When social justice feels like LARPing
The risk of becoming characters in a game
LARPing. Maybe you’ve heard of it?
It’s live action role-playing (LARP), where people get together, throw on awesomely elaborate costumes, and play out fictional worlds in a game-like fashion. People go toe-to-toe in a medieval battle or rebuild society in a magic-filled, post-apocalyptic world.
Honestly, as I finish writing that first paragraph I’m like, damn, I wanna LARP! Sounds like a friggin blast. So I want to carry that energy with me as I write.
Because likening something to LARPing typically carries a critical connotation to it, which is the basis for me using it here. It implies there is a performative nature to what’s going on. That it’s not real life. Instead it’s play acting, which, outside of fun-filled fantasy games, can be cringe-y at best and regressive at worst.
Interestingly, my reflections on the LARPification of things within the social justice space are actually a sign of our success as a movement. We’ve been able to leverage current events and translate complex topics into digestible content that has and continues to effect change. This success calls for celebration, as well as introspection on what has emerged from this—the good and the bad—and where we see ourselves going next.
From where I stand, and with the love of an insider, there are trends around identity markers, language use, and cultural practices that, if blindly used or driven by the wrong things, can lead to a characterization of social justice that turns it into a game instead a life-giving movement for true change.
A note on critiquing social justice stuff
There can be a tendency to not want to offer criticism about the things that we support. I feel that way, anyways. To poke at the movements or cultural spaces I identify with can feel risky. Like I’m feeding into narratives or perspectives that want to see these projects fail, so it’s best not to speak up.
But what I’ve learned, and believe, is that offering criticism in good faith makes ideas and projects stronger. It means I respect them enough to point to ways they’re working and not working, and offer constructive takes on ways to move forward.
In this regard, I’ve been particularly inspired by people like Freddie de Boer, a self-identified Marxist who pushes back on trends in the social justice world; and something I saw author Daniel Pinchbeck write once: that he criticizes the things and people he has the utmost respect for.1 It’s in that spirit that I venture into this piece about social justice, a cultural and political movement I love and respect.
Becoming characters
LARPing is about assuming a character and then playing that role within a make-believe setting. The thing about playing a character is that as much method acting as one can do, you’re still putting on a facade to tell a story.
When I look at the social justice movement from this lens, I can see ways that this makes sense and can even be considered a good thing for a political movement. Social justice is about futurism and culture change. It’s about envisioning how you want the world to look for your grandkids and bringing that to life in the here and now. It’s about doing things differently to usher in culture shifts.
From this view, a little LARPing-like energy isn’t too bad. Intentionally playing a role—like emphasizing certain parts of your identity, using certain language, uplifting certain aspects of your lifestyle—in order to shape society can be constructive and helpful, and makes sense for a cultural movement.
The challenge, though, is when this goes too far and puts us as a movement at risk of compromising our own values. What happens when social justice becomes about assuming a character? In my view, we risk:
Incentivizing the wrong things
Pushing people out
Getting stuck
Let’s unpack each of these below.
But before we do…
Cultural movements distill things down
I want to start with a bird’s eye view on movements more generally.
The goal of cultural and political movements is to make change by getting a large number of people on board about something to influence pubic opinion, policy, or cultural norms. In order to do this, movements need to distill down complicated issues into easy-to-understand and easy-to-adopt ideas that are accessible and can be widely disseminated.
It makes me think to communication efforts around climate change. The climate justice movement has historically faced challenges around how to communicate the severity of global warming (luckily this has changed in recent years2). The climate is abstract and far away. Polar bears on melting ice caps? Sure, that’ll move a few green diehards, but as a whole, unless the issue touches people’s everyday lives, the public typically doesn’t care.
That’s why research has shown that if you tie the climate crisis to public health, and people’s individual health more specifically, it gets more attention. Talk about asthma and lower air quality, then their ears will perk up. Air quality is one tiny and, in some ways, adjacent topic to the climate conversation, but has been an effective in-road to get climate issues on the public’s radar.
Social justice in the form of anti-racism, LGBTQ+ rights, Indigenous rights, disability rights, and more have grown in cultural significance. This is awesome, and also means, that in order to have gotten to where we are now, the many big, complex topics within these umbrella categories have needed to be distilled down to memes and sound bites in order to reach a larger number of people.
THe LARPification of social justice
Let’s unpack the main risks I see through the lens of: “What happens when social justice becomes about assuming a character?”
We risk incentivizing the wrong things
If social justices becomes about assuming a character then we risk incentivizing shallow expressions of social justice that can be used for self-gain.
My social justice origin story was formed by nuns and academics. It’s the faith-based side of the movement that shaped my heart and sense of how to move about the world with this work. As I think back to the people who influenced me, I have a hard time remembering specific names of Sisters or Fathers. Besides being a product of my bad memory, this strikes me as interesting, and reflective of a humility I felt from these people. Nothing that they did was for ego or show. It was a vocation and calling imbued with modesty. Steady and strong.
These days, I meet people who wear being an organizer or activist on their sleeve as a way to signal something. The NYC actress who spends gobs of money on trips to Paris and the Caribbean, only talks about herself at a party, and then throws in that she’s a community organizer and all of a sudden has street cred.
Our digital age exacerbates this. Instagram profiles’ 150 character count makes us reduce ourselves down, and strategically pick the right descriptors to signal our relevance. As a movement, we risk social justice becoming a status symbol that is fueled by superficial markers. Without a discerning eye for this, we can give our power away to people who look like they’re leaders but who might not have the substance or wisdom to back it up.
When identity politics creates a new social hierarchy that’s equally as superficial as the old, but just with an inverse power dynamic, then we’re back to square one. In Black Lives Matter, But to whom? philosopher and writer Bayo Akomalofe says it so well: moving from the lower deck of the slave ship to the upper means “all of us – are still on the damn slave ship.”
There is, of course, so much to celebrate around the liberation of identity and strides in representation these days. I feel myself caught between this feeling of ‘Hell yea! Claim all the parts of who you are! Put it out on display.’ With ‘Ooooh, that’s not actually what we’re doing… We’re instead being incentivized to rep very specific parts of who we are because of how they signal certain things within our current cultural understanding of what social justice is.’ I personally find myself in a tug-of-war impasse on how to (or if to) share certain aspects of who I am because of this.
We risk pushing people out
If social justice becomes about assuming a character then we run the risk of limiting who sees themselves as part of the movement.
I remember a conversation with a dear friend who was fretting about how to show support to the LGBTQ+ community. She was racking her brain trying to figure out how to use her small online platform to show support. Would she say the right words? Would her message have the right qualities to it? Who was she to have anything to say about the LGBTQ+ space?!
I looked at her as we both caught our breaths. “Camila, you’re part of the community. You’re bisexual.”
She paused. Seemingly stunned by that reminder. She had been so caught up in worrying whether she would fit in, that she forgot that she was already a member of the community.
If being queer or being part of the social justice movement or being anything requires us to don a certain aesthetic then those who don’t resonate with that aesthetic or don’t naturally inhabit it won’t think they’re involved. This limits us as a movement. It locks certain people out who would otherwise be part of the cause.
This isn’t a call for those who naturally dress or show up or talk in a certain way to stop doing so. It’s more a reminder to us a movement that there’s space for all sorts of different expressions. I think back to my example above about the NYC actress and check myself—is there some sort of purity test I want her to pass to be part of the in-group? And the answer is no. I’m a proponent of big tent politics and multicultural coalitions coming together to get stuff done. My red flag is around the misuse of social justice identity for personal gain.
Ultimately if being part of a cultural movement means playing a character (ie. needing to look, act, or dress in a certain way to signal you’re in) then that will be unattainable for a lot of people.
My vision for a healthy, thriving movement is one where all parts of ourselves belong. If a cognitive dissonance forms between who someone feels they need to be in a certain community space and who they are at home in their everyday life then we miss out on integrating a sense of the movement into more parts of our world.
We risk getting stuck
If social justice becomes about assuming a character then we risk getting locked into ideas about what social justice is that prevent us from responding to new things as they arise.
Land Acknowledgments come to mind. They are statements that acknowledge the history of the land that a meeting or institution takes place on as being unceded territory previously owned by Indigenous people. It is a gesture of decolonization. The practice has grown in cultural significance in left-leaning circles to the point that the Democratic National Convention kicked off with one and TV shows mock Brooklynites for them.
This practice has been making its way into organizations and schools, with more institutions teaching employees how to facilitate them. All of this looks like progress within the movement to advance Indigenous self-determination and land repatriation.
But interestingly, in October 2021 the journalism outlet The Conversation reported that the Association of Indigenous Anthropologists asked the American Anthropological Association to stop doing Land Acknowledgments. The article goes on to say,
“[T]he historical and anthropological facts demonstrate that many contemporary land acknowledgments unintentionally communicate false ideas about the history of dispossession and the current realities of American Indians and Alaska Natives. And those ideas can have detrimental consequences for Indigenous peoples and nations.”
This is one of several push backs from Indigenous scholars and leaders against the emerging popularity of Land Acknowledgments, and the various ways they are practiced. It is part of a larger conversation about diversity, equity and inclusion programs’ inadequacies, leading to what historians Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder describe as a “paint-by-numbers approach.” AKA LARPy.
The take-away here? If we get locked into doing Land Acknowledgments simply because as good social justice advocates or good Democrats we think we need to do them then we don’t allow ourselves to learn and evolve as new information arises. This is such a key thing that movements need—the ability to ebb and flow and respond to different manifestations as they arise. This helps us return to the question, are our actions doing what they hope to do in terms of social change? And helps us have an authentic relationship with what we’re doing.
What’s the antidote?
Here’s what I see as the antidote to social justice LARPing and the things that I practice:
Come up with our own answers
And our own understanding of what social justice is and what it means for the times we live in. This can be hard for a whole host of reasons, including the breadth of the topics out there. Taking the time to learn about different philosophies of practice, reflect on your unique values and worldview, and examine unexamined assumptions or beliefs held within them are a great way to begin to do so.
In his article A Biblical Critique of Secular Justice and Critical Theory, Theologian Tim Keller offers us this breakdown of different perspectives on social justice:
Each of our takes on social justice are valuable and needed. Coming up with our own answers requires us to believe that and see ourselves as parts of the larger system and movement that we’re actively co-creating. Know that you and your unique approach belong and are needed, especially if you’re doing so earnestly.
Allow ourselves to change
And evolve as our world and communities change and evolve. This looks like allowing ourselves to change our minds on an issue, being open to listen to people we might not otherwise, and approaching the world from a place of curiosity and ongoing learning.
There’s strong pressure to dig our heels into ideological camps. The issues we face are dire and scary so it can be easier to make up our mind on something and not look back. Plus many of our social and professional relationships have become immeshed in politics, which adds extra incentive to not rock the boat.
Change is at the heart of the times we live in, though (and all times, really). With so much happening at such a rapid pace, it’s in our best interest to position ourselves in a way that allows us to be shaped by new things as they come. There’s a dance here. The ongoing back and forth between taking in what’s happening around us, digesting and making sense of it, and then translating that into how we show up and respond. How we actively participate in shaping things.
Support others to do the same
Which brings us to the community side of things. We can wiggle loose some of the LARPy, pressure-filled energy that’s out there by encouraging those around us to come up with their own answers, as well. Supporting divergence of thought, not assuming someone’s beliefs, holding a stance of curiosity around differences in approach.
As I bring these practices out into my relationships, the growth edge for me is to remain open while also staying grounded in my own unique take. Not allowing my practice of openness to supersede my practice of using my voice and authentically expressing my position. Finding the balance between the two and knowing when it’s time to pipe up and lovingly push back or when it’s time to just listen and hold space.
Not a direct quote, but hopefully captures the sentiment. Was in response to pieces he’s written critiquing writer Charles Eisenstein.
Or not so lucky because it means things have gotten worse and now it is at a lot of our doorsteps? Sigh..