Speak Up for Your Own Good

This week I saw several threads on Facebook that made me think about something that I've studied as a historian and as a gender studies scholar for many years now: speaking out when stereotypes and biases play out in public.

Perhaps you’ve heard the saying “speak truth to power” (created by American Quakers in 1955 actually) that urges folks to speak up with the idea that you’ll change the world through your words.  Or maybe you’ve been told that you need to “preach unto the world” (drawn from the Bible, Mark 16:15) what you know to save said world or the souls in it.

Both of these reasons for speaking out are built around the idea that doing so will help others.  Sometimes the help is small — you are helping one immediate person by speaking out and taking a public stand.  Sometimes the help is great — your words are a strike in the “cultural war” or for civil rights or for truth and this will change the world.  All sounds very familiar, huh?

Let’s get back to the FB threads that inspired me.  In these threads various “friends” of mine expressed horror or shock at behavior they witnessed and then spoke out or tried to take action.  It was about 50/50 whether or not they got any positive results but in almost every case the author of the thread also expressed that she/he was sick and tired of these situations arising.  At one point in the thread either the author or a commenter on the status update mentioned that they simply had stopped speaking out or were thinking about it.  They weren't quite apathetic but it felt to me like they might well be on their way.

That made me sad but not because they were abandoning the above two reasons I mentioned for why we might speak out but because it felt to me like the individual who wanted to or had given up was potentially doing harm to her/himself by increasing the possibility that they might develop apathy, a condition that can leak into other aspects of your life.

The problem with the two incentives to speak out are that they make the motive external to the person taking action and they raise the expectation that through words they can change another person or the world around them.  It is not wrong to have these goals but if they are your only reason for speaking out you are going to get sick and tired of doing so after a relatively short time.

Why?  We can’t make any other person change. Heck, even parents who raise a kid from day one often are left amazed at how a child turns out.  Each of us, while a product of our environment (nurture) and our biology (nature) is unique; no two people experience the world in the exact same way.  Now expand this reality to a small group of individuals, then a neighborhood, then a city, then a region, then a nation, then the world.  Each step becomes more complicated and takes longer to effect change.

Don’t get me wrong, change does happen, one need be only a casual scholar of history to see the changes that have happened.  Human rights, inequalities, political and economic power, changes in these areas have expanded and contracted and expanded again over the course of human history.

Deep changes though take time, a lot more time than it seems that most modern people are willing to embrace.  Think of how long it took to get women the right to vote in elections in most countries or how long it took for anti-slavery movements to affect the law and enforcement of it.  Stereotypes, biases, and prejudices are even more entrenched than the laws.  Here is just one study about how we all know stereotypes.

I live in a country where folks express deep disappointment after only half a term of any president because we are raised to want things to change NOW.  That is not how change happens even on a legal level and certainly not with stereotypes that might be a product of centuries of not millennia.  When you have changing the world or another person as your only or main motive for speaking out when what you see or hear conflicts with your sense of morals or ethics, you are setting yourself up for failure and increasing the likelihood of burnt out and giving up on speaking out at all except perhaps to an audience that all ready agrees with you.

That, too, is very tempting.  If you only speak out among those who agree, you don’t have to worry about not feeling like you are accomplishing something or fear that you might have someone speak out against what you are saying.  The problem with this is that then you really are not speaking out so much as bonding with a group you are all ready part of.

I want to suggest that we try changing our motivation for speaking out in public against actions and words we believe are offensive and belittling to other human beings.  Speak out for yourself.  Not when someone offends you personally, though I think we all need to have enough power to do that, but speak out when you hear or see something to remind yourself of your morals and ethics.  Remember those stereotypes are in your head, you know them, the good and the bad, and 99% false and the slightly true, they are all there and they can impact your decisions.  By speaking out you remind yourself that there are other ways for human beings to behave and that human beings have worth as humans.

Speak out for your own well-being, speak out to support your own morals and ethics, speak out to fight the stereotypes lurking in the background, speak out to fight off apathy, and then speak out just in case you might just move the world one tiny step closer to empowering all of humanity.  I hope this made sense to you all.

See you next Friday and go have a piece of good chocolate this weekend!