Better Angels Convention 2019 Day 2

Wuff. Full, intense day. Happily, I found a reliable source of latte-nated caffeine, so it was endurable.

Some quick take-aways:

I went to a morning session about abortion mainly to see if and how this often intractable issue might strain the civility mechanisms Better Angels prides itself on. It did, though the session was for most people still productive. One of the most pronounced tensions came from within the red group. Most of the reds were by their own account nuanced in their views of abortion (though all still seemed to the right of any of the blues). One red, though, carved out a position far more conservative than any of the others.

Basically: it was "clear" (they said) that the fertilized egg was fully human, both biologically human and a civic person possessing inalienable rights. Not recognizing that, in this person's view, threatened everyone's standing as rights-bearing citizens. Arguments for the welfare of whoever was pregnant with this full person, they said, boiled down to mere inconveniences. We asked more from young men drafted for Vietnam, this person said. Surely women can give their all. The person making this argument was tired and frustrated, simply fed up with the fact that people were still talking about this as if it were questionable.

Aside from my alarm at the Handmaid's Tale kind of vision this conjured (drafting women into forced childbirth), I came out of the session reflecting that Better Angels faces an odd tension. For some, BA is great because it enables debate on these difficult issues that require debate. For others, BA is offensive because it entertains debate on these black-and-white, morally clear issues that ought never be debated.

I also went to a training for Better Angels Debate Chairs. I'll write more about that form another time. It's pretty different from a lot of the other BA curricula.

The final event was a discussion between Ray Warrick, Cincinnati Tea Party leader, and Hawk Newsome, president of Black Lives Matter New York. This event--Newsome particularly--strained BA's civility engine. I don't mean that Newsome was uncivil; he was charming and charismatic even when delivering hard-hitting arguments. I mean that he presented some unvarnished accounts of the murders of unarmed black men like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Philando Castile. They were murdered, he said, and the people responsible (police officers in Garner's and Castile's cases) got off. "This," he said, "is just Truth." He spoke out of anger and impatience at White America's standing to one side while black people were being oppressed.

He was powerful, convincing. Even Warrick averred that the murders had happened. "It's undeniable."

Other truths Newsome delivered: Christopher Columbus perpetrated genocide. The US has concentration camps at the border. Human-caused climate change threatens the planet. These, too, he said, are simply undeniable. And, his biggest theme: white oppression of black Americans exists and persists.

He's right, of course. That's obvious to me. But most or all of those statements fall into the category of utterances that Better Angels moderators are taught to avoid for fear of alienating reds. Don't weigh in on whether climate change is caused by humans, they tell us. It's just not going to get you anywhere useful with your red participants. I think that's true enough.

But, to live in Newsome's world, to be an ally with him and BLM, affirming the truths he uttered constitutes the entry-ticket price. You can't fight systemic racism if you deny racism exists, or if you conveniently define racism as something only isolated bigots practice.

What do you do when the necessary truth alienates half the people you're working with?

More tomorrow,

JF