A Brief Introduction to Privilege, Historical Oppression, Social Justice and the Modi-Trump Wave
This interview between a 22 year-old Donald Trump supporter and a journalist at The Atlantic, illuminates a crucial part of why Trump in the US (and Modi in India) have such a stranglehold on the public imagination.
The new century has seen a strong, media-savvy movement throughout the world which has sought to aggressively champion the social and economic rights of historically oppressed demographics across gender, caste, colour and race lines. But where these movements differ from other historical social justice movements (be it Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement, Mahatma Gandhi’s movement for the uplifting of the Bahujan castes, the suffragette movement in England fighting for the right of women to vote, etc.) is in the more confrontational nature of social justice agitations today. Some of this is because, due to the legal and socio-cultural victories won by these past movements, mainstream culture and the law today safeguard the basic human rights of such minorities. These days, you can’t get away with saying women should stay at home, or that African-Americans can’t do the same jobs that white Americans do — mainstream media, your own education, the law, all point in another, more liberal, direction.
This new generation of activists has to fight a much more nebulous enemy — that of subliminal attitudes and prejudices, of sly underhanded discrimination, of socially (but not legally) mandated segregation. These are much harder to hold up as examples of oppression, because these facts are so insidiously ingrained into the life experience of someone who faces such discrimination, that it’s difficult to communicate to someone else who, because of the privileges of their birth, have never had to deal with such hurdles or handicaps. Imagine, if you will, a person who can perceive colour and someone who is colour-blind. Imagine holding up a red traffic light in front of them. The first person knows and recognises the barriers on their ability to move forward that the light represents; the colour-blind person, however, has no clue. He does not even realise that there is something in society called a red light which means you have to stop. (I'm not trying to advocate banning traffic lights, this is just an analogy.) That blindness to society’s hurdles and handicaps is “privilege”. And it is against this privilege that the new social justice movements fight.
It is difficult to argue against an idea as abstract as privilege. Mass communication, speeches to large sold-out stadiums, television “bites”, even 140-character tweets, are a bad way to talk about nuance. And so, the current generation of activists, schooled in a Marxist tradition, use a different, more aggressive rhetoric in support of their movement — that of envisioning the society once again as a battlefield of class warfare. To bring out the injustices hiding in plain sight, the dominant culture has to be attacked (much like the economically bourgeois classes were attacked in the historical Communist uprisings). Upper-caste Hindus will have to be forced to acknowledge the horrors of the caste system; white Americans will have to face up to the legacy of slavery and white supremacist movements like the Ku Klux Klan. It is not enough to celebrate minority culture — the majority culture often has to be denigrated in the process.
But remember what I said about nuance and mass movements, and how the two things are basically incompatible? That’s pretty much what’s happened here too. We went overboard in our criticisms and our mockery. We painted too many people, good people, with the same brush. Sure, we laugh at the “Not all men” jokes, but they speak to a deeper anxiety that many socially conscious, even feminist, men face — that of always being seen with suspicious eyes, of being potential attackers. Similarly, while decrying upper caste Hindu oppression, it’s difficult to add a disclaimer after every two sentences saying “Not all Hindu Brahmins were bad, of course” etc. — the result is that a large section of this demographic too feels demonized now, their religion mocked, their rituals held up as the fetishes of a barbaric culture.
Perhaps this is the outcome of any social movement which tries to right the historical scales of right and wrong — when seismic changes are occurring all around you, some people will lose, some people will win. If you've lived your whole life in privilege, equality is a galling proposition, especially since it means that in the short-term, you and your kin will receive the short end of the stick.
And this sentiment is what Modi and Trump are tapping into — they loudly proclaim to the dominant majority culture that it’s all good, they’re decent people, just trying to live honestly and peacefully, and that they deserve to keep receiving the same benefits and advantages that their forefathers had also enjoyed. If there are two people with a loudspeaker on opposite sides of the road, one telling you your grandfather was a racist who exploited people, and the other telling you your gramps was a stand-up guy, a wonderful man, and you deserve to carry on his traditions, which side of the road are you likely to join?
Any attempt at countering the propaganda machines of leaders like these must involve real dialogue, such as in the article I cited at the beginning of this note. We must learn to accommodate and understand points of view that are radically different from our own. We have to think beyond easy binaries — if you treat the upper castes as your enemy, will they ever understand you? Will you understand them? Political correctness (PC) started off with noble intentions — by socially curating the language we use, we could try and learn to be more considerate of the experiences of others. But this has now been taken to the extent where PC culture has become the de facto dominant culture in many liberal spheres, with its own rabid adherents and zealots, and entailing its own punishments if you fail to abide by this culture. For example, someone who makes a sexist comment is not just a capital-S Sexist — that is not the sum total of who they are as a human being. Maybe they need to be informed of how certain behaviour or speech is offensive to many people, but to brand them off as misogynist douchebags and blocking them on social media, or trash-talking and socially ostracising them is a non-ideal way of assimilating anyone into your society, to say the least. Because these same people, who could have been your allies, are left with a seething resentment at everything you and your comrades represent, and can’t wait to vote in someone like Trump who vows to rid the country of people like you.
It’s not particularly cool or hip to say so, but perhaps the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) movement has finally reached a point of mainstream ubiquity, that we have to move beyond a culture of confrontation to a culture of conciliation and compromise. Revolutions are always zero-sum games. And there are too many lives at stake here.
