve the government or some group. Individual bias refers to an individual person doing some biased act, whether it is part of a systemic problem or they are acting alone.
Individual bias can be broken down into explicit and implicit bias. When you see someone of a different race, your subconscious might (or might not) automatically categorize them on an emotional level as “good” or “bad”. If your subconscious does this (and it might not), this emotional categorization can bubble up to the conscious level of your thinking, and you might take that subconscious categorization and turn it into explicit action, or you might be shocked at your own thought and attempt to consciously suppress it or drive it away, followed by a secondary reaction of feeling guilt or shame for having that feeling.
Systemic bias can be broken down into top-down and bottom-up bias. Top-Down systemic bias would be something like a law that says blacks have to ride at the back of the bus, women can’t vote, or gays can’t marry. Bottom-Up systemic bias would be a condition of bias that is not driven by any external organization, but many individuals operate on an unstated agreement to operate in a biased way.
For example, imagine an area that has a population that is a majority of whites and a minority of blacks. None of the whites belong to racist organizations and none of the laws for that area are racist, yet, if none of the whites will hire blacks for jobs, then this is Bottom-Up systemic racism.
One of the issues with Bottom-Up systemic bias is deciding how to detect it. Individual acts of bias can be detected. The question is at what point does it become Systemic. A common place where bottom-up systemic bias can occur is an area where Top-Down systemic bias was once in place, the laws enforcing that bias are removed, but the biased people are left in place. Bottom-Up bias is often found in these situations immediately after the laws are removed. But identifying systemic bias, especially Bottom-Up Systemic Bias is problematic, and false positives can worsen a situation. The issue of false positives is further discussed in the Ninth Maneuver.
So, we have established at least four types of bias:
Implicit (Individual)
Explicit (Individual)
Bottom-Up (Systemic)
Top-Down (Systemic)
Implicit is a function of how an individual thinks. Explicit is a function of how an individual acts. Bottom-Up is a form of social bias held in place by implied agreement. Top-Down bias is a function of organized (state, government, or private organization) bias.
Both Bottom-Up and Top-Down are explicit. And both will demonstrate instances of individual explicit bias. But they are systemic due to these individual acts of bias operating on a social level.
Implicit bias is internal, a reflection of thoughts and feelings. Explicit, Bottom-Up, and Top-Down are all external, measured by actions. For the action-based forms of bias, they can be further broken down into Intentional versus Unconscious versus Accidental. And since these external acts may affect other people, the concept of Responsibility is also brought into the picture.
So, we have established a few modifiers for the different types of bias.
Intentional
Unconscious
Accidental
Responsibility
These will be talked about in more detail later.
Second Maneuver: Implicit Bias.
Psychologists have been studying Implicit Bias as it relates to the unconscious reaction an individual has in response to someone’s skin color, gender, age, and other physical differences. You can get a rough approximation of what level of implicit bias you might have to skin color, gender, age, etc, by taking some of the various online tests. One such test is provided by Harvard here:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/
You may have implicit bias, or you may not. The thing is that it is in your subconscious and therefore is fairly inconspicuous to your conscious self. It is like water to a fish, you aren’t really aware of it by default. You might want to take the above test and maybe search around online for other similar tests to get a sense of what your implicit bias might be. The tests are designed to try and avoid the filters of your conscious self so that the bias of the underlying subconscious can be sensed.
You may have implicit bias against your own race or gender and not even know it. There was a psychology experiment that put a bunch of Asian women in a room and gave them a math test. Before the test, the psychologists gave some rooms a speech about how Asians are perceived to be better at math than non-Asians. In other rooms, before the test the psychologists would give a speech about how women are perceived to be worse at math than men. The results of the math tests tracked with which speech was given before the test. The rooms that heard “Asians do better” actually scored better than the rooms that heard “women do worse”. The experiment suggests that our own implicit negative bias about our own race or gender may affect our own behaviour in negative ways.
If you take a test and it reports that you have implicit bias, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It means you’re human who has a subconscious. Where implicit bias actually becomes a question of Responsibility is when you act on that bias in some external way. If you’re interested in acting in a nonracist way, it may help you if you address your implicit bias. But you cannot be made “wrong” for having “impure thoughts”, and anyone who attempts to take on the role of “Thought Police” ought to expect to have their motives questioned. See “Responsibility” for a related discussion.
Third Maneuver: Explicit Bias
Explicit bias occurs when someone takes an action based on bias. It could be verbal or physical. A verbal example is when a biased person calls someone else a racial epithet. A physical example would be when a biased person doesn’t hire someone based on skin color. The action may be unconscious, an outcome of Implicit Bias, but the action is still biased. If you have the implicit bias that Asians are better at math, and you unconsciously steer yourself to ask for help from someone who is Asian, you’re exhibiting explicit bias.
Explicit Bias can be broken down into Intentional, Unconscious, and Accidental.
If you consciously think women aren’t good at math and don’t hire someone for a job involving math because they’re a woman, then you’ve got Intentional Explicit Bias.
If you have some implicit bias against women and math and subconsciously choose a male candidate for a math job, then you’ve got Unconscious Explicit Bias.
Say you don’t have implicit bias about women and math, say you consciously think that a woman can be just as good as a man at math, but say you’re a writer and you write a story where a female character can’t get a math problem and a man has to solve it for her. If a woman reader is offended by the character, then it qualifies as accidental bias.
Accidental bias can get confusing for folks. The main thing to remember is that if you do something that offends someone else because it occurs to them as bias, then how can you, the person who did the action that caused the offense, differentiate yourself from someone who actually intended to offend? By taking responsibility. Saying “it was an accident” is informative, but does not qualify as responsible behavior. The person who accidentally offended someone is easily able to take ownership of their actions, compared to someone who intentionally offended but is trying to get away with it. The intentional racist may try to pretend it was accidental, and may offer a half apology. The accidental racist can simply apologize, make amends, and move on. The intentional racist will often try to avoid responsibility for their racism.
This also brings in the concept of Responsibility. The question of responsibility is simply a matter of whether or not you will acknowledge the effects of your actions and inactions. Note that being responsible for your action is independent of whether the action was intentional, unconscious, or accidental. Being responsible for a biased action could be as simple as saying “I’m sorry.” If you want to add to this, you might say it was intentional but you’ve changed your ways, it was unconscious and you’ll try to be more aware of your implicit bias, or that it was accidental and you didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feeling.
Once you apologize for an action, you have taken responsibility for that action, whether the person accepts your apology or not.
Some biased actions cause measurable damage. If you haven’t given your female employees equal pay, as part of your apology you might want to consider compensating them for the difference they would have gotten had you not acted in a biased way.
Some actions cause emotional damage. Someone is offended. Someone is angered. Someone is distraught because of the biased action you did. Being responsible means you acknowledge that your action contributed to them feeling distraught and that you regret that outcome. That is the basis for being responsible and apologizing for a biased action. If they don’t accept your apology, that doesn’t mean you haven’t been responsible. If they don’t accept, you might want to first consider the possibility that your apology didn’t quite own up to your actions. But if you believe you have taken full responsibility for your actions, the fact that the person doesn’t accept it doesn’t void that you have taken full responsibility for your actions.
You do not have to accept responsibility for the action of others. If you could have done something (anything) to stop those people, then you can apologize for not doing enough to stop them, but you cannot truly take responsibility for the actions taken by someone else, because responsibility requires choice.
Fourth Maneuver: Top-Down Bias
Top-Down bias is bias that is organized from some central body. The government may have discriminatory laws. A private group might be organized to reinforce a discriminatory practice (anything from not letting members of some other group join, to reinforcing fear amongst a minority population through violence). There is some organizational means of keeping bias in place.
Dealing with Top-Down bias usually means dealing with the organization in some manner, and then sometimes correcting the situation so that Bottom-Up bias does not maintain the same practices of discrimination through familiarity of the population.
Fifth Maneuver: Bottom-Up Bias
Bottom-Up bias is bias that is not organized from some central body, but instead is the outcome of individual members of a population acting independently but in the same direction to reinforce discrimination. Bottom-Up bias can sometimes be seen after an organization enforcing Top-Down bias has been forced to remove Top-Down bias. The organization no longer enforces or organizes the bias, but sufficient numbers of people are familiar with how the discrimination is enforced that they can maintain it long after any Top-Down organization of discrimination is removed.
One issue with systemic Bottom-Up bias is false positives, i.e. claiming systemic bias where none exists. One rule of thumb to keep in mind before making the charge of systemic bias is this: “The plural of anecdote is not fact”. Systemic Bottom-Up bias would require some notion of the people with bias acting in concert to maintain their bias.
Sixth Maneuver: Individual responsibility for Individual Bias:
Responsibility means taking ownership of some effect in the world that you contributed to in some way. For example, if you did something that was accidental explicit bias and someone was offended by it, you contributed to the situation that offended that person.
Trying to be responsible for something you didn’t contribute to breaks the definition of responsibility. For example, taking responsibility for building the transcontinental railroad doesn’t really work. If you didn’t contribute to the result, you are not responsible for it.
Contributing to a result may be an active or passive thing though, so watch out for that. You might tell a sexist joke. Or you might do nothing when a sexist joke is told around you. Either way, you’re contributing to the result. You’re contribution may be different depending on whether you’re active or passive, but if you made some contribution, then you have some responsibilty.
You are not responsible for something you had no choice in. You are not responsible for the gender, race, or sexual orientation you were born into. You are not responsible for the parents you are born with, or the family you are born into. You are responsible for what you do with what you were born with, but you are not responsible for being born.
If someone is mad at you, and you had no choice in whatever contributed to that person’s anger, you are not responsible for that person’s anger. If someone is mad at you because you’re black or because you’re a woman, then you’re not responsible for that. If they’re mad because they’ve got a chip on their shoulder and just wanted to vent at someone, you’re not responsible for their anger.
If they’re in a rage against you because they had a really bad day and you cut them off in traffic, then you are responsible for cutting them off in traffic and whatever that contributed to their anger, but you’re not responsible for their entire rage, even if they are venting their full rage at you and blaming you for how they’re feeling.
But the important thing to keep in mind is that you are responsible for the *effects* in the real world that you contribute to via your action or inaction. If they are angry at you because of something you said, you may want to be responsible for the effect you created.
You are responsible for the *effects* in the real world that you contribute to via your action or inaction. This means intent doesn’t affect responsibility. If you’re in a crowded room and spill a drink on someone, then the effect (spilling a drink, soiling someone’s clothes, causing them some amount of grief) is the same whether it was accidental, intentional, subliminal, or the result of years of pent up and unresolved anger about some unresolved issue with your mother. If you spilled a drink on someone, the effect of spilling a drink is what you’re responsible for.
Seventh Maneuver: Individual Responsibility for Systemic Bias:
On a systemic level, an individual is responsible for whatever they do or do not do to affect their social structures. If you don’t vote, you’re responsible for the contribution that has to the election results. If you vote for some law that enforces a prejudice, then you’re responsible for your contribution to that effect. If there is systemic bias and you don’t do anything to oppose it, then you are responsible for whatever your inaction contributes to the systemic bias.
An individual is not responsible for the system they are in, they are responsible for whatever actions or inactions they take that contribute to the current systemic state.
If someone votes for discriminatory laws, they are responsible for whatever effects their contribution to creating that law had. If the law passes and implements discriminatory effects, the individual who voted for that law is responsible for whatever effects that law had, the individual who abstained from voting is responsible for whatever effects the law had that their abstaintion contributed to.
The thing about passive choices that allow systemic discrimination is that some use it to judge others they deem have not done “enough”. The issue here is that responsibility is personal and requires choice. You are responsible for what you do and what you did not do but had a choice to do. If you could go to the poll and vote, but didn’t, then you had a choice and you’re responsible for that inaction. If there is a campaign to stop some discriminatory law and you do not contribute money, time, and energy to it, but didn’t have any spare money, time, or energy to contribute, then you didn’t have a choice and are not responsible for your lack of contribution.
It’s important to honestly evaluate what you can and cannot truly contribute. You don’t want to gloss over that you could have done something minor but didn’t. But you also don’t want to say you could contribute a hundred thousand dollars to the cause when you would have to sell your house and become homeless. Some might not be happy until you put yourself in the poor house to support their cause, but Responsibility doesn’t say what you should do, responsibility says you own the effects you contribute to. Some people decide on some percentage or total dollar amount they contribute every year. And if they’re under that amount they will send money to a cause. Only you really know whether you can contribute or not, and only if you’re honest with yourself.
Addressing the responsibility an individual has towards systemic bias addresses that particular individual, but doesn’t neccessarily address the systemic bias itself. Even if an individual “Sees the light”, they only have so much input into the system, and converting that individual may do nothing to alter the systemic problem. Attempting to hold the individual more responsible than they truly are might be an attempt to use the individual to force a change in the system, but any approach that assigns more responsibility to an individual than they can honestly claim is a dishonest approach.
Which means, if you want to change systemic bias, you need systemic solutions.
Eighth Maneuver: Systemic Solutions for Systemic Bias:
A way to address systemic bias is through systemic solutions. If the systemic bias is in the form of Top-Down bias, then the solution is to deal with the group that organizes the bias and keeps it in place. If a government is the source of systemic bias then protests, marches, and campaigns may alter the system. If the source is an employer then protests, strikes, and boycotts might change the system. Note, the point here isn’t to provide an exaustive list of systemic solutions, the point is to clarify and distinguish the differences between systemic solutions and individual solutions to systemic bias.
One famously used systemic solution was the Montgomery Bus Boycott. City laws implemented racial segregation on public transportation such as busses. The discrimination was systemic and the boycott directly addressed a major source of the systemic problem. The boycott cost the city revenue because a large portion of passengers were black and most blacks agreed to support the bus boycott. The boycott worked locally because it pressured the city to change its policies. It also worked on a national level because a case was brought to court challenging segregation laws and eventually reached the Supreme Court which ruled the law unconstitutional.
If the systemic bias is in the form of Bottom-Up bias, then the systemic solution is more difficult (not to say that dealing with top-down is easy). In dealing with systemic bias, I support the notion of Affirmative Action. If hiring practices have systematically excluded a minority, then using legal means to alter hiring practices to correct this systemic bias may be justified. However, it is important that systemic solutions to systemic bias follow due process, and not be overly costly. It will have to have some “cost”, since Bottom-Up Bias essentially is “free” in a biased population, and changing that will have some “cost”. But it should not require businesses fire everyone and start hiring from scratch. Finding the “reasonable” level for a systemic solution is difficult and this difficulty is why it needs to be solved in some form of democratic process, rather than individuals extracting the cost from other individuals who haven’t done “enough”.
The point being that the best way to address systemic bias is with systemic solutions. That doesn’t mean it will be easy, but being difficult doesn’t justify attempting unfair alternatives.
Note that systemic solutions should be implemented with transparancy in execution, and with the full protection of due process as a check against systemic abuse. You don’t want a lynch mob running around acting as enforcer for the Equality Dojo. Some individuals who want to maintain their biased positions will obviously oppose any systemic solutions to their bias. But some individuals will want to do more than any democratically created systemic solution to bias would ever allow.
In a situation where individuals will never unanimously agree, a systemic solution will have to be enforced against the will of some individuals, perhaps individuals on opposite sides of the debate. Some may want to do nothing. Some will want to do more. The systemic solution may not satisfy either end of the extremes, but may satisfy those in the middle. And to enforce a systemic solution against the will of some individuals, the systemic solution should be transparent, should balance the cost, should be reasonable, and should have its *force* implemented by a government following good practices.
If someone is holding an individual personally responsible for some kind of systemic bias, it may be out of frustration with the system and with the lack of any obvious way to solve it. And they may want to check their motivation.
Ninth Maneuver: Explicit Bias==Objective. Implicit Bias, Systemic Bias==Subjective
Now that you know the difference between Explicit Bias, Implicit Bias, Top Down Systemic Bias, and Bottom Up Systemic bias, the thing you may not know until you practice with them a lot is that Explicit Individual Bias is the direct objective form of bias that is easiest to address and point out. Whereas, Implicit and Systemic Bias are subjective, difficult to prove, and can easily cause the conversation to derail.
An individual does some behaviour that was Explicitly Biased. Pointing out the act of explicit bias is fairly direct. You point it out, and either it was or it wasn’t Explicit Bias.
Making assertions that Implicit Bias is in place means you’re reading a person’s mind which will likely derail the conversation into character testimonials. If someone is giving a character testimonial in a conversation about discrimination, then someone probably tried to make an accusation of implicit bias.
Making assertions that an act of individual explicit bias was the tip of a Systemic Bias iceberg is equally problematic. The conversation can quickly derail from the specific instance of Explicit Individual Bias to a wandering and sometimes gaseous conversations about “what is society, and is there such a thing”.
This three minute video explains that the best way to deal with racism is to engage at the level of what they did that was racist (explicit bias) and avoid conversations of who they are (implicit bias).
http://www.illdoctrine.com/2008/07/how_to_tell_people_they_sound.html
If you are in a conversation because an individual committed a specific act of Explicit Bias, then by all means keep the conversation on that specific act and try to avoid making remarks about implicit bias or linking it as part of a greater systemic bias in the system.
Or, don’t, and take responsibility to how it pushes the conversation into a downward spiral. You may not have intended it but intent does not affect responsibility. And now that you have been informed, you cannot claim it was completely unconscious behaviour to take the conversation to implicit or systemic bias.
Tenth Maneuver: Some, None, All:
What can sometimes happen when someone has started learning a maneuver in the Equality Arts Dojo is that they start seeing it as a solution to every problem. If you learn the “hammer maneuver”, everything starts looking like nails. So once people start getting some experience around these Equality Arts Dojo maneuvers, some of them can sometimes fall into the “all or nothing” trap.
All or Nothing simply means that you are hearing what people are saying but you are translating all the direct and implied invocations of the word “some” and replacing it with either “all” or “none”. All or Nothing can also mean that you make absolute statements like “All people are racist” when “Some people are racist” might be more accurate.
Probably the first rule of thumb is to assume that any unqualified statement intends to imply “some”. It can require a bit of generosity on your part. If you can’t let it slide by itself, simply restate the statement with the “some” qualification in place. And to avoid assertions, put it in the form of a question.
Alice: Tone is not a valid criticism.
Bob: you mean tone is sometimes not a valid criticism?
If the statement in question does not contain any kind of quantifier or modifier or qualification as to some, none, or all, assume the person is implying “some”, and move on. If you can’t assume that, then put it in the form of a question as the example above shows. It puts the spotlight on the person and may make them defensive, but it allows for the possibility that there was a simple miscommunication. If you can’t put it in the form of a question, then you my end up replying to something the person didn’t intend, or accusing them of something that isn’t actually there. And if so, you will have contributed something if the conversation tends downward after that.
Eleventh Maneuver: An ommission is not a condoning:
This is somewhat related to the issue of “some, none, and all”. In a real live discussion about a real live instance of bias, not every person is going to exhaustively list every aspect of bias that is involved, and not every person is going to exhaustively list every act of bias that has ever occurred in human history. Often what people do is raise the specific issue to which they disagree and leave the rest unmentioned because they aren’t disagreeing with that.
For example, you might be reading this very text about bias and be thinking “Why hasn’t he even mentioned a single issue about slavery?” and you might even go so far as to take the lack of slavery being mentioned in this text as evidence that I actually condone slavery. At which point, you might get rather angry and attempt to expand the conversation to list every act of bias that has ever occurred in human history, and ask me if I condone or condemn each one.
Sometimes, the implication behind this laundry list approach seems to be that the laundry list of bias throughout history is so great that the one specific issue brought up is not important and the person wants to ignore it and refocus attention to the laundry list.
Alice: Men should just shut up and listen when a woman is telling them about gender discrimination.
Bob: Well, that might be a slightly problematic approach.
Alice: Are you saying that genital mutilation against women is not a problem?
Bob: No, I just think you’re suggested approach could create new problems.
Alice: Are you saying rape is not an important issue?
Bob: No, I’m just disagreeing with the “shut up” thing.
Alice: Are you saying women getting less pay isn’t important?
In the above example, Bob never disagreed with gender bias being a problem. He disagreed with Alice’s proposed solution. However, Alice took Bob’s ommission of identifying the problem and turned it into accusations that he was in fact saying the problem of gender discrimination didn’t exist. Rather than discuss Alice’s solution, its merits and demerits, and possibly find a good solution that all agree on, Alice turned the conversation into an inquisition as to whether or not Bob was a member of the “True Dojo” or not.
If someone omits some fact from their coment, do not turn it into them secretly condoning that fact.
Or, if you do, and the conversation goes south (and believe me, it will), be responsible for your contribution to that downward spiral
See also “No True Dojo”.
Twelveth Maneuver: Your Emotions are Valid. And You are Responsible for Them.
Emotions can be tricky in any discussion, even worse in something like discrimination which brings along with it a long history of baggage, wrapped up in emotions.
First things first: Your emotions are valid. No one should tell you to stop feeling angry. No one should tell you to start feeling guilty. Whatever you’re feeling is what you’re feeling and is really nobody’s business but yours. And if anyone who tries to get into your head and control your emotions, feel free to tell them to get the hell out. This isn’t simply restricted to issues of bias. The notion of “thought police” violates the basic principle of personal responsibility. You are responsible for whatever real world effects you contribute to. Unless you’re a Jedi and can kill people with a thought, your thoughts are your own damned business.
One thing to keep in mind about emotions though is that they’re bloody damn tricky. Anyone who has had some powerful experience with therapy or counseling or similar psychological processes usually starts out with an emotion and assign it a cause. “I feel depressed because my spouse didn’t say ‘I love you’ this morning.” The session usually proceeds by tugging at the string called “depression” and finding out what it is attached to. Usually, we assign it to some surface event. But it is often the case that the emotion has much deeper roots than we think.
What you say and do as a result of your emotions can create real world effects and therefore you are responsible for those words and actions. If you’ve had a really lousy day and come home and your kid says something snarky and you blow up at them and vent your entire day’s worth of anger at them, *you* are responsible for your actions. This is the primary rule of responsibility. You are responsible for your actions, whether it was intentional, accidental, subliminal. You are responsible for your actions even if they were the result of years of pent up and unresolved anger around some completely irrelevant issue.
Your emotions do not absolve you of your responsibilities.
Yes, your feelings of anger from a really lousy day were Valid.
No, it was not responsible of you to vent all those feelings of anger at the last person to anger you.
If Bob is infuriated at Alice and vents his anger at her, and if Charlie says to Bob that his anger at Alice doesn’t seem in proportion to whatever crime Bob accused Alice of committing, then this is not simply a matter of Charlie telling Bob he has no right to feel anger. This isn’t Charlie telling Bob that Bob’s emotions are invalid. This could be an attempt by Charlie to tell Bob that Bob is responsible for his words and actions to Alice.
If Bob is angry, he might take Charlie’s comment and turn it into Charlie telling him he shouldn’t feel angry. At which point, Bob might accuse Charlie of invoking the “tone” argument.
At which point, Charlie and Bob are talking about two different things.
See “The Tone Argument” later in this text.
Thirteenth Maneuver: Not everyone is a Black Belt in the Dojo:
Not everyone who joins a Dojo is a black belt. A high level black belt in Aikido can apply most of the techniques of Aikido to a situation, execute it successfully, and inflict little harm on the assailant. A person with a white belt can clumsily try a technique and can sometimes injure the person they are practicing with.
A black belt in the Equality Arts Dojo is marked by a sense of responsibility for when they misuse a maneuver and contribute to teh downward spiral of the conversation. It doesn’t matter whether it was intentional, subconscious, or accidental, the measure of responsibility is the contribution someone has on the world.
Humans make mistakes. One sign that someone has a grasp on the notion of responsibility can be indicated by the number of times they apologize or the number of times they say something like “Even I get this wrong sometimes”. A mark of some whitebelts is that they downplay their own negative contribution to the conversation. If you tell them their approach to dealing with racism is unhelpful, they may accuse you of being a racist yourself.
Anyone who refuses to acknowlege *specific* examples of their own mistakes, or *specific* examples of mistakes their “allies” have done, anyone who refuses to be responsible for their actions and refuses to point out when their “allies” are being irresponsible, they’re essentially approaching the issue as if they and their “allies” are all black belts who make no mistakes.
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The above maneuvers are what I would consider “helpful” maneuvers. Some of them are more “meta” to the conversation than others, but I think learning them can only help people address bias.
Below are a few of the “problematic” maneuvers that other Dojo’s teach. Some people can use these manuevars in helpful ways, but overall, they seem to be problematic. Having a hair trigger on a service pistol you use every day isn’t neccessarily a good thing. You may be able to handle the weapon properly, but since not everyone is a black belt like you, a green belt might end up accidentally shooting a good guy.
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Problematic Maneuver: White Privilege:
In discussions of racial discrimination, the term “white privilege” is thrown around. In gender conversations, “male privilege” is common. This phrase is used without much awareness of what it is attempting to point at and how it is sometimes misused. White Privilege can be used by some to point to systemic bottom-up bias in a population. Some use “white privilege” the way a vigilante uses violence against a criminal to dish out his version of “justice”.
There are a lot of FAQ’s on the internet trying to explain “white privilege”. Some might argue that all these FAQ’s are needed only because people with privilege don’t want to acknowlege their privilege and have to have it explained to them over and over again. But one of the problematic bits of “white privilege” is that the FAQ’s usually don’t explain to the vigilantes what white privilege is NOT.
First of all, privilege has connotations of intentional choice, yet what people are talking about when they talk about “white male privilege” includes a list of things that people are born into. They have “advantage” for being born into it, but it isn’t a “privilege” they necessarily choose to reinforce. And privilege has a number of connotations that come along with it, most of them negative. People of privilege are born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Some will argue that ”privilege” does not carry any such connotations, but these same people will also resist using a different word, like “advantage” instead of “privilege”. They may argue that there is a “history” to the phrase now, and we can’t keep changing the language. Whatever the argument is, the argument ends up keeping in place a phrase that has highly charged negative connotations.
So, lets look at it in terms of “white advantage” instead of “white privilege”. The word ”advantage” has less baggage than “privilege”. Those who like to use the baggage as a weapon won’t be too happy about changing the word, but if you’re interested in solvign the issues around systemic bias, then how you label the problem shouldn’t matter as long as you’re solving the problem. And if the label you choose is problematic, then one cannot simply gloss over those problems under some notion that bias is so costly that we have to inflict a little collateral damage to fix it. If there are problems with the label, then transparency would require those problems be made explicit and then people decide whether the cost is worth the benefit, rather than simply glossing over and ignoring the problems or pretending no problems exist.
From a purely linguistic/logical point of view, it’s equally valid to describe the circumstances of systemic bias as having a group of disadvantaged individuals, or a group of advantaged individuals.
Say, for example, that Alice has five more dollars in her pocket than Bob. We can describe this situation a couple of different valid ways. Alice is five dollars richer than Bob. Bob is five dollars poorer than Alice. Both of these are true statements. Both are logically equivalent.
However, people aren’t purely logical, and the terms used can affect them in nonlogical ways. When discussing the issues of systemic bias in terms of a group being “advantaged”, some studies have shown that the choice of language can cause some who identify with being in the “advantaged” group to want to correct the problem that caused their group to have an advantage. Framing it as “advantage” invokes a form of collective guilt in some members of the advantaged group. If systemic bias is discussed in terms of the “disadvantaged” group, some in the advantaged group view the problem of systemic bias as “someone else’s problem” and are less likely to engage systemic bias.
Alice: Charlie, you’re in the disadvantaged group.
Charlie: Oh no!
Bob: Yawn.
Alice: Bob, you’re in the privileged group over Charlie.
Bob: Oh no! So sorry!
Charlie: You bastard!
In the scenario where Alice has five more dollars than Bob, it is logically true to say “Alice has more money than Bob” or “Bob has less money than Alice”. But sometimes when Bob wants to say he has less money than Alice, his goal is to guilt Alice into giving him some money, not really dealing with the systemic issue in a systemic way.
Therefore, from a linguistic/logical point of view, “advantaged” and “disadvantaged” are equally valid ways of discussing the circumstances of systemic bias, however some insist that the only “right” way to discuss systemic bias is in terms of one group having “advantage”. And some take this to the extreme of accusing you of committing intentional explicit bias for suggesting that a phrase like “white privilege” may have some problems associated with it.
What hasn’t been proven is that this form of “collective guilt” is the only way to get people in the “advantaged group” to empathize with the “disadvantaged” group and engage in dealing with the problem of systemic racism. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech is clearly framed in terms of the “disadvantaged” who suffer systemic bias, rather than pointing fingers at the “advantaged” and attempting to invoke collective guilt on them.
And any lab experiment will have to sanitize the conversation so that framing the issue in terms of “disadvantage” and “advantage” are fairly neutral. What they don’t measure is how people use terms like “white privilege” in the real world.
My experience has been that there are some who have lost focus of the final goal of getting people to engage in the problem of systemic bias, and focus on the shorter term goal of inflicting collective guilt on individuals of the advantaged group. Maybe they feel guilty for their own advantage and want to spread it around. Maybe they feel angry for their own disadvantage and want to punish someone for it. I’ve seen people frame their attempts to engage and correct systemic bias as a war. They’ll tell you that they’re bleeding all over the place. And they want to know where your (you, the advantaged) pound of flesh is. Have you paid your pound of flesh yet?
Certainly not everyone uses “white privilege” as a club with which to beat people over the head with. But some are definitely sluggers.
The fact that there are numerous FAQ’s and numerous papers and numerous articles on the internet all trying to explain “White Male Privilege” and what it is and what it isn’t would seem to indicate that not everyone is using it with a velvet glove and some are using it as a club.
So, it seems that some are using “white privilege” as a way to hold individuals personally responsible for systemic bias. Which violates the concept of responsibility. The fact that they intend for you to feel guilty violates the concept responsibility as well.
The use of “privilege” instead of “advantage” overstates individual responsibility because it is packaged with an assumption of choice wrapped up in circumstances that you were born into and therefore had no choice over.
And the fact that discussing “systemic bias” in terms of “disadvantaged” or “advantaged” groups are linguistically and logically equivalent, it becomes a logical fallacy when someone insists that the only valid frame is framing it in the “advantaged” group.
Lastly, even in the most extreme case where you have an individual who uses “white privilege” while insisting it is the only valid frame, using it to inflict collective guilt, using it to hold the individual personally responsible for systemic bias, using it to inflict harm and even put down, even then, it is not unheard of that such a person will refuse to acknowledge how their own behaviour (language, framing, guilt tripping, individual responsible for systemic bias, inflicting harm, etc) has contributed to the downward spiral of a discussion about race.
In the most extreme examples I’ve seen, the person misusing “white privilege” absolves themselves of ALL responsibility and transfers ALL responsibility to one or more individuals they have placed in the “advantaged” group. If the conversation devolves into a flamewar, this “white privilege” accusing individual will refuse to acknowledge they made any contribution to that real world result and they will insist the blame lays solely at the feet of those in the conversation who have “privilege”.
My experience has been, so far without exception, that pointing out this sort of behaviour results in a number of people who prefer the frame of “advantage” instead of “disadvantage” to rally to the defense of the violator who is grossly abusing the phrase “white male privilege” and using it as a weapon, and this group then makes certain that the individual is not held responsible for their actions or words.
And what is their most likely defense? Accusations that you’re using the “Tone” argument.
Another outcome of the White Privilege maneuver is that “Shut up and listen” maneuver.
And again, there are people who talk about “white privilege” without using it as a club. Certainly not everyone who uses the phrase intends to violate the concept of personal responsibility. Certainly not everyone who uses the phrase is attempting to act as Thought Police and get people to feel guilty. Certainly not everyone who uses the phrase is attempting to hold individuals personally responsible for systemic bias. Certainly not everyone who uses the phrase is attempting to act as some sort of “Bias Vigilante” extracting a “pound of flesh” from those they deem have not “done enough” to fight systemic bias.
The problem is that there ARE people who use the phrase that way.
Problematic Maneuver: Those with Privilege should shut up and Listen:
So, this one is interesting. I’m going to start by saying that I think “shut up and listen” is really an outcome of emotional stuff. If the source of your frustration is that “no one understand you” or “privileged people don’t understand you” and so on, then the individual acts of explicit bias that are upsetting you are probably individuals who forward stereotypes about your group which are blatantly false.
For example, maybe you hear stuff like “Women aren’t good at math” over and over.
These individual acts build up over time inside you, until at some point, you lose it. And what do you want to do? Explain to this person the truth about women and math.
At which point, you really don’t want to be interrupted with more uninformed stereotypes about women.
Now, the reality is that for a lot of people, if they are simply allowed to vent their emotions they can actually find a more emotionally centered place. It helps them. It heals them. And in that regard, “Shut up and listen” makes some sort of sense. If you’re talking to someone who just said some stereotypical thing, the last thing you want is for him to interrupt you with even more stereotypes.
But there are some who use this to try to silence the person they identify as “privileged”, to let them give it to the person with both barrels, and tell them they should just shut up and suck it up. Not all, clearly, but some definitely abuse this “shut up and listen” idea.
If someone has a lifetime of bias they’ve had to put up with, then they might want to find someone whom they can vent to. Someone with a sympathetic ear. Someone who understands. If you’ve had to put up with a lifetime if bias, and suddenly feel the urge to purge at the last person to tick you off, then vent on a friend first, before you bring down a lifetime of discrimination on someone who did one act of explicit bias.
See: Twelveth Maneuver: Your Emotions are Valid. And You are Responsible for Them.
Problematic Maneuver: We Are All Racist:
There’s another commonly used in response to systemic bias, specifcially systemic racism. It is the assertion that “we are all racist”.
If we are truly all biased and if we cannot change that, then the effort to root out systemic bias is doomed to be an eternal battle. Progress of human history over time says to me that people can improve. I believe it ought to be possible to create a world that is so diverse and so void of explicit racism that large numbers of the population would qualify as “Not Racist”.
I think what “we are all racist” is useful for is getting someone to exercise some introspective effort to look at themselves and possibly see some racism in themselves that they didn’t notice before. Implicit bias is subconscious, so it isn’t obvious to us that we have implicit bias. Saying “we are all racist” can be used as a way to get individuals to look at their subconscious and see if there is implicit bias where they thought none existed.
If Bob says something, and Alice says it was racist, and Bob says no it wasn’t, then Alice might try to present the idea of “we are all racist” to Bob in an effort to remove the guilt Bob might have associated with being racist so that he might be more willing to look at his statement and see that it might have been racist.
The problem with the “we are all racist” statement, though, is that it also gets abused and misued by the same sorts of people who abuse the “white privilege” phrase to inflict guilt, attack, and hold some individual personally responsible for systemic bias.
The abuse form of “we are all racist” is “we are all racist, and you’re more racist than me”. This essentially robs the original phrase of its one and only productive purpose: presenting Bob with the notion that implicit bias is subconscious and making it more important to correct the behavior than assign blame and guilt.
The abusive form focuses on assigning blame and guilt, which sometimes causes Bob to dig in his heels and refuse to acknowledge his implicit bias. This abusive form actually violates the Ninth Maneuver, which says to focus on “what you did” versus trying to make the conversation about “who you are”.
Another abusive form of “we are all racist” is “we are all racist, so when someone accuses you of doing something racist, it must be true”. This version is an attempt to grant someone the power to be judge, jury, and executioner in dealing with bias. The vigilante accuse someone of doing something biased. The person protests their innocence. The vigilante comes back with “We are all racist” with the implication that this particular accusation must be true.
Not everyone has implicit bias, so ”everyone is racist” is actually false. The phrase may be useful in getting Bob to look at his implicit bias in a non-guilt way (if used in a non-guilty way). But if you use ”everyone has implicit bias” as a premise in a logical argument, you have no guarantee that you’ll reach a valid conclusion.
The goal I see for the Equality Dojo is a diverse population such that many individuals have little or not implicit bias based on race, gender, and other measures. If this is possible in the future, it ought to be possible that some individuals have little or no implicit bias now.
If the ingrained motto of the Equality Dojo is “everyone is racist” then it causes problems. I’d much rather see this phrase replaced with something like “check your subconscious bias” or something. It engages people to look inward, but doesn’t assert what the result will be.
Problematic Maneuver: The Tone Argument:
If you’re angry and vent a bunch of anger at someone, you’re responsible for that venting.
Pointing this out can sometimes raise accusations of making the “tone” argument.
The “tone” argument is this. An individual who is explicitly biased doesn’t want the attention of the conversation put on their bias. So, they try to move the spotlight of the conversation to the tone of the person accusing them of racism. The person making the accusation is angry and may say something irrational or untrue. The racist person tries to shift the spotlight to “You’re just being angry”.
Bob: “(some other conversation) Women aren’t good at math. (tangent about calculus)”
Alice: “You worthless piece of $#!^. I’ve had to put up with *$)# like that for my whole life and I’m sick to death of it. (long rant about male privilege, attempts at guilt tripping, holding Bob individually responsible for whole system of bias, so on, so forth)”
Bob: “I think you’re overreacting a bit.”
Alice “Don’t make the tone argument with me! (long screed about the tone argument, what it is, how it is abused by biased people, so on, so forth)”
Bob: (long inflammatory screed attacking Alice)
But sometimes Bob didn’t do something explicitely biased or he did but Alice vents a lifetime’s worth of discrimination at Bob. And raising the issue that Alice’s response doesn’t line up with Bob’s actions isn’t avoiding bias, it’s saying Alice’s response wasn’t in line with Bob’s actions.
No matter how Alice reacts, if Bob realizes he has committed some form of explicit bias (whether intentional, subliminal, or accidental), he can take responsibility for it and apologize, without condoning Alice’s behaviour.
Alice is still responsible for her reactions, even if Bob committed some act of explicit racism, and whether Bob apologizes or not, she is still responsible for her actions whether she wants to be or not.
To quote Martin Luther King Jr.
“In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.”
What often happens in situations such as above is that after Alice and Bob have their initial exchange, friends of Alice respond to accusations against Alice by rallying behind Alice, defending her and attacking Bob. Meanwhile, friends of Bob respond to accusations against Bob by rallying behind Bob, defending him and attacking Alice.
Then these two groups expand their attacks to the other groups.
And if you don’t end up with a flamewar before it’s over, I’d be surprised.
Problematic Maneuver: No True Dojo:
There is a logical fallacy called “No True Scotsman”. The discussion starts with an assertion by Alice that no Scotsman would ever do “x” (for whatever “x” might be). Bob then presents an example of a Scotsman doing “x”. Alice then responds with something like “Well, OK, but no TRUE Scotsman would ever do x”.
What Alice has done is used “true Scotsman” to define a group of people who happen to meet her definition of whatever it takes to be a member of her group.
This can become insidious.
When members of the Equality Arts Dojo disagree on whether something is a helpful technique in confronting discrimination, what sometimes happens is that some members invoke the assertion that “No True Dojo Member would ever do what you just did”.
This turns the goal from confronting discrimination to arguing about who gets to be a member of the “true” Dojo, and who are simply “wannabe’s”.
Members of any group should be open to criticism without responding by attempting to expell the critics, silence them, and otherwise sweep the criticism under the rug of “that isn’t what a true member of the dojo would do”. That’s invoking a “You’re either with us or against us” and a “love it or leave it” attitude, which is fascism minus the violence.
Unfortunately, this sort of reaction can happen sometimes in discussions among people who all agree that equality is a goal worth working towards. Alice and Bob both consider themselves members of the Equality Arts Dojo. Alice does something and Bob questions her action as irresponsible. Rather than engage Bob’s point and accept responsibility for her action, Alice instead changes the conversation to whether or not Bob isn’t actually the enemy in disguise, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
If you find yourself publicly accusing someone else of not being good enough to be a member of the Equality Arts Dojo, first stop and question if you’re simply committing a “No True Dojo” fallacy to avoid something the other person said about you.
If you find yourself on the receiving end of a “No True Dojo” comment, I’ve yet to see a good way to consistently resolve it. Usually, once someone calls an ally a “traitor”, things can only go South from there. The best response I can think of is to say you’re a member of the dojo and to say you’re disappointed that a disagreement about the effectiveness of a technique had to be turned into an attempt to redefine membership into the dojo to exclude the person.
Even that doesn’t work, though.
Problematic Maneuver: No “Meta” Conversations
Alice says something explicitly biased. Bob flames Alice for it. Charlie comes in and says that although he agrees that Alice’s words were explicitly biased, he also says that Bob’s flamage of Alice was not helpful in any way.
Dave comes in and says we shouldn’t have “meta” discussions.
The “no meta discussion” maneuver is interesting. It is presented as somethign that is needed to prevent biased people from derailing the conversation. But in the above example, Charlie isn’t exhibiting explicit bias, he just thinks Bob’s flame of Alice was out of line.
Invoking the “No Meta Conversation” rule can be abused to prevent discussing the tactics used by an individual to deal with bias. Bob was out of line, but if no meta conversations are allowed, then everyone is supposed to focus strictly on what Alice said that was biased.
In its worst case, the ‘no meta conversations’ rule can be a way of enforcing carte blanche anything-goes types of responses to someone identified as explicitly biased. Bob can flame Alice, and no one can call Bob on his behaviour.
This is also how the “tone” conversation can get abused. Charlie points out that Bob’s post was an undeserved flame against Alice, and then Dave acuses Charlie of complaining about Bob’s “tone”. When abused, the goal is to allow Bob to say anything he wants to Alice without having to be held responsible for it.
Something to get is that this entire text is a “meta” conversation. I’m not talking about any specific instance of explicit bias. I’m talking about how conversations about specific instances of bias can go south based on the linguistic tactics the people use in their conversations.
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In summary, here are the Equality Arts Dojo maneuvers along with the potentially problematic maneuvers that some dojos use.
First Maneuver: Big Picture.
Second Maneuver: Implicit Bias.
Third Maneuver: Explicit Bias
Fourth Maneuver: Top-Down Bias
Fifth Maneuver: Bottom-Up Bias
Sixth Maneuver: Individual responsibility for Individual Bias:
Seventh Maneuver: Individual Responsibility for Systemic Bias:
Eighth Maneuver: Systemic Solutions for Systemic Bias:
Ninth Maneuver: Explicit Bias==Objective. Implicit Bias, Systemic Bias==Subjective
Tenth Maneuver: Some, None, All:
Eleventh Maneuver: An ommission is not a condoning:
Twelveth Maneuver: Your Emotions are Valid. And You are Responsible for Them.
Thirteenth Maneuver: Not everyone is a Black Belt in the Dojo:
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Potentially problematic maneuvers:
Maneuver: White Privilege:
Maneuver: We Are All Racist:
Maneuver: The Tone Argument:
Maneuver: No True Dojo:
Maneuver: No “Meta” Conversations
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As far as I can tell, there are no easy answers to bias. The above ideas are presented so that they may help people have conversations about bias without devolving into “Lord of the Flies” results. Nothing in this text is meant to downplay the effects that bias has in the real world. There are racists and sexists and homophobes and other persons of bias out there. They are real. And the focus of attention should be on them.
What seems to happen is that sometimes the conversation turns into one that splits the dojo, pitting it against itself, rather than having the conversation be focused on dealing with the explicit bias.
The core of this text is the idea of personal responsibility. It doesn’t matter what “side” of the debate you are on. Whether you are one of the people who committed the bias or whether you are on the “right” side of the dojo after the civil war tears it in two. No matter what side you are on, you are still responsible for your contribution to others around you.
Hopefully this helps.