I’m not concerned about offensiveness.
All of my work centers on population-specific injustices — mostly transphobia, homophobia, and racism. I am openly far-left, and in my florals and nose ring and dyed hair I am exactly the picture of an internet social justice warrior who is here to tell you how to behave. But in my work as a university administrator in a Diversity & Inclusion office, I don’t talk about things being “offensive.” It’s not a political strategy — I don’t talk about offensiveness in my private life either. I have almost forgotten about the concept of offensiveness as it applies to this kind of work, such that when a colleague brings up the notion that we don’t want to “offend” anybody, I never quite know what to say.
The truth is, I don’t really mind offending people. I swear a lot. I self-describe as queer. I have a fat, trans, disabled body. I offend people just by existing.
And on the flip side, my concern is not whether people offend me. Joel Feinberg has done some great work in legal theory around the concept of offense, which captures a vast range of unpleasant sensations and emotions ranging from moral disgust to personal embarrassment to physical discomfort. The paradigmatic case of offense is at the level of nuisance — that is, an experience that is decidedly uncomfortable (physically, emotionally, or morally) but that causes no real harm. An offensive nuisance is something like stepping in dog poo. Every part of the experience is awful: the sensation of the squish, the immediate sinking feeling of recognition of what has transpired, and the smelly, messy process of cleaning it off shoes and, if you’re especially unlucky, floors you’ve tracked it onto. Stepping in dog poo is an absorbing, unpleasant experience, but it very rarely does any kind of real harm. But the concept of offense is not really about harm, it’s about the immediate emotional and physical response of a person who has experienced an unpleasantness.
That’s why I don’t use it.
I don’t conceptualize my job as being about reducing unpleasant experiences. My job is about reducing harm. Imagine that I step in dog poo on the way into an important job interview; I can either walk in reeking of shit and risk my potential employer being disgusted, or I can take the time to clean my shoes and arrive late — either could cost me the job, a potentially serious harm. Or instead, imagine that I stepped in dog poo every day. The practical inconvenience would be the same, but the emotional burden would be exaggerated by the sisyphean quality of the repeated experience. Based on any number of circumstantial factors, the same offense could be very harmful, mildly harmful, or merely a nuisance.
When we center diversity and inclusion work on offense — on the immediate physical and emotional response to an unpleasant stimulus — we can’t tell the difference between a student experiencing repeated, malicious, or systemic harm (like a student whose access to university resources is being reduced because of bias incidents) and a student who is experiencing unpleasant sensations because they disagree with someone or don’t understand something (like a student who objects to the Black Student Union existing). Both students might be offended. Only one student is being harmed.
Frameworks centered on offensiveness may seek to clarify social expectations to reduce emotional discomfort in group environments, and this is a totally worthwhile thing to do in institutional settings. Adopting social standards that reduce emotional discomfort by standardizing ingroup etiquette is incredibly valuable. But it isn’t generally equity work — and it can actually undermine equity work, especially when a privileged majority insists on etiquette that silences more vulnerable people. Anyone can be “offended,” and a lot of privileged people are offended by even the discussion of inequality. When we weigh educators like Jordan Peterson being offended by nonbinary pronouns versus trans students being offended by being misgendered, many policymakers end up saying that free speech should prevail, because one person’s emotional experience doesn’t supersede the other’s. And just like that, national Title IX protections against intentional misgendering are unwritten.
A common approach to etiquette in offensiveness-based frameworks is to ban discussion of controversial topics —a move that enshrines whatever harmful and inequitable behaviors already exist in the space, because discussion of them is inevitably controversial. These frameworks often seek to set agreements based on consensus agreements about which things are offensive, which means that in spaces that are white dominated, the white majority gets to decide what is reasonable for their coworkers of color to be upset by.
Frameworks based on harm are not consensus-driven. I don’t need to ask everyone to vote on whether having a broken arm is harmful. It just is, whether or not I am demonstrably upset about it. Even if I have broken my arm so many times it’s just routine, it’s still just as broken, and it still needs the same level of care. In offensiveness frameworks, the goal is often to avoid upsetting people, so the person who is most upset may get to claim priority. In a harm framework, we can recognize that people are very often upset while they harm others — and that does not make their needs more urgent than people who are being harmed.
Harm frameworks aren’t at all new — John Stewart Mill famously argued that harm should be the basic metric of what things the state should set limits upon, and which things should be issues of personal liberty. The paradigmatic example is “your right to swing your fist ends at my nose,” which is easy to understand as long as the harm is immediate and obvious. Using an effective harm framework means looking for good evidence and considering not just immediate physical harm but also psychosocial harms, which also have concrete effects on the body but may be harder to spot. It can be challenging to establish clear cause-and-effect chains for psychosocial harms that hold up in criminal cases, but the evidence about which things likely cause psychosocial harms are clear enough to guide institutional best practices, workplace and social space expectations, and personal choices.
Equity frameworks centered on harm look for big-picture effects of immediate circumstances, which provides clarity about which issues to prioritize and what resources they demand. Right-wing critics frequently lambast universities for overinvesting in measures to avoid making students experience adverse emotional reactions, and I think to a degree that’s actually justified. We shouldn’t be concerned with preventing a normal range of emotional experience on college campuses. However, the issues we are investing in and should be investing in are those where the adverse emotional experience is connected with greater unjustified harm in a way that could reasonably have been predicted and avoided.
I don’t work on getting professors to correctly gender trans students because of the momentary experience of humiliation, sadness, or anger that arises in the classroom(although I sympathize with that experience and care about it on a personal level). I work on getting professors to correctly gender trans students because experiences of harassment and rejection in educational settings are a major predictor of suicidality in trans college students (Williams Institute). I personally want trans students to be happy, but professionally I want them to be alive. When we weigh educators like Joran Peterson being offended versus trans students being dead, we are less at risk of making a bad call. There is no evidence that using pronouns for nonbinary students harms Jordan Peterson, and there is a solid body of evidence that refusing to use pronouns does harm nonbinary students. Therefore it is entirely reasonable for a public university to demand that professors like Peterson use students’ correct pronouns.
Promoting equity is hard work. It requires consideration, judgment, and evaluation of non-obvious factors. It would be great if our moral instincts always pointed toward the right answer, but the truth is they don’t. One of the things that has helped me is using a harm framwork in conjunction with evaluation of biopsychosocial harms that may be cumulative and hard to spot in situ. I hope these tools help others as well.
