Performative activism: From Tinseltown to the Halls of Ivy
Neil Gilbert
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Hollywood has traditionally been a pulpit for performative activism, where celebrities deliver political sermons and broadcast their virtue by endorsing causes in a manner that requires nothing more than talk. The biggest surprise at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony will be if no one onstage demands more equity and inclusion in movies, denounces white male privilege, delivers a lecture on police brutality, or declines to accept an Oscar, declaring the muscular, sword-wielding statuette an obvious symbol of heteronormative male supremacy.
A short drive from Hollywood, performative activism has recently climbed to new heights at the University of Southern California, where a faculty committee in the School of Social Work has raised the bar on wokeness to an unparalleled level of progressive virtue signaling. After careful intellectual deliberation, they decided to delete the term “field work” from the curriculum, fearing that this customary description of social work internships may have disturbing racist connotations. The president of the National Association of Social Workers quickly applauded this effort to “remove all language that oppresses people.”
IS IT REALLY WORTH GOING TO MOVIE THEATERS ANYMORE?
In case you don’t get it, slaves worked in the masters’ fields, which makes me believe that anyone thinking “field work” offends the sensibilities of college students would benefit from watching a few episodes of South Park. I understand the impulse to mollycoddle students paying $45,000 a year for their education but find it difficult to imagine how these semantic guardians somehow failed to notice the most toxic term in their program, which confers a master’s degree in social work — the professional MSW credential. “Masters?” You all know who they were. That committee needs to have another go at it. If they seriously believe that “field work” will trigger disturbing emotions, perhaps it’s time to substitute a PSW, proficiency in social work, for the master’s degree.
Much of performative activism on the academic stage engages in scrubbing language and renaming structures. Since 2020, the University of California has renamed five buildings on the Berkeley campus based on recommendations of a review committee composed mainly of administrators and students. The buildings stripped of their names were honoring distinguished scholars who endorsed some ideas and practices that were commonplace for their time but are now seen as reprehensible. The application of this standard, of course, encompasses a range of historical figures stretching from ancient Greek philosophers to modern champions of civil rights. Both Aristotle’s justification of slavery and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s habitual use of the n-word would be cause for cancellation.
Since the review committee’s charge is to identify not only buildings but other places that should be included in the un-naming process, I wonder when they might get around to examining the views and practices of the renowned Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, for whom the campus is named. Berkeley was a slaveholder who proposed forcing Native American youth to attend a school in Bermuda “for the better supplying of churches in our foreign plantations and for converting the savage Americans to Christianity,” and an ardent supporter of the Yorke-Talbot opinion, which justified the legal basis of slavery. Hundreds of students at Trinity University Dublin, Bishop Berkeley’s alma mater, have signed a petition to scratch his title from the library and the prestigious Gold Medal awards named after him.
Not only is the University of California, Berkeley, named after a slaveholder with intolerable views of Native Americans, but as many of my colleagues at the university apologetically acknowledge beneath their pronouns in the email signature line, the campus is located on the Huichin territory, the ancestral and unceded land of the Ohlone people. Renaming the campus the University of California, Huichin, would be a twofer and even has a nice ring to it. The progressive professoriate should jump at the idea. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Just as it is easier to erase a few phrases from the curriculum than to change the name of college degrees, it’s a lot cheaper to remove the name plaque from buildings than to rename a campus. Unlike the 1965 civil rights marchers who risked their lives on Bloody Sunday in Selma, the hallmark of performative activism is to champion a cause without putting any skin in the game.
When Hollywood personalities engage in performative activism, it’s simply an extension of what they do for a living. When the professoriate performs this routine, they make the Halls of Ivy look a lot like Tinseltown.
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Neil Gilbert is a Distinguished Professor of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley.