Turns out I’m one of only 4% of white people in the US who support reparations to African-Americans.
The reason why reparations are so unpopular among everybody but me and a few other people is not that I’m morally superior and everybody else is a vicious racist. I’m not and they aren’t. The real problem is that the issue is being presented to people in a very heavy-handed, flat-footed and frankly stupid way.
Trying to guilt-trip people with rants about white supremacy, “Whiteness”, white privilege, original sin, the “white racial spoils system” that benefits even the poor whites (see the linked article, for instance, it’s all there, I just copy-paste) achieves nothing. People are alienated by the rants and turn away. And what’s especially curious is that the least racist will be antagonized by these rants the most. The only way out of the alienation is to do what I do and reject the ranters as idiot clowns who are not to be taken seriously. But hey, I’m from a different culture, it’s easy for me to do.
It is so obvious that this is not the way to achieve a political goal that I believe the ranters don’t actually want reparations to become reality. They want to feel important and aggrieved and they easily sacrifice those who actually need reparations. It’s the same strategy as the one that is making climate change so repellent to so many people as a political issue. More often than not, it seems that the activists are passionately dedicated to the goal of not being successful and not attracting anybody to their cause.
As I keep saying, a huge part of what people see as political activism is actually extreme psychological dysfunction.
In Alice Dreger’s book that I reviewed recently, there is an amazing detailed description of how activists work when they really want results. Dreger’s organization of people who fight for the rights of the intersex achieved phenomenal success. It’s insanely hard work but it brought actual results. And the #1 rule was: don’t rant, don’t accuse, don’t yell, don’t guilt-trip. Listen, flatter, cajole, thank, show that you are grateful for any interest towards your cause, recognize your opponent’s humanity, accept that the opponent is basically a good human being who wants what’s best. And remember, in the case of the intersex, the opponents were doctors who’d been cutting off the genitals of these very intersex, mutilating them for life. Try accepting the essential goodness of somebody who left you sans a clitoris and you’ll understand what kind of personal maturity and intellectual growth the activists had to bring to their cause.
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