Kai Cheng: A Woman You Should Read Talks about SJW, ID Politics and Activism
I came across this article posted in Medium by Kai Cheng Thom, a radical leftist, SJW, Transwoman. I believe what she has to say might just interest you.
Kai Cheng is a Canadian writer, social worker and activist prominent in the LGBTQ community. She considers herself part of the Social Justice Warrior movement, but before you stop reading and tune out (as I suspect some of you might upon seeing the term Social Justice Warrior), please take the time to read what she has to say, or read at least some fo the excerpts from her article posted at Medium, entitled, Righteous Callings: Being Good, Leftist Orthodoxy, and the Social Justice Crisis of Faith. In it she critiques the SJW movement and Identity politics as someone who is considered a prominent voice within the "radical leftist" community.
So who is Kai Cheng? I'll let her describe herself and her background:
Deep down, I have always believed that I’m a bad person and that the world we live in is an awful place. Maybe that’s just what happens when you grow up an effeminate boy (and secretly a trans girl) in a Chinese-Canadian Christian-ish (not religious enough to go to church but enough for threat of eternal damnation to be used as a motivator to do household chores) family with class trauma and inherited mental health issues, you know? [...]
Flash forward to me in a hospital bed in the psych ward, post-suicide attempt at 16 years old, still thinking the same thing. (DOUBLE flash forward to me at 26, typing this essay through chronic pain and brain fog in bed on a Saturday morning, STILL thinking the same thing.)
So in retrospect, it’s easy to see how I got into the whole social justice/radical queer activism thing. Like most of us, all I wanted was to be good — or, in the fashionable parlance of various political moments in the past ten years, “rad,” “down,” or “woke.
Kai Cheng wrote a novel, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir and a book of poetry that brought her a certain amount of fame, along with her speaking and performance art engagements. As she herself notes, she's been called the "High Priestes of the Movement," a "microcelbrity" and gets a lot of likes on her face Book posts, for whatever that's worth.
What she does have is a lot of experience with groups and organizations, pricipally among the LGBTQ community, that are considered SJW or radical leftists, or, in recent parlance, the "Antifa." However, Kai is uncomfortable both with her sudden name recognition, but also with the tenets, values and ideology of what she calls the Social Justice Left. Again, a few brief excerpts to give you a flavor of her approach to the problem she sees with Identity Politics.
[T]here seems to be a wave, if not a sea change, moving through the online and IRL [IRL = In Real Life] leftist communities/scenes, a ripple of dis-ease (if you will) with the ways in which affect (the experience and performance of emotion) and orthodoxy (the creation of norms of political thought and action) are currently playing out.
However, Kai Feng does not respond to the internal conflict within this subculture of the left by lashing out at those who have called into question its dogma (her words) or the reliance upon identity politics alone to build a movement for social change. Instead she acknowledges that the movement for social justice with which she identifies is not without its flaws.
[I]n my experience, there are many leftist and marginalized folks who are not always comfortable with the direction of the social justice left and in particular its focus on increasingly fragmented identity politics and the performance of virtue. In fact, most of what I do now when hanging out with friends “in the Community” is complain about the dynamics of “the Community.”
She doesn't back away from her core beliefs which she sets forth, as follows:
. Our world is fundamentally shaped by the systemic exploitation and abuse of many oppressed peoples.
· Capitalism and ableism are dominant systems of oppression that reduce the worth of individuals to their ability to work and produce goods for the privileged classes. In reality, everyone deserves access to life resources, dignity, and self-determination regardless of ability.
· For the past several centuries, European capitalism and imperialism have resulted in the ongoing colonisation and in many cases genocide of Indigenous peoples across the globe, as well as the enslavement and indentured servitude of people of colour. Black people particularly have been and continue to be disproportionately targeted for racist exploitation, violence, discrimination, and imprisonment to this day
· The repression of women and gender-nonconforming individuals, as well as so-called sexual minorities, plays a fundamental role in upholding the structures of oppression at large.
· People who live at the intersections of oppression, such as trans women of colour sex workers, have unique and intensified experiences of marginality
· TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN
· The work of contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More is vital and necessary and must be supported
· Oppression is rarely if ever overthrown through peaceful demonstration alone. Economic and social pressure, as well as direct action and violent protest are all essential parts of revolutionary movements {Note: As an advocate of non-violence, I disagree with her on the need for violent protest. I would leave that to the so-called Alt-Right to pursue}
If she stopped there, I assume many in this community would take umbrage with some of her values, and consider that she has nothing to offer you. But she doesn't stop with a mere restatement of radical leftist, SJW or even Antifa ideology. She recognizes that what bothers her about the bubble in which her community resides - and let's face it, in our postmodern social media world where we can pick and choose what information and ideological perspectives we prefer and exclude all others, everyone lives in a bubble of one kind or another - is that its perspective is too narrow and confining, and excludes the chance for real dialogue and progress.
However, as resources dwindle under late-stage capitalism, I think we are seeing increasing fragmentation and oversimplication of identity politics via the Oppression Olympics: harsh competition for resources like funding, attention, and legitimacy based on the number and type of oppressed identities one can claim ...
This type of identity politics is based on a level of essentialism that I am uncomfortable with; it assumes that all people of colour, trans folks, etc, have the same experience and that identity categories apply uniformly across the board. It also reduces people to a very restricted set of “relevant” identities and erases the rest of their life experiences while fetishizing the pain of the oppressed. ... [The] kind of identity politics that discomforts me is not strategic so much as disingenuous and self-serving. It often feels like we are far more interested in diversity of identity rather than diversity of thought.
To paraphrase her argument, identity politics all too often looks at the world in a binary, i.e., "either or" fashion, in which you are either "for us or against us" whoever the us is with which one identifies. She also objects to what she calls the "Performance of Virtue," in which SJW folks compete with one another to demonstrate their adherence to the most current norms and memes among social justice activists to the exclusion of any real dialogue with those who may hold opposing views. As she states it better than I:
The cultural atmosphere is thus more conducive to anxiety-driven attempts to prove one’s goodness through faith to the dogma than it is to the creation of authentic relationships in which we are allowed to be imperfect (which is to say, human) or the development of meaningful social change. The performance of virtue often relies on adherence to startlingly simplistic political slogans that are applied rigidly to across situations regardless of context.
The thrust of her critique of the SJW community is that it excludes people far more than it includes them. That it cuts off dialogue and the opportunity to ally with others who may hold differing views in some areas, but whose overall value system and goals are more in line with the SJW agenda than opposed to it. We all have one common enemy - those who defend the current status quo, which sets one group of people against another. The simplification and over-generalization of many individuals (promoted by the mainstream media) labels people and places them in opposing camps.
This simplified, dogmatic way of looking at our fellow human beings lacks nuance, creates unnecessary conflicts, and prevents the majority of people from coming together to discover what we have in common, and where dialogue and true communication can bring about a united front to oppose the oligarchy that oppresses us all. In short, identity politics taken to the extreme dis-empowers all of us for the benefit of The Powers That Be.
I am pushing the boundaries of fair use, but I want to give you one more excerpt from her exceptional article, which, in my opinion, wraps up the essential points she wishes to make regarding how all of us on the left should proceed:
[C]ynical, crazy East Asian transsexual that I am, I have to believe that another way of seeing, of speaking, of being with one another is possible. That compassion and forgiveness and generosity might join justice and accountability and survival as the core values of our movement. That we might learn to develop tools for reconciliation even as we hone our tools for battle.
To that, I say, "Amen."
Comments
I find myself in a similar place.
This:
PS and the pitfalls of identity politics are self evident to me as well.
Amen to that.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
honest social justice warriors
Kai Cheng Thom is what I would call an honest social justice warrior, a fighter for genuine fairness and justice for all. This statement of hers downright nails it:
(To which I say "Amen!" as well!)
The use of "social justice warrior" or SJW as a pejorative term is inaccurate, really. The narcissistic, self-centered, "only my sufferings matter" kind of crapola which infests the Turd Way Democratic Party and Daily Kos today is more accurately described as Injustice Collecting, is as phony as a Series 2000 USA 3-dollar bill, and is the very thing Kai Cheng Thom is fighting against (as well as the vast majority of us!).
Social Justice, a just society, will only be arrived at Kai Cheng's way (Cat willing, sparing the violence!). Injustice Collecting only makes matters worse, as Kai Cheng points out and most of us know altogether too painfully well.
Thank you for posting this Essay, Steven D!
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
@thanatokephaloides Virtue signalling is
Virtue signalling is another name for it.
It's an establishment ploy, certainly, and largely fake--but lots of people on the left are falling for it. It's not just that they're creating facsimiles of us, and puppeting them through talking points useful to the establishment, though that is, of course, true. They're also playing us. Some of the left, and more liberals, are falling for the establishment's stupid shit. Because they're playing on weaknesses in our thinking and divisions in our movements.
The divisions in our movements are self-evident (I think) but we might need to face the fact that some of the sacred cow truths of the 60s-80s need to be analyzed rigorously and honestly, even if we're scared to do it.
Because they're playing with our belief that Black people are automatically smarter, better, righter than white people; women than men, etc. Also the belief that minority groups have the absolute right to define their oppression and no one not in that group is allowed to question those definitions. They are making hay with that one. As soon as the establishment gets hold of that, they can make anything true that they want to be true, and call anybody racist or sexist that they want to, and all they need is the collaboration of a relatively small percentage of any minority group--enough to provide commentary as talking heads on major media channels and enough leadership in the community to get together a rally for optics. Online, it's even easier, because it's easy to create the impression of a large number of people with the digital tools we have. It's like a character assassination generator that they can use on anybody who is white, male, straight, whatever. You could even take a white woman and call her racist, a Black man and call him sexist, a trans native-born American and call her xenophobic. It's endless. And that plays off another quality in the left: our habit of endless vigilance, scanning our hearts, minds, and souls for evidence of bigotry--and that's supposed to be helpful in producing revolution or even reforms to make things better for oppressed groups? The results don't seem to bear that out.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
divide and conquer
And a really effective tool for divide and conquer it is, too!
Thus, the cesspit we've fled over at Daily Kos.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal Try saying that in
Try saying that in public on the campus where I work. You would create a vortex of obscenely outraged virtue. New New Left same as the old New Left, only perhaps more incapable of creating meaningful change.
@chuckvw Ultimately, you have
Ultimately, you have to choose between giving people the status of Always Right, Never Questioned and telling the truth. No matter how righteously aggrieved a group is, neither they nor anybody else can assume the role of Always Right, Never Questioned without sooner or later getting in the way of the truth. It's a real easy way to transform a justice movement into an establishment-talking-point-generator: if a given demographic is Always Right, Never Questioned, just recruit a handful of people from that demographic and put them on TV taking down critics of the status quo and other dissidents by calling them "racist."
I've posted this list elsewhere, but these are the reasons I've been accused of being racist:
1)Criticizing NSA surveillance
2)Opposing drone assassinations
3)Supporting Social Security
4)Asking someone why they were saying that Bernie Sanders was racist
Interestingly, shutting down these views (and one question) by associating the views and the question with racism is absolutely in the interests of the richest, shittiest people in the country, most of whom are actually white.
If Black people are the ones who get to say, without question, what is racist, then the above statements are unchallengeable as long as you can get at least one Black person to say them. If you try to challenge the validity of the above statements, you must be racist. Pretty soon we'll be hearing that opposing the war in Afghanistan is racist, or that it's racist to oppose fracking. All the establishment has to do is find a handful of Black people to go on the media and say whatever establishment talking points they're handed, and have enough pull in the local leadership of some Black community to provide a rally or two for optics.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
I agree
It's taking kabuki to the streets. Resist!™
THIS^^^^^!!!
Ultimately you have to choose between Aways Right, Never
Questioned and telling the truth.
Damn I LOVE it when the light goes on!
Those groups Do have the ultimate right to define themselves and their issues--- but So Do the INDIVIDUALS Within that group have the right to do so in their personal lives.
No Goup is a MONLITH! The reason it's a group is Shared Values! But not all values within that group may necessarily Be shared Amongst the Group!
This is what we All need to be aware Of, and make allowances For! These hypocrites call me a Purist, yet then they purge all who, in their eyes, are Not Pure Enough?
Even when my Natural inclination is to assist as an Ally!
HOW does this advance Anyone's cause but the Establishment's?
Srop These Fucking Wars
peace
Edit to get the damn quote right! Sheesh.
Edit redux; can't spell neether.
Ya got to be a Spirit, cain't be no Ghost. . .
Explain Bldg #7. . . still waiting. . .
If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied in 1930’s Germany,
Now you know. . .
sign at protest march
@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
Exactly!
They're terrified that we'll realize that we're all in this together, and that when one general population group is targeted or propagandized to be set against others, it harms not only the involved individuals but the whole society - the latter being a concept which those such as Thatcher tried to deny the very existence of, for facility in their psychopathic and destructively unsustainable 'might makes right' looting fest.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
SJW Is A Bad Thing Now?
I saw SJW used as a perjorative a few days ago and was puzzled how that happened. My recollection is that Ralph Nader & Nader's Raiders were the original Social Justice Warriors, and that was considered positive. So I checked Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior
So the Twitterverse denizens altered the narrative. Glad I got that cleared up.
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
@Meteor Man
Certainly sounds like (edit: another organized) long-range plan, shifting yet more terms and the concepts they represent over onto the shit list of anything which might benefit/save The People - or the planet's survival - over the short-term (and thus temporary, due to blind-greed-created early expiry dates for the actual economy, civilization and planetary life) maximized profits of the relative few. Their PR people waste nothing in the search for propaganda tools - except for everything destroyed by this process.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Some of my most memorable conversations have been with
"Experts". In the trenches, then-Black Panthers, met over an impromptu dinner at a Great House in the Thousand Islands. Abby Hoffman downriver, in hiding. His ghost may have visited. Others did. Plenty of old history on the River. Always a War or a skirmish. A chance to be an Outlaw or a Pirate for a moment in time.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
Blues in the Bay,
baby! Need a ride let me know.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
She gets at the same issue as.....
...."Lifestyle" v life. The simplification of something so complex as humans for the purpose of marketing/sales (in the case of lifestyle) for buying/consumption of unneeded goods, in the case of IDPol, for political distraction/gain for the oligarchs.
Decades ago I had a prof of mine tell me that anyone that used the term "LifeStyle" instead of life was a fucking idiot. True-dat. Real humans have lives.
Compensated Spokes Model for Big Poor.
@GreatLakeSailor @GreatLakeSailor
Thanks, cheers and applauds!
Life (in all senses) is complex and it drives me nuts when such things as basic biology, individual imperatives and interwoven relationships of all sorts are so commonly misrepresented as being simplistic - for control purposes.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Sounds like a useful article.
Thanks for posting this. I'll give it a look.
No point in reacting before I read the whole thing, but I wonder if she addresses the ways in which the fetishization of oppression is being used by the establishment, both in the sense of fetishizing the pain of the oppressed and members of oppressed groups themselves. Or the ways in which some members of oppressed groups, most notably those who are middle- or upper-middle class and working in the media or political sectors, are cashing in on this in much the same way that conservative whites cashed in on their status as the powerful's favorite sons in the 80s and 90s (think of Limbaugh, Hannity, and, well, all the lawyers, judges, politicians and media figures who made bank out of being conservative and white. Well, in the post-Obama age, POC and people belonging to other minority groups can do the same, as long as they eliminate economic considerations from everything they say and don't get too radical (read: effective) in their comments regarding the legal justice system.
For quite a while now, I've been thinking of writing an article entitled "Wall St Puts on Blackface," but have always figured it would be too incendiary. Still, after last year's smorgasbord of noxious poisons, maybe it's time.
Although really, a better title would be "Where Are the Immigrants?"
That's what Schumer and Pelosi said at their rally against the Muslim ban. They delivered their talking points and then turned to bring the immigrants forward...and somebody had forgotten to bring them. Sort of like somebody forgetting to bring snacks to Friday Night Movie Night.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Workers of the world unite.
I think I'll just borrow a line from Helen Keller and say that the choice between social issues and economic issues isn't a real choice at all because economic issues ARE social issues. And anyone who pays attention knows far-right economic policy eventually lead to far-right social policies.
If you're going to fight fight for peoples' rights and better working conditions, no centrist gradualism bullshit, do it all at once.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
Wow, wow,wow,wow
This is a real thing?
I am a person. I have experiences good and bad. Some experiences are self determined, some are externally imposed. I know society doesn't fully accept me. Society must change.
I belong to a group of people that are like me in experiences and biology. Outside the group are people similar to me. Some very similar by degree to very dissimilar. Through my group we will change society.
The people that are most similar to me have differences. These differences are called "privilege." I have more/less privilege that another group that has more/less privilege than I. The greater the difference between us, the more privilege you have, the greater oppression you impose on me.
You belong to society. You are very "not me". You must change. This is how you must change. If you say you support this change you must do this, this, this,this. You must be corrected. We demand this.
This is gonna piss people off, and I could very wrong how I read this SJW thing, but this reminds me of the selfgasm that some young people have after reading Ayn Rand. If you see society as the Borg Collective, you have to have something better than another Borg Collective to replace it.
BLM or ALM ?
pick one quick! give the right answer or else.
this is bogus badge flashing, imo.
can I say stop the war? can I say justice for all?
this is a blind alley we have entered so many times.
how do you feel about R. E. Lee?
we will lose our last hope if we remain divided & set against one another.
we must get past this trap.
Weaponizing Social Justice
I pulled that term from an article at Raw Story:
Yeah, she's talking to you Markos, you ignorant little twit:
Kelly stresses the necessity for the left to get back to building bridges to work together against the real common enemy:
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/08/dear-fellow-leftists-it-is-time-to-get-o...
As dkmich has pointed out on more than one occasion, the good people here at c99% are doing it right. Nobody is ostracized or banned for having the "wrong" opinion. Our conversations are all about listening as well as speaking.
The only reason Markos and Armando would not fit in is because they lack the capacity to listen and learn. Well, they also happen to be idiots and assholes, but nobody's perfect.
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
@Meteor Man Leaders and organizers
Leaders and organizers of the movement against racism should stop tolerating the transformation of anti-racist discourse into an establishment tool for silencing criticism and dissent.
It's not a question of "being too extreme" or "going too far," and it's not about people's fee-fees, not even mine. It's the hijacking of what used to be a justice movement and the looting of its moral history for establishment use.
I say again, I've been called racist for opposing NSA surveillance. I've been told I have a problem with Black male authority because I don't like drone assassinations. I've been told I was racist for opposing Social Security cuts. When I asked why Bernie Sanders was being called racist, as in, what had he done? I was told I was racist. Interesting how shutting down that criticism--and that question--serves the interests of the richest people in the country, most of whom are white.
Not gonna be part of a movement, even as an ally, if the movement is willing to use, or accommodate those who use, the tactics of Joe McCarthy. Not interested in any movement that works with the establishment to silence the establishment's critics. And, by the way, it's disgusting to watch the establishment put on a facade of anti-racism to gin up moral credibility to paper over the vast, empty hole in its chest where its heart should be. Particularly disgusting is the part where the establishment changes anti-racist critique to eliminate all economic considerations and all mention of money, and talks a great line about racism in the police and the courts, but studiously avoids suggesting or supporting any concrete reforms (check out Nancy Pelosi's directive to Congressional Democrats on how to respond to BLM).
A lot of Black activists appear to be glad enough to go along with this shit because it gives them a space to voice their anger at white people, racists, and the right wing. It gives them visibility all over the culture, particularly in the mass media. But they are not only being given no real concessions or reforms--none that will materially benefit anybody Black apart from Black pundits and politicians--but their movement, its frames, and its language generally, and even its demands, are being rewritten in a way that would make this discourse unrecognizable to anybody from even a decade ago.
A few years ago, if a person had said that questions of money, finance and economics have nothing to do with racism, that person would have been, at best, laughed out of the room, and, at worst, decried as a racist. Now, as long as a Black person is saying it, or as long as a Black person is supporting a white politician who's saying it, it becomes gospel. Just put a camera on the Black person saying it, or cheering on the white politician who's saying it. Now suddenly it's racist and wrong to consider allocations of wealth in this society to be racist. Who benefits from that revision?
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Complete Agreement
I can not even fathom how criticizing surveillance or drones is racist. That's just one of many, many things I don't understand.
I had a similar problem when BLM was occupying L.A. City Hall. Some of the young black people weren't too happy about some opinion I expressed. About an hour or so later Chella showed up and was talking to them while they gave me the evil eye.
I wasn't concerned because Chella and I had talked at other protests and demonstrations. Chella straightened them out and it was all good. Chella is one of the largest people you will ever meet and just happens to be trans.
One black woman there tried to explain that abortion was a genocidal program against the black race. No sense wasting my breath over that discussion. You can't tell stupid nothin'. I tell people that I ignore ignorance and walk away from Stupid.
I'm just sayin'.
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
@Meteor Man I suspect opposing
I suspect opposing drones and surveillance is racist because Obama was President when I said it.
Jesus wept.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
@Meteor Man I had also been
I had also been saying it when George W. Bush was President, but the fact that I'd criticized a white man in the exact same way did not seem to matter.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Thanks, great find! She
Thanks, great find! She sounds wonderful, and we need so many more of this mind-frame, so as share it more widely
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.