A PREFACE OF SORTS

As people read this piece, many might think that even though I have a right to express myself in any way I want, the topic does not merit the reactions that I have when I talk about it. After all, it is just a dance. Right?

Well, yes… and no. It is a dance, yes, but what is happening to this dance is an extension of larger socio-political dynamics under capitalism, globalization, and cultural neo-colonialism.

That will get its own post, later on. On a future post, I will explain why it is important to contextualize seeing casino as just more than a dance–and by extent, why seeing it as “just a dance” is highly problematic.

To best way I can think of previewing this context so that people understand that this is more than just about a dance is this:

In 2016, the then-president of the U.S., Barack Obama, temporarily normalized relations with the Cuban government. In fact, he was the first U.S. president to visit Cuba in almost 100 years. This meant that U.S. people could travel more easily to Cuba. Cruise ships docked in Havana on a weekly basis. Beyoncé and Jay-Z were photographed in the island, along with many other celebrities. It seemed that everyone in the U.S. wanted to go to Cuba, a country that had been off-limits since 1959 despite being 90 miles away from the border.

And all the while, I kept hearing this from people (fill in the blanks if you either said this yourself or heard it said):

“I have to go to Cuba before…”

You see, there is an implicit understanding of the effects of capitalism on a culture. The sentiment behind that statement was U.S. people would go to Cuba and destroy its culture with their businesses and overall love of capitalism. McDonald’s and Starbucks would begin to sprout in the streets of Cuba, and the authentic Cuba would be no more. People wanted to go before that happened.

Herein lies the paradox: While U.S. people seem to be aware of what capitalism can do, they simultaneously and collectively seem to choose to turn a blind eye to its effects when it is uncomfortable to them to admit how they actively participate in the culture-consuming machine that is capitalism.

I hope that you keep this in mind as you read this piece.

This has never been about just a dance.

Since I started the blog in 2014, every time I have posted something that is even mildly controversial, I have come to expect at least one comment about how I come off as angry, rude or bitter, and how I should be changing my tone and/or the ways I say things so that people are more receptive to what I have to say. As the saying goes, one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar.1

For the longest time, this bothered me to no end because it did not matter how I tried to put things, I would always get this type of feedback. For the longest time, I thought there was something wrong with me. Eventually, I started to believe that I was the person whom some people said I was. Needless to say, this had an effect on my mental health and the way I perceived myself and interacted with others.

Then I learned about tone policing, and everything made so much more sense. It finally gave voice to why I was feeling the way I was, and it provided me with a framework with which to analyze and address these types of comments.

Essentially, tone policing stems from the idea that if things are not said in a certain way, the message is invalid. Tone policing usually occurs as a response to people who are having an emotional reaction to something they are experiencing personally.

When people tone-police, they may say the following (and this is not an exhaustive list by any means):

  • “Calm down” or “Chill.”
  • “It’s hard to take you seriously when you’re so emotional.”
  • “Your language is divisive.”
  • “You’d have a lot more people on your side if you weren’t so rude.
  • “If only you said things differently…”
  • “You sound like…”

Tone policing is problematic because a) it evades engaging with the actual contents of the message, and b) it dehumanizes the person by suggesting that what they are feeling is invalid unless it is expressed in a certain way. That “certain way” is usually defined by the people who have created the problem, or who uphold the system that created the problem.

In other words, it’s a way to dismiss the message and not take accountability.

As such, tone policing is a form of oppression. It keeps systematically oppressed people and the issues they raise silenced. This is why, historically, tone policing has been widely used by those in power to suppress the concerns of minority groups and maintain the status quo.

Inded, the intention behind tone policing is not to “push back” against something that could be stated more “effectively” (code for “less aggressively”). People who have experienced tone policing will tell you that that is one big, stinky load of BS.

The intention behind tone policing is, and has always been, to maintain things as they are.

As Chanda Prescod-Weinstein puts it, when people tone-police, “what they are really communicating is, ‘I don’t care about your experience with oppression or how it makes you feel. I only care about how it is discomfiting for me to hear about it.'”2

At the end of the day, tone policing preserves the privilege of the people who do not want to have to experience–or want to outright ignore–a certain issue and are thus unwilling to have uncomfortable conversations when these issues are brought up. In other words, people who do not want the metaphorical mirror held up to their faces. As a result, tone policing prevents people from acknowledging their role in upholding oppressive systems of power–which, ironically, they do when they tone-police. 

What’s more, it puts the burden on the speaker to “care” for the feelings of those who are listening at the expense of suppressing one’s own. Indeed, people who have internalized the oppression of tone policing will often think twice about saying something, or spend copious amounts of time thinking about how to say something so that it is not labeled as “angry”. They know that the moment this happens, whatever they say will be dismissed as a “rant”. The message will be invalidated. 

And their feelings, their experiences, their very humanity, will be erased.

As “angry” and “bitter” as some people may perceive what I write on this blog, whatever is written here has already passed through an internal filter, thanks to me having internalized the tone policing comments over the years. Believe it or not, I do think about how the words I write may be received. At the end of the day, I want people to listen to what I have to say. As a case in point, during a recent interview published on this blog with Kuriko La Japomana, I specifically expressed this concern. While we were on the topic of how to to keep an open mind when having difficult conversations about cultural appropriation within a capitalist market that upholds white supremacist power structures, I told Kuriko, “I’ve spent the day thinking about writing an article titled ‘Sh*t I’ve had to hear non-Cubans say about Casino,’ but I know if I publish something like that, I’ll get torn apart.”

So yeah, that’s me, tone policing myself, internalizing oppression. Thinking about other people’s feelings when I talk about how they engage with my culture, so that they don’t get too “offended” when their actions rarely take into consideration how they might offend me as a Cuban.

Because let’s be honest. Most non-Cubans who engage with Cuban culture…when do they ever think about how their actions–teaching a class, doing a performance, making a video and posting it online–might be perceived by the people of Cuba? Especially when what is being done has very little to do with how Cubans dance? If they did think about their actions and their consequences, this blog would likely not exist because a lot of the problems that it is critiquing would not occur. 

When people engage with my culture because it looks “cool” and “fun”, or for whatever other reason that does not have to do with Cuban culture but rather serves some personal end, cultural sensitivity or appreciation is not really a concern. Anything goes, as I have extensively talked about in this blog.3

And when Cubans see that, they have a right to get upset and express it.

In the same way that Dominicans have a right to complain about what has happened to bachata.

In the same way that Angolans have a right to criticize the ways in which kizomba is being commodified and fetishized abroad.

This is not a Cuban issue only. These conversations are happening everywhere. If you look for them, you will find them. It’s all part of living in a capitalist society that prioritizes the need to sell something in whatever way possible over the needs of a culture to exist authentically. It’s all part of a bigger, systemic issue: like racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and the other many -isms and phobias that malign our society.

And of course, you will also find non-natives of these cultures telling the natives to “chill” and “calm down.”

Which is also part of a bigger, systemic issue.

During the month of February of this year, I decided to do a “Cuban Salsa Detox” on the Son y Casino’s Facebook page. To quote myself, the detox was “ a video series which purpose is to educate the public about how CASINO is danced in Cuba. The idea of a “detox” is to get rid of something from the body. Similarly, through daily exposure to authentic CASINO clips, this video series seeks to get your mind rid of all the inauthentic ideas and concepts that “Cuban salsa” instructors/videos have created about how Cubans dance.”

The detox was a tremendous success, and the videos were shared widely by many people. When I started looking at how these videos were shared, however, I began noticing that, even though I was doing the detox precisely to raise awareness about casino not being the Cuban way of salsa dancing that non-Cubans think it is, people were actively sharing the videos–along with my description of the video–and calling it salsa.

Every time I saw one of those videos shared as an example of “salsa” dancing, it felt like a slap in the face. Here I was, trying to educate people about my culture (because people have historically engaged with my culture without much need to educate themselves), literally telling people, “This is not salsa”–in a very nice way, mind you–to which some people responded: “Meh. Whatever.”

And so, one day, I snapped. I had an emotional reaction. 

And I published this:

Which I then followed in the comment sections with:

Am I upset in these comments? Clearly. Do my feelings invalidate larger systemic issues, such as how non-Cubans deliberately reshape aspects of other cultures to fit their own ends (i.e. cultural appropriation)? Do my emotions erase the ways in which people actively uphold the systems of power that allow for this to happen?

Only if you let it.

As this person (and everyone who liked her comment) clearly did:

I hope that this article has been clear enough about what constitutes tone policing so that you recognized it in real time when you saw it in the picture above. If you did not notice tone policing, please read it again or as many times as you need. It’s there.

If anything, responding emotionally to an issue should validate what is being said, not have the opposite effect. Indeed, an emotional response should alert the listener to the real and personal impact of the issue. It should make it transparently clear that what they are listening to is important to the speaker, that it has real-life effects.

Which is why it’s quite devastating to the person’s mental health when those emotions get invalidated, discarded, suppressed.

No one tells a person who is grieving during a eulogy to change their tone, to not be angry or cry, to not scream or wail. The tone is an instinct part of the message. Without the tone, there are countless layers of life experiences shared with the lost one that would be erased. We would be robots reciting facts and dates.

Ugh.

It’s tiring, trying to defend my right to speak about my culture in the way that I see fit, not in the way non-Cubans want me to.

At any rate, here are some concrete steps to stop engaging in tone policing:

  • The right reaction is to listen, check where and how you went wrong and do better in future.
  • Don’t be quick to condemn the anger, instead examine the root of the problem.
  • Focus should be on the issue and not the tone in which the issue is expressed.
  • Anger, frustration and pain are valid emotions. People (including you) are allowed to be angry and emotional when you are being mistreated. They do not owe anyone any sort of explanation and it doesn’t make them unreasonable or rude.4

Ultimately, tone policing says more about the person receiving the message than the person conveying it. It speaks to the unwillingness of the listener to actively engage with and empathetically respond to what the speaker is saying. As the bullet points above suggest, it requires the listener to understand, at the very least, that the speaker is reacting to a problem–and that yes, the listener might be part of the problem. 

So no: I do not need to change my tone. The work is not on me. The work is totally, absolutely, and unquestionably on you.

Retrieved from: https://whatisessential.org/blog/no-we-wont-calm-down-emotion-and-reason-dialogue

Difficult conversations are labeled “difficult” for a reason. In these conversations, people often have to face their own role in an issue that affects someone else.

Generally speaking, people do not like doing that.

Case in point: when I linked this article in response to the person who tone-policed me (see picture above) in order to hopefully make her see what she was doing to me through an analogous scenario with which she was likely more familiar, she laughed at it and called me “stubborn.”5

If living in the U.S. has taught me anything, it is that many people are very unwilling to accept (or even see) the role that they play in larger power structures, and the benefits and privileges that are bestowed upon them based on arbitrary criteria created precisely to maintain these power structures.

(And no, this is not about white people only. The insidiousness of these power structures is that they are often internalized by those oppressed by them.6 When it comes to the commodification of Cuban culture within a capitalist market, pretty much everybody who participates in this is in a position of privilege in relation to that culture, for they get to set what they want “Cuban culture” to mean and be to them.)

Difficult conversations bring out the gaps that we have in our understanding. They make us see things that we had not considered before. More than anything, they make us confront our role in the oppression of others. I’ve been taken to task by people from backgrounds different than mine about things I do not fully understand about their experience. I’ve listened and taken the time to process how I’m complicit in upholding the status quo so that I do not continue recycling the oppression.

I am asking you to do the same.

So, when it comes to I or any other Cuban expressing their views about how their culture is commodified, fetishized, and reshaped abroad for the benefit and entertainment of the non-Cuban consumer…

…will you just listen with empathy and humanity?

Notes

  1. Or as Sheldon Cooper would say, “You can catch even more flies with manure. What’s your point?” ↩︎
  2. See full article here. ↩︎
  3. For an in-depth analysis of the effects of cultural appropriation on the dance of casino, see this article. ↩︎
  4. Retrieved from this website. ↩︎
  5. From the article: “when people of color become (rightfully) emotional in discussions about race or racism, they are often told to ‘fix their tone’ or to ‘relax’ — in order to have ‘a more civilized conversation.’ When people of color call out microaggressions or challenge other problematic behaviors in others, they are sometimes said to be ‘escalating situations’ or ‘picking fights,’ instead of being viewed as advocating for justice or equity.” ↩︎
  6. In fact, a black woman told me to “Chill” on that same post I referenced. There is an entire stereotype created around “angry” black women that is used precisely to silence them. Read more about its effect here. ↩︎