Taming the Madvocate Within: Social Justice Meets Social Compassion

Abstract

AS SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATORS and advocates, we strive to be result-oriented pragmatists and compassionate change agents. We employ social justice instruction and philosophy to promote unity on campus, as well as mitigate the boundaries as social justice relates to the general curriculum. Our diversity work with student aff airs graduate students, faculty, and staff throughout the country is predicated on one major strategic question—how eff ective have we been in creating mutually supportive, compassionate social justice communities throughout the campus as well as off campus? The more we strive to help our students and colleagues to become eff ective and compassionate advocates, however, the more we fi nd that it is impossible (indeed, naive) to separate how we advocate from what we claim to advocate. This is a salient learning task that students will face when they begin to employ authentically eff ective communication strategies. We will use the terms advocacy and activism because the former connotes “calling compassionately to others in order to bring about change,” and the latter denotes “taking vigorous, bold action in order to produce immediate outcomes.” “Compassion,” says the Dalai Lama, “is the radicalism of this age” (p. 256). We believe that it is social compassion that is the radical notion that has supported the greatest social changes in our time. Advocacy is a process; activism is a product. Advocacy calls for empathy, patience, determination, nonjudgmentalism, and humility. Activism calls for directness, righteous indignation, critique, and immediate, tangible results. Listen to the words of James Baldwin (in a letter to his nephew), who was both an activist and an advocate, in the sense we are talking about: