Just head on over to the FuckCars community. Tons of ableism in there to witness.
So it depends how you define progressive.
As a PoC I have certainly witnessed racism from white, black and Hispanic liberals. At its worst the democratic party can feel like a clubhouse for non regressive white people and the largest minority groups in the country. No one else really has a seat at the table. Is that really progressive?
I’ve moved on to assessing peoples worldview as either inclusionary or exclusionary. Unfortunately most people, left or right, have an exclusionary world view.
Exclusionary here means a failure to acknowledge the universal sanctity of human dignity. Nearly everyone is focused on themselves or their group exclusively. Some in ways that are more harmful than others.
Oh yeah big time. I see it primarily in discussions about religion. Progressive people like to act as though any Christian has the same mentality as the Westboro Baptist church cult. Its a real bummer.
I put a poster up for a women/trans/non-binary inclusive group in an anarchist cafe, with their approval, only to get a literal essay from the cafe the next day about the miss-use of a word pertaining to our trans inclusivity. I can’t recall what the “right” word was supposed to be, and the poster’s verbiage was already researched/reviewed by trans people in the group. Due diligence was done.
Queue people leaving the group because we didn’t feel it was necessary to print new posters. They felt we should be less hostile to “people taking the time to educate.” Yeah, I made a few comments.
But you know what? I much prefer that to the kind of shit I had to deal with in conservative spaces. I worked on a couple political campaigns, had back room discussions where people don’t “educate” when you’re not one of them, they insult and back-stab you.
I can at least see the essay as an attempt to share knowledge, to include rather than exclude, even if it was from a place of self-importance and ignorance.
The friction I see in progressive spaces is usually about making things more equitable. It can be poorly thought out, but no one’s perfect. I prefer flawed inclusivity to hostile exclusivity.
Pulling the cultural appropriation card too much perhaps? Especially for cultures they do not understand beyond surface level. Just because someone is wearing something from another culture, it doesn’t mean it’s being appropriated. Obviously negative appropriation exists especially for instances where it is being done for profit. The problem is sometimes some people are reactionary and are too quick to label something as such without looking into it first.
I know there’s like, actual cultural appropriation…but at this point I wish it never entered the cultural conversation at all tbh because I feel like it became weird bioessentialist shit. Like, just actively telling people what they’re allowed to be interested in is based on genetics. Not to mention cases where mixed race people have been assaulted over perceived hair appropriation (the idea that you can tell what race people are by looking at them is monoracist.)
At my most charitable, I think people are forgetting that most people aren’t influencers or public figures?
In American leftism there is a definite divide between black and white.
For example second wave feminism is often thought of as Women seeking entry into the workplace, but at the same time black feminists were trying to leave the workforce and take care of their own kids.
The labor movement has an explicitly racist history. A fact that Capitalists often took advantage of by leveraging black scabs who were often ineligible for union membership. Eugne Debs identified this as a problem with the socialist movement.
I’m not saying that racism is common among today’s lefties, just that white lefties are often ignorant of black American life and especially black radical thought and activism.
If you are vexed by Bernie Sanders’ struggle with black voters, you’re probably not very familiar with this history.
Absolutely. No one hates the left more than slightly different brands of the left.
A frequent frustration is recursive guilt-by-association.
“Yeah so okay we do align on everything however you refuse to denounce your friend who didn’t really do anything but he is a fan of a controversial figure who also didn’t really say or do much but they are friends with a bad person so… Get lost?”
Another is translation based on the assumption that one’s assumptions are universal.
“You said you think Terry Davis was a technical genius for his OS. Honestly his work is nothing compared to a modern OS. I think so so therefore you must think so, and so you must mean something else. What you are really praising is his extremist christianity.”
The latter one is more of a human trait. That’s why basically every conservative will immediately suspect you pf something if you start badmouthing religions (at least their religion), even with totally accurate critique they happen to not know much about.
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I, too, resent the man in the mirror.
Yes, I have a friend who is extremely progressive but is still very much a slut shamer. She really looks down with disgust on women who like sex or have more boyfriends than she deems acceptable.
She also shows bigotry against other groups of people. Although she would never in a million years look down on someone because of their skin colour, she absolutely takes on a tribalistic Us vs Them mentality for other reasons. An example is the war in Ukraine started by Russia. Did Russia start it? Yes. Is Putin evil? Yes. Are there many Russians who support this war? Yes. BUT… not every Russian person in the world is inherently evil, not all of them want this, many are victims trapped in a system that will literally throw them out the god damned window if they dissent. And my friend absolutely fucking hates Russians. All of them. No empathy about the nightmare situation so many of them are stuck in. It has gotten so bad that she has literally started to hate her chickens that are a Russian breed. She has started assigning negative human traits to them and is insisting that they are negative and bad because they are Russian chickens. It’s honestly getting ridiculous.
Holy shit, I would unironically start trolling her… Give her chickens Jewish names so when she starts badmouthing them, she might have a clue she’s just being a bigot, exactly like Nazis in that respect of, “everyone of a group I don’t like is guilty”.
I’d start giving her nicknames of officers that stood over concentration camps if she continued.
Yes. I’ve even seen progressive people being quite racist. Political beliefs don’t always line up with how people act in everyday life.
Constantly. Usually it takes the form of reducing topics to binary choices and/or purity tests.
- “You’re either with me or against me / You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem”
- Where “part of the solution” means doing exactly, and only exactly what they think you should be doing.
- “If you don’t satisfy all of my impossible requirements, you’re
as bad asa nazi” - “We only agree on 99 out of 100 things, so clearly you’re not to be trusted”
- etc
i really have never encountered someone like this.
unless the ‘purity test’ is being anti genocide or pro trans rights. you know, basic fundamental shit.
Genocide is a term that is both over and under used. There are currently about six genocides ongoing. I don’t see the point in trying to call someone out on it because no one is actually doing anything for or against it outside of a very small number of people.
If someone asks me if I’m anti genocide I assume they mean something they specifically consider a genocide and they are trying to use this as bait to get me to out myself in some way. They don’t actually expect I’m personally participating or countering it in any way.
Trans rights also is a loaded term now because there are a LOT of individual rights Trans people are needing to fight for all in parallel. It’s better to be specific.
Sure someone who says they are against trans people is awful, but I find folks set the bar in different places and use that to start an argument. The easiest example is, what age should someone be allowed to transition which is an intensely challenging question to answer even on a medical level.
Yeah, the comment above is kind of a hilarious example of cognitive dissonance. “I’ve never seen purity tests, other than these tests for ensuring purity”. Blanket statements like that are rarely used in good faith.
You’re all making generalities out of assumptions here…
There’s no assumption. They literally listed two purity tests that they themselves use, directly after saying that they never see anyone use purity tests
Their purity test: You must not deny genocide.
What you heard their purity test was: They must accept that any and all genocides that I think exist are real and a big problem.
Again, you fucking morons are inferring things that aren’t there just to try and be witty, while utterly missing the point…
Congratulations on failing your reading comprehension test.
You’ve got a bunch of nutjobs that will turn that phrasing into a white genocide conversation is the problem.
The second part of that is that genocide is a subjective term due to classification of ethnic groups being subjective.
Honestly this well encapsulates the problem I tend to have aligning on goals with other progressives and some liberals. Every time folks try to simplify something as complex as genocide down to a yes or no question it means they are already invalidating the majority of positions and forcing a conversation of agree with me or call me wrong. That isn’t how it works, that isn’t how discussion and debate work. Forcing people into Yes/No thinking doesn’t lead to progress, asking for people to think critically does.
The easiest example is, what age should someone be allowed to transition which is an intensely challenging question to answer even on a medical level.
That actually has a really simple answer, the right age is the one that the person and their doctors/medical professionals consider age appropriate for that individual. It isn’t up to society to restrict that decision. That is before the fact that medical professionals with direct experience with the person will have the best opinions on the topic.
This is also true for every single medical decision. Also true for every decision that doesn’t directly harm someone else.
I can’t imagine thinking any medical procedure has a simple answer, especially anything that permanently alters you.
Medical professionals are people, sometimes they make the right choice, sometimes the wrong choice. There are people who shop for the wrong answer, and also people who get the wrong answer and live in suffering. It is important to question things and have a discourse.
If my 16 year old came to me and asked to have their hearing removed as a solution to their mispohonia and that their therapist agrees and they found a surgeon… I don’t think I could just jump on board with that call.
The simple answer is that it is nobody’s business but the patient and the medical professionals.
A surgeon would not remove someone’s hearing for misophonia. They took an oath to do no harm and the vast, vast majority of medical professionals take that seriously on a personal level before getting into licensing and other requirements to practice.
The reasonable debate is at what age is that allowed. I do not think that has an easy answer other than legal age of majority for the country you are a citizen of. I think that the problem is there are harder answers than that worth seriously considering.
This is like saying there needs to be a minimum age for ADHD medications or birth control. Doctors are not giving minors sex changes all willy nilly and the procedures that they do provide like hormone suppression are proven safe, effective, and reversible.
Why does the general public or politicians need to pick an age for medical care that doesn’t involve them and doesn’t harm anyone?
Saying it is simple is a clear sign that this is a purity test.
Framing ‘medical decisions should be left to patients and medical professionals’ as a purity test is pretty ridiculous. That is like saying ‘people shouldn’t abuse children’ is a purity test.
I need the right to take hormones, but I dont need the right to take my dick to the ladiesz bathroom. Does this make me a Nazi?
There are thick, uncrossable lines, and there are a lot of people who don’t mind crossing them. You cannot compromise with a bigot. You cannot find common ground with a person who would subjugate you, or someone who sees you as less than human.
We can have disagreements about many political issues, but when you are standing next to pedophiles, rapists, fascists, and bigots, you shouldn’t be surprised to be called a Nazi.
So the question becomes, what is the test of “purity”?
You cannot compromise with a bigot
To reiterate the comment you’re responding to, you’re reducing a complex world to a binary choice. Everyone that has ever existed is bigoted to some degree, therefore no compromise is possible ever?
Bull, and I cannot emphasize this enough, shit. Everyone is not a little bit bigoted. That’s something bigots tell themselves when rationalizing their own prejudices. You should probably take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself if you’re the problem.
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Their example of bigots was racists and nazis plus pedos (which isn’t bigotry but universally frowned upon). They did NOT say, “any and all bigots, even of minor things”.
Why are you trying to make them say something they did not say?
You are part of the problem. When someone says, “I like pancakes”, what they SPECIFICALLY DID NOT SAY is, “I hate waffles”.
Similarly, when someone says, “you cannot compromize with nazis and bigots”, what they DID NOT say was, “any concervative deserves the death penalty”. Why do you read it as such?
I quoted an entire sentence exactly. They didn’t say “I like pancakes”, they said “You can’t compromise with waffle-eaters”
English must be so hard for you when you utterly fail to understand how assumptions work. Good job being a piece of shit contributing to the problem you’re attempting to be above.
- “You’re either with me or against me / You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem”
Good examples from others but I also want to bring up microaggressions. Basically, small things that add up, like a white woman gripping her bag tightly when a black man enters an elevator, or a white man crossing the street because a Latino guy is approaching who looks a little “gangy.” Usually they aren’t that progressive (e.g. they support diversity but critical race theory is a bridge too far).
That said, prejudice is something we all have and is part of human nature. It protects us historically from things like snakes and spiders who may not be venomous but on the off chance they are, better safe than sorry. Prejudice leads to stereotypes, stereotypes lead to discrimination. Conscious effort is needed to overcome that, and progressives do that better than not but no one is fully immune to your natural instincts.
A lot of microaggressions are assumed to be about one thing but are actually something else. Maybe the white woman clutched her purse because he was a man. Maybe she was just moving it closer in a tight space. Maybe he reminded her of someone specific. Sure, it is probably race and if the same person does it multiple times it could be confirmed. And yes, it is totally reasonable for a black man to see a bunch of white women clutching purses and assume there is a pattern even if not every single one was due to racism.
Microaggressions are one of those things that are real while also frequently misread because it is impossible to infer intent from a single vague action. Better to assume the minority/oppressed group is right, and if accused of something in error just let it go.
“Progressive” describes a position, not a person. A person can be many things. A person can hold contradictory viewpoints, and fully believe two incompatible thoughts at the same time. It’s tragically naive to assume that people are rational or consistent.
Can a person think they are progressive and also be a bigot? Of course a person can. Everybody is the hero in their own story.
Is there supposed to be some equivalence between being politically progressive and not being discriminatory?
The way I see it is we’re all equal opportunity assholes, it’s just the context that differs. Ones politics does not make one a paragon of virtue.
Generally being more aware of something means less ignorant behavior like discrimination. Not a guarantee, but if someone is smart enough to understand racism they should be able to grasp sexisim and so on.
Again, not a guarantee and there are plenty of people who are progressive about a limited number of topics.
