I think it’s also about people’s material reality. People live in their own little worlds. You can (and should!) make all the political and moral arguments you can think of against racism– but ultimately it’s going to be something in that person’s experience that gives them the ‘a-ha’ moment. They go on strike and and are thrown together with people of other races on the same side in their union. A white person witnesses a black person experiencing racism and sees it for themselves. A sexist man’s daughter is attacked and he realizes that rape jokes aren’t funny. It’s different for everyone, it can be something small or gigantic, but I think that’s what really, ultimately changes people. And if there’s a real, fighting left that puts those ideas out there, and if you keep making those political and moral arguments everywhere you go, when that moment happens they can suddenly say ‘Oh! Now I get what Angry Black Woman was talking about!’

At least that’s been my experience in ten years of organizing… :)

So I tend ot base my arguments more in that which is provably correct or incorrect, much more than morality or pragmatism (though pragmatic arguments hold far more value to me). Morality is a quagmire, and people twist that argument around on you constantly. It’s a septic-tank issue, where if you let the whole issue of “morality” come up, you instantly lose.

The fact of the matter is that any claim that skin color or hair texture of anything else is a substantive difference among humans is simply, demonstrably incorrect. We pretend there is a difference, and we pretend that these differences matter. That has as much currency as money — another thing that has no intrinsic value but we agree to rpetend it does, and so it rules our lives. But inherently, no value at all. Saying otherwise is like saying that rocks fall upward.

And yet people are horrifically resistant to this. Drives. Me. APESHIT.

I’m not sure of moral, pragmatic, or factual arguments are the most effective; I suspect you need all three. But myself, I tend to rely on factual ones.

Now, I have no idea how one would go about this, but I feel like people tend to be convinced more if they see something with their own eyes, rather than being told.

As for the more philosophical roots of what is or isn’t moral behaviour with respect to racism and other oppressions, historically morality has been linked to what’s popular or legal or commonplace. Slavery and lynching were legal in their time, of course. While I may believe in a deep common human moral core that we all may have, and that we each express it differently depending on how much privilege/oppression we’ve experienced, this doesn’t work in reality.

Thanks for the food for thought.

If you say “morality”–people hyperventilate and think you are talking about God. (That’s okay with me, I like God.) But that’s *why*, I think.

The atheists came up with a good way around this, to say something is either “harmful” or “helpful” rather than bad or good. (I am not saying everyone who uses these terms is atheist, but that in my observation, atheist utilitarians popularized these terms.)

Personally, I’d like to *merge* the terms, and just everyone ASSUME we mean bad/harmful and good/helpful and then just get on with it. :)

People use outrageous and absurd arguments to justify their immoral habits all the time, simply because changing the habit is difficult. It’s a habit.

Sometimes I think we’d all be better off forcing the habit change than trying to convince the masses that this or that needs to change.

Segregation doesn’t stop until integration is forced. Wage discrimination doesn’t stop until equal pay is forced. I could go on…

So, the real question is how to change habit? How to force the issue?