Social Justice Work Then and Now

I've been thinking about this Internet meme since I saw it in Rachel Barenblat's blog post earlier this week: "If you want to know what you would have done during the Civil Rights movement, you're doing it now."

It's an interesting way of framing and reframing the Civil Rights movement. I think that many of us tend to think that during the 1950's and 1960's, citizens were either integrating lunch counters or holding the fire hoses that were turned on black citizens peacefully assembling, either registering people to vote in the deep South or murdering the workers who traveled south to inform citizens of their civil rights.

But most people were living their lives:  men who were working at their regular jobs and coming home to have dinner before the kids went to bed or women who were running households and doing important volunteer work.  Then, as now, most people had to earn a living and didn't have the luxury of free time to work on issues of integration.

I'm guessing that many of them did what I do:  worked for justice in much more smaller and local ways, while not doing as much to rework the structures that require the work of charity.  I write letters to my lawmakers, even as I'm not sure it does much good.  But the real work I do is much more local--especially in terms of the time I spend on each portion of my social justice work.  

Like many citizens during the Civil Rights era, I'm not putting my body on the line.  I rarely go to marches.  I can't imagine chaining myself to a fence or a tree to prevent injustice.  I'm not bombing buildings or destroying documents.

I am willing to admit that the most important social justice work that I do is to contribute money to groups that are doing the harder direct work of charity and justice.  I am willing to pay others who might have more free time and knowledge to do the work that I cannot do.  Part of me feels guilty about that, but part of me is willing to admit the reality of the economics.  

It's important that the charity and the justice work gets done, and money to groups can make that happen.  In many instances, it's the only way that the work will get done.  We imagine that those student activists of the Civil Rights movements were working without funding, but most of them weren't.  They were working in group structures, and those groups needed money. 

I want to believe that the work that I do for my livelihood is also moving the world towards justice.  Most of our students are working their way towards jobs that they wouldn't have without our degree, and those jobs, while those jobs may not pay well enough to catapult students to the upper class, they will give those students a job that will give them more options than they currently have.