Also Sometimes One Can Be Sneaky About Social Justice

For example, in my husband’s home country of New Zealand, diabetes was a really common health problem for Maori and Pacific Islanders for many many years, but whenever the labor party would try to introduce bills to do health initiatives to deal with this National (New Zealand’s big conservative party) would smack them down as “racist.” (which is bullshit)

So eventually labor got clever, and passed a general diabetes health campaign, which wasn’t specifically for Maori and Pacific Islanders, made access to treatment and prevention a lot easier for everyone, and of course those groups for whom diabetes was a common problem benefitted most from the program, but National couldn’t say shit because “What, do you hate people with diabetes, or are you a racist, do you want a white’s only diabetes program?”

And rates of diabetes and complications from diabetes went down dramatically for Maori and Pacific Islanders and that’s how you sneak crap under the radar.  

Like it’s unquestionably shitty to have to do that, but I think the material good of people not dying of a treatable illness kind of makes it worthwhile to make an effort to do things like this, because it’s effective.

Like, you center an issue that’s primarily an issue for oppressed people, but don’t make it explicitly about oppressed people and you can sometimes manage to manipulate the shitty “equality means treating everyone the same” system (which needs to be changed, but that’s a bigger change than sneaking some crap under the radar which will minimize suffering while we’re working on the big change).

Like doing an anti-domestic violence campaign that was for “all genders” would probably do some useful stuff and get less flack than one just about ladies (but as a whole be more helpful to ladies, because ladies are more likely to be victims of domestic violence).

Many of the most successful affirmative action programs have been non-explicit in their aims, because they don’t create the same resentment and backlash, and while it still sucks that their is resentment and backlash and it’s important to try and change that, it means that the programs get to do the work they’re supposed to do without being at as much risk of being instantly dismantled.