I don't think trivializing important problems by using them for fodder to make fun of people on the internet and pat one another on the back is socially positive. If anything it makes actual progress harder. At least with racist trolls you've got a clear sort of Goofus and Gallant scenario. These people are just muddying actual legitimate issues because it's fun to laugh at neckbeards. I don't know about you, but when assholes are assholes to me it doesn't make me feel bad about myself, it makes me annoyed that there are assholes.
Well I wasn't really referring to racism specifically. People abusing ideals of social justice to prop themselves up by arbitrarily deriding other people as ideologically impure doesn't constitute actual social justice advocacy, especially when they pack their accusations into a blunderbuss and fire at random. Just running about calling people sexist or racist for whatever reasons you can construct isn't social justice activism. Moreover, calling someone a racist or sexist doesn't make them racist or sexist. If a user joined Hubski and started following you around saying you're a big old homophobe (you personally), that's not something that would help gay and bi people. Why? Because unless I've sorely misjudged you you're not a homophobe. Calling out legitimate bigotry is just dandy, but pointing out bigotry where it doesn't exist is just a distraction. Instead of being a positive force for social change, your obnoxious new follower is the boy who cried homophobic wolf. To put it another way, you do not gain the affection of the fire department by running around town pulling all the fire alarms. Fire alarms are for identifying fires so they can be extinguished, not boosting egos and providing opportunities to ogle firemen. How? Because if we're constantly hearing groundless accusations of bigotry, accusations of bigotry don't mean much. To use the example of racism, if racism means that a person or a population were mistreated or systematically denied resources because of their race that's something people can get behind. If racism means that some people at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts were wearing kimono in front of pictures of people wearing kimono (something that is, not frowned upon by Japanese culture, foreigners wearing kimono is seen as a positive sign of cultural appreciation) then significantly less people are going to be concerned with that. The reason should be obvious. The former are legitimate concerns and the later is ridiculous nonsense born out of ignorance. When you call white people in kimono racist cultural appropriators, you're diminishing the significance of the term. If a woman in a kimono is racist, suddenly way fewer people care about racism as a whole. Maybe they care about subtypes or racism that include basically the contemporary definition of racism, but they won't care about the version that extends to hypersensitivity to things like 'cultural appropriation'. And who does this confusion affect? All the people who don't recognize the significance of racism in the modern social context. Furthermore, possibly people who are subtly racist themselves but don't really see it. If racism is still a problem, which I certainly would say it is, then we ought to expect that there are quite a decent number of these people. If we want change and we want it soon, they're the ones who need to reconsider things. What's better for that? A racist troll that looks like a moronic caricature of their own bias or a "social justice" troll who looks like a moronic caricature of a legitimate social justice activist?How? And for which groups are the issues being muddied? What I mean is, who is actually confused?