GET IN YOUR LANE!
(Of the activist highway)
Social justice activism is a multilane highway— from amplifying BIPOC voices by reposting them on social media, to donating to organizations that do work on the ground, to buying from BIPOC artists, to having constructive, albeit difficult, conversations to help educate more people on matters of social justice, to showing up at protests. Everyone has a lane, and my lane might be different from yours, and that's ok!
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We can’t all be in every lane, or else we’d spread ourselves too thin, and never have enough energy to make meaningful change. The beauty of the multilane highway of activism is that you can make your own lane. Good at art? Make art that speaks to an antiracist message! Good at understanding policy, or staying kind in charged conversations, or mobilizing your friends to take action? Great! Utilizing your talents and passions for social justice is an excellent way to rally for the cause.
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This blog breaks down loaded policies, deconstructs internalized biases, and much more, all in an effort to help you find your lane, so you can do the work and become the best version of your activist self that you can be.
WHO IS NORA?
Nora is a solidly cynical aspiring world-changer. She’s your average college student with anxiety about grades and social events, as well as the impending environmental doom that Nora believes will inevitably make itself undeniably and disastrously known at some point in her life. What does Nora want to change about the world? Interesting you should ask. Nora is constantly and painfully aware of what’s going awry in her home country and in world affairs, although is certainly not the expert on any single subject. She just knows enough to know that humans are in deep shit. That said, her mission now is to do her part in the fight for racial justice in the United States. To this end, Nora has been running a fundraiser for the Equal Justice Initiative since June, selling her original art, candles, flowers, and mobilizing her community to care about racial justice. (Want to help her in this? DM her here!)
Unfortunately, Nora has demanding bubble tea and travel habits that require her to work for pay, in addition to her volunteer/fundraiser work. To satisfy this demand, Nora has been working as a social media and website manager for various employers for the last four years and plans on putting her communication and synthesis skills picked up from these jobs, as well as her English and Communications Major, to work at a think tank. She wants to help educate voters, policy makers, and everyone in between about research-proven ways that we can improve the lives of people in our country and make equity not a far-off dream, but a quickly approaching reality.
When she’s not spending her time worrying or working, Nora loves to explore waterfalls, romp around with her dog, and get her hands dirty throwing mugs in dusty ceramics studios. She suffers from pre-nostalgia, a very real and official condition that forces Nora to feel the bittersweet sting of nostalgia in the very moment that something happy or memorable is happening. As a result, Nora’s Instax instant camera and her old Nikon film camera are close to constant additions to any of her thrifted outfits.
Nora hopes to one day work at a partially remote job, which has gotten much more feasible since the pandemic—one of approximately two upsides that came from the pandemic, and Nora’s not even sure what the other upside could be. Nora would love to live a transient life in a van for a while and turn into a wannabe version of those kombucha drinking, plant eating, Birkenstock wearing granolas. Eventually, Nora will settle down in a tiny house with a sunroom where she can have her plants, and where there will be plenty of waterfalls for exploration and mountains and rock formations for hiking with dogs.