You know, on one level I very much get the frustration with the musical theater school of progressivism. You know, the Hamilton, Kinky Boots, capitalism is great but hate isn’t kind of progressivism.
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It’s easy to say: this stuff doesn’t address material issues! “If you change your mind you can change the world,” well I don’t see how you changing your mind is going to pay my light bill or put food in my stomach.
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But then people post dumb shit like “what would you do if your son came out as GAY” and the responses are “I’d kill him,” “You can be normal in my house or get out of my house,” etc. And it’s like... we really don’t see how this is IMMEDIATELY material?
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I’ve noticed that progressives have really backed off of the more thorough-going argument for cultural change. It’s not about not getting our feelings hurt, though that is a first-order benefit that helps kids finish school, helps people rise at their jobs, etc.
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Cultural change as a progressive strategy is really about changing the explicit assumptions and unconscious biases that affect everything material: housing, hiring, policing, parenting...
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And do we even have to get into mental health, a nexus at which the boundary between “cultural” and “material” becomes infinitely porous?
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And whatever, it’s always up to the people with power to answer the question “what have you done for me lately” to those they have taken that power from (voluntarily or not).
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I’m just concerned that the people denigrated as “team woke” (eyeroll) aren’t even making the real argument that undergirds their/ours position.
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But then, you see people talking about how they would literally murder their own child if that child were to come out as not-cishet, and it gets really hard to argue that the Kinky Boots progressivism, as shallow and self-congratulating as it can be, ain’t pretty damn important.
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Also for that matter, you can’t have your cake and eat it too: either representation and cultural progressivism are ineffective OR the LGBTQ+ rights stuggle has jumped the “oppressed enough for policy solutions” line. I don’t see how it can be both.
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If anything, doesn’t the (partial, incomplete, ongoing) success of the LGBTQ+ movement(s) demonstrate that all this culture stuff CAN move public opinion, which can then very successfully move public policy?
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And of course part of this has to do with the structural features of queerness, right? That is, MOST queer children have cishet parents. Very few children of color are parented by white people. Very few poor children have rich parents (altho homeless queer youth...)
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End of conversation
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