I believe purity politics – which I will describe here as hyper-focus on differences in views, language, and approach within a community rather than the greater commonalities that stakeholders in that community share – is a major deterrent to social change that affects our ability to build relationships, grow together, and move forward. In a country that can be extremely hostile to leftist and progressive views and that is discriminatory towards queer, trans, disabled, and many other groups, building community with like-minded people can be crucial for survival. I am not criticizing this practice. Community spaces should exist that are intended as respite for marginalized people.
Outside of these spaces, however, I am deeply discouraged about the growing tendency to dismiss, cancel, and dehumanize people who simply hold different views from how the loudest social media influencers or activists in a community may feel in a particular moment.
It can be challenging to be in relationship with people who hold harmful views. However, dismissing, canceling, and dehumanizing people just for having views that you or someone else considers harmful is not an effective way to move people along in their journey of learning and unleanring and does not respect the fact that there are multiple knowledge systems and truths. While it is not every individual’s responsibility to stay in relationship with someone harmful, I would argue that it is the responsibility of more privileged members of a community to remain in relationship for the purpose of change making. Just dismissing people as harmful, in my opinion, becomes a way to escape doing hard work of trying to engage that person. Furthermore, harmful beliefs are not as cut and dry as they might seem on the surface. Every political and social belief connects to social justice and human dignity for some group in some way, so most opinions, perspectives, and beliefs can be conceptualized as harmful, if one chooses to define harm in that broad of a way.
The reality is that most people, even in leftist and progressive spaces and among queer, trans, and disabled people, don’t agree on a lot of different and important topics. If we only collaborate with people who share our exact views, manners of speaking, and change-making approach, we will end up talking to the same groups of people over and over. This is a problem given that the stated purpose of a large amount of political and social activism is to try to change society and people’s views/actions.
Overall, I think we need to increase our tolerance for disagreement. Someone can hold a belief that I feel is harmful, but that does not make them a harmful person just for holding it. It certainly does not make someone else harmful just for being associated with them.
I have encountered some activists who behave like it is their personal mission to be associated with zero harm interpersonally. Unfortunately, if you live in the United States and participate in anyway in our social and economic systems, you are contributing to harm and there is nothing you can do to completely eliminate that. The goal, from my perspective, should not be only to want to reduce association with harm, but as an equally important objective, to try to intervene on harm. And while it can feel good and be necessary to cut off or shout at people we disagree with, some of the most powerful interventions for harm occur through extended conversation and maintaining relationships with people we disagree with.
The last thing I want to say is that most activists I know believe in some form of transformation as part of their vision. They want to see people and the world change. I would argue here that if that is our goal, and I think that should be the goal, then we need to affirm and incenctivize people to change. Currently, we often do the exact opposite, shaming people over their past actions and missteps and not letting people grow beyond them. We need to have ways to affirm and incentivize growth, and we need to develop tolerance for people’s past mistakes. Some people may disagree with this, but if someone has made mistakes in their past but now wants to show up and do good work, I am here for it. Furthermore, if you are being open and acknowledging your past mistakes, for me, that becomes a powerful basis for building trust.
Purity politics is incompatible with the messy realities of humanity. We are flawed. We change. We learn as we are exposed to new knowledge. Even people raised in radical spaces have some issues they needed to be educated on later in life. Ultimately, I think the solution to purity politics and to building meaningful coalitions with people who don’t entirely agree with us is for each of us to have greater humility about our own politics. We often think we know best. So do a lot of people…
Where do we go from there?
