Thanks for your thoughtful comment! I appreciate the generosity you have toward people whose bad experiences are colouring their interactions with you. Part of what goes wrong in many activist groups in my opinion is that people try to bond immediately rather than engaging in the slow process of getting to know one another in a genuine w…
Thanks for your thoughtful comment! I appreciate the generosity you have toward people whose bad experiences are colouring their interactions with you. Part of what goes wrong in many activist groups in my opinion is that people try to bond immediately rather than engaging in the slow process of getting to know one another in a genuine way. The latter is what has the potential to build real actual trust; the first relies on shortcuts to trust, which is often identity or mutual friends.
I also like what you said about a larger common project! I've read that union organizing does a better job of decreasing racism in white workers than diversity trainings do, which makes sense to because it requires people to figure out how to work together in spite of their differences. I'd love to see more large projects that people can plug into. I think there are a lot of dormant leftists, waiting for something to get behind that is focused, achievable and will not implode from infighting ;)
That's well said. And that's the thing about organizing: you get to know people in a substantial and trust-building (or -breaking) way, fast! So those two things line up intuitively.
(I guess I should add, maybe obviously, that organizing together shifts the stakes from personal difference to common goals, which is 9/10 of the battle in terms of transcending difference. If you're trying to get people to the picket line or something, you're not thinking about microaggressions or oppression outside of identifying them as a liability to achieving common goals, which is a totally different frame in which to process those questions, in principle much more productive than assessing relative personal virtue.)
Thanks for your thoughtful comment! I appreciate the generosity you have toward people whose bad experiences are colouring their interactions with you. Part of what goes wrong in many activist groups in my opinion is that people try to bond immediately rather than engaging in the slow process of getting to know one another in a genuine way. The latter is what has the potential to build real actual trust; the first relies on shortcuts to trust, which is often identity or mutual friends.
I also like what you said about a larger common project! I've read that union organizing does a better job of decreasing racism in white workers than diversity trainings do, which makes sense to because it requires people to figure out how to work together in spite of their differences. I'd love to see more large projects that people can plug into. I think there are a lot of dormant leftists, waiting for something to get behind that is focused, achievable and will not implode from infighting ;)
That's well said. And that's the thing about organizing: you get to know people in a substantial and trust-building (or -breaking) way, fast! So those two things line up intuitively.
(I guess I should add, maybe obviously, that organizing together shifts the stakes from personal difference to common goals, which is 9/10 of the battle in terms of transcending difference. If you're trying to get people to the picket line or something, you're not thinking about microaggressions or oppression outside of identifying them as a liability to achieving common goals, which is a totally different frame in which to process those questions, in principle much more productive than assessing relative personal virtue.)
Oh yes, and you guessed the right clown!