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NancyLebovitz comments on Call for Anonymous Narratives by LW Women and Question Proposals (AMA) - Less Wrong Discussion
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There's confrontation, and then there's confrontation. I see a difference between "We will make it emotionally and/or financially expensive for you to not change" and describing people as white devils. One sort of confrontation is based on the premise that people can change, and the other is based on the premise that they won't and/or can't.
The problem I'm seeing, broadly, is that white people can't necessarily always tell the difference between the two. Even when it's couched in positively obsequious language there's a decent chance of that. I'm not exaggerating here; some white people now think it's racist to even mention racism. Most white people (certainly a lot of them here in this site) are highly resistant to the idea that racism even exists in this day and age, or that it's anything other than a strictly defined "paying attention to racial differences."
You can't meet everyone halfway here, because they're either unable or unwilling to reciprocate. It's not about reaching out to people and persuading and convincing them, at that point -- it's about not letting the fact that you can't stop you from addressing your actual situation.
I don't think people can reliably tell the difference between the two, probably especially when they feel they have higher status than the person being addressed. At the moment, we're getting a variant of the problem in regards to gender.
Who decides the emotional significance of a statement? What tool can you use? Emotions are a rubber ruler, but what else could be available?
This being said, I don't think the problem is completely unsolvable. Social justice as currently practiced is probably not going to be the last experiment in working on it.
What do you mean by "actual situation"?
I'm looking at what you said here, and the paragraph I wrote whose format it echoes, and I can't help but think we're talking about two very different things.
The person whose emotions were touched off by it. Easy, right?
The question I'd be tempted to derive from your connotation here is more like: "Who gets to decide which interpretations of those reports-of-emotional-significance are being proposed as the priority for the purposes of conflict resolution and communication?"
(My answer to that is "the question is slightly broken", but I'm about to head out so can't give you the preferred reframing right this moment).
Oh, definitely not. It has plenty of its discontents, even within the movement, who aren't satisfied with the tools and methodologies available, its failure modes, and so on. That's being actively discussed in many spaces, I've observed.
Some of us even object to "white people"!
Depends who you're speaking to, and why. To a significant extent, the "confrontational" approach wasn't about asking for change, it was about "consciousness raising" - debiasing the self concepts of black people, fixing learned helplessness, constructing the conceptual framework to experience white supremacy as racism rather than having internalized it as legitimate.
And, to my mind, the assumption white people "won't and/or can't" change was well calibrated. Political anti-racism succeeded somewhat in shoving the Overton window off avowed racism and completely off avowed segregationism. Every variety of disavowed racism remains politically viable (examples: border fences, "illegals", voter suppression laws) or even politically unassailable (examples: the drug war and its disproportionate criminalization of black people, police casual violence against black people, felon disenfranchisement coupled with the above, lack of reparations). "Color blindness" has been shown to be a cause of / form of racism, but it remains the default "liberal" position in white dominated culture.
The war on drugs is a tricky one-- I'm against it myself, but I've seen black people be in favor of it, and in favor of closed borders. too.
Neither the war on drugs nor severe border restrictions (which I'm also against) are overtly racist the way Jim Crow was, and that makes them harder to fight. It's much easier to frame the war on drugs and border restrictions as the sorts of thing a normal government ought to do-- some combination of help and punishment and keeping people who don't use drugs safe for the war on drugs, and safety and control for border restrictions.
Something got accomplished to lower the racism level in the US, even though much less was accomplished than either of us want. I'm inclined to think that the real problem is that we have no idea how to reliably get people to be less prejudiced, and institutional problems will get re-established as long as a lot of people want them to persist.
This isn't a counsel of despair-- it's a recommendation to keep trying to figure out what might work.
I would't really call "police casual violence against black people" "politically unassailable".
</nitpick>