What I found was old white male theologians talking. It was two years after I graduated from college, and I had gone to the event looking for the urgent activism of faith-based social change agents like Bayard Rustin, Pauli Murray, Malcolm X and Mahatma Gandhi. I brought the critique/resist/dismantle approach to an interfaith conference in the late 1990s. What social order might replace the system we would so cheerfully destroy? There was no discussion of that. We enlightened few could take down an oppressive system with our brilliant critique and forceful protest. Very often, it is educators on college campuses.
Who supplied the conceptual frameworks and charged language being used to wound not so much overt regimes of patriarchy and racism (remember, Trump is still the kingmaker in the Republican Party), but, as Grim’s article discusses, the human beings trying to do the good work of protecting the environment and empowering the marginalized?
Grim does not mince words when he sums up his extensive reporting, writing that “the progressive advocacy space” has “more or less, effectively ceased to function” and “seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.” A critical mass of recent college graduates has brought a resistance mind-set into the nonprofit organizations that employ them and created debilitating disruptions in major institutions like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sierra Club and the Guttmacher Institute.
Day of defeat source background professional#
Ryan Grim’s widely read article in The Intercept “Elephant in the Zoom” details how this has played out in the professional social change sector.
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