Jen Gerson: The right to disengage from the Omnicause

2024/05/31 Leave a comment

Valid commentary on the nature of meaningful citizenship. Certainly, political activism is also meaningful but needs to be sustained, well-thought out, and reasonably consistent between all the various injustices in the world and society:

…Look, I’m not saying that it’s wrong to engage in political and social activism. But I suspect we risk harming young people with still-forming identities when we encourage them to hyper-fixate on problems that they have neither the emotional maturity, life experience or practical skill sets to meaningfully address. 

Further, we’ve all fallen into the habit of reducing the concept of citizenship into a narrow axiom of activism, and stripping that word of the very social context that makes it effective. The purpose of an education can’t be to churn out an army of well-intentioned activists, throwing their bodies and minds at every passing injustice. Rather, we should be trying to create well-rounded citizens; people who meaningfully contribute to their local communities through their families, employment, volunteer work, spiritual lives, and hobbies. If activism of a more radical sort is one pillar of a rich and well-grounded social life, all the better, but to reduce the concept of “civic society” to activism at the expense of all the other pillars not only risks creating unbalanced individuals, it will, paradoxically, make such individuals far less effective at creating the social changes they wish to enact. 

Hence the choir quip. Or field hockey. Or drama. Pick an extra-curricular, really. (And I would, here, encourage all education ministers to appreciate the importance of activities too often and too easily cut in the budget for being considered frivolous or expendable. They’re not.)

Obviously, I’ve been stewing over this idea since the encampments demanding various universities divest from Israel began to pop up on North American campuses. Police also appeared to move rather quickly to arrest protestors who were beginning to set up an encampment on the road in front of Parliament this week. For a moment, I want to reserve my judgment on what appears, to me, to be a clear example of a highly contagious social phenomena. That is, I don’t want to turn this column into an opinion piece about whether or not these protestors are right or wrong about Palestine and Israel. In principle, I don’t really have a problem with protestors setting up encampments to make their point, except insofar as this form of protest has a tendency to create serious safety problems over time, both for the participants, and for the surrounding communities. 

Rather, I’d confine myself to observing that these protests and encampments appear to be only the latest manifestation of a series of highly charged political movements that rapidly attract followers, engage in mass shows of support, and then fizzle out and move on to the next seemingly existential crisis. 

Coastal Gas, MeToo, Black Lives Matter, trans issues, COVID, anti-COVID, Ukraine, now Israel. Others have recently labelled it “The Omnicause.” Social activism that is ever present. Ever urgent. Ever crucial. Put the morality of any specific issue aside for just a moment, and it’s hard to ignore the bandwagoner effect. This is absolutely no different to the kind of energy that gets stirred up when a city’s sports team hits the playoffs. 

I often get the impression not of a real commitment to a cause, but rather a desperate flailing for meaning and society by people who are doped by the certainty of being on the right side of history. Righteousness is a high, man. …

You have the right to deeply interrogate your own beliefs, emotions, and motives, and from that state of introspection, to decide how you wish to spend your limited time and energy. You have a right to confine yourselves to the things that serve you. 

You don’t have to do things that serve your peer group; you don’t have to be or appear to be virtuous; you don’t need to go along to get along, nor to acquire status; and you sure as hell don’t need to let your will be hijacked by social media algorithms that profit by fuelling perpetual social movements and outrage cycles. 

And if that process of conscious examination returns a positive result — “yes, this does actually matter. I do care about it” — then know that you will be radically more effective as an activist or political actor if you can raise awareness or cash or volunteers within established and durable social networks; again, family, school, employment, social hobbies, spiritual community, and the like. It’s great to attend a protest, but real, effective and durable change most often finds itself in these quiet and unglamorous foundations of real civil society. Developing a fulfilling and healthy life isn’t an abrogation of our duty to do good in the world. Rather, I think that it’s by being healthy and engaged people that we start to become the change we wish to see in the world around us. 

Source: Jen Gerson: The right to disengage from the Omnicause

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Paul: And Now, a Real World Lesson for Student Activists

2024/05/31 Leave a comment

Yep. Money quote: “The toughest lesson for this generation may be that while they’ve been raised to believe in their right to change the world, the rest of the world may neither share nor be ready to indulge their particular vision:”

The encampments have been cleared, campuses have emptied; protester and counterprotester alike have moved on to internships, summer gigs and in some cases, the start of their postgraduate careers.

Leaving aside what impact, if any, the protests had on global events, let’s consider the more granular effect the protests will have on the protesters’ job prospects and future careers.

Certainly, that matters, too. After all, this generation is notable for its high levels of ambition and pre-professionalism. They have tuition price tags to justify and loans to repay. A 2023 survey of Princeton seniors found that nearly 60 percent took jobs in finance, consulting, tech and engineering, up from 53 percent in 2016.

A desire to protect future professional plans no doubt factored into the protesters’ cloaking themselves in masks and kaffiyehs. According to a recent report in The Times, “The fear of long-term professional consequences has also been a theme among pro-Palestine protesters since the beginning of the war.”

Activism has played a big part of many of these young people’s lives and academic success. From the children’s books they read (“The Hate U Give,” “I Am Malala”), to the young role models that were honored, (Greta Thunberg, David Hogg), to the social justice movements that were praised (Black Lives Matter, MeToo, climate justice), Gen Z has been told it’s on them to clean up the Boomers’ mess. Resist!

College application essays regularly ask students to describe their relationship with social justice, their leadership experience and their pet causes. “Where are you on your journey of engaging with or fighting for social justice?” asked one essay prompt Tufts offered applicants in 2022. What are you doing to ensure the planet’s future?

Across the curriculum, from the social sciences to the humanities, courses are steeped in social justice theory and calls to action. Cornell’s library publishes a study guide to a 1969 building occupation in which students armed themselves. Harvard offers asocial justice graduate certificate. “Universities spent years saying that activism is not just welcome but encouraged on their campuses,” Tyler Austin Harper noted recently in The Atlantic. “Students took them at their word.”

Imagine the surprise of one freshman who was expelled at Vanderbilt after students forced their way into an administrative building. As he told The Associated Press, protesting in high school was what helped get him into college in the first place — he wrote his admissions essay on organizing walkouts, and got a scholarship for activists and organizers.

Things could still work out well for many of these kids. Some professions — academia, politics, community organizing, nonprofit work — are well served by a résumé brimming with activism. But a lot has changed socially and economically since Boomer activists marched from the streets to the workplace, many of them building solid middle-class lives as teachers, creatives and professionals, without crushing anxiety about student debt. In a demanding and rapidly changing economy, today’s students yearn for the security of high-paying employment.

Not all employers will look kindly on an encampment stint. When a group of Harvard student organizations signed an open letter blaming Israel for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, the billionaire Bill Ackman requested on X that Harvard release the names of the students involved “so as to insure (sic) that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.” Soon after, a conservative watchdog group posted names and photos of the students on a truck circling Harvard Square.

Calling students out for their political beliefs is admittedly creepy. But Palestinian protests lacked the moral clarity of the anti-apartheid demonstrations. Along with protesters demanding that Israel stop killing civilians in Gaza, others stirred fears of antisemitism by justifying the Oct. 7 massacre, tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis, shoving “Zionists” out of encampments and calling for “globalizing the intifada” and making Palestine “free from the river to the sea.”

In November, two dozen leading law firms wrote to top law schools implying that students who participated in what they called antisemitic activities, including calling for “the elimination of the State of Israel,” would not be hired. More than 100 firms have since signed on. One of those law firms, Davis Polk, rescinded job offersto students whose organizations had signed the letter Ackman criticized. Davis Polk said those sentiments were contrary to the firm’s values. Another major firm withdrew an offer to a student at New York University who also blamed Israel for the Oct. 7 attack. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law urged employers not hirethose of his students he said were antisemitic.

Two partners at corporate law firms, who asked to speak anonymously since other partners didn’t want them to talk to the media, told me that participating in this year’s protests, especially if it involves an arrest, could easily foreclose opportunities at their firm. At one of those firms, hiring managers scan applicants’ social media histories for problems. (Well before Oct. 7, students had keyed into this possibility, scrubbing campus activism from their résumés.)

Also, employers generally want to hire people who can get along and fit into their company culture, rather than trying to agitate for change. They don’t want politics disrupting the workplace.

“There is no right answer,” Steve Cohen, a partner at the boutique litigation firm, Pollock Cohen, said when I asked if protesting might count against an applicant. “But if I sense they are not tolerant of opinions that differ from their own, it’s not going to be a good fit.” (That matches my experience with Cohen, who had worked on the Reagan presidential campaign and hired me, a die-hard liberal, as an editorial assistant back in 1994.)

Corporate America is fundamentally risk-averse. As The Wall Street Journal reported, companies are drawing “a red line on office activists.” Numerous employers, including Amazon, arecracking down on political activism in the workplace, The Journal reported. Google recently fired 28 people.

For decades, employers used elite colleges as a kind human resources proxy to vet potential candidates and make their jobs easier by doing a first cut. Given that those same elite schools were hotbeds of activism this year, that calculus may no longer prove as reliable. Forbes reported that employers are beginning to sour on the Ivy League. “The perception of what those graduates bring has changed. And I think it’s more related to what they’re actually teaching and what they walk away with,” a Kansas City-based architectural firm told Forbes.

The American university has long been seen as a refuge from the real world, a sealed community unto its own. The outsize protests this past year showed that in a social media-infused, cable-news-covered world, the barrier has become more porous. What flies on campus doesn’t necessarily pass in the real world.

The toughest lesson for this generation may be that while they’ve been raised to believe in their right to change the world, the rest of the world may neither share nor be ready to indulge their particular vision.

Source: And Now, a Real World Lesson for Student Activists

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Protests reveal generational divide in immigrant communities

2021/04/28 Leave a comment

Likely similar in Canada, as second generation grow up with Canadian expectations of equality and opportunity:

When protests began in a Minneapolis suburb after a white police officer fatally shot a Black man, 21-year-old Fatumata Kromah took to the street, pushing for change she says is essential to her Liberian immigrant community.

Meanwhile, 40-year-old Matilda Kromah feared stepping outside her home as trauma associated with the Liberian civil war suddenly rushed back into her life, two decades after she escaped the conflict.

The two women, whose shared last name is common among Liberians, have seen their lives changed amid the unrest that has sometimes engulfed Minneapolis in the months since George Floyd’s death. Their behavior also reflects a generational split: While Fatumata has been drawn into the protests, Matilda has tried to avoid them, focusing instead on running a dress shop and hair-braiding salon that is essential to sending her children to college.

The same divide has played out across the Twin Cities’ burgeoning Somali, Ethiopian, Liberian and Kenyan communities. Young people have thrust themselves into movements for racial justice, often embracing the identity of being Black in America. Older generations have been more likely to concentrate on carving out new lives rather than protesting racial issues in their adopted homeland.

When Fatumata visited Matilda’s shop this past week in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center, the topic was unavoidable. Matilda’s strip-mall storefront — Humu Boutique and Neat Braids — was vandalized in the aftermath of the April 11 death of Black motorist Daunte Wright. Thieves smashed windows and doors and took nearly everything of value, even stripping mannequins of their African dresses.

Tears formed in the elder woman’s eyes, and her hands shook as she spoke. Memories of the atrocities she had fled during the Liberian civil war had returned.

“Maybe war is starting again,” Matilda said of the demonstrations. “I was traumatized. For three days, I didn’t want to go out of my house. I was hiding in my room.”

But she needed to figure out a way to pay for her son’s college tuition, so she posted an “open” sign on the plywood covering the shop’s broken windows and began accepting customers. She did not have insurance to cover the losses, she said.

Fatumata, who chanted and yelled at protests, grew quiet as Matilda spoke. She agreed that the United States offered opportunities for education and a “better life,” but she had also made up her mind that such a life would not be complete without justice for Black people.

After moving to Brooklyn Center from Liberia in 2015, she said she was treated differently as a Black person. People commented on the color of her skin, disapproved of the clothes she wore and once called the police on her and a friend for being too “loud.”

“I started to realize like, ‘Oh, America is not what it says on TV,’” she said.

Then Floyd’s death sparked protests, and she decided that “this was not the American dream I was promised.”

Kromah is not alone. Young people in the city’s East African communities came out to protest in droves following Floyd’s death. Despite tension, at times, between Black immigrants from Africa and Black people whose long history in the U.S. began with slavery, protesters united around decrying police brutality they said plagued their communities.

The verse “Somali lives, they matter here,” often followed the protest refrain of “Black lives, they matter here.” And one of the most widely shared images of last year’s protests was a video posted on social media showing a protester in a hijab and a long skirt kicking a tear gas cannister back toward law enforcement officers in riot gear.

“I am Somali, I am Black American, I am Muslim,” 21-year-old Aki Abdi said. “If a cop pulls me over, he don’t know if I’m Somali or Black. They go hand in hand.”

When former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in Floyd’s death, celebrations broke out across the city, and Abdi and two friends made their way to George Floyd Square.

On the sidewalk down the street from where Floyd took his last breath, they scrawled the names of two Somali men — Dolal Idd and Isak Aden — who were fatally shot by Minnesota police in recent years. They hoped some people in the crowd would search those names on the internet. Police defended their actions in both shootings, saying the men had guns, but the men’s families have pressed for more thorough investigations.

Many older immigrants grew up in countries where speaking out against the government resulted in punishment, and some are so focused on making a living after escaping war-torn countries that they do not have time or energy for anything besides their families’ immediate well-being, said Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Younger Black immigrants who were born in America or came at a young age often know firsthand both their parents’ struggles and America’s history of racial injustice, Hussein said.

“By being squeezed by these two pressures, they have no option but to fight and to try to change the system.” he said. “The younger generation is propelled by this legacy of the fight that is happening in the country that they’ve adopted, but also the fight that their parents have been teaching them about in the country that they left.”

Fatumata Kromah’s mother, Rebecca Williams Sonyah, said parents like her fear for their children’s safety both in interactions with police and at demonstrations, all while trying to stay focused on the jobs and businesses essential to their livelihoods.

“Our children should have freedom. They should have equal rights,” Williams Sonyah said. “They shouldn’t judge our children because of their color or because of where their parents are from.”

She recognized her daughter’s activism as important to those goals but still pleaded with her to stay home after Wright’s death, knowing that destruction was likely. They compromised by agreeing that Kromah would return home before the curfews set by city authorities.

Williams Sonyah’s job in medical home care prevented her from joining in the marches in front of the police department. But she seemed sympathetic to the movement.

“If I had a way to go protest,” she said, “I would protest.”

Source: Protests reveal generational divide in immigrant communities

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