Two reasons: 1. Because people want to "win" and they want to be "right". Look at what happens on discussion list. We want to win the argument, so we do shitty stuff. And that's just over this stuff.
What happens when it's bound up with something that can be painful for you ever single day? When you are, daily, the target of racist remarks, when you must daily give lectures on that material, the genocidal history of the US, etc.
2. I have actually been developing this argument at the blog about a particular way of theorizing on the left that is associated with the claim that the whole of history is this grand either/or: either you're oppressed or you're an oppressor. Such a theory tends to insist on what I've jokingly called a monotheism of thought where there is one and only one oppression
When shorn from a Marxist framework (and that is the key here), such views rely on a two-dimensional conception of power. How do we get out of this place -- if life is a grand either/or, either you're oppressed or you are not?
This is also what Timothy Burke at Swarthmore was hinting at with regard to the underlying metatheoretical claims that undergird the moral universe Churchill espouses in the 9-1-1 essay. I have developed a similar line of thinking on this list with regard to the inadequacies of various theories of social change. In the end, such views of social change end up, like Max Weber's, requiring either a force "outside" society and history to -- zap! -- introduce social change. This is more common to conservative visions of change.
But, if you're a leftist, such a position doesn't wash.
Weber relied on a view of historical change as accidental or something that just happens because, inexplicably, some charismatic leader emerges to lead the sheeple. (Not that Weber was a leftist, but some leftists, in the way they conceive of "duh people" tend to imply that the only thing that will save us is special people that will lead the revolution.
On this view which, as Burke pointed out, tends to pick and choose from all kinds of theories, what happens is a lot like what happens with radical feminist position on social change. The only way to make it happen -- since everything is a matter of being an oppressed or the oppressed -- is to constantly exhort people to change their personal behavior -- Because structures of domination shape every single thing we do, there's no way to escape it. The only way is to shun it all.
And the only way to get people to do that, is to engage in polemics and agit prop to incessantly -- snap! -- change the way people see the world.
And so, when what's at stake in your academic work is that you think it can change the world or if you think it is a part of that -- snap! -- radical 180 degree change in consciousness for people ...
well, there's a lot at stake, isn't there?
somehow, like whipping a tablecloth out from underneath a fully set dining room table, you need to radically transform society and to do that, you must start with the radical transformation of each individual consciousness. SNAp!
Imelda Whelehan writes in _Modern Feminist Thought_ for instance that, "This is a common tendency in some radical feminsit writings and has regularly antagonized women, since it implies that all who do not agree with this perspective on women's oppression are living in a state of false consciousness or colluding in their own oppression by active means. I think, however, that the spirit of the message (in the quote from Robin Morgan, BL addition) in context becomes cleaerer; that is, that radicals often exploited the rhetoric of urgency in order to rally large groups of women under the broadest of political agendas possible, in order to convince them that total social change was possible only with massive collective support trhough a refusal to sustain and perpetuate male power in their personal and working lives."
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org