Mona: How To Make A Difference For Yourself And Everyone Around You
Sometimes I think I’m a failure as an activist, and I guilt myself and tell myself I should be rioting on the streets and writing letters to the government and reading the news even though doing so sends me into depression/anxiety attacks. I tell myself…
Hmm…
Hmmm…
I don’t know that I would call any of this activism, “quiet” or otherwise. It’s more like mentorship, or actually just confidence and openness that you hope will rub off on others (as indeed it often does, like the post says). This can change others’ lives for the better, but not all good things fit under the activism umbrella.
Of course said activism umbrella is larger than riots, and God knows it’s larger than signing online petitions and winning arguments on webcomic forums like online social justice newbies sometimes think. (I am making fun of myself here.) Now midwestmountainmama is almost the only person I’ve ever seen actually educating people on what activism can be. She’s talked about how we should learn to feel that THRILL when we see women in a cafeteria stuffing envelopes, like we thrill over riots. That’s what I thought of when I read the term “quiet activism.” It’s a community activity, it’s part of a larger action/strategy to get something specific done, and it builds relationships for future actions.
In contrast, what I see in the OP shows a lot of inner focus and not much else. It’s great to focus on yourself and to be as loving with yourself as you can be. However, I read “being loud about your own pleasure,” or “telling people what you feel” as practices that can easily go too far. Especially if you have a relatively large platform to begin with, like because you are white and/or a man for example. Do you see, I can’t help thinking of feminists like Jessica Valenti who have essentially made an “activist” living out of blogging their personal thoughts and interests, which are honestly pretty shallow and poorly-researched, while being sloppy with other people’s needs, voices, boundaries, histories, and work. For this reason when I read an exhortation to talk about your feelings as social justice praxis without any attempt to delineate where sharing or centering your feelings may be inappropriate, I become wary. In fact, I don’t see anything anywhere in this post that advises discretion based on other people’s needs or signals. I understand that the post probably wasn’t aiming to be comprehensive, but this still seems to me like a big omission.
I simply don’t think any of the things on this list are “activism,” partly because the advice is so self-centered and partly because…it’s not really working toward justice. It’s working toward a better you. Of course I LOVE to see my friends be open, confident, mutually vulnerable, and happy, especially in a world when they were taught they should be otherwise. And it can definitely have a positive influence on other people. But that is not activism in and of itself, especially when you consider like the post says that most of those things can only happen when you’re in a position with enough resources and safety.
I think that the “professional activism” model (and of course the oppressive structures themselves) has resulted in not enough people knowing how to do activism. I certainly don’t know hardly any of it. So it’s a common problem to be unsure and even guilty about whether you’re doing enough. Uhh, but dealing with that guilt and concretely moving toward better activism are two completely different things. I think this post just has the completely wrong solution, to assuage the guilt by calling just being yourself activism and reminding yourself of the positive influence you’ve been, so that then there’s no need to take a hard look at your behavior OR to come up with some ways that you & your community could make activism more doable for you. In fact this way anybody who to your perception gets in the way of you being yourself is obstructing social justice. That’s not conducive to accountability.
I had a really hard time trying to tease out and articulate my thoughts here. I hope all this makes sense.
bolded bit = best summary
it’s ok if you can’t do ALL OF THE ACTIVISM
it’s even ok if you can’t do any social movement work at all — it very possibly says more about the movements’ problems than your own
I know lots of people who do a lot of good in the world without doing any “activism” per se
BUT it’s kind of silly and counterproductive to redefine things that do not have a fairly direct connection to the construction of a transformative social movement as “activism”. what is the point of doing this? doing activism is not the same thing as being a good person.
related note: the “not everyone can participate in a riot or a drawn-out argument with a hostile audience, therefore questioning whether any specific action is tactical and/or ‘activism’ is ableist” thing is a total strawman argument. stop saying that. I haven’t been in anything that could remotely be labelled a riot for years, and most of my best and most useful and even actually most high-status social movement work has been relatively low-key stuff that’s accessible to people with a range of different abilities and energy levels — copywriting, envelope stuffing, stall staffing, arranging/cataloging books, pricing goods for sale, cleaning and tidying community spaces, child-minding, catering, making conversation with people who are new to a space, photocopying, leaflet and zine layout, online promotion, meeting facilitation, radio producing and presenting, etc etc etc.
