All together, now, can we all say "activist?"

Last week, Professor Greg Squires visited our campus to give a lecture on his new book, There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina.  Now based at George Washington University, he was decked out in his D.C. attire - navy blazer, powder blue collared shirt, no tie.  Before his departmental lecture, he met with interested graduate students to offer advice on how to best address public issues in our academic work.  It quickly became clear that he is one of those guys who looks like the embodiment of upper middle class, white hegemonic masculinity, but is really, on the inside, is not.  It's like "white bread D.C." is his Halloween costume, if you will.  That's not to say that he doesn't endorse academia, but that he didn't see why we couldn't all do work that promoted justice within the academic realm.  He promoted the idea of "doing good and doing well," which translates to doing "good" things for those outside of academia while doing "well" professionally (writing awesome papers, publishing in awesome journals, getting awesome contracts with awesome editors...you know, just being all around academically awesome).  Squires told us we must work to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," all the while "advance an agenda worth advancing."

After his brief monologue encouraging us to comfort and afflict, the table opened for student questions.  I asked him how he was able to balance being an activist scholar with the institutional pressures that may make it difficult to do activist work.
 
Oops.

All his talk of changey hopey stuff doped me up, and I forgot a cardinal rule of disciplinary academia: never say 'activist.'  Because no one is an activist.  They might "disrupt" or "destabilize," they might "challenge" or "counter," they might even do "good" or do "justice," but they never, ever, ever are "activists."

He immediately went into back-tracking mode.  We can't be viewed as activists, he told me.  Being perceived as an activist undermines our ability to do 'good' work.  There is a danger of being seen as too much of an activist, which is that no one will publish you and your work is discounted in and outside of your discipline.  He then told a story about being in a court case where the bad guys were demanding that he say he was an activist scholar to the court, but then he turned the tables on them by saying what he had just said to me - that he can't be an activist because then he wouldn't be able to act in his own self-interest (by that he meant publishing in the best journals), and that the only activist in the room was them (the bad guys) because their activism blinded their view to other perspectives.

In many ways, I understand.  Squires, like any professor, can't afford to be perceived as an activist - "activist" has a taint of agenda-pushing (as if that's a bad thing) that shuts doors and closes ears.  But activism doesn't seem quite what he made it out to be.  Sudbury and Okazawa-Rey define "activist scholarship" as "the production of knowledge and pedagogical practices through active engagements with, and in the service of, progressive social movements."  That sounds fair enough.  No 'blinding' or journal shunning there.  But I know it's not necessarily what people presume of you when you identify as an 'activist' - instead, it's all the things Squires said in his answer, and for that reason Squires does not.

I can't help thinking though, that there can't be anything that wrong with saying we are 'activists.'  If anything, I wonder what we lose by not saying we are activists.  It means it stays that bad thing no one wants to say they are, even though everyone's secretly (or not so secretly) doing it.  For Squires to distance himself from it speaks to the marginalization of the word, because surely Squires in the most comfortable place of all of us to claim "activist."  As my partner said to me upon hearing this story about Professor Squires, "If he can't say he's an activist, who can?"

Then I realized...maybe only someone like Squires (white, upper middle class, totally hegemonic, I mean let's be real here) can be like Squires.  He had said he didn't see why we couldn't all do work that promoted justice within academia, but really we can't all do justice work so easily within the academy.  First of all, some folks don't make it to academia...either academia has never been a place for them to find justice or academia has never been a possibility.  Second, some of those that do don't stay because they quickly realize they are not welcomed or don't fit the ideal type of an academic (who looks and talks a lot like Squires).  And third, some of those who stay aren't able to do justice work as easily as Squire suggests. They are perceived as agenda driven because they are not white, or not male, or not straight, or not middle class...they are branded activists because they are 'the other' and dare to theorize on their otherness.  They cannot so easily do good and do well.  For some of us, doing good means we will never do 'well,' at least not in the eyes of the 'best' journals and editors.  Squires can do this work and it can be "good" and published in the best journals...and he can still safely assure us he is not an activist, if only because he is presumed to have no stake in the matter. 

But we all have stake, don't we?  Indeed, that what leads, each of us, no matter our positionality, to...act.  While I agree we desperately need more Squires in academia, people who fit the academic mold and yet are willing to promote social justice in their work, we must also broaden our idea of what "doing good" and "doing well" mean, and who has greater access to either of them.