In the wake of the recent, deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, there was a swift anti-Islam backlash, followed by a swift counter-response to the effect of: “***Not all **Muslims.” *
Which is, of course, statistically true - the vast majority of Muslims aren’t terrorists, and numerous Muslims condemn terrorism.
But when people say,* “Not all men,”* or “Not all white people,” suddenly that same “Not All” statement is condemned or criticized, even though it’s statistically true that plenty of men oppose sexism, are not harassers of women, many white people condemn racism, oppose police brutality, etc. So what makes “Not All” a laudable statement in one situation but not in another, if it is statistically true?
What makes this odder is that oftentimes, the people who condemn “Not All Men” or “Not All White People” are folks who talk about the need to avoid stereotyping and why stereotyping is bad for society. Isn’t “Not All”, by definition, an anti-stereotyping message?
Don’t you think it would make for a better debate if you gave specific examples with specific “condemnations and criticisms”? I’m just not seeing why your hypothetical has any validly without cites.
I think it’s only really appropriate in situations where it’s necessary: if the standard storyline being followed is that “EVERY SINGLE WHATEVER is __________”, then yeah, it might be worth a little bandwidth to point out otherwise. However, if one of the first things you see in a story is somebody saying “Not all ___”, then it’s a little premature, or unnecessary, like if somebody went to the trouble of saying “Not all cops gun down innocent people just because they can get away with it.” So, it’s only really appropriate to point it out if the usual response isn’t going to be “well, duh…”
I don’t think it has to be that explicitly stated to be appropriate. It can be a phrasing such as “men need to stop [behavior]”, “cops need to stop [behavior]”. While most of the time the writer does not actually believe that all members of the group take part in the undesirable activity, it does imply that members of the group should be suspected of it simply for being what they are.
Now it’s true that sometimes phrases like that are immediately jumped upon in isolation while the complaint about [violent behavior x] is ignored, but that does not mean that they should not be addressed at all.
Plus, often times the meat of the discussion does not need to be addressed because like you say, the appropriate response often is “well, duh…”, so it may look like men/cops/Muslims don’t care about the violent among them when it’s so obvious that they do care that it doesn’t need to be stated.
If it is ever laudable - and I don’t know that it is - the answer would be power; because “not all” is not an anti-stereotyping message, really, it’s a “no, this is about me, not you” message; my reality is more important to me than yours.
If you are straight, white, male, and / or Christian in the U.S., your reality is the “norm”; it is reality. No one needs to hear it defended further.
“Not All” is passingly acceptable as a semi-apology - “Not all Muslim support this act of terrorism”, but from the higher socio-economic groups it just sounds like rejection and denial of the reality of others.
Consider for a moment the typical response - “Yes all ____”. In the case of “Not All Men”, the response “Yes All Women” paints a pretty clear picture - of course it’s not all men, it’s just enough men that all women have to deal with these issues. That all women have to worry when walking the city at night, that almost all women have a story of sexual assault, that every single woman has a story about a man feeling entitled to their body, et cetera. Saying “Not All Men” in a situation like that doesn’t further the conversation. Of course there are men who aren’t misogynists. It’s just that societal misogyny and rape culture are alive and well to the point where every single woman has to worry about them.
This is why “Not all men” horribly misses the point, while “Not all muslims” does not. In the west, the vast majority of Muslims are well-adjusted, peaceful citizens. The vast, vast majority. We’re talking about a minority so slim, it makes the American Nazi Party look big by comparison. When someone starts generalizing about Muslims based on terrorists, they are doing so out of a place of fear. Could you really respond with “#YesAllTerrorVictims” without sounding like a huge bigot? I don’t think so. Islamic terrorism is not some massive societal issue that each and every person alive has to grapple with. Racism? Sexism? Rape culture? Those are.
Also to add to what j666 said. NotAllMen has the added benefit of making the discussion about you, of acting like you are somehow the victim, and taking away from the discussion about, you know, the real victims. In the case of NotAllMuslims, they actually are victims in a significant way.
This is actually a good example of where Not All ___ is appropriate: as an attempt to calm emotions and restore sanity immediately after a traumatic event that is reflexively blamed on a (mostly) innocent group.
In the case of Not All Men, I can think of no specific example of a rape followed by a mass movement against men that realistically endangers this half of the population.
If it’s a speaker’s favored group then “not all X” is a shield against closed minded black and white thinkers who want to lump everyone together. If it’s a speaker’s hated group then “not all X” is a pathetic dodge of responsibility, just another form of apologia that ignores the root of the problem because of course no one actually means every single member of a group.
Often these sort of language debates seem to devolve into a sort of hyperliteralism nitpick fest, where no statement is acceptable unless it’s surrounded by so many qualifiers and weasel words that it’s content free. Which in some cases may be the point.
I can think of examples where high profile cases do lead to calls for greater “protection” of rape or abuse victims and less protection for the accused. Whilst this is not endangering half the population it is potentially infringing upon the rights of many thousands of people every year, a number of whom will be innocent.
There are an estimated 5 to 12 million Muslims living in the United States according to PBS’ Frontline. Cite Wikipedia notes “A 2013 Pew Research Center poll asked Muslims around the world whether attacks on civilians were justified. Globally 72% of Muslims said violence against civilians is never justified, and in the US, 81% of Muslims opposed such violence. About 14% of Muslims in the nations surveyed (and **8% of Muslims in the US) said violence against civilians is “often” or “sometimes” justified. **”
**bolding **mine
Multiplying low population estimates we get 5 million x 8% = an estimated 400,000 Muslims living in the United States say violence against civilians is “often” or “sometimes” justified. High estimate is 12 million x 8% = 960,000.
I would argue that this minority of Muslims that sees violence against civilians as acceptable is not a well-adjusted peaceful populace.
How many members of the American Nazi Party are there then to look “big by comparison” to 400,000 ?
The American Nazi Party effectively disintegrated after the assassination of their leader in 1967. It had an estimated membership of only 100-200 at the time. Cite
Of course there are plenty of other hate groups against which we could make a comparison but membership levels can be difficult to estimate:
Which is an interesting take, to be sure, but not actually what’s going on here, as a reading of the multiple other posts in the thread might have told you.
Interesting figures, but I disagree with the assumption needed to defuse my argument - the assumption that those 8-12% actually are willing to go out and do it themselves. Oh, sure, it’s a problem that they think that way, but there’s still absolutely no justification for the average man on the street to look at a Muslim and immediately have to worry that the whole block is about to go up in smoke. And that’s fundamentally what “NotAllMuslims” is talking about in response to terrorist attacks.
Not to minimize the issue; the fact that so many muslims hold fundamentally un-liberal and unsupportable values is a very real issue.
I would dispute your claim that Islamic terrorism isn’t a massive societal issue. While only a small minority of Muslims actually commit terrorism, the number of muslims worldwide who say terrorism (against civilian targets, no less) is often or sometimes justified runs into the hundreds of millions.
Even in the West, poll results are not encouraging. For example, in Britain, 25% of Muslims sympathise with the Charlie Hebdo killers. I’d wager the percentage of men who sympathise with rapists is considerably smaller.
Another poll of 500 British muslims (and I had to double check this one because I couldn’t quite believe it) showed that every single one without exception thought that homosexuality was immoral. I’ve never seen a completely unanimous poll on anything before that. While frat-house dudebros may not be the most tolerant of demographics, I’d find it hard to believe that a similar poll of college frat boys would be even half as singularly opposed to homosexuality as the average British Muslim.
Seems to me that #NotAllMen is more justified than #NotAllMuslims.
There were 69,000 reported rapes in Britain in 2013. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the actual number was three times that. That’s 217,000. Let’s also say that there were absolutely no false rape accusations whatsoever in 2013, that there were absolutely no instances of male rape, and that every single rape was committed by a different man. None of these assumptions are true, of course, but I’m trying to be as generous to your argument as I can possibly be. There are 31,000,000 men in the UK. That would mean 0.7% of men in the UK are rapists. To reiterate, the actual figure is obviously way lower than that, but let’s stick with it for the moment.
While the number of rapists (given these vastly inflated figures) is obviously much higher than the number of Muslim terrorists, the vast, overwhelming majority of men are clearly not rapists. So if a woman says “All men are rapists” or “All men are potential rapists”, I think #NotAllMen is a pretty reasonable response.
You are the one who made the comparison. I just researched the numbers.
And for what it’s worth younger Muslims in the United States were more accepting of suicide bombings and attacks against civilians. A worrisome point for a growing demographic.
With about 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide if we calculate the 8% rate then you have 128 million Muslims worldwide supporting suicide bombings and attacks against civilians.
But 8% is low. The US Muslim population was one of the least likely to support these sorts of attacks. That number supporting those attacks rarely, sometimes, or often is 53% in Egypt, 26% in Turkey, 69% in Nigeria, 22% in Pakistan, etc…
In a prior thread I recall the statistics worked out to an average that meant the worldwide Muslim population supporting such terroristic tactics is about equivalent to the entire population of the United States.
Similarly, your linked Telegraph poll finds that “Some 27 per cent of British Muslims said they have ‘some sympathy for the motives behind the attacks’”, which is not necessarily the same thing as endorsing the actual violence of the attacks.
[QUOTE=Tithonus]
Another poll of 500 British muslims (and I had to double check this one because I couldn’t quite believe it) showed that every single one without exception thought that homosexuality was immoral. I’ve never seen a completely unanimous poll on anything before that. While frat-house dudebros may not be the most tolerant of demographics, I’d find it hard to believe that a similar poll of college frat boys would be even half as singularly opposed to homosexuality as the average British Muslim.
Seems to me that #NotAllMen is more justified than #NotAllMuslims.
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But your own link undermines your claim by showing how much Muslim opinions vary across different countries:
So British Muslims are apparently way more repressive than French or German ones (insert “No sex please, we’re British” joke here).
The broader question with the #NotAll tag, ISTM, is what kind of statement it’s responding to. Of course it’s appropriate as a contradiction of a factually false assertion explicitly directed at an entire group, such as “All men [do x]” or “All Muslims [do y]”. If such an assertion happens not to be true, then no, #NotAll, and it’s valid to point that out.
When somebody is talking about tendencies and influences, though, the use of #NotAll gets trickier.
Do we have similar statistics for self-identified Christians who may agree that violence against civilians is (sometimes) justified? For a baseline comparison, of course.
(In my outrageously unsupported and over-simplified opinion, the “Not All . . .” response is legitimate or illegitimate based on what follows the statement. Anyone saying it is suspect, unless they follow it with “but those who are not must do something about those who are.”)
It’s always appropriate when it’s true. It’s not much of a counter-argument though, usually it just clarifies a statement, often needlessly. When someone truly believes all _____ do anything there’s no point in arguing with them. When someone says all ____ do something but knows it’s just the majority the clarification is pointless. When someone says all ____ do something and it’s just a minority they probably don’t care. So waste your breath with the not all ____.