Jonathan Matthew Smucker

This weekend I am celebrating with friends. I am celebrating that the confederate flag has overnight become a pariah, even among mainstream conservatives. And I am celebrating that gay people can now marry each other anywhere in the United States. Do I think that these victories have solved structural racism or discrimination against LGBTQ people? Of course not. Nonetheless, I am celebrating these victories. They were hard won. These shifts will positively impact a lot of people in meaningful ways. And these victories point the way forward.

Some of my radical friends’ dismal reactions to good news this week has reminded me of something I wrote a few years back about the story of the righteous few. I decided to repost a lengthy excerpt today:

Radicals tend to become radicals because we become disillusioned with aspects of the dominant culture. When you feel like you’re up against the culture, it’s easy then to develop an inclination to separate yourself from that culture. When we begin to become aware of the destructive impacts of capitalism, racism, sexism, and whatever other social systems we encounter that we see perpetuating oppression, we don’t want to be part of it. We feel a moral repugnance and a desire to not cooperate with injustice.

However, this desire to separate ourselves from injustice can develop into a general mentality of separation from society more generally. In other words, when we see the dominant culture as a perpetrator of injustice, and we see society as the storehouse of the dominant culture, then our desire to separate ourselves from injustice can easily develop into a mentality of separating ourselves from the mainstream of society. With the mainstream seen as bad, we begin to look for ways to distinguish ourselves and our groups from anything mainstream. We begin to notice, highlight, exaggerate, and develop distinctions between ourselves and the mainstream, because these distinctions reinforce our radical identity. The distinguishing features go far beyond nonparticipation in those aspects of the dominant culture that we find offensive…

In the story of the righteous few, success itself becomes suspect. If a group or individual is embraced by a significant enough portion of society, it must be because they are not truly revolutionary or because their message has been ‘watered down.’ It seriously messes with radicals’ heads when some of our ideas start to become popular! We are so accustomed to being the most radical kid on the block, and suddenly people we’ve never met are coming out of the woodwork, marching in the streets with us, and spouting some of the lines we’ve been saying for years. Frankly, it can lead to a bit of an identity crisis. [emphasis added today]

The only thing I’ll add to this is: How do you expect to get more people to join collective action to win bigger victories if you completely dismiss the value of everything collective action has accomplished thus far? Take a minute to celebrate. We have our whole lives to keep critiquing, and, more importantly, to keep fighting for a better world.