Nazi Punching
I’ve been going about my evening yesterday and travel day today witnessing an unusually large volume of discussion about the Nazi punch. Lots of videos, GIFs, and remixes that I haven’t bothered to watch, lots of explanation as to why it’s acceptable to appreciate it and laugh about it, and lots of responses to the response that it shouldn’t be okay to tacitly support violence in that situation.
It’s always an interesting experience to have a social media bubble arranged such that I get the initial reactions and the third wave of responses to responses without the middle step. I didn’t actually see very much detraction from the enthusiasm.
I have absorbed a lot of really useful perspectives and opinions on the matter while being too busy and too scared to share how I feel.
The process of being a good ally starts with and is continually based on listening. That’s been a big part of my life for the past 5 years. You learn about other people’s experiences and how individuals and groups formed into the people they are today. You notice more things that you were once privileged not to see. You become more capable of expressing those perspectives when they are not being fairly represented or actively disrespected.
I sincerely consider this a personal transformation that I am more proud to have gone through than graduating from college. It defines me more strongly than my engineering degree and job.
But not every new perspective is easy to adopt. I had to lean heavily on “the riot is the language of the unheard”, spoken by MLK, to help me understand and accept that property damage is sometimes expected when fighting for social or political or economic change. (I had similar issues coming to terms with blocking highway traffic or halting events to call attention to a cause.) It’s very easy to appeal to a shallow understanding and assume that breaking windows or cars is for theft or just pointless blind rage or disruption. It’s much more difficult to zoom out in time and space from that moment and observe all the factors that led to it. To have an understanding and sympathy for what is happening. To recognize power structures at play that limit options and modes of expression that garner the attention deserved.
I’ve never decided if I Condone such behavior, usually leaving it as an “understandable reaction”. I would focus on the long history of oppression that will likely forever dwarf any damage done now. How pitifully small in comparison it is and therefore not of primary concern. But it felt a bridge to far to accept it.
One of the challenges in my head for accepting these actions has been my inability to measure harm. Potential harm. Historical, cumulative harm. Physical harm, psychological harm, emotional harm. Risk.
Everything is a spectrum. And most lines are drawn in sand: arbitrary and malleable. If the cause of racial equality is so important as to tolerate destroying a car for the greater good, what type of vehicle is acceptable to wreck in the name of saving the red panda?
This is a silly question that is not meant to be answered. It’s frequently not especially useful and damn near impossible to quantify and compare the relative marginalization women, people of color, and queer people face, for example. “Oppression Olympics” is a ridiculing term by anti-progressives for this reason.
But I am not in those groups. I do not have an active way to measure the harm done by being a part of those groups. I have to trust and listen to what those people say. And I do. I make marks in the sand as best I can and adjust them as necessary.
For years I have expanded my empathy, evolved my understand, and thought deeper on these subjects. I have seen where my knee-jerk reaction told me one thing, and my friends another. I believe I have consistently chosen the latter.
And now we are at this weekend, where a guy who I’m told is a white supremacist or even Nazi (I couldn’t hear what he was saying too well the one time I watched a clip.) is punched in the face. It’s a good hit. He stumbles away and stops talking. It feels as good to see as when Buzz Aldrin socked that conspiracy theorist.
How it was shared and actively celebrated on my social media feed was another challenging time for me. How it was treated as obviously a good thing was also difficult, because it opened the question of when it would not be obviously a good thing.
I thought I understood what the stakes were and where the (grey, rough, malleable) lines were. And now I’m being told that all along there was this additional area of acceptable, even laudable behavior. If a person’s opinions are so toxic, so historically likely to be severely damaging, it is okay to harm them when they are spreading those actively harmful views. (This is probably not exactly how anyone feels, but perhaps it’s a reasonable approximation.)
I had trouble with this for some of the obvious reasons that have probably been talked to death in that initial response round that I never got to see. I was jarring to hear such pride for years in nonviolent protest, or to compare the reaction to this video to the outrage at every single injury or death of a person by police.
I know the power dynamics at play that make these asymmetrical comparisons. But I assumed more of the anger was proportioned to the harm of another human than of the abuse of power.
It’s jarring to hear pride about the scant number of arrests after all these protests over the weekend sandwiched between assault memefied at one of these events.
And yes, I’m wary of conflating different people sharing different perspectives into a single feed in order to brand it hypocritical. It’s not my goal to reach some sensational headline. But the contrast merits highlighting, even with that caveat, for those of us who didn’t understand.
I could broaden this to a conversation about tactics and optics, but I won’t. I’m speaking for myself and how the attention on the Nazi punch affected me. But this is related to how a wider audience would interpret what I saw.
It wasn’t obvious to me through the celebration where the limits were anymore. I suspect, based on some snippets of thoughts I’ve gleaned from scrolling all day, that part of the appeal of this video is the superficial nature of the harm done. If it were more punches, if blood were drawn, if he didn’t stay standing, if he were espousing less awful but still awful views, I’m led to believe there would be less celebration.
But that was not made clear to me. Again, the history of my growth into being progressive is from listening, accepting, and changing. If you accept the principles that the marginalized people are the experts, I actually don’t have a lot of agency in the matter. I’m an empirical person first, though, and I will deviate from what I’m told is proper progressivism if it does not comport with reality.
Physical confrontations are messy, though. Arguments aren’t always clear or best represented. Tactics are used that are complex and layered. For example, yelling over someone else sharing the most homophobic and sexist parts of the Bible is a useful tactic. It can be amusing and a source of unity for a crowd of people to join in. It can be viewed as protective, maintaining a not-awful environment for people being attacked. But it can be viewed as actual censorship or set a bad precedent for when the roles are switched.
I cut a lot of slack for these moments, because emotions and tensions run high. Words and actions leap out quicker than our more careful brains (that type up lengthy posts) can keep up. And in physical encounters, risk is higher.
Risk is another related concept that I must listen and trust the experiences of others to properly assess. The punchee may have had some likelihood of harming someone that day. The cumulative effect of his words reaching the audience behind those microphones and cameras, causing some individuals to feel emboldened, could be roughly summated as causing some measure of physical harm in the long term.
We’re back to spectrums and shades of grey. I don’t require someone to advocate for the death of someone else to begin to take action against them. I don’t require someone to start a knife swing or point a gun at me to begin to believe they are violent. I recognize more subtle cues and risk factors that can plausibly be used as a heuristic to stop potential harm, especially when harm can be wrought so quickly. It’s complicated, but it can reasonably open up a range of options for harm reduction and violence prevention, perhaps including a suckerpunch.
Facebook is a place where people using it for very different purposes get put on top of one another in a feed that sometimes falsely connects them together. This weekend was a show of great, visible action and a cause of celebration for many. Posts about those things, or continuing the tone of lightness and happiness, are not necessarily spaces to dive into this complicated conversation.
But for people who are always learning about these things, like myself and others, that was not the environment I needed. I needed discussion, not celebration, because of one of the subjects chosen to celebrate. I’m aware that no one owes me that explanation, nor is it fair to enter a space and demand such a thing. But that doesn’t remove the conflict and challenge I was facing.
Sometimes my posts are long and meandering because I only start them knowing I have a knot in my stomach that is only untangled with careful thought and words. I’m going to try to summarize all that I’ve said and where I’ve ended up.
- The process of becoming progressive and a good ally is through listening and trust.
- When an ally learns of a new perspective or way of thinking, the boundaries on it are not always clear. This can test the trust.
- Online spaces take on different tones and purposes, and it is useful to respect them. If you are not matching the tone, consider not contributing or using your own space to share thoughts.
- Some superficially nonviolent actions, like spreading ideas that directly incite violence, can be appropriately stopped by a lesser form of violence.
- Risk is high in physical confrontations, so actions taken may not always be the morally or efficaciously optimum ones. Acting upon rough heuristics may be required.
Edit: The people who have shared the harm they personally or their family have enduring from Nazis have put this issue into the starkest contrast. I’m aware that my hemming and hawing can seem deeply disrespectful because it’s not obvious to me how to feel. Nazis are the worst people possible. But the reaction to this video clip went against my understanding of what progressivism was about.
