Date: 2012-05-23 11:45 am (UTC)
tim: Tim wearing a flannel shirt, against a brick wall (Default)
From: [personal profile] tim
It sounds like you have made an effort. To broaden your horizons further, I'd recommend trying to get to know women and people in minority groups and truly listening to them when they talk about their experiences (avoid falling into any of the traps that the Geek Feminism wiki categorizes as "silencing tactics" -- it's surprisingly hard to avoid sometimes). If you don't already, that is. Even then, people in those groups aren't necessarily going to trust you by default -- some of them may not talk about their experiences when majority-group members are around, because of too many past experiences of being silenced/shut down/invalidated. Try to make it clear that you're a safe person (*saying* so explicitly is approximately the worst way to make it clear, though).

The other way is to give people with less privilege the benefit of the doubt when it comes to sensitivity or lack thereof. Maybe it hasn't happened yet, but in the future, if a woman / minority group member reacts to something and you think "oh, that's really not that bad" -- consider that they're the expert on the subject of what harms women / minority group members, and listen.

Perhaps these are things you're already doing. If so, perhaps the most important thing you can do is set an example for other people *like yourself* -- even when you're in a group that's entirely white het cis men, call out oppressive comments when you see them. There should be plenty of work to do (in my circles, for example, there are so many casual uses of "lame", "crazy", and "retarded" as pejoratives that I can't hope to call out every one).
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Matthew Garrett

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Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Nebula. Ex-biologist. @mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer.

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