SJW? The abbreviation SJW stands for “Social Justice Warrior” and it is used pejoratively by the Right against those who defend the strictures of political correctness as the only effective means of combatting the use of hate speech and other discriminatory behaviours against women, minorities and the LGBTI community. SJWs are dismissed as self-validating attention-seekers using social media to advance socially progressive views as inauthentic as they are strident.
YOU CAN LEARN A LOT from blog comments. A recent posting on
the Rugby Union’s report into the Ōkoroire Hot Pools incident attracted this
terse response:
“I thought you would have heard the news, Chris. No one
cares about people who take offence anymore. Maybe you could go to a safe
corner till you feel less offended. Take an SJW with you.”
There’s a lot packed into these four short sentences, so
bear with me while I attempt to unpack them.
Let’s begin with the commentator’s central assertion: “No
one cares about people who take offence anymore.”
Taken at face value, this is obviously false. Just consider
the Rugby Union’s swift response to the avalanche of criticism that came
crashing down on its report. Given sponsorship’s vital role in the funding of
professional rugby, the game’s administrators’ acute sensitivity to such
sustained public criticism – especially in relation to the vexed issue of
gender relations – is readily understood. That the Union felt obliged to
announce that it’s seeking the help of anti-sexual-violence campaigner, Louise
Nicholas, shows how much they needed to be seen to “care”.
At a deeper level, however, the commenter is more accurate
than many New Zealanders might care to admit.
It is one of the proudest claims of the Baby Boom
Generation: that it confronted the racism, sexism and homophobia of its
parents’ generation; defeated it; and ushered in a new era of tolerance and
social equality. The Boomers point to the Black Civil Rights struggle in the
United States; the onrush of so-called “Second Wave” Feminism; and the Gay
Rights Revolution of the 1970s and 80s. Without these “new social movements”,
they claim, neither the dramatic and permanent shifts in social attitudes, nor
the legislative reforms they inspired, would have been possible.
But the question seldom asked of the Baby Boomers is whether
their much-vaunted changes were the product of an entire generation – or just a
fraction of it. Just how deeply did the ideas of the new social movements
penetrate? All the way down to the public bars and rugby club changing-rooms?
Or only as far as the common-rooms of the universities; the editorial offices
of the more respectable media outlets; and the screenwriting teams of movie and
television studios?
Politically-speaking, it has long been the contention of the
Right that the social changes of the 60s, 70s and 80s were only ever the
project of a wafer-thin layer of left-wing activists. As proof they point to
such contrary historical indicators as the white riots against Dr Martin Luther
King’s attempt to racially integrate Chicago’s public housing in 1966; the
defeat of the feminist-inspired Equal Rights Amendment in 1982; and, to use a
New Zealand example, the 800,000-signature petition (the largest in the
country’s history) against the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1986.
It is this conspiratorial version of the West’s recent
social history (in defence of which, rightists love to quote the 1960s student
radical, Rudi Dutschke’s, advice for comrades to undertake “the long march
through the institutions”) that spawned the notion of “political correctness”.
According to the Right, political correctness is the method by which left-wing
elites impose their ideas about what is, and isn’t, acceptable political
discourse on the rest of society.
The references in the comment quoted above to a “safe
corner” and an “SJW” trace their origins to this Left-Right struggle over
political correctness.
“Safe Areas” are spaces to which university students in the
US are able to retreat when the language and behaviour of the politically incorrect on campus is deemed to have
grown too confronting and/or dangerous. Derided by the Right for pandering to
the alleged preciousness of the students making use of them, safe areas are
also assailed for implicitly curtailing the rights of those from whom their
users are seeking refuge.
The abbreviation SJW stands for “Social Justice Warrior” and
it is used pejoratively by the Right against those who defend the strictures of
political correctness as the only effective means of combatting the use of hate
speech and other discriminatory behaviours against women, minorities and the
LGBTI community. SJWs are dismissed as self-validating attention-seekers using
social media to advance socially progressive views as inauthentic as they are
strident.
Unpacked like this, our commenter’s observations offer us a
clear insight into the Right’s estimation of the Ōkoroire Hot Pools incident,
and the Rugby Union’s response. The key suggestion on offer is that any and all
offence taken as a result of the interaction between the stripper “Scarlette”
and the Chiefs at Ōkoroire is, or should be, a matter of indifference to those
mainstream New Zealanders who remain unconvinced by political correctness, safe
areas, SJW’s – and left-wing writers. He further assumes that these unoffended
Kiwis constitute a clear majority.
The scary thing is – I’m not so sure he’s wrong.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
13 September 2016.
