I feel like activism has not played a very active role in academia for me up until this class. This is the first time I’ve had to look into myself and think about what matters to me in real life and apply it to school. I wrote my first essay for Professor Moy’s class about misguided, or profit-driven, activism, and whether or not it was valid in a very “do ends justify the means” themed manner. I found that activism can be a very murky subject to delve into because of how broad and inherently recurrent it is. It is very rare that activism is achieved on the basis of  moral understanding, it is almost always the case that a party is forced to concede due to financial pressure. This sat with me heavily because events like the Montgomery Bus Boycott were highlighted as glorious moments in civil rights advocacy, but the prevalent reason that bus segregation was outlawed in Montgomery was because the majority of bus passengers were black and their boycotting of the bus route left the Montgomery bus system in financial shambles. It seems that at the end of my investigation, I found that for modern day activism to be successful, it must use an immoral means (almost always financial) to coerce the opposition into meeting the activists’ demands.

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I feel like activism has not played a very active role in academia for me up until this class. This is the first time I’ve had to look into myself and think about what matters to me in real life and apply it to school. I wrote my first essay for Professor Moy’s class about misguided, or profit-driven, activism, and whether or not it was valid in a very “do ends justify the means” themed manner. I found that activism can be a very murky subject to delve into because of how broad and inherently recurrent it is. It is very rare that activism is achieved on the basis of  moral understanding, it is almost always the case that a party is forced to concede due to financial pressure. This sat with me heavily because events like the Montgomery Bus Boycott were highlighted as glorious moments in civil rights advocacy, but the prevalent reason that bus segregation was outlawed in Montgomery was because the majority of bus passengers were black and their boycotting of the bus route left the Montgomery bus system in financial shambles. It seems that at the end of my investigation, I found that for modern day activism to be successful, it must use an immoral means (almost always financial) to coerce the opposition into meeting the activists’ demands.

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