I remember when I first read Audre Lorde’s seminal essay, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House as a sophomore in college. I felt like I was hearing something so familiar, yet revolutionary. In it, Audre Lorde criticizes the white organizers of the conference where she’s speaking for their inability to see the intersections of racial, sexual and gender hierarchies in their activism and in their own practices. She admonished white feminism’s hypocrisy in trying to disrupt patriarchy, while perpetuating practices of marginalizing the voices of women of color specifically/especially as she herself was being tokenized at that moment. Specifically, she voiced the frustrations of being treated as a token conference speaker and I, as the only Black woman in class, knew that practically every time I spoke, my white colleagues were hearing one of the few, if not only, progressive Black voices in their lives up to that point.

I was somewhere on the distant left, basking in the easy authenticity of being a young Black woman with a recently grown afro and working-class ethics. So when I did talk, I had to really challenge the fundamentals of the content and direction of many of the discussions we had in class. For me, speaking up meant speaking to many puzzled white people. Folks who felt challenged just by my presence. They felt I took everything too literally, too aggressively, or too abstractly. Whatever microaggression you can think of, Feel free to insert the microaggression of your choice here; I heard it. While I couldn’t quite grasp the fullness and complexity of the world then and I definitely still can’t now,

I feel like those of us who are concerned with social justice are still living in the world of Lorde’s 1979 essay. That even with all of our wokeness, we still are missing something fundamental when we recognize someone’s discriminatory practices. The problem starts with a particular brand of social justice warriors (or SJWs) and call-out culture.

A social justice warrior describes a person who is willfully trying to make a difference, but they are going about it in the worst possible way. Warriors for social justice typically are students of some humanities degree, who, after being traumatized by American history in college, speak of “tearing down the system” without doing enough thinking, which results in gratuitous amounts of Tweeting hashtags and outrage without actually doing any work or research into solving the problem at hand. SJWs are symbolic, there is no action behind the outrage. virtue signaling and an abnormal Twitter habit. They are slightly naive, but not wrong. They’re not actually/often wrong in the outrage, they are misdirected. Someone who is misdirected in their self-righteousness typically sees any resistance to their call-out as legitimate resistance to societal change. For example, if I get into verbal fisticuffs with someone over his use of the word “cunt”, I will most likely mistake this person’s anger and resentment and mansplaining as “toxic masculinity” and “unchecked privilege”. In reality, the entire conversation is misplaced. Patriarchy will still be a thing even if men en masse stopped calling women “cunts”. Arguing over words is only ever going to make a person not say the word anymore; that is until they log on to 8chan and complain about the whole interaction to their adoring audience of online trolls.

Capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and all the other rooms in the master’s house will continue to exist while SJWs argue over words and minor offenses. What’s more, these entities love when SJWs are misdirected because they become useful idiots for the whole game. Think about the Me Too movement. On one level the movement captured a moment when women collectively expressed that they were “fed up” with sexual harassment and to some degree it will always be that. However, recently, with allegations leveled at people like Al Franken and Aziz Ansari, it became clear that something wasn’t quite right about the direction the movement was going. The quickness with which the movement’s supporters chanted, “believe women”, as opposed to “listen to women”, meant that we were moving farther away from a critique of institutions that maintain patriarchy and sexual abuse, and into a realm where the focus became stripping individuals of their individual power, which for the cause of feminism, doesn’t get us closer to systemic change for all women. Missing the mark in this way means that feminism’s detractors have a legitimate claim to telling us to chill out. It’s now becoming increasingly clear that the systems wouldn’t work if there weren’t equally misdirected people on both sides. On the right, misdirection is someone saying that SJWs are ruining “free speech” and turning contemporary leftist politics into fascism. Just imagine if lonely white people, left, right and center were no longer able to envision themselves as caged civil rights martyrs, persecuted for freely speaking their minds? The capitalist, patriarchal and racist status quo (the master’s house) mobilizes this kind of fear and victimization, making it easier for those in MAGA hats (and those without) to vote against progressive interests. Even more now, with Trump operating as an imperfect vessel “fighting” against the donor class and liberal media elites, is it possible for misdirected people on all sides to fall into the trap of beating on the wrong drum too loudly for too long.

SJWs, therefore, make it so easy to criticize leftist politics and tear down otherwise meaningful movements and conversations, as we see happen every day with Trump acolytes dismissing legitimate causes as SJW “whining and crying.” Just watch Fox News any time. But even I, a Black woman who read The Communist Manifesto in eighth grade, find it difficult to understand their endless individual outrage. The call-out culture that we see emerging on Twitter when a celebrity or company says or does something that offends us (or a marginalized group) isn’t enough to produce transformative change. It allows for too much virtue signaling and victim-making to actually keep track of what the actual issues are. Think back to the H&M hoodie controversy. When the image of 5-year-old, Black child named Liam in a hoodie that read, “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle” went viral. The internet didn’t stop to think that the outcome of its outrage might mean that Liam would never get work as a model again. It also didn’t think twice about attacking Liam’s mother as an “Uncle Tom”. Eventually, as the conspiracy theories started to roll in, the family had to seek protection. All for the sake of starting a new diversity department at a multinational company worth billions of dollars? The real issues got lost and it’s no surprise that the company was able to come out on top. And now, since the controversy has died down, with the help of some good PR, I’m sure SJWs feel just fine shopping H&M’s latest deals. There were no questions about how their clothes can actually be that cheap and no questions about the average wage of their retail workers and their work environments. Virtue signaling, with no substantive virtues.

Virtue signaling is a hot topic right now, with folks on the left critiquing the political landscape of the Twitterverse and arguing for the left to chill-out en masse in order to beat Trump. This is not to say that those of us who are concerned about social justice should stop caring about the problematic and harmful things that people with power and privilege do and say, it’s not that we’ve gone too far left, it’s that the problems that call-out culture focuses on too often don’t offer a comprehensive understanding of what’s happening systematically. Call-out culture simply drops the mic, rather than critiquing how the mic was made and how it got here in the first place. What if we called out income inequality, corporate corruption and the means of production instead of examples of cultural appropriation by musicians? What if we were known for challenging systemic racism or sexism instead of discussing individual stories of marginality?

SJWs have misdirected and fixated on the wrong problematic behavior, that when addressed, makes the larger cultural problem worse and therefore maintains the foundations of the master’s house. Another person with unchecked privilege saying something “#problematic” is no different than the next one that will come along. Call-out culture doesn’t shift the narrative, it only victimizes the folks that need to understand that they have privilege and where that privilege comes from. It shuts down privileged people’s ability to interrogate themselves, and opens up the floodgates of self-pity and resentment, reaffirming to them that there is indeed nothing wrong with them or “the system”. The problematic behaviors that matter are the inability of people with privilege to see it and the silence about the systems of power that maintain that privilege. Victimization keeps their privilege hidden from them and the people around them, leaving oppressive systems unchallenged.

Put simply, the main problem with call-out culture and SJWs is that too often they abandon a holistic view of systemic problems in favor of isolating and shaming individual people for doing what they were always going to do within these systems, abuse their own power. This is not to say there is no critique of these folks that’s necessary, it is in some cases the first step, but these critiques ought to be connected to larger systems and their root causes. I’m suggesting that we all become more critical of the world around us. We need to analyze the stories that are being told to us every day and challenge corporate and social media’s depiction of the world. We have to understand how these stories operate in society and how they inform systematic marginalization and oppression. I know history is boring, but perhaps the greatest antidote is interrogating what has happened and refusing the same outcome. This is the only way to truly see the master’s tools, see that they’re broken, find new ones, and dismantle the damned house.