- working harder to piss off The Man than on actual change
- fighting sectarian battles
- working for esoteric intellectual goals, not what actually helps
- laying the groundwork for idealistic concepts that will never come to be
The commonality in each of these is that they're overthinking the situation. It can be just a case of wasting effort, but what's really frustrating about it, is when people actually end up working against themselves. For instance, there was this case a few years ago when someone was trying to convince poor people not to vote as a protest. You'd think that voting would be a no-brainer for activists, but here you have people voluntarily forfeiting it, for no reason but their own over-analysis.
I've always had a theory that this activist tire-spinning is at its worst in times and places where liberal ideas are favoured. That's when activists are indulgent, and don't consider that they must eternally struggle against political enemies. When progressive ideas fall out of favour, activists are forced to fight for everything, and can't afford to waste effort. They think about what's truly important, fight for their priorities and compromise on those things that don't really make a difference. It forces a rigorous efficiency.
I first came to this way of thinking in university. Universities are ripe for these problems to begin with, being filled with liberal intellectuals. And Canada is ripe for it, with our liberal leanings, and interventionist government traditions. People often take that for granted, and don't consider that others are working to roll back past progress. And this being the nineties, we'd had decades where the only conservative force was the Mulroney government, who in retrospect was hardly regressive. So an activist in this environment would feel quite unchallenged.
But there were plenty of hints that all was not well in progressive world. Newt Gingrich was trying to remake the American government. Here in Ontario, Mike Harris was handing out torches and pitchforks to angry suburbanites. And in pop-culture and word-of-mouth, it was clear that political correctness had become a lightning rod that was being used to demonize lots of positive actions.
I observed that this negativity seemed to be forcing American activists to think about what was important to them in a way that Canadians - particularly those around me on campus - didn't. I remember that when Bill Clinton's infidelities came out, Canadian feminists were ready to throw him under the bus, while American feminists defended him; they understood that a cad in the White House is a small price to pay to have a charismatic politician working against the conservative tsunami.
But now I think I may have to throw out the theory. It's because of what I'm seeing from African-American activists. You would think that if I'm right about political challenges forcing people to adopt a battle-tested robustness, then Black Americans in the alt-right era would be about as efficiently pragmatic as possible. And yet, I keep finding people disappearing into a spiral of opaque justifications of nonsensical actions.
The latest concerns a meme you may have seen recently. A white woman on the campus of Colgate University went around campus carrying a sword. Why she had a sword is a bit of a mystery - I thought Americans preferred guns. Anyway, her prancing around with a sword didn't seem to concern anyone, and was generally greeted as a whimsical prank. She goes on to report that months later, the campus was put on lock down after reports of a gunman. That turned out to be the result of someone seeing a black man with a glue gun and panicking. So now the woman is passing the story around as an example of white privilege: When people saw her they assumed the best, while they assumed the worst for that black man.
You would think that this meme would be welcomed by black activists. A white person finally understands white privilege! And she's explaining it to other white people! But no, in the upside-down world of activism, this woman's actions were criticized for... well - I don’t really know, but it sure has made the author of this article angry.
Obviously, you can understand why black activists would be frustrated by the circumstance. It’s unfair that this white woman gets credit for making point that black have been trying to make for years. But the writers of this article don’t seem to realize the unfairness is not her fault. I’m left wondering what exactly she should have done that would have been better. It’s telling that the author goes on to express frustration with white allies - a complaint I’ve heard a few times. If spreading your message for you leads to frustration, it’s hard to imagine how that relationship could work out better.
So here we are in an era of high racial tension, and people trying to fix problems are getting shouted down. It's not quite talking your own cohort into not voting, but it is the sort of intellectual time waster I'd hoped we'd left behind.
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