The Victory of Social Revolution Over Social Evolution
How an insistence on immediate change will reverse the winds and luff our sails.
I find myself drawn, as many are, to a particularly poignant section of Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter From A Birmingham Jail.”
Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was "well timed" according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "wait." It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say "wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodyness" -- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
Not only is it one of the most poetic sections of the letter (of any letter, really), it also speaks to the tension between two disparate views toward societal change. In King’s day, as in ours, there are those who believe change takes place gradually over time, starting with a small acorn of desire until it grows into a mighty oak. Then there are those, like King, who believed change needed to occur as quickly and abruptly as possible, particularly when it came to matters of social justice and equality. Marx and Engels laid this out as essentially the difference between quiet social evolution and violent social revolution.
Those of us old enough to remember saw this play out with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Back in 2007 there were many people (mostly in the south) who insisted that there would be a time when they would be “ready” to see a black president, but that time had not yet arrived. “We’re not ready,” one such person said to Alexandra Pelosi in her documentary Right America: Feeling Wronged. “We’re just not ready.” When those people were going to be “ready” was anybody’s guess. A person more enthusiastic about electing the nation's first black president would rightly feel frustrated by such people, of whom there were legions.
Change had to happen yesterday. Even after Obama’s election in 2008 there were people pronouncing that it was to America’s great shame that it took 219 years to elect someone other than a white man to the highest office in the land. They’re not wrong. And to King’s point in the letter, there are times when quiet social evolution probably shouldn’t be relied upon.
The problem as I see it, is there has lately been a great flattening in our approach to social change in favor of violent social revolution. At this point it’s worth my pointing out that by “violent” I don’t mean always physically violent, rather: abrupt or sudden. A blowtorch works great when you’re trying to crack open a safe; less great when trying to light birthday candles. In this analogy, desegregation, giving people equal protection under the law, is the safe. Language is the birthday candle.
Police reform requires a blowtorch. Policies, procedures, training, loopholes, precinct locker room culture, all of it needs an immediate overhaul if we want to see substantive change take place in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods–neighborhoods where police seemingly behave with antipathy towards its residents and justify their more aggressive actions with policies and legal cover. If that legal cover can be removed, it should have been removed yesteryear. That’s violent social revolution.
But while you can revoke a policy or enforce another policy overnight, the same can’t be said unfortunately for the heart and mindset of the individual police officer. That has to take a slower social baking process. Nor can it be (and here’s where I see us making the most egregious error) punitively enforced on the individual.
We see this with language. Often disparaged as “politically correct” speech, language has always evolved and on a long enough timeline we can see how this evolution has been for the better. On the whole, I think it’s a good thing that we no longer call developmentally disabled people “idiots,” “morons” or “retards.” It’s a net good that we all politely refer to that most triggering of words as “the n-word” when we need to reference it. (Such as I just did). In my lifetime I watched our society evolutionarily weed out the homophobic “f-slur.”
The key word is evolutionarily. In all those cases, with arguably the exception of the n-word, those developments happened over time and numerous conversations. Commercial spots, television shows, songs, PSAs, and peer influence helped to gradually remove those slurs from our tongues. It was the process of listening to people we cared about, admired, or idolized speak out against the use of these words, or in some cases we even witnessed the deleterious impact of these words on others that changed our thinking. It didn’t happen overnight. And nobody lost their job over it. I say the n-word has some exception because the word is so vile, so disruptive that it has sparked violent reactions, causing people to fear an immediate consequence if they use it (See: a punch to the nose) But even in the case of the n-word, many many white folks simply stopped using the word because they realized it was hurtful and disgusting. (See: no punch to the nose necessary).
Fast forward a bit to 2023 and the list of words we want to exile is growing bigger every day. I was going through the alphabet with my teenage son the other day when we discovered, there’s a b-word, a c-word, a d-word, an f-word, a k-word, an m-word, an n-word, a q-word (though that’s coming back on the rainbow) an r-word, and a t-word. That’s not to mention all the other words that have been targeted because of their historical roots. Not many years ago I was gently chastised by a friend of mine on Facebook because I told him his withholding of some juicy gossip left me feeling “gypped.” Somehow I’d failed to get the memo about that word’s ties to prejudice against the Romani people. A young adult novelist I interviewed told me he’ll never know the economic and professional impact of a negative Kirkus review he received for his debut novel because a character in the novel sat “Indian style” on the floor. (His publisher scrambled to pulp the print run and reissued the book; a very costly outcome indeed) No matter that the novel takes place in the late 1970s, when that phrase would have been perfectly normative.
This isn’t a “you-can’t-say-nothing-anymore” post. This isn’t going to be some 14,000 word screed enumerating all the situations where people suffered serious consequences for using a word that was merely impolite five minutes ago.
This is more about that five minutes. What we’ve been witnessing in our culture over the past five or six years is powerful and influential leaders online taking the same approach to language that they would take to repeal a municipal law, or remove an offensive statue. That is, they expect the change to take place immediately. If a mob assembles to march on a confederate statue on a Monday, that statue should be (and conceivably can be) gone by Tuesday.
But language doesn’t work that way. It never has. And forcing it to work that way has caused a tremendous amount of pain, suffering and has even sparked a backlash that I think is counterintuitive for a group seeking to see real change in our society. The “you-can’t-say-nothing-anymore” people feel that, indeed, you can’t say nothing anymore: not without losing your job, your college scholarship, your book contract, your volunteer spot on that committee, your award nomination, etc…
Changing a flag on a building, or removing a name from a dormitory is hard. Changing people’s minds not to use a “harmful” word or phrase they don’t directly intend to use for harm is harder. The solution to that problem is time and healthy leadership, not scorched earth, punitive consequences that will only cause people to dig in deeper and become resentful of the people seeking to enact change. I understand the impulse to say “oh, screw their feelings,” and when it comes to matters of law, policy, procedures, I concur. But when it comes to language it’s not a tenable position. Language requires quiet social evolution.
What do I mean by healthy leadership? I’ll give you a personal example. When I was in high school in the early 1990s there was a boy named Doug in my English class. Doug was white, but he was heavily invested in hip-hop culture. He dressed hip-hop, he listened to hip-hop, he strongly identified with members of the black community at my school (about 15% of our population at the time). His friends were all black and hispanic kids.
We were reading the work of Ernest Hemingway in our class, and the teacher used a round robin style of reading whereby everyone had to read a passage and then pass it on. When it was Doug’s turn to read, he landed on a passage where the narrator in Hemingway’s story tells the audience that the “n-word boy” went to get water for the soldiers. When Doug reached that word, he stopped and said “I’m just gonna skip that word; I’m not gonna read it. You can all see it.” The teacher praised this socially conscientious decision and told him she was incredibly proud of his stance. For the rest of the Hemingway piece, and as the year progressed, (Mark Twain was next!) whenever the n-word appeared in a text, many students followed Doug’s lead and skipped right over it. Some argued that Hemingway’s words shouldn’t be censored. (I was initially in this camp). A lot of students from that group eventually changed their position and went with Doug’s approach. That’s what I mean by healthy leadership. Doug showed leadership. He didn’t glare at anybody, he didn’t castigate anybody, and his behavior won over a lot of people, including myself. For me, compassion was more important than taking some weird stand on behalf of a dead writer. The point is: we all carried something away from that experience, and 30 years later that word has ostensibly been weeded out of polite society. Nobody in my English class was hit with a milkshake, called a racist, beaten up in the hallway, had the university they were applying to contacted by Doug.
The punitive, violent revolutionary manner some people are embracing to enforce language norms is doing more harm than good. Those on the receiving end are finding their punishment far outstrips their crime. Those hearing about these “cancellations” are siding with the canceled. And scores of other people are hiding behind fake social media accounts to speak their minds or staying out of the national conversations entirely. This is not how we progress forward. In fact, it’s almost a sure-fire way to regress. There are situations when change can not wait for everyone to come around. But there are situations where waiting, speaking and waiting; indeed there are times when convincing and waiting is the wisest course of action.