Oberlin has a reputation for activism. The institution has historically pushed the boundaries, empowering and encouraging marginalized people to agitate for their rights and interests on this campus. Oberlin brought important civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., to campus, and it’s not hard to find photos of protesting Obies throughout the decades. Oberlin has positioned itself as a beacon of progressivism, attracting politically active students devoted to progress. This, in my opinion, is a far cry from the Oberlin activism I see today.
As someone who is tangentially involved in activist spaces on campus, I see both the casual and serious approaches students take when trying to achieve their political agendas. The past five years have been politically volatile, with movements surrounding Black Lives Matter, Israel–Palestine, and abortion rights becoming major issues in the public sphere. It seems that most average people are at least somewhat politically aware, and many of those people have strong opinions. Oberlin students are not immune to this; in fact, I have found them to be rather vocal about their stances. Vocalizing issues is a necessary first step to actualize change, but I find that the ways in which many Obies go about advocating for their causes are largely ineffective because they do not consider the larger impact of their expressions of displeasure.
I first started to think about this a couple days before election day. I was walking through Tappan Square with a friend when we saw a poem that had just been put on display in the square. Due to both the Democratic and Republican candidates’ endorsement of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, many pro-Palestine voters proposed a movement to vote for third party candidates instead. While I believe in everyone’s right to vote how they would like, this poem specifically instructed readers to vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who was ineligible to receive any votes from the state of Ohio. By this point, voters who had not yet cast their ballots were likely to vote within the state, meaning that voters who took the poem’s advice would have effectively thrown their votes away. Considering the context, the poem reads as a piece of vent art.
While I do understand the need to express those pent up emotions, I encourage Oberlin activists to consider the impact of their actions on a grander scale. When devising a plan of action on how to achieve one’s agenda, but activists need to be more intentional about making thse plans realistic and actionable.
On the topic of emotions, in the wake of the recent passage of Ohio Senate Bill 104, a bill mandating multi-occupancy restrooms to be restricted to only women or only men, many Oberlin students have expressed their displeasure with the law. As soon as the gendered bathroom signs went up, campus became flooded with discourse. On Yik Yak, an anonymous forum often used by college students, there was a growing sentiment that the school should outright refuse to comply with the policy. This sentiment fails to account for the legal and financial ramifications for the institution; for example, the institution is required to adhere to state law in order to receive state funding. If Oberlin had refused the policy, the state could find its own way of enforcing the policy, which could possibly do more direct harm to Oberlin students, and further endanger transgender students.
Common expressions of proest on this campus include graffiti about resisting “fascist” bathroom laws, which solely serve as cathartic outcries that are void of a clear call to action. Most of these messages do not tell students to write their representatives or organize in a larger, more constructive manner. They virtue signal without analyzing the greater context of the problem. Oberlin did not write the bathroom law, the Ohio legislature did. The anger of these activists would be better funneled into writing their representatives, building community, and advocating for legal challenges to these new laws.
I do not by any means think Oberlin students should not be angry; in fact, I think anger can be quite helpful in fueling a movement. I just think that our performances of anger and attempts at self-soothing should not be the extent of our activism. We have to move beyond pure expression, and instead begin examining and challenging the systems that act as the sources of our issues.
