Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Social Justice Warm-Ups

Warm-ups are necessary before a marathon. But stretching is not the actual race. Playing the scales is a warm-up for a concert pianist, but it is not the actual performance. Self-care calls are a good warm-up for social activism. But it's not the actual fight for social justice.

Now we need to do warm-ups. You can't roll out of bed, jump into house slippers, and run the NY Marathon, just like you can't roll out of bed, plop down on a cushion and expect to have a good meditation. But once we complete our warm-ups, we have to actually DO the thing.
I think the problem is that we are taught things in a half-ass way. It's our country, our education system. We learn things in broken, backward, and incomplete ways from kindergarten through college.  We rush through to the end. Most of us aren't taught any warm-ups or preliminaries and so we either hurt ourselves or nothing happens and we think 'this doesn't work.' Then we go out and discourage others. The other half of us are only taught the preliminary practice. So we stretch by the side of the road and think we're in the race.

I went to grad school for playwriting and our teachers made us write for the entire first semester...moments. We objected. We wanted to write glorious plays, epics, trilogies. But our teacher made us learn how to explore our voices and then write a dramatic beat. And then write a monologue, and then write a scene, and then a series of scenes, and then we had to put those scenes up as short plays. And guess what? The plays sucked...they were lumpy lopsided first pancakes burnt at the bottom and undercooked. And so we had to go back and do it again. And again. And then we wrote 30 minute plays. We didn't get to even attempt to write a full-length play until our second year. We learned fundamentals. At any point, if we didn't complete the assignment, we had to go back and do it again.

Social justice warriors...you did the warm-ups. You made some calls, maybe you posted a black square on your social media yesterday. You showed consternation and empathy for others. Maybe you even made a sign and walked with others. That's good. But that is just a warm-up. The marathon is ahead of us and it takes place in the form of elections, letter writing, organized gatherings, planning. The civil rights movement of the 60s wasn't a series of marches or concerned phone calls to black people to see how they were feeling after a bus boycott. The marches were the tip of an iceberg. It was an actual collection of millions.

Some of y'all did some really good warm-ups during the Ferguson uprising in 2014. You put on your social justice exercise clothes, did some mental stretches of empathy, watched past experts share their experience..and then you went and had a cheeseburger. Today, we have another chance to run the race. So stretch, show empathy, post black squares of whatever you need to feel good about yourself. And then get a trainer or a teacher (this doesn't mean your black friend.) Commit to a workout regime so that you can run the race. Make it small and realistic. It's better to do something small consistently than to do grand gestures every 4 years.
And yes...keep stretching. But remember...stretching isn't the goal of a marathon. It's a warm-up.

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