Have you seen progressive people be discriminatory either intentionally or unintentionally and if so in what way?

A frequent frustration is recursive guilt-by-association.

"Yeah so okay we do align on everything however you refuse to denounce your friend who didn't really do anything but he is a fan of a controversial figure who also didn't really say or do much but they are friends with a bad person so... Get lost?"

Another is translation based on the assumption that one's assumptions are universal.

"You said you think Terry Davis was a technical genius for his OS. Honestly his work is nothing compared to a modern OS. I think so so therefore you must think so, and so you must mean something else. What you are really praising is his extremist christianity."

Yes. I've even seen progressive people being quite racist. Political beliefs don't always line up with how people act in everyday life.

Constantly. Usually it takes the form of reducing topics to binary choices and/or purity tests.

• "You're either with me or against me / You're either part of the solution or part of the problem"
  • Where "part of the solution" means doing exactly, and only exactly what they think you should be doing.
• "If you don't satisfy all of my impossible requirements, you're as bad as a nazi"
• "We only agree on 99 out of 100 things, so clearly you're not to be trusted"
• etc

I put a poster up for a women/trans/non-binary inclusive group in an anarchist cafe, with their approval, only to get a literal essay from the cafe the next day about the miss-use of a word pertaining to our trans inclusivity. I can't recall what the "right" word was supposed to be, and the poster's verbiage was already researched/reviewed by trans people in the group. Due diligence was done.

Queue people leaving the group because we didn't feel it was necessary to print new posters. They felt we should be less hostile to "people taking the time to educate." Yeah, I made a few comments.

But you know what? I much prefer that to the kind of shit I had to deal with in conservative spaces. I worked on a couple political campaigns, had back room discussions where people don't "educate" when you're not one of them, they insult and back-stab you.

I can at least see the essay as an attempt to share knowledge, to include rather than exclude, even if it was from a place of self-importance and ignorance.

The friction I see in progressive spaces is usually about making things more equitable. It can be poorly thought out, but no one's perfect. I prefer flawed inclusivity to hostile exclusivity.

Yes, I have a friend who is extremely progressive but is still very much a slut shamer. She really looks down with disgust on women who like sex or have more boyfriends than she deems acceptable.

She also shows bigotry against other groups of people. Although she would never in a million years look down on someone because of their skin colour, she absolutely takes on a tribalistic Us vs Them mentality for other reasons. An example is the war in Ukraine started by Russia. Did Russia start it? Yes. Is Putin evil? Yes. Are there many Russians who support this war? Yes. BUT... not every Russian person in the world is inherently evil, not all of them want this, many are victims trapped in a system that will literally throw them out the god damned window if they dissent. And my friend absolutely fucking hates Russians. All of them. No empathy about the nightmare situation so many of them are stuck in. It has gotten so bad that she has literally started to hate her chickens that are a Russian breed. She has started assigning negative human traits to them and is insisting that they are negative and bad because they are Russian chickens. It's honestly getting ridiculous.

Purity testing.

If you don't align with the party narrative 100%, down to the atom, then you're basically maga.

I don't think people realize this is a major factor that drives people away from progressive politics.

When a conservative meets someone more conservative, they removed about liberals. When a leftist meets someone more left than them they compete with each other to see who's most "pure."

This is a major problem.

In American leftism there is a definite divide between black and white.

For example second wave feminism is often thought of as Women seeking entry into the workplace, but at the same time black feminists were trying to leave the workforce and take care of their own kids.

The labor movement has an explicitly racist history. A fact that Capitalists often took advantage of by leveraging black scabs who were often ineligible for union membership. Eugne Debs identified this as a problem with the socialist movement.

I'm not saying that racism is common among today's lefties, just that white lefties are often ignorant of black American life and especially black radical thought and activism.

If you are vexed by Bernie Sanders' struggle with black voters, you're probably not very familiar with this history.

So it depends how you define progressive.

As a PoC I have certainly witnessed racism from white, black and Hispanic liberals. At its worst the democratic party can feel like a clubhouse for non regressive white people and the largest minority groups in the country. No one else really has a seat at the table. Is that really progressive?

I've moved on to assessing peoples worldview as either inclusionary or exclusionary. Unfortunately most people, left or right, have an exclusionary world view.

Exclusionary here means a failure to acknowledge the universal sanctity of human dignity. Nearly everyone is focused on themselves or their group exclusively. Some in ways that are more harmful than others.

Pulling the cultural appropriation card too much perhaps? Especially for cultures they do not understand beyond surface level. Just because someone is wearing something from another culture, it doesn’t mean it’s being appropriated. Obviously negative appropriation exists especially for instances where it is being done for profit. The problem is sometimes some people are reactionary and are too quick to label something as such without looking into it first.

Absolutely. No one hates the left more than slightly different brands of the left.

"Progressive" describes a position, not a person. A person can be many things. A person can hold contradictory viewpoints, and fully believe two incompatible thoughts at the same time. It's tragically naive to assume that people are rational or consistent.

Can a person think they are progressive and also be a bigot? Of course a person can. Everybody is the hero in their own story.

Just head on over to the FuckCars community. Tons of ableism in there to witness.

If you see a polite obviously rural person who has not said anything remotely questionable, a common comment is "but you probably wouldn't want to know their political opinion" or "you probably don't want their take on minorities or women". To be folksy is to guarantee progressives brand them as right wing racist sexist bigots.

I have a lot of first hand experience with it via dating. In terms of outward Appearance and how I present I am an average looking straight cis white male. Mentally, in addition to being on the spectrum, that's not really how I identify or am wired though. If anything, I'm probably more lesbian based on who I seem to get along with and am attracted to, lol.

As I am sure we are all (hopefully) aware there are a lot of men with very problematic behaviors (which is an entire other complex topic). As a result, within the liberal sphere I exist in it is very socially acceptable to shit on or otherwise have a negative bias against people that present like I do in a way that would not be acceptable if it were against another social group because of what they are.

I have had a number of interactions and conversations where my point of view/input/feelings/etc. were more or less dismissed or ignored by women when if I were a woman saying the exact same thing it wouldn't be. I have also had people flat out say "that's a very man thing to say" as a when what I am saying conflicts with their world view or how they feel and they can't engage with it logically anymore.

Please note, I am leaving a ton of intricate context out of the above to try and avoid having to write a novel. I understand why women have the bias/reaction towards men who present like I do, and why it's necessary. In the examples I am thinking of, these are women who know me, not strangers or randos. When discussing things I do my absolute best to have conversations in good faith and on the merits/logic of what is being said.

I don't like pulling the autism card or saying that's just how I feel, but I find that people are so unused to interacting with someone like me, rather than engage in the nuance of my experience and how it very much contradicts their world view, it's much easier for them to find a reason to be dismissive of it. I also realize that from a third party perspective without any context my autistic behavior is indistinguishable from gas lighting.

Oh yeah big time. I see it primarily in discussions about religion. Progressive people like to act as though any Christian has the same mentality as the Westboro Baptist church cult. Its a real bummer.

I’ll use myself as an example.

There were some guys having an argument in another room, and it got increasingly intense. They were speaking some kind of Arabic. I thought they were genuinely mad at each other, but then one of them mentioned an athlete’s name and started listing what sounded like stats.

While telling this story at a party, I said something like “Arabic is a very angry-sounding language.” I noticed someone’s eyes get large, and I didn’t realize until then how racist I had unintentionally been.

Later, I thought more about it. Any language that you don’t understand sounds bad if people are having an emotionally charged conversation. It didn’t occur to me until then how easy it is to be thoughtless and racially insensitive.

I generally try not to be an asshole, but I messed up big time. I have no idea who he was, but I’ll always be grateful to the guy whose eyes got big. He gave me a much-needed reality check.

Good examples from others but I also want to bring up microaggressions. Basically, small things that add up, like a white woman gripping her bag tightly when a black man enters an elevator, or a white man crossing the street because a Latino guy is approaching who looks a little "gangy." Usually they aren't that progressive (e.g. they support diversity but critical race theory is a bridge too far).

That said, prejudice is something we all have and is part of human nature. It protects us historically from things like snakes and spiders who may not be venomous but on the off chance they are, better safe than sorry. Prejudice leads to stereotypes, stereotypes lead to discrimination. Conscious effort is needed to overcome that, and progressives do that better than not but no one is fully immune to your natural instincts.

I've seen liberal POCs say racist shit about White people more times than I can count.

Is there supposed to be some equivalence between being politically progressive and not being discriminatory?

The way I see it is we're all equal opportunity assholes, it's just the context that differs. Ones politics does not make one a paragon of virtue.

I'm progressively discriminating. Everyone is equally annoying and I hate you all. 😁

I'm Asian. If I do anything well in life it's because of privilege not because I worked 2 jobs while attending community college schooling and doing nothing else for myself other than to be at a better place. My effort feels completely and utterly dismissed by some of these people. They refuse to acknowledge my effort at all and instead they keep trying to dig deeper to find reasons why I'm "privileged".

Older ones. Less physically discriminatory, more using slurs or making judgemental comments. They're ok with gay people, but you can't be flamboyant or having more options on trans people than they really need to. They haven't made trans comments in a while, but I think that has more to do with not wanting to be on the wrong "team". He's is a big South Park fan, so that's probably where it came from.

I can't believe this is a serious question...

Yes. Most women in my city, esp that I've dated, claim to be progressive liberal feminists... but IME are often act with 1950s level of racism and sexism in their personal lives, and if you point this out to them they claim it doesn't count because they are women and/or you are a male chauvinist trying to oppress them. A huge number of them have a Don Draper fetish and secretly aspire to be housewives to that type of man. No wonder they all need therapy and assume anyone who doesn't get therapy regularly is 'less than' themselves.

Truth in my experience is that people only like 'diversity' when it's people that look/talk like them but are a slightly skin tone or nationality. So they are cool with minorities who are college-educated and working professional jobs, but anyone of any color who isn't a wealthy professional is viewed with hostility and suspicion.

Most people have a pecking order in their heads. The only difference the order in which they place people and whatever minority group is consider the most oppressed they have to support to score the most 'progressivity' points. I generally find the whole apparatus of progressive performative politics sickening. Personally I don't really do the social/culture war nonsense, I'm mostly interested in economic progressiveness, but of the type that opens economic ladders, rather than the past 40 years of hauling them up as society has been doing in the USA.

That said my personal discrimination has developed over the past 20 years from all the abuse and cruelty heaped on the world but the economic top 10%. I really have found it hard to find wealthy folks who aren't incredibly classist towards those that are 'below' them. And the 'working class' progressives will turn on you the second you do something as innocuous as buy a car or own a home or suggest maybe they find better employment/budget if they are so unhappy with their own economic situations. Can't tell you the amount of 'working class progressives' in my city screaming about landlords being 'evil' while they blow $2000/mo on take out and booze and are traveling internationally 3x a year.

I have a fairly unique perspective on these issues. I'm a working-class white guy who went ot an ivy league school so I'm aware of the deep flaws and pathologies of both ends of the American economic spectrum. I've held a job since I was 15 years old and paid for my own education. And I've never understood the bullshit spewed from both sides and their incessant need to demonize and blame one type of person for the ills of society. For the right it's the poor/immigrants/minorities. For the elite progressives it's working-class white men. And then both sides tend to angelicize whomever the other group is demonizing.

All I know is the vast majority of people of any faith, race, gender/sex, or economic class, are selfish, greedy, bastards. And they only care about other people typically in so far as they think it will get them 'ahead' in life and score points with other people in their group. Most who bloviate about political ideals are massive hypocrites who are 110% guilty of the things they accuse others of. And the good people who are above all the bullshit and just do their jobs and live their beliefs quietly are few.

Hello! I'm a Humanitarian, which sits under the Progressive umbrella. Saying there are discriminatory progressives is a bit silly as a broad stroke, but to be fair, everyone has gaps in their knowledge and understanding. Anyone can be accidentally or subconsciously discriminatory, but Progressives tend to go out of their way to correct discrimination as often as possible.

To be fair, there is one type of person I discriminate against: Fascists.

But that is more of a common sense thing. You can't get along with someone that wants to exclude everyone but an endlessly decreasing group of people. Fascists only want to get along with Fascists. I want to get along with everybody.

If you have any other questions, I'm happy to answer ^_

I have watched progressives create the perfect breeding ground for fascism in the USA.

Are we counting speciesism? Because "progressive" people are still generally a bunch of cruel, violent murderers.

I've given up caring about all that shit. If people want to throw LGBTQ+ people into the line of fire to protect their moral fuckall stance on Gaza, fuck them as much as the ones abducting children.