You Need to Stop Making it Harder For People to Agree With You
By: Sam Young
Tags: Social Justice, Politics, BlackLivesMatter, Racism, Writing

You Need to Stop Making it Harder For People to Agree With You Sam Young Follow Dec 10 · 6 min read

Recently, I came across an article here on Medium talking about slang terms white people need to stop using. Normally, this sort of stuff wouldn’t bother me, but every time I look at my medium digest some article pops up belonging to a genre I can only really describe as “let’s get upset at shit white people do”. Let me start out by pointing out the pachyderm. I am white. I am so white, I offend mayonnaise. I’m so white, snow blindness was originally called Sam blindness. I cannot leave the house without instantly getting four types of skin cancer. I invented Tay-Sachs disease. I am so white, my skin tone is used competitively to color business cards like that scene from American Psycho. When I try to dance, it becomes a personal tragedy and my reputation is destroyed like Elaine from Seinfeld. When summer arrives, socks with sandals grow onto my feet like the alien symbiote from Spiderman.

Maybe we should ease up on the whole it’s cool to be sexist if they’re white deal? I’ve seen some real jaundiced reactionary yahoo bruiser types yelling about “white girls” and it’s pretty uncomfortable.

I am not your ally. My support for BLM and other such movements is unconditional. Alliances are conditional and subject to change, especially with shifting interests. Supporting human rights for all people has nothing to do with my interests, and there is nothing anyone can do to change my position on such issues. That being said, it took work and time for me to get to this point. I would not have been able to develop an understanding of these issues if it weren’t for exposure I had gotten through various relationships and life experiences. Not everyone has gotten the opportunities that I have, and many are ignorant for this reason and do not understand the issues that people of color and other minorities face. In a democratic society such as ours, it is necessary that we reach out to these people and bring them to a place where they understand social justice and actively support it.

The focus of much of my political work has been on reaching out to people who share my values regarding life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and explaining to them why social justice is the critical component of actualizing that dream in the modern world. Every time I see one of these stupid articles, I feel like I am being shot in the foot. Nobody wants to join a movement that explicitly hates them and requires them to compromise the things they love to join. These articles actively feed into right-wing propaganda that the left is a puritanical and pessimistic movement based on a dreary group of boors who hate the white working class.

The right understands intuitively that people base their politics on social identity just as much if not more than they base it on their moral values or even their material interests. This is why they constantly push the narrative that the right is an accepting and fun-loving community while the left is chronically spiteful and morose. Anyone with ears and a conscience can see that Donald Trump is morally repugnant, but the religious right accepted this adulterous brute regardless because they understand the symbolic meaning behind accepting an outsider and seeing past their sinful exterior to embrace the humanity within. I have often heard black Republicans talk about how they experienced more “discrimination” for being conservative than they ever did for being black. Clearly, this position comes from a place of privilege, but I don’t think these people are being disingenuous. There are a number of people of all backgrounds who feel compelled to abandon the left because they feel stifled by its more dogmatic cohorts.

I have to question what the people writing these articles even hope to achieve. I can only imagine that these articles push people sitting on the fence further away from the social justice movement. The black community has an immense amount of soft power, so much so that the United States government still uses black cultural inventions like jazz to proliferate our political influence overseas. As a linguist I hate the term “slang” being used as a way to differentiate features of African American English from other varieties, but either way AAE language features are continuing to define the evolution of mainstream English and it’s ridiculous to me that this is seen as a negative. No, “fuckboy” doesn’t mean the same thing in Spokane as it does in Atlanta, but neither does “baikingu” in Tokyo mean the same thing as “Viking” nor “Handi” in Berlin the same as “handy”.

I imagine someone who has been growing up their whole life being taught that the Confederacy was a group of freedom fighters and that blacks just need to stop complaining and work harder encountering elements of black culture and falling in love. This is someone who may be on the precipice of beginning to understand systemic racism in the United States and deconstructing the problematic aspects of the culture they grew up with. Then, they come across an article telling them that they need to walk like this talk like this if they want to be a good ally, telling them that they’re not allowed to enjoy certain things or feel good about themselves for who they are. Is this supposed to make them more likely to support the movement? Is this how we get people to abandon the communities and ways of thinking they’ve held onto their entire lives and throw themselves into a movement their culture has trained them to resist through centuries of propaganda?

BLM rally in Japan

I want to be careful in emphasizing what I do not mean by this. People of color should not be obligated to explain anything they don’t want to, pander to white people, sugarcoat their struggles, hide how they really feel, or otherwise handle racism with kid gloves. The situation black people are going through right now in the United States is nothing short of horrifying and we do not have time to be nice about it. White people have an obligation to work within our own communities and translate what black people have been saying about their own struggles for centuries into language that is suitable for reaching white audiences. All human beings have an obligation to help each other, and considering the great power white people have extracted from other communities over the centuries, the obligation is especially heavy upon us to utilize our privilege and genius to move equality forward.

That being said, the seriousness of the struggle we face necessitates pragmatism and I feel the need to criticize the almost suicidal sort of idealism the left continues to embody. The left sucks at marketing, and this has severe real-world consequences for the most vulnerable. We must not fall into the trap of appropriating unethical tactics our opposition uses or mindlessly adopting methods that are antithetical to our goals. At the same time, we need to pay attention to why these methodologies are so effective and figure out what our movement needs to be maximally constructive. When the stakes are this high, we don’t have the privilege of losing. We certainly don’t benefit from making it more difficult for people to agree with us.