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Calls for civility, "openness" and "freedom" by people who institute and enact structural violence on the regular, but feel like their freedoms are eroded when they are challenged, can bite me. https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
They are absolutely correct that their freedoms depends on the unfreedoms of others, and are therefore being limited when the validity of their claims are challenged. You are not free to be unchallenged.
This liberal framework of a flat ground upon which freedoms are equally distributed is a shell game for the uneven distribution of access, for allowing mediocre work based on bad facts, and for stopping people for calling harm where it happens.
Sorry for grammatical errors above I'm just so angry and upset to see good people sign onto this, to see malevolent people piling on, to see vicious gatekeepers who have ruined peoples' lives in there.
I am all for experimentation, mistakes, everything. There are some things I regret very much in my own writing, and I have made every mistake in the book. Every single one.
But without structural analysis, claims for freedom are unthought-through, and too easily deployed in the service of unfreedom. And very specifically, they are deployed against us, and then the narrative of freedom flipped back at weaponized toward us.
Some of us have more freedom to make mistakes than others! The "mistakes" you make when you have power to harm are not so easily forgiven under the banner of artistic or creative license. You have to repair.
By contract, I entreat you to read this article by the excellent @ProfAishaAhmad https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Survival-Guide-for-Black/249118/
This superb elucidation of the subtle and "free" ways in which BIPOC scholar are harassed, tortured, convinced of their lack of worth, sidelines from entry into the profession, denied access is much more of a meditation on unfreedom than that letter ever will be.
Sorry I meant "contrast"
