Clarifying common social justice praxis

Social justice is not my primary political project, so I don’t want to claim profound expertise. But having rolled with people who are serious social justice advocates for a long time, I have a developed a somewhat-unique way of articulating some key things which some people find useful. This post is no place to start thinking about social justice, but it may clarify what is happening with other commentaries.

Fundamentals

Social justice

The term should be familiar. I like to name a few things explicitly.

Social justice means addressing injustices experienced by social groups: the sexism women encounter, the racism people of color encounter, et cetera.

Social justice advocacy more specifically refers to the practice of attempting to correct social injustices. There are a range of different approaches, grounded in different analyses of how social injustices work. This post is mostly an attempt at clarifying how some major approaches work.

Social justice advocacy culture is an expression I use to distinguish advocates’ driving ideologies from the social norms & practices people exercise. This can be useful, for instance, in naming that one embraces the radical feminist project & analysis while faulting some moves radical feminists tend to make … or vice versa.

Opponents of social justice include people acting from a few different principles. Some assert that American society is fundamentally just, with social justice advocates misrepresenting how the world works. Some accept that the conditions social justice advocates point to are at least partly real, but reject addressing them as impractical, or entirely impossible. Some recognize those conditions but assert either implicitly or explicitly that those conditions are right & good. I find it useful to talk about these types together while recognizing that they are not simply all the same.

The left

We should not just conflate social justice advocacy with “the left”.

We need to start with clarity about the term “left”, which can mean a few different things. (I have a long post on the subject.) To name to the range from Democratic Party moderates to Maoist revolutionaries and countless points in between, I like to refer to “the broad left”.

Leftism — or The Left — is the portion of the broad left which calls for profound institutional change replacing capitalism with some form of socialism (not just social insurance like single-payer health care, but public control of factories et cetera). Within both groups one can find many different relationships with social justice — frameworks for understanding, policy approaches, and degrees of attention.

Social justice advocacy is not just the same thing as either the broad left or leftism. Social justice advocacy on the broad right is rare, but does exist. Some people on the broad left have a weak enough concern with social justice that they do not qualify as advocates. Many social justice advocates conceive themselves as leftists; many others do not. Some leftists consider social justice advocacy a distraction from economic class as the important locus of political action.

Two big social justice ideologies

Among social justice advocates in the US one finds two broad ideological schools with profound differences. The failure of social justice advocacy culture to articulate these schools clearly produces a lot of confusion. Alas, as when talking about the left, the most precise terms of art invite confusion, but we have no better alternative.

People who do not have a deep engagement with social justice advocacy culture tend to think about social justice in the framework of the liberal school. Not “liberal” in the sense of the policy objectives of the Democratic Party (which leftists call “lib”) but a deeper sense: the approach to governance & society which grounds political claims in democratic institutions and universal egalitarian rights. (To specify that sense, I often abbreviate liberal democracy as “libdem”.) One may summarize the liberal school of social justice as:

• calling for equal rights for all
• vigorously rejecting institutional discrimination
• exercising institutional power to counter private discrimination

In the last few decades, a different school has come to dominate US social justice advocacy culture. Unhappily, the most precise name for it is even more fraught: identity politics. Opponents of any efforts toward social justice often invoke that expression as a bogeyman. As with “woke”, “politically correct”, and “social justice warrior”, that coöpts a social justice term of art; “identity politics” was first used in print in the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement. One can learn a lot about how identity politics thinks about social justice by reading that early document. One may summarize the liberal school of social justice as:

• considering the universalism of the liberal school inadequate for achieving social justice; as Anatole France famously snarked, “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”
• examining the particular group categories society imposes on individuals’ identities (race, gender, et cetera)
• countering the unequal relationships between those groups

Identity politics concepts

I find it clarifying to reïntroduce a few bits of key vocabulary from the identity politics school’s analytical toolkit which advocates don’t always describe crisply.

The term equity directs attention to bottom-line conditions, in contrast with liberal ideas of rights & process equality. This famous cartoon offers a metaphor:

Identity politics registers that different axes of identity (race, gender, et cetera) operate in similar ways. In particular, it refers to relative advantage as privileged positions (white people, men, etc) and relative disadvantage as oppressed or marginalized positions (people of color, women, etc). “Privilege” in this context neither contrasts with rights nor denotes the particular advantages of high social class; the term stuck despite those misleading resonances because a famous 1991 commentary used it well in speaking to college-educated white feminist women.

Identity politics articulates several ways that different privileged positions operate similarly, just as different marginalizatized positions do. For example — along a given identity axis, people in positions of privilege generally understand the particular injustices of that axis less well than marginalized people do, so people of color are more sophisticated about racism than white people and so forth.

Identity politics also examines the unique characteristics of each axis, and intersectionality names its body of ideas for addressing how people’s positions on mutliple axes interact in complex ways. No one is simply privileged or marginalized. A gay Black man experiences privilege along the axis of gender while experiencing marginalization on the axes of sexuality and race. Each identity complicates the others; a gay Black man experiences racism differently than a Black straight man or a Black lesbian woman does.

The identity politics school has a vocabulary for talking about different mechanisms which produce inequities — interpersonal, institutional, structural, and more. This expands the scope of social justice advocacy beyond impacts of overt bigotry & discrimination, trying to overcome systemic inertia from ignorance, misunderstandings, inequities in financial & social capital, et cetera. Thus it uses racism to refer to everything which creates & sustains racial inequities, rather than to refer just to racial bigotry; likewise for sexism, homophobia, etc.

Hard vs soft identity politics

I find it not just illuminating but important to distinguish “soft” from “hard” identity politics. This distinction is my own coinage, but I find that it helps make sense of where people stand.

Soft identity politics embraces both the liberal and identity politics approaches. It sees them as complimentary, acting as counterweights to each other’s limitations.

Hard identity politics rejects any other approach to social justice as illegitimate. It sees the liberal school as nothing other than an instrument for maintaining & justifying inequities.

One cannot draw an entirely bright line between these camps. Among the soft school, people may lean more or less on liberal or identity politics frameworks, often changing their priorities in different contexts. Among the hard school people still sometimes invoke liberal language about rights et cetera despite their rejection of the liberal framework. But looking for social justice advocates’ attitudes in these terms can be very clarifying.

Grappling with criticisms

Reasonable people of good conscience can come to significantly different conclusions about how to understand & correct social injustices. This requires respect for allies who one considers mistaken but legitimate. I think vigorous contention between social justice advocates about how to understand and address injustices is healthy, inherently difficult, and necessary.

Hard as that is, opponents of social justice speaking in bad faith make those discussions even harder. Indeed, that chaff they throw up presents the biggest obstacle to a better culture of social justice advocacy.

I name the distinction between social justice advocacy and social justice advocacy culture in part to enable a little sympathy for people who misread the worst failings of advocate culture as the core truths of what these movements stand for. I admit that social justice advocacy culture does not police bad moves as well as I think it should; I have substantial concerns.

But such problems are not nearly as bad as opponents of social justice suggest. Yeah, I have deep frustrations with social justice advocacy culture, even think that a few advocates need to be kept far from the levers of power. But the worst ideas and people do not hold significant power on balance, and will not any time soon. If one lacks intimacy with a movement, one can easily misread loud voices as more significant than they are; there will always be smug, noisy assholes whose voices carry when they rationalize themselves with so-called political principle.

Social justice is too important for me to accept abandoning advocacy over those grumbles. I am committed to taking libdem remedies as far as possible before venturing beyond them … and the core identity politics toolkit for overcoming the limits of libdem is unmistakably necessary. So I stand with soft identity politics.

I neither want problems with the particulars of social justice advocacy culture to deter anyone from working for a more just world, nor do I want social justice advocacy culture to dismiss all criticisms as hollow. In service of that, I offer some critiques of particular failures of praxis which I find illuminating.

Faux liberalism

A lot of criticism of social justice advocacy which exercises libdem language is either deceit or wank rationalizing inaction which leaves inequities in place. One can see this fundamental problem with these critics in one of their classic moves: demanding that we demonstrate to their satisfaction that an inequity emerges directly from bigotry severe enough that acting to correct it is possible and morally necessary.

Social justice advocates often reject that move because they have bitter experience with such critics refusing to ever accept that we have proved that case. I consider it useful also challenge an assumption lurking within that demand. The burden of proof should fall on their suggestion that an inequity may be fair, not on social justice advocates’ assertions that inequities are unjust.

Consider people framing their objections to antiracist policies as standing for “equality of opportunity, not opportunity of outcome”. How do they account for every metric one can find revealing white people better off than Black people? It is trivial to see how in 1950 this reflected inequality of opportunity. Today’s inequities pointing in the same direction as past differences in opportunity is a very suspicious coïncidence. If American society changed to provide equal opportunity, when exactly did that happen? 1975? 2008? What evidence supports that claim? If Black people get lesser outcomes from equal opportunity, is that not a claim that Black people are somehow inferior? If one is not a bigot, isn’t it more parimonious to attribute inequity to lingering unfairness in the system? If that unfairness does not emerge from direct discrimination, why would that make it OK? Even if bigotry were entirely erased from American society — which we know it has not been — we would expect it to leave a lingering systemic legacy, like a traffic jam persisting after cars wrecked in an accident have been cleared. Why wouldn’t we do whatever we can to correct those echoes from past wrongs?

Reflexive anti-liberalism

I respect how the kind of people I describe above inspire impatience with liberal arguments skeptical of the analysis and remedies offered by the identity politics school. The culture of identity politics advocacy sometimes presumes that all support for the liberal school of social justice must therefore reflect nothing other than disingenuous opposition to social justice. In my personal experience people offering skepticism framed in shallow liberal terms sometimes turn out to be more goodhearted than they appear, having embraced a misreading of liberal principle because they have given these questions very little thought. I would never demand that any social justice advocate spend the time and energy it takes to walk people out of that thinking, but they should not oppose other people making the attempt.

Some hard identity politics folks extend that reading yet further. One rarely sees social justice advocates draw the distinction I do between the liberal and identity politics schools because a lot of people committed to identity politics resist recognizing it as a social justice ideology, because they think of it as the only real form of social justice advocacy. This denial of the legitimacy of the the liberal framework often extends to implying that no real liberal tradition in social justice advocacy has ever existed, which would come as a surprise to the people who put the word “rights” in the middle of the name of the Civil Rights Movement.

Language policing

Most social justice advocates consider cultural change as important as institutional change. I have sympathy for this feeling like nitpicking sometimes … though the shock of encountering casual racism, sexism, homophobia, and other bad cultural politics in media just a few decades old makes a strong case that the nitpicking efforts which changed our norms were well worth it. Taking care with language is a big way social justice advocates do this cultural work. But the practice can have messy unintended consequences.

Sometimes preferred language is just an arbitrary signal that one pays attention to social justice. One cannot deduce from antiracist principle that one should say “person of color” rather than “colored person”, one has to just know. It does not make the language hollow — signaling that one pays attention to social justice is a good thing to do! We should be forthright about that. In that particular example, objecting to someone saying “colored person” is fair because the rule is well-known. But in other cases, social justice advocates take offense based on language norms which they presume are better-known than they are. Esoteric language can drive away people with their hearts in the right place who don’t know where to start in getting more engaged with social justice advocacy culture, and can reïnforce social class gatekeeping by presenting a greater challenge to people who have not been exposed to that langauge through a college education or other professional-class spaces.

Social justice advocacy culture responding to people who don’t use the word “racism” the way it does presents a particularly fraught example. Advocates often tell people that they are “wrong” to think that “racism” means racial bigotry because the “real” definition of “racism” understands it as a system. Trying to assert the “correct” meaning of “racism” is like trying to identify the “correct” meaning of “God” — the ideas the word represents are too contested. Most dictionaries offer racial bigotry as their first definition of “racism”; and many do not reference racism as a system at all. Countering people talking about racism in terms of bigotry with an assertion about the definition of the word turns the discussion away from the substance of language to the semantics.

At its worst, this becomes a lazy attempt to force people to accept a whole way of thinking about social justice without bothering with the argument for it. I find it both more honest and more effective to say, “Because looking only bigotry does not reveal enough about how things work, a lot of social justice include everything which produces racial inequities when they use the word ‘racism’ — stuff like honest ignorance, social & financial capital, et cetera. Since different people use the words ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ differently, I try never to use them by themselves. I say ‘racist bigotry’ or ‘institutional racism’ or whatever, in order to be precise.” People often object that the way advocates use the word is weird, but they can accept a description of the usage of the word is accurate, and talk about the substance of what I am trying to say, without spiralling into unanswerable questions about what the word “really” means.

It further undermines attempts to assert an “accurate” definition of “racism” when social justice advocates are not actually precise with their usage of the word. Advocates commonly slip between using “racism” to mean The Big System Of Injustice and using it to mean bigotry. That sloppy language makes advocacy look like sloppy thinking. In those cases, it is slopping thinking, implying that systemic inequities prove the presence of bigotry without presenting an argument, which falls into the trap I described of faux-liberal skepticism setting by insisting on proof of bigtory.

Social justice advocacy culture needs to do better at delivering the care with language in practice which it calls for in principle.

Absolutism

Sometimes social justice advocates over-read tendencies as absolutes.

For example, people in a marginalized position generally have a much more sophisticated read of the dynamics of the axis along which they are marginalized than people in a privileged position do. Women understand sexism better than men, et cetera. We can recognize that while also understanding that sometimes a man will happen to have an insight into sexism which a woman does not.

But this sometimes does stiffen into an abolute form. I have been told that a fact about the history of feminism which a woman did not know could not possibly be right because I am a man. I have seen social justice advocates insist that the lived experience of queer people are the only ground for understanding homophobia, we may make dismiss a useful insight from a straight historian because it differs from queer cultural memory.

This is tricky to navigate. My fact about feminist history was not all that important. Relying too much on queer cultural memory may still deliver a better understanding of how homophobia works on balance than being too credulous with straight historians. Correcting such errors at the margins is not always worth the effort. People in privileged positions tend to over-read the marginalized as making bad moves, which is one reason why the privileged need to cultivate skepticism about their own reactions. And in decisions where stakes are higher for the oppressed than for the marginalized, the marginalized have a compelling moral claim that they should be the ones to make a call about what to do.

And absolutism can curdle into truly ugly implications.

For example, the privilege-marginalization framework inherits a lot from the anticolonial work of Franz Fanon, who underlined the importance of always checking one’s politics against whether or not it supports the oppressed in overcoming their oppression at the bottom line, summarized in the famous aphorism that the oppressed have a right to overthrow their oppression by any means necessary.

If one actually reads Fanon, he cautions about the dangers in reducing that analysis to a campism which justifies any brutality the oppressed might commit. He supported liberation by any means necessary, not by any means possible. I have encountered people fall into the trap he warns about, claim a moral impunity for frightening ruthlessness, in a creepy parallel with Carl Schmitt’s fascist “friend-enemy distinction”. That kind of vulgar Fanon-ism should give us the cold spooky.