Has anyone thought about consensual tone deafness?
To explain what I mean, here’s a story from the OpenVillage Festival (LOTE6 “OpenVillage Festival”). A German guy (I think it was Henry, @emsone, from Wir bauen Zukunft) said something that fell foul of an American woman present there. She told him off, very publicly, as a white male neoliberal or something. We looked at each other in disbelief, for we had heard no such thing. The situation was solved by @nadia (bilingual, a native speaker of English and Swedish of very international background, and deft at navigating cultural contexts), who explained that the woman was trying to read Henry as she would read an American of his age and skin tone, and was picking up a subtext that simply was not there. She pointed out to the woman that he was doing all the work to communicate with her in her native language, and she, instead of being grateful (or learning German to improve their communication), was punishing him for not knowing the English language and the contemporary anglo-American culture like a native. She then asked her to leave.
Tone policing is often problematic, but even with mediation, it’s not clear to me who is qualified to do it in a context like Edgeryders. Few people have Nadia’s ability to cross cultural borders. And people like Henry, or me – we speak good English, even great English, but we cannot guarantee the fine command of subtext that we would have in our native languages. Native English speakers might get many false positives, and think we are being inconsiderate or even violent, while we are simply out of our linguistic and cultural comfort zone.
Hence, consensual tone deafness. A rule that says: to accommodate people who are operating outside their native language (in Edgeryders, that’s the majority, whichever language you choose), we don’t engage with anything that has not been said explicitly. If you are in doubt, ask: do you think what I wrote was dumb? Are you trying to make the point that [insert project/organization name] is a puppet of some vast neoliberal movement? Stuff like that.
@johncoate’s strategy of forbidding only the most obviously wrong stuff is in the same direction, I think.