The Dangers of Performative Activism | 01/05/21
The Future Focus talks are part of a webinar series hosted by Maine Youth for Climate Justice, Maine Audubon, the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative, the Maine Environmental Education Association’s network of Youth Changemakers, and Maine Climate Action Now.
I was chosen as one of five Maine youth activists to give a one hour talk on a topic of my choice. I chose to discuss performative activism in a talk titled The Dangers of Performative Activism.
Hi, thank you for being here everyone, I appreciate your time, and I look forward to having a good conversation with you all!
As Amara said, my name is Sirohi Kumar. I’m 16 and live in Bar Harbor Maine, and I’m a Junior at Mount Desert Island High School. I’m really excited to tell you about my journey as a climate and racial justice organizer.
I wasn’t always an activist. In fact, I used to be quite the opposite. See, when people think of youth activists, they think young, driven, hardworking. While I am all of those things, I also had one major character flaw: I’m a major procrastinator.
I was a procrastinator in the way most teenagers are: “why do the dishes when they’ll be dirty tomorrow anyways?”, or “why do my homework when I have all of the bus ride to school tomorrow to do it?”. I was abstractly aware of the problems in the world, but I was never driven to fix them. After all, there would always be problems to solve.
In the summer before my sophomore year of high school, I applied for an internship with A Climate to Thrive, a local climate organization. I didn’t do it for any specific reason, I just really needed something to do over the summer other than work. Over the course of my internship, I learned about the existential threat posed by climate change.
Not only what it was caused by, but what it would do to the island I live on. Mount Desert Island’s two main economic sectors are fishing and tourism, which are both directly threatened by the climate crisis. Fishing, by the increase in ocean temperatures and acidification, and tourism by the increasingly erratic weather patterns and heavy storms.
I learned about what the climate crisis would do to my family across the world: creating climate refugees and making India, where my grandparents still live, almost entirely a desert.
It was mind-blowing for me. My “the dishes will still be dirty in the morning” mindset was now in direct conflict with this knowledge that the world was on fire. I was 15 at the time, and had no plan other than to do what was in front of me.
So I immersed myself in climate activism. I completed my internship and joined my school’s green team in the fall. There, I took every opportunity I was presented with. I volunteered to co-write a white paper on my school’s solar installation with one of my friends, Thomas Korstanje. I helped local college students organize a climate strike. I worked with other MDI youth to declare a Climate Emergency in my town as part of the Climate Emergency Action Coalition.
I took on more and more, and eventually I found that “change-maker” and “activist” were titles that fit me.
If I had to describe those months leading up to March, it’s like when you have to climb a really tall mountain: one minute you’re at the bottom and the next you’re at the top, with no recollection of getting there other than a lot of little steps.
That’s not to say there were no bumps in the road. In December of 2019, I was in the middle of the climate emergency declaration process in Bar Harbor. For those of you who don’t know, a climate emergency is a formal piece of legislation passed by a government acknowledging that the climate crisis is real. Often they include action steps to be taken by the government.
Part of this climate emergency declaration process included local outreach — talking to the people who would be affected by the declaration. To be clear, this wasn’t one or two conversations. This was hours of coordination and conversations, and being direct witness to the huge disconnect between the reality of the climate crisis and what most people thought we were facing.
Where I saw years of environmental destruction and thousands of lives and livelihoods lost, others saw a minor inconvenience: hotter summers and colder winters.
One conversation I had with a member of the Bar Harbor town staff was particularly memorable. They asked why the Climate Emergency Declaration was something that even needed to be done by the town: if the youth organizers were willing to coordinate this whole process, couldn’t they just take up the decarbonization effort themselves?
That assumption that the effort to decrease the emissions of a whole town could be taken on by full-time students only highlighted a clear lack of understanding of the true scope of the climate crisis. It was really, deeply, disheartening. I was a kid seeing my community and local leaders dismissing a real and scientifically proven threat to my future. So what did I do to cope?
Well, as any mature, intelligent, calm 15 year old would do, I ate a lot of junk food and watched trashy TV. I shoved everything I was feeling, all the overwhelming emotions, into a little box and left it somewhere in my chest. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t keep it all down. The negative emotions I was experiencing as a result of my extracurriculars started leaking out of that little box and messing with the rest of my life.
I was constantly tired, unmotivated in class, ignoring my homework, emotionally exhausted, and just generally unhappy. I didn’t know it, but I was experiencing a common phenomenon among activists: burnout.
Burnout can manifest differently in different people, but it’s a physical or emotional reaction to extreme emotional duress. It can manifest in anger, sadness, anxiety, exhaustion, lack of motivation, or depression. If you don’t have the tools to handle the emotional stress, it can be really damaging and turn you off social justice permanently. While that wasn’t my experience, I sure as heck was not emotionally intelligent enough to deal with it on my own.
But I’m going to give you guys a shortcut I didn’t have then. Often, when we’re experiencing a reaction to the worst parts of activism, we need to remind ourselves why we got into this work in the first place: what was our original motivation? Where does our passion lie?
In my experience, answers to these questions fall into one of two categories: healthy or unhealthy.
Healthy motivation is usually something long-lasting and independent of outside structures: for instance, fighting for your rights, or those of the people you care about. If you can find a source of healthy motivation, your activism is much more sustainable, and your mental health is in good hands. But it’s much easier said than done. I myself still struggle with motivation, and I will be the first to admit that.
Unhealthy motivation is a trap lots of change-makers (including myself) can fall into. Unhealthy motivation can be: outside approval of peers, the desire to impress someone, looking for something to bolster your CV, the desire for social clout, or just something that doesn’t last long, like anger. When these are our motivators, we can get so swept up in the momentum we forget to make sure we’re doing it for the right reasons.
Unhealthy motivation leads to unsustainable activism. For instance, if I’m a climate activist looking to gain social capital by speaking at huge conferences and events, how is my activism going to hold up when we’re struck by a pandemic that prevents large gatherings?
In my experience, unsustainable activism comes in two forms: either I can’t do it at all or I can’t do it well. Let me explain.
“Not being able to do it at all” doesn’t mean I’m not an activist, or that I don’t do any change-making. It means that activism takes a deep toll on my mental health and my ability to balance the various aspects of my life. It means I feel less joy from my work, and burnout that I experienced would be longer and more severe. To use an earlier metaphor, it’s like having to climb the mountain without shoes — you can do it but at some point it’s easier to stop walking.
The damage is mostly self-contained, and while it is awful, it’s not the worst consequence of unhealthy motivation. The other type of activism that comes from unhealthy motivation is performative activism. Now, this is a phrase thrown around a lot, and the definition is not always clear.
Performative activism is activism done purely on a superficial level, with very little actual execution on the part of the activist. For instance, a performative activist might talk about the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement but fail to stand up in the face of instances of racism in real life. Or, they may only do social justice work when it looks good on a resume and then ditch it once they get credit.
Unlike the other type of unsustainable activism, performative activism’s negative effects aren’t just contained to them — it can be damaging to the movement they’re part of as a whole.
It’s disrespectful to the people who worked hard and made the movement what it is. Performative activism can be misleading, because performative activists may not take the time to learn everything about their movement, so they may mess up definitions to terms they throw around, or confuse popular figures in the movement.
There are also more insidious consequences to performative activism. This summer I worked with other students to organize protests in my hometown in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. As part of the work I did, I helped write a petition to my school district that contained various anti-racism action steps we felt were appropriate.
One such action step was the formation of an anti-racism task force, which had the ability to make recommendations to the school board about curriculum, the school resource officer position, and how to deal with incidents of racism within our schools. Now, as one of the members on the Task Force, I have the power to shape what anti-racism in my school district looks like.
But, if I was a performative activist, I might not be willing to dedicate my time and energy to this task force now that I could put it on my resume and get credit for starting it. I would be setting back the work of a group that has the potential to do real quantifiable good.
Not only is it damaging to you and your direct surroundings, but it can discredit the movement or damage its reputation.
To organize the aforementioned BLM protests, we had a Facebook page we used to coordinate the dates/times of the protests. However, some people abused the platform: despite calling themselves supporters of the BLM movement, they spread false rumors about the motivations of the organizers, and incited fights that detracted from the real progress we were trying to make.
Performative activism also thrives in the age of social media, where it can be so easy to put up a false front. It’s easy to retweet the words of someone else about an issue and say you “brought awareness” to a topic, or to preach a certain kind of behavior online without actually carrying it out in real life.
For instance, in the months after the murder of George Floyd, almost every social media influencer posted about the importance of the BLM movement, spreading resources and attending protests. However, as the media wave around the movement died down, they quickly stopped discussing it and their “activism” disappeared. Social media also allows people to glean a shallow understanding of a real and nuanced topics from posts instead of taking the time to do real research to gain a serious understanding or a topic.
So if performative activism is so bad why do people do it?
Well, it’s hard to admit when you made a mistake and need to step back. Often we don’t know we’re being performative until it’s pointed out to us that we’re misleading others or don’t know enough about a topic, and hearing that can be hard. Sometimes, we can get excited by social movements because of their glam and appeal, and don’t stop to think about if we really want to get into them.
Performative activism is also emotionally easier — there’s no burnout when you don’t invest time and energy into a movement. And when you can get social or academic credit from faking it, why would you invest?
When I got my internship in the summer of 2019, I was the definition of a performative activist — I was entering a social movement to pass my time over the summer.
But as I learned more about the realities of the climate crisis, I became more and more of a real activist. So how can we work together to make this a reality for more young performance activists?
I would like to introduce to you all, my friend Sam. Sam is a junior in high school. She is currently taking 3 AP classes, running track and field, studying for the SATs, and has a part time job.
Sam is a performative activist: she posted about the BLM movement over the summer, but has not said anything about it since August. I am interested in getting Sam involved in my school’s Civil Rights Team, but I have no idea how to do it.
First, I thought about trying to educate her. After all, Sam is a good person and cares about others, so surely she’ll speak up in the face of injustice she sees? But I don’t have access to any anti-racism resources. My library doesn’t carry any books on anti-racism and my Civil Rights Team doesn’t have any either.
Well, I might appeal to her desire to invest her time in something cool — after all, as part of the Civil Rights Team we go on fun field trips and attend protests together! But Sam also works a part time job, and the Civil Rights Team meetings fall during the track and field meetings. While the Civil Rights Team is cool, she’s saving up money so she can buy a car. And, she heard that the school is building a new track over the summer, which will be awesome because she’s looking into getting a sports scholarship.
Sam has also heard that being part of the Civil Rights Team is really hard emotionally — that they have to talk to people who are racist and homophobic. Sam is a good person, but she’s not sure she can deal with that kind of hostility regularly, especially when she doesn’t have access to a therapist or any strong emotional support structures.
So how do we convince Sam to join the Civil Rights Team and become a racial justice advocate? How do we educate her about the movement, provide compensation for her time, and support her emotional wellbeing? How are we supposed to compete with the million other things that can demand the time of a performative activist?
Every youth activist has some ideas: more stipends for youth, increased recognition of youth leadership, or providing mentorship for young activists.
The question I want to leave you all with is this: How do we convert performance activists, who may see social movements as a hobby or trend, into real sustainable activists, who can make careers out of their change-making?
Thank you.
