Via Jamelle Bouie’s twitter feed, Asam Ahmad at Briarpatch Magazine:
Call-out culture refers to the tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organizers to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviour and language use by others. People can be called out for statements and actions that are sexist, racist, ableist, and the list goes on. Because call-outs tend to be public, they can enable a particularly armchair and academic brand of activism: one in which the act of calling out is seen as an end in itself…
In the context of call-out culture, it is easy to forget that the individual we are calling out is a human being, and that different human beings in different social locations will be receptive to different strategies for learning and growing… One action becomes a reason to pass judgment on someone’s entire being, as if there is no difference between a community member or friend and a random stranger walking down the street (who is of course also someone’s friend). Call-out culture can end up mirroring what the prison industrial complex teaches us about crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with them as people with complicated stories and histories…
The whole piece is just six paragraphs, and Ahmad says more in those paragraphs, and more fluently, than Jonathan Chait and all his defenders in that notorious cover article on “political correctness”. If you can’t be arsed to read the whole Briarpatch piece, you are lazy and/or willfully less informed than you could be, and I feel sorry for you.
Excellent Read: “A Note on Call-Out Culture”Post + Comments (108)