Purdue has an active pro-life movement on campus, which is not surprising anywhere and certainly not in a heavily-Christian red state like Indiana. Today this was chalked on the landing leading to my building, with a lot more where that came from outside and flyers making the same point inside. Though this chalking is a little vague by itself, many others made the connection clear: abortion is a racist tool that harms black Americans.
This reasoning, of course, is bogus. Yes, black women are disproportionately likely to end a pregnancy. And yes, racism is likely at play in this broad dynamic; poor women have abortions at dramatically higher rates than average, and black women are dramatically more likely to be poor. It’s not hard to imagine that women who lack economic security might be more likely to make the choice not to bring a child into the world. The racial disparity of interest here is the fact that black people live in such starkly different socioeconomic conditions than the country as a whole. That inequality is my business; that some black women might respond to it by choosing to undertake the medical procedure of abortion is none of my business. Black women, like all women, should exercise the right to terminate a pregnancy as often as they see fit, without legal obstruction or invasions of their privacy. This appropriation of the BlackLivesMatter terminology is an act of sophistry, trying to use a transitive property of offense to associate the evil of racism with the procedure of abortion.
The chalkings have predictably ginned up outrage from many of the liberal folks on campus, and for good reason. But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily an ineffective tactic. There are, after all, many young people on campus who are not fully formed political beings, and there are likely some who are malleable on the topic of abortion and sincerely committed to opposing racism. (Contrary to how it seems online, everyone is not already sorted into easily-separable political camps.) While I find their conclusions offensive and their reasoning faulty, these students are taking advantage of a type of rhetoric that we have empowered, in recent years, and applied it to a different goal than that for which it was originally intended. When certain types of appeals are empowered, people notice and seek to borrow those appeals.
This general situation plays out all the time. A classic example is pro-Palestinian protesters being confronted with safe spaces rhetoric when people are trying to shut down their protests; while many see that deployment of that rhetoric as cynical or insincere, it doesn’t much matter. Once you empower a certain type of claim, that claim can be brought back against you. This is particularly true when that rhetoric gets formalized into a rule or a law. Consider student protesters at Loyola University Chicago. These students were protesting poor working conditions for low-paid workers at the school, an excellent issue to organize against on campus. But the students were punished under an anti-bullying rule. That might seem to be far from the intent of such a rule, but then rules aren’t enforced according to their intent, but according to their letter; that’s what makes rules rules. It’s likely that any anti-bullying terminology broad enough to encapsulate the behaviors such rules are meant to eliminate will always be subject to this kind of abuse. That might compel us to ask whether a concept as shaggy and subjective as “bullying” should be codified into rules in the first place. We have to recognize that there is a difference between intent and effect, and to remember that everyone gets to use the same tools.
The fact that everyone gets to use the same tools does not mean that such tools shouldn’t exist. The susceptibility to inappropriate use of bullying rules are also likely true of anti-harassment rules and laws. Twitter is under justified pressure to do a better job fighting harassment, particularly towards women. And they certainly need to do a better job. We should be clear as we press for better tools to combat harassment, however, that such tools will inevitably be turned against some of those who are pushing for them. The infamous tactics of the Twitter storm/calling out/etc. frequently involve behaviors which almost certainly would fall under the definition of any sufficiently-comprehensive anti-harassment policy. You might find that an offensive comparison, and argue that calling out bad behavior and serial harassment of women are not at all the same thing. But the point is that it doesn’t matter; if a harassment policy is drawn up and enforced equitably, as it has to be if it’s to actually work, it will inevitably catch some in its net that feel certain they are fighting harassment, not perpetuating it.
That, again, does not mean anti-harassment rules aren’t worth it. It does mean, however, that we have to be extremely careful in how we advocate for such rules, and it also means that we have to recognize that there’s no perfect system. Personally, I think we should err on the side of greater freedom rather than greater protection, in part because such policies have a habit of deepening traditional inequality even if they are intended to fight it. More, I think those interested in pursuing social justice must take care to recognize that everybody gets to use the same tools. One of the treasured assumptions of that school of politics is that different claims have different value based on who is making them, that some accusations of harm are more serious because they emanate from disadvantaged groups. Perhaps that’s true, in an abstract moral sense. But in the concrete and clumsy world of law and policy, such an assumption has no power to actually police who gets to make what kind of claim and when. So let’s remember that every noose we tie might be the one that goes around our own neck.