The Fighting 44s

Jaehwan asked me, quite some time ago, a very interesting question on where I stand with regard to writing and activism itself. He said this:

Just a question: what are you eventually going to do with your writing? Do you plan to start stuff up, do activism, fiction, write polemics, or something else? I know that you described yourself as not being an activist …. I’m just curious about where you plan to go from here.

I was responding to xian’s post yesterday, and I think he’s right: a lot of talented people have just fallen out. You probably know more about this than anyone else since everyone goes to you or [Lopan] to complain, but I’d like to work to get the activism thing going if people are interested or able. (”able” is an important question since people may be different in person than on the web…) Our activist group in Portland is doing really well–we had an awesome meeting last week where we analyzed the local cultural scene. It would be cool if there were some way to take everything we have and make it into something bigger.

This question touches on a few themes in my life, and I’m guessing, in the lives of many of us who read this and other AA sites. Where are we going? Where is activism going? How do we contribute? What is the point, or the goal of being an “activist” today?

Consider this piece to be a starting point of my thinking; a first attempt at organizing some of my thoughts.

First, I see a serious problem in the general understanding of social activism today. We are NOT doing what people did in the last few decades; it’s not the 60s anymore, it’s not even the 80s anymore. It’s the 21st century, we are in the midst of an information revolution, people are now the most sensitive they’ve ever been to racial, gender, and cultural issues, and in the West, fundamental rights have been pretty much set down (with gay marriage rights still having a little ways to go in the U.S., but progress is being made).

We’re no longer dealing with issues of “formal equality,” or the old, explicit, overt racism: we all have the right to make money, vote, own property, and express ourselves. We’re now dealing with “substantive equality,” “structural injustice,” or what some people call “new racism” (and sexism, and homophobia, etc.). We’re dealing with much more complex, nuanced, and stickier issues, some of which pertain to things like self-esteem, identity, media and political representation, much of which is debatable as to whether something is “racist” or “sexist” at all. This is why I don’t like throwing around those terms very much; when explicit intent is taken out of the equation, calling things racist or sexist and trying to destroy peoples’ lives and careers over it seems malicious, spiteful, insecure, ill-considered (with regard to gaining public support), and just plain crying wolf.

But some people still think it’s the 60s. They think they’re “fighting” for “civil rights” when they complain about a bus stop poster, or a song, or a movie, or a photo, or a piece of dialogue, and while it’s not 100% bullshit, it definitely smells.

With this lack of more “serious” (a better word would be “fundamental,” which I’ll explain later) things to fight, combined with cultural/ value confusion, and an increasing emphasis on the self in the West: self-esteem, self-confidence, self-identity, we have seen the rise of a significant insecurity and self-centeredness in activism. (I presented some of my thoughts on this in the Harold and Kumar comments, in case this seems familiar to some of you.)

As I see it, at this point in time, many social activists suffer from

1) Fear/ self-victimization/ insecurity
2) Condescension/ disdain
3) Narcissism

Very briefly, I believe that political/social activist groups tend to be fairly fucked up emotionally and intellectually, and filled with fairly fucked up people; this, in turn, fucks up, or undermines, the legitimacy and effectiveness of their political/social agendas. It wasn’t always this way, but it’s become this way, partially as a result of baby boomer narcissism, which has been passed onto the boomer children, partly because all the fundamental fights have been won (having established “formal” equality but not “substantive” equality), and partly because it seems to be the nature of the beast at this point. I believe that untraumatized people with “normal” or healthy childhoods, who participate fairly successfully in meaningful productive activities (whether they be economic, artistic, spiritual) tend not to have social activism as their primary focus; it’s generally the people who have been hurt, who have been damaged, who have been stunted, whose identities require some sort of therapeutic participation - or compensation - in whatever cause they choose, who really care about these things enough to make it their primary focus.

It may not have been this way a few decades before; when fundamental rights, or formal equality hadn’t even been established, and “regular” people felt compelled to get involved, just so they could live like fellow humans. That isn’t so much the case now, so now it takes a “special” sort of person to dedicate his or her life to these much more ambiguous “causes.”

We had one member at our site not too long ago, a female half-Asian involved in an IR, who was, to me, a prime example of a good person who completely lost perspective as she got caught up in her “feminist” agenda (I put this word in quotation marks because I consider myself a feminist, just not a crazy one, and I don’t want to denigrate the term): twice, she attempted to apply a feminist anti-patriarchy critique to articles which distinctly did not say what she said they did. The Economist discussed the economic benefits and efficiencies of marriage with a specific emphasis on how having children out of wedlock could hurt women more than men; she took this to mean the Economist was putting all the responsibility for single mothers’ life circumstances on them. I discussed how, because straight white men are at the top of the food chain, that it probably wouldn’t make the best symbol to be an activist leader while sleeping with a straight white man; she took this to mean that I was putting the entire burden of race representation on women. Both were completely untrue.

There are thousands, if not millions, like her. Also let me say that I don’t exempt myself from this, as none of us is immune; I try to be aware of the roots of my reactions and motivations and conduct myself as reflectively as I can.

In another example, according to a long-time member his girlfriend was “downright appalled by the way gender was handled” in Harold and Kumar go to Guantanamo Bay, and she and her friend “felt unsafe - unsafe in the way that you might feel if you’re the only asian person watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s in an all-white theatre.”

The comments in the above link contain my thoughts on the “sexism” in the movie. Essentially, I do not believe that the movie “worsened the female condition”, or promoted “objectification” and “sexism” any more than it promoted objectification via class, age, race, appearance, or physical ability: as I alluded to early in this article, you can always find something to complain about if you look hard enough, or are sensitive enough and self-centered enough.

With regard to them feeling “unsafe” or “alone,” it could not be compared to being a singular Asian at Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’m going to make a fairly safe assumption here and guess that there were many more than just two females in that theater, and that they probably weren’t the only AA ones either. So their feelings didn’t stem from any danger or isolation based on numbers in the physical world.

These feelings stemmed purely from their minds. They stemmed from the fact that they felt isolated in their offended-ness; that they knew “better” than all the other women and men in the room, and they didn’t consider that perhaps their offended-ness was not warranted, and certainly not to the degree that they felt it. There is a significant self-centeredness in this reaction; there is a sense of fear and victimization here, and there is certainly massive disdain for fellow audience members.

The question is, was it warranted? Was this reaction “reasonable” given the whole context of the movie? I believe that it was not, and I believe that anyone who felt this way has lost a bit of perspective on just what sexism (or racism or whatever-ism is), and that they are projecting their own fears and insecurities onto the movie, and onto others. They are bringing their own monsters out, and essentially “creating” them where none exist (or where the “real” ones are a lot less scary). And isn’t this the downside, which nearly everyone has encountered, of “political-correctness”?

This is, to me, is a massive problem in social activism, and this type of thinking and feeling is what is being promoted by the intellectual and social activist elite.

(To be continued in pt. 2, where I discuss the objectives of AA activism, the powers currently contributing to the “diversity” movement(s), and the application of developmental, or needs-hierarchy thinking.)

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Activism, Blog, Features, My Opinion, Racism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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