I need to talk about this

[transemacabre]

As some of y'all know, I hateread Tumblr fairly regularly. I come across a lot of things I find bizarre and/or disturbing, but among the most troubling, at least to me personally, is the casual dehumanization of the incarcerated. Like, a Tumblrite will furiously blog about how wearing a necklace makes you a culture-appropriating shitlord, and then a post later this same person is saying: We have prisons full of criminals to test drugs on.

Or: guys getting raped in prison! #misandry!

I see these things, and I think -- You are so immature, so naive, and so thoughtless. You have no concept of the seriousness of the things you casually say. Their impact means nothing to you. This subject has never touched you in any way, in your sheltered life, and you think it never will. Prisoners aren't real to you. They aren't human to you.

This is something I rarely bring up, and I may never talk about it on here again, but I come from two generations of prisoners. I have a parent AND a grandparent who were both incarcerated here in America. This is not ancient history, I'm not talking about some long-ago convict ancestor; this affected me, in the here and now. And I'm not going to talk about their crimes, because I don't want any apologetic "oh, but they weren't the bad ones!" platitudes. How can I express how disturbing it is to see my family talked about blithely as though they were lab rats? How do you think I feel at seeing prisoner rape chuckled about by these children?

Think for a moment about how you might feel.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled fannish squee.

Comments

[ofthespider.livejournal.com]

This sort of thing is why I'm seriously considering a full-on Tumblr hiatus just to shake it out of my system. I'll give people on Tumblr credit for being passionate (?), but the general atmosphere is lightning-fast to condemn even small infractions and those little things will stick with you forever and ever and ever, and the opposite side of that coin is people fiercely defending and endorsing some really horrible behavior, because you're either a worm or a saint. And that includes this really casual dehumanization of people, because it's so much easier to joke about or to crusade for concepts instead of full human beings.

It's worth mentioning that many of the users are pretty young, or in that I-know-everything social justice "warrior" college phase. The way prison and prisoners are treated by general society is gross anyway, so pile that on top of the internet's equivalent of people's "immortal and always right" youth phase just makes the environment toxic in the worst places.

And it's a shitty format for any kind of meaningful discussion, because Tumblr isn't built to be a forum, so good luck correcting anyone and having any impact.

[lokifan]

I'm disturbed enough when I see that kind of awful so I can't imagine how it must feel for you, but I also find it weird to see this described like it's a Tumblr-specific phenomenon given how utterly endemic it is to US and UK culture? Idk, Tumblr is so huge that I think describing Tumblr as thinking one thing is sort of misguided anyway, but I also think the average Tumblr user is more bothered about prison reform than the average human.

[transemacabre.livejournal.com]

Dehumanization of prisoners is a problem endemic to, I'd wager, most human societies. Tumblr is where I tend to encounter this sentiment most often, as people IRL rarely seem to give prisoners much thought or express their feelings towards prisoner abuse, but Tumblr as a platform encourages an echo chamber effect, so one expressed opinion will keep spreading as reblogs pile up.