unspeakablehorror | Entries tagged with activism

I want to be more effective in my activism, but there's definitely a sense I have that effectiveness in one area seems to invariably come at the cost of effectiveness in other areas, and that it is very, very difficult to strike the right balance. And maybe striking the right balance is not even possible, and we are always tasked with choosing between things that are unbalanced and unsatisfactory, because we live in an inherently unbalanced world.

To give an example, I have had to learn to be a less uncompromising person in order to be a social person, because to be too uncompromising is to isolate oneself, thus making it impossible to coordinate one's actions with others.

At the same time, I have observed ample demonstrations of the cost of compromising with one's ethics for this purpose, where one compromises and compromises with others to be more socially connected and thus more effective, but by doing this, effectively compromises themselves out of any worthwhile ethics, thus making themselves less effective in accomplishing their goals.

Thus their actions cannot effectively bring about any worthwhile goal, because they either no longer hold any worthwhile ethics, or believe that their willingness to compromise will convince others to adopt their more worthwhile stances. When rather, a willingness to compromise, a willingness to wait, can be used to compromise away those ethics, to forestall them, forever.

And I do not bring this up merely to express negativity for the sake of it, but because this is something I think is important to think about, because perhaps through that thought we can identify ways to avoid some of the pitfalls in these thorny choices.

I feel like the mental health field is about helping people deal with adverse situations without getting overly worked up about them. I mean, whether it's through therapy or medication or some other means, that's the core of it, right?

And sometimes that's a good approach.

But I think we need a second approach, too.

We need a public mental health approach, where we address mental health by getting rid of the problems that are getting us worked up in the first place.

And this is why we need political activism.

It's critically important not to view listening to oppressed people as a passive activity where you simply accept what is said without understanding. You must make an effort to integrate what people say into a cohesive political framework in order to help. Listening requires no less thought than speaking, and sometimes considerably more. Additionally, when it comes to standing up for oppressed people, it's necessary to take a position based on more than what the first (or last) oppressed person to voice an opinion around you says. Because the people you happen to encounter are not going to reflect everyone's opinion in a given group. And because you need to have more than knowledge to take a stand; you also need to have principles.

If two people from the same group have conflicting opinions (practically inevitable) you have to decide who you are going to back up. You don't need to forever stick with that decision; sometimes new information or further thought can lead you to a different conclusion than your original one. But it's impossible to stand for anything if your opinion changes with the slightest disagreement to it, regardless of if the person disagreeing is part of the oppressed group you're trying to support.

There is no substitute for having firm convictions, just as there is no substitute for getting the perspectives of the oppressed. You need both to have a political position of any integrity.

I think a single person cannot devote adequate time and effort to every deserving cause. There are many causes that need attention that I am not giving. What I do find frustrating, especially as someone who sees liberation efforts as deeply intertwined, are people who resent attention given to causes outside their own focus.

No, that liberation effort does not have enough attention either. That liberation effort is also far from over. Do not believe you can forward the liberation of some by trampling over that of others. Those who will expend the effort to help those you will not should be appreciated, not denigrated.

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth of time. I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said, “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but is it possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry? It has taken Christianity almost 2000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.

--Martin Luther King Jr., excerpt from Letter from Birmingham Jail

This letter and other letters and speeches from Martin Luther King Jr. are available here on historynet.com.

While I definitely have my limits in who I am willing to associate with, I certainly don't avoid interacting with all people I disagree with. This would be both impossible and pointless anyway, as I have never encountered a person who I don't have some strong disagreement with about something. I have strong opinions on a lot of different topics, and unfortunately for me, the particular combination of opinions I possess doesn't map cleanly to any ideological group I am familiar with, much less any popular philosophical or political group.

There is a caveat to this: I also try not to surround myself with people who all disagree with me on the same things, or disagree in the same direction. I think when someone does that, their perspective on opposing viewpoints gets narrowed, as does their perspective of 'reasonable people who I nonetheless disagree strongly with on some things'. I'm also going to say that there's a very specific way I often see this perspective narrow, and that's the 'people who are more conservative than me are more reasonable than people who are further (or differently) left than me'. This is likely because these conservative opinions are more mainstream (since they're pushed heavily by the weight of society).

This is not me trying to say that leftists need to forget or ignore their differences to work together. Sometimes that's really not realistic. However, I do get a little tired of the different varieties of leftists painting each other as fascists while they express more positive opinions of actual fascists than they do of other leftists who disagree with them. What I'm saying to other leftists is, don't let the most palatable variety of fascist to whatever one's ideology may be position themselves as someone to be defended against leftists you disagree with.

Additionally, it might also be good not to defend more mainstream imperialist and colonialist views from leftists one disagrees with, positioning these imperialist and colonialist views as necessarily less violent than those dangerous radical leftists one doesn't agree with. The degree of popularity of a belief does not determine its violence, and in this case, mainstream beliefs are incredibly violent. So are they really somehow less violent than the leftist one disagrees with, or are they simply violent in a more widely acceptable way which society has trained us all from birth not to see as violence?

Are the leftists you disagree with capable of and perpetuating harm? Yes. So are all of us, in all the myriad varieties of different ways that harm can be perpetuated. I'm a pacifist, but that doesn't exempt me from perpetuating harm. Indeed, it is easy to perpetuate harm by promoting nonviolence, especially the form that is often promoted by mainstream colonial and imperialist powers, where you, the protestor, where you, the activist agitating for change, are asked to perform nonviolence and allow yourself to be brutalized by the police, by the state. Where you allow yourself to have the terms of your protest dictated by the state. This is the conservative conception of pacifism, and it is, ironically, its own form of state sanctioned violence, this time with the protestor as willing participant.

But pacifism isn't the only ideology vulnerable to this sort of conservative coopting. Every ideology can and has been coopted in this way by the mainstream. Which is why, for anyone who realizes that change needs to happen, we need to be alert for the ways the status quo may use the inevitable divisions between leftists to enlist our defense of it against other leftists. Because no leftist needs to be wasting their energy on that.

I think there's a kind of totalizing thinking where a lot of people, whether they are really into activism or think it's kind of pointless, end up drawing this false equivalency of activism = protests.

And while I believe protests are a necessary part of activism, they are far from the entirety of it, and in fact protests in the absence of the other necessary components of activism are not sufficient to bring about change.

Activism is made up of many components: conceptualizing what you want, understanding the obstacles to get there, raising awareness of the problem, gaining support for your cause, direct action to obtain the result you desire, helping to organize other people to work toward the solution, mutual aid, and more. A person doesn't have to have the set of skills and abilities that makes someone good at protesting to help advance their cause. Whatever a person's skills, they are something that can help that cause. And if a person has no skills? Well, that's okay, too. You can't be faulted for what you can't do.

One reason it's important to read what prominent marginalized activists have to say rather than just getting everything from social media is the tendency for ego to play such a large part in social media interactions. There's also the tendency to use one's more marginalized friends to validate their beliefs, which self-selects for less critical introspection. Like, your friends often either a.) are your friends because they already agree with you or b.) in an online space, are very unlikely to feel comfortable criticizing you if they want (or need) to remain your friend. Don't use your marginalized friends as props to validate your beliefs. That previous sentence seems to be a problem I've seen most often when race is involved (eg. 'but I have black friends'), though it's equally obnoxious when applied to other types of marginalized identities. Anyway, one reason it's important to read the works of marginalized activists that one isn't personally friends with is that the distance provided allows for better self-reflection and self-criticism to be applied. A book or essay doesn't feel the need to be planning in realtime how to assauge one's feelings and ego as a friend might, but also feels less threatening than receiving the same criticisms directly in a conversation.

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Page Summary

The Cost of Being Uncompromising and of Unbalanced Compromise
A Second Approach To Mental Health
Listening With Conviction
Activism Cannot Be a Zero-Sum Game
Excerpt From "Letter From Birmingham Jail"
Acknowledging Differences Without Allowing Their Exploitation
Activism and Protests
Reading Activists

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Entries tagged with activism

The Cost of Being Uncompromising and of Unbalanced Compromise

A Second Approach To Mental Health

Listening With Conviction

Activism Cannot Be a Zero-Sum Game

Excerpt From "Letter From Birmingham Jail"

Acknowledging Differences Without Allowing Their Exploitation

Activism and Protests

Reading Activists