The Activist Ego Chamber
BY RAJA KRISHNA
On a cloudy Friday morning in early May, seven Washington University students were arrested for trying to enter a board of trustees meeting. The “Wash. U. Seven,” as they started calling themselves, say they wanted to deliver a letter to CEO of Peabody Energy Greg Boyce, a member of the board and the target of their dissent. They claim they had no choice but to escalate after the university rebuffed their attempts to negotiate. The truth is that the students were arrested because they had hotheadedly rejected unexpectedly generous concessions from the university weeks earlier and were in need of a way to revitalize their campaign. In other words, they had squandered an opportunity for real change and needed a way to discredit the university. Their goal was not progress, it was publicity.
The story of the Wash. U. Seven is just one example of a brand of twenty-first century activism built not on ideas, but on egos—a trend which threatens to undermine the entire activist movement.
One of the most pervasive forms of this egoism is also one of the most common: the call-out. On blogs and online forums, activists perpetuate what The Atlantic’s Jon Lovett calls the “culture of shut up”: wantonly accusing each other of racism and classism, ignorance and bigotry. The same thing happens offline, too. Across the country, college students have taken to protesting their own graduation speakers, dismissing the very act of providing a platform to an opposing opinion as universally offensive. Most famously, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was pressured out of delivering her Rutgers University commencement address.
Activists do damage to themselves as well. Many delude themselves into thinking that the “safe spaces” they moderate are the same as the important discussions they rightly encourage. Through their dismissal of new or opposing opinions, they erect walls of ignorance around themselves, yell at those on the other side, and smirk when they hear the shrill echoes of their own dissent. Yes, words carry significance and call-outs are important, but when we use them to stroke our egos we end up condescending instead of educating.
All too often, when activists are offended by something—a Facebook photo, an international event, the words of a politician—they conclude that they must also be correct. They spend so much time focusing on their feelings they forget that in order to turn compassion into action, one must also reach deeper than gut reactions or sympathetic newspaper headlines. They constantly ask their peers to “seek understanding” of actors all around the world but find it difficult to do the same. They mistake having an opinion for being informed, citing each other as the moral authority on complex issues like Israel-Palestine, consciously and subconsciously filtering out any countervailing evidence or ideas. Such a philosophy is irresponsible.
Moreover, many of today’s activists engage with identities before ideas. Championing calls for “solidarity,” they claim that caring about an issue should not have prerequisites, and yet they impose them with righteous gusto. They categorize people into rigid pockets of identity, such as “white gay middle class male” or “southern black straight female,” often using these identities as a metric to judge the validity of their opinions. Sure, white people can talk about race, and affluent people can talk about class, but if they do not already sympathize with the young activist community, their opinions and identities are promptly dismissed. Identities undoubtedly matter, for they provide crucial context and perspective, but swearing by them—and forcing others to do the same—is dangerous. When someone’s privilege becomes a death sentence for their opinions, they become victims of ad hominem attacks instead of participants in fair, context-based discussion.
As a student activist myself, I am the first to admit that this piece is as much a self-critique as it is a critique of the overall activist movement. I know that I have made and will continue to make the mistakes I have pointed out. I cocoon myself with information from sources I already agree with, and spend much of my time in the company of like-minded friends, often catching myself labeling others as racists or bigots without seeking true understanding. That is wrong.
Activists are people who have set out to make change, and so it is understandably difficult to grapple with the idea that we are not always right. But it is imperative that we try. Our causes are too urgent and our action is too necessary for us to allow the activist movement to continue down the path of egoism.
This is not a call for restraint, nor is it a call to stop making others angry—both of those are in the activist job description. Rather this is a call to build a movement around our ideas instead of our egos.
As we continue to better the world, let’s not forget to better ourselves.
A version of this article appeared in the “Modern Warfare” issue of WUPR.