Hm.

[yvannairie]

There's a post going around about the racist, eugenicist origins of MBTI and I've passed it by without reblogging or commenting on it b/c like. Yeah, acknowledging the fucked up origins of my special interest might be the responsible thing to do, but at the same time this is a thing that makes me happy and gives me something to let my thinking revolve around as a way to make myself happy,

and I feel like self-flagellating about how I didn't know I was perpetuating something "bad" would... just be kinda performative, because I am not gonna stop engaging in MBTI analysis, I enjoy it too much, I'm just gonna treat it even more like horoscope when applied to real people and stop bringing it up as a conversation opener.

Comments

[yvannairie]

Yep, yep, yep, you've got my feelings down on it pat. I have seen MBTI used the way people talking about its racist origins talk about and my neurodivergent arse has always been like "YOU DON'T GET IT" because they're leaving half of the most interesting implications of the theory on the table, just like the idiot racists who designed it did.

But also -- I honestly just think self-flagellating about the bad implications of the thing I like (or the bad implications of something anyone else did, I literally just got into an argument with a friend over whether it's okay to endlessly hold one bad-taste joke over someone's head) is actually detrimental to analysing what those bad implications are and how we might go about either alleviating them, reframing them, or questioning them. The damage from me applying it without being aware of the eugenicist agenda behind it has already been done, essentially, if I get hung up on that instead of continuing to analyse the way I use MBTI to structure the world around myself to see a) what kinda damage I did and b) how to not do it in the future.

I've always found perpetually bringing up the badness of something a distraction. Does it matter? How is it relevant? Is it more worth my time to keep thinking about ways to weed out unconscious racist bias from myself rather than keep repeating "I know this thing is racist in origin, but--"