i feel like all i do is take care of myself, my plants, my friends and family, manage my depression and sometimes do laundry. one of my supervisors says i am “working for peace and good in this world”, that i am “helping the helpers”. a therapist-friend today said that was true and that once we are out of training and can choose our clients more ourselves that will be true even more so. most days i can see it. what do you think about it? thank you for your blog!
I have… three thoughts on this, I think.
- Part of the definition of treason is giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy. Aid and comfort are no little things.
For me, posting cat pictures is a form of activism. I use the term “doughnut dolly of the revolution” a bit jokingly, because like Doughnut Dollies used to feel about themselves, I sometimes feel a bit inessential and useless. On the other hand. Most of the hardcore activists I know–the ones who negotiate and form coalitions and go out on picket lines and protest and testify to legislative committees and run nonprofits–are so burned out you can smell the smoke coming out from under their hoods. And have been for years. My girlfriend hasn’t totally recovered from the work she did against GWB’s war in Iraq.
So I do, in fact, aim to be a source of comfort, refuge, and resupply for people who go out and fight on the front lines of social justice. I blog the way I do in reaction to the intense level of media overload people got in 2015 and 16, where they couldn’t even check their fannish social media without getting overwhelmed by world events. So on days when something terrible is happening, I don’t think I can meaningfully contribute commentary or spreading awareness with any more skill or insight than 100,000 people are already doing–but I can reblog cat pictures from a source that’s fundamentally friendly.
One major issue I have with leftist activism is that it chronically undervalues work of nurturing, tending, cleaning, and maintaining. Who runs your bake sales? Who tends your wounds? Who cleans your clothes? Who makes food? Who cleans up after? That is a massive amount of work that’s taken absolutely for granted.
- How we choose to work can be massively political. I had a professor, during grad school, who insisted that we could not let clients focus on the systemic problems they faced. If we let them blame anyone else for their problems, he said, they would never improve. (He worked for the US Army, convincing servicemembers that their children’s misbehaviour wasn’t due to having been moved around all the time, their spouse’s anxiety wasn’t related them being redeployed to Iraq for their fifth tour, their own bad moods weren’t related to traumatic brain injury; they just needed to take personal responsibility)
And one of the most formative clients for me during my own training was a Black university student who described how everyone in her class called her “sassy” and copied anything she said or did that seemed a little outside the norm, even though she felt that she wasn’t any weirder or louder than anyone else–or was she? Was there really something wrong with her? Was she ridiculous, worth being mocked? She drew in on herself like a setting sun, a star losing lustre, as she questioned herself.
I was still feeling my way, as a white girl reading a bunch of work by Black feminists and womanists, but even I knew about Black women being called too loud, too aggressive, too sassy. I very tentatively said, “It’s so upsetting, being picked on in this way that feels unfair and… honestly sounds kind of racist.”
“It does, doesn’t it,” she said, and dropped her head into her hands, knees drawn together. “Oh my god! It’s so racist! It’s so fucking racist!” And then she screamed quietly into her palms and did a little dance in her chair, and lifted up her head, and listed off all the things they’d said that they were racist–all the Black professionals and experts in her field they didn’t know when she mentioned them–how frustrating it was–how she’d dealt with racism in the past–how her family dealt with racism in the past–how much she missed her family–the festival she was going to in two weeks to reconnect with her Caribbean relatives.
I didn’t have to do anything for the rest of the session, just nod and make encouraging noises. That one little bit of validation linked her back into an entire system of resistance and community that gave her the strength to resist the pressures on her and renew her sense of pride and joy in who she was.
- I think there’s a role therapists could have, and often do not have, in leftist movements. I keep thinking about it, but I don’t know how to make it fit.
Circling back to “every activist I know has burnout”: The way modern activism is done is very psychologically costly. We have discussions about “mental health and self-care” that kind of look like “BURN CARE WHILE LEAPING OVER LAVA: Remember that the lava is hot! Take frequent breaks to let your feet cool off!” Like, what if we did not have to leap over lava. What if an ordinary person’s activism didn’t have to involve large amounts of outrage, terror, and helplessness to fuel their work. What if we put resources into mental health as well.
And like I said, I don’t know what to do with this thought. Should I offer activist group members discount rates? Volunteer with an org as a counsellor? Suggest ways groups could make their members’ mental health better? Take my skills as a mediator into union disputes between nonprofit workers and management? Write articles about how somebody ought to address something about this problem? I’m not actually drowning in good ideas here.
I feel like there could be very targeted and effective work that we could do, that often gets ignored or discounted because the Left has a very ascetic bread-and-water, sacrifice-everything-for-the-revolution view of what activism should look like. And maybe we should start talking about it.
Tag: activism
“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo.
I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and
electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings
on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and
giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room.
They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to
pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried
fish to go with their rice.They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments
they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a
month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know
how to use them.”So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these
same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the
very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney
characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor
organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?It took a very long time for him to understand the question.
When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him
and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in
the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one
person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large,
organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers
to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning
the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing
was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite
of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your
political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal
lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping
fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.These very different understandings of social change came up
again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would
give talks about the need for international protections for the right
to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it
didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those
talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers
are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your
clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still
find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks
about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to
seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global
greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me
what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can
I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t
do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals,
even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in
stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy,
is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge
together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.The irony is that people with relatively little power tend
to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power.
The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well
that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even
their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act
not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To
try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of
workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor
laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual
powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand
structural changes.In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how
powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even
individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and
privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily
small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or
town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal
work— to others.”
I gave up Holier-Than-Thou ‘Social Justice’ back at the end of 2015 when I realized it was neither productive nor appropriate.
1) it makes you stressed out chasing and giving off the image that you are perfect and free of mistakes or ‘problematic behaviors’
2) it stops you from growing as a person and activist
3) it makes you come across as an actual asshole
4) it makes you defensive in the face of being held accountable. You think you can do no wrong and do not respond well to any challenge of that.
5) it makes you blow things way out of proportion. You get so busy trying to be Wokest of Them All that you’ll argue and send incredibly aggressive and sometimes violent messages to people over things like iPhones.
6) you start to lose sight of your goals as a person passionate about social equality. It’s all a performance now.
I learned before I got really bad and I’m so much better for it.
I’m reblogging this not as a nock on online activism or the stuff we do, but rather the culture that’s formed around it and warped how we do it. All of this is relevant and its become a bad place with unproductive “activism.” There’s a better way.
Seriously, that sort of thing gets under my skin like nothing else. It’s… just… it despairs the Josie
I can’t believe that young folks taking part in fandom these days are coming away with these conservative ideas about content and thought purity and thinking that this is the new progressive activism. This idea that portraying a thing convinces society as a whole to emulate said thing. They scoff when 60 year old pundits on TV scaremonger about video games causing children to gravitate towards violence (think of the children) but then jump down the throats of queer women in fandom for writing about their sexuality in adult spaces lest a child chance upon it (think of the children).
They fail to see the irony in the fact that, by doing this, they are seeking out content which by their own ruleset many of them are too young to be seeing, and in that their new activism is the same thing that the conservative right has been levering as a tool for oppression for centuries. They can’t see that irony because the fear of violence social expulsion and branding as a “literal child abuser” (because anyone who disagrees must of course be demonized) has transformed any dissenting thoughts into badthink that must be blocked out at all costs!!!
By the way, it is always queer women who end up the target of these campaigns. Straight cis men are seen as too unapproachable; we queer women are picked out because they see us as soft targets – they feel that they can exploit that and exercise their thrilling witch hunt muscles on us without facing serious repercussions. And they still get to feel like heroes at the end of the day, because once we disagree with the prevailing purity wisdom we become bad nonpeople. Forget the fact that this is the same oppression that queer women have faced for decades, except now it’s coming from the progressive left as well as the right.
It’s pretty horrifying. It reminds me a little of how terfs use wrapping-paper activism to front their regressive ideals as with a progressive facade, convincing themselves that they’re in the right, really. And to be honest, I think that what some of these antis are doing is just as dangerous as the terf corner of feminist activism. And coming from a trans woman, fuck, that means a lot when I say it. You have no idea.
@nuggetemily this was the post!
Okay, friends, let’s talk about going to protests and weaponizing our whiteness, if in fact we are white.
You know what the protesters who marched with Dr. King wore? Their best. Their clergy stoles, their suits. If you’re a doctor or a nurse? Wear your scrubs. If you’re a parent? Wear your PTA shirt if it’s too hot for a suit. If you’re a student? Dress like you’re going to go volunteer somewhere nice, or wear a t-shirt that proclaims you a member of your high school band, your drama group, your church youth group. Whatever it is, make sure it’s right there with your white face.
This is literally the tactic of the people who marched with King in the 60s, and we need to bring it back, and bring it back HARD.
I do this all the time when I go to marches. I wear my cutest, least-offensive geeky t-shirt, crocs and black pants, or I wear my t-shirt that mentions my kid’s school district, or now I’ll wear the pink t-shirt that says I’m part of the Sisterhood at my shul. If it’s cold enough, I wear a cardigan and jeans and sit my ass in my wheelchair. (I need to anyway.) I put signs on my wheelchair that say things like ‘I love my trans daughter’ and ‘love for all trans children’ or something else that applies to the event. Dress like you are going to an interview if you can, or make yourself look like a parent going to pick up a gallon of milk at the corner store. Make yourself “respectable.” Use respectability politics and whiteness AS A WEAPON.
Fuck yes I will weaponize the fact that I look like a white soccer mom. And you should do this too if you can. Weaponize the fuck out of your whiteness. If you are disabled and comfortable with doing so, turn ableism on its head and weaponize it. Make it so that the cameras that WILL be pointed at you see your whiteness, see your status as a parent, see your status as a community member. See you in your wheelchair or with your cane. If you have privilege or a status that allows you to use it as a weapon or a shield, use it as a shield to defend others or a weapon to break through the bullshit.
This has a fair number of notes, so maybe it’s already been mentioned but …
The “Sunday Best” thing from the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s & 60s, or wearing markers of an assigned profession (e.g. scrubs) is an established tactic of social movements. They’re part of what Charles Tilly (one of the academic god father’s of social movement theory) called “WUNC” displays. WUNC can be broken down to:
- worthiness: sober demeanor (!!!); neat clothing (!!!); presence of clergy, dignitaries, and mothers with children;
- unity: matching badges, headbands, banners, or costumes (!!!); arching in ranks; singing and chanting;
- numbers: headcounts, signatures on petitions, messages from constituents, filling streets;
- commitment: braving bad weather; visible participation by the old and handicapped (!!!); resistance to repression; ostentatious sacrifice (!!!), subscription, and/or benefaction. (Tilly, 2004, pg. 4 – tumblr-style emphasis my own)
While I’m very much in support of anti-fascist protesting in whatever form it takes, especially when engaged in a counter-protest, one of the great tragedies of the American political climate right now is that we’ve really forgotten some of the biggest lessons of the Civil Rights Era. King didn’t trot out fresh-faced students, church women in big fancy hats, or the elderly and disabled without knowing what he was doing. He (and the other members of his affiliated organizations) knew that if the police were photographed using violent repression against a mother holding her child, or a student in slacks, a cardigan, and Buddy Holly glasses, it would go over very differently than if they were photographed beating up “unruly thugs”. Their presence alone would be notable to people locally, especially in the heat of the south. But so would photographs of repressive violence against “nice people” that would then get picked up by the national media, and maybe in markets that were more sensitive to racial oppression.
[And like, there are other factors as well. People also sometimes think the Civil Rights Era erupted spontaneously from Jim Crowe and segregation in the South, and those are giant factors (”depravation” and “grievance”, in jargon), but there were also legislative things and court rulings brewing since the 1920s (the NAACP had been trying Civil Rights cases, and looking for test cases over the years), and the Cold War meant that America needed to appear to be the perfect image of opportunity and equality (together these things manifest as an “opportunity structure”. again, jargon). Not to get to down on protest as its own thing, but the structuralists do have a bit of a point.]
… There are other types of anti-fascist counter-protesting that have developed in various ways through the years. And like, a big thing in social movement theory overall is that while there are common tactics (”protest repertoires” in jargon), historical contexts matter a lot and some groups will have to do more dramatic performances of the WUNC to get attention. There’s also the move revolutionary antifa-type riot mentality. I’m not gonna call that one wrong either, mind, but since the Civil Rights Movement was brought up, it should be noted that those two forms of protest differed intentionally.
Anyway, as someone turning in a dissertation on this in a couple of days, here’s some drive-by political-sociology. If you want to learn more about the research behind processes of social movements, where they succeeded, and where they failed, I totally recommend checking out:
- Charles Tilly (2004) Social Movements 1768-2008,
- Sidney Tarrow (2011) Strangers at the Gates: Movements and States in Contentious Politics,
- Sidney Tarrow (1998) Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics,
- Frances Fox Piven & Richard A. Cloward (1988) Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed and How They Fail, (this is on the Civil Rights Era protests and the somewhat fraught legislative follow-up exactly)
- McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (2001) The Dynamics of Contention
(McAdam has a quite well-regarded book on the Civil Rights Era specifically. I haven’t read it personally as it relates less to my regional context. However like, that’s worth noting and looking into. Also all of these are stodgey academic texts, but they’re not uncommon in university libraries, or even in some bookstores. They’re also all a bit old now and shouldn’t cost you a ton online.)
As a note – My point here isn’t to descend from the Ivory Tower of Academia and say “you people on the streets are doing this wrong!!1!”. Theory doesn’t always match up with Practice, and as noted by pretty much every notable theorist anyway… Context matters a TON. Not all movements will be able to use the same practices or performances. Sometimes their inaccessible, sometimes they just don’t have the cross-context appeal. It’s about experimentation and finding opportunity. To be clear, this isn’t about me telling folks how it should be done. Still, I think it’s worth sharing information when it’s available, especially if people who might not know are trying to draw specific links to historical cases. Social movement theorists have pretty much all agreed that WUNC displays (along with other factors like media diffusion) are super duper important and can be recognized in movements across historical contexts. I think it’s worth it for younger activists who might be looking for protest repertoires that work for their movement as it’s developing to take heed of the successes and failures of the past. Especially since a lot of it is either a) so much a part of history and culture that it doesn’t really get examined for its constituent bits, or b) has been mythologized to the point that it’s hard to look for really good popular historical information on its technical processes.
(If people have questions, feel free to DM me. I might be a little slow the next couple of days as I finish up proof-reading and checking all my citations but yeah. Let’s share knowledge and smash the fash.)
The Nazis of 2017 gained the ground they have with articles about how they were “dapper.” That was a political choice, and it worked. It snowed a lot of gullible goyim. People refused for almost a year to call “the alt-right” Nazis because they looked “like average white people.”
Nazis see their whiteness as a weapon already. Get yours out there and show them – they will never sway everyone. “If you have privilege or a status that allows you to use it as a weapon or a shield, use it as a shield to defend others or a weapon to break through the bullshit.”
Not someone who typically adds to an already long post, but I have done the whole dressing dapper af thing and it WORKS.
A few years ago there was this big city council vote about an anti-discrimination ordinance that was going to be passed in my relatively progressive, but still very southern hometown. There were huge protests on both sides, both for and against the ordinance, with each side wearing a specific color (red was for, purple against) to show which side they supported. Most of the people against the ordinance were bussed in by hyper conservative churches and many didn’t even live in the town. It was a lot of old people and many of them wore nice clothing. I knew this would probably be the case, so I, being a southern girl at heart and knowing how these people work, broke out my crinoline and nicest red dress and perfect white gloves. I curled my hair and put on makeup and I showed my ass up to the protest. Made a point to be the picture of a perfect southern belle. And it threw the bigoted assholes for a serious loop. It was like they were short circuiting or something. They kept telling me how I reminded them of someone from their church or how pretty I looked and “how would a nice girl like you like a big cross dressing man in the ladies room???” which of course allowed me to explain, ever so nicely, that they were being bigoted assholes. And they Did Not Like that, because I was forcing them to look in the mirror, at someone who looks like them/someone they claim to be “protecting” and question their motives and beliefs.
Seriously guys, it fucking works. Weaponize the fact that you look like the oppressor and throw it in their faces.To be quite honest, I do not think WUNC would work in current climate. In Poland, only violent protestors are ever listened to, and nonviolent ones are being accused of the most horrible crimes, even when they are nurses on hunger strike. And please bear in mind that in America government has much more social consent to use violence (in democratic Europe, it has zero). Plus nowadays the government is explicitly on the side of the nazi, and the nazi do not care how you look or behave, as for them you are a rat in a tuxedo.
Yeah, I would imagine it definitely depends a lot on those types of things.
In the US, there’s still a lot of lingering influence from the Puritans, so the general public tends to be really focused on how you look, on whether you “look” like a worthy and good person to them or not.
The Puritans had this idea that if you were privileged/rich, or if you had a good life in general, it meant you were a good person. Because it meant that God was rewarding you for being a good person. And therefore, if you’re oppressed, it’s because you’re secretly bad/unworthy.
So there’s this centuries-long culture of basically retconning people who have bad experiences, trying to find a reason to blame them. Basically so that you can pretend whatever happened to them would never happen to you. Victim-blaming.
Plus, the US is ridiculously large, thanks to our bullshit colonialism and genocide. Which makes it really difficult to govern. And the focus on states being able to mostly govern themselves also takes some power away from the federal government.
So even though we have a system of government, in a lot of ways public opinion is just as powerful as the government is. If the media sees a large force of “good” people speaking out against Nazis, (who are by definition “bad” people, except they tricked the media into treating them well for a while by dressing “good”), then the media jumps on board and starts telling everybody that there are bad terrible Nazis around. And that Good Americans are fighting them.
And then politicians either lose political power by ignoring that, or gain it by going along with public opinion.
I mean, that’s a simplistic explanation. The current administration doesn’t care what people think, because the current “President” is not a politician. But when public opinion is against everything he does, the politicians in his party stop supporting him enough to pass the kinds of legislation he wants.
TL;DR: around here, violent protesters are immediately seen as Bad, and therefore their positions must be Wrong. (Which is a big part of why the police does use violence against protesters. Because the public will immediately assume that they would only have used violence against Bad and Wrong Violent People.)
If you can make it look like it would be really, really dishonorable to use violence against you, because you are so clearly Good, because you have a suit and tie on or some shit, then the government/police can’t use violence without looking like THEY’RE Bad and therefore Wrong.
It’s a fucking ridiculous place TBH.
You are just as responsible for your fandom activism as creators are for their fanworks.
More so, in fact, because your primary purpose is telling people what to do or not do. Any instructive value in creative work is understood to be subordinate to entertainment and self-expression, but if you’re out there explicitly advocating for something, you’d damn well be ready to own it. Including all its implications and potential negative effects.
That means: If you’re urging people not to create some kind of fanwork because you think that’ll protect a vulnerable group, you’d better be ready to account for the members of that group who make it, enjoy it, and find solace in it.
That means: If you’re urging retaliation against creators, you are absofuckinglutely responsible for the harm that befalls them as a result, including harm to members of the group you’re trying to protect.
That means: If you’re holding everyone else to high standards about how they could affect someone with a trigger-able mental illness, you need to hold yourself to the same standards, including effects on people whose anxiety manifests as over-scrupulosity or intrusive thoughts.
That means: If you’re shaming erotica you find “gross,” you don’t get to blow off conversations about how that shame plays into conservative sexual-purity enforcement. You don’t get to wash your hands of the implications, whether or not that’s what you meant. Explicit activism has far more duty to consider indirect implications than anyone’s personal pursuit of sexual fulfillment does.
That means: If your activism has garnered you a huge follower count, you are responsible for the exposure you inflict on the people you pick fights with, and the dogpiles or hate mobs you incite. This can be a tough thing to learn if you get popular overnight, and even well-meaning people fumble with it at first, but it’s something you have to figure out. And don’t fucking give me that “it was just a block list, I didn’t mean for anyone to go into their askboxes on anon and tell them all to kill themselves” crap, the only people fooled by it are the ones looking for an excuse to be fooled.
That means: You are responsible for assessing the relative power and influence of the people you’re addressing, and not griefing marginalized subcultural small fry over artistic sins that are far more egregious among canon creators. Especially canon creators who are just as accessible on Twitter as fanwork creators are on Tumblr.
(Pre-emptive response to objections to the preceding paragraph: Only going after people you know you have social power over isn’t activism, it’s bullying with a thin veneer of activist lingo smeared over it. Only trying to clean up your immediate surroundings isn’t activism, it’s complaining to the local homeowners’ association–valid enough if someone’s running their chainsaw at 2am, but if you just can’t stand Betty’s problematic lawn flamingoes, dressing it up as concern for what tacky decorations say about the neighborhood is a little precious.)
If any of that is too burdensome for you, I suggest you take the advice fandom activists tend to have for fanartists and authors: if you can’t do it without doing damage and you’re not prepared to deal with the consequences, abstain. Restrict your activism to shit that’s not going to hurt people, even if that’s just being the best role model you can be.
You want to set yourself up as a moral authority? You want to dictate what people can and can’t create without activist blowback? That’s power–and yes, local power in a community can exist irrespective of society-wide systemic advantage. With power comes responsibility. Use it wisely or not, as you choose, but don’t act like you get to hold anyone accountable for their art’s indirect potential to harm if you don’t want to be accountable for your direct advocacy.
Addendum: if you coerce someone into disclosing an intimate trauma or outing themselves as a member of a vulnerable group on a public blog just to avoid harassment… yes, you bear partial responsibility for any subsequent abuse of that information. Also, fuck you, fuck your “activism,” and maybe try taking a break and minding your own fucking business for a while.
Tired of the old “your problem doesn’t affect me, therefore it’s not real” game? Try one of these fun alternatives!
- Your problem is real, but since it doesn’t affect me it’s not important
- Your problem is real, but first let’s talk about this other, more urgent problem that neither one of us can meaningfully engage with
- Your problem is real and important, but I’ve framed it as a subset or consequence of a problem that does affect me, so the best way to address your problem is to focus exclusively on my problem
- Your problem is as urgent as you say it is, but I’ve decided that it’s an inevitable consequence of humanity being intrinsically awful, and I’d lose Enlightened Cynicism points if I actually tried to do anything about it
- Your problem is awful, but I’m reluctant to act on it because of some purely hypothetical consequence that I have no evidence is even a thing, yet am firmly convinced would be worse than the status quo
Bonus round:
- Your problem’s solution is clearly a radical restructuring of all of our cultural, political and economic institutions, and advocating any less drastic or more immediately fruitful approach represents a cowardly capitulation to the Man and makes you Part Of The Problem™.
These are all good but the last one in particular sounds like it can butt up against one of the difficulties that intersectional feminism encounters.
The ‘me first, you later’ problem occurs where people argue that your cause isn’t a good one to champion right now because it’s too extreme and would require too much work, or because you and your community are too far away from the norm. It doesn’t matter that those things are rarely true, what matters is that you’re centering people who aren’t straight, white, or cisgender and that’s worth fighting over, apparently.
And I say this in response to your bonus round, @prokopetz, because claiming that we cry capitulation and ‘Part of The Problem’ is exactly the way that people like to dismiss intersectional activism.
I still like this way of framing the discussion, I just wanted to articulate this one point of friction.
Oh, absolutely; spuriously accusing folks of engaging in derailing tactics is, itself, a time-honoured derailing tactic. The “bonus round” entry is meant more to refer to the rhetorical trick whereby, if you can’t find an excuse to dismiss a problem, but you also don’t want to adjust your actions to account for it, you instead generalise that problem until whatever you were planning on doing anyway can be framed as somehow addressing its root cause, resulting in a sort of sterile one-size-fits-all activism where abstract opposition to the Great Evil is more important than doing stuff that actually helps people.
the idea that “privileged people should speak out on behalf of oppressed people” and the idea that “it’s not the oppressed person’s job to educate” are both good ideas in their contexts.
if you take them out of context and try to scale them up outside of a single conversation into precepts of larger-scale discourse, they IMMEDIATELY become tools of white supremacy and get misused to justify privileged people talking over oppressed people.
I want to expand on this a little more, too – left it short and sweet because I’m too prone to walls of text, but I feel like this deserves a second pass:
Basically, establishing the idea that it is *only ever* the responsibility of people who are privileged in a specific discourse to speak out about oppression leads to the following situation. I have seen it primarily in racism discourse and now in antisemitism discourse, but it’s really all over the bloody place.
1) Someone not in an oppressed group circulates a thing that they made up, or nicked out of context from an off-the-cuff rant by some person in that oppressed group, without checking any kind of group consensus, because that thing is punchy and angery and gets attention. And it’s about ~protecting the weak~ so arguing looks bad.
2) Nobody bothers to run it past the group being spoken of (because that would be “expecting someone to educate you”) or check it against even the cheat sheet versions of decades of existing critical theory by that group (because that would be “work”).
3) Several thousand reblogs later, the echo chamber of privilege has generated a Fact! Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hold up to analysis. If there are like two or three approving reblogs from people in the group you’re talking about, and a few dozen disputing it? Well, clearly the dozens of folks are just internalizing prejudice, because of course the person who started it knows better than them, poor dears, and they can Prove It, now that they’ve got an endorsement from the handful of affected people who agree with them.
… And then folks start getting policed and yelled at by activists from out of their lane, for practicing their own cultural traditions or talking about their own life experiences or making their own stories and analyses.
The dominant narrative is a steamroller. People in a position of dominance, who decide to blithely attach shit to it without fact checking, have basically just discovered a new, exciting and socially approved way to steamroll minorities.
The system rewards punching down; it rewards talking over people that we’ve been trained to think are lesser. Unpicking this is *hard work*; flowing with the current is not.
Don’t be that person, is what I’m saying. Don’t confuse what’s satisfying with what’s right.
A lot of so called slacktivists are actually just people living in poverty who really can only share an article or two between whatever combination of jobs, chronic illnesses, or the increasingly unrealistic demands of higher education are grinding their life away.
just moving along like everyone else 