(Note from the future me who has finished writing: This is very much part 1. There’s SO MUCH reading to do before part 2. It may never happen.)

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It was ‘defund the police’ and ‘ACAB’ that got me thinking about this. When I first heard those slogans, I didn’t agree with them, because I was engaging with them on a surface level. I’d say that most people think we need policing in some form, and I’ve met nice police officers. And you’re already ahead of me here and you don’t need me telling you, because you’re intelligent and thoughtful and also have access to Google, that the surface interpretation alone isn’t representative of what these slogans actually mean.

Let’s look at the other side: I’ve been a strident feminist for so long, I haven’t been able to connect with the surface view of feminism in a very long time. I know the background arguments about the patriarchy and the role of patriarchy in misogyny / misanthropy, about equity vs equality, institutional sexism, and so on, and so on. And because of this, for so long, when people said to me, ‘If you’re a feminist you think women should be treated better than men’, my reaction was, ‘Well obviously that’s not what it means. For goodness’ sake, spend five minutes reading about it at least.’

And so, for ACAB, I spent five minutes reading about it. And then five more, and five more, and kept reading. While I’ve been lucky enough that institutional racism and classism haven’t been a big part of my life and so won’t ever have the full understanding that comes from lived experience, I now have a reasonable grasp of the pressures and issues that led to this kind of slogan being created. And because of intersectionality, many of the ideas I read were familiar to me and I was already convinced that they were true.

What I’ve begun to wonder is what effect this discrepancy between the surface meaning and the deep, contextualised meaning has: If the slogan had been less controversial, would I have spent the time to understand as deeply as I hope I now do?

However, if you’re someone who hasn’t been exposed to the ideas of any section of intersectionality, I can see where the temptation would come from to say ‘I don’t agree with that slogan’ and stop there. If you’ve been taught that ‘woke’ ideas are worthless, or not taught to think or to read, or to investigate ideas at all, then again that stops you looking into it further. And in fact because the surface meaning is controversial, that would reinforce your idea that ‘it’s all woke nonsense’.

I write this kind of post to help me think through an issue, and to encourage me to read around interesting ideas. After all, there was no way that the creation and influence of political and revolutionary slogans wasn’t an area with a huge amount of existing writing and research! After an hour or so’s reading (which of course is several weeks off being comprehensive), here’s what I’ve got so far:

Jaroslaw Chodak:

“In general terms, building on or transforming the already existing collective identities and injustice frames is easier than creating them anew…The sense of identity can be enhanced by the use of [various elements, which are] combined into stories or narratives which circulate among members of a movement, reflecting their vision of the world and reinforcing solidarity and collective identity.”

Cécile Van de Velde:

“These depictions were intended not just for other demonstrators, but a much wider and potentially global audience, via social networks and the media. As a result, protest writings should not be considered as mere written words, but as public stagings marked by a form of theatricalization.”

Liberationschool.org:

[The communist slogan ‘All power to the Soviets’] “was meant to educate the movement, not by lecturing the people with one viewpoint over and over, but by helping them come to their own conclusions based on their own experiences.”

And Myisha Cherry (hope the author excuses that I only had access to the abstract!)

When bringing philosophical attention to bear on social movement slogans in general, philosophers have often focused on their communicative nature —- particularly the hermeneutical failures that arise in discourse. Some of the most popular of these failures are illustrated in “All lives matter” retorts to “Black lives matter” pronouncements. Although highlighting and criticizing these failures provide much needed insight into social movement slogans as a communicative practice, in doing so, philosophers and slogan users risk placing too much importance on outgroup understandings. This emphasis is misguided because gaining such uptake is not required of particular slogans to perform their functions; indeed, it is an inherent risk of them.”

So from this very minimal reading: 1. Slogans are a key part of group identity building, and can be performative or a kind of shibboleth¹. 2. Opposition i.e. defining an out-group is often part of this. 3. Not a lot of weight is placed on whether the slogans transmit bad information to out-groups.

In my speedy scud around, I didn’t find much about the informational effect of slogans at all, other than an acknowledgement that the “narratives provided by slogans have also been associated with a simplified or even reductionist portrayal of otherwise complex or controversial phenomena”.

So I guess from an in-group perspective only, it makes sense that a slogan should contain an invitation to further thought. If a slogan doesn’t encourage further thought, then it might effect social change but doesn’t educate. But the effect on the outgroup does worry me. As someone who teaches and transmits information for a living, we do need to think about whether harm is caused by disrepancies in meaning but outgroups misunderstanding.

So at the end of part 1, I’ve laid out the context a little but for the core question of whether a slogan should be deliberately contrary, I’m no further along in my opinion. Before I write more on this, I need to find the section of the literature that actually discusses this directly. As academics from the 90s like to say, ‘The truth is out there (in the literature)’.

Wish me luck!