Social Change is About the Journey, Not Just the Destination
In recent years, the Black Lives Matter movement has been rising with more and more organizing around the deaths of unarmed Black people murdered by police. On the heels of the pandemic, people are unemployed and their world has been turned upside down. The mood in the air is: we’ve got nothing to lose so we should fight for something better than what we have. Even major brands like Ben and Jerry’s, Nickelodeon, and Airbnb are coming out and speaking in really clear language to protest police violence and denounce white supremacy. They are taking meaningful and symbolic action, as well as making huge donations.
To be clear, I am not interested in praising these brands, but I do find their actions indicative of a cultural tipping point.
I think there is something about the pandemic that has made people ready to see the world in a new way. There is a newfound willingness to let go of outdated institutions that proved to be doing more harm than good. Anecdotally, I would say that white people have increasingly gotten behind movements like Black Lives Matter in mild ways by posting on social media, etc. However, previously there was absolute silence from companies that relied on keeping a neutral image for consumers. They believed being vocal about racial injustice would be polarizing and disadvantage their capacity for profit. I don’t think these brands are brave for finally taking a stand. Rather, their leaders felt it was ok to make bold statements because broad support was already there. From a marketing perspective, it was safe because culture had shifted. Profit would not be threatened by some radical moves.
In a way, this reminds me of how support for marriage equality “suddenly” became acceptable in the mainstream. Banks and soft drink brands suddenly started buying floats in Pride parades and commercials featuring same sex couples became the norm. It may seem like it happened overnight, but in reality it was the result of decades of activism aimed at cultural change. Only when it was clear to brands that there was an overwhelming support for marriage equality across the population, did companies and politicians come out (posing like trailblazers) to commit their support publicly. It was a safe move because it would no longer hurt business profits or political wins and it would give these companies “cool points” for being “vanguards,” even if they weren’t.
Similarly, actions of brands affirming Black Lives Matter indicate a potential cultural shift. As these brands acted as harbingers of broad and lasting acceptance when it came to marriage equality, they may also be bellwethers in this situation. What was once radical and therefore, marginalized, is now embraced by a larger group. That spells power. That (hopefully) signals change.
This leads me to reflect on how social change is really made, versus how organizations are asked to map out and predict it in business-type models.
Eleven years ago, when short-form video was becoming increasingly hailed as a human rights advocacy solution, NMAP — where I now work — was founded with the mission of strengthening social justice campaigns via visual storytelling. While visual storytelling can be persuasive, setting up our organization around this idea fed into the mistaken belief that a couple of videos would change society. Our organization exists in a world that revolves around profit, so we were encouraged by partners (or “clients” as we sometimes were taught to call them) and philanthropists to speak the language of financiers. What is the “return” on investment? What “change” can be bought with a six-month grant? The focus was often on impact and results, not process.
More than a decade later, we struggle to overcome the myth that one video alone will make a case. We try to explain that change occurs much more organically than impact metrics seek to predict. The video showing George Floyd murdered under the knee of a police officer sparked outrage and emboldened new people to a movement, but it also unfortunately wasn’t the first video of its kind. Not to mention how extreme a video it was. This, coupled with the fact that people were already outraged, created an explosion of action. The movement was growing and building a common language. Understanding the threat faced by BIPOC at the hands of brutal police and generally within a white supremacist culture became paramount. Many white people also came to understand that a threat on any human being is a threat to society at large. As is often said, all lives do not matter unless Black Lives Matter.
It is not surprising that unity around this issue comes as we are trying to collectively fight a global pandemic. In his frequent addresses to New Yorkers during this viral crisis, Gov. Andrew Cuomo moved from telling citizens not to wear masks because they didn’t protect individuals wearing them, to explaining that while a mask may not protect the person who wears it from getting COVID-19, it does protect others from getting the virus. We watched him regularly explain that the welfare of others impacts collective welfare. “I wear a mask to protect you, you wear a mask for me,” became his popular refrain. We are at a unique moment of government-sanctioned solidarity so it makes sense that people have decided to rise up and stand together for fellow human beings. “I can’t breathe” became a popular refrain, as we dealt both with a respiratory virus and a brutal culture, both suffocating Black people.
A new narrative has emerged and gained resonance.
Could a civil society organization write into its five-year strategy that by 2020 Ben and Jerry’s would announce a commitment to smash white supremacy or that Lego would pull advertising of police-themed sets? In light of the fight against the pervasiveness of white supremacist culture, I think it’s time the social justice sector reflect on the potential toxicity of overvaluing success indicators.
Social change work continues to be measured by indicators that come directly from white supremacist culture, as Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun point out in Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups. This culture requires that organizations direct all resources toward producing measurable outcomes. The number of people who attend a meeting or the number of times a newsletter is opened are embraced as indicators of progress, because they can be counted. Meanwhile, the quality of relationships built and the personal transformation of those who attend is less measurable and therefore largely ignored. This creates a situation where the people one is seeking to serve get lost in the shuffle of meaningless data.
In fundraising for our mentorship program, Rights Reframed, we often bump up against these issues. The program teaches a group of individuals narrative change methodology and supports them through the creation of a media project that experiments with new narratives around a particular human rights issue. We are often pressured to quantify the program’s impact as we compete for financial support. We are often asked, If there are fewer than 10 people in each cohort, how does this program scale impact? This question is frustrating. The value of the program is in the transformative process that participants go through. It is a deep and lasting change that goes on to transform society via a long-term ripple effect. How do you measure “wokeness?” Sometimes attempting to define or quantify our projects distracts us from the value of things that are not easily measurable. The benefit to the social justice movement of deeply transforming individuals is hard to describe.
How would we even begin to measure the indicators and cost of the change we are seeing now? It is the product of at least a century of broad activism. More importantly, should we even be trying to measure it, only to report to grant officers who are beholden to trustees who manage money derived from the very system that created the problems we have to begin with!
It’s trickle down economics in the most horrifying sense.
Defining progress using metrics from this deeply flawed system is not only boring and lacking in imagination, but it also perpetuates a toxic worldview. It prevents us from creating a new reality that is not simply an upgraded version of the old deeply flawed one.
Hopefully watching this new movement grow and create change will inspire us to think expansively. We can remember the hard-fought battle for marriage equality and see that when you put effort in over time, this sustained, immeasurable action produces transformation. Eventually this creates social change that takes off and is then supported by society at large. Change begins in ways that are at first not easily seen and are usually not easily measured. We have to be comfortable with the journey, not just focused on the destination.
