When you are strident in your belief, when you are convicted in your ethical approach, when you are robustly energetic in your presentation style, and when you are an Other, folks will always read you as aggressive. Without condoning poor listening skills, unnecessary insult or other degrading communicative faults, I urge those discussing their beliefs and most importantly their life experiences pertaining to in/justice to refuse to cower to these attempts at pacification and rhetorical neutralization. Our comments, like our physical presence, are read as overly aggressive, but I think that has more to do with the racism that we are talking about-- the racism that prejudices an individuals reading of an Other body and the racism that sees any criticism of the status quo as automatic aggression-- than that has anything to do with remarks about injustice. Barring threats of violence, barring personal insults, barring hypocritical reprisals of hate speech (and I do not mean reverse racism, gah), how can comments or remarks be aggressive, lest they be outright violent. Attacking injustice, while seemingly aggressive, if it is truly injustice we are attacking, can never be aggressive enough. If there is to be any participation of a ruling class or a privileged group of people in the reconstruction of a just society, those with power and privilege have to come to share in the thick skin that injustice has forced on all of us who have been born into and live under its burden. The insulated and doted feelings of those who society automatically holds in high esteems and privileges and those who by the very pursuit of mundane, individual goals perpetuate disadvantage and inequality do not sit at an equal moral table with those who are born into disadvantage and inequality, those who society unfairly disdains (whose individual goals or pursuits in the present system often require them to replicate their own oppression on their fellow). Lets stop trying to treat the push for a more just society like a war that needs a truce or conflict that needs mediation. Middle ground in the struggle for a more justice society gets us no where closer to justice. The struggle for justice, in the phase of demonstration, discourse, and political contest is only a struggle to turn back the dials on actively reproduced inequality, to get our heads above water so we can then, and only then, begin to build something new. Reaching middle ground in the push for justice is like drowning in an ocean and getting your head half way up to air... FYI, youre still drowning. Middle ground in the push for justice is like killing half of a cancer and being surprised when next week its back at full force. You have to go all the way, and those who see that unwavering commitment to justice as a problem see that as a problem primarily because they are a part of the problem.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 16:43:08 +0000
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