Safe space only exists under the title “safe space” when it is being made safe for the oppressed. The rest of the time, in the rest of the world, that space exists for people who are on top of the paradigm.

I don’t need to create special safe space for myself as a white person, because I already have it.

I don’t think I’m qualified to use the term as you define it, because my need for safe space is rooted in my individual history and quirks, rather than in the oppression of a class that I belong to.

I’ve been thinking about Safe Space for a while today. I’m a white male yadda yadda. I’m so white and so male and so yadda yadda that I even have a spare bedroom. And now I even have a more-or-less permanent house guest. Which is great in many respects. And a big intrusion in others.

He doesn’t really impede my ability to do anything. But he makes me self-conscious. It’s kinda like when I first had a kid, and could re-experience everything through her eyes. Only now, the thing I’m re-experiencing through his eyes is me. Just yesterday I wanted to complain to my wife about how I don’t have time to do this or that, after having spent hours reading blogs. But my guest was in the room and knows I’ve been goofing off, so now how do I get to bitch about my day? And the point isn’t that I’m deprived of the opportunity to make bogus justifications to my wife; I’m deprived of the opportunity to make bogus justifications to myself. And I really miss it.

A safe place is where I am safe from having to confront things that hurt – things like, well, me.

For example, I know a lot of people who rely primarily on emotional arguments. They might like a space where they can discuss things with other emotional-argument people; where there are no people pointing out the logical flaws in their arguments, or picking at their phrasing, while ignoring the emotion of what they are saying.

And I know a lot of people who reply primarily on logical arguments. THEY might like a space where they can argue logically without worrying about someone feeling personally insulted by a general remark, or calling them evil, or otherwise responding illogically to their arguments.

Those two type of people each feel attacked by the other (I’m using “feeling attacked” as a synonym for “feeling unsafe”). But membership in those groups isn’t linked to any particular status, race, sex, or class.

Safe space only exists under the title “safe space” when it is being made safe for the oppressed. The rest of the time, in the rest of the world, that space exists for people who are on top of the paradigm.

I don’t need to create special safe space for myself as a white person, because I already have it. There’s no need for our understanding of power dynamics to go out of the window here.

I disagree that “safe space” is a concept, and term, that can only be rightly applied to oppressed classes of people; and I also disagree that recognizing that people can feel a need for safe spaces along axises that have nothing to do with oppression requires tossing our understanding of power dynamics out the window. (Although I realize maybe that’s not what you meant, and I’m misunderstanding your argument).

I think “safe space” is a concept that could conceivably apply to any human who feels vulnerable, but that how we respond to someone’s desire for safe space rightly depends on contextual factors, including (but not limited to) our understanding of oppression and power.

In my comment #40, I referred to my own need for “safe space,” but I don’t think I’m qualified to use the term as you define it, because my need for safe space is rooted in my individual history and quirks, rather than in the oppression of a class that I belong to. But I think most readers probably understood what I intended by the term in comment #40, and I’m not certain what alternate term I could use that would communicate the same idea as well.

Because no white, heterosexual, monogamous, religiously conservative, homophobic, mildly racist individuals ever are in recovery from abuse or sexual assault.

I am a sexual abuse survivor. I don’t wear it on my sleeve, but it’s there nonetheless. And I find it appalling in the extreme that my experience and pain can be devalued to zero because of your (partially wrong) list of completely irrelevant behavioral factors. The next time I wake up from a panic dream where he’s trying to get my pants down, I’ll take comfort in the religious conservatism that means it didn’t happen.

She didn’t say that people with the former qualities never–or even seldom–also have the latter. She said that people don’t need safe space in order to celebrate those former qualities. I don’t know where you got your interpretation, given that she said in that comment that she herself doesn’t feel the need for safe space to protect her whiteness.

- Bonnie

The problem begins with what constitutes an idea and what constitutes an identity or a experiential piece of information.

I think people who want to create safe space need to place very clear parameters about what is open to CONSTRUCTIVE critique and what is not.

Tone is important, as is context. However, it isn’t always as clear as we’d like them to be. The internet lacks the ability (except for visual conference) for humans to receive crucial signals (body language, tone of voice etc) that would usually clarify the tone in a face to face encounter.

I also agree with Nexyjo regarding safe space having the ability to have a level of challenge. I don’t think safe space needs conflict though.

I would like to offer better descriptions of safe space. Safe space can involve constructive dialogue instead of challenge and conflict and it’s what I strive for as a SysOP and blogger.

So a conversation or a room or a group that might be safe for me on one dimension (gender) might not be on another (race), and so on and so forth. And the power relations that make up our world can make negotiating these boundaries kind of difficult, as the above exchange illustrates.

To me, it seemed like Mandolin’s grouping of “white, heterosexual, monogamous, religious conservative, homophobic, [and] mildly racist” in contrast to “recovering from abuse, sexual assault, homophobia, transphobia, and so on” was, while not necessarily completely impersonal, certainly more along the lines of saying “the (safe space) needs of people in privileged groups are radically different than those of people in marginalized or victimized groups.”

A person may be privileged in many ways and victimized in another, as you point out Robert. Having privilege along some dimensions does not mean that you will never need a place of refuge… but it is also true that more privilege tends to mean less need of the space, and that lessened need tends to make people hostile or indifferent to the needs others might have of it.

In that respect, it interests me that your reaction seems to perfectly well illustrate identity safe space needs; there’s an issue for you which you don’t like having challenged, and which hurts when you’re pushed on it. You can deal with it and have a regular conversation, but it seems to me that you would rather that people did not make assumptions about your experience and that your experiences, when voiced, were respected.

Although I certainly agree that identity issues and ideological issues are not the same and don’t need to be treated the same, I have a hard time understanding why some people* don’t extend the same sensibilities to ideological issues. Again, it’s not that people aren’t also having other conversations and participating in spaces that aren’t safe (where they may be having the challenging breakthroughs of the sort mentioned above); nobody lives in a safe space (not forever, anyway, though some people do go out of their way to make as much of their life like that as possible). And sometimes, you just don’t want to deal with everything else. Or you can’t deal with it. Or you don’t want to be derailed. That doesn’t make your conversations any less valuable; they’re just different.**

* That’s not a pointed some people, it’s just a sort of hand-waving ‘I’ve heard this argument at times’ thing.

** Ideological separation can also foster higher levels of discourse, even when everyone is civil. You can’t have a good quantum physics course when half the class is still struggling with regular physics, or with people who are stuck on the “when am I ever going to need this?” question. Yes, of course, challenge and change are good, and people who are not in the group can have valuable ‘outside the box’ contributions… but most of the time, complexity and nuance require shared bases, and you drag the whole conversation down if you’re still playing the defense and 101 game.

That was bad phrasing on my part. I agree with you that there is challenge and conflict in a safe space. What I meant was that there are sometimes specific ideas or challenges that simply won’t arise within a safe space. It’s not that there won’t be any growth or development in the safe space, just that certain types of development might be foreclosed or limited.

Frex (I am stealing that neologism), say that I decide to host a “safe space” for a libertarian discussion of, I don’t know, child care issues. I want it to be people who already agree that the government has no place in child care; all we’re going to talk about is how the private sector can and should do things. So I ask Amp, noted advocate for publicly-funded childcare, to bow out of the discussion and he agrees. But Amp is the only one in the potential discussion pool who knows about a big government program in [country X] that indicated [important facts Y and Z]. We won’t have access to facts Y and Z, because we don’t want to hear Amp’s point of view. That doesn’t mean our discussion won’t be fruitful; maybe Amp’s interjection of Y and Z would in fact have been highly destructive. Or maybe it would have been the catalyst for us achieving a huge breakthrough; no way to tell. We won’t find out, because Amp won’t be there to have his say.

There are many, many, many times and places when that tradeoff is well worth making - when the possibility for discussion opened up by excluding Amp’s POV is judged more important than the avenues foreclosed by his absence. That’s cool - it’s diversity in action. Some discussions should have Amp and some shouldn’t.

That’s all I meant to say.

Because no white, heterosexual, monogamous, religiously conservative, homophobic, mildly racist individuals ever are in recovery from abuse or sexual assault.

I am a sexual abuse survivor. I don’t wear it on my sleeve, but it’s there nonetheless. And I find it appalling in the extreme that my experience and pain can be devalued to zero because of your (partially wrong) list of completely irrelevant behavioral factors. The next time I wake up from a panic dream where he’s trying to get my pants down, I’ll take comfort in the religious conservatism that means it didn’t happen.

Maybe you should start looking at human beings instead of at lists of labels. Your exquisite sensitivity to power dynamics is lovely; maybe you could extend it to people.

(Sorry for the disobedience to your edict, Myca. Ban me if you feel you need to. I won’t have my experience zeroed out because someone thinks that their side owns pain.)

i’d disagree that safe space lacks challenge and conflict, at least for me. in fact, i’d argue quite the opposite. the difference lies in the way that challenge and conflict is expressed. in safe space, conflict is explored without insult, assumptions, or stereotypes; a space where conflict is examined without judgment.

I completely agree.

I also think that safe space serves two different and complimentary functions in this context

1) It’s a tool of inclusion. That is, there are plenty of people who cannot realistically participate without some sort of guidelines in place protecting them from certain sorts of attack, and often these people are those whose voices aren’t heard in the dominant discourse, making their inclusion doubly important.

2) An ideologically-constricted Safe Space often serves as a method of focusing the discussion on a particular topic. Frex: If your goal is to discuss various competing methods of Universal Health Care, it is not unreasonable to exclude from the discussion those who oppose UHC. That’s not an echo chamber, that’s just proactively avoiding unnecessary derails.

—Myca

Safe space only exists under the title “safe space” when it is being made safe for the oppressed. The rest of the time, in the rest of the world, that space exists for people who are on top of the paradigm.

I don’t need to create special safe space for myself as a white person, because I already have it. There’s no need for our understanding of power dynamics to go out of the window here.

Bonnie,

Email sent! Let me know if there’s a problem in receiving it.

I’d like to clarify that I wasn’t referring only to identity, or to ideology, although both of those are often relevant to what makes a space safe or unsafe for some people.

Another matter is tone. When I was growing up, my father had significant anger management issues, and would suddenly erupt in over-the-top fits of rage and contempt that were far beyond what I was emotionally equipped to understand or handle. I think as a result of that, my tolerance for anger and contempt is very low.

This has been a constant problem for me as a moderator who often blogs about racism and sexism; my need for a “safe space” where people are civil, and anger is relatively muted, often creates an unsafe space for others who find it racist and sexist to be expected to repress their justified outrage (or express it only in “constructive” ways).

I don’t think I’m wrong to want safe space. I don’t think they’re wrong to want safe space. But I don’t think we can always share the same safe space, either.

I pretty much agree with Robert that the only viable solution is to try and encourage the creation of many kinds of safe spaces.

The great thing about the Internet is that it has taken what was always everyone’s theoretical right to create their own spaces and made it a practical (if limited and flawed) reality.

I want this thread to be open to a wide spectrum of people, because I am interested in differing opinions on what constitutes safe space, and whether or not creation of safe space is a desirable thing or not.

Last, I did not get the sense that Mandolin’s comment had anything to do with whether or not anyone was male.

Seriously, let’s stop. No more attacks, no more defenses.

—Myca