On Sarah Haider's "On Effective Activism and Intellectual Honesty"

An idea worth drawing for.

This visual essay is a tribute to Sarah Haider. It’s part of an ongoing series called Ideas Worth Drawing For, in which I make hand-drawn images to honor the excellence of essayists I admire.

Why did Claudette Colvin fade into the background of Rosa Parks’ image? Colvin refused to give up her seat on a racially segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama nine months before Parks, but few remember her. Activist and writer Sarah Haider prompts reflection about this history in her essay “On Effective Activism and Intellectual Honesty.”

To those who value both activism and honesty, allegations of tension between these values might rankle cherished beliefs. Thus the trade-offs Haider weighs are disquieting:

The activist game, to sum in one sentence, is about results. The goal of a “good” activist is to achieve the ends as quickly as possible — as ethically as this might allow. Her morality is rooted in the goodness of the ends she works towards, indisputably noble means to attain them are not required.  

The thinker game is about truth. The goal is to uncover reality as it is — to achieve a true map of the real world (and hopefully, to be the first to do it). Reflecting reality accurately requires honesty — with oneself and with others — and a strict adherence to principled conduct. Although all fields have some degree of competition, knowledge-building is inherently not a zero-sum game. Truth builds upon itself.   

The activist, meanwhile, lives in a world of scarcity — limited time, limited funds, limited public attention. To her, not winning is the same as losing: every minute in which her goals are not achieved is a minute in which a harm has been achieved. There is a cost to delay.

Meanwhile, from the thinker’s perspective, the only activism that doesn't look like dishonorable demagoguery is, in practice, ineffective activism. 

Years ago I was asked on a podcast whether it was possible to be effective and intellectually honest in the activist space. 

I said no.

Because Haider is both an activist and a deep thinker, it must have pained her to parse these virtues. Only the Machiavellian want to cast aside truth to stand on the right side of history. Indeed, she writes, “It took me some time to accept the dichotomy myself, and especially, the realities of what it might mean for my own abilities to be a highly successful activist.” As I am not an activist, I can dry swallow her bitter pill – and yet, I wonder if an exception to her rule is embedded in her essay. Perhaps it is rare, but is it truly impossible for activists to be simultaneously effective and intellectually honest?

Haider uses Rosa Parks as an example of an effective activist:

While many activists are clear about what they want you to think, the effective are also clear about what they want you to do next. All that attention and anger is pointless, if it is not wielded to some end. I think this final point separates the high-quality, highly-effective activists from those who merely have an intuitive feel for how to garner attention. Compare, for example, the strategic thoroughness of the Civil Rights era activists, who carefully and thoughtfully chose a woman like Rosa Parks in a planned act of protest to the unmanaged chaos of current-day Black Lives Matter activists.¹ Despite the worthiness of their cause, one must concede that they have squandered the vigor they were able to inspire, with few policy gains to show for it.

When civil rights activists “carefully and thoughtfully chose a woman like Rosa Parks in a planned act of protest” in 1955, were they dishonest? Civil rights leaders decided against building their momentum around 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who has said:

Later I had a child born out of wedlock; I became pregnant when I was 16. And I didn't fit the image either, of, you know, someone they would want to show off. I knew why they chose Rosa. They thought I would be too militant for them. They wanted someone mild and genteel like Rosa.

Colvin added:

My mother told me to be quiet about what I did. She told me: “Let Rosa be the one. White people aren’t going to bother Rosa, her skin is lighter than yours and they like her.”

Phillip Hoose, author of Claudette Colvin, Twice Toward Justice, said that civil rights leaders “worried they couldn’t win with her. Words like ‘mouthy,’ ‘emotional,’ and ‘feisty’ were used to describe her” while they considered Parks “stolid, calm, unflappable.” When Parks was arrested, she was a 42-year-old professional and the trusted secretary of her local NAACP chapter. In the popular imagination, many embellish the memory of Parks as a tired, aged woman who finally snapped, rather than an activist who premeditated her defiant stance. In her 1992 autobiography, Parks wrote:

I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

So, were civil rights activists intellectually dishonest when they passed over Claudette Colvin for Rosa Parks? I don’t think that curating stories is underhanded, or even staging a second act of defiance with a new leading lady. They did not lie about Colvin or hush up her actions; at the time, Colvin did receive some media attention. Parks set out to make good trouble, but to my knowledge, civil rights leaders did not try to downplay her leadership in the NAACP or intentionally portray her as elderly. If Colvin was slighted, it was not by a lie.

It may be that sidelining Colvin was necessary to abolish Jim Crow. Undeniably, civil rights leaders had to shrewdly consider their options for achieving success, and their idea of success was not writing A Comprehensive History of Everyone who Defied Segregation. Their primary allegiance was toward results, as Haider argues it must be.

Therefore I’m skeptical that it’s impossible “to be effective and intellectually honest in the activist space,” because I think Parks and her fellow civil rights activists balanced both during the Montgomery bus boycott. Ultimately, I agree with Haider that there is tension between these values, and she makes a compelling case that activists who prioritize intellectual honesty for its own sake risk failure — perhaps Parks is iconic, in part, because her effective activism was uniquely honest.

And yet, Rosa Parks may be an exception that proves the rule. Haider’s essay has stuck with me because it draws attention to a discomfiting example of how we often can’t have it both ways.  Please read it in full to grapple with her entire argument, because Sarah Haider’s insights are as stimulating as they are uncomfortable.

On Effective Activism and Intellectual Honesty

Postscript

I wrote this essay in preparation for creating Fashionably Late Takes, so it was complete before this publication launched.  Since posting my inaugural visual essay “When Curiosity Kills the Cat” about the lab leak theory of COVID-19 origins, I‘ve been asked to join the non-profit Biosafety Now, which aims to regulate risky research to reduce the likelihood of lab leaks. So, although it was accurate at the time when I wrote, “As I am not an activist, I can dry swallow her bitter pill,” that is no longer the case.

Truly, it is a bitter pill. I want to use my one, short life to understand how the world works – to play “the thinker game,” as Haider puts it. If Haider is right, then no small part of me hopes that I become an ineffective activist, because abandoning intellectual honesty seems reprehensible. But I also became a mother in March 2020 when COVID-19 was shutting down society, and now my most pressing priority is the wellbeing of my children. What value does intellectual honesty hold compared to their lives?

Biosafety Now matters because irresponsible research on dangerous pathogens poses an outsized threat to human flourishing.  There is a long and troublesome history of lab accidents, and I believe it likely that COVID-19 originated as one.  It troubles me that too few people take that possibility seriously, because hand waving that “we’ll probably never know how the pandemic started” cuts off conversations about tightening lab safety, despite that even if I’m wrong about COVID-19, lab accidents are a common problem that must be accounted for.

When I wrote this essay, I was engaged in an intellectual exercise of testing Haider’s ideas about activism; as I publish this essay, I am engaging activism directly, so the story of Rosa Parks takes on more significance to me as a case study of an ideal activist.  Though it may be naïve, I’m going to try to have it both ways: to remain intellectually honest while becoming an effective activist.

But if my children hemorrhage to death because an enhanced strain of Ebola escapes from a lab, I’ll regret not playing hardball.

1. The writer Coleman Hughes has followed this issue closely and summarized the impact of the BLM movement critically. That link will take you to a podcast episode, so here’s a transcript of the relevant segment (starting around 21min into the recording):

2020 was a monumental year, I think. It’s a year like 1967, it’s a year in American history that I think our children should learn about. I think it’s a really important year. I also think it’s a year that will almost certainly be misconstrued and mis-summarized in lots of mainstream accounts.

What I expect a lot of people to write in mainstream sources about 2020 is that this was the year of racial reckoning. That’s the sort of mandatory line to trot out about 2020. The year of racial reckoning. The year when America finally reckoned with white supremacy and racism, and we finally started having a conversation about the entrenched legacy of slavery and so forth.

What I would like to say about 2020 is that it was the single greatest year-over-year increase in the homicide rate in the past hundred years, according to Pew Research. And that didn’t happen in any of our peer countries. That didn’t happen in Canada or the UK. It was not because of the pandemic. It was because of the racial reckoning. It was because of “defund the police” as policy and as ethos. [It was because of a] mass retirement of police officers. We saw cities losing one in every four cops that they had on payroll, and a general unwillingness to stand up for law and order. Law and order rhetoric is considered to be racist, it’s a code, it’s a dog whistle for white supremacy.

Not only was it the single greatest year-over-year increase in homicide in a hundred years, that increase was almost entirely felt by the black community. It was not born equally by whites, Hispanics, Asians, etc. It was highly concentrated.

To me, if we’re going to weigh the costs and benefits of the racial reckoning, of the Black Lives Matter moment, we have to be honest about what is on the cost side of that ledger, which is probably thousands of lives. Probably several thousand actual souls dead. And torn social fabric, businesses burned and looted, some of which are black owned. Mom and pop shops that may never come back. Businesses that had to board up for good. And I personally fail to see what is so good on the positive side so as to outweigh that. Now I’m not saying that there was nothing good.

The one positive I see to the BLM movement in general is that prior to 2020, a cop could do almost anything and never get punished. And that didn’t even have a racial dimension. There are examples of cops shooting an unarmed, six-year-old white boy. That has happened. And cops have gotten zero punishment. So that was the status quo prior to the BLM movement. And so, that’s a very toxic status quo, because like anyone, cops are going to be their worst selves if there’s no incentive to be better, if they know they will never be punished. So that’s the one good thing that has come of it. But it’s hard for me to say if that outweighs the bad, though.

So, I hope that the history of 2020 is written and understood in view of the absolute catastrophe of the rise in murder and crime, and all of the downstream consequences of that for black Americans.

Hughes would probably agree with Haider that the Black Lives Matter movement is “unmanaged chaos,” but his analysis of 2020 diverges a bit from her claim that, “Despite the worthiness of their cause, one must concede that they have squandered the vigor they were able to inspire, with few policy gains to show for it.” As Hughes points out, ever since the 2020 BLM protests, the status quo has shifted so that cops can rarely, literally “get away with murder.” (A status quo shift is not technically a policy gain; without policy to undergird it, the status quo may more easily shift again. Even so, the BLM vigor was not entirely squandered.)

But Hughes describes how this accomplishment has been costly to black Americans. To Haider’s point that, “The goal of a ‘good’ activist is to achieve the ends as quickly as possible — as ethically as this might allow,” it is arguable that BLM was extremely successful in accomplishing its core directive of holding police accountable on an accelerated timeline. The status quo shift that Hughes described happened within not just a year, but a summer.

Are graver ethical risks necessary to accomplish activist goals faster?