Does intent matter?

If you say words that are known to be hurtful, be they the traditional slurs starting with n or c, among others, or words that people who are hurt by words like "lame" are telling you directly that they are hurtful words, your intent doesn't fucking matter.

You are willfully and directly causing harm because you refuse to understand their point of view and accept that your continued usage of those words is harmful.

That's an asshole thing to do.

Genderbitch has a post that's extremely on point: Intent! It's fucking magic!

Today, someone said a slur. It actually doesn’t matter what slur it was, because you see, he didn’t intend to hurt anyone and therefore it couldn’t possibly be a slur. Much like how intent magically protects the actions of all privileged fuckjobs, intent means that anything you say, no matter how many groups it hurts, what awful views it enables, no matter what systemic bigotries it props up through the usage of language that enforces social concepts that crush a marginalized group, it mystically negates all of that.

So if you out a trans woman? Your uncanny intent wraps around her and protects her from murder, harassment, degendering and objectification by the people you just outed her to! If you say something ableist, you’re not actually contributing to the system that demeans PWD because your intent will gird your words with alchemical shields, made of eldritch power themselves, that prevent the words from creating and furthering social associations between disability and being bad, wrong, broken or unwanted! I know? Isn’t it grand? I love magic!

Go read the rest.

Today's progress

A scene written, 641 words. We have pirates in the house. I just have to get myself working earlier in the day and stop farting around on the internet.

I need to write a review of Broken, which I got a review copy of (it hits a lot of my buttons: nationalism, totalitarianism, dystopia; there are a few little things, but they don't hinder my enjoyment, anyway) and read on Sunday. I've been trying to decide if I want to read it a second time before reviewing it. It's only 388 pages; that's about 4 hours.

I also need to finish my blog tour of Germany, because when I get to the end, I get to talk about Berlin for an entire entry. You'd think that would be easy, because it's my favorite place EVER, but that just makes it harder.

One sentence today: Atesh’s gut told him these pirates were Sons of Mars. Ivanov’s research would confirm it.

Background reading.

If you really want to educate yourself on what I'm talking about when I say "social justice" and that sort of thing, here are some links, in addition to the ones scattered throughout the previous posts and comments. This is my starting point, and these are the things I take as understood when I make arguments. I know it's a lot of material. It's a big internet out there.

I'll note there's likely some overlap between these sources. And many of these sites were found by simply putting "X 101" into the google.

Starkeymonster's links for clueless white people

my delicious' privilege tag see also the feminism and politics tags.

Intent! It's fucking magic!

101 Primer

Finally! Feminism 101

Feminism 101 at Shakesville (includes a section on "$SLUR doesn't mean that anymore")

Racism 101

racism_101

Ableism 101

Ableism 101 at FWD/Forward

Ableist word profiles

Not your mom's trans 101

I couldn't find a good LGBT* 101 site, but a lot of the feminism 101s cover that.

Julia Serano's glossary of terms

Heteronormativity

Intersectionality

Kyriarchy

Understanding the principles of social justice is a lot of work. Adjusting your habits along those principles is a lot of work, and ongoing effort. It doesn't hurt you to change yourself to be more kind and less knowingly harmful to others, and it can help make the world a better place for those who have been harmed by the effects of privilege.

You'll still slip up sometimes, or you might not know that a word is harmful to others. No one's perfect, and no one expects perfection. When someone says, "hey, that hurts me, please stop," your response should be, "oh, sorry. I didn't know." and then to cease that behavior. You shouldn't dig in your heels because your sacred, magical intent was good, so the fact that you hurt someone else doesn't matter.