Activism comes in many forms. Whether you are out on a street corner petitioning for better environmental regulations, spending hours phone banking for a favored political candidate or even spreading a hashtag in solidarity with a given movement, now more than ever there are so many mediums through which you can fight for social and political change. I would posit that most, if not all, students on this campus have participated in activism of one form or another — some taking more energy-intensive and serious actions to combat perceived problems in society, and some sticking to the realm of online activism.
Yet, who decides who is an activist? There is undoubtedly a difference between posting a tweet and actually marching in protests (though the two are not mutually exclusive, of course). I have heard the argument that only action on the latter scale actually constitutes activism — thinkpiece after thinkpiece have decried the rise of “slacktivism,” or online actions that nominally support a cause but take little energy or effort to execute, such as signing petitions or posting on social media. Shonda Rhimes ’91 even explicitly said “a hashtag is not a movement” in her 2014 commencement speech at the College.
These arguments are valid, but misguided in their scope. A hashtag alone may not be a movement, but lasting social and political change is not created through short bursts of cinematic, revolutionary action. A movement needs actors across all parts of the spectrum in order to make meaningful, long-lasting and deep-seated change. Political and institutional reforms must be coupled with the changing of hearts and minds — laws will mean nothing if underlying cultural norms and sensitivities are not there to enact them in the lived experiences of each person’s day. The truth of this has been demonstrated throughout American history, from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement to legitimate gender equality. We have laws safeguarding civil liberties and social justice that simply do not manifest in the daily life of marginalized communities because the hearts and minds of many within society remain in the past. Legal and structural change means little without the sociocultural change to support it.
Hashtag activism, slacktivism, Tumblr social justice warriorism or whatever one would like to call it has the benefit of spreading awareness and education to constituencies that may have otherwise remained ignorant. This is how we achieve the kind of sociocultural change crucial to the manifest efficacy of laws regarding whatever issues for which one is fighting, be it civil rights or environmental regulations and protections. Exposure is crucial to the success of changing hearts and minds, and the more popularity and newsworthy a hashtag or a petition or a Facebook profile is, the more people will be aware of the underlying issues that these tools purport to support. If the public is largely unaware of an issue, the concrete on-the-ground action by more dedicated activists is unlikely to culminate in lasting change. The fact that you can go up to almost any individual in this country and they will having at least a passing knowledge of the #BlackLivesMatter movement fundamentally changes the import and scope of the movement. Public exposure and common knowledge confers legitimacy upon movements that would otherwise remain on the fringe or in the shadows.
Ideally, more and more people would be on the streets or in the halls of government agencies fighting for change with more than words or online presence. The people who are already doing so are incredible, and I wish them the best of luck in their endeavors. But in today’s technologically-flooded society, we need actors on all parts of the spectrum — we need online petitions and we need hashtag activism. Ignoring the efficacy of these tools minimizes the very real effects of education, exposure and the spread of information in the fight for social change.
