Performative Activism: Is It Helping or Hurting Real Change?
The modern world is focused a lot on the online counterpart, and it’s very easy to avoid the pressure of commenting on social issues. Many people will try to support various ideas online just to gain attention or clout. The thing is, a lot of the time they go past their morality and ethics, just to ensure that they obtain a benefit from this situation, which may or may not be against their true beliefs.
But the truth is, people won’t always care about this stuff, as long as there is a way to profit from it. And that’s the problem, because performative activism has become very appealing to a lot of people. It comes with a broad impact because people push the attention away from themselves, and instead the spotlight is on influencers. It’s hard to identify when and if you engage in slacktivism.
Obviously, if you think about an idea with all your heart and focus on highlighting its benefits, that will help quite a bit. However, not everyone will do that. They join a movement just to receive more attention and potential benefits. Yet in doing so, they get past their moral compass, and that can become a very problematic thing. At the end of the day, you need to try and make changes that support your beliefs. With performative allyship, that’s not always the case.
Are only people focused on performative activism, or do corporations engage in it?
The sheer truth is that many corporations engage in performative activism as well. And they usually do it either to increase their sales by catering to specific audiences that agree with them, or to improve their image. Regardless, many companies worldwide engage in performative activism, and they do it because they know it works. It can provide some great results for them, and all they have to do is find the right ideas to follow and implement into their work.
What we need to understand is that performative activism is embedded in many situations these days. And a lot of the time, it has to do with personal gains for one of the parties. For example, joining movements like Black Lives Matter will help people obtain personal appreciation, more followers online and a way to create their own brand.
Many times, regular people and corporations alike tend to jump on trends, especially if they have to do with things like social justice. While not very prevalent, those can be common, and they are easy to spot. Whether it’s moral or not to jump on those ideas, it depends on the beliefs and values of each person or company.
Is performative activism good?
As always, it comes down to how an idea gets implemented and how people support it. Of course, sometimes performative activism can be great, other times it could be very bad. The most important thing you need to do is to understand how slacktivism can be used in order to make a difference.
If you want to use performative activism rightfully, then you want to support those ideas that truly matter to you. Show that yes, there are great things that you are supporting because they can make people’s lives easier, and that aligns with your values and ethics.
Of course, performative activism is also a great way to highlight what you believe in, while also increasing your following online. However, the problems appear when you think more about the following you have rather than the things you are actively trying to support.
Activism can be great, because you don’t want to leave those things that bother you and not do anything. And yes, a lack of performative activism can be interpreted as you not caring about those situations. But a lot of the time, that’s much farther from the truth than you expect.
With performative activism you can spread awareness and let people know about crucial things they might need to understand and take action for/against. And it can be a powerful tool, if you choose to use it right. But at the same time, it can also bring certain challenges as well.
Is performative allyship bad?
A lot of people use performative activism wrongfully. Instead of focusing on helping people and offering a solution, what they do is they engage in promoting something that’s trending, just to generate exposure for themselves and thus profit off that idea. It might not seem like a lot in the beginning, but the truth is that slacktivism can be very bad, and extremely problematic if it’s used this way.
That’s because you’re showing people you seem to care about something, but you don’t take any actions other than highlighting a trending idea. The next day/time when people see you, all you do is you sweep the ideas under the rug and focus on finding new things that will offer you a way to promote your ideas. That’s the most important thing you want to do when it comes to performative activism, it gives you the means to expand and join an idea, but it can also be a downside in many cases. What really matters is how you are addressing things, how you’re managing them, and how you can get past those issues in the long term.
Advocating for and supporting a great idea can be great. But you need more than just share something for clout and talk about it for a little bit. That’s why performative allyship can be rather bad, because you can’t really make a difference if you just talk about something once. And unfortunately, a lot of people just do this because they know they will get a large following.
Conclusion
As you can see, performative activism can have a positive or negative impact on our society, it all comes down to how we use it. Yes, performative activism can be great if we highlight a societal problem and get involved in finding ways to solve it, promote it online and become a true activist. But a lot of people also use performative activism just to boost their following and profit off an idea, without making a difference. That’s when performative activism can be used negatively, and it can have a bad impact on our society!
