What is performative activism, and does performance have a place in change-making?
Performative activism is the idea that a group or person pushes for change on a surface level, where there is no real power for change. The “performance” of activism gains public favor and allows activists to feel better.
A great example of performative activism is wearing buttons, pins, or shirts that show what you stand for. These could make someone who agrees with you feel welcome and make you feel good about wearing your opinions on your sleeve, but nothing substantial changes by doing it.
Many protests broadcast on social media have been performative over the last ten years. On the one hand, they can galvanize crowds: anywhere from 50 people (many local demonstrations on issues like gentrification of OTR) to 500,000 people (the Women’s March in 2017) to show up and feel good about their impact. However, very few such protests have achieved lasting, substantial change. This is mainly because these demonstrations do not have an expressed aim, realistic demands (if any), or tangible steps and strategy.
Most performative activism stems from anger. While anger is a valid emotion when witnessing human rights atrocities play out online, it will not stop the violence by itself.
The best example of this has been at Cincinnati City Council. Pro-Palestinian activists still attend city council meetings weekly, asking the Council to pass resolutions for a ceasefire or arms embargoes. However, this body has no direct impact on a ceasefire or arms embargo (and hardly even an indirect impact!). Their resolutions on the subject are entirely performative.*
On the opposite side, one of the reasons the Jewish community succeeded in ensuring a ceasefire resolution had language Jewish institutions tolerated was through relationship building and one-on-one conversations with council members. The community built such strong relationships among elected officials that when a group of people threatened what was seen as the safety of the collective, mobilization was feasible, practical, and effective.
Effective change requires sitting down with people, sharing ideas and opinions, finding common ground, honoring differences, and building a coalition of diverse voices with shared interests. That is not accomplished by only appearing at the public forum time and alienating the attempted persuadable coalition. Councilmembers will not join a coalition because they are yelled at to do so.
The city council resolution was one of the times a performance made an impact because it was paired with non-performance. The Jewish community’s showing up en masse at a meeting was influential partly because of the background work the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) had done to build a coalition with the council.
The Quiet Before by Gal Beckmann has an entire chapter on the Black Lives Matter protests. These protests were built from widespread anger and fear of the trauma and violence against the BIPOC community. In Detroit, a small group of activists realized how little the protests by themselves did. The demonstrations did not make the city accept the demands of activists to defund police and highly fund mental health and community support resources, in part because activists were trying to create change outside of the existing systems. After a few years of not progressing from the performative actions alone, Detroit organizers started restructuring their organizing tactics.
Once their organizing tactics changed to building relationships within the city’s systems, the politicians and budget managers suddenly understood what activists wanted and their demands. The coalition with elected officials was so strong that when the George Floyd murder occurred and protests popped up across the country, Detroit was one of the few places where activists’ demands were met effectively.
The way that the Detroit Black Lives Matter protests utilized performance to supplement their coalition can be replicated in future activism. Performative activism is ineffective but can be incredibly effective paired with actual coalition building. Sometimes, the consequences of performance can have problematic impacts. Some performances glorify violence as a way to resist oppression. Next time, I’ll discuss what that does for community organizing.
