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Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. There is indeed massive infighting amongst the left, and obviously a lot of misguided people. But generally and in theory I still disagree on the GP's point that the left aims to divide our society.

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It may not be that they intend to divide. It may be the inevitable result of their current strategy. If the way you tell people to think about society is to categorize people by race, sex, gender, etc., then that's... not very unifying. If the central point of your message is that certain groups treat members of other groups badly, that's not just not unifying, that's dividing. (It may be necessary dividing, but it's still dividing.)

Empirical analysis of our current society shows that there are divides and power relations along racial, gender and class lines. If you can't acknowledge them, there is no way to fix them. And most importantly, in practice the left reduces the divide.

If you have a better idea of how to fix it, I'm all ears. But fixing a problem without recognizing it exists is, well, not typically accepted as solid practice.

Take "White Fragility", for instance. Can there be unconscious racism? Certainly. But telling every white person that they are inherently racist simply because they are white... yeah, that's not how you "reduce the divide". (It's also both wrong and racist.)

I don't know what the answer is, but that wasn't it. All that did was tell people that they're dealing with flaming zealots with ridiculously out-there ideas. And it told whites that the author had selected them as being part of the bad guys, without actually knowing anything about them - and therefore that there was no point in engaging with people like the author, since all they were going to get was condemnation, regardless of what the reality was.

The book "White Fragility" was rejected pretty soundly by most leftists, actually. Corporate pseudo-progressives loved it, however. I definitely agree that a lot of people are coopting leftist languages. But ultimately, corporate diversity consultants aren't leftists, they're delusional neoliberals.

Here are criticisms of "White Fragility" from a leftist perspective :

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/racism-george-floyd-racial-ju...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/08/divers...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dig-read-this-not-whit...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0kFTtR34cek

As you can see, there are a lot of them. I definitely agree with your criticism of White Fragility , and so do the vast majority of leftists. I'd attribute the stunningly deficient thinking behind it to trying to explain why we still have the divide starting with the assumption that our economic and political structures are fundamental good, which they aren't, but a less charitable and a bit more cooky explanation would be that it's a classic case of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Interesting. (And, to me, very surprising. I had no idea - I thought leftists embraced "White Fragility".)

Thanks for the links.

I would guess, though, that the author of "White Fragility" at least thinks she's on the left, maybe even the radical left. And I don't think that book helped to reduce the divides we were talking about. (I still don't have any answers for what to actually do. What do you do with people who think they're with you, and who are both theoretically and practically against you? And who label themselves with your group?)

I'm happy you find the links useful :)

There is definitly a lot of cognitive dissonance amongst people such as the author of White Fragility. The best solution for them is figures such as Chris Hedges, Richard Wolff, Cornell West, and Bernie Sanders. I think ultimately the issue with this lies upon the media - the views of the left are constantly misrepresented, and leftists such as Chris Hedges are outright banned from the media - he was fired from the NYT for opposing the Iraq War. Ultimately what you have to do is to build local organizations, vote very heavily in local primaries to get people such as AOC elected, start unions. It's a very difficult fight. You'll notice too that people such as DiAngelo in the mainstream media will generally attack leftists on aesthetics and ignore their points, like what happened with Sanders.

Additionally, people politically have tried to label themselves as leftists (including the Nazis - they called themselves National Socialists as they were signing deals with Krupp to make unions illegal and preparing to execute members of the Socialist and Communist parties). When those people have hegemony, it's a difficult fight.

Ultimately I think the basic distinction between leftists and people that pretend to be leftists is always economic. If you get the platform, the best attack vector is to focus on how useless their ideology is to fix economic issues, and how these economic issues are the engine of racism. If you manage to get them to admit that their economic policies do nothing to help the poor and the common man, it becomes very easy to call them out as not a leftist. But getting that platform is exceedingly difficult, even when you're a professor in economics at MIT, a Pullitzer prize winning journalist, the most popular politician in the US (see : Bernie Blackout), or an acclaimed doctor in Philosophy and influential critic of Obama (such as Cornell West - if he was a Republican he'd get twenty times more airtime).

I disagree with the idea that asking people to stop treating other groups badly, if they are in fact doing that, is divisive. I would argue it's the opposite of divisive.

However – and I say this as someone who identifies as a progressive – I agree with the sentiment that we have a problem on the left with both the over-application of purity tests and with lack of discipline, both of which I think are alienating, but neither of which are inherent to liberalism.

Asking people who are treating other groups badly to stop is necessary, whether or not it's divisive.

Telling all of a group that they're treating other groups badly is, I argue, divisive, in two ways. First, it defines the accused group as being a unity which is against the other group, which is also defined as a unity. That's dividing people into those groups.

Second, it's peeling off allies from the other group. People react by thinking "If you're going to lump me in with the oppressors, without knowing a thing about me, then screw you. I'm out. I don't want anything to do with your crusade."

I agree with your second paragraph.

Yea, I don't think it's really accurate even if it's sometimes the unintentional result. It's frustrating because I really appreciate the rest of the perspective they're offering.

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