Bix dot Blog

Let’s discriminate “indiscriminate efforts”. Here’s what I mean: White men have had the power in America for four hundred years, and over that time have constructed and molded the society in which we live today, often rerouting against challenges to their authority. (Parenthetically, I was prompted in a sort of sideways manner to come back to this by Kimberly Hirsh’s thoughts on Naomi Alderman’s The Power, somehow.) In such a socially glacial timeframe, to many people it simply doesn’t seem like they live in a structure or a system; society is just society, like the air. At the very least, it certainly isn’t a single if exceedingly complicated mechanism. (I’m setting aside for the moment those who know full well that society is a structure and a system devised to keep them in power.) So when a movement comes along seeking to address that entire structure, that entire system, of course the intellectually lazy (or the intellectually deceptive) are going to scream and whine and opine about that movement being “indiscriminate” in its efforts. Any concerted challenge to an entire unjust system is going to appear “indiscriminate” to those for whom the system was built, to those whom it privileges. In truth, the movement discriminates against unjust power and those who wield it whether as sword or shield. That only feels “indiscriminate” if you benefit from that unjust power. Or, if you prefer: that challenge can only be called “indiscriminate” if you also acknowledge that the system being challenged itself is just as “indiscriminate” in its leveraging of power in your favor.