It’s no secret that the political climate in America is heavily divided. Naturally, liberals will blame conservatives for the mess we’re in. Conservatives blame liberals, in turn.

Things weren’t always this nasty. The presidential campaigns of Donald Trump for the past eight years brought a lot of this tension to the forefront of the conversation, but it’s a tension that has been brewing for decades.

Instead of choosing one side to join in blaming the other, I’d like to offer some observations about the terrain these political disputes are playing out on. Maybe, with some effort, we can start with these observations to identify a path towards healing the wounds in our hearts.

Problem 1: Activists Infected By Academic Language

Privilege. Performative. Prejudice Plus Power.

Academics have an entire dialect of English dedicated towards technically precise terms rooted in academic philosophy. This new-speak has infected civil rights movements and shaped how activists talk and even think about these topics.

This, by itself, wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t utterly confusing to laypeople who speak a different dialect of English entirely.

Let’s start with “performative”.

Performative

To an academic philosopher, performative language is when the “speaking” is the “doing”. When a judge says, “I hereby sentence you.” When a Justice of the Peace or member of the clergy says, “I pronounce you man and wife.” When the words are the act itself, the language is performative.

That isn’t what performative means to the rest of us!

To laypeople, performative language is, like, lip-service. “All the world’s a stage.” You’re performing to your audience. Maybe you’re distracting them with your right hand while you do something else with your left. It’s shifty and untrustworthy.

When activists use the technical jargon to an audience that only understands the colloquial, they will NOT be understood.

Another example, which many terminally-online Twitter users are all-too-familiar with, is “privilege”.

Privilege

To understand privilege, you need to first understand Jazz.

As Miles Davis famously said about Jazz, “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.”

Privilege, to a layperson, means something significantly different from how activists understand the word. This delta between worldviews is subtle.

To an activist, privilege is the absence of a systemic burden. If you have white privilege, that just means you aren’t discriminated against for being black (because, categorically, you’d have to be white to have white privilege).

To a layperson, a privilege is a boon. Some explicit advantage you have over the rest of us. Your parents were rich enough to afford a private tutor to help you get into college? That’s privilege.

Both definitions gesture towards the same notion of one person having more advantage than the other, but the framing and centering is distinct.

Academic privilege is “you aren’t penalized”. Being at the baseline is privilege.

Colloquial privilege is “you have an advantage”. Being at the baseline isn’t privilege, being above it is privilege.

When different people disagree about what the baseline actually is, it distorts their view about being privileged or not.

White privilege? Where was my white privilege in the Crash of ’08 when there were no jobs anywhere? I’m not privileged, and fuck you for invalidating my struggles!

Many Floridians

Despite whatever merits the academic use of “privilege” has in academic circles, it’s next to useless when communicating with the general public.

Why Are Activists Like That?

I don’t really know. Despite decades, I still haven’t been able to figure this one out.

You would think that any movement championing for civil rights, fairness, and empathy would care a lot about their message being understood. Instead, they prioritize precision over clarity.

I do have a hunch where this impulse comes from, but I may be missing something, so I hesitate to call it the root cause.

Liberals and lefties are, in their heart, nerds.

Now, some nerds try to establish a pecking order of intellectual superiority. They interpret the other party being confused or ignorant as being less intelligent than them. That makes them feel vindicated and superior.

So what I think is happening here is that, when given the chance to build bridges and speak clearly to an audience, this impulse incentivizes liberals and lefties to do the exact opposite. Instead of building rapport or speaking the dialect of English that their audience will understand, the nerd brain wants to signal their superior intellect.

If you start with the aggregate of individual personal insecurities, mix it with a system comprised of people with likeminded insecurity, then over many years of reinforcement to exacerbate the problem, you would expect to see this sort of result.

Academics only know how to speak in their own precise, technical jargon because that’s necessary to succeed in academia. The incentive structure is skewed away from common understanding or finding agreeable terms. Thus, anyone that cuts their teeth on these topics will only learn the precise jargon for these topics, and a nuanced approach to understanding the colloquial language isn’t considered. Worse, in some circles, it might be viewed as a red flag that you’re on their side.

Activists generally value their college education, and so they learn bad habits from academia. When confronted with this, they don’t have the context to appreciate the problem, and therefore they instead blame the rest of us for being uneducated.

Anything that can be asserted without academic credentials can be dismissed without academic justification.

With apologies to Christopher Hitchens

There might be much more to this story than my observations here, but that’s the best I’ve been able to piece together. Maybe career academics can offer a different perspective than mine, and we can meet in the middle with a clearer understanding someday.

There is a ray of hope, however. It has to do with how society defines “racism”.

Racism. Prejudice Plus Power.

If you’d been listening at all during the fallout from the murder of Eric Garner, you may have noticed something from the Black Lives Matter movement.

Civil rights activists that focus on matters relating to race and ethnicity have long defined racism as “prejudice + power”, but that didn’t lesson didn’t really penetrate white communities before BLM.

Naturally, there were misunderstandings that arose from the camps that thought of racism merely as explicit race-motivated prejudice, and didn’t understand that implicit behaviors or power dynamics were important for that designation.

You hear this a lot from the “reverse racism” talking point whenever Affirmative Action comes up.

“I’m not racist!”

Guy who didn’t use slurs or overtly discriminate against people of color, but still avoids “the bad neighborhoods” at all costs.

And, let me say in no uncertain terms, the misunderstandings that occurred after Eric Garner’s murder by the hands of police were large in number and horrible in degree.

But something happened during those protests that hadn’t really happened before, to my recollection.

White people started talking about “systemic” racism. The kind of racism that arises when one family (usually white) has generational wealth due to their great-great-grandparents’ plantation ownership, compared with the descendants of slaves. Or their great-grandfather’s privilege to pursue higher education once deprived to people of color (and, largely, to women). Or decades of city planning designed to promote segregation and concentrate wealth in the “white” parts of a city leading to a long tail of economic conditions that persist to this day, even if nobody exhibits an explicitly prejudiced attitude towards black people or black communities.

Racism isn’t just prejudice. If it were, it would still be bad, but the impact of it would be skin deep compared to the systemic issues that we face in America today.

That white people started to acknowledge “systemic racism” as a category of racism that isn’t explicit, racially-motivated prejudice, is a step in the right direction (even if it’s all racism and the qualifier is technically unnecessary).

The problem of racism hasn’t changed, but how the privileged talk about racism has. Technical precision has been discarded in favor of clarity and empathy… and if you care about living in a Free Country, you need clarity and empathy in how you communicate.

And that is the ray of hope I speak of. Not the specific moniker adopted by white folks. The fact that they were willing to adopt one that teaches each other about an aspect of the discussion we were previously ignorant to gives me hope that some of these other academic-sourced precise terms about social injustice can be distilled into a common language that unites us all towards equitable solutions.

Let philosophers eat the poison of precision.

Intermission

Part two will talk about social media, our information diets, critical thinking, media literacy, disinformation, influence campaigns, and surveillance capitalism.

This post is already rather long, and I think folks would like to discuss this one in isolation. Covering the other topics will require a lot of focus to write, but I hope it comes across with clarity and compassion.

Until next time, I’m Floriduh Man, wishing you all a safe and peaceful election.