On moments of toxic silence in computer science
This is a stream of consciousness rant, impulsively posted with minimal editing. I’m sure it could be better, but I’m tired.
It’s pride month.
For a month that is supposed to be about affirmation and joy, at least in its modern incarnation, I’ve often found myself more in the mood for anger, resistance, advocacy. For many years, I’ve actually felt kind of guilty about this. I want it to be a month of creating spaces for joy and experiencing joy myself. I need that. But too often, there are things in the way of joy, whether it’s stories of violence against trans people, another loss of civil rights, or cruel rhetoric that promises to create lasting, dehumanizing disinformation about trans people globally.
This year in particular, I’ve been particularly angry. This year’s legislative injustices have been on the surface of my mind every moment of every day; it’s all my news recommendation algorithms show me; it’s most of my Twitter feed. It’s to the point where I can’t help but bring it up in every conversation. I meet someone new from Alabama? I’m going to talk about it’s destructive oppression of its trans youth and the refugee families I’ve met struggling to flee their state. There’s a conference in Florida? I’m going to mention the class A felony and one year of prison I’d receive for peeing in a public building and the trans scholars who’ve had to harm their careers to stay out of prison. Talking about CS in schools? I’m going to rail on how CS not only doesn’t make space for critical examination of its used to harm gender non-conforming people, but also how CS teachers passively relent to DEI bans rather than fighting back. There is so much to be angry about.
I don’t know how sharing any of these stories of oppression comes off to my colleagues. At some level, it doesn’t really matter. If I don’t constantly raise these issues, they get normalized, because the cis majority (falsely) believes they have no stake in these fascist escalations in the United Stated. They are mostly silent about them, with the exception of the occasional ally. It doesn’t really matter how uncomfortable it makes me to have to constantly and disruptive lay our oppression out for display in a cordial professional conversation. I hold in the tears and make the information as plain as I can, dispassionately sharing the horrors of what this country is doing to my community, because I have no choice.
What frustrates me most is how my colleagues respond to this sharing: with silence. It reminds me of the responses over the past several years of discussions of anti-Black racism in academia. A colleague will call in a group to point out a horror of being Black in academia, and then all the white folks in the room have that deers in the headlight look, as if they’ve never had to face direct conflict about their identity (because they probably haven’t). Everyone is quiet for a few seconds, and then someone quickly changes the topic to something else, as if the past few moments didn’t happen. And then afterwards, someone comes privately to the person who spoke out at great sacrifice to their momentary wellbeing, and they say some platitude, or write an email, creating a little private safe space for themselves where they feel safer to engage. Meanwhile, the person who shared is left to either go be disoriented, gaslit, and angry the rest of the day or once again swallow down deep the group’s passive dismissal of an existential threat, and move on as if everything is normal and okay. Toxic order restored.
The same things happen when trans folks raise these issues in a group of cis folks. And it will probably happen in a response to this blog post. I’ll get the usual private emails, “thank you for speaking out, you’re so brave”, “I really appreciate you raising that, I didn’t know what to say”. And the message will be clear: we’re not going to do anything about this, but we understand why you need to.
So I want to tell cis folks and other allies in CS what I wish would happen, instead of the silence I described above. Maybe this will help you think more thoughtfully about how to help halt the rising North American brand of fascism that is directly affecting people now, and will eventually (and sooner than you think), start affecting you.
First, the easiest way to avoid uncomfortable silences about some ongoing oppression that somewhere shares is to plan for them. Make space in every agenda for explicit discussion about ongoing racial and gender oppression and how it’s affecting communities in CS. Have an informed ally get everyone up to speed on the status quo, and have a trans person there to fill in any gaps the ally can’t answer. Make time for problem solving around racial and gender oppression, as much time as you do for other business matters. And when that Black, trans, Black and trans person tells you what needs to be done, accept it, no matter how hard it is to accept, whether it means reprioritizing, reallocating, canceling, relocating. Anything less means that business as usual is more important than dealing with this urgent, existential threat to members of our community under direct assault.
And if you can’t schedule time, begin by ask yourself why you think it’s less important than other activities. What you’ll probably find is that you’re prioritizing the majority and avoiding conflict. And then you’ll have to ask yourself if that’s the kind of community you want. (And if it is, you might have to accept that you — gasp—might actually be anti-trans/anti-Black in your actions, if not your heart).
And if you really can’t find time, and you’re accepting that oppressions might be shared at any time, consider this protocol. When someone raises a topic of race, gender, or disability oppression, stop the meeting, acknowledge what was said, admit that it was an oversight for not making space for the topic earlier, and then make ad hoc plans for a discussion. Will the group come back to it? Address it now? How? Who will lead it? Recognize that this means doing ad hoc planning for the activities I described above, which means they will not work as well, and will be harder to make happen. But also recognize that if you do not pause, acknowledge, and make space, you are directly signaling to the person who shared that their existential concerns are less important than whatever else is happening in a gathering. Is that what you want to signal?
I’m not writing to call anyone out. This happens at every meeting I go to multiple times, at all scales of groups. You don’t need to write me to see if you did harm. You probably did, but that’s normal. I regularly make the same mistakes above when I have moments of weakness, or I’m not paying attention, I have advocacy fatigue, or I’m just so ignorant that someone has shared something of existential importance. CS is a harmful community; it is the default.
What I want you to do is listen: the bare minimum here is making space for talking about the experiences of people at the margins in CS and what we’re going to do about their exclusion. That is not a lot to ask. Aim for this one basic goal, and then we can work on the bigger asks in that space you make. Like excising capitalism from academic CS, making space for love and mutual respect, and valuing more than making.
/rant
