As a Uni student, scrolling through my Instagram feed will usually bring up a handful of stories from classmates highlighting various social issues. I’ve seen stories demanding the closing of Uyghur concentration camps, advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, and shedding light on antisemitism. These posts peaked during the Black Lives Matter movement, during which dozens of stories about African-Americans being unjustly affected by police brutality were shared daily. Even more recently, the Uni community stood against Asian violence by spreading information and resources to help.
These posts advocating for justice have been important for raising awareness. They’ve helped inspire conversation surrounding important issues, making our school a place that’s more open to discussion and critique. They’ve contributed to making the Uni community more informed and sensitive towards prominent issues. In that way, spreading the word is really important.
However, there are limits to how much raising awareness can do. Many of these posts get skimmed over, the information half-digested before being replaced with the next story on a feed. Other times, caring students will stop to read, absorb the content, and leave a like. Some might even re-post or share it with a friend, yet they likely won’t take further action. Lack of personal connection to the issue can contribute, as can the post not containing accessible resources that help the reader dive deeper, both of which can be symptoms of performative activism.
Performative activism occurs when supporting a cause is done for one’s own benefit. It can take the form of participating in a movement through social media for recognition or acceptance, but stopping before taking tangible action. You likely recognized displays of performative activism during the Black Lives Matter movement. On June 2nd, 2020, black squares dominated social media in the wake of the death of George Floyd, each accompanied by the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Many contained no further resources or information. While often posted with good intentions, walls of blank images flooded the hashtag and drowned out critical, meaningful information.
It’s tempting to show solidarity by taking five seconds to post a hashtag or share a story, and performative activism makes it all too easy to “participate” in causes. It may not be done out of bad intention, but performative activism can flood eager advocates with empty content, center the voice of the activist instead of the affected, and oversimplify issues by contributing in ways that don’t make a genuine difference. It ties into the white savior complex with its emphasis on displays of tokenism, or symbolic effort, not accompanied by work to learn more and take meaningful action.
However, if we do make the effort to understand and take further steps, we can move beyond performative activism. During the BLM movement, I also saw stories of classmates attending protests and demonstrations, often encouraging friends to participate with them. Sharing our actions, instead of words alone, can be powerful inspiration, and encouraging others to participate alongside us can create impactful collective efforts. It’s also important, when we do spread awareness through posts, to always link back to an original source written by someone impacted by the issue in order to center their voices.
So, next time you see a standalone hashtag, consider starting by looking into ways to take real action.
Great post! Action is super important and it's one of the main things that sets real activism apart from performative activism. In a lot of situations, there aren't always clear methods for people to get involved in taking action for an issue, and I think that's part of why people get really focused on sharing information, because its easy and they aren't sure what else to do. Performative activism has become a part of internet culture, and I think there needs to be more of an active effort on the part of individuals to reflect on what we want internet activism to look like and how we can use it as a tool get people more involved in real world activism too.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. I think looking back on the social media reaction to the BLM movement in July, I realize just how prevalent and harmful performative activism was. I think because of the severity of the situation, a lot of people felt like they were obligated to do something, but didn't have the knowledge of what would be most helpful to do. I'm guilty of it as well, I posted a black square on instagram. I think the most important thing is to make sure what you're doing is not completely online. It's good to spread awareness, but actually doing physical things like protesting, volunteering, or donating money will help the cause more. Really great post!
ReplyDeleteThis is a great post. I definitely agree with what you are saying. Nowadays, activism is defined as simply reposting something on your Instagram story, or commenting a hashtag under an organization's post. People today need to realize that there are actual ways of helping a cause that take little to no effort. This form of activism is so twisted because it can get to a certain point where people feel like if they don't do anything they will be villainized, which is sometimes the case. In response to this they are forced to partake in the performative activism which in many cases does not actually help the cause at hand. I believe that moving into the future, people should find real and trustworthy ways of contributing to a certain social issue that are not simply reposting something on their social media stories.
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