The safe space is dead, long live the safe space

queeranarchism:

Many people have in the past pointed out that no safe space that depends on the exclusion of people with privilege is safe. Part of the criticism has focussed on the way building a woman-only space or POC-only space or queer-only space forces people to either identify with that label or reject it completely, forcing human diversity into a binary that doesn’t fit.

But the biggest critique has focussed on how a womens safe space is only ever safe for white abled cis etc women. Because a racist women-only space is not safe, an ableist POC-only space is not safe, an islamophobic queer-only space is not safe, etc. To build a safe space this way we would need to allow only poor queer disabled muslim trans intersex women of color and absolutely no one else. That’s not going to build much of a space, is it?

And that’s before you start considering that many of us internalize and reproduce oppression and a lot of us face violence from our own communities because of it. (For a good example: see truscum)

Many spaces have responded by changing their wording to ‘safer space’ while keeping the same rules. I believe that is a cop out, people change the name instead of the space. A racist space, an ableist space, a transphobic space etc is not ‘safer’. We need something much better than that.

If we really care about the safety of everyone, not just the white cis abled people in a space, we need to find more effective means of creating safety than excluding a kind of privileged identity. That strategy is just not working. Instead, we need strategies to create safe behavior, without overusing the option of exciling people (see: disposability in social justice spaces). We need to ask every group (not just the ones we’re focussing our organization on) specifically what they need to be safer. We need to take healing and transformative justice more seriously. We need to stop asking ‘who can we exclude to make this space safer?’ And instead ask the question we should also ask in our families, workplaces, schools and streets: how do we actually make this place safer?

The safe space is dead, long live the safe space