Left Outside the Social-Justice Movement's Small Tent

[romanic]

Mahad Olad, a high school student, used to be active in “the local social-justice scene” around Minneapolis, Minnesota, attending meetings and leading demonstrations for feminist, LGBT, and anti-racism groups. Then he became disillusioned.

When he was just 16, the ACLU profiled the teen activist. He came to the U.S. as a child. Later, his immigrant parents took him back to their home country, Kenya, so that their son could experience what it was like to live in that culture as well.

“In Kenya, he saw the harsh realities faced by women trying to access reproductive health-care services and how the gay and lesbian community is forced to live underground,” the ACLU explained. “While Mahad cares about many social-justice and civil-liberties issues, he is especially drawn to reproductive freedom and LGBT rights because of his experience in Kenya. He has been one of his school's biggest advocates for comprehensive sex education and has helped to organize events at his school to teach students important information about comprehensive safe-sex practices, something that his school does not teach in class.”

Two years later he was sending off a frustrated email to me.

“I genuinely cared about these causes—still do,” he wrote, referencing everything from anti-racism to LGBT rights to reproductive health. “I believed I was doing something noble. At the same time,” he added, “a large part of me was not quite in agreement with some of the views and concepts espoused by social-justice groups. Their pro-censorship tendencies, fixation with intersectionality, and constant uproar over seemingly trivial and innocuous matters like ‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘microaggressions’ went against my civil-libertarian sensibilities.”

He fit in fine at the ACLU. But interacting with social-justice groups made up of high school and college students, he increasingly found himself having to bite his tongue.

“I never voiced my personal disagreements because having dissenting views is strictly forbidden in the activist circles I was a part of,” he explained. “If you’re white, you will be charged with being a ‘bad ally.’ (There's also certain gatherings you cannot come to because your mere presence might be threatening.) If you’re a person of color, your disagreements will usually be dismissed as some form of ‘internalized racism,’ ‘internalized sexism,’ or ‘respectability politics,’ among many other activist jargon's thrown at individuals who do not conform the groups views.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/outside-the-socialjustice-movements-small-tent/479049/

I definitely empathize with this kid and found myself nodding a lot at points in the article. The part where he describes being called a "uncle Tom" really struck me. Something's very corrupt in many of these youth-led social justice groups.

[Igel]

1. Nearly every such group, high school, undergrad, or grad that I've run into

has been precisely this.

They're oppressed. That means they need to equalize power.

Thing is, people suck at figuring out what "fair" and "equal" mean, esp. when they think they're superior. "Free speech" is often "free for me," but since the other guy's speech is immoral and oppressive, corrupt, it's dangerous and like other dangerous things should be limited or controlled. And who better to control it than those who know how dangerous it is?

The struggle sets up boundaries and sides, and that makes compromise impossible. Even when you're probably wrong, you just argue and argue yourself into a little corner. At that point, haters gonna hate, the problem being that if you hate the other side, well, then you're gonna hate and just keep on hating. It becomes a habit, familiar and reassuring, because you have your community or group and need to protect it to protect yourself.

It's not obvious when there's clearly an imbalance of power in a situation. It doesn't always happen, but once a group becomes established it's not like it's easily going to say, "Oh, gee, that's taken care off. Pizza?"

That said, I have seen groups do exactly that. Most often they implode as those who don't fall for that dynamic leave and those who are left can't work together or find a next common object of ire.