The Percy Foundation is funding author, blogger, and social commentator Yasmin Nair to complete a book titled Strange Love: How Social Justice Destroys the World. She deconstructs a number of the more popular, media-driven causes celèbres of the last 25+ years, including Gay Marriage, #MeToo, Dreamers as the face of immigration reform, schools of social work, and the sex trafficking panic.
In her words, “Strange Love looks closely at the most prominent social justice movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to show how the very concept of ‘social justice’ has been an utter disaster for people and societies everywhere. It argues that continuing with such an unfiltered concept, based on the faulty ideas and histories from which it has sprung, will only result in empty oppositional gestures and a worsening of the current crises confronting us. Rooted in a scrupulously progressive and left perspective and focusing on the United States, this book is an in-depth history of Social Justice and the damage it has done, and it offers alternatives and solutions that go beyond the empty, gestural politics of today.”
Distinct from the mediagenic culture of performative victimhood, she offers us “a politics devoid of sentimentality, one that addresses the needs and wants of people without demanding that they continually perform their terror and angst for the benefit of nameless publics.” She praises as better models less well-known grassroots collectives like the Chicago Freedom School, San Francisco-based Gay Shame, or Atlanta’s Women on the Rise.