In Good Faith: Intent & Impact in Social Justice
A few days ago I had the privilege of attending a talk by Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, and speaking with her at a reception afterward. The talk was phenomenal in general (I shared some of my notes) but one of the things that has stayed with me is how Garza handled issues of good faith, bad faith, and how to deal. I’ll go into one surprising example in a bit.
Impact Over Intent
One popular idea around good faith is “impact over intent” — that good intentions are meaningless and only impact matters. Everyday Feminism has an article that shows the basic perspective on this. It centers around the person who is told they’re being racist or sexist or homophobic and responds that they meant well (so you should just lay off). And that’s bullshit! But intent doesn’t show up only when people are trying to get out of accountability. Intention is an important aspect of moral responsibility, and impact-only formulations throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The problem with “but I meant well!!!” isn’t that good intent isn’t meaningful, it’s that this response is in bad faith. Meaning well isn’t a “get out of jail free” card and someone who means well doesn’t try to use it as one — but it still has an important function in reconciliation. A person who says “I meant well, so lay off” doesn’t mean well, they just want to end the conversation.
But if you accidentally hurt someone you care about, you probably do say something like “I’m so sorry — it was an accident.” A real apology usually comes with an assurance of good faith, because part of assuring the wronged party that we’ll fix it and do better is assuring them that we wouldn’t have done it to hurt them. Impact-over-intent, through a filter of callout culture, can become impact-only, and that quickly becomes treating every conflict as a worst-case scenario of its type.
That’s a problem for several reasons. First, it’s really stressful for the person interpreting the situation. But it’s also really unfair. A good faith mistake has different moral value than a malicious act, it demands a different kind of correction, and it has different implications about the future. If my partner breaks my laptop because he tripped and dropped his coffee on my keyboard, I have a broken laptop and my partner should take on the responsibility of fixing it. If my partner breaks my laptop because he’s mad at me and decided to pour his coffee into my keyboard, my biggest problem is an abusive relationship. The laptop is just as broken, but the intent changes the situation dramatically.
When something goes wrong, it’s important to know why, and that why includes intent in most if not all social conflict. “I didn’t mean to” is part of preserving or regaining trust after conflict, because if the person who wronged you doesn’t care about not harming you, you are having a way bigger problem. Accordingly, judging fairly whether someone’s error was in good faith (and responding appropriately) is also part of maintaining trust. If we’re about justice, we can’t ignore mens rea completely.
The purpose of holding someone accountable is to maintain the mutual dignity and humanity of all parties — and managing that means considering both impact and intent.
Which brings us to…
“All Lives Matter”
I wasn’t surprised that Alicia Garza talked about the “all lives matter” trope but I was surprised at what she said. We’re all familiar with the standard line on this, put bluntly in the HuffPost headline “Every Time You Say All Lives Matter You’re Being An Accidental Racist.” The thesis of this article is that “all lives matter” always means “we should not highlight that black lives matter because all lives matter.” This is a very clear impact-over-intent position, and we’ve likely all seen (and maybe participated in) a coming-to-Jesus moment because someone tweeted #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter.
But Garza had something else to say. Oh, she had some words for people who use “all lives matter” to shut down conversations about racism: “‘all lives matter’ is not a very courageous way of saying ‘I don’t believe there are disparities in the way Black people are treated in this country.’” That part I expected — but Garza doesn’t extend this criticism to everyone who says those words. When it comes to people who say “all lives” and mean all lives, including hers, she has no beef. She said that when people say “all lives matter” to communicate that they are standing in the shared liberatory struggle that includes the defense of Black lives, she will stand next to that person and have no issues.
It surprised me. In social justice circles (especially online), there can be a lot of pressure to never say the wrong words, even if you mean the right thing. But the postmodernist practice of hearing only the worst possible meaning of a statement, regardless of context, lends itself to bad-faith holdings. Garza wasn’t responding to a question when she delivered this defense of good faith “all lives matter” statements. She decided to talk about it. What I took from that was that when the stakes are survival, making sure everyone uses the same words can’t be our top priority.
Part of this is likely because the surface meaning of “all lives matter” is not problematic — it is problematic because it is used to imply something racist, so someone could easily say it in good faith. That doesn’t extend to all such errors, but again — that’s a matter of fairly judging why an error occurred.
A Movement of Millions
Garza deemphasizing shared vocabularies in favor of shared values is further explained by another part of her speech: the call for a movement of millions that tears down the “siloing” of social justice issues into separate projects. Garza warned of the growing fascist and white supremacist movement in the US and the world. As she put it, white supremacists are no longer an “embarrassing fringe” — “there are Neo-Nazis in the streets punching people in the face like ‘this our hood now’!” Fascism is everyone’s problem. The shit has hit the fan and we need to be there for each other.
A movement of millions, tearing down the boundaries between issues to take up our shared struggles as one body means bringing together a vast array of groups that don’t know very much about each other. Every issue contains a universe of knowledge and norms that isn’t shared with other issues. That is always going to be true.
The rising tide of fascism is an existential threat to many, many communities. To survive, we have to come together like we never have before. Building a team of millions will mean different competencies, different vocabularies, different methodologies, and different visions. We need to find a way for our different specialties to be a strength and not a weakness.
Garza’s different responses to the “all lives matter” folks — a callout for some and solidarity with others — model an approach to consider. There are certainly egregious faux pas that no amount of good faith will cover, but if a founder of Black Lives Matter can be unruffled by a good-faith proclamation that all lives matter, there are places in my activism that I can make room for good-faith differences too.
