quotations: Defining social justice
Paolo Freire: True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.
Bill Moyers: Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which, if individuals choose not to be charitable, people still don’t go hungry, unschooled or sick without care. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.
Paul Rogat Loeb: [from Greg Ricks, City Year, who] compared the situation of community service volunteers to people trying to pull an endless sequence of drowning children out of a river. Of course we must address the immediate crisis, and try to rescue the children. But we also need to find out why they’re falling into the river - because no matter how hard we try, we lack the resources, strength, and stamina to save them all. So we must go upstream to fix the broken bridge, stop the people who are pushing the children in, or do whatever else will prevent the victims from ending up in the water to begin with (p. 209)
UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare Second Annual Social Justice Symposium: Social Justice is a process, not an outcome, which (1) seeks fair (re)distribution of resources, opportunities, and responsibilities; (2) challenges the roots of oppression and injustice; (3) empowers all people to exercise self-determination and realize their full potential; (4) and builds social solidarity and community capacity for collaborative action.
National Women’s Alliance (http://www.nwaforchange.org/nwa/main_htmls/define.html): Progressive social justice organizing is organizing that recognizes the intersecting nature of oppression….Progressive social justice organizing requires a shift in thinking about power relationships and the root causes of oppression….[I]t becomes clear that race, class, gender, ethnic, and sexual oppression are inextricably linked and cannot be separated to advance single-issue agendas….
(from Social Justice Training Institute, http://www.sjti.org/home_professional.html, Adams, Bell and Griffin (1997): The goal of social justice education is full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs. Social justice includes a vision of society that is equitable and all members are physically and psychologically safe and secure.
Roger Grande: Social Justice movements are planted by a handful of people, some with a fleeting interest who move on when the fledgling plant demands more. Others are true gardeners, and nurture their seedlings, if they have survived. They empower others to grow an expanding field of social, political or economic transformation. They bear fruit when they have expanded opportunity and decreased need among marginalized people and groups, who now subsist on greater fairness or equality. Now and again, a bumper crop of activists demands a change in power relations.
Social justice is also the struggle to till, to plant and to harvest, regardless of the yield. Unlike charity work, social justice is guided by analysis of, and perennial reflection on, the landscape of power relationships near and beyond the horizon. A bountiful harvest includes fresh acts of courage, especially the courage to see one’s place in the world as a mirror of power relations--to revisit the familiar and relinquish tacit acceptance of our conditions, commodities and experiences as value-free. It is our willingness to sharpen the scythe of our gaze so that which is comfortable no longer obscures what is unjust. It is not merely how one reshapes the contours of power, but also the transformation in how one sees the world.
Just as important as achieving one’s goals, moreover, are the subterranean roots and rhizomes that bind the soil of common cause, providing a medium, fertile for the telling of stories of subjugation and resistance that is otherwise silenced, and for the will to serve in solidarity, collectively, to those in need.
Ayesha Mehrota, student in BHS Program in Social Justice Leadership, 2011-12: if charity was pruning back a weed (or problem), then community service was spraying the weed with chemicals, and social justice was yanking it out by the root.
Bill Moyers: Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which, if individuals choose not to be charitable, people still don’t go hungry, unschooled or sick without care. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.
Paul Rogat Loeb: [from Greg Ricks, City Year, who] compared the situation of community service volunteers to people trying to pull an endless sequence of drowning children out of a river. Of course we must address the immediate crisis, and try to rescue the children. But we also need to find out why they’re falling into the river - because no matter how hard we try, we lack the resources, strength, and stamina to save them all. So we must go upstream to fix the broken bridge, stop the people who are pushing the children in, or do whatever else will prevent the victims from ending up in the water to begin with (p. 209)
UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare Second Annual Social Justice Symposium: Social Justice is a process, not an outcome, which (1) seeks fair (re)distribution of resources, opportunities, and responsibilities; (2) challenges the roots of oppression and injustice; (3) empowers all people to exercise self-determination and realize their full potential; (4) and builds social solidarity and community capacity for collaborative action.
National Women’s Alliance (http://www.nwaforchange.org/nwa/main_htmls/define.html): Progressive social justice organizing is organizing that recognizes the intersecting nature of oppression….Progressive social justice organizing requires a shift in thinking about power relationships and the root causes of oppression….[I]t becomes clear that race, class, gender, ethnic, and sexual oppression are inextricably linked and cannot be separated to advance single-issue agendas….
(from Social Justice Training Institute, http://www.sjti.org/home_professional.html, Adams, Bell and Griffin (1997): The goal of social justice education is full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs. Social justice includes a vision of society that is equitable and all members are physically and psychologically safe and secure.
Roger Grande: Social Justice movements are planted by a handful of people, some with a fleeting interest who move on when the fledgling plant demands more. Others are true gardeners, and nurture their seedlings, if they have survived. They empower others to grow an expanding field of social, political or economic transformation. They bear fruit when they have expanded opportunity and decreased need among marginalized people and groups, who now subsist on greater fairness or equality. Now and again, a bumper crop of activists demands a change in power relations.
Social justice is also the struggle to till, to plant and to harvest, regardless of the yield. Unlike charity work, social justice is guided by analysis of, and perennial reflection on, the landscape of power relationships near and beyond the horizon. A bountiful harvest includes fresh acts of courage, especially the courage to see one’s place in the world as a mirror of power relations--to revisit the familiar and relinquish tacit acceptance of our conditions, commodities and experiences as value-free. It is our willingness to sharpen the scythe of our gaze so that which is comfortable no longer obscures what is unjust. It is not merely how one reshapes the contours of power, but also the transformation in how one sees the world.
Just as important as achieving one’s goals, moreover, are the subterranean roots and rhizomes that bind the soil of common cause, providing a medium, fertile for the telling of stories of subjugation and resistance that is otherwise silenced, and for the will to serve in solidarity, collectively, to those in need.
Ayesha Mehrota, student in BHS Program in Social Justice Leadership, 2011-12: if charity was pruning back a weed (or problem), then community service was spraying the weed with chemicals, and social justice was yanking it out by the root.