The BODcast - S2: E4

Well well welcome back - it’s Episode Four, Season 2 of The BODcast! 

Today’s episode is about tone policing - have you heard of it?

If you’re Black, Indigenous, a person of colour - and especially if you’re not a cis man - you’ll have experienced it even if the term doesn’t ring a bell.

You might already know from TV and films black women in media have long been limited to characters who are sassy, sexy or sweet housekeepers.

The ‘angry Black woman’ stereotype has existed since at least the 1920s, and isn’t limited to American culture. It is seen most often in US sitcoms and one of the most notable recent mentions of it comes from a NY Times article where Allesandra Stanley penned the sentence “When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called “How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman.” 

If you’ve ever been told that you need to ‘lower your voice’, ‘watch your tone’, or to ‘calm down’ - if you know what it feels like to be so frustrated because you know you were making a valid point but the only thing in question is why you’re so angry all the time… then you know what tone policing is.

Tone policing tries to draw attention away from the truth (or maybe the falsity) of a statement by attacking the way in which it was presented rather than the actual statement itself.

This is something we see online and real life and it disproportionately affects marginalised people.

Ijeoma Olou, in her book ‘So You Want To Talk About Race’ says, “Tone policing is when someone (usually the privileged person) in a conversation or situation about oppression shifts the focus of the conversation from the oppression being discussed to the way it is being discussed. Tone policing prioritizes the comfort of the privileged person in the situation over the oppression of the disadvantaged person.”

I have experienced tone policing quite often as a fat person of colour. These intersecting identities are relevant when you consider that in my 20s, I often felt like the sassy sidekick from a 90s sitcom. I was referred to as being ‘big and black’ - which made me entertaining but also someone  you ‘shouldn’t mess with’. 

An ex-partner loved to say “You never mess with an angry black woman who’s got her finger pointed at you.” That same ex-partner compared me being frustrated, angry or crying in a conversation to being abusive or violent - when it turns out, the way I was being gaslit and manipulated was much closer to that. Using tone policing tactics in public and body-shaming in private meant that I believed a lot of the things I was told, internalising racism and in turn believing that the quieter, less ‘sassy’ version of myself was the better one.

The difficulty that comes with working in online activism is the way you are often expected to put your own trauma aside to be able to discuss things. I do feel that what I do is something I have been ‘called’ to do - I do it because I believe in the power of social change - but it can be exhausting to be asked to comment on things or to speak uncomfortable truths. I know that sometimes it isn’t possible for people to do this, and it’s a boundary that online creators often find hard to uphold. 

One of the ways that people deflect and tone police is to call someone who’s asking them to examine their actions ‘a bully’. They start with aggression, demanding that you explain to them why they’ve done the wrong thing because they just don’t get it. They may even gaslight you and say “I didn’t say/do that” in defence of something harmful they’ve done or said.

You MIGHT try to explain, but you don’t owe someone the explanation. It’s likely that you might become emotional while trying to do what’s being asked, and this is a perfectly reasonable way to respond.

Imagine you tell someone they’ve posted something that shows an anti-fat bias. You are feeling triggered or upset - or maybe just sick of it! - and you explain. The person sees you getting upset and says “you don’t need to get so upset about it, you’re being irrational’. 

If you continue to explain, getting frustrated at the way they’re deliberately misunderstanding you, then they might try to say that you’ve hurt THEIR feelings. They’ll bring up (most likely) unrelated issues and trauma of their own, asking “how could you hurt me like this when I am vulnerable?!”

They might accuse you of being unwilling to educate them, and that you’re not being ‘nice’ which makes it hard for them to listen to what you’re saying. 

Some messages I have received that reflect this exact situation include:

• All you needed to do was explain this to me in a nice way

• I did something unintentionally without understanding the impact

• You’re a nasty bully and you’ve really hurt me

• This is an issue I didn’t have enough understanding on. But my willingness to learn just surely tanked.

Yep - they are REAL messages. 

So… when I say the topic of tone policing is one I am sure you might find interesting, this is one of the reasons why. People who put pride flags and ‘ally’ in their Instagram bio might still only be showing up for the people they see are worthy of their allyship. Our ongoing commitment to expanding our understanding of others has to be genuine, and not just for the aesthetics.

Someone admitting that they would give up on trying to learn anything about how anti-fat bias hurts people… even yes, if performed as a one-off comical video for the internet or an entire character in a series of films, whatever … because YOU as a fat person didn’t make them easy to hear it?

Yeah - well you know what you can do with that.

An article from 2018 suggests that the idea of tone policing is flawed, because “in telling someone that you have a right to express yourself as angrily as you want to without them raising an objection, you’re also inherently telling them that they don't have a right to be angry about the way you're addressing them.”

I can see the logic in this viewpoint - however, there is so much value in being able to wrap a phrase around the feeling of being invalidated this way. Like all aspects of communication, nuance and context are key and mistakes will surely be made. 

If you are genuinely trying to give the space to people whose voices have been silenced for far too long, being called in and asked to consider the impact of your actions will be uncomfortable but not impossible.

Thanks again for being here for episode four of The BODcast  - and until next time, remember: your body, my body, every body is a good body.