Y’all would never suggest that some misogynist shadow white ladies for days and have those ladies recount their sexism-related experiences and traumas. You would intuitively get that the actual stakes of that arrangement ain’t whether that misogynist changes his mind. And yet. 😐
One important effect of the civil rights movements is that it helped establish powerful (if fragile) social taboos around open bigotry. It created new consequences for bigotry where few existed before; prejudice, as they called it, became seen as a kind of moral failing. But.
a lot of what happened afterward is that that same bigotry became more euphemized and extenuated in our public life and politics; still that shift gave Black people, and people of color in general, more room to navigate through the world.
The corresponding changes you see in white opinion on a host of racial issues post- civil rights had far less to do with people's souls being touched than it did with changes in social expectation. (And again, segregation was still the material reality of US life.)
We rightly think of antiracism in moral terms, and civil rights leaders and Native rights leaders and radical queer folks use the language of morality to make their arguments. It’s powerful and important to do that.
but those movements were *never* primarily concerned with making sure every bigoted person has some profound moral reckoning with their bigotry — shit is too urgent for that —but whether oppressed people have the space to operate and live and get/be free.
That means changing norms. Social norms. Policy norms. Legal norms. And in order for those norms to be affirmed, they need to have consequences.
In that since-deleted tweet, the person wondered whether it was counterproductive for a white lady (caught on camera threatening a Black woman who was waiting for AAA for help) to lose her job behind her behavior. Isn’t this a chance for her learning thru dialogue w/ Black ppl?
Whether she learns is a private concern she can work out on her own time.
Whether people are disincentivized from calling the cops on Black people for having the audacity to be in public is a fundamentally different question, and potentially a question of life or death.
Whether people are disincentivized from calling the cops on Black people for having the audacity to be in public is a fundamentally different question, and potentially a question of life or death.
These are different projects with wildly different levels of urgency, and by making racism a problem of white people’s souls, we make its engines opaque and unknowable and ineffable instead of observable and quantifiable and fixable.
Norms move the needle in how people behave; let’s focus on creating and affirming the norms we want.
Apologies for typos.
Apologies for typos.
Okay, to make this a little less abstract, imma borrow a scenario laid out to me by the homie @DrPhilGoff.
Your uncle says racist/homophobic shit at the Thanksgiving table. You may care about him being a better person, which is fine — he’s your uncle and he taught you how to grill or whatever.
But the reason you consistently push back on his bullshit at Thanksgiving dinner is not to change his mind, but because the expectation of friction for saying that bullshit makes him and other people have to weigh whether it’s worth saying that bullshit.
And that has a huge difference for the social dynamics at the table should your Muslim friend swing by for dinner, or whether your queer niece who ain’t out to nobody yet has to sit through that bullshit in quiet agony.
Your uncle’s mind may not change AT ALL bc you clapped back.
But that not why you do it. Bc if he keeps that bullshit to himself + doesn’t say it at the dinner table bc he ain’t trynna hear your mouth?
That dinner is an observably less hostile space for your friend or cousin.
But that not why you do it. Bc if he keeps that bullshit to himself + doesn’t say it at the dinner table bc he ain’t trynna hear your mouth?
That dinner is an observably less hostile space for your friend or cousin.
