Being Offended

[elainegrey]

Well, i might be offended by
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/how-to-be-offended.html

He makes two points:

* Offense is not injury. The most important step to keeping a level head in the face of serious offense is to remember that just because something offends you doesn’t mean that it hurts you in any way. Be careful to sort out your immediate, emotional response from the actual practical effect of whatever offensive situation you’re confronting – most of the time, you’ll find your life can go on just fine regardless of this offensive thing.

* People aren’t stupid. For the most part, people do things for reasons that, at least at the time, seem like good ones. And when they have the weight of tradition behind them, they’re usually right – societies that do things that are actually and truly wrong tend to be extinct. No matter how difficult it is to accept, you have to acknowledge that many practices that seem utterly impractical and stupid have endured for hundreds or even thousands of years without killing, maiming, or traumatizing the people who practice them.

I'm in the middle of a day of conference calls, so i can't process this now. However, you might want to offer some suggestions about privilege and tradition and oppression.

His context, about offense and learning, is set in the first sentence:

Whether it’s articles containing racist language in my “Gender, Race, and Class” course or descriptions of oral insemination as part of the Sembia male’s coming-of-age rituals in my anthropology course, I know that some students are going to be offended, sometimes deeply.

In comments

isa says on May 11th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I do have to take issue with one point in this otherwise fascinating article: social practices that maim and traumatize (and sometimes even kill) people can and do persist for generation upon generation. As long as they leave enough people to reproduce and continue the practice, the practice continues.

Just as in evolution, not every trait is adaptive. Some just continue to exist because they don’t do quite enough damage for natural selection to eliminate them.


Dustin Wax says on May 11th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Dias: Fair enough - perhaps I overstated that. The point is, things that look dysfunctional from the outside often make perfectly good sense from the inside, so it pays to make an effort to understand them. That’s true even if, in the end, your initial offense evolves into an activist resolve to put an end to some practice or another. Reformists who act from offense rarely do any good, and often cock things up even worse than they were to begin with.

So, it seems he's talking about something different than "offense." It seems he's describing a immediate judgement that something that is different and somehow violating familiar social norms is wrong.

Comments

[weofodthignen]

There's a point in there somewhere about not going off half-cocked and not making hegemonist assumptions, but methinks the gentleman has forgotten the intensity of youth, and how much getting things done we owe to it. Sometimes the emperor has no clothes.

M