Why I Won’t Be Unfriending Anyone After This Election
When the 2016 election happened in the United States, I lit myself on fire with rage. I took to the streets with crowds of other demonstrators in Portland, OR. I screamed my feelings on social media. I unfriended people rapidly, and those I didn’t unfriend witnessed my steady stream of angry posts online. Did making angry posts feel good? Absolutely. Did I feel solidarity with others who were posting similar sentiments? Definitely. Did my angry posts change people’s minds? I agree with Kazu Haga, an activist in the prison reform movement, who says, “You can’t shame people into transformation.” You can’t unfriend others into transformation, either.
I want to first frame these reflections by acknowledging that not everyone is in a position to do the labor of convincing others to agree with them, and in this piece, I speak from a position of a middle-class, white, educated, cis woman. There have been times when reaching across the line and offering my hand has been neither the appropriate or healthiest action for me to take, and in those times, I have allowed myself to sit back or roar wildly — for example, when the #MeToo movement emerged and I was navigating that space as a sexual abuse survivor.
I recognize that in many cases, political views are indicative of other values as well, and sometimes unfriending someone over politics really means unfriending them for upholding values that represent discrimination, racism, dehumanization. If this is the case for you, by all means, unfriend as needed. But if you are in a position to do the mental and emotional labor of making connections with people who disagree with you, as I sometimes am, you may find that the practice of doing so is worthwhile.
The Inefficacy of Punching Back
Sometimes, the sledgehammers we so passionately wield are not effective tactics — instead, they can diminish opportunities to make productive headway in understanding. Shelly Tochluk, author of Living in the Tension: The Quest for a Spiritualized Racial Justice, uses the popular term “sledgehammer tactics” to recount experiences wherein her “unwavering and distancing” attempts to discuss race result in her becoming a less powerful advocate for social justice. As Dacher Keltner says in “The Compassionate Species,” we humans are “wired” to be compassionate toward one another. So how do we extend that compassion toward people who don’t agree with us? Not in a way that excuses their potentially harmful actions or opinions, but in a way that allows us to see them, and them to see us, as human beings?
During the #MeToo movement, I kept wondering how to get my message across to people in a way that both honored my personal experiences and the experiences of fellow hurt and angry women, and also present my views in a way that could be accessible to the folks I wanted to listen to me. One of my teachers, Dr. Alka Arora, describes in her talk On Feminism’s Fourth Wave her past assumption that if you “cut [white men], they didn’t bleed as deeply.” While “punching back” can feel like a cathartic action, it has some strategic pitfalls. Granted, it is not healthy to hold anger in — if you have a need to express your anger, do. I am not here to act as the tone police.
Building Bridges
What I would like to be able to do is to engage in dialogue — slow, complex, nuanced, and productive dialogue — with people who might not side with me on political issues. Gloria Anzaldua in This Bridge We Call Home speaks of the challenge to develop “an ethical, compassionate strategy with which to negotiate the conflict and difference within self and between others.” I recognize that cultivating a bridge-building superpower might not impact every cause — and that sometimes, a conversation is simply not worth the time, or not even possible. But for other times, developing the skills and courage enough to engage in these dialogues can be rewarding. And sometimes, Tochluk says, it doesn’t take much finesse aside from “listening with a whole heart and allowing the inner debater to take a rest.”
Listening
Listening can be a real challenge when it comes to trying to stomach opinions that are upsetting, harmful, or formed from misleading facts. Dropping the urge to debate or to respond with the perfect counter-argument can feel particularly challenging, especially if a bullseye rebuttal is right at the tip of your tongue. As the authors of Difficult Conversations point out, “difficult conversations do not just involve feelings, they are at their very core about feelings.” It is important to be able to self-identify when our heightened feelings require self-care and space, rather than a deep-dive into a triggering conversation where patience and self-restraint must be exercised. Ann Russo of Feminist Accountability emphasizes that we cannot cultivate societal change “from a numbed-out distance or a defensive resistance.”
But if you have the ability to do so, listen. You may find that you are surprised by what you discover if you dig deep. Find common ground. Look for similarities in values. The more your conversation partner sees they have in common with you, the better. AnaLouise Keating reminds us that when we focus on labels, “we make biased, inaccurate assumptions about [people’s] politics, worldviews, and so forth…we unnecessarily close ourselves off from potential allies.” What if I saw people who didn’t agree with me as potential allies?
Resisting Call-Out Culture
Although it can feel momentarily satisfying to publicly tear someone down for their political views, or to announce that you are unfriending someone for something they said or how they voted, call-out culture is perhaps not the most effective way to enact change. Adrienne Maree Brown explains in Emergent Strategy the pitfalls of demonizing one another and creating divisiveness, particularly on social media. While digital platforms give us endless opportunities to create glib soundbytes out of our differences, Brown questions whether the people partaking in takedowns uphold a productive vision of what we want justice to look like.
This is not to say that calling others out is not important — although I do recommend instead calling people in, which involves a more private and more compassionate approach to pointing out harmful actions. As Layla Saad says in Me and White Supremacy, this is unavoidable — people “will be called in as [they] do anti-racism work.” What I am recommending is a more keen and attentive willingness to refine the way we call others in. Brown points out that when we tear one person down, we are taking aim at something that doesn’t encompass the scale of the problem — it is larger than the individuals we are attacking. Furthermore, when we seek to tear those people down, we are ourselves “perpetuating systemic oppressions.” Zenju Earthlyn Manuel discusses similar concepts in her writing, saying, “As I experienced being disregarded, I learned to disregard others.”
As it stands, call-out culture reinforces the divisiveness of an already-divisive culture rather than building bridges. It cultivates environments in which the groundwork for change is thwarted. Brown urges us instead to have more “humility” as we approach these complex conversations. She suggests that we get “mediation support,” because “real time is slower than social media time, where everything feels urgent. Real time often includes periods of silence, reflection, growth, space, self-forgiveness, processing with loved ones, rest, and responsibility.”
Applying the Work
I’ve spent a great deal of time in my 15-year career building safer classroom spaces for my high school students, where they can feel seen, included, represented, and where they are given a platform on which to speak their stories. Largely, the students I make the most room for are underrepresented in the standardized curriculum, the school district, America at large. As a white person with relative privilege, creating a curriculum centered around social justice has presented a formidable learning curve and I have made a lot of mistakes.
A mistake I regret having made on several occasions is writing off students who fail to engage eagerly in lessons on social justice, calling them out too vehemently, or worse, shaming them rather than educating them. I wonder if my student who needs to feel care, compassion, and belonging the most right now is my student who changed his digital learning platform profile photo to a Third Reich symbol last month. This is not to say that I need to ignore his digressions, or give this child a platform in class to speak about his disgusting and racist opinions, but on a subtler level, the relationship-building I do in class seems to warrant that I build connections that garner trust, understanding, and hopefully a small opening through which larger messages on social justice can actually be heard. After all, it is young men like this who may seek refuge and acceptance from groups like the Proud Boys if they feel ostracized enough by everyone else.
Of course, not everyone needs to be expected to maintain the bandwidth to consistently make space for people with opinions such as these: setting boundaries and limits for this is necessary. But I am coming to see that each time I either push too hard or simply give up, no progress is made. If I unfriend someone on social media, I have lost all opportunity to make any impact on them. I want to make progress, and I see that so much of this starts with me. It is not just my actions, but also my approach, that are both integral to the success of the movements I care about. As I grow, I hope to be able to show actions of allyship with more grace, compassion, integrity, and impact. As Kazu Haga says, “Change is fractal in nature…what’s possible at the smaller scale is possible at the larger scale.”
Bibliography
Anzaldua, Gloria. This Bridge We Call Home. New York and London: Routledge. 2002.
Arora, Alka. “On Feminism’s Fourth Wave.” CIIS Public Programs Podcast. 2019. https://soundcloud.com/publicprograms/alka-arora-on-feminisms-fourth-wave.
Brown, Adrienne M. Emergent Strategy. Chico: AK Press, 2017.
Haga, Kazu. “On Healing Resistance.” CIIS Public Programs Podcast. 2020. https://soundcloud.com/publicprograms/kazu-haga-on-healing-resistance
Heen, Sheila, Bruce Patton, and Douglas Stone. Difficult Conversations. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Keating, AnaLouise. “I am a Citizen of the Universe.” Gloria Anzaldua’s Spiritual Activism as a Catalyst for Social Change.” In Feminist Studies, edited by Analouise Keating, 2008.
Keltner, Dacher. “The Compassionate Species.” Earthling Opinion. September 24, 2020. https://earthlingopinion.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/the-compassionate-species/.
Manuel, Zenju E. The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality and Gender. Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2015.
Russo, Ann. Feminist Accountability. New York: NYU Press, 2018.
Saad, Layla. Me and White Supremacy. Naperville: Sourcebooks, 2020.
Tochluk, Shelly. Living in the Tension: The Quest for a Spiritualized Racial Justice. Roselle: Crandall, Dostie & Douglass Books, Inc. 2016.
