I have a friend who insists upon pointing out any instances of racist speech. He’s the Microsoft Word racism checker: his verbal red dots will interrupt your conversation if you utter something even tinged with racialized assumptions. Back when we were little kids it was grammar mistakes. You could never incorrectly use adverbs around him because he would tell you they were wrong: “You didn’t do good, you did well.” Recently while hanging out with a few old high school pals, my trusty Racism-Nazi pointed out the unacceptability of an unabashed use of the N-word. Everyone turned to him: shocked that anyone cared; shocked that anyone would point it out. What a kill joy!
But I started to wonder if he didn’t have a point: we shouldn’t accept racist thoughts just because we’re “with our friends” and “having fun.” First, it makes ethics incredibly situational: there are times when I’m against racism and times when I’m not. One would never make the equivalent statement that there are times when I’d authorize the Holocaust and times when I would not: at least, you wouldn’t say it out loud to people you didn’t know. It’s clear that there’s something going on beneath this type of quotidian encounter which we’ve no doubt all experienced in different ways: pointing out sexism in song lyrics, pointing out classism in the way we relate to the poor or the expensive nature of our purchases, etc. You feel awkward: paranoid in the very real sense that perhaps they’re right that pointing out instances of problems is ruining everyone else’s time. After all, don’t we have some responsibility to the happiness of those around us? Recently, this situation appeared in the indie music scene: Tyler the Creator started receiving flack for the highly gendered and heteronormative content of his lyrics. Many of the indie music blogging scene shot back: “But the music is creative and good, don’t be kill joys.”
To me, this struck something of a chord with my recent exodus into vegetarianism. I decided that at an age where I am capable of maintaining a consistent ethical system, it would be wrong to not establish some coherent practice. For me, to consume meat is to sanction the death of an animal. It’s not to say you are laying the killing blow yourself, but instead that you are subtly endorsing that killing. When individuals boycott a product, companies respond by making less of the product or changing it. That is supposed to be a base rule for the market system, at least. So while my individual action may have negligible impacts, they are “felt.” Very few people have much in the way of a defense of meat: it’s delicious, it makes them happy, it’s going to get eaten anyways, etc. For a lot of meat eaters, ethical concerns related to consuming animals are ignored or deferred. Which isn’t to say that individuals who eat meat haven’t considered the ethical issues: often they have. But when these contemplations are brought up at meals, it can make situations awkward. Largely for that reason I promised not to be the proselytizing type of vegetarian: we all don’t like the kill-joy. At a recent dinner, two of my friends got into an argument about eating meat. But it ended quickly: nobody wants to ruin a dinner with squabbles.
In her most recent book, Sara Ahmed writes a defense of “the kill-joy.” For Ahmed,
“we learn not to be conscious, not to see what happens right in front of us. Happiness provides as it were a cover, a way of covering over what resists or is resistant to a view of the world, or a worldview, as harmonious. It is not that an individual person suffers from false consciousness but that we inherit a certain false consciousness when we learn to see and not see things in a certain way. (pp. 83-84)
Happiness Lost
Happiness truly is a powerful concept, and nobody wants to rock the boat too much. After all, there’s a social consensus that being happy is better than being unhappy. We experience it all the time in our day-to-day interactions: I hate reading the SaveDarfur mailing list that I’m a member of because it’s depressing to witness again and again the absolute inability of anyone of political importance to take a strong action on the genocide. To avoid unhappy topics is polite: there’s no need to turn every communal get-together into an ethics discussion. But I also think that there’s something important in embracing a certain level of unhappiness. For Ahmed, those who are more conscious of issues of race, gender, and sexual discrimination are often considered or consider themselves less happy. Feminists are frequently considered kill-joys because they insist upon pointing out sexism in the places we notice it and the ones we don’t. “You always make everything about gender.” But statements of this nature ignore that issues of gender equality really do impact people in incredibly powerful ways. To learn about the limits that society places on us related to race, gender, and class often makes one unhappy. To be unaware of many of those limits allows a more beautiful mental image of possibility: ignorance is bliss, after all.
But I think we have something of an obligation to every once and a while, and very likely more often than that, engage in those messy conversations: I’m tired of people throwing around “gay” like it means stupid, and was glad to be told about the Think Before You Speak campaign. Having gay relatives that issue has always stung me, ever since I first remarked about it in middle school. It’s just one example of many of the ways in which we have inherited the “false consciousness” that Ahmed refers to in relation to many different issues. After all, other people do it, it’s not entirely our fault.
But to allow racism, sexism, and classism to go unnoticed is often as violent as to be the enunciator of those views. To stand and watch a murder without stopping it or reporting it still makes you guilty in important ways. Discourses are powerful – which is, of course, Foucault 101 – and they function as much by what is spoken as those things which are accepted as speech and the things we are silent about. To begin to make true progress against the oppression of hateful speech and actions, sometimes means we won’t be popular. But it’s clear that sometimes we ought to be the kill-joys: we can and we should.
