Call-outs online

My first response when I started doing community accountability and transformative justice work to the question of "how do we handle harm that is mostly happening and witnessed online?" was "STOP THAT! DIVEST FROM SOCIAL MEDIA! IT'S TOXIC AS FUCK".

That's my own trauma and 12 years in digital marketing as a user experience designer that has cringed through the emergent ubiquity of habit-making social media platforms and of large-scale platforms that combine both the illusion that wealth is accessible to anyone through effort (We can all have Youtube or Twitch streams, capitalism may work afterall!) and that sense that we as individuals are not human beings existing as part of a community, but brands in a marketplace speaking to an..."audience". All the world's a stage and our public spheres have become bigger and bigger. As a queer person, the internet was the first place I felt like I could find other queer people, and it's still a life saving resource on a weekly basis, so my visceral reaction of "I hate Facebook oh so very much" while valid isn't a useful offering.

So let's assume you don't have all the baggage I have around social media and you're looking for resources for harm reduction around social media! We like harm reduction here!

I'm mostly going to link to two articles here and frame a little bit about how they felt to me reading them. These resources will focus on the internet call-out and give some guidelines for how to approach whether a call-out is about healing, community safety, accountability or...something else that has the potential for harm in your community.

https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/6-signs-your-call-out-isnt-actually-about-accountability/

The harm that I initially saw that brought me to transformative justice work was online. I was seeing Facebook callouts about behavior a housing insecure trans girl in my community had in the past, and I saw the callouts continue after she'd been alienated from community and run out of the entire state. She did cause harm, and those people she harmed deserved support. But there was a part of me that couldn't witness her continuously cut off from life-sustaining support, seeing her trapped in time with no hope for redemption, because it just...felt wrong to me that this was the best option. As a queer person, witnessing the discarding and dehumanization of other queer people was hard to hold while also trying to fight for my own humanity and the value of lives like mine. Queer liberation and queer disposability could not co-exist within me.

Call-outs are hard to navigate mindfully, but sometimes are still useful. Especially when you're dealing with someone with a lot of power who isn't likely to take accountability without social leverage.   This article helps with some framing around call-outs to prevent creating more harm with them. Had the person making the call-outs that first brought me to actively supporting in TJ work felt empowered and supported without first having to prove that the person who had harmed them and others was irredeemable and deserving of total social "cancellation" their relationship to their own community could have centered their healing instead of putting the onus on them of "proving" that harm really occurred.

This next article came out and is a trauma aware analysis by a queer person of color who is trained in mental health about why queer people are so mean to each other. I will say that a lot of what they talk about resonated deeply for me and my experience in queer community, but I still hated the title of the article because of how questions like this often bring up hard defensive feelings just because the syntax reflects how folks outside of queer community talk about queer people as a monolithic other. That aside, it's worth a read.

https://www.dailyxtra.com/why-are-queer-people-so-mean-to-each-other-160978?fbclid=IwAR1qXfx0-sCk3Ey95exnuyMZpVqi86KUq7LBzBCWeitH9cda-MN_8nGRJdI

Finally, from Fumbling Towards Repair by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan there is a section offering "How to deal with public callouts on social media"

Bless them and their work. Please go buy the workbook here on AK Press: https://www.akpress.org/fumbling-towards-repair.html

"How to deal with public callouts on social media"
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jjhslx72epf8pss/20190919.pdf?dl=0

Hope these offerings have something to support y'all in the work of nurturing and accountable community making.