My strained relationship with radicalism and pragmatism
Our pandemic, and the horrific murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, has triggered a moment pregnant with potential for long overdue radical change. Abolish the police. Abolish capitalism. Universal basic income. Universal health care. Reparations! To those on the left, these are essential ideas that move us toward justice. To those on the right, these are appalling, unreasonable demands that challenge the balance of power and their notions of fairness. This is a moment that demands all of us to wrestle with these ideas, deciding whether and how to act for racial justice. And so I have, trying to evaluate whether and how my personal and professional priorities are adequately combating America’s endemic anti-Blackness.
I sit in a messy political middle, culturally. My family is a melange of radical evangelical Christians, passively secular Asians, and younger progressive multiracial liberals. By my conservative relatives, I’ve been called an accomplice to murder for my support of reproductive choice. By the more radical progressives in my family, I’m assumed to be a techno-utopian fascist. At my academic institution, outside of CS, I sometimes feel like just having a CS background condemns me to assumptions of neophilic ignorance. And within CS, I am sometimes seen as aggressively and uncomfortably progressive. And throughout, I’ve lived both within a dominant category—white and Asian man in CS—and in minoritized categories—transgender, biracial, lesbian, interdisciplinary. I feel like a kaleidoscope of perceived political leanings, shifting entirely based on who’s reading me and from what perspective.
Despite all of this apparent complexity, my politics are much simpler. Ideologically, I am fundamentally progressive. To borrow modern Unitarian Universalist language, I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. I believe in a notion of justice that grants every person, regardless of who they are, everything they need to survive and thrive, including food, safety, health, wellness, education, respect, justice, stability, community, and love. I believe that the role of government is to create the conditions that sustainably enable these supports, through the careful design of private enterprise, public infrastructure, and public-private partnerships. To me, there is nothing radical about this dream, although it is consistent with most radical left positions. And I suspect that to most people, if this dream could become a reality at the snap of a finger, most would want it.
And yet, at the same time, I am also fundamentally pragmatic. I am utterly concerned with and curious about the world as it is. I am captivated and motivated by the machinery that drives our broken systems. I want to open its hood to understand how it works; I want to tinker with its engines; I want to replace its parts, and rebuild it, to fashion it into something resembling the utopia in my dreams. I am, at my core, an engineer, driven by a commitment to maintain, evolve, and enhance the brittle, fleeting social stability known as the United States of America into a more perfect union. There is nothing ideological about this part of me, only a ruthless compulsion to problem solve.
These two stances are in tension. After all, some problems in society can’t be easily solved by modifying what we have. The United States itself, for example, wasn’t a transformation of British colonial rule, it was a rejection and destruction of that rule and the creation of something new. The radical spirit of the left recognizes this need for revolution; it is the left’s preferred tool for change. And yet, some problems in society can’t involve burning down institutions. For example, as someone who views public education as essential to democracy, I don’t see a path to reforming it by firing all teachers, closing all schools, and building them anew while countless youth languish, waiting for us to sort out our new design. The pragmatic spirit recognizes this need for surgical, considered reform that equitably ambles towards justice.
To reconcile my radicalism with my pragmatism, I labor on whether an injustice demands revolution or reform. I read about problems I care about. I learn about their mechanics. I learn from people more expert than me about ongoing efforts to make change. I change my beliefs. I look for ways that I can use my position and power to contribute to those efforts. And occasionally, when my position calls on me to lead, I take everything that I’ve learned and try to decide: does this problem, at this time, in these communities, demand revolution or reform? This process is deliberative, and personally transformative.
To those to my left, this is too slow and too trusting of our institutions. It leads people to incorrectly read me as half-heartedly committed to the values of social justice. And when I hold power over an unjust process or institution, it leads people to express to me their impatience for change and their disappointment in my lack of moral imagination. And to those to my right, this process is still too radical. Even considering change, or raising conversations about change, paralyzes them, makes them avoid me for fear of having to face challenging ideas or respond to my advocacy. I can’t move fast enough for the left and I can’t move slow enough for the right. And yet, in my muddled politics, it’s not me that’s determining the speed of change, its the irreducible complexity of making sustainable, effective change that necessarily sets our pace. I am, for better or worse, an Elizabeth Warren and not a Bernie Sanders.
What does this mean for my role in pursuing racial justice? Prior to this week’s protests, much of my attention was centered on racial equity and inclusion in computer science education, and broadening literacy on the racially oppressive role of computation in society. These intersect with CS education, data science education, education more broadly, and the role of computing in policing, incarceration, and surveillance. For the past year, I’ve been reading a book a week on these topics, including Design Justice, Automating Inequality, Algorithms of Oppression, Geek Heresy, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Saving Capitalism, Weapons of Math Destruction, and dozens many more. Racial inequality has never been more central to my thinking, my research, and my advocacy. And I’m only getting started: I can see a path through the next decade of my career that not only leads to scholarship and teaching in this space, but real change, in my role leading CS education reform in Washington state and beyond.
But somehow, I still feel the urgency of action, and the guilt of inaction, at least on the time scale of weeks and days. I don’t feel safe enough to attend a protest. I don’t know enough to confidently advocate for specific police reforms. I can barely sustain my professional long term advocacy and reform goals, let alone add new ones to them, lest my delicate post-transition emotional stability crumbles. And because of my ignorance, it feels irresponsible to add my voice to what is already a cacophony. And yet also cowardly.
This is perhaps the greatest limitation of my pragmatism: inaction. There are moments that demand action despite ignorance, and this is one of them. Either I risk regretting what I support, or regretting doing nothing. Some days I long for the courage of conviction to act. Other days, I long to slow the pace to make room for sustainable, effective change. And on days like today, I step back and remember that I’m neither a barrier to social change, nor the voice demanding it: I am the person that implements change behind the scenes, one day at a time, one person at a time, invisibly yet effectively. And that is enough.
#BlackLivesMatter
