Ignorance Is Not A Virture, Nor Is It An Excuse

You have to read this piece by Lindy West. For real. I'm not just linking for back up here.

She opens her take on the Aziz Ansari story with this:

In 1975, 42 years before the comedian Aziz Ansari reportedly brought a date home to his apartment and repeatedly tried to initiate sex with her after she told him “next time” and “I don’t want to feel forced,” Susan Brownmiller published “Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.”

“All rape is an exercise in power,” Brownmiller wrote in 1975, “but some rapists have an edge that is more than physical.” Sometimes, the 1975 text suggests, rapists “operate within an emotional setting or within a dependent relationship that provides a hierarchical, authoritarian structure of its own that weakens a victim’s resistance, distorts her perspective and confounds her will.” “Against Our Will” has been available in American libraries since its publication, which was in 1975.

Her ultimate point is that feminists have been talking about issues around consent for a long time.

I would like to take this a step further for all those lamenting "political correctness" and wishing to "make America great again".

People have been talking about white privilege and gender issues for a long time too.

Example from 1978. Here's an entire thesis on the historical origins for the term white privilege. Spoiler alert: a graph on page 3 shows its first usage in the 1940s.

Gender identity in 1968. Manliness being separate from loving your penis in 1963. You can also read a nice summary and check out all the citations in Wikipedia, of all places.

Don't like academic works? Read Maya Angelou. Or James Baldwin. Or Ralph Ellison. Or Alex Haley. Or Alice Walker. Or August Wilson. Or Virginia Woolf. Or Langston Hughes. Or Audre Lorde. Or Armistead Maupin. Or Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.

Definitely click on the Karl Heinrich Ulrichs link. He was pretty cool. 

People on the margins have been talking about all this stuff longer than you've been alive.

Of course you didn't hear about it when you were a kid or a teenager. When we were kids and teens, there was no social media, no internet and having cancer was something people whispered about. The MINISTER who lived behind me was forgiven by the community and his church for having an affair while his wife was dying of cancer because, well, "a man needs a wife who can perform her duties."

Yes, this is an actual quote I overheard about the whole issue when I was a kid. Not from either of my own parents, thank God. It was from another neighbor. Also a minister. Of course, beliefs like this still exist. 

But I bet if you reached out to black peers, they'd tell you they were talking about this stuff as kids and teens. And if you have peers who are gay or queer or not cis, I bet they were at least desperately searching for info on this stuff back then.

What's new is that we're talking about it openly. What's new is that your grandma is not only talking about her breast cancer, she's sporting a "Save the Boobies" t-shirt. What's new is that people who are different aren't hiding anymore. What's new is that we know racism is not only wrong, it's harmful. What's new is that you can go on Twitter or Medium or Instagram and hear directly from people who aren't white, or cis, or middle class, or American, or straight, or on your side of the political divide.

Every day, you choose whose stories you listen to, whose feeds you follow, whose experiences you learn about. You can absolutely curate your information in such a way as to never hear about struggles you don't relate to or ideas that make you uncomfortable, but if you choose to do that?

You don't get to complain about everything changing or being a new idea. New to you doesn't mean it's new, just like the fact that you just ate lunch doesn't mean that people aren't starving to death in the world.

You don't get to plead ignorance of the nuances of consent, alleged feminist Aziz Ansari.

Not anymore.