Steering our cultural conversations away from justice requires frantically “responding” to phantom arguments, with the pretense that one is “setting the story straight” or somehow striking a blow for fairness while in actuality re-asserting the primacy of a dominant group. The idea is to flood the collective conversation with these “responses” in order to create the sense that there really is a huge contingent of individuals out there who, for example, seriously argue that men can’t be raped, or that whites should be denied fair opportunities. This shifts the conversation away from institutionalized violence and discrimination, and onto the comparatively rare, often non-systemic ills sometimes suffered by persons in the dominant group.
Some of the “responses” to these imaginary arguments may even be created in good faith by individuals swept up in the frenzy generated by the new spin, convinced that they’re helping right a terrible, little-discussed wrong. Due to the sheer number of human beings in existence, there will always be an example available of the cops not taking a male domestic violence victim seriously, or school authorities laughing off a sexual assault perpetrated by a female student. Frantic faux-arguments to the contrary, very few people are actually saying that these things don’t happen, or that they’re not important. What they are saying is that these things do not happen with the same frequency as the institutionalized violence and discrimination faced by certain classes; they are saying that the ignorance with which many respond to these acts is, in fact, caused by the systemic oppression against which they are already fighting. They maintain that the way to end these less-frequent, but still serious incidents of violence and discrimination faced by persons in more-privileged classes is not to derail conversations and shut down attempts to defeat sexism, racism, transphobia, ageism, etc., but to end institutionalized bigotry once and for all, for the good of everyone.
This explanation has been offered, with varying degrees of patience and thoroughness, for multiple decades, yet the “But [dominant group] encounters (violence/discrimination/deprivation) too!” contingent sturdily ignores this information, while issuing yet another impassioned plea on the behalf [dominant group], whose problems supposedly are never addressed or acknowledged. This demonstrates the disingenuous nature of their position. One the one hand, one is tempted to ignore such rhetoric, but adopting a laissez-faire attitude about derailment has actually allowed that rhetoric to become normalized, an extremely undesirable outcome. Although arguing with each individual who tries to spin our cultural conversation back to the Stone Age is an exhausting waste of time, the derailment phenomenon does need to be addressed.
Unfortunately, many people who participate in derailment truly seem to believe that they are righting a wrong, which lends them passion and conviction. This probably results from their being unaware of certain concepts and information, or from being new to conversations about culture and power. If a person is unaware of post-Civil War laws and cultural practices designed to keep African-Americans marginalized, for instance, they may not understand that current race-based inequities are a result of deeply-entrenched systemic racism, rather than (as some argue) poor individual choices. These people’s words are nevertheless every bit as toxic and bewildering as those of someone who is deliberately attempting to muddy the waters, perhaps even moreso because they may also manage to say some things that are sensible, or at least well-meaning. It does not help that people in this group are likely to be our friends, family, co-workers, and other people with whom we desire to maintain warm relationships and avoid conflict.
The more conscious perpetrators of these derailing tactics are often successful in part because they are aiming at humans’ worst, rather than best, qualities: a sense that life is a zero-sum game, an obsessive desire to belong, our regrettable tendency (as Terry Pratchett put it) to bend at the knees. It feels good to pretend that people with power are really the oppressed class, and to stick up for them—it feels like one might be on the winning side. Aligning oneself with a more powerful class certainly has rewards, if only emotional ones. This is, in part, why poor whites in the United States will vote into power rich white people who want nothing more than to destroy every last opportunity for happiness the poor might have had. People will vote (or speak) against their own interests if it makes them feel like they’re affiliated with the powerful. The rhetoric of derailment is comforting because it assures people that things are fine just as they are.
On the other hand, the people who are advocating for positive social change are saying things that make many people uncomfortable. They’re saying that we need to dismantle some of society’s most cherished beliefs, that what people “know” to be true was never true in the first place, and that the roles and behaviors people think keep them safe are actually holding them back. Their ideas feel alarming because, in a sense, they destabilize society. While their ideology appeals to the best in humanity—intellect, empathy, inquiry, courage—acting on these traits is far more demanding than aligning oneself with the currently-existing dominant ideology.
When you rarely, or never, encounter anyone actually saying the horrible things thesefaux-arguments are claiming to respond to, you should probably start wondering whether that impassioned plea to consider instead the much more important crimes against [powerful, dominant group] is actually a derailment tactic. If you do encounter someone from a traditionally marginalized class making an angry or vengeful remark, you might want to consider the lifetime of systemic oppression that they have faced, which might just make them prone to angry statements. It is an indicator of power imbalance that persons in a dominant group can speak and behave in a dehumanizing and violent manner, but have their behavior dismissed as the act of a lone individual and not a marker of systemic oppression, while every member of a less-powerful group is assumed to be acting as a representative of their group at all times, so that anything they say or do is interpreted as having broad political significance. The irony is that more-privileged persons are not only more likely to engage in violence and discrimination, but are more likely to have that behavior covered up by a system designed to benefit them, yet it is the angry speech (and, occasionally, retributive behavior) of oppressed classes which is being held up as the true problem.
Oppression has built into it the means for its own propagation: divisiveness, Othering, confusion, and fear. It’spersistent and sneaky. Derailment is just one of its weapons, but it’s a powerful one because it can take a fruitful conversation and turn it upside-down in an instant.
