Justus For All

Timothy Burke, a professor at Swarthmore, comments on a yearly ritual, and yearly controversy at his college: Free Speech Kabuki

There’s a lot of discussion on campus this year about the annual “chalkings” that coincide with Coming Out week. They’ve been controversial before (as one student puts it in the campus newspaper, it’s a “predictable moment” in the calendar). If I had a rankings scale, I’d put this year’s controversy near the top of the scale, however. The drawings and messages were a significant shade more explicit and intense than in past years.

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I’ve noted before that the longer you’re at a place like Swarthmore, the more that the ritual repetition of some of these debates is vaguely frustrating. It’s part of a learning experience, though. The students who object learn some things, the students who do the chalkings learn some things. Or so one hopes. Among the things I hope that the students who did the chalking learn is to stop believing that the efficacy of activism is measured by the degree of antagonism or discomfort it produces. If there’s a bad idea that I’d like to see worked out of people’s systems by the time they graduate from a place like this, it is the old saw that objections to activism are proof of the claims of activism. That’s a bad bit of Freudian or Marxist intellectual judo, a classic sign of shallowness (lately common among many conservatives).

Read the whole thing, it is quite fascinating.

(via comment at Ann Althouse)

Typically, it seems to me that ‘in your face protests’ are mostly a martyr type complex that lets the activist feel good about themselves, but doesn’t actually advance the cause they espouse.  Indeed, I expect that it often hurts the cause.   As such, it is at its core a selfish, self-cented activity.

Poltical Theater can be a very effective tool.  Rosa Parks, Lunch Counter sit-in and anti-afirmative actions all show this.  The goal though, is to get people to think not merely to get them to react.