The fight for justice keeps evolving

What happens when the youth roll their eyes at principles we've spent our lives fighting for, when they've decided that they are not only outdated, but oppressive?

And this is important to remember, for all of us. No matter what our intentions, everything we say and do in the pursuit of justice will one day be outdated, ineffective, and yes, probably wrong. That is the way progress works. What we do now is important and helpful so long as what we do now is what is needed now. But the arguments I was having in college are not the arguments the world needs now as I prepared to send my son to college. And if I refuse to acknowledge and adjust to that, all I'm doing is making things harder for a generation that would really lke to move things forward.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p.  187

What's privilege?

The definition of privilege is in reality much simpler than a lot of social justice discussions would have you believe. Privilege, in the social justice context, is an advantage or a set of advantages that you have that others do not.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p. 59

The Layers of Social Justice Conferences

Academic or organizational conferences centered on social justice form a two-sided ecosystem, like the ocean on either side of an equatorial thermocline: the well-lit layer where professionals bask and sport about the dim reach of the slow-moving clients—or constituents or stakeholders, members or customers, special interest group or community, depending on the agency and the year. What never changed was the dynamic. The conference was organized around those at the top of the food chain, who made their living from those below. If you ran a nonprofit, or wrote papers about those who needed the services of a nonprofit, you floated in the warmth of power and influence. You were approached by corporate reps and interviewed for jobs, you hung out in the bar in good clothes and laughed with the journalist who had just sucked dry an angry, badly dressed member of the latest social justice struggle then tossed the husk back into the cold, oxygen-starved depths.

Nicola Griffith, So Lucky (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux: 2018), p. 85

MLK on the Importance (and Limits) of Law

Let us never succumb to the temptation of believing that legislation and judicial decrees play only minor roles in solving this problem ["an evil monster called segregation and its inseparable twin called discrimination"]. Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless. The law cannot make an employer love an employee, but it can prevent him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin. The habits, if not the hearts of people, have been and are being altered everyday by legislative acts, judicial decisions, and executive orders. Let us not be misled by those who argue that segregation cannot be ended by force of law.
But acknowledging this, we must admit that the ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable. Court orders and federal enforcement agencies are of inestimable value in achieving desegregation, but desegregation is only a partial, though necessary, step toward the final goal which we seek to realize, genuine inter-group and interpersonal living.

Martin Luther King, Jr.,  On Being a Good Neighbor (sermon), p. 10

MLK on Philanthropy & the Big Picture

Philanthropy is marvelous, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the need for working to remove the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

Martin Luther King, Jr.,  On Being a Good Neighbor (sermon), p. 5

Who could have foreseen the French Revolution?

It was too much the way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown—as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it—as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw. 

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book the Second, ch. XXIV

J.K. Rowling: We don't need magic to change the world

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

J.K. Rowling, commencement address, "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination," Harvard University, June 2008

Reformer says: keep reforming

[T]he need for reform never ends. My hope for Seattle is that its leaders will continue to challenge dysfunction and injustice whenever and wherever it is found in our fair city.

Christopher T. Bayley, Seattle Justice: The Rise and Fall of the Police Payoff System in Seattle (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2015), Afterword

King advises: use direct action and legal action

Direct action is not a substitute for work in the courts and the halls of government. Bringing about passage of a new and broad law or pleading cases before the courts of the land, does not eliminate the necessity for bringing about the mass dramatization of injustice in front of a city hall. Indeed, direct action and legal action complement one another; when skillfully employed, each becomes more effective.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Remarks at the Convocation on Equal Justice Under Law, sponsored by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, May 28, 1964, p. 4

"Ill-timed" civil rights demonstrations

Shortly after, at ten-thirty, the President greeted the civil rights leaders. He was legitimately concerned that the March on Washington would give fence-sitters in Congress a "not at gunpoint" excuse to vote against his—their—civil rights bill. King agreed that the march might seem "ill-timed." But he had never engaged in a direct-action movement that did not seem ill-timed. "Some people thought Birmingham was ill-timed," he said.

"Including the attorney general," the President said, and added, "I don't think you should be totally harsh on Bull Connor. After all, he has done more for civil rights than almot anybody else."

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), pp. 449-50.

Oppression bears fruit

Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book the Third, ch. XV

Vengeance and retribution require a long time

"You are faint of heart to-night my dear!"

"Well, then," said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung out of his breast, "it is a long time."

"It is a long time," repeated his wife; "and when is it not a long time? Vengeance and retribution require a long tim; it is the rule."

"It does not take a long time to trike a man with Lightning," said Defarge.

"How long," demanded madame, composedly, "does it take to make and store the lightning? Tell me."

Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something in that too.

"It does not take a long time," said madame, "for an earthquake to swallow a town. Eh well! Tell me how long it takes to prepare the earthquake?"

"A long time, I suppose," said Defarge.

"But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it is not seen or heard. That is your consolation. Keep it."

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book the Second, ch. XVI

GWB: some doubt the promise & justice of the USA

While many of our citizens prosper, others doubt the promise, even the justice, of our own country. The ambitions of some Americans are limited by failing schools and hidden prejudice and the circumstances of their birth. And sometimes our differences run so deep, it seems we share a continent, but not a country.

George W. Bush, First Inaugural Address, quoted in Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 98; also available here.

Justice is a gift

"Properly conceived, justice is not solely the product of governmental institutions, procedures and actions – the grist of laws and lawsuits. Justice is a gift that good people give to each other by the way they treat one another at all times and places, in and out of the courtroom.”

Roger C. Cramton, "Spaulding v. Zimmerman: Confidentiality and Its Exceptions," in Legal Ethics Stories 175, 178 (Deborah L. Rhode & David Luban eds. 2006)

Prisons or social services?

I repaired to the prison where Mr. Creakle was powerful. It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850), ch. 61

Repression and power

Repression, whether it be of the Negro, Catolic, Jew, or laborer, is the way of frightened power.

Frank Porter Graham (President of the University of North Carolina), 1938

quoted in Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), p. 32.

Democratic vision

“Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” 

James Bovard, quoted on coffee cups at At Sara’s Table Chester Creek Café, Duluth

Not exactly good versus evil

Now that the outcome is known, we tend to frame this era in terms of good versus evil. But the truth is scarier. Mostly this was a conflict of good against normal: Things that now seem surreal as well as shocking . . . were conventional in their time.

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), p. 598.