When I moved from the desolate reaches of a Southern California desert to San José to pursue my university education, nearly half a decade ago. I came with bright-eyed visions of the like-minded community I would find, liberated from the grasp of my conservative hometown.
While looking ahead to an encroaching tide of authoritarianism in the U.S., I am near the end of this chapter of my life feeling disconcertingly detached from the communities I identify with and purportedly advocate for.
I realized embarrassingly late that community and progressive change don’t simply fall into your lap, but require hard work and continuous energy.
The most effective civil rights movements are based on grassroots, local organizing sustained with long-term participation and specific goals, according to The Commons Social Change Library.
As a journalist, this dissonance I experience has been amplified even more, as I feel like a stilted intruder when I enter community spaces rather than another member of said community.
As I progressed through my degree, I found myself less likely to visit community and activism spaces on campus, including San José State’s LGBTQIA+-serving PRIDE Center as a nonbinary and queer student.
Gloria Jean Watkins, an author and activist better known under the pen name bell hooks, may have an answer to this phenomenon in her 2003 book, “Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope.”
Throughout her life, hooks wrote extensively about the intersections of sexism, racism and what could be done to fight against white supremacy, patriarchy and socioeconomic disenfranchisement.
In “Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope,” hooks says that university systems are structured in ways that dehumanize students, leading many students who come looking for community to despair and lose that spirit.
I fear this has negatively affected not only my interactions with communities I’m already a part of, but also hampered my practice of other values I hold, such as anti-racism and anti-colonialism.
In chapter five of hooks’s book, she describes how many white students were in “theory” anti-racist but lacked the everyday work, commitment and communication with Black people needed to actually be anti-racist.
I often feel emblematic of those “liberal, well-meaning” young white people hooks describes.
And it’s here that I realize these feelings of white guilt are all but meaningless if not channeled into some actionable change.
So the question is: how do we all stop wallowing in the injustice of the world and actually do something about it to craft a better future?
Countering the despair and hopelessness that oppressive institutions instill with community-building permeates hooks’s writing for the future of activism in “A Pedagogy of Hope.”
“Despair is the greatest threat. When despair prevails, we cannot create life-sustaining communities of resistance,” she writes.
In the digital age, it feels like despair and helplessness fester.
Doomscrolling is an infamous pastime for the majority of Generation Z on the internet, according to a 2024 Morning Consult study.
The practice contributes to existential anxiety, cynicism and distrust in others, fostering isolation among internet users, according to a July 18, 2024, article from The Guardian.
It is only natural when algorithms feed you a constant stream of shocking news and galvanizing content meant to provoke your reaction, because that’s what drives engagement.
In the militant activism book, “Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times,” Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery write about the urgency of forging close relationships with one’s community in the face of oppressive forces, in other words, “become dangerous together.”
While the internet can be used as a tool to spread effective activism campaigns, as we look to the future where communication technology will undoubtedly progress, we must keep in mind that it shouldn’t replace the community that surrounds us when we put the screen away.
In hooks’s book, she also shares her experience living through the political climate following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, where American nationalism was high and communities of color were increasingly policed and attacked.
In a climate of fear, where many were compelled to flee, hooks says she found the most resilience in the community that surrounded her.
Reading that, I’m reminded how, in a way, I fled my community when I left for university.
Although my hometown was undoubtedly a toxic environment that put a halt to my growth and self-expression, I often think about my disabled mother and the queer friends left in the dust of the desert.
I wonder if I have a responsibility to return, even if just to advocate for them despite that hostile environment.
I’m not sure I can answer that specific question currently, but I do know that wherever I end up, I want to make an effort to be an active community participant and advocate against injustice in any way I can, both as a journalist and citizen.
In an era where due process is being challenged and the democratic act of protest is being punished, as seen with the detention of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, strengthening and leaning on our community is paramount for a future of transformative activism.
If you have related to the despair I’ve described, hooks reminds the jaded student that there are always havens of subculture and organizations that resist oppressive powers that instill those feelings.
“Most of them have had no guides to teach them how to find their way in educational systems that, though structured to maintain domination, are not closed systems and therefore have within them subcultures of resistance where education as the practice of freedom still happens,” she says.
With the U.S. administration’s current attacks on immigration, the Buddy System project is one of the ways American students can build solidarity and community with immigrant and international students by becoming mentors and bridging the gap in our local communities.
The project involves U.S. students signing up to be a guide to integrate students entering the U.S. for the first time, after which they are assigned an international student “buddy” by the local coordinator in the student’s city, according to the Buddy System website.
Now is the time, more than ever, to befriend your neighbor, work on initiatives in your neighborhood and build resistance to discrimination and the future threat of authoritarianism, brick by brick.
