Racial Roles in Social Justice Culture
Reducing people to their race is not progressive.
This spring, I got to participate in two events hosted by
, which is a socialist podcast hosted by and that challenges cancel culture, identitarianism and social justice orthodoxy in order to build solidarity on the left. In Portland, I got to speak alongside Bebe Montoya and Roger Peet, and in Vancouver, Sarah Blackmore and .
It was a moving experience to discuss these topics in person. Some old anxieties reared their heads in the days leading up—my brain was convinced I’d say something out of line and be unceremoniously tossed out the door. But what actually happened is that a really smart, curious and warm bunch of people showed up to imagine a left that does not keep devouring its own.
A number of the people who came up to talk to me afterward told me how the rigid racial roles within social justice culture had negatively affected them, alienating lifelong friends, causing acute distress for mixed race people (Bebe’s zines illuminate this experience), and driving away people of colour who got tired of being constantly reduced to their race. This subculture makes identities contingent on being “good”—people of colour are commonly told they are enacting white supremacy, and that they’re not really insert-race-here, if they do not subscribe to an identitarian worldview.
Below you will find the talk I gave in Portland and Vancouver, followed by my interview with Clementine and Jay. Finally you’ll find my favourite labour song, which I sang at both shows.
Fucking Cancelled Tour Talk
I spent five years of my life dedicated to a social justice orthodoxy that reduced people to their identities, and decided how good or bad, how worthy or unworthy people were based on those labels. People with multiple marginalized identities, such as women of colour, were put on a pedestal, and others, such as white men, were treated as though they were personally responsible for everything that was wrong in the world. Everyone had certain roles to play: people of colour were expected to be outgoing, expressive and confrontational, to bare their hardships for everyone to see, and to connect with their cultural backgrounds in a public way. White people were expected to be quiet and submissive, to hold back from sharing explanations or dissenting thoughts, and to defer to the leadership of various charismatic people of colour. People who fell outside of such parameters, regardless of skin colour, were regularly accused of white supremacy.
This structure never sat well with me, but for a long time I convinced myself it was because of my white fragility. Discomfort is a sign of growth, I was told over and over again, so I got used to being uncomfortable, to hearing insulting and degrading comments on a regular basis, to watching people’s humanity get trampled over and over again. I convinced myself that this was all for the greater good, even if I wasn’t sure how that could be.
The terrain of what was right and what was wrong was constantly shifting under my feet. I found myself parroting slogans not because I believed in them, but because I was worried people would think I was a bad person if I didn’t. I watched people lose their entire community over mild mistakes or misunderstandings. I watched vengeful, unstable people with the “correct” identities behave terribly and I watched as not a single person, myself included, stood up to them. It was safer to keep your head down and hope you wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire than it was to put a target on your back. So we allowed this destructive behaviour to run rampant through our scenes.
I participated in an accountability process that was anything but, that demonized a person for experiencing normal levels of relational conflict, that stripped them of their community and their friends, deemed their new partner guilty by association, forced them to move out of the city and resulted in a diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder. All under the banner of believing women and supporting survivors.
Slowly but surely, doubts started to creep into my mind. I’d been told that we were building a new world, breaking ground in not relying on the legal system to deal with conflict. And yet this new world disposed of crucial safeguards such as the requirement of evidence and the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”. This new world seemed to be a resurgence of vigilante justice with some extra bureaucracy sprinkled on top. And the kangaroo court cases kept piling up.
Deciding to leave this subculture was not easy. Social justice orthodoxy likes to pretend that it is the only true left, and that if you’re not loyal, you must be right wing. Over time I realized that it was possible to separate out the largely symbolic and representational politics of social justice culture from material leftism, policies such as high corporate and wealth taxes, a robust social safety net and well-funded public health, education and transit systems. I could reject the former while continuing to fight for the latter.
When I was ready to publicly announce my leaving, I did so by publishing a series of essays online. I braced myself for blowback, but the overwhelming majority of messages I received were supportive, from people who had left the subculture silently. I was happy to see so many people rejoining the larger world, but it was glaring how few people felt comfortable declaring out loud that they were leaving, even just in a comment on my newsletter. It made me realize that I wasn’t the only one who felt deeply alone in my deprogramming process.
When I first left, I struggled a lot with residual paranoia. I knew I wasn’t a bad person for leaving, but I had plenty of intrusive thoughts to the contrary. It took time for the frequency and intensity of those to go down, and there were times where I asked for reassurance from my friends and partner that I wasn’t a bad person for considering and adopting new perspectives. Dropping the bad/good binary was crucial to changing my state of mind: I decided that I would never be the best or worst person on earth, that I was a normal person who was trying my best, and that my missteps didn’t make me a monster. I stopped holding myself to impossible standards of purity of thought and action; sometimes I even had shivers of pleasure after thinking a previously forbidden thought. My mind was waking up again, and it felt so good.
Another challenge in leaving was that all of my close friends remained in the subculture. I was too frightened of being labelled a traitor to talk about my rising doubts in those friendships, although I dipped my toes in here and there. What was ultimately the most helpful was making new friendships outside of the subculture altogether. This gave me an opportunity to practice speaking my mind freely, and learning that these new friends didn’t just tolerate but actually wanted to discuss the ideas I was grappling with was a revelation. The more I did this, the less anxiety accompanied it, and the more I could relax into these connections. Then, when it was time to publish my essays, I knew I wouldn’t lose everyone.
The first time I walked into a library after leaving the subculture, my heart was racing. It was as if I were entering it for the first time. There was not a single book in there that was off-limits to me; I’d thrown my ever-growing list of problematic writers in the trash can. Walking out with “The Coddling of the American Mind” tucked under my arm, I felt the rush I used to get when I was shoplifting. I honestly felt like someone was going to jump out of a bush and accuse me of treason. But nobody did! I got home and devoured it. It’s a truly beautiful thing, to no longer be scared of new ideas, to in fact seek out different perspectives in order to see if my own hold water, and to grant myself the freedom of changing my mind.
One massive change in my life was when I realized I was not responsible for other people’s reactions. If someone wanted to massively distort what I said, there was nothing I could do about it. Same for putting words in my mouth, or attacking my character rather than my ideas. My job is to write out my ideas as clearly as I can; what happens after that is beyond my control. This has been an incredible relief, and it has allowed me to begin writing again after many years of silence.
It used to drive me absolutely crazy that other people didn’t think, speak and act as I did, and a lot of my life force went toward trying to make this happen. I was so convinced that I was right about everything that people who disagreed weren’t just wrong, they were harmful and even dangerous. What a sad, small world I was living in. What an incredible diversity of human thought and opinion was I missing out on. This subculture is where curiosity goes to die, and reviving it, taking a renewed interest in the world around me in all of its beautiful complexity, is something I can’t recommend enough. It’s allowing me to treat others with the full humanity they deserve instead of relying on stereotypes. It’s giving me practice in using persuasion rather than shame to change minds. Most of all, I can once again see the incredible work that countless generations have put in toward providing for the material needs and respecting the human rights of all people, regardless of the forces that have tried to divide us. In other words, what I have found again, is hope.
My wish is that this nominally leftist subculture, with its inverted hierarchies and indifference towards material issues, will fade in influence as more and more people realize that vengeance is not politics, that dividing the working class along identity lines only benefits the ruling class, and that nothing is as powerful as good old-fashioned solidarity.
Your point about social justice orthodoxy acting as if it's the only legitimate leftist viewpoint is something my friends and I often talk about. There's clearly a strategy going on where people of that ideology want there to only be 2 options: their ideology or some outrageously far-gone oppositional ideology that most sane left-ish people would be repulsed by.
Their lack of genuine and prioritized concern for material interests makes sense since a lot of social justice orthodoxy is really an intra-class war among the elites (or wannabe elites). They're either comfortably off anyway or don't care too much about money in the first place. They care much more about social status hierarchies (of which money is one of, not the only, factor), sexual self-esteem, attention and deference, and so forth.
I've spent a bit of time today reading through your essays on leaving the SJW subculture, in addition to this piece. I never got too deeply into it, but I brushed up against it, and have distanced myself in recent years from spaces that seem to be infected by it. You've written with great insight into the dynamics of the culture, and of the mental liberty that accompanies turning away from it.
One thing in particular that's struck me is your experience with its impact on creativity, and the near impossibility of writing in a way that successfully toes the line. When I dipped my feet in years ago, having initially bought into the culture's outward projection of empathy and egalitarianism, the strictures imposed upon writers were what warned me not to wade in too deep. "If white people can't write about people of color," I thought, "in an environment where most of the people in publishing and film are still white...then won't that have the effect of /reducing/ representation?" What's more, the attitude seemed to be at cross purposes with the notion of empathy. Part of the purpose of fiction is to help readers/viewers empathize with those who are different from them, to challenge them to inhabit the minds of such people. But here was an ideology that said that, no, the purpose of fiction is in fact to meditate exclusively on one's own "lived experiences;" and that further insisted that it's impossible to understand anyone who is different from you.
I enjoyed "problematic" works and characters; I couldn't bring myself to believe that they were irretrievably tainted. And I also couldn't buy that I, when writing fiction, should explore only my own self, and should refrain from including diverse characters. In what world could that possibly be antiracist?
It was then that I noticed that even following the rules wasn't good enough. As you've noted, all works are judged not only by the rules that currently exist; they're judged by rules that, at the time of writing, hadn't been invented yet. The point, therefore, couldn't be to build a better world. The point was to have an inexhaustible supply of enemies on whom to vent one's worst impulses.
Goodness, I've gone on quite a bit, here. I think it's mainly due to relating to your experience of the culture stifling creative energy, because that's absolutely what it does. I'm glad you're out of it and can write freely, now. Keep doing it!