I appreciate learning your perspective. Frankly, though, the argument you make for accepting and embracing such things to me reinforces the notion that the BLM movement feels like forced cultural revolution. Though you are not coming across with any such tone, the idea seems like "shut up, and take your medicine".
All cultural revolution is forced for those who do not benefit directly from it.
Nothing worth fighting for comes easy. Women's rights, racial rights, gay rights... It all had to be forced to happen, because it's much easier to maintain an unfair status quo than it is to convince millions of people that perhaps their world view is wrong and holding others back.
The difference between the current social justice movements and the previous civil rights movements is that they're more about changing culture than policy. Voting rights, marriage rights, desegregation, abortion rights, these are things with concrete laws that could be changed.
If anything, the protests should have been about police reform. Change qualified immunity, change police training to avoid inadvertent deaths. That's something that a lot of people could support because more than just Black people get harassed by cops.
Instead, everything from master bedrooms, to math, to western civilization itself has been called "white supremacist", "racist", and "problematic". It's diluted the ability for these movements to make real substantive progress and is creating growing animosity towards themselves.
But changing this word was easy and doesn't really benefit anyone. A corporation gets to pat themselves on the back and US police continue to brutalize people just the same. Nothing really changed
> All cultural revolution is forced for those who do not benefit directly from it.
How would you say the American Civil War fits into this picture? Most of the people fighting (and dying to fight) slavery were not slaves. Or when the British made slavery illegal in their Empire? Why choose that, in your model?
Fighting for people's rights does not put an unnecessary burden on other people. Rosa Parks wanted to allow black people to ride anywhere on the bus, not make white people stand up and give them their places instead.
I think we're in agreement? I'm saying that regardless, fights for equity are still a fight and therefore forced.
I'd also argue they do put a burden on people, though not an unnecessary one, to reevaluate their thinking and world view. Rosa Parks didn't force a white person to give up their seat for her. But she, and others, did force white people to rethink what they took for granted as the status quo.
For the people who were always able to sit in the front of the bus, having black people sitting there was a new burden, and meant they had to stand more often.
Certainly, but it was a burden in that it took away an unnecessary privilege. The point of the boycotts was ultimately not to put an extra burden on others to remind them of their privilege.
The point of the original comment was that renaming master to main served as a reminder for people. But movements in the past that you were referencing never served a goal of solely putting burdens on other people.
This is a matter of perspective. Creating awareness is usually the first step to changing things. Your take here only really works of you believe that burdening people with awareness is the end goal.
To use the standing example, it's like saying that Parks's goal was just to get arrested to burden people with the knowledge of inequality.
If you accept that racial privilege exists, and that it's causes are correctable, even in part, then raising awareness of those helps. This is doubly true if you think that stone of the causes are social cognitive biases, where awareness and mindfulness directly address the causes.
I was on the fence before I read this comment. I don't mind changing insignificant things if it makes people feel better.
Now I'm firmly in the camp that this wasn't worth it. Even having this remotely associated with the real important change that BLM is pushing for really dilutes the message. We're talking about a name and not the real injustices that some people face everyday.
