Sometimes, when people learn I’m a cultural consultant, they ask me why queer people, or people of color, or religious minorities, or disabled people, or any other subaltern population seem so sensitive about trivial things. Maybe it’s cultural appropriation, or orientalist orcs, or a mildly offensive word.
Sometimes we react so strongly because it’s the last straw after a long day, or week, or lifetime of hearing that same thing and worse, over and over and over again; and you haven’t seen all the times we ignored it, just the one time we didn’t. Sometimes we want to see your reaction to our reaction, to learn more about how you handle this situation. Sometimes we even do overreact. But a lot of the time, it’s this:
When you were a child learning to swim, someone probably told you that if it ever started raining, you immediately had to get out of the lake, pool, river, or wherever it was you were splashing around, because if lightning were to strike that body of water, it would electrocute everyone therein.
Now, the fraction of you who have ever actually seen lightning strike water is probably vanishingly small. Nevertheless, I bet most of you immediately climb out the pool the moment you feel the first raindrops, right? Because you’ll get another chance to swim sometime, but a lightning strike—even if it’s unlikely—would be deadly.
When you grow up contending with systemic oppression, you develop a spider sense for it. You probably remember at least one time you gave someone the benefit of the doubt, but then the situation worsened fast, and they harmed you or someone else terribly. To survive those situations, you’ve learned to recognize little things, early warning signs, flags that sometimes but not always signal something bad about to go down. Certain words. Certain jokes. Certain symbols on clothing or jewelry or tattoos. Even certain favorite media, lines of argument, or personal habits.
When someone near you displays one of those signals, if you’re like me, you start looking for the exits, getting ready to bolt. You might leave that party, disengage from that conversation, block that user on the Internet, play a different game. And you know, you know, you’re probably just paranoid right now. That most of the time, those symbols mean nothing. They’re expressed casually or thoughtlessly, and whoever expressed them is harmless, and you’ll feel sad to have missed out.
But there are other parties, other conversations, other users, other games. You’ll find another before too long. Had you stuck around when those signals were indeed, improbably but not impossibly, leading up to something much more sinister as you’ve seen them do in the past, you might have suffered something traumatic or fatal—or at very least, something that would ruin your day.
Often, we don’t even think this reaction out. We move before we know it, because the part of the subconscious mind dedicated to threat responses moves us. We veer away from it and keep going, like we would on the sidewalk from an aggressive dog, a yellowjacket, or someone conversing angrily on the phone. In addition to reactions, we also have actions that fall into this category: ways we change our voice or how we stand or what words we choose to prevent others from having this reaction to us, from seeing us as threats. We know mainstream society sees our identities as the raindrops or the lightning, so we habituate ourselves to minimizing and mitigating the apparent threat we pose through behavior.
Maybe you don’t live like this. Maybe you think you’re built different. In which case: I envy you, I really do. Because if you’ve lived a life without fear, then either you’ve lived a life without hardship or danger, or you’ve been hurt in a way that numbs you to the painful reality that others around you might be in danger.
When I work with cultural consulting clients, I often give feedback on details like these, words or concepts that might provoke a threat response so fast your audience won’t stick around to find out you meant it innocently. It’s relevant to daily life too, though. So remember, we’re not reacting like we do because that thing you said is some inherently wicked act or social sin. We’re reacting because it’s raindrops on a pool.