I don’t want to bore you by adding too much to the #CancelColbert pile. I just want to ask this question: do intentions matter, when it comes to political speech? I ask because it seems like the current conventional wisdom on the question is schizophrenic. Many people have been arguing that intentions don’t matter, that whatever your intent, causing offense should result in criticism and ostracism. Certainly that’s been a popular tack to take with Colbert, as it was with infamous Onion Quvenzhane Wallis tweet. And yet the congealing conventional wisdom is the opposite when it comes to questions of efficacy, when it comes to asking whether hashtag activists are actually having any material benefit for any actually existing people of color. Asking whether any of this works– if it succeeds in making the world a more just or equitable place– is rapidly finding its place on the list of the great forbiddens. Forbidding questions of efficacy strikes me as something like a nadir for any political movement, but that is the trend.
What else to make, for example, of the last couple of paragraphs of this piece by Jay Caspian Kang? It’s received a lot of praise as a balanced take, but I find it confusing, even nonsensical. Kang seems simultaneously to want to access the question of efficacy and yet to shield Park from those questions herself. Kang says that he spoke “to Park about what she hoped to accomplish with all this (a paternalistic question if there ever was one).” This is a profoundly strange definition of paternalism. I ask my Congressmen what they are hoping to accomplish with a piece of legislation, my political allies what they hope to accomplish in a particular protest or action, myself whether a particular political utterance might be of some use. Listening to what someone says politically and then asking her what she hopes to accomplish, or if she thinks she can accomplish it, strikes me as the opposite of paternalism. Talking to someone about politics but writing in such a way as to prevent those nasty questions– that, on the other hand, seems to me to be the behavior of a parent, briefly patronizing the political pretenses of a child.
I take Suey Park seriously. I take seriously her stated intention to dismantle the state. I take her fight against racism seriously. And so I am required, by the conventional definition of respect, to acknowledge that her intentions and her tactics seem misaligned, to say that she has articulated no meaningful strategy through which she might actually dismantle the state or defeat the structural economic inequalities that constitute racism, to point out that racism and the state seem remarkably persistent in the face of her trending topics. An insistence on the mutual acknowledgment of reality is not an insult; it is rather a precondition of respect. Suey Park is not my little sister. She is an adult political activist who is intent on changing the world. Kang writes in his piece that “#CancelColbert may have been silly and dumb and wrong in spirit,” says that if we take it at face value “we can easily dismiss it as shrill, misguided, and frivolous”. I would like to think that I can go through my political life without larding my defenses of those I call allies with these kinds of qualifications. I would like to be able to give out praise or blame, and give it out honestly, the way adults talk to each other.
An activist is someone who wants to create change. Taking the desire to be an activist seriously, whether in Park or anyone else, means assessing whether they are creating that change. You can call that attitude tone policing, or mansplaining, or whatever else you want. But as long as you deploy that language as a way to protect someone from the truth of her own intentions, you are neither an ally or a friend.
My suspicion is that those who claim to stick up for Park, or other Twitter activists like her, know very well that she has no ability to dismantle the state. My suspicion is that they know she has done nothing to halt racism. My suspicion is that their forceful rejection of questions about her efficacy is not, ultimately, a defense of her, and certainly not of her project. My suspicion is that they reject those questions because they have already assumed her political irrelevance; my suspicion is that they quietly believe the worst things people say about her. I think the current contradiction in popular attitudes toward political intentions functions, ultimately, as a kind of modesty screen, placed in well-meaning condescension around adult, passionate people, under the false presumption that they must be shielded from the harsh truth of a broken and friendless world.
Or maybe people protect the ineffectual activism because it’s a comfortable sort of activism, costing not even a shred of discomfort.
I’ve been surprised by the number of people who suggested that it would’ve been more respectful of me to ignore Suey Park than to take her ideas seriously enough to air and engage with them.
In the small corner of Twitter I was backed into last night there seemed to be some sort of developing consensus that your article exemplified the “white savior” complex.
I think the argument for ignoring her is that it seemed obvious she was trolling from the outset. (That was certainly my reaction.)
Well, it’s just that questioning their efficacy will probably feel offensive to them, and so you may find yourself a target of criticism and ostracism, no matter what you intent was. And who wants that.
Intentions are pretty much all that matter to me.
I have pretty much *zero* respect for Suey Park, and for all the professional offenderati who are eager to take up her banner on behalf of a group that’s wildly overrepresented in the corridors of power (i.e. East Asians). What a damned crybaby whiner.
Mao and Hector, recently become personae non gratae at Crooked Timber, hogging half of a (admittedly comparatively diminished) comment thread at Fred deBoer’s pad. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…
They say time is a flat circle
Wow, both Latin and French in a 3-line comment; fancy, ain’t we? May I ask: in what sense, exactly, does your observation, as stated above, justify the conclusion that things stay the same? People get banned from one place, they appear in another: ça change. It doesn’t seem very remarkable.
Mao Cheng Ji,
I must say, I found your comments consistently to be among the best and most thoughtful at Crooked Timber, though that’s a pretty low bar.
Thanks, I think. How’s life in exile, Marshal Tito?
As a generally twitter-averse person I was not prepared for the deluge of hate and viciousness coming my way when I criticized Suey Park and one of her twitter warriors. I wasn’t particularly hurt by the whole thing, but apparently I went to the wrong place to have anything approximating an “exchange of ideas.”
Yes, although we should be quick to say that Suey Park also gets a lot of ugly language thrown her way.
I don’t know that we should be so quick in acknowledging that fact that we fail to frame it in such a way that mitigates rather than aggravates the intense feelings of persecution she’s experiencing.
I’m getting the feeling that the #CancelColbert hurricane is notable only because typically twitter-detached individuals tuned in to pay attention. That outrage generating machine seems pretty well-oiled to me.
Wait, there are whole conversations taking place under the assumption that #CancelColbert obviously had no concrete effect on anything? Like, there are enough people laboring under this belief that they have cleaved into competing sects? Weird.
I was surprised to learn that #CancelColbert wasn’t meant to be taken literally — that Park never had any real desire to get the show taken off the air, or belief that she could — but that made sense, once I learned about it and thought about it. What really surprised me was a short Twitter conversation I had with an activist who seemed to take it for granted that most people would understand it wasn’t a literal demand, because activists have a history of using hyperbole and irony. That just does not track at all with my sense of how the vast majority of people view activists and online activists in particular. (And of course, that “vast majority of people” encompasses only those who have any real awareness of these Twitter events, which is to say they’re a tiny, tiny fraction of the population.)
That said, your (I think well-reasoned) concerns about it aside, the Kang article did get me to think about the issues here differently, and same goes for some other stuff I read about it, and I can’t be the only one, so I have to credit Suey Park with some efficaciousness.
Now I am going away to do my breakfast, when having my breakfast coming again to read further news.