Social Justice Warriors

 For Mary-Alice

The term "social justice warriors" first came about as a descriptor of people working for greater social justice.  People trying to equalize the power and experiences between different groups.  Things like working towards equal pay for equal work for women and men, or equalizing the rate at which black people and white people are stopped by the police.  People committed to the cause of equality and fairness.

More recently this term has become a pejorative term for people who attempt to police speech, tell everyone that they should do and think certain things or they are wicked people.  The idea is that such people are actively looking to find things to be outraged by, and then start an aggressive campaign against it.  An example of this would be being outraged by men holding doors open for women as it is an open sign of the belittling of women's competence that is pervasive throughout society.  It has further elements of this outrage being fake, that its' primary purpose is to show what a virtuous person you are (e.g."segregation is a social justice problem that must be solved!" from someone who never enters black neighborhoods because they aren't safe.) This is a powerful description of this point of view. As a progressive it seems to get more insane the longer you read it, but if you look at the examples given of the activities of social justice warriors you wouldn't be nuts to think those are nuts too.

So, which is right?  I don't think there would be much debate between the two groups as to who is a social justice warrior.  One side is proud to be one, and the other side thinks those people are awful.  The difference is in the description of the same activities.  I'm going to go back to my progressive college education, with its moral relativism and all, and say that both sides are right.  Social Justice Warriors are people who see themselves as committed to the cause of justice and fairness in a society that is patently unfair.  As such they search out injustice, make people aware of it, support those suffering, and stamp out the actions of those who are the cause of this injustice.  During this process they attempt to police speech, call certain beliefs abhorrent, and there's a hell of a lot more posting on the internet than quietly volunteering in slums.

I'm a progressive who strongly supports programs to rectify unfairness.  I think more funds should be spent raising up the most disadvantaged than supporting the more privileged.  A poor, black neighborhood should have more money spent on their schools than a rich, white neighborhood.  Women should get equal pay for equal work.  Men should get the same amount of time off for their children as women.  I also think Social Justice Warriors are appallingly annoying people and this has serious consequences.

In getting something done you need to know what it is you want to get done.  However, there's also the necessity of doing the things that achieve that result.  It's one thing to want more fairness in the world, it's another to make that happen.  Social justice warriors have no problem with knowing what they want, but their method has, in my opinion, has limited positive effect and serious negative effect.

A little history.  The march of social justice has gone at a remarkable rate over the last fifty years.  If you were going through your formative years in the 1960's the idea that there would be a black president, gay marriage was a right, and working mothers being the norm you would have been surprised.  In the 1980's you could be explicitly racist and elected senator.  Unfairness abounds but the movement is strongly in the direction of equality.  A consequence of such rapid change is that there are many people who grew up somewhere where everyone agreed that something was right, that are now told by society in general is not only wrong, but very wrong.  A good Christian in the 80's would likely think that homosexuality is a sin as described clearly in the Bible, and so would most of the people they knew.  Now society says that if they believe that they are vile bigot.

In order to advance fairness you have to get people with power to agree with you.  If there is one group with power then by definition you can't make them behave differently.  Furthermore, it seems to me that power is a zero sum game, any increase in power for one group means a reduction for another group.  To increase social justice you must convince those with power and privilege to give it up with no inherent reward.  This is where the goals are no longer enough, a practical method of achieving them is necessary.

The politics of social justice warriors as far as I can tell is identity politics.  There are different groups based on race, gender, culture, religion and anything else you can think of.  These then are essentially scored on the amount of privilege or oppression they face.  So if you are a black person you rank lowest on the privilege score (or native-americans?) on race, and if you are white you score at the top.  With the concept of intersectionality you can be in multiple groups simultaneously, so a rich, white, christian man is the pinnacle of privilege and power, while a mentally ill, black, gay, homeless muslim woman is somewhere near the bottom. 

As a point of ideology the different groups are inherently equal, there are no biological roots for the circumstances in which people find themselves.  For example, the smaller proportion of women who are engineers cannot be because women have biological differences in their brains that make them in general less interested in engineering.  It must be because of the influence of culture, and through the prism of identity politics that culture is determined by those with the most power and privilege, white men.  This results in the belief that inequality and the problems that arise because of them are predominantly because of white people, particularly men.

So we find ourselves in a situation where the people who are fighting for justice blame those in power for injustice, yet need those in power to change their behavior to their own detriment.  The sensible thing to do at that point is to try to find the most efficacious manner to get that to happen.  I maintain that yelling at people about how horrible they are, how ignorant they are, and how much better they have it than anyone else is not an effective way to do this.  When I agree with the basic principles of your campaign but you tell me that if I'm not part of the solution (i.e. do what they want me to do) I'm part of the problem (i.e. a bigoted member of a racist patriarchy) you piss me off.  If you are pissing people off on your side then your chances of changing the minds of people of people not initially supportive has got to be very low.

There are consequences to this, the most glaring being the election of Donald Trump.  Trump during his campaign was sexist, racist, bigoted on religion, offensive etc..  He won because of these things, not in spite of them.  Clinton said that half of Trump's supporters were "deplorables" because of their bigotry.  This is just an example of an unending stream of abuse towards those who hold beliefs that would have been considered standard a few decades ago.  Those who elected Trump say that America is being destroyed, taken away by the extreme activist left.  They are right.  The activist left is campaigning to destroy vital parts of a culture.  Religion, identity, morality, relationships, family are all being changed by people outside this group.  Just with any culture that is being destroyed it is painful to those undergoing those changes.  Tens of millions of people had just had enough and fought back.

What bothers me most is the hatred and intolerance within the progressive movement.  If you disagree you cannot just be a person with a different upbringing and different opinions, you are evil.  In order to alter the domination of white male voices the method is usually to ignore, dismiss, or exclude those voices.  There is indeed a domination of white, male voices but those are the people you want to give up their voices, and they don't have to.  It really just comes down to not being horrible to the people whose help you need.

I agree with the views of social justice warriors but hate the way they operate.  They are insufferably annoying.