When Civil Rights is a Job
I've been at my job for two weeks now. It's got me thinking about the difference between working for change and blogging for change. on blogs, people love to be as radical as they possibly can. I don't just mean this in terms of "Radical feminism" or something like that. I mean that people on blogs are talking about their opinion. Or they're talking about theory. When you talk about something like theory, you can pretty much say whatever you want. When you can say things that are completely out of the bounds of actual possibility, and defend yourself by saying that your more pragmatic opponents lack imagination. You can speak quite fancifully of the Revolution, whatever your pet revolution may be. You can decide that anyone who doesn't want a complete and major overhaul of a basic facet of society, from consumerism to prostitution, is simply assimilationist and unwilling to go as far as they should.
When, like me currently, you actually have a job for an organization dedicated to the civil rights of some group (in my case, people with disabilities--and no, I'm sorry, but I don't want to give details on this particular blog), you realize very quickly that however much you like or don't like society's basic structure, you work within it. You start talking about things like legislation, rather than window smashing. Federal budgets for programs, rather than alternative communities. You start looking for the best citations you can find, not the best stories you can find. You stop talking about fascinating concepts like "How useful is masculinist science?" and start looking for the peer reviewed material.
And you start to realize, or at least I did, that some of the things you can easily talk about while sitting in a chair in front of your computer just no longer apply. You start thinking that maybe the people who "work with the system" are not unimaginative, but rather are the people who manage to get things done. The people who manage to hear a few of those "subaltern voices" (OK, so I'm not steeped when well enough in theory to be sure entirely whether that means what I'm trying to say) and try to convince someone to do the studies, conducted the interviews, right up the reports that will get important people, like legislators, to wake up and take notice.
And you when realize very quickly that the battles about who is most committed, who truly understands the concepts and the language and the theory and the community and the this and that and the other, don't have anything to do with anything. They do absolutely nothing but derail real work, especially when they're debates about who is pure enough to do the work in the first place.
I do think that any movement needs its revolutionaries. its loud people, its way out people, its people that no one within the system could dare to listen to. But those people are one piece of a whole, and not everyone needs to be them, and not every one of them is brimming with the worthwhile sort of harebrained idea. The people that do have the good ideas are only the first step. People closer to the mainstream hear those ideas, get fired up, and find ways to make the system listen. Their efforts to create programs, allocate budgets, revise standards.
If we're really talking about civil rights, rather than shining Revolutions in the sky, those people are just as necessary as the dreamers. People like to say that it's the people who come up with the ideology who are the fighters, the warriors, the heroes. But they're not the only heroes. The heroes are just as much the ones who get things done as the ones who dream things up.
And I couldn't be prouder of myself right now, as someone who has an opportunity to be one of the people who tries to get things done.
And do you know what else? The only reason that some of the dreamers aren't also the ones to get things done is because they're more wrapped up in disdain for the system than in making things work.
Where do you stand?
When, like me currently, you actually have a job for an organization dedicated to the civil rights of some group (in my case, people with disabilities--and no, I'm sorry, but I don't want to give details on this particular blog), you realize very quickly that however much you like or don't like society's basic structure, you work within it. You start talking about things like legislation, rather than window smashing. Federal budgets for programs, rather than alternative communities. You start looking for the best citations you can find, not the best stories you can find. You stop talking about fascinating concepts like "How useful is masculinist science?" and start looking for the peer reviewed material.
And you start to realize, or at least I did, that some of the things you can easily talk about while sitting in a chair in front of your computer just no longer apply. You start thinking that maybe the people who "work with the system" are not unimaginative, but rather are the people who manage to get things done. The people who manage to hear a few of those "subaltern voices" (OK, so I'm not steeped when well enough in theory to be sure entirely whether that means what I'm trying to say) and try to convince someone to do the studies, conducted the interviews, right up the reports that will get important people, like legislators, to wake up and take notice.
And you when realize very quickly that the battles about who is most committed, who truly understands the concepts and the language and the theory and the community and the this and that and the other, don't have anything to do with anything. They do absolutely nothing but derail real work, especially when they're debates about who is pure enough to do the work in the first place.
I do think that any movement needs its revolutionaries. its loud people, its way out people, its people that no one within the system could dare to listen to. But those people are one piece of a whole, and not everyone needs to be them, and not every one of them is brimming with the worthwhile sort of harebrained idea. The people that do have the good ideas are only the first step. People closer to the mainstream hear those ideas, get fired up, and find ways to make the system listen. Their efforts to create programs, allocate budgets, revise standards.
If we're really talking about civil rights, rather than shining Revolutions in the sky, those people are just as necessary as the dreamers. People like to say that it's the people who come up with the ideology who are the fighters, the warriors, the heroes. But they're not the only heroes. The heroes are just as much the ones who get things done as the ones who dream things up.
And I couldn't be prouder of myself right now, as someone who has an opportunity to be one of the people who tries to get things done.
And do you know what else? The only reason that some of the dreamers aren't also the ones to get things done is because they're more wrapped up in disdain for the system than in making things work.
Where do you stand?