Ask Lemmy

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've given up caring about all that shit. If people want to throw LGBTQ+ people into the line of fire to protect their moral fuckall stance on Gaza, fuck them as much as the ones abducting children.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Yes. I've even seen progressive people being quite racist. Political beliefs don't always line up with how people act in everyday life.

Absolutely. No one hates the left more than slightly different brands of the left.

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.

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 as~~ a nazi"
• "We only agree on 99 out of 100 things, so clearly you're not to be trusted"
• etc

"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.

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.

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.

I’ll use myself as an example.

There were some guys having an argument in another room, and it got increasingly intense. They were speaking some kind of Arabic. I thought they were genuinely mad at each other, but then one of them mentioned an athlete’s name and started listing what sounded like stats.

While telling this story at a party, I said something like “Arabic is a very angry-sounding language.” I noticed someone’s eyes get large, and I didn’t realize until then how racist I had unintentionally been.

Later, I thought more about it. Any language that you don’t understand sounds bad if people are having an emotionally charged conversation. It didn’t occur to me until then how easy it is to be thoughtless and racially insensitive.

I generally try not to be an asshole, but I messed up big time. I have no idea who he was, but I’ll always be grateful to the guy whose eyes got big. He gave me a much-needed reality check.

I'm progressively discriminating. Everyone is equally annoying and I hate you all. 😁

I've seen liberal POCs say racist shit about White people more times than I can count.