plain-flavoured-english:
Okay, so. The problem with Tumblr is that even though it’s a great place to talk about social justice concepts it isn’t a great place to mobilize or organize political change. That means that social justice on here mostly ends up being performative rather than active.
Unfortunately the easiest way to perform your ideological purity within an online community is to point the finger at those who are less pure (see: callout posts, blacklists, smackdowns, receipt pulling, reductive black-and-white mantras/statements, ‘10 Reasons Why So-and-So Isn’t a Real Feminist’, and so on). I see this happening more and more and it makes me really uncomfortable because a) it discourages necessary discussion and learning within social movements by framing all differences/disagreements as moral battles where one person is right and the other person is terrible and b) it reduces social justice to a passive, self-congratulatory performance of personal identity rather than an active, organized pursuit of political change.
Look: Tumblr is many great things, but it is not a safe space. The safe space (a concept originating in the women’s liberation movement) is designed to allow members of a community to speak freely and compare personal experiences with the assurance of respect and the intention of expanding ideas while also finding common ground. Tumblr doesn’t work that way. It’s a vast online forum where likes, reblogs, and followers determine whether or not a particular voice is heard, and it’s just too fast, too big, too diverse, and too anonymous to assume good-will and common interest from all participants. Therefore, many people’s chief priority becomes loudly proving their loyalty to a particular group, as group members who say the wrong thing risk being cast out, blacklisted, harassed, and even threatened.
The result is that Tumblr communities become more polarized, beliefs become more entrenched, thought-terminating cliches abound, common interests are overlooked, and participants are hesitant to ask questions or do anything that might open them to criticism or condemnation (which naturally includes most meaningful political action).
And the problem with this Revenge of the Sith post-9/11 ‘you’re either with us 100% or you’re the enemy’ attitude (where we refuse to work with or even listen to people whose beliefs differ from ours in any way) isn’t just that it’s a little cultish and scary, it’s that it’s totally unsustainable in politics. It’s worth remembering that constantly culling a movement to get rid of less-than-perfect members doesn’t just make the movement purer and purer, it makes it smaller and weaker.