You (Practically) Da Man

Let's say you hear a story about someone facing prejudice. A person discriminated against at work, or treated unfairly by the judicial system. Assuming you're a reasonably compassionate person, you want to show that you care. But there's two general ways to do this:

You could portray yourself as a sort of comrade in arms, either by comparing it to your own situation ("I know what that's like") or by highlighting a common enemy ("You tell 'em! Stick it to The Man!")

The other way is to act as a representative of society as a whole ("We really need to change as a people.") Or even to take responsibility as part of the problem ("On behalf of all X, I'm really sorry.”)

Which attitude you take largely depends on who you are. If you're a member of the same oppressed group as the victim, you'll surely commiserate. And probably, if you're from a group that had suffered similarly, you'll probably also compare your struggles. On the other hand, If your life situation is quite different, you'll probably avoid comparison, and try to show sympathy from the outside.

As a straight, white, able-bodied cis-male, I'm generally restricted to that second approach. It's going to sound silly if I try to compare my experience to someone who has lived their life with systematic discrimination. ("I know what you mean, let me tell you about how long they're taking rebuilding the expressway interchange I use.") Or, to put it another way, I can't say "Stick it to The Man" if everyone knows I am The Man.

And in a society that is prominently white, many of the people I know are in the same boat. Generally, if I'm talking to someone who ticks any of the oppression boxes, it's a woman. That is, a straight, white, able-bodied cis-female. So how do they react when looking at someone else's struggle?

I've noticed that in these situations, they're pretty quick to go to that first reaction. They align themselves with the victim, and jump to a very negative view of society. This always makes me feel kind of awkward. Sure, I'm quick to acknowledge the unfairness of society, but in this case, I'm like, excuse me, The Man is right here, I can hear you.

But here's the interesting point: In recent years - thanks to social media - I've had the chance to see the perspectives of more people with many different backgrounds. And I've discovered that although white women may see themselves as part of The Oppressed, many others definitely don't see it that way. There's a widespread feeling that white women are hardly worse-off than white men, with a lot of pent-up anger aimed at them.

I don't know how fair that is. It often seems like a grass-is-greener situation, in which white women have taken on a mythical status among frustrated activists, envisioned as incredibly privileged, hardly different from folks like myself. That’s clearly inaccurate; domestic abuse and sexual assault are problems that are not easily dismissed.

But ultimately that just adds to my point: There’s a big divide there amongst progressives, and a lot of misunderstanding. So please realize that people don’t understand one another’s struggles as much as they think they do. You may not have the oppression-cred that you think, and it will look fake if you pretend you do. But conversely, you will look out-of-touch if you assume that another’s life is easy.

Pride Goeth Before One Final Examination Of Both Sides

So we made it through this controversial Pride Week. The absence of police in Toronto didn't seem to dampen things too much - the PM made his usual appearance anyway, which some people didn't like. Though this was another one of those cases where the people who were really angry about it wouldn't have voted for him anyway, and the people who did vote for him probably won't be offended enough to not vote for him.

But I read a couple of things that are interesting relating to the police ban. One is from this Minister who talks about removing symbols of ministry when visiting first nations communities. And she feels this is a reasonable allowance, acknowledging the churches mistakes in the past and the reasonableness of fears of them. I can understand that, and it makes me wonder if there is some sense to the police uniform ban.

On the other hand, there was this incident in Chicago where Jewish members of the LGBT community waved rainbow Star of David flags. They were then took to go home, because that was considered offensive to some.

Just to clarify, they were offended by the presence of the Star of David as a symbol of Israel. I initially assumed that Jews or Israelis were offended by repurposing the flag, as I had recently seen similar complaints about Canadian rainbow flags. And also to clarify, this wasn't the main parade, but the Dyke March, which is the day before the main event, and supposedly more inclusive.

That incident is quite illustrative of the problem I had with excluding police. You've crossed the line from criticizing the actions of a group to eliminating aspects of the group itself. I've disliked many of the actions of Israel as much as the next guy, just as I've been critical of police actions. But in both cases, it's unreasonable and unfair to blame the entire group for the actions of a few. In this case it's a bit more obvious, since it's a more sympathetic group being targetted, and a group that has more often been victim of broad anger.

So how can I square these two points in favour of and against the police ban? First of all, we have to acknowledge that it's kind of comparing apples and oranges, since there is a big difference between voluntarily giving up symbols of your group vs. being told to give them up. I don't think anyone would have thought poorly of a police officer who chose to remove the uniform for the parade to improve community acceptance. And much as I understand why a minster might want to downplay the symbols of her church in a community hurt by it, it would be wrong for that community to ban the religion or symbols of it.

So that's why I'd stick with my original opinion. As the Chicago incident shows, you can't ban the symbols of a group without it being interpretted as an attack on the group itself. And unless you're going to say that the group is inherently bad, then their right to exist has to trump another group's discomfort.

Sense And Sensitivity

It's Pride time again.  Or, as it currently is in Canada, "How Much Do You Hate Police?" Week.  Thanks to the Toronto Pride Parade's decision to grant Black Lives Matter's request to ban official police participation, that has become the big story this year.

There have been different reactions.  Black gay-rights activist Orville Lloyd Douglas condemned the move. Interestingly he also called out Black Lives Matter for demanding that Pride be more accommodating of blacks, while not doing anything to stamp out homophobia within their own movement.

Meanwhile Now magazine has an article about how the policy was accepted at Pride Toronto with surprisingly little resistance and a fair amount of enthusiasm. Apparently, the outside assumption that BLM turned the screws and Pride caved is not very accurate.  It's an interesting look at how people within the movements see the world and are motivated to act. If, like me, you find that understanding your political opponents makes them less frustrating, it may help even if it may not convince you.

Similar police bans - oh, I'm sorry, police in uniform bans; police are totally welcome as long as no one knows they're cops - have been enacted at Pride events throughout Canada.  I'm not sure they really know what they're getting into.  Sure, I realize that sometimes you have to play hardball.  But you also need to choose your battles, particularly when you're thinking about a tactic that is going to give your opponent a sense of isolation and siege mentality.

Whenever I hear Pride activists talk about the bans, they use language that's not nearly as aggressive as the action itself. For instance, I saw a report from Brantford Pride in which a committee member explains it as eliminating something - the uniform - that some people find "scary." I have no doubt that many do find police officers scary, perhaps with good reason.  But we are talking about picking a fight with a major societal institution full of largely innocent people just to eliminate some people's fears.  My first reaction was that it sounds like something out of conservative paranoia, in which the desire for a safe space overrules the fair treatment of others.  In this case, I have to agree that it doesn't seem like a fair compromise between people's rights. And, on a pragmatic level, it will ultimately do progressive movements more harm than good.

Sword Fight

There's this phenomenon I've noticed in activism, and I don't know if it has a name. It's when people waste their efforts on useless endeavours. There's a number of different reasons why:

• 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 blacks 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.

Ally Advice

In the days following the killing of two more black men at the hands of police, I've seen several articles online that list things concerned white people can do. Since that seems to apply to me, I've been reading them. But I find they leave a lot to be desired.

The lists seem to fall into one of two categories: in the first, they're aiming at people new to the issue, and the list is just ten different ways of saying, "open your mind to the possibility that maybe perhaps there is still some racism in the world." That and, stop saying "All Lives Matter."

As for the second, this article from the Washington Post is a good example: There isn't a whole lot of practical advice, but there is denigration of people who aren't activists and suspicion of white progressives. This list, and others I've seen, hold the philosophy that caucasions have to change their behaviour, and shouldn't look to blacks to tell them what to do.

It may sound reasonable that black people don't have a responsibility to fix white people. But the problem that these activists are trying to change is the behaviour of whites. So if the activists are not working to change white people, then what exactly are they doing? I'm certainly not claiming that this is a fair situation: it obviously isn't. But that's what activism is: fighting an unfair situation.

So I've come away from this experience confused. I'd like to do something to help a huge problem, but it's not clear what to do. I make an effort to examine my own actions and reactions to be as fair as possible. I've also used the Internet to learn about the perspectives of people from different backgrounds. I guess I'm assuming that there must be a level of action that's beyond "don't be personally racist" and "march in the streets." I'm thinking that for major change to happen, there needs to be a wider movement, but of people doing more than just minding their own actions.

Anyway, Here's a much friendlier list. (Sorry it's a PDF.)

That's The End Of The Killerwhaletank

SeaWorld has announced that they will end orca breeding. I found that pretty surprising: yes, it's been getting them very bad publicity, lately, but their identity is quite tied to the performing orcas.

What I'm getting at is, this is about the biggest win I've ever seen activists get. As such, it's interesting to see how people are reacting. The stereotype of activists is that they never give anything but bad news. Environmentalists were traditionally the worst, but in recent years they seem to have realized that this is turning people off. Even David Suzuki seems to understand the benefit of mixing in some positivity.

Animal Rights had never been a cause I was particularly close to, so I'm not really knowledgeable on their reaction. But from what I have seen, as individuals they are quite positive, celebrating this as the win that it is.

On the other hand, PETA put out the protestors' traditional this-isn't-enough reaction. Yes, it's clear that PETA has never really cared about having a positive public perception. But still, you have to wonder: if this doesn't get a positive reaction out of them, what will?

I've always figured that the nothing-is-good-enough attitude from activists comes from their relatively rare motivation pattern: they tend to be spurred to action by the badness of the situation, so they see relentless negativity as a motivator. Unfortunately, for most people downplaying any and all positivity just Leafs to hopelessness, which leads to inaction.

So it might pay to emphasize this victory. Like I say, PETA had positioned itself as an organization for more dedicated, uncompromising people. It's the 70's Greenpeace of Animal Rights. That might mean that the all-negative attitude will work for it.