Social Well-being: Flavia is a genius.

Flavia @ Tiger Beatdown just put up an amazing post on substituting "social justice" with "social well-being", as a concept with a less limited history (almost no history at all, actually!) and a broader perspective that includes justice but also so much more.

Oh heck, I'll let her describe it:

Social Wellbeing seeks to restore balance, to create a state in which needs are met and where people are allowed to develop through opportunities for advancement. Social Wellbeing should account for difference and local cultures, it should be inclusive of Justice but also of the “aftermath” of Justice. For me, it is not a universally defined idea of progress but one which is defined locally. From the standpoint of my Feminist lens, Social Wellbeing should call intragender oppression into question (i.e. What does it mean to succeed, as a woman, in an environment that oppresses other women, sometimes even at our expense?).

Social Wellbeing is measurable and tangible, not based on subjective notions “allowed” by those in power, but by conditions reflecting the overall health of a community. The kind of Social Wellbeing that I envision is holistic and integrated into our experiences as individuals but also as individuals within a group (our immediate community/the city we live in/ the Nation State/ Family/ etc.). Wellbeing is emancipatory and horizontal, it should also take into account the health of the environment as an indicator of human health. Above all, Social Wellbeing should hold us all accountable for each other’s rights and needs.

I'm not going to turn around and advocate throwing out the term "social justice" altogether (and neither does Flavia), but to me these kinds of arguments are essential in pushing the conceptual boundaries of what we are doing and preventing our language (and subsequently our ideas) from stagnating or regressing back to a hegemonic mean. I think we always need to challenge ourselves and our assumptions, and not get comfortable with engaging the issues from the exact same ideological standpoint. Not when all of our foundations are by necessity built on the mucky swamp of oppression.

We keep moving, or we sink.

Existential Horse-Pucky, Rachel Naomi Remen, and Other Tips on Not Being An Asshole

There's a post on Feministe right now about the rage-inducing treatment and social education of a young black woman, with an almost-as-rage-inducing derail going on in the comment thread that I keep letting myself get sucked into, especially now that it's brought up my favourite navel-gazing question, "Can (and how do) people compromised by socially-afforded privileges combat the system which gives them this power?"

The commenter in question, Doc G, started by making distracting comments in defense of an inappropriately-behaving camp counsellor which he has now retracted based on a more careful reading of the original post. He has admitted that his original interpretation was guided by feelings over a recent personal failure where he felt that he was incapable of working with inner-city children of colour in a school setting and is now questioning his career choices and his ability to be an effective activist due to his privileged status.

I'm frustrated by the way that his comments have dominated the thread especially because I recognize the behaviour in an uncomfortably familiar way - I have been that self-centered person caught up in my own guilt and self-doubt, forcing the people around me to deal with my emotions in advance of their own, feeling all along that I just can't help it and knowing that I don't entirely want to (okay, that last part is me, and not necessarily Doc G, although I would challenge him to consider the possibility). Watching someone else engage in that behaviour is embarrassing and uncomfortable because it reminds me of how much high-grade horseshit it is when I do it, no matter what justifications I concoct at the time.

So I'm writing a post to try to distract myself from contributing anymore to the derail, and to get some other stuff off my chest about the existential angst of being a highly privileged person trying to fight for social justice. Namely, that angst is a waypoint that you should spend as little time at as possible. It happens, it's inevitable, and it's necessary - the angst is the realization that our beliefs about the rules of the universe are at least questionable and at most flat-out wrong, and it's part of what gets us on the track of trying to figure out what we can do, now that we know we don't have to play by the rules of the kyriarchy. It's effing scary, because existential angst is about freedom - the freedom to chose, and the freedom to fuck up (and, oh, there will be fucking up). Part of giving up one's entitlement to one's social privileges (because we can't give up the privileges themselves without changing the system), especially when one is very, very privileged, is giving up certain expectations about how the world works, and what we can expect from it. Privilege brings a lot of security - nameless, faceless, but omnipresent comfort that certain things will not happen to us, that certain things will, and that this is all right and just. When we fight privilege, we fight this sense of comfort and security.