The Privilege of Being Polite

A version of this work was first published in February 2019 in the Community Alliance newspaper, Fresno CA

Have you ever known someone who was always polite? Then one day they just snap and every bad thing they ever thought about you just came out. And they are angry at you, because in addition to their grievances there is that big grievance that you didn’t see through their politeness and just know that they were upset. I used to be one of those polite people. And then I exploded, and just couldn’t do it any more.

It took some time to learn that I was responsible to tell people what I needed, and how their behavior affected me. There are times when being well is more important than being polite. Times when the relationship will only be served by the discomfort of asserting yourself past what seems civil. Now, this of course doesn’t mean that we are always fully responsible. In some abusive relationships there is no possibility of being anything other than polite, but let’s set that aside for now.

Years ago I stepped away from social media. For all the reasons that people know now. At the time the only people who I spoke with that really understood my reasons were those that worked in it or with it. We could see all of this nonsense coming. One of the things that people complained about then as now is how hateful people are. How mundane. How narcissistic. People seemed to think that what they were complaining about was some effect of social media. My thought was that people just had more access to other people’s thoughts. Things you might not normally say to 80% of the people on your friend list were being posted for everyone. Conversations you might have in public with one or two people, that might be overheard by bystanders who only caught parts were being held in public view of everyone and fixed in writing. Previously, we only had to deal with the proverbial racist uncle on holidays, but here we were confronted with him daily. It was a lot easier to ignore him when we spent a few hours with him a year, and he never had the opportunity to go very deep into any of his theories. Social media is making people worse, but it’s cultivating seeds that have long lay dormant. People we racist, classist, and unfeeling before. We just had less exposure to it. And they had a smaller group of people with which to cultivate these traits.

And some people were polite enough to not say these things in front of other people.

Now, I don’t think being polite is a problem. In fact I think one of the reasons there is so much anxiety, especially in younger people, is that the concept of etiquette has fallen out of favor. I am not a fan of rigid, shame enforced behavioral rules. I do, however, think that etiquette gave us an idea of what to expect. It was like traffic rules for social interaction. Of course any structure can be used to exclude and control people, so thinking of them as some kind of inviolable set of guidelines with which to punish people is damaging. Just as traffic laws which are designed to keep people safe can be used unfairly against some populations, or as a way to get a police officers foot in the door and end run around the Fourth Amendment. But generally knowing who has the right of way in an intersection does more good than harm. And so here we are, with politeness having the potential to be used for good, as in setting boundaries for people, or for ill, as in unfairly enforcing social control.

The word boundaries can seem like a buzzword, but it’s a useful way to conceive of all kinds of relationships. Politeness is related to boundaries. What is acceptable behavior and toward whom, and when. Those are all boundaries. That hypothetical friend I spoke of earlier, whose politeness finally broke was responding to boundary violations. Of course boundaries must be asserted if anyone is to know they are being crossed. In order to maintain politeness we must assert and respect boundaries.

And here comes the problem with all of the lamenting I have heard recently about politeness. Those boundaries that are violated by impoliteness, we must think about who set them and why. In a relationship of equals, my hypothetical friend can ask me not to call her in the middle of the night asking for rides. She has that right. She shouldn’t assume that I will know that is a boundary she doesn’t want me crossing. She must assert that boundary. And if she spends years tallying up the times I have called, and the mileage, and harboring a grudge about it, but never says anything to me until she explodes, then how can I take responsibility for having violated that boundary? I never even knew it was a problem. But, here, we are equals. And her polite behavior was a choice that she made. She was responsible for setting her own boundary and asserting it, and she failed.

When I hear calls for politeness in civil discourse I imagine that whoever is asking for this is assuming that we are all equals in these relationships and therefore have the privilege of negotiating what the boundaries of civil discourse is. Some people do in our society. But maybe not as many as you think. The use of the term “civil discourse” to mean something like polite conversations is not what I mean here, but literally discourse about the ways in which we are governed. Boundary setting is about power. You must have power in order to set and assert boundaries. In an abusive relationship there is a power imbalance which prevents the abused party from deciding how they are to be treated. Whether the abuser has physical, psychological, or some other kind of power over the abused, there is something unequal about the relationship that prevents the abused party from having the power to decide. The abused is not being polite. It is not politeness that keeps them behaving in a deferential way. They must defer in order to survive.

On a political scale this means that oppressed groups are not civil because they choose to be, they are deferential because they must be. They were not a party to the negotiation of boundaries and have been prevented from asserting them by social structures and by violence. When we speak against the oppressors as a member of an oppressed group we are by definition speaking out of turn. There is no politeness in this act and can never be. We were not a party to the setting of boundaries. We did not have that power. We are the abused party, not the friend with equal standing. And when we speak as a member of the oppressor class on behalf of oppressed classes we have no membership in we walk in a strange zone, where we violate the terms of politeness of the class we are a member of on behalf of those who didn’t hold the power to negotiate those terms. We must be ever mindful that we are not just creating new oppressive boundaries, and hand over the mic to someone who should have it whenever possible.

I was that polite person. For most of my life. “Civility” seemed so important to me. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Changed my mind. I read the Letter From Birmingham Jail, and it was like being struck by lightening. I was the White Moderate asking people with my actions to stay oppressed until we could find a nice way to liberate them. But there is no nice way to liberate someone else. Fanon saw that as another form of paternalism. And by asking oppressed people to be civil by the standards that they weren’t a party to negotiating I was simply asking them to stay oppressed until it was convenient for me. Until it could be done in a way I could stomach. Turns out I just needed to get a stronger stomach.

Standards of politeness protect people of privilege from having to know that they are privileged. It’s one of the privileges of privilege to not have to know you are privileged. I wish we had a better term than privilege. It’s been misunderstood and gotten such a bad rap. I have had some terrible life experiences. Assault, trauma, poverty, just to name a few. But I do have privilege. The color of my skin doesn’t make my life harder. And there are privileges I lack, being a woman living under patriarchy.

The bottom line is that the politeness that you seek in civic discourse may just be a function of your privilege. Some people don’t have time to wait for their liberation to happen in a way that is polite. Some people’s very lives are on the line, and there is no time to be polite about it.