Pure temple vs broad church – Pride Parade now a Woke Walk
Oh dear, this has hit a new low hasn’t it…
Auckland Pride Board ditches parade plans for a walk
The Auckland Pride Board has ditched its Pride Parade plans and has replaced the event with a Pride Walk across the city.
…so this is what woke politics leads to, a walk for pride with the Green caucus, half a dozen reporters from The Spinoff covering it and a handful of Action Station activists from Wellington coming up in a bus?
This could be the first pride parade in history that actually goes backwards!
Remember, none of this is the fault of the woke board who decided to exclude Police because the uniform might trigger trans people, this is all the fault of the heteronormative patriarchy.
Identity politics is all about inclusion through exclusion, it’s pure temple ideology – you either agree with all these tenants of faith or you are excluded.
That’s fine for protest, but it’s a hopeless recruitment tool for mass politics. Real change requires a democratic majority, which is why broad church politics needs to focus on the we not the me.
Labour won the 2016 election using a broad church strategy. The idea was to rob National of coalition partners so that NZ First looked at Labour + Greens as a real possibility, but to do that Labour had to field candidates who could knock out the Māori Party and United. Remember how the woke screamed when Willie Jackson and Greg O’Connor were selected as candidates? Remember how their selection was the difference between United and the Māori Party losing? Remember how the woke all shut up once the broad church tactics actually gained them a victory against National?
Identity politics is an incredibly important personal voyage to how you become aware and identify in politics, but taken beyond that, ‘I’m different and you’re wrong’ isn’t much of a recruitment tool.
What the Woke Board did here was put Millennial ‘triggering’ culture ahead of actual solidarity, and this pathetic watered down nothing is the fruit of that divisive harvest.
What an embarrassment for Millennial activism and what a message to those who are serious about making actual change in society, inclusion can’t come at the cost of exclusion. After fighting for the right to wear the Police uniform in the Pride Parade, Police were never going to agree to taking it off and the woke activists pushing for this knew it, here was an email PAPA sent out to their base admitting as much when they stacked the last meeting…
Kia ora whānau,
As many of you may have heard the Auckland pride board decided to not to let police wear uniforms in the pride parade. Obviously we ideally we would not like police to march at all but this was a good first step and compromise. There has been a lot of backlash though and the people who want cops to march in uniform have been signing people up to be members and are planning on calling for a special general meeting to try and get rid of the current board members. So if you’re LGBT please sign up so that we can push for this decision to not be overturned.
Ngā mihi,
Auckland Branch
…to make real social change in 2019 we don’t need more decent people to become woke activists, we need more woke activists to become decent people.
Well put Martyn. It was a shameful thing that the Pride Board did. They have lost so much with their pyrrhic victory. It just goes to show how quickly so many forget the lessons of very recent history.
And more still, the Pride Board empowered and emboldened right wing bigots to spew their anti-LGBTQI (especially anti trans) prejudice as a display of faux-“solidarity”. When certain commentators on the Conservative Right express agreement with the decision by the Pride Board, doesn’t that say something about their (the Board’s) new-found friends??
Yeah, and making trans feel uncomfortable around police sends the wrong message. So what, we gana try and send cops to work in mufti now or what. Don’t think the board thought this through at all.
Well I’m all for the Board’s ‘preference’ NOT to have the cops marching at all. That means cops identified as cops in uniform, or behind a banner, or wearing police T shirts etc. Nothing stopping cops parading or walking identifying as queer rather than as cops.
Since when does revolutionary, even radical, change necessary to win class and gender equality include members of the police? It can do and will do sometime in the future but this is well down the list of priorities under capitalism where police must take the role of repressing radical and revolutionary movements.
This is like Yellow Vest protestors kissing the same police that assault, maim and kill them in the name of protecting democracy. Cops are trained killers, they are one of the last lines of defence, along with the army and paramilitaries, against mass movements as we see today in Zimbabwe. In the immediate future the prospect is for the post-modern fetish of identify politics to be trumped by the common class struggle for economic and ecological survival.
If we manage that then the material conditions to allow individuals full sexual freedom will be won.
I call bullshit on this bigoted, shortsighted drivel… What is being demonstrated by the narrow minded, self absorbed fuckwits that have hijacked the pride movement is pure hypocrisy… Having police marching with their brothers and sisters, and openly proclaiming their identity is a huge step forward towards acceptance of the diversity of human existence by the general population…. And before you launch into another reactionary tirade, I write this as a fully heterosexual man.. neither stupidly proud of being so, or offended by the fact that not everyone shares my proclivities… Having dealt with the police on numerous occasions, on both sides of situations, I can say without hesitation, that the people who make up the police force on the ground are a reflection of the wider community as a whole.. There are some bigoted, racist, arseholes among them, but there are also a lot of caring, thinking human beings, who are there because they care about their community, and want to contribute… Who the fuck are you to make blanket judgement on them?
“decided to exclude Police because the uniform might trigger trans people”
Re-writing history?
The issue was solidarity with the trans community over how they were being treated by uniformed police in the practice of their jobs – their concern was being safe and having safe places.
Thus excluding uniformed police at the parade was an act of solidarity, in protest at police practice.
No surprises here. Gather any interest group together and you will find a wide range of views on life and politics. Your views on sexuality, gender or whatever will be the same wide range of views.
Where’s my post? Was my opinion too far from Martyn’s?
Just remember what side the Police always take in Peoples Revolutions, protests and Activism.
And just consider this….
“When Huri Dennis ran training for police managers, he’d give them a scenario to consider.
“Okay you’ve got a job,” he’d say.
“It’s a burglary and you’re moving down to the house and there’s two people walking away from the house.
“You’ve got no description about who the offender is, one’s Pākehā and one’s Māori, you can only stop one – who are you going to stop?”
The room goes dead silent…”
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/103137846/police-politics-and-race-the-long-and-anguished-tale-of-the-constabularys-relationship-with-maori
It was a great victory for Gay Rights and GAY PRIDE when the police were allowed to march with them in uniform….it is incomprehensible that they would fight to take this right away
Your challenge for 2019 Martyn is to never ever ever ever use the word “woke” again. Even if you are talking about rising from slumber. Ever!