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 distinctive way of articulating some key things which some people find useful. This post is no place to start thinking about social justice, but I hope that it will help clarify what is happening in other commentaries.
Fundamentals
Social justice
The term should be familiar. I like to name a few things explicitly.
Praxis is a word much-used by leftists to name to the manifestation of ideas through practices.
Social justice means addressing injustices pervasively 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 feminist project & analysis while faulting some moves 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.
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.
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.
The liberal school school is more familiar to people who do not have a deep engagement with social justice advocacy culture. 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:
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calling for equal rights for all
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vigorously rejecting institutional discrimination
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exercising institutional power to counter private discrimination
The identity politics school has come to dominate US social justice advocacy culture in recent decades. Unhappily, this name for it is most often used as a bogeyman by opponents of any efforts toward social justice, but we need to be able to distinguish this framework from the liberal school, and no other term will do. (The nearest alternative term in use, “woke-ism”, is even worse for obvious reasons.) “Identity politics” first appeared in print in the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, and one can learn a lot about this approach to social justice by reading that early document. I summarize the identity politics school as:
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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”
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examining the particular group categories society imposes on individuals’ identities (race, gender, et cetera)
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actively countering the unequal relationships between those groups in every context (cultural, social, institutional, et cetera)
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 tendencies. 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.
To understand what the identity politics school is — and to make a lot of social justice praxis legible — I find it clarifying to reïntroduce some key vocabulary & concepts from the identity politics school’s analytical toolkit which advocates don’t always describe crisply.
The term equity directs attention to bottom-line outcomes, 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 refers to 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, culture tends to frame privileged positions as “normal”, while taking marginalized positions as deviation from that norm, so a privileged identity often goes unmarked while a marginalize identity is marked even when it was irrelevant — one will hear references to a “Black doctor” or a “female doctor” much more often than to a “white doctor” or “male doctor”.
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 — personal, 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. This makes it easy to get confused about which processes we are talking about in a particular instance; I try to never deploy terms like “racism” alone, instead specifying “racist bigtory”, “systemic racism”, et cetera.
Because of this attention to systems beyond bigotry, identity politics underlines that one can participate in injustices without exercising bigotry at all — that indeed one inevitably will unless one makes deliberate efforts toward antiracist / antisexist / etc action, especially along the axes where one occupies a privileged position. The aphorism “impact, not intent” reminds us how focusing on the particulars of bigotry can become a distraction from understanding & correcting how one implicitly enables unjust processes. One practical application of that is that nouning is considered harmful — one should avoid asking whether we should indict a person as a racist or sexist et cetera, instead registering without disqualifying their whole moral character the ways they should look to better support justice. I sometimes express that by saying things like, “I don’t think you are a racist, but when you X you are doing racism, so you should change that”.
Reasonable people of good conscience can come to significantly different conclusions about how best to understand & correct social injustices. Vigorous contention among social justice advocates is healthy, inherently difficult, and necessary.
Personally, I find the identity politics toolkit for overcoming the limits of libdem unmistakably necessary … and I am committed to taking libdem remedies as far as possible before venturing beyond them, so I stand with soft identity politics. I find wisdom and allies from folks in both both the hard liberal and the hard identity politics camps; one must respect people committed to the project whom one considers mistaken.
I also think that successful social justice advocacy requires admitting significant problems in social justice advocacy culture.
There are a few social justice advocates who I think we must keep far from the levers of power. So it goes: there will always be smug, noisy assholes whose voices carry when they rationalize themselves with so-called political principle. But in any movement one can easily misread loud voices as more significant than they are. The worst ideas and actors in social justice advocacy hold no significant power, and will not any time soon.
Similarly, I see obstacles to a healthy culture of social justice advocacy within the movement … and recognize that more dysfunctions emerge from necessary adaptations to constant attacks from outside, either as stubborn misunderstanding or deliberate bad faith. Even the movement’s greatest failings are not nearly so bad as opponents of suggest.
Those defenses made, I see a need to talk about criticisms at length, for several reasons.
It is important on the merits. I have posted before about concerns because we can and should do better.
It serves the primary misson of this post, delivering clarity to people sympathetic to the project of social justice who find encounters with social justice advocacy disorienting and frustrating. Advocacy culture is not self-aware about legitimate anxieties about our practices which tend to drive people away. Clarifying things people react to and putting them in perspective helps people find good ways to engage, even when they remain skeptical. This is why, for instance, this post names a distinction between social justice versus social justice advocacy culture; I want to defuse any tendency to reject the project of social justice because of stinging encounters with movement culture.
It refuses to cede the ground of critiquing social justice advocacy culture to opponents of social justice. I don’t want to those opponents to look more credible than they are by being able to claim “we are the only ones talking about XYZ”.
It supports improvements in praxis. When we cannot sustain an internal dialogue about a problem, new critiques cannot build on past efforts or address those efforts’ limitations, re-starting from Square One, reïnventing the wheel. (I find it particularly galling that social justice advocacy culture has let our opposition repeatedly coöpt our terms of art for self-reflection, including not just “identity politics” but also “political correctness”, “social justice warrior”, “woke”, and others.)
So below I try to name some common troubles in social justice praxis, focusing on things which I find that people unfamiliar with advocacy tend to mis- or over-read.
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 in one of critics’ 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 from bitter experience with such critics refusing to ever accept that we have proved that case. I find it useful to challenge an assumption lurking within critics’ demand of “proof”: the burden of proof should fall on suggestions that an inequity may be fair, starting from the presumption 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 the unfairness 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?
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 we should consider it noble to 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.
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 absorb it from involvement in social justice advocacy culture. This does not make the language hollow — signaling that one pays attention to social justice is good! We should say so, forthrightly. 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 advocacy culture 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 at bigotry does not reveal enough about how things work, a lot of social justice advocates include everything which produces racial inequities when they use the word ‘racism’ — stuff like honest ignorance, social & financial capital, et cetera. This dignifies all of those processes as important for us to address.” People often object that the way advocates use the word is weird, but they can accept a description of the usage as clarifying, making it possible to 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 … because in those cases, it is slopping thinking, implying that systemic inequities prove the presence of bigotry without presenting an argument, which walks right into the trap I described of faux-liberal skepticism 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.
Sometimes social justice advocates over-read tendencies as absolutes.
Understanding from lived experience
For example, standpoint theory registers that one’s identity positions have an inescapably profound impact on one’s encounter of the world, which makes it good praxis to value lived experience: people in a marginalized position have a generally more sophisticated read of the inequities along that axis, and the mechanics of how those inequities work, than people in a privileged position do. Women see sexism more clearly than men, et cetera. We can recognize that while also understanding that sometimes a man may 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 particular fact I have offered about the history of feminism which a woman did not happen to know could not possibly be correct, because men must always defer to women’s lived experience of sexism. I have seen social justice advocates insist that the lived experience of queer people are the only ground for understanding homophobia, which may make us dismiss a useful insight from a straight historian because it differs from queer cultural memory. This can produce maddening paradoxes, calling on people in privileged positions to speak out against injustices but then scolding them when they do.
This is tricky to navigate! Correcting over-reliance on lived experience is not always worth the effort, and people in privileged positions need to learn to correct for their tendency to misdiagnose these problems as far more prevalent than they are. My fact about feminist history was not all that important. On balance, relying too much on queer cultural memory may still deliver a better understanding of how homophobia works than being too credulous with straight historians.
It is particularly important to draw a distinction between theory and action. Since no position sees everything, dialogue between the privileged and the marginalized is necessary as we try to make sense of things together. In making sense of things, the marginalized should exercise a little patience while the privileged must step carefully to avoid trying that patience. In deciding what to do, since marginalized people face higher stakes, the privileged must defer to their choices.
Campism
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 and every brutality the oppressed might commit. He supported liberation by any means necessary, not by any means possible. I have encountered people falling into the trap he warns about, claiming 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.
Oppression Olympics
If the only ground for understanding is the experience of the marginalized … how do we discern who resolve whose marginalization is legitimate and relevant in context? Some “feminists” claim that men accepting trans women’s account of transphobia illegitimately favors trans women (who are privileged because they are “really” men) over cis women (who are the marginalized group). Trans women call this a demand that we favor privileged cis people over marginalized trans people. Deferring to the marginalized in itself cannot resolve the question, we must compare claims on some other basis. (Relatively easy in this case, since transphobic feminists are liars.)
This interlocks with campism; if any ruthlessness is justified in the name of the marginalized, then correctingly identifying who is most marginalized is hugely consequential, creating an oppression Olympics. Intersectionality names the importance of not doing that, because the dynamics are always complex and entangled.
I have another post directly addressing this. There is no better example of a genuine challenge which opponents of social justice grossly exaggerate. Two key points:
the scary thing is capriciousness and lack of proportion
Perversely, the more one actually cares about social justice, the more vulnerable one becomes to the thing we are talking about when we are talking about “cancel culture”. That bad actors often benefit from being “cancelled” is no comfort if one is neither cynical nor evil.
