Thread by @keith_ng

So. My US trip has been a civil rights pilgrimage. There are people in NZ who are actively seeking to emulate the US, to use the same tactics and the same themes to divide our society, poison our discourse, and to use our values against us.

The Culture War is coming to NZ. 1/n

When I described hate speech as acts of humiliation earlier this year, I think I deeply *underestimated* how significant acts of humiliation are.

https://twitter.com/keith_ng/status/1026637040186580993?s=19

Consider the Montgomery Bus Boycotts (Rosa Parks). There was never material value to bus seating. Its importance - and the reason why the segregationist fought so hard to retain it - was always about maintaining a routine and public act of humiliation against Blacks.

Public humiliation was the means by which cultural and structural oppression was maintained. These were rituals of dominance and submissions, the way in which you brand power onto people's minds and spirits.

It is not enough to - as I had - consider public acts intended to humiliate as merely hurtful. They are intentionally designed to empower domination. To make day-to-day humiliation normal, to make political subjugation seem reasonable, to make acts of violence tolerable.

Second, the civil rights movement was itself about demonstration of power. Of moral power, through its embrace of nonviolence in the face of violence, but also of legal/political power. Riding buses/going to school with armed escorts was a demonstration of power.

They never shamed the Deep South into accepting civil rights. This didn't happen. Their moral truths did not persuade their oppressors. It persuaded the wider American public and the *Federal* government acted against the state and local authorities, which frequently defied..

..court rulings and even basic rule of law. To the extent to which things have changed, it required soldiers to enforce laws, laws to change behaviors, and maybe behaviors would alter attitudes over generations. A little.

We like to believe that we - as humans in general and Western civilisation in particular - will arc towards justice once it is shown. It's not true.

Truth and justice have power, but it doesn't work on its own.

The work is everywhere, on all the fronts. As much as it mattered to show the world what was happening, to have marches and speeches, it also took incredible, unglamorous work.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott took *13 months*. 13 months where people ending a hard day of work would walk miles and miles rather than catch a bus, where strangers would give each other rides, where community organizers would set up an entire shadows public transport system.

But the most striking part was understanding how diverse the movement was, in terms of how they thought. The church leaders and lawyers concerned with respectability politics; the students and communists who pushed for radicalism, not to mention the Black separatist etc...

As much as these were principles held by the various factions, they were also strategies to be tried and tested. The more respectable side pushed for incrementalism - they *explicitly* said they didn't want to end segregation in their demands during the Montgomery Bus Boycott...

..only better treatment. And they did not approve of the Freedom Rides, believing that the violence which would ensue (it did) would lose them support (it did not).

When strategies failed, they were abandoned. When they worked, they were embraced.

We have got to stop picking strategies based on what makes us feel good, or treating them as matter of principle. We have to learn to adapt and change courses. And we have to stop treating those with different strategies as enemies.

Fin.