TL;DR
The writing below argues that AA’s elective, particular, egalitarian confession collides with the universal, stratified, justice‑oriented confession that surged after 2020. I first sketch Foucault’s genealogy of confession, then place AA and social‑justice practices on that map, and finally suggest a way AA can absorb social‑justice insights without losing its singleness of purpose.
When you think of AA, you probably think of the classic introduction: “Hi, I’m Max and I’m an alcoholic”. In 2020, though, you might hear something different: you might hear something like “Hi, I’m Max - I’m an alcoholic with he/him pronouns, sitting at the intersection of whiteness, cisgenderness, and able-bodiedness, currently occupying unceded Seminole land”.
COVID had pushed AA meetings online, which in many ways was good - it made AA more accessible to people who might never have left the house to check it out before, and it connected people who certainly never would have encountered each other otherwise. It also made AA more vulnerable to outside discursive pressures, and 2020 saw an explosion of those pressures when George Floyd’s death sparked an outpouring of social-justice consciousness-raising.
Living through that time, I found myself inside an unforeseen collision of confessional cultures: the self‑elected confession of Alcoholics Anonymous and the universalizing confession demanded by contemporary social‑justice activism.
To grasp why two confessional cultures now collide, we need Foucault’s account of how confession shifted from a voluntary sacrament to a pervasive technology of power. According to Foucault, medieval Christianity saw the rite of confession transform the nature of self and of sin - truth and reconciliation were no longer achieved by deeds but through verbal disclosure. The authority of the Church did its work by extracting speech from people, commanding “you must tell me who you are, so that I may save you. Modernity saw the secularization of this process. Through psychiatric evaluations, case files, and (especially) through social‑media feeds, each of us generates an archive of personal truths that is offered up to an authoritative gaze for evaluation and guidance, for better or for worse.
AA represents a flat, at-will pole of confession: speech offered freely among equals to secure sobriety. The only credential for hearing a 12-step moral inventory is a shared experience of brokenness. The confession is particular and voluntary. Nobody is ever drafted into it. You walk through the door and keep coming back simply because you want sobriety. Recognition is, likewise, particular: this room promises unconditional acceptance, but there is no expectation that society at large must do the same. AA’s spiritual language keeps the door open to transcendence, yet Tradition Ten insists on political neutrality, precisely to preserve that preciously unconditional welcome.
By contrast, social‑justice activism exemplifies the new, compulsory pole: everyone must speak their privilege to secure justice. Drawing on critical‑race theory, it asks every participant in U.S. civil society to name their structural location - white, Black, Indigenous, etc. - and to acknowledge complicity in systems of exploitation and domination. The confession here is universal and mandatory. Everybody is expected to interrogate and articulate their privilege. The expectation to do this isn’t seen as a violation of consent but a restoration of the possibility of consent - nobody could have consented to be born into the social position that they were, so bringing those positions to light is seen as a way to grant autonomy to people whose identities would otherwise be completely defined by other people. These are noble goals, with devastating moral consequences: silence is consent, neutrality is violence, etc. Recognition is no longer the gift of a circumscribed fellowship but a moral obligation owed by everyone to everyone else.
If AA inherits the old “pastoral” logic - confession to a finite, sympathetic ear - the social‑justice confession is now dispersed across millions of witnesses. Instead of a single priest or a single room of fellow sufferers, the new tribunal is part social media feed, part HR policy, part inner critic. Compliance is measured less by a priest’s absolution than by defined, algorithmic visibility - likes, shares, institutional ‘DEI dashboards.’ The sanctions may be external, from callouts to boycotts, or they may be internal, like the superegoic voice that whispers, Have I posted enough? Have I disclosed enough? Power is thus everywhere and nowhere at the same time, felt as moral pressure yet lacking a single confessor who can grant definitive pardon.
There are a great many points of friction between these two confessional paradigms. For an AA newcomer, self‑disclosure is elective and particular: you speak when ready, and you only speak about alcoholism. In the social justice confessional, withholding self‑identification can itself be read as an act of privilege preservation. The ethic shifts from “Share if it helps you” to “Share or you are the problem.”
AA reduces identity to one salient fact - alcoholic - so the group can bracket every other difference. The social justice confession multiplies identity predicates: race, gender, sexuality, settler status, class, on and on and on. The self becomes a stack of positionalities, each carrying its own moral status. AA’s singular identity engenders an egalitarian ethos - no matter how much sober time you have, each of us stays sober one day at a time just like anyone else, and all of us are one drink away from disaster. The social justice confessional engenders a reactive, inverted hierarchy of privileges - the non-white is owed deference, but the non-white non-male is owed even more deference, and the non-white non-male non-able-bodied even more deference still. Proponents would reply that this ‘inversion’ is provisional, meant to equalize the balance rather than freeze a new caste system. My claim is not that the project is ill‑motivated, only that its rotational logic jars against AA’s flat‑circle egalitarianism and therefore produces friction in practice.
It’s worth a brief interjection to point out that these illustrations are idealizations - as I see it, AA’s egalitarian ethos is not perfectly realized, and the social justice confessional has non-extreme manifestations and also comes from a basically correct place. It would be insane to dismiss the historical facts of chattel slavery, female disenfranchisement, extractive colonization, etc. It would be similarly insane to dismiss the very idea that there might be ongoing impacts from these obvious historical facts, that cruelty and exploitation might be baked into respectable and neutral-looking institutions. What I’m trying to do here is look at the points of conflict between these two logics, to take the conflict as an opportunity to distinguish the confessional process in general and some different kinds of confessional in particular.
Back to the confessional analysis. AA’s primary purpose is sobriety “one day at a time” - progress is measured by abstinence and emotional relief. The social justice confessional orients toward historical redress - its temporality is indefinite, its success metrics collective and deferred. Put another way, there’s a big difference between ‘go to bed sober tonight’ and ‘eliminate all social manifestations of identity-based hierarchy’. AA’s here‑and‑now pragmatism can look morally complacent to social justice activists, while the activists’ sweeping horizon can feel like an unreachable moving target to recovering drunks just trying to stay sober until bedtime.
Foucault insists that confession is never merely cathartic - it is a technology of subject generation. By speaking certain truths about ourselves we become the kinds of subjects who can be oriented (and thus governed) on that terrain. The alcoholic doesn't simply report a fact when they say "I am an alcoholic"; they create themselves as a particular kind of subject through this utterance, someone to be held accountable in their commitment to quit drinking and reduce the psychic distress that drove the drinking in the first place. Similarly, stating "I am a white person with privilege" doesn't just describe a social position; it constitutes the speaker as a particular kind of racialized subject, declaring oneself to be publicly accountable for your commitments to dismantle racial hierarchies.
These truths operate differently. AA's truth is experiential and personal - I “know” I'm an alcoholic because of how I drink, because of what happens when I drink. It's a truth verified by individual experience and shared recognition. The social justice truth is structural and analytical - I “know” I have privilege because of how social systems operate, irrespective of my personal experience or intentions.
When these truth-regimes collide, they create impossible demands. How can one simultaneously be an alcoholic among alcoholics and a specifically positioned subject within racial capitalism? How can confession be both voluntary (AA's requirement) and obligatory (social justice’s demand)? How can we live at the intersection of therapy and prophecy?
For the individual, the dual summons can feel like cognitive overload. As an AA subject I’m asked to collapse identity into a single, humbling predicate - *alcoholic* - and to trust that anonymity levels the room. As a social‑justice subject I’m asked to expand identity into a layered dossier- race, gender, ability, citizenship - and to speak from each stratum with ethically charged precision.
The collision of confessional regimes creates a crisis of subjecthood, asking individuals to be simultaneously equal and differentiated, anonymous and positioned. This can be cognitive overload for anyone, but especially for people who are new to recovery and are by-definition in a state of emotional crisis. For the newly sober, the bare fact of going to bed sober tonight is exhausting in and of itself - do we add expectations on top of that, making AA more accessible to marginalized identities but less accessible in general? Or do we keep social justice commitments as “outside issues” and permit unexamined dehumanization to raise the barrier of entry for the marginalized?
AA’s own history, I think, offers a clue: the fellowship has always survived by placing singleness of purpose and group autonomy as parallel commitments. The Traditions insist that sobriety must remain the common denominator while simultaneously allowing each meeting to decide how best to pursue that aim. Firm purpose and fluid form is what has helped AA survive for as long as it has.
Practically, this means treating new identity‑oriented rituals (pronoun rounds, land acknowledgements, identity-positionality statements, etc) the same way AA treats every other meeting format: as optional spiritual tools, never as membership tests. A meeting that opens with land acknowledgements should be as welcome in the fellowship as one that begins with the Big Book preamble alone - provided neither meeting demands that every participant comply. In effect, the principle of anonymity - “placing principles before personalities” - can be widened to “placing principles before positionalities.”
The question isn't whether social justice insights belong in AA - they're already there. The question is how to honor both confessional traditions without sacrificing what makes each one transformative. Social‑justice insights can sharpen AA’s moral imagination without eclipsing its mission. The rooms already recognize that alcoholism itself does not discriminate on the basis of race or gender or class. Extending that insight outward, groups can acknowledge that race, gender, or colonial history do shape the basic reality of who feels welcome at a meeting. Exploring identity categories can be an honest inventory of the world newcomers must navigate. What AA must guard against is transforming that inventory into a new hierarchy of spiritual worthiness.
AA has integrated the lessons of the last 5 years the way it has integrated the lessons of the last 90. What began as a program created by and for middle class white men has evolved to become accessible to and even generated by people of all different backgrounds, races, creeds, sexual orientations, genders, etc. The work never stops, because despite its higher-level position of political neutrality, the ground-level work of connecting recovery to those who seek it will always mean confronting these social issues. Recovery works best within a plural, dialogical confessional culture - rooted in AA’s autonomy and open to social‑justice critique - which allows every meeting to decide how much structural analysis or ritual acknowledgment serves its primary purpose. In short, AA need not choose between silence and total ideological overhaul. By protecting voluntariness while welcoming optional identity practices, the fellowship can honor its singleness of purpose and still respond to the moral insights of our time.
The end goal, for all, is the ability to freely speak a truth that liberates us.