More than an Aha Moment
By Nia Norris
A political awakening comes in phases, sporadic bursts of self-knowledge where you remember who you are and what exactly it is you stand for. It is growing up in a household dedicated to social justice, where it is drilled in you from an early age, where your mother takes you to marches for women’s rights and racial equality.
Your awakening can be gentle, when you simply join the organizations that you already knew you should belong to. You write a graduation paper for high school on education inequality, after you transfer from an exclusive prep school to a public school and observe for yourself the racial disparities. You go to college, you join organizations that meet the criteria of the things that you believe in: you join the Feminist Collective, the Black Student Union, the LGBT Society. In protest, you go to a march the day after George W. Bush wins his second term.
Eventually, you lose yourself. Your friends ask you why you are so obsessed with politics. You turn your interests to pop culture and music. Photography and art. You try not to make a statement with any of your work, and it feels empty. However, you continue to cast your votes for the candidates who best fit your key platforms. You continue with your life; you find yourself working corporate jobs and losing interest in social justice beyond the candidates for whom you vote.
Your awakening can be all encompassing. At this point, you have moved to the suburbs and started a family. Suburbia is the different place. In the city, you were sheltered in a bubble of people who shared the same general values and ideals. You did not understand overt racism. You understood systematic racism because you observed it in the school district, on the news and in the statistics. Overt racism was another thing entirely. You start to notice chatter in the neighborhood Facebook groups, with an overwhelming attitude of Not in My Backyard. They do not want a low-income housing project in town. They talk about the displaced brown people from the city living in the next town over; they do not want them here. You start to realize that overt racism is real.
The priest at your Catholic Church neglects to talk about family separations at the border. You think this is an important omission from an institution that is supposed to care: You quote the beatitudes in an argument with your husband.
A political awakening is not simply an Aha Moment. Awakenings build within us, simmering below the surface of the distractions of everyday life. Awakenings come with growing up and having real-life observations. Awakenings come from the reality that Something is Not Right and there is a need to implement radical social changes. Eventually, they boil over, and we find ourselves compelled to act on what was in us all along.
This essay is part of our Political Awakening series this month.
Nia Norris is a freelance writer living in the Chicago area. Her areas of interest include public health, social justice and harm reduction.