In June of 2020, the murder of George Floyd sparked an unprecedented rise in awareness and support for the Black Lives Matter movement. For many of us, Floyd’s death was a wake-up call to the long-standing plagues of police brutality and mass incarceration on the African American community. The systemic racism that America was founded upon and its persistence today became an unavoidable fact of life. Many, now disillusioned, were desperate for solutions.
People sought to help, and empathetic responses to the racial injustice sprung up in forms like protesting, donating to nonprofits, and posting infographics on Instagram. The demographic of participants varied, but college students were far from absent in American society’s overwhelming reaction. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, 41% of 2020 protestors were under the age of 30, though they composed only 19% of the American population.
Historically, students have been a key demographic in the advancement of social movements. For instance, in 1960, four college students began protests at white-only lunch counters and inspired thousands of others to join with them in the fight for civil rights. It’s clear that we students care, yet it’s easy to feel like we’re treading water in trying to achieve social justice. When it seems so easy to make mistakes, how can we go about making real change?
Even within activist circles, we lack consensus, and we continue to make mistakes. With the popularity of Instagram posts discussing the latest social issues, performative activism has become a prevalent discussion topic. Communities interested in social justice can often seem like a minefield of missteps instead of a united front against injustice. In a climate like this, it is crucial that we unpack what performative activism and its consequences are.
Performative activism is participating in activism to gain clout without any genuine interest in creating positive change. While performative activism’s motive could be seeking success like gaining new followers on social media, it could also be avoiding negative consequences like being “cancelled.” While a related issue exists at the corporate level–see rainbow capitalism–performative activism is generally an accusation leveled on the individual level. Now, this seems fairly self-explanatory: disingenuous intentions are bad. All we must do is examine our intentions, and we’ll be safe from “bad activism,” right? Or perhaps, you wonder why your intentions even matter as long as you’re doing the right thing. Well, they do matter, and surface-level activism doesn’t often accomplish “the right thing” at all. Here’s why.
A difficult fact of the world is that everyone’s experiences are different, particularly when you exist as an oppressed minority. For instance, the median weekly earnings for people of color and women are much lower than white men’s. For some of us, hard work and a good attitude is enough to gain us high paychecks and promotions—the supposed American dream. For others, markers of success like heading their department, owning their own home, or sending their children to college are exceptions in their communities.
These hardships are no fault of communities of color, but a series of governmental choices overlooking them in favor of white Americans. Take the exclusion of African Americans from the New Deal’s benefits, a program literally meant to improve the lives of lower-class and middle-class Americans, for example. The sad reality is that America as a whole remains blind to the blatant discrimination it practices. We will agree on the horrors of slavery or the internment camps for Japanese Americans, yet the moment someone requests federal aid, we blame it on a lack of work ethic rather than centuries of systemic oppression.
Performative activism does not care about the struggles of minority groups; it has not listened to what minorities have said they truly need. The first step to avoiding performative activism is listening to minorities. Your experiences are not the same as theirs. You might not relate to or immediately believe much of what they say their lives have been, but you must believe them. One of the worst things you can do to someone is gaslight them into thinking they have not suffered, or that their hardships are a result of their own failures rather than how the world has failed them. This victim-blaming is not only emotionally taxing, but without any acknowledgement of the problem, we can never find and create solutions.
While there is no harm in reposting on social media, it should never absolve anyone of their responsibility to enact change in their life and world. Unlearning our biases is a difficult, lifelong work. If we intend to care, we must commit to it, because true allyship and activism are not passive. They are an active choice. We must be willing to be uncomfortable and be corrected because the world is unfortunately not what we were taught it is.
If posting on social media isn’t enough, what should we do? The first step is to educate ourselves. Read books like “So You Want to Talk About Race” by Ijeoma Oluo and essays like “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and watch video essayists from marginalized communities on YouTube. Think critically about the way things are, and be willing to question it. What we must keep in mind is that it is okay to have been wrong. Being open is the first step to progress.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.