“Are We Mistaking Feelings for Politics?”
“I think of White girls in my middle-school English class, offended by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because it contained many uses of “the n-word,” yet never questioning why our “honors” English class was all-White.
Being offended is not in itself political. “What is political,” Cross writes, is the way that racist ideas contribute to systemic violence, the way transphobic language acts as “the spearpoint of violence against trans women, used to justify it and all but ensure such crimes will be repeated.” We are not talking about offense. We are talking about actual harm and lost life.
As Sara Ahmed points out, making arguments turn on hurt feelings is an excellent way to cover up the actual mechanisms of power at work…
what we’ve seen too often lately is the feelings of one or a small group of people being substituted for an actual understanding of harm and of power. And the people whose feelings get aired in public and taken seriously are often those who already have a level of power to begin with…
What we end up with instead is a politics of pity and charity; endless articles in newspapers and magazines about the abject misery of the poor and handwringing about what “we” should do about it. Gira Grant argues in For Love or Money that tears become a substitute for the hard work of political organizing. “Weeping, from a safe distance. Weeping that somehow isn’t also read as a form of objectification.”
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I actually jotted down some of my thoughts about this the other day, before reading this article, so this was a great find.
Here is my problem statement: Do we know how to be political without presenting with anger?
I’m thinking about our models for political-ness, our models for engagement. There is this idea that we can only legitimately approach the need for change if we do so through personal experiences of explicit oppression, and that we need to communicate that need through anger and motivate it with fear. There is all this destructive language about “political enemies” and being at “war” with certain ideas or groups — even the term ‘campaign’ was adopted from the military, very intentionally. But I think these terms elide the goals — we aren’t trying to destroy something, we are typically trying to create something new.
I think that activism is rooted in a radical optimism, not anger. I have always been a political child, even if it was just on the scale of my elementary school’s after school program, and I remember being tiny and wanting to have my voice heard because I was excited that I could make something better. At that age I was motivated by my imagination and uninhibited childhood ideas, by images of how-things-could-be if we just changed one thing, tried something new, extended generosity. But I didn’t really see models of people being like me — I watched elections and learned partisan anger and was told that debate was the best way to address political questions and I saw how the discourse was primarily concerned with yelling about things that were absolutely, fundamentally a problem.
I saw how people were even irritable when they spoke about the solutions, because what was the problem with people that we didn’t already have that obvious solution. Anger and derision was so often how passion was communicated
So, it strikes me that this emphasis on the fear-anger seems like another way that the status quo protects itself: It’s easy to we have to commit our energy to opposing, and then maybe when that’s done, then we can have energy for building. It is easy to sneer at hopeful versions of what-could-be; it’s easy to call these visions naive, demanding, entitled and unnecessary. This attitude of ‘if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it’ that comes from exhaustion and distrust.
There is real anger, real fear, real motivation from real social/psychological/physical violence; there continues to be something radical about being open with anger and fear, being a woman who refuses to smile through pain, being a black person who refuses to sing through undesirable labor. Some of us are given so little room to process, much less heal.
The problem is that our cultural narratives frame passionate anger as the necessary sources of social change. And so the burden of proof is shifted, from asking the status quo to prove that it can’t get better, to asking activists to prove that their experiences are validly angering.
This harms the individuals asking for change, forcing us to both experience and perform our anger. But it also harms activism as a whole, because we are directed away from our vision of what society should look like; time spent imagining the better and being motivated by hope is time wasted in the effort to convince society that it is flawed in the ways we say it is.
I am interested in the idea of a vision-based activism; this isn’t the limiting positivity of “upworthy”, this is the radical belief that, even in the absence of evil, society should change because it can always be so much better. This is the joyful replacement of apathy with growth.
I am going to spend time thinking about what that looks like, and looking for examples.
Related: Against Against X; an example of sort of it-could-be-this-way policy
