Before Spring Break, many students wrote about campus activism, showing just how pertinent this issue is. However, I worry about the way that Addie Browne’s article, in particular, framed activism.
For example, Browne separates cultural appropriation and offensive language from “fundamental social problems.” She writes that Bowdoin creates activists “who are setting out to eliminate one offensive word and action at a time.” I think that she is trying, perhaps, to argue that simply getting someone not to say “faggot” is different from getting them to truly understand why it is offensive.
Some forms of activism on campus do merely police language and behavior without radically challenging our attitudes and ideologies. But Browne seems to believe that concern over language and behavior is inherently bad activism. She calls it the “ultimately superficial goal of becoming politically correct.”
For me, those words and actions that even Browne deems offensive are a fundamental part of larger systems of oppression. There can seem like a distinct distance between Bowdoin and the violence against minorities that we read about in the news.
I certainly agree that we should be more active against this violence. However, the attitudes and ideologies that motivate or excuse offensive language and behavior operate within, and partially reproduce, the systems of oppression that take a much more forceful form elsewhere. For example, disregard for Native American cultures is part of a historical and ongoing privileging of non-Natives and cultural appropriation is a product of the colonial project of eliminating Native personhood. The scale of discriminations might differ, but they all share the same genealogy.
I also wish to challenge Browne’s framing of reservations. She writes that stopping someone from appropriating Native American cultures “[does] little to help those who remain disadvantaged by the debilitating environment of reservations.” This description of reservations, offered in the name of social justice, proves that being an activist requires self-reflexivity.
If Browne wants to use the plight of Native Americans to further her own arguments about political correctness, then she needs to consider what it means to construct their experiences as a plight. What does it imply to say that reservations, the home of peoples of multiple cultures and histories, are “debilitating environments” that necessitate a white intervention?
Portland Press Herald reporter Colin Woodward recently wrote a series on the Passamaquoddy, a tribe in Maine. He wrote that, “an economic, political and cultural renaissance is underway throughout Indian Country in the United States.” According to Woodward, this renaissance, empirically evident in statistics of income, life expectancy, and employment rate increases, results from the “greatly increased control Indians have over their own affairs.”
Native Americans have long maintained their agency through complex acts of resistance to, and negotiation with imperialist institutions. Now, through a measure of autonomy that has come from decades of indigenous activism, they are fashioning their own future. When we portray Native Americans as passive victims, “disadvantaged by the debilitating environment of reservations,” we not only once again ignore their personhood, but we also distance ourselves from our responsibility within the systems of oppression that work against them.
Fighting for social justice involves collaboration with those people we are trying to help. It involves listening to them and asking them what they want, and how they want us to act as their allies. It involves respecting them as people. It involves educating ourselves and our peers about the systems of oppression that still operate on and off our campus.
Lane Sturtevant is a member of the Class of 2015.