To be clear, I'm not urging another "read theory" struggle session. This to me seems to be about posting. Or maybe not? I guess we could have a struggle session about what it's actually about instead. And to prove I'm not one of the elite liberals, here's the link
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Great tagline!
Oh shit, someone better add that to the rotation!
I'd be pretty upset at anyone using the phrase "Intersectional Identity Politics" while organizing.
A socialist organization in my city has been handing out tenant organizing flyers. I ran the text through a reading level calculator. It was written at an upper-graduate level.
Two-thirds of my city is functionally illiterate.
Yeah this is a big problem, a lot of the people who intersectional, very academic woke and generally decent leftists want to help actually cannot or are not interested in parsing a lot of the language used to address issues. Getting down to the basics (healthcare, jobs, end racism, etc) is much more effective than saying "the institutional and political crisis that has arisen from an excessively punitive criminal justice system which does not adequately meet the needs of BIPOC and Latinx people and forces them to suffer at the hands of a white-supremacist-associated police force with a penchant for brutality, murder, and oppression needs to end"
Instead of that you could literally just say "defund the police and put that money towards jobs and food" and it would be 100% more successful. And it has if you look at the support behind diverting cop money to other shit in places where that's been the main message
Unless you're trying to write the next great novel or deliver a stirring speech, short sentences and ordinary words are the way to go.
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The concepts from (3) should still be explained in a way that people who didn't go to college can understand. The academy deploys a way of speaking which is designed for the reproduction of elites and not actually changing anything.
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I don't think this is the best way to get otherwise well-meaning people to reconsider whatever types of bigotry they're still expressing. If they're just some chud stirring up shit, sure, bully the hell out of them. But for everyone else it's usually more effective to educate them a bit and point out a better approach. Most people don't have One True Leftist syndrome and are willing to learn. That willingness to learn will disappear, though, if instead of teaching them we lead with "shape up or fuck off."
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:100-com:
My most effective tool for that is the "how does it hurt you to not use someone's preferred pronouns?" approach. Because it's really hard to come up with a negative answer to that that doesn't make someone sound like an asshole.
And people generally don't want to be thought of as an asshole.
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If you’re writing cover for mass movements? Run it by someone else first.
If you’re talking to people? Don’t dumb it down. Just be open to explaining words and concepts. People like to learn. Provided you aren’t being condescending or gatekeepery, it’s not a problem. (Unless you talk like Zizek or Jameson, in which case, don’t.)
Actually, Jameson and Fisher provide pretty good contrasting examples. Jameson came up with the idea of postmodernism as the cultural logic of capitalism (in the book of the same name), whereas Fisher built upon it with the notion of Capitalist Realism (again, in the book of the same name). Try reading both of them, and you’ll very quickly get an understanding of what accessible language does and doesn’t look like.
To expand on this a touch, people can tell when you're talking down to them. The slight pauses as you search for "plainer language" are a dead giveaway. Be yourself, but also be fully prepared to answer questions about what you said.
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Here's a great tool if you are trying to reach the largest audience possible.
If you are speaking or writing above a 5th grade reading level, you are alienating a lot of people.
Specialized language has its place, but fluency at various reading levels is a great skill to have.
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It's okay to use academic language if you're explaining it. If you replaced "intersectionality" with "flibertygoop" everywhere in your writing, would a reader still come out of it understanding flibertygoop? Then you're fine, you've explained the thing. That's particularly important for words that have many colloquial (or even formal) meanings, like socialism or anarchy, since it might already be flibertygoop to your audience.
It's also worth considering are how google-able the term in question is. If you start talking about intersectionality, that's a unique word and if someone trips over it they can find an answer easily. If you start talking about the absurd, you're going to want to name-drop Camus or something, since that's just a common word in English.
Finally, not every message needs to be accessible. If you can safely assume your audience knows the thing you're talking about, just use the jargon and save some time.
Practice, exposure to people who speak in a more normal way. I have the opposite problem, I always describe stuff in plain English, and highly educated types tend to find it really funny hearing me talk about complicated academic subjects in a way they are not used to.
To make myself stand out less and be taken more seriously by these kinds of people, I practice explaining things in my head when I'm doing boring stuff like cleaning around the house. Like, just pick a subject and start lecturing about it. Even if it's a little incoherent and badly structured, it's practice.