A dialogue about social justice praxis

In a discussion on a private forum about my post Social Justice Praxis Dreams, I got a reply from a social justice advocate with whom I have had decades of fraught conversations.

I find after the many years we’ve been wrestling with the deeper foundations of this conversation, that my current position is that Western liberal philosophy has a white supremacy problem baked into it, and that we need to restart from a place of de-emphasizing European historic philosophy and finding ways of valuing other folkways … because a lot of the toxicity is originating in the choice of source materials.

I replied:

After the many years we’ve been wrestling with the deeper foundations of this conversation, I have lost patience with your inability to articulate what the fuck you actually want me to do.

These points [from the original post] are for you:

• … which does not enable narcissistic abuse. e.g.: If someone has stepped wrong, they can expect clear feedback about how to correct the error, and if they make the correction we consider the matter closed.
• … which understands the liberal school and identity politics school as counterweights to each other’s limitations.
• … very enthusiastic about addressing clearly & specifically what individuals in privilege can & should do.
• … with a sophisticated ethos for dialogue between the privileged and the marginalized.

so the problem is “clear feedback” because “well tell me exactly how to fix it” when the problem is “assuming the supremacy of Western liberal philosophy” and that there isn’t a monolithic homogeneity in the non-Western source materials (and also that centuries of Western imperialism have destroyed the access to non-Western materials) … we then have a problem.

That is a non-answer. Tell me what the fuck you want me to actually do.

What, if not liberal democracy?

you’re judging this based on the idea that there should be a rigidly (and safely, if adhered to) laid out set of instructions, when the flip side is actually “learn to detach from the idea that orthropraxy is protective from error”

You have accused me of demanding a perfect error-free orthopraxy before. I recognize the familiar pattern of privileged deflection which leads to that objection, the people who demand an explanation but will never find anything adequate because they are just resisting having to change.

But no, that is not what I am calling for. I am calling for good-enough principles plus practices for pursuing improvement when those principles are not enough. As I have discussed with you literally for decades.

I do not accept your refusal to name a praxis. I think you are demonstrating one of the worst dysfunctions of social justice advocacy culture.

I have had too damm many encounters — many of them with you — in which I have said …

I believe that I stepped wrong and I stand ready to address the harms for which I am responsible. But I do not understand what my error was, so I am stuck unable to make proper apology or amends, unable to avoid the error in the future. I want to do better, so I would appreciate help.

… and then got responses along the lines of …

• “it is not my job to educate you”
• “I already told you but you are just not listening”
• “it is your responsibility to figure that out, not mine”
• “let go of white norms”

… and I hesitate to grumble about it, because that puts me in very bad company.

There are good reasons for those responses! Pragmatically, sometimes people just don’t have capacity at the moment of truth; injustice is fatiguing. Morally, responsibility for correcting injustice rests entirely on the privileged; the marginalized shouldn’t have to lift a finger.

But.

I have experienced social justice advocacy culture going from rightly supporting the pragmatic limits of delivering “clarity” to the stubborn privileged … to absurdly casting refusal to engage as a positive good. I know someone who had a paid antiracist trainer tell them “it is not my job to educate you”.

This is ineffective.

This is ideologically paradoxical. One cannot maintain both that the privileged are blind to the mechanics of injustice and that the privileged have to dismantle those mechanics on their own.

This is, at its worst, poisonous. Saying “you harmed me, and it was your responsibility to understand my needs without me naming them, and it is your responsibility to figure out how to satisfy me without me saying how” is a narcissistic abuse pattern.

I think that, as a general praxis, we need to turn back the dial a few notches.

And very particularly, with you, after all this time, I will not permit you to keep doing it. Stop.

literally I have noted that step one is to give up on the idea of the superiority of Western canon and that there can be a singular correct praxis

The fact that this leaves you bereft because you want a praxis to replace the previous one is … simply what is, and not an indictment of the need for dismantling a desire for One Superior Correct Praxis.

I am not demanding One Superior Correct Praxis. Read what I actually said:

I am calling for good-enough principles plus practices for pursuing improvement when those principles are not enough.

For decades you have told me that I am thinking wrong and acting wrong, and then refusing to name something better. I cannot come up with a charitable theory of what you are trying to achieve.

They did not reply, but shortly after that exchange, they did post this to their own space:

There’s a conversation I’ve been having for years with many different people, where well-meaning individuals of demographic privilege truly want to “do better” and ardently wish for specific instruction sets or checklists so that they can “do better”.

…the problem is that this is doomed to failure, except in very specific contexts where there’s actually an assessor with authority who is committed to only using the agreed-upon checklist.

[It can be noted here that there are indeed specific contexts like this, with what are supposed to be agreed-upon checklists, and it’s the violation of those parameters that we pursue with lawsuits and petitions]

But the thing is, every single time any attempt at an instruction set is presented, people of privilege will start arguing with the instructions and parameters, and trying to game the system. Because that’s what is trained in through generations of success and survival in this kind of system. There are entire cultural traditions that involve training people to look for the loopholes.

And we’re supposed to — “in the West” — live in a system of “rule of law” and fairly and evenly applied checklists. That’s the promise.

… except we know that’s not reality, and most cynically the checklist is loudly declaimed while the violation of the checklist is clearly visible to everyone observing. Because the checklist is mainly an emotional shield for the people designated as protected under systemic oppression. It provides a rationale for “as long as [anyone] follows the rules…” and promises that the only people brutalized are those who break rules.

And it encourages the protected to think of “rules” as electrified fences that they dare not breach. (And thus to want new rules imposed with proof of safety before the previous set are ever flouted.)

There are other ways to organize the world, with different flaws. Asking for the current system to remain in place until a flawless replacement is available sounds philosophically appropriate until you notice that this results in maintaining the current pattern of protecting certain groups by feeding the blood of others into the machine.

Transparently a comment on our exchange, reframing it … without pointing to what I actually said.

I have seen this many times before in social justice advocacy culture: offering a criticism of a pattern, person, commentary, or event which is not quite an outright lie, but does evoke an image very different from the reality. This is a form of the motte-and-bailey move “in which someone switches between a ‘motte’ (an easier-to-defend and sometimes common-sense statement) and a ‘bailey’ (a harder-to-defend and more controversial statement)”.

Distaste for this pattern is one reason why my post about social media shitstorms says:

Shitstorms sow confusion. Resist this. Everything one says every time one engages must pursue clarity — especially about what actually happened. Return as much as possible to the known specifics of what people said and did. Push back against the telephone game effect.

This sort of thing does not compromise the righteousness of the project of social justice, or my commitment to working for it. It does complicate my engagement with the culture of social justice advocacy, which is the pits because I recognize that as an individual one must work in alliance with movements which never fully align with one’s preferences. But I sure don’t like that I have learned that I cannot trust second-hand accounts of events from my comrades in the movement.