Avoiding Conflict by Fostering an Opt-In "Inclusivity 101" Space

[sw17ch]

NOTE

This post uses the terms 'privileged persons' and 'marginalized persons'. Neither of these are derogatory. If you are from a privileged background, this does not automatically make you guilty. Personally, I am a white, heterosexual, cisgender man, from an affluent background, and (currently) am without any major disabilities. I have privilege in many common dimensions.

Many people have privilege in far fewer dimensions than I and many people fall into categories that are systematically marginalized (either intentionally or unintentionally) by society.

Avoiding Conflict by Fostering an Opt-In "Inclusivity 101" Space

The goal of this post is to try and formulate some ideas that members are expected to be aware of. It does not require that members never make mistakes. Mistakes are human. So, without any more introduction, here we go.

My perception is that GA has two primary sources of members:

1. Marginalized persons who don't normally feel safe in broader gaming environments.
2. Privileged persons who feel safe in other communities, but want to be part of an inclusive gaming community.

There's a possible clash between the first and the second groups that's hard to properly point out, but I'll do my best.

1. Privileged persons (including myself) are often unaware of said privilege.
2. The obvious reaction of a privileged person to being accused of wrongdoing is shock and anger. Ex: "I'm not sexist." "I'm not racist." "What even is ableism?!"
3. Privileged persons often times aren't aware of their internalized biases.
4. Privileged persons are likely to think they are entitled to a certain level of education about their wrong-doing. Unfortunately, they are likely to seek this education directly from people who they've hurt. While a privileged person's attempts to discover what they've done wrong is admirable, they often times go about it in ways that are easily considered harassment.
5. Which brings us to the conflicts of interest we should be aware of:
   1. If we want to include (and we do!) well-meaning persons from places of privilege, we need to be upfront about expectations and ensure they understand how to take critical feedback.
   2. These persons should know they may not demand explanations from others--especially those who they've hurt (intentionally or unintentionally).
   3. Persons who have made mistakes should know which members (and we need members to volunteer) are willing to talk to them about what they have done wrong.
   4. It shouldn't be expected that marginalized persons have the time or energy to have a 101-level inclusivity conversation every day.
   5. It's entirely understandable that a marginalized person may not want to engage with a person by whom they feel harassed (whether the harasser is aware of it or not).
   6. 101 Outreach is one thing that some members, but not all may opt to perform.

A couple technical tools I think might help address this fostering:

1. It may be helpful to have some sort of registry that allows members to voluntarily discuss their own boundaries (for example: no private messages, no out-of-channel conversations, prefer non-violent games, etc).
2. Provide a way for members to "register" preferred pronouns. This should likely default to "they/them" for new users.
3. It would be nice to have a mechanism for marking which members are open to discussing 101 topics. That is, people willing to help members who aren't sure what they've done wrong, are respecting their co-members wishes to be left alone, but would like help investigating their behavior.

Does this make sense to people? Any questions? Comments?

Note: I borrow the term "Inclusivity 101" from the term "Feminism 101". If unclear on the "101" concept, this link and the links it refers to may be of use: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Feminism_101.

Note 2.0: This issue discusses behavior of privileged people more than marginalized. This is not to say that marginalized people are perfect. Rather, we already have tools for dealing with bad behavior that doesn't fall in the realm of marginalization.

[typed-hole]

I'm liking most of what is written here. One thing that comes to mind though, is that some of these things (such as registering pronouns, perhaps building some sort of education knowledgebase) sound a lot like stuff that would require a database and an actual web application.

I would personally like to be the first to volunteer in helping build and maintain such systems, but there are issues regarding costs for hosting and such that would need to be dealt with.

Anyway, all in all, I really like what's written here.

[SamLR]

+1 If I can I'll try and add some out linking to the bot so common questions can be deferred to a single source (e.g. !define mansplain, !define cis). It'd need a canonical source, possibly a page on the site and possibly a faq mode as well but speeds up a lot of these sorts of conversations.