# Offense, MicroAggressions, and Oppression **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 28, 2015, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/offense-microaggressions-and-oppression/726397 "2015-07-28T14:50:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2015, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/offense-microaggressions-and-oppression/726397/1 "2015-07-28T14:50:54Z")
Inspired in part by a plethora of ongoing threads, e.g., [Trans people claiming that Drag Queens contribute to objectification & oppression of trans people](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=763174) ## [[URL=“[http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=763525"]"Person](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=763525%22%5D%22Person) with disabilities” vs “Disabled person”, etc]([If you whine about political correctness, you're a bigot - The BBQ Pit - Straight Dope Message Board](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=762817)"If you whine about political correctness, you’re a bigot[/url) • A lot of things can be offensive to people for a variety of reasons, some more justified than others; my use of “justified” just now implies that there’s some kind of objective measure of whether the offending person is being genuinely offensive or if, instead, the offended person is being unreasonably offendable; _I would say thinking in those terms is unproductive_. There’s no such objectivity. It’s a collectively negotiated understanding that tends to involve the offended, the offending, and the whole village of surrounding others. And yes, power is still involved in that negotiation, enabling one to describe the entire situation to a larger audience and ask us to view the entire (original) village as offensive, but that merely kicks the question into a larger context, like appealing a court case. • I’m one of the people who wants certain kinds of social change, and who points to certain social behaviors and calls them oppressive and so on. So yes, I think there are ongoing offensive acts of various sorts and yes I’m in favor of drawing attention to them and to what is wrong with having done them. _I would distinguish between an event and a phenomenon, though_. Don’t get me wrong: I think it can be highly useful to cite an example (an event) or two for the purpose of drawing attention to a phenomenon. But because actual people are involved I think it’s bad social politics to state that anyone is an oppressor or has revealed their true awful _whatever_ist nature because of one thing that they said or one thing that they did, unless it’s really over-the-top outrageous. There are other reasons that people say and do things that violate other people: ignorance, inattention, old behavioral habits that they themselves disapprove of, just plain mistakes. Zero-tolerance reaction to offensive behaviors is, I think, the primary thing that non-trollish complainants complain about when they complain about “political correctness”. I tend to agree with them: cite the behavior as an example if you wish but what we’re up in arms about is ongoing phenomena, not one person’s one-time act. Or it should be. • A lot of what is going on is reframing things so that they can be understood differently. There’s usually an old entrenched way of looking at a situation that denies the perspectives of a minority of people who suffer, socially, from being regarded and treated from the vantage point of the old entrenched understanding. Then there’s an alternative way of perceiving things that is less judgmental or makes fewer assessments of what is appropriate, generally designed to let the minority function in a less marginalized, less negatively labeled way, and we become engaged in an attempt to get people to rethink the issue, to perceive things the new way. _Again, neither perspective is ‘objective’ and I think it’s a bad idea to proceed as if the perspective we want folks to adopt is ‘right’ and the old one ‘wrong’_ in the factual / objective sense of right vs wrong. Reciprocally, I find myself asking mainstream (i.e., “privileged”) people to step back from protesting that their old entrenched way of understanding things is perfectly OK insofar as, hey, it’s the way it actually is (“let’s call a spade a spade” / “you can use all this fancy new language to make it sound different but it’s still really this same ugly thing so we’re just being factual and nonbullshitty and objectively accurate here”)… _your older entrenched way of seeing things isn’t any more ‘objective’ than the proposed new way; it’s just more entrenched_. Kindly get past seeing our intention for what it is (to reframe social understandings more to our liking) and wipe the sardonic contempt from your face, if you would, and instead _try seeing the matter itself as we see it_, try it on, see if it in any way actually hurts your reality-based modeling of the universe to accept that reframing. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2015, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/offense-microaggressions-and-oppression/726397/2 "2015-07-28T17:54:37Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > • A lot of things can be offensive to people for a variety of reasons, some more justified than others; my use of “justified” just now implies that there’s some kind of objective measure of whether the offending person is being genuinely offensive or if, instead, the offended person is being unreasonably offendable; _I would say thinking in those terms is unproductive_. There’s no such objectivity. It’s a collectively negotiated understanding that tends to involve the offended, the offending, and the whole village of surrounding others. I don’t see how there can be reduction in offensive behavior or oppression without a clear, unchanging understanding of what those words mean. As I mentioned, when I was in college not long ago, the Society of Women Engineers held an annual drag show. It was a major event on the social calendar, and doubtlessly many involved thought it was highly good and progressive. Fast forward a few years and suddenly certain parties are telling me that drag shows are “devaluing” and “objectifying” and so forth. Plenty of other, similar examples could be given. The word “retarded” was instituted specifically to describe a certain group of people inoffensively. Then I blinked, and it was offensive. If what’s an attack on oppression on Monday becomes a type of oppression on Tuesday, how can we possibly know what it will be on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday? How can we know what language is inoffensive if it’s constantly in flux? On a more large scale, oppression is defined as cruel or unjust use of power. To resist oppression, one must know what oppression is. To know what oppression is, one must know what justice and cruelty are. If such things aren’t defined objectively, how can there be any struggle against oppression? [Martin Luther King](http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html) certainly seemed to believe in objective definitions. > [@](#): > > One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” > > Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.