rahgheer:

The other day in one of my history classes, we were talking about the prologue to the civil rights movement of the ’50s, an the ’60s, and my professor pointed out that the movement did not happen spontaneously, all just out of its own. He said that in that at least since the 1920s, and 30s, African Americans had been building up legal arguments against constitutional racism, if not before. For instance, NAACP had been founded in 1901; people like Thurgood Marshall had been putting up legal challenges and advocating on behalf of his community. What he said was this (and I am paraphrasing), before crowd marches occur to bring in sweeping changes, many individuals dedicate decades and lives to lay down the foundations for those changes. Meaningful, lasting social change often requires  a lot of patience and time, and it happens when individuals from the community step into professions and institutions from where they can mount legal, rhetorical fights (in terms of education, politics, businesses, etc.). 

It got  me thinking about a phenomenon that I see fairly often on the internet - for example, when people blog about issues such as racism, sexism, lgbtq, able-ism, they are often accused that they do nothing except rant on the internet, and so are useless.  I’ve also been told that theory is useless; afterall, what does it do anyway? But neither the internet, nor the rhetoric found on the internet stays in a vacuum. Enough people read it and move from being defensive to real empathy, and if enough individuals started consciously changing their attitudes towards other individuals of different demographics within their society, if enough people started questioning the status quo, only then can we hope for lasting sweeping changes that we need to see in society. That means that both academia, and everyday people and their experiences, become very important for a dialogue to take place, so we see it implemented in everyday life.