The Activism Doctrine

It's not very often that I’m confronted with the weight of my own words after they’ve been sent off into the vortex of the Internet. That changed this winter break.

A few days before I arrived back home in California, I went out to dinner with my family. The restaurant we chose that night was crowded, so we had to wait outside with a number of other patrons until our table was ready. While we were waiting, I saw a young couple standing on a nearby corner. The man had his hand gripped around his girlfriend’s arm, and was screaming a number of expletives at her, calling her an “f—ing bitch”, and pressing his face within inches of hers. The girl was in tears. I looked around at the other restaurant patrons, waiting for someone to react, but they ignored the scene. Some looked down at the floor and others continued on with their conversations.

It was the first time I had personally witnessed the bystander effect in action. Momentarily, the phenomenon implicated me too, for I thought that I had perhaps overestimated the severity of the situation based on the responses from fellow patrons. It was then that I considered an article I had written a few months prior, which covered a social experiment from a Swedish group known as STMLM Panda. For the experiment, STMLM Panda hired a man and women to act out a scenario in which a boyfriend verbally and physically abuses his girlfriend in an elevator. The incident was filmed for a YouTube short, which captured the troubling lack of reactions from fellow bystanders. Only one out of 53 “participants” in the experiment stood up for the woman being abused.

Having been critical of the responses in the video, I knew that this incident outside the restaurant was a test of whether or not I could turn my own words into action. As the girlfriend ran into the restaurant crying, I followed after her and asked if she felt safe in her current situation. When her boyfriend saw me talking to her, he screamed at me, warning me to mind my own business, after which I asked him to consider how talking to a woman that way looked to a third party observer. He quickly apologized, and I walked away content in the knowledge that my passion for social justice was more than just idle chatter.

Minutes later, however, I heard the man screaming at his girlfriend again, using the same tone and the same choice words as before. In that moment, I was convinced that I had failed. My actions had been meaningless, and served more to bolster my own ego than affect real change. It was only when I reflected on the incident later on that I realized how naïve I had been—I was performing an action with the expectation that there would be a guaranteed pay-off, when, in reality, being a champion of social justice often means resting on principle alone.

As young people, we tend to be overly idealistic about our impact on the world, particularly when it comes to issues of social justice. We tell ourselves that problems will be fixed if people speak up, but we occasionally fail to consider what happens when our words or actions are insufficient.

Yet, as discouraging as these moments may be, the act of protest, of standing up for what is right, of defending the defenseless, is critical to advancing our society. Many of our own Harvard students seem to have already figured this out. Moving forward, I intend to keep their example in mind and remind myself that activism is a doctrine, not an investment.

Aria N. Bendix ’15, a Crimson editorial writer, is an English concentrator in Quincy House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.