"Are We Mistaking Feelings for Politics?"

"I think of White girls in my middle-school English class, offended by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because it contained many uses of “the n-word,” yet never questioning why our “honors” English class was all-White.

Being offended is not in itself political. “What is political,” Cross writes, is the way that racist ideas contribute to systemic violence, the way transphobic language acts as “the spearpoint of violence against trans women, used to justify it and all but ensure such crimes will be repeated.” We are not talking about offense. We are talking about actual harm and lost life.

As Sara Ahmed points out, making arguments turn on hurt feelings is an excellent way to cover up the actual mechanisms of power at work...

what we've seen too often lately is the feelings of one or a small group of people being substituted for an actual understanding of harm and of power. And the people whose feelings get aired in public and taken seriously are often those who already have a level of power to begin with...

What we end up with instead is a politics of pity and charity; endless articles in newspapers and magazines about the abject misery of the poor and handwringing about what “we” should do about it. Gira Grant argues in For Love or Money that tears become a substitute for the hard work of political organizing. “Weeping, from a safe distance. Weeping that somehow isn’t also read as a form of objectification.” - See more at: http://www.damemagazine.com/2015/03/02/are-we-mistaking-feelings-politics#sthash.r4IYS6Ur.dpuf

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I actually jotted down some of my thoughts about this the other day. I don't know if we know how to be political without presenting with anger.

I'm thinking about our models for political-ness, our models for engagement. There is this idea that we need to approach the need for changes through personal experiences of explicit oppression, that we need to communicate that need through anger and motivate it with fear. There is all this destructive language about "political enemies" and being at "war" with certain ideas or groups.

I think that activism is actually radical optimism. I have always been a political child, tiny and wanting to have my voice heard. I think I have been motivated by my imagination, by images of how-things-could-be if we just changed one thing, tried something new, extended generosity.

And I think this is another way that the status quo protects itself: No one wants to hear about hopeful versions of what-could-be. That is easy to sneer at and be exhausted by; that's easy to call demanding and entitled and unnecessary.

There is real anger, real fear, real motivation from real social/psychological/physical violence; there continues to be something radical about being open with anger and fear, being a woman who refuses to smile through pain, being a black person who refuses to sing through forced labor.

The problem is that passionate anger is what our cultural narratives hold up as the necessary sources of social change. And now the burden of proof is shifted, from asking the status quo to prove that it can't get better, to asking activists to prove that their experiences are valid.

And this harms the individuals asking for change, forcing us to both experience and perform our anger.

But it also harms activism as a whole, because we are directed away from our vision of what society should look like; time spent imagining the better and being motivated by hope is time wasted in the effort to convince the status quo that it is what we say it is.

I am interested in the idea of a vision-based activism; this isn't the limiting positivity of "upworthy" or whatever, this is the radical belief that, even in the absence of evil, society should change because it can always be so much better. This is the joyful replacement of apathy with growth.

I am going to spend time thinking about what that looks like, and looking for examples.

Related: Against Against X; article about a basic income [an example?]

FB: Really important reflection on the problems of my-feelings-first activism, and some thoughts I've been having about why being political is so often a performance of anger and how we can escape that "As Maltz Bovy notes, feelings journalism arose from economic constraints on the media industry; budget cutbacks and the accelerated 24-hour news cycle online lead to a demand for content that simply can't be filled by costly reporting. It is itself a structural issue. The feelings evoked by such pieces drive the clicks that pay the bills, and the writers themselves are usually underpaid (or unpaid).

Whatever the cause, though, the result has been an individualizing of political issues, a narrowing of our understanding. As I wrote in For Love or Money, a chapbook I co-authored with Melissa Gira Grant, “When we center our own feelings about something that’s happening to someone else, we lose all potential for solidarity.”"