IamNotCreepy wrote:I'd like to point out that you can criticize the delivery of a method and still agree with the message and ultimately support their cause -- they're not mutually exclusive.
Who said these things are mutually exclusive? I'm baffled by how often this happens. I say, "Too much of X might be bad, especially done with a particular emphasis," and then someone says "X is isn't always bad" or "X doesn't always have the wrong emphasis." I never disputed the second two claims. Statements like that start to come off as people thinking I'm stupid because they're explaining very obvious things to me as if I didn't already get them.
I'll try this one more time (with very little faith). This will be a bit lengthy.
So let's say you have (A) giving criticism; (B) the criticism is to excess or has an unuseful focus; and (C) being damaging to a cause.
I am suggesting that if
A AND B, then C.
But the responses I consistently see imply that I said if A OR B then C. I am NOT saying that. Now, there is a question as to whether B is true. Obviously, that is subjective and context-dependent. I will supply some examples of what I mean.
I think it is one thing to say that you find a protest method ineffective. It is another to suggest that people are just blocking roads or screaming to feel good about themselves or are just being jerks because they didn't get their way. The latter tow come off as dismissive and ironically don't take into account human nature in the way that protesters are asked to.
Now, it's easy to dismiss the anger of protesters if we just assume they don't actually care or are just trying to make themselves feel good, but I'm not convinced that that's a fair assumption. I personally am not one to scream at people and I like to be civil, but that doesn't mean I don't understand why someone would feel outraged or act out. And more importantly, it's not that case that people just willy-nilly block roads. The issues many people in the black community (or their allies) block roads about, like police brutality, have been going on for a long time, and those issues have been ignored or dismissed or under-addressed. There are also peaceful protests, but those don't get as much publicity and will also get criticized for being even slightly upsetting to certain groups of people. We can say those upset people are extremely conservative, but there is a seprate and related issue of signaling I will get to in a moment.
I think it's disingenuous to assume that people will vote opposite of what they believe in just out of spite because they think the messenger is being uncivil.
I agree, which is why I didn't assume it. Where did that even come from? I said that if the way a group protests sways the way a person sees the issue being protesting about, then they probably didn't care about the issue. That is a different thing from what you are criticizing in my opinion. Now, if moderates want to appeal to the people on the fence, which I think was a good suggestion by Crimson, there is the issue of signaling to consider.
If there is a target of attention (let's say, the right cause/set of issues to focus on), the amount of information tied to that target will determine how easy it is to perceive the target itself. If there is a lot of noise both from the far right and from the middle, the concer from me is that it's more likely that people on the fence (i they can be persuaded in the first place) will find it harder to actually notice the issue. Again, this does not mean I think it's wrong to criticize. But it does suggest that if I think a certain type of criticism is overblown, I will consider it more of a distraction from the target. I would liken it to
the fan effect in psyshcology, though not the same thing exactly, at least as I have presented it.
If those actions do push away moderates who are on the fence, that's just a natural consequence of their actions. It's unrealistic to expect your target audience to change how they react to your tactics rather than to change your tactics to be as effective as possible.
I also think it's unrealistic to expect people from certain groups who are judged to unfair standards constantly not to take issue with being lectured about whether they should show anger. Sometimes those lectures are warranted, as when people went to Tucker Carlson's house. Other times I think they're overblown.
I would also like to point out that in my own personal experience, being civil sometimes actually makes some people view others in my racial group more negatively. I personally don't yell or even confront people who shout the N-word at me, for example (yes, this had happened multiple times in my life, and one of those times was a few weeks ago), but I also feel like if I did there would be people who would just see an angry black man. I have have tried to reach out to less extreme people who have less than positive views about black people (I used to have one of those people as a friend), but because I seem "smart and well-spoken" or "reasonable" they simply see me as an example of why they're justified in disliking the rest of my group that they view in more stereotypical terms. It suddenly becomes, you went through some bad things and didn't turn out like that, so they have no excuse.
Now, obiously, that example does not apply to everyone. But I also know that people who look like me get held to a harsher standard on a consistent basis, and it used to happen to me when I was younger and scarier looking to white people (at leat until I opened my mouth and showed I was one of the "good ones). But when you have to deal with that all the time, you don't always want to lecture the people in your own group, especially those who are treated even worse than you are, unless you really feel it's warranted. I think something similar might happen with protesters, especially if they feel they're held to unfair standards anyway. For the last time, that doesn't mean "don't criticize ever" or that every criticism is bad. Hell, I don't entirely disagree with everything Trump says sometimes.
I would also like to clarify that I really don't think we're all working with the same idea of what's "uncivil." Some people see boycotts as uncvil because they're coercive. But they can also be a useful way to push people in power to act. In that sense and others I will not get into (I think Asami mentioned plenty), I think incivility can be very useful and moreover, it illustrates that the point of protest doesn't always have to be to "persuade" to be meaningful (because I don't define economic threats as persuasion).